Page 9 of The Treasure House

“Everyone’s a little crazy, honey,” she said, rubbing my shoulder. “It’s not a matter of how crazy you are, but how you use your crazy to be happy.”

Three

OXEYE, MAINE

My crazy, it turned out, led me to a rundown town on the edge of a cliff. Flo and I had finally settled on a treasure house we were serious about and had come to Maine to see it in person. In the pictures it looked too good to be true, a wood-shingled cottage nestled in an overgrown garden. The property description said it had a glimpse of the ocean from its front windows. It was in an undeniable state of disrepair—but it wasn’t the worst we’d seen. At least not according to the photos. It was like something out of a children’s book, the kind of place infested by sprites, with a magical tree out the back.

Oxeye. It was a dot of a town on the Maine coast, a few miles from the rich summer resort of Camden and the town of Rockport. I’d spent hours on Google Earth, zooming in on every corner of it. The place had a store, a gas station, a little library, a coffee shop, a couple of scenic bed-and-breakfasts, and a handful of summer vacation houses. Oxeye mostly seemed to exist to serve the campground to the south of it, which sat on a wooded spit that jutted into the bay. Our treasure house was on Tinker Street, one of two cottages at the head of a cul-de-sac, facing down the street to the cliffs and Penobscot Bay beyond. One side of Tinker Street was just woods, the other was summer houses with little rental signs out front, and there was a two-story hardware store on the corner, the first in a row of storefronts along the main road.

From what I could tell, Oxeye seemed kind of forgotten, abandoned by the side of the coastal road. But the house was in my price range, and the school district was excellent. There was a highly ranked middle school up the coast in Camden that Flo could attend now and a high school in Rockport for later. The school buses stopped in Oxeye, right at the end of Main Street. Even better, there was a small family medical practice in Rockport currently advertising for an office manager, and when I’d phoned about the job, they seemed overtly relieved that someone was interested in applying.

The realtor had also seemed relieved when I called about the house. “I… uh… can leave a key with the guy at the hardware store,” she told me. “I have viewings all day in Camden or I’d meet you myself.” She huffed a plastic little laugh. “But it’s not like you’ll need me to show you around. You’ve seen the photos, right?”

I assured her I had.

“Thank God.” That awkward little laugh again. “Jake Abernathy is the guy at the hardware store. He can answer any questions you have.”

But Jake Abernathy had questions of his own. “Gail told you it’s full of culch, didn’t she?” he had said dryly when I’d called to arrange a time to collect the key.

I didn’t know what culch was, but the way he said it made it sound kind of charming. His raw concern for me and Flo was charming too. I pictured him with a fisherman’s cap and a salt-and-pepper beard. A flannel shirt. He had a slow, careful way of talking and his smoky voice and courteous manner led me to assume he was an older man. The gentlemanly type.

“It’s really no place for a woman alone,” he said, sounding more like somebody’s grandpa now. “Let alone one with a kid. The realtor told you that, too?”

I assured him that we knew full well what we were getting into.

Mr. Abernathy gave me directions to his hardware store, and I followed a road that curled off US 1 after Waldoboro and ran along the breathtaking coastline. Maine in midsummer was something to see. The sky shone a blue that didn’t quite seem real, and everything was sharp-edged and breezy fresh. The salty scent of the bay and the resin fragrance of the pines was intoxicating through the open windows as we wound north along the coast. We’d had a two-day journey from Pittsburgh in my little blue Honda Fit, staying overnight at a Days Inn in Hartford, Connecticut, and singing along to Disney soundtracks as we ate junk food from gas stations.

At last, we crested a hill to find ourselves abruptly in Oxeye, just as the directions had promised. Rusty cliffs dropped starkly at the edge of the road, down to the swells of the bay with its impossibly clear water marked only by the wakes of yachts, crisp white against aquamarine. Jake Abernathy’s weatherbeaten store sat on the corner of Beach Road and Tinker Street.

Our street.

“Let’s drive by the house before we get the keys,” I suggested to Flo. I was already turning into the street before she answered. I couldn’t resist. I was dying to see the treasure house in person.

The woods on the south side of Tinker Street were thicker and wilder than they’d seemed on Google Maps, a dark mass of balsam fir, like a Christmas tree farm run wild. The perfume of resin was overwhelming. Google Maps sure hadn’t conveyed the magic of the ocean gusts and the glitter of the seaside air. Instead of the hum of traffic, I could hear the restless soughing of the sea and the cry of gulls. Along the north side of Tinker Street, the shiplap-walled summer houses had their doors thrown open and the faint sound of baseball commentary and music swirled out in lazy eddies. Beach towels were hung to dry along the picket fences like carnival bunting.

“I guess that’s our junk house,” Flo announced as we slid to the head of the cul-de-sac. Twin cottages stood at the end of the street, staring down to the cliffs, and it was obvious which one was ours because the left house was neat as a pin, a charming colonial with weathered wood shingles, bright white trim, and a lemon-drop-yellow front door. There was a cute little sign next to the door that read, “SYLVIE BY SEA.” Lush hydrangeas bloomed pink and white on either side of the porch steps, and a pillowy green lawn that would have impressed Wayne ran all the way down to the curb.

The house on the right, though…

It was the witchy version of its twin, a gnarled crone of a cottage. Brambles exploded along the path, casting wickedly long canes into the sky. They bobbed threateningly in the sea breeze. Railings had fallen from the porch, leaving gaps like missing teeth, and the windows that weren’t broken were so thick with dust they looked brown. The gutters were hanging down like sagging streamers, and someone had boarded up the front door with plywood. Keys would be no help to us there. How on earth would we even get in?

“I can’t see any junk,” Flo said, seemingly undaunted by the sight of our house.

“I think the whole place is the junk,” I replied nervously. What I was actually thinking was that this was too good to be true. A house like this one should be worth a fortune. Even run-down, it was right on the coast and only a stone’s throw from the fancy tourist towns. So why was it so affordable and why weren’t there people queuing up to buy it? Surely every investor on the East Coast should have been bidding on it?

“I like it,” Flo announced. “It’s got a vibe.”

“We can’t live there,” I said, feeling numb at the scale of the house’s disarray. It looked worse in person. An investor might just bulldoze the whole place and build something new. “It’s not habitable.”

“Wayne said it was.”

It was true. Wayne had read the building reports the realtor had sent through. The building was structurally sound. Mr. Abernathy had been plain about that too.

“It’s just culch,” he’d said. “The place just needs some love.”

Love is an understatement, I thought as I regarded the house on Tinker Street. This place didn’t need love, it needed an intervention.

But we’d come all this way, and we might as well see inside while we were in town. And, I thought with a shivery thrill, imagine if we could live here, by the sea, in a place I shouldn’t realistically be able to afford…