Ed put his large hand on Michael’s damp back. Michael tried to step away, but Ed pulled him into a tight embrace. This threw Michael off, because Ed rarely touched him; he said he respected his “borders.” Michael could see that holding back was hard for Ed, who was affectionate and open. But now, he couldn’t seem to help himself. “Don’t you know we don’t care that you can’t swim?” Ed’s voice broke.
Michael freed himself and took a few steps back. He was in the center of the circle. All eyes were on him. He felt trapped.
Ann looked at Ed. “Can we tell him, Dad?”
“Now?” Ed said. “I thought we were going to wait.”
“Please?”
“Tell him what?” Poppy asked.
Michael braced himself: they were about to tell him he’d have to turn around and leave. He knew it, he just knew it.
Ed looked straight into Michael’s eyes, serious. “We’re thinking we’d like to adopt you, Michael.”
Poppy put her hand over her mouth and gasped. “Seriously?”
Ann said, “Isn’t it great?”
“Yes, but…”
“But what?” Ann said.
“Nobody ever tells me anything.”
“What’s your problem?” Ann said. “We knew you’d be OK with it. We all love Michael.”
The word “love” threw Michael even more off balance. “You want to what?” Michael asked. He’d once seen a bird fly into a window at school—this was the same kind of shock, of not knowing that plate of glass was right there, right in front of you.
“Only if that’s what you want,” Connie said. “Nobody is forcing you to do anything.”
“We started the paperwork, that’s all,” Ed said. “When we get back to Milwaukee in the fall, if you’re game, we can make it official.”
Connie smiled dreamily. “Don’t you feel we’re already related? The first time you walked through the door I felt we’d been together in a past life.”
Michael didn’t believe them. This couldn’t be real. Past life? They were high.
Ann said, “It was so hard for me not to say anything. It was my idea.”
“Everything is Ann’s idea,” Poppy said. She looked almost as stunned as Michael felt.
“Aren’t I too old to be adopted?”
Ann said, “You’re never too old to need a family.”
“Sixteen is nothing,” Ed said. “You still have two years of high school. Those are two important years. But you have to give consent. The whole thing is totally up to you.”
Poppy brightened. She took his hand. “You’ll be my brother.”
Until that moment, Michael hadn’t realized he already felt like he was Poppy’s brother. But then Ann said, “And I’ll be your sister.”
Ann? His sister?
That was a harder idea to process. It reminded him of that optical illusion his psychology teacher had shown him, the ink drawing where you see either two faces or a vase; you can see it only one way at a time. The faces or the vase.
That entire summer in Wellfleet and all through the next school year, when his adoption was made final, he tried to see and think of Ann that way: just a sister. Only a sister. He tried.
TWO
Ann
Wellfleet
2000
Ann lined up a babysitting job her second day back on the Cape. Some lady named Mrs. Shaw had called the house after she’d seen the flyer Ann posted at the Wellfleet library. She had two boys. More importantly, she offered to pay Ann more than double what she made back home in Milwaukee.
Ann babysat every summer since she’d become Red Cross certified—well, except for last summer, because her parents had wanted her to spend time with Michael. She didn’t mind. She cheered him on at his swim lessons; they ran together on the sandy soil in the fire lanes, looked for shells at Mayo Beach, and ate soft serve on the town pier. Ann had always loved Cape Cod, but last summer, seeing the place through Michael’s eyes, she became newly aware of how special it was, and how much Michael meant to her—more than she should feel for a “brother.”
Michael loved their Cape house. Ann felt badly that he had to sleep in the bedroom in the attic, where it was hot and stuffy, and the ceilings were so slanted that he would bump his head when he woke. She tried to make his space nicer by wallpapering it with some old, yellowed newspapers from the thirties she’d found in the basement, and she covered the armrests of her grandfather’s favorite chair that sat in the middle of the room with electrical tape where the mice had chewed the upholstery.
That first summer, the prospect of Michael’s upcoming adoption made everything seem new and exciting. But now, a year later, everything was different. Ann realized that absorbing another person into the family, even someone she cared about as much as she cared about Michael, wasn’t as easy as she thought it would be. All her parents seemed to care about lately was the idea of family. They talked about being together like it was some sort of higher calling.
Money was tighter and her parents were busy. They’d always had a lot going on, but now they had all the appointments with lawyers, social workers, and therapists that legal adoption required. Ann noticed that Poppy and Michael had grown closer in the past year, so close that sometimes Ann felt like a third wheel around them, a feeling that was uncomfortable and disarming.
Unlike Ann, neither Poppy nor Michael was part of a big clique, both of them preferring to hang out with the granola crowd at the Coffee Trader on Downer Avenue. They made knotted bracelets out of embroidery thread, shared inside jokes and secret handshakes, and liked to make each other disgusting potions with milk, syrup, and turmeric in the kitchen. Michael seemed loose and comfortable with Poppy, but when Ann walked into the room he’d freeze up, and Poppy would act like she was interrupting them. All her life, Poppy had followed Ann around like a lost puppy, wearing her clothes, imitating her gestures, wanting to hang out with Ann and her friends instead of making her own. Ann was used to shrugging Poppy off, only now Poppy didn’t seem to care if Ann lived or died. She missed Poppy, but she was too proud to say so. Instead, she slammed doors and walked around in a huff, expecting Poppy to understand why she was upset, hoping Poppy would care.
She didn’t. She had Michael now.
Something was off with Michael, too. She felt him pushing her away. He wouldn’t sit on the same couch with her, or come into her bedroom to talk late into the night the way he used to. He’d started running with some of the faster guys on the varsity team, and when he wasn’t chumming around with Poppy, he’d sometimes hang out with them. He’d grown taller, more muscular and lean, more confident. His thick brown hair stretched to his shoulders. Suddenly Ann’s friends wanted to spend a lot more time at her house so they could be around him. She could understand why. Truthfully, she felt the same way they did. Michael—her brother—was so good-looking that Ann sometimes felt shy around him. She averted her gaze, afraid of his intensity, afraid of the way he made her feel, afraid of the closeness they once shared, but missing it all the same.
Ann was still happy that Michael was part of the family, but by the time their car pulled into the Cape house driveway for the first time that summer, she felt so frustrated by her siblings that she thought she might burst. She needed some space, and she wanted to make some money for college, which was only a year away. So, when Mrs. Shaw asked her to start babysitting the very next day, Ann jumped at the opportunity.
* * *
WHEN SHE WAS YOUNGER, ANN understood her parents’ concern about her prospective employers. Now that she was seventeen, their supervision felt unnecessary and annoying. They insisted on driving her to the Shaws’. She sat in the backseat, feeling like a little kid. “I told you I can ride my bike. It’s not that far.”
“We just want to know where you’ll be.” Her dad was driving slowly, looking carefully at the addresses on the mailboxes, pissing off the drivers who were stuck behind him, not that he ever cared what anyone else thought. They were on Chequessett Neck Road, nor
th of Mayo Beach, in a fancy area somewhere near the yacht club. This was the way they drove to get to Jeremy Point, their favorite picnic spot.
“This is so embarrassing.”
Her mother said, “We’re your parents. Someday you’ll have your own kids and you’ll understand.”
“You always say that.”
“Because it’s true.”
“How are they going to trust me to watch their children if you guys show up? It’s not dangerous here, like in Milwaukee.” Oh God, why did she have to say that? She knew any reference to Milwaukee and crime would lead her mother to think about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Ann was still in elementary school during his trial, but she remembered Connie volunteering as a court comforter to provide support to the victims’ families. She brought them food, coffee, and tissues, and held their hands while they listened to gory testimony about how he’d drugged and tortured all those young men.
Her mother never spoke much about what she’d heard, although Ann noticed that the experience had changed her. Because of her easy nature, her mother was still more laid-back than most of Ann’s friends’ parents, but after the trial she seemed more suspicious of people, warier. Ann sometimes wondered if that’s why her mother was willing to move forward with Michael’s adoption. Dahmer had lived near the Marquette neighborhood where he’d found his victims. Michael was young and vulnerable—he could have easily been in danger.
“Mom,” Ann said. “Really. You know nothing bad ever happens here.”
“That’s not true,” her father said. “A woman was murdered in Truro a few years ago, remember?”
“Ed!”
“I’m not scared. I’ll be fine,” Ann said. “Next year I’ll be in college. What will you do then?”
“We’ll never let you go.” Her mother reached back and squeezed Ann’s knee like she meant it literally. Ann swatted her hand away and frowned, even though she wanted to be nice to her mother, because her mother was always nice to her.
“Tell you what, Ann with a Plan.” That was her father’s name for her, because she’d always been so determined, and so focused on her next steps. “How about we just drop you off and leave. We won’t lurk.”
“Yes!” Ann said. “Thank you.”
“We wouldn’t think of embarrassing you in front of Mrs. Shaw.” It was Ann’s mother who had taken her call while Ann was at Gull Pond with Michael and Poppy. Michael could swim about as well as both of them now, and he could outpace her both on the land and in the water. When Ann called back, Mrs. Shaw sounded breathless. “I was just thrilled to see your sign on the bulletin board. I’m positively desperate. You know how it is with two rambunctious boys and a household to manage, and my husband is hardly ever around and we have all these visitors and activities. Exhausting!”
Her father whistled when he pulled up to the house—not an appreciative whistle, but the kind of whistle he’d make if he passed a bad car accident, a whistle that seemed to say, Look at that disaster. The Shaws’ house was huge, dwarfing the still large but comparatively smaller houses next door. He double-checked the address. “I guess this really is the place,” he said. “Geez.”
“Oh dear,” Connie said. “Look how it blocks the view of the bay. I’ll bet their neighbors hate them. It’s so big … and so brown.”
Her dad said, “That’s a ‘fuck you’ house if I ever saw one.”
Ann thought the house was awesome because it was so massive, and so different from the homes she was used to seeing in Wellfleet. It reminded her of one of the big, new houses she saw in subdivisions in Mequon, a wealthy community north of Milwaukee where some of the kids she’d met in the Model UN lived. The Shaws’ house was neither charming and old nor sleek and modern; it was the kind of house that was simply meant to impress. It was newer but not original, massive but not grand.
Ann said goodbye to her parents quickly and slipped out of the car. She walked down the long, curving driveway in the shadow of the enormous house. Her father’s car engine was still idling. She turned around and mouthed Go away until he backed off and drove away in the same direction he’d come.
* * *
MRS. SHAW GREETED ANN AT the door. She was attractive in a severe, weatherworn way, tall but slightly stooped. Her thick, red hair looked like it might have been curly if she hadn’t blow-dried it into submission. She’d pulled it back into a ponytail so tight that it tugged at the sides of her eyes. Her skin was dark and freckled, and a stack of gold bracelets jangled against her thin wrist. She wore a belted Izod polo dress that hung slack off her bony shoulders.
“You must be Ann. I’m so pleased this worked out. I’m Maureen.” She pushed her tortoiseshell eyeglasses higher up the bridge of her nose. “I enjoyed speaking with your mother. She sounds lovely. She says you want to make a little mad money.”
Money might have seemed like a trivial matter to someone like Maureen, but Ann needed it. Back home, Ann took as many babysitting jobs and shifts at Lisa’s Pizza as they’d give her. Her parents told her she’d need to pay for part of college, and she had every intention of going to a school out East, even if it was more expensive. She had her heart set on Boston College and Amherst, maybe even Harvard if she could get in.
Maureen ushered Ann inside, to the center of an airy great room. The dining room, living room, kitchen, and family room were all part of one huge, uncluttered space, not unlike the lobby of a megachurch. Just beyond the giant picture windows was a mound of lush, green lawn, the kind of lawn Ann wasn’t used to seeing in sandy Wellfleet, where the grass grew in patches at best. Beyond the yard, the water sparkled in the bay, a view quite different from her family’s view of the cove. There were no scrappy pitch pines or cacti in sight, no mulberry or beach grass. The water in the distance was seemingly always at high tide, while the cove her family’s house fronted was a mud pit half the time. She looked out the Shaws’ window and saw a different Cape than the one she thought she knew, a Cape that was placid and tame instead of rustic and wild. It made Ann jealous of this big house and their perfect, organized life.
Achingly bright pillows in turquoise and orange punctuated the white expanse of drywall and bleached hardwood floors. A buoy hung from fishing line above the couch. Big navy letters spelled out SHAW on the top and COTTAGE on the bottom. Ann figured they must be important to live in such a big house and to broadcast their name like that. It must really mean something to be a Shaw.
“I love your house,” Ann said.
“Do you?” Maureen asked. She seemed surprised.
“It’s so impressive.”
“Too many bathrooms to clean if you ask me. I actually spent my summers in a sweet old house that sat on this very spot. It was leaky and creaky and filled with bats.”
“Sounds like our house.”
“Oh, you’re so lucky! I absolutely loved our old place.”
“Did it burn down?”
“No, no. We had it razed.” Maureen gestured with a flat hand, sweeping across the air. “There were problems with the foundation, although that could have been fixed, but don’t mention that to the town preservationists, promise?”
Ann liked Maureen right away, the way she made her feel like she was important enough to gossip with.
“My husband calls them the preservationistas. They had a fit when we demolished the house. They made us dig around in the yard for Indian artifacts and they hit us with zoning bylaws and challenged every permit. It took over a year just to get the plans approved. Anthony—my husband—he wanted something new. He grew up poor. He said he couldn’t understand why we’d want to live the way he had, with old two-prong electrical outlets that sparked when you put a plug in, and a well pump that always seemed to break. Old houses aren’t for everyone, I guess. Certainly not for Anthony. And now, after everything we went through to get into this house, he’s hardly ever around.” The giant, pear-shaped diamond in Maureen’s wedding band twinkled under the recessed lighting.
Maureen walked toward the hallway an
d shouted, “Toby! Brooks! Come meet Ann.”
Maureen rifled through her big bag and pulled out a car key. The chain had a Jaguar logo. “Your mother says your driving record sparkles.”
“Well, I just got my license.”
“Of course, you don’t need me to tell you to be careful, but the people out here drive like the sun is in their eyes. It gets worse every summer. I need you to shuttle the boys to Chatham this afternoon. Their friends are having a party. You can just drop them off and meander around town—Chatham is so lovely, don’t you think?”
Ann was about to say that yes, she did like Chatham, until Maureen said, “I personally avoid the town because every third person I see there is from Marblehead, where we live. What’s the point of getting away when you’re surrounded by the same awful people? Funny, I find myself wondering what vacations are even for lately. What’s the point? I’m just as stressed as ever with this house and the kids. Vacation from what, that’s what I want to know.”
It wasn’t really a question, but Ann felt Maureen looking at her as if she had answers. Vacations made perfect sense to Ann; she lived for vacation, even if this one was off to a rough start.
A boy walked into the room. He must have been ten or eleven years old. He had Maureen’s frizzy red hair and freckles. He was also tall and thin like Maureen, but he had a very large head and big joints that seemed out of proportion to his frame, suggesting he still had a lot of growing to do. The boy looked Ann up and down.
“Brooks, honey, this is Ann. She’s going to help us out this afternoon.”
Brooks? Ann thought it was a rich name, like the rich house.
“I told you I don’t need a babysitter,” he said. His tone wasn’t much different than the one Ann had used on her own parents just a few minutes earlier.
“Well, perhaps not, but Ann can get you to the party at Max’s house that you wanted to go to. I can’t, because I’m meeting with a contractor. Ann is in charge while I’m gone, understand? Now go tell Toby you need to get moving. And change, please, into a shirt that doesn’t have a stain.”
The Second Home Page 4