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The fierceness, she gets from her father.
All summer long, she has felt herself standing on the precipice that separates a girl from a woman, not afraid to fall but also not quite ready to leap. Knowing that this part of her life will soon come to an end. She has a sense that she’ll miss it when it’s gone, even though being a lady looks like its own kind of fun. She has always loved thefreedom of her wild girlhood, the small rebellions that her mother is always promising to punish her for.Next time, Miriam,she says.I mean it.
They both know she doesn’t mean it. Her parents pretend to be dismayed by her untamable nature; their only daughter is forever trailing an untied ribbon from her hair, a loose thread from her hem. She turns up with her shoes missing and her stockings all stained with grass, until her mother sighs and says fine, she can run barefoot, as long as it’s only here at the Whispers and there’s no company to offend—but even then, they know this definition of “company” will be invoked rarely if at all. On the day they arrived at the house for the summer, Miriam left her shoes under her bed, and there they’ve stayed, collecting dust. She has never been asked to fetch them, not even when the local garden club came to take tea on the veranda and inspect her mother’s roses, or when the two young ladies whom her brothers had been courting since last August arrived one evening with their families for dinner and dancing, wearing their prettiest silk gowns and pearls.
One day Miriam will put on her own silk dress and heeled shoes and take a seat at the great maple table in the dining room and make boring grown-up small talk with the boring grown-up guests. One day she’ll have a suitor of her own to bring her flowers and whisper things in her ear that make her blush. The sensation of his breath on her neck will melt her.
One day he will kiss her with a mouth that tastes like salt water as the whole world burns.
But not now. Not yet. This summer, she is shoeless and sun-kissed and free to do as she pleases—and if any of those young ladies are scandalized by the sight of Roland Day’s youngest daughter running in bare feet across the lawn at dusk to chase fireflies, they have the good sense not to say so. Their host, for all his generosity and good humor, is not a man it would be wise to offend.
But on this particular August evening, Miriam is not barefoot and not happy, either. The summer is coming to a close, and the country is at war; in only a week, her family will leave the Whispers and return to their home in Egg Harbor, New Jersey. This summer is the last they’ll have here together as a family. Robert, the eldest, will be married before the year is out; Edward, younger and more idealistic, has announced his intention to enlist instead of continuing his education. Her father will be busy and absent, traveling often for business, and Miriam and her mother will be left to themselves, alone and quite lonely.
For all these reasons and more, she wishes she could kick off her shoes and run. Across the grass, through the gardens, along the shoreline where the pink granite rocks are still warm from the heat of the sun. She wants to fling open her arms and drink up the sky, the sea, the whole world.
Instead, she is stuck indoors playing hide-and-seek with an idiot.
Tonight’s dinner was one she was not allowed to miss, the kind where children were expected to be seen but not heard, unless someone spoke to them, in which case they were expected to answer politely and using the proper honorifics. The guests, a family called Chandler whose house sits on the other side of the bay and which they insist on referring to as “the cottage” despite the fact that it’s at least as big as the Whispers, were here to be impressed by Roland Day’s many successes, including his lovely and well-mannered daughter. The Chandlers also have three children, including a son the same age as Miriam, whom she has been told she must be nice to. His name is Harold and he has pale blond hair, gangly legs, and a bright red face because he went outside today and forgot to wear his hat. Miriam thinks Harold looks like a freshly cooked crab. She also thinks he’s a real dummy, and not just because a kid with his complexion should have learned to stay out of the sun by now.When she asks him if he’s read any good books lately, he says he doesn’t like to read, and she has to fake a sneeze to conceal her look of horror. But she plays her part just like she’s supposed to. She uses the proper fork; she sayspleaseandthank youandno, sir,andyes, madam.She dabs delicately at the corners of her mouth with her napkin, as if to keep from marring her lipstick, even though she’s not old enough yet to be wearing any. She understands that the glorious freedom she enjoys here at the Whispers comes with an unspoken agreement that she’ll play the role of the mannered and dutiful daughter on the rare occasions, like this one, when her parents require it.
But then dinner is over, and Papa tells her to go and play with the Chandler boy and his younger sisters while the grown-ups gather on the veranda to watch the sunset and talk about whatever grown-ups talk about. He waits for the rest of the children to turn away before he leans in with a wink and says, “Perhaps you should all stay indoors, darling. And try not to embarrass him. If that boy gets any redder, he’ll burst into flames.”
Miriam suggests hide-and-seek and volunteers to be it first, since it is her house. She leads the group out of the dining room and into the front foyer, where two long hallways stretch away into the house and a grand staircase rises toward the second floor. She points: upstairs is out of bounds, but anywhere in the north wing is fair game. The little Chandler girls clap their hands and scatter off into the shadows as Miriam sits on the staircase, closes her eyes, and begins to count. But when she reaches ten and opens them, she sighs. Stupid Harold is still standing exactly where he was, staring at her. Outside, the sky is deepening, and shadows are beginning to pool in the hallway. She hears the clink of glassware and the tinkle of laughter from the veranda. It sounds very far away.
“You’re supposed to hide,” Miriam says, and bites her tongue to keep from addingdummy. “I’m going to close my eyes and count to ten—”
“Mumma said that you and me are going to get married,” Harold says, staring at her. His face doesn’t look so red in the dark, but his strange pale eyes are unsettling, the pupils like big black holes. Miriam’s mouth drops open. Now she doesn’t have to bite her tongue at all; she couldn’t speak if she wanted to. Harold takes a step toward her and makes a sort of clumsy half bow. “I want to give you a kiss.”
“Oh,” Miriam says faintly. “Oh, no. No, thank you.” But Harold takes another step toward her, and the little pink lips at the center of his very red face start to pucker, and Miriam realizes with dismay that Harold intends to give her the kiss whether she wants it or not. And so she does the only thing she can think of: she stands up and taps him hard with her index finger, right in the center of his chest. Harold’s puckered mouth transforms into a little O of surprise. He stares at her.
“I found you. So you’re it,” Miriam says gaily, and skips away into the house. She doesn’t look back to see what Harold is doing, but some small part of her wonders if she’s made a mistake, if the Chandler boy will turn out to be what her mother would callpersistent.Persistent is not necessarily a bad thing. Miriam’s own father was persistent, which is why Mother ended up married to him and not some other suitor, of which she had many. But Miriam does not want persistence from Harold. She doesn’t want anything from Harold at all. She nearly sighs aloud with relief when his voice rings out from the foyer.
“One,” he says glumly. There’s a long pause, and a sigh. Then even more glumly: “Two.”
Miriam darts through a dimly lit parlor and into her father’s library, inhaling the familiar scent of pipe tobacco and old books. Harold is nearly done counting, but she lingers just inside the open door, waiting. Listening. Hide-and-seek is Miriam’s favorite game, and she its undefeated champion, because she figured out long ago that thesecret to winning isn’t staying hidden. It’s staying in motion, creeping from one hiding place to another, concealing yourself in spots that the seeker already investigated and found empty. Sliding unseen around corners like a ghost. Sometimes, when she’s feeling especially mischievous, she’ll make it into her own game and begin following the person looking for her, daring herself to get closer and closer. Nobody has ever caught her doing this, but it’s thrilling to take the risk—and to see the way that people begin jumping at every creak and shadow the longer the chase goes on, as if they can sense they’re being hunted.
The house itself is built perfectly for this game, although Miriam won’t understand the reasons why until she’s older. Her father bought the land for his house around the turn of the century, but he didn’t finish building the Whispers until 1920. Just in time to make it a wedding gift for his beautiful young wife—but also to outfit the place with cubbies and passages to hold the illegal liquor that ran like a secret river through the dark harbor outside. Roland Day was an ambitious and deliberate man and rarely touched a drink himself. But he knew a good investment when he saw one: at the height of Prohibition, his great stone house above the bay was one of the biggest bootlegging hubs in the state.
He was already quite a rich man by the time Miriam came into the world, red-faced and screaming, on a dark and wild day in 1929. Papa liked to joke that she arrived furious, having gotten a bad stock tip from the stork who dropped her at their door. He could afford to joke, of course. The bulk of his fortune wasn’t sitting in any bank when the market crashed. While his neighbors struggled, he thrived, even surpassing some of them in wealth, a fact he speaks of with dark and contemptuous pleasure. Mother tried to explain it once: These men used to sneer at Papa for being new money, a self-made man. But now he had assets, things those sneering neighbors desired.
Miriam is beginning to understand, barely, that she herself is one of those coveted things—and that Papa has plans for her. But what she knows without a doubt is that the house is full of wonderful places to hide, especially if you’re a young girl whose hips are exactly half as wide as a case of whiskey.
Still, she doesn’t want to spend an hour tiptoeing from place to place, dodging Harold Chandler and his puckered pink lips until it’s time for the guests to go home. When she’s sure he’s far enough away not to hear it, she unbuckles her shoes, peels off her stockings, and leaves them stuffed behind a potted plant. Then she slips through a side door and runs.
Her bare feet touch the soft, warm grass as the sun dips just below the tree line, streaking the sky with pink. Behind her, the house looks like a great jewel, its windows shimmering gold with electric light, a beacon above the sea. She hears voices on the veranda, but they’re only murmurs; nobody shouts her name, and she knows they haven’t seen her. A moment later, she is behind the garden wall, down the steps that lead to the water, out to the long wooden pier that stretches into the bay. Once last summer she woke in the middle of the night and saw her father standing here, smoking, surrounded by the bobbing shadows of his men as they unloaded a small boat by moonlight. But this evening, with the sun still fading, she is alone. The wind dies and the water turns glassy, and then she sees him. Out in the bay a lobsterman’s boat is passing, and a boy—or maybe a young man—is standing on the bow beside the stacks of rickety traps. His face is half hidden by shadow, but she can tell from the tilt of his head that he has seen her. That he is looking at her.
He looks at her for a long time.
Miriam looks back and continues looking, even when she can no longer tell which of the specks on the horizon is him. Even as someone calls her name from far above, in the sharp tone that tells her shewill be scolded when she gets back. She stays just a moment more. She breathes in the scent of salt water, of sea mud, of the sun-warmed wood beneath her feet. The speck on the horizon is gone now. The path where the boat traveled ripples in the dying light, the faintest of disturbances, the only sign that it was ever there at all.
4.
2014
December
By the time I first set foot in the Whispers, it was a shadow of its former self: cracked and creaky and full of locked doors, cluttered rooms, no company but stacks of old books and magazines and the muttering of the wind. What I knew of its history came mostly from an old brochure I’d found in one of the boxes that were stacked up in the library: built by my great-grandfather in 1920 as a wedding present for his new, young wife, back when Bar Harbor was a summer playground for the rich and famous. Partially destroyed in one of the famous fires that swallowed half the state in 1947. Restored the following year, when Mimi married my grandfather, turning it into a love nest twice over.
Mimi had left Bar Harbor for New Jersey after her husband died, but she was smart enough to keep the house, and to eventually realize its romantic history made for a great marketing pitch. Bootlegger’s Historic Seaside Château. For decades, the Whispers had been in thecare of a management company that rented it for wedding parties or corporate retreats. But a few years ago, without explanation, Mimi had canceled her contract with the management company and moved back to the coast—and here she’d stayed alone, quietly losing her mind where nobody was around to see it. I used to wonder if she was already sick then, or if rattling around in all that empty space with nothing to keep her company except her memories somehow unmoored her. It took five years for her dementia to progress to the point where someone finally noticed, in what my mother calledthe first incident.The old man who served as the Whispers’ winter handyman was driving up at twilight to change out the furnace filter when he came around a curve and found Mimi standing dead center in the road. Her hair was wild, her feet were bare and bleeding, and when he called her name, she just stared—until he walked up and put a hand on her shoulder. Then she shrieked—like a banshee, he’d said—and sank her teeth into his forearm.
