I’d been keeping my distance from Finn all summer, but I decided I’d go talk to the two of them after I finished updating the website. Having Tessie around would make it less uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to have to avoid Finn forever.
Elsie looked up too when her children walked past the building. She glanced at me and a sigh escaped her. “He’ll be okay, won’t he?” she asked.
“Who?” I knew she meant Finn, but I didn’t want her to guess that I was thinking about him too.
“Finn. Sometimes I’m afraid he’ll never get over Lorna. But he will, won’t he?”
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to reassure Elsie, but I was pretty sure Finn never would get over Lorna and I didn’t want to lie. Finally I said, “It hasn’t been that long.”
She nodded. “I know. You’re right. And I don’t mean to make light of the effect of it on you too, Jackie. I know you must miss her terribly.”
My fingers went slack on the keyboard. “I can’t believe it’s been three months already.”
Elsie narrowed her eyes. “What was it about Lorna that made you all so loyal to her? I know she was an exciting person, but she could be difficult sometimes too, couldn’t she? A little bossy?”
I was taken aback by Elsie’s criticism. She seldom had anything negative to say about anybody. “Lorna liked being in charge, if that’s what you mean. But none of us minded that. We did what she wanted us to, but that was because it was more fun than anything we came up with.”
“Until it wasn’t.” Elsie’s eyes locked on mine. “I’m sorry. I know you loved her, but as Finn’s mother, I worried about the way she led the three of you around. I hoped that Finn . . . well, it doesn’t matter now.”
“Lorna was the best thing that ever happened to us!” I couldn’t believe Elsie didn’t understand this.
A frown puckered her brow. “It seems to me you and Finn and Lucas were the best things that ever happened to Lorna. You supported her when her parents didn’t. Or couldn’t. Without the three of you, she would have been a sad little girl.”
I thought about the way Lorna, at ten or twelve, would pull her long fiery hair in front of her eyes, closing the curtains so we couldn’t see the emotions trampling her face. “She was sad sometimes. It made me want to protect her, which was ridiculous because she was a lot stronger than me.”
“Oh, Jackie, I doubt that. You have an inner strength Lorna never did. I’m sure that’s what she saw in all of you.”
I didn’t want to argue with Elsie, but if I was strong, I was pretty sure I had Lorna to thank for that too—she was my role model.
Elsie pawed through the file cabinet, a little distracted now. “I like your new friend Charlotte. Hanging out with her must be helping you get over Lorna, isn’t it?”
Why did she want us all to “get over” Lorna? It wasn’t going to happen. “Charlotte’s great, but no one can replace Lorna.”
“Of course not. I’m sorry. I put it badly,” Elsie said. “I just meant it’s healthy that you have a new friend. That’s what I worry about with Finn—that he’s stuck in the past. He can’t move forward.”
She was right about that, but I didn’t confirm her fears.
“I’m finished here,” I said. “I’ll go say hi to Finn and Tess before I leave.”
“Oh, do that.” Elsie brightened up. “They should be done soon too. Finn can give you a ride home.”
Don’t get your hopes up, I thought as I walked across the parking lot toward the row of studios. Half a dozen bulging trash bags were stacked outside the open door of Studio 9. I heard Finn complaining before I saw him.
“Why can’t these friggin’ geniuses clean up their own messes? They can’t even take a minute of their precious time to throw out the moldy food in the back of the refrigerator. I’m surprised they can manage to flush the toilets for themselves.”
I stood outside the window for a second and watched as Tess filled a bucket at the sink in the corner, her arms long and graceful. She didn’t look like a child anymore, another reminder that time didn’t stop, whether you wanted it to or not.
“Most of them aren’t that bad,” Tess said. “There was this really sweet guy, Neil, here this summer. A sculptor. We had a long talk one day about how you can tell who’s trustworthy and who isn’t. He says you can tell by a person’s voice.”
Finn put down the dustpan and gave her a suspicious look. “Really? What’s ‘a person’s voice’ supposed to sound like?”
“You know. Honest.”
He groaned. “And what does old Neil think honesty sounds like? A throaty whisper? An Italian tenor? Does it have a reggae beat?”
Tess sighed. “Why do I try to tell you anything?”
I knocked on the open door. “Hi guys. Don’t let me interrupt your argument.”
“Hey, Jackie. Come in. You can be on my side.” Tess grinned as she lifted the bucket from the sink, slopping water onto the painted wood floor.
Finn glanced at me, then looked away. “Did you hear this? Some artist guy was bullshitting Tess about how honest he is and she bought it. She’s so naïve.” He turned to his sister again. “Did you tell old Neil you were thirteen years old?”
“You’re disgusting, Finn. He wasn’t coming on to me. Besides, I’m almost fourteen.”
Finn flattened another pizza box and stacked it on the mattress with half a dozen others. “Thirteen and a half. And, by the way, when did you start wearing so much makeup?”
“Oh, my God, Finn, shut up! You sound like Mom! I hardly wear any makeup compared to my friends.”
“Ask Jackie. It makes you look older than you are. Guys’ll take advantage of you. Tell her.”
I put up my hands and stepped back. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard these two squabble, and I knew better than to get in the middle of it. Not that they ever drew blood. In fact, I’d always envied their relationship—they teased and argued, but they stuck up for each other too. As opposed to my three brothers who traveled as a pack, continually punching each other like prizefighters, but never taking much notice of me.
“You think I’m stupid, but I’m not.” Tess squirted Lysol into the bucket and swished the mop around in the water. “You need to get a life, Finn, and stop bugging me about mine.”
Finn grabbed a broom and attacked the floor beneath the bed.
“Are you giving that to Jackie?” Tess pointed to a box full of art supplies—pieces of canvas, sheets of newsprint, and half-used tubes of paint.
“Oh, yeah. Those are the discards from this year’s spoiled brats.”
Finn always saved any left-behind art supplies for me, even though he was conflicted about it. I rifled through the box excitedly.
“There’s some great stuff in here. Thanks.”
He grunted. “You know I hate aiding and abetting you in this art business.” I was actually happy to hear him grumble at me. It was the most normal conversation we’d had in months.
“God, Finn, you’re such an old grouch!” Tess said. “Mom loves your new collages, Jackie, the ones that are layered on top of cloud photographs. I do too.”
“Thanks, Tess.”
Finn sighed. “I’m not saying I don’t like the pictures. I’m just not sure Mom should encourage you so much.”
Tess plopped the mop back into the bucket. “Why the hell not?”
“Yeah, Finn,” I said. “Why the hell not?” I’d heard his objections before, but I was glad to have a safe subject to talk about, even if we disagreed.
“Don’t get mad. It’s not about how good you are. It’s about you thinking this is going to be your life’s work. Like taking photographs is a real job.”
“It is a real job for some people,” I said.
He shook his head. “You don’t get it. Art’s a big game, and a lot of people lose. Making art that somebody wants to pay for is an unrealistic goal for . . . well, you know.”
I did know, but I’d never heard him put it so bluntly before and it hurt my f
eelings. “You mean it’s unrealistic for somebody like me? A poor person. You sound just like my mother. She thinks only rich people should go to art school.”
“I don’t know why anybody wants to go to art school,” Finn said. “Is it living in Provincetown that makes people think they need to write sonnets or dab oil on canvas? Not everybody needs to express themselves creatively.”
“Maybe not,” Tess said, as her mop swabbed the floorboards and her brother’s sneakers simultaneously. “But Jackie does, don’t you?”
I nodded and tried to swallow the anger that pushed up into my throat.
Finn went into the small bathroom and returned in a minute, dragging a badly mildewed shower curtain behind him. He rolled it up and stuck it in a trash bag.
“Look, Jackie, I’m not saying you won’t make it. Maybe you will. Maybe you’ll turn into one of these conceited jerks we get here who think it’s beneath them to speak to anyone without a book contract or a New York gallery. But I hope not.”
“Jackie would never do that,” Tess said.
“They all do.” Finn pointed an elbow toward the open doorway. “Speak of the devil,” Finn said, his lip curling up on one side. “There’s the Crown Prince of Affected Assholes.”
Elsie and Cooper were standing in the parking lot, talking. I hadn’t seen Cooper all week, and my stomach fluttered a little at the sight of him. I’d missed him, missed his soft voice and comforting presence. But I didn’t contradict Finn. He’d always been a little jealous of Cooper, maybe because his parents liked him so much. Anyway, I didn’t want Finn, or anyone else, to suspect I had a little crush on the guy. It could only be embarrassing.
Tess looked out the door. “Who? Not Cooper?”
Finn glared at his sister. “Of course, Cooper!”
“You’re crazy, Finn. He’s, like, my favorite person. He’s nice to everybody.”
Finn groaned. “Oh, my God, you must be related to Mom. You’re both genetically blind to douchebags.”
Tess rolled her eyes. “I don’t think so. I can see you without any problem. Why don’t you stop bitching and take the trash out. I want to finish this floor and go home.”
Finn hoisted a bag onto his shoulder and grabbed another with the other hand.
“I’ll help you,” I said, grabbing two more bags.
He gave me a quick grin. “See what I mean? You don’t have the jerkitude necessary to be an artist.”
I figured that was as close as I’d get to an apology. Cooper smiled a warm greeting as I lugged the bags to the Dumpster, and for a moment I didn’t care what Finn thought.
• • •
Finn and I were washing our hands in the custodian’s room when Tess came in to empty her bucket and rinse out the mop.
“How come you don’t have a boyfriend, Jackie?” she asked, out of the blue.
Tess had always been adorably outspoken, but it wasn’t usually at my expense. I felt my cheeks color. “I don’t know.”
Finn was careful not to look at me. “You’re so nosy, Tess. Maybe Jackie doesn’t want a boyfriend. Did you ever think of that?”
“Bull. Everybody wants a boyfriend. Unless they want a girlfriend.” Tess took off her wet sneakers and slipped into flip-flops. “You should be Jackie’s boyfriend, Finn,” she said lightly.
“Tessie!” I couldn’t believe she’d said that.
“Ignore her,” Finn said, flatly. “She thinks she’s being outrageous, but she’s just annoying.”
“No, I’m not!” Tess pouted.
Finn dried his hands on his jeans and bolted out the door.
“It just makes sense,” Tess said to me. “You guys have known each other forever and you’re both tall and nice-looking. And you know Mom loves you, Jackie, and so do I.”
“Tessie, you can’t pick out partners for other people. It doesn’t work that way.”
“But you’ve always liked Finn, haven’t you? I watched you two walk on the beach once. You looked right together.”
I was starting to feel sick. Why did everybody but Finn think he and I would make a great couple? “Tessie, I like Finn, but that’s not the point. Besides, he’s still in love with Lorna.”
“Well, he can’t be in love with her forever,” Tess said, with the certainty of a thirteen-year-old.
Finn pulled his gently used Prius up to the door and honked the horn. “Come on, Tess. I want to get home. Jackie, your art stuff is in the backseat so I might as well drop you off too.”
He sounded resigned to his duty.
“I can walk. I always walk—”
“Get in, Jackie. Don’t be silly.”
The command surprised me, but I figured he was embarrassed by Tess’s remarks too. I climbed silently into the backseat.
Tess got in the front and slammed the door. She was quiet for a minute as Finn turned the car toward the West End. Then she turned and glared at her brother.
“Lorna’s not coming back. You know that, right?”
9.
I liked to leave my house early so I could meander to the Blue Moon, taking pictures along the way. This morning I walked down Cottage Street past the clapboard house where Lucas used to live, and felt the familiar ache of longing for my disappeared childhood. I wanted to feel it, wanted to roll around in nostalgia a little bit.
All four of us used to live in the West End within a few blocks of each other until Lucas’s dads saved up enough money to open the bed-and-breakfast inn on the other end of town. Finn still lived in his family’s enormous place on the bay beach, with views all the way up the arm of the Cape to Wellfleet, and Lorna’s mother still owned her ramshackle house on nearby Franklin Street. At least I assumed she did—I hadn’t seen her in months. I felt like my ten-year-old self was following me down the streets where we used to run, a pack of loud, skinny, barefoot monkeys, pushing and shoving each other, laughing at just about everything. Now I was a kind of tourist, looking for the remains of my life, taking photographs of what we’d left behind.
I went to the breakwater first. I’d probably taken more pictures of the breakwater than of any other spot in town—at all times of the day, in every kind of weather. Since the accident, I didn’t walk out on it anymore—I hadn’t all summer—but I still liked seeing it through the lens, framing it in the viewfinder.
Walking back into town along the beach, I slowed down at Dugan’s Cottages, a row of shabby shacks that rented during the summer to last-minute vacationers willing to tolerate a little mold to have the beach outside their door. Unheated and without insulation, they were boarded up from the end of August through late May. The spot was prime real estate, and developers had tried to buy it for years, but Mrs. Dugan wouldn’t sell. She said she wanted to keep one little piece of Provincetown the way it had been for half a century.
When we were kids, Dugan’s Cottages were our off-season hideout, especially Cabin 5, which backed up to a patch of pine trees and could be approached without anyone seeing us. The way the cottage was tucked back into the trees, it was invisible from the street, and in the winter that stretch of beach was always deserted. All it took was a screwdriver to pry the boards off a grimy window. The four of us spent hours in that cottage, pretending to be thieves or pilgrims or pirates, runaways hiding out.
When we were little, we sometimes played “house” too, the way kids do. As I remembered it, Lorna never wanted to be the mother, whether because it was too boring a role or because her model for it was such a bad one, I didn’t know. But I liked playing the part of the perfect mama who kissed knees, settled arguments, and tucked her children into bed. I was often a single mother, because Finn never wanted to be the father, and neither he nor Lorna was willing to play the child very often. Lucas could sometimes be coerced into one of those roles, but the other two preferred more dramatic parts.
Finn liked to pretend he was the captain of a ship that had wrecked on our shore, someone who’d had many adventures he’d happily recount to those of us more shore-bound. But Lorna u
sually wanted to be a mysterious person of some kind. Someone whose life we had to guess at. I think she didn’t always know herself who she was supposed to be, but she liked to hear our guesses: circus performer, famous actress, amnesia sufferer found wandering on the dunes. That last one was her favorite role, a woman with a cleanly erased past who might have been anything, but now had to start all over.
As we got older the cabin became our clubhouse where we shared secrets we told no one else. Some were about petty arguments with family or classmates, some about stand-offs with teachers, but sometimes the topic was more important and we took our roles as confidants seriously. When Lucas’s dads were fighting a lot and he was afraid they might split up, we huddled around him on the creaky sofa and listened intently to the fears that never materialized. When Lorna’s mother was arrested for shoplifting a bunch of expensive cheeses from the Stop & Shop, we let Lorna pace and curse and throw things until she settled down. Every one of us offered her rooms in our houses should Carla go to jail. That didn’t happen, even though Lorna kind of wished it would (and so did we).
Finn and Lorna may have used the cabin for other purposes too, the last few years. They’d been sleeping together since they were fifteen, and the cabin would have provided the privacy that neither of their houses did. But that was a subject they didn’t talk about with me or Lucas. Why wouldn’t they sleep together at Dugan’s? From September through May Cabin 5 was our own secluded refuge and no adult ever knew.
I hadn’t walked past the cabin all summer. In season it was usually rented, and I hated seeing other people in our place. But I noticed that Mrs. Dugan, never a procrastinator, had already gotten someone to board up the windows, even though it wasn’t quite Labor Day. I walked the perimeter of the place, taking shots of the rusty hinges and weathered shingles. I wondered if it was still furnished with the same ancient, uncomfortable furniture—the couch springs broken, the mattress on the bed moldy, the pots and pans in the tiny kitchen pitted and burned? Even as kids we knew it was kind of a crummy place to spend a vacation, but it was a palace to us, our headquarters, our home.