“You know,” I said now to Julie, “we’ll just have to go to Colorado ourselves a couple of times a year. We’ll take Mom with us.”
“What?” She glanced at me in confusion, then laughed. “Oh, you’re back on that topic again.” We’d talked about Shannon and Tanner for most of the ride down the shore, but I could see that Julie had now shifted gears to our old neighborhood and Ethan. “I don’t plan to go to Colorado a couple of times a year,” she said, “because I don’t intend to let Shannon go.”
“She’s pregnant,” I said. “She can become legally emancipated and do whatever she likes if she wants to.”
“Can we talk about this later?” she asked, as we turned yet another corner.
“Sure,” I said. We’d recently gotten into this dance of Julie denying the reality of Shannon’s leaving and me trying to force it down her throat. “Sorry to be a pain,” I added.
To our right, between some houses, I saw the canal.
“Oh!” I said. “Is this our old street?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Wow. I’d never recognize it,” I said. Then I asked rhetorically, “Where did all these houses come from?”
Julie stopped the car in front of a sunny yellow-and-white Cape Cod.
“Do you recognize this one?” she asked.
I didn’t. “Is that ours?” The house meant nothing to me.
She nodded.
I looked at the mailbox, painted to resemble the sea and topped by a sailboat. “Somebody loves this house,” I said.
“And this is Ethan’s house,” Julie said as she pulled into the next-door driveway. She opened the car door before even turning off the ignition. The recent change in her was dramatic. I knew she was upset about Shannon, and I knew the past was weighing heavily on her in a way it had not for many years, but there was also a joy in her I couldn’t remember ever seeing before, not even when she was falling in love with Glen as a young woman. And the cause of that joy walked out the front door of his house and over to us, giving Julie an embrace that lasted several seconds as he planted a kiss on her neck. The scene made me smile.
“Welcome, Lucy!” he said to me, giving me the much shorter and more perfunctory version of the hug he’d laid on my sister.
“Hi, Ethan,” I said. “I’m desperate for a bathroom.”
He laughed, pointing behind him to the house. “Halfway down the hall on the right,” he said. “We’ll meet you in the yard.”
When I left Ethan’s bathroom, I headed for the back of his house. Through the open jalousies on the sun porch, I could see the canal clearly and suddenly everything seemed familiar. I walked outside to where he and Julie were leaning against the chain-link fence watching the beginning-of-the-weekend array of boats on the water. I felt almost dizzy with déjà vu. The current was so fast, and I remembered my fear of it. I’d have nightmares of falling into the canal and being swept away by the water as I struggled unsuccessfully to swim into one of the docks.
I shivered as I leaned against the fence next to my sister.
“Whew,” I said. “I remember how scared I was of the water.”
Julie put her arm around me. “You were,” she said. “Poor little kid.” She nodded in the direction of the yard next door. I had not even thought to look over there. “Do you remember it?” she asked.
I looked across a short metal fence to see a little boy playing in a swimming pool. He was riding—and falling off—a huge plastic alligator, while a heavyset, dark-haired woman relaxed with a book on a lounge chair nearby. I could see the top of a boat in the fenced-in dock, but the long, dark, deep-green screened porch was the most familiar part of the scene to me.
“I’d love to see the house inside,” I said. “See how it’s changed.”
“It’s totally different,” Ethan said. “I’ll give them a call later and we can go over.” He glanced at Julie. “You don’t have to go with us, if you don’t want to.”
Julie bit her lip. “I think I can do it,” she said. It was clear they’d had a conversation about this before.
We spent the rest of the afternoon on Ethan’s boat on the canal and the river. It was my first voyage ever in those waters, since I’d been too chicken to go out on our boat when I was a kid. I loved it now, but what was most amazing to me—thrilling to me—was seeing Julie in a boat again. She laughed when the wake of a much larger boat sent a wall of water crashing over us, making us look like two women in a middle-age wet T-shirt contest. She was not only finding love in Ethan, I thought, but also a rekindling of the courage and vitality she’d lost many years ago. Watching her laugh put a lump in my throat.
After dinner, as the sky turned fuchsia from the setting sun, we strolled barefoot across our old front yard and knocked on the frame of the screen door. The young dark-haired woman I’d seen in the backyard pushed the door open for us.
“Hello!” she said, as we entered. “I’m Ruth Klein. And you guys must be the former residents of our house.”
“Hi, Ruth,” Ethan said to her. “This is Julie Sellers.” He rested his hand on Julie’s back. “And her sister, Lucy Bauer.” We stood packed into the hallway near the front door.
“When did you live here?” Ruth asked. She was beautiful in spite of the fact that she was quite overweight. Her pink skin was flawless, her blue eyes a vibrant contrast to her dark hair.
“Our grandfather built the house in 1926,” Julie said. “Lucy and I lived here during the summer in the fifties and early sixties.”
“Oh, wow,” said Ruth. “I bet it’s totally different by now. Where do you want to start your tour?”
“Well,” Julie looked at the partly open door on our left. “This used to be our grandparents’ room.”
“Go ahead in.” Ruth leaned forward to push the door open. It was a small room with a queen-size platform bed and sleeklined dresser and armoire. “This is the master bedroom, as you can probably tell,” she said.
Julie nodded. “And across the hall was the bathroom.”
“Still is,” Ruth said, and we followed her across the hall, taking turns peering into the tiny bathroom. The toilet and pedestal sink looked new. In the corner was a small triangular tub.
“We just had a shower there,” Julie said.
“I think the people before us put the tub in,” Ruth said.
We walked a short distance down the hall. “Here’s our son’s room.” Ruth pointed to her left. Inside, the room was just barely wide enough to fit a twin bed and a tiny dresser.
“This was Mom and Dad’s room, right?” I looked to Julie for confirmation.
“Yes.” She smiled. “They didn’t have much space, did they?”
Across the hall was the kitchen, and it was unrecognizable as any room we’d ever lived in, with white glass-fronted cabinetry and granite countertops. Julie laughed.
“Well,” she said, running her hand across the blue-gray granite. “I can tell you our kitchen looked nothing like this. This is beautiful.”
“This—and being on the water, of course—were what sold us on the house,” Ruth said.
We walked the last few steps of the hallway into the living room, which was painted a soft yellow and furnished with chairs and love seats upholstered in a variety of blue-and-yellow prints. Gauzy white curtains hung at the windows.
“This room seems much more open than it did before,” I said.
“You’re right,” Julie said. “I think it was a darker color or something. I love it like this.”
“We used to play Uncle Wiggly in here,” Ethan said.
“I beg your pardon?” Ruth asked with a laugh.
“It was a board game,” Julie explained.
I looked down at the oak-colored laminate beneath my bare feet. “This used to be linoleum,” I said. Then my eyes were drawn to the staircase at the side of the room. “Look!” I said. “Real stairs!”
Julie laughed. “We had pull-down stairs when we were kids,” she said. “Lucy was terrified of them.”
/> “Would you like to see up there?” Ruth asked.
“Would you mind?” Julie lifted her hair off her neck, as she often did when she was having a hot flash. “It was an open attic when we were kids,” she continued. “Just a bunch of beds divided by curtains.”
“Like a dormitory?” Ruth asked.
“Sort of.”
The three of us followed Ruth up the stairs, where we discovered the attic had been completely transformed. Now it contained an office with three skylights, a large playroom, two small bedrooms and a bathroom with a shower. Everything looked scrubbed and neat and well loved. You would have to work really hard to feel any bad memories in this house, I thought. There was nothing from the past left to trigger them.
I thought of asking to use the bathroom. I was okay for the moment, but I knew that my infected urinary tract could and would act up at any minute. Julie, Ruth and Ethan, though, were already heading back toward the stairs. I could wait.
Once we were downstairs again, Julie turned to Ruth. “It makes me happy to see how nice the whole house looks,” she said, touching our hostess’s arm. “I can tell you love living here.”
“We do,” she said, guiding us through the open French doors onto the porch. “Was the porch screened when you lived here?” she asked.
“Uh-huh,” Julie said, looking from one end of the porch to the other. “This is where we spent most of our time.”
I remembered the porch. Of all the house, it had changed the least, perhaps because the view was still of the small sandy backyard and the water. A long farm table and six ladder-back chairs stood where our old table used to be, and white faux wicker rockers and love seats and coffee tables filled the rest of the space.
The little boy I’d seen in the pool was sitting in the backyard, sharing a lounge chair with a man who appeared to be reading to him in the fading light. Nothing made me happier than seeing a parent sharing a book with a child.
Ruth must have seen me watching them. “Come meet my family,” she said.
We walked outside. The sand in the backyard was already cooling down, and it felt good beneath my feet. The man spotted us and he and the boy stood up.
“Hi, Ethan,” the man said. “And these must be the former owners.”
Ethan introduced us to Ruth’s husband, Jim, and their seven-year-old son, Carter. We chatted about the house and the area for a few minutes, swatting mosquitoes as darkness began to close in on us.
Julie’s gaze shifted to the part of the yard nearest the corner of the house. “When I was a kid,” she said, pointing, “I buried a box of treasures right over there.”
“A treasure box?” Carter asked, looking interested in our conversation for the first time.
Julie nodded.
“Could it still be there?” Ruth asked.
Julie shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe someone found it during the last forty years, or they had some work done to the house foundation and it got disturbed.”
“Or maybe it is still there,” Ethan said. He nudged Julie. “Do you want to see?”
Julie looked at our hosts. “It wasn’t buried very deep,” she said, and I knew she was reassuring them that we wouldn’t be digging up their entire yard. “Just a few inches, really.”
Ruth looked at her husband, whose expression said, Why the heck not? “I’ll get a shovel and flashlight,” he said, and he headed toward the garage.
Carter looked up at Julie. Even in the dim light, I could see he had his mother’s pretty blue eyes. “What did you put in the box?” he asked.
“Things I found,” she said, as we started walking toward the corner of the house. “Just silly things.”
Jim returned with a garden shovel and a strong halogen lantern.
“You know,” Ruth said, looking at the small shovel her husband had provided, “people have brought in fresh sand over the years. We had a couple of truckloads come in when we moved here. It might be down pretty far by now, if it’s still there at all.”
Julie took the shovel and knelt in the sand, glancing at the corner of the house, taking some measurement with her eyes. I could tell that, even after all this time, she knew exactly where the box should be. With the shovel, she smoothed away a couple of inches of sand from the surface of the ground. Then she set the blade of the shovel into the sand at a ninety-degree angle, and we heard it hit something solid.
“Oh, my God,” Julie said. “It’s still here.”
We all sat down on the ground, and Carter and I helped sweep the sand away with our hands, while Julie worked with the shovel and Jim held the lantern balanced on his knee. Soon the top of the box was completely exposed, and Julie dug her fingers around the lid on one side while I did the same on the other.
Julie looked at me across the box. “One, two, three,” she said, and we lifted the lid together, sending a fine dusting of sand onto the objects below.
Carter reached into the bread box, and I wanted to stop him. This was Julie’s box of treasures. I wanted her to be able to do this herself.
Ruth seemed to read my mind. “Wait, Carter,” she said. “Let Julie do it, since it’s really her box. Then maybe she’ll let you use it for some of your own toys and things in the future.”
Julie nodded her thanks to Ruth. “Of course, I’ll let you use it,” she said to Carter. “After tonight, it will be yours.”
“Oh, good!” Carter folded his hands in his lap. What a nice kid.
I could see how hungry Julie was to dig through the old remnants of her life, but I had to go to the bathroom and that was all I could think about. I wished the antibiotics would kick in and knock the infection on its rear. I was about to tell everyone I needed to leave, when Julie suddenly let out a squeal. She reached into the box and pulled out a tiny leather baby shoe. It had probably been white at one time; in the lantern light it took on a yellowish-orange glow.
“Omigosh,” Julie said. “I found this in the shallow water where Grandpop used to keep his killie trap.” She looked across the open box at Ethan and smiled. “And where Ethan kept his marine laboratory.”
Ethan laughed. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I forgot about that.”
“Did your microscope still work after I…you know?” she asked him, and I could tell the question had an esoteric meaning known only to the two of them.
“It was fine,” Ethan said.
Julie reached into the box again. “And look at this!” she said, pulling out an old record, a forty-five. She held it under the splash of light from the lantern and laughed. “Neil Sedaka. ‘Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen,’” she said. “I don’t know where I picked that up.”
I had to interrupt. “I’m afraid I need to use the bathroom,” I said, getting to my feet. “I’ll go over to Ethan’s and be back in a min—”
“Use ours,” Ruth said, nodding toward the house. “Go ahead.”
“Thanks,” I said. I walked up the two steps to the porch, pushed open the screen door, then raced down the hallway toward the bathroom, leaving my sister’s yelps of discovery behind me.
CHAPTER 42
Julie
Sifting through that box was the strangest thing. I was glad for the poor lighting in the backyard, because my eyes were misty and I didn’t want anyone to notice. I felt sympathy for the lonely girl who’d tucked meaningless objects away, longing for a mystery to solve. She’d never imagined the real, unwanted mystery that would await her midway through that summer. Picking out the scraps of old cloth, the dented Ping-Pong ball, the baby shoe, I became aware as never before that I had indeed been a mere child, a twelve-year-old with little concept of real danger. The only scary things I’d known about were from my Nancy Drew books, where the heroine always prevailed in the end.
Something caught my eye in the bottom corner of the bread box, tucked beneath another record and a piece of cloth. It couldn’t possibly be what I thought it was.
“Could you move the lantern a little closer, please, Jim?” I asked.
r /> The circle of light fell into the box, and there it was. Red and purple, as I remembered it. I reached into the corner and pulled out the small plastic giraffe.
“I never put this in here,” I said, quite certain that was the truth.
“What is it?” Ethan asked, leaning closer. I could feel his breath against my bare shoulder.
“A toy,” I said. “A giraffe. Isabel and Ned used to—”
“That was Ned’s,” Ethan interrupted me. “Our uncle gave it to him. He gave us both one. Mine was an elephant. It’s a puzzle.” He reached for it.
“A puzzle?” I was confused. “I thought it was just a token they used to pass between each other.”
“Who did?” Ethan examined the giraffe. “Ned and your sister?”
I nodded.
“I’m not sure how this one works,” he said. He was manipulating the giraffe’s tail and neck; I had never even realized the toy had moving parts. Suddenly the red and purple halves of the giraffe sprung apart, and I laughed out loud.
“They must have sent notes to each other in the giraffe!” I said. “I never guessed.”
Ethan held the halves of the giraffe beneath the lamplight.
“It looks like there’s a note in here right now,” he said.
CHAPTER 43
Lucy
I finished in the bathroom and walked into the dimly lit hallway. I was standing next to the screened front door when I heard laughter out on the road. I turned to look, but it had grown so dark that I could barely make out the group of small, giggling children as they ran down the street. I couldn’t have said how many there were or if they were boys or girls, but watching them, I began once again to remember the night Isabel died, and for a moment, Julie and her Nancy Drew box were forgotten.