The Guest Cottage

by Nancy Thayer

  —

  That first morning, the Blacks and the Andersons went into town separately. Trevor and Leo did the grocery shopping. Sophie took Lacey to the library, where they got cards and checked out books while Jonah, not thrilled at the idea of hanging out with his mother and sister, loped off exploring the streets and wharves by himself, promising to meet them at the car at noon.

  As Trevor had warned, the small town was packed with people and parking spaces were scarce, although the traffic was not as bad as it would be in August. Sophie stopped at Glidden’s Island Seafood to choose salmon for dinner and then happily headed back down Surfside Road to the house.

  After a casual lunch of sandwiches, everyone changed into bathing suits and drove to Surfside Beach. Trevor and Leo sat in the backseats of Sophie’s minivan—it seemed silly to take two cars. Once on the beach, they split up. Sophie established a beach chair beneath an umbrella and took turns playing in the surf with Lacey and reading. Once again Jonah ambled off by himself, walking along the water’s edge toward the distant horizon. Trevor and Leo made sand castles.

  Sophie became a bit restless after an hour or so. She wasn’t used to long periods of unscheduled time. The sea was calm today, lapping at the shore in a lulling rhythm that made her want to close her eyes, but she needed to stay alert to watch Lacey. All up and down the shore, clusters of people on beach blankets laughed and talked and rubbed suntan lotion on each other. Lovely young girls in bikinis strolled past, pretending not to notice people looking at them in admiration. Sophie glanced down at her black Speedo, her good old mommy bathing suit. She could still wear a bikini. She’d brought her red one. Perhaps she’d even wear it. But not today. The sky was high and blue, the sun hot, the occasional breeze refreshing. Children screamed and giggled as the waves nibbled at their knees. Sophie felt as if she were encased in a glass globe called summer.

  Back at the house, they all rinsed off the sand in the outdoor shower, then raced inside for a real shower. They dressed and wandered away, sunburnt and content, to read or nap or tap on computers or, in Leo’s case, to work on the Great Wall of China. Sophie cooked dinner—salmon, quinoa, salad complete with arugula, sliced carrots, and cucumbers, and one cheese-and-mustard sandwich for Leo. To the boy’s credit, he tasted the strange food and said he really liked the salmon. Sophie tried not to look too pleased.

  After dinner, the sun was still high in the sky. The fresh air was inviting. They found a badminton set in the large hall off the kitchen. Jonah and Trevor staked the net in the backyard, which was flat and large enough for a good game. They decided to play, Jonah and Lacey against Trevor and Leo. Sophie carried a tall plastic glass of iced herbal tea out to the patio to watch.

  A person could write a psychological study of people solely from watching them play badminton, Sophie decided. She was delighted to see her son racing to slam the birdie, fully engaged in the game, and shouting encouragement to his sister. Jonah was almost as tall as Trevor and almost as muscular. He was a good-looking boy, a smart student, and he’d always had plenty of friends. She couldn’t understand why he’d become so withdrawn around her. During the past two months when she had tried to ask him how he was doing, he’d always shrugged and answered that he was fine, acting as if she were loopy even to ask the question. Zack, of course, never wanted to engage in a discussion about their son.

  At least now, this evening beneath the soft blue sky, her children were safe and happy. She didn’t want to think about her marriage. Not tonight. And she tried hard not to look at Trevor as he sprinted around hitting the birdie with his long, well-toned arm.

  Suddenly, the peace of the evening was broken.

  Lacey screamed. “A man! A man in the window!”

  The game slammed to a halt. Jonah dropped to his knees, put his arms around his sister and talked to her. Sophie assumed he was reminding her about Susie’s grandfather staying in the apartment.

  Then the blue door of the apartment opened and Connor Swenson stepped out. In his seventies, he didn’t fit the image Sophie had conjured up of a retired farmer. She had expected striped overalls and a baseball cap with the words Carl’s Cattle Feed across the top. Instead, the man wore chinos, a clean white collared T-shirt, and a clean if rather beat-up pair of leather loafers. His hair was thick and snow white and his eyes were Icelandic blue.

  Sophie walked down the lawn to greet him. “Hello, I’m Sophie Anderson. I’m renting the house for two months from Susan.”

  The man held out his hand. “Connor Swenson. Pleased to meet you. Didn’t mean to give your girl a fright.”

  The rest of the group ambled over to introduce themselves.

  “I hope all our noise wasn’t bothering you,” Trevor said.

  “Not at all. I enjoy having people around.” Connor smiled down at Leo, who stared back, wide-eyed.

  “Would you like to play with us?” asked Jonah.

  Connor shook his head with a rueful smile. “I’m afraid my badminton years have passed.”

  “Would you like to join me on the patio to watch?” asked Sophie. “I’ll fix you a glass of iced tea.”

  “Thank you for the invitation, but not tonight. I’ve got a slight problem walking—nothing to worry about—oh, yes, and there is a TV show about to come on for me.” With a wave of his large weathered hand, Connor turned back into his apartment.

  Sophie noticed that with the few steps he had taken out of his home, he had limped a bit and grimaced with each step. Arthritis, she assumed—her mother was beginning to get it in her knees.

  The game began again and Sophie resumed watching, thinking about Connor Swenson alone in his apartment. He seemed like a perfectly nice man. She wondered if he was lonely without his wife, on this island instead of his farm. Change is hard, she reflected, although if this day were any sample of her own transitional period, she counted herself lucky.

  Twilight was falling by the time the badminton game ended. Sophie and Trevor herded the two smaller children into the house to begin the routine for bed while Jonah barricaded himself in his room with his various electronic devices.

  Sophie hadn’t failed to notice that Trevor had not cleaned the kitchen—she couldn’t blame him for that; he had come out to play badminton. Lacey had decided to sleep by herself in the free bedroom tonight so that she could start arranging her special shrines of books and seashells, which allowed Sophie to have her bedroom to herself. She wasn’t that tired, although she was relaxed and drowsy from the sunshine. It would be nice to go down and pour herself a glass of wine to take outside to the patio to drink while she listened to the night sounds. But she knew if she went to the kitchen and saw the dishes still there she would start cleaning the room, and then she would be mad at Trevor, and it was ridiculous that she was even thinking about this! For a moment she allowed herself to fantasize Trevor backing her up against the sink.

  “Get a grip,” she whispered, alone in the bedroom. “You are a thousand years older than he is. And you are not going to go do those dishes. We made an arrangement.”

  She busied herself with her laptop, answering emails and posting on Facebook. She left her bedroom door open, in case Lacey called out, but by nine thirty, Sophie shut her door and crawled into bed with a book.

  When she got up the next morning and went downstairs to make coffee, she found the kitchen sparkling clean.

  After the first couple of days, time began to blur for Trevor, in a really good way, as if he were on a cruise with no obligations except to enjoy himself. He checked in with River ten times a day in case some snag had snarled up that River couldn’t handle—but no, all was cool, and as the days passed, Trevor texted him less and less. Domestic life fell into a pleasant routine revolving around food, the beach, more food, badminton, tag, or Frisbee, and television or a book.

  Sophie’s kids were heaven-sent. Jonah, a monosyllabic boy clumsily growing into his height and handsomeness, trudged along obediently wherever his mother took him, but moved like Houdini around ei
ght o’clock, zapping into the family room to take possession of the remote control and turn on the Red Sox game before anyone else could claim the television. This allowed Trevor to watch the game, too. He was a huge Sox fan, even though they were playing poorly this year. Leo, tired after a day at the beach, would sit between Jonah and Trevor, asking endless questions about the game until he began to yawn. During a commercial, Trevor would carry his son up to bed and dutifully urge him through the ritual of brushing teeth, peeing, and washing hands.

  After a few days, Leo stopped laying his clothes out for the next day. He was too sleepy, plus all he needed to put on was one of his two bathing suits. A little triumph, Trevor thought happily, a small step forward.

  Lacey at ten was as talkative as Jonah was silent. Lacey talked all the time. She never seemed to have a thought she didn’t announce aloud. A busy, cheerful, pretty girl, she shared her indecision about how to wear her hair that day—braids, pigtails, or ponytail, and did Leo prefer the mini-barrettes with the bows on them or the coated rubber bands with the sparkly round balls? One morning Trevor saw Lacey and Leo in front of the mirror in Lacey’s room. Lacey was settling a headband with pom-poms on it onto Leo’s head. Leo waggled his fingers like a bug and pretended the pom-poms were antennae, and Lacey shrieked and ran to hide behind her bed.

  Trevor stepped back into the hall, closed his eyes, waited for his heart to calm, and tried to grasp his own over-the-top reaction.

  Ah. After a moment’s reflection he realized why all his alarm bells had gone off. That moment had been so much like the times Tallulah had spent playing dress-up with Leo. Trevor had wanted to yell: Don’t make him remember his mother while he’s happy! Don’t send him back into his lonely well of sorrow. Leaning against the wall, he heard Leo and Lacey giggling and realized he didn’t need to protect his son right now. Silently, Trevor said a prayer of thanks that his boy was playing.

  But he knew that sometime Leo was going to blow, and the Anderson family would realize what a nutcase his child was. And then what?

  The third morning they went to the beach, it happened.

  They were in Leo’s bedroom, getting ready for a day at the beach. Leo insisted on taking along Tubee, his stuffed giraffe.

  “Tubee will get all sandy and gross on the beach,” Trevor pointed out.

  His son had clutched the animal—one of nature’s less fortunate designs, in Trevor’s mind—to his chest like a diva in an opera. “Want Tubee.”

  “Sorry, dude,” Trevor said, trying to be brisk and natural, “no Tubee. Come on, let’s go splash in the ocean.”

  “Daddy. I want Tubee to live in my sand castle,” Leo explained reasonably.

  Trevor knelt next to Leo. “Leo. Look. We can wash the sand out of your hair when we return from the beach, but sand and salt water will ruin Tubee. His fur would get all yucky—if he gets soaked, he might even fall apart.”

  Wrong thing to say. Trevor knew it the moment the words were out of his mouth. Leo didn’t need anything else in his life to fall apart. Leo shrieked. Gripping Tubee even tighter, he ran into the closet and slammed the door shut behind him.

  “Leo. Come on. Don’t you want to go to the beach?” Trevor tried to keep his cool.

  “NO! WANT TUBEE!”

  Trevor opened the closet door. His son was huddled on the floor like a storybook character fearing the ogre. “Leo. Tubee can wait right here on your bed. Or even in the car, we can leave him on the seat in the car—”

  “NO!” Leo began to kick and yell in protest, making such a racket that Trevor finally shut the door on his son, leaving him to have his tantrum in the closet.

  Aware that the entire household could probably hear his son’s freak-out, Trevor sat down on Leo’s bed and forced himself to count to ten. Children held their parents hostage, he thought. They had no shame about screaming, while their parents had to act like adults.

  For a moment, Trevor wished Lacey would come in and work her happy-girl magic on Leo, cajoling him to join them on the beach. Instead, Sophie stuck her head into the room.

  “We’re leaving now. Maybe we’ll see you at the beach later.” With a smile, she was gone.

  Trevor heard the front door slam. They’ve deserted me, he thought sullenly, and then admitted to himself that probably they were trying to do him a favor, to get out of earshot of Leo’s gale-force fit.

  After a while, Leo’s energy ran out and he went quiet. Trevor opened the door to be sure his son hadn’t turned blue from yelling. “I’m going to work in my computer room,” he said, and left the room, with the door open.

  His hands were shaking too hard to manage the computer, but he sat staring at it, calming down, wondering what to do next. Sophie and her kids were so disgustingly normal it made Trevor and Leo look worse by comparison. Should Trevor forget about this and go back to Boston, or take Leo to a hotel in Maine or something, where no one could see what a loser he was? Plus, what about Sophie’s family’s reaction to having a screaming child in the house?

  Leo came into the room, head hanging. “I want to go to the beach, Daddy. I put Tubee in bed for his nap until we get home.”

  Relief and something like joy flew up inside Trevor’s chest. They give us these miracles, these pardons, so generously, he thought; they crush our spirits like crashing boulders only to hold open their hands to give us jewels.

  “Good boy, Leo. Good decision.”

  Another crisis threatened one day when Sophie was preparing lunches to take to the beach. It had taken them a few days to develop a routine for getting all the paraphernalia to the beach: towels, beach chairs, sand toys, beach umbrella, cooler of drinks, basket of lunch or snacks, books, sunblock. Getting out the door was like preparing for a trip to a foreign and backward country, but once they’d lugged everything down to the shore, the world opened up in a blaze of blue sky and sunshine. It was worth it. Sophie and Trevor had decided to join forces until they got to the beach rather than duplicate the coolers, the lunches, the chairs.

  Sophie was making sandwiches. “Do you want to try tuna fish today?” she casually asked Leo.

  “No!” Leo said. “Daddy makes my sandwich.”

  Trevor was dumping ice into the cooler. “Leo,” he began, hoping that his son would relent.

  “Only Daddy,” Leo asserted stubbornly.

  “Fine,” Sophie said easily. “I’ve put the bread out—”

  “I want Daddy to make my sandwich,” Leo insisted, and now his voice was more scared than bossy, as if in Leo’s mind something bad would happen if each single detail weren’t followed exactly as it always was.

  Trevor put down the ice. What could he say? Careful, or he’ll blow?

  To his infinite relief, Sophie shrugged. “Okay. I’ll give this to Jonah. He can always eat lots of sandwiches.”

  When they got to the beach, Trevor and Leo established their home base a few yards away from Sophie and her kids. After all, they weren’t a family. Leo seemed to prefer playing alone, building walls out of sand or walking along the beach holding Trevor’s hand. The few times Lacey had made overtures—bringing Leo more shells, asking if he wanted to throw the Frisbee with her—Leo had done his shoulder-shrug, head-dip movement in response. Lacey stopped visiting their camp.

  Still, they all went home together. Trevor and Leo used the outside shower, then dressed in dry clothes. Lacey and Jonah clomped up to their rooms to shower and check their iPhones, and Sophie rinsed her feet with the hose, then ambled into the kitchen to begin preparations for dinner. She always set out a plate of chewies—carrots, celery, zucchini sticks, almonds—to keep the kids from digging the potato chips from their hiding place and devouring them. Everyone became crazed for salt.

  By the end of the first week, when Trevor got ready to make his shopping expedition to the grocery stores, Leo said he’d stay home and work on his Lego wall. He didn’t say he’d play with Lacey, or invite Jonah to help him, but he was willing to remain in the house with the Andersons while Trevor wa
s gone. That, to Trevor, was a success of great magnitude.

  And eating Sophie’s fabulous cooking every night was a bonus he’d never anticipated. They all sat together, eating and talking, and although Leo insisted that Trevor was the only one who could put food on Leo’s plate, he quite happily ate the food that Sophie, not Trevor, had prepared. Small steps, Trevor thought. Inch by inch.

  —

  Sophie had forgotten how dazzling the world was. Sitting on her beach chair, watching Lacey and Jonah splash in the waves, listening to the laughter and chatter of other families, friends, and lovers floating like balloons up and down the beach, feeling the warm gold of the sun on her skin, staring far out to a horizon that seemed never to end, she remembered the grandeur of the world. It was like being a child again.

  Yet her oldest offspring was leaving childhood. Jonah had been her one true love, her pal, her pet, her honey bunny. Lacey, five years younger, had both Sophie and Jonah (and Zack, of course, busy in the background) to care for and be adored by, and Lacey had a different personality. She was curious, people-loving, outward-bound. Sophie and Jonah joked that Lacey would grow up to be the entertainment director on a cruise ship. Jonah had always been quieter, slower to react, more of a homebody. A smart, studious boy, he’d enjoyed baseball, soccer, and swimming, but he liked his private time, too, reading or playing video games. He’d shared everything with Sophie, he’d lean against her on the sofa when the family watched TV—and then this year he’d turned fifteen and morphed into some version of Eeyore, slouching directly into his room from school without saying hello, shrinking away from Sophie’s slightest touch, eating at the dinner table as if the rest of the family were invisible.

  This was only normal, natural, Sophie knew that, but it was hard to be ignored by her son, and more than that, she worried about him now that he never shared the inner workings of his heart. What could he be doing on his iPad all the time? Was he happy? Were any adolescents happy? She found great consolation when Jonah, by the fourth day, started hanging out with some guys his age, body surfing up the beach from where Sophie and Lacey had established their camp.