The Last House Guest

by Megan Miranda

  * * *

  THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF the storm last night was the soft give of the earth beneath my feet. The morning was crisp and sunny, the way of Littleport postcards in the downtown shops. These were the days that catered to the tourists, that kept us in business: picturesque, quaint, protected and surrounded in turn by untamable nature.

  In truth, the place was wild and brutal and swung to extremes. From the nor’easters that could quickly drop an easy foot of snow and ice, downing half the power lines, to the summer calm with the birds calling, the buoy bell tolling in a rhythm out at sea. From the high-crested waves that could tear a boat from its mooring, to the gentle lapping of the tide against your toes in the beach sand. The quaint bustle to the barren loneliness. A powder keg to a ghost town.

  As I passed the garage, I noticed that the garbage can had been fixed, the gate secured. Parker was apparently up and out, unfazed by the late night and the liquor.

  I had just set my foot on the first step of their porch when the front door swung open. Parker stopped abruptly, doing a double take.

  It was the same look he’d given me the first time he saw me. I’d been sitting in Sadie’s room, cross-legged on her ivory bedspread, while she painted our nails a shimmering purple, the vial balanced precariously on her knee between us, nothing but sea and sky behind her through the glass doors of her balcony, blue on blue to the curve of the horizon.

  Her hand had hovered in midair at the sound of footsteps coming down the hall, and she’d looked up just as Parker walked by. He was nineteen then, one year older than we were, just finished with his first year of college. But something had stopped him midstride. He’d looked at me, then back at Sadie, and the corner of her mouth had twitched.

  “Dad’s looking for you,” he’d said.

  “He’s not looking very hard, then.” She’d gone back to painting her nails, but he hadn’t left the doorway. His eyes flicked to me again, then away, like he didn’t want to get caught staring.

  Sadie had audibly sighed. “This is Avery. Avery, my brother, Parker.”

  He was barefoot, in worn jeans, a free advertisement T-shirt. So different than he looked in the carefully staged portrait downstairs. A faint scar bisected the edge of his left eyebrow. I’d waved my hand, and he did the same. Then he took a step back into the hall and continued on.

  I’d been looking at the empty hallway when her voice cut through the silence. “Don’t,” she’d said.

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “Just don’t.”

  “I won’t.”

  She’d capped the bottle, blowing lightly on her nails. “Seriously. It won’t end well.”

  As if everything that promised to follow would be contingent on this. Her attention, her friendship, this world.

  “I said I wouldn’t.” I was not accustomed to being bossed around, to taking orders. It had been just me and my grandmother since I was fourteen, and she’d been dead six months by then.

  Sadie had blinked slowly. “They all say that.”

  * * *

  PARKER LOMAN HAD GROWN broader in the years since then, more put together, self-assured. He would not falter in the hallway. But I raised my hand, just like I did back then, and he did the same. “Hi. I tried texting you first.”

  He nodded, continued on down the steps. “Changed my number. Here.” He held out his hand for my phone and updated his contact info. I wondered if he’d changed his number because of Luce. Or Sadie. If people called him, friends with condolences, journalists looking for a story, old acquaintances coming out of the woodwork in a tragedy. Whether he needed to cull his list, his world shrinking back to the core and rebuilding—like I had once done.

  “What time is the lunch?” I asked.

  “It’s scheduled for one-thirty. I already added you to the reservation. Want to drive over together?”

  I was taken aback, not only that he remembered but that he was following through. “I’ve got a few errands to run after, better drive myself.”

  “All right, see you then.” He walked backward a few steps in the direction of the garage. “Off to pick up some groceries. There’s nothing in the house. I mean, other than the whiskey.” He smirked. “Should I get anything else?”

  I’d forgotten how charming he could be, how disarming. “No,” I said. “We’re good.”

  “Well,” he called, still smiling, “guess I’ll let you get to that early appointment.”

  * * *

  I KEPT TO A familiar path. Taking the incline down Landing Lane, stretching my legs in the process. Reaching the edge of downtown before looping back and ending at Breaker Beach.

  August used to be my favorite time of year in Littleport, from both sides of the divide. There was something in the air, a thrumming, the town in perpetual motion. This place was named for the Little family, but everyone here—residents and visitors alike—had adopted the moniker like a mission. Everything must remain minuscule in the town center. Small wooden signs with hand-painted letters, low awnings, narrowed planks. The visitors during the summer sat at small bistro tables with ocean views, and they drank from small flute glasses, speaking in small voices. There were little lights strung from rafters, as if we were all saying to one another: It’s always a holiday here.

  It was an act, and we were all playing.

  Step outside the town center, and the act was gone. The summer homes towered two, three stories above the perfectly landscaped yards, perched even higher on cliffsides. Long stone-lined drives, sprawling wraparound porches, portrait-style windows reflecting the sky and the sea. Beautiful, magnificent monstrosities.

  I’d grown up closer to the inland edge of town, in a three-bedroom ranch with one room converted to my mother’s studio. She’d ripped out the carpeting and pulled off the closet doors, lining the shelves with row after row of paints and dyes. Every room had been painted a bright color except that one, as if she needed a blank and neutral palette just to imagine something more.

  Our only view then was of the trees and, beyond that, the boat in the Harlows’ driveway. Connor and I used to race the trail behind our homes, startling the hikers as we wove around them, slowing down for nothing.

  My grandmother’s bungalow, where I’d spent my teenage years, was in an older waterfront community. The scent of turpentine and paint I’d grown accustomed to had been replaced with the sweet sea roses that lined the perimeter of her backyard, mixed with the salt air. Families had lived in the Stone Hollow neighborhood generations gone back, staking their claim before the rising prices and holding it.

  I’d known every facet of this place, lived a life in each different quarter. Had believed at one time, wholeheartedly, in its magic.

  I stopped running when I hit the sandy strip of Breaker Beach. Hands on knees, catching my breath, sneakers sinking into the sand. Later in the day, the tourists would gather here, soaking up the sun. Kids building sandcastles or running from the tide—the water was too cold, even in the heat of summer.

  But for now, I was the only one here.

  The sand was damp from the storm last night, and I could see one other set of footprints crossing the beach, ending here, just before the parking lot. I walked across the sand, toward the edge of the cliffs and the rocky steps built in to the side of the bluffs. Here, the footsteps stopped abruptly, as if someone had headed down this path in the other direction, leaving from the house.

  I stopped, hand on the cold rocks, a chill rising. Looking at the dunes behind me and imagining someone else there. These prints were recent, not yet washed away by the encroaching tide. That feeling, once more, that I was not alone here.

  The power outage last night, the noises in the dark, the footprints this morning.

  I shook it off—I always did this, went three steps too far, trying to map things forward and back, so I could see something coming this time. A habit from a time when I could trust only myself and the things I knew to be true.

  It was probably Parker out for a ru
n earlier. The call about the second break-in shaking me. The unsteady dream of the sea lingering—the memory of my mother’s words in my ear as she worked, telling me to look again, to tell her what I saw, even though it always looked exactly the same to me.

  It was this place and everything that had happened here—always making me look for something that didn’t exist.

  This was where Sadie had been found. A call to the police around 10:45 p.m. from a man walking his dog that night. A local who knew the shape of the place. Who saw something in the shadows, a shimmer of blue in the moonlight.

  Her leg, caught on the rocks at low tide. The ocean forgetting her in its retreat.

  CHAPTER 4

  Bay Street meant trying hard without looking like you were trying at all. I pieced through my closet, a collection of my own items and Sadie’s hand-me-downs, imagining Sadie taking out an outfit at random, holding it up to my shoulders, the feel of her fingers at my collarbone as she twisted me back and forth, deciding.

  At the end of each season, she’d leave me some dresses, or shirts, or bags. Everything thrown on my bed in a heap. Most of it wound up being either too tight or too short, which she declared perfect but also kept me from truly blending in to her circle. Their world was old money that said you didn’t have to show it to prove it. The clothes didn’t matter; it was the details, the way you carried it, and I could never get it just right.

  Even when she dressed like me, she commanded attention.

  * * *

  THE WEEKEND AFTER SHE’D found me hiding out in her bathroom, she remembered me. A bonfire and a couple of cars hidden behind the dunes of Breaker Beach at night, the rest of us arriving on foot. Boat coolers repurposed for cheap beer. Matches taken to a pile of rotting driftwood.

  It was the silence that made me turn around and see her. A presence I could feel rather than hear. “Hi there,” she said, like she’d been waiting for me to notice her. There was a group of us gathered around the fire, but she was speaking just to me. She was shorter than I remembered, or maybe it was because she was barefoot. Her flip-flops hung from her left hand; she wore loose jean shorts fraying at the hem, a hooded sweatshirt zipped up against the night chill. “No tetanus, I see? Or sepsis? Man, I’m good.”

  I held up my hand to her. “Apparently, I’ll live.”

  She smiled her face-splitting smile, all straight white teeth shining in the moonlight. The light from the flames moved like shadows over her face. “Sadie Loman,” she said, holding out her hand.

  I half laughed. “I know. I’m Avery.”

  She looked around, lowered her voice. “I saw the smoke from my backyard and got curious. I’m never invited to these things.”

  “You’re really not missing anything,” I said, but that was kind of a lie. These nights on the beach were a freedom for us. A way to claim something. I’d shown up out of habit but immediately regretted it. Everyone was celebrating—graduation, a new life—and for the first time, I had started to wonder what I was doing here. What had brought me here and now what was keeping me here. Beyond the boundaries of this town, there was a directionless, limitless wild, but anywhere might as well have been nowhere to someone like me.

  My dad had grown up in Littleport—after attending a local college, he’d come back with his teaching degree, as he’d always known he would. My mother had found herself here by accident. She’d driven through on her way up the coast, the backseat of her secondhand car stuffed full of luggage and supplies, everything she owned in the world.

  She said there was something about this place that had stopped her. That she was drawn in by something she couldn’t let go, something she was chasing. Something I later saw in draft after draft in her studio, hidden away in stacks. I could see it in her face as she was working, shifting her angle, her perspective, and looking again. Like there was some intangible element she couldn’t quite grasp.

  The beauty of her finished pieces was that you could see not only the image but her intention. This feeling that something was missing, and it pulled you closer, thinking you might be the one to uncover it.

  But that was the trick of the place—it lured you in under false pretenses, and then it took everything from you.

  Sadie wrinkled her nose at the scene around the bonfire. “It’s going to rain, you know?”

  I could feel it in the air, the humidity. But the weather had held, and that was half the fun. Like we were daring nature to do something. “Maybe,” I said.

  “No, it is.” And as if she had control over the weather, too, I felt the first drop on my cheek, heavy and chilled. “Want to come back? We can make it if we run.”

  I looked at the group of kids I’d gone to school with. Everyone casting glances my way. Connor sitting on a nearby log, doing his best to pretend I didn’t exist. I wanted to scream—my world shrinking as I watched. And this feeling I couldn’t shake recently, that all along I had just been passing through.

  “You know, there’s a shortcut.” I pointed to the steps cut into the rocks, though from where we stood, you couldn’t make them out.

  She raised an eyebrow, and I never figured out whether she’d known about the steps from the start or I’d opened up something new for her that night. But when I walked over to the steps, she followed, her hands gripping the rock holds after me. The rain started falling when we were on top of the bluffs, and I could see the commotion below in the glow of the bonfire—the shadows of people picking up coolers, running for the cars.

  Sadie had a hand at my elbow as she took a step back. “Don’t hurt yourself,” she said.

  “What?”

  In the moonlight, I could only see her eyes clearly—large and unblinking. “We’re close to the edge,” she said. She peered to the side, and I followed her gaze, though it was only darkness below.

  We weren’t that close—not close enough where a misstep could be fatal—but I stepped back anyway. She gripped my wrist as we ran for the shelter of her backyard, laughing. We collapsed onto the couch just under the overhang of the patio, the pool lit up before us, the ocean beyond. The windows were dark behind us, and she slipped inside briefly, returning with a bottle of some expensive-looking liquor. I didn’t even know what kind.

  The perimeter of their yard was lit up in an amber glow, hidden lights around the black pool gate, so we could see the rain falling in a curtain, like it was separating here from there. “Welcome to the Breakers,” she said, placing her sandy feet up on the woven table in front of us. As if she had forgotten that I’d been working a party here just the week earlier.

  I stared at the side of her face, so I could see the corner of her lip curled up in a knowing smile. “What?” she said, facing me. “Isn’t that what you call this place?”

  I blinked slowly. I thought maybe this was the key to success: eternal optimism. Taking an insult and repurposing it for your own benefit. Taking everything, even this, and owning it. Looking again and seeing something new. And I felt, in that moment, completely sure of one single truth: My mother would love her.

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s just—I’ve already been here before.”

  Her smile grew until it reached her eyes, and her head tipped back slightly, almost like she was laughing. I felt her looking me over closely. If she recognized the sweater I was wearing, she didn’t say.

  She raised the bottle toward me, then toward the ocean. “Hear, hear,” she said, tipping the bottle back, wiping her hand across her lips after.

  I thought of Connor down at the beach, ignoring me. My grandmother’s empty house, waiting for me. The silence, the silence.

  I took a long drink, my mouth on the cool glass, the edges of my nerves on fire. “There, there,” I said, and she laughed.

  We drank it straight, watching the lightning offshore, close enough to spark something in the atmosphere. I felt like a live wire. Her fingers closed over mine as she reached for the bottle, and then I was grounded.

  * * *

  I IGNORED SADIE’S CLOTHES
hanging in my closet, settling for my own business attire—dress pants and a white sleeveless blouse—because I couldn’t stomach the thought of Parker seeing me in his sister’s clothes.

  I arrived at Bay Street first, because I was always early. A vestigial fear ever since I started working for Grant Loman, that he could fire me for any reason and all of this would be over.

  When her parents first met me, I’d arrived as a series of failures: something Sadie had found on the beach and would hopefully get over just as quickly. They all must’ve thought I was a phase Sadie would outgrow. A finely tuned, controlled rebellion.

  She’d sprung the meeting on me with no time to either prepare or back out. “I told them I was bringing a friend to dinner,” she said as we walked up the front steps later that first week.

  “Oh, no, I don’t—”

  “Please. They’ll love you.” She paused, cracked a smile. “They’ll like you,” she amended.

  “Or vaguely tolerate me for your benefit?”

  “Oh, it wouldn’t be for my benefit. Come on, it’s just dinner. Please, save me from the monotony.” That airy wave of her hand again. All this. My life.

  “I don’t know anything about them,” I said, even though that wasn’t true.

  She stopped just before the front door. “All you really need to know is that my dad is the brains of the operation, and my mom is the brawn.” I’d laughed, thinking she was joking. Bianca was petite, slight, with a childlike pitch to her voice. But Sadie just raised an eyebrow. “My dad said it wasn’t safe to build up here. And yet,” she said, gesturing as she pushed open the front door, “here we are. And she runs the family charitable foundation.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper then, while I was desperately trying to take everything in. “All must worship at the shrine of Bianca Loman.”

  “Sadie?” A woman’s voice echoed from somewhere out of sight. “Is that you?”