In the drawer of the desk is a sketch pad that contains early versions of the drawing I did of Wyatt. I don’t need to take it out; I see them perfectly in my mind. It was a super-alive summer, when all of my senses were on a delicious high alert. It was the summer I noticed everything—the way the salt dried on my skin, the way sand settled between my toes. The way Wyatt smiled at me while he was composing a song. We hung the final version of my drawing on a rusty nail on the treehouse wall, back before we knew how easily precious things could disintegrate in the salt air.
As I get out of bed, I think about how memories are just fine the way nature made them. We are forward-moving people, so as we go through life our unnecessary memories fade until we finally shed them. The ones we need—the time you touched the hot oven, the time you slipped on black ice—those memories burrow into our psyches to keep us safe. But there’s no reason to walk into the museum of your childhood just for old times’ sake. It’s confusing to be faced with all the things you used to think were important once you’ve grown up. If I were my parents, I would have changed this room into a gym.
I find Gramps on the back porch, waiting for someone to make him coffee. “Oh, thank God,” he says when he sees me. “You know Annie’s going to sleep till ten and I don’t know how the hell that contraption in there works.”
I brew the coffee and make raisin toast, buttered and with marmalade, the way he likes it. I head back out and place the tray on the table between our chairs.
“Ah, lovely,” he says. “What a wife you’ll be.”
“Gramps.”
“Antiquated?”
“Definitely.” I sip my coffee and notice it tastes different here. There’s something about the beach that changes the chemical components of everything around it. Wood feels damp, sheets right out of the dryer still smell of salt. And the coffee, it’s just better.
“Sounds to me like you’re making your own money now anyway. Maybe he should be making you breakfast.” He gives me a sideways glance to let me know he’s just trying to get me going.
“I do make plenty of money, Gramps.”
“Good for you,” he says. “Cracks me up that people pay you to boss them around.”
“It’s not bossing them around so much as setting standards,” I say. “We take a fact-based approach to human capital and create measurable outcomes.”
“Sounds like nonsense,” he says, and I guess it does. I say that sentence so often I don’t even hear it anymore. I’ve been working for Eleanor Schultz for eight years and her approach to human resources consulting is like her religion, and mine too. The beauty is that there’s never any kind of misunderstanding between people; you never have to wonder. If we tell you that you need to score eight on some scale and you score seven, you’re fired. We can literally point to the chart that made the decision, so no hard feelings.
I met Eleanor during my senior year at NYU at a recruiting event. She was wearing her signature black wool suit and seemed completely in control of herself and her surroundings, even as she sat at a folding table in a hard metal chair. The banner behind her said human corps: productive people, predictable outcomes. And I just loved that. I wanted to wrap myself in that banner and enjoy a lifetime of predictable outcomes. No more surprises, no more broken promises. Just people doing what they say they’re going to do. Eleanor may have mistaken my enthusiasm for the concept with enthusiasm for the job, but a few weeks later, I was hired.
“The thing I like about Human Corps is that we help people succeed by making rules that they can live by. Then they just get to decide if they want to do what it takes to keep their jobs.”
“Human Core? Like an apple?”
“No, like ‘Peace Corps.’?”
“So if you write it down it looks like ‘human corpse’?” Gramps laughs. He puts down his coffee and says it again, “Human corpse.” Soon he is laughing so hard that he has to take off his glasses to wipe his eyes. He takes a giant handkerchief out of his pocket and blows his nose.
His laughing makes me smile, and I don’t remember the last time my body gave itself over to a laugh that way. Human Corpse. I’ll never be able to unsee that.
“Kind of a lifeless job you’ve got there, sweetie,” he says, still laughing.
“It can be rigid,” I say.
“A bunch of stiffs in suits.” He’s wiping his eyes again.
It baffles me that I ever did anything to compromise this job. I like the people, I like the processes, and I like how I know exactly how things are going to turn out. It’s the perfect job for me. My mistake was suggesting something new to a client. Looking back now, I see it was ridiculous. When Eleanor called me into her office, she blamed my engagement. According to her, in the past year I’ve been less predictable, which is a pretty big insult coming from her. It’s been a week since this all went down, and it feels like temporary insanity more than anything else.
Granny appears on the porch, in a nightgown and a cardigan sweater. “You two had better thank God you made enough coffee for me. It sounds like there’s a hyena out here.” She takes a long sip from her mug and looks out at the water. “What’s so funny anyway?”
“Sam’s a human corpse,” says Gramps, blowing his nose again.
Granny turns toward the water. She’s focused on a very specific spot. “Is that a dolphin or a person?”
While Granny sees pretty well for eighty-four, you wouldn’t exactly trust her to land a plane. I get up to have a look. The water is calm. It’s a paddleboarder moving parallel to the horizon, a big hat on his head. And I know. I can tell from the way he moves. Even though the Wyatt I knew didn’t paddleboard. I don’t even think that was a thing back then.
My heart rate quickens and my breath gets shallow as we stare. My memory fills in his features, his wide-set brown eyes. The way his hair curled up on the left side of his widow’s peak. The furrow of his brow. I wonder if he’d be doing that now, concentrating on the water.
“It’s him,” I say almost to myself, but of course to Granny because I need her help. “He feels like a ghost.”
Granny puts her arm around me. “And I bet he’s still holding a candle for you too.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” I say, wiggling out of her embrace. “No one’s holding a candle for anyone. That was over a decade ago, we were kids.”
“Oh my,” Gramps says. “Strong feelings.”
The two of them. Honestly the cutest people I’ve ever wanted to strangle. “Okay, enough. We’re going to pretend he’s not here and focus all of our energy on the man I’m actually marrying. The good one. The doctor.”
* * *
Jack sleeps until nine, which surprises me. He’s normally up and at the gym by seven, but the garage apartment is dark and he slept right through. Jack works out four (never five) days a week in our building gym, alternating between push day, pull day, and leg day. On the other days we have Fritz come to our gym with high-intensity workouts that are designed to confuse our muscles into shape. It all feels completely counterintuitive, and sometimes I feel like my muscles are more than confused, but it’s an efficient workout and something we do together. Two nights a week, Jack plays tennis with his cardiologist friend Elliot, and Gracie comes over to eat ice cream for dinner.
I’m happy to skip the gym, because it’s beautiful on the deck, eighty degrees with the sunlight feathering the water. There’s a breeze coming through the dunes that hits me each time my skin starts to feel too warm. The breeze on my skin reminds me of something I don’t want to remember. I’m starting to feel the pull of the ocean, and on a day like this, I can’t imagine spending ninety minutes in a basement gym confusing my muscles.
I take Jack into town for lunch, and we share a lobster roll and a Caesar salad at Chippy’s. We walk down West Main Street afterward, and I point out the ice-cream shop where we used to go in the afternoons and the library where I worked that summer. Oak Shore has known me at every stage of my life—when I was seven and got scolded for running into Ginnie’s Bakery without shoes, when I was twelve and rode with the boys in the back of Wyatt’s dad’s truck in the Fourth of July parade, when I was sixteen and Mrs. Barton called to me at the end of every shift, “Time to go, your Wyatt’s outside.”
We walk by the Old Sloop Inn, but we don’t go in because my mom’s going to make us do a deep dive there tomorrow. “Rustic,” Jack says. Everyone knows “rustic” is nice for “needs paint.”
“Well, yes. It’s as old as the town.”
“I can’t really see you standing in a gown in front of that place.”
I look at the inn for a few seconds. “Neither can I. Let’s just look at it for my mom, then we can take her to Connecticut, and she’ll love it.”
“I don’t know why I was picturing the Hamptons.”
“You’re not the first,” I say.
Something’s off as we meander through town, specifically the fact that no one’s meandering. There’s a disproportionate number of people who aren’t in bathing suits and cover-ups. They’re wearing messenger bags and moving quickly.
Jack notices it too. “What’s with all the press?”
“Is that who they are?”
“Looks like it. I’ve seen three guys with camera bags. Think they heard Samantha’s back for a wedding venue showdown?”
“Ha.”