Where It Began

Huey says, “Mom? This is Gabby.”

This causes Mrs. Hewlett to look up fast.

“Yearbook,” Huey says. He doesn’t actually say what about yearbook, so it’s not like he’s technically lying.

“Well, keep your door open, Hewbo,” she says. Hewbo? And then she registers my face and the rivulets of eye makeup and the red eyes, and maybe I remind her of a wounded raccoon or maybe I’m just more pathetically enthralling than the ferret and a box of baby moles put together because she wipes her hands on the sides of her jeans and she hands her little ferret to the accommodating lady with the snack tray.

She is in animal rescue mode for sure and I am the unfortunate mammal.

“Madeleine Hewlett,” she says, extending her sticky hand, and all at once she’s got me in her grip, pulling me in for a hug. “Hello, dear.”

“Gabby Gardiner,” I say into her shoulder.

“My cousin Lolo used to visit Gardiner Island!” she says. “Lovely!” As if I were in line to inherit the place, or was in touch with rich and famous Gardiners, or knew them, or could recognize them in a crowd.

“Well then,” she says. “Tea!”

You can tell from Huey’s whipped demeanor that there’s no point in fighting this onslaught of maternal involvement no matter how weirdly crazed he is to haul me upstairs. He kind of leads me back down to his kitchen, which is the size of my house, and sits me down at a grotesquely long rustic table where Louis XVI probably had orange juice with his entire court dressed up as shepherds.

Only probably Marie Antoinette didn’t open the backdoor for the pushy lamb to come in and pour it a big bowl of livestock kibble.

The room is filled with black-and-white photos, Mr. and Mrs. Hewlett when they were still young and still hippies, posed in front of what appears to be their house when it was still in Europe, and a bunch of candid photos of someone you have to figure is either the Pope or a highly skilled Pope impersonator.

“I’m going to get your friend some tea,” Mrs. Hewlett says, looking at me quizzically, still in rescue mode. This involves silently telegraphing to the other maid that she’s supposed to make a cup of tea appear in front of me with a scone and a pot of jam.

“She’s upset about her boyfriend,” Huey says. It’s hard to tell if this is for parental consumption or if he thinks this covers it.

“Oh dear!” Mrs. Hewlett says, in the parental mode of being deeply concerned but even more deeply not getting it. “I was always upset about my boyfriend until I met Jeremy Jr.”

Mrs. Hewlett is still pretty without makeup at the age of fifty, wearing jeans and a sweater covered with ferret fur and wet spots you don’t even want to think about, a gazillionaire from birth, and married to a fellow gazillionaire who likes the Grateful Dead, writes music for a living, and puts up with a house full of rodents and farm animals because he loves her so much. It’s hard to relate to anything about her.

“Remember Buddy Murphy, Huey?” she says. Buddy Murphy is this two-hundred-year-old former studio head who everyone has heard of. “I was crazy about him, and then it turned out he was allergic to dander!” Mrs. Hewlett smiles with the faraway look of a woman imagining old Buddy Murphy doubled over and sneezing uncontrollably. Then she scoops up a cat and plops it on my lap.

“There,” she says. “That always makes me feel better.”

There you have it. Billy and Aliza are going to be coronated at Fling and I have a one-eyed cat on me, licking my scone. I can’t exactly throw her against the wall. She’s a one-eyed cat. So we all sit there at the grotesquely long table watching the cat eat my jam. It so does not make me feel better.

I don’t know what’s supposed to happen upstairs, and I only like surprises that involve candy, but I hand Mrs. Hewlett back the cat.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Yearbook,” Huey says.

And I can feel his mother watch me somewhat limp away, trying to figure out if she should report my condition to the Humane Society.

LVII

HUEY’S PHOTOGRAPHY ROOM IS A BIG, SUNNY octagonal place in the top corner of the house with a skylight and a black-and-white tile floor. It is the kind of room you design on purpose, because you want to be able to sit in exactly that space with those windows and that cold, hard floor whenever you feel like it, not a room you just end up with because it’s in the cheapest house on a ritzy street and you can just kind of afford it so you buy it and you’re stuck with it no matter how dreary it looks.

The room is filled with folding tables and metal shelves and cardboard bankers’ boxes labeled by year with the names of events and holidays, like he has records of every Christmas, Easter, and Fourth of July for his whole life. His equipment is strewn over a big, old fluffy couch covered with a faded yellow quilt and sat on by a couple of cats named Pinky and Cocoa Puff. Actually, it’s all sort of perfect.

And it’s not that I’m jealous thinking of Lisa sitting in this room with Huey doing whatever it is that Lisa and Huey do, which probably entails playing Boggle and Parcheesi and Monopoly and feeding ferrets for all I know. It’s just that it’s so nice in there.

Huey says, “Wait here.”

I walk to the bay window in the corner, which curves in a semicircle and lets you look down to the coast, out to the slate-blue water, and it just strikes me how happy Vivian would be to see me there. I might be a well-dressed slut of a drunken car thief with an unimpressive GPA and no Ivy League prospects whatsoever, but hell, if I didn’t mind suffocating Lisa, I could be queen of the castle. So then I stand there thinking about what a bad friend and really bad overall person I am to even be having this particular fantasy, but at least I know I wouldn’t actually do anything like that.

And then Huey comes back with the album and that particular chapter, the chapter where I knew what I knew and felt what I felt, ends.

LVIII

IT’S ONE OF THOSE CHEAP ALBUMS FROM RITE AID, the little plastic kind with cellophane sleeves that holds the pictures back-to-back. Labeled “April 11, Songbird Lane.” Neatly organized. You can tell that Huey is the prince of good organization, and he probably has hundreds of these little albums all lined up in order, and he could just pop open the Cataclysmic Disaster box and there this one would be.

So many of the pictures are shot from behind, you can tell the whole thing involves Huey skulking around and sneaking up on people, blowing his breath down toward his camera so they won’t feel him breathing on the backs of their necks. It’s creepy, but the pictures are creepier.

First, there is the house. A big, fake Tudor with maybe thirty kids on the front lawn with red plastic cups and bottles. The front door is hanging wide open and you can make out the shapes of more bodies in there, in the white light that seems to have engulfed them and blurred their edges.

“Is it coming back to you at all?” Huey asks.

“This isn’t some freaking Alfred Hitchcock movie, Huey! It isn’t coming back, all right? Ever. Do you want me to look at these or not?”

“You want to look at these,” he says.

Huey likes photographs with bodies crammed together in the frame, or maybe that’s all the party had to offer. Bodies curved and leaning into one another, arms dangling over rounded shoulders and around necks, hands and wrists and forearms disappearing into the dark folds of each other’s clothing. Bodies curved toward each other in doorways, leaning toward one another like arches, shapes with faces melting into darkness.

But you can always pick yourself out. Even years later, photographed from a distance in a group photo at summer camp, you can still tell that that’s the left side of your little-kid-self’s back in the Camp Tumbleweed T-shirt. Even two months later, you can tell it’s your profile, drinking in a corner in a chair and it looks as if you’re crying, sobbing actually, at a party you can’t remember.