Big Summer by Jennifer Weiner
To Meghan Burnett
Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning.
—“Not Waving but Drowning” by Stevie Smith
Prologue
1994
By the second week of September, the outer Cape was practically deserted. The tourists had packed up and gone home. The roads were empty; the glorious beaches were abandoned. It was a shame: by September, the ocean was finally warm enough for swimming, especially if it had been a hot August, and the paths that wound through the dunes and cranberry bogs and secret blueberry bushes, the ones that were pickup spots for men in summer’s high season, were deserted, and the bushes were full of ripe berries. She and Aidan could fill their pockets and pick beach plums out of their bushes between the cottage and the beach. They would each bring a metal pail, and they’d recite Plink! Plank! Plunk!, like the heroine of Blueberries for Sal, as each plum rattled to the bottom.
You’ll go crazy out there, her father had told her when Christina asked if she could take the summer cottage that perched on the edge of the dune in Truro. It’s too empty. Too lonely. No one to see, nothing to do. But he hadn’t told her no. As the first weeks and months had passed, Christina had come to cherish the solitude and the silence, the slant of late-afternoon sun that warmed the floorboards where her ginger cat slept.
With the summer people gone, she could have her pick of parking spots on Commercial Street when she and Aidan went to Provincetown. If he’d behaved himself at the grocery store, she’d buy him an ice-cream cone at Lewis Brothers or a malasada at the Portuguese Bakery. She’d learned every quirk of the cottage, the way the doors swelled up when it rained, the creak of the roof as the beams settled at night. When there were thunderstorms, she could go out to the deck and watch lightning crack over the water of Cape Cod Bay, letting the rain wash her face as she imagined that she was standing at the prow of a ship, she and her little boy, alone on the storm-tossed seas.
Sometimes, that was how she’d felt. Her mother was dead; her sisters and brother, the closest in age a decade her senior, were strangers she saw on holidays; and her father had been puzzled when Christina had asked for the cottage, then furious when he learned the reason why. “Daddy, I’m pregnant,” she’d told him. His face had turned pale, then an unhealthy, mottled red; his mouth had worked silently as he glared. “And I’m keeping the baby. I’ll raise it on my own.”
When he’d raged, demanding to know whose baby it was, Christina had simply said, “Mine.” He’d yelled at her, spittle flying from his lips, insisting that she tell him the name of the man she’d spread her legs for, demanding to know whose whore she’d been. He called her all the names she’d expected to be called and a few that had surprised her; he’d said “You have broken my heart,” but she’d kept quiet, silent and still as he shouted and threatened. Eventually, he’d relented, the way she knew he would.
Fine. Go. Wish you all the joy of it, he’d muttered, and handed her the keys and a list of phone numbers, for the caretaker and the plumber, the trash hauler and the guy who kept the furnace running. She’d stayed in Boston long enough to give birth, and then, as soon as her stitches had healed, she’d taken herself and her baby to Truro, following Route 6 as it snaked and narrowed, over the bridge at Sandwich, up to Hyannis, past Dennis and Brewster, Harwich and Orleans, Eastham and Wellfleet, then into Truro, onto a rutted dirt path that ended at the bluff, where the cabin stood. She’d worried that Aidan would fuss or cry on the ride up, but he’d sat, awake, in his car seat, like a wise old owl, his eyes open as they bounced along the lane and parked on the patch of matted grass in front of the cottage. “We’re home,” she’d said, lifting him into her arms. He was just three weeks old, but she thought he understood.
The cottage wasn’t grand. It was a summer place, with no central heat, ripped screens on the windows, no dishwasher in the kitchen, and just a handheld nozzle in the tub to serve as a shower; a place with threadbare sheets and mismatched napkins and kitchen cabinets filled with chipped hand-me-down mugs and garage-sale glasses, nothing like the grand, sprawling summer palaces that the rich folks who’d discovered Truro had started building, high on the dunes. Christina never cared. She loved every imperfect piece of it. The pared-down quality and the quiet were exactly what she needed after New York. In spite of her father’s warning, she’d made some friends, and they had helped her insulate the walls and showed her how to use steel wool to fill the holes that admitted families of mice every winter. She bought space heaters, layered braided cotton rugs over the creaky wood floors, bought heavy wool blankets for the beds. She found ways to acquire the things she needed, trading heirloom tomatoes for jars of honey and firewood; writing wedding vows in exchange for a cashmere blanket, revising a personal ad in exchange for a pale-blue bud vase. She’d made the summer cottage a home, and she’d crafted a life full of routines and rituals for herself and her son. Oatmeal for breakfast, with honey from the honey dripper; a cherry Popsicle from Jams after a day at the beach; three stories before bedtime, two from books and one made up.