My mother briefly looks guilty. “Well, I meant to tell you. Right there at the house. I guess Marion didn’t rent it this summer, because he’s been there for a while.” She stirs the pitcher of mai tais and refills Jack’s glass.
“You know Wyatt?” Gracie asks me. Gracie’s asking me about Wyatt, and it throws me like a wave after a hurricane. Everyone is looking at me for a response. There is a loud ringing in my ears and the heat in my chest has spread to my face. Jack knows the story. And he knows how incendiary all of this is.
“Well, I’ve heard all about Wyatt,” Jack says. “The whole reason I became a doctor was so that I could compete with a guy with a guitar.” Nervous laughter titters over empty mai tais.
“I see him all the time,” says Gracie. “He lets me watch him surf. And he’s teaching me to play ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ on the guitar. He has a bunch of guitars up there.”
“Up where?” asks Jack.
“In the treehouse,” says Gracie. This makes Jack laugh, and I try to make sense of it. There is not one funny thing about that treehouse. Or Wyatt. Or the fact that I’m thirty years old and feeling panicked about seeing the guy who broke my heart when I was a teenager.
Wyatt’s dad helped his brother, Michael, and him build that treehouse in the oak tree between their pool and the dunes when they were ten and twelve years old, spending days at junkyards and shipyards all over Long Island. While I can remember falling in love in small moments all over the beach and while floating on the ocean, I lost my virginity specifically in that treehouse. At night, after my house went quiet, I would sneak downstairs and out the back door and through the dunes to the rope ladder that led to Wyatt. He’d say, “Hey, Sam-I-am,” and he’d kiss me, and I’d wonder if there were any two people in the world who were more right together.
The treehouse would last forever, Wyatt once told me, because there were no walls in the front or back. A storm would blow right through it. The tree itself grew to form a bit of a back wall, giving us privacy in case Marion and Frank happened to be peering out their bedroom window with binoculars. But the front was wide open to the ocean view, Wyatt’s beach chair next to mine. Eventually, just a jumble of bodies and blankets.
My chest is still tight, and I cannot wrestle my face into neutral. I study my drink and use my handmade umbrella to try to fish a tiny piece of pineapple out of my mai tai. I haven’t seen Wyatt since I was sixteen, haven’t spoken to him since I was eighteen. It was teenage infatuation, and Dr. Judy even went so far as to call it addiction, but it’s been a long time and I’m a rebuilt grown-up person with a real live fiancé and a career. I recently contributed to a 401(k), for God’s sake. I can’t imagine seeing Wyatt now, introducing him to Jack and asking about life in Los Angeles. So hey, how’d that all work out? Wyatt is a locked-away memory of a time I don’t want to go back to and a person I can barely remember being. And somehow he’s thirty feet away, right next door. I’m not sure I would have come if they’d told me he was here. Which probably explains why they didn’t tell me.
“You know Wyatt,” I say to Gracie. Just to confirm. Just to nail down one single fact that will keep everything I know from blowing away with the next breeze off the ocean.
“Yep,” she says. “He knew who I was right away.”
* * *
Travis and Hugh are late for dinner, but we’ve all had enough mai tais and cashews not to care. “Nice slacks,” is the first thing Travis says to me. I haven’t seen him since Easter, when he commented that I was dressed like a Delta flight attendant.
I hug Hugh before I say, “They’re called chinos in the catalog. I think they’re even called ‘favorite chinos.’ They’re what people who don’t surf all day wear.”
“Ah, I didn’t know they made catalogs just for tax accountants,” Travis says.
“Cute. How far did you have to chase the Hawaiian Punch guy to get that shirt?” I ask, and toss another cashew into my mouth. This is our love language, but Jack thinks Travis is threatened by how much I’ve made of my career when all he does is surf and pick out fabrics all day. Jack’s being overly loyal, because Travis and Hugh actually do really well. They have a booming architecture and design business in town, Travis being the aesthetic director and Hugh being the actual architect. My parents have expected their engagement for longer than they’d been expecting mine.
My dad barbecues sausages, and my mom’s made a salad and scalloped potatoes. We eat at the long table on the back porch, as usual, as the sun puts on a dramatic show of setting. I can do this for three days. As long as I can avoid Wyatt. He’s not going to just walk up onto our deck, and I could put Gracie on lookout and let her run interference for me. I take in my immediate family, my grandparents, and my handsome fiancé. We’ve sat like this dozens of times since Jack and I met, mostly in my parents’ cramped dining room in the city. But it’s different here, like a step back in time to who my family used to be.
“So have they started selling you on the Old Sloop Inn yet?” Hugh asks. “The garden can accommodate two hundred people and the food’s great.”
“That’s what we’re here for. To check out all our options,” Jack says, and gives my hand a squeeze. My mom smiles at the sight of our hands together.
“I think you’re going to love it. And it has thirty guest rooms for out-of-towners,” says my mom. And then, “Of course your parents would be welcome to stay here,” which stops my heart. Jack’s mom does not make her own paper. In fact, her paper comes in a lovely box with her initials printed in navy blue in the upper left-hand corner. Like a normal person.
Travis shakes his head. “I think it’s unbelievable that you haven’t nailed this down yet. I figured you would have laid all this out in a spreadsheet the day you got engaged.”
I shrug. It is planned, of course. Jack picked B. It’s not the beach wedding I imagined as a kid or the Central Park wedding I imagined the day Jack proposed to me, but it’s easy, and I’m sure it will be beautiful.
A few guitar notes come from the treehouse. Everyone’s quiet, and I wonder if they can hear my heart beat. I notice I am holding my breath. The same notes come again, then again with a few more added on. He’s writing a song in there and I can picture him doing it, his legs dangling over the edge, his brow furrowed. It’s like I went out into the world and grew up, and he’s still right here. Right where I left him.
2
I wake in my childhood bedroom to the early morning light coming through the window and briefly don’t know where I am. The sound of the waves crashing outside isn’t so different from the rush of cars down Lexington Avenue. My double bed is pushed up against the pale yellow wall on which is painted my terrible version of the tree of life. I got the idea for this project the summer that Wyatt and Michael were building their treehouse. I wanted one of my own, but there was no tree for it on our property, so I decided I would turn my bedroom into a treehouse by painting a gigantic tree on the wall. My dad was working in his studio when I asked him for a can of brown paint. He pointed to a stack of cans in the corner, not looking up from his work. We were all artists then, no questions asked.
I spent a week working on it and wouldn’t let any of the boys in my room until I was done. Wyatt was the only one who wanted to see it anyway. Looking at the big brown trunk and its leafless branches now, I understand fully why I don’t like working with paint. Paint drips and bleeds and responds to gravity. Of course this is why my dad loves it; he’s practically reckless. At the time, he was thrilled with my wall, probably by the effort more than the outcome. He put his arm around me as he ran his eyes over every branch. “I love it,” he said. “Needs texture.”
I check my phone and it’s only six. I lie back down and pull the covers up over my head to see if I can go back to sleep, and also to avoid taking in the rest of the time capsule that sits on my open rolltop desk. A jar full of sea glass. Three swimming trophies. A red ribbon from the Summer Muffin-a-thon. Stacks of self-indulgent journals that I decide I will throw out today.