That Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

  She explained herself as best she could, a recitation that left Michael looking troubled. “Is it nonnegotiable?” he asked.

  “I don’t think anything is nonnegotiable,” Diana replied. “But… well, is it very important to you?”

  He bowed his head. “I need to think,” he said. She touched his shoulder, his dear face, the skin of his cheek so soft against his beard. “I love you very much,” she said, and prayed that it would be enough. He blew out the candle and drew her down to the bed.

  “Let’s get some sleep,” he said. Diana closed her eyes, but for hours she lay awake with her heart quaking in her throat. She imagined she could feel her entire body trembling with the thought of losing him, and she didn’t know what she could say, or promise, to get him to stay.

  The next morning, Michael went for a walk by himself, on the beach. Diana cleaned every inch of the cottage, emptying out the refrigerator and scrubbing the shelves, pulling every book and shell and postcard off the shelf to dust them. She tried not to look at the time, or to entertain fantasies that she’d never see Michael Carmody again.

  A few hours later, Michael came back. His face was very serious as he took her by the hands. “I always thought that the reason you got married was to have a family,” he said. “I always thought I’d have kids, and be a good father to them, like my father was to me.”

  She nodded and felt like she’d swallowed a stone, like she’d just stepped off a ledge and was falling into the darkness.

  “But I want you to be my family,” he said. “I want us to be a family together. I want that more than anything.”

  She gave a hiccup-y half-laugh, half-sob. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure about you. But you have to be sure about this.”

  Diana squeezed her eyes shut and forced the words out of her mouth. “What if I don’t deserve to be happy?” she whispered.

  His inhalation was loud enough for her to hear it; the noise that meant that he was angry and trying to keep his temper in check. Now is when he’ll realize I’m crazy, she thought. Now is when he’ll leave.

  Michael paused, then said, in a slow and deliberate voice, “Do you think you deserved what happened to you that summer?”

  Diana shook her head. When she thought about the girl she’d been, young and trusting, running, fleet-footed, down the beach in her white dress, it felt like she was thinking of a stranger. But she knew that girl hadn’t deserved what had happened to her. No girl did.

  “Do you?” Michael’s voice was still low and calm, but she could hear anger underneath it.

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Then why wouldn’t you deserve to be happy?” When she didn’t answer, he bent down to gently brush his lips against hers. “Everyone deserves to be happy,” he said. “Maybe you, most of all.” Diana wrapped her arms around him, pulling him close, hearing him breathe.

  “I love you so much. Please say yes,” he whispered.

  She watched him slide the ring on her finger. “Yes,” she said.

  18

  Diana

  They were married on the deck behind the Abbey, in the glow of a perfect September sunset with their friends and family all around them. Diana wore a white dress. Michael wore a blue suit. Willa wore a garland of white orchids and roses around her neck that she alternately sniffed at and attempted to eat. A Unitarian Universalist minister conducted the service, with Reese as an unofficial co-officiant, resplendent in a morning coat and a top hat.

  Everyone was there: Diana’s parents and her sisters and their husbands and kids; Michael’s parents and his sister and her husband and their kids. Dr. Levy and Mr. Weinberg came. Maeve sent best wishes from Dublin, and Marie-Francoise from London, where she’d moved, and Kelly and Alicia were there, watching, as Diana walked down the aisle, a candlelit path in the sand.

  Dora Fitzsimmons, silent as ever, wore a black pantsuit and black New Balance sneakers, and gave the couple a check for five hundred dollars and a pound of Cabot’s fudge. Ryan, freshly returned from Los Angeles, gave them a birdhouse that he’d had commissioned, a version of their cottage in miniature, with a perch for a pair of lovebirds out front. Heavy Flo donated her services as a singer and DJ. She sang “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and a rainbow appeared in the sky over the water as Michael waltzed Diana around the deck. Then she played “It’s Raining Men,” and everyone crammed onto the dance floor, laughing and singing along. It was, everyone agreed, the party of the summer.

  At Michael’s urging, Diana told her parents the truth that they’d long ago guessed at: she’d been assaulted that summer, and, while it had knocked her off the path she’d planned, she’d found a different one. “And you’re happy?” her mother asked. “Because you look happy,” she said, before Diana could answer. “I just wish…” she said, her voice getting thick.

  “What, Mom?”

  “I just wish you’d told us back then! I wish you’d let us help.”

  Diana wrapped her arms around her mother’s shoulders, pulling her close. “I know. I wish a lot of things were different. But I promise, it all worked out okay.” Her mother nodded, and wiped her eyes before pushing Diana toward the dance floor, where her father was waiting, looking healthy and strong, his shoulders straight and his skin less sallow. “Go dance with your dad, honey. He’s been waiting for this a long time.”

  * * *

  Diana had the money she’d saved up from years of living rent-free. Michael had a small inheritance from his grandfather. But even after they’d pooled their savings, it only amounted to ten percent of what they estimated the cottage would sell for on the open market.

  “It can’t hurt to ask,” Michael told her, so a few weeks before their wedding, Diana approached Dr. Levy.

  “I don’t even know if you ever wanted to sell the place,” she began.

  “Actually, I’ve been giving it quite a bit of thought lately,” Dr. Levy replied. “I think—wait, hang on.” Diana waited. A few seconds later, Dr. Levy, sounding sheepish, said, “I had to close my office door before anyone hears me saying anything this woo-woo. But here’s the truth: I think that people and things, and, maybe, sometimes houses, come into our lives for a reason. That cottage mattered a lot to my parents, and it was important to me when I was a young woman. Now, though, I think that you’re the one who’s meant to be its caretaker. Well, you and Michael.”

  Dr. Levy accepted their offer. Michael gave up the lease on his apartment in Wellfleet and moved in with his clothes, his collection of spy novels, and his television set. Diana worried that the cottage would feel cramped and claustrophobic, as the novelty of cohabitation wore off, but as soon as the weather was warm Michael started work on an addition, a living room with a second loft bedroom above it. In the warm months, they would use the deck, with its firepit and picnic table and the outdoor shower; in the winter, when it got dark early, they were happy to build a fire and huddle indoors, on the couch or in bed, tucked up underneath the eaves with Willa snoozing at their feet.

  Michael replaced the creaky, drafty windows with double-hung, weatherproof ones that glided up and down at the touch of a finger and fit snugly in their frames. The next year, Michael dug up a patch of sandy earth and had a friend at a landscaping company haul in a truckload of soil, to make Diana a garden. That summer, they had a garden, and grew tomatoes and peppers and eggplants and corn.

  Diana learned to bake, and Michael took up birding. They both became expert kayakers and proficient surf casters, standing on the beach in their waders, watching the horizon for signs. When they spotted clouds of birds massing, and the water roiling beneath them, they’d cast their lines and, more often than not, pull in a fish or two.

  Michael bought a smoker, which he set on the corner of the deck and would use to smoke sea bass and make bluefish pâté. Diana began selling her embellished oyster shells to shops in Eastham and Orleans, and, just as Michael had predicted, when she raised the price, her sales first doubled, then tripled. For her
birthday, Michael signed her up for watercolor lessons at the Castle Hill Center for the Arts, and Diana added painting to her hobbies. That summer, she displayed a few paintings at the farmers’ market, next to her shells, and watched, surprised, as the summer people bought them. The year after that, she was showing her watercolors at local art fairs, and as the new century began, a gallery in Provincetown took her on. Diana Carmody is a self-taught artist whose work explores the contradictions in nature and in the landscapes of the Outer Cape, where she makes her home. In still lifes and seascapes, Carmody forces the viewer to consider the spaces between the tranquility of sea and sky, the beauty of dunes and marsh grass, and the potent violence of wind and rain, thunder and lightning, the gallery’s brochure about her said. In her work, nature is restless, motion is constant, the threat of danger implicit in the churn of the waves or a darkening sky or an animal lurking at the border. Her work invites the viewer to consider her own expectations about safety and beauty. (“I don’t know what it means, exactly,” Diana confided to Michael, who’d replied, “It means they can charge five thousand dollars.”)

  Eventually, Diana found a therapist, one of Reese’s friends, a woman named Hazel with short white hair and a thoughtful, quiet manner, who specialized in treating survivors of sexual assault. She taught Diana techniques for staying grounded, how to distinguish between her “emotion mind” and her “wise mind.” In her soothing, melodic voice, Hazel would point out when Diana was catastrophizing or personalizing, and urge her to reframe her thoughts, to look for benign interpretations, and consider the facts in evidence when Diana talked about feeling empty or worthless or inconsequential, or on the days when she woke up so full of rage it was all she could do not to scream at everyone she saw.

  Michael’s sister, Kate, and her husband, Devin, eventually had three children, two boys and a girl. Diana’s sister Julia’s daughters were in elementary school, and Kara’s son and daughter were seven and eight years old when Kate and her husband had their third (and, Kate swore, their final) baby. Diana watched her sister nurse the latest addition, a girl they’d named Addison. She watched Michael take the baby, his arms engulfing the blanket-wrapped bundle until it all but disappeared, his smile crinkling his cheeks and turning his eyes into slits, and waited to see if it would hurt. She probed her feelings the way she’d sometimes poke at a bruise, testing to see how it felt. The babies, she found, didn’t break her heart the way she worried they would, and toddlers were exhausting. It was not until years later that she had cause to question her choices.

  “I love it here,” her fourteen-year-old niece Sunny said, her voice dreamy, when she and her sister came to stay for a long weekend while Diana’s sister Julia and her husband celebrated their twentieth anniversary. “Aunt Diana, will you show us how to do the oyster shells?” Sunny asked, as Sasha, her twelve-year-old sister, stood slightly behind her, awaiting Diana’s answer. Sunny and Sasha both had dark hair and dark eyes, but Sasha was a petite girl who moved in lightning-quick darts, like a lizard, while Sunny was taller, good-natured and tranquil, with hair that fell in ringlets and her mother’s curvy build.

  Diana showed them how to paint shells, and rode with them on rented bikes into Provincetown and all around the dunes. She took them to the cranberry bogs, and for walks along the jetty, and kayaking through the marsh. At night, Michael set up a tent in the yard, arranging camping lanterns in a circle around it. With a fire burning in the firepit, and the hot tub bubbling away, Diana thought it felt enchanted, even magical. The girls hadn’t wanted to leave, had demanded that Diana and her sister settle on a date for their return before they’d get in Julia’s car.

  “You can send them here anytime,” Diana said. “They’re always welcome.”

  “I’ll take you up on that. They look like they had a great time.” She beckoned Diana toward the railing that overlooked the water, away from the car, and the girls. When Diana was at her side, she said, “I’m glad Sunny had a good time. She’s been needing a break.”

  Diana felt a weight settle against her chest. “What’s going on?”

  “Oh, you know.” Julia tried to sound nonchalant, but her face was bleak. “She was one of the first girls in her class to, you know, develop. I think some of the boys have been teasing her pretty bad.”

  And there it was, the rage that lived just under her skin, ready to come boiling up at an instant. Diana forced herself to breathe, to feel the ground beneath her feet and the wood of the fence under her fingertips, to relax her hands, which wanted to form fists. “It’s just teasing? Nothing’s happened?”

  “No,” said Julia, with an uncomfortable smile. “Nothing’s happened. But I’m glad she’s got this place. I’m glad she has you.”

  That night, Diana put away the tent and the lanterns, and straightened the clutter of shells and paintbrushes the girls had left on the deck. She called Willa, whose walk, in her later years, had become the stiff and oddly dignified gait of a queen. Slowly, they descended the beach stairs and walked along the sand. I should have had daughters, Diana thought, feeling her eyes sting with unshed tears. I would have been a good mother. Those boys stole that from me.

  That night, in bed, when Michael reached for her, she rolled away, facing the wall. In a low voice, he said, “Want to talk?”

  “Oh,” she said, and cleared her throat, “just thinking about old times. I’ll feel better in the morning.” But it was a few mornings, and an emergency session with Hazel before she felt like herself again, like a human adult woman with friends and work and hobbies, a rich, fulfilling life, and a husband who loved her, and not like a broken thing that could never be made right. That winter, and into the spring, she went for lots of walks by herself, ranging for miles along the sand or the paths through the marshes and forests, trying to feel less empty, more at home in her skin and her life.

  Fourteen years after Diana got her at the shelter, Willa died in her sleep, curled, as always, at the foot of their bed. Michael scooped up her body, wrapped in a blanket. He carried her out to the truck, then came back, and held Diana, in silence, for a long time.

  Diana took it hard. It felt like another painful reminder that, however happy she felt, however safe and protected, there was always misery, crouching in the nearby shadows, waiting around the corner, and nothing could keep it away.

  Michael didn’t push her. When Diana finally felt ready, they went back to the shelter in Dennis and found a medium-sized mutt, a cheerful fellow with bushy brown fur and eyes like bright black buttons. He seemed to be the result of the union between a corgi and some kind of terrier, and, like Willa, he’d been abandoned, tied up underneath a bridge, starving, with his fur full of mats and burrs and every kind of bug. Diana and Michael brought him home. They brushed the remaining dirt and twigs and burrs out of his coat, and fed him kibble soaked in chicken broth, and tossed a tennis ball for him to fetch. Eventually, his favorite thing became sitting in the prow of a kayak with his back paws on the base of the boat and his front paws on its top, gazing out across the water as Diana paddled.

  In 2010, more than twenty years after he’d fed her dinner and given her a job, Reese called Diana into his office, a small, cramped space at the back of the restaurant that smelled of spices and industrial-strength cleaner. “Jonathan and I are retiring,” he said.

  “You’re leaving?” she’d said, feeling her face and hands get cold. “You can’t leave!”

  He’d shaken his head. “We’re not going anywhere.” He waved his hands dramatically toward the sunset, and the drag queens on the street, visible through the window. “How could we leave all this behind? No. We’ll be right here, except for a few months in the wintertime, when we’ll decamp for warmer climes.”

  “So you’re selling?” New management, she thought. A new menu and a new chef. Maybe the new management wouldn’t even want to keep her. Maybe he, or she, would want eager young things, with their strong backs and their open minds, ready to adapt to new ways of doing things.


  “That was what I wanted to discuss.” He’d smiled at her and smoothed the white curls of his beard. “How would you feel about being the Abbey’s new proprietress?”

  She’d gasped, and said, “I don’t have—I mean, I don’t think—”

  “Jonathan and I discussed it. We have what I consider to be a very reasonable mortgage. If the bank agrees, we’ll let you take it over.” Diana was silent, shocked into speechlessness, as Reese said, “You can even change the name, if you want. Call it Our Lady of Good Harbor again. Take it back to its roots.”

  She wiped away the tears that were spilling down her cheeks. “I don’t know what to say. You’re too good to me. I don’t deserve this.”

  He’d shrugged, still smiling. His beard was completely white by then, but his skin was still the same smooth golden-brown, with his gold glasses twinkling against it. “Stop your sobbing.” He’d reached for the box of Kleenex on his desk, the one he kept there for servers who’d come in crying about bad breakups or families who didn’t want them, and handed it to Diana. “Go home, talk it over with that man of yours, and give me an answer in the morning.”