The Second Home

by Christina Clancy

  Now, all these years later, Noah couldn’t wait to spend time with his aunt. He’d always wished they had a bigger family, more siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, pets. At school, he tried to create that whirlwind of people and activity that he craved. He was incredibly social, the kid who volunteered as a math tutor, competed in forensics, organized a zine fest for the other students who were also into graphic novels. He’d even started a student film festival with two other high schools, and was interviewed by the television station. Noah was everyone’s friend. They didn’t care that he was on the heavy side, or that he wore mismatched vintage clothes from resale shops that somehow worked on him—argyle sweaters with tweed jodhpurs and black cowboy boots—and had painted nails and a shock of long bangs that he’d bleached and dyed purple, red, pink, blue. He was ambiguous about his sexuality. Ann didn’t push. He seemed happy. At home, he’d befriended all the elderly people in their apartment complex. He took out their trash and picked up essentials for them at the store. Mary O’Grady in 3B was teaching him how to play bridge so he could fill in as her bridge partner, and he’d helped newly widowed Martin Cox set up a profile on a senior dating service.

  Noah was actually a lot like Poppy. Sometimes he started his sentences the way Poppy started hers, like “Wouldn’t it be great if…” or “Don’t you think that…” He was always imagining possibilities.

  The wind picked up off the river and blew so hard she could have been pushed over. Stay loose, stay loose.

  Cars, bikes, and other runners zipped past her as she ran. It felt like everyone had a place they were supposed to go, including Poppy, who was planning to come to the Cape as soon as she had the house in Milwaukee squared away. Ann wasn’t holding her breath.

  Ann ran so fast that it felt as if she were fleeing the scene of a crime. She wished she could start running toward something instead of away, but what?

  She would have to face Poppy’s questions. There was so much Ann hadn’t told her, so much Poppy didn’t know. It seemed every question started with Michael, and every answer circled back to Anthony. Don’t think about Anthony!

  She tried to push away her last image of him, slumped in a wing chair, blood trickling out of his nose, his mouth.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Poppy

  Dawn, Connie’s best friend, met Poppy in the baggage claim of General Mitchell Airport, an airport Poppy hadn’t set foot in since she’d come home for Christmas a decade ago, when Ann and Noah had waited for her just beyond security. Noah was jumping up and down with excitement, unsure which traveler she was. Is that her? she could still overhear him asking. Is that her? And Ann saying, excited, “That’s her!”

  Dawn wrapped her up in a warm, fragrant hug that smelled like department store perfume. They stood like that for a while, clinging to each other and crying, until Poppy’s giant and worn backpack containing everything she owned, and decorated with a slew of colorful airport tags, slipped off the conveyor belt and landed with a thud against the bumper rail, like a dead body.

  Poppy almost didn’t recognize Dawn, even though she’d once been a steady presence in her life. She looked a lot older than she had the last time Poppy had seen her, heavier. Had it really been a decade?

  Dawn took Poppy’s hand and gave it a chubby pat. “Just look at you, as beautiful as ever. And so tan! I sure wish you could have brought the sunshine and warmth here with you. Where were you again? Hawaii?”

  “Panama. On an island called Isla Colón.”

  “Panama! Well, how about that. There’s a place I’ve never been.”

  “It’s nice,” Poppy said. “You’d like it.”

  “I’d like any place without this crud.” She pointed at a chunk of snow outside the window. “I keep telling myself I’ll retire somewhere warm, but who am I kidding? My whole pathetic life is here.”

  Poppy slung her familiar bag over her back. Dawn, who seemed happy to see her even though Poppy thought she might have been disappointed by her absence, spoke in quick, nervous bursts as they walked to her car. “You’re here. You’re here! It’s so good to have you back.”

  “It’s good to be here,” Poppy said.

  “I just wish you could have returned under better circumstances. And you know, I still think there ought to have been a funeral for your parents. I pushed and pushed. Funerals are for the living. For you. You and your sister. Even me! When things like this happen, we need closure. But Ann insisted. She said they absolutely didn’t want any sort of service, church or no.”

  Or no. Poppy had forgotten how Milwaukeeans tack on or no or yet to the end of their sentences. Nice day yet. Gone fishing or no? Dawn’s Milwaukee accent was thick with indulged vowels.

  “They hated funerals,” Poppy said. “My dad always said ‘you die, the end.’”

  Why had they hated funerals so much? Poppy wished she could ask them. In the absence of a public memorial, Poppy had honored them her own way. She’d made an altar for them at Carenero Beach. She lit two candles every night for a week. She’d prayed and cried and meditated and tried to invoke their auras. None of it made her feel any better, or any closer to them.

  “Sometimes it feels like your parents just slipped out the back door in the middle of the night. And now, well, here you are. Here we are.”

  “It’s surreal.”

  “Still no will?”

  “Ann says she can’t find one. She’s the executor.”

  “I could see your mother not worrying about a will, but Ed. He would have left one. He wouldn’t want you girls to have to sort everything out yourselves. What a mess. Good thing Ann is so good at managing situations like this.”

  Poppy wanted to say, “As opposed to me, right?,” but she didn’t. It was no secret that tending to major life-and-death concerns wasn’t in her wheelhouse. She’d been too numb to function beyond autopilot since that horrible afternoon she’d read Ann’s email. That had been six months ago. Now the probate judge said they could dissolve the estate, which was why Poppy was home: to help dissolve it. “Dissolve” was the perfect word—to reduce everything their parents owned, including the Cape house, to nothing.

  Dawn led Poppy through the sliding doors toward the parking ramp. The harsh winter wind blew off the lake and hit her with a slap of reality. She’d forgotten how quickly the cold could get into her bones.

  “Ann tried so hard to reach you, hon. She didn’t say so, but I could tell she was worried. In this age of cell phones…”

  “I don’t want a phone,” Poppy said. “I mean I have one…” She pulled out her ancient Nokia flip phone to show Dawn. “But I hardly use it.”

  “That’s admirable I suppose, but why? I thought everyone your age loved their phones.”

  “I’ve seen too many tourists get lost in their devices. Half the time they don’t even know they’re in a beautiful place.” That sounded good, but it wasn’t the real reason Poppy didn’t have a phone: she liked being disconnected. It made her feel weightless somehow to be anywhere and nowhere.

  “Well, we were all very concerned. Could you imagine if something had happened to you, too? That’s what we were all thinking—not that we don’t believe you can manage on your own. You’ve always been a free spirit, that’s what your mom called you. I think she was a little jealous, if you want to know the truth. Connie was a free spirit, too. I think that’s where you got it from. She was one of those people who never cared if her earrings matched.”

  Poppy laughed. It was true. She followed Dawn to her Dodge Avenger in the airport parking lot, feeling like a kid again. It was Dawn who’d taken her out for pizza at Zaffiro’s when she was a senior in high school so they could talk about drugs after Poppy had been busted at Mike Lassiter’s house snorting coke in the bathroom. A few years later, it was Dawn who’d called her in Costa Rica and begged her, on behalf of her parents, to come back home and finish college. But Dawn’s efforts to intervene had failed, and Poppy was glad about that. It wasn’t always easy, but she wouldn’t have trade
d her years as a vagabond. She’d found adventure and community and many moments of deep contentment, although now she realized that part of what made her adventuring possible and exciting was the knowledge that she always had a home to return to. Now that home was just an empty house.

  Poppy’s hoodie was thin and her jeans were ripped. The air was bitingly cold and made her jaw ache as though she’d just rebroken it. She was miserable, but she would have felt even worse without Dawn’s constant chatter. It soothed her, and kept her from thinking about what she was in for.

  “I can’t imagine coming back here after, well, after everything. Such wonderful people, your parents. I couldn’t have gotten through my whole breast cancer ordeal without your mom.”

  “You had breast cancer?”

  “Not too bad. Stage two. No big whoop.”

  “I didn’t know,” Poppy said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, I’m fine now. Lumpectomy and radiation. Connie was there by my side, even though she had her own stuff going on. I just had a follow-up scan. My oncologist says it looks like I’m out of the woods.”

  “That’s good to hear.” Poppy felt terrible. What else didn’t she know? What did Dawn mean when she said her mother had her own stuff going on? She was too tired to ask, too overwhelmed to think about all the people she hadn’t been there for. She’d spoken with her parents occasionally, and they emailed sometimes, but there had been long chunks of time when she’d drop out entirely, like when she was running from dark energy in Indonesia, or during her months in the ashram.

  “I think of it as a blessing that your parents died together. They were so close, I don’t think they could have lived apart. Everyone wanted what they had. I know I sure did.”

  Dawn started driving. Her conversation picked up nervous momentum along with her car’s engine. She turned on Rawson and passed the airport runways. Icicles hung from the wings of the parked planes, and the snow on the ground was stained a toxic blue from the deicing fluid. There was so much snow and concrete, like a color photograph that’s been turned to sepia, that Poppy wondered if all her time on golden beaches, with sparkling water and vibrant green palm trees, had been some sort of dream. How could both worlds exist on the same planet? Milwaukee in winter was a place that could make you believe that warmth and color didn’t exist.

  They crested the Hoan Bridge. Poppy was struck with a view of downtown Milwaukee that was strange and almost postapocalyptic: dunes of salt for the deicing crews in the industrial valley, and the rugged city in the distance, the blend of solid old buildings and sleek high-rises, looking clean, tough, and resilient under the stiff bank of clouds that hung above it. Lake Michigan was silver and still, like a pool of mercury. Incinerators belched out smoke in the distance, a dark reminder that her parents had been cremated.

  In one of Ann’s emails, she told Poppy that the crematorium had a waiting room. Isn’t that strange? she wrote. A waiting room. Everything is so weird now.

  Poppy pictured her sister on a vinyl chair, surrounded by grieving strangers, all alone. When they handed me the boxes they were still warm. It was almost like they were alive.

  As if reading Poppy’s mind, Dawn said, “I still can’t believe they’ve left us.” She lifted her glasses to wipe a tear that had settled into the pillowy crevice under her eye. She drove past the fancy new art museum and the 1950s War Memorial, where Poppy’s prom had been held. Stately mansions perched watchfully on the bluffs over Bradford Beach. Poppy noted all the landmarks she remembered: Villa Terrace, the water tower by St. Mary’s, the hospital where she’d been born. Dawn made her way up the hill at Lake Park, and soon they were back in the East Side, near UW–Milwaukee. Home.

  Dawn passed Cramer, her street, and took a left on Oakland instead, the neighborhood’s main drag, as if she knew Poppy needed a tour to get reacquainted. Some of the businesses she knew were still there: Oakland Gyros, where Michael had worked; Axel’s bar, where Poppy and her friends used to get away with buying drinks with their bad fake IDs; and Shahrazad, the Middle Eastern restaurant her parents loved. Still, much had changed. There were new businesses without character, like the Goodwill and Walgreens, and a generic Irish bar stood where the German restaurant Kalt’s used to be. She saw a sign on the edge of Riverside Park, where she used to sneak away to get high with her friends, for a place called the Urban Ecology Center.

  The changes felt like betrayals. But why? Did she think her life could move on while everyone else’s would stop, frozen in place?

  Would she even remember which house was theirs? The Victorians on this typical East Side block near campus all looked alike, most of them owned by professors and idealists who rejected urban flight and were committed to the social causes of the city and public schooling. The block was studded with duplexes that had been trashed by students. She remembered empty beer cans in their bushes, students urinating on their lawn, and midnight games of touch football in the street, and potlucks, book clubs, and salons. They were walking distance to the businesses on Downer Avenue, the lake, and Riverside Park. This was the kind of neighborhood where you could let your porch sag, and where her mother could paint a giant mural with flowers and birds and a peace sign on the side of their garage. Here you could adopt teenage kids, raise daughters who remained unmarried and had children out of wedlock, who took off to explore the world. Maybe they would have been better off in a more conventional suburb like Whitefish Bay or Brookfield, where there were rules, and where gossip and reputations kept everyone in line—places where they would have been expected to follow a straighter path.

  It was dusk. The house had no lights, no signs of life. Poppy could barely make out the outline of the turret against the darkening sky. Was it possible for a house to look sad? She wished Ann were there to greet her, even though Ann was pissed at her for having been gone this long, pissed that Poppy couldn’t deal, pissed she’d had to be the one to take charge (even though Ann was always the one to take charge anyway).

  “Let me help you with your things,” Dawn said.

  “I’ve only got my pack. I’m good. Thank you.”

  “Watch your step. I’m glad Brad shoveled the sidewalk.”

  “Brad?”

  Dawn laughed. “You sure have been gone a long time, haven’t you? Brad’s been living in your house for a few years now, and thank goodness. He’s taken good care of it. And your parents.”

  “But who is he? Ann didn’t mention—”

  “She didn’t? Oh, he’s wonderful. He was in band with your dad. Owns some kind of factory. He sleeps in the basement. It’s very private, he has his own entrance and everything. You’ll hardly ever see him.”

  “Does he know I’m here to get the house ready to sell?”

  “I’m sure Ann told him. He knows he can’t just live there forever.”

  “I thought I’d be alone.”

  “Oh, you will be. He told me he’s going to stay with a friend for a few weeks. He figured you’d want some space. That’s the way he is.” Dawn leaned noisily across the seat in her big, squeaky coat to give Poppy another hug, and Poppy remembered that Midwesterners love hugs. “Promise you’ll call me if you need anything. I live in Wauwatosa now, in a condo, but it’s not that far, not really, just a hop, skip. Especially for someone like you who’s been all over the world, right? What’s Tosa, for Pete’s sake? I’m here for you, honey. Call me. We’ll get dinner. Oh, and speaking of, I left a casserole and some taco dip for you in the fridge.” She handed Poppy the set of keys Ann had left for her. “Sure you don’t want me to go in with you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She wasn’t at all fine. Poppy was afraid to enter the home she’d left all those years ago, afraid of all the emotion she’d feel, all the regret and recrimination she was in for. Good thing this Brad guy had decided to make himself scarce; she needed to be alone to face her parents’ absence and the grief she’d been wrestling like a wild animal since she’d first heard the news the previous September. Even if there ha
d been nothing for Poppy to do, as Ann had insisted once Poppy finally connected with her, and no point in coming home earlier, it might have been better to have faced everything head-on. In the months since the news of her parents’ deaths, she felt like she’d been pulled under and gotten caught in the current. She didn’t know if she’d ever surface again.

  * * *

  POPPY SETTLED INTO THE QUIET HOUSE in a void of stunned sadness. It was like a dream: one minute she was bartending at a small hotel, sleeping near an orange-sand beach in the town of Bocas del Toro, and the next she was in Milwaukee in February.

  How could her parents be dead? Their closets were filled with clothes waiting to be worn again. They still got calls from telemarketers. The mail kept showing up addressed to Edward and Connie Gordon: reminders for six-month dental checkups, letters from former students, and envelopes from prisons throughout the country with the inmates’ next moves in the chess games they played with her dad.

  There were also letters addressed to Brad: a vintage guitar magazine, a catalog selling nothing but industrial floor mats, and lots of credit card offers. The refrigerator was filled with cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and dozens of tortilla packages. The kitchen cabinets were stocked with protein-powder shake mix and cans of refried beans and diced tomatoes. She poked around the medicine cabinet: nasal spray, floss picks, multivitamins, and a compact multi-tool Leatherman with hooks, saws, scissors, and wire strippers.

  Who was this guy?