The Cousins

by Karen M. McManus

  * * *

  —

  Half an hour later, Milly’s had it. I don’t know her well enough to be sure, but I’d bet everything I have that she’s taken an instant, profound dislike to me.

  Mission accomplished, I guess.

  “I’m getting a drink,” she says, rising from our window booth on the first floor. “Aubrey, do you want anything? Or to come with?”

  I expect Aubrey to take off too, but she’s distracted. Every once in a while—like right now—her entire face droops as she stares intently at her phone. She’s looking for something, and she keeps getting disappointed. “No thanks,” she murmurs. Milly heads for the stairs, and silence descends as Aubrey swipes methodically at her phone. Mine buzzes in my pocket, and I dig it out to a text from a contact I’ve saved as JT.

  How’s everything going?

  Every muscle in my body tenses as I reply, Fine.

  That’s all you have to say?

  I could say fuck you, I think. But all I type back is Yep. Gotta go.

  I ignore the buzz of a new text and stuff the phone back into my pocket as Aubrey lifts both hands to tug on her ponytail, pulling it tighter. “Sorry about Genius Camp,” she says.

  “What?”

  She tilts her head. “That’s what Milly and I call that science camp you wanted to go to. Do you think you’ll get another chance? Like next summer, maybe? Or is that too late?”

  “Too late,” I say. “The whole point was to enhance the college application process.” Without Milly here, I can’t inject as much disdain into my words as I want to. Being sarcastic to Aubrey feels like kicking a puppy.

  “That’s too bad. I wasn’t sure you’d come, to be honest. You seemed pretty determined not to.”

  “Turns out I didn’t have a choice.”

  “I guess none of us did,” Aubrey says. She crosses a leg over one knee and jiggles her foot, staring out the window at the darkening sky. It’s thirty-five miles from Hyannis to Gull Cove Island, and it looks like we’re headed for stormier weather. “What’s your dad like? Uncle Anders.” She says the name like he’s a movie character. “I think I last saw you guys when I was five? I can’t remember him at all.”

  “He’s—intense.”

  Aubrey’s blue eyes take on a faraway expression. “My dad talks about yours the least of anyone. Like, he probably has the most in common with Aunt Allison, and he seems to feel sort of protective about Uncle Archer, but your dad? He barely mentions him. I don’t know why.”

  I swallow and lick my lips. I’m on unsteady ground, and not sure how much to say. “My dad…he was always kind of the odd man out, you know? I think he felt that way, at least.”

  “Are you guys close?”

  To that asshole? No way. I swallow the truth and try for a nonchalant shrug. “Ish. You know how it is.”

  “I do. Especially lately.” Rain starts spattering against the window next to us, and Aubrey cups her hand against it to peer outside. “Do you think she’ll meet us at the dock?”

  “Milly?” I ask. “What, you think she found better company till then?” Here’s hoping.

  “No,” Aubrey says, laughing a little. “Gran.”

  The laugh catches me off guard. Aubrey and I are getting comfortable with one another, and that’s not good. In the words of every reality contestant ever: I’m not here to make friends. “Yeah, right,” I snort. “She never even bothered to send a follow-up letter.”

  Aubrey’s face clouds. “You too? I wrote her six times and heard nothing.”

  “I wrote zero times. Same result.”

  “It’s so cold.” Aubrey shivers a little, but I know she’s not talking about the temperature. “I don’t understand. It’s bad enough that the first time she ever contacted us, she made a job offer. Like we’re hired help instead of family. But then she can’t even be bothered to stay in touch? What’s the point of all this, if she’s not interested in getting to know us?”

  “Cheap labor.” I mean it as a joke, but Aubrey’s mouth just turns down further. I’m about to make an excuse to leave when I catch a flash of red on the stairs: Milly’s back. That should get me moving even faster, but for some reason I stay put.

  “Here you go, cousins.” Milly is balancing four plastic cups: one full of clear liquid and garnished with a lime wedge, and three that are empty except for ice. She settles next to Aubrey and starts evening out the cups, pouring the full one into the other three until it’s empty. When she’s finished, she hands one cup to me and one to Aubrey. “Cheers to—I don’t know. Finally meeting the mysterious Mildred, I guess.” We all clink cups, and Aubrey takes a long swig of hers.

  “Ugh!” She spits it right back out. “Milly, what is this?”

  Milly hands her a napkin, unfazed. She plucks the lime garnish from the empty cup and squeezes juice into each of ours. “Sorry, forgot the lime. A gin and tonic.”

  “Seriously?” Aubrey grimaces and sets her cup down on the table. “Thanks, but I don’t drink. How’d you get alcohol?”

  “I have my ways.” Milly watches as a line of people stream down the staircase from the upper deck to escape the rainstorm, then focuses her attention on Aubrey and me. “So. Now that we’ve covered all the surface stuff, let’s get real. What aren’t we telling each other?”

  My throat gets dry. “Huh?”

  Milly shrugs. “This entire family is built on secrets, right? It’s the Story legacy. You guys probably have some juicy ones.” She tilts her cup toward me. “Spill.”

  I glance at Aubrey, who’s gone pale beneath her freckles. I feel a muscle in my jaw start to twitch. “I don’t have any secrets,” I say.

  “Me either,” Aubrey says quickly. Her hands are clenched tight in her lap, and she looks like she’s about to either throw up or cry. I was right; she’s a terrible liar. Even worse than I am.

  Milly isn’t interested in going after Aubrey, though. She pivots toward me and leans forward, her big watch sliding down her arm as she cups her chin in her hand. “Everybody has secrets,” she says, taking a sip of her drink. “That’s nondebatable. The only question is whether you’re keeping your own, or someone else’s.”

  A bead of sweat gathers on my forehead, and I resist the urge to wipe it away as I gulp down half my drink. I don’t like gin, but any port in a storm seems like a solid metaphor right now. I try for a half-bored, half-irritated expression. “Can’t it be both?”

  Rain lashes the window behind Milly as her eyes lock on mine. “With you, Jonah?” she asks, raising one perfectly arched brow. “I’m guessing it can.”

  “Doesn’t look like much, does it?” Jonah asks.

  I steal a glance at him across Aubrey. The rain has cleared, and we’re on the upper deck watching our approach to Gull Cove Island. Jonah rests his forearms against the rail and leans forward, the wind tousling wavy, dark brown hair that’s halfway between Aubrey’s blond and my near black. The pointed chin I remember has morphed into a square jaw, and braces did him a world of good. Not that he smiles much.

  “I think it’s pretty!” Aubrey says, raising her voice to be heard over the roar of the ferry’s motor. The boat pitches sharply to one side, sending a spray of white foam into the air. I hold tightly to the rail with one hand and use the other to indulge in a nervous habit my mother hates—bringing the knuckle of my thumb between my teeth. My damp skin tastes like salt, but it’s better than the exhaust-filled air we’re breathing.

  “Me too,” I say.

  My words are automatic, a reflexive desire to disagree with Jonah, but he’s right. Even from a distance the island looks flat and unremarkable, surrounded by a strip of pale-yellow beach melting into an ocean that’s almost the same shade of gray as the dense, low-hanging clouds that surround us. Tiny white houses dot the shoreline against a backdrop of short trees, and the only spot of color is a squat tan
lighthouse striped with jaunty blue.

  “It’s so small,” Aubrey says. “Hope we don’t get island fever.”

  I pull my knuckle from my mouth and lower my arm, feeling the heavy weight of my watch slide to my wrist as I do. My grandfather’s battered old Patek Philippe is the only memento my grandmother passed along to my mother before she cut off contact. No matter how many times Mom’s tried to have it repaired, the watch refuses to tell time. It always reads three o’clock, so twice a day—like about now, probably—it’s right. “Maybe Mildred will work us so hard that we won’t even notice,” I say.

  Aubrey glances at me. “You call her Mildred?”

  “Yeah. What about you?”

  “Gran. My dad always says ‘your gran,’ so I guess I just went with that.” She turns toward Jonah. “What do you call her?”

  “Nothing,” he says briefly.

  We’re silent for a few minutes as the ferry continues its progress toward shore. The white houses get bigger, the yellow strip of sand more defined, and soon we’re passing so close to the lighthouse that I can see people walking around its base. The dock is crowded with boats, most of them much smaller than the one we’re on, and we neatly slot into a space between two of them. “Welcome to Gull Cove Island!” the captain calls over the intercom as the noise of the engine abruptly stops.

  “It’s packed,” Aubrey says nervously, scanning the crowd on the dock below us.

  “Tourist trap central,” Jonah says, turning from the rail and toward the staircase. “Have you looked up how much rooms cost at Gull Cove Resort? People are out of their minds.” He shakes his head. “The beaches are way better on Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket, but somehow being the worst, smallest island has become a selling point. Because it’s ‘off the beaten path.’ ”

  When we near the ferry’s exit, Jonah veers off to one side and hauls a battered duffel bag out from under a bench. “Where’s your stuff?” he asks Aubrey and me.

  “We checked it when we came on board,” I say, eyeing his bag. “Is that all you brought?”

  Jonah slings the duffel over one shoulder. “I don’t need much.”

  We enter the stream of people leaving the ferry, following the narrow walkway from the boat to the dock. It’s a full-on vacation crowd; despite the cloudy weather everyone is decked out in shorts, sunglasses, and baseball hats. My red dress looks completely out of place, even though I wore it for a reason. It was my mother’s in high school, one of the few things she held on to that I can get away with wearing today. Putting it on felt like getting a subtle dig in at my grandmother for bringing us all this way without acknowledging her children first. They still exist, Mildred, whether you want to admit it or not.

  The ferry walkway exits onto a wide cobblestone path flanked by shingled buildings in alternating shades of white and gray. As soon as we reach the road I take a deep breath, then startle a little as I smell honeysuckle mixed with the salty air. Mom’s signature fragrance, but I’ve never smelled it live before.

  A row of luggage tents on wheels line one side of the cobblestone path. Aubrey and I find number 243, as we were instructed when a valet took our suitcases, and open the flap. “Here they are,” Aubrey says, sounding relieved as she pulls out a suitcase and backpack.

  I go in for mine. Behind me, Jonah lets out a snort of disbelief as I extract two large rolling suitcases, a smaller carry-on, and a bulging laptop bag. “That can’t all be yours,” he says. When I don’t reply, he adds, “Did you pack your entire closet?”

  Not even close, but he doesn’t have to know that. Or that the smaller suitcase is nothing but shoes. “We’re going to be here for two months,” I say.

  Jonah narrows his eyes as he takes in my suitcases. They’re Tumi with pearlized aluminum casing, and I suppose if you didn’t know my mother bought them secondhand on eBay, they might look a little ostentatious. Especially in the middle of this shorts-and-T-shirt crowd. Gull Cove Island visitors have money—lots of it—but they don’t flaunt it. That’s part of the alleged charm of this place. “Guess Aunt Allison is doing all right,” Jonah says.

  “Oh please,” I snap. “You were going to go to some fancy-ass science camp all summer, so don’t judge me for bringing wardrobe options.”

  “Except I couldn’t afford it,” Jonah says. Something almost like anger flashes across his face before he composes his features into their usual expression of half-boredom, half-disdain. “And now I get to be here instead.”

  I pause before the reflexive response lucky us crosses my lips. I don’t know a lot about my cousins’ financial situations. I know Aubrey’s mom is a nurse and her dad has spent the past ten years trying to write another book, so they’re probably comfortable but not rolling in it. Jonah’s parents’ situation is murkier. Uncle Anders is a financial consultant, supposedly, but the kind who works for himself instead of an actual company. A couple of weeks ago, when I was trying to find any information I could about Jonah’s family online, I stumbled across a short article in the Providence Journal about Uncle Anders in which a disgruntled former client called him “the Bernie Madoff of Rhode Island.”

  I didn’t know who that was, so I had to look him up. Apparently Bernie Madoff was a financial adviser who went to jail after cheating thousands of investors in a giant Ponzi scheme. I’d felt a shocked little thrill then—our family had always been strange, but never criminal—until I kept reading. Ultimately, even though a couple of former clients reported him for fraud, all that could be proved was that Uncle Anders gave bad financial advice. It wasn’t a big enough story to make the New York papers, so my mother hadn’t seen it. She didn’t seem especially shocked when I told her. “Nobody with an ounce of common sense would ask Anders to help manage their money,” she’d said.

  “Why?” I asked. “I thought he was supposed to be brilliant.”

  “He is. But there’s only one person whose interests Anders has ever looked out for, and that’s Anders himself.”

  “What about Aunt Victoria? Or Jonah?” I’d asked.

  Mom’s lips had thinned. “I’m talking about business, not family.” But from the look on her face, she didn’t think much of those relationships, either. Which might have something to do with the bitter expression Jonah’s wearing right now.

  Aubrey gazes around at the teeming crowd surrounding us. “No Gran,” she says sadly, like she honestly expected Mildred to be waiting for us. “Should we just grab a cab?”

  “I guess. I don’t see any, though.” I squint against the emerging sun and pull my sunglasses from the top of my head, settling the large tortoiseshell frames across my nose.

  “Allison.” It takes the name being repeated a few times—plus Jonah’s furrowed brow—before I look for the source. An old man, white-haired and frail, stands beside me, with his watery brown eyes fastened on my face. “Allison,” he repeats in a low, wavering voice. “You came back. Why did you come back?”

  “I…” I glance between the man and my cousins, at a loss for words. People have told me I look like my mother—“surprisingly like her,” they sometimes add with a sideways glance at my dad—but I’ve never been mistaken for her before. Is it the dress? The sunglasses? Or is this guy just senile?

  “Does Mildred know?” the man says, sounding agitated. “She wouldn’t like this, Allison. She wouldn’t like it at all.”

  The back of my neck prickles. “I’m not Allison,” I say, pulling off my sunglasses. The old man startles and takes a step back, the heel of his shoe catching on a cobblestone. He nearly stumbles, but Aubrey darts forward lightning-quick and catches hold of his arm.

  “You okay there?” she asks. He doesn’t reply, still looking at me as though he’s seen a ghost, and she adds, “It sounds like you know our grandmother? Mildred Story? This is Milly, Allison’s daughter, and I’m Aubrey. Adam Story is my father.” She gestures toward Jonah with her free han
d. “And this is Jonah, he—”

  “Adam,” the man says faintly. “Adam is here?”

  “Oh no,” Aubrey says, smiling brightly. “Just me. I’m his daughter.”

  The man looks forlorn and lost, one hand fumbling at the empty pocket of his cardigan like he just realized he left something important behind. “Adam had seeds of greatness, didn’t he? But he wasted them. Foolish boy. Could’ve changed it all with a word.”

  Aubrey’s smile slips. “Could have changed what?”

  “Granddad!” A harried voice floats our way, and I turn to see a girl around our age striding toward us. She’s short and muscular, with brown skin, freckles, and a cloud of dark hair. Both of her wrists are piled high with braided leather bracelets. “I told you to wait in front of Sweetfern! Parking was impossible because of all the damn tourists—” She pauses as she takes in the three of us surrounded by suitcases, with Aubrey still propping up her grandfather. “I mean new arrivals. Is he all right?” she asks, a note of anxiety creeping into her voice.

  The man blinks slowly a few times, like he’s trying to bring her into focus. “Fine, Hazel. Just fine,” he murmurs. “A little tired, is all.”

  Hazel takes hold of her grandfather’s arm, and Aubrey steps back. “I think we startled him,” she says apologetically, even though it was the other way around. “He seems to know our grandmother.”

  “Really?” Hazel asks. “Who’s your grandmother?”

  “Um, Mildred Story?” Aubrey says it like she’s not sure the name will register, but the girl’s eyes immediately widen. Her face, which had been tense and preoccupied, breaks into a wide smile.

  “No way! You guys are Storys? What are you doing here?”

  “Working at our grandmother’s resort for the summer,” Aubrey says.

  Hazel’s gaze bounces between the three of us with avid interest. “Wow. Is this your first time on Gull Cove Island?” Aubrey and I nod, and she squeezes her grandfather’s arm. “Granddad, how could you not tell me the Story grandkids were spending the summer here? You must’ve known, right?”