Pippin had made checklists, noting everything that needed to be done to the house. The two bedrooms upstairs, as well as the master, just needed cosmetic work done. Each room had its own bathroom, however, and each of them was in pretty bad shape and needed to be gutted. After the kitchen was done, they were next. The top floor had a bunk room and another bathroom, neither of which had ever been finished, as well as two storage rooms, a sitting room, window seats in the dormers, and access to the widow’s walk. Finally, the main floor. What had been their father’s study, which had its own half bath, was in the back left corner. Off the kitchen was a mudroom, laundry room, and pantry. A bar was built into one wall in the great room. A ten-foot island created a division between the great room and the kitchen. Pippin had plans for new countertops, as well as new cabinets, fresh paint, and shiplap. Lots and lots of shiplap.
A small office sat just to the left of the foyer. Pippin claimed that for herself. It was at the bottom of the renovation list, so she’d cleaned the walls herself, prepped the space by using blue painter’s tape to protect the wide baseboards, which were in surprisingly good condition, and painted the space a cream color that made it feel bigger than it actually was, important because, although there were two windows, the covered porch in front and on the side of the house prevented sunlight from streaming in.
She’d found an old table at a secondhand furniture store that she’d stripped and painted white, distressing it. “I don’t get it. It was old, you painted it, but then you made it look old again,” Grey said as he and Kyron carried it inside for her.
Pippin directed them into the little office. “Yes, but now it’s clean. And it’s distressed in the way I want it to be. That’s the key.”
“I get it,” Kyron said to her with a wink. To Grey, he said, “Good thing she’s in charge of the decorating.”
Travis and Jimmy were working upstairs demoing one of the bathrooms. Kyron headed back to the study to sand the wainscoting, and Grey returned to installing the hardwood floor Pippin had chosen for the great room and kitchen. Grey had anticipated the project taking a solid three months. Things were moving along at a pretty good pace and they were ahead of schedule with just a few more weeks to go.
Now, standing just inside the front door, Pippin closed her eyes. She could picture herself sitting next to Grey on the couch watching TV, but instead of the memory bringing her comfort, a feeling of loneliness washed over her. After their mother died, their father had retreated into his head. If he wasn’t at the marina working on his boat, or out to sea fishing, he was in his study. After the funeral, he’d tried to act normal. He kept his emotions bottled up, and he never asked Pippin and Grey how they felt. If he did, Pippin thought it would have opened up a floodgate.
He forced smiles that never reached his eyes. He used to take them for ice cream. The three of them would sit on the bench across the street from the ice cream parlor, but the scoop atop his cone always melted in his hand as he stared off into the distance.
She remembered him muttering under his breath, as if he was talking to Cassie. Maybe he was. To her ghost, at least. “I should have been able to protect you,” he’d say. “I’ll protect them.” He blamed himself, she realized, though no one could have predicted the trouble Cassie would have with her pregnancy or that she’d die in childbirth. It wasn’t her father’s fault.
Pippin and Grey had been sent off to their grandparents when their father was gone on his extended fishing trips, and after he vanished on them, they’d gone to Greenville for good. They tried to push their feelings away. They really did. They made friends with their classmates, but everyone knew they’d been orphaned and abandoned. It was a dark cloud that hovered over them, ready to release a torrent of rain any second. They tried to be normal. To be kids, but it was never the same. The moment Cassie died, Pippin and Grey had grown up, because how can you still be a child when your mother is gone?
Pippin opened her eyes, chasing away that forlorn feeling that often settled in her. She had to excise it and making new memories in this house was the way to do it.
But deep down, she knew the house had something to tell her.
Chapter 3
“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.”
~Vincent Van Gogh
Pippin had moved on to the garden. She left Grey to the shiplap he was installing in the kitchen and great room, pulled on a pair of work boots, donned her gloves, and hauled the four-tired wheelbarrow she’d bought, a pair of garden shears tossed inside, over to the northeast corner of the property.
She stood back, looking at the mass of pampas grass that blocked the view of the Sound. The grassy foliage had been unchecked for years and almost hid her father’s thirty-two-foot fishing vessel. Somehow, the idea of revealing her father’s fishing boat and having to figure out how to get it hauled away was more daunting than the renovation of the entire house, but day by day, she’d been cutting the long strands of grass, chopping the plant’s white feathery plumes, and bit by bit, she was making headway and getting closer and closer to the boat.
Finally, she’d chopped away enough of the grass to be able to see the dilapidated tarp that had been covering the boat over the last two decades.
Twenty years. When she thought about it in those terms, it was like a mind-blow. That’s how long her father had been gone. And her mother had been dead for three years more than that. It felt like a lifetime.
She still ached over the loss of her parents. She had few memories, but the ones she did have were strong and growing more vivid now that she was back in her early childhood home. Sometimes she wanted to chase them away and not feel the loss and emptiness that came with them. Unfortunately, emotions didn’t respond to logic. She couldn’t just press a button and make them go away. She was learning to live with them. To embrace them, even.
Oddly, she had only a vague memory of her father’s boat. She knew from Grandmother Faye that he’d worked on a boat captained by someone else when he’d first left home and moved to the Outer Banks. When he’d finally saved up enough money, he bought a used boat and had captained his own crew. Pippin remembered boarding it as a little girl, but her father forbade it after Cassie died.
Pippin’s mind drifted back to the one time she and Grey had left North Carolina. She hadn’t thought about it in years, and the story was foggy. It had been just after their father disappeared that Grandmother Faye sent them to Laurel Point, Oregon for a visit. That’s when they learned several truths. The first truth was that they had other family. An Aunt Rose, and two cousins, Lily and Cora—twins, just like Pippin and Grey.
Pippin looked a bit like the two girls, what with their massive amounts of ringlets, only Cora and Lily’s hair was blonde, while Pippin’s was copper. The two sets of twins shared the same gray-green eyes. “Your eyes are the color of an angry sea,” Pippin remembered her mother telling her. It was a random memory and one she’d often wondered if she’d imagined. After all, she’d been only six years old when her mother died.
Grey had darker hair than Cora and Lily. It was less red and more chestnut than Pippin’s. Still curly, though. His grandmother kept it cut short on the sides with a flounce of curls sitting atop his head. “Your mother’s curls,” Grandmother Faye often said to him, but not as if it was a good thing. There was always some hidden message in Grandmother Faye’s tone when she talked about Cassie, but Pippin and Grey didn’t know why…or what it meant.