Message in the Sand

by Hannah McKinnon

  Now he knocked on the front door. No one answered. Alan had told him to come and go as he needed that day, so, reluctantly, Wendell let himself in. He headed through the foyer, keeping his head down. He really hoped it was just a matter of resetting one of the breakers in the fuse box. He was just about to turn down the hall for the basement door when Anne caught sight of him from the kitchen. “Wendell! Come in.”

  He froze, looking down at his work boots, then up at Anne. She was a vision in a slip of a white dress, her hair pulled up and her face aglow. But there was a furrow in her brow. She pointed to a half-collapsed tripod in front of her. “Would you please give me a hand? I can’t get the darn thing to stay up. And Alan and the girls aren’t even dressed for the family photo.”

  Gingerly, Wendell joined her, praying he had stomped his boots hard enough outside not to track any dirt. He caught a flurry of pink dash by. There was the little one, Pippa, in a fancy dress. She grinned at him, then ducked behind her mother, who was still focused on the buckled tripod. Anne tugged at one leg, then the other, her cheeks flushed. “This stupid thing.” She was not quite ready to hand it over, and so he stood to the side, trying to keep a straight face. “Oh, hell.” She stepped away and blew a tendril of hair out of her face, looking suddenly like a little girl herself.

  “May I?” he asked.

  “Please. But if you can’t get it to work, I get dibs on smashing the damn thing.” This time he did not hide his smile.

  There were clips on each leg she hadn’t noticed, but he fiddled with them a good while, so as not to show her up. “It’s tricky,” he fibbed. Then he extended the legs and screwed each clip tight, almost afraid to meet her gaze.

  She cocked her head. “Well.”

  “You would’ve figured it out, I’m sure…”

  “Liar.” But Anne recovered quickly and laughed. “Thank you. Now don’t let me keep you from whatever it is you were trying to do.”

  Wendell headed back down the hall and into the basement. Sure enough, there was a blown fuse in the box, a simple fix that filled him with relief. It was when he passed the living room on his way out that he stopped in his tracks.

  By then the whole family had gathered in the living room for the photo. Eliza, Anne’s assistant, stood behind the camera and the tripod he’d helped set up. Wendell watched Pippa wiggle and fidget. Julia stood beside her mother in a summer dress, a foreign creature out of her usual riding clothes and jeans. She was as tall as Anne and threatening to be almost as beautiful. Wendell appreciated the slight curl of teenage disdain to her mouth as Eliza directed her to smile “like she meant it.” Alan seemed as unperturbed as he was thrilled by all of it, arms wrapped tightly around his three girls, that crazy dog of his leaping about at their feet. Frozen, Wendell took it all in.

  “Smile!” Eliza instructed one last time, and when the flash went off, Wendell saw stars.

  * * *

  Outside, he scanned the scene with military-like focus. Tall vases of hydrangeas had been set on each linen tabletop. The musicians were setting up in the gazebo. A faint plume of smoke billowed from the catering tent, delivering the scents of the lavish summer menu, causing his mouth to water. What pleased him most was that none of it could compete with the spectacular view of White Pines. Beyond the patio and all its trappings were the rolling fields, green and gold. Crisscrossed by the occasional tumble of New England stone wall, the view was tamed, then wild again, and it left Wendell with a deep sense of peace. It was the best tribute to an evening devoted to land conservation, and though Wendell was not a political man, the ruralness of his hometown mattered very deeply to him. He felt good about his contribution.

  He was on his way out when the first guests trickled in. There was Donald Hungerford, the town’s first selectman, and his wife, Estelle. The position had changed a good deal since Wendell’s father held it, but Don was a fair man who worked closely with the citizens of Saybrook, and Wendell liked him quite a bit. Right away Wendell recognized the president of the bank, Tim Gordon. The man had donned a white tux, dressed more formally than most. Tim had denied Wendell a home equity loan when he first inherited the family farmhouse and wanted to repair the roof; Wendell had been fresh from Afghanistan without a job or savings. On the way out of their meeting, Clara Wintonberry, the longtime bank teller who’d been friends with his mother, averted her gaze before marching back into Tim’s office. A day later, Wendell got a call that there’d been some kind of error and the loan had been approved.

  The guests were really flooding in now, and among them Wendell spied the chairwoman of the historical society, Gloria Rose; the library director; and the head of the Candlewood Lake Authority. They were as known as some of the celebrity-caliber weekenders of Saybrook: the choreographer of the New York City Ballet, a morning news anchor from NBC Studios, a journalist for the Wall Street Journal. They were regulars, and while Wendell knew none of them personally, thanks to the size and nature of Saybrook, he knew many of them. He had to give it to Alan Lancaster: the man drew everyone from every corner, and he was as well connected as he was respected. From years of watching his own father, Wendell could appreciate the challenge of that achievement.

  When he was sure things were going as planned, he stole away down a side path to the lower barns and climbed into his truck. Wendell adjusted his rearview mirror. In it was the shimmer of the setting sun and the white tents and the twinkling lights. The upper pasture sparkled with row after row of shiny cars. The party would roll late into the night, possibly into the early-morning hours of tomorrow. His work here was done.

  * * *

  Back in his own driveway, Wendell breathed a sigh of relief as he pulled up to the house. When he cut the engine, he sat a moment, staring up at the farmhouse.

  He’d inherited it years ago, after his father passed away, but it still felt strange to him, the only surviving member of his family.

  From the beginning, Wendell hadn’t been sure he’d wanted it, so full of memories it was. But he kept it up, at first in memory of his mother, and later as a sense of obligation to his father. And it was worth a pretty penny now, sitting on ten acres of land just outside the town center. Over the years, he’d had more than a few offers for it, several times from out-of-towners who happened by it on a Sunday drive. Those offers were met with the same reply each time: a blank look from Wendell and the squeak of hinges as the door swung shut in their faces. He was not a rude person, but it got under his skin every time. Wendell did not need the four lofty bedrooms that spanned the whole of the upstairs. Nor did he need the open kitchen with the original woodstove or the wraparound porch or the formal parlor his mother had insisted be added to the side. But even less did he need other people’s money or opinions.

  True, it was the place where his mother had died. It was also the last place the whole family had been together, before Wesley had gotten it in his head that he needed to enlist in the National Guard and serve his country overseas. Wendell did not believe those were the reasons that rooted him to the property, but he also couldn’t say they were not. One thing he’d learned since being in Afghanistan: there were some questions that did not require answers. Sometimes you just did what you thought was the right thing in the moment. Sometimes that was the only thing you could do.

  He made his way down the side walkway to the back door and into the kitchen. Nothing in the house had changed since his childhood, and he liked it that way. The kitchen wallpaper was a blue chintz design his mother had favored. He hung his truck keys on the same rack his parents had used by the door. Wesley’s room was as he’d left it: navy blue walls, pine bunk bed. In the downstairs parlor, which his father had used as an office, the mahogany desk still stood in the corner. How many meetings had his father held at that desk that Wendell overheard as a child?

  As first selectman of Saybrook, Wendell’s father had always been a fair man, in his son’s estimation, but it was different viewing a man through a child’s eyes than as an adult. He’d been a
politician, and even fair ones had to bend and flex, he often told Wendell.

  Of all the memories of his father managing negotiations, there had never been more than the year before the breast cancer took his mother away from them. Charlotte Combs had fought long and hard, but in the end, when the cancer had won, she’d insisted to the doctors that she come home to die. On her terms, she’d said. As devoted as Alder was to Charlotte, he could not escape his work at the town hall entirely. As life would have it, he was also wrapped up in a town development project involving a particular piece of open space that Charlotte was very fond of, called the Town Meadows.

  The Town Meadows was a place Charlotte had taken her boys all throughout their childhood: to sled down its hills and skate across its pond in winter, to picnic in summer, and to hike its wooded trails in the fall. Her favorite thing to do was to take the boys fishing and hunt for spotted turtles. For hours she’d crouch at the pond’s edge, showing the boys how to locate them among the rocks and cattails. The spotted turtles were so rare they’d been feared almost extinct, but they’d begun to thrive in recent years in that section of protected parkland.

  That summer, however, a developer from Hartford had made the town an offer to purchase it. A sprawling suburban development, the first Saybrook had seen, was proposed dead center in the meadows. The woods would be felled and the pond drained. Thirty-six lots for a series of vinyl-sided boxy Cape-style houses, each as uniform as the one before it, would fit the tract-style pop-up neighborhood. Not many in town were happy.

  Despite her frail condition, Wendell’s mother was among the most outraged. “They cannot dig up that field and fill it with such ugliness. You cannot let them, Alder,” she’d cried from her bed. “What about the turtles?”

  “Yes, darling. The DEP is on it. They’ve got state biologists coming in to do a count.”

  Wendell’s mother was not done. She propped herself up on shaky arms. “Those turtles are special, Alder. You must fight this.”

  Wendell could see the pain in his father’s face as he tried to placate his wife. “It’s all right, darling. The development will probably never get passed, even if it does come down to a vote. Now, let yourself get some rest.”

  Wendell watched as she collapsed against her pillows. His father stayed beside her, pressing a cold washcloth to her forehead as she fretted. When she finally settled, his father came out to the hall looking weary. He always looked weary these days after being with her.

  “I have to go to that meeting tonight at town hall,” he told Wendell. “Look after your mother.”

  Wendell could not believe his father was leaving for a meeting. Their mother was fading before their eyes, especially in recent days, and he feared being alone with her almost as much as he feared the ticking of the clock.

  “Are you going to stop the development?” he asked.

  “It’s not up to me, son. I’ll do my best. But it’s a board vote, and I’m just one.”

  “But what about Mom’s turtles?” Wendell’s childhood memories with his mother ran strong through those meadows. He might not otherwise have felt as passionate about them as she did, but given her poor health, preserving them was about far more than preserving the turtles.

  His father loosened his tie. There were deep bags under his eyes. “There are some things your mother doesn’t understand.”

  Wendell was too respectful to voice his disagreement, but his father was dead wrong. Despite the hundred ways her body was failing her, there was nothing wrong with his mother’s mind.

  Later that night, when his father came home, Wendell passed their room on his way to bed. On the other side of the door, he heard his mother’s whispery voice. She’d insisted on staying awake until his father returned. “Jane McNeill called. She said there was a vote tonight.”

  Jane McNeill was a friend of his mother’s and a town busybody. But he could tell by the look on his father’s face when he came home that Jane was right. Wendell paused, waiting for his father to say the right thing. Through the crack in the door, he watched him sink onto the edge of the bed. “Jane McNeill doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” he said softly. “Don’t you worry, I’m taking care of it.”

  His mother looked up at his father, a mere bird beneath the blankets, and Wendell waited for her to say more. But her eyelids fluttered. Wendell watched his father take her hand and press it to his lips. The look on his face made Wendell swallow hard. “Get some rest, my love.”

  There had been a vote. Later, Wendell would learn that money was exchanged and the aforementioned DEP file was buried, along with the plight of the spotted turtles. But if his father could not protect the turtles, he did everything he could to protect his wife. Wendell was never sure how he managed it, but he held the contractors off and out of the town meadows all through that spring, as his mother grew sicker and sicker. Permits were stalled. Paperwork was misplaced. And all the while Charlotte Combs faded.

  She’d been laid to rest in the cemetery for just a week when the first dozer clambered up the grassy flank of the meadow and broke ground. Somehow his father had kept them at bay just long enough. Wendell supposed that was love.

  Five Ginny

  Could a thirty-five-year-old woman ever really go home? Ginny turned the radio down as she crested the final hill to Saybrook and slowed to take in the view.

  Ahead, the sun hovered over the horizon, casting everything beneath it in a bath of gold. Ginny couldn’t help it: the idyllic view took her breath away now just as it had years ago, and she steered her VW Beetle to the side of the road so she could take it all in. Flanked by rolling green hills on either side, Candlewood Lake shimmered like a silver ribbon in the distance. The small village of Saybrook stretched along its shoreline. “It’s nice that some things don’t change,” she whispered to herself, sliding her sunglasses up on her head.

  She could trace her entire childhood at the base of this hill. White church steeples and red barns jutted out of the greenery. There was Main Street, dotted by familiar shops: the Hickory Stick bookstore, Haven’s Bakery, and Sacred Grounds coffee. Among the quaint village shops was her parents’ real estate business, Feldman Agency. Though she couldn’t see it from the hilltop, outside the village center were the library and Saybrook Elementary, where she’d gone to school. Beyond, tucked among the New England greenery, looped a tangle of rural country roads that she knew like the back of her hand: leading to the homes of childhood friends, the town beach, the winery at the northern point on the lake. All of it glittered in the late-day sun like a promise, and Ginny tried to reassure herself that it was a sign. A grown woman could go home. Even if she didn’t really want to be there, there was nothing like summer in Connecticut’s lake region.

  Reluctantly, she put the car in drive and pulled back onto the main road. Time to face facts. The rental cottage she’d arranged for the summer was only five miles from her parents’ place and right on the water. She loved her parents, but there was no need to press her already questionable luck and cram in together under the same roof.

  “I don’t understand,” her mother had complained. “You have a perfectly good bedroom waiting for you. I even left all your high school posters on the wall!” Which was precisely why Ginny would not be staying with them. Aside from the far more important fact that her father was still recovering from heart surgery. A small detail her mother had sprung on her mere weeks ago, a week after the heart attack and days after the subsequent surgery. “He’s fine, really. It was a bit of a scare, but we didn’t want to worry you. Nothing a double bypass couldn’t fix.”

  Ginny had been shocked. Not just by her mother’s casual and late sharing of such dire news but by the realization that they hadn’t wanted to bother her with it. “What?” her mother had asked in an exasperated phone voice when Ginny questioned why on earth they hadn’t told her right away. “We knew you were already coming home. Why add to your stress?” It had left Ginny speechless.

  It didn’t matter that the d
octor said he was in otherwise good shape, that he could expect a full life ahead of him with some dietary tweaks and a little exercise. If her parents had truly believed the news of his heart attack was best kept a secret for her own well-being, what did that say about the state of her life?

  True, Ginny was in a bit of a transition, as her therapist had defined it. She had left her fiancé, her job, and her apartment in Chicago and driven halfway across the country to return home. But she was not a train wreck. The past year had been the real train wreck, when her fiancé of five years finally admitted that he was not just pushing off the wedding yet again—he actually did not want to get married at all. He was happy, however, to stay together and continue to live together as they had been the last four years. “It’s just a piece of paper, Ginny. It doesn’t mean anything.” But the problem was, it did. To her. For five years she’d waited for Thomas to set a date. After all, he’d been the one who had proposed! At first he’d wanted to save up more money. Then, when they found a great deal on the Lincoln Park place, they couldn’t afford to turn it down. So the wedding was delayed another year. “I want you to have the kind of wedding you’ve always dreamed of,” he’d insisted. Which was kind of funny, really, because unlike plenty of brides, Ginny had never been caught up in the idea of a dream wedding. All she’d dreamed of was marrying Thomas. And so it went, year after year, while they attended the weddings of all their friends, and Ginny began dreading the repeated question, “When is it going to be your turn?” The wedding showers gave way to baby showers, and by then Thomas questioned if it even made sense to host a wedding. “Then let’s elope!” Ginny had said. But after further consideration, Thomas would say something like “We’d miss having our friends there” or “My mother would never forgive me,” to which Ginny thought, What about me?

  That spring, when they’d returned home to their one-bedroom apartment from a friend’s housewarming party celebrating new digs out in the suburbs and new twin babies, Ginny had tossed her purse on the couch and confronted Thomas. “We’re never getting married, are we?” He’d looked perplexed, then offended. But when pressed, Thomas could give no real reason. They’d sat on the couch, shoulder to shoulder, staring out the window of their perfect one-bedroom, and split a bottle of wine. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” he’d said when she suggested moving out. “Then give me a date, Thomas,” she’d countered. “Any date. Anywhere, you choose. Just give me a date in the next six months.” When he couldn’t, Ginny told him it was over.