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“You sure about that?” Eve says.
“Positive,” Nate says. “It could have been a lot worse. You have no idea what’s waiting for us inside.”
Eve laughs at this, a little too loud, like she knows something they don’t. Or something they are about to find out. “Well,” Eve says. “I guess I’ll be seeing you both a little later today.”
“Sounds good.”
Maggie gets back into the car as Nate drives them to the side of the driveway, out of the way.
Eve gives them a wave and heads back to her truck too. But instead of moving forward toward the house, she puts the truck in reverse and drives straight out of Ditch Plains. As fast as the vine van will carry her.
Nate looks at the now empty driveway, as though he can’t believe it. “She’s not coming in? What about the mushroom caps?”
“I guess they are going to have to wait.”
He shrugs. “Maybe she’s just not ready.”
Maggie turns back toward the house-slash-national-park in front of her—its pillars like signposts to a world she doesn’t exactly want to visit. The large wraparound porch like a promise of something, but maybe nothing she is quite ready to know about yet.
“I know the feeling,” she says, as they walk inside.
Gwyn
This is what she remembers.
That first time she came to Montauk with Thomas, to see where he lived, it was winter and freezing out. And she came down here to the edge of the property—to this deep cliff, overlooking the beach below, and stood there, by herself, watching as the sun slowly went down. She was barely twenty-two years old, she was shivering, but standing there on the cliff she saw her life spread out before her. Or maybe that’s too easy. Maybe what’s closer to the truth is that for the first time she saw something promising in her life, something she didn’t want to look away from. Even now, all these years later, she remembers how she felt looking out at that water. She remembers that this was when this place first became hers.
Now, she sits down on the swing—the small, wooden swing—that Thomas’s parents gave them as a wedding present. That Champ actually made for them. It is a beautiful swing, and she comes out here daily to sit on it. To read or knit, just have her morning coffee, and look at the paper. Or, like today, to get herself ready for something she doesn’t want to do.
That first weekend, though, there was no swing, and she stood there getting ready for all she did want to do.
Thomas had been so nervous to show her where he grew up. He had already started to work at the free clinic out here, so he wasn’t only showing her his past; he was showing her their future. If she decided to join him in it. They would live here, on the end of the world, which at the time—in theory—felt romantic. But seeing it firsthand in the middle of a cold, cold winter felt like something more complex, closer to something he had explained: You’ll either love the quiet or you won’t be able to take it. And that will make all the difference. It will make all the difference in whether you can imagine this becoming your life, too.
It was then she started to understand that it wouldn’t just be her and Thomas out here, but this third component—the house itself—that would dictate things for them. This house, in its isolation, which would demand that their marriage be both stronger and looser than if they lived somewhere else. Somewhere urban or suburban—somewhere less close to the edge of the earth, that required less partnership to make things work. That, quite simply, required less.
Thomas doesn’t know this part. She went into town that first afternoon to get some fresh juice, and called her sister from a pay phone on the side of Old Montauk Highway, wondering why it was that it took her until now to understand that she was being asked to step into someone else’s already-chosen life. Or step out.
“What do you want from me?” Jillian asked her.
“I want you to tell me that you like him,” she said. “I want you to tell me it will turn out okay.”
“I like him, Gwyn,” she said. “And it is probably not going to turn out okay.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because you only ever ask me questions when you need to hear an answer you can’t tell yourself.”
Then Jillian stopped giving any opinion. She reminded her instead of something her father did when they moved into that colonial house in Macon—Gwyn barely four years old—the house her parents would stay in until they died. He told the girls that when they grew up and found the place they wanted to make their home, they should find a safe spot there and make three wishes. They could count on three coming true, but only three, so they should wish carefully.
It probably stuck with Jillian, and should have stuck with Gwyn, because their father never said things like this. Superstitious things. But he believed you got to make three wishes for being brave enough to even imagine a place could become your home.
So that first night—once Gwyn decided she would make Montauk hers—she stood on the edge of this very cliff and did it. She made her wishes. She sealed her fate.
She’s never told anyone what she wished for, not even Jillian. And she’s never told anyone that she saved the third. She’s saved it for the day she needed to wish to overcome something bigger than she could imagine, or plan for: that one of her kids would get better, that the car accident wasn’t insurmountable, that death wouldn’t get to Thomas before her.
But she’s using it now—by the edge of the cliff, her cliff, looking down over it while it still is.
This moment, this wish.
