“What?” Grace squints at the glass, half expecting that the bird is a trick of the light. But it’s not. It’s there. Its feathers as bright as Birdie’s favorite lipstick. “What do you mean?”
“The sign,” Caleb continues. “It’ll be up by mid-September,” he adds, making her breath hitch. “The house goes up for sale this fall.”
The sign.
Asign.
And that’s what finally gets her.
Four
Saturday
There’s only one way to get to the island.
No charming ferry slicing through waves. No tiny airport with a lone runway and a rickety passenger staircase wheeled up to the plane. Just two lanes of narrow asphalt stretched like a tightrope over the vast mouth of an endless, shimmering bay. One way in. One way out. That’s it. Birdie used to joke that once they made it onto the causeway, there was no turning back. From where Grace currently sits—car shifted to Park, boxed in by midday traffic—it’s hard not to understand what her mother meant. She’s literally stuck in the middle of it.
“You’re kidding me?” Jenny’s voice flickers in and out from the bad reception—one of Sea Drift’s many charms. “You’re actually down there? Right now? This very minute?”
“Technically, I’m on the bridge,” Grace clarifies, her phone in the cup holder and set to speaker mode. Behind her, a car strapped with boogie boards and beach chairs honks in quick succession, like the driver’s impatience will move things right along. “If we’re being official, I still have time to change my mind.” Grace dips her fingers into a bag of pretzels she picked up at a rest stop—the only thing she’s eaten all day. “For all intents and purposes, I’m not there yet.”
Late yesterday afternoon, after she reluctantly agreed to the offer (I guess. But probably only for a long weekend. I doubt I’ll stay all week.) andthen gave Caleb her credit card information, Grace spent hours convincing herself she was a fool.Of courseshe couldn’t go back to Sea Drift. Not now. Not ever. Despite the water and sand selling the illusion, it wouldn’t feel like a vacation. Not one bit.
When her alarm blared at seven this morning (not that she’d slept), she swore she’d call Caleb and cancel. She told herself the same lie while she stuffed an assortment of faded tees into a bag. And again, shortly after nine, while she backed Birdie’s Jeep—which Grace hadn’t sold yet and had chosen over her own newer SUV at the last minute—out of the driveway. Grace navigated through town—a place that never felt like hers so much as a convenient zip code for Adam’s commute—still playing chicken (Just pick up the phone!) with herself. As she drove over the bridge into New Jersey, then sat in traffic for three hours on the Parkway South, Grace kept saying it:Next exit, I’ll pull off, make a U-turn, and place the call.
Only, she never did.
Deep down, something tugged at her—a question she wasn’t ready to answer, one she’d been putting off for a long time. She didn’t want to go back to Sea Drift—to write, to grieve, to plot out her next steps. But she wasn’t ready to completely let it go, either. Which is how she ended up at her current coordinates—trapped between two shores, the wreckage of her present behind her, the ghosts of her past up ahead.
“Well, I’m impressed you made it that far,” Jenny states, competing with the sound of her children. “It’s a good step.”
“Really?” Grace fumbles with the older car’s knobs, still trying to remember how to operate the temperature panel. Birdie wasn’t impressed by technological advancements. Bluetooth. Satellite radio. Even so, there’s comfort in being in the Jeep. “Because right now,” she adds, and glances at her laptop and her mother’s photo album on the passenger seat, “it mostly feels like a mistake.”
In the past, Grace cried on the drive home every summer, devastated when their week in Sea Drift was over. The only time she didn’t was the year she brought Adam, the first summer they were dating. He airedsmall grievances about the house all week. No central air. No fancy coffee machine. It was nothing like the lake house, the one they’d visited together earlier that June and which he’d described asrustic, though it was professionally decorated to look as if it’d been torn from the pages ofArchitectural Digest.
“He has a lot of ... opinions,” Birdie noted to Grace one morning on that trip. They were having coffee on the patio while Adam—hoping to work out the kinks in his muscles caused by the home’s springy mattress—was out on a run.
“A little bit.” Grace laughed, still in that phase of a relationship where everything about a person—even his flaws—seems endearing. “Lucky for him, he has a lot of good traits, too.”
Prior to that week, Birdie had met Adam twice on visits into the city. She liked him; there was much to like. He was steady. Reliable. Successful. Driven. He brought Birdie flowers the first time the three of them had dinner and always held doors open.
“He doesn’t care for it here,” Birdie said, her words framed as a fact.
“That’s not true!” Grace exclaimed, as if offended by the remark. “Of course he does.”
Birdie didn’t respond, just gave her daughter a look.
“Fine,” Grace huffed. “It might not be his favorite place on earth.”
“But it’s yours,” Birdie said.
Near the street, the sound of footsteps on the pea gravel driveway signaled Adam’s return.
“You laugh different when you’re around him,” Birdie said, eyeing a seagull overhead.
“What?” Grace swatted her mother’s hand. “No, I don’t.”
“You do. It’s more subdued. Restrained.” Birdie stood and, without asking, took Grace’s empty mug. “Just make sure you’re letting him see you. The real you. The one who’s always loved nothing more than being here.”
