Beach Read

I WASN’T READY TO look through the rest of the house, so I settled down at the table to write. As usual, the blank document stared accusingly at me, refusing to fill itself with words or characters, no matter how long I stared back.

Here’s the thing about writing Happily Ever Afters: it helps if you believe in them.

Here’s the thing about me: I did until the day of my father’s funeral.

My parents, my family, had been through so much already, and somehow we always came through it stronger, with more love and laughter than before. There was the brief separation when I was a kid and Mom started feeling like she’d lost her identity, started staring out windows like she might see herself out there living life and figure out what she needed to do next. There was the kitchen-dancing, hand-holding, and forehead-kissing that followed when Dad moved back in. There was Mom’s first cancer diagnosis and the wildly expensive celebratory dinner when she kicked its ass, eating like we were millionaires, laughing until their overpriced wine and my Italian soda sprayed from our respective noses, like we could afford to waste it, like the medical debt didn’t exist. And then the second bout of cancer and the new lease on life after the mastectomy: the pottery classes, ballroom dancing classes, yoga classes, Moroccan cooking classes that my parents filled their schedules with, like they were determined to pack as much life into as little time as possible. Long weekend trips to see me and Jacques in New York, rides on the subway during which Mom begged me to stop regaling her with stories of our pothead neighbors Sharyn and Karyn (not related; regularly slid informational “Flat Earth” pamphlets under our door) because she was afraid she was going to pee herself, all while Dad debunked the flat Earth theory under his breath for Jacques.

Trial. Happy ending. Tribulation. Happy ending. Chemo. Happy ending.

And then, right in the middle of the happiest ending yet, he was just gone.

I was just standing there, in the foyer of his and Mom’s Episcopalian church, in a sea of black-clad people whispering useless words, feeling like I’d sleepwalked there, barely able to recall the flight, the ride to the airport, packing. Remembering, for the millionth time in the last three days, that he was gone.

Mom had slipped into the bathroom, and I was alone when I saw her: the only woman I didn’t recognize. Dressed in a gray dress and leather sandals, a crocheted shawl tied around her shoulders and her white hair wind-tossed. She was staring right at me.

After a beat, she swept toward me, and for some reason, my stomach bottomed out. As if my body knew first that things were about to change. This stranger’s presence at Dad’s funeral was going to wrench my life off track as much as his death had.

She smiled hesitantly as she stopped in front of me. She smelled like vanilla and citrus. “Hello, January.” Her voice was breathy, and her fingers twirled anxiously through the fringe on her shawl. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

Behind her, the bathroom door swung open and Mom walked out. She stopped short, frozen with an unfamiliar expression. Recognition? Horror?

She didn’t want the two of us to talk. What did that mean?

“I’m an old friend of your father’s,” the woman said. “He means … meant a lot to me. I’ve known him all my life, just about. For quite some time, we were thick as thieves, and—he never shut up about you.” Her laugh tried for easy, missed it by a light-year.

“I’m sorry,” she said, hoarse. “I promised I wouldn’t cry, but …”

I felt like I’d been shoved off a building, like the dropping would never end.

Old friend. That was what she said. Not lover or mistress. But I knew, from the way she was crying—some funhouse mirror version of Mom’s tears during the funeral. I recognized the look on her face as the same one I’d seen on mine this morning while I tapped concealer under my eyes. Dad’s death had irreparably broken her.

She fished something out of her pocket. An envelope with my name scrawled across it, a key resting atop it. A tab hung from the key with an address scribbled in the same unmistakable handwriting as the chicken scratch on the envelope. Dad’s.

“He wanted you to have this,” she said. “It’s yours.”

She pushed it into my palm, holding on for a second. “It’s a beautiful house, right on Lake Michigan,” she blurted. “You’ll love it. He always said that you would. And the letter is for your birthday. You can open it then, or … whenever.”

My birthday. My birthday wasn’t for another seven months. My dad would not be there for my birthday. My dad was gone.

Behind the woman, Mom unfroze, moving toward us with a murderous expression. “Sonya,” she hissed.

And then I knew the rest.

That while I’d been in the dark, Mom had not.

I closed the Word document, like clicking that little X in the corner would shut out the memories too. Looking for a distraction, I scrolled through my inbox to the latest email from my agent, Anya.

It had arrived two days ago, before I left New York, and I’d found increasingly ridiculous reasons for putting off opening it. Packing. Moving things into storage. Driving. Trying to drink as much water as I could while peeing. “Writing,” heavy on the scare quotes. Drunk. Hungry. Breathing.

Anya had a reputation for being tough, a bulldog, on the publishers’ end of things, but on the writers’ end, she was something like Miss Honey, the sweet teacher from Matilda, mashed together with a sexy witch. You always desperately wanted to please her, both because you had the sense that no one had loved and admired you so purely before and because you suspected she could sic a herd of pythons on you, if she so chose.

I drained my third gin and tonic of the night, opened the email, and read:

Helloooo, you beautiful and miraculous jellyfish, angelic artist, money-maker mine,

I know things have been SO crazy on your end, but Sandy’s writing again—really wants to know how the manuscript’s coming slash whether it will still be ready by the end of the summer. As ever, I’m more than happy to hop on the phone (or instant message, or a Pegasus’s back as need be) to help you brainstorm/hash out plot details/WHATEVER it takes to help bring more of your beautiful words and unparalleled swoon into the world! Five books in five years was a tall order for anyone (even someone with your spectacular talent), but I do believe we’ve reached a breaking point with SLB, and it’s time to grin and birth it, if at all possible.

xox,

Anya

Grin and birth it. I suspected it’d be easier to deliver a fully formed human baby out of my uterus at the end of this summer than to write and sell a new book.

I decided that if I went to sleep now, I could pop out of bed early and crank out a few thousand words. I hesitated outside the downstairs bedroom. There was no way to be sure which beds Dad and That Woman had partaken of.

I was in a funhouse of geriatric adultery. It might’ve been funny, if I hadn’t lost the ability to find anything funny in the last year spent penning rom-coms that ended with a bus driver falling asleep and the whole cast going off a cliff.

It’s SUPER interesting, I always imagined Anya saying, if I were to actually send in one of these drafts. I mean, I would read your GROCERY list and laugh-cry doing it. But it’s not a Sandy Lowe book. For now, more swoon and less doom, babycakes.

I was going to need help sleeping here. I poured myself another G&T and closed my computer. The house had gotten hot and stuffy, so I stripped to my underwear, then circled the first floor opening windows before draining my glass and flopping onto the couch.

It was even more comfortable than it looked. Damn That Woman with her beautifully eclectic tastes. It was also, I decided, too low to the ground for a man with a bad back to be climbing on and off of, which meant it was probably not used for S-E-X.

Though Dad hadn’t always had a bad back. When I was a kid, he’d take me out on the boat most weekends that he was home, and from what I’d seen, boating was 90 percent bending over to tie and untie knots and 10 percent staring into the sun, your arms thrown wide to let the wind race through your swishy jacket and—

The ache rose with a vengeance in my chest.

Those early mornings, on the man-made lake thirty minutes from our house, had always been just for the two of us, usually the morning after he got back from a trip. Sometimes I didn’t even know he was home yet. I’d just awake to my still-dark room, Dad tickling my nose, whisper-singing the Dean Martin song he’d named me for: It’s June in January, because I’m in love … I’d jolt awake, heart trilling, knowing it meant a day on the boat, the two of us.

Now I wondered if all those precious chilly mornings had been literal guilt trips, time for him to readjust to life with Mom, after a weekend with That Woman.

I should save the storytelling for my manuscript. I pushed it all out of my mind and pulled a throw pillow over my face, sleep swallowing me like a biblical whale.

When I jerked awake, the room was dark, and there was music blasting through it.

I stood and ambled, dazed and gin-fogged, toward the knife block in the kitchen. I hadn’t heard of a serial killer who began each murder by rousing the victim with R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” but I really couldn’t rule out the possibility.

As I moved toward the kitchen, the music dimmed, and I realized it was coming from the other side of the house. From the Grump’s house.

I looked toward the glowing numbers on the stove. Twelve thirty at night, and my neighbor was blasting a song most often heard in dated dramedies wherein the protagonist walks home alone, hunched against the rain.

I stormed toward the window and thrust my upper body through it. The Grump’s windows were open too, and I could see a swath of bodies lit up in the kitchen, holding glasses and mugs and bottles, leaning lazy heads on shoulders, looping arms around necks as the whole group sang along with fervor.

It was a raging party. So apparently the Grump didn’t hate all people, just me. I cupped my mouth around my hands and yelled out the window, “EXCUSE ME!”

I tried twice more with no response, then slammed the window closed and circled the first floor, snapping the others shut. When I was finished, it still sounded pretty much like R.E.M. was playing a concert on my coffee table.

And then, for a beautiful moment, the song stopped and the sounds of the party, laughter and chatter and bottles clinking, dipped to a static murmur.

And then it started again.

The same song. Even louder. Oh, God. As I pulled my sweatpants back on, I contemplated the advantages of calling the police with a noise complaint. On the one hand, I might maintain plausible deniability with my neighbor. (Oh, ’twas not I who called the constable! I am but a young woman of nine and twenty, not a crotchety old spinster who loathes laughter, fun, song, and dance!) On the other, ever since I’d lost my dad, I’d had a harder and harder time forgiving small offenses.

I threw on my pizza-print sweatshirt and stormed out the front door, marching up the neighbor’s steps. Before I could second-guess myself, I’d reached for the doorbell.

It rang out in the same powerful baritone as a grandfather clock, cutting through the music, but the singing didn’t stop. I counted to ten, then rang it again. Inside, the voices didn’t even waver. If the partygoers heard the doorbell, they were ignoring it.

I pounded on the door for a few more seconds before accepting no one was coming, then turned to stomp home. One o’ clock, I decided. I’d give them until one before I called the cops.

The music was even louder in the house than I remembered, and in the few minutes since I’d shut the windows, the temperature had risen to a sticky swelter. With nothing better to do, I grabbed a paperback from my bag and headed for the deck, fumbling for the light switches beside the sliding door.

My fingers hit them but nothing happened. The bulbs outside were dead. Reading by phone light, at one in the morning, on the deck of my father’s second home it was! I stepped out, skin tingling from the refreshing chill of the breeze coming off the water.

The Grump’s deck was dark too, except for a lone fluorescent bulb surrounded by clumsy moths, which was why I nearly screamed when something moved in the shadows.

And by nearly screamed, I of course mean definitely screamed.

“Jesus!” The shadowy thing gasped and shot up from the chair where it had been sitting. And by shadowy thing, I of course mean man who’d been chilling in the dark until I scared the shit out of him. “What, what?” he demanded, like he expected me to announce that he was covered in scorpions.

If he had been, this would be less awkward.

“Nothing!” I said, still breathing hard from the surprise. “I didn’t see you there!”

“You didn’t see me here?” he repeated. He gave a scratchy, disbelieving laugh. “Really? You didn’t see me, on my own deck?”

Technically, I didn’t see him now either. The porch light was a few feet behind and above him, transforming him into nothing but a tallish, person-shaped silhouette with a halo ringing his dark, messy hair. At this point, it would probably be better if I managed to go the whole summer without having to make eye contact with him anyway.

“Do you also scream when cars drive past on the highway or you spot people through restaurant windows? Would you mind blacking out all our perfectly aligned windows so you don’t accidentally see me when I’m holding a knife or a razor?”

I crossed my arms viciously over my chest. Or tried to. The gin was still making me a little fuzzy and clumsy.

What I meant to say—what the old January would’ve said—was Could you possibly turn your music down a little bit? Actually, she probably would’ve just slathered herself in glitter, put on her favorite velvet loafers, and shown up at the front door with a bottle of champagne, determined to win the Grump over.

But so far, this was the third-worst day of my life, and that January was probably buried wherever they put the old Taylor Swift, so what I actually said was “Could you turn off your sad-boy-angsting soundtrack?”

The silhouette laughed and leaned against his deck railing, his beer bottle dangling from one hand. “Does it look like I’m the one running the playlist?”

“No, it looks like you’re the one sitting in the dark alone at his own party,” I said, “but when I rang the doorbell to ask your frat brothers to turn down the volume, they couldn’t hear me over the Jell-O wrestling, so I’m asking you.”

He studied me through the dark for a minute—or at least, I assumed that was what he was doing, since neither of us could actually see the other.

Finally, he said, “Look, no one will be more thrilled than me when this night ends and everyone gets out of my house, but it is a Saturday night. In summer, on a street full of vacation homes. Unless this neighborhood got airlifted to the little town from Footloose, it doesn’t seem crazy to play music this late. And maybe—just maybe—the brand-new neighbor who stood on her deck screaming foot job so loud birds scattered could afford to be lenient if one miserable party goes later than she’d like.”

Now it was my turn to stare at the dark blob.

God, he was right. He was a grump, but so was I. Karyn and Sharyn’s vitamin-powder-pyramid-scheme parties went later than this, and those were on weeknights, usually when Jacques had a shift at the ER the next morning. Sometimes I’d even attended those parties, and now I couldn’t even handle Saturday-night group karaoke?

And worst of all, before I could figure out what to say, the Grump’s house went miraculously silent. Through his illuminated back doors, I could see the crowd breaking up, hugging, saying goodbyes, setting down cups, and putting on jackets.

I’d argued with this guy for nothing, and now I’d have to live next to him for months. If I needed sugar, I was going to be shit out of luck.

I wanted to apologize for the sad-boy angst comment, or at least for these goddamn pants. These days, my reactions always felt outsized, and there was no easy way to explain them when strangers had the bad fortune of witnessing them.

Sorry, I imagined myself saying, I didn’t mean to transform into a crotchety grandmother. It’s just my dad died and then I found out he had a mistress and a second house and that my mom knew but never told me and she still won’t talk to me about any of it, and when I finally came apart, my boyfriend decided he didn’t love me anymore, and my career has stalled, and my best friend lives too far away, and PS this is the aforementioned Sex House, and I used to like parties but lately I don’t like anything, so please forgive my behavior and have a lovely evening. Thank you and good night.

Instead, that knife-twisting pain hit my gut, and tears stung the back of my nose, and my voice squeaked pathetically as I said to no one in particular, “I’m so tired.”

Even silhouetted as he was, I could tell he went rigid. I’d learned it wasn’t uncommon for people to do that when they intuited a woman was on the verge of emotional collapse. In the last few weeks of our relationship, Jacques was like one of those snakes that can sense an earthquake, going taut whenever my emotions rose, then deciding we needed something from the bodega and rushing out the door.

My neighbor didn’t say anything, but he didn’t rush away either. He just stood there awkwardly, staring at me through the pitch-dark. We faced off for easily five seconds, waiting to see what would happen first: me bursting into tears or him running away.

And then the music started blaring again, a Carly Rae Jepsen banger that, under different circumstances, I loved, and the Grump startled.

He glanced back through the sliding doors, then to me again. He cleared his throat. “I’ll kick them out,” he said stiffly, then turned and went inside, a unanimous cheer of “EVERETT!” rising from the crowd in the kitchen at the sight of him.

They sounded ready to hoist him up into a keg stand, but I could see him leaning over to shout to a blonde girl, and a moment later, the music fell silent for good.

Well. Next time I needed to make an impression, I might be better off with a plate of LSD cookies.