The Island Read Online Free PDF Page A

said. “Talk to Chess when you get home.”
    “If she doesn’t change her mind, I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna do,” he said.
    “You’ll survive,” Birdie said, looking at Hank on the sofa, wiping crumbs from his lips with a cocktail napkin. “We all do.”
    In the week that followed, there were all sorts of other conversations, conversations upon conversations. Birdie had never had so many conversations. One of the most difficult, predictably, was Birdie’s conversation with Grant, which she chose to undertake at nine o’clock at night when he would be at home in his “loft” rather than at the office.
    She said, “Grant, I’m calling to tell you that Chess has broken the engagement. The wedding is off.”
    “Off?” he said.
    “Off.”
    Silence. Birdie had wondered how Grant would meet the news. It was telling that after thirty years of marriage, she had no idea. She figured his main concern would be for Chess’s welfare, and once he realized the murder had come at Chess’s own hand, he would be worried about his money. Birdie waited for his questions, but none came.
    “Grant?”
    “Yes?”
    “What do you think?”
    “What am I supposed to think? You want to tell me what the hell happened?”
    Of course, she should have guessed that he would not react at all until Birdie told him how he was supposed to feel. She had always done his emotional work for him.
    “Chess wanted out. She’s not in love with him.”
    “Not in love with him?”
    “That’s the gist of it.” It was no longer Birdie’s job to shield Grant from the unpleasant realities about his children. Birdie had to deal with it, and now so did he. “She’s not in love. She doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life with him.”
    “I don’t get it,” Grant said.
    Of course he didn’t get it. This was why Chess had wanted Birdie to call; Birdie was supposed to make him understand. Grant was eight years her senior; he had been thirty-one to her twenty-three when they got married. Grant had just made partner at the firm; he was expected to marry, start procreating, move to the suburbs, join a country club. He had come after Birdie like a bull charging; he had tracked her like a hit man. I want you, you, you. There had been dinners and musicals and weekends skiing in the Poconos, where they kept separate rooms for the sake of appearances. Birdie had an entry-level job at Christie’s, where she showed a proclivity for carpets. She idolized the head of fine carpets, a man named Fergus Reynolds, who was always dashing off to Marrakech or Jordan. He spoke fluent French, Spanish, and Arabic and wore silk scarves in the style of Amelia Earhart. Birdie wanted to be a female incarnation of Fergus. She wanted to smoke clove cigarettes and appraise estates on the French Riviera. But instead, she succumbed to Grant. Within a year of marrying, she had quit her job; within two years, she was pregnant with Chess. The ways in which Grant Cousins had curtailed her potential were too numerous to name.
    And then, once they were married and the girls had been born and the household established, Grant vanished. He was still present physically—sitting at the head of the dinner table with his tumbler of scotch and his benevolent, slightly baffled smile—but his mind was elsewhere. He lived in a state of constant distraction. The office, the cases, the clients, the billable hours, his handicap, the Yankees game, the Giants game. Birdie had grown to feel that anything and everything was more important to Grant than she and the girls were. He was kind to them, and generous, but they could never quite capture his full attention.
    “I don’t know how else to say it,” Birdie said. “She’s not going to marry him. And rather than beating her up, we should be praising her for calling it off before it was too late. If she’d gone ahead and married him, she’d regret it.”
    “The way you regret marrying me?” Grant said.
    Birdie inhaled.