Outside a bike leans against the house. The landlord inspects it. “Last tenants must have left it,” he says. “It’s yours if you want it.”
The bike is a three-speed, not a vintage-cool three speed, just old. Kristie wants it. In Miami Beach Jesse drove a motorcycle, and Kristie used to ride on the back. She loved that. Motorcycles are glamorous, and dangerous, like Jesse himself, like Kristie used to be—like a Technicolor movie. Abandoned old bikes are like black-and-white television with rabbit ears you have to adjust by hand.
Still, it’s something. She rides the bike around most of that first week, putting in applications at North Beacon Oyster, Rockland Cafe, Archer’s on the Pier. One by one they tell her that they’re covered for the summer. All set, they say. All set, all set, all set. They hired everyone they needed by Memorial Day, a week ago. She hears the same at The Landings, Cafe Miranda, In Good Company. She can leave her number on the application, they all say. They’ll call her if anything changes.
Two doors down from her new apartment is a house full of college kids. Lots of cars with stickers that saymiddleburyanduniversity of virginiaand evenharvard. These are the kids who have the jobs that Kristie needs, and they probably don’t even really need them, not the way she does. In the early afternoons they sit outside and drink craft beers from cans, toss a Frisbee back and forth. The girls all have long straight shiny hair and smooth brown legs and complicated sets of bracelets. The boys take off their shirts to play. Their bodies are hairless and slender and at the same time muscular. Kristie feels nostalgic watching them, even though it should be impossible to feel nostalgia for something you never experienced. Those years, the years when she could have been doing what these kids are doing, are lost.
By day she applies for jobs, and at night she eats the cheapest food she can find: Dairy Queen, Subway. She can survive without eating a lot. She can survive without most things. Sometimes, when she’s eating her cheap food, she takes out her collection and looks at it: the printout of Louisa McLean’s bio from the New York University website. The press release from the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, announcing Martin Fitzgerald’s retirement. The directions to the house from downtown Rockland, and the Google Earth printout of the aerial view, and the Zillow page. The photo of Matty McLean winning a cross-country race.
By the fourth day of June she’s worried she’ll run out of money. She’s also bored; there are no more restaurants to apply to. Andmaybethat’swhy she decides finally to bike to Ships View. It’s three and a half miles from her apartment. She wonders if the bike will make it that far; she supposes there’s only one way to find out.
Google Maps did not mention the hills. The ride is basically all rolling hills once she hits North Shore Drive, and she’s really starting to sweat. The glimpses of the water in between the houses, and the houses themselves, are all glorious, but the sky is gray, and it’s humid. She wishes she’d brought water. She passes the turnoff to the Owls Head airport, and then there are more hills, up and down, up and down. She knows she has to take a left on Hidden Beach Road but she has forgotten what comes before it; she worries that she’s missed it. She wonders if she should pull over and look at her phone but she doesn’t want to lose momentum on the hills. And then, yes, here it is, a dirt road, bumpy, uneven. And then the smaller lane turning off the road. And then the house.
She pulls her bike over near a playset with a green slide so she can look at the house without revealing herself.The house.She has Wazed it and googled it and mapped it; she’s thought about it and dreamed about it, but now that she’s standing here looking at it it’s both more and less intimidating than she expected. Gray shingled, five windows across the top, five across the bottom, a semicircle of a garden that’s a riot of color. Cars parked around the circular driveway: a minivan, a Mercedes sedan, a green pickup with the wordsgil’s gardensstenciled on the side. She takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. She can’t go any closer than this, not now, not the first time. She just wanted to see it. There’s a long porch on the back of the house; she knows this from her research. It wraps around one side, and that’s the part she can see. She hears the voices of children farther out, maybe near the water, and as she watches a little girl runs across the lawn, arms pumping.
Kristie’s heart constricts with something complicated and indescribable, but also with a very basic, very primal feeling. The feeling is envy. The people who live in this house have money. Oldmoney. Real money. She has felt like an outsider plenty of times in her life, but never perhaps as she does right now.
“Can I help you?” Kristie jumps, turns around. There’s a man there, a man about her age, maybe a year or two older; maybe five years older. He has longish hair curling a little in the back, and he’s wearing a Portland Sea Dogs baseball hat. His eyes are dark green, almost olive. “You a Peeping Tom?”
“No!” She gestures toward her bike. “No. Not at all. I was out on a bike ride.”
“Onthat?”He nods at her bike, but he’s smiling. “Can’t believe you got very far. What’s that, a one-speed?”
“Three,” she says. “Not to brag or anything.” He smiles harder. “I took a wrong turn. I was just—trying to figure out where I meant to go. Are you Gil?” She points to his shirt, which saysgil’s gardens, just like the truck.
“Nope. Gil’s my boss. I’m Danny.”
“Kristie.”
He holds out his hand, then pulls it back. “I’d shake your hand, but I’ve been pulling weeds all day. And maybe you’re allergic.” He points to the sky, which is darkening quickly, storm clouds racing across. “I’m no weatherman,” he says. “But I’m guessing you don’t want to be stuck out here too long.”
As if on cue, the sky opens up, and the rain comes down.
2.
Louisa
Every summer the McLean family spends two weeks in Louisa’s family’s home on the coast of Maine, in a little hamlet called Owls Head. Louisa has never seen an owl here—she’s been coming since she was a milky-eyed newborn, and actually before that, as a dividing egg; now she is nearly forty. Local lore has it that eighteenth-century explorers saw the shape of an owl’s head in the promontory, so it’s possible she’ll never see an actual owl at all. But she keeps looking, and now her children, who are twelve, ten, and seven, look too. Matty, Abigail, Claire.
The house is called Ships View. Rightly so: from the window in the dining room they see all manner of ships pass, schooners out of Camden and yachts with Caribbean flags and pleasure boats from Rockland or Rockport or farther afield—up from Brunswick or down from Deer Isle or Stonington. And presumably those on the ships can see the house as well.
This summer Louisa has come for ten weeks; Steven, her husband, may come for one, or part of one, at the very end, or may come for none at all, as per their agreement. She might be okay if he doesn’t come at all.
The drive from Brooklyn was long, with traffic at the beginning and then toward the end, as they wound past and through the tourist-clogged towns like Wiscasset and Bath. They left at six in the morning but Louisa was up at four-thirty, packing, worrying, organizing, mainlining coffee. She is tired already, and the thought of dragging in the children’s suitcases, pulling them up the stairs, unpacking the clothes, fills her with an even greater exhaustion: bone deep. After she greets her mother, Annie, Louisa walks directly into the dining room, at the rear of the house, to look at the harbor through the vast picture window. Across the harbor sits the town of Rockland and the Samoset Resort, where Louisa’s parents were married more than forty-five years ago. Louisa and Steven were married in the yard she’s looking at now, in a big white tent, on a windy day in May with a hard, bright sky. She feels her heart begin to lift, picks up her phone, and texts Steven:Got Here Safely. Her fingers hover over the phone’s screen for several seconds, and then she adds,Miss You.
In the harbor she sees two lobster boats, as well as the ferries to Vinalhaven and North Haven. The sliding door to the back porch is open, and as she smells the ocean she feels the energy return to her body. Brooklyn is where she lives most of the year, yes. But this is home.
The children run immediately down to the water, bringing Otis, her parents’ golden retriever, with them. Otis can hardly stand the excitement. Children!Three of them! After such a long winter of near silence, holed up in the little house in Portland, with only a small scrap of yard. The children cross the wide lawn and go through the rickety wooden gate, scampering across the flat rocks to where the water breaks against them. Louisa watches them slowtheir progress as they reach the seaweed-strewn rocks, closer to the water’s edge, and she watches them as they arrive at last at the frigid water.
In Brooklyn, the only body of water nearby is Prospect Park Lake, which sort of counts but doesn’t really. Here, the harbor meets the Atlantic, which then stretches on interminably, at once standoffish and welcoming, mysterious and utterly familiar. Louisa loves this house all the way down to its bones: every carpet and pillow and rug and table; every damp scent and old board game and quilt; the creaky seventh stair and the tiny forgotten extra bathroom with the oddly shaped shower that nobody ever uses, so Louisa knows she can hide there with her secrets and her heartbreaks and her expensive shampoo that the children will waste if they come across it. She loves the handprints on the wall of the half bath off the kitchen, with the names and dates of the children the year they stamped them, and with Louisa’s own tiny handprint too, from the summer she was five. She has loved this house at the age each of her children is now and in the years before that, and in the years after too. To see her children embrace it the same way she always has—well. She can think of no purer joy.
“Looks like they’ve made themselves right at home,” says Annie, coming up behind her daughter and touching Louisa on the shoulder. “I’m glad to see it. I can’t tell you how happy I am to have you here for the whole summer. Now let me have a look at you. Are you thin? You look thin.”
“Oh, please,” says Louisa, laughing, patting her tummy, which is mostly invisible, at least to others. “I’ve put on three pounds since last summer!”
“I think you needed those three pounds.”
Louisa snorts and then looks more closely at her mother. “It’syouwho doesn’t look right, Mom. Are you eating?”
