Prologue
Ann had never been to Wellfleet in February. Each fall her parents emptied the water heater, shut down the well pump, flushed antifreeze down the toilets, threw some sheets over the furniture, pulled down all the shades, and closed the house. Cape Cod felt like a hazy dream the rest of the year, a place suspended forever in beach days filled with sunshine and warmth.
But there she was, alone and cold in a house that felt both familiar and now strange because it was the off-season, and because her parents were gone, although she could feel them there. It was as if they were sitting behind mirrored glass during a focus group like the ones Ann participated in at work, watching and listening to everything Ann did and said. Even now, half a year after they’d died, she kept waiting for some magical door to swing open, and for her parents to walk out from the other side of the glass to tell her they’d been watching her this whole time.
She felt her parents’ radiant energy in everything she saw as she paced the house to stay warm: in the chipped wineglass left in the sink, the sloppily folded beach towels and stained pillowcases, her mother’s cookbooks, her father’s telescope, even in the bulb digger where they’d always hidden the heavy iron key that unlocked the back door. Their possessions seemed ready to be put to use again and again, and made the house feel like it was less a place they’d left behind than a place they’d planned to return to.
Ann shivered and took a sip of her now-cold Starbucks coffee. She checked her phone to see if Carol, the Realtor, had tried to contact her to say she’d be late, but she had weak cell reception out here on the Outer Cape. Maybe she’d gotten lost. You couldn’t see the house from Route 6, and the mouth of the long driveway, tucked in a thicket of brush and oak trees, was easy to miss.
Ann didn’t want Carol to think she was someone who could be talked into a low asking price, so she’d dressed for their meeting in her most serious work suit, a chocolate-colored alligator jacquard jacket and matching pencil skirt. Not wanting to diminish the impact of her outfit, she left her wool coat in her car, but the house wasn’t heated and she was freezing. It was better this way, she thought. She’d need the sharpness of the cold to get through this.
A strong breeze blew so hard that the house seemed to moan and the door flew open. Ann jumped, as though the ghosts of her parents had breezed in and scolded her for what she was doing. She rushed over to the door and shut it firmly. She needed to list the house before she lost her resolve, and before summer arrived along with all the tourists and their naïve dreams of owning a place on the Cape. She already hated the buyers (whoever they were) who would love the house differently than her family did, free of their complicated history and conflicting personalities, unburdened by all the stuff they’d accumulated across three generations. It felt oddly intimate and wrong to imagine strangers living there, like she was letting them wear her own skin.
She tried to focus on logistics. She and her younger sister, Poppy, would split the proceeds. If they got a good price, Ann could use her share to put some money in Noah’s college fund and move into a bigger apartment in Boston than the cramped two-bedroom they shared in the South End. She was tired of living paycheck-to-paycheck; it would be nice to put some cartilage between the bones, especially since her job was now on the line. Noah had pleaded with her not to sell. She tried to explain to him that it made no sense to hold on to a house for sentimental reasons, although that was an argument that was easier to make from a distance.
Ann opened the door to the “blue room,” the bedroom she’d always shared with Poppy. The twin beds, covered in the ancient crochet bedcovers, stuck out from the wall like piano keys. The room had once been a parlor. When they were kids and they’d finally arrived for the summer, Poppy would bolt out of the station wagon, run inside, and throw herself on her creaky old spring mattress, clinging to it like a life raft. “We’re back!” Ann’s great-grandmother had died in this room the same day she was born, which was how she had escaped being named after a flower herself.
She could glimpse Drummer Cove through the wavy lead glass in the window. After the railroad dike was built in the late 1800s, the cove began to fill in with silt deposited with every high tide. When the tide emptied out, it left a mudflat with the consistency of quicksand. Real quicksand, the stuff of fairy tales and nightmares. The cove was a place where boats had been marooned, deer got stuck, and dolphins were stranded. Dead horseshoe crabs littered the edges. Ann hardly ever visited the cove now that she was an adult. The tall beach grass was thick with ticks, and the damp hay path was always squishy from the last high tide. She wouldn’t dare swim in that muck. Still, Ann thought the cove was pretty to look at. It smelled like rotten eggs at low tide, but that was a smell she loved in the same primal way that she’d loved the smell of Noah’s sweet bald head when he was a baby. She’d roll down her car windows as soon as she got to Blackfish Creek and wait for the odor to hit her. When it did, every molecule in her body seemed to change. That’s when she knew she was really there, on the “real” part of the Cape.
She walked back into the living room and pulled down the writing desk of her late grandmother’s beloved antique secretary. She rummaged through the contents of the delicate little drawers, finding only yellowed cash register receipts, nail clippers, and kite string. She lifted the piles of paperwork in the larger cubbies—just old New Yorkers, bills from the plumber that could have been thrown away years ago, and there, on the bottom, some old crayon drawings Noah had made when he was little, the words “I love you Nana” in his sweet, sloppy capital letters. It amazed her, all the fresh new ways her heart could break.
She stuffed the papers back where she’d found them and, more gently this time, closed the desk back up, remembering how her grandmother would scold her if she was rough with the furniture. She looked around the room with a scavenger’s eye. Surely there must be a will—how could her father, who’d spent hours preparing detailed notes for substitutes in his classroom—not have one?
An old framed family photograph on the mantel caught her eye, perhaps because it was strangely free of the veil of dust that gently shrouded everything else in the still house. The photo was almost too painful to look at. After everything that had happened with Michael, she was surprised her parents had kept it on display—how had she never noticed it before? That was his first summer with them, when she and Michael were sophomores and best friends. He hadn’t been adopted yet. Michael stood between Ann and Poppy, all of them about the same age, still about the same height before Michael’s growth spurt the next year. Ann’s hair was pulled back, but Poppy’s whipped wildly around her face. Michael was smiling like he’d just won the lottery.
They all looked so happy, so innocent.
Pilgrim Monument loomed behind them. Ann and Poppy always had to beg their parents to take them to P-town. They complained that the traffic at the tip of the Cape was terrible and there was nowhere to park. They didn’t want to be mistaken as tourists with their fudge-stained lips and boxes of saltwater taffy stuffed under their arms, gawking at the friendly drag queens who stood outside bars in giant wigs, stuffing postcards for drag shows into the hands of passersby. Her parents had only agreed to that excursion because it was Michael’s first summer on the Cape. The next summer, Ann would miss the trip to Provincetown, because she’d spend all her days babysitting for the Shaws.