Unlike Ann, neither Poppy nor Michael was part of a big clique, both of them preferring to hang out with the granola crowd at the Coffee Trader on Downer Avenue. They made knotted bracelets out of embroidery thread, shared inside jokes and secret handshakes, and liked to make each other disgusting potions with milk, syrup, and turmeric in the kitchen. Michael seemed loose and comfortable with Poppy, but when Ann walked into the room he’d freeze up, and Poppy would act like she was interrupting them. All her life, Poppy had followed Ann around like a lost puppy, wearing her clothes, imitating her gestures, wanting to hang out with Ann and her friends instead of making her own. Ann was used to shrugging Poppy off, only now Poppy didn’t seem to care if Ann lived or died. She missed Poppy, but she was too proud to say so. Instead, she slammed doors and walked around in a huff, expecting Poppy to understand why she was upset, hoping Poppy would care.
She didn’t. She had Michael now.
Something was off with Michael, too. She felt him pushing her away. He wouldn’t sit on the same couch with her, or come into her bedroom to talk late into the night the way he used to. He’d started running with some of the faster guys on the varsity team, and when he wasn’t chumming around with Poppy, he’d sometimes hang out with them. He’d grown taller, more muscular and lean, more confident. His thick brown hair stretched to his shoulders. Suddenly Ann’s friends wanted to spend a lot more time at her house so they could be around him. She could understand why. Truthfully, she felt the same way they did. Michael—her brother—was so good-looking that Ann sometimes felt shy around him. She averted her gaze, afraid of his intensity, afraid of the way he made her feel, afraid of the closeness they once shared, but missing it all the same.
Ann was still happy that Michael was part of the family, but by the time their car pulled into the Cape house driveway for the first time that summer, she felt so frustrated by her siblings that she thought she might burst. She needed some space, and she wanted to make some money for college, which was only a year away. So, when Mrs. Shaw asked her to start babysitting the very next day, Ann jumped at the opportunity.
* * *
WHEN SHE WAS YOUNGER, ANN understood her parents’ concern about her prospective employers. Now that she was seventeen, their supervision felt unnecessary and annoying. They insisted on driving her to the Shaws’. She sat in the backseat, feeling like a little kid. “I told you I can ride my bike. It’s not that far.”
“We just want to know where you’ll be.” Her dad was driving slowly, looking carefully at the addresses on the mailboxes, pissing off the drivers who were stuck behind him, not that he ever cared what anyone else thought. They were on Chequessett Neck Road, north of Mayo Beach, in a fancy area somewhere near the yacht club. This was the way they drove to get to Jeremy Point, their favorite picnic spot.
“This is so embarrassing.”
Her mother said, “We’re your parents. Someday you’ll have your own kids and you’ll understand.”
“You always say that.”
“Because it’s true.”
“How are they going to trust me to watch their children if you guys show up? It’s not dangerous here, like in Milwaukee.” Oh God, why did she have to say that? She knew any reference to Milwaukee and crime would lead her mother to think about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Ann was still in elementary school during his trial, but she remembered Connie volunteering as a court comforter to provide support to the victims’ families. She brought them food, coffee, and tissues, and held their hands while they listened to gory testimony about how he’d drugged and tortured all those young men.
Her mother never spoke much about what she’d heard, although Ann noticed that the experience had changed her. Because of her easy nature, her mother was still more laid-back than most of Ann’s friends’ parents, but after the trial she seemed more suspicious of people, warier. Ann sometimes wondered if that’s why her mother was willing to move forward with Michael’s adoption. Dahmer had lived near the Marquette neighborhood where he’d found his victims. Michael was young and vulnerable—he could have easily been in danger.
“Mom,” Ann said. “Really. You know nothing bad ever happens here.”
“That’s not true,” her father said. “A woman was murdered in Truro a few years ago, remember?”
“Ed!”
“I’m not scared. I’ll be fine,” Ann said. “Next year I’ll be in college. What will you do then?”
“We’ll never let you go.” Her mother reached back and squeezed Ann’s knee like she meant it literally. Ann swatted her hand away and frowned, even though she wanted to be nice to her mother, because her mother was always nice to her.
“Tell you what, Ann with a Plan.” That was her father’s name for her, because she’d always been so determined, and so focused on her next steps. “How about we just drop you off and leave. We won’t lurk.”
“Yes!” Ann said. “Thank you.”
“We wouldn’t think of embarrassing you in front of Mrs. Shaw.” It was Ann’s mother who had taken her call while Ann was at Gull Pond with Michael and Poppy. Michael could swim about as well as both of them now, and he could outpace her both on the land and in the water. When Ann called back, Mrs. Shaw sounded breathless. “I was just thrilled to see your sign on the bulletin board. I’m positively desperate. You know how it is with two rambunctious boys and a household to manage, and my husband is hardly ever around and we have all these visitors and activities. Exhausting!”
Her father whistled when he pulled up to the house—not an appreciative whistle, but the kind of whistle he’d make if he passed a bad car accident, a whistle that seemed to say, Look at that disaster. The Shaws’ house was huge, dwarfing the still large but comparatively smaller houses next door. He double-checked the address. “I guess this really is the place,” he said. “Geez.”
“Oh dear,” Connie said. “Look how it blocks the view of the bay. I’ll bet their neighbors hate them. It’s so big … and so brown.”
Her dad said, “That’s a ‘fuck you’ house if I ever saw one.”
Ann thought the house was awesome because it was so massive, and so different from the homes she was used to seeing in Wellfleet. It reminded her of one of the big, new houses she saw in subdivisions in Mequon, a wealthy community north of Milwaukee where some of the kids she’d met in the Model UN lived. The Shaws’ house was neither charming and old nor sleek and modern; it was the kind of house that was simply meant to impress. It was newer but not original, massive but not grand.
Ann said goodbye to her parents quickly and slipped out of the car. She walked down the long, curving driveway in the shadow of the enormous house. Her father’s car engine was still idling. She turned around and mouthed Go away until he backed off and drove away in the same direction he’d come.
* * *
MRS. SHAW GREETED ANN AT the door. She was attractive in a severe, weatherworn way, tall but slightly stooped. Her thick, red hair looked like it might have been curly if she hadn’t blow-dried it into submission. She’d pulled it back into a ponytail so tight that it tugged at the sides of her eyes. Her skin was dark and freckled, and a stack of gold bracelets jangled against her thin wrist. She wore a belted Izod polo dress that hung slack off her bony shoulders.