The House on the Gulf

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  It rained those few days, which fit my mood and probably made everyone think I was just a fair-weather delivery girl. But on the third morning, the clouds cleared away and a feeble sun peeked out.

  And then, not long after Mom and Bran both left for the day, the doorbell rang.

  I thought about ignoring it, but whoever was outside started knocking, too, and hollering, “Britt, Britt, are you in there?”

  It was Mrs. Stuldy.

  I opened the door and there she was in all her glory, with wild hair and a wild dress. I thought about how hard it must have been for her to walk down her stairs, across the sidewalk, and up our steps. She looked so worried I was tempted to tell her I’d been sick—nothing serious, just a cold—so she didn’t feel bad that I hadn’t been over to see her. But that might upset her, because she hadn’t brought me chicken noodle soup, because she hadn’t come to see me before now.

  When it came right down to it, I didn’t want to lie to Mrs. Stuldy.

  I let her into the house and she eased herself down onto the Marcuses’ couch, and the whole time she was talking.

  “I’m so glad I found you at home. I wasn’t sure. . . Have you heard from Mrs. Marcus?”

  “Uh, no,” I said. A little shiver of fear seemed to flow through my whole body. I struggled to keep it out of my voice. “Why would I?”

  “Oh, no, that’s what I was afraid of,” Mrs. Stuldy said. “I could hear your phone ringing from my house—sometimes I can, when the air-conditioning’s off—and I could tell nobody was answering it, and I didn’t know if you had an answering machine or not and I thought you probably hadn’t heard—”

  “Heard what?” I interrupted.

  She peered at me with such sorrow in her expression that I immediately thought of all the worst possibilities. Had something happened to Mom or Bran?

  But why would Mrs. Marcus have called? Why would Mrs. Stuldy be the one telling me the bad news?

  Mrs. Stuldy cleared her throat.

  “It’s Mr. Marcus,” she said. “He’s dead.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Mr. Marcus died. Yesterday,” Mrs. Stuldy repeated.

  And then the news sank in and I couldn’t say anything. All the awful stories Bran had told me seemed to melt away, and all I could think about was the man from the family pictures. “Goofy Pop-Pop” was gone. He’d never clown around with his grandchildren again, never hold them on his lap and make them laugh.

  He’d never make up with Mom or love me and Bran.

  My eyes filled with tears.

  “There, there,” Mrs. Stuldy said, patting my hand. “Haven’t you known anyone dead before?”

  Silently I shook my head. I was afraid Mrs. Stuldy would say, You didn’t really even know him. You only saw him once. But she didn’t. She just sat there patting my hand. It was amazingly comforting, the feel of Mrs. Stuldy’s warm, wrinkled skin.

  Then a horrible thought struck me.

  “Did—did Mrs. Marcus call you?” I wanted to ask what else they’d talked about, if Mrs. Stuldy had said anything about my family, about Bran’s alleged house-sitting.

  And was that awful of me, to worry about such a thing when Mr. Marcus was dead?

  But Mrs. Stuldy was shaking her head.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I just read it in the paper.”

  And for the first time I noticed that she was clutching a newspaper, folded over the wrong way to reveal an inside page. She held it out to me.

  “I always read the obituaries first,” she said. “You get to be my age, that’s where you find the people you know. All the people in the rest of the paper seem so young—children, almost.”

  I glanced down at the newspaper. The words seemed to jump out at me: John Marcus, 67, of Gulfstone and Opal, New York, died Tuesday at Binghamton Hospital Binghamton, New York. . . .

  There was a picture, too, of Mr. Marcus as a much younger man. The picture was probably thirty years old. That was probably the way Mom remembered him.

  I peered at the picture, trying to see hints in his bland face of the kind of man who’d burn his daughter’s belongings, who’d destroy her diary and dreams. I tried to see hints too of the “Goofy Pop-Pop” he’d eventually become, or of the tired-looking old man I’d met at the beginning of the summer. But the picture was just ink on paper, a bad reproduction. And the man himself was gone.

  I read the rest of the obituary in spurts, because I didn’t seem capable of taking in more than one sentence at a time. Mr. Marcus had been a salesman, it said. He’d worked for the same company for forty-five years. He’d served in the army; he’d been a Jaycee. Then there was one sentence that left me feeling like I’d been punched in the stomach: He is survived by his wife, Mary; one son, Michael, of Binghamton, New York; one daughter, Susan Bridgeman, of Portland, Oregon; and five grandchildren.

  Why were newspapers allowed to lie like that? I wanted to yell at the obituary You left out a few people, What about the other daughter, Becky Lassiter of Gulfstone? And he didn’t have five grandchildren. He had seven.

  But probably the family had told the newspaper how many children and grandchildren he had. And the family said we didn’t exist.

  “I wonder how Mary’s coping with all of this?” Mrs. Stuldy was saying. “There was one woman who really depended on her husband. . . . Maybe I should call her.”

  “What?” I said, suddenly jolted out of my fog and confusion. “You’d call her at a time like this?”

  I wasn’t crafty enough to try to dissuade her. I was just stunned. I looked up at Mrs. Stuldy’s kind, sad face, and I felt like I was looking at the end of everything.

  But, incredibly, she was tilting her head to the side. Reconsidering.

  “You’re right, honey. I wasn’t thinking. That woman’s dealing with funeral arrangements and kin flying in from all over the place. . . . When is the funeral? I forgot to look—they’re not having a memorial service down here, too, are they?”

  My heart seemed to skip a beat, but I forced myself to calmly bend my head over the newspaper again.

  “‘Services will be Thursday at Burkline Funeral Home in Binghamton, with burial to follow,’” I read out loud. I looked back at Mrs. Stuldy. “It doesn’t say anything about a service in Gulfstone, just that memorial contributions can be made to the American Heart Association. If it’s the heart association—does that mean he had a bad heart?”

  What a stupid question. Of course he’d had a bad heart. He’d disowned his own daughter. And then died without making up with her.

  I couldn’t understand why I was suddenly so angry.

  “I think he’d had a heart attack or two,” Mrs. Stuldy said vaguely. “But that was years ago, before they moved down here. He always seemed—fine. Or maybe not this past winter. . . Now that I think of it, he didn’t do as much outdoors as he used to. This was the first year he didn’t cut the grass himself when they were in town.”

  So Bran arrived at the Marcuses’ at the exact right time, I thought. That seemed to fit Bran’s argument that everything was meant to be.

  But why was Mr. Marcus meant to die now? I wondered. Now when I’d just found out who he was?

  “Maybe he was feeling poorly this past winter and just never told,” Mrs. Stuldy was saying. “But . . . he was a young man, really. Just sixty-seven . . . I passed that birthday more than a decade ago.”

  I hadn’t realized Mrs. Stuldy was so old, that she and Mr. Marcus were nearly part of different generations. She was staring off over my shoulder in a way that scared me.

  “That doesn’t mean you’re going to die!” I said.

  Mrs. Stuldy looked back at me.

  “Oh, it happens to all of us eventually. I just want to see Sam out of jail first. . . .”

  Had Mr. Marcus ever said, “I know I’ll die someday. I just want to see Becky and her kids first?” Why hadn’t those other heart attacks scared him into making up with Mom?

  Mrs. Stuldy was still talking.

 
“I’m sure Mary will be getting in touch with you—with your brother, I mean. She and John used to joke that if anything ever happened to him, she’d put the house down here on the market the next day. She was always bugging him to sell. She hated being so far away from her grandkids all winter. But he said they had to come for the sake of her health—she has some health problems too, though I’m not sure I ever heard exactly what they were. . . .”

  It was hard to hear Mrs. Stuldy’s voice through the buzzing in my ears. But the “she’d put the house on the market the next day” came through loud and clear, like an alarm clock going off in the middle of a confusing dream. I didn’t have time to sit here grieving for Mr. Marcus, thinking about might have beens, worrying about Mrs. Marcus dying too. If Mrs. Marcus was going to sell our house, Bran needed to know that right away. We needed to move right away.

  I sprang up.

  “Mrs. Stuldy, I’m sorry—I don’t mean to be rude, but—I need to go tell my brother about Mr. Marcus. I need to tell him now.”

  She blinked at me in surprise, a confused old lady. Somehow finding out about Mr. Marcus’s death made her seem older and more fragile than ever, like an antique teacup you’d hide up on a shelf after all the other teacups are broken. I hated being so mean to her, but I couldn’t let myself think about her feelings.

  “I’ll have to lock up,” I said. “You have to leave too.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, dear. Well, of course I’ll go. I wasn’t thinking.”

  And then it was agonizing, waiting for her to slowly rise up from the couch, slowly shuffle over to the door. I should have walked her to her house, should have let her lean on my arm in that gap of empty space between the Marcuses’ porch railing and her own. But I didn’t. I didn’t even watch to make sure she got home safely. I vaulted off the porch and jumped on my bike and pedaled off furiously toward the Shrimp Shack.

  I’d never been to Bran’s restaurant before, but I’d been past it plenty of times. It was right downtown, in a large pink stucco building that looked about as much like a shack as Miss America looked like me. I chained my bike to a parking meter and raced inside.

  “Where’s Bran? Can you tell me where I can find Bran Lassiter?” I panted to the hostess.

  She slowly turned the page of a fashion magazine before looking up.

  “Bran? You mean that cute busboy who never talks? He’s somewhere in the back.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and ran past her, almost knocking over a waitress with a tray full of water glasses.

  I pushed through a pair of swinging doors marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.

  “Hey!” a man yelled behind me. “No customers allowed.”

  “I’m not a customer,” I said. “I’m looking for my brother.”

  And then I saw Bran. He was chopping lettuce at a long, stainless steel counter.

  “Bran, I’ve got to talk to you,” I said.

  Bran looked from me to the man behind me.

  “Is it important?” Bran asked slowly. “I’m not due for a break any time soon—”

  “Oh, go ahead,” the man said. “We don’t have any customers waiting. Next year, I won’t be so stupid—I’m closing up for the off-season, like everyone else.”

  Still, Bran hesitated.

  “Go on,” the man said. “Your sister’s acting like there’s a death in the family or something.”

  I wanted so badly to say, How did you know? That’s exactly what happened. I let the solemn words flow over me: “a death in the family.” Did it still count as a death in the family if the family didn’t count us?

  I waited while Bran peeled off his rubber gloves and washed his hands. Then he led me out to a loading dock at the back of the restaurant.

  “Is it Mom?” he asked. “Is she okay?”

  “No, no, it’s not her,” I said impatiently. “It’s Mr. Marcus. Mrs. Stuldy just told me—he died. Our grandfather died.”

  It was the first time I’d said the words out loud, together. I felt a little foolish, like I was claiming something that didn’t really belong to me. But I also felt sadder. My grandfather had died.

  Bran’s face didn’t change.

  “So?” he said.

  “So don’t you feel sad? Aren’t you even a little sorry that he and Mom are never going to make up?”

  Bran just looked at me.

  “Britt,” he said gently. “They were never going to make up anyway.”

  “But—” I blinked back tears.

  “Come on, Britt,” Bran said. “Why should you care? I don’t. This is like—like Hitler dying. Do you think people cried over Hitler?”

  I wanted to defend Mr. Marcus, my grandfather, but of course I couldn’t. I swallowed hard.

  “You ought to care,” I said. “Mrs. Marcus is probably going to sell the house now, and you know the Realtor or whoever will find out that we’re living there. So we’ll have to tell Mom and move.”

  This was what I had wanted to tell Bran so urgently, but I tried to sound casual and offhand. Like I wasn’t dying to tell, dying to move.

  Bran frowned.

  “Just ‘probably’?” he asked, like a debater finding a weak point in an argument.

  I wanted to say, No—definitely. There’s a Realtor coming tomorrow at nine A.M. I wanted Bran to see how urgent this was. But I forced myself to be honest.

  “Well,” I said slowly. “Mrs. Stuldy said Mrs. Marcus always joked that if Mr. Marcus died, she’d put the house on the market the next day. Mrs. Marcus didn’t like coming down here and being away from—from her grandkids.” That was hard to say, and I stopped talking.

  “That’s just talk, then,” Bran said. “Nobody would sell a house the day after its owner died. There are a lot of decisions involved in selling a house, a lot of paperwork. When did Mr. Marcus die?”

  I noticed Bran didn’t call him, “our grandfather.”

  “Yesterday” I said in a trembling voice. “He died yesterday.”

  “Then Mrs. Marcus is busy with the funeral and everything,” Bran said. ‘And mourning. My boss’s father died last week, and he was just saying today that his mother can’t even pick out her own clothes anymore, she’s so blown away by grief. Probably Mrs. Marcus will be like that—even if she does sell the house, she wouldn’t do it for months. And we’d be gone by then.”

  How could Bran sound so cheerful about other people’s grief?

  “But we don’t know that,” I said. “We don’t want to take any chances, do we?”

  My question seemed to hover in the air between us. And for a moment it was like I’d torn away Bran’s mask and could see beyond his confidence and his bravado, even beyond his anger. I could see he wished he’d never found the Marcuses, never offered to mow their yard, never told Mom we could move into their house. I could see he knew—even more than I did—what a huge chance we’d been taking all along.

  “We don’t have much choice,” Bran said grimly. “We can’t move now. Mom’s got exams next week.”

  And for some reason I thought about Mrs. Stuldy’s son then. Sam. Was there some point, when he was robbing the bank, when he thought, Oh, no, this was all a big mistake. But I can’t back out now? Once he was at the bank, once he was pointing the gun, did he think he had any other choice but to pull the trigger?

  “Bran,” I said. “There was this girl at school last year. I didn’t really know her, but everybody said she and her family were living in their car. In the school parking lot. The principal let them stay there. If we had to, we could do that. Just until the fall. It wouldn’t kill us.”

  Bran winced.

  “It would kill Mom,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing her parents told her would happen if she even dated Dad. And there are laws about that. We could be arrested for vagrancy or loitering We couldn’t do it. If we move out of the Marcuses’ house, Mom will have to drop out of school.”

  And then it was those words that hung in the hot, stale air on that loading dock.

  “What if M
om sees the newspaper?” I asked. “What if she reads Mr. Marcus’s obituary and figures everything out?”

  Bran waved away that concern.

  “Mom won’t read the newspaper,” Bran said. “She hasn’t read anything but textbooks in two months.” He patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry, Britt. Everything’s going to be all right. Mrs. Marcus is up in New York and her husband just died and she’s not thinking about the house down here at all. Okay?”

  Bran smiled at me, his mask of confidence firmly back in place.

  “Mmm,” I said, not committing myself. I couldn’t promise not to worry.

  “Just keep hanging around Mrs. Stuldy,” Bran said. “If she tells you anything definite, let me know.”

  What could be more definite than death?

  “I’d better get back to work now,” Bran said. “If I got fired, we’d really be in trouble!”

  He gave me a grin that was totally fake. And then he was gone.

  I didn’t follow him back through the restaurant. I just stood there, breathing in the smell of rotting garbage from the Dumpster a few feet away. I hadn’t noticed the odor before when I was talking to Bran. But now I realized the entire loading dock reeked. So did the alley it faced—the alley was positively studded with Dumpsters. I jumped down from the loading dock and looked to the right and the left, trying to find a way out of the alley. But none of the stores and restaurants looked the same from the back as they had from the front. The fronts had been polished, scrubbed, proper. The backs were dirty, ramshackle, garbage strewn. Were people like that too, always putting a good face on shameful secrets? Was Mrs. Stuldy the only exception, because she didn’t hide her shame?

  I thought about Mr. Marcus’s funeral up in New York. Everybody would probably talk about what a great person he was, what a great father and grandfather he was. Probably nobody would mention the daughter and grandchildren he’d so cruelly disowned.