Page 19 of The Treasure House

“I’ll sleep in the other room. Or is that one full of clothes too?”

Jake had stayed out on the landing, at the head of the stairs. He seemed like he needed to be close to an exit, as though he felt like the junk was closing in on him. He was holding on to the banister and looking tense.

“You’re really still thinking about taking the place?” he asked me quietly while Flo examined the second attic room, which was filled with books, toys, snow globes, and other random detritus. “Even now that you’ve seen it?”

It was a good question.

In most respects, the house was a total nightmare. And a money pit. The windows up here were weather damaged, and I thought I’d seen water stains on the ceilings; the walls needed repainting and the floorboards resurfacing…

None of it would be cheap. And how long would it take me to clear out the junk to even get to the real work? I’d be sorting bags and boxes and garbage for months.

And yet…

It would be a house of my very own. A place no one could take away from me. I could wake up knowing I’d be here at the end of the day, the week, the year. I felt my throat get tight at the thought. To have a place that was ours, somewhere safe and sure, where Flo and I could live our lives without worrying about our home being taken away from us… It made me shaky with feelings I couldn’t even name.

The little attic room Flo was poking around in looked directly into the branches of the oak tree, and the light was tinged a hushed green. I could hear birdsong through the broken window and see the woods behind the wild backyard. I tried to imagine the room without the junk. It was small but cozy, an attic room that belonged to another age. From here, Flo could see the fall leaves blaze and the winter snow swirl; she could sleep to the lullaby of the sea. Maybe we could refurbish one of those brass bed frames in the laundry for her.

All this place required of me was courage and hard work.

A lot of hard work, I thought, as I took in the landing full of junk. Which I’d have to do while working full time and raising a kid. And then there was the issue of money. Could I actually afford to fix this place up?

But surely living in a place I owned that I couldn’t afford to fix up was better than paying exorbitant rent on a place that would never be mine.

“Mom!” Flo’s excited shriek rang through the small attic room. “Look!” She brandished an old magazine. “It’s that lady you like from the old movies. The one who was splashing about in the rain, singing.”

I took the old magazine from her. It was from summer 1952, the colors lurid bright and plasticky. “No, that was Debbie Reynolds. This is Jane Powell.”

“Huh.” Flo held up another magazine. “You know these people too?”

“Sure, that’s Doris Day and Rock Hudson.”

“How do you know?”

“We didn’t have cable when I was a kid. I watched a lot of old movies.” I opened the magazine she’d handed me. The fragrance of dusty newsprint wafted up.

“The people who lived here must have liked old movies too. There’s a whole stack of them.” Flo wrinkled her nose as she looked down at Doris and Rock. She hadn’t taken to musicals.

“You want to see more?” Jake grumbled impatiently. “Or do you want me to stand here watching you read magazines all day?”

“You need a snack,” Flo scolded him. “I think you’re hangry.” She handed me the other magazine and joined Jake on the landing, where he was still holding the banister and looking like he wanted out of here as fast as possible.

“I’m not… hangry, I just don’t want to stand in all this culch all day.”

“No one asked you to show us around,” I reminded him, tossing the magazines back into the attic room.

Six

OXEYE, MAINE, 1953

Marly Orcutt was sick of being the baby of the family. She was fourteen (almost fifteen) this summer, but everyone still treated her like a little kid. Her cousins Priscilla and Sylvie were their usual stuck-up, snotty selves, acting like they were all grown up while Marly was just a pipsqueak. Which she wasn’t. She was almost as tall as Sylvie already, for Pete’s sake. And she’d recently bought a bra.

Marly had spent every summer at Oxeye since she could remember. Her grandparents had left the house to her mom and her Aunt Betty. Every June, as soon as school was over, Mom packed Marly and her three older brothers into the station wagon, along with Happy and Yappy, their two irritable old terriers, and they headed for Maine. Aunt Betty was usually there already, since Priscilla and Sylvie’s private school let out early, and Marly’s cousins always claimed the twin beds in the attic room under the white oak. Mom and Aunt Bet slept together in the big room up front when their husbands stayed in town for work, and the boys got the second attic room, piled in like dogs in a kennel. When Marly’s father and Uncle Don came down for the weekends, Marly’s brothers were moved to the porch and Mom and Dad slept in their attic room. Marly was always relegated to a folding cot in with the girls—who always made it clear they didn’t want her there.

Marly was what her mother called “a late child” and her brothers called “an accident.” But Marly had decided “afterthought” would be the most appropriate term, given that’s how she got treated. Once they even forgot her entirely in all the chaos of packing up the house and left her behind in Oxeye. She’d had to go down to the general store and use the pay phone to call someone to come back and get her. Old Mr. Laughton had lent her the money for the call, and she’d called her dad’s work number, knowing that Mom and the boys would still be on the road. Her dad had been busy, but his secretary had said to sit tight at the house and someone would come get her—Marly’s mom would surely realize and turn around before she finished the near four-hour trip to Boston. It had taken two hours: one to notice Marly was missing and another to drive back. The year after that, Marly noticed they’d installed a phone in the house on Tinker Street.

This year, they were rolling into Oxeye on the nineteenth of June, Marly crammed in the back with the dogs, her brothers Bobby and Virgil taking over the entire backseat, and her eldest brother Paul driving like he was in a bumper car at the fair. Mom kept letting out noises of distress and grabbing at the steering wheel. Doris Day was on the radio, singing some sappy song about starlight and love. Mom loved Doris Day and Patti Page and all kinds of squares. Marly preferred it when her brother Bobby took over the radio. She liked it when Johnnie Ray was sobbing away, and she really liked the Orioles and the Du Droppers. But Mom didn’t let Bobby at the radio dial if she could help it; she said all that wailing gave her a headache. Mom got a headache a lot. Eighteen-year-old Bobby was what Mom called a “handful,” even though Marly thought sixteen-year-old Virgil was the real troublemaker. He was just so good at it that Mom never caught on. Marly wished her father would come away with them for the summer, and not just for the occasional weekend, because he was a pushover compared to Mom. Bobby in particular could always get around him. Mostly because Dad liked keeping the peace, and if there was one thing Bobby could do, it was upset people.

Marly shuffled the dogs out of the way and pressed herself to the window as they reached the coast. She loved the first glimpse of the bay, the foaming cobalt flashes through the trees and the yachts flying toward the horizon. She held her breath as she looked for all the familiar landmarks: the roadside stalls with their turnip greens and asparagus, rhubarb and bunches of blue flag iris; the fishing tackle shack; and the elegant sweep of the Saint-Cyr resort on the spit just before they crested the hill into Oxeye.