Every morning on the pond, before Peter and the kids come in, I sweep the floorboards, making tight neat piles of dust and sand and earwigs that I then transfer into the dustpan, pile by pile, before shaking the whole thing outside underneath the nearest bush. And every morning on the pond, in that moment, I think of Anna. The briefest flash. Not so much a memory of her, as the recognition of a tiny but indelible mark, a living piece of her that still lives in me. Anna taught me how to sweep when I was seven. “Not like that, moron,” she corrected from the porch as I swung the broom around the room like a pendulum, lifting billows of dirt and dust ahead of me. “You have to do small strokes close to the ground. Make lots of little piles. Sweep inward. Otherwise that’s what happens.”
This morning when I put the broom away in its place between the refrigerator and the pantry wall, it slips sideways, falls into the cobwebby gap behind the fridge. I sigh, knowing I have no choice but to retrieve it from the spidery darkness. My mother always cleans the camp before we come, but only the places she can see. When we arrived for the summer yesterday, the first thing Maddy noticed was a massive mouse nest in the rafter above the pantry shelves.
“I’m pretending I haven’t seen it,” I overheard my mother saying to her as I passed the back door, lugging bags of our clothes in from the car. “I leave the truly horrible things for when your mother arrives.”
“I heard that,” I said.
“A family of muskrats is living in the water lilies,” she said to Maddy, ignoring me. “They’re very sweet—three little ones swim out behind their mother every morning. There were four, but I found one floating in the weeds when I was out in the canoe. His body was like a fur log. Full rigor mortis.”
“That’s nice, Mum. Thanks for sharing that with my daughter,” I called out over my shoulder.
“Are you planning to move in permanently? I’ve never seen so much stuff.”
I stopped at the end of the path and stood looking out at the pond, the bright June sky. A perfect day for a swim. “I’m so happy to be here, I can’t stand it,” I said to no one.
But this morning is gray and overcast, too cold for a swim. I leave the broom where it has fallen, walk down the path to our cabin, and fish around my canvas duffel for running shoes and a jog bra. Peter’s clothes are in a little heap on the floor where he took them off last night. I hang his white cotton shirt on a hook, fold his threadbare moleskin trousers and put them over the back of the chair.
Peter stirs behind me.
“It’s early,” I whisper. “Go back to sleep.”
He turns over, smiles at me, hair matted to his forehead, his pillow sleep-wrinkled onto his cheek. “Cozy,” he says. He looks so sweet, like a little boy.
“Back soon.” I kiss his eyelids, breathe in his familiar smell of salt and cigarettes.
“I’ll make breakfast,” he mumbles.
I jog up our steep driveway, dodging roots and winter potholes in the soil, before heading down the dirt road that skirts the pond and ends at the sea. The woods are quiet, barely stirring. Most of the houses haven’t yet been opened for the season. June can be rainy and damp. The fresh morning air feels like a splash of cold water. With each thud of my feet on the sandy ground I can feel my body waking up, as if I’m coming back to life after a long hibernation, sniffing for bees in the clover, looking for just the right tree to scratch. It’s this way every year.
As I near the ocean, I pick up speed, eager for the dense woods to give way to low scrub and cranberry, eager for the sea. Around the last bend in the road, I’m surprised to see Jonas sitting on the shoulder, binoculars dangling around his neck.
“What are you doing here?” I’m panting when I reach him. “You said you weren’t coming up ’til next week.” I sit down beside him.
“Last-minute decision. One hundred percent humidity, the whole city stank of armpit, and then the air conditioning in the loft decided to stop working.”
“Oh, c’mon. Admit it. It’s because you missed me so much.” I laugh.
Jonas smiles. “Well, that too. It seems impossible for us to get any proper time together in the city. We’re all so crazed. And then suddenly it’s summer. Thank Christ. Kids happy to be here?”
“Hardly. We haven’t even been here a day and already they’re complaining about no Wi-Fi. Peter’s threatening to send them all to military school.”
“He up for a bit?”
“Two weeks. Then the usual back-and-forth on weekends. Are you on your way to the beach, or already been?”
“Been. I went to check on the nesting shorebirds.”
“And?”
“They’re nesting.”
“Are the fences up?”
He nods. “They’ve cordoned off half the beach.”
“I fucking hate piping plovers.”
“You hate anyone who doesn’t understand that you own the Back Woods,” Jonas says.
“The whole thing is ridiculous. The paper says the plover population has decreased since they started roping off those sections of beach to protect them.”
Jonas nods. “It’s possible the smell of humans was keeping the coyotes away from the eggs.”
“So, what’s been happening at your end? Gina good?”
Jonas hesitates a hitch before answering, almost imperceptible, but I notice it. “Ecstatic to be here. And already looking for ways to avoid my mother. She left to go sailing before I woke up. Took the Rhodes out to check the rigging.”
“Sailing.” Even after all these years, the word sticks on my tongue, as if I’m speaking a Namibian click language.
“Sailing,” Jonas says.
It hangs in the air like a slow-falling rock. I feel the unpeeling of something tender and awful and sad and shameful between us, as I always do. But Jonas breaks its fall, and the moment passes.
“She wants to buy a Cat 19. I’m on the fence.”
“Jack will be psyched if she does.” My bright voice rings false, and I know he hears it, too. But it’s what we do, what we’ve done for years now. We drag our past behind us like a weight, still shackled, but far enough back that we never have to see, never have to openly acknowledge who we once were.
Above us, a peregrine wings the sky. We watch it peak into the clouds, turn, and plunge headlong toward the earth, sighting its prey.
Jonas stands up. “I need to head back. My mother wants help planting marigolds. The mosquitoes are terrible this year. Stop by for a drink later. We’re home tonight.”
“We’d love that.”
He gives me a quick kiss on the cheek and heads off. I watch him walk away until he rounds the bend, out of sight. It is easier this way.
Mum is in her usual spot on the porch sofa when I get back. Peter is in the kitchen making coffee.
“Morning, gorgeous,” he calls out. “How was the first run of the summer?”
“Heaven. I feel like I can finally breathe.”
“Coffee’s on its way. Did you make it to the ocean?”
“I did. The tide was just going out. I found this.” I walk over to him, hold out my open palm. “I’ve never seen a horseshoe crab this teensy. It’s perfect.”
“How was the water?” my mother asks.
“I didn’t swim—I was in my running clothes.”
“You could have swum naked,” Mum says. A criticism.
“I could have,” I say. It has begun. “I ran into Jonas on the road. He invited us all for a drink later.”
“Excellent,” Peter says.
“Did you notice? The gypsy caterpillars are back,” Mum says.
“The road to the beach looked fine.”
“They’ll get there. They’re like locusts. Half the trees between here and Pamela’s are bare. It’s too depressing. That horrible pattering sound of droppings raining down onto the path. I had to put my rebozo over my head and run, yesterday morning.”
“Caterpillars shit?” Peter asks.
“It looks like beige coffee grounds,” I say.
“That happened to me once,” my mother says. “It turned out I had an ulcer.”
“Your mother is speaking in tongues again, Elle,” Peter says.
“Your husband is impertinent,” Mum says. “In any event, if you ever find what appear to be coffee grounds in the toilet bowl, you’ll know.”
“That’s disgusting,” I say.
“Nevertheless.”
“Coffee, Wallace?” Peter asks, coming out of the kitchen with a fresh pot.
I adore my husband.
We hear about the dead child at the Fourth of July parade. A five-year-old girl, buried alive this morning when a dune collapsed on her at Higgins Hollow. Her mother was out on a sandbar doing yoga. When she turned to check on her daughter, all she could see was her daughter’s pink bucket, which at first appeared to be floating four inches above the ground.
“I will never get that image out of my head. That little hand sticking up out of the sand.” I’m standing with Jonas and his mother under the shade of a towering maple, watching the parade. Gina, Maddy, and Finn have waded into the crowd hoping to get a front-row view.
“What did I always say to you kids about climbing on the dunes?” Jonas’s mother says now, with a tone of smug “I told you so” satisfaction. “See?”
Jonas looks at me in amazement and bursts out laughing.
“That’s extremely insensitive of you,” his mother says, and turns her back to us. “You’re disgraceful.”
I’ve been trying my best to keep a straight face. But I can’t help it. I feel like I’m fourteen again, standing in Jonas’s living room being chided by her for ever having liked an overtly racist television program like Little House on the Prairie. Or the time she preached at Anna on the beach about the evils of wearing a bikini. “You’re allowing yourself to be objectified by men.” Anna had pulled off her bikini top and shimmied at her like a stripper, before walking down to the water topless. Once, Jonas’s mother made the grave mistake of chastising my mother for bringing a bag of charcoal briquettes to a bonfire. “Charcoal, Wallace? There’s barely a tree left in the Congo. You might as well go to Virunga and shoot the mountain gorillas yourself.”
“I would, but the airfare is extravagant,” Mum had said.
Then she’d dumped the entire bag of charcoal onto the bonfire, which rose in a glorious blaze. “You’re disgraceful,” Jonas’s mother had spat. Jonas and I had stood there, jaws dropped, thrilled by the sight of our mothers doing battle, before running away down the beach, laughing and shouting, “You’re disgraceful!” at each other.
Jonas grins at me. “You’re disgraceful,” he mouths.
“You’re disgraceful,” I mouth back.
A float of teenage girls in lobster suits drives by. They wave and smile, throw candy corn into the crowds. Behind them, the local middle school marching band plays an off-key version of “Eye of the Tiger.” Gina approaches us with Maddy and Finn in tow. All three of them are waving plastic American flags stapled to balsa sticks. Maddy is wearing a candy necklace.
“What’s so funny?” Gina puts her arm through Jonas’s.
“Look!” Finn waves his flag at me. “Gina bought us flags.”
“You shouldn’t have,” I say to Gina. “Those things are a waste of money.”
“It’s for the war veterans,” Gina says in a tone that makes it clear I’ve offended her.
“Of course,” I say quickly. “It was very generous of you.”
“It was three dollars.”
“I just meant: look how happy you made them.” Maddy and Finn have run back down the hill and are waving their flags excitedly at four weather-worn old men in a brown Oldsmobile holding up a Rotary Club banner.
Jonas puts his hand on my arm. Points to the Oldsmobile. “I could swear those are the same old geezers we used to wave at.”
“I’m pretty sure they swap them out every ten or twenty years. Remember the guy in the Uncle Sam hat who screamed at me for wearing a Walter Mondale T-shirt and chased us down the street?”
Jonas laughs.
“So,” Gina says, pushing back into the conversation. “What was so funny?”
Jonas’s mother turns, purse-lipped. “A small child died on the beach earlier today. Your husband and Elle seemed to think it a cause for merriment. Anyway, I’m leaving. It’s like an oven here. I’d appreciate it if you could stop at the store on your way home and pick up rice cakes and Clamato juice. And we need paprika.” She stalks off without saying goodbye.
“Whoa,” Gina says. “What’s up with that?”
“She’s in a huff because we were laughing at her,” Jonas says.
“About a child dying?”
“Of course not. She was being tone-deaf.”
“So . . . what?” Gina presses.
“Something she used to say when we were kids,” Jonas says. “It wouldn’t translate.”
“I’m sure I can keep up.” Gina bristles. “Whatever. You two can keep your secret code.”
Jonas takes an irritated breath. “She called us disgraceful.”
“She’s right,” Gina snaps.
I feel like I’ve been slapped in the face. I look over at Jonas for an explanation, but he is intent on Gina, his eyes a slow burn.
“Sorry,” Gina says quickly, backpedaling. “I have no idea why I said that. It’s hot and I barely slept.”
“It’s fine,” I say. But it isn’t. Her hostility, her insecurity makes no sense. Gina has always had an unquestioning self-confidence, a complete lack of superego. She likes herself. When Gina and Jonas were first together, I knew she felt threatened by me. Not because she had any idea how much Jonas had once loved me, he has never told her. What made her jealous back then were the ancient roots of our friendship—a shared history that would always exclude her. But that was a hundred years ago. We’ve all made our own history together. We’ve grown older together. As couples. As friends. Yet it feels as if just now, for a quick second, she lost control and revealed her true feelings, a jealousy and deep resentment of me that she has kept hidden all these years. Then, realizing what had escaped, tried to put it back in the bottle. Something must have triggered this. It’s about more than lack of sleep, the heat. Something is going on between them, some strain that Jonas hasn’t acknowledged to me.
“I’m going to get the kids and head off,” I say, backing out. “You’re right, Gina. This place is a furnace. Maybe see you at the fireworks later?”
“We’re skipping it,” Gina says. “I have the regatta tomorrow morning. Six a.m.”
“I might come,” Jonas says.
Driving out of town with the kids, I pass Jonas and Gina outside the grocery store. They are arguing. Gina gesticulating at him, livid. She’s crying. Jonas has a plastic bottle of Clamato under his arm. The appeal of tomato juice laced with clam has always puzzled me. Jonas shakes his head angrily at whatever she is saying. Cars inch forward in front of me. I know I should look away, but I don’t. The yellow light turns to red. Above the low thrum of the air conditioner, through the closed car window, I hear Gina shout, “Fuck you!” I glance behind me to see if the kids have heard, but they are deep in their phones. Jonas says something to Gina, then turns and walks away down the street. Gina calls after him—begs him to stop—but he keeps going. I watch her shoulders slump. I feel like a Peeping Tom. She wipes the dripping snot from her nose with the back of her black shirt-sleeve, leaving a streak of mucus that glistens and shimmers in the sun like a snail trail. There is something so defeated in her posture—a vulnerability I have never seen before—and it makes me sad for her. I look away, begging the light to change before she notices our car. Behind me, Maddy rolls down her window, waves to Gina, calling out. Gina looks up just as the light changes.
“Mom,” Maddy says as we pull onto the highway into an endless line of post-parade traffic, “Gina told us there are alligators in the sewers in New York. Is it true?”
“Did she?” I laugh. “Did she also tell you that when you play the White Album backward it says, “Paul is dead?”
“Who’s Paul?” Finn says.
“I don’t think there are alligators down there, Maddy. Although you never know. When I was four years old I watched my mother’s boyfriend flush a baby alligator down the toilet.”
“How big was it?” Maddy says. “Wouldn’t it have gotten stuck?”
“Like a gecko.”
“What if they climb out onto the sidewalk and kill people?” Finn asks.
“I’m pretty sure you’re safe, bunny.”
“I don’t want to walk to school anymore.”
Traffic creeps along. Bicyclists pass us on the verge.
“You know,” I say, “when Anna and I were little, our father gave us Sea-Monkeys for Christmas. They came with a plastic aquarium and a packet of Sea-Monkey eggs. It said on the box that when you put the eggs in water, they would grow into instant pets. There was a little packet of food with a tiny spoon.”
“They still have those,” Maddy says. “We should get some. They sound cool.”
“Well, -ish,” I say. “They were supposed to turn into creatures that looked like naked sea horses with long human legs and crowns and lived in underwater castles.”
“Can we get some?” Finn asks.
“No.”
“Why not? I want a pet.”
“Because they are bullshit.”
“Mom!” Maddy says. “Language.”
“Fair enough.” I laugh. “Anna and I waited and waited for the Sea-Monkey family to appear. We ran home every day after school to see if they had hatched into little kings and queens. And lo and behold, after about a week these microscopic shrimp-like things began to dart around the water.”
“So, then what happened?” Maddy asks.
“Nothing. They didn’t grow. They stayed that way. It turned out they were just microscopic krill.”
“That’s what whales eat,” Maddy says to Finn.
“I know that,” Finn says.
“End of story: One day we got home from school and they were gone. My mother had poured them down the sink. She said most of the Sea-Monkeys were dead on the bottom of the container, and the aquarium was turning into a breeding ground for mosquitoes.”
“That’s so sad,” Maddy says.
“Maybe, maybe not. We never got to see them grow, but who knows—maybe they finally grew after she flushed them. Maybe there are kingdoms of Sea-Monkeys in the sewers, full of teensy kings and queens and princesses in their minuscule crowns.”
“I hope you’re right,” Maddy says. “That would be the best thing ever.”
“I do, too, sweet pea. Anyway, my point is, maybe Gina is right about the alligators. Maybe they are down there living on tiny Sea-Monkeys.”
“No!” Maddy says. “I hate that. That would be horrible.”
It’s been years since I’ve thought about the Sea-Monkeys. How Anna and I watched that plastic aquarium every day. How we hoped and waited and clapped when tiny things began to move, and felt bitterly disappointed when that was all. The waiting begins early, I think. The lies begin early. But so do dreams and hopes and stories.
I pull off the highway onto our one-lane dirt road, head into the Back Woods, praying I don’t meet another car coming out. I hate backing up, and this stretch of road has no turnoffs.
Every year the town sets off fireworks from an old wooden barge in the harbor, testing fate, sparks aiming for shore as the barge creaks and groans. My favorite place to watch the fireworks has always been from the end of the pier that juts farthest out into the bay from the town wharf. Walking out past the line of briny trawlers, their nets piled damp, tethered to the dock like horses outside a saloon. Past the dinghies, bobbing on their moorings. Out to where the deeper water licks the tops of the pylons, far from the crowds. The smell of fishiness and wet timber. Most people gather at the town beach to watch the display: cascades of color rocketing into the night, illuminating the roof of the sky, comet tails and giant sparklers reflecting onto the bay like a million stars, so that for an instant, the sea becomes the sky. Sitting at the end of the pier, legs dangling down above the dark water, the stars appear right beneath our feet, slipping past us under the pier, into that mysterious world. It was Jonas who first brought me to this spot.
The blank, unbearable heat of the day has alchemized into a perfect summer night. Soft breezes in the dark. The kids have run off somewhere to watch the fireworks with their friends. Peter, Mum, and I drink white wine from paper cups, waiting, anticipating that first spiraling whistle. Any minute now, my mother will start to complain.
“Mind if I pull up a chair?” Jonas materializes out of the night, a phantom, silent approach, just as he used to do when we were young and I walked to the beach on my own. I have rarely if ever heard his footfall.
“They said nine p.m. on the dot, but as usual they’re making us wait,” Mum says.
“Gina not coming?” Pete asks, as Jonas sits down beside him.
“She sends her love. She badly wanted to come, but she’s been feeling a bit under the weather.”
I look over at Jonas, surprised by the white lie. It is unlike him. I know he can feel my steady gaze, but he doesn’t turn.
An hour later, when all that remains in the air is the tang of gunpowder and the skies have regained their gravity, we head back to round up the kids. Peter and Mum are in the lead, laughing and bickering. I slow to let them pull farther ahead of Jonas and me before bringing up his lie.
“I wasn’t lying,” he says, annoyed. “I was making Gina’s excuses. It’s called being polite.”
“Actually, it’s called lying, when you lie,” I say, not letting him off the hook.
“She was having a shitty day. Am I really required to explain that to Peter and your mother?” he snaps.
“Don’t be a jerk. I was just asking. I saw you shouting at each other outside the pharmacy.”
“Sorry.”
“So? What’s going on?”
“Gina lost her gallery in May. She hasn’t told a soul—she feels too humiliated. Meanwhile I’m having my big show in the fall. She thinks I told you, and she’s upset.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Well, I have now.”
We slow to a stop, stand together looking out at the sleeping boats. I wait for him.
“The fight was my fault,” he says. “I was extremely angry with her for speaking to you that way. I lost my temper.”
Jonas championing me over Gina gives me a jolt of cat-cream pleasure I shouldn’t feel, but I say, “That was dumb.”
“Gina loves you, you know that. But she knows we talk about everything. I think that if my oldest friend was a man, it would be easier for her.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I scoff. “Gina is the Rock of Gibraltar.” But I know what he says is true. I’ve seen it: a fissure; the vulnerability she revealed today when she thought no one was watching; the way her body luffed, wind knocked from her, as Jonas walked away and didn’t look back. And yet some lizard-brain instinct in me recognizes that openly acknowledging even the slightest rift between Gina and me will leave all of us more exposed—though to what, exactly, I don’t know. A nervous energy.
“You should have stayed home with her tonight,” I say. “Patched things up.”
“We did. We’re good. And you and I always watch the fireworks together.”
“We could have skipped a year.”
“It’s our tradition.”
“So is eating turkey at Thanksgiving. But frankly turkey is dry and bland. Who really likes it?”
“I do,” Jonas says. He links his arm tightly through mine and we head down the pier to join the others.
Sunday. Peter, Mum, and the kids have gone off to the flea market, their weekly ritual of looking through tables of other people’s junk to find pearls, usually in the form of some hideous laminated reproduction of a Gibson girl drinking Coca-Cola, or a book about fly-fishing that Peter thinks might one day come in handy. Afterward they have lunch at the Clam Shack, where every time Peter tries to convince the kids to eat raw oysters and lobster rolls, and every time they order foot-long hot dogs in buttered buns.
I walk down to the edge of the pond, take off my bathing suit, lay my towel on the warm sand. Above me, the trees wave their branches to me as if they are greeting an old friend. I’m thinking about Bain de Soleil, its thick, orange oiliness, burnt caramel smell, zero sun block—how Anna and I used to try to attract the sun rather than block it—when the phone starts ringing in the Big House. I try to ignore it, but it doesn’t stop. Mum doesn’t believe in answering machines. “If they want to reach me they can call back.”
It is Peter’s office. They need him to fly to Memphis in the morning for a story. Flight details. Hotel information. Local telephone numbers.
I look around for a pen and something to write on. All I can find is a takeout menu and a flyer for a local production of The Silver Cord. Nearby, thumbtacked to a wooden shelf above the phone, is my mother’s list of important phone numbers. It has been there since I was a child, by now covered in scribbles and corrections, names of local plumbers and electricians, the Park Ranger station; numbers crossed out in ballpoint pen, rewritten in pencil; a peace sign Anna once drew in green Magic Marker. In the middle of the list, written in faded blue ink, Conrad’s mother’s phone number in Memphis is still visible. The handwriting is Leo’s.
“Wasn’t your stepfather from Memphis?” Peter says, throwing a few things into a carry-on bag. “Socks.”
“He was.” I pull open a lower drawer and take out four pairs of socks.
“Have you ever been?”
“Once. For Conrad’s funeral.”
“Of course. I wasn’t thinking.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“How old was Conrad when he died?”
“Jack’s age,” I say. “Do you need undershirts?”
“Christ. How do you ever get over something like that?” Peter throws a few last things into the bag—a pack of gum, a comb, the book from his bedside table—and zips it.
I sit down on the edge of the bed. “You don’t.”
Down the path, I hear Finn and Maddy arguing. “No shouting on the pond,” my mother yells from the porch.
“I can’t believe you’re abandoning me with that crazy woman.” I chip at the red nail polish on my big toe. My heels look like they are made of rhino horn. “I need a pedicure.”
“Come with me. We can have a romantic getaway.”
“In Memphis?”
“Anywhere we can have sex without your mother hearing us.”
“Much as I love you, Memphis is the last place on earth I ever want to see again.”
Peter sits down beside me on the bed. “I’m serious. It’ll be cathartic. I’ll take you out for barbecue spaghetti.”
I stare out the cabin door, mind searching for a simple excuse. The pond is golden, glassy, tipping toward evening. Here and there a few small turtle heads have popped up like thumbs, basking in the last of the sun. I wonder whether Peter is right—whether there could ever be such a thing as catharsis.
“Come,” he says again. “You’ll be rescuing me from four depressing days on my own in the murder capital of America. We can have loud sex. You can get a pedicure.”
“I doubt Mum’s willing to watch the kids,” I say. But even as I sidestep, I hear my mother’s voice in my head, the pep talk she would always give me and Anna when we were afraid of anything—the dark, a bad grade in social studies, the idea that, one day, she would die and rot: “We are not a family of cowards, girls. We face our fears head on.”
“Let me ask her,” Peter says. “You know if I ask, she’ll say yes.”
“True.”
“And you can visit Conrad’s grave.”