The Children

by Ann Leary

  “These are Joan’s books. I’m not sure if Spin’s mentioned them,” I said to Laurel, giving her the quick history of the collection, but she was looking at the framed photographs that sat on a table next to the shelves.

  “Is this Spin and Perry?” she asked. She had picked up a photo of Spin, Perry, and Everett when they were all boys. Everett and Perry were teenagers, and Spin was about six or seven. They all were in a midair leap from the dock. It’s a great shot. Freckles, grins, messy boy hair, and everywhere, long, exuberant arms and legs. Whit always loved taking photos of us jumping from the rope swing or the dock. “Who’s the third kid?”

  “That’s Everett,” I said.

  She moved on to another photo, a beautiful black-and-white picture of my mother. Joan was wearing a sleeveless summer dress. She was out on the lawn and she was bent over, helping baby Spin try to walk. He was wearing nothing but a diaper and he was between her bare legs, holding onto her fingers for support. They were both barefoot in the long grass, both laughing up at the camera.

  “Oh, look how pretty your mom was. Is that when you were a baby?” Laurel asked.

  “No, that’s Spin.”

  “It must have been strange for your mom to have a stepson who was born, well, so close to when she married his dad,” Laurel mused.

  “I guess it was, I don’t really remember. They used to come up here with a nanny, I do remember that. Marissa wanted the nanny to take care of Spin when he was here with us. I guess she didn’t really trust my mom and Whit to take care of him. But my mom loved Spin like her own baby. She just doted on him.”

  “Why does everybody call him Spin?” Laurel asked.

  “Perry says he was the one who first called him that. Sally says it was me and her. We were small. It’s hard to remember.”

  Laurel was really studying the picture. She turned it a little, as if she were trying to catch my mother’s expression from another angle. I saw the corners of her lips turn up ever so slightly. It was almost as if she were looking in a mirror, trying to match my mother’s smile.

  “Apparently, everybody just called him ‘the baby’ for almost his entire first year. The name Philip was a touchy subject between his parents,” I said.

  I found a framed photo of Spin as an infant, smiling toothlessly at the camera. “He was so cute.… Sally and I treated him like a little doll. Like a pet, really. When he started walking, he loved us to spin him around and then we’d crack up when he staggered away from us like a little drunk. He’d always want to do it again. ‘Spin,’ he’d say. ‘Spin.’ So we started calling him that—at least that’s how we remember it.”

  “That’s sweet,” said Laurel, but she was still staring at the photograph of my mom and Spin. I got the feeling that she hadn’t been listening that closely.

  “I think Spin was the son my mom always wanted,” I said, removing a pile of old newspapers that had been stacked next to the fireplace last winter. The pages were yellow now. “Joan grew up with boys. She had two brothers and she lived on the Holden campus, which was all boys at the time. I think she really didn’t know how to deal with Sally and me. She would have been more comfortable with sons.”

  “Well, I think she did okay,” said Laurel, and just when I was about to thank her for the compliment, she said, “I mean, it’s not like you and Sally are the girliest girls, anyway. Is this Spin’s dad? I’ve only seen pictures of him when he was older.”

  She was holding my favorite photo of Whit. Sally took it with a Polaroid sometime in the early nineties, so it’s not a very large print, but my mom set it into a larger frame. He’s standing in the door of his banjo shed, a coffee cup in hand. He’s winking into the camera, winking at Sally with that great smile.

  “Here’s another one of Spin,” I said. I wanted her to put down the photo of Whit. I didn’t like her touching it. “This is great, Laurel; my mom was teaching Spin how to do a back dive off the dock.”

  She was still staring at the picture of Whit.

  “It’s really hard to do a back dive without a diving board,” I continued, moving the picture closer to Laurel, “but Joan taught Spin to do it. You have to really spring off your feet, see? Sally and I always landed flat on our backs.”

  Laurel placed Whit’s photo back on the shelf, but she kept staring at it. Finally, she turned her attention to the diving photo. It was such a lucky shot. Whit had managed to catch Joan and Spin at just the right moment, when they were both in mid-arc, my mom in her Speedo one-piece, her sleek athlete’s torso just a few inches higher than Spin’s. Their arms were stretched over their heads, their fingertips about to hit the lake. My mom still looked like a girl in that shot. Spin was just starting to show the muscles of a man. I handed the photo to Laurel and she glanced at it, smiled, and then turned her attention back to the small photo of Whit.

  “Through here is a little pantry and then we’re back in the kitchen,” I said. I walked out of the room and she followed behind me.

  In the kitchen, Joan was bustling about, making dinner preparations. She had made a bunch of hamburger patties, which were piled onto a plate on the counter.

  “Lottie, I went out to start the grill and couldn’t find it. Laurel, we grill here almost every night in the summer, but we haven’t used that grill once this year. I have no idea where Everett put it last fall. Lottie, go ask him where it is.”

  “He’s not home,” I replied.

  “Well, it has to be someplace. Look behind Whit’s shed,” she said.

  I was happy to leave Laurel. I’m not used to small talk, not used to having to entertain others. It’s exhausting. I was walking across the lawn to look in Whit’s shed when Everett pulled up in front of his house. He gave a little honk, but I didn’t wave, I just went into the shed. A moment later, Everett followed me inside.

  “How’s Sally?” he asked.

  “She’s better. Joan drugged her and she slept from yesterday morning until today, almost straight through.”

  “Joan drugged her? What do you mean?”

  “She shot her with a tranquilizer gun. What do you think?” I said. I started to walk away, but Everett grabbed my arm.

  “What’re you so pissy about?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Everett had left the night before and stayed out all night. I kept waking up, listening for Sally, so I noticed that his truck wasn’t in the driveway. I don’t mention stuff like this anymore. Everett once talked about moving somewhere else because he wants to be able to have a life without my knowing everything he does. I don’t want him to move. But last night I heard him drive off. I knew he was at the Pale Horse, and I thought I’d wander over when he got home.

  “Laurel and Spin are staying here for two weeks,” I said. “Joan invited them without telling us, so I’m, you know, not that pleased.”

  “Oh,” Everett said.

  “Yeah, I have to go inside. Can you get the grill?” I tried to push past him, but he grabbed my hand.

  “Babe, what’s wrong?” he said. “Look at me. What’s the matter?”

  I was tearing up. I had turned my face away, but he wouldn’t let go.

  “What is it?” he asked again.

  “I’m just not used to having company in the house. I don’t know Laurel. And I’m worried about Sally.…”

  Everett pulled me close and gave me a hug. I pressed my face against his chest and put my arms around him for a moment, held him so tight, just for a moment, then I pulled away and walked out of the shed and toward the house.

  * * *

  Everett always thought Whit never knew about what went on between the two of us. He imagined that Whit would have been enraged, that he would have fired him and thrown him out of his house if he knew. But Whit did know. One morning, the summer after we first started hooking up, Whit had woken up early and saw a young woman leaving Everett’s house. He had chuckled to himself, he later told me. He couldn’t see who it was through the lake mist, in that silvery predawn light, but it wa
sn’t the first time he’d seen one of Everett’s girlfriends coming or going. He was, therefore, very surprised a moment later when I tumbled in through the dog door and landed at his feet.

  “Charlotte!” he said after a moment. “Where the hell are you coming from?”

  “Um—”

  “Did I just see you leave Everett’s?”

  “No,” I said. “Well, it’s not what you think. I was just out walking. I just stopped at his house to say hi.”

  Whit looked puzzled. I replayed the moment obsessively in my mind all morning, wondering if he was angry or disappointed in me. Ultimately, I realized that he had just seemed to be surprised. He had looked at me, then he’d ducked to look through the window at Everett’s. Finally, he’d shrugged.

  “I need a coffee,” he had said. That was it.

  That afternoon, I was walking down to the beach for a swim when he called me over to the shed. He was holding a banjo.

  “Here, I want to see how it sounds. I’m sending it to a guy up in Northern California.”

  I took the banjo from him and sat on the bench outside the shed. I plucked at a few strings, listening carefully.

  “It’s in tune. Just play something,” Whit said. So I played one of his favorite songs. It was an old folk song he had taught me when I was little, and I embellished it with some crazy licks during the chorus. He sang along. It was impossible for Whit not to sing to a tune.

  Wake up, wake up darling Corey

  What makes you sleep so sound

  The revenue officers are coming

  They’re gonna tear your still house down

  Whit was belting it out by the final verse, and I ended with a few good fast strums.

  “Sounds pretty sweet,” I said. I turned the banjo over and saw the inlaid mahogany that surrounded the drum and the graceful curve of the neck. “It’s beautiful, Whit.”

  Whit smiled when I handed it to him. He looked it over with pride.

  “I think it’s the best I’ve ever made,” he said. “It’s the closest I’ll ever come to making art, this banjo.”

  “That’s what you say about every banjo you make.”

  “This is it, though, this one’s the best.”

  From Everett’s house came the sound of his truck starting. We watched as he backed out of his driveway and then drove off. Everett gave us a little honk as he passed, and I waved.

  “The thing you haven’t considered,” Whit said, gently tightening one of the strings, “is what’ll happen when it’s over between you two. Nothing can ever come of this thing. You’re never going to stay here in Harwich, and he’s not likely to leave.”

  “Yeah, well, so what? We’re just having fun,” I said.

  “You’re setting yourself up for some awkward times ahead, once one of you starts dating somebody else. That’s all. It’s just too close to home. It puts Everett in a compromising situation. I’d hate to think that he’d have to move from here because of any fallout from this.”

  I remember thinking the words I wished he had said. I remember thinking, And you’re just a kid. And I care about what happens to you. I want what’s best for you. Those were the things a father would say. But Whit wasn’t my father. Whit was worried about Everett.

  “You’re like your mom. You’re a free spirit, you’ll never stay here,” Whit said dreamily. “This town was always too small for her.”

  “Funny how she still lives here,” I said.

  * * *

  Joan was absent from Harwich for almost a decade after she graduated from Holden, and in Whit’s mind, this departure was just another shining example of her joyous devil-may-care attitude, which he so admired.

  The summer after her second year at Princeton, Joan took a job as a nanny with a family in New York City. She didn’t return to Princeton in the fall, nor did she return to Harwich. She told her parents that she had asked for a leave of absence from school, then sort of disappeared into the East Village, where she was spotted, very infrequently, by some of her old Holden friends, who would report back to her anxious parents. She was fine, they told my grandparents; she was planning to call. The year passed and Joanie didn’t go back to school. She never went back. She did come out to Harwich from time to time, and her mother worried about how thin she had become. She was jittery. She was a chain smoker. Often, the reason she came home was to ask for money. She was modeling those first couple of years. She told her parents that she might start acting. She was seeing this guy. He was studying at the Actors Studio. A few years later, she returned to Harwich with a haircut like Debbie Harry’s. She was so thin and pale. She didn’t tell her parents much about her life in the city or the husband that she never brought home (our father, the actor), but she would entertain some of her old friends with stories of her previous exploits. She had been a regular at Studio 54; she had partied with Mick and Bianca. She had slept with Warren Beatty. Now she had Sally on her hip and was pregnant with me. Within a year, her hair had grown out, her deviated septum had almost fully healed, and she was sprinting across the tennis court in her old Holden whites. It’s hard now for anyone to imagine she ever left Harwich at all.

  TWELVE

  Ever since we were children, whether we dined outside or in, each of us has always sat at the same place at the table. Joan had her end; Whit had his spot at the other end of the table, which now is occupied only when we have guests. I used to sit next to Whit. Spin sat next to Joan. Everett, who ate many meals with us while growing up, also had “his” chair, which was across from mine. I’m only telling this now because on Laurel and Spin’s first night here, there was an awkward moment when we all sat down to eat at the porch table.

  Spin held Joan’s chair out for her and then Laurel moved to the seat on the other side of Spin. This was Sally’s seat. I know—Sally and I are no longer children. We should have been able to cope with this, and, of course, we did after a few moments of watching Sally walk around the table, muttering about having no place to sit. There were several empty chairs, of course, but Sally had that jaded, faraway look she gets when she’s been working on music too intensely for too long. It’s hard for her to snap out of her work sometimes.

  “Sal,” Everett said during her second lap around us. “Sit here, next to me.” Sally plopped into the chair he had pushed out with his foot and she stared sullenly at Laurel.

  Joan launched into her plans for the Fourth of July barbecue. We have it every year. The town puts on a great fireworks display here on the lake, and we invite the same crowd that would come when Whit was alive: friends from the club, some of our old friends from school, various Holden classmates of Spin’s and Perry’s. The fireworks are set off right here on the end of Whitman’s Point, so the town’s volunteer firefighters and their families join us as well.

  “This year, it’ll also be an engagement party,” Joan said. “Everybody’s dying to meet you, Laurel.”

  “And I’m dying to meet everybody,” Laurel said. “You’ll have to let me help with the preparations.”

  “It’s totally casual. A kind of a potluck thing. People really come for the fireworks. And the music. All the picking and fiddling crowd will be here—you’ll love it,” Spin said.

  “So you guys are getting married at the end of August?” I asked. I wanted Sally to know that they’d set a date.

  “Joan, Perry thinks that the house and the ‘grounds,’ as he calls them, could look a lot better,” said Sally, ignoring me. “Maybe you should think about getting the place fixed up a little before the Fourth. Look, there are leaves all over the place from last year and the weeds are getting so high down near the beach. The place looks like a dump.”

  “A dump,” Joan laughed. “Don’t be silly. Do you have any idea what those landscaping guys charge? Anyway, it’s fine. It looks the way it always has. We’ll rake the leaves; I hadn’t even noticed them.”

  “Didn’t you tell me there is a trust or something that covers those types of expenses, Philip?” Laurel asked. “W
ould that come out of your own trust fund or what, babe?”

  She took a bite from her burger and looked first at Spin and then around the table as we all silently grappled with our alarm and confusion.

  “Could you pass the butter, please, Spin dear,” my mother said finally.

  While we were growing up, we never heard Whit or Joan talk about money, unless it was about how not to spend it. The topic was as mysterious as sex to us when we were children. We knew that people liked it, that they craved it. But we also knew you weren’t supposed to talk about it, that doing so was indecent somehow. The grown-ups in our house really didn’t seem to want to touch it with their hands. Of course, now we were able to joke about it with one another—me, Sally, and Spin; we could laugh at our parents’ bizarre relationship to money. But Laurel’s question had to do with whose money belonged to whom, and I can’t speak for the others, but I was dreadfully ashamed. I knew nothing about the various trusts that Whit had left behind. I just knew that Joan was living off the interest of some of it.

  “Here you are, Joan,” said Spin finally, with a forced laugh. He shoved the butter plate at my mother.

  “Mmm, these hamburgers are great,” Everett said, and we all dove into our food, mumbling about how delicious the salad was, how tender the corn, how perfectly cooked the burgers! Laurel glanced from one of us to the next, chewing her food slowly, and I thought I caught a little smile, a little show of delight. Joan appeared to be choking on something; her face was very red and she grabbed her water and sipped at it between little coughs.

  “We don’t need to have anybody come here,” Spin said. “The place looks fine. It’s got character, as Dad always said. Perry and Catherine are more used to the Hamptons. They like things a little more formal, that’s all.”