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“Hello, darling,” Mrs. Walden said. Her cheeks were flushed from cocktails. “We were just talking about you.”
“Were your ears burning?” Mr. Walden asked.
Rose laughed nervously. Zachary crossed the room to mix a cocktail for her, something he said was straight from the Amalfi Coast andto die for.
“The girl doesn’t know where the Amalfi Coast is,” Mrs. Walden said. Her voice was syrupy.
Zachary gave Rose a sharp look, then said, “She knows where the Amalfi Coast is. Who doesn’t?” He laughed. “Don’t discredit this one. She’s sharp as a tack. Look at her.”
Rose offered a nervous smile, grateful that Zachary had decided to assume she knew where the coast was. In actuality, she had no idea. Geography hadn’t been covered well at her high school. She could list most of the state capitals, and that was about it.
From where Rose sat with her cocktail, she tried to gauge Oren to figure out what he was doing there and what he’d been through that week. But Oren seemed uninterested in giving himself away. He hardly spoke. He hardly drank. Mr. and Mrs. Walden and Zachary were drunk at this point, gesticulating wildly through their stories. It felt as though Oren refused to play along.
“Tell us about Mississippi,” Zachary urged when Rose was halfway through her cocktail. “We need to know about your life before Nantucket.”
Mrs. Walden scoffed as though she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to know about such a heinous place.
Rose stuttered and considered what she could possibly say.
“What was your house like?” Zachary pressed it. “What are your parents like?”
Rose imagined what her parents were doing right at that moment. It was nearly eleven, which probably meant they were drinking domestic beer and watching reruns on television. They’d probably gotten into some kind of argument that had mounted to such decibels that the windows had shaken in their panes and the little kids had wept in their beds. But they refused to get divorced. They couldn’t afford it, for one. And for two, they probably knew they were two peas in a pod. Who else could stand them?
“My house at home is nothing like this house,” Rose began, her voice shaking. “You could call them direct opposites, in fact.”
“We had a private investigator take photos of the house,” Mrs. Walden said, her words slurring together. “I can show them to you if you like.”
Rose’s jaw dropped with surprise. She imagined herself on the front porch with her little siblings, wrangling them and cleaning things up as a hot-shot private investigator circled the house with a hot-shot camera.How dare they?Rose thought.
Mrs. Walden giggled. “You can see how hot and bothered she is about it, can’t you?” She put her hand on Mr. Walden’s knee. “But how else could we trust someone with our babies?”
“We couldn’t,” Mr. Walden affirmed. “It was out of the question.”
Zachary raised his eyebrows with surprise and glanced at Oren. “I wonder if Mother and Father ever did that with our governesses,” he said quietly. “You must remember them, Oren. Don’t you? The plump one whoran off with the plumber? The pretty young one who always made-up silly voices for our stories? What about the other one—the one who could ride horses?”
Oren looked genuinely uncomfortable. Suddenly, he was on his feet, with his hand over his chest and his eyes on the veranda stretching along the mansion's top level. He bucked for the door and opened it to walk outside, where he hung himself over the side of the veranda railing and gazed out at the black horizon of the Nantucket Sound.
Mrs. Walden got up swiftly to close the door behind him with a fluid motion, then turned to clasp her hands together and look at Zachary.
“He’s been through a lot,” Zachary reminded her. “Just this week, he’s lost everything.”
It took Mrs. Walden several seconds to fix her face, as though this deep into the night and into the cocktails, she’d lost full control.
“Of course,” Mrs. Walden said. “I can’t imagine how awful it’s been.”
“Can’t imagine,” Mr. Walden agreed, tossing back some of his cocktail. “You’ll let us know when the funeral is, won’t you? We really do want to support your family.”
Rose furrowed her brow with surprise. Before she could stop herself, she breathed, “I’m terribly sorry for your loss.”
Zachary’s face broke into a strange smile. “Thank you, my dear. I’m sure that will mean a lot to Oren if he ever gets back inside and faces himself.”
But there was no mention of who had died. Mrs. Walden changed the subject, and Zachary dove immediately into iconic tales that had transpired in faraway lands. There was no way of knowing if any of the storieswere true. Rose allowed herself to drop into them anyway, imagining herself somewhere in the backdrop, on an Asian mountaintop or floating on a crystalline sea.
Not long after that, Mrs. Walden indicated it was time for Rose to return to her bedroom. They were done with her.
Throughout that time, Oren didn’t flinch. His eyes remained on the horizon.He’d lost everything.
Chapter Four
