CLAMMING—OF ALL THE ridiculous activities WASPs loved, this one took the cake. Ivy had imagined that clamming would involve a boat and nets, similar to catching lobsters or crabs, but really, it was just pulling a rake through the sand until you hauled in something, and more often than not, it was a pebble or a shell, and not anything edible. They arrived at the Great Pond to kids splashing around little tide pools while their parents, in large sun hats and rolled-up chinos, dug for their dinner with a Puritan work ethic that would have made Ivy’s yam-digging farmer ancestors proud.

It was the golden hour, the sky a haloed blue with wistful streaks of pink and orange, a sliver of a moon high in the sky. After they collected enough clams, they headed to a nearby park for the bake. Gideon got out Poppy’s aluminum stockpot and set it on the outdoor grill; Roux and Sylvia dumped the clams inside with an entire stick of butter, half a bottle of Albari?o wine, and a bunch of bayberries. They all gathered on the grass, getting rapidly drunk, brushing sand from their legs and the hollows underneath their ankles. When the shells popped open, they feasted, all of them starving, and no one talked much as they chewed on Portuguese bread, driftwood-smoked clam meat, another bottle of wine. The sky slowly darkened. Moths flittered toward the streetlights. Everyone was beautiful but their beauty had a sinister quality, like the beauty of Venetian masks that might hide the glorious or grotesque. The sight of Roux and Sylvia sharing a kiss was enough to bring sudden tears to Ivy’s eyes. I care about you a lot. But caring a lot was not love. Caring without loving was only pity. Roux looked at her. It was too late to rearrange her expression. His eyes were dark and stormy and honest—the only honest thing around her!

At ten o’clock, Gideon said they had to get going if they wanted to make it home before the tide turned. He held her hand very tightly on the walk back to the boat. She felt like telling him to cut it out, he didn’t have to mollify her in these cheap ways, as if she were such a simpleton, like Andrea, the kind of naive girl who’d believe in such apologies. It occurred to Ivy that she and Gideon had never before quarreled. He’d never had a reason to apologize. Now he did and she was the one who was sorry.

Immediately after they boarded the boat, she went down into the cabin area and lay on the trundle bed. It was hard, cramped, and smelled of seaweed. From the little window she saw the hazy brushstrokes of the Milky Way: burning stars millions of miles away, where she wished she could be, if only she could be reborn as something other. She counted two hundred stars before she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. The next thing she knew, she opened her eyes and Gideon was murmuring, We’re back.

14

THE NEXT MORNING, IVY WAS in the kitchen making breakfast before anyone else was awake. Roux was the first one down. He took one look at her appearance—fully made-up, her hair clasped back in a mother-of-pearl clip, a new apron tied around her skirt—and asked whose body she’d buried. “Gideon find out and put you in the doghouse?” he added, pouring himself a cup of coffee. Instead of leaving for his usual morning donut run, he sat on one of the barstools and watched as she arranged the raspberries in concentric circles atop a bowl of yogurt. “You missed a spot here,” he said, plucking up a raspberry and popping it into his mouth. “Better start again.”

She picked up the paring knife and began slicing a kiwi into quarters. “On the boat yesterday,” she said calmly, “Sylvia wanted me to ask you to go to St. Stephen’s with us tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“It’s important to her parents.”

“No. Why’d she tell you to ask me?”

Ivy gave him a sharp look, but he seemed genuinely ignorant of why his girlfriend would assume Ivy had any influence over him. Maybe she’d been the only one tiptoeing around him, imagining a shared history that he found so inconsequential, it hadn’t even been worth mentioning to Sylvia.

“Anyway, I’m not going,” he said, eating another raspberry.

“Doing the opposite of what everyone wants—it’s childish. And not amusing whatsoever.”

He eyed her coldly. “Who says I want to be amusing?”

She felt his desire to pick a fight and resisted by adopting her “teacher” tone, which she sensed would most irritate him.

“Suit yourself. But if your girlfriend asks, can you please tell her I tried to convince you?”

“You’re so…”

“Yes?”

“Never mind. It’s too fucking early for this.”

“You clearly want to say something to me. It’s not healthy to hold things in.”

“You know those monkeys who clap and screech when their owner cracks the whip?” He made a snapping motion with his wrist. “That’s you with the Speyers. Cooking them breakfast. Running their errands. When’d you become such a goddamn ass-kisser? It pisses me off just looking at you.”

She asked if he was done. He wasn’t.

“You’re being played a fool and you don’t even know it. You really think these people care about you? They care more about the stray cat. They just want you to clap, monkey, clap.”

Ivy brought the knife to her mouth and licked the flat surface of its juices. “You know what your problem is?” she said quietly. “You just wish you were the one holding the whip.”

She turned her back to him toward the stove, turning the sausages one by one, her hands trembling with rage, until she heard him turn and walk away. When she came to her senses, the sausages were burned, streaked with char and unsalvageable.

The Speyers came down around ten. Ted and Poppy praised the food as if no guest had ever toasted bread and scrambled eggs for them. Ted kept asking what Ivy had put in the eggs, they were just so delicious. “A lot of butter,” she said ebulliently. She gave Gideon a light kiss on the lips. He spoke to her in a normal, cheerful tone. No degree of discomfiture could survive the unassailable force of inane morning chatter. It was why she’d gotten up early to cook breakfast. She spooned out a portion of yogurt into a bowl, drizzled with honey, and handed it to Gideon with a wide smile. To show you were wounded from battle was to lose the war.

Roux returned to the table. He pulled Sylvia aside to the porch, speaking to her in a harsh voice, which they all pretended not to hear through the thin sliding doors. Sylvia remained still; Roux was a pacer. They went back and forth for a while. Roux, his voice louder, said, “You know what I’m talking about, you do this—”

Sylvia returned inside, heading straight upstairs; Roux remained outside, lighting up a cigarette.

“These eggs really are just delicious,” said Ted.

“Enough about the eggs,” said Poppy.

After helping Poppy load the dishes into the dishwasher, Ivy went to her bedroom to grab her prep book. To her surprise, she found Sylvia standing by the window. When Sylvia saw her, she quickly removed her hand off Ivy’s table.

“Pepper got out of my room. I was looking for him.”

Ivy gazed around the empty room. “Is he here?”

“Not that I’ve seen. I checked the bathroom and he’s not in there either.”

Ivy asked if she’d checked underneath the bed. She dropped to her knees but only saw dust balls rolling underneath the wooden slats of the bed frame.

“I’m going to check the attic,” said Sylvia. “Let me know if you see him.”

Something didn’t sit right. Ivy went to her desk. Her test prep book was wide open on its spine in a section she didn’t recognize. She thumbed through the pages, then shook it down by the spine. Roux’s sketch, the one she’d stuck inside for safekeeping, was gone.

* * *

IVY FOUND GIDEON working in the foyer after his swim. She asked him if he’d seen Sylvia’s cat, it’d gotten out of its room. He said he hadn’t seen it.

“Are you really going to bring it back with us to Boston?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“I guess we’ll be spending our time at my place from now on…”

He glanced up briefly from his laptop to reassure her he’d keep his apartment clean of cat hair, she would hardly notice Pepper’s presence, and besides, she seemed to be doing much better on her allergy medications and he’d heard from Tom’s mother that tolerance could be built over time. As he spoke, his fingers kept on typing as if they were separate entities from his brain.

“It’s just that Sylvia found him,” said Ivy. “And she seems so attached already. Why doesn’t she keep him?”

“Her apartment doesn’t allow pets. And she has her heart set on rescuing Pepper. It’s the right thing to do.” His decisive tone allowed for no further discussion.

Ivy felt a scrunching sensation between her eyes, as if she were trying to squint at something far away.

“Should you really always be humoring Sylvia like that?”