The Summer House Read online

She never should have let Ned talk her into staying late for his team’s lacrosse game. It was a Friday night—she knew what summer traffic was like on a Friday. Weekenders, renters, and wash-ashores, like her family, knew that once you hit the Westerly Bypass, the brief-but-eternal four-mile connector that delivered you from Stonington, Connecticut, to Westerly, Rhode Island, you were pretty much screwed. She reached across to the passenger side and rested her hand on Arthur’s cinnamon fur. The terrier barely stirred in his old-dog sleep.

  “How much longer, Mom?” Ned asked loudly. His earbuds were in. As far as she could tell, he hadn’t looked up from his iPad since Old Saybrook. Which was about where she’d given up trying to engage her two teens in conversation, the only other exchange occurring when she’d swerved into a rest stop and begged Ned to throw his lacrosse bag in the trunk. Little good that did—the sour smell of athletic shoes was still ripe in the Volvo. Paige rolled down her window.

  “Hopefully we won’t be sitting here much longer.” What she really wanted to say was, If only you’d listened to me earlier . . .

  In the rearview mirror, she watched Emma sweep back her long red hair as she pulled her gaze slowly from her book. The fourteen-year-old tipped her nose up to the breeze; Paige knew she was trying to detect salt air. But they weren’t close enough to the summer house yet.

  “How’s Huck?” Paige asked.

  Emma had only just plucked her summer reading list out of the mailbox days earlier, and already she was more than halfway through it. She dog-eared her page and met Paige’s gaze in the mirror. “Huck and Jim are on the Ohio River, and the fog is rolling in. Huck is trying to decide whether to go ahead without Jim or stay on the raft.”

  Beside Emma, Ned groaned. “The raft. Do they ever get off that damn raft?”

  “Ned,” Paige warned.

  Emma rolled her eyes. “If you’d actually read the book, you’d know that they do. Besides, Huck is about to go ahead in the canoe.”

  Ned threw up his hands. “See? Now they’ll be stuck in a canoe.”

  Paige adjusted the mirror and smiled at them. Her children, separated only by a year, were so different. Ned, her easygoing firstborn, who jogged headlong into life like it was a giant game to be won and who was now a full head taller than his mother. Why had no one ever warned her how disconcerting it would be to stand on tiptoe to hug the very son you had nestled in your arms what felt like only yesterday? Ah, yesterday: the day she’d found a bottle of vodka in Ned’s closet. Paige winced. She still hadn’t told David. She’d stumbled over it while packing for the trip, stuffed in the corner beneath his tennis shoes. When she’d grasped the bottle in her hand, the clear liquid sloshed around inside, just as her stomach had. Paige knew he’d been to high school parties where kids drank, so she and David made a point to talk to both of their kids about it regularly. We’d rather you didn’t, but if you do . . . Don’t get in the car with anyone who’s been drinking . . . Call us, no matter what time. But until now she’d never caught Ned with any evidence. It came like a kick in the teeth.

  But it was also the day before David’s big interview at the university, and Paige was elbow deep at work before leaving for vacation, so she’d put it off. Though, truthfully, she’d hoped in the meantime Ned would come clean when he discovered the bottle missing. Unlike Emma, who would never do such a thing to begin with, Ned would react when he discovered the alcohol missing: either with outrage that she’d “invaded his privacy” or with a rehearsed hangdog expression accompanied by a lame excuse. Something. But at the end of the day when he’d come home from lacrosse camp, wolfed down dinner, and later put away the clean laundry she’d strategically left by his closet without so much as a guilty glance, Paige was stunned. She studied him now in the rearview mirror.

  David would be coming up tomorrow. They’d confront Ned together, as privately as they could without the rest of the family sticking their beaks in. Christ. Wouldn’t his uncle Sam get a kick out of it.

  The long line of cars in front of her crept along, and she shifted impatiently in her seat. Her back ached. She needed to use the bathroom. She couldn’t help but wonder about the Wheelers’ spaniel, whose broken pelvis she’d operated on that morning. As soon as they got to the house she would call Janie, her head vet tech, to check in.

  The Jeep in front of them stopped short again. Paige stomped the brakes. Behind her, Ned’s iPad crashed to the floor.

  “Mom! Geez,” he cried, retrieving it from under her seat.

  “I know, I know,” Paige snapped irritably. This stretch was the part of the trip she hated most. She cursed David silently, then felt bad. Hopefully the interview would go well. He needed the work, and it wasn’t just about the money.

  What they needed was to get to the summer house. The house—a gray, cedar-shingled two-story tucked back along the bluffs of Weekapaug Beach—had been in the Merrill family since Richard’s parents had had the foresight to buy it from a retired fisherman during a summer visit in the early 1920s. Originally a rustic two-room fishing cottage, it had since survived not only the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 but also two restorations and three subsequent decades of the Merrill family. Although its improvements over the years, including a second-story addition and gambrel roof, had allowed it a somewhat more stately façade, Flossy insisted that the house maintain its original carriage, akin to what she referred to as an “aged sea captain”: weathered but wise.

  At the house, Paige knew her mother would already be stationed at the kitchen window watching the driveway. Florence, or Flossy, as all three of her children called her, would have been up since sunrise washing linens, straightening rooms, and ordering their enduring father, Richard, to the overgrown shrubs with hedge trimmers or into the depths of the garage to locate the ancient blue-and-white enamel lobster pot. It was the same routine every summer. The dust covers would have been plucked from the sofas and the scuffed, sloping hardwood floors swept clean of every granule of beach sand. It was nearing six o’clock now; Paige shuddered at the thought of all those bustling, efficient hours.

  Clem would probably roll in first with the kids. It would be good to finally set eyes on her. Clem was a terrible liar. She couldn’t possibly be faring as well as she insisted she was. As for her brother, Sam, Paige wasn’t sure she had the energy today. It didn’t matter that she was forty-five and he was forty-two; he still knew exactly how to get under her skin. He and Evan had arrived the night before, and she would bet on finding them settled on the back porch with cocktails, cool and crisp in their insufferable Nanny Reds, while she and the kids unfolded themselves from the sticky, messy car in their standard family-vacation dishevelment. Just thinking about it, she tucked a stray hair back into her ponytail. For Sam, a vacation at the summer house seemed to Paige like just a continuation of his life—business travel, car services, and long lunch meetings (plated lunches in real restaurants, unlike the brown-bag tuna sandwiches she threw together each morning). Work weeks that ended lingering over romantic dinners with Evan in dark Georgetown bistros or weekend jaunts to Rehoboth Beach. Sam could wax poetic all he wanted about the tortures of his sixty-hour week; she was pretty sure he never drove home covered in pet hair and reeking of cat urine.

  Eventually they edged their way to the traffic light that marked the end of the Westerly Bypass, and moments later—magically—they were swooping past the Westerly Airport and turning left toward town. As was tradition, they’d drive through Watch Hill village first. Salt ponds and marinas cropped up along the road, and the shingled New England houses grew more stately as they approached the historic resort village. Moments later they coasted down Bay Street into the charming heart of the village, and Paige was finally able to let the air out of her lungs. To her right, Little Narragansett Bay sparkled, its pristine boats nearly glittering on their lines, and just beyond it at the edge of the cove, the venerable Watch Hill Yacht Club. To her left, the three-tiered, crisp-white porches of the Watch Hill Inn echoed the white masts and sails of
the harbor it overlooked. The decks were already teeming with diners. She drove past Bay Street’s charming storefronts, slowing to peek at her favorite, the 1916 Olympia Tea Room, where she, Flossy, and Clem would occasionally escape for a lunch free of men and children. Tourists strolled the sidewalk in their summer pastels, some armed with ice cream cones from St. Clair Annex. Up ahead, at the northern point of the street, the famed antique carousel loomed.

  “Look guys, the horses are flying!” she said. Even as teens, both kids perked up in the backseat. Tucked on the corner beside the East Beach entrance, the Watch Hill carousel was the oldest in North America. Paige rolled down her window to hear the old-fashioned music. The hand-carved wooden horses still sported manes and tails of real horsehair, their saddles and bridles repainted in the same primary colors they had been when Paige was small enough to swing her leg over the saddle and try her hand at catching the brass ring. Past the carousel, Bay Street forked left and continued uphill along the ocean bluff, giving way to a strip of imposing Victorian mansions behind stone walls and private gates, perched along the bluff so that the Atlantic surf merged with blue sky into one shimmering backdrop. Paige felt her breath escape her. At the crest of the hill, they rolled up to the titanic façade of the historic Ocean House hotel. Its canary-yellow clapboards and sweeping white porches were the most eminent harbingers of summer in the seaside village. She slowed as a rush of childhood memories filled her: sitting on the grand porch among the resort guests as they sipped gimlets and watched the sun set over Narragansett Bay; the scrape of the heavy wooden chairs along the deck as she stood up to lean over the railing and gaze at the crashing surf below; the squeals of laughter when she and Clem hid beneath the billiards table in the giant hall rec room as Sam and the other young guests scratched the flannel surface with their pool cues, while at the front of the hotel’s first floor, in the paneled main dining room, her parents and grandparents lingered over diminutive glasses of brandy. Each Ocean House memory was as gilded as the seaside hamlet it overlooked.

  “Welcome home,” she whispered to herself.

  Minutes later, when they finally pulled into her parents’ crushed-shell driveway and came to a stop at the cedar-shingled cottage, Ned removed his earbuds and rolled down his window. And Emma, without looking up from her book, closed her eyes dreamily. “Yep, I can smell the salt. We’re here.”

  Flossy

  The lobsters clicked and clambered over one another in the old farmhouse sink. Flossy tried not to look at them. Best not to make eye contact before the water was at full boil. Overhead, the ceiling thumped and thudded as the first two of her grandchildren dragged their suitcases down the upstairs hall. Ned and Emma would be settling into the nautical depths of the red-and-blue great room, the cavernous sleeping space over the garage, lined military style with bunk beds where all the grandkids could be tucked safely beneath the eaves and crisp whale motif blankets. Paige would be settling into the yellow gingham room with the queen bed overlooking the back lawns and the beach below the bluff. Flossy let out a long breath. There was just one more carload to go before all of her offspring were accounted for.

  Paige had looked road-worn to Flossy upon her arrival. Her curly hair, despite being pulled back in a childish elastic, had escaped and sprung out at curious angles around her head, not unlike that of her wirehaired dog, Arthur. And her eyes—there was tiredness behind the determined blue glint she’d inherited from her mother. On the one hand, Paige was the one Flossy probably worried least about. She’d graduated from Vassar, where she’d gotten her degree in fine arts. She then marched straight into the veterinary sciences school at Cornell, ignoring her family’s raised eyebrows, and without so much as an explanation as to how her years spent in campus studios painting colonial-era farmyard animals had suddenly translated into the study of veterinary medicine. It was a move that relieved Flossy as much as it had saddened her husband, Richard. She supposed she’d liked those paintings about as much as a person could be expected to, but really, how many bovine portraits did Richard expect their eldest child to sell? Paige had been a headstrong child, moving quietly but stubbornly down paths of her own choosing, thankfully not derailed by the need to people-please, as her younger sister, Clem, had been. Or be the life of the party, as Samuel had proved exceedingly skilled at. Paige ran a solid domestic-animal veterinary practice in the village of Litchfield, Connecticut, where she also raised two bright children, and somehow also carried on a marriage to a man Flossy could not quite put her thumb on, but who seemed agreeable enough to roll along in the efficient wake that followed her daughter. No, Flossy had not spent a single sleepless night on Paige. But still—those deep circles under her eyes were unusual.

  * * *

  Sam had arrived the night before with Evan. Their arrival was always so civilized compared to the others’. Sam had stood on the front step and called out boyishly, “Flossy, Pop . . . we’re home!” It got her every time. He’d picked her up and spun her around the living room while Evan stood patiently to the side, flowers in one hand and chilled wine in the other. Evan fussed over her new linen capris, which she’d purchased in one of the Watch Hill boutiques just that morning after fretting over the tangerine color. It had seemed so bright, but she’d decided that bright was exactly what they needed this summer. There was no discussion of the disappointments the boys had suffered earlier that spring, as suggested, strongly, by Richard the night before their arrival. Flossy was desperate to know more of what had transpired on what was to be the last of many trips to Austin, Texas.

  “Give them time to settle,” Richard had advised. “Let’s focus on welcoming them back.”

  So welcome them she did. There had been gin and tonics on the back porch and grilled salmon for supper. Later, they’d taken the sandy trail that awaited them at the far end of the yard, where the beach grass grew scraggly and dense, scraping against their bare legs as they made their way down its steep, winding path to the shore. They’d watched the sun go down from the dunes, enjoying the quiet of the empty beach and joking about how loud tomorrow would be when the grandkids all rolled in. Flossy had kept her promise, biting her tongue when the subject of grandchildren arose, trying not to search their expressions too obviously. And if disappointment had flickered within her when neither Evan nor Sam broached the topic, she was certain to keep it cloaked. Flossy always kept her word.

  That morning, before the others arrived, Evan had risen early and brewed espresso, setting out the small Lenox cups he knew Flossy liked. How she loved that man! Ever since, he’d trailed her quietly through her lengthy to-do list: making beds and putting fresh towels in the bathrooms, stubbornly ignoring her hints to go join Samuel on the beach, and smart enough to steer clear of her monogrammed heirloom linens with the iron. Those she saved only for the downstairs powder room. They’d been her grandmother’s, and she kept them tucked away in acid-free tissue paper in the antique highboy in the upstairs hall. Everyone in the family knew not to use them to dry their hands. But although Evan’s polite assistance sometimes flustered her—couldn’t he just join the others down on the beach and leave her to set the table the way she liked?—she couldn’t help but notice how he grabbed the broom when Samuel eventually traipsed through the back screen door late that afternoon, newly freckled, smelling of sunscreen, and tracking beach sand across her ancient hardwoods. He’d slapped Samuel playfully on the rear end and proceeded to sweep every last grain into the dustpan. Yes, Evan was a roll-up-your-sleeves kind of guy. A giver. He’d make a wonderful father. If only.

  Now, Clem was the only one still on the road. Alone, with two small children. She was the one who had kept Flossy awake the night before. Oh, who was she kidding? She’d been keeping Flossy awake since that day when everything changed.

  The call had come just over a year ago, in the spring. It had been an ordinary day in the way most days seemed ordinary to Flossy since she had retired the year before as the public high school librarian. She’d been in the garden, b
ent over a patch of dandelion weed that had rooted itself precariously close to her tender toad lilies; how she’d not seen this offensive patch against the cultivated backdrop of her yard was beyond her. She was on her knees with a trowel when Richard had opened the back door and called out to her.

  Flossy could not remember what he’d said exactly. Something about Clem. What she did remember was momentarily turning her attention back to the obstinate weed, determined to remove it before trudging up to the patio where she would take a break on the lounge and take her youngest daughter’s call. She hadn’t heard from Clem all week, and it was an oddly warm day; she could use an iced tea and a chat.

  But then Richard came up behind her, his tall frame shading the garden bed for a dark instant. And in that moment, as she stood and turned to face his wet eyes behind his reading glasses, she knew that whatever he had to say would alter her forever.

  “Tell me!”

  Richard, never one to be without words, could only shake his head. She’d hesitated, fumbling to remove her dirt-caked garden gloves before taking the phone. Before putting it to her ear and saying Clem’s name.

  * * *

  That had been fifteen months ago—fifteen months and a funeral and countless visits ago. Months of worrying and praying and waiting for the easy laugh, which had once rolled so regularly out of her youngest child’s mouth, to return. A laugh that usually came so easily to her third child that Flossy had often wondered at the source of such happiness, and if she had been somehow cheated out of it. A constant flow of cheer had seemed to surround Clem and her tidy Boston-based family, where handsome, affable Ben worked as a partner at Howell and Mansfield Law Firm, and Clem had found her greatest joy staying home to raise her young family.

  In the weeks after Ben’s accident, Flossy and Richard moved in with Clem and the children in an attempt to keep things as normal as their new normal allowed: putting dinner on the table, running baths, turning the pages of bedtime stories. During those moments Clem would appear from her bedroom like a ghost, coaxing broccoli into George’s mouth at dinner. Tucking her children onto her lap as they recited the words to Goodnight Moon. Running a brush through Maddy’s baby-fine hair after a warm bath. But then she’d fade away from them, returning to the dark recesses of her room the moment the children were tucked into their beds. She was always just beyond Flossy’s reach.