She saw people walking down Commonwealth and Newbury. Wouldn’t it be nice to be carefree, to meet up with friends, go on a date? She imagined herself sidling up to the bar with a guy she was excited to be with. She’d catch the bartender’s attention. “I’ll have a martini,” she’d say, and a warm hand would rub her back. This nameless, perfect man always appeared in her fantasies as Michael, but why? Perhaps because he’d once been her best companion before she pushed him away. A companion, that’s what she wanted. She wished she could tell him about her day, about Mindy’s spreadsheet, about Noah’s latest exploit, about Anthony, about selling the house in Wellfleet, about how nervous she was to see Poppy again. “Can you imagine?” she’d say. “I’m nervous to see my own sister!” And, familiar with the contours of her life, he’d nod in understanding.
She shut down her computer. She couldn’t stand the idea of being alone like this forever.
TWENTY-NINE
Poppy
Brad stood in the alley next to Poppy’s mother’s Civic, his callused fingers gripping the edge of her rolled-down window. It was only four in the morning, and his hair glowed copper under the streetlight. He leaned in to kiss Poppy. She could tell he wanted it to be a slow, meaningful kiss, but she wanted to get it over with, get on the road, get through Chicago before rush hour, get to Cape Cod, get away. She was in “go” mode.
“Come back soon,” he said.
“I can’t promise anything.”
“I’ll wait for you,” he said. “And I can come visit you. I’d love to see the Wellfleet house. Your parents talked about it all the time.”
“That would be great,” Poppy said, but she knew she sounded halfhearted.
“What’s going on with you?” Brad asked.
Why did everything about him have to appeal to her? The blunt shape of his nose, the intelligence in his eyes. What was wrong with her? She left all the time. But she didn’t want to hurt him. “You need to live your life.”
“We’ve got something special. You know it.”
“I do know,” she said. “This has been great.”
“This?” He seemed sad, exasperated. “What’s ‘this’? Are you breaking up with me?”
“Brad—” She put her hand on his, looked into her lap. His fingers were cold under hers, warm from the travel mug of coffee.
“Look, don’t say anything more. Just think about us. Call me when you get to Syracuse—don’t just keep driving. You need a break for a night. Let me know you got there safe.”
“OK, OK.”
“I hate to think of you driving that far by yourself.”
“I’ve been all over the world by myself.” What did he think, that she needed a man? Was this patriarchal BS or—
As if reading her mind, he said, “I know you’re going to be fine but it’s also OK for me to be concerned.”
“I don’t need your concern.”
“Goddamn it, Poppy. Can’t you see I love you?”
There it was: love. She was afraid that was coming, afraid of commitment. But why? There was nothing scary about Brad. Everything about him was easy, good. Something about him snapped in place. “I’ve got to go.”
“I know you feel it, too. At least I hope you do.” He kissed her one more time, and she enjoyed it, and she wanted him. She had half a mind to … Love? Did he really just tell her he loved her? She was as terrified as she was thrilled. “Don’t forget about me.”
“I won’t.”
“I’ll be right here, you know. And I can come there, help you out. We’re good together.”
“We are. I’m just—”
“But you need to know that I’m not going to put pushpins on a map to keep track of you.”
“I never asked you to.”
“Jesus, Poppy. What are you so afraid of?”
What was she so afraid of? That was a question she asked herself as she made her way onto the freeway, her eyes blurry with tears.
She had twenty hours of driving ahead of her. She tried not to think about Brad, or the house, or the way Brad’s hair curled at the nape of his neck, or the way he’d stood there with his hands stuffed deep in his jacket pockets as he watched her drive away. She was afraid to look in her rearview mirror, fearing he might still be there, no matter how far away she drove from her old house. Soon it wouldn’t even be hers anymore. She and Ann had accepted Brad’s offer: a reasonable price, no Realtor fees, no inspection, no hassles. The closing would happen in about two months.
Take that, Ann.
She made it through Chicago, and just as she drove through Toledo she realized she’d gone past the spot where her parents’ accident had happened. She turned around and headed back in the opposite direction, looking for some kind of sign to mark the spot where the truck had hit them. The driver, it turned out, had had an epileptic seizure, and had died, too. It was hard to be mad. It was tragic, that was all.
She pulled to the side of the freeway and broke down so completely while cars whipped past that she felt as if her veins had been scraped out by grief. It wasn’t just her parents she cried over: she cried for Brad, for the end of an era with her house in Milwaukee, for the feeling she had that she’d never be able to return to her old life, for the loss of family, for not having a center, for being a fucked-up, commitment-phobic betrayer of family and friends. She was so caught up in her crying spell that she didn’t see the cop pull up behind her, and startled when he rapped on her window.
“You OK?”
Poppy wiped her face with the back of her jacket sleeve. “No.”
He was an older cop, probably in his sixties, and he seemed awkward about confronting a tearful young woman. “It’s not safe here. You should use your hazards. Better yet, pull off at the exit.”
“Sorry.” Her tears caught in her throat. “I’ll leave.”
She thought he was about to hand her a ticket, but he passed her a tissue instead. “Your registration is expired, did you know that?”
“No. Really? I don’t pay attention to any of the right stuff. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
He patted the top of the car as if he could pat her on top of her head. “I’ll let it go for now. But in the future, find a safer place to cry. And get those tags renewed.”
She was facing west instead of east now, and thought about going back to Milwaukee, but the pull to the Cape was too strong. She felt it every spring, no matter where in the world she was living. She could practically hear the terns, plovers, and barn swallows, smell the heady scent of sulfur and peat of the cove, feel the damp sand at the shore of Gull Pond, and taste the oysters and lobster rolls. This impulse to migrate back to a familiar place was troubling. She’d always defined herself as someone who could continually expand outward, never needing to return.
* * *
EXHAUSTED FROM DRIVING, SHE stayed overnight in Syracuse. The next day, she got a late start. The area outside Albany was lovely, with barns tucked into rolling hills, like in Wisconsin. She felt a surge of energy as soon as she hit the Mass Pike. The closer she got to the Cape, the more she remembered—all the positive things she thought she’d forgotten, like the way her father would turn up whatever stupid song was playing on the radio as soon as they went over the Sagamore Bridge, and her travel-weary family, including Michael, would roll down their windows and start singing at the tops of their lungs, magically transformed from weary to revived. When Poppy saw signs for Plymouth, she turned up the classic-hits station. “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves came on. It seemed like the perfect song at first. She didn’t even like it; it was cheesy and old and familiar, but when she started to sing she became acutely aware of the sound of her own voice and the fact that she was the only person in the car.
She was nervous to reunite with prickly old Ann, who she was sure must have withheld information from her on purpose as a kind of punishment. She hadn’t warned her that Brad was living in their house, hadn’t mentioned their mom’s deteriorating mental state. So w
hy was it hard to stay mad at Ann? Poppy felt lonely for her instead. They’d shared this childhood trip, and the memories, and this horrible loss. If Ann were with her, they could reminisce about the music, and how her mom would insist that they stop at the Friendly’s just off the rotary. She said the ice cream was a reward for good behavior on the drive out, but really it was also a kind of sweet torture she exercised to delay their arrival and amp up their anticipation.
Friendly’s was gone. How could Friendly’s be gone?
Was it possible that the Cape could no longer deliver the way it did when she was a kid? She hadn’t been back since she was sixteen. In all those years, had it become just a place?
Before she knew it, she was on the bridge over Buzzards Bay that didn’t seem nearly as high over the canal as it used to. She saw signs for towns like Osterville and Sandwich, towns that meant nothing to her because her family had only ever cared about the Outer Cape, where the peninsula was chewed away to a resilient sliver of sandy earth. Poppy couldn’t wait to get past Hyannis, where Ann had once sworn she saw John F. Kennedy, Jr., in Ray-Bans pumping gas into his convertible at the Mobil station. The real turning point came when she went through the rotary at Orleans, just past the elbow of the Cape. After Orleans, she could see salt ponds and marshes instead of scrub pine, and she began to feel that magic tingling of anticipation again. Driving past all these towns made her feel like she was driving through time, not to a place, but to her past. The Lobster Shanty, National Seashore Museum, Audubon Center, mini-golf barn, and drive-in movie theater were still there, although now there were Mexican, African, and Thai restaurants. Since when could you buy ethnic food on the Cape? What other changes should she brace herself for?
She wasn’t ready to experience the house yet, and the flood of emotion she knew was waiting for her there, so she pulled into the parking lot in front of the General Store and went inside. Even that had changed. It had been remodeled. Now you could buy kombucha and six-dollar smoothies. She missed the General Store she remembered, where you could enter in your bare feet. The floors were never swept, doughnuts were fifty cents, and she and Ann would use their paltry allowance to buy Mad Libs and quiz books with invisible-ink pens while her parents bought The New York Times.
She went into the liquor store, quaintly called the “package store” in New England, or “packie,” as her dad had called it. She bought a six-pack of beer that cost more than ten bucks, the most obvious sign she wasn’t in Milwaukee anymore, where beer was practically free.
Across the street was a fancy boulangerie where there’d once been a clam shack. A boulangerie in South Wellfleet?
She got back into her car and drove to the long dirt drive that led to her family’s house and came to a stop in the clearing. Poppy had never been to the Cape this early in the season, and she found the landscape strangely lush from rain, not dry and brown the way she remembered it. This time of year, mist rose from the lawn instead of dust. She parked next to the old barn her father had converted into a workshop and looked between the clusters of scrub pines on the bluff. In the distance, she could see the expanse of flat brown silt in Drummer Cove and wondered if arriving at low tide was a bad omen.
The rusty hinges moaned when she opened the door of her mom’s dinged-up car. She unfolded herself from the seat she’d been pressed into for what felt like a lifetime, stepped outside onto the crushed oyster shells on the driveway, and inhaled the achingly familiar scent. She’d lived all over the world, but at that moment she felt like she’d never left Wellfleet, never known anything or anyplace else. She even felt known by it. This was where the feeling of her parents lingered.
She popped open the trunk with the decal that read BELIEVE IT, DREAM IT, DO IT! and another one she’d sent her for Christmas one year that read OM. I. GOD. She smiled when she looked at the bag of cat litter her dad kept there to add weight to the rear wheels during the long Midwestern winter. It was such a practical gesture. Her smile disappeared when she surveyed the rest of the contents. Wedged between the spare tire and her tattered backpack were the robin’s-egg-blue boxes from the crematorium. They hadn’t budged during the long ride out. Poppy had felt their presence on every bump and turn, and when she got lonely and tired of listening to her own thoughts she imagined that her parents were really there in the car, alive and engaged in their usual banter, arguing about politics, food, art, and household chores the way they always did.
Now, looking at the stickers with their names on them, she saw that the boxes were deathly quiet and still. When she picked them up she was again surprised by the weight of ashes. Ann’s plan was to dispose of the ashes and put an end to their grief. Ann said they needed to move on, but that didn’t make sense to Poppy. She resented the way Ann made it sound like grief was a simple problem when she knew full well that Ann’s problems were never simple.
She threw her backpack over her shoulder and headed for the door. The old saltbox looked the way she remembered it, although the weathered gray clapboard shingles, moss on the roof, and sagging shutters made it seem private and sad instead of welcoming the way it had when she was a kid, when she felt like she was reuniting with an old friend.
She walked up to the back entrance they always used because the front door had been sealed off ages ago, just a floating door that someone had nailed shut long before she was born. The steps had rotted away and been removed. Nobody knew why. It was one of the house’s many mysteries, something she’d always considered part of the antique charm. Now, according to Ann, whatever Poppy found charming was an “issue.” Ann had emailed her with a whole list of “issues” that would need to be fixed over the course of the summer.
Poppy fished around in the giant woven bag that she’d bought in Honduras and wrapped her hand around her mother’s BOOKLOVER key chain, which she’d found hanging from the bulletin board in Milwaukee. Everything she owned came from somewhere else. Had she ever used a key? They’d always left the door unlocked. It was a heavy bitted key with an ornate bow, the only fanciful element of the no-nonsense Puritan design of the house. When she slipped it into the lock, she remembered the summer when she and her mom painted the door bright green, but it was red now. At least the paisley curtain was still there, hanging over the window. Her mother made it herself, at home in Milwaukee.
She opened the door and smelled the familiar scent of trapped air. She walked to the Formica kitchen table she and Ann used to cover with blankets and newspapers and hide under with flashlights and books. A pamphlet that said “Preparing your home for sale” sat on top of it. If only she could figure out a way to keep the house.
Poppy looked around and thought about all the things she had to do. Her parents had always attended to the business of opening the house for summer. They turned the water valves, lit the pilot light, and cleared away spiderwebs and evidence of mice. Now it was up to her to figure out how to make the house inhabitable, and she had no idea where to start. She didn’t even know how to turn on the electricity, and remembered the summer when she and Ann were little, when, just as an experiment, the family lived without electricity for almost a week.
She heard a noise on the other side of the house, near the sunporch. Was she imagining it? Was this what happened after spending too much time alone? She wished Brad were there. Footsteps. Then she swore she saw someone outside in the back lot, or was it just the tree moving in the wind? A neighborhood cat? A mouse? A squirrel? Ghosts? What was that?
“Hello?” Poppy said.
She ran to the kitchen and picked up the old mustard-yellow phone on the wall. Nothing. The service had been shut off for the winter.
She needed to be comforted by the sound of her own voice. “Noah?” she shouted. “Ann?” She looked at her Nixon watch. It was only five o’clock. Ann said they’d come down for the weekend, their first face-to-face encounter in more years than Poppy wanted to consider.
She lifted the curtain to peek out at the driveway: nothing. She’d felt someone, she was sure of it.
She still did. She stood still in the quiet of the house watching the dust particles light up in the day’s last light and float in front of the windows, waiting for the figure to appear again, listening for more footsteps, waiting for the door to burst open.
Nothing happened.
It was getting dark, so she went to the basement and found the breaker so that she could turn on the lights. She went outside, and walked around the property. Had she imagined the intruder after such a long drive and so much time alone? She couldn’t see anyone, but she felt like she was being watched. In the creepy, invaded quiet, she became even more acutely aware of her parents’ ashes waiting in the car. She went back outside to get them and headed back indoors. “We’re back,” Poppy said, startled by the weight, “where do you want me to put you guys?”
There was the giant fireplace mantel, but setting them there could be mistaken as an attempt to be decorative next to the old conch shell Michael found his first summer on the Cape. You can hear the waves, she told him, and he looked at her, amazed when he held the shell next to his ear. She saw the family photo, the glass broken. Michael … Who knew where he’d landed. Maybe Milwaukee. Maybe anywhere. He’d only spent two summers in the house but his presence was heavy, like the lingering feeling of the ghostly intruder.
She went into her parents’ bedroom, which was lit through the slits in the old wood shutters. She set her father’s box on his tallboy, and her mother’s box on the wide, squat mahogany dresser. No, she thought. Still not right, too far apart. She moved them to the bed they’d shared for all those years and set her father’s box on his side and her mother’s box on hers.
The Second Home Page 24