MOMMY

Chapter One: The Lease

The road into Keddock Point ran out of trees a mile before it ran out of pavement.

Theo Jennings drove the last stretch with his window cracked, letting the October air in because the smell of the sea was the only thing that made the drive feel real. Salt, wet granite, the low rot of kelp drying on the tideline. Three months ago that smell had meant vacation. Now it went into him like a needle.

The town appeared the way it always did, all at once, as if it had been crouching behind the last hill. A white church with a black steeple. A harbor full of lobster boats sitting at their moorings in perfect order, none of them scuffed, none of them sunk. A hardware store. A diner called the Gull's Egg with a hand-lettered sign about pie. Forty-two houses on the landward side and maybe twenty on the water side, and above all of them the bluff, a long shoulder of rock and beach grass that ran north until it broke apart into the black shelves of the point.

He had loved this place for eleven days in July. He would have said, at the time, that he had never been anywhere kinder.

The cottage was the last building on Gull Bluff Road, a gray-shingled rental with white trim and a crooked porch. The landlord lived in Bangor and had never once come to look at it. Theo parked in the gravel, cut the engine, and sat with both hands on the wheel.

He had rehearsed this. Four days of packing. Two loads to the dump, one to the church donation bin, the rest into the back of the wagon. The lease was up on the thirty-first, and after that Keddock Point could sink into the Atlantic for all he cared.

He got out. The wind off the water was already knife-edged, the kind of cold that came early on that coast and never really left. Down the slope, past the beach roses gone thorny and red-hipped, he could see the shore. Low tide. The rocks were out, wet and shining, laid in long black ribs, and between two of those ribs was a smooth oval of standing water about twelve feet across.

He did not look at it for more than a second. He had promised himself that.

The key was still under the third flowerpot on the porch, where they had always left it, and the front door still stuck at the bottom so you had to lift and shove. When it opened, the smell of the house came out at him: dust and old woodsmoke and, underneath, faint but absolutely unmistakable, the coconut sunscreen Eliza had insisted on because it smelled like cookies.

Theo stood in the doorway and breathed it in and made a sound he was glad no one heard.

Then he went in and started being a person who packs.

The front room was as they had left it, which was to say a mess frozen in place. A jigsaw puzzle of a lighthouse, three-quarters finished, on the coffee table. A paperback of Leigh's face down on the arm of the couch, its spine broken. His own laptop bag by the door where he had dropped it the night of July twelfth and never picked up again.

The police had let them back in after two days. Leigh had walked through the rooms once, put four things in a tote bag, and gone out to the car. She had not come back inside. Not that day, not ever. The funeral was in Portland, at her mother's church, and by the end of that same week she had a sublet in the East End and a phone she didn't answer.

Theo had stayed in the cottage until the middle of August, sleeping on the couch because the bedroom was unbearable and the bedroom across the hall was worse. Then his employer stopped being patient, and he had driven back to Massachusetts and spent nine weeks pretending to sell industrial adhesives over the phone.

Now he was back for the things. Because the alternative was the landlord bagging his daughter's clothes and hauling them to the transfer station, and Theo would rather have been keelhauled.

He made coffee with a filter and a mug because the coffee maker's carafe had a crack in it. He carried the mug to the window that faced the water and made himself look, finally, straight down at the rocks.

The tidal pool sat there, calm as a mirror, reflecting the flat gray sky.

Eliza Jennings, age seven, had drowned in it on the evening of July twelfth during a neighborhood cookout, in front of eleven adults and six children. That was the sentence. The report said the pool was three and a half feet deep at the center. It said she was found face down. It said the water temperature was fifty-nine degrees and that cold-water immersion can produce rapid incapacitation even in strong swimmers, and that no evidence of foul play was present.

Eliza had swum since she was three. She had a certificate from the Y with a laminated seal on it that she had made him tape to the refrigerator.

Theo had been inside, in the dark of the back bedroom, with a migraine that had started as a smear of light in his left eye at four in the afternoon and grown into something that put him flat with a pillow over his head. Leigh had said go lie down. Leigh had said I've got her. Leigh had said, and he could still hear the exact music of it, go on, we're fine, there's forty people out there.

He had heard screaming at 6:52 p.m. By the time he got down the bluff path in his bare feet, tearing the sole of one on a mussel shell, Frank Chambers was doing compressions on a small body on the flat rock and the volunteer ambulance was already grinding down the lane, which he later thought about a great deal, because the ambulance came from the firehouse on the far side of town and that was four minutes if you drove like a lunatic.

He drank the coffee. It went cold in his hands before he was halfway down it.

The first box he taped together, he labeled KITCHEN, because he was not ready.

He worked until the light started to go. It went fast in October, the sun sliding down behind the pines inland while the sea stayed bright a little longer, that odd effect where the water seems lit from beneath. Theo boxed pans and plates and a set of jelly glasses that had come with the house. He found a hair elastic with a pink bead under the radiator and had to sit down on the kitchen floor for a while.

At six thirty someone knocked on the door.

He knew before he opened it, because there was a casserole dish in it. There had been a lot of casserole dishes in July.

"Theo Jennings," said Anne Bates. "I saw the car and I said to myself, he's going to eat crackers over the sink."

She stood on the porch in a wool coat the color of oatmeal, her hair loose, silvering at the temples in a way that somehow read as expensive rather than old. She was, he knew from July, forty-seven. She held a covered dish in both hands like an offering, and her face when she looked at him held exactly the right amount of everything: sorrow, warmth, a careful readiness to be sent away.

"Miss Anne," he said, and his voice cracked on it, and her eyes filled instantly, and that undid him more than anything had all day.

"Oh, honey," she said.

She put the dish down on the porch rail and hugged him. She smelled like woodsmoke and something herbal, and she was strong, stronger than a woman her size ought to be, and he stood in the doorway of the house where his daughter's coat still hung on a peg and let his dead neighbor's widow hold him together.

"You're not eating that alone," she said into his shoulder. "Come to mine. Seven o'clock. I have a fire going and a bottle of something better than either of us deserves."

"I'm not fit company."

"Nobody in this town is fit company," said Anne Bates. "Seven o'clock."

She went down the steps. At the bottom she turned, and the porch light caught her, and Theo noticed—the way you notice a thing and put it away without examining it—that her hands were very smooth. Not a woman's hands who had spent forty-seven winters on that coast. A girl's hands.

"It's good you came back," she said. "I mean that. This is where she is."

And she walked off down the road into the dark.