Fellow writers: This is the final installment of Undercurrents. Have at it. Chapter 45. Damages

August, 1983

The wedding cake outlines of the grand hotels had given way to jagged Lego towers. There was nothing familiar about the skyline that rose in the distance as the bus approached the shore, and I knew I had my first line: “Atlantic City used to be called America’s Playground, but nobody plays outside anymore.”

The air was saturated with Philadelphia nasals and diphthongs. “Do ya think there’ll be time to stick our feet in the wooder before the bus takes us back?” a woman across the aisle asked her friend. Five years in California, and I couldn’t scrub the Philadelphia from my speech. Though often mistaken as a Midwesterner, I sometimes found my lips moving Philly style so that “oh” came out “eh-oo.” I suspected that if I awakened to find my room on fire, I’d yell wooder.

I was the only one with a suitcase, so I waited for the other passengers to leave the bus before I got up from my seat. Most of them were women in their late sixties or seventies with multi-color tote bags and dyed orange hair, along with a few men whose remaining hair had been touched up by time.

The salt air crackled with memories. I heard from Shelly that our house had been hit hard by the last hurricane—structurally compromised was the phrase she used. According to Shelly, Cookie’s brother-in-law, a structural engineer, had done an inspection and would be meeting with Mom, Olivia, and Cookie in a couple of weeks to decide if the house was viable. I told Shelly the house hadn’t been viable to me for years.

Another deep breath and I headed to the lobby. By the time I got there, the casino had swallowed up my travelling companions. The person at the front desk told me I had a message and handed me an envelope. I recognized Cookie’s writing and figured Shelly must have told her where I was.

When I got to my room I put the letter on the desk by the window and opened the curtain. Rows of identical blue and white striped umbrellas and cabanas marched in formation the length of the hotel. Even though it was a hot afternoon, only a few people were sunning themselves because nowadays all the action in Atlantic City was inside.

I sat down at the desk and pulled out the two sheets of notebook paper Cookie had stuffed into the small envelope. Her writing was uneven with lots of words blacked out.

Hi P.J.

I thought maybe this might be the perfect time for us to get together. At the house. All of us. To work things out. Just a thought.

If that doesn’t work, maybe just the two of us could meet.

I put looked up from the letter, watched a seagull touch down on the window ledge, then returned to the letter.

I’m staying at the house. Mom and Olivia are driving down sometime late tomorrow. But we could meet somewhere else, like the pizza place on Ventnor Avenue.

Neutral turf.

Any time that works for you. Tomorrow or Tuesday after the meeting. Though I really wish you’d come to the house Tuesday. Either way, you know the number. Give me a call.

Cookie

No love.

P.S. I think the only reason they invited me to the meeting was because of my brother-in-law.

There was something about a Jersey beach that felt like home. In California the sand was coarser, the surroundings hillier, and it felt like the ocean was on the wrong side of the beach—as if I’d planted my feet in a mirror universe of the real shore. The sight of two teenage girls walking arm-in-arm along the water’s edge reminded me of my upcoming meeting with Cookie, and I decided I’d had enough beach for one day.

I stood under a lamp pole and paged through a book of Atlantic City history I’d bought in the hotel gift shop. The boardwalk I remembered from the nineteen fifties and early sixties didn’t look much different from pictures of the nineteen twenties. The hotels that had been converted into training camps and hospitals for wounded soldiers during World War II had been restored to their former elegance long before I was born, only to be demolished in the name of progress. What war couldn’t destroy, gambling did, wiping out Ferris wheels, kitchenware hawkers, high divers, and weight guessers in a tsunami of craps and slots.

I parked across the street anyway to get a good look. Some of the wooden supports holding up the porch had given way, and one side sagged as if the front of the house had suffered a stroke. Except for the missing section of boardwalk and our wrecked porch, the street looked remarkably normal. I’d seen coverage of the storm where a reporter stood on our block as choppy water ran down the street, carrying pieces of demolished boardwalk toward Atlantic Avenue. So other houses on the block must have suffered damage, but on the surface it looked like the storm had singled out our house as a kind of retribution.

I noticed how much smaller the house seemed—not because childhood landmarks look smaller when seen through adult eyes—but because the houses around it had grown. Since lot sizes in Ventnor were small, owners couldn’t build out, so they built up, adding third- and fourth-floor additions so they could charge the higher rentals that came to town with gambling. I took notes, confining myself to facts and ignoring emotions. I could do dispassionate well; it’s what made me good at my job. Granted, it hadn’t worked with Vera (and thank God for that), but I wouldn’t let that happen again.
I parked on a side street and walked to the beach next to ours. It was on the other side of the pier, so I wasn’t likely to see anyone I knew. Though the storm had chewed up a considerable chunk of boardwalk, it had miraculously spared the pier, where a few old fishermen were casting their lines. There was no lifeguard stand on this side and no swimmers—just surfers.

“Where’s your tag?” A middle-aged man wearing a beat up Oxford shirt and a badge planted himself in front of me.

“What tag?”

“Beach tag. You need one to use the beaches here.” His belly stuck out between the unbuttoned flaps of his shirt, bellybutton round and pink as a berry.

“You’ve gotta be kidding. You mean the beaches aren’t free anymore?”

“Not for a few years now. When’s the last time you were here?”

“A couple years ago. I grew up on this beach, but now I live in California, where most of the beaches are free.”

“Well, it might not mean a lot to you rich California types, but we Ventnorites need money to keep up these here beaches. Erosion you know. When they brought up the idea of charging for the beach, we fought it. Then they talked about raising taxes and suddenly beach tags didn’t sound so bad.”

“And now this.” He swept his arm across the foreshortened beach and choppy sand. They’d been dumping extra sand on the beach at the beginning of the season for as long as I could remember, but the ocean level was rising. They’d probably have to construct dunes so you wouldn’t be able to see the beach from the street anymore. The people would protest, but they’d eventually have to give in because you don’t want to mess with the Atlantic.

“I guess it’s not such a bad idea after all.” I smiled. “So are you going to kick me off the beach?”

“Nah. I’ll give you a break since it’s almost five. You gonna be here tomorrow?”

“No. Just visiting. Day-tripper.”

The beach was too drenched with memories for me to stay. I was tempted to call Cookie and cancel, but it had become a matter of principle: See, I’m not such a bad person. The sun was low in the sky as I walked back to the boardwalk, brushed the sand off my feet, and headed barefoot to my car. Driving uptown along Atlantic Avenue I could see the unintended consequences of casino construction. I pulled over and wrote: The poor, who’d always been invisible, are even more so—crowded together and pushed further from the ocean because their houses have been razed. The rising tide that was supposed to lift all boats, has sunk them even lower, and hidden them behind multi-block barricades of casino parking lots.

Just inside the door leading to the parking lot was a waiting area for bus passengers who sat slumped over their plaid Bermuda shorts, mumus, and pants suits after a hard day of lever pushing, their faces so drained of animation it was hard to tell winners from losers. Tomorrow I’d put on my press badge and interview them for local color before I met with my sister the next day. As I walked toward the lobby, a woman in a busy shirt studded with rhinestones called out. “Excuse me missy. Excuse me.” I turned to face her, and she looked me up and down. “You’re too skinny.” Her red lipstick covered both lips and not-lips, an effect that I assumed was due to either wishful thinking or bad eyesight. “You should try the all-you-can-eat buffet on the second floor. The ribs are out of this world.”

Back in the room I poured a glass of wine from the mini bar and stood by the window, surveying the neon landscape and wishing I’d never agreed to meet with my sister.

Cookie parked between her mother’s light blue Cadillac and her brother-in-law’s pickup. Yellow tape blocked the front porch, so she went around to the side entrance. The outdoor shower, tucked into the space between the kitchen steps and the garage, had survived the storm intact. When they were little and the inside bathrooms were occupied, she and P.J. would take their towels, soap, and clothes outside and shower together. The stall was open at the top and anyone looking down from upstairs could see them, so they’d bring an umbrella and hold it up for each other when they showered to “cover our privates.” For some reason, that memory of childhood intimacy gave her hope for her meeting with P.J. later that afternoon.

Three concrete steps led to the kitchen door. Through the parted curtains, Cookie saw her mother and sister next to each other at the breakfast room table, heads down over an architectural blueprint. Mom’s black curls were inches from Olivia’s corn silk, framed in the window like an illustration from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Olivia’s face was unlined despite her forty years, many of them spent in the sun. It could have been the handiwork of her plastic surgeon husband, but probably not, since the most valuable genetic capital of their family had been gathered into a single basket and sprinkled like fairy dust over Olivia. Mom was attractive in a different way, and people said Cookie looked like her mother, so some of the magic stuff must have landed on the two of them as well. Only P.J. was dust free.

“Cookie!” Olivia said, with a tone of surprise as if her sister’s visit had been unexpected. She got up and gave Cookie a big hug. The breakfast room wall and floor appeared freshly painted, untouched by the storm, as was the part of the dining room she could see through the archway. But anything could be going on behind and beneath the facade.

“Come here, Honey,” Mom said as Olivia released her. Mom stood in front of her seat and held out her arms. After a hug she held Cookie at arm’s length, the way she did when Cookie was younger, and she checked to see if her daughter had washed her neck. They smiled at each other, and Cookie saw what she’d look like at sixty—dark curly hair rinsed clear of gray, laugh lines fanning out from the corners of lash-heavy eyes, the barest softening of jaw and neck.

“I haven’t seen you in so long, I keep forgetting you’re a grown woman.”

Cookie didn’t think she’d changed in the six months since she’d seen her mother, but she suspected that the images mothers stored of their grown children were snapshots from earlier days when they’d not yet fallen short of expectations.

Cookie sat down next to her mother, and her brother-in-law Paul positioned himself behind them, leaning over and pointing to the blueprint with his pencil. Olivia wore dark green shorts and a yellow halter top the exact color of her hair, and when she got up to pour coffee, Cookie noticed the backs of her legs were free of cellulite. Damn that fairy dust.

“You did a beautiful job on the breakfast room, Olivia.”

“Thanks, Cookie. Sunshine yellow brightens it up, don’t you think?” Olivia had redone the house a couple of times since she’d taken ownership. Everything matched, as if the paint had come from the same dye lot as Olivia’s tank top and hair.

Cookie told her the decor was fabulous, and Olivia promised to give her a tour of the house once they’d conducted our business.

“She’s got the touch, doesn’t she?” Mom said. “Maybe now you can see why I gave her the house.”

Mom still didn’t understand what her decision had done to the family. Clueless. That’s what she was. Cookie blew on her coffee and took a careful sip. She thought: This house, this piece of real estate has broken the family. How does a nexus of floors, walls, and ceilings hold such power?

“Let’s not get into my so-called touch right now,” Olivia said, spreading the blueprint out on the table. To her, the change of ownership had been nothing more than a formality. After all, she told her sisters they could come and go as they pleased. “Mi casa es su casa,” she’d said before P.J. had stormed out the door. Which was a lie, because it was neither Cookie’s casa nor P.J.’s.

Damage to the house was marked in red and labeled on the blueprint: mold, cracked beam, water damage, sagging roof. Along with the visuals was a report that Paul went over with them. The estimate for remediation and repair was substantial.

“What do you think we should do, Cookie?” Mom asked after they went over the figures. “I could have let Olivia make the decision, but I wanted you girls to be part of it.”

“I guess P.J. isn’t interested in what happens to this house,” Mom went on. “She…”

“P.J. has always been interested in what happens to this house,” Cookie said in her scolding schoolteacher voice.

“Well not showing up today is sending a different message.”

P.J. sent her message years ago, she thought, but you didn’t listen then either.

“So what do you think we should do with the house?

Cookie looked around the room for something familiar. Definitely not the walls, which were so yellow it was like being inside a stick of butter. The shell clock on the wall called attention to itself with its metronome beat. She and P.J. had found it in the basement. It was a generic elementary school clock with Roman numerals. They decided it wasn’t fancy enough for their new house, so they collected shells and stuck them onto the frame with model glue. The shells were so tiny they kept slipping out of their hands onto the floor. It took forever to glue them on, but those little shells were still holding fast.

“Why don’t we all share the house?” Cookie said. “You told us everything would be divided equally some day. You might not remember, but that’s what you said, so here’s your chance. Evan and I are doing well, so we could put money in. Kimmy loves it here.”

“Oh Cookie,” Olivia said shaking her head. “I agree it would be great to pass the house on to the kids. My girls love it here. But Jessica’s talking about spending a month at overnight camp, and Jennifer’s making noises about doing Outward Bound or going to Europe. Then there’s college. They’ll probably decide that a summer house doesn’t fit their lifestyles. As for P.J…” the shell clock ticked relentlessly, “I don’t think you’ll be able to convince her to come back. I think that ship has already sailed.”

“If we sell, all the proceeds will go into the estate,” Mom said.

“What estate?”

“What I leave you girls when I die. It will be divided three ways.”

“Uh huh.”

But what about now, Mom?

Mom and Olivia took her around the house—all three stories and six bedrooms. Except for the shattered porch, the uneven roof, and those marks on the blueprint, one might never know the house was in danger. The décor was new and foreign except for Jennifer’s room. Her niece had insisted on keeping P.J.’s old furniture, and her room had an unpainted wall that showcased the old flowered wallpaper. The other walls were white, and Olivia said she tried to persuade her daughter to go with something more contemporary for the accent wall, but Jennifer had insisted on the wallpaper. She’d even performed an archeological dig of sorts, scraping away a section of wallpaper to expose the layers of paper underneath. As an artistic touch, she hung a frame over the cutaway layers. Jennifer appeared to have inherited the sentimentality gene that had bypassed her mother and grandmother.

Cookie was late, and the smell of baked cheese was making me sick. A kid at a nearby table burned the roof of his mouth with hot pizza, followed by a soda chaser that dribbled down his chin. His friends dribbled in imitation. Hilarious. I rolled my eyes.

I shouldn’t have agreed to this meeting, but there I was. 2:05 on the wall clock, which meant Cookie was five minutes late. I’d give her twenty minutes, max, like we did for professors in college. I hadn’t eaten all day, but the thought of grease on a crust turned my stomach. Chips were another story. Crunchy always worked for me. I pulled a bag of Doritos off a rack next to the soda cooler, paid the cashier, and stuffed a handful of chips into my mouth. Way too many. They were dry as box tops. I picked up my water glass, but it was empty. Five minutes to go.

A fire truck wailed, I looked up, and there was Cookie framed in the doorway. I could have been looking at my mother. Same tall, lean frame. Same dark, curly hair. She was even wearing the kind of outfit Mom might have worn when she was younger: big earrings, a brown halter top, and a long peasant skirt. I felt overdressed in my pants suit and frilly blouse, the outfit I wore for my interviews that morning. I should have changed. Now there were sweat rings around my arm pits, and the humidity was having its way with my hair. My heart was pounding.

Cookie took off her sunglasses and scanned the room, smiling when she spotted me. I stood up, chewing frantically, finally making enough saliva to swallow. We hugged stiffly. Hands on my shoulders she stood back and looked at me. “You look good, P.J.,” she said. “Looks like you lost some weight. And I like what you did with your hair.”

Really. I knew without looking that every inch of my hair was going its own way.

“The color,” she said. “Highlights or something, right? Great for your skin tone.”

I said something nice about how she looked, but all I saw was how much she looked like Mom and how little she looked like me. We sat down and picked up our menus, silently reading. If we were men, we could kill an hour talking baseball. There was a time when the two of us were comfortable with silence.

“Look. They have hot fudge sundaes,” she said, before launching into a monologue about hot fudge, why she was late, and the quality of local pizza joints on the island, “They say Tony’s is the best on the island, but this is my absolute favorite.”

She put down her menu and leaned forward. “Wanna hear about the house?”

“That’s what we’re here for.”

Elbows on the table, she tented her arms, resting her head on interlaced fingers. “I don’t know what they’re going to do, but I know it’ll take a lot of money to fix the damage. Not that Olivia doesn’t have plenty, but I don’t think she’s up for the job. She even said it would be cheaper to tear it down and start over than fix what’s there.”

She leaned back and went on about her house tour, and I tuned out until she said something about my old room.

“What was that?”

“I said Jennifer took your old room. Kept the furniture. Wallpaper, too. At least one wall of it. And remember the clock with the little shells. Remember how they stank when we put them into the bucket with the wet sand, but when they dried out and we rinsed them, they looked like purple and gold pearls. Can you believe none of them fell off after all these years?”

“Hard to believe,” I said, sensing her desperation to reel me in, trying to resist the tug of nostalgia. I picked up my napkin and tore off a strip.

“How about you and I stop by the house. Mom and Olivia are already on their way back to Philly. Maybe there’s something you’d like to take home as a souvenir of…”

“No, nothing,” I tore another strip, then another, wishing I was anywhere but there. “You have no clue what it’s like to be an outsider.”

“Let me tell you about being on the other side,” she said

The waitress came by to take our order. When we didn’t acknowledge our presence, she walked away.

Cookie continued. “I never told you what happened when I went to Uncle Bill’s funeral.”

I had every intention of going to the funeral. Uncle Bill had been good to me, and I wanted to be there for him. Michael and I had even bought plane tickets, but at the last minute I came down with a case of flu that kept me in bed for a week. I was both sorry and relieved I couldn’t be there.

“So after the burial, we gathered at Mom’s apartment,” Cookie continued. “Last time I was there she was into Louis the Fourteenth… Fifteenth… One of those Louis. Must have been a year ago. Anyway, this time she’d done it in chrome and glass, with black and white tile like Bloomingdale’s cosmetic department.”

I had no idea where she was going with this, but I didn’t interrupt. It all sounded so Mom.

“There were mirrors everywhere. Made me dizzy and disoriented, like we used to get when we went into Bloomies. Remember how we’d get lost, afraid we’d be stuck in there all night, or maybe forever, with a store full of snooty salesladies?” She paused, saw she still had my attention, and went on. “Mom’s been painting—canvas, not walls—and she’s really good. Huge abstracts in browns and turquoise. Southwestern colors. Maybe she and Yacht Guy—name’s Tom, by the way and he’s a doctor—took a trip there or something. And lots of Olivia’s pottery. She uses the exact same colors as Mom, so I guess it’s art imitating art imitating life. Getting hard to tell where Mom ends and Olivia begins.”

I thought you were going to tell me about being an outsider.”

“Oh yeah, I’m getting to that. So when I walked in, Mom waved and smiled, all Mom-ish, but she didn’t get up. Olivia did. Walked over and gave me a hug. I think she had a limp, but I’m not sure. Anyway, she walked me over to the card table where she’d been sitting with Mom, Brad, and Yacht Guy. And here’s the thing. At first Mom and Olivia acted like they were genuinely glad to see me, but after a few minutes they forgot I was there. The two of them huddled together whispering like girlfriends, and the two doctors talked shop. Although they had their backs to me, I sat there for a while, acting like I belonged. But it felt too much like junior high… family edition… so I got up and left. The only people who noticed were the people standing near the door.”

Cookie waited for me to respond. I know she was trying to convince me we shared the same sense of alienation. But at least she’d felt comfortable walking in the door; I could no more picture myself in that room than flying out a window.

“Would you like to hear about Kimmy?” Cookie wasn’t giving up.

I must have smiled, because Cookie relaxed. I could tell because my sister always carried her tension in her shoulders, and now she leaned back in her seat. “She’s almost fourteen now. Drop-dead gorgeous. You’ve seen the pictures.” I nodded, and she shook her head. “Oh boy. Trouble ahead.”

Kimmy and I had stayed in touch, and we talked even more once she hit her teens. I guess sometimes an aunt can be easier to talk to than a mother, at least about certain things. But I think Cookie was wrong about trouble ahead. My niece complained a little about rules, boys, even asked me about birth control—for the future, she assured me. I listened and told her she’d have to go to her mother for that kind of stuff. But mostly she talked about school, grades, college, wanting to make her mark on the world someday. My niece was not only seriously beautiful but beautifully serious.

“She talks about you all the time, you know. Amazing with all the time that’s passed. I guess you imprinted on her early, like those ducks.”

“Ducks?”

“Right. Not your business.” Now that Michael and I both wanted children, none were forthcoming. There was a problem with my Fallopian tubes, but the doctor told me conception was still possible. We decided to give it another six months. After that we’d talk about in-vitro. I wasn’t sure I wanted to put my body through all that—the creampuff face, the other side effects—but I was really feeling the tug. Six months earlier, an elementary school teacher invited me to talk to her class about the life of a reporter. Afterward, the kids crowded around me with a gazillion questions and said they didn’t want me to leave. I didn’t want to leave either. The teacher told me I had a way with kids. Yes I’d probably endure IVF, especially if Michael and I could end up with a little Kimmy…

“P.J. I know you’re in there somewhere. Why do you keep doing this? Cutting yourself off. Don’t you remember how we were together? Don’t you think about our history?”

The memory of the day I lost the house crowded out everything that came before. I couldn’t make myself remember differently.

“That’s ancient history, Cookie.” My sister’s shoulders hunched again, but I couldn’t stop. “You think hide-and-seek, jump-the-waves, all that’s enough to keep people together. Well it’s not. People grow apart. It just happens. Maybe we weren’t really as close as all that.”

“So now you’re going to rewrite our history?” Cookie said through clenched teeth. “You can’t chop off your childhood like it’s some kind of… tumor.”

“Well it’s ancient history to me,” I said, loud enough for the waitress to back away from our table.” I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about Mesopotamia either.”

“We aren’t freaking Mesopotamia. We’re sisters. And you act like I’m the enemy. I apologized over and over for my stupid remark. Waved the white flag. I’m still waving, and you just sit there dumb as a rock.” She knocked her chair down when she stood up. Everything around us froze.

“I can’t do this anymore. I’m giving it up.” Cookie yelled on her way out, raising her arms in surrender. “I’m done.”

After a long, numb while I put some bills on the table and left.

I wasn’t sure why I’d agreed to meet with my sister. A sense of obligation? Whatever the reasons, I didn’t expect to be blind-sided by emotions or end up with two shaky hands gripping the steering wheel of my rental car. After fifteen, twenty minutes I was calm enough to drive. My head was pounding and I was out of aspirin, so I drove by the little grocery store that used to be around the corner from our house. But it wasn’t there anymore.

Chapter 48. The Big House
Her eyes were fixed on the ocean, where the action was. Somewhere inside her, a radiator released a puff of air. “Ha.”

So many people come and gone. New families moving in, pushing out the old, tearing down, building up, bemoaning the bad taste of those who came before. It was a cycle as inevitable as ebb and flow.

The Atlantic was a trickster. Just when you thought you could trust her, she lost her temper, overflowed her boundaries, and lashed out at everything standing on solid ground. Then she remembered there was no such thing as solid ground. It was all just undercurrents.

She watched the moon pushing and pulling the tides, and watched the ocean fight back. Truth was, the Atlantic, all mighty and massive, wasn’t actually in control. The moon pushed her around like a schoolyard bully. And all those people painting walls, making plans as if they could steer their own lives...

The radiator went, “Ha.”

Chapter 49. Cookie

October 1983

Cookie had been right. The house was salvageable, but it would require a boatload of work and money to fix it. Too much trouble for Olivia, so in the end she decided to sell. The new owner could decide whether to tear down or rebuild. People were flush with money, and everyone seemed to be into teardowns, so that was most likely where the Big House was headed. Sad.

Right before she flamed out of the pizza shop, Cookie had been on the verge of lashing out at her sister in the worst possible way. In retrospect, she was thankful she hadn’t told her sister how close she’d come that close to sleeping with Denny, and how hot he was, and how much he wanted her. Thank God she’d held her tongue.

Angry as she was with P.J., Cookie didn’t want to give up her connection with Michael, so they kept in touch. During their most recent conversation, he confessed he was worried about P.J. He recognized her depression, even though she usually hid it well behind her jokester scrim, especially with Vera. And when the subject of her family came up, P.J.’s face would take on the pained expression of someone with heartburn, which was, he said, exactly what she had: a burned heart.

Cookie had a burned heart, too. She considered seeing a therapist, but it was her daughter who eased her pain. Kimmy had a sweetness about her, despite the occasional adolescent outbursts, which were to be expected. Smart and beautiful with thick black hair and blue eyes, she didn’t look like any of them except around the eyes. The Coleman eyes. Evan kidded her about it, insisting that’s why he married her.

Kimmy seemed genuinely unaffected by her looks, oblivious to the guys who stared at her as they no doubt imagined what she was hiding beneath the baggy clothes she favored. “Comfort first,” she told her mother. “More important to focus on school.” She was a single-minded young woman, intent on pursuing a “meaningful career.” Cookie was struck by how radically women’s lives had changed from the time she and her sisters had gone to school. P.J. had been a woman ahead of her time; Kimmy promised to be a woman of her time.

After the confrontation in Ventnor, Cookie told her daughter she was done with Aunt P.J., hiding none of her anger. But Kimmy wouldn’t accept the finality of her mother’s declaration.

“Don’t give up on Aunt P.J.,” she said. “I have a plan.”

“You have to tell her it’s my idea,” Kimmy told her mother.

“If it works.”

“When it works. This is going to fix Aunt P.J. And you too, Mom.”

“We’ll see.”

“You too, Mom.” Kimmy gave her mother a hug, knowing that’s what her mother needed. Kimmy had never been big on sustained physical contact, wriggling out of her parents’ arms even as a young child, eager to get onto the next thing. But there were times when she felt the need to hug them, relishing their surprise and pleasure. And every once in a while she let herself rest comfortably in the embrace of the people who loved her. Her mother told her someday she’d meet a guy who’d put his arms around her and she’d want him to keep them there forever. She conceded that was possible, but a long way off.

Kimmy knew all about her mother’s childhood: the family dynamics, the secret father, the estrangement from Aunt P.J.—all of it. So she knew she had a lot of fixing to do. She was excited about her plan, sure her parents would agree to it once they talked it over. So sure, in fact, that she already started planning the rollout. First she’d call her Uncle Michael and enlist his help. Then there was the package to wrap and the instruction booklet to write. Not that P.J. would need instructions once she got the package. But the idea of a hand-written user’s manual was a hoot.

Kimmy was trying to decide whether to send it in a big box with fancy wrapping, or in a plain manila envelope. The envelope would be a nice touch. Her aunt would open it, expecting to find bills or an application or who knows what. But then she’d pull out the surprise, and…

She had no doubt it was going to work, and she could hardly wait.

Chapter 51: Cry if you Wish
August 1984

An hour ago the sky was sugared with stars, the water still as glass. But a storm had swept in, and now I was struggling to stay vertical. The neighboring boats were tucked into their slips, tied down extra tight. A few lights dotted the marina, but most of the owners had gone ashore for the night, taking their champagne toasts and rock music with them.

The marina was packed with sailboats and yachts—a nautical subdivision without streets or sidewalks. Most of the boats sported cheery names—New Dawn, Genesis, Bill’s Excellent Adventure—as if that’s all it would take to set them sailing happily off into the sunset. Our boat was another example of misplaced optimism; the couple who had rented us the Toujours L’Amour were entangled in a messy divorce. So much for amour being toujours.

The cabin of the Toujours L’Amour was like a dollhouse for grownups with its mini-kitchen, mini-bathroom, mini-everything. But the boat rental had been too good a deal to pass up, much cheaper than the mortgage and taxes on our house, and since we’d be moving back to Philly soon, we could put up with the inconveniences.

As a stiff breeze set the boats rocking, the marina echoed with the sound of shattering glass and a muttered “Oh fuck” from the boat next to ours. The guy who owned the Bright Hope—yet another name gone awry—rarely went ashore after his wife died of cancer a few months back.

The wind kicked up a notch and I stretched out on the deck, resting my head on a pile of lifejackets. Sometimes Michael and I amused ourselves by making up more realistic names for our neighbors’ boats: Shark Bite, Upchuck, Mal de Mer—that last being the name of the boat my father owned, and it had lived up to its name. When we went fishing, mal de mer was all I caught. Dad sold it at the end of the summer, and I thought that was it for me and boats. But her we were living on a houseboat, if only temporarily.

Penn wanted Michael back, offering tenure and a big salary increase as incentives. When he’d gotten the offer, he said he’d turn it down if I said no.

“It’s up to you, P.J. Stay or go?”

“Let me think.”

“No rush.” He took off his glasses and held them up to the light, then reached into his pocket for a tissue. I closed my eyes. Michael had kept his expression neutral, as if either yes or no was an okay answer. But cleaning the glasses gave him away. The only time he did anything about his dirty lenses was when something bothered him. I knew from the way he said “big fat raise” that he wanted the job, and I knew he missed the Jersey shore.

“Name that tune,” I said, opening my eyes. It was a game we played, making the other one guess the answer to a question by humming the first few notes of a song. He nodded, and I saw his lips flirt with a smile. Playfulness had brought us together as kids, and it was part of our marital Super Glue. I hummed a few notes.

He laughed. “Sing it, Tammy.”

I stood up and grabbed an imaginary microphone. “Stand by your man.” I gave it the full twang. “And tell the world you love him.”

“You mean it?”

“I sang so, didn’t I?” He laughed. “You’ve been offered your dream job. How could I say no?”

“Lots of reasons you could say no.” He put his hands on my shoulders.

I took a deep breath. “I can handle it.”

“And your job at the paper. I know how much you love it.”

“Don’t think I’ll have trouble finding something else. I have a pretty good CV.”

He pulled me close. “Almost Pulitzer is better than pretty good,” he whispered in my ear. I didn’t want to spoil it for him, tell him it didn’t really matter to me where we lived. Tell him that a lot of things didn’t matter to me anymore. I managed to crank up enthusiasm when that was expected, but most of the time my world was beige.
As wind gusts whipped things up, the boats around us clacked like billiard balls. Dark clouds had swallowed the stars, and I was beginning to feel nauseated lying on my back, so I sat up and leaned against the side of the deck, bracing my feet against the cabin. It was probably safer below, but Michael still wasn’t back, and I didn’t want to be inside alone. I could have been working on the scrapbook we were making for Vera. Michael had pasted the last of the photos he’d taken into the album we were giving her for her birthday, and I promised to help him write captions. But I couldn’t summon the energy to move, so I let the elements rough me up.

My foster care series in the Chronicle hadn’t won the big prize, but it gave me the opportunity to feature Vera in a professional role. As a social worker she’d encountered her share of toxic foster parents, including the ones who had beaten Robbie to death years earlier. But her recent experience as a foster parent was a rare example of the system at its best. Drake had been Vera’s foster child for a year before she adopted him in March. The final article in the series featured a picture of Vera lighting candles on her new son’s birthday cake, and nine-year-old Drake, his face radiant with candlelight, leaning forward to blow them out. There’d been some hate mail over a white woman adopting a black child—technically a mixed race child, though “mixed” invariably translated as “black.” But I was sure that the joy transfiguring the faces of mother and child in the photograph silenced a few would-be racists.

“I swear I’d have won the Pulitzer if I’d included more about you in the series,” I told Vera one evening as we sipped coffee in her living room. “The readers got such a kick out of you. And it wasn’t just your personal story.”

“Was it my big mouth?”

I nodded.

“My curves?”

“That too. You know, I’m still getting your damn fan mail.”

The dinner dishes were cleared, and Michael and Drake were starting their dessert routine.

“Hey Drake, why don’t we see what’s in the freezer? What do you think we’ll find?”

“Toothpaste?”

“Don’t think so. Probably spinach.”

“Nuh uh, Michael. It’s toilet paper. I saw Mom put it in there yesterday.”

“Yum. Toilet paper.”

“For dessert?”

“Of course, little buddy.” He ruffled Drake’s curls. “It’s delicious with a little chocolate sauce and whipped cream.”

While Michael and Drake were raiding the freezer, Vera leaned over and stage whispered, “I love your husband. I think I’ll steal him.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You’ll have to walk over me to get to him.”

“I’ll squash you like a bug.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“No luck in the pregnancy department?” I was no longer embarrassed by Vera’s blunt way of asking personal questions. In fact, I considered it one of her endearing qualities.

“No luck yet. But practice makes perfect.”

Michael and Drake interrupted before Vera could respond with an inappropriately graphic remark that would crack me up and leave me scrambling for a G-rated explanation. They were carrying bowls of peppermint ice cream smothered in chocolate sauce. When Drake moved in with Vera, he asked about the picture of the little boy on the wall. Vera told him Robbie was a sweet little boy who’d gotten sick and died.

“What’s he holding?” Drake asked.

“A peppermint ice cream cone.”

“That’s my favorite. Yeah, peppermint’s my favorite.”

“Have you ever tried it?”

“No, but I know it’s going to be my favorite.”

The same family pictures were hanging on Vera’s wall, but she’d added a couple of herself and Drake. “It’s good to have some living people on the wall for a change,” she told me. Where’s my family wall? I thought. Where’s my family? Where are my children?

* * * * *

The first drops of rain touched down softly as insect wings kissed by dew. I wouldn’t have noticed, were it not for the irregular tapping on the deck. Soon it was jack-hammering my body, making a second skin of my T-shirt. I was determined to stick it out, but the sound of thunder finally drove me downstairs. The deck was so slippery, I had to crawl to the cabin door and inch backward down the steps. I sat on the floor dripping and shivering and worrying about Michael out in the storm.

He must have been right behind me, because when I looked up, there he was. He stood framed in the doorway in his bulky L.L. Bean raincoat, which was buttoned all the way, so only his eyes were visible beneath the hood. Despite the violent rocking of the boat, he held the railing with only one hand as he came down the steps because of the plastic bag he was carrying in the other.

“What happened, baby?” he said, his words muffled behind the coat flap.

“Nothing. I’m okay. Just wet.”

“You sure?”

I nodded. He turned away and hung his raincoat on a hook, but it slipped off. On the kitchen table next to him was a box that hadn’t been there before. The boat bucked, and the package slid off the table onto the floor next to the raincoat.

“I picked up the mail,” he said dropping to his knees in front of me. “The storm is turning out to sea,” he said. “A guy at the mailboxes said he just heard it on the radio, so the worst is over.”

“The worst is over,” I echoed.

“You’ve been feeling like shit, haven’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

“You thought you’d done a good job hiding it, didn’t you?” Michael added, framing my face with his hands. I didn’t have the energy to tell him he was a mind reader. “After fourteen years, I have a pretty good idea what’s going on in that head.” He tilted my face up. With the water dripping from my hair, it probably looked like I was crying, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t cry because my insides had dried up. I was alive and not alive at the same time.

He put his arms around me, but I couldn’t stop shivering. He sat back on his heels, his plaid shirt soaked. “This isn’t helping. I have a better idea. Let me get you a towel. Don’t move.” I closed my eyes until I heard him stumble back into the room. He was carrying a beach towel and wearing a dry shirt. He lifted me to my feet and held the towel loosely around me while I stripped off my wet clothes. Then he wrapped me tightly in the towel, and wrapped himself tightly around my towel cocoon.

“I have a surprise,” he said. “I’ll meet you in the bedroom. Just give me a sec.” When we’d first moved aboard, we tried using nautical terminology— stateroom, galley, head—but soon slipped back into land-speak. I never could get that port, starboard, bow thing straight.

Still wrapped in the towel, I got into bed. The boat was still rocking, but less violently then it had been a few moments before. More cradle than amusement park ride. A foghorn moaned. Saddest sound in the world. Michael stood in the doorway a silly grin on his face, holding the box out in front of him.

“Wait’ll you see this. It’s going to change everything.”

Once in bed, he held the box out for me to take, but I was still mummy-wrapped in the damp towel.

“Here, let me,” he said unwrapping the towel and handing me a clean set of pajamas from his nightstand. I put on the top and took a deep breath, sorry I couldn’t feel anything except the desire to turn off the light and let the boat rock me to sleep. He put the box on my lap. It was wrapped in brown paper and marked Special Delivery. In the upper left corner, written in a familiar hand, was Cookie’s name and address.

“What’s this?”

“For me to know and you to find out.”

His silly grin and response were annoying. I was eager to get this whatever-it-was over with. The box was sealed with string and tape, but I was too shaky to open it, so Michael took the package from me and unwrapped it. He pulled out an 11x14-inch manila envelope and handed it to me. Taped to the outside was a key on a chain. I turned to Michael, who mouthed, “Me to know, you to find out.”

Inside was a packet of papers stapled along the side like a book, and under them were a couple of printed sheets. The words “Instruction Manual” were printed in large block letters on the top sheet of stapled packet.

I turned to the next page.

P.J.’s Instruction Manual

1. 
   Fasten chain with key around neck.
   
2. 
   Read legal documents enclosed herein.
   
3. 
   Take plane to Ventnor and meet sister outside Big House. (You’ll recognize her by the matching key and chain.)
   
4. 
   Walk up steps.
   
5. 
   Insert key in lock.
   
6. 
   Turn key.
   
7. 
   Walk into your house.
   
8. 
   Do not track sand inside.
   
9. 
   Cry if you wish.
   
10. 
    That’s it.
    

On the following pages were interior and exterior photos of the Big House.

I turned to Michael, who was watching me, mouth slightly open. He lowered his eyes to the printed sheets, and I picked one up. It was a legal document, like hundreds I’d written when I was practicing law. But now I was unable to make sense of it. “Quit claim,” “grantor,” “grantee,” “joint tenancy,” “right of survivorship.” I saw “Ventnor City, Atlantic County,” and the address of the Big House at the top. I saw Cookie’s legal name, my legal name at the bottom. The words blurred.

“Let me take that,” Michael said, pulling me close. “If you cry all over the signature, she might have to buy it all over again. I’m not sure she could afford that. Or the lawyer’s fees” I tried to speak, but the pipeline between my brain and mouth had flooded out.

“She bought it, P.J.,” he whispered in my ear. “The Big House. Olivia sold it to the next door neighbor, who planned to tear it down and build a swimming pool on the land, but Cookie wasn’t going to let that happen. She bought it and added you as a joint owner. I promised her I’d call as soon as you opened the package. It’s a good thing the phone lines are down, because you’re in no condition to talk to anyone right now. I’m sure you’ll have a lot to say to her.”

“I don’t…I can’t…”