The Milwaukee house had become a time capsule, especially in winter, sealed up from the elements. Everything was just as her parents had left it, from the tattered throw blankets on the armrests to the plants on the windowsills. The basement smelled like old cardboard. They were the kind of people who’d kept all the boxes that once held the things they’d bought: an old fan, a vacuum, a computer, a changing table.
Poppy wandered the house, restless. She finally mustered up the courage to enter her parents’ room and lie down on their bed, feeling the dents in the mattress where their bodies left their impressions, smelling their pillows, crying her heart out.
Her own bedroom was just as she’d left it, although her tie-dyed curtains had been bleached by the sun. A poster of surfer Greg Cipes standing shirtless on the beach still hung above her bed, and a pile of faded surf magazines sat on her dresser, gathering dust. Even her one-hitter was still hidden in the back of her top drawer.
Ann’s room was also neatly preserved. Poppy inspected her bookcase, which was lined with track medals and academic awards, along with framed photos of Noah as a baby. On the bulletin board, she saw a photograph of the two of them taken from behind. It was sunset at Mayo Beach, and they were squeezing each other. How Poppy had worshiped Ann! They must have been seven and eight, their legs still a little chubby, their hair more golden. Poppy sat on Ann’s bed for a little while and guiltily looked through the nightstand, remembering how, in high school, she’d sneak peeks into her sister’s diary to find out who she liked, and how surprised she’d been, once, to see an entry about Michael, how he was unlike other guys, and so cute!!! The diary was gone, but she discovered a folded-up drawing that lacerated her heart. It was a picture Noah must have drawn of Poppy when he was around six, when Poppy had visited home for Christmas. It was a trip she didn’t remember well, aside from feeling like Milwaukee was cold and boring. She’d taken everything for granted. Her mother must have spent hours preparing Poppy’s favorite dishes, and she’d blown off her father’s invitation to see a band at the Jazz Estate. She got high before her parents took the family to see the Milwaukee Ballet perform The Nutcracker and slept during the entire show. After only a few days she left, strung-out and in a huff because Ann had gotten on her case about being more responsible. Noah must have made the drawing the next day when he’d woken up to discover she was gone. He pictured Poppy standing on a surfboard, her face as big and round as the sun on the corner of the page. The Milwaukee house with the turret stood behind her. He’d written in painstakingly careful letters, some backward, “Ent Popee you fgrot to soy good bie from NOAH.”
She had forgotten. She’d been so thoughtless, leaving the way she had, at night, when Noah was sleeping, without ever taking his feelings into account. The worst part was that Ann had kept the drawing in the intimate space of the nightstand, so Poppy knew it had mattered to her.
It took emotional fortitude to enter Michael’s old room, too. It still felt like it was his. She would stare up at the glow-in-the-dark stars he’d attached to the ceiling with her dad, who bought them for Michael shortly after he’d moved in with them. She couldn’t believe nobody had ever gotten rid of Michael’s stuff after what he’d done. His T-shirts were still folded in the drawer. The bookshelves held his track trophies, the desk was stuffed with old math quizzes he’d aced. The giant aquarium that used to fill up the room with its comforting hum and eerie, wet light sat empty on the table.
Michael’s rolled-up balls of socks reminded her of when she’d teased him because he always wore his socks inside out. He explained that his mother, shortly before she died, told him that whenever he was sad, all he had to do was wear his socks inside out and he’d feel happy again.
Michael, Michael … She had so many questions for him, so much she wanted to say, so much anger. But alone in his room, a room she knew her parents had left untouched because they wanted him to come back, like all of their bedrooms—she only wished that he were there to mourn with her. Sure, he’d left, but she’d left, too, only for different reasons.
So much had changed, yet Poppy still felt stuck in that hard time when Noah was a baby, when the atmosphere in the small home often grew tense, loud and anxious. Sleep-deprived, her parents had snapped at each other. Poppy withdrew and started sleeping at her friends’ houses, escaping to their cottages, tripping at music festivals on the weekends, using drugs to escape. Everyone was too stressed and exhausted to worry about her.
The longer she stayed in the house, the more she pieced together her reasons for leaving, and why she hadn’t come back, save for that one awful visit. She’d once felt integral to her family. After Michael’s adoption and the trauma of his exit, along with the birth of Noah, she’d been rendered invisible, insignificant, especially by Ann, who’d never confided in her except to share details about her body.
Normally private and self-conscious, Ann was surprisingly open about childbirth. She told Poppy about the stitches from her episiotomy zigzagging all the way to her ass, explained how her breasts hardened into hot, hard boulders. When the milk came in, Poppy made warm compresses to set on her painfully infected nipples. She nursed so much she walked around the house with her nursing bra unstrapped, the flaps up, right in front of their father.
Ann had a hard time burning off the baby weight. Poppy inadvertently set off a fit of tears when Ann saw her walking from the bathroom to her bedroom wearing only her bra and underwear. “What’s wrong?” Poppy asked.
“Look at you. You’re so thin,” Ann said. “Check this out.” She pulled up her shirt and grabbed a handful of flesh from her stomach. “It’s so gross. Like raw chicken.”
Noah was amazing and precious. Poppy loved the way he smelled, loved to clip his fingernails while he was sleeping, loved the way he sucked his bottom lip. She played peekaboo and blew into his stomach so he’d laugh. He was so soft and juicy and sweet. But he was also difficult in the way that babies are difficult. She understood why sleep deprivation was used as a method of torture on prisoners, and during long crying jags from teething or gas she felt sudden sympathy for mothers who shook their babies. She begged Noah to stop crying. “Please,” she’d say. “I’ll do anything. Just give me peace and quiet for five minutes.”
Even though it was hard, Ann was a good mother, shouldering the burden of love and worry for this tiny living thing she’d brought into the world while still somehow managing to take classes at the college in the fall. Poppy had vowed she’d never have a child of her own, partly because having a kid meant having a family, and her once-close family had changed from the stress. She couldn’t wait to move out.
But when she did, she thought of Noah all the time, and ached to be with him, remembering how his sweet face lit up whenever he saw her. Most weekends through college, she took the Badger Bus home from UW–Madison. One fall day she’d arrived home and found Noah banging his hands on the tray of his high chair when she walked into the kitchen, baby food all over his face. “Pay-ay.”
“He knows your name,” her dad said, his big hand resting gently on Noah’s soft curls. Most people seemed older when they became grandparents, like her mom. She’d doted after Noah, talking in baby talk, knitting pumpkin hats for him and showing baby photos to all of her friends. Her dad, on the other hand, seemed younger now, as though he fed off all Noah’s endless baby energy. “Hey, sport, who am I?” He pointed at himself. Noah said, “Dooo.” Her dad beamed. “I’m not ready for ‘Grandpa,’” he said. “I want him to call me ‘Dude.’”
One weekend when Poppy watched Noah, she gave him a bath and trimmed his hair with her mom’s sewing scissors. Ann came home, took one look at him, and broke down in tears. “That was his first haircut! How could you do that? I wanted to save his first lock.”
Poppy didn’t know Ann had a soft, sentimental side. The baby had changed her. “That’s so, like, Victorian. You really care about stuff like that?”
“Of course!” Ann reached into the bathroom garbage looking for hair. It was easy to set Ann off.
“You’re welcome for babysitting.”
“That’s all it is to you: babysitting. Don’t do me any favors,” Ann snapped.
Soon, Poppy learned that talking about college was a hot button. She saw Ann’s face turn bitter with jealousy when she told her about helicopters dropping joints on the State Capitol lawn during Mifflin Street days, and her excellent political science professor and the bands she’d seen on the Union Terrace, or how she’d partied at the Kollege Klub. Ann was too proud to admit she was jealous of Poppy’s freedom. Instead, her jealousy manifested itself as meanness that only pushed Poppy further and further away until her visits became less frequent. One afternoon Ann exploded when Poppy came home, breathless with excitement, and told her she was planning to go to Costa Rica on a study-abroad program. “Costa Rica?” Ann said. “You don’t even care about school. You just want to surf and hang out with a bunch of dropouts and losers.”
“What’s your problem?”
“I’m raising a kid on my own and going to school. What the hell are you going to learn about in Costa Rica? Study abroad is total bullshit. You can learn something right here in Milwaukee.”
“You don’t have to be a bitch about it.”
“Whatever. Just leave, go to Costa Rica. Go anywhere, see what we care.” Ann held Noah in a tight grip. We: she was speaking for both of them.
“Fine,” Poppy said, deeply hurt. “I’ll do anything to get away from you.”
And she did. Poppy left for Costa Rica, seeking a less complicated life somewhere, anywhere else.
Poppy tried to escape her memories the way she usually did: by heading outside. The wind was sharp and cold, and the city was covered in a blanket of dirty snow that looked even darker under a flat, gray sky. Instead of VW vans and palm trees, Poppy had to readjust to a world of Jiffy Lubes, Home Depot, and frozen-custard stands.
Green Bay Packer T-shirts were on clearance at Walgreens because the Packers just lost the last round of the playoffs. Everyone seemed aimless and deflated now that football season was over.
She sought the solace of water. She walked through Lake Park to Lake Michigan in her dad’s ancient L.L.Bean parka, which still smelled like his beard. She was freezing, even with the parka and several layers of her mother’s old sweaters. Maybe it was true that her blood had become too thin. She didn’t mind, because the cold reinforced her inner numbness. She walked until her cheeks were raw and red and her eyes watered.
She found herself at the funky deco terrace at Bradford Beach, where she’d shroomed the night Ann had Noah. She squinted and read the waves on instinct. The wind had blown the snow into drifts, and there were mounds of ice where the waves had crashed and frozen before they could retreat. She’d heard that people surfed here, the way her Cape Cod friends, the “townies,” had surfed in the freezing Atlantic during winter.
All those years she was away, she’d grown accustomed to thinking of Milwaukee as ugly, a tired old industrial city, a place where time stopped. But the longer she was home, the more she began to appreciate the ways in which it hadn’t changed, and the city’s quiet, sturdy beauty. When it snowed, the oak trees in Lake Park looked like they were made of white lace, and the cold steam that rolled over the icy lake at sunrise took her breath away. She loved how she felt her parents here, walking where they’d walked, appreciating nature and the dramatic winter sunsets. It was an unexpected comfort to be in a place where everything was familiar and solid, and people didn’t just come and go. Even Dick Bacon, the legendary Milwaukee man who sat on the beach in a reflective tinfoil contraption to tan himself all year long, was still there in his Speedo, catching rays in the cold.
She called Ann sometimes to catch up, but Ann’s voice sounded clipped, businesslike. “Have you contacted a Realtor yet? St. Vincent’s will pick up furniture if you call them. A coat of paint will work wonders.” She cut Poppy off whenever she asked about the missing will and the distribution of her parents’ assets.
There was so much distance between them. If it weren’t for Noah and real estate, would they have anything to talk about?
She was lonely. She thought about calling some old friends from high school, but she’d been gone too long to casually reconnect. The people who stayed in Milwaukee had kids and busy, purposeful lives.
Desperate for company, she took a few Anusara yoga classes, because the focus of Anusara was on celebrating the heart, goodness, and worthiness, and she really wanted to believe in those things again. The classes were in Cedarburg, a quaint old mill town half an hour north of the city where the main street was lined with ice-cream parlors, antiques stores, and a coffee shop where ladies her mother would have been friends with met to quilt together. Everyone seemed to know each other there, which made Poppy feel even more alone. She was a strange species in the Midwest: a single woman in her thirties without kids or a job. She rolled up her mat and took off as soon as class was over. She wanted to avoid conversations so that people wouldn’t ask about her life story.
She put everything into her practice, hopeful that something, anything could help her work through the grief she felt over her parents and her confusion about what she should do next with her own life.
After one class, the instructor walked up to Poppy and said, “I know I tell you to open your ribs, but you need to keep them a little tighter. I can see you give too much of yourself away in your poses. Careful, or you’ll end up empty.” Poppy broke into tears and never went back.
One day, almost three weeks since her return to Milwaukee, she was doing yoga alone in the living room, surrounded by piles of books and her parents’ worn Scandinavian-style furniture, working on poses that were supposed to help with depression. She tried to quiet her mind and rebalance her sympathetic nervous system. Nothing worked. She’d listen to Habib Koité, do a hundred sun salutations, and go into wheel pose, only to collapse on the floor. She screamed out loud to the ceiling and whatever higher power was above it, “I’m opening my fucking heart and it’s not helping!”
That was when she met Brad. He was standing in the entrance to the living room holding two beers. “Maybe this’ll help?”
“Yeah,” she said, embarrassed. A beer sounded perfect, almost as perfect as the hard stuff she’d sworn off a few years ago.
“Brad Sobatka. You don’t remember me, do you?”
Brad Sobatka, Brad Sobatka. She studied his face, his cropped copper hair. Nothing clicked. “I don’t. I’m sorry, I’ve been gone a long time.”
“We were at Riverside together. I was in your class.”
“I’m surprised I don’t recognize you. You’re so good-looking.” She wasn’t flirting. He was good-looking, even if he wasn’t the kind of guy she was usually drawn to. His hair was beginning to recede, and he didn’t have a surfer’s lithe, athletic frame. Brad was more a part of the land. He was tall but stout, a little thick in his neck and gut. His nose was straight and blunt, and his chin and jaw were covered in coppery razor stubble. He had perfect teeth.
He held up the stiff fabric of his heavy twill work pants to reveal the rubber lift on his big, black shitkicker of a shoe. “I have a club foot. Kids could be pretty brutal about it. By the time I got to high school I learned how to make myself invisible. That’s probably why you don’t remember me. I was that guy in the back row.”
“High school was a long time ago, and my last year there was, you know, a bit of a blur.”
“You partook,” he said, pretending he was inhaling a joint.
Poppy smiled. “Yes. I partook.”
Her eyes traveled back up his leg to his broad, square chest. His coat was partially open, and on one side she could see the clips where the tan Carhartt bib overalls attached. Overalls, a leather tool belt, and oil under his fingernails: this guy was the real deal. “You remember me?”
“Sure I do.”
Poppy smiled at his awkwardness. She was used to attention from men, but Brad’s interest seemed more straightforward and sincere. She pretended to be distracted by the sanitation truck that rumbled down the street, and the dog barking in the neighbor’s yard.
Brad said, “I can get my stuff out of here as soon as you need me to leave. I don’t want to be in your way. I know this is a hard time.”
“Ann tells me I’m supposed to get the house ready to sell.”
Brad shook his head. “Ann is a force of nature.”
When Poppy thought of forces of nature, she thought of hurricanes, tsunamis. The kind of power that could cause complete destruction. “She is.”
“I spent some time with her after, you know, helping her with some of the arrangements. She’s tough. Tougher than I was. I told her I could move out but she wanted me to stay, keep an eye on things.”
“She didn’t even tell me about you. I think she’s pretty pissed that I haven’t been around much. At all, actually.”
“What were you supposed to do? She wasn’t here that long, anyway. Just long enough to take care of logistics, look for the will, talk to lawyers, meet with the judge. She seemed like she was in an awful big hurry.”
Poppy looked around the living room. “There’s so much stuff to get rid of, and this is just one of the houses we have to clear out. I don’t know what I ever thought about death. I thought it would be neater, like everything just goes poof! Gone. But there’s so much. And what’s the deal with the bathroom upstairs?”
Brad said, “I was helping your dad with that renovation project. It was sweet, actually. Your parents—” He blushed and looked down.
“What about them?”
“Well, they liked to take baths together.”
Poppy put her hand over her mouth and laughed. “Oh, God. That’s so them.”
“Your dad wanted a bigger tub, and he had the space for it. We’d just gotten started with the demo when he, when they—”
“A bigger bathtub. I’m not at all surprised.”
“I loved your parents. He was my favorite teacher. We were in a Dylan cover band at Linneman’s, and we bowled together. And your mom, she was the best. We’d shoot the shit for hours. She knew something about everything. Aristotle, the special biscuits they made for Cold War fallout shelters. It’s funny what she could still remember.”
She wanted to ask—still remember? But there was too much to focus on, like the way his hair curled over the top of his ear, and his green eyes, like the unbroken green waves she’d have to paddle out to surf.
“Anyway, I can take off if you want, or if I stick around, I can help you get the house cleaned up, finish the big sextub. That’s what your dad called it.” He smiled. “I’ve held off because I wasn’t sure what you’d want done, and I got busy with my welding—I own a welding shop, it’s more like a hobby but whatever. The shop is slow right now. So I guess I’m trying to say I’ve got the time and I work for free in exchange for lodging.”
“Yes! God, yes. I’m so glad you offered. This place is like the Land of Unfinished Projects.”
“This is a great house. I’ve thought of buying it myself if I can make it work. They don’t make ’em like this anymore. I love these old Victorians.”
“I’m up for selling it to you. I’d give you a good price. I don’t plan to be here long.”
“Where to next?”
“The Cape house. One last summer.” She wanted to get there soon, while the winds were still good, before the swells disappeared. “I thought about moving in there, but Ann wants to sell that house, too, and I’m not in a position to do much about it.”
“Then what?”
“Oh God, I don’t know. There’s always someplace to go to,” she said, although she was so weary from winter and grief that the thought of going back to her old lifestyle exhausted her. “Ann says I need to start investing in my future.”
Brad laughed. “Sounds like Ann.”
“I tell her she needs to learn how to live in the present.”
Brad said, “The present is a hard place to be sometimes.”
In her yoga classes she’d tell her students in warrior two not to reach for the future or the past. Finally, her advice made sense, even to herself. The future? She really had no idea what was in store for her. And the past? Well, that was complicated. For Poppy, the present was all she had.
Brad said, “I don’t mean this in a creepy way or anything, but would it be OK if I just, like, gave you a hug? You seem like you need one and I guess I could use one, too. It’s been really lonely here without your parents.”
Poppy nodded yes. She did need some human connection, he was right. She felt his warmth, and also something else, an electric jolt. She buried her face in his coat. It smelled like snow, metal, and musk. He smelled real.