“No. CiCi’s a real estate agent.”
Good grief, Maddie thought. Word seemed to travel around the Vineyard faster than it did around the campus at Green Hills. She would not have thought that possible.
“She’s a good person,” Lisa continued. “Though I’ve heard she can come across a little . . . strong.”
“Thanks for the warning. I’ll be sure to find a hiding place.”
“There’s a great little place off the back bedroom,” Lisa said, “but only if you know how to get there. Nancy used to let my daughter go in and play with anything she wanted. Loren loves it there.”
Maddie checked a knee-jerk move to say, “No! No one’s allowed in there but me!” Which she quickly realized sounded rather pitiful.
Then Lisa waved. “Gotta go check on Charlie. Good luck with your paperwork.” Then she trundled down the path, leaving Maddie still startled by her reaction.
* * *
The line at the gray-shingled shack with the bright blue trim was long. As Maddie inched closer to the fish-shaped wooden sign that hung near the entrance, she tuned out the happy lilt of summer voices and let her thoughts drift back to her “hobbit house,” her one-room special place, where she’d loved talking to the yarn dolls Grandma Nancy made for her. She told her dolls everything, like how much fun she had at Grandma’s and how she wished Daddy was there, too. But he had to teach summer school in July and August, and her mother said it was fun to sneak away—just the girls—and jump into the ocean waves with Grandma. She was right.
When they got back to Green Hills, Maddie and Mommy always spent Labor Day weekend with Daddy at a lake in the Berkshires, where the water was ice-cold and there were bugs that bit her, leaving little pink lumps that itched at night. She tried not to cry, because Mommy said it was Daddy’s only chance to have a vacation and she wouldn’t want to spoil it for him. One thing Maddie hadn’t minded was going in the rowboat with Daddy to fish. She wouldn’t have liked to put the worm on the hook, but he did that for her. The best fun was surprising Mommy after they’d docked the boat and walked up the rocky slope to the rental cottage and Daddy called out: “Toss the coals on the grill, Hannah! We caught dinner!”
After her mother died, Maddie tried to reinvent the hobbit house in her bedroom closet in Green Hills. She moved her shoes and the storage bins where her winter clothes were kept in summer, and where her summer things went in winter. But even doing that didn’t leave much room. So she put the toys, most of her dolls, and all the books except for one under her bed, which left enough space in the closet for two dolls, the book, and her. When Daddy saw it, however, he said if she went inside and closed the door she might suffocate. It was no fun leaving the door open, so Maddie abandoned it.
“Next!” A man’s voice pierced her ears and reinstated her attention.
She stepped forward. “One lobster roll. And a bowl of chowder. Both to go.”
“The roll comes with chips.”
“That’s fine.”
Once back at the cottage, her dinner in the refrigerator, her lunch on the table, Maddie sat down and reflected on all the memories she’d recollected in the past twenty-four hours. If anyone had asked—and more than once, they probably had—what her childhood had been like, chances were she’d had little to tell. Rather than dwelling on what, if anything, that might imply, she picked up the lobster roll and took a bite. Like so many flashbacks she’d been having, the taste was happily familiar.
When she finished eating, she went directly to the closet in her mother’s bedroom.
In the back, she found the door—“The perfect size for the Seven Dwarfs,” her grandmother had said. Maddie opened it, crouched, and wriggled in.
The room was much the same, though the cot was now covered with a puffy pink blanket. Several of Maddie’s favorite yarn dolls, however, were nestled in a basket that sat atop the seaman’s chest. She remembered every one of them.
Setting the basket on the floor, she lifted the lid of the chest; her heart quivered, her eyes teared up. Inside were her childhood clothes, including the pink shorts with the drawstring waist and the white T-shirt with the big sequined star. She held the T-shirt up and wondered how she’d ever been that small. Below the clothes were a few dozen children’s books: Golden Books, Sesame Street, Dr. Seuss’sThe Cat in the HatandHorton Hears a Who!Grandma Nancy had read Maddie a whole book every night when they were there. When she reached “The End,” Grandma kissed three of her fingertips and touched them to Maddie’s forehead while whispering a word Maddie didn’t know but sounded like it was about a cow. Whatever it had meant, whenever she heard it, Maddie fell sound asleep.
Picking up a doll with orange yarn hair, she stretched out on the cot. Unlike in earlier years, it wasn’t long enough now to fit her legs past her knees. So she curled up, hugged the doll close to her chest, and shut her eyes.
Which was when it occurred to her that her mother’s closet—the secret passageway leading to her hobbit house—had been empty. Gone were her mother’s clothes. Gone were boxes of her mother’s shoes and purses and memories like the high school yearbook that Maddie liked to look through because many of its pages included drawings that her mother had made of popular venues on the island: the Flying Horses Carousel, the Capawock movie theater, the lighthouse at the cliffs. Maddie hadn’t seen any of those things in Green Hills; they must not have crossed over to the mainland the way her mother had.
And now they were gone from the Vineyard, too. Maybe it had made Grandma sad to see them there. So she’d packed them away. Or thrown them out.
Chapter 5
The next thing Maddie knew, an onrush of muted shouting filled the room. It was nearly dark; she knew right away that outside it was sunset. And that she’d slept.
Rubbing the remnants of sleep from her eyes, she untangled her body, shook a few kinks from her limbs, and ran her fingers through her hair. Picking up the two yarn dolls, she crawled back through the tiny door and into the hollow closet.
Once again in the living room, she set the dolls on the sofa as if to make it look like she had company. Then she opened the front door, where she was greeted by a full, day’s end panorama—a glow of pink, yellow, and tangerine blazed across the evening sky, accompanied by a symphony of cheering from an audience that stood on the shore, many of whom were on the water’s edge, as if that would bring them closer to the enchantment, help them see better, help them see more.
It was the same shoreline from which Maddie’s grandmother wanted her ashes scattered into Menemsha Bight. At sunset.
According to Maddie’s hazy memory, no one knew when or how the tradition of clapping for the sunset had begun; someone might have started it spontaneously, without intention. But people had so much fun with it that island chatter had spread the word about its spectacle, long before social media could have sent it spiraling, viraling as the most striking sunset in the universe. The sight was downright magnificent, climaxing when the orange ball dropped into the sea like a flaming rock.
Maddie might have forgotten this if it hadn’t been for her mother’s penchant for painting the scene. And yet, no matter how many Hannah Clieg canvases existed of the last arc of the sun as it dipped and bowed into the water, to Maddie, each one had looked different. In fact, a Menemsha sunset still hung over her bed in Green Hills. Unlike her father, she had not dismissed her mother from her life. Or her love of the times they’d spent on the island, a love that had resurfaced—and seemed to be growing—with each hour she was there.
