“Mm-hm. My mom used to visit Beechwood in the summers.”
“So the kids who died—”
“They were my second cousins, I guess, technically. Plus thisboy who was their friend. I knew them all from summers here, or sometimes we’d get invited to Beechwood for a weekend. My mom is still close with her cousins.” She wipes at her eyes. “Anyway. The memorial for Johnny and Mirren was the day after I got here. And I was so stupid, Matilda.”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought somehow that I’d put on a black dress and do this mourning ritual with my mom and everyone, and that would be it. Like, I thought that after the service, I’d feel better. And it would be completely easy to spend the last part of summer in the rental house with my girls, just partying and lazing around before college starts. But it turns out not to be easy at all. I keep crying. At unexpected times. And my extended family has been up in Edgartown for weeks now, and they keep having dinners. They want me to come, so I go. Iwantto go, because they’re all so freaking wrecked. And I’m wrecked, too. But my friends don’t understand. They’re mad I keep leaving them. And taking my car, because that means they don’t have the beach pass and whatever.
“Then this other cousin of mine, we were supposed to meet up, but he blew me off a bunch. And I don’t know why he didn’t show, or what I did that made him decide to ditch me now, of all times. I wouldn’t have thought that kind of thing would matter so much, but it actually gutted me. Because I lost Johnny and Mirren, so it feels like the threads connecting me to all the family in my own generation just burned to ash and blew away. I’m very…” Holland trails off. She stands and paces the room a couple times.
I wait.
“I know I’m lucky as hell,” she says finally. “I shouldn’t have dumped this on you. I’m not trying to make you feel sorry forthe poor little rich kid. But it’s just freaking sad and I’m going throughit.”
“It’s okay.”
“This is a picture of them,” she says, pointing toCliffside Gothic.“My aunts, when they were young. That’s my aunt Carrie, the Cinderella. And that’s my aunt Bess and my aunt Penny.”
“That’s yourfamily?”
“Absolutely no doubt.”
“Kingsley knew Tipper Sinclair,” I say. “Is that her? The mother in the painting?”
“Yeah.”
“Why is your aunt Carrie Cinderella?”
“I have no idea.”
“Why are they on the edge of a cliff?”
“I don’t know. But it looks like the cliffs on Beechwood.”
36
After absenting herselffrom our meals for well over a week, this evening June is making an enormous meringue. A “pavlova,” she calls it. It’s the size of a lasagna, and she’s topped it with whipped cream and a thousand wineberries, blueberries, and blackberries, dusting the whole with powdered sugar. “Dessert for dinner,” she calls out, when it’s ready.
I come in from the living room, where I’ve been drawing in my sketchbook, and follow her out to the picnic table with napkins and silverware in my arms.
I haven’t told anyone about Holland coming by this morning because they never have visitors—so I’m surprised to see that tonight there is a dinner guest. He’s already standing at the table with a glass of wine in his hand, talking to Meer and Brock.
Gabe is unusually tall and very thin, probably about fifty. He’s Black with cropped graying hair and wears a cream-colored linen suit that hangs on his frame as if he once filled it out with more muscle. He tells me he’s based in New York but he’s been coming to the island since he was a kid, part of the long-existing Black community vacation scene outside Oak Bluffs. He met Kingsley and June here fifteen years ago when he tagged along with a filmmaker friend to a party at Hidden Beach.
Now he’s Kingsley’s cultural property lawyer. He handles “relationships with galleries, purchases by collectors, and estate planning.” June invited him over because an offer came in for one of the more famous paintings,Prince of Denmark.But she can’t get Kingsley to sign the paperwork, she says. Off in Italy, he isn’t answering email or telephone calls. She wants Gabe to talk her through the options, since the buyer is eager to close the deal.
“What’s the painting?” I ask.
“It’s aHamletthing,” says June. “It caused a big drama when the Whitney showed it.”
“How come?”
“Critics called it overly violent, untrue to Shakespeare, all that. They said it was a cheap offering aimed at creating a sensation. Not that Kingsley minds. He never cares what critics say.”
“And the offer’s for eight million,” says Gabe, “partly thanks to the controversy.”
“Eight million, for one painting?”
