Page 6 of The Book of Summer

“I’ve literally never heard anyone say that.”

Dr. Bess Codman is indeed dawdling. What she’s afraid to see, not even Bess understands. A lot can happen in a thousand-plus days. Perhaps the home will be as wrecked and keening as Dudley described. Or else it’ll be the same old place, the house evenshelived in year-round, for a while, after her life had gone to shit. In other words, the glory days. It’s funny what amounted to problems when you were sixteen.

Alas, Bess can no longer stall, particularly if Cissy has anything to say about it, which of course she will. And so with both eyes squinched closed, Bess shuts the car door. She inhales and twists her torso to the left and then to the right. At last Bess reopens her eyes. She lets her mind swallow the scene.

And there it stands: the inveterate Cliff House. Large. Gray. Shingled. Surrounded by a massive privet hedge. Looking almost like it did before.

“Oh,” she says aloud.

Maybe this isn’t so bad.

Bess takes a few steps forward, and more after that, her knees shaky beneath her. As her toes touch Baxter Road, Bess realizes that although the home resembles its usual self, the ocean seems closer than it’s ever been.

She shuffles onto the white-shelled drive, suitcase dragging behind her. To the left is nothing but a view of the Atlantic. There were once two guest homes in that spot, and Bess expected to see at least one. Cissy told her that “Overflow” was lost about a year ago, but now “Family Room” has vanished with it. To the right looms Cliff House itself, secure for now behind its hedge.

Bess exhales and walks farther up the drive, past her mother’s ancient Land Rover Defender, plastered as it is with bumper stickers from her kids’ colleges. Cissy’s “ACK nice” sticker had been covered up—by Chappy—with an “ACK naughty” one instead. (“Oh, Chappy Mayhew wants naughty?! I’ll show him naughty!”) Bess chuckles, thinking a truck like that beats the heck out of a basket and a bike. Sometimes her mother is in tight supply of that good New England sense she yammers on about.

Suddenly Bess notices the flagpole, or, rather, the lack of one. When she pictures Cliff House, her mind begins with only three things: a big, gray house, the privet hedge, and Old Glory fluttering above it all. Bess abandons her suitcase and rushes through the hedge’s arbored gate and into the side yard.

The flagpole is in fact gone. So are the tennis courts, the outdoor shower, and the storage shack. All of these things, and more, turned to air. Bess’s breath goes thin.

“Jesus,” she gasps.

Cissy is a tenacious old broad, but Chappy Mayhew is right. It’s time to give up on Cliff House. There’s already too much they’ll never get back.

4

Saturday Evening

They stand on the back patio, the last of the day’s sun stretching across the Atlantic. Though the view is magnificent, Bess’s stomach roils and churns. Her insides are nothing but roller-coaster drops. The excessive winds don’t help.

“Cissy,” she says. “We can’t stay here.”

Vanished. Cliff House has disappeared.

The building itself remains, for the moment anyway, but gone is the lawn where Bess got married, where so many before her wed, including Cissy and her grandmother Ruby. Ruby’s vegetable garden has also evaporated, as well as the public walking path behind it.

Gone also is the pool, once set in the grass, a rectangle of blue with a single white border around it. Gone is the volleyball court Cissy ambitiously installed though it was the one sport the family never played.

The outdoor shower, the flagpole, the bike and board shed: gone, gone, and gone. Even their remarkable privet hedge, tended to for generations and photographed for magazines and tourist brochures, is dead and brown in the back. How could it all look okay from the road?

“This isn’t safe,” Bess says.

If she walked ten feet forward, she’d reach the end of the patio, where steel edging is exposed. A cell phone dropped in that very spot would fall several stories onto the rocks below. As the wind howls through her, Bess wonders if she’s in danger of tumbling over the cliff herself. The gusts are strong that far up on Baxter Road. Within minutes she has sand in her teeth and on her skin.

Bess’s throat prickles and it has little to do with the sand she’s inhaled. She understands Cissy’s reluctance to let go. It’s about the house, yes, but also their family. In the early twentieth century, Bess’s great-grandmother Sarah Young longed for a home their brood might retreat to in the summers. Her husband, Philip, was an MIT-educated scientist who devised a way to process reclaimed rubber. His invention built a fortune and it built his wife the house of her dreams.

Sconset, seven miles from Nantucket Town, has never been the most fashionable part of the island. Back then it was riddled with artists and seamen and new-money types like the Youngs. But Sarah adored it on sight, even more so when she and Philip made the one-mile trek up Baxter Road. With a single glance at the unadorned bluff, she envisioned lawn parties and orchestras and ragtime performers playing into the night. Her family would grow up there, Sarah decided. Whatever happened in the months before or after, each year would be anchored by a summer spent at Cliff House.

Bess’s heart breaks to see it end up like this.

“We have to leave,” she says, shimmying off the encroaching nostalgia. It’s time to get practical. “Dad mentioned he sent over some empty boxes? Let’s start packing. It’s funny, I never realized I was afraid of heights.”

“Bessie, I acknowledge it seems a little… dicey?”

Bess turns toward her mom, mouth agape.

“If by dicey you mean lethal, then I agree. Your plumbing is sticking out of the bluff!”