have this conversation over the phone, okay?” Henry said.
“The conversation’s over. You know what I’m talking about, and I don’t want to be part of it anymore.”
“Fine. I hear you. We’ll, uh, not find any more girls to play with.”
“And I don’t think we should hang out together anymore. It’s risky, and . . .”
Henry was quiet.
“You there?” Corbin asked.
“Yeah, I’m here. I’m trying to understand what it is that you just said.”
“I think . . . I think, for now, at least, we are no longer friends. I don’t want to be your friend.”
“Whatever the fuck you want, man. I hear you, but keep your head, buddy. Don’t forget about the Polaroids.” Henry’s voice was different. Calm, almost.
Corbin ended the call. His palms were sweaty and he wiped them on his shirt.
He hoped he’d never hear from Henry again.
And he didn’t, not for a long time. Not until after he’d met Rachael Chess.
Chapter 16
Corbin would never have met Rachael if he hadn’t decided, shortly after his father died, that he needed to have a better relationship with his mother and his brother. They were both planning on spending the months of July and August at the New Essex house on the North Shore of Massachusetts, and Corbin, now living in his father’s apartment in Boston, asked if he could join them for two weeks.
His brother Philip’s response: “Dibs on the front bedroom, Corbin. I always stay there now.”
His mother’s: “I thought you hated the New Essex house. There’s greenheads on the beach, remember?”
He’d gone anyway. The day he arrived he knew it had been a mistake. Philip had taken the boat out—in a transparent attempt to avoid Corbin’s arrival—and while his mother had made an attempt at civility, he caught her looking at him in a mirror while she mixed gin and tonics. She wore an expression of visible disgust, her wrinkled mouth turned down at the corners, translucent nostrils slightly flared. She’d never loved him. He’d known this from a very young age, and accepted it the way that children will always accept the rules of their universe. As he got older, he realized that his mother despised him because he reminded her of her husband, and that she loved Philip because he reminded her of herself. One of the reasons that Corbin wanted to visit his mother after the death of his father was to see if she’d softened at all, if her attitude had changed. It hadn’t. He felt it immediately, and in a strange way it comforted him. If his mother had become affectionate, the way she was with Philip, well, the thought of that almost made him physically sick.
He stayed for the two weeks, anyway, determined to enjoy the house, with its views of the Atlantic, and spend as little time with his family as possible. On his second night in New Essex, he ate dinner at the Rusty Scupper—a bar and grill walking distance from his mother’s house—and that was where he met Rachael Chess. She was escaping from her family as well, having just begun her annual two-week stay at their year-round house just off the town beach in the southern part of town. He walked her home, and they sat talking on her front porch for hours. He told her about the recent death of his father and the awful members of his remaining family, and she told him how she’d been sleeping with one of her teachers, a married man, at the nursing school she was attending.
By sunrise, they were kissing, and they’d agreed to a two-week fling, no strings attached. He walked home along the beach in the milky light of dawn and felt a strange sense of calm, as though the world were shifting in his favor.
He and Rachael had made plans to meet for lunch the next day, and when she was late, he wondered if he’d dreamt her. But she showed up, and they spent almost every moment of the next two weeks together. Rachael was an open book, telling Corbin intimate details from her complicated life. Corbin, in turn, told her about the way his mother had paraded her sexual affairs in front of his father, and Philip and him, for years before his father finally left. He even told her about some of his own sexual problems during college; she was sympathetic without being pitying, and Corbin found himself desperately wanting to tell her what had happened with Claire in London, and then with