Dedication

For my brother Apple, with all my love

CONTENTS

Creature

Five Tuesdays in Winter

When in the Dordogne

North Sea

Timeline

Hotel Seattle

Waiting for Charlie

Mansard

South

The Man at the Door

Acknowledgments

CREATURE

The summer I was fourteen, a few months after my mother had moved us out of my father’s house, I was offered a job on Widows’ Point babysitting this old lady’s grandchildren who had come to visit for two weeks. Mrs.

Pike got her dresses fitted at my mother’s shop and the two of them made these arrangements without consulting me. It wasn’t like my other babysitting jobs, a few hours at a time. I had to live there. I can’t remember the conversation with my mother, if I’d wanted to go or if I’d put up a fight.

I fought her on so many things back then.

The Point was a frying pan–shaped spit of land that thrust out into the Atlantic. Beyond it, at low tide, you could see a crescent of rocks offshore, but at high tide the water hid them entirely. No doubt it was those rocks, several hundred years earlier, that made the widows who’d given the Point its name. My father still owned the house I’d grown up in, on the handle of the pan, and to get to the Pikes’ from our apartment downtown I had to pass it on my bike. He was in rehab again, in New Hampshire this time, but still I kept my head low as I pedaled by. All I saw was the bed of flowers along the road, untended since last fall, new shoots and buds trying to push through brown husks. This was the third time we’d moved out and I hoped the last.

The road sloped down after that as it began its loop around the Point. An ornate sign announced PRIVATE WAY. High hedges hid most of these fancier houses from sight, giving everything an overgrown, Sleeping Beauty feel.

As kids we’d ridden down here despite the warning, scaring ourselves into believing that we’d be put in jail if we got caught, but we never dared go down a driveway. Still, we knew all the pillars, all the plaques with the old names barely legible anymore.

The Pikes’ driveway was much longer than I’d thought. There had been a hot sun on my back on the road but now it was cool and dim, huge trees shaking on either side of me. The only other person I had ever known to do such a thing as I was doing now was Maria from The Sound of Music. I couldn’t remember the song about courage that she sang as she walked with her guitar from the abbey to the von Trapp mansion, so I sang “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” until a horn blasted behind me and I swerved off the road and down a shallow gully and tumbled softly off my bike onto last year’s leaves.

Above me, a man in a black suit and a bow tie called down. “You breathin’?” is what I believe he said. He had an accent. He formed the r with his tongue, not his lower lip.

I told him I was. He did not step down into the gulch of leaves to help me, but he waited until my bike and I were back on the driveway. He had a long face and a perfectly round bald head so that the two together looked like a scoop of ice cream on a cone.

“You come to subdue the kiddies?”

“Yes,” I said uncertainly.

“I’ll meet you below then. Come round the back. To the left. Not the garage side.” He made gar age rhyme with carriage, the stress on the wrong syllable.

It was only after he had driven off that I noticed the car, its tinny engine and lack of roof and long thin nose of a hood. It was an antique. I heard the horn again, very loud, even at this distance. And nothing like a regular car horn. More like the signal at halftime of a football game. No wonder it had blown me off the road. The word “claxon” came to mind and floated there as I wound down the rest of the driveway. I was halfway through Jane Eyre for summer reading. I figured the word had come from that.

The house came into view. Slowly. The road bent and I saw a section of it then more as I went along until the whole thing was splayed out in front of me. It was a mansion. Gray and white stone with turrets and balconies and other things that jutted or arched or recessed that I had no words for. We’d always guessed it was a mansion because people spoke of it that way, but really all we could picture was a house like our small capes, only much wider and taller. But mansions, I realized, were not made of wood. They were made of rock. There was a great curved procession of steps up to the front door but I remembered about going round the back.

The back seemed to me no less fancy than the front, fewer stairs to reach the door but the same carved columns and stone balustrade around a wide veranda. The man from the road was waiting for me, along with a woman in a striped dress and white shoes. They led me up and into the house, through a dark hallway to a pantry with a square table covered in checked oilcloth and three mismatched chairs.

The woman asked me if I was hungry, and though I said I wasn’t, she brought out saltines and slices of orange cheese. She pressed a small wheel with spokes into an apple and produced eight even wedges and threw away the core. The two of them sat down with me. I wondered why, if they had this whole house, we were in such a small, dreary room.

“Where are your children?” I asked the woman. I figured she was more my direct boss than the father.

I’d never seen a grown-up blush before. Hers was instant, the way mine was, and the worst shade imaginable, as if the blood itself were just about to spill out. “I don’t have any,” she said. Sweat glinted above her lip and she stood quickly to bring my plate to the sink.

The man laughed. “The children you’re to be taking care of don’t belong to either of us! Show her upstairs and straighten the poor girl out.”

I followed the woman up three flights of back stairs, uncarpeted wooden steps with a greasy banister and a potato chip smell. We turned out onto a wide corridor full of light from long high windows that framed the blue sky above us. We passed at least five bedrooms until she pointed to one on the left, as if she were just now choosing it for me. But when I peeked in I saw a set of towels at the foot of the bed and my mother’s green suitcase on a wooden rack. It felt for a moment as if I would find my mother, too, in the room when I stepped in, but when I did it was empty. I’d forgotten she’d driven the suitcase over on Sunday. The woman told me her name was Margaret and that she would be downstairs in the kitchen whenever I needed her.

“The littles have gone to the beach with their mum but should be back for naptime. They’ll come find you then, I’m sure.” Her accent wasn’t like the man’s. Foreign, but different. I realized they might not be married at all.

When she’d gone, I shut the door and looked around my room. It was the first room I’d ever had that had nothing to do with my parents, their tastes, or their rules. I felt like Marlo Thomas on That Girl, a girl with her own apartment. It was a chaste room, with two twin beds covered in the same

white knitted bedspreads, their fluted oak posts rising to eye level and tapering to pinecones. The bedside table between them was small, covered with a piece of calico, and had just enough space for a glass lamp with a pull chain and an ashtray, also glass, with a bull in the center and four notches along the edge for cigarettes. I’d smoked a bit when I was younger, with my friend Gina in the woods, but I’d grown out of it. Even though the ashtray was clean, I could smell old ash and I slid it into the rickety drawer below.

I had a window seat! I rushed over to it as if it might disappear and stretched out on my stomach on the long, curved cushion. There were three huge windows that bent to form a half circle—this whole half of my room was curved—and it was only then that I realized I was inside one of the turrets I’d seen from the road.

I pressed my nose to the old glass and breathed in its dusty metallic smell and looked down at the gravel driveway and the shaved lawn that gave way to an un groomed field of tall grasses and a few wildflowers and ended abruptly with a drop to the ocean. I thought of my parents and their fights over money, of my father living in what my mother and I thought of as a big house now that we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, which wasn’t at all like That Girl to me. Though maybe to my mother—who was still in her thirties and had a pretty smile and, as she often said, a lot of things going for her—it was. I wanted to show each of them my room in this mansion, but then again I didn’t. I wanted it to be all mine.

The ground suddenly seemed a long way down and escape far away. I pushed out thoughts of Rapunzel, a story that had always scared me, and of Charles Manson, whom Gina’s older brother had told us about that spring. I opened my suitcase and took out Jane Eyre and the new notebook I’d bought. But I didn’t feel like reading or taking notes, so I started a letter to Gina. I told her about the bike ride to the Pikes’. I told her about going past my father’s and seeing the neglected flower beds, all the death and new life tangled together, I wrote, and surprised myself and kept writing.

Over an hour later a navy blue station wagon came down the driveway and stopped in front of the gar age. My windows were closed but I could see the little boy was crying when he got out of the car and the little girl was asleep as her mother pulled her out of the back and draped her on her shoulder. I supposed I should go down and help them unload the car of towels and beach toys or scoop up the sleeping girl and put her down on a

bed somewhere, but I didn’t. I wasn’t in a hurry to become an employee. I stayed in my turret sprawled on my window seat until, a half hour later, there was a knock on my door and the job began for real.

It wasn’t difficult, at least not before Hugh arrived. Margaret made all the meals and Thomas, the man with the ice-cream cone head, did all the serving and the washing up. A lady named Mrs. Bay came for the laundry, including the disgusting cloth diapers that Kay, the children’s mother, insisted on using. When I met Kay the first day, she attached Elsie to one of my hands and Stevie to the other and said, “I’ve got to pee like a racehorse, Carol,” and dashed off. She came right back and gave me a hug and thanked me for coming, as if we were old friends and I’d stopped by to visit. I was aware of the age difference between us—I was fourteen and she was twenty-nine—but to her, because she spent her days with a two- and a four-year-old, I must have seemed older than I was. Kay was different around her mother, stiff and nearly silent. Mrs. Pike told us each morning in the breakfast room how the day would unfold. Kay nodded at her mother’s ideas—Mrs. Pike wanted her to see old friends, play tennis at the club, visit her old German tutor who had said she had so much promise—but as soon as her mother left the room to go to her desk after breakfast, Kay turned to me and hatched another plan.

We took the kids to several different beaches, a whaling museum, an aquarium, often stopping after lunch at an ice-cream parlor where we made our own sundaes. In the early afternoon I played with the kids in the pool while Kay read her book on a lounge chair in the grass, then I took them up and put them down for their naps. They never resisted the naps. After the morning activity and the hot sun and the swim, they were ready to crawl into their cool beds in the dim house and fall into a heavy sleep. While I read and sang to them, I imagined going to my room and sleeping, too, but when I got up to my third-floor turret I always had a new surge of energy. I continued the letter I’d started to Gina all about my life in the Pike mansion.

I read Jane Eyre. I suddenly felt so much closer to Jane, now that I, too, lived in a huge house and had charge of two children. Soon my long letter took on the tone and vocabulary of Charlotte Brontë, which Gina mocked me mercilessly for later. But I was trying things out, life as That Girl, life as Jane Eyre, life as a writer alone in her own room, which eventually, after a lot of other things, is what I became.

When the children woke up from their naps, I played with them outside on the lawn until hunger made them cranky and we went and visited Margaret in the kitchen for a snack. Dinner wasn’t served until eight, when I’d wrestle Elsie into her highchair (she much preferred a lap, especially at that hour) then retreat to the kitchen where I was given my dinner at the oilcloth table. Sometimes Thomas or Margaret would sit with me for a minute or two, but they were always popping up to plate and serve a new course. Stevie and Elsie rarely made it to dessert. Kay often poked her head in the kitchen, signaling that I should evac them upstairs. Of course they put up a fight. Dessert had been held out to them as a reward for good behavior at dinner, but they had “fussed,” as Mrs. Pike called it, and their departure in my arms from the dining room was loud and trailed behind me like the tail of a kite all the way up the wide front staircase, across the landing with the two sofas beneath the windows, and up to their rooms on the second floor.

This is how it went for the first six days. Then Hugh arrived. He pulled up in a scraped-up Malibu sedan. We were at breakfast, which I ate with the rest in the dining room to help manage the kids’ morning energy. Margaret was the one to notice. We all went out to the loggia, as Mrs. Pike called it, a covered portico held up by a series of arches facing the driveway.

“But Thomas is supposed to get you at Logan this afternoon,” Mrs. Pike called to him as she began making her way down all those steps.

Hugh leaned against the car. “Then I’ll go back to the airport this afternoon and wait for him.”

“Don’t be silly.” Mrs. Pike, in stockings and pumps, took each uneven step carefully.

“Look at him. He won’t move an inch toward her,” Kay said to me. Then, down to him, “Where’s Molly Bloom?”

“Molly Bloom’s got a new job.”

“She’s not coming?”

“Nope.” He tugged a canvas duffel out of the back. “You get me all to yourselves.”

When Mrs. Pike reached the gravel, he put out his arms and said,

“Motherlode.”

She lifted her heels off the ground to kiss him.

“Who’s Molly Bloom?” I asked Kay as we waited for them to come up. I had Elsie in my arms and she had Stevie in hers. They were both squirming

but we ignored them. Kay and I had already gotten to that point of not having to communicate about the kids, not having to point out how perilous those steep steps would be for them.

“Hugh’s wife.”

Hugh looked too young, too disheveled, to have a wife. He looked like a boy coming home from boarding school. He was lean and seemed to be still growing, his torn, unwashed pants an inch short, his arms waiting for more muscle. And he had wild teenage hair, frizzy and unable to lie down. He climbed the steps with his arm around his mother and they looked like a pair in a movie, the rich old lady befriending the hobo.

When he got to the top he wrapped his arms around his sister and Stevie and squeezed till they squealed.

He turned to me. His eyes were a pale, watery green. “An alien in our midst.”

“This is Carol. She’s my mother’s helper.”

“Hello, Cara.” He ruffled Elsie’s hair instead of shaking my hand.

“Car ol,” Kay said.

But he didn’t pay attention. He reached down and lifted Stevie high in the air and broke into song about someone begging a doctor for more pills.

Stevie shrieked his laughter.

The song continued in my head. The Stones. “Mother’s Little Helper.” It thrilled me that he hadn’t spelled it out, that he’d been confident I would get it.

“Put him down or he’ll wake the dead,” Mrs. Pike said.

Hugh set him down on his feet with exaggerated alacrity, then pressed his mouth to Stevie’s ear. “You’ll wake the dead,” he said in a slow growl.

“And the dead are our only friends around here.”

Stevie sunk his face in his mother’s leg.

“Hughie, he’s four, for pity’s sake,” Kay said.

“Pity’s sake? Who are you, Mrs. Milkmore?” He turned to me. “You know Mrs. Milkmore?”

“Talk about waking the dead. Jesus,” Kay said.

“You think she’s dead?” Hugh raised himself up and thrust out his chest and spoke with his jaw slanted to one side and a wet frog in his throat. “For pity’s sake, Kay, go change that skirt. Your school is not called the Ashing Nudist Colony!”

“Oh God, you sound just like her. She really said that, didn’t she?”

Behind them, Mrs. Pike slipped away through the door. I saw the white of her shirt and the tan of her plaid skirt flicker in a window on the way to her writing desk. Hugh was looking off toward the pool and the ocean beyond it. “I’m having wedding flashbacks.”

Kay watched her mother through a window. “Well, we chased her away in less than a minute. Might be a record.”

“Easy come, easy go.”

“The thing I remember the most,” Kay said, turning back, “is that minister weeping.”

“That’s the thing everyone remembers. He stole the show. Where did she find him?”

“I think he’s the summer church guy.”

“No, it wasn’t. That wasn’t Reverend Carmichael.”

“Reverend Carmichael? How on earth do you know these things? We never once went to that church. I never know if you’re shitting—” She covered her mouth.

Hugh stretched open his glowing green eyes. The whites were full of bright-red threads. He bent his head in front of Stevie’s. “Mommy said a bad word.”

Stevie giggled uncomfortably.

“So, flashbacks in a good way?” Kay said.

He looked off again, nodded slowly. He had more to say but did not say it. He scratched one of his bony elbows. Then he said, “It was magical. It was like a long dream.” He turned back. He looked at me. “Elsie is making you a lovely runny poop bracelet.”

Elsie’s diaper was leaking onto my wrist. As I raced up the wide dark stairs, I felt light, my chest full of something new and exciting, a helium that lifted me from step to step and made breathing difficult but somehow unnecessary. The poop had soaked through the useless cloth diaper and rubber cover and I had to change her whole outfit. I hurried back down to the front patio, but they were gone.

Hugh changed all our rhythms. The children waited for him to wake up. I waited for him to come downstairs before we left the house. Kay waited for the afternoon, when he would join us at the pool and she could talk freely without her mother around.

“She insists that the children eat with us,” Kay said to him that afternoon,

“but a fucking hour after their bedtime. It’s the only time she sees them all day and they are at their absolute worst. She keeps calling them sensitive and fragile. They’re fucking exhausted, Ma.” With Hugh, Kay sounded like my father after a couple of drinks. She sounded nothing like who she’d been before.

Hugh lay on his back on the cement, his feet and shins bent into the water. He was tossing one of Stevie’s stuffed animals, a blue bear with a white star on its chest, high up in the air and catching it. Stevie looked on nervously from the shallow end where I was towing him around in a red ring. I was a long-finned pilot whale, he told me, guiding his boat to shore.

“I’m not sure we’re going to have kids.”

“What? Why?”

Hugh didn’t answer.

“Raven doesn’t want them?”

“Stevie,” Hugh said, “this bear wants to get on the boat.” His throw was short, and the bear landed facedown in the water. Stevie moaned that the blue bear didn’t know how to swim and I got it out quickly, before the fabric could absorb much liquid. Kay was still waiting for an answer from her brother, but it never came.

Hugh had married Raven (I wasn’t sure if that was really her name or a name he had given her, like he gave me Cara, but everyone in the family used it, except when Kay called her Molly Bloom, an allusion I wouldn’t get until twelfth-grade English) in the garden the previous summer. Before he arrived no one had mentioned this, but now it came up all the time. After a while I noticed it was Mrs. Pike more than anyone else who brought it up.

I got the sense that it was an expensive wedding and there were still some outstanding bills in town (there were stores to be avoided, particularly the liquor store, and trips had to be made to vendors farther away because of it).

Money was tight for Mrs. Pike, though I heard Thomas say once that that was all in her mind and she made terrible trouble for herself because of it.

But Mrs. Pike didn’t seem to resent Hugh for the wedding. She just needed to confirm, several times a day, that it had been worth it. For her, remembering it and talking about it increased its value, or at least helped her get more and more of her money’s worth, as if they were still using it, like an expensive appliance whose frequent use justifies the cost.

Within a few days, I knew so much about that one weekend I could nearly block it like a film: Hugh’s friend Kip’s long and inappropriate toast at the bridal dinner about Hugh’s old girlfriend Thea; Raven’s black dress (that did not match her hair—despite her name she was blond) that made

“the aunties” (not sure whose) gasp; Stevie carrying the rings on Night Night, his special—and filthy— little sleeping pillow; the weepy minister; the family friend who at the end of the reception drove right off the seawall and was very, very lucky the tide was out.

Until Hugh arrived, Mrs. Pike had never come out to the pool with us. Now she came out after her “lie down” every afternoon. On the second day of his visit, Hugh and I were playing seals with Stevie and Elsie. The children floated in their plastic rings and water wings and we dunked underwater in tandem to tickle their feet and listen to them shriek.

“You bited me!” Elsie said after several rounds of this.

Hugh snapped his teeth together and she squealed.

Margaret came out the patio doors, down the four flights of stone slabs, and across the sunken garden to the pool gate where she said, “Your wife is on the phone for you, Hugh.”

“Hugh, me sir?”

Margaret’s face split into a grin. “Hugh, you sir.” He rose up out of the pool in one sinewy motion. The water sluiced off his head and down his back. His green bathing suit clung to his bum and I could see its exact shape, two bony teardrops. He gave it a little wiggle then, as if he knew someone was watching. He jogged across the grass and by the time he reached the steps his ringlets had sprung back up.

“Well, you can’t say he’s not still utterly smitten,” Mrs. Pike said.

“No, you cannot,” Kay said.

Without Hugh there, they seemed barely acquaintances now. Kay was stiff in her chaise longue, her hands resting on a facedown hardcover in her lap, which I knew she wanted to get back to. But Mrs. Pike, in one of the smaller upright chairs under the umbrella, had no reading or distractions.

And while she didn’t make continual conversation, she made just enough to keep someone from picking up their novel. I was glad I was an employee in the pool, now a gentle blue-ringed octopus who gave rides to gentle children. Stevie wore earplugs because he was prone to ear infections.

(Hugh teased Stevie by mouthing words just so Stevie would shout: I can’t

hear you I have my pugs in! ) Elsie pinched one out of his ear and Stevie let out a screech.

“Isn’t it naptime?” Mrs. Pike asked. Usually when she asked this it was not, but this time it was.

I gathered up the towels and swim toys, the diaper bag and snack boxes and plastic cups.

Kay said, “I can take them up.”

Mrs. Pike said, “Let Cara do it.” She knew my name but she decided she liked Cara better. There had been a girl in her Sunday school class when she was little named Carol whom she hadn’t liked. “It’s what she’s here for.”

I’d dried us all off as best I could but we dripped a bit coming through the French doors and through the library, little drops that sank darkly into the blue-and-gold carpet. I sounded like I was hurrying them. I sounded like I was concerned for the rug and trying to find the most direct route to the stairs, but I was taking detours, guiding them through sitting rooms and studies and short hallways, listening hard for someone on the phone. I wanted to hear how he spoke to Raven. I knew how he spoke to his sister (blunt, sarcastic) and his mother (softer, upbeat, the edge slightly dulled, nearly but not quite solicitous), but how would he speak to his wife?

He wasn’t in any of the rooms. I spotted a little closet with a door ajar and dark dribbles on the beige rug. It was empty except for a shelf and an old black dial phone, the only phone I ever saw in that whole house. But the receiver was on its cradle and Hugh was not in the room.

He was on the bottom step of the front staircase, his elbows on his knees, head bent forward and hanging limp below his sharp shoulder blades. He didn’t look up until Stevie poked him in the ear. He didn’t straighten up. He just turned his head toward us.

“Hey, you,” Stevie said in an awkward imitation of his uncle.

“Hugh, me sir?” he said. He looked ill, greenish gray, though everything looked a bit that way in that dim house in the middle of the day.

“What’re you doing?”

“Thinkin’. What’re you doing?”

“I’m being put down for my nap.”

Hugh gave him a slight smile. “That sounds nice. I’d like to be put down for a nap.”

Stevie shook his head.

“No?”

Stevie kept shaking his head. He was already out of his conversational depth. And he was tired. But he was blocking my way up, with one hand on Hugh’s leg and the other on the first newel post of the banister. I could tell without looking that Elsie had already fallen asleep. Her forehead lay hard and moist against my neck.

“Do you like coming here to this house?” Hugh asked him.

“Yeah,” Stevie said, swaying, shifting his small weight from the knee to the post and back.

“I remember coming here to visit my grandmother.”

“Your grandmother?”

“Grammy’s mommy.”

“Grammy’s mommy,” Stevie whispered, trying to fathom what that meant.

“She only wore black, huge long dresses down to her ankles. She was the last Victorian. And the only ghoul I ever met.”

“What’s that?”

“A ghoul? It’s worse than a ghost.”

“Oh.” He wouldn’t want to continue that conversation.

They looked at each other, Hugh breathing loudly through his nose, Stevie still swaying from knee to post. I could smell Hugh. I knew the scent by then. It was sharp and unclean, even after a swim, and I knew I wouldn’t like it anywhere else but coming up from his long taut body. I breathed it in greedily.

I knew I should nudge Stevie up the stairs but I sensed Hugh didn’t want to be alone. Something within him was crying out for something. Neither Stevie nor I knew what it was or what had happened, but we were compelled by it anyway.

“How’s your dad?” Hugh said. For a few seconds I thought he knew about my dad and the drugs and all the rehab places, that my mother had told all that to Mrs. Pike and they all knew and laughed about it at dinner when I was in the pantry, and my body stung everywhere at once.

“Good,” Stevie said. “Busy.”

“He and your mom get along?”

“Yeah.” There was a question in it.

“Sometimes parents fight. Like you fight with Elsie. They don’t do that?”

Stevie shook his head.

“Your dad is kind to your mom?”

“Yup.”

“And your mom is kind to your dad.”

“Yup.”

“Do you hear them talking? Not to you and your sister but to each other, about grown-up things?”

“Yup. A lot.”

“And they talk in nice voices?”

“Uh-huh.”

“When do you hear them talking?”

“Most times. Morning.”

“You can hear them from your room?”

Stevie took a breath for a big thought. “I think they’re watching TV but I go in and they’re not, they’re just lying there looking at the ceiling and laughing. They’re weird, I guess.”

“They’re not weird. They’re happy, Stevie. Will you promise me you’ll remember that?”

“’Member what?”

“Your mom and dad laughing. Will you promise? Even when you’re old as Grammy you’ll remember?”

“Yup. Okay. Good night.” He laughed. “I mean, not good night but good nappy night.”

“You won’t forget?”

“About what?”

“You’ve already forgotten!”

“No I didn’t. I won’t forget.” He laughed again. He didn’t move to go upstairs. “Laughing is weird. Why do we laugh?”

“Probably so we don’t blubber like babies.”

“Oh.”

Stevie took a couple of steps up and I followed. Elsie shifted with the sudden movement but didn’t wake up.

“Can we read the red car book?” Stevie asked me.

“Sure.”

We got to the landing. The air was warmer up here. We turned and could see Hugh now, still on the bottom step. He grew smaller as we headed up the next flight.

I lowered Elsie to her crib slowly, gingerly, and she did not wake up. I read Stevie two books, then he crawled into his firmly bound bed (Margaret

made the beds every morning, tight as sausages). He was asleep before I’d gotten to the chorus of “Here Comes the Sun.”

Back out in the hall I stuck my head out over the upper railing. Hugh was still down there. He moved and I pulled back quickly.

Up in my room I continued my letter to Gina. It was over fifteen pages now, the longest thing I’d ever written. I liked to run my fingers over the words pressed into both sides of the pages with my blue ballpoint pen.

“Where’s Hugh?” Mrs. Pike said as I was buckling Elsie into her highchair that night.

“Davy Stives is home,” Kay said. “They went into town for dinner.”

Town, to the Pikes, wasn’t downtown Ashing. It meant Boston, an hour away.

“I hope he told Margaret.”

“I told her.”

Mrs. Pike frowned as she spread her napkin across her dress. It seemed like she was looking for something else to complain about.

I retreated to the kitchen before her attention could alight on me.

It was nearly four in the morning when the Malibu crunched slowly into a spot below my window. I felt a familiar dread as he opened the car door and got out. But he wasn’t drunk. I knew drunk. I was already an expert calibrator of drunk and high and coked out of one’s mind. He cut a straight crisp line to the stairs and took them easily. He opened the door quietly and disappeared. The outside light went off.

He didn’t come down for breakfast. Kay and I took the kids to Drake’s Island on the ferry for the morning.

In the afternoon we were back by the pool.

“How long have you known she wasn’t happy?” I heard Kay ask him.

Mrs. Pike was out playing bridge so there was no chance of her overhearing.

“Happy.” He said it like it was a filthy word. “Is your husband happy?

Every day? Some days? What is happy? What is being happy in a relationship? Are you happy? Such a stupid word. What the fuck is happy?”

“It’s not that complicated. You either like living with someone or you don’t. You either like the commitment part or you don’t. Maybe you don’t like the commitment part any more than she does, but she was the first one

to say it out loud and now you are acting all indignant, but it’s really what you want, too.”

“Gesundheit, Herr Doktor. I don’t think so.”

“Well that’s how it was with Thea, right?”

“Thea? We’re not talking about Thea.”

“I’m talking about patterns.”

“My wife, with whom I made vows on that patch of grass right over there less than a year ago, wants out. That is not a pattern, Kay. That’s my life fucking falling apart.”

He walked off and slammed the gate behind him.

They thought I wasn’t listening. They thought I was a scuba diver searching for treasure that Stevie had hidden at the bottom of the pool. It was a skill of mine, splitting myself in half, pretending to be childish and oblivious while sifting through adult exchanges with the focus and discrimination of a forensic detective.

I was eager to put the kids down and write to Gina about what I had heard. Hugh’s heart is in fragments. What coldhearted she-devil could cease to love such as he?

But they’d had chocolate pudding at lunch and weren’t sleepy. Stevie had a plastic record player and only one record, a 45 with “Feed the Birds” on one side and “It’s a Small World” on the other. I wanted to play “Feed the Birds” to make them groggy, but they wanted “It’s a Small World”—over and over. They danced to it, winding themselves up and flinging their clothing off until Elsie shimmied out of her diaper and flung it at the wall where it made a dark urine stain on the wallpaper with roses. I whisked her off to the bathroom where Kay had set up a changing table. Elsie had a bit of a rash and I wiped her crotch and bum white with Desitin. I liked the smell of Desitin. I sniffed my fingers. It brought on something from the earliest part of my childhood. I sucked in another long deep breath of it. I tried to remember a specific moment, a place, but it was only a feeling. A good feeling. A warm, safe feeling I no longer had.

I heard Stevie talking and then I heard Hugh and I hurried to pin on Elsie’s fresh diaper, but by the time we came out of the bathroom I could hear his steps going down the back stairs.

“Who were you talking to?” I said.

“My uncle,” Stevie said.

“What’d he say?”

“He said he was looking for something for me in the attic.”

“The attic?”

He pointed up. I hardly thought of my floor, with all those beautiful bedrooms, as an attic. “But he didn’t find it.”

The three of us snuggled in Stevie’s bed. Just as I opened Life Cycle of the Green Sea Turtle Stevie said, “Oh, he said that you are a excellent writer.”

“Who?”

“You.”

“Who said?”

He was giggling, thinking I was playing that game but I was not. He saw I wasn’t joking and sobered up. “Hugh said,” he said softly. “Uncle Hugh said.”

I speed-read through the life of a green sea turtle. I agreed to let them nap together in Stevie’s bed. I shut the door and ran to my room, as if I could prevent what had already happened.

I’d left my notebook on the window seat, closed, beneath my paperback of Jane Eyre. But now it was open, turned to a drawing of Hugh’s long, thin figure alone in the field where he was married. I flipped through my notebook with his eyes, trying to gauge just how incriminating it all was. A drawing of his car from my window, a poem about him touching my leg on the stairway, which hadn’t happened. And if there were any doubt at all, my most recent entries to my letter to Gina spelled it out with great drama, as if from the moors of England: You cannot know these blistering feelings—you have not yet met your Rochester. But believe me, they are so powerful that now every novel, every line of poetry, makes perfect and vivid sense. And: Like everyone else in the family I am swept up in the tide of him, but he is good and kind and funny and that tide is where I want to hang suspended always. And: At the pool he lies on his back on the concrete with his arms spread like Christ on the cross and I want to ravish him. I did not know exactly what ravish meant. I didn’t think it could mean anything as boring as sex.

Nearly two hours later, Stevie called out for me. I hadn’t moved from the window seat. My legs were stiff and barely held my weight as I crossed the room. I’d have to quit. I had another five days left, but I would have to leave. Hugh had probably already told his sister and mother. I couldn’t bear the humiliation.

The kids were flushed from heavy sleep, their hair damp at the temples. I kept them entertained in their rooms for as long as I could, but eventually they wanted to go see Thomas and Margaret in the kitchen and eat the cubes of cheese she served them and play out on the grass. I imagined that everyone in the house knew by now, that Hugh had already had a good laugh with each of them, quoting from the notebook as my father would have if he’d ever found such a document. I expected him to give me a pleased, knowing glance that would harden if I didn’t see the humor.

But he did not. He barely looked at me when I followed Stevie out onto the patio, Elsie on my hip.

The three Pikes were out there with their drinks, sitting on matching wrought iron chairs painted white to make them look more comfortable.

“Does she want to stay in Florida?” Kay said to her mother.

“Her stepchildren won’t let her sell the house. They all own it together and they like going down there for vacations.” Mrs. Pike pursed her lips on the rim of her cocktail.

“But they hate her.”

“She moves out for those weeks.”

“Why doesn’t she sell them her share of the house?”

“They don’t want that either. They want her to pay for the upkeep and the taxes.”

“But if they all have equal shares—”

Mrs. Pike held up her hand. “I have the same conversation with her every week at bridge. They have got her wrapped around their little fingers. I think she likes it. I think it keeps her close to William.”

“That’s very astute of you,” Kay said.

“You sound surprised.”

It was the most I’d ever heard Kay talk to her mother. It was forced, but they were both giving it a lot of effort. They were each trying to hide from the other the fact that Hugh wasn’t talking, wasn’t mocking them or the people of their youth, that he was sitting in his wrought iron chair slack and wan, holding then releasing big breaths without realizing the racket he was making. Kay had advised him to absolutely not mention the situation with Raven to his mother, but Hugh might as well have had a T-shirt printed up. I relaxed a little, understanding that as usual the adults were not thinking about me, and the words in my notebook were meaningless to them.

The children were playing in the garden below the patio, chasing each other around the rosebushes.

“Cara, please, have some salmon.” Mrs. Pike built me an hors d’oeuvre of a cracker, smoked salmon, chopped onions, and capers. I carried the little tower of it carefully to my mouth. It was delicious. So many sharp flavors at once.

Hugh watched. “The Education of Cara—what’s your last name?”

My mouth was too full to answer.

“Hyeck,” Mrs. Pike said. “And she hardly needs an education from us.

She lives a half mile down the road.”

“She does?”

“Where did you think she came from?”

“I don’t know. She seems a little sophisticated for Ashing.”

“You’re not making any sense, Hugh.”

“Big vocabulary.” His expression did not change but his white-green eyes flashed at me, straight on, the pupils tiny because he was facing the sinking sun.

“I suppose she does,” Mrs. Pike said, not at all agreeing.

“Would you make sure they don’t fall in, Carol?” Kay said. The kids were edging toward the fountain at the end of the garden.

“Charlie just cleaned it, so it’s fine if they want to dip their toes in,” Mrs.

Pike said.

I was relieved to be sent off. I soared across the grass with my arms out, flapping, tilting, and when the kids looked up they screeched at the great hawk angling at them.

Behind me, Hugh laughed. I scooped them each up in my talons and spun them toward the fountain. I lowered them gently near the edge of the basin and they stayed pressed against me, laughing, their tummies bouncing against me.

“Her parents recently—you know.” Mrs. Pike never used the word

“divorced.” She always left it blank. She didn’t realize how well her voice carried over the grass. It wasn’t true, though. There had been no lawyers, no papers.

Hugh asked something and she said, “I have no idea.” Sharply.

Kay snorted.

“When on Friday will Dan arrive?” Mrs. Pike asked Kay, to change the subject.

The fountain in the center of the little pool was a birdbath that produced a small orb of water that looked frozen in place. The only way you knew it was moving was from the dribbling off the sides. The oval basin was painted a pale turquoise, nearly the shade of Hugh’s eyes.

I told the children they could put their feet in. I helped them take off their shoes and socks. The water was warmer here than in the big pool and soon feet were not enough.

Stevie pulled down his pants.

“Stephen Pike Martin!” Mrs. Pike called.

I pulled his pants back up.

“Can’t they, Mom?”

“In the fountain? No.”

“Take it all off, Stevie!”

“Hugh!”

“God, Mother,” he said. “Let them be children, for pity’s sake.”

“You and your pity’s sake. Oh, all right. Cara, let them go. No one’s watching.”

The side of the basin was steeper than it appeared and Stevie slid underwater as soon as he stepped in. I leapt in with my shoes still on and I scooped him up by his armpits. Water sluiced off his thin hair and he blinked madly and I waited for him to howl but he burst out laughing, which made Elsie scream for me to bring her in, too. I was already wet from the rescue, so I tossed off my shoes and put both kids on my lap and we slid down the little slope. Raised up like that they didn’t go under, but their chins got close enough to make it feel dangerous and there was much yelling and splashing, their naked bodies rubbery under the water, gripping onto mine and howling in pleasure. We slid a few yards until my feet touched the base of the fountain and we stood up and waded up the slope to do it again.

“You’re a polar bear,” Stevie said. “And we’re your little cubs sliding down an iceberg.” We went down again and on the way back up he said,

“You should be nudie, too.” He tugged on my shirt.

“No, I can’t be nudie,” I said. We slid down many more times. I forgot about the Pikes, about Hugh and Raven and my notebook, until the light shifted and I saw Kay at the edge of the fountain, her face strange, stripped of all kindness.

“Okay, that’s enough. Pass me the children and go put some dry clothes on, Carol.”

When I walked past the seating area Hugh’s head was bent and he was pinching the insides of his eyes with his thumb and index finger. He was laughing, not crying.

“Don’t you say a word,” his mother said to him.

Margaret was coming out with towels as I was going in. She gave me one and said something that I didn’t understand until I’d gotten to the front stairs. “Cover yourself now” is what she’d said.

In front of the standing mirror in the corner of my room, I understood.

My wet clothes, a pink tank top and white shorts, were transparent. I had been nudie, just like Stevie wanted. But the body in the mirror didn’t entirely seem mine. The breasts were fuller, risen suddenly like an ad for biscuits. And through the shorts and underwear my crotch was a dark triangle. I recognized nothing about this body. It felt to me that the mirror itself, more like a looking glass, really, in its old-fashioned frame, had conjured it up, that I hadn’t had this body before I’d moved into this room.

I went down to eat dinner in the pantry with Thomas and Margaret in the darkest, baggiest clothes I’d brought. I sat with my back to the dining room, so the Pikes didn’t have to see me when Thomas pushed open the swinging door. Kay did not call for me that night to take the kids upstairs, even though I could hear them fussing throughout the meal.

I thought perhaps Mrs. Pike would send me home before breakfast, but the next morning she was particularly attentive and kind. She asked me how I’d slept and showed me how to use the little egg cutter to lop off the top of my soft-boiled egg. She proposed that she take me and the kids to the beach club for lunch, and Kay could have some time to herself. She could make an appointment for her at the hairdresser’s if she liked.

But Kay said she wanted to take the kids to a place called David’s Animal Farm, just over the New Hampshire border. I’d never heard of it before.

“Why on earth would you go all that way on such a beautiful day?” Mrs.

Pike said.

“It sounds fun.”

“I hired Cara so you could get a break.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean, so you can have some grown-up time.”

“I know what you meant. But I want to be with my children on our vacation.”

We ate our soft-boiled eggs in the silence that followed, everyone except Elsie who had Cheerios on her tray.

Hugh pushed through the swinging door and laughed at us.

“The egg cups!” We were eating from little figure eight–shaped porcelain cups that matched the plates, pink flowers, gold rims. “Ah, isn’t it good to be alive in 1905?” He reached for the silver egg cutter and pretended to go after Stevie’s nose.

I smelled him and remembered how I’d put myself to sleep the night before with a story about him taking me out into the woods where there was this old tennis court no one used anymore and him teaching me to play and afterward kissing me, a tender, delicate kiss, not the gross kind you saw on TV when it looked like the two people were trying to eat the same piece of candy, and remembering that story—even more than Hugh himself—gave me a nervous stomach and I couldn’t take another bite of egg.

Hugh wanted to come with us to the animal farm. His mother told him he couldn’t, that she needed him to move some furniture for her. He pressed her on what furniture and why couldn’t Charlie do it and she wasn’t prepared for the fight. She left the room abruptly.

He leaned over to me, his smell stronger now. “My mother thinks you are trying to bedevil me.”

“Hugh, stop it,” Kay said. “Jesus. Carol, that is not what my mother thinks.” She was pouring more Cheerios for Elsie. “Bedevil,” she said and held it in for about ten seconds then broke into a fit of laughter. Hugh joined her and for a while all you could hear was the little snaps of their throats.

David’s Animal Farm wasn’t a farm. It was more like an amusement park for animal lovers. You bought tokens for the dispensers of food, which were just bubble gum machines filled with pellets. The pellets tumbled into your hands and baby goats and sheep would come running over and you put your hand out flat and felt their big black lips delicately nibble them up. Hugh squatted next to one of the machines, put Stevie on one knee and Elsie on the other, and gave them a steady flow of pellets. Soon they were surrounded by goats. Hugh started putting the pellets in his ear and on his nose and the goats mauled his face with their rubbery lips and Stevie and

Elsie giggled madly until someone in a David’s T-shirt told him to stop.

They also sold milk in baby bottles to feed the littlest goats. We got bottles for the kids and I sat on the ground with Elsie and we held the bottle together as a tiny black-and-white goat sucked the milk down.

Hugh tried to put his face where our goat was. “I want to be a baby goat.

Feed me!”

But he was quiet on the way home. Kay tried to get him to talk but he would only answer with one or two words. I was in back with Stevie and Elsie who wanted to sing, and while we sang I heard Kay say, “You scare me when you get like this.”

We went through town, past our apartment, then out on the neck toward the Point.

“Why did they put these sorry little shitholes right here?” Hugh said.

“Nice road, crappy house. Sorry about that.”

One of the shitholes up ahead was my father’s. I saw a woman in a yellow shirt crouched down in one of his flower beds. My mother. I felt a strange whirring in my chest.

Go home! I wanted to scream out the window at her. Let all his flowers die. We’d been through this so many times, the dry-out places, the circle of chairs, the specked linoleum, all the apologies and tears that meant nothing.

Before the kids’ naps, we all swam. The day had grown hot, hotter than it had been all week. Mrs. Pike joined us wearing a bathing suit. She had some blue knots in the veins, but her legs were strong, surprisingly muscular.

Hugh noticed this, too. “Those Richard Simmons classes have been paying off, Motherlode.”

I grinned, but she had no idea what he was talking about.

He looked at me. We were in the shallow end. Stevie was swimming in his wings back and forth between us. He’d said it for me, I realized. I was swinging my arms along the surface of the water and he was imitating me. I understood that I had his full attention now. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. I’d never had any boy’s attention before as far as I knew.

“Carol, I just used the last of Elsie’s diapers in the bag,” Kay said.

“Would you mind running up and getting a few more?”

“Sure.” I lifted myself out of the pool.

“Now where is she off to?” I heard Mrs. Pike say from her chaise as I unlatched the gate.

“Who knows, Mother.” He was speaking loudly to be sure I heard. “But she makes perfect and vivid sense to me.”

I walked quickly across the grass. On the patio I dried off as best I could before I went in and up to the second-floor bathroom with the changing table and the big bag of diapers beneath it. I shut the door to pee. My bathing suit was still wet and I had a hard time peeling it down and a harder time pulling it back up when I was done. I flushed the toilet, grabbed two diapers, and pulled the door open. Hugh was there, his hands on either side of the door.

“Just making sure you got the diapers.”

“Right here.”

We looked at each other. He lifted a strap of my bathing suit off my shoulder then set it down again. “You were a little crooked there. In your rush.”

“I should get these down there.”

“You should.” He stepped even closer, closer than I’d ever been to a boy before. “But let’s just step in here. Just for a couple of minutes.” He took my hand and led me back into the bathroom and shut the door and looped the hook on the door into its metal eye.

“Now. You,” he said. The whole thing was like one of my stories at night.

It was actually happening. “You are trouble. I, like my mother, think you are trying to seduce me.” He came close to me again. “Are you?”

I didn’t know how to respond.

But he wasn’t listening for an answer. He reminded me of my dad, going in and out of focus like that. He breathed heavily. I smelled mayonnaise from the ham sandwiches Margaret had made us for lunch. He slid his finger under the strap again, this time hooking it and pulling it off my shoulder. He did not lean in to kiss me, which was how I thought these things were supposed to go. Up close his beard was sparse, too much space between reddish shafts.

He pushed me with his body against the changing table. One hand started kneading my right breast and the other went up into the suit from below. It was a tight fit. The suit was from last year. I felt his fingers wiggling around like they were looking for a dime in a small purse.

“I know you want this,” he said in my ear, in a voice I didn’t recognize.

“I can give you this.”

He started rubbing me hard both on the chest and down below. “You like me. I read all about it. All about it. And I can do this for you.”

He kept rubbing. I knew what he was talking about. I hadn’t done it to myself, but Gina had told me about it. I wanted to wait until I had a boyfriend so that the first time I felt it I would be with someone and not alone in my bedroom and it would be special. I also knew there were times when it was not special. But I didn’t know that it could be not special with someone you liked. This was not special. This felt like Hugh was doing some kitchen chore inside my bathing suit.

Sweat had broken out all over his face. “I can give pleasure, not just receive it.” His head was tilted toward the window, as if there were other people down on the grass he was talking to. “I do care about other people.

Other people are real to me. Cara. You are real to me.” One of his fingers inside my bathing suit was poking into me.

It hurt, really hurt. I reached for his hand but he kept rubbing and poking.

“It hurts,” I said.

He pressed his mouth to my ear. “It hurts at first and then it feels really, really good,” he said.

But it was burning me. “This is so stupid,” I said in a voice my mother hated. I’d been using it a lot lately. It was probably the reason she’d handed me over to Mrs. Pike. I was embarrassed by the sound of the voice. I tried to yank his hand out of my suit but he clamped me tighter against the table.

His shoulder was pushing against my jaw. I shifted my mouth slightly and bit down hard.

He flinched back. “Jesus.”

You become a creature I can’t understand, my mother sometimes said to me.

He pulled away and looked at me then smiled and came for me again.

But I had enough space now to put out my arms and shove him off of me.

The weird thing was, Hugh’s body fell so willingly. He fell backward over the lip of the tub and his head hit the tiled wall with a perfect clack, like the castanets in “It’s a Small World.” It worried me that he didn’t open his eyes.

I picked up the diapers and unlocked the door.

I knew I should tell Thomas or Mary or call 911 from the phone in the little room, but I walked outside toward the pool. I rehearsed not what I was

going to say to Mrs. Pike or Kay but what I would write to Gina from jail, how I would explain it to her, the way he went down so easily, like a slinky you just have to nudge at the top of a staircase. I needed to remember to bring my notebook with me to jail.

“Well, the diapers must have been somewhere in California,” Mrs. Pike said.

Kay had either dozed off or was pretending to, with Elsie in a deep sleep on her chest.

I was saying things in my head but nothing was coming out.

“Look, Cara, look! Look at me!” Stevie called from the pool. “I’m doing this all by my lone self!” He swam the whole width of the pool slowly, his arms and legs beneath him moving every which way, his head between the inflated wings on his arms, his mouth in a concentrated frown.

“Good job.”

“What’s wrong with your voice?”

“Nothing.”

“I’ll swim all the way to there”—he pointed to the deep end—“if you come with me. You can be my own pet wolf shark.”

“A wolf shark? That sounds scary.”

“They don’t have to be.”

It would be odd now if I said suddenly that I’d bitten Hugh and also he might be unconscious.

“Look!” Stevie lay on his back then flipped over onto his stomach, put his whole head underwater, then flipped over again onto his back. A week ago he was too scared to be the only one in the pool. Now he was doing tricks.

“Mrs. Pike,” I began, my voice still strange. But behind her something caught my eye. Across the lawn and up at the very top of the mansion, nestled between the peaks of the two turrets, was a small widow’s walk.

Hugh was leaning against its railing, looking out to sea. He was still in his bathing suit, a square white bandage on his bare shoulder.

“Did you have something to say, Cara?”

“No. Just— Would you mind passing me the fins?”

She had to bend down to reach them.

“A wolf shark needs her fins,” I said and slid them on.

At the edge of the pool I let out a howl and jumped. I could hear Stevie cheer me on just before I went under. I wasn’t sure if wolf sharks actually

existed. At four and a half, Stevie knew far more about the natural world than I did. But I hoped they existed. I hoped there was such a thing.