She took me out in her midnight-blue roadster, tearing around the hills of East Egg as if they had personally offended her. We went past the paddock where Tom’s ponies grazed, through a small copse of trees where Daisy told me the last witch of Long Island had been hung, and then we stopped at the high and sandy dunes on the undeveloped side of the peninsula. She parked us overlooking the water, nothing in view but blue and the encroaching creep of Briarwood Island, and then she slumped over, her head on my shoulder and both her hands playing with one of mine.
“So what’s the crisis, darling?” she asked, her voice conspiratorial. “Have you fallen in love with Nick after all? I had so many plans to bring you two together, but you both keep on in the city as if there’s anything there.”
“There’s nothing but sand and sea here,” I said. “Daisy … Gatsby wants you.”
She went still, her head a weight on my shoulder, her hands suddenly squeezing mine tight before letting go. She didn’t move.
“Oh?” she asked. Her voice sounded as well-balanced as a throwing knife, but she had no target at the moment, only me in her car with her, overlooking the glittering water.
“Yes … look.”
I told her all of it, starting from the night I had met Nick at Gatsby’s party, through to what had happened last night at the Cendrillon. I spared nothing, not the love bites on Nick’s throat or how Gatsby had looked after his expensive Amherst boy. I might have been telling her a fairy tale, none of it real enough to reach her where she was huddled against my side.
I came to a stop, because the story had run out for the moment, and I prodded her so she would finally sit up. She did so reluctantly, and to my shock, my complete and utter shock, her eyes were full of tears.
“My God, my God,” she said in a fascinated whisper. “He loves me.”
“I don’t know if he does,” I said. “There was … I don’t know, Daisy.”
“He does,” she said, her hand tightening into small fists. “He does, he does.”
Over the Sound, dark clouds were forming, and a cold breeze chilled the sweat on my bare arms. An ache came to rest between my eyes and through my temples as the clouds rolled like a croupier’s dice.
“Daisy…”
“Tell me again,” she demanded, turning to me. The Sound and the sky had gone to match her eyes, and I told her again.
The words sank into her, and as I finished, fat drops of water fell on us, wide-spaced and hard, leaving us speckled rather than soaked in our light dresses.
When she finally looked away from me, I fell back against the seat, wisps of my hair stuck to my face from the falling water. Almost as an afterthought, Daisy raised the roadster’s roof and lit us both cigarettes. We smoked together in silence, and her hand covered mine, possessively and almost afraid.
It’ll be fine, I thought to myself. I remembered the last time she had held my hand like that, and it had been fine then too.
CHAPTER TEN
Daisy married Tom just nine months after the Armistice, three months after Fulbright’s, and just three years before I came looking for her at her home in East Egg. It had been a rainy June, but that Sunday morning, the sun came out to burn away the clouds as if it could not resist the soon-to-be Mrs. Thomas Buchanan.
Daisy’s wedding was a wonder, and it drew people from all over the state and beyond. There were Carlyles from Fulton County, Parrishes from Upton, and of course plenty of Tom’s people from Chicago: the Weltys, the Anselms, the Evanston Palmers, and the Tollands. Daisy’s side of the aisle was hardly lacking either, with Phelpses, Moons, and Petries, and a scattering of relatives from farther afield. The Carraways, distant and distinguished, sent along a representative despite suffering some small tragedy earlier that year, and the Millays from Wisconsin provided Daisy with a flower girl in the form of a tiny cousin who was like a rosebud come to life.