“We already made copies. Ann, this is what Mom and Dad wanted. Noah will have to share the house with Michael’s daughter.”
THIRTY-SIX
Michael
Michael’s lawyer successfully fought Ann when she tried to contest the will. Finally, after months of legal wrangling, the judge issued a sharing agreement between Michael and Ann for the house on the Cape, if sharing was what you could call it. To Michael it felt more like two people “sharing” a rope in a tug-of-war. But he had to make the best of the situation, at least until Avery turned eighteen, and then who knew what would happen.
Every two weeks, occupancy changed hands between Michael and Ann. For someone who seemed so eager to sell, Ann rarely missed an opportunity to drive down from Boston to take advantage of her allotted time in the house, even in the heart of winter.
Things were just as strained between Michael and Ann as they were between himself and Poppy. Shortly after that awful night, Poppy showed up at his office again. It was a bad time. He was on the phone with Sharon Gold, who was upset about the bluestone patio he’d installed earlier that week, because one of the bigger pieces was already cracked. Sometimes that just happens, he explained, and he was happy to replace it. Jason stormed into his office and dropped a seed catalog on his desk. “They raised their prices again.” Jason left, Mrs. Gold kept screaming, and there was Poppy.
He smiled, happy to see her, anxious to debrief after that fight with Ann, but she didn’t smile back. “I just have one question,” she said. “Did you really…?”
He raised his finger—just a minute.
It was finally warm out. She wore a tank and shorts that showed off her muscles. She still had the build of the sixteen-year-old he remembered.
“Hang on,” he said to Mrs. Gold.
“Don’t tell me to hang on!” Mrs. Gold was one of his biggest customers, and usually she was OK to deal with.
“Did you or did you not take money from Anthony Shaw?”
“I can explain,” he said.
“Yes or no?” Poppy’s voice was unexpectedly shrill.
Mrs. Gold said she wasn’t sure she even liked the bluestone to begin with. “Are you sure it’s real?” she said. “Not some stone made in China that’s supposed to look like it’s real?”
“It’s real.”
“Answer me,” Poppy said. “It’s a simple question.”
Michael put his palm over the mouthpiece of his phone and said, “Yes, but—”
“You planned to force the sale of the house without telling me?”
“No, all I’d done was try to remove Ann as executor. I hadn’t even—”
And then Poppy was gone. Really gone—later, he’d learn from Carol that Poppy took off for Portugal the next day. She was an ocean away. He couldn’t stand to think of Poppy feeling badly about him. He wished he’d just hung up on stupid Mrs. Gold that afternoon. She’d ended up having the whole damn patio torn up and replaced with brick.
He never saw Ann, but she made sure he knew she’d been there. He found evidence of her stay every time he returned, which was at five o’clock on the dot every other Sunday, when the court-ordered changeover took place.
Michael made his presence known, too. He took it upon himself to sand, paint, and rehang the battered shutters against the windows. He pruned the trees, treated the pitch pines for bark beetles, cleared the brush, and cut down the leggy yews that had grown too close to the foundation.
Even in their silence, they’d somehow found a way to divide and conquer, with Michael and Ann addressing separate but balanced kinds of work. While he tended to the nuts and bolts of the house, Ann purged the junk drawers of crumbs, expired coupons, brittle rubber bands, and acid-burned batteries. The plastic Tupperware containers and rusted baking sheets were quietly decommissioned. New hand towels hung from the hooks in the bathroom.
Michael filled the cracks in the walls with Spackle, while Ann transformed the space with paint. He had to admit that he liked the bold colors Ann picked out, especially in contrast to the fresh coat of white he’d painted on the trim and windows. Avery thought the colors were fantastic. She gasped with delight when she saw the eggplant purple in the birthing room, and she was taken with the vibrant periwinkle in Connie and Ed’s old room, where Michael now slept—he wasn’t about to go back to the attic. This was where Ann slept, too.
Ann also rearranged the furniture and bought bright rugs and throw pillows to brighten up the space. The décor was tasteful, not showy, and complemented the rustic antiques, adding visual interest and warmth to every room. She’d somehow managed to skirt the line between classic and contemporary, lived-in and new, beach house and family home. The Gordons were never into decorating. He wondered how Ann had developed such a refined design aesthetic.
Like Michael, Ann was a neatnik. If he had to share a home in a less than ideal arrangement, it might as well be with someone who labeled her storage bins, returned things to their rightful places, and left every corner free of dust bunnies. Upon arrival, he found the dishwasher empty, the bed stripped, the counters gleaming.
Everywhere he looked he saw evidence of a human being who ate, slept, flossed her teeth, and clipped her toenails just like anyone else. It was strange after all these years to stand in the same spot where she showered, sink into the same comfortable chairs she sank into, to eat his cereal out of the same bowl she’d used. He could smell her shampoo in the pillows. He stumbled across her box of tampons in the medicine cabinet. The nightstand drawer next to the bed was filled with lip gloss and ponytail holders.
Once, he found one of her earrings on the floor, and left it for her in a small bowl on the kitchen table. It was gone the next time he stayed there. That was their first real act of communication.
The Post-its marked ANN’S that Ann had affixed to half the cabinets and drawers were starting to fade and lose their adhesive. It was hard for Michael to avoid these forbidden spaces. Late at night, he couldn’t help himself. He’d open her closet and see her sweaters, T-shirts, and running clothes stacked neatly on the back shelves. He opened a drawer in Ann’s dresser and pulled out her bra. He ran his fingers over the soft satin cups and fingered the discreet lace on the straps. It was the kind of bra a woman wore not for herself, but for someone else. Who saw it on her? Did she have a boyfriend? Did she bring him here? Did they make love in the same bed he slept in?
He held the bra up to his nose and inhaled her still-familiar scent. He knew she hated him, and he resented her, so why was he smelling her damn bra? He stuffed it back in the drawer where he found it, feeling like a seventeen-year-old kid again. He told himself for the hundredth time that he ought to start dating again even if the inventory on the Cape was severely limited.
But Ann, still tempting and illicit, was everywhere he looked, like an invasive species. She took root in every drawer, cabinet, towel, pillow, and book. It made him mad, horny, frustrated. He couldn’t stand it. It didn’t help that Avery couldn’t stop asking about the mystery woman, this strange poltergeist who changed things around when they were gone. Is she pretty? she asked. How old is she? Is she nice? Why do you share the house with her? How come we don’t ever see her? Who is she?
How could he even begin to explain Ann to his daughter? If he started to answer one question, he knew it would provoke a landslide of more totally understandable questions, so he didn’t say much at all. Ann was just some “lady” who shared the place, someone he’d known when he was younger. He said the house was a place they’d “invested” in. He brought Avery with him whenever he could because he wanted her to love the house, even though she had no idea that she had a stake in it.
Michael tried to pass the situation off to her like it was the most normal scenario in the world, the way it was normal for him to live with his ex-wife and her partner. This was just another odd arrangement that worked out for them, he said, and that was all there was to it.
* * *
THE SILENCE BETWEEN MICHAEL and Ann s
tarted to feel suffocating and intense. Connie and Ed’s ashes sat atop the bedroom dresser, untouched, while the rest of the house was subject to almost relentless progress. There was something Michael found disturbing about the emerging aesthetic. It was starting to feel too perfect, like a rental that would appeal to anyone instead of the people who lived there.
He tried to get under Ann’s skin. He put fresh flowers in the vase on the kitchen table shortly before the end of his stays there, because he figured a nice gesture would annoy her. But then she tricked him and did the same thing.
He began to fix Avery’s school portraits and some of her drawings to the refrigerator with magnets. Avery was an amazing artist like her mother, mostly because she had inherited Shelby’s incredible attention span and could focus on a single drawing for hours, and because so many artists stayed at their inn. They all seemed willing to nurture and develop his daughter’s talents. She carried her drawing pad with her everywhere she went. Provincetown was an ideal place for a budding artist, with interesting landscapes like busy Commercial Street, the harbor, the dramatic bluffs at Herring Cove Beach, Race Point Lighthouse, and the iconic Days’ Cottages, little houses that sat like beads on a necklace along the shore of Cape Cod Bay. Avery frequently raided the inn’s lost and found for odd trinkets the tenants had left behind and arranged them in configurations for still-life paintings. She did the same thing at the Wellfleet house. Avery had an eerie knack for finding objects that carried psychic weight, like Connie’s old wind chimes and chipped mugs she’d bought at one of the many pottery places in Wellfleet, or the ship in a bottle that Ed said his grandfather had given him.
It felt good to brag about Avery through her artwork this way, because Michael wanted Ann to know that his daughter was beautiful and bright, and that she wasn’t the red-haired stepchild or pushy outsider Ann likely thought her to be.
It took a while, but Ann began to return in kind, and the refrigerator slowly became a metallic Switzerland. Michael saw that Ann had posted a photo of Noah eating an ice cream at Emack & Bolio’s, and a clipping from the Cape Cod Times of Noah leading a kayak expedition as part of a youth group at sea camp. Michael couldn’t get over how much the kid looked like Anthony, but still different. Anthony’s hair had been straight, while Noah’s had some wave to it. They were both stocky, but Anthony’s build had been more solid. Noah wasn’t chubby, not exactly, but he looked like he still had some baby fat he hadn’t grown out of yet. Anthony was intimidating, while Noah seemed approachable. Noah looked like someone who wanted to make friends, while Anthony was on his guard. Michael wanted to meet this kid, and he was grateful Noah hadn’t grown up with Anthony in his life, because he was the kind of kid Anthony wouldn’t have wanted to deal with.
* * *
MICHAEL KNEW HE’D HAVE TO TALK to Ann eventually. So far, thanks to their lawyers, he hadn’t had to say a single word to her. But that couldn’t last. They weren’t permitted to do any major remodeling or repairs unless they were in agreement. Fortunately, nothing major had come up so far, although the old oil furnace probably wouldn’t make it through another winter, and Michael was starting to think about a kitchen remodel. He had a feeling Ann was, too. With that awful mushroom-print wallpaper, how could she not? The drawers swelled shut in the summer and hung loose in the winter. The Formica countertops curled up at the edges, revealing moldy particleboard underneath. The old faucets leaked, and the linoleum floors were pocked and chipped.
He could subcontract the job himself, but he knew Ann would have good ideas about the layout and a strong opinion about the details. It was a big project, one they’d need to sit down and discuss, and they’d need to agree on a budget.
He thought he’d show up early for his two weeks on the off-chance that Ann might still be there. It was a sultry mid-July day, over a year since their confrontation, and he was a nervous mess. Thank God he had Avery with him, at least for part of the ride. He was going to drop her off at her friend Jess’s house in Truro. She kept him occupied with her chatter about school and her friends, and the odd facts she accumulated in the Velcro of her young brain. “Did you know a whale’s heart only beats once a minute?”
“That can’t be true.” He thought of his own heart racing in his chest.
“It is. My science teacher told me.”
“One beat a minute, huh? That’s like ringing a big bell.”
“Whales are cool.”
“They sure are.” Michael and Avery went to see the stranded pilot whales whenever they heard news of beachings in Wellfleet Harbor, a disorienting place for the animals. They swam in at high tide, and because of the distance between the shores and the shallow slope, they frequently got confused and couldn’t find their way out.
“Almost all animal hearts will beat about a billion times,” she said. “No matter how big or small.”
“That so?”
Avery nodded. She watched the blur of pitch pine, white pine, and oak that lined Route 6. She wore a T-shirt from the Kidz Dash triathlon she’d competed in last year, and already it was getting small on her—uncomfortably small for Michael, who noted that she needed to start wearing a training bra. He wished Shelby or Deedee would bring it up with her, but they refused. They thought bras were a choice, and Avery should make the decision about wearing one when she was ready, but he didn’t want the boys at school to notice anything about Avery but her brains. Whenever Michael thought of boys who might be interested in Avery, he thought of Anthony preying on Ann. Look how that had turned out.
“I wish I could go with you to the old house,” Avery said. That was what she called it: “the old house.”
He couldn’t talk to Ann with Avery there. “I’m just going to spend the whole time working.”
“On the house, or Anibitz?”
“Anibitz,” he said. The company was big now, so big he’d finally sold his interest in the landscaping business to Jason, so big he was considering buyout offers from larger toy companies. Sandi called him with talk of offers. He didn’t want to let go, but couldn’t keep it going on his own. He worked night and day, doing everything he could to avoid trips to New York to meet with the sales reps and marketers. He’d have to travel to China to meet with the fabricator soon. He didn’t want to go to China. He didn’t even want to go to Boston.
“Jess is boring,” Avery said.
“She’s been your friend for a long time now. You should be loyal to friends.”
“She only cares about boys. She’s always taking pictures of herself with them so people will think she’s hot.”
“That’s probably not a bad strategy. Guys are dumb.”
“Not Noah.”
Michael wanted to slam on the brakes. Noah? “Is that a kid at your school?”
“No, Noah Noah. The boy who shares the house with us.”
“You know him?”
“We’re friends, actually.”
Friends? What was going on? “But you’ve never met him. How could you be friends? Isn’t he older than you?”
“We leave notes for each other in the secret space next to the fireplace. We call it the portal. He started it. He was, like, hey, who are you? And I was, like, hey, I’m Avery, who are you? And then we started leaving entire notebooks for each other, and writing back and forth. You know him, right?”
“Not really. I’ve seen his photo on the fridge, same as you. He’s not telling you things he shouldn’t, or asking the wrong kinds of questions?”
Avery rolled her eyes. “You’re so gross. Nothing like that. You and Deeds watch too much Law & Order: SVU.”
“I’m your dad. It’s OK for me to ask questions.”
“Don’t worry. He’s not like that.”
Michael was worried, but not in the way Avery thought. “What else does he tell you?”
“Nothing really. He’s a junior. He’s into Game of Thrones. He likes to do old-people stuff like collect rocks and do crossword puzzles. We make puzzles for each other. He’s writing a book ab
out us, actually.”
“You haven’t even met and he’s writing a book about you?”
“A graphic novel. I’m helping. It’s about these two kids who find out they live in the same old house, like us, but then they discover that they are actually trapped in two different times. His character is from the fifties. Mine is from the Civil War. My parents free the slaves that come in through the cove. Noah said they snuck in on banana boats. He knows everything about the house and all this stuff that happened there. It’s his family house.”
This got under Michael’s skin. “It’s your family house, too.”
“Not like his. Noah says his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents used to live there.”
“That many ‘great’s, huh?” Avery would have loved Connie and Ed, her own grandparents. How sad it was that they weren’t around to meet her.
“Well, we’re there now, so the house is your family house, got it?”
“Whatever. Noah was supposed to leave a new chapter for me but now I have to go to Jess’s dumb sleepover, and she’ll make me smell Jasper McNally’s T-shirt that he left on the bench after gym.”
“That’s gross.”
“Jasper McNally smells like a sunfish. I left an anibitz for Noah in the portal.”
“You did?” Now Michael felt like Avery had shared one of his own secrets. “What’d you pick?”
“A bee for staying busy on our project, and an owl, because Noah is wise.”
“Sounds like ‘bowel.’”
“And a lion for strength. A ‘beeowlion.’”
“That sounds like a winner.”
“I think he’ll love it.”
* * *
THE TOURISTS HAD INVADED THE CAPE. His dread over the encounter with Ann was exacerbated by his annual displeasure, a vacation frenzy as unavoidable as a high tide: two long months of Volvos with kayaks strapped to the roofs and bikes of all sizes hanging off the racks, long lines of cyclists in Lycra stretching outside the French bakery, jammed-up parking lots at the beaches, and impossible throngs of tourists clogging the streets and roads. Couldn’t The New York Times stop writing stories extolling the virtues of this place? Couldn’t they help him keep it a secret?
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