TWENTY-TWO
Michael
It was another cold day. The sky was so heavy it felt like it was sitting on Michael as he drove Route 6 from Provincetown to his office in Eastham. Still, he preferred the cold to the impending summer heat and the migration of all the tourists, who drove slow and made it hard to get a seat at the Wicked Oyster for breakfast, and impossible to find a parking spot at the Beachcomber. “String bean eaters” was what Ed called them, a phrase passed down to him from his grandfather, who told him that the tourists arrived on the Cape when string beans were in season.
Ed had taught him lots of old sayings and sailing hymns, like “Pull for the Shore” and “There Shall Be Showers of Blessing.” He knew to call a thunderstorm a “tempest,” and that the morning fog that burned off was the “easterly mull.” If a storm was coming he’d hear Ed say, “Long foretold, long last. Short notice, soon past.” And after a period of rain, Ed would say, “Ain’t going to clear up until the moon changes.”
Michael could hardly think about the weather without thinking of Ed, which is what he was doing when he passed the Gordons’ driveway and noticed a couch sitting next to the road. There was a cardboard sign that said FREE! taped to the armrest.
He knew that old couch. It used to sit in the sunporch, although it was meant to be outdoors. The base was made of shellacked wicker and the cushions were covered in vinyl. He’d slept on it whenever it got too hot in the attic. He remembered the creaking sounds the hard cushions made with the slightest movement, the way his sweat would pool on the vinyl, and how his back would ache in the mornings.
It was funny how a single familiar object out of place could also conjure up such a crystal-clear image of Ed. It had been ages since he’d really gotten a good look at him, but the sight of the couch triggered an image as vivid as a hologram, right down to his receding hairline and Adam’s apple. For just a moment Michael swore he could feel Ed’s presence in the seat next to him, hear the faint whistle in his nose when he inhaled. Michael had been close to Connie, too, and he missed her, but it was Ed who haunted him—he was a father figure, and Michael felt especially awful about how he’d let him down. There was so much Michael wanted to tell him, so much he wished Ed had known and understood about what happened with Ann. He figured that one day he’d have a chance.
FREE!
Michael couldn’t stand the thought of the couch getting picked up by just anyone. He wanted to grab it himself, but he’d loaned his red truck to Jason, who needed it to tow his boat to the marina to get fixed. That’s why Michael was driving Jason’s ’82 Camaro Iron Duke instead. Why would he even want the damn couch? It was as ugly and beat-up as the car he was driving, and the cushions had a bilious green cast to them. Still, he wanted it. “Want” wasn’t the right word. You want something you don’t already have. Michael felt it was his already, and he needed to retake possession, just like he’d always felt the house was his because he loved it. He dreamed of owning it someday.
He could picture himself sitting on that couch in the Gordons’ sunroom, back when he was welcome there, looking up at the wrinkled poster of a clay Indian doll in a yellowing plastic frame. The poster said SANTA FE. Michael used to look at it and wonder why the Gordons would bother to drive all the way from Wisconsin to Cape Cod every summer only to conjure up the Southwest. They also had a Milwaukee Railroad poster in the kitchen that Michael always wished he could rip down. Maybe those posters were the reason he’d returned to the Cape and stayed here all these years, because they made him think: Why would anyone want to be anywhere else?
Michael didn’t have time to mess with an old couch. He had to get to work. He needed to hire their summer landscaping crew and fill out all the tax forms and paperwork. The business had grown from the early days, when Jason could only have as many employees as he could fit in a truck. Back then, he ran it out of his backyard, and all his neighbors complained about the tools everywhere, the trucks in the driveway, the crew coming and going. Later, Jason bought one of the last industrial lots in Eastham and built a small office, and two garages large enough to fit the trucks, trailers, and snowplows.
He had plenty of competition, although he’d been around long enough to develop a solid arsenal of regular employees and clients. Michael had already agreed to rehire three of his regulars, and he’d lined up a few interviewees that morning to fill his open spots. He liked to think he was a good judge of character, but he’d accumulated his share of horror stories over the years: the oxy addict who stole an old widow’s checkbook, and a pedophile who solicited a teenage boy. The one that gave him the most grief was the idiot who mixed up an address and tore up the wrong lawn. And there were always employees who would buy their own truck and try to poach his clients. How could you look at a person and predict what kind of damage they might be capable of doing? Is that what Ed thought when he reflected on his decision to adopt Michael? Look how that turned out.
Between interviews and two calls from Sandi about a copyright issue with Anibitz, Michael was nagged by questions about the couch. He wondered why Ed and Connie would be on the Cape already. They worked at schools, and it wasn’t even spring break yet. He pulled Carol Hargrove’s business card out of his wallet and stared at it. No, Ed and Connie would never sell their house. Never.
But something was wrong. He knew it. They never got rid of anything. But say they did? It was just like them to leave their crap by the side of the road for someone to take instead of throwing it away.
And then there was the handwriting on the cardboard sign. Ed and Connie didn’t use exclamation points, and they didn’t get excited over material possessions, free or not. That sign could only mean one thing: the girls, one or both of them, were back. But why now, before summer? He could think of little else. He waited impatiently for Jason to bring his truck back so he could snag the couch before someone else did.
When Jason finally showed up, Michael lied and said Avery was sick, and he needed to pick her up from school early. They made good partners; Jason was on top of the accounts, taxes, and paperwork, while Michael had a keen sense of timing. He knew exactly when to plant from the smell in the air and the direction of the wind.
“Nothing dies on your watch,” Jason said to him. “You should work in a hospice instead of a nursery.” It was about as close to a compliment as a salty New Englander like Jason could muster, and Michael’s dismissive shrug was about as close as he could come to thanking him.
But that damn couch got to him. It put him in a restless funk. He was a mess over an old piece of furniture. Who put it out there? Why did they want to get rid of it? He was almost afraid to touch it.
TWENTY-THREE
Poppy
The Milwaukee house had become a time capsule, especially in winter, sealed up from the elements. Everything was just as her parents had left it, from the tattered throw blankets on the armrests to the plants on the windowsills. The basement smelled like old cardboard. They were the kind of people who’d kept all the boxes that once held the things they’d bought: an old fan, a vacuum, a computer, a changing table.
Poppy wandered the house, restless. She finally mustered up the courage to enter her parents’ room and lie down on their bed, feeling the dents in the mattress where their bodies left their impressions, smelling their pillows, crying her heart out.
Her own bedroom was just as she’d left it, although her tie-dyed curtains had been bleached by the sun. A poster of surfer Greg Cipes standing shirtless on the beach still hung above her bed, and a pile of faded surf magazines sat on her dresser, gathering dust. Even her one-hitter was still hidden in the back of her top drawer.
Ann’s room was also neatly preserved. Poppy inspected her bookcase, which was lined with track medals and academic awards, along with framed photos of Noah as a baby. On the bulletin board, she saw a photograph of the two of them taken from behind. It was sunset at Mayo Beach, and they were squeezing each other. How Poppy had worshiped Ann! They must have been seven and
eight, their legs still a little chubby, their hair more golden. Poppy sat on Ann’s bed for a little while and guiltily looked through the nightstand, remembering how, in high school, she’d sneak peeks into her sister’s diary to find out who she liked, and how surprised she’d been, once, to see an entry about Michael, how he was unlike other guys, and so cute!!! The diary was gone, but she discovered a folded-up drawing that lacerated her heart. It was a picture Noah must have drawn of Poppy when he was around six, when Poppy had visited home for Christmas. It was a trip she didn’t remember well, aside from feeling like Milwaukee was cold and boring. She’d taken everything for granted. Her mother must have spent hours preparing Poppy’s favorite dishes, and she’d blown off her father’s invitation to see a band at the Jazz Estate. She got high before her parents took the family to see the Milwaukee Ballet perform The Nutcracker and slept during the entire show. After only a few days she left, strung-out and in a huff because Ann had gotten on her case about being more responsible. Noah must have made the drawing the next day when he’d woken up to discover she was gone. He pictured Poppy standing on a surfboard, her face as big and round as the sun on the corner of the page. The Milwaukee house with the turret stood behind her. He’d written in painstakingly careful letters, some backward, “Ent Popee you fgrot to soy good bie from NOAH.”
She had forgotten. She’d been so thoughtless, leaving the way she had, at night, when Noah was sleeping, without ever taking his feelings into account. The worst part was that Ann had kept the drawing in the intimate space of the nightstand, so Poppy knew it had mattered to her.
It took emotional fortitude to enter Michael’s old room, too. It still felt like it was his. She would stare up at the glow-in-the-dark stars he’d attached to the ceiling with her dad, who bought them for Michael shortly after he’d moved in with them. She couldn’t believe nobody had ever gotten rid of Michael’s stuff after what he’d done. His T-shirts were still folded in the drawer. The bookshelves held his track trophies, the desk was stuffed with old math quizzes he’d aced. The giant aquarium that used to fill up the room with its comforting hum and eerie, wet light sat empty on the table.
Michael’s rolled-up balls of socks reminded her of when she’d teased him because he always wore his socks inside out. He explained that his mother, shortly before she died, told him that whenever he was sad, all he had to do was wear his socks inside out and he’d feel happy again.
Michael, Michael … She had so many questions for him, so much she wanted to say, so much anger. But alone in his room, a room she knew her parents had left untouched because they wanted him to come back, like all of their bedrooms—she only wished that he were there to mourn with her. Sure, he’d left, but she’d left, too, only for different reasons.
So much had changed, yet Poppy still felt stuck in that hard time when Noah was a baby, when the atmosphere in the small home often grew tense, loud and anxious. Sleep-deprived, her parents had snapped at each other. Poppy withdrew and started sleeping at her friends’ houses, escaping to their cottages, tripping at music festivals on the weekends, using drugs to escape. Everyone was too stressed and exhausted to worry about her.
The longer she stayed in the house, the more she pieced together her reasons for leaving, and why she hadn’t come back, save for that one awful visit. She’d once felt integral to her family. After Michael’s adoption and the trauma of his exit, along with the birth of Noah, she’d been rendered invisible, insignificant, especially by Ann, who’d never confided in her except to share details about her body.
Normally private and self-conscious, Ann was surprisingly open about childbirth. She told Poppy about the stitches from her episiotomy zigzagging all the way to her ass, explained how her breasts hardened into hot, hard boulders. When the milk came in, Poppy made warm compresses to set on her painfully infected nipples. She nursed so much she walked around the house with her nursing bra unstrapped, the flaps up, right in front of their father.
Ann had a hard time burning off the baby weight. Poppy inadvertently set off a fit of tears when Ann saw her walking from the bathroom to her bedroom wearing only her bra and underwear. “What’s wrong?” Poppy asked.
“Look at you. You’re so thin,” Ann said. “Check this out.” She pulled up her shirt and grabbed a handful of flesh from her stomach. “It’s so gross. Like raw chicken.”
Noah was amazing and precious. Poppy loved the way he smelled, loved to clip his fingernails while he was sleeping, loved the way he sucked his bottom lip. She played peekaboo and blew into his stomach so he’d laugh. He was so soft and juicy and sweet. But he was also difficult in the way that babies are difficult. She understood why sleep deprivation was used as a method of torture on prisoners, and during long crying jags from teething or gas she felt sudden sympathy for mothers who shook their babies. She begged Noah to stop crying. “Please,” she’d say. “I’ll do anything. Just give me peace and quiet for five minutes.”
Even though it was hard, Ann was a good mother, shouldering the burden of love and worry for this tiny living thing she’d brought into the world while still somehow managing to take classes at the college in the fall. Poppy had vowed she’d never have a child of her own, partly because having a kid meant having a family, and her once-close family had changed from the stress. She couldn’t wait to move out.
But when she did, she thought of Noah all the time, and ached to be with him, remembering how his sweet face lit up whenever he saw her. Most weekends through college, she took the Badger Bus home from UW–Madison. One fall day she’d arrived home and found Noah banging his hands on the tray of his high chair when she walked into the kitchen, baby food all over his face. “Pay-ay.”
“He knows your name,” her dad said, his big hand resting gently on Noah’s soft curls. Most people seemed older when they became grandparents, like her mom. She’d doted after Noah, talking in baby talk, knitting pumpkin hats for him and showing baby photos to all of her friends. Her dad, on the other hand, seemed younger now, as though he fed off all Noah’s endless baby energy. “Hey, sport, who am I?” He pointed at himself. Noah said, “Dooo.” Her dad beamed. “I’m not ready for ‘Grandpa,’” he said. “I want him to call me ‘Dude.’”
One weekend when Poppy watched Noah, she gave him a bath and trimmed his hair with her mom’s sewing scissors. Ann came home, took one look at him, and broke down in tears. “That was his first haircut! How could you do that? I wanted to save his first lock.”
Poppy didn’t know Ann had a soft, sentimental side. The baby had changed her. “That’s so, like, Victorian. You really care about stuff like that?”
“Of course!” Ann reached into the bathroom garbage looking for hair. It was easy to set Ann off.
“You’re welcome for babysitting.”
“That’s all it is to you: babysitting. Don’t do me any favors,” Ann snapped.
Soon, Poppy learned that talking about college was a hot button. She saw Ann’s face turn bitter with jealousy when she told her about helicopters dropping joints on the State Capitol lawn during Mifflin Street days, and her excellent political science professor and the bands she’d seen on the Union Terrace, or how she’d partied at the Kollege Klub. Ann was too proud to admit she was jealous of Poppy’s freedom. Instead, her jealousy manifested itself as meanness that only pushed Poppy further and further away until her visits became less frequent. One afternoon Ann exploded when Poppy came home, breathless with excitement, and told her she was planning to go to Costa Rica on a study-abroad program. “Costa Rica?” Ann said. “You don’t even care about school. You just want to surf and hang out with a bunch of dropouts and losers.”
“What’s your problem?”
“I’m raising a kid on my own and going to school. What the hell are you going to learn about in Costa Rica? Study abroad is total bullshit. You can learn something right here in Milwaukee.”
“You don’t have to be a bitch about it.”
“Whatever. Just leave, go to Costa Ri
ca. Go anywhere, see what we care.” Ann held Noah in a tight grip. We: she was speaking for both of them.
“Fine,” Poppy said, deeply hurt. “I’ll do anything to get away from you.”
And she did. Poppy left for Costa Rica, seeking a less complicated life somewhere, anywhere else.
Poppy tried to escape her memories the way she usually did: by heading outside. The wind was sharp and cold, and the city was covered in a blanket of dirty snow that looked even darker under a flat, gray sky. Instead of VW vans and palm trees, Poppy had to readjust to a world of Jiffy Lubes, Home Depot, and frozen-custard stands.
Green Bay Packer T-shirts were on clearance at Walgreens because the Packers just lost the last round of the playoffs. Everyone seemed aimless and deflated now that football season was over.
She sought the solace of water. She walked through Lake Park to Lake Michigan in her dad’s ancient L.L.Bean parka, which still smelled like his beard. She was freezing, even with the parka and several layers of her mother’s old sweaters. Maybe it was true that her blood had become too thin. She didn’t mind, because the cold reinforced her inner numbness. She walked until her cheeks were raw and red and her eyes watered.
She found herself at the funky deco terrace at Bradford Beach, where she’d shroomed the night Ann had Noah. She squinted and read the waves on instinct. The wind had blown the snow into drifts, and there were mounds of ice where the waves had crashed and frozen before they could retreat. She’d heard that people surfed here, the way her Cape Cod friends, the “townies,” had surfed in the freezing Atlantic during winter.
All those years she was away, she’d grown accustomed to thinking of Milwaukee as ugly, a tired old industrial city, a place where time stopped. But the longer she was home, the more she began to appreciate the ways in which it hadn’t changed, and the city’s quiet, sturdy beauty. When it snowed, the oak trees in Lake Park looked like they were made of white lace, and the cold steam that rolled over the icy lake at sunrise took her breath away. She loved how she felt her parents here, walking where they’d walked, appreciating nature and the dramatic winter sunsets. It was an unexpected comfort to be in a place where everything was familiar and solid, and people didn’t just come and go. Even Dick Bacon, the legendary Milwaukee man who sat on the beach in a reflective tinfoil contraption to tan himself all year long, was still there in his Speedo, catching rays in the cold.
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