You haven’t experienced gridlock until you’ve been on the Long Island Expressway on the Friday before Independence Day. The traffic has passengers standing outside of their cars, looking out toward the ships and the shoreline—welcoming them like a postcard—and one traveler staring into her rearview in the direction of New York City, trying desperately to believe she can still see it.
I’d had no choice but to drive my car. Leaving it in the garage in New York was insanely expensive—a luxury I didn’t have, or I wouldn’t have been going to Montauk in the first place. Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing, though. All the earthly possessions I cared the most about (including my egg chair) were stuffed into that car, and with everything else that had been lost in the last couple of weeks, I couldn’t bear to part with them too.
Besides the egg chair, I hadn’t taken any furniture. I’d left it all for Danny, a final gesture I knew he wasn’t capable of receiving. He could sell it to the new owners or he could keep it himself. I’d left him a note saying as much and signed (as ineffectually and sincerely as any words I had ever written), I’m sorry, S.
It pained me to leave everything for him, not because I wanted any of it (though I did want some of it—the yellow denim couch we had purchased at a flea market in Pasadena, which we had carried up the stairs together). It was more because those things were all that tied us together at that point. If I stayed and fought for the slick leather ottoman we’d purchased at The Future Perfect, it wouldn’t earn Danny’s forgiveness, but it would keep us in conversation—a fourteen-year conversation that I wasn’t ready to stop having. Didn’t that count for something that, because I knew he needed to, I stopped anyway?
After five hours of crawling traffic, I weaved off the highway. Fields and farms started coming into view. People opened their convertible tops, stared out at the trees and the green as far as the eye could see—but I couldn’t see any of it. I just saw failure.
I was overcome with a feeling that I was going to throw up. I don’t mean that as a way to emphasize my incredible discomfort. I mean that literally. I pulled off the road at Stop & Shop, which was jammed with folks stocking up for their holiday barbecues, and parked quickly. I ran toward the grocery store, but felt too dizzy to go inside, so I sat on the ground—on the concrete—in front of the store, trying to catch my breath. Trying to think of anywhere I could go that would send me away from Montauk, away from my childhood home.
I pulled out my phone—my new phone—to see if anyone had called. In a fit of rage, I had almost opted to get a new number. Let any of the traitors even try to reach me! They’d get a disconnected message, a robot’s nasally voice telling them they were out of luck. I wasn’t able to pull the trigger, though, hoping someone—Danny, Louis—would come to his senses and realize I deserved a second chance.
There were no new messages.
“Why are you on the ground?” I heard.
I looked up, squinting into the sunshine, to see a little girl in a red cover-up, looking down at me.
Behind her, the little girl’s mother wrangled two other children into their car seats. She looked up, noticing that her daughter was missing, and I waved as if to say, she’s safe over here.
“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.
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.