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ChapterSixteen
“Are you heading out for the day?” Jane’s words followed Jeremy to the front door, where he stood with his gym bag across his shoulder and a strange, urgent pain itching along his lower left leg.
“I have to hit the gym,” Jeremy explained, although he didn’t want to get into the rest of it: that he’d been so worried about his leg pain and his daughter’s diminishing body to bother to care for anything like fitness. Still, fitness was often the only thing that kept his emotions at bay without it, and he felt the weight of it— a depression that settled itself across his shoulders and threatened to stay.
“Oh. Gosh. You don’t need the gym,” Jane said, cupping her hands together timidly.
“I do.” Jeremy arched his brow. “Do you need anything else for the day?”
Jane’s cheek twitched. “I got a message from Julia Copperfield about the paperwork?”
“I see.”
“She said she’s a bit confused about some sections she needs to fill out,” Jane explained, eager to keep him hostage in the foyer. “Should I pass along the email to you?”
“I can get to it tomorrow,” Jeremy explained.
Jane’s eyes quivered. “She says it’s urgent.” She then swallowed as she added, “I guess I was too young to remember all that Copperfield stuff.”
Jeremy’s throat made a sound like an animal. He’d never wanted out of a conversation more than right now.
“But everyone I talked to about it says he was guilty,” Jane continued.
Jeremy shrugged. “There’s no reason to believe that he was anything but guilty.” He then shoved his shoulder into the door and walked out into the late afternoon air.
“Jeremy…”
Jeremy glanced back at the needy figure, a woman who ached to keep him within the confines of the red-brick courthouse.
“Why do you think those women are digging around for their father’s court files?”
Jeremy considered this for a long time. He couldn’t give Jane an answer that led to another conversation. He could only say, “I guess sometimes, people don’t know how to find closure. So, they make up ways to build it for themselves.”
With that, he shoved his way outside and abandoned Jane at the front desk.
As Jeremy walked through the heat of mid-June on Nantucket Island, his headphones blaring old nineties hip-hop as he went, sweat bubbled along the flat of his stomach and oozed in his armpits. Around him, tourists swarmed, their hands around ice cream cones and their feet in boat shoes and sandals. Their conversation, which was largely just about “the water,” and “the sand,” and “the food,” bubbled and spat with excitement. Jeremy detested handing over his island to so many tourists every year. He longed for the view of the water, all to himself.
Piper, his ex-wife, had thought this was terribly selfish of him. “God made this planet for all of us,” she’d told him. The fact that Piper had been the one to call Jeremy selfish was what God might call “a pretty good joke.” Piper had been the one who’d left. Piper was to blame for Sarah’s trauma and self-hatred. Piper. Not Jeremy, who’d stayed.
Well, he hoped he wasn’t to blame.
It was difficult to say how you damaged your own children. He knew that. He recognized it in his own relationship with his parents, whom he’d loved dearly before they’d passed. “Perfect” parents didn’t exist.
Although he’d directed himself toward the gym, he cut his course short and decided, instead, to head back home. His heart felt bruised from missing Sarah, who’d been either latched away in her room or somewhere with friends for the past week or so. Their conversations had been basic and logistically oriented. “I’ll be home by ten,” or, “Do you know where the jump rope is?” or, “We need more dish soap.”
Jeremy had no reason to believe that Sarah would be home that late afternoon around four-thirty. When he walked through the shadows of his living room, a glass of orange juice lifted, and discovered Sarah with her three best friends, Harlow, Evie, and Nora, in the backyard, he felt an impossible joy.
From the window, he watched for a moment as the girls performed something— their arms moving as they acted out little speeches and interacted in a way that didn’t seem natural at all. After about five minutes, Harlow caught sight of his outline in the back window and waved, which made the other three wave as well.
To his surprise, Sarah’s wave included a half-smile and then, mysteriously, a gesture for him to come outside to join them.
What?
Jeremy was confused. His heart pounding, he stepped into the glare of the afternoon sunlight and greeted the girls verbally. “Hey there. What are you up to?”
The girls laughed that secretive laugh that all teenage girls had mastered. Sarah bounced over, then gave him a hug— actually hugged him! She then said, “We’re just practicing. It’s a play.”
Jeremy was so shocked that he nearly missed the hug altogether. “What play are you talking about?”
