The House on the Gulf

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  I wondered if the Marcuses came to dances on the beach when they were living in Florida, and if they held each other close like the people I was watching. From across the beach the dancing was so beautiful I wanted to cry. Some of those couples had probably been together for forty or fifty years. I thought about how lots of the people I ran errands for were always talking about their husbands and wives, even though they were dead. Mr. Johnson had mentioned Erma so much that I said I couldn’t wait to meet her. He’d gotten a sad look on his face and said, “Oh, Erma’s been in heaven for twenty years now.” Was that the kind of marriage Mr. and Mrs. Marcus had—the kind where they would still dance cheek to cheek when they were eighty-two, the kind where whichever one lived longer would keep the other’s memory alive for decades?

  But how could they love each other so much and not love Mom?

  They were right about Dad being wrong for her, I reminded myself. Maybe Mom had never told them about the divorce. Maybe if they knew—

  But no, I’d learned from my errand route that old people saw divorce as something shameful, and children with only one parent as horribly deprived. I’d tried to tell Mrs. Stuldy that I didn’t miss my father at all, and she hadn’t understood.

  “Don’t you ever long for him?” she’d asked.

  “Of course not,” I said. “Lots of my friends just live with their moms or just with their dads. My friend Wendy, back in Pennsylvania, her parents didn’t even bother getting married in the first place.”

  I’d wanted to amaze and scandalize Mrs. Stuldy, but she just shook her head sadly.

  “Shouldn’t be that way,” she’d muttered sadly.

  And now, sitting on the beach, I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years.

  Back when I was five, the last time I saw my father, I’d cried when he left. I could see the cracked green tile of our kitchen floor as I lay there and sobbed. I don’t remember what Mom said to comfort me, but I remember Bran, all of nine years old, bending over and whispering in my ear, “It’s okay. We don’t need him. It’s better this way, just you and me and Mom.”

  And I’d believed him. I’d trusted him. I’d never longed for my father since.

  I wanted to trust Bran now, to leave all the decisions up to him once again. I just couldn’t.

  But if I started making decisions on my own, what was I going to do?

  “Give me the key to your closet,” I said to Bran the next morning, as soon as Mom left for school.

  Bran jumped, so stunned that he actually knocked the spoon out of his bowl of cereal. Milk dribbled across the table.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “You have the Marcuses’ pictures in there,” I said. “I want to see them.”

  Too late, I realized that I was practically confessing to having snooped in his closet before. Or maybe he would think I was just being logical—he’d admitted hiding pictures, and they wouldn’t be safe out in the heat of the shed, so naturally they were in his closet.

  It didn’t matter.

  “You can’t show them to Mom,” he said, and there was a new tone in his voice, a certain helplessness. If he gave me the key, I could show the pictures to Mom. But if he didn’t give me the key, I could still tattle, still destroy everything.

  “I’m not going to show them to Mom,” I said. “Not without talking to you first. I promise.”

  The words were out of my mouth before I thought about them. It was force of habit—I was used to having to try to make Bran trust me. But I didn’t need to say those words now.

  I didn’t want to show Mom the pictures anyway. I just wanted to look at them again myself. All of them.

  Silently Bran pulled his keys out of his pocket and twisted one key apart from the others.

  “Don’t lose it,” he said. “That really is the only key. I had to buy a new doorknob with a lock, after you told me things could rot in the shed.”

  So I’d guessed right about that.

  “Why did you bother?” I asked. “If you wanted to tear up the pictures anyway, why didn’t you just leave everything out in the shed?”

  “I wanted you and Mom to think I was taking care of things,” Bran said. “I didn’t want to lie any more than I had to. And if we did destroy their property, the Marcuses would have good reason to track us down and take us to court or something.”

  I watched his face. I was searching for some sign that he’d looked through the pictures too, that he imagined loving grandparents the way I did. But his eyes were hard. He didn’t really care. He just wanted to avoid getting in trouble.

  “Don’t you—,” I started.

  “What?” Bran said.

  “Never mind.”

  I couldn’t explain. Not when his expression looked so much like stone.

  I tucked the key in my pocket, and as soon as Bran left for work I went into his room and opened the closet. Several pictures were still stacked on the floor where I’d left them. I carefully set them aside for the moment and maneuvered the box with the rest of the pictures out of my way. Then I pulled out the last box in the closet, the one I hadn’t had time to look at before. I opened it now.

  It contained letters, bills—every scrap of paper the Marcuses owned that spelled their name right. I even found the MAR page from the phone book. It was so like Bran to keep that, to plan to tape it back in at the end of the summer.

  I wasn’t impressed. I kept thinking, If I’d opened this box that other time, I wouldn’t have gone looking for other evidence. I wouldn’t have found Mom’s high school grades, wouldn’t have discovered her maiden name. And would I have eventually told her that the Marquises were really Marcuses and blown Bran’s secret without even knowing how far it went?

  Part of me wished that everything had worked out that way. Then I wouldn’t have had to make any huge decisions. I wouldn’t have known what weighed in the balance.

  I glanced through the box of papers, but I wasn’t very thorough. I wasn’t trying to solve any mysteries anymore, just make up my mind, and credit card notices weren’t going to help me with that.

  I did find one more personal letter in the box. It was a note-card that started out:

  Dear Mom and Pad,

  Alexa Keeps asking when Grammy and Pop-Pop are coming home—she’s counting down the days on the calendar, but she still thinks anything but “right now” is too long! We all miss you. . . .

  It wasn’t a long note, but each word felt like a dagger in my heart. I folded it and put it back in its envelope before it could hurt me any more.

  Alexa was probably my Little Girl Marcus. How could the Marcuses be Grammy and Pop-Pop to her but not even know my name?

  I shoved the box of letters back against the wall and turned to the box of pictures. These were just as hard to look at, but I couldn’t stop. I was like someone gobbling down a whole box of chocolates—still eating long after I’d made myself sick.

  Right under the big family photo was a framed shot of Mr. Marcus with three grandchildren on his lap. Little Girl Marcus/Alexa was messing up his white hair and he was grinning at her with his teeth bared, like a monkey. The other girl and the little boy were practically falling off the chair, but you could tell he had a firm grip on them both. He wouldn’t let them get hurt. Someone had decided to write a label at the bottom of the picture—it said GOOFY POP-POP.

  I stared at that picture for a long time. I think I wanted to find some evidence in it that Mr. Marcus really was mean, that the clowning around was just an act for the camera. I looked at the way the kids were sitting—were they secretly terrified of their grandfather? Were they trying to get away? Were their mouths open because of screams, not laughter?

  No. Everyone was having fun.

  I put that picture to the side and dug out the Marcus family album I’d noticed the last time. I turned the pages slowly, examining every detail.

  Someone—Mrs. Marcus?—was heavily into scrapbooking. All the pages were decorated with cutesy cutouts, like miniature pap
er hoes and spades on a page about their garden, sand buckets and starfish on the page showing a beach outing. She’d cut the pictures in creative shapes too—ovals, flower petals, hearts.

  And everything was labeled.

  Besides Alexa, the other grandchildren were Emily, Michael, Josh, and Noah. Evidently they’d all visited the Marcuses in Florida not that long ago, because there was page after page of pictures of picnics on the beach, children playing in the waves, even a trip to Disney World.

  And that wasn’t their only trip. Traveling seemed to be a big thing for the Marcuses. So many of the photos showed one or both of them posed in front of some beautiful scene. It looked like they’d taken the whole family with them to Vermont one autumn. I felt like I was getting a minute-by-minute replay of that vacation as I looked through dozens of pictures of the entire group in front of beautiful trees, romping in fall leaves, pointing to signs that said YOU ARE IN VERMONT NOW.

  I’d never been to New England. Until I moved to Florida, I’d never been anywhere. But looking at that picture made my lungs hurt, just as if I’d breathed too much crisp Vermont air.

  The next album I pulled out of the box was even harder to look at. It was old.

  The first picture I saw was of a baby lying in a crib. Holding my breath, I pried it out of its plastic sleeve and looked at the back. It said SUSAN, OCTOBER 197—the last part of the date was too blurry to read. It didn’t matter, because the baby wasn’t Mom. But Mom would have been a little girl in the 1970s. Mr. and Mrs. Marcus hadn’t disowned her yet. There might be a picture of her in here.

  I looked through the entire album but didn’t recognize her anywhere. Doggedly I pulled every photo out of its place and looked at the back. Not all of the pictures were labeled, but none of the ones that were said BECKY. It was all Susan and Mike.

  Had the Marcuses gotten rid of every single picture of Mom when she left? And then rearranged their photo albums to make it look like she had never existed?

  I looked at the front of the photo album. Yes, the album did look newer than the pictures it contained. What a lot of trouble to go to, to rearrange all those pictures.

  I began to see what Bran meant about the Marcuses being awful people.

  But then I looked back at the “Goofy Pop-Pop” picture and I just couldn’t understand. How could someone who clowned around with his grandkids be so horrible?

  I put all the photo albums and almost all the pictures back in the box. But I carefully removed the “Goofy Pop-Pop” shot from the frame. And after I locked up the closet again, I took the “Goofy Pop-Pop” picture into my room and hid it between my mattress and box spring. I wanted to be able to look at it again.

  Someone who could laugh like that, I thought, wouldn’t be too angry if he finds out that Mom and Bran and I are staying in his house.

  But why had he stayed angry with Mom for eighteen years? All my thoughts seemed to lead in circles. No wonder I couldn’t figure out what to do.

  That night at dinner my trick from the night before—focusing only on the food, thinking of nothing else—didn’t work. I’d seen so many pictures taken in this house I felt like there were ghosts of the entire Marcus family hovering over us. Had Mom felt like she had ghosts with her ever since she left home? Were they always bad?

  Before I could stop myself, I blurted out, “Mom, do you have any happy memories of your parents?”

  Bran glared at me. Mom looked up in shock from her leftover shrimp scampi.

  “What brought that up?”

  Bran’s glare intensified.

  “It’s just—I’ve been around all these old people, and they’re always talking about their kids and grandkids, and it got me thinking about my, uh, relatives,” I said.

  I shot a look at Bran that said, See, I’m not giving anything away. He still frowned, then hastily made his face blank when Mom glanced his way.

  “I just wondered if there was anything good about your parents,” I said, because Mom hadn’t answered yet.

  “There wasn’t,” she said flatly.

  “Didn’t they ever teach you how to ride a bike? Didn’t they ever give you a birthday party? Didn’t you ever go on picnics together, or fly a kite, or—”

  “Brittany, I don’t want to talk about it,” Mom said. Her voice was shaky now.

  I didn’t understand. I’d seen so much bike riding and kite flying in the photo albums, so many picnics and parties.

  “But—did you have any brothers and sisters who were nice to you even if your parents were mean? Do we have aunts and uncles out there who might—”

  “I said I don’t want to talk about it!” Mom said. She stood up abruptly. “I’m not very hungry. I’ll be in my room studying, if you need me.”

  She seemed to be making a huge effort to keep her voice steady, to keep from bursting into tears right there in front of Bran and me.

  “Now look what you did!” Bran hissed at me as soon as she was gone.

  “I didn’t mean to upset her!” I protested. “And I wasn’t going to tell her anything. It’s just—the Marcuses look like such a happy family in the pictures.”

  “Pictures can lie,” Bran said.

  He started clearing dishes off the table, banging the plates together.

  “Have you ever seen a picture of Mom from when she was a little girl?” I asked. “There weren’t any in the Marcuses’ albums.”

  “That’s because—” Bran winced.

  “What?” I said.

  Bran took the stack of dishes to the kitchen counter, then he turned around to face me.

  “Mom told me a story once, about what happened after she ran off with Dad. She got married in blue jeans and a T-shirt—did you know that? It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. And then her parents were mad, and they disowned her—”

  “I know that part,” I said.

  Bran ignored me. He started running water in the sink.

  “But all she had were the clothes she left with,” he said. “And Dad’s parents weren’t too happy either, so it’s not like they were going to buy her a whole new wardrobe. . . . So she contacted her mom and dad and said, ‘Please, just let me come and get my clothes.’ And they said, ‘Okay, come at four o’clock Saturday. All your things will be out in the yard. Don’t come to the door. We don’t want to see you.’ And when Dad was driving her out there, they started seeing the smoke from miles away. And when they got there, there was a huge bonfire in the front yard. It was everything Mom owned, everything she’d ever owned. They’d set it all on fire. Her clothes and her hair barrettes and her dolls from when she was a little girl . . . And you wonder why you can’t find any pictures?”

  He crashed the plates into the sink. I was surprised they didn’t break.

  I backed away from Bran and clutched the counter.

  “That’s why I don’t feel the least bit guilty about living here,” Bran said fiercely. “Mom deserves to have something good happen, just once in her life.”

  “What if the Marcuses have changed?” I asked in a small voice. I was thinking of the “Goofy Pop-Pop” picture. I didn’t think the man in that picture would burn all his daughter’s possessions. “What if they’re nice now?”

  “Nobody can change that much,” Bran said. He scrubbed a plate, rinsed it, and flung it into the dish drainer. “You know, everyone Mom has ever trusted has ended up betraying her. Her parents, Dad, Carlene . . .”

  “What did Carlene do to Mom?” I asked in a shaky voice. I didn’t care about Carlene. I just wanted to be distracted from the image of Mom’s entire childhood going up in smoke. And from being jealous that Mom had told Bran that story, but not me.

  Bran gave me a sideways glance.

  “Remember how Carlene was going to come to Florida with us? And share expenses? The night before we were going to leave, she met this guy, fell madly in so-called love, and decided to stay in Pennsylvania. And Mom had already put a nonrefundable deposit on an apartment down here, had already rented the trailer.
. . .”

  “Maybe Carlene really was in love,” I argued hopelessly. I hadn’t even liked Carlene that much, but something made me want to argue with Bran.

  “Yeah, right, it was love,” Bran said derisively.

  He was working on the forks and knives and spoons now, furiously sliding them back and forth against the cloth. They were going to be the cleanest silverware ever—that is, if he didn’t rub them away to nothing.

  He slammed the knives into the drainer and turned to face me.

  “Britt, I know you want to tell Mom whose house this is. I know you want to ask her all sorts of questions about her childhood. But you can’t Don’t be somebody else who betrays her.”

  I looked back at him—Bran, my protector and defender my entire life, my beloved big brother. And it was like I didn’t recognize him. He was so angry he might as well have been a total stranger.

  “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” I mumbled.

  “Good,” Bran said.

  And I knew he didn’t understand what I meant. My “anyone” was so much broader than his. It included the Marcuses and Mrs. Stuldy, all my customers. The whole world.

  His “anyone” was just him and Mom. And maybe, maybe me.

  I didn’t go anywhere for the next few days. I wasn’t proud of myself, but it’s like I was hiding out, avoiding everyone and everything. I knew my customers probably needed me, but I let the phone ring without answering it. They’d had some way of getting their Metamucil and Alka-Seltzer and National Enquirers before I’d moved in, and they’d find some way of getting them after I left. I couldn’t face anyone.

  Especially not Mrs. Stuldy.

  I just had the feeling that if I walked into her sunny kitchen or took one bite of her sumptuous cooking I’d let everything spill out, whether I wanted it to or not. And, really, I kind of did want to tell her everything. I wanted her to know everything so she could tell me what I should do.

  So I couldn’t let myself see her.

  Instead I just absently wandered around inside the Marcuses’ house, fingering objects here and there. I still had the key to Bran’s closet, but I couldn’t stand the thought of looking at any more pictures. I did open it, though, to pull out the box of old books. I was so desperate I even read some of the Reader’s Digest condensed novels, but they drove me crazy. I kept trying to figure out what the stories left out.