She turned around to look at him. He held his hands open, grinning.
“It’s still my favorite place in the world. I go for two weeks every summer. I stay at the same Airbnb in Wellfleet. It’s near where the Camp used to be.” He got up, crossed the room, embraced her. “You don’t have to see me,” he said. “But I’ll be there, if you decide that you want to.”
Dismayed, Sarah shook her head. “It’s Ruby’s wedding,” she said. “I can’t—I won’t ruin anything.”
“Of course not.” His tone was indulgent, and his fingers were tracing patterns on her back and her bottom. “I’m just saying, maybe you get to slip away for an hour or two. I could make a picnic. We could go for a swim. You’ll need a break from everything, right?”
Even as she shook her head, Sarah was imagining it: being with Owen in the water again, swimming across the pond. His blue eyes, fringed with dark, wet lashes. How it had felt to kiss him there, their bodies cool, their lips warm.
“Maybe,” she whispered. Owen kissed her, then pressed his finger against her lips, like he was fixing her conditional assent in place. “I’ll keep my phone on. I’ll be waiting.”
Part Three
Met by Moonlight
And so here they were, thought the house. The mother, and her children, and their children. Other adults, some of them strangers, some familiar. One, who’d been a girl, now all grown up. How good it felt to be full again! she thought. How good, to welcome people, to hold them, to do what she’d been built to do. How good it was to feel little feet, trotting up and down her stairs; how good to hear them, splashing in the pool. The hum of conversation, the smells of good things to eat.
You can’t leave me, she thought, to the woman, whose step had gotten slower; who’d started crying in the shower, and alone, in her bed at night; whose scent now included a new, unsettling note that the house recognized with sorrow. You can’t go yet. We have work still to do. We have to fix this. We have to fix them. You need me, and I need you. You need this, all of the people you love around you, and you need me for it to happen. Don’t leave, the house pleaded, in words no one could hear. And, when the woman didn’t answer, she knew it was time to act.
WEDNESDAY
Sam
Sam and Connor left Los Angeles early on a Wednesday morning and landed in Boston at just after one o’clock, which became just after four o’clock, a change that confused and delighted Connor. “But how did we lose three hours?” he asked, his voice plaintive. “Where did they go?”
Collecting their luggage and their rental car went smoothly, and traffic was light. “If this were a Saturday,” Sam said, as they crossed the Bourne Bridge, “we’d be sitting here for hours.” They stopped for lunch in Chatham. Connor had fish and chips, and Sam enjoyed his first oysters of the summer. By eight o’clock, they were pulling into the driveway of the Levy-Weinberg home, and Veronica was waving from the second-floor deck, backlit by the setting sun.
“Hi, Mom,” said Sam, bounding up the stairs to kiss her, hoping he didn’t look as startled as he felt by her appearance. He hadn’t seen his mother in person since his dad’s funeral, before COVID and the lockdowns, and in the intervening months she seemed to have sped through the remainder of late middle age and gone straight to old. Her skin had new wrinkles; her hair was as fine as dandelion fluff, and she moved with the slow, careful gait of an invalid. As he walked up the stairs behind Connor, he wondered what he’d missed, and how it had been for her, alone on the Outer Cape, which emptied out from October to May. Had she been sick? Had she been lonely? Was he a terrible son because he hadn’t come to visit?
Veronica bent down to Connor’s eye level to greet him.
“Hi, Connor, I’m Sam’s mom. We’ve met before, but you might not remember.”
Connor was prepared. He was the kind of child who always liked to know what he’d be doing, and where, and for how long, and with whom, and so Sam always let him know the schedule. During the last half hour of the car ride, Sam had briefed him on the wedding guests, and how all of them were connected. “You were there when Sam and my mom got married, right?” he asked Veronica. “I remember. But I was a little kid then,” Connor said, with all the scorn an eight-year-old can muster for his five-year-old self. Sam saw his mother hide a smile when Connor extended his hand for a shake, and gravely shake it. Connor looked up at Sam and said, “Can we go in the pool now?”