by Maisey Yates
“You were... I’m just saying you were difficult sometimes, and maybe I did something wrong...” Wendy said.
Anna felt like her mother had reached inside her and hollowed her out completely. “You think you did something wrong. You think there’s something wrong with me?”
Thomas had thought so, obviously. Why wouldn’t her mother?
“Can we please not have a giant fight?” Rachel asked. “My hands are covered in blackberry juice, my daughter is mad at me—”
“And God forbid it not be about you for a second,” Anna said, rounding on her sister. “We must remember, after all, that your pain is greatest.”
“Anna,” Rachel said. “That’s not fair.” Rachel sounded like all the breath had gone out of her and Anna regretted that. Because the blow had landed a whole lot sharper than she’d meant it to.
“I don’t need either of you to act like teenagers,” Wendy said. “One is enough.”
Well, there was the truth of it. All that tension with her mother that ran beneath the surface of her help. Of their interactions. This was what she thought of her. That she was still a teenager rebelling.
“I didn’t ask for commentary on my life. If you don’t want me to act like a teenager, then don’t treat me like one. If you want me to act like an adult, then you don’t get to intermittently school me whenever you feel like it over what you consider to be my poor life choices. I couldn’t tell you when my marriage was falling apart because I knew you would just blame me! I don’t blame Emma for not wanting to work with all of this...” Then Anna turned and walked out of the kitchen, breathing hard.
It felt good to scream it. To shout what she’d believed deep in her heart. To stop trying to make them feel better when she felt broken.
Well, maybe she would storm out of the house, too. It wasn’t every day she identified with her niece, but today she was definitely Team Emma.
If only she could find someone to be Team Anna.
9
You worry too much about rules. When you get older you’ll realize that Mom and Dad don’t know everything. And no, of course the ghost isn’t real.
—FROM A LETTER WRITTEN BY SUSAN BRIGHT TO HER SISTER, JUNE 25, 1961
EMMA
Emma found that it was difficult to sulk at an empty room. But that was the decision she’d made when she’d stormed out of the Captain’s House and gone back to the Lightkeeper’s House.
There was no one here to witness her disgust, and that felt injurious.
She had given up Boston. And maybe her mom didn’t know that, but it was true, and that choice was bearing down on her, harder and harder every day, and it only got worse when she was in this house.
Staring at this oppressive sameness that was now so unalterably different.
The house was the same.
But her dad was gone.
And those pieces didn’t fit, and couldn’t.
She couldn’t even go into his room. Couldn’t go up to the lighthouse, not when it had been a special place, a special walk for the two of them. Pieces of her home, her life, had been ripped away when he’d died, and she couldn’t bear being here and being so...aware of it.
Her mom moved through the house with ease. She slept in that bedroom Emma couldn’t even go into. She’d cleaned out her dad’s medicine and all the signs he’d been here, and sick.
Emma couldn’t act like it was over. It felt like it was still happening.
If she’d gotten the diner job she could have at least had some escape. And Luke... Luke was right there and he was the symbol of her escape. Of just a few minutes to look at something beautiful and wonderful and not connected to any of...this.
Her dad had died here. And they were just still...living here.
She didn’t know how.
A lot of people had died in this house. She knew that.
And in the Captain’s House, too. It was even rumored that they had a ghost living on the first floor. As a result they were part of the Haunted Buildings Registry. Though Emma had never seen one, and she supposed that if anyone should have seen them, it was the people who lived there.
But it felt different, more personal, and it just... She just wanted something different. She had taken that escape from herself.
Sometimes she wanted to be just like all of her friends and shout about the unfairness of life when her mom wouldn’t buy her a new cell phone. And sometimes she wanted to shout at God. Because her dad was the best, and he was gone. Because her aunt Anna had been publicly humiliated by someone they all should have been able to trust.
Because she and her mom should at least be able to get along easily since they were all each other had left.
The front door opened, and Emma turned, prepared to sulk at her mother.
But it was her aunt Anna.
“I got yelled at, too,” Anna said.
“Did you do any yelling back?”
“Plenty of it.” She took a breath. “I figured you had the right idea storming off. But I don’t want to go anywhere. So I thought I would storm over here.”
“You could’ve gone back to your cottage.”
Anna nodded. “Yeah. I figured I would find you. See if you were okay.”
“No,” Emma said. “I’m not okay.”
“Neither am I,” Anna said.
Silence fell between them, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. She felt understood, somehow. Their pain wasn’t the same at all, but still. She felt like Anna might be the one person who really understood her.
She remembered taking her aunt’s hand when she’d been little and they’d been waiting in a doctor’s office for hours for her dad. Her mom had asked Anna to take her somewhere. They’d gotten ice cream and gone to the beach and Emma had smiled for the first time in two days.
Anna knew her. Emma knew Anna.
“Can I tell you something?” Emma asked.
Anna’s expression was cautious, but her words were compassionate. “You can tell me whatever you need to.”
Emma hesitated, unsure if she should bring this up. “I... I don’t actually care what happened with you and Uncle Thomas. But I think what he did was messed-up.”
Anna blinked. “You do?”
“We were all there. We were all there, and my dad just died, and he didn’t even warn us. He didn’t warn my mother. He didn’t warn Grandma. How could he do that? And he... I can tell that he just expects us to disown you. He just expects us to take what he said as the truth and side with him. I’ve never felt so...betrayed as I did right then. And whatever you did or didn’t do, it won’t make me feel as betrayed as that.”
To Emma’s horror, her aunt’s eyes filled with tears. She blinked, and then sat on the overstuffed floral couch that rested just beneath the living-room window, that looked out over the ocean. “That’s really sweet of you. I did sleep with someone,” Anna said. “Just... If that changes your opinion.”
Emma took a moment to turn that over. “It doesn’t really.”
“Em, have you ever even kissed a guy?”
Emma’s face went hot. “No.”
Anna huffed out a laugh. “That could be why you aren’t as horrified as other people are.” She swallowed. “It’s a really intimate thing to do.”
Normally, this sort of conversation with an adult would make her skin itch, but she felt a strange bloom of pride that her aunt was talking to her like she was an equal. An adult who understood.
It stood out in total opposition to her mom turning down a job on her behalf.
Anna looked down. “I didn’t do it without thinking about it a lot. And I didn’t do it just because... I didn’t do it just to feel pleasure. And I feel like it’s easy to believe that I did. I feel like everyone is so happy to have me believe that I got...seduced and I’m weak. I mean, I did get seduced. But... Not the way they think. He ma
de me feel special. I really wanted to feel special. Because one day I woke up and realized I didn’t know whose life I was living. And once I had that thought, I couldn’t let it go. You can’t live your life for other people, Emma.”
Emma’s pride was replaced by a deep discomfort.
Her grandma had lived her life for her mom and aunt. She’d been a single mom, working hard to give them a life. And her mom had taken care of her, taken care of her dad.
Emma didn’t want to be a weak link in that chain.
Emma couldn’t believe that you could just...set aside all that and live for yourself.
“My mom’s lived her life for other people all this time,” she said, bald and simple. She could tell those words hurt Anna. She wasn’t trying to accuse her of anything; she was just...saying.
She kept so much back to protect her mom; she had to. From having to do makeup work for shaky grades over the years when her dad’s health had been compromised, her crush on Luke, any problems with friends... She hadn’t ever wanted her to worry. But she could see now that it amounted to a wall. Not stones that Emma carried; rocks that she had built up into a barrier between them.
Anna was offering honesty, and even if Emma couldn’t quite believe some of it, she wanted to answer honestly. Wanted to take this moment, this space, to say something that was true.
“Yeah, I guess so. But I don’t even mean that you have to be selfish. Because I don’t believe in being selfish, either. I know that there’s a whole congregation full of people who would laugh at me saying that. But I just mean... If you bend too much, you’re going to make weak spots in who you are. And eventually those weak spots will give. And you will break. Like gluten-free dough. No stretch, all break. Because you can’t do it forever. And if you wait until you break, it’s going to be a pretty spectacular break that hurts a lot more people than it had to. So if I were you, I would avoid being me. I would maybe hold firm on the job I wanted. So you know... You don’t break your marriage vows later.”
Emma’s eyes felt scratchy. “I guess that makes sense. But I don’t want to hurt anyone, least of all Mom.”
“I know. But you know what would hurt her worse? If you ended up resenting her. If you ended up angry at her because you didn’t know how to be the person that she wanted you to be. If you didn’t find a way to lovingly show her that you have to do what’s right for you. Because eventually, you lose the ability to do that lovingly. Speaking from the other side.”
“Right. Well. Thank you.”
“Thank you,” Anna said. “For...loving me enough to be on my team.” She breathed out, long and slow, like she was considering the next few words carefully. “You didn’t believe him, though, did you?”
Emma thought about it. “I didn’t care.”
“So you didn’t believe him. Because I feel like if you had...you might have cared a little bit that I cheated on your uncle.”
“I know you,” Emma said. “And whatever I believed, I knew you didn’t do something to be cruel. Or just to be selfish. I’m seventeen, and I know enough to know that. I don’t know why everybody else can’t figure it out.”
“You know, not to cast aspersions on your youth or anything, but part of it is because you never had a husband. Look at your mom, Em. She stuck by your dad through everything. All of his illness and all of that... I couldn’t even stick by my husband, who is perfectly fine, and is good to everyone, and—”
“No one’s going to think of it that way.”
“Honey, everyone thinks of it that way. People can’t help but compare. And on the comparison front, I come out badly. That’s just the truth.”
“You’re not the same person. And Uncle Thomas isn’t the same person as my dad. Which I think might be an even more important piece of that.”
Anna smiled sadly. “Yeah. Maybe. Go get that diner job if you want it, though. Okay?”
“I promise,” Emma said. Anna stood and pulled Emma in for a hug. “If your mom gets mad at you, just blame me. Everyone already thinks I’m a bad person, anyway.”
“I don’t,” Emma said, resolute.
“You have no idea how much that means to me.”
Then Anna walked out the front door, and Emma could hear her heavy footsteps on the porch.
And her words replayed, over and over again. She could already see that they were true.
Emma trudged upstairs, her hands running along the familiar banister. She stopped, right across from her parents’ room.
She didn’t want to go in. Because he still wasn’t there.
She paused for a moment and wondered. What he would tell her if she went in to talk to him. If she asked him what she should do.
He would take her hands and walk her up to the lighthouse, when he’d been able, and they would watch the beam of light go out over the sea...
“The world is so vast, Em. And you want to study the ocean. It goes even deeper. So not only do you want to wander all the land up here, you have to go beneath the waves, too.”
“I want to study it all at least.” She gripped the railing and closed her eyes, letting the mist coming in off the water spray her face.
“There is more than you’ll ever know or see in a lifetime.”
“Is that supposed to be comforting?”
“It is to me. There are mysteries in the world we’ll never untangle. Depths we’ll never explore. So we don’t have to regret that we can’t do it all, see it all. In life the greatest gift isn’t knowing the most, or seeing the most—it’s loving the most. Being loved the most. Trusting that when you do go out to explore all that’s out there, love will be here. Waiting...”
Except her dad was gone. And she wasn’t even brave enough to go up to the lighthouse right now.
She turned away from the empty bedroom and slunk into her own. She climbed onto her twin bed, the mattress punching down beneath her feet. The lavender bedspread wrinkled as she stretched up to look at the carving on the beam overhead. It had been painted over a couple of times with white, but she could still make it out.
Lazy Susan slept here. 1961.
Emma often thought about the college students who’d lived here, and wished she knew more about them. It was strange to think they’d been here on an adventure, when to her it was as worn and familiar as an old pair of sweats.
She flopped down onto her bed and grabbed hold of a pillow, clutching it to her chest.
If she wasn’t careful, she was going to break later. She’d spent a lot of time trying very hard not to cause her parents trouble. She didn’t want to give her dad any grief, not when he felt so ill all the time. She didn’t want to give her mom any grief, not while her mother was caring for him.
But somewhere in there, she had forgotten that she needed to minimize her own grief, too. The diner wasn’t Boston, but it was something.
And she was going to get it.
She liked to think that whoever Lazy Susan was, she would approve.
10
He tends the light all night; he sleeps all day. He’s a stranger to me. I have been married once and thought it would be simple to marry again. Nothing about him is simple.
—FROM THE DIARY OF JENNY HANSEN, JANUARY 20, 1900
RACHEL
Rachel still felt guilty about the fight with Emma the next day.
She hadn’t seen her that night; her door had already been firmly shut, and Emma tucked up in bed, the universal signal for “I am a teenager and I’m not speaking to you.”
And she felt marginally guilty about how things had gone with Anna. She had not intended to be part of any ganging up on her sister.
The terrible thing was, in her anger last night she’d suddenly identified that hot, reckless thing in her chest. The one that sat there sometimes when she looked at Anna and Thomas over dinner, when Jacob was too ill to come downstairs.
A
nna’s life had seemed so easy. So perfect. Her husband was healthy, he was successful and there was something about that vitality that made Rachel feel...jealous. She felt petty even acknowledging it now, especially now.
Maybe you should ask about what happened.
No. Not yet. She did need to talk to Anna. But right now healing the rift with Emma was what mattered.
Emma didn’t come home after school, which was strange, and she also didn’t return Rachel’s text, which had her feeling panicked for a whole five minutes until her phone rang.
She recognized the number as J’s—unsurprising, given she’d called it enough times to place orders. She answered.
“Mom?”
“Why aren’t you using your phone?” Rachel asked.
“Because I’m at work,” Emma said, a note of defiance and steel in her voice that sounded a whole lot like Rachel’s younger sister.
“You’re...at work.”
“Yes. I stopped by before school today to talk to Adam about taking the job. He hired me. And I’m being trained.”
“I... I told you that that wasn’t happening.”
“Yeah, I know. And I decided that it was important enough to me that I needed to make it happen. And I would’ve come home and talked to you first, but Adam wanted me here now.”
“He did.”
“Yes.”
“What made you decide to do this? We could’ve talked about it.”
“No, I didn’t think we could talk about it.” Her daughter never, ever talked to her like this and the words felt like a stark slap down the line. “I tried to talk about it. You were weird. You basically acted like I was doing meth when I told you that I went to get a doughnut. So we’ll talk about it later.”
“Emma...”
“Talk to Aunt Anna.”
Emma hung up the phone, and Rachel suddenly had an out-of-body experience, where she saw herself storming into J’s Diner and turning over a table in the middle of her daughter’s work shift.
Her daughter, who was seventeen and not seven.