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The toaster hurled two slices of toast into the air. Olivia touched the piping-hot slabs, dropped them onto plates, and turned to find Anthony, backpack over his shoulder and leather jacket on. She had insisted on feeding him before his trek off to Providence, where he would perform one of the greatest actions of his life: he would finalize his divorce, celebrate the end of an era with his daughter, crash at a hotel, then return to the island the following day. Olivia hustled up to him and pressed a kiss on his lips. She was overcome with longing to go with him but knew he had to do this alone. It was closure in his life; it had nothing to do with her.
“I can’t believe I’ll be single after today,” Anthony said, teasing her.
“Yeah, you’ll have to go out on the town. Pick up girls.” Olivia wrapped her fingers around his neck and hung on him like a monkey to a tree. “Are you sure you have to go so soon?”
“I do.” He flashed her that wicked grin, then said, “But I’ll grab a piece of toast for the way.”
Olivia knew full well that Anthony was the kind of man who could do anything himself. Tyler had been the sort to demand breakfast on the table; she’d found herself buttering and jamming his bread while he scrubbed up in the shower, already late for work. For this reason, however, Olivia relished caring for Anthony in this way. He half-protested when she scraped the butter across the toasted bread, then held up his hands and said, “You know you don’t have to take care of me like that.”
Olivia shrugged playfully. “I just don’t trust you to do it correctly.”
“So the truth comes out. She thinks I’m stupid, everyone.”
Olivia rolled her eyes, placed the two pieces of toast on a paper towel, and then handed them over. “You’ll drive safe?”
“No. I’ll be all over the road at one hundred miles an hour.”
“Be serious.”
It was a Saturday morning. Olivia felt strange and outside of herself in the big house alone. She scrubbed the counters, cleaned out the fridge, and then checked on her various responsibilities for the upcoming fundraisers. She was waiting on four email responses, which meant she was at a standstill. She texted Amelia to explain the situation, and Amelia sent back a flurry of messages, highlighting the number of tasks she’d already managed to perform that morning, despite the fact that the day had only just begun.
OLIVIA: You’re a monster, Amelia Taylor.
OLIVIA: Your baby is going to be a genius, isn’t she?
OLIVIA: Ugh. Thank you for everything you’re doing.
AMELIA: We’ll get you that money, girl. I promise you that.
Olivia still wasn’t so sure. She didn’t want to lean too heavily on hope. She stood from her desk and stretched her arms over her head and considered what to do with her time. Papers, she supposed. They had piled up again. She’d asked students to choose their own adventure, as it were, when it came to topics. Thusly, she’d read a number of interesting ones, including “the significance of female characters in the novel,” and “the metaphorical meaning of color,” and “none of the characters in The Great Gatsby are happy, and here’s why.”
After about an hour of grading papers, Olivia began to read one titled, “The Concept of Broken Hopes in The Great Gatsby.” Her heart began to patter wildly as she read her student’s analyses of the various “hopes” the characters in The Great Gatsby had, many of which were defeated and how this represented a greater American dream and the subsequent loss of it.
“The thing about hopes is that we have to cling to them as long as we can, to give us some sort of drive, something to live for. Gatsby had Daisy; he always had Daisy. But it was just a facade. I wonder then, how many of our hopes are just that — empty vessels that we reach toward, thinking that once we retrieve them, all of our questions will be answered.”
Olivia furrowed her brow and re-read the essay. It was remarkable and utterly moving, and it created a little black hole in the back of her mind. It demanded of her: what had she hoped for all these years? And did she have anything to reach for, now that The Hesson House had been wiped away?
It also demanded another question, one that had wormed around the back of her mind for several weeks. Did she really want to go on like this, year after year: eating bad lunches in the teacher’s lounge, demanding kids read books they didn’t want to read, and performing the same duties, year after year?
She had certainly loved teaching. Loved it! And for a long time, it had been enough. She had talked poetics about the beauty of filling teenagers’ minds with literature, about activating their creative energies. All of that was still just as amazing as ever before. But she couldn’t help but think, what was her story, exactly?
Would she really remain this empty shell, this endless giver of thought — without ever forming anything of her own?
Olivia finished grading the rest of the papers and placed the stack to the side. The late September early afternoon drew up a slight storm and splattered the glass with rain. Olivia’s stomach jumped with fear as she hustled to her phone to check the weather. “Mild showers,” it read. “Fifty-two degrees.”
She heaved a sigh of relief. This wasn’t hurricane weather. It was just a light drizzle.
Back in her study, Olivia sat in front of her computer and poised her fingers on the keyboard. A long, long time ago, before she had headed off to school to study teaching, she’d told her best friends that she wanted to be a writer. In the wake of that, she had thought if she couldn’t be a writer, she could at least teach writing. That had been almost enough.
But maybe it wasn’t enough any longer.
The act of writing was a bit like digging through all the meaningless fluff and grabbing onto the creative side of things that one never knew existed. It’s to push the boundaries of every word and description. It meant darting toward some sort of truth and drawing out fantastical things, beautiful images and thoughts and making them come alive on paper. Things in the dark recesses of her mind that she’d buried back there for years.
Eventually, she found herself writing poetics about her Great Aunt Marcia.
“She was an iconic woman: perpetually well-dressed, with this air of incredible intelligence, as though she already knew what you were about to say before you said it. Perhaps the love she had in her life was a more zealous and fiery sort of love — the type that burned out quickly and wasn’t meant to last. I knew this better than most, as one afternoon after school, a handsome boy from school and I discovered her in the upstairs of an old mansion, pressed up against the wall by a younger man. She looked at me with these big, beautiful eyes — eyes that knew something and from that moment on, she felt we were linked. She attributed a level of courage to me that I don’t believe I deserved. Perhaps, since that day, I’ve tried to build it within myself, against my nature. Perhaps Great Aunt Marcia would say that that’s the only thing to do: fake your courage until you find it within yourself.”
Olivia continued to write. She wrote about that young man her Great Aunt Marcia had had an affair with, whom she had later discovered was a relation to Anthony himself, which was part of the reason Anthony had been allowed to help build back up the old mansion in the first place. With each tap of her finger, each word scribed, Olivia felt closer and closer to some sort of identity she’d long since forgotten.
And goodness, with her love for her Great Aunt Marcia fluttering across the page like this, she missed her more than ever. She’d lost her aunt, and with the storm, she had lost The Hesson House. All she had left were her memories and she would ensure they would have a home, a place on the page. This was the only way.
Time seemed to speed up as Olivia wrote. She fell into a daze, one she was officially yanked from at around four o’clock when none other than Camilla Jenkins appeared in the window there in front of her desk. Apparently, she had jumped the fence in order to do just this: rap her knuckles on the glass and demand answers.
Olivia jumped from her desk and cried, “What the heck are you doing?”
Camilla’s face brightened. She mouthed something — probably screaming it through the window, but Olivia couldn’t make it out. She hustled out of the office and toward the back door, where she opened it to find the rest of the Sisters of Edgartown attempting to jump the fence to follow in Camilla’s footsteps, save for Amelia, who stood off to the back instructing Jennifer on where to put her feet.
“What the heck are you doing? Are you all collectively robbing me? Because you should know, I don’t have more than a few pennies to rub together.”
“We’ve been calling you for hours!” Camilla said. “And then we knocked on your door and rang your doorbell the past ten minutes.”
“Are you in some kind of fugue state?” Jennifer called.
“I was just—” Olivia hadn’t thought she’d be caught in such a delicate act. She wasn’t fully sure she wanted to share what she had been up to, even to her dearest friends. It was too precious. “I’m fine, but what about you? Is something wrong?”
“We want to go on an adventure,” Mila announced mischievously.
“We decided we’ve all been working way too hard,” Camilla affirmed. “Namely one of us.” She glared at Amelia through the fence.
Amelia shook her head. “If I don’t do it, it doesn’t get done correctly.”
“What kind of adventure?” Olivia asked.
Jennifer hobbled down the other side of the fence, giving up. “We have bottles of wine in the car and plenty of food.”
“Say no more,” Olivia said.
“And grab your coat. And extra blankets,” Mila told her.
“Aye, aye, captain.” Olivia rushed back inside, holding open the door so that Mila and Camilla could come in the back way and meet the others out front. As Olivia hunted through her closet for blankets, she said, “I can’t believe you guys tried to break into my house.”
“You didn’t give us a choice, babe,” Camilla said. “And it’s what you girls did to me earlier this year, remember?”
Camilla had taken the separation from Jonathon incredibly hard. She’d boarded herself up in her bedroom, hardly showered, and avoided food. The Sisters of Edgartown had cleaned her up, organized her house, and helped her take each day at a time.
“We were worried about you, hon,” Mila said as she took several of Olivia’s blankets into her arms. “That’s enough of a reason to break your door down, in my book.”
Olivia returned briefly to her computer and saved all two thousand words she had written that afternoon. For the first time in her adult life, she contemplated what it might be like to write a book — maybe a fictionalized account of the wonderfully wicked life of her Great Aunt Marcia. Perhaps she could even weave her own story within it, with a backdrop of The Hesson House. Perhaps in that small way, The Hesson House could live on, if they weren’t able to build up the funds, that is.