“Let’s flip a coin and see who gets to pick her room first,” Mom said, and I won the toss. My room would be—could be—overlooking the water. I could wake up and see Dad go out to sea. Yes, Mom said, of course I could paint it purple. Yes, that big bed was for just me. She let us jump on the beds and ooh and aah over the bathrooms. There was a cupola with a ladder to peek out. We splashed in the ocean, and then Mom took us shopping for clothes, a bribe even my eight-year-old self could see.
Still, I couldn’t remember such a happy day with Mom. “Just us girls,” she said. “It’ll be like this all the time.”
“Except for Beatrice,” I said. Mom ignored me.
But when we got home that night, I knew I couldn’t leave. The birds, the chipmunks I had worked so hard on taming, the blue heron that walked slowly along the edge of the pond . . . how could I leave this place?
And, if I moved to Provincetown, who would my father have? HandsomeBoy was a good dog, but Dad would be so lonely. Mom already had someone else, but Daddy would just fish and come home to a dark, empty house. So we would stay. Obviously, we’d stay. This was our home. We could visit Mom. It might even be fun.
“I don’t care how fancy the new house is,” I said to Hannah that night. “This is home.”
She murmured in agreement, but she was almost asleep.
Which was why I was gobsmacked when, the night before we had to meet with the lawyers in Orleans, Hannah announced she’d be going with Mom.
“What? But you can’t!” I yelped, bursting into tears. “We have to stay together!”
“Then come to Provincetown,” she said in her calm way. “Don’t you want to start over?”
“Don’t you want to stay here?”
“Not really, Lillie. Here kind of sucks for me.” She rolled over in her bed and looked at me, her face soft in the gentle glow from the night-light.
“What are you talking about?”
She looked at me almost sadly because I was so dumb. “You don’t know what it’s like to be ugly,” she said.
“You’re not ugly!”
“Yes, I am. Look at this nose. My whole face is weird.” Okay, she did have a big nose. And she was very tall, already taller than Mom. “I have one friend, and she’s been giving me the cold shoulder since September.”
“What about me? I’m your friend!”
She sighed. “I know. But even if it’s just a town away, Provincetown is . . . new. A fresh start.”
Fresh start? I was aghast. I knew she didn’t have a lot of friends at school, but that was because she didn’t need them, not with me! She got good grades. Teachers liked her. We had fun, pretty much, though yeah, for the past couple of years she hadn’t been as keen on playing our old games in the woods. “You can’t leave, Hannah,” I said, my voice thin and small.
“P-town will be better for me,” she said. “Mom has a point about being with her. I can’t see telling Dad I got my period and he needs to run to the general store and get me some maxi pads.” She rolled onto her back and looked at our sloping ceiling. “Maybe it’ll be easier, starting over where no one knows us.”
“I’m not leaving,” I said. “I could never leave!”
She gave me a kind look. “Well, then, we’ll live apart.” Her voice roughened with tears. “It’s only fifteen minutes, Lils. Don’t worry. We’ll talk every day and see each other at least a couple times a week. We’ll just have two houses now.”
She was so serene about her decision. I was furious. I told her she was my sister, my big sister, and she was abandoning me and Daddy. She was going to live with a stranger! Our mother had been cheating on Dad! Didn’t she have any loyalty? How could she leave this place?
Hannah was unmoved. “I’m sorry, Lillie,” she said. “My mind is made up.”
To be fair, back then, our home was dark and poorly insulated, filled with drafty windows and iffy electricity. You couldn’t use the blow-dryer if the stove was on. The back steps were crumbling. We were always cold in the winter, as the furnace couldn’t get the temperature above sixty-three, and Dad’s solution was “put on another sweater.” The modernity of my mother’s new house, the light, the glamour of Provincetown had its appeal, sure.
But what about the woods and the pond and the breeze and the adventures? What about Daddy? There was no way I would go to Provincetown and stab my father in the heart.