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Hollis immediately calls Caroline but is flung right to her voice mail. She leaves a babbling message that she knows Caroline will never listen to: “Soproud of you, darling, all your hard work on that essay, your grades—your father would be over the moon! Brava!” Caroline has been scheming to get this particular internship since the fall, and over a thousand aspiring filmmakers applied for this opportunity with Isaac Opoku. But it’s unpaid, so the subtext on the sublet is that Hollis will be paying the rent.
Selfishly, Hollis wants to have Caroline around for the summer so they can heal things between them, but Hollis reminds herself the internship is a big deal and is probably what Caroline needs after losing her dad.
On June 21, the first day of summer, Hollis leaves for Nantucket, her actual home-home. Wellesley is Matthew’s place, and although Hollis has adopted it, she’s certain that once she’s back at the house on Squam Road, things will get better. The change of scenery, the change of season, and the ocean out her back door will help. She won’t mind that Gigi has vanished, that she and Caroline are dangerously close to becoming estranged.
But being back on Nantucket doesn’t help, because, on Nantucket, there’s another version of Matthew to mourn, a more relaxed, summertime Matthew.
It’s their second summer in the house, which is so thoughtfully designed, so soundly built, that Hollis can’t believe it’s hers. This is the kind of house she used to dream of having when she and her father were living in their tiny five-room cottage, one Hollis feared would be lifted right off the ground during a nor’easter, like something fromThe Wizard of Oz.That cottage was heated by a woodstove. Hollis and her father ate meals at the round kitchen table from which they could see the TV in the living room. They shared a bathroom and had one phone. All winter, Hollis hunkered beneath the covers of her bed wearing an Irish fisherman’s sweater and a pair of wool socks. It took the shower a full five minutes to heat up, during which time Tom Shaw could be counted on to clear his throat from outside the door, meaning Hollis should jump in, like it or not.
Hollis used to babysit for the Gasperson family down the road. Their house had nineteen rooms, some of them with individual decks and balconies that overlooked the ocean; there was a room lined with matching bunks in the basement and a screened-in sleeping porch on the third floor. The Gaspersons didn’t have a television. When the Gasperson parents and grandparents went out for dinner at the Chanticleer in Sconset, the Gasperson children played cards or board games or curated their collections of shells and sea glass, and they liked Hollis to tell them ghost stories by candlelight. Hollis would have worked for the Gaspersons for free. She wanted to blend into their big family. Her dream was to live on Squam Road only in the summer.
This dream has now come true.
Hollis and Matthew turn onto Squam Road, which is thick with Spanish olives and rugosa roses; on the fences are posted hand-painted signs:SLOW DOWN! PEDESTRIANS!When Hollis was growing up, this road was so rutted and potholed that it was impossible to drive faster than ten miles an hour, but now, every Mother’s Day weekend, the neighborhood association grades the road as smooth as a yellow ribbon. Hollis and Matthew pass a gentleman wearing Nantucket Reds and Jack Kennedy sunglasses and walking a chocolate Lab, then a woman in a straw hat cutting the wild cosmos and black-eyed Susans along the side of the road—perfect, Hollis thinks, for a kitchen-sink bouquet. They pull down their new white-shell driveway that’s lined on both sides with evenly spaced young hydrangea bushes that their landscaper, Anastasia, assures them will “fill out.” Their six-year-old daughter, Caroline, has just fallen asleep in the back seat along with their Irish setter, Seamus.
When Matthew parks in front of the house—they need to come up with a name for the house and the cottage; all proper summer homes have names—he says, “Let’s leave them be for a minute. I have something to show you.”
“But—” The car windows are down, Caroline and Seamus are snoring in harmony, but Hollis is itching to get the bags and boxes inside, to unpack, to settle.
“Trust me, sweet-love,” Matthew says. “It’ll be worth it.”
He leads Hollis around the side of the house and unlatches the pool gate (yes, they built a pool; it seems nearly shameful when they’re only a hundred yards from the ocean, Hollis knows her father must be rolling over in his grave, but she had wanted a pool badly) so they can access the backyard—the pond, the path to the beach.
Hollis gasps. The pond—which was an eyesore when she was growing up, mucky and mosquito-ridden—has been… reimagined. The surface looks like green glass, and it’s dotted with water lilies, many of them in full flower. But the most remarkable thing is the arched footbridge with handsome crosshatched sides that now spans the pond.
“Did you do this?” Hollis asks, then she laughs—obviously he did; the pond didn’t clean itself, the bridge wasn’t built by magic elves.
“Because of how much you loved Giverny,” Matthew says.
Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny—yes, on a trip to France while Hollis was pregnant with Caroline, she’d been captivated by the bridge. She’d bought a print of one of the Giverny paintings in the gift shop. She can’t believe Matthew remembered; she can’t believe he’d been paying attention.
“Can we… walk across it?” Hollis asks.
Matthew offers her his hand.
Hollis is a hostage to her grief; she’s not eating, not sleeping. She breaks down, calls Dr. Lindstrom, and asks for a prescription for Ambien. The pills help herfallasleep, but by one in the morning, Hollis is wide awake, at which point she pads out to the kitchen and flips open her laptop. With her face bathed in blue light, down the rabbit hole she goes. She types inWhat to do when your husband dies,and the results pop up: “How to Deal with the Death of a Loved One,” “A Guide to Grief Journaling,” “Sex and the Widow.”
“Sex and the Widow”?she thinks. As if.
She takes a bite of one article, a nibble of the next; nothing helps, nothing helps, nothinghelps!She brings up Jack Finigan’s Facebook page. There are still no new pictures of Mindy, but even that doesn’t make Hollis feel better.
She texts Caroline asking how she likes her internship.
OK.
And what about the sublet?(That I’m paying for,Hollis thinks but does not say.)
OK.
Would you please answer my calls, Caroline?
No response.
Then, on July 15, the seven-month anniversary of Matthew’s death (she experiences every day in relation to Matthew’s death), Hollis finds something unexpected.
On a site called Motherlode (Hollis has never heard of it), she reads about Moira Sullivan, age fifty-nine, whose husband of thirty years dropped dead at the hardware store while he was buying birdseed for Moira’s feeders.
I was devastated,Moira wrote.I fell apart.
