Elin Hilderbrand - The Rumor

Grace tried not to take offense at the evasion-not a word of greeting, no thought to ask how her day had been. If Grace were to be very honest, she might admit that lately her daughters made her feel more lonely instead of less so.

“How was school?” Grace called after them. But there was no response.

“We’re having quiche for dinner!” Grace said. “Around six!” No response.

There had most certainly been days this past winter when being so thoroughly ignored had sent Grace into a fog of depression. She yearned to make the girls cups of hot tea and bake them chocolate chip cookies and sit around looking at fashion magazines while Allegra talked about her weekend plans with Brick and Hope pulled out her flute and played a few bars of a Mozart concerto. But even Grace realized this was unrealistic. They were, after all, teenage girls and could be counted on to think only of themselves.

Today, Grace didn’t care. Today, Grace headed back to her master bathroom to paint her toenails.

Benton Coe had returned. This year was their year. They had all summer in front of them.

Sometimes she wished her parents had never told her the story of her birth, and yet it had been part of her personal narrative since she was old enough to understand it. Hope-or baby number two, the smaller, weaker twin-had had her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, a fact that escaped the obstetrician’s notice because Allegra had popped out healthy, whole, and hogging the entire room’s attention for the first time of a million in her life. Once the doctor noticed that baby number two was in distress, Grace was raced to the operating room, where Hope was delivered by emergency C-section four minutes later. But she was nearly dead by the time they got her out. She was, her father liked to dramatically say, the color of a damson plum, and he had thought, There’s no chance. But the doctor had resuscitated Hope, kept her alive on a ventilator, and she and Eddie had been taken in the MedFlight helicopter to Boston while Grace and Allegra stayed at Nantucket Cottage Hospital.

Hope had been in the NICU for a week before she was named. The name her parents had picked out was Allison-Allegra and Allison, for nauseating twin symmetry-but after all that transpired, they changed their minds and decided to call her Hope, no explanation needed.

She was a survivor, an underdog who had prevailed; she was the smaller, weaker twin, all but ignored while her sister took center stage; she was lucky just to be alive. The doctors had told her parents that Hope might be brain damaged or hindered in some other way.

“But,” her mother said, “you are just as right as rain.”

Hope had no idea what that meant, but she did wish her parents had kept the story of her birth to themselves. She wished it were secret history that nobody ever talked about, rather than being the event that defined her.

Smaller, weaker, lucky to be alive. Whereas Allegra was bigger and stronger, her easy life an apparent birthright. In the fourth-grade class play, Allegra had been cast as Alice in Alice in Wonderland, and Hope as the Dormouse. Then, as now, this had pretty much summed up their differences.

Allegra was okay. At times. Not as smart as Hope, or at least not as book smart; in school, she put forth minimum effort. Hope had one class with Allegra: health, taught by the phys ed teacher, Ms. Norman. It was a layup, the easiest A in the world, because it was nutrition and exercise and personal hygiene, basic stuff everyone on earth already knew from being a human and being raised by other humans. And yet Allegra never handed in her homework, and when Ms. Norman called on her in class, asking her to name the most prevalent nutrient found in milk, Allegra gave a derisory laugh and said, “Um? Don’t know?” She sounded like a moron, and Hope was embarrassed to have shared a womb with her. Anyone who had ever watched a cereal commercial knew the answer was calcium.

Out of the classroom, however, Allegra and her best friend, Hollis Brancato, ruled the school. They were the real twins, matched in their prettiness, their long, shiny hair (although Hollis’s was blond to Allegra’s brunette), the makeup right out of magazines, their carefully curated clothes. Who knew how many thousands of dollars Allegra had wheedled out of their father so that she could have “pieces” by Parker and Alice + Olivia and Dolce Vita. Allegra’s one coup over Hollis was that she had been invited to New York City for a modeling interview. Allegra had told Hollis and everyone else at school that she was “still waiting to hear,” meaning she might start her climb up to the ranks of Gisele and Kate any day. Only Hope knew that the woman at the modeling agency had declared Allegra three inches too short and too “standard issue” in the beauty department to ever get any work.

The other thing that only Hope knew was that, although Allegra had been dating Brick Llewellyn for the past two years, she was cheating on him with Ian Coburn, a rich kid who had graduated from Nantucket High School the year before and who was now a freshman at Boston College.

To Hope’s knowledge, Allegra had seen Ian three of the past four weekends. Allegra was supposed to be flying over to the Cape every Saturday to take a fancy, expensive, guaranteed-to-get-results SAT prep course at the community college, but Allegra had ditched the class, and Ian picked her up in his red Camaro and they “drove around,” whatever that meant. This past weekend, they had gone to the Cape Cod Mall, where Ian bought Allegra three Chanel lipsticks from the makeup counter at Macy’s; then they enjoyed a long, boozy lunch at the Naked Oyster, Allegra using a fake ID saying that she was a twenty-seven-year-old resident of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Allegra had asked Hope to cover for her-both with Brick and with her parents. She had offered to pay Hope, or lend Hope the fake ID, even though Allegra and Hope both knew Hope would never need it.

Hope agreed, but not because she wanted the ID or the money.

She wanted Brick.

For two years, Hope had assumed there would be no way Brick would ever break up with her sister. They would be one of those couples who grew up together, made it work long distance through four years of college (if Allegra got into college, which at this point seemed doubtful), and then married, had children, and found themselves celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Although Brick might have shared this vision, what neither he nor Hope had considered was that Allegra was Allegra, which meant not smart enough to know a good thing when she had it. Allegra was a seeker and a climber and an opportunist, and she had a short attention span. Allegra would get caught with Ian Coburn, and that would be the end of her and Brick. Hope just had to wait.

Hope and Brick texted each other regularly about their honors chemistry homework, a fact that Hope did not share with her sister, and she knew Brick didn’t either. Allegra hadn’t been selected to take honors chem; she was in regular chem with other underachievers like Hollis and their friend Bluto.

At five thirty, when Hope knew Brick would be home from baseball practice, she shot him a text: Hot glass looks like cool glass. This was how they started every conversation about their chem homework, an inside joke referring to the enormous sign hanging over the Smart Board in their classroom. Mr. Hence lived in mortal fear of one of his students picking up a beaker that had recently been over the Bunsen burner.

No response. Maybe Brick wasn’t ready to tackle chem yet. Maybe he was taking a shower or hanging out with his parents. Brick liked to spend time with his parents-whereas Hope, and especially Allegra, avoided it like the plague-because Trevor and Madeline were so cool, and the three of them in their family were, like, friends.

Sometimes Hope thought that she might not want to date Brick as much as become his adopted sister.

She texted: Have you looked at the questions on page 242? Inert gases?

No response. Hope could send two unanswered texts but not three. That would make her look desperate and pushy.

A second later, her phone pinged.

Brick wrote, Was your sister really at class on Saturday? Or did she ditch and go to the mall?

Hope ogled her screen. Here it was, then, at a time she least expected it. Brick was on to Allegra. It was all Hope could do not to spill the beans.

She wrote: Class, I think. Why?

Brick wrote: Someone said they saw her at the mall.

Hope wrote: Which someone?

Brick wrote: Someone.

Hope wrote: Come on. Who.

Brick wrote: Parker Marz. He said she was with some guy in a Boston College sweatshirt. Doesn’t your cousin go to BC?

Hope chewed her pencil eraser. Her cousins were all older, although one of them-the biggest, most pompous jerk of the bunch-had gone to BC, prompting Eddie to tell his favorite joke. How do you know if someone goes to BC? They’ll tell you.

Hope wrote: One of our cousins went to BC. A while ago.

Brick wrote: Oh. Okay.

Hope wrote: Did you ask Allegra about it?

Brick wrote: Nah. Not a big deal. Never mind.

Burying his head in the sand, Hope thought. She couldn’t blame him. The truth was too awful to contemplate.

Hope went to church every week with her mother. She was a spiritual person, she believed in God, she bought most of the tenets of the Catholic Church but not all of them. She did believe in prayer, and so she said a heartfelt one for Brick, and then she opened to page 242 and started learning about the inert gases.

He bounced up the cobblestone street in his Porsche Cayenne, wearing his lucky Panama hat, waving at everyone he saw. Grace liked to accuse him of what she called “indiscriminate waving.”

“You didn’t even know that person,” she said once. “Why did you wave?”

The fact was, Eddie was a little nearsighted, and he feared not waving to the wrong person more than he feared waving to a complete stranger. A not-wave in the real-estate business could mean a killed deal or a lost rental; it could mean missing out on thousands of dollars of potential income.

Next to Eddie, on the passenger seat, were four bills from the spec houses on Eagle Wing Lane. Or, more correctly, four bills from 13 Eagle Wing Lane, because Eddie had been forced to stop construction on numbers 9 and 11. He simply didn’t have the cash.

Getting four bills in one day should be illegal, Eddie thought. Three should be the maximum. But today’s mail had brought four; his secretary, Eloise, had handed them over, pinched between her thumb and index finger, as if she were giving him someone’s snotty handkerchief.

The first bill, for putting in the foundation, came in at twenty-two grand. Eddie blinked, then felt a rush of relief when he realized he had already paid that one. But a call to Gerry, the foundation guy, revealed that Eddie had paid for the foundations of numbers 9 and 11 but not for the foundation of number 13.

His Panama hat was not lucky. He would have taken it off and thrown it into the way back, but he so believed in its powers that he feared taking it off in anger would cause him to crash the Porsche and die, leaving Grace and the girls in debt.

Before he’d left the office, he’d stopped by the desk of his sister, Barbie, who was the only other broker that worked with him, because she was, essentially, the only person on Nantucket that he trusted other than his wife and children.

He said, “What am I gonna do about money?”

Barbie looked up at him through her frosted bangs. She wasn’t the most beautiful woman on the island, but she presented what she had to maximum advantage. She always wore a dress-she favored Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses (Eddie had no clue, but Allegra had schooled him as to Aunt Barbie’s tastes), always heels (Manolo Blahniks), always the perfume (he didn’t know what it was called, but it was so distinctively her that it might as well have been called Barbie). She was wearing her signature piece of jewelry: a black pearl that was the same size as the jawbreakers they used to steal from the five-and-dime when they were kids.

They had grown up on Purchase Street in New Bedford, dirt poor. High school for Eddie had been two pairs of corduroy pants (gray and beige) and two pilled sweaters (gray and beige), two button-down shirts (white and red plaid), and a pair of zippy red-and-blue running shoes that his mother had found at Goodwill. The shoes had come to define him as he proceeded to break every sprinting record at New Bedford High School and other high schools across the Commonwealth, earning himself the nickname Fast Eddie.