“Are you playing hide-and-seek?” the girl asked.
“You could say that,” I said.
“Can I play?” she asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, she sat beside me. “Who are we hiding from?”
I pointed toward a man a few feet away, loading groceries into his car. He was wearing a backward baseball cap, and his jeans were rolled up to his knees. And he was talking two decibels too loudly into his headset, organizing a barbecue that night, telling whoever was on the other end that they should plan on staying over. I seriously thought about asking him if he had room for one more.
“That person?” she said. “That’s who we are hiding from?”
I nodded.
She laughed, unimpressed. Then she said the truest thing I’d heard in weeks. “We’re going to have to find a better place than this,” she said.
13
Summer people in the Hamptons loved naming their houses. And if there was one story that pretty much summed up the difference between growing up there and spending a summer there, it had to do with The Shipwreck—the house next to the house where I grew up on Old Montauk Highway.
The Shipwreck was a large, shingle-style cottage gorgeously restored by the owners—a local architect and his family. The house had been in their family for several generations, his grandfather resurrecting it after the hurricane of 1936. It sat high on a two-acre, seventy-five-foot bluff—with 180-degree views of the Atlantic Ocean.
&n
bsp; The architect often rented out his house for parties and weddings. A handful of those, especially in the summer, paid his mortgage for the rest of the year. Most years. But while they were preparing for one August wedding, the bride and groom (a tech mogul and his model wife) decided that the two acres of land weren’t enough for their five hundred guests, and so, without the owner’s approval, they cut down protected trees behind the house to build a larger dance floor.
The case of cutting down those five trees went through two lawsuits and eight years. The town sued the architect, the architect in turn sued the tech mogul, the tech mogul countersued everyone. A jury found for the local family and ordered the tech mogul to foot the tree-destroying bill of a hundred thousand dollars. They then ordered the mogul to pay another hundred thousand (and legal expenses) to the local architect for distress.
It was a happy ending, right?
Not so much.
The tech mogul refused to pay. And after eight more years and several more lawsuits, no one had seen a dollar. The architect was forced to sell his home (no longer legally allowed to rent it out for parties). And the kicker? The tech mogul purchased the house under a secret trust.
Which brings me to the difference between growing up in Montauk and summering there. One of you ends up with the house that was never yours. And the rest of you sit there telling the story.
I drove past The Shipwreck—the ocean and dunes glistening just beyond it—and pulled down my family’s driveway, up to a house that was never named, a mix of ramshackle and hopeful that defined vintage Montauk. The smaller version of it, a two-room guesthouse, was visible a few yards behind it.
I shut off the ignition and stared at the house through the windshield. It wasn’t as grand as The Shipwreck, or most of the houses that lined this stretch of Old Montauk Highway. I tried to see it as a stranger would, if they had happened upon it, driving along this stretch of the dunes: a traditional Hamptons cottage with a large red door, striking bay windows, a wraparound porch—its charm undeniable. But instead I only wished I was that stranger, that I had driven up to the wrong house. That I could reverse down our dirt driveway to The Shipwreck and hide out in one of their extra wings, where no one would find me.
I didn’t have a plan for when I got to the front door. How do you say hello when you’ve been gone for so long?
So I stayed in the car for a minute too long, maybe five minutes too long, tapping on the steering wheel. I willed someone to open the door so I wouldn’t actually have to ring the bell and give them the chance to slam it in my face.
Then I heard sirens in the distance. Except they were getting closer.
I looked in my rearview mirror to see a squad car racing down the driveway, its lights flashing.
A police officer stepped out of his vehicle, screaming into his megaphone, apparently at me.
What was happening? I got out of the car, squinting toward the squad car in the afternoon sun.
“Step out of the car.”
“I am out of the car!”
“Step further out of the car. And keep your hands by your sides!” the officer yelled.
I pointed toward the house. “No! See, this is my family’s home.”
“HANDS BY YOUR SIDES!”