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“Surprise,” he said. “Where’s your family?”
I gestured back over my shoulder. “Here and there. But not right here.”
“So we’re alone.”
“We are,” I said. “For now.”
“Good,” he said, and wrapped his arms around me, pulling me back through the door beneath the stairs. I felt his breath hot against my ear as he buried his face in my neck.
“We’ll have to be careful,” I whispered, my hand finding the doorknob.
“But just until we tell them, right?”
“Yes. Until we tell them.” I tilted my chin and his lips found mine. The door closed silently behind me as we kissed in the safety of the dark.
6.
1946
Summer
She is seventeen years old, and in full bloom.
The prettiness that she had as a child has grown past its promise of ordinary beauty into something less conventional, more striking. She’s tall for a girl, her angular face framed and softened by a cascade of dark blond curls. Her blue eyes are set deep beneath prominent brows and slightly downturned, so that she always looks just a little bit skeptical, a little bit unimpressed. It’s a useful look to have, since people—boys, especially—are always trying to show off for her. The expression on her face gives nothing away, on the rare occasion when there’s anything to give. Miriam is rarely impressed by anyone, but particularly not by try-hards.
That doesn’t mean she’s cruel, of course. She likes people well enough, even if she’d like them better if they’d stop boasting and putting on airs, and anyway, she’s been carefully taught that attention should be graciously accepted no matter the source. Better to havemore than you want than to need it and have none at all: that’s what Mother says, and Miriam knows she’s right. One of her friends at school, a girl named Janet Reardon, is always going on about what a bore it is to be beautiful—which is awfully audacious coming from Janet, who is the prettiest girl in their class, a real stunner. She’ll moan about how exhausting it is to have so many suitors, and so on and so forth, and while Miriam would never say so out loud, she thinks that Janet Reardon has her very pretty head stuck all the way up her own ass. She knows that most girls would give anything to be half as beautiful, and she also knows that Janet wouldn’t trade places with one of those girls for anything, no matter how much she might like to pretend otherwise.
The weather in Bar Harbor is unseasonably cool this summer, with a fierce wind blowing off the water that sounds more like a howl than a whisper as it races past the house. It’s a mournful sound, but then the Whispers has been a mournful place lately, full of empty rooms where nobody is coming to stay and empty chairs where people used to sit. Her brother Edward had come back from the war and promptly married the pretty girl he was courting during that hazy summer five years past. He is so busy in his new life that he can spare only a week to visit the coast this year, and then only because Miriam begged. Her other brother, Robert, is gone, too: rejected by the army for his poor eyesight, he married his own sweetheart and decamped to Kentucky with his father’s blessing (both of them having agreed that there was good money to be made in the whiskey business, especially for a family with such a rich and storied history in liquor). And maybe it’s seeing his sons scattered and starting families of their own, or maybe it’s just Miriam noticing what she was too much of a child to see before, but Papa seems to have aged fifteen years just within the past two summers. His rich chestnut-colored hair is half-gone now and almost entirely gray, and the unhappy furrow that used to appear between his eyebrows when he scowled is now a permanent fixture, even when he’s in good spirits.
To Miriam, it seems like the house and her father are suffering from the same sickness. The same loneliness. It’s hard to believe that the Whispers used to be a bustling place in the summer, with parties and picnics and an endless series of guests coming and going, or that her father is the same man who used to keep his visitors entertained with wild stories and bawdy jokes, the gaiety lasting into the wee hours of the morning. Lately he’s been talking of retiring, selling the house in the city and spending his remaining years here by the sea—unless, he says, a certain daughter thinks she might like to settle in the city house herself, someday soon, when she’s married.
Miriam doesn’t have a single solitary thought of getting married. None of the young men she knows are appealing enough to spend an evening with, let alone a lifetime. But she likes to see the smile on her father’s face when he talks about this, and so she plays along. “I don’t know, Papa,” she says with a wink. “My future husband and I might prefer a seaside cottage ourselves, or maybe a château in the South of France. Or both.”
“For my girl, a house on every continent,” Papa says, winking back, and they both laugh. It’s lovely to see him laugh.
Little red-faced Harold Chandler is a young man now, still prone to sunburns, and still dull as a doorstop. But Miriam has been thrown together with him often enough over the course of so many summers that he doesn’t annoy her as much as he used to, and Harold has wisely avoided making any further attempts to pucker up and lunge at her. Instead, he and his sisters and Miriam enjoy a casual seasonal acquaintanceship, one that rekindles each May and disbands without fanfare three months later—and because Harold is such a pale, indoorsy creature, Miriam’s relationship with him has largely consisted of eating luncheon at his parents’ so-called cottage when it’s too rainy to do anything else. But this year, things are different. Harold arrived in town in his brand-new birthday present, a Cadillac convertible—a blue one, with chrome hubcaps and soft leather seats and a push-button radio,and a sleek body that reminds Miriam of a sleeping cat. It’s a beautiful car, Harold’s pride and joy, and he’s never prouder than when he can drive around town with a pretty girl sitting next to him. At least twice a week, he’ll come trundling up the driveway to the Whispers and beep the horn, sitting there with a grin on his face and one hand resting casually on the steering wheel until Miriam comes outside.
“Want to go for a spin?” he asks, and Miriam, looking back at the house and thinking of the dreadful silence inside, of all the people who used to be here and are now, painfully, not, nods and hops in. It doesn’t matter that she’s only there to make Harold look good, as decorative as the silver hood ornament that’s shaped like a woman with her hair swept back from her face. It’s still nice to sit back in those soft leather seats and allow herself to be taken away.
Today she’s up and out the front door at the first beep of the Cadillac’s horn. The cloth bag that holds her towel and swimsuit bangs against her hip as she runs across the piazza, her espadrilles kicking up gravel. It’s the Fourth of July, the sun has finally chased away the unseasonable chill in the air, and the delicious heat has everyone feeling giddy. There’s a rumor that one of their neighbors has procured fireworks, big ones, which Miriam will watch with her family from the broad veranda at the Whispers—but that’s hours away, and the day is hers. She intends to enjoy it. Harold is waiting in the usual spot, his arm draped out the window, but the back seat of the Cadillac is full: Harold’s sisters, Dodie and Peggy, are crammed in like sardines with a girlfriend each beside them. They’re giggling and whispering to each other, and Harold’s face is a shade of pink that Miriam has never seen before: not sunburn, but embarrassment.
“Miriam!” Peggy chirps. “It’s so nice that you’re coming with us. Harry wassoooworried that you might change your mind. Weren’t you, Harry?”
“Shush, Peg,” Harold says, blushing harder as Miriam arranges herself in the front seat. But Peggy doesn’t shush. She leans over to listen as her friend whispers something to her, and giggles.
“That’s a darling dress, Miriam,” she says. “Did you bring your bathing suit? Pete, that’s our man at the cottage, he says the water might be warm enough to swim.”
“I brought it.” Miriam pats the bag at her hip and fights the urge to laugh herself when Harold glances at it and turns a shade redder, as though just knowing he’s in the presence of a bathing suit is more excitement than he can bear. His sisters aren’t so restrained: Peggy exclaims, “Jeepers, Harry, even yourneckis blushing,” and the girls collapse against each other, giggling and shrieking.
“It’s the sun,” Harold says lamely. He doesn’t look at Miriam at all as he puts the car in gear and pulls away from the house.
They take the long way toward the bridge that connects the island to the mainland, gliding along the winding coastal road with its endless views of the bay. There are white gulls in the sky and white sails in the water, so bright in the sunshine that Miriam can still see the shape of them when she closes her eyes. Eventually the road turns north, with tall trees looming on either side, and Miriam doesn’t realize she’s been dozing until Peggy suddenly shouts, “Harry, you’ve just missed it!” and her eyes fly open as Harold stomps the brakes. There between the trees is a narrow dirt road, climbing gently uphill. A few minutes later, the narrow road opens into a grassy clearing, where tire tracks mark the presence of previous visitors. They park beside the only other automobile, an old truck with rust coming up over the hood and some lobsterman’s traps stacked in the cargo. A mosquito whines past Miriam’s ear while the girls pile out of the back seat, all talking at once about whether they should have packed more sandwiches, and if they ought to change their clothes right here behind the car or somewhere in the woods, and where was the swimming pond anyway, and her gaze drifts along the edge of the clearing, to a spot where the flattened grass becomes a dirt footpath that disappears between the trees.
She’s the first one into the woods, breathing a sigh of relief as the dazzling sunshine gives way to the cool and quiet of the forest. The path twists this way and that, the air is fragrant with the scent of growing things, and she has just enough time to wonder if it’s much farther to the pond when the next twist of the path brings her around a huge mossy boulder and she sees it: the sparkle of sunshine on dark water. She walks the last few yards to emerge from between the trees onto a broad, flat rock that slopes gently downhill at one end to a little patch of bobbing lily pads—and then looks up with surprise at the streak of something plummeting through the air just off to her right. There’s an enormous splash, and a moment later, a boy’s head pops up in the water. A chorus of whooping and shouting goes up: twenty yards from her own rock, a sheer cliff rises from the water’s edge to a rocky precipice high above the pond. A half a dozen of them are standing there, bare-chested and laughing and shoving, young men with the deep tans and hard muscles that come from hauling lines or digging ditches day in and day out.
There’s another shout, another boy runs, leaps, splashes down, and Miriam suddenly feels like she’s witnessing something secret and precious, like opening a love letter meant for someone else. She feels like an intruder. She’s sure that the Chandlers’ man wasn’t supposed to tell them about this pond, or if he did, that it was only in passing, never expecting any of them to actually come here. This is not a place for seasonal visitors. It’s for these boys, who spend their summers trawling the seas and combing the tide beds, sweaty and salty and standing knee-deep in muck, so that people like Miriam Day can eat freshly cooked lobster off fine china in their seaside estates. Boys who were too young to enlist, yet bore the burden of supporting their families when the older men were drafted. For some, it was a temporary hardship; for others, the ones whose fathers and brothers never came back, it would last forever.
They haven’t seen her yet, and she wonders if she ought to just go, step back and disappear into the woods the same way she came.
