plunge in her stomach. This famous winding road had never before made her uncomfortable, but now she saw how close to the cliff’s precipice the passenger was, how blind the curves were. Anything could happen: a bicyclist, a deer, a car from the opposite direction swinging too wide. The road might not be swept away today in a mudslide because it wasn’t the rainy season, but at any moment an earthquake could send it tumbling into the sea.
Paul swerved around a bicyclist, and Gina felt her lunch rise in her throat. “Paul, pull over!” she rasped.
He stopped the car in a turnout. Gina got out and stood shivering in the bracing wind.
She stared up at the restless, gray expanse of sky where gulls drew invisible lines, then down at the restless, empty gray expanse of ocean; sky and water together were like an impossible jigsaw puzzle in which every piece looked the same.
The nausea receded, Gina returned to the car, and they began the descent into the valley of dripping redwoods and eucalyptus. When they left the trees and turned onto the straight lane of freeway, she was relieved.
“Sweetie, I’m excited about the house,” Paul said after a while. “But I don’t want you to feel pressured about the plans for it. Give yourself a break; you’ve been through a lot.”
Gina was silent for a few moments. Finally, she said, “Nothing feels right.”
They’d reached the Golden Gate Bridge where people on the walkway clowned for cameras; others clutched their jackets closed against the wind. Tourists, everywhere. She felt like one, too.
“You’re not yourself now. It takes time,” Paul said.
Gina let her head fall back on the seat. Why did people say that, she wondered, as if it were the flu? Since her parents’ accident, everything had changed somehow. And yet, certainly not the day-to-day. She’d only seen her parents one or two weeks a year during the past decade. Still, the idea of her parents at the house in Maine, drinking Lipton tea at the kitchen table or touching up the paint on the porch, animated by the occasional phone call with her and the kids, had admittedly provided more comfort than the reality of being with them. This is the way it is, she’d always told herself about their family dynamic, which even Paul conceded was dysfunctional. But buried in that resignation was a kernel of hope: as long as her parents were there, there was the possibility her relationship with them could change. Now, it was frozen stuck; the way it was felt like a kind of failure, a colossal waste of human potential for growth and acceptance.
Paul was right; it took time to mourn. But it wasn’t only loss she felt. Her parents’ death was a period at the end of a long, difficult sentence whose words had conveyed more urgency and pain to Gina the more she’d aged. In the past few months, it seemed to have shaken the very foundation of her courage and contentment. She felt unmoored—like a tent with one of its stakes pulled out of the ground, flapping and folding in the wind.
They rode in a humming silence punctuated by the thumping of the bridge’s expansion joints and Stella’s panting. When they arrived at his office, Paul pulled over, kissed Gina on the cheek, and got out of the car.
Gina climbed into the driver’s seat and just as she pulled away from the curb, her phone rang. It was Cassie.
“Cass,” she said when she answered, “I’m driving, can I . . .”
“I’m sorry!” Cassie interrupted “But you’ve gotta hear this. Sid just called and left a message that he bought the house. Our house. He wants to discuss his plans for it.”
“Our house?” Gina ran a yellow light and noticed a cop parked at the intersection.
“Cassie, it’s illegal to talk on my cell while driving. Wait—hold on.” She laid her phone on the seat next to her and pressed “speaker.”
“It’s so awful! Just spiteful!” Cassie’s agitation filled the car, making it hard for Gina to breathe.
“You know, Sid’s bought and sold, like, three houses in Whit’s Point in the last ten years. He’s just buying ours to flip it, too,” Gina said, thinking this might somehow reassure Cassie.
“Oh, how horrible! What will he do to it? I just can’t talk to him.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to.”
“No!” Cassie practically shouted. “You can’t. He wants something from us—besides the house, I mean. He thinks we have something, and he’d probably do anything to get it.”
Gina’s mind was not on her driving; she needed to say goodbye. “Let me think about it, okay? Email me his number. You and I will talk.”
They hung up. Gina’s head felt foamy with confusion. As usual, she’d been so intent on calming down Cassie that she couldn’t register how she felt about Sid’s buying the house. Cassie’s distrust of their cousin was over-the-top, she knew, but Gina wasn’t eager to talk to him, either. She’d associated him with inexorable family hostility for so long that she imagined any contact with him could suck her into a vortex of pain. She was sure he felt the same way about her and Cassie—he’d long ago distanced himself from them. He hadn’t even shown up at her parents’ funeral.
But what could she really know about Sid? She’d been Esther’s age when she last saw him. Why was he coming back into their lives now?
A book is a home for a story
A rose is a house for a smell
My head is a house for a secret
A secret I never shall tell!
Mary Ann Hoberman, A House Is a House For Me
Just when it seemed her mother’s birthday was doomed, Ginny’s father was struck with the idea of a family trip to the Museum of Fine Arts. Eleanor had frowned at his other ideas of how to spend the day: lunch at Howard Johnson’s or a drive to the mountains.
“Okay, the museum—that’s good,” she had said, and Ginny, her father, and maybe even the timbers of the house, having been in suspense all morning, sighed with relief.
The Gilberts wound out Pickering Road, mounded on both sides with colorful leaves.
As they approached Lily House, Eleanor said, “Slow down, Ron. Look! They finished the roof job. The color of those new roof shingles is all wrong.”
Ginny turned to look. Everyone in the car expected Eleanor to remark about something or other every time she drove by Lily House. Wasn’t the field behind it getting high or the barn needing some paint? From her mother’s vigilance Ginny gleaned that Lily House was her mother’s real house, the one she would move into if Fran weren’t living there. Because her mother and Fran didn’t get along, Ginny had only been inside Lily House a handful of times.
“Stop!” Eleanor now commanded. “It’s Sid—in the driveway. Let’s see if he wants to go to the museum.”
“Oh, honey, you don’t really want—”
“Certainly I do! Pull in.”
Ginny slumped in her seat. Cassie had left for her first year of boarding school six weeks ago, and Ginny missed her almost unbearably; it didn’t seem fair to have your sister leave home when you were only nine. They were going to pick her up at school to go with them to the museum, and Ginny had been looking forward to having her to herself in the backseat. Plus, for some reason, Cassie hated Sid, and she’d be mad he was coming.
Ron pulled into Lily House’s driveway, and Eleanor got out. Ginny couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Sid. She took in his bell-bottom corduroys and jean jacket, the dark hair that reached jaggedly for his shoulders, and the cigarette clamped in his mouth and decided he looked like a musician on the cover of a record album, lanky and loose. He appeared