Summer People by Elin Hilderbrand Read Free Book Online

beautiful wife!
Garrett chose to believe his father was too angry to be scared, too furious to cry out in fear for his life. But those images slid into Garrett’s brain despite his best efforts to push them away: his father crying, stricken with terror.
    Better to watch your parent die of cancer, Garrett thought. Like Katie Corrigan’s mother who got breast cancer and died a year later. Then, at least, you could prepare yourself. You could say good-bye. But Garrett’s father had been ripped from their lives suddenly, leaving behind a hole that was ragged and bloody, smoking.
    Garrett stayed in his room until the sun sank into the water. His walls turned a shade of dark pink; the urn was a silhouette against the wall. There was a knock at the door.
    “Who is it?” Only one answer would be acceptable.
    “Mom. Can I come in?”
    “Okay,” he said.
    She stood in the doorway. “We miss you downstairs. I’m about to start dinner. What are you doing up here?”
    “Sleeping,” he said. “Thinking.”
    “What are you thinking about?” she asked. She glanced at the urn.
    I’m a seventeen-year old boy. I need my father.
As if there were anything else to think about. “Nothing,” he said.

Chapter 2
    T bree days later, Marcus felt like the main character in that Disney movie where the little boy is adopted by wild animals and lives among them in the jungle. Here it was, two o’clock in the afternoon, and he was lying on a beach. There was no one else for miles, except Winnie, who lay in a chaise next to him wearing purple bikini bottoms and her Princeton sweatshirt. She seemed intent on getting a tan—all shiny with baby oil— but she refused to take off the sweatshirt. Except for when she swam, which she and Marcus did whenever they got too warm. This, Marcus thought, was what people meant by “the good life.” Sitting on a deserted beach in the hot sun—no bugs, no trash, no other people kicking sand onto his blanket or blaring Top 40 stations on the boom box like at Jones Beach—and he could swim in the cool water whenever he wanted. Plus, he had a handmaiden. Winnie made lunch for both of them—smoked turkey sandwiches and tall glasses of Coca-Cola that she spiked with Malibu rum. At first, when Marcus tasted the rum in his drink, he balked. Because he did
not
want to have his summer over before it even began for getting caught drinking. He said so to Winnie and she promised him that they would just have this one cocktail—he loved how she called it a “cocktail”—and that her mother was out doing a two-hour jog and would never know. The Malibu rum had been sitting in the liquor cabinet for a couple of years; she and Garrett dipped into it all the time, even with her father around, she said, and they had never gotten caught.
    The mention of Garrett made Marcus uneasy. Garrett was lying up on the deck, presumably because he never swam and didn’t like to get all sandy, but Marcus suspected it was because he wanted to keep his distance. And up on the deck he could watch everything Marcus and Winnie were doing. Like Big Brother. Like God.
    Marcus squinted at Winnie. “If you’re so concerned about getting tan, you should take your sweatshirt off.”
    “You just want a better look at my body,” Winnie said.
    Marcus found that funny enough to laugh, but he didn’t want to piss her off. “Why do you always wear it?”
    “It was Daddy’s.”
    Immediately, Marcus’s reality kicked back in. Despite the hot day, he felt the chill of humiliation as he recalled the worst personal shame of his life. At the beginning of swim season, he’d come out of the showers to find the locker room abandoned, to find his locker jimmied open, to find all of his clothes missing, even his wet bathing suit. He stood in his towel, shivering, not because he was cold, but because he’d thought the guys on the swim team, at least, would cut him some slack about his mother. But no: they, too, wanted to expose him. Marcus sat