Silver Girl

EPILOGUE

Autumn on Nantucket was serene and shockingly beautiful. Meredith was able to swim until the twenty-fifth of September. She kept hoping for the company of another seal-a brother of Harold’s, perhaps, or a son or daughter, or a friend or lover-but none came.

Dan Flynn, whose real job it was to know everyone on Nantucket and everything that was happening, found Meredith a beat-up Jeep for $2,000 cash.

“The thing will probably leave a trail of sand all the way down the Milestone Road,” he said. “But at least you’ll be able to get around.”

Meredith loved the Jeep much more than she had loved any of her other, fancier vehicles. It made her feel younger, wilder, freer; it made her feel like a person she had never been. She had taken taxis until she was twenty-eight; then, she and Freddy bought a Volvo wagon, which was quickly traded in for a BMW and so on and so on.

The Jeep already had a beach sticker, so Meredith packed herself a lunch-chicken salad that she’d made herself, a ripe, juicy pear, and a whole-wheat baguette from the Sconset Market-and she headed up to Great Point on a sparkling Thursday afternoon. The foliage on the Wauwinet Road was burnt orange and brilliant yellow. Meredith wanted to internalize the colors of the leaves, much like the flower fields of Bartlett’s Farm. She wanted to keep the beauty, even as she knew that it was, and only could be, ephemeral. Time would pass, the leaves would fall, children would grow up. Thinking this made Meredith feel unspeakably lonely.

But there, at the gatehouse, was Bud Attatash. He peered at Meredith and the derelict Jeep suspiciously. Then, once he recognized her, he saluted.

Meredith slowed to a stop and shifted into first gear. “Hello, Mr. Attatash.”

“Bud, please. You make me feel like I’m a million years old.”

Meredith smiled at him. He was checking out the car.

“You’re sure that’s going to make it?” he said.

“If you don’t see me by sundown, you’ll come out and get me?”

“That I will,” Bud said. He cleared his throat. “Young Flynn tells me that you’re staying on island through the winter, and that you’re looking for a job. Something out of the public eye?”

“That’s right,” Meredith said. She needed a job-for the money, certainly, but also as a reason to get out of the house.

“Well, my wife is looking for someone to shelve books after-hours at the Atheneum. They had plenty of help this summer, but everyone has gone back to school.”

“Really?” Meredith said. “I’d love to do it.”

“It doesn’t pay a fortune,” Bud said.

Meredith blushed. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t need a fortune.”

And so, Meredith worked Tuesday through Saturday from 5 to 9 p.m., shelving books at the Nantucket Atheneum. She worked alone; most times, the only other person in the echoing historic building was the Salvadoran janitor.

Louisa, Meredith’s housekeeper and cook, had been from El Salvador. Flashes of Meredith’s previous life surprised her like this.

One day, she read a collection of Gwendolyn Brooks poems before she shelved it. My God, she thought.

Her favorite thing about the job was everything. She liked the quiet hush of the building; she liked its dusty museum smell. She loved the Great Hall upstairs-its volumes of Nantucket whaling history, its old New England cookery books. She loved handling books, putting them back where they belonged, in their indisputable proper place. When her workload was light, she would sit and read a chapter or two of books she’d read years before, and they seemed brand-new to her. She always poked her head into the children’s section, which was dark and calm, the wooden trucks put away in their garages, the picture books fanned open on display. Children still read Goodnight Moon, they still read Carver’s favorite, Lyle Lyle Crocodile. There was a colorful area rug and huge, plush chairs in the shape of zoo animals. Meredith wondered if she would have grandchildren someday.

Those grandchildren would never know Freddy. Thoughts like this haunted her.

She talked to Leo and Carver several times a week. Meredith asked Leo if he wanted Annabeth Martin’s diamond ring, and he said yes. He was planning to propose to Anais sometime in the spring. The house that Meredith had been imagining them in had been sold for profit, and the boys had put a bid on a dilapidated Victorian in Saratoga Springs. They had promised they would come to Nantucket to see Meredith at Thanksgiving.

Meredith bought butternut squash at Bartlett’s Farm and made soup, with Connie on the phone as a consultant. Meredith froze what she couldn’t eat. She met Dan every Monday night at A.K. Diamond’s, and he introduced her to his year-round friends, the carpenters and firemen and insurance agents, and whereas Meredith imagined that his friends would be interested in her lurid back story, most of them just wanted to know how she liked driving that funky Jeep.

The larger world began to open its doors to her once again. Notes arrived at Dev’s office from people who had received their restitution checks, and Dev forwarded these letters to Meredith, though Meredith would sometimes let them sit for as long as a week without opening them. It was difficult to accept praise or thanks when so many people had lost so much. Meredith received a letter from an elderly woman in Sioux City, Iowa, who had received a check for a quarter of a million dollars, only 60 percent of what she’d invested-but still the woman was grateful to Meredith, and at the end of the note, told her to hold her head high. You did the right thing, she said.

What right thing was that? Meredith wondered.

A letter came from Michael Arrow in Broome, Australia, saying that the US government had promised him restitution of $1.3 million. It wouldn’t be enough to buy back his family’s pearl farm, but with the favorable exchange rate, it would be plenty to buy a holiday home somewhere in the south-maybe in Geraldton, maybe in Margaret River. The letter was friendly and informative; at the end of the letter, he invited Meredith to come visit him in Western Australia “anytime.”

She folded the letter back up, baffled. Where had Michael Arrow been before the restitution was promised, when Meredith was living in the dark and didn’t have a friend in the world?

There was no communication from Amy Rivers.

Through Dev, Meredith was informed of interview requests from Diane Sawyer and Meredith Vieira. The manager who had once handled Oliver North wanted to put Meredith on the lecture circuit. Big bucks to be made there, this manager told Dev.

Meredith turned everything down. She didn’t want to make a single penny from her connection to Freddy.

A book offer came in. Undisclosed millions. More than the advance that Samantha had gotten, because Meredith was the wife.

No.

Her passport arrived in the mail. She could go anywhere in the world.

But she didn’t want to be anywhere else.

Meredith talked to Toby on the phone, she talked to Connie. She and Dev discussed how to go about changing her name back to Meredith Martin. It was easier than she thought it might be-fifty dollars, a stack of paperwork at the town clerk’s office, five minutes in front of a very sympathetic judge. Once Meredith had shed the name Delinn like a diseased skin, she thought she might feel like a different person.

But she didn’t. She felt the same. Although she had decided not to talk to Freddy, she sometimes found herself talking to him in her mind.

I let go of your name, she said. Like it was a balloon that she’d sent soaring up into the air.

Meredith was lonely some nights, and sadness cropped up in her like a virus. It made her sick, it went away, it made her sick again. On cold nights, she lit a fire and she tried to read-she would always have reading-but she wanted someone beside her. Goddamn you, Freddy, she thought (zillionth and ninth, tenth, eleventh). One particularly bad night, she checked in Connie’s bathroom for the pills, but Connie had taken them all with her.

Meredith felt like she was waiting for something. She thought perhaps she was waiting for Freddy to die. He would be murdered by the Russian mob, or he would do the job himself by eating rat poison or slicing his wrists with a shiv. Prison officials would find a scrap of paper next to his bed with a single letter on it. The letter M.

And then, one afternoon, there was a thump on the front porch, and Meredith, who was on the sofa in front of the fire reading a Penelope Lively novel, sat straight up.

Call 911? she thought. Or Ed Kapenash’s cell phone?

She tiptoed to the front of the house. The sun was hanging low in the sky, casting a mellow autumn glow across the front porch.

A package.

Meredith was suspicious. Bomb, she thought. Crate of rattlesnakes. Raw sewage. She stepped out onto the porch and, without touching the box, looked at the label.

It was from Toby. And then, Meredith realized that it was October twenty-third, and that the next day was her birthday.

She lugged the package inside. She knew she should save it for the following day, but her life had been devoid of small, happy surprises like this one for so long that she went ahead and opened it.

It was a record player. A pearlescent blue Bakelite record player with a black rubber turntable and an extension cord snaking out the back. It had a grooved white plastic knob, off/on, volume one through ten. She plugged it in. Would it work? Meredith ran upstairs and grabbed her Simon and Garfunkel album, which until that moment had been as useful as a pocketful of Confederate money. She dashed downstairs and put the record on the turntable. She turned the knob and a tiny red light came on and Meredith lowered the arm until the needle fit in the groove of the first song.

The song filled the house; the music had that crackling, staticky sound that Meredith remembered from childhood. Meredith turned the music up as loud as it would go, which was, surprisingly, pretty darn loud. Meredith braced herself against Connie’s beautiful kitchen counter. As the operatic strains of the song progressed through the verses, she felt something happening to her chest, her head, her face.

Sail on Silvergirl,

Sail on by

Your time has come to shine

All your dreams are on their way

There was a slow burning in her eyes, a buzzing in her nose, and then, her cheeks were wet.

She was astonished. She felt like she was standing at the refrigerator watching herself. Look, Meredith’s crying! Then she let go. She sobbed and wailed and gasped for breath. She took off her glasses and set them on the counter. She didn’t care how out of control she was; no one was around to hear her. She thought of Ashlyn’s swollen belly, and she thought that these tears had been gestating in her for a long, long time.

See how they shine

Oh, if you need a friend, I’m sailing right behind

Like a bridge over troubled water

I will ease your mind

Meredith Martin Delinn was crying. Her tears were coming from someplace old and far away. They were coming from the beginning of this story-the uneaten lobster roll, the weekly poker games, the driving lessons in the Villanova parking lot. Meredith was crying because she missed her father. It was the pain that never went away.

Tomorrow was her fiftieth birthday.

When the song was over, Meredith did the only thing she could do. She picked up the arm of the record player, and she started the song again.