“Well, for one thing, Dad is like a huge Buddhist.”
“A huge Buddhist?” Nate laughs. “I don’t think you can be a huge Buddhist.”
“It has become his whole life, Nate. There is nothing else he wants to talk about. Like when I miss Denis or something, he keeps telling me to live in the present moment. To let myself be present. It’s all I can do to not say, ‘Presently you are being a total ass.’ ”
“Georgia . . .” Nate says.
“Mom is not acting like herself either,” she continues. “They say this divorce is amicable, but they both seem like they swallowed a box of pills to get there.”
Nate is quiet, as they drive out of town and up into the hills. He points to a structure no bigger than a dot, far out in the distance. “We used to jump off that bridge when we were kids. You can’t see it clearly from here, but there’s this great roof on the top—”
“Nate! Come on, man!” Georgia says. “You’re not even listening to me. Please listen to me.”
“I’m listening,” he says. “But this is what Dad and Mom want, remember? Don’t you want that for them? We’re not kids anymore. And they’re definitely not. Maybe you should be focusing on your own . . . situation.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Because I’m not married, Denis and I could fall apart at any minute?” She drills Nate with a dirty look, as if he is missing everything, and turns to Maggie. “You understand what I’m saying, right, Maggie? You understand this isn’t good?”
“Which part?” Maggie asks.
“How fucked up things are about to get,” she says.
Maggie watches Nate turn on the blinker, fights her urge to ask him why he is not chiming in—why he seems to have no opinion about any of this? Why he seems not only calm, but, also, unbelievably . . . removed.
But before she can say a thing, Nate takes another right into an area called Ditch Plains: small cabana houses, a low-rise condominium, the beach and ocean out before them. And then they are heading toward it, heading to a street marked PRIVATE: a threat of prosecution if they drive through. Nate does anyway, driving all the way down the road—past several long driveways and high gates—until he has arrived at the farthest one, a small rock in front of the drive with white paint on it, reading: HUNTINGTON HALL.
Why does that sound familiar to Maggie? Maggie doesn’t know, not until they drive farther down the driveway and his family’s house comes into view. And then it hits her, in a bright flash, almost like a home movie: zoom in on a large oversize cardboard box of postcards. Pan out to a childhood bedroom, Maggie’s bedroom, Maggie sitting in the corner, poring over the postcards. She would do this for hours. In fact, that was what she wanted to do when she was a kid. She wanted to make postcards. She figured to make them, you had to be able to go to all the places where the pictures were taken.
She loves those postcards. They are the one possession she has held on to, still safe in her childhood room. These hundreds of postcards, many of them she still knows by heart. This is why the name resonated with her: Huntington Hall, Hunt Hall. On the back of the postcard, that was how it was labeled: Hunt Hall, Summer Cottage. A photograph of the house, life-size before her now: this Victorian home with beautiful white pillars, an enormous wraparound porch, a windmill on top of the third story, cliffside surrounding it, as far as the eye sees.
“There is a postcard of your house?” she says. She turns toward Nate. “You grew up in a postcard?”
“You have a copy of it?” Georgia says. “How cool!”
Which is when Georgia’s phone starts to ring.
“It’s Denis!” Georgia says. “Stop the car.”
And just as Nate does, she reaches over the front seat, takes the keys from the ignition and is out of the car, leaving the door open, and racing away from them, racing toward somewhere she can speak to Denis in private. Maggie watches her stop by the steps leading to the porch, flipping her phone open, her free hand instinctively wrapping around her stomach.
She keeps her eyes on Georgia, focuses on her and not on the house behind her, or on Nate, until he slides over into the passenger seat, moving her onto his lap, his hand cupping her leg. She doesn’t know exactly why it comes to her, but it does: a memory of the two of them sitting, similar to this, in a hospital emergency room, near her father’s house, after she dropped a speaker on her foot. She had been carrying it across the bar, the first time Nate came home with her, and she dropped it, slicing her ankle open. Nate sat with her all night in that hospital room, holding ice there, waiting as she moved to the front of the triage line for a doctor to sew her ankle up, tell her she could go home.
Maybe the memory comes back so strongly because the only other time she was in that hospital, she had been there alone, after breaking her wrist during a lacrosse game in high school. She hadn’t even been able to reach her father, let alone count on his caretaking abilities.
“I can’t believe you grew up here . . .” she says, and shakes her head.
“Are you overwhelmed?”
“Why would I be?” she says. “I don’t even have to worry about meeting your parents. I can pitch a tent on the cliff, and hide from them all weekend if I want.”
“Very funny,” he says. He smiles at her, happy. “But you like it?”
“Who wouldn’t like it?” She points at an acre of clearing near a swing, or what looks like a swing, near the edge of the cliff. “We could build a yurt for ourselves right there.”
“Well, that would involve coming back with some frequency.”
“And why i
s that a bad thing?”