He looked. He nodded. He smiled.
Carly stopped breathing.
Brian took the cup from the girl’s hand and said something that made her giggle.
She said something that made him laugh.
It went like that, back and forth a few times and then—
He waved, turned away, and started winding cables again.
The girl stood there looking at his hunched back for a few seconds, and when he didn’t look up, she turned and rejoined the gaggle surrounding Avery and Liam.
Carly resumed breathing.
13
STONY HOLLOW was good for Jess. During mealtimes, whenever Carly would peek out through the conveyor-belt window, she’d see her little sister in the middle of a group of girls, laughing or singing or engaged in one of those endless clapping games that seven-year-olds do obsessively. Sometimes Jess would sneak back into the kitchen to exchange hugs with Carly and play around with Brian, Liam, and Avery, who doted on her. If Kevin wasn’t around, they’d let her stand on a stool and rinse things with the overhead power washer—which, because she didn’t have to do it for hours a day, she found fun. One night Liam and Avery enlisted her help in building a giant pyramid of plastic cups then knocking it to the floor.
She liked horseback riding and, unfortunately for Carly because she had to watch what she said about Cameron Foster, sailing. But of course drama was her favorite activity. She played the Undersecretary of Understanding in The Phantom Tollbooth and stole the show—in Carly’s opinion—during the Parents’ Weekend production.
Nick came up for that weekend, which was tense. He and Isabelle were stiff and awkward with each other, while pretending to be great friends. Carly just felt weird. She introduced him to Brian, and the three of them sat together for Jess’s play on Saturday night, but what conversation they had never moved beyond small talk.
All summer she’d been thinking about how well Nick and Brian would get along, how much she was sure Nick would love Brian’s music. She’d imagined taking Nick back to Ernestine’s so he could hear the guys rehearse and see the cool old house. But when they were both there, sitting on either side of her, there didn’t seem to be any point to trying to connect them when Carly’s own connection to Nick was so uncertain.
Nick made an effort. He invited her and Brian to join him and Jess for dinner the next day. The kitchen crew always got Sunday afternoons and evenings off. Usually the camp bought pizza from a place in town, and the campers ate dinner in the sheltered annex down by the lake, but since it was Parents’ Weekend, some families were going into town for dinner.
“Invite Brian, too,” Nick said. “He can tell us where to go, and I can hear more about the band.”
But Carly said no. Brian had told her he had a surprise planned for that afternoon, and she’d been invited for dinner at Ernestine’s afterward. She knew that all she had to do was ask and Sheryl would insist that Nick and Jess come along. But Carly was surprised to find that she didn’t want to ask. She didn’t want to share Sheryl and Brian and the Quinn clan with her falling-apart family. She wanted them all to herself.
All Brian would tell her about their mystery outing was that they’d be driving part of the way in the van and walking the rest. He’d told her to wear long pants and long sleeves and good walking shoes. And he’d refused to tell her anything else.
They drove along a winding country road, past rundown houses with yards full of junk next to newly pimped-up farmhouses with swimming pools and tennis courts and shiny new Range Rovers. One of these places had a brand-new stable, red with white trim, in front of which they saw two little girls—who couldn’t have been older than eight or nine—decked out in jodhpurs and boots and holding riding crops.
Now and then they’d catch a glimpse of the Hudson, which looked dark green against the clear blue late-summer sky.
Eventually Brian turned onto a dirt road. It was full of bumps. Rocks and pebbles crashed and clicked against the underside of the van.
Carly kept asking where they were going. Not so much because she wanted to know but because she loved the sneaky smile that would appear on his face when he said “Not telling.”
Finally they pulled off and parked on the shoulder. There were no other cars, but there were a lot of footprints and tire tracks. Brian pulled a small backpack from the behind the driver’s seat, put it on, and took Carly by the hand to the edge of the seemingly endless, pathless woods.
“How will we find our way back? There’s no path.”
“Sure there is, if you know how to look.” He reached out and pulled the branch of a small tree. A small piece of light-blue plastic ribbon hung from its end. They took a few steps past the tree to another that had a piece of that same ribbon dangling down.
“See? Like Hansel and Gretel, only no one’s gonna eat these.”
They followed the little blue ribbons for about fifteen minutes until they came to a small, hilly opening in the woods. What looked like part of a brick wall rose a few feet from the ground at the foot of the hill. Behind that wall—under a pile of branches and dead leaves that Brian pulled and pushed and brushed aside—were two large rectangles of plywood.
Brian slid them aside to reveal a large hole on the side of the hill. He pulled two flashlights out of his little backpack and handed one to Carly.
They had to crouch to get themselves all the way in, then duckwalk for about ten feet to where things opened up and they could stand.
Brian pointed his flashlight at the ground directly in front of where they stood. Steps.
The light revealed five; there were more after that.
“What is this place?”
“You’ll see,” he said, starting down the steps. They were barely wide enough for one person. “Coming?”
Carly followed in spite of the slight claustrophobia she felt surrounded by dark, moist earth.
The steps ended at ten, and the narrow tunnel opened up into a room. Not a hole, but a room, with four walls, all made of brick, and a ceiling of logs. On one side was an archway over what must have once been a door. Stacked logs filled the opening.
It was another one of those locals-only secret places, like Baldwin Rock. No one knew for sure what the room was for originally, Brian explained. It might have been for storage, or part of an underground tunnel used for transporting goods to and from the river during the winters. For at least thirty years, since Brian’s father was a kid, the townies had managed to keep it a secret among themselves and pretty much as they’d found it. The only alteration they’d done was to add a bit of ventilation using pipes. Somehow every year the pipes were cleared of whatever dirt or debris got in there over the winter.
He walked Carly over to the logs stacked under the archway. They were filled with carved initials and numbers.
“When someone brings you here for the first time, you add yourself. There’s me, and Avery and Liam.” He shined the light on three sets of initials: BFQ, AFQ, and LKQ ’05. “And here’s my dad and my uncle Michael.” He moved the light down two logs to find the SOQ and MOQ ’75 that belonged to Sean O’Brien Quinn and Michael O’Brien Quinn.
He pulled a Swiss Army knife out of his pack and handed it to Carly.
“Let’s find a spot for you.”
Later that night, after dinner with the whole family, she and Brian lay side by side on the not-so-neatly made futon on the floor of room nine, catching their breath, letting the warm summer breeze pass over them while they listened to the crickets and the bits and pieces of the Yankees game on Sheryl’s kitchen radio.
This time there was no “We better stop.”
And there was no call to Val to share the news. Not that night when she got back to the cabin or in the morning when she got up. Even if Val managed to say the right words this time, Carly knew her friend’s voice would betray judgment. Doubt.
And she didn’t want to hear it.
Maybe after a “couple nights” she’d tell. Like Val had with the news about her and
Jake. But not yet. Or maybe she wouldn’t tell at all. Maybe that was how it should be, something that stayed between her and Brian.
14
BEFORE SHE knew it, the summer Carly had expected to drag by slowly was coming to a close. The day after the campers and counselors went home was a Sunday, Carly’s last. The next day she was heading to Ohio for what promised to be an excruciatingly boring week at her father’s, and then it was back to New York, to a dubious-sounding sublet on the West Side that Isabelle had finally found.
If Brian weren’t moving back to Brooklyn, if the two of them hadn’t sat down at the computer and mapped out the fastest ways to get from her new apartment to theirs in Brooklyn, if she weren’t already on the guest list for their first New York City gig, she’d have been miserable.
But she wasn’t miserable. Nothing—except the physical distance between them—was going to change when they got back to the city.
On her last night upstate, she was invited for dinner with the whole family. She and Sheryl had one more talk in the garden before dinner.
Carly had never seen anything like the garden at Ernestine’s: a huge, triangular plot with something growing on every inch it. Flowers, berry bushes, zucchini and melon vines, tomatoes, cucumbers, even a few rows of corn.
“Damn it!” Sheryl threw her wicker basket to the ground and dropped to her knees.
“What’s wrong?”
“Look at this.” She held up a heart-shaped leaf with holes and ragged edges. “Goddamn beetles!”
Kneeling in the dirt next to the bean poles, Sheryl examined each vine, inch by inch. “Okay, where are you guys hiding? You may as well give up now, because you know I’m going to find you. Do you hear me?”
“I think they probably do,” Carly said.
Sheryl laughed without looking up. “Yeah. Listen to me. I’ve become one of those crazy gardening ladies.”
Before marrying Brian’s father, Sheryl had lived her whole life in Brooklyn. “My mother grew a few tomato plants in the little space we had behind our house, but nothing like this. This is like having a grocery in your backyard.”
When she and the boys moved upstate, Ernestine put her to work getting the garden ready for winter.
“God, she was a smart one, that Ernestine. She was just as torn up as I was. But in a different way, because Sean was her child. Her firstborn. But she kept me from completely falling apart. Put me to work harvesting the fall stuff, getting the garden ready for winter. And then there was all the canning. She wasn’t trying to get my mind off Sean. We talked about him the whole time. But in the midst of all that death, she made it so I was up to my elbows in life. Now I’m totally hooked. Just like her, I’m trying something new every year.”
Over the summer, listening to Sheryl talk about her life, Carly had fallen half in love with her, too. Also with Ernestine, even though she was dead, and the generation back in Ireland—Nellie, Ernestine’s mother; Auntie Maureen; and Cousin Patrick—whom she had never met, never would meet.
She was half in love with “the whole lot of them,” which is one of the expressions she heard a lot hanging around the Quinns. They called those expressions Ernestineisms, little phrases Ernestine brought with her when she came to America as a teenager and passed on to her kids and grandkids along with all the stories.
How Ernestine’s cousin Patrick got kicked in the head when he turned his back on a newborn calf, or how her Auntie Maureen’s fiancé died when his bicycle was hit by a bus three days before the wedding, and she never recovered. How Nellie, Ernestine’s mother, took her brother’s place on the family fishing boat when all the boys in the village went off to fight in World War I.
“Aha.” Sheryl held out her palm for Carly’s inspection. In it was a small bug. Yellow, with black spots.
“I thought ladybugs were good for gardens.”
“Oh, these aren’t ladybugs. They’re Mexican bean beetles. Distant cousin of the ladybug. The nasty branch of the family,” she said to the bug before dropping it. She took a flip-flop off her foot and squashed the bug into the ground. “Last summer, they ruined my beans.” She leaned over and yelled into the plant. “That is not happening this year.”
Two hours later, they were all crowded around Ernestine’s creaky kitchen table, brainstorming band names. A thunderstorm had driven them inside. A platter piled high with empty corncobs and bare chicken bones sat next to another with a pinkish-gold puddle of olive oil dotted with tomato seeds.
The booking agent who signed the band wanted them to come up with a new name. Something with a ring to it. Something people would pay attention to and remember. The one simple word “Quinn” wouldn’t do.
The boys were reluctant. They all felt loyal to Ernestine for getting them started and defending them to their parents. They didn’t want to lose the name she’d given them. But the guy was adamant. They’d decided that they wouldn’t get up from the dinner table until they’d found a new name.
“Dingwall Scotty?” Liam had Ernestine’s seed catalogue out, convinced that the perfect name could be found among the weird names of tomato varieties. And since the book was Ernestine’s, a tomato band name would still be a tribute to her.
Brian and Avery shook their heads.
“Abraham Lincoln?”
Avery scoffed. Brian scowled.
“Box Car Willy? ”
Carly tuned them out and looked around, wondering how it could be possible to miss a person she’d never met.
Because she was already missing Ernestine.
She understood what Brian meant when he explained why they’d always call the house Ernestine’s. Everywhere you looked, you’d see her. Every chair, couch, and bed had a crocheted afghan. The week before, Sheryl had gathered them all up and arranged them by decade. Wild, fluorescent colors from the sixties, earth tones from the seventies, mauves and purples from the eighties. Then it started all over again with the wild colors in the nineties.
The kitchen drawers were full of her handmade pot-holders, and all over the house you’d find framed needlepoint prayers and inspirational phrases about life, lemons and lemonade, God at your side and the wind at your back. If you picked a book up off the shelf, chances are some little bit of paper would fall out, with a note about what she needed at the store, or a question about a recipe. Sometimes it was a passage she’d copied out from the book, or notes to herself ranging from the mundane—“call carpet cleaner” and “check with Michael about Monday”—to the utterly mysterious: “seventeen silver birds’ nests.”
They called these Ernestineabilia, and had been taping them to the wall next to the refrigerator as they appeared. It was covered in scraps of paper in varying colors and sizes, all with Ernestine’s neat, schoolteacherish handwriting.
Carly didn’t mean to suggest a band name when she said “Ernestine is everywhere.”
But as soon as she said it, everyone stopped talking and looked at her.
Brian repeated it slowly. “Ernestine . . . is . . . Everywhere.”
Liam said it faster, “ErnestineisEverywhere.”
“EiE for short,” Avery said.
Sheryl smacked the table. “Of course! That’s brilliant, Carly. Brilliant.”
15
CARLY’SWEEK in Ohio was spent helping her father transform what had been the guest room into a pink paradise for the baby. Carly had to sleep on a pullout couch in the study her father and Ann shared. The room was crammed with cases of diapers and other assorted baby gear.
She returned to New York, where home was now a fifth-floor walk-up in an uptown neighborhood, a part of town so indistinct it didn’t have a name. Not even one of those that real estate agents make up to make nowhere sound like somewhere. Carly’s mother tried, though. For a while she called it the “Outer Upper West Side.” Then it was “Almost Morningside Heights.”
Carly called it “West End of the Earth.”
The only store within five blocks was a little bodega with a huge selection of chips, ca
ndy, tropical fruit juices, and beer, but little in the way of real food.
For groceries, they had to walk ten blocks to a D’Agostino on Broadway. The building had no laundry room. Washing clothes required a four-block walk, an hour and a half of sitting (longer if you had to wait for a machine), and at least ten dollars’ worth of quarters.
The apartment had two small rooms: the bedroom, where her mother and Jess slept, was big enough for a bed and a small bedside table. The second room contained everything else—living room, kitchen, and Carly’s room, which wasn’t really a room but a corner closed off by a pair of dark blue drapes hanging by a piece of rope nailed to the wall on each end. Carly’s mother got the idea from the IKEA catalogue, which was full of impossibly happy people living in impossibly small places.
The first weekend Carly was back in the city, Jess went to Nick’s, and Carly went to IKEA with her mother. They bought shelves and brackets, under-the-bed drawers and hooks in almost every size the store carried.
The hooks made Isabelle optimistic about the apartment.
“We can do this,” she kept saying. “A hook for everything and everything on its hook.”
And, “I promise this is just temporary. I’ll find us a better place.”
When Nick dropped Jess off on Sunday morning, he offered to help put the stuff together and mount the hooks on the walls for them. He seemed happy when Isabelle accepted his offer, and he said he’d come back that afternoon with his tools. Carly was relieved to see that they were being civil with each other. Kind of almost even friendly.
But then after he left, her mother asked Jess about her weekend, and Jess told them about how much fun she had with Nick and his friend Chantal, how they watched a movie that included a scene with a man and a woman taking a bath together and splashing a lot of water on the floor.
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