The Malonesusedto be prominent Haven residents, until my asshole father changed all of that. Just by existing, he’d taken away everything I’d worked for over the past year and snatched away my trip overseas. And if I couldn’t get through to him this summer, I couldn’t afford to return to Harvard in the fall.
Just thinking about it made my stomach hurt.
The scenery changed as we drove through rural towns, and as the sun began approaching its race to golden hour, I spotted a sign that gave me butterflies.
welcome to haven beach
where the little river meets america’s third coast
Feeling excited and panicky all at once, I took out my earbuds and leaned my forehead against the glass of the window to greedily soak in the sights. The road hugged the southern bank of the Little River as we drove through Haven’s downtown—where a kaleidoscope of colorful shops and restaurants called to tourists and locals. After a few blocks of bustling sidewalks and shops hawking T-shirts, the river flowed into Haven Harbor, and finally into Lake Michigan. We made the turn onto Shoreline Drive, and after nine months away, I gazed at the slow-rolling waves that crashed on its beachy shore.
My ocean.That’s what I used to call it when I was a kid. Everyone who visits here for the first time is amazed by the size of it.How could all this blue water be a lake when you can’t see the opposite shore? Milwaukee was two and half hours across the water from us by ferry. Chicago was the same distance southwest. But you couldn’t see either one from Michigan.
Nothing but endless blue water.
“Captain Wyrd Jack’s pirate ship,” the driver said, squinting into the distance, where an old packet steamer was moored on the harbor, outside a museum.
Wyrd Jack was one of the town’s big tourism draws, the only man to be officially arrested and charged with piracy on the Great Lakes, back in 1929. He captained a ship that hauled mail to Chicago until he decided he could make a better living by hijacking cargo on Lake Michigan, stealing lumber from the government and alcohol from gangsters... Any boat on the lake was fair game for hijacking. When he finally got caught, he wrote a poem from jail that was said to contain all the information needed to find his most valuable stolen treasure: the priceless lost antiquity known as the Golden Venus, a standing marble sculpture covered in gold. It was found off the coast of Italy in the 1500s, claimed by Charles V, Holy Roman emperor, then it went missing for hundreds of years... until Wyrd Jack stole it off another smuggling boat passing through the Great Lakes. He conspired with his pregnant wife, Mabel, to hide the golden statue, leaving nothing but his prison poem to point at its location.
Thousands of treasure hunters had shown up here from around the world to find the Golden Venus. No one had gotten lucky yet. At least, not when it came to the statue; it wasn’t the only thing Wyrd Jack had smuggled over the years.
“Did you hear someone in your town found a single bar of gold in a sewer drain a few weeks ago? Been speculation on the localnews over whether it was a part of a bigger cache of gold buried by Wyrd Jack back in the day.”
Jazmine had texted me the news story last month.
“Believe it or not, I’m descended from him—Wyrd Jack,” I told the driver. “He was my great-great-grandfather.”
“No lie? That’s crazy. You know where the rest of the gold is? Or maybe where the mother lode is buried, that priceless Roman statue that Wyrd Jack smuggled—some ancient goddess of love?”
“Afraid I don’t.” Not for lack of trying. The gold bar that had recently been found was a fluke. Golden Venus was the real treasure. Everyone in my family had looked for it. When I was a kid, I spent most of my summers combing the beaches, chasing down clues to its existence with a group of four friends. We called ourselves the Wags—short for Scallywags—and growing up, we sometimes pretended to be pirates ourselves and hid our own “treasures.”
I was Wag number one. Jazmine, the person whoshouldbe giving me a ride home, she was a Wag, too. Another old friend, Benny, was Wag three. But it was the fourth Wag who truly matched my own zeal for treasure hunting back in the day, my oldest friend in town, a towheaded kid named Seb Jansen.
When we were young, Seb and I were inseparable, daring to go places that the others wouldn’t, in search of the gold. He had a big personality and tons of energy to explore and see new things. My nana encouraged our adventures and even gave me and Seb a matching pair of Blackbeard decoder rings from a 1940s radio show about pirates. I still wore it on a chain around my neck, along with a ring that belonged to my deceased mother. And as I gazed out the window in the back of the rideshare, I couldn’thelp but run my fingers over the decoder ring’s warm metal and wonder what Seb was doing with his life.
No telling. Seb left both me and the Wags behind years ago.
The driver turned onto the main drag that ran perpendicular to the public beach. I caught a glimpse of a Slushie-red lighthouse as we traveled south along the coast, where sleek resorts and lake homes faced the water. Toward the end of all the newer developments were smaller beach cottages that had been around since the late 1800s, perched on the edge of the sand and surrounded by wild grass. As the car slowed, I spotted my nana’s house, painted various jewel-like shades of blue and surrounded by a white picket fence.
Heron Cottage.
Two tiny bedrooms, one tiny bath. Named after the great blue herons that lived around the lake. Females often made nests in our trees. I remembered nearly running into one of the big birds on the beach the last time I was at the cottage—I’d been walking around in a fog, tying up loose ends after Nana’s funeral. My heart squeezed at the thought of her, and it was all I could do to endure a fresh wave of grief that washed over me as I hefted my luggage out of the car.
“Right on the water,noice,” the driver said, making a half-concerted effort to help me with my bags as he looked around. “You ever rent this? You could make a ton of cash.”
“It’s a private home.”
“Shame.”
I thanked him for the ride and tipped him on the rideshare app to get him to go away, sighing when the wheels of his car briefly spun in the sandy gravel of the driveway. Then I quickly took stock of the cottage while digging out my old keys.
All the plantings around the front of the home were overgrown and spilling across the stony walkway, spiky sedge and butterfly milkweed. We didn’t have much grass, but what wedidhave should’ve been mown. Our family lawyer handled most of the probating of my nana’s will and was supposed to have hired lawn care services.
Guess I’d be doing it myself.
Even the cottage’s mailbox was overflowing. “What the hell am I paying you for, Mr. Kimbell?” I whispered to myself. I supposed I’d add “book a meeting with the attorney” to my to-do list.
At least I’d made it here. I stuck my key in the front door and inhaled familiar scents before I even stepped inside. Old wood and my grandmother’s oil paints, the smell of my childhood. For a fraction of a moment, some sort of internal autopilot kicked in: I was home, which meant Nana was just there, inside, waiting for me. A strange, disconcerting feeling followed when my sluggish brain remembered she’d never welcome me home again. I paused at the door as grief crept out of the corners of my heart and ambushed me with hurt.
