Praise for Things to Do When It’s Raining
“Things to Do When It’s Raining has heart and soul and guts, and it has achingly beautiful prose and characters so dear and real I couldn’t bear to say good-bye when I reached its final page. It’s a book about friendship and secrets, grief and regret, the peculiar shape of families and the redemptive nature of love. And it is, quite frankly, one of the best books I have read in a very long time.”
JENNIFER ROBSON, bestselling author of Moonlight Over Paris
“Evocative, wise and infused with heart. A deeply moving story about family, love and loss, the novel shows how secrets can either haunt us or set us free, depending on whom we trust them with. One of my favorite books this year!”
KARMA BROWN, bestselling author of Come Away with Me
“Fans of Nicholas Sparks will adore Things to Do When It’s Raining, an irresistible tribute to first love, second chances and the powerful legacy of the past. Elegant and heartfelt, Marissa Stapley’s writing is a gift.”
PAM JENOFF, New York Times bestselling author of The Orphan’s Tale
“A generous book about imperfect people, a novel about the family we choose, the mistakes we make, and how love, flawed and searching and messy, is the only path to forgiveness. It’s also a gorgeously written page-turner, and when I finished it, I flipped right back to page one to savor it just a little bit more.”
LAUREN FOX, author of Days of Awe
“Spellbinding . . . I fell in love with Mae Summers from the first page, and I followed her, heart between my teeth, as she uncovered family secrets and reconsidered her place in the world. Full of engaging characters, sensitivity and insight, Marissa Stapley’s newest novel is a beautiful, emotionally acute saga that makes us all reconsider the meaning of love and family.”
DANILA BOTHA, author of Too Much on the Inside
“A tightly woven story that beautifully illustrates how tragedy and human weakness can cause heartbreaking ripples for years and generations to come.”
K. A. TUCKER, bestselling author of He Will Be My Ruin
“Things to Do When It’s Raining is the complex and moving saga of a nontraditional family with deep bonds and even deeper secrets. Set against the idyllic background of a far-flung seaside town, the finely drawn characters of this novel test the limits of friendship, love and forgiveness. A story that lingers long after the final page is turned.”
ANDREA DUNLOP, author of Losing the Light
“There is something so intimate and true in the sentence ‘Every marriage harbors secrets, secrets about why it works or why it doesn’t work, secrets between two people that the rest of the world can never be privy to.’ Profound and intimate, raw and real—Things to Do When It’s Raining is hard to put down. Loved the ending but hated to have it end!”
NAN ROSSITER, New York Times bestselling author of Firefly Summer
“A haunting, gripping novel about family secrets and love lost and found. It’s a story that will resonate with anyone who has returned home to find that places have as much power as people to wound, and heal.”
ELIZABETH RENZETTI, author of Based on a True Story
“Written with compassion and insight, Things to Do When It’s Raining is a truly captivating novel with exquisite prose and moments of bittersweet tenderness.”
NICOLA MORIARTY, author of The Fifth Letter
Praise for Mating for Life National Bestseller
“Clever, honest, funny and forever analytical . . . This is one of the most charming novels I’ve read in years, and I loved every last page.”
JENNIFER CLOSE, New York Times bestselling author of Girls in White Dresses
“An immensely readable novel, with smart, engaging characters who come to life on the page—the sort of characters you miss long after you’ve put the book down. You will see yourself in these women.”
TAYLOR JENKINS REID, author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
“The pages fly swiftly as each woman’s individual drama unfolds. . . . Time with this novel passes at an easeful clip.”
The Globe and Mail
“An addictive, enthralling read, full of authentic, hopeful characters, each on a quest for their own version of true love.”
HANNAH TUNNICLIFFE, author of The Color of Tea
“[An] intriguing and heartbreaking debut novel . . . The novel carefully illustrates the power that each of us has to define who we are and who we can become.”
Publishers Weekly
“A living, whispering, shouting beauty of a book that bypasses easy answers and cracks open the deepest, most contradictory longings in all of us . . . This is vital and vibrant writing born of true insight into the human heart.”
GRACE O’CONNELL, bestselling author of Magnified World
For my grandparents: Margaret Jean and Ronald Soper Herbert Lawrence Greenman Margaret (McKay-McLeod) and Raymond Stapley
“In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.”
—Leonardo da Vinci
“I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I’ve refused to vanquish.”
—Julia Glass, Three Junes
Virginia has always loved the rain. She never hides inside: she goes fishing or for a walk, and she doesn’t mind getting wet. Even now, when she knows that rain means danger, she tilts her face up to meet the droplets. The fear retreats for a moment. But then she lowers her head and keeps on across the ice, faster now because she knows she must find her husband, somewhere out on this river, and save him before it’s too late.
In the distance, she hears what sounds like a gunshot: the ice surrendering. If she’d known it was going to rain, she’d have gone for help. Usually, she feels it coming. But this time the clouds gathered and she didn’t notice. There were bigger things on her mind. And now that she’s out on the river she can’t turn back. He needs her. The river, which tells her where the biggest fish are when she goes out in her boat, which tells her so many other things because she listens, is telling her now that Chase is in danger.
She’s known everything about Chase since the moment he stepped off his family’s yacht and onto her family’s dock six years ago. She tossed her braid over her shoulder, rolled her eyes and helped him tie a proper sailor’s knot, and then he looked straight into her and said, “Thank you,” but he meant other things and the world stopped spinning for a minute. Later he told her he felt an axis tilt, a realignment of planets. He saw a constellation of freckles on her nose. She fell in love with him because he said stuff like that to her. None of the boys in Alexandria Bay talked that way.
And now he needs her. She knows.
It would be the same if their daughter were in danger: the river would whisper the threat in her ear and she would go find Mae. But their girl is out of harm’s way, up in the attic of Virginia’s parents’ inn, also her home, playing with her friend Gabriel, oblivious to the ice that is shifting and about to crack in her world.
There’s another splitting sound in the distance just as Virginia approaches Island 51. She stops and looks at the shack with its boarded-up windows. She’s afraid to move, afraid to stay still. Pointless to even try, but maybe Jonah Broadbent is her only hope. Part of her still believes in this boy she once knew—now a broken man—so she climbs the slippery bank, scrambles up the stairs and pounds on the door of the shack, but then doesn’t bother to wait for an answer. It’s unlocked, as always, so she turns the knob and walks in.
PART ONE
Things to Do When It’s Raining
A list by Virginia Summers, J
unior Proprietor (self-proclaimed) of Summers’ Inn, Alexandria Bay, New York
Is there someone at home you miss? Write her a letter and say it. Don’t wait; tomorrow it might not be raining.
On the morning Mae woke and Peter was missing, she had been dreaming she was chasing her childhood friend Gabe through the farmer’s field with the steep slope where they used to go tobogganing. It was night and the moon was full, and the river was in the distance, invisible but ever present, and every time she almost reached him, she stumbled on a root, she fell, and he just kept running ahead. He would never have done that when they were kids, though; he would have turned back and reached for her hand, pulled her up—wouldn’t he have? “Why do I still believe you’re good?” she had shouted at his retreating form before waking and reaching for Peter.
But she was on the couch, not in their bed.
She sat up, listened, found only the silence that cloaks a space when the person being waited for hasn’t come home. (Sometimes, people go out and don’t come back. Sometimes, bad things happen. Mae has known this since she was six.)
Peter. Her partner. Where was he? She searched the apartment, but there was no sign of him. All thoughts and memories of Gabe vanished, all warmth from sleep was replaced with fear. She pictured a black cab running Peter down. A mugging, maybe even a heart attack. She tried his phone: no answer. She walked through the apartment again, slowly, and found herself cataloging the items that were hers. It was somehow calming, this evidence of her presence in his home, in his life: the painting of the Saint Lawrence River on one wall; a vase near the door in a fox-hunt pattern that she used as an umbrella stand, just like the one her grandmother kept at the door of the inn where Mae was raised; the artist’s rendering of Summers’ Inn itself, hanging in the hallway; and the photocopied list, tucked into her dresser drawer, a replica of the one that still hung on a corkboard in the lobby of the inn, an artifact from when Mae’s mother, Virginia, was alive. What would my mother say to me if she were here now? She would tell me to get out of here and go figure out where Peter is.
Mae went to the office in a taxi. Maybe he’s fallen asleep at his desk. The thought reassured her, calmed her heart.
But when she arrived, she found his office empty, the entire floor devoid of life—or so she thought.
First, she found the note, tucked into her Columbia Business School coffee cup:
Mae: I’m sorry. And I want you to know you meant something to me. You won’t be implicated; WindSpan had nothing to do with you. And I won’t forget you.
L,
Peter
P.S. Please destroy this.
The world went black at first. The note was evidence that he wasn’t hurt or dead. But this, in a perplexing way, was worse. Mae studied the sentences scrawled on company letterhead like an anthropologist interpreting markings on a cave wall. This was the man she had planned to marry. This was the life she had wanted to lead. And yet she had not allowed herself to see it coming.
And now, here she is. At the beginning of the end.
* * *
Mae opens her computer and logs in to the main server. How many lives has he destroyed? How many has she destroyed, by proxy? Will there be anything she can do to make it right? Please let there be something I can do to make it right.
Her fingers fly. She opens files; she reads. It’s all there, and it’s absurd, how easy it is to piece together. As if he wanted her to figure it out. Or—and this is a thought that spins the room, roils her stomach, brings bile to her throat—as if he didn’t bother to hide it from her because he knew she’d be too stupid, too trusting, to ever check.
WindSpan Turbine does not exist. It never existed. But the money did. And now it’s gone.
She abandons her computer and goes into his office again. She sits at his desk watching the sun rise over Brooklyn Bridge Park. Less than twelve hours earlier she was buying take-out ramen, carrying it home along with a six-pack of Peter’s favorite microbrew. She’d remembered the hot sauce, she’d experienced and felt guilty about the smug joy that can accompany being needed by another person while passing people on the sidewalk who are possibly not needed by anyone at all. She’d set the coffee table, she’d put the ramen in glass bowls in the oven to keep it warm while she waited for him to get home from the office. She’d called him. “Something unexpected came up. I’ll be home as soon as I can,” he told her. Eventually, she’d fallen asleep watching Netflix.
Now she looks away from the park and down at the yellow diamond on her left ring finger. It belonged to his mother, Peter had told her, in a voice hoarse with heartbroken reverence. When Peter spoke of his family she felt like she was listening to a Southern gothic novel: tragedy and romance, privilege gone sour, a murky history involving a plantation, slaves, family secrets. Sex, lies and a damaged boy. She would heal him with her love, she had decided at some point, perhaps the minute she met him. This time, with this man, she would succeed.
She takes off the ring and puts it on top of the note. They’d gone to see a brownstone over the weekend. There’s an expensive white dress hanging in her closet. Her biggest concern lately had been finding the perfect shoes. Who had she become?
She hears a whimper and can’t believe she doesn’t recognize the sound of her own crying. But then she realizes it’s Bud. “You asshole, you left your dog behind!” The dog—named after Bud Fox from the movie Wall Street—is lying in the corner on a canine bed covered in toile-patterned fabric. Mae picked it because it reminded her of the curtains in her childhood bedroom at the inn. She stands; Bud woofs and scrambles toward her.
“Okay, Bud. Come on.”
She once found the name of the dog endearing but now she adds it to the list of things that should have alerted her to the fact that Peter is a criminal: Bud Fox, pure intentions or not, ended up in jail. “Come on, we’ll go for a walk.” Bud wags his tail and romps around her, knocking her back into the chair. He’s not a city dog; he’s a dog who should have many acres upon which to roam. But he’s the same kind of dog Peter had on the ruined plantation as a child. Peter said the dog from his childhood—named Earl—was the one positive memory he had extracted from his youth. Until the dog had been hit by a train while out walking with Peter’s suicidal twin brother not too long ago. “You were so lucky,” he had told Mae, “to have had such an idyllic upbringing at that inn, with grandparents who loved you so much.”
“But . . . my parents died when I was six.” In that moment, she thought maybe he’d forgotten, but he’d waved a hand, nodded. No, he hadn’t forgotten.
“You were so young you can’t remember them. How can you pine for something you never really had?”
These words had hurt her, deeply and swiftly. What she had wanted to say was, “I remember everything—and yet, I remember nothing. You can’t imagine how much that hurts. Sometimes, I wake from a dream and I know it was a memory, but it slips away from me like a fish down an ice hole. And no matter how hard I try, I can’t get it back. Except there is one memory that, no matter what, I can’t shake: the last time I saw my father. What I said, what I did, what I caused. I’ve never told anyone, but—” Even when she’s only imagining her confession, though, she can’t finish the sentence. So she buries it, back in the place where it lives, deep down in the riverbed of her soul. She had actually believed that Peter was good for her, because he didn’t allow her to wallow, to dwell in the past.
Bud is nuzzling her hand; she clips the leash onto his collar. He resembles an old man: gray, bedraggled, hair growing out of his ears. She suddenly imagines Peter leaving a note for Bud, maybe tucked under his dog bed. You meant something to me, Bud. And I’m sorry. Please eat this note. She shoves her own note, and her engagement ring, into the pocket of her jeans and thinks about what she’s going to do with the scrap of paper. Burn it, maybe. And the ring? She’d throw it into the Hudson except she’s probably going to need the money she’ll get from selling it to pay for a lawyer. The note said she wouldn’t be impli
cated, but there’s no reason to trust Peter’s words.
As she walks through the office again, she considers running. Just running away. But that would be an admission of guilt—and she did not do this. Besides, she knows she could never live with herself if she ran, if she hid, from a crime that was not hers but a crime she presided over no less. She pauses and looks into the office of Andrew, the CFO, but it’s as silent and empty as Peter’s. Something is missing: he kept a paperweight made of meteor rock on his desk, but now there’s a dust-free circle where it used to sit. “It reminds me that the world could end at any second, so I might as well live it up,” he said to her once, trying to explain why he was dating a twenty-five-year-old waitress he met at Hooters. She has the urge to sweep her arm across his desk and crash everything left on it to the ground.
The elevator opens as she pushes the down button, and Bridget, one of the account managers, steps off. “Morning!” she says.
“Oh, hi!” It comes out as a shout.
“Hey, is Peter here?”
“Not yet.”
“Can we chat? I got a strange call from Alex Moffatt last night. I tried to get in touch with Peter, but his phone is off and—”
“Definitely!” Mae tugs Bud onto the elevator, hard. This is not an easy dog to bend to your will. “I’ll be right back.” She hits the button for the door to close and keeps pressing it until finally the doors shut. Outside with Bud, she rolls the sleeves of her sweater down over her hands and squints against the winter sunlight. Bud leads her to the park. Once he’s inside the fence, she unclips his leash and he runs off, first lifting his leg against a fence post and then walking a few paces away to squat, lowering his head modestly. She sinks down onto a bench and feels the cold dampness seep through the seat of her jeans.
“Mae?” She looks up. It’s Jon Evans, a lawyer who works nearby and lives with his wife, Mattie, in Williamsburg, the same neighborhood where Mae and Peter live. They have a baby named Jorja. Mae held her once, at the office. She remembers Jon explaining that Mattie had become ill shortly after Jorja was born. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma; she had a kerchief over her head when she visited the office. She still looked beautiful, vibrant even, with her pale skin and high cheekbones in sharp relief against her face, but there had been something in her eyes that had made Mae want to reach out and squeeze her hand. Peter had been overbright to make up for it.
Things to Do When It's Raining Page 1
