He saw now that her time in the Peace Corps had been formative for Connie, and it was why she believed that everything was about energy. She even wore a string with a crystal on it that hung from her neck. When Poppy and Ann fought over space in the backseat on the ride out, Connie told them they were making her crystal turn cloudy.
Poppy was alarmed, while Ann rolled her eyes and groaned.
“Come on, Michael,” Connie said. “You need to change your energy. Please. I’ll jump with you.”
Jump? He didn’t feel like jumping. That was the bullshit for crystal-wearing ex-hippie teachers. Connie jumped, and her giant breasts rose and collapsed with her. She started laughing, and before Michael could help it, he laughed a little, too, and his anger crashed like a wave.
Suddenly he was deeply sad. It was all too much. “I want to go back,” Michael said, afraid his voice would break and he’d start to cry.
Ed said, “Back where? Milwaukee?”
No, no. That wasn’t what Michael was thinking. He shook his head violently. Milwaukee? He’d be fine if he never went back there, not ever.
Michael was so pent-up he could hardly open his mouth to speak. “The house,” he said. “I want to go back to the house.”
Ann suddenly appeared next to him, followed by Poppy. They came to an abrupt stop, sweaty from the run. The sun glinted off their foreheads and cheeks.
Connie said, “Michael tells us he wants to go home.”
Ed said, “What the hell is going on?”
“Why are you looking at me?” Ann said.
“Oh, Ann,” Connie said, as if she’d been frustrated with Ann a million times before. Mother and daughter were nothing alike—or as Connie would say, their energy was different. Ann liked to stir things up; Connie liked to smooth them over.
“He’s embarrassed because he can’t swim,” Poppy said.
“I told him it was no big deal and it totally isn’t.” Ann spoke about Michael the way the counselors and social workers did, like he wasn’t even standing right there in front of them, covered in sweat.
Ed put his large hand on Michael’s damp back. Michael tried to step away, but Ed pulled him into a tight embrace. This threw Michael off, because Ed rarely touched him; he said he respected his “borders.” Michael could see that holding back was hard for Ed, who was affectionate and open. But now, he couldn’t seem to help himself. “Don’t you know we don’t care that you can’t swim?” Ed’s voice broke.
Michael freed himself and took a few steps back. He was in the center of the circle. All eyes were on him. He felt trapped.
Ann looked at Ed. “Can we tell him, Dad?”
“Now?” Ed said. “I thought we were going to wait.”
“Please?”
“Tell him what?” Poppy asked.
Michael braced himself: they were about to tell him he’d have to turn around and leave. He knew it, he just knew it.
Ed looked straight into Michael’s eyes, serious. “We’re thinking we’d like to adopt you, Michael.”
Poppy put her hand over her mouth and gasped. “Seriously?”
Ann said, “Isn’t it great?”
“Yes, but…”
“But what?” Ann said.
“Nobody ever tells me anything.”
“What’s your problem?” Ann said. “We knew you’d be OK with it. We all love Michael.”
The word “love” threw Michael even more off balance. “You want to what?” Michael asked. He’d once seen a bird fly into a window at school—this was the same kind of shock, of not knowing that plate of glass was right there, right in front of you.
“Only if that’s what you want,” Connie said. “Nobody is forcing you to do anything.”
“We started the paperwork, that’s all,” Ed said. “When we get back to Milwaukee in the fall, if you’re game, we can make it official.”
Connie smiled dreamily. “Don’t you feel we’re already related? The first time you walked through the door I felt we’d been together in a past life.”
Michael didn’t believe them. This couldn’t be real. Past life? They were high.
Ann said, “It was so hard for me not to say anything. It was my idea.”
“Everything is Ann’s idea,” Poppy said. She looked almost as stunned as Michael felt.
“Aren’t I too old to be adopted?”
Ann said, “You’re never too old to need a family.”
“Sixteen is nothing,” Ed said. “You still have two years of high school. Those are two important years. But you have to give consent. The whole thing is totally up to you.”
Poppy brightened. She took his hand. “You’ll be my brother.”
Until that moment, Michael hadn’t realized he already felt like he was Poppy’s brother. But then Ann said, “And I’ll be your sister.”
Ann? His sister?
That was a harder idea to process. It reminded him of that optical illusion his psychology teacher had shown him, the ink drawing where you see either two faces or a vase; you can see it only one way at a time. The faces or the vase.
That entire summer in Wellfleet and all through the next school year, when his adoption was made final, he tried to see and think of Ann that way: just a sister. Only a sister. He tried.
TWO
Ann
Wellfleet
2000
Ann lined up a babysitting job her second day back on the Cape. Some lady named Mrs. Shaw had called the house after she’d seen the flyer Ann posted at the Wellfleet library. She had two boys. More importantly, she offered to pay Ann more than double what she made back home in Milwaukee.
Ann babysat every summer since she’d become Red Cross certified—well, except for last summer, because her parents had wanted her to spend time with Michael. She didn’t mind. She cheered him on at his swim lessons; they ran together on the sandy soil in the fire lanes, looked for shells at Mayo Beach, and ate soft serve on the town pier. Ann had always loved Cape Cod, but last summer, seeing the place through Michael’s eyes, she became newly aware of how special it was, and how much Michael meant to her—more than she should feel for a “brother.”
Michael loved their Cape house. Ann felt badly that he had to sleep in the bedroom in the attic, where it was hot and stuffy, and the ceilings were so slanted that he would bump his head when he woke. She tried to make his space nicer by wallpapering it with some old, yellowed newspapers from the thirties she’d found in the basement, and she covered the armrests of her grandfather’s favorite chair that sat in the middle of the room with electrical tape where the mice had chewed the upholstery.
That first summer, the prospect of Michael’s upcoming adoption made everything seem new and exciting. But now, a year later, everything was different. Ann realized that absorbing another person into the family, even someone she cared about as much as she cared about Michael, wasn’t as easy as she thought it would be. All her parents seemed to care about lately was the idea of family. They talked about being together like it was some sort of higher calling.
Money was tighter and her parents were busy. They’d always had a lot going on, but now they had all the appointments with lawyers, social workers, and therapists that legal adoption required. Ann noticed that Poppy and Michael had grown closer in the past year, so close that sometimes Ann felt like a third wheel around them, a feeling that was uncomfortable and disarming.