It was so cold that February day that it seemed like a miracle the salt water managed to shove its way into Drummer Cove and escape back to the sea without hardening into ice. The Cape was so quiet, so frigid. The water was the only thing that moved.
It was high tide. From the roof, Michael took a break from his work and stopped to admire the view—there were so many trees around the Gordons’ house that this was the only real way to take it in. The surface of the water sparkled royal blue against the light dusting of snow that had fallen earlier that morning on the bluff and the small islands of beach grass. The storm was off to sea now. Michael could see the thick layer of once-threatening clouds, like an army in retreat in the distance. It created a dramatic contrast between the hovering darkness on the horizon and the pure, high midday light of winter.
Michael loved the cove, a place that felt special and secret, especially this time of year, when it was hidden from the tourists’ greedy eyes. He wished like hell that the Cape’s economy and his own livelihood didn’t depend on weekly renters who arrived on summer Saturdays in their minivans, armed with cell phones, floaties, flip-flops, and People magazines. In winter, the tourists and all their crap were thankfully gone. The roads were clear, and the greasy sheen of sunscreen had vanished from the surface of the ponds, now frozen and still.
On days like this, it was so quiet that Michael could fool himself into thinking that the cove belonged to him alone. It felt like it did: he loved the whole Outer Cape, but this spot was especially sacred. The earthy smell of rotting peat and sulfur somehow made his whole confusing life make sense. He appreciated the danger of the silt, the privacy of the cove, the rhythm of the tides—a change that was predictable, the only kind of change he could stomach.
He wished his daughter, Avery, could be there with him, but she was at school. He’d never brought her to the Gordons’ house or told her about them. But two or three times a week he took her to Blackfish Creek so they could walk along the crunchy straw path that wrapped around most of the cove. They’d stomp on the sand and watch the hermit crabs scamper back into their holes and inspect the carcasses of upturned horseshoe crabs. The small, young ones had golden backs as thin and clear as varnish, while the bigger crabs had thick shells like tree bark, and could live to be over a hundred years old. He liked to run his finger along the spiked toothy ridges of their backs. Avery knocked her small fist against their crab shells so she could create a drumming sound. She’d flip the dead ones upside down and yank off their sandy, barnacled legs like she was pulling petals off a flower. She could do that without hesitation; she was a child of the Cape, comfortable with the ocean and its creatures in a way he never would be, although his distance created a space for a sort of reverence that she’d never understand.
Michael pounded a nail into the side of the Gordons’ chimney and wrapped wire around it. What started as a simple project had become more complicated when he realized the mortar between some of the bricks had started to crumble, and the chimney needed tuck-pointing. He’d taken care of that last week. Now he could proceed with the original task at hand: repairing the grate on the top of the chimney that kept the squirrels and raccoons out. This was something Ed should have checked when he left. It wasn’t like he hadn’t learned his lesson.
That second summer Michael came to the Cape with the Gordons, Connie opened the door and backed away, overcome by the odor in the closed-up house. They discovered a family of dead raccoons in the living room. Their nest had collapsed down the chimney, and the animals couldn’t get out of the house. The signs of their desperation were everywhere: in the dirty animal prints all over the rugs, upholstery, and floorboards, the scratch marks on the windowsills and the nose prints on the windows. He should have seen it as an omen of how that summer would ultimately end.
Michael looked at the roof. The shingles needed to be replaced, but that was the kind of big job he couldn’t tackle without being noticed. There were plenty of other big jobs he itched to take care of: spackling the cracks in the living room walls, sanding the floors, putting dormers in the second floor to make decent living space out of the attic—his old bedroom.
He’d wanted to fix the Gordons’ house ever since the first year after he’d left Milwaukee, when he’d spent part of the winter living there undetected. That was the loneliest time of his life. No television, no companions, no job to go to, no school to keep him busy, no family, no friends: just Anthony’s threats rattling around in his head, and the reverberating thoughts of Ann telling everyone that Michael was the father of that prick’s kid. It crippled him to think of what Ed and Connie must have said about him, how wrong they thought they’d been to have adopted him. He was crushed and sorry for himself. By the beginning of March, he’d decided he couldn’t hide out at the Gordons’ place anymore. Sooner or later someone would find him. He closed the house down, careful to conceal every single trace of his presence, and he showed up at Jason’s.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“I graduated early.”
Jason could tell Michael was lying. “You’re going to need to get your GED.”
“Fine. Can you give me some work?”
“I knew you’d be back.”
Michael could tell that Jason knew something was up, but he was grateful that his old boss—and now his only friend in the world—played along. “I could also use a place to stay for a while if you’ve got some extra room.” It was all he could do to hold it together. As much as he hated asking for help, it was better than spending a dime of Anthony’s dirty money.
“I’ve got a couch in the basement. It’s not much, but sure beats sleeping on the beach.”
“I’ll pay you back.”
“I’ve seen you work your ass off. I’m not worried about that. You hungry?”
Michael nodded yes. For months, he’d eaten only nonperishables. He was overcome with gratitude for Jason’s company and warm food. He felt, for the first time in months, that it might actually be possible for his life to improve again.
Jason took Michael’s bag off his shoulder and ushered him into the kitchen, where his wife, Angela, was pushing steaming food around in a frying pan. “Hey, Michael,” she said. “You know you’d better like yourself a whole damn lot if you decide to live on the Cape in the off-season.”
Jason paid him in cash; no background checks, no requests to furnish proof of who he was, no taxes to file, no way for Connie or Ed to figure out where he’d gone, not that they were looking. When Michael wasn’t plowing driveways or checking on his clients’ empty houses, he was studying.
When summer came around he asked Jason not to have him work in Wellfleet, convinced that Connie or Ed would spy him pruning a hedge or edging a lawn. Come September, once he knew the Gordons were back in Milwaukee, he’d slip away and spend a secret night in their Wellfleet house listening to Ed’s LPs. Ed loved Dylan and the Eagles and all the stuff you’d expect a middle-aged, guitar-playing, sandal-wearing guy like Ed to listen to, but he also had a thing for blues and jazz. It was through Ed that Michael learned about heavy-hitters like Charles Mingus, Art Blakey, and Coleman Hawkins, but he also had albums by obscure musicians like Roswell Rudd, Jeanne Lee, and Alan Shorter. Michael didn’t always love Ed’s music, but he gave it a try, just like he’d read whatever books Connie had read. He studied the lines she’d underlined and paid attention to the notes she wrote in the margins. He wished he could talk to them, but getting that close to them, listening to their music, reading their books—that was as close as he could get to having a sort of conversation.
His overnight visits eventually stopped, like a childhood habit he’d outgrown. Still, he looked after the house whenever he could, the way he was watching over it that cold February afternoon.
He often worked in the barn, where he could use what Ed called his “medieval torture devices,” an amazing collection of the kinds of rusty tools that had been passed down to him: a miter vise, a creeper, a Stanley plane—even a special hacksaw used to dehorn goats and calves.
The barn was where Michael found the die-cutting tools he needed to make what was, at first, just a toy for Avery. Later, it became a prototype that would help him launch Anibitz, his new side business based on that old game he’d played with Ann and Poppy, where they’d combine two, three, four parts of animals. A centipede, catfish, and crow: the “centifishow.” A hyena, shark, and gerbil: the “hyarkbil.” The thin wooden pieces snapped together like jigsaw-puzzle pieces, and the game was to try to guess and name the creations, and to find creations that represented who you were—your “spirit Anibitz.” The concept had become so successful that he could hardly say it was a side business anymore, and sales had recently surged thanks to a few magazine articles and some active Anibitz fan sites. He could barely keep up with the orders on his own anymore, and soon he might need to cash out his share in the landscaping company to raise funds to invest in expansion.
His distributor was a freelance rep from Los Angeles named Sandi. She was so into Anibitz that he swore she played with the toys herself when she wasn’t talking to him about social media and the youth market. She had a million ideas for his product: a clothing line, coloring books, plastic figures that snapped together, an educational line for science teachers, and a bunch of other stuff Michael tuned out because she always called him at the most inopportune time, like when he was fixing an overflowing toilet for Shelby, or firing an employee with a heroin habit.
Sandi had called him earlier that week, excited. “The kids in Japan are going apeshit for them,” she said.
“Great.” Michael must have sounded unimpressed.
“Michael! Did you hear me? Japan! The kids are combobulating like crazy.”
“Combobulating” was the process of selecting the animal segments that customers could choose from to make their own Anibitz creation. You could pick up to three, although Sandi was already imagining how they might expand to four, maybe even five, if they could find a plastics manufacturer that could come up with a decent prototype.
There was even talk of opening an Anibitz showroom somewhere. The past two years, during the low season, this was what Michael had been focused on. He’d always believed in his idea, although he’d rather work outside than deal with the business that needed to be done on his computer.
A truck rumbled down Route 6. It was easy to spend time at the Gordons’ undetected. The neighbors on either side of the Gordons’ house didn’t notice Michael’s presence. They were gone for the winter, and even if they’d been there, their houses faced the cove—they reminded Michael of chairs with their backs set away from each other. Michael drove a landscaping truck, and landscapers were hired to routinely check on houses during the winter—nothing suspicious about that. The police wouldn’t care much, either. The force was thin after the budget cuts, and the few officers who remained were busy with bigger problems, the kind you wouldn’t think you’d find on the Cape: thefts, drug abuse—stuff that kept Michael up at night worried over trouble that could befall Avery when she got older.
He finished his repair work, climbed down his tall ladder, and loaded it back in his pickup, which he’d parked on the service drive under the trees so nobody would know he was there. He figured he’d check to make sure the pipes hadn’t burst. Ed and Connie emptied all the water, but sometimes they did a shit job, like three years ago, when they’d neglected to drain the water heater and Michael caught it just in time, before the heating element cracked.
As much as Ed and Connie loved their house, and as much as Ed liked to tinker, they weren’t really house people, not the way Michael was. That was why Michael figured they probably hadn’t ever noticed his small repair jobs. But he couldn’t help leaving little messages behind, like the dried leaves he inserted between the pages of some of Connie’s books, a shiny penny dropped head-up on the floor because Poppy used to be superstitious about pennies, or a jar of grilling spices he thought Connie might like tucked in the back of the kitchen cabinet. Last fall he’d set a pretty slipper shell under the pillow of Poppy’s bed. When she was young, she told him the shells were cribs for babies. He noticed when he lifted the pillow up that her bed was covered in dust; he figured it hadn’t been slept in for years.
But Michael never left a secret message for Ann. He didn’t know how to communicate with her, not even in the smallest and most subtle way.
Anthony Shaw, on the other hand … for years, Michael had planned to someday send him a message loud and clear. Back when Avery was born and he and Shelby sorted through all their financials, Michael finally checked on “his” bank account and discovered that Anthony, who’d cosigned and had equal access to the account, had withdrawn so much that there was barely enough to keep the account open. That was money that was supposed to go to Ann. Michael knew Ann was getting screwed over, and even though she’d sold him upstream, he couldn’t stand the thought of her struggling. He was so upset that he’d finally told Shelby the full story about the Gordons.
He didn’t have much money then, not after he’d used the other check Anthony had given him to buy his partnership in Jason’s business, but he suffered from lingering feelings of guilt for accepting Anthony’s payoff in the first place. Michael worked it out with the bank and scraped together some of his own money to send to Ann, a little here, a little there, always in odd amounts that probably confused her since she’d been used to getting the same amount every month. Shelby was generally supportive, but during the financial crisis, when they were really struggling to get by, she told him that it was time to wash his hands of Ann and her “situation.” After all, Shelby said, Ann was the one who’d fallen in love with a jerk, and she was the one who’d come up with the stupid plan in the first place.
Enough was enough.
Michael took off his heavy gloves and scooped the house key out of the bulb digger. The heavy, old key to the Gordon house slid into the lock. He heard the familiar click and opened the door, inhaling the familiar, musty odor. But this time something was different. Someone had been there. He spied a Starbucks cup with lipstick on the kitchen table. He picked it up and pulled off the lid. The little bit of coffee left inside had frozen solid. “Hello?” he said, although he could sense that he was alone.
The rooms were just as they’d been the last time he’d been there, the beds and all the furniture covered in sheets. He felt as if he were in the middle of a morgue. Then he saw something he also hadn’t seen before: a business card with a photo of the ocean as the background. He picked it up: Carol Hargrove. Her photo was off to one side. She wasn’t even smiling. She didn’t look like any Realtor he’d ever met. She looked like she belonged outdoors, like she worked on his landscaping crew.
Perplexed, Michael stuffed the business card in his wallet and sat down on the sofa. That was when he felt something hard and heard a sharp crack. He lifted up the sheet and saw the photo of himself with Ann and Poppy that had always remained on the mantel. That photo meant everything to him, because, after what had happened, Ed and Connie had kept it on display when they could have stuffed it in a drawer.
Why, now, was it hidden under the sheet? The crack ran right down the middle, right through him.
How did it get there? He set the photo back on the mantel as it was. He felt spooked enough to drive back to the shop and pull the Shaws’ house key from the pegboard. Jason still had the Shaws’ key, and it dangled teasingly all these years.
Michael parked his truck down the street and walked quietly down the long driveway toward the brown house, careful to make sure nobody was watching him. The sun was going down, and he admired the slit of light on the horizon over the bay. There, in that eerie afternoon light, was the bluestone patio he’d once laid, visible in the gullies where the wind had lifted the snow. There were the rosebushes, although nobody had bothered to cover them with burlap. The key slid into the lock, and the door creaked when he opened it. He walked back into the place and felt as if he’d been body-slammed against the massive white walls. This was where his youth had died. It took him a moment to collect himself. What was it about houses, the power they had? The houses he’d once inhabited now inhabited him. They were witnesses to who he once was, to the people he’d loved—and hated. He could practically hear the fall of Anthony’s footsteps, the jingle of Maureen’s bracelets, the bored lamentations of the boys. And Ann, Ann, Ann. He could practically reach out and touch her ponytail, her bare feet, her smile.
Everything that had seemed modern and new now looked old and worn. The sheet on the couch was rumpled, the vase at the center of the dining room table was empty. He had to leave.
But first, he had a mission to accomplish, just a flick of a switch. Only Anthony might appreciate how a single gesture could cause such great destruction.