Page 8 of Dead of Summer

ORLA

Orla spends the afternoon opening up the house, shaking out linens and yanking up storm windows, swollen with age and humidity, slowly replacing the stale damp air with a fresh ocean breeze.

Her childhood home is still furnished with the kind of oversize decor you’d never fit into a cramped New York apartment.

In the living room there are several large stuffed chairs, an ottoman, and a long davenport all facing the soot-stained stone fireplace.

An antique sailing flag hangs above it. The faintly musty smell of it all brings on a wave of nostalgia so strong it makes her dizzy.

She puts a hand to the wall to steady herself.

It’s funny how everything else kind of just disappears when you return to the place you grew up, like the rest of your life has been some sort of hallucination and the childhood you, the one from all those years ago, is the only version that is real.

Being back on Hadley, Orla can almost pretend that New York never happened at all. Would things have been better that way?

She walks out to the screened-in porch at the back of the house.

The evening sun has only just snuffed out behind the trees.

The remnants of it cast a bluish light across the wooden floorboards.

A shadowy tower of chipped wooden oars and nets leans against one corner.

She gulps in the humid salt-tinged air and looks out on a lawn.

It’s hemmed in on both sides by thick stands of trees framing what her dad hopes is a multimillion-dollar view of water.

If the buyers can ignore the abandoned house next door, that is , Orla thinks, glancing into the dark woods separating her property from the Gallos’.

During the summer Alice and Orla had spent their evenings out here lounging on rattan chairs, eating ice cream bars, and drawing pictures on paper spread across the floor. Art Club they called it, until they got a bit older and more serious.

Their last summer together, she remembers Alice had them working on pieces for their portfolios for their applications to the School of Visual Arts.

They had two years to go before college still, but Alice said they needed practice.

She was right. Orla was struggling. The sailboat she’d been drawing looked out of balance.

The perspective was skewed and the paper had become smeared with frustrated eraser marks.

Alice had leaned over to look, but before she could properly see it, Orla snatched up the page and balled it up, tossing it into the corner.

“Let’s do something else,” she’d said. Ignoring her, Alice had gone to retrieve it, smoothing it out on the coffee table in front of her.

“Stop, Orla. It’s so lovely. I think it’s one of your best.” She always had a special way of looking at things, turning the flawed and mundane into something magic.

Orla had tried to hide a shy smile. “Stop! It’s terrible.”

“No. Look at the waves, the way you’ve done it, with all those lines, they’re almost moving. It’s like a Van Gogh.” Alice said it with such conviction that Orla almost believed her, even if she would never admit it.

“No, it’s not! And even if it was, no one is going to like it. Besides, he wasn’t even successful until he was dead.”

There’s a loud snap of a branch to Orla’s right, followed by the rush of something moving through the woods beside the house.

Orla clutches her chest as a rabbit runs out from the brush and hops across the lawn.

She laughs out loud, but it comes out strangled and nervous.

She goes back inside, twisting the lock behind her.

Orla pauses at the staircase, looking up into the darkness of the second floor, before full-on exhaustion propels her toward her childhood bedroom.

Her fingers glide along the banister, remembering the familiar knots and dips in the wood.

The upstairs of the house is narrow, holding two bedrooms and a small bathroom at the end of the hall.

She stops at the door to her parents’ room.

Its double windows look out through the trees at the water.

Her throat goes tight at the sight of an old quilt folded neatly at the foot of the bed.

Being alone in the house fills her with a strange heaviness she hasn’t anticipated. The silence here catches her off guard.

Orla turns back and crosses the hall to her old room. It has been cleaned up since she left for college, stripped of all her old band posters and toys for the one time her parents half-heartedly tried to rent it out. Orla takes in the white beadboard walls with a strange ache in her chest.

She pulls back the edge of a cotton curtain printed with tiny blue and red sailboats.

In the near dark, the dust-caked upper windows of Alice’s room stare back vacantly at her.

When they were kids, Alice and Orla played games with flashlights at these windows.

“Morse code” they called it, but they’d never had any interest in learning how to do the real thing.

Instead, they invented their own made-up language of flashes and pauses that only the two of them could decipher.

Two flashes in quick succession meant hello .

Two short, one long meant come over now .

One long, two short, one long was to be used only in an emergency.

They were only fifteen when Alice disappeared.

Drowned presumably. Her mother had left Hadley Island a few months later.

She’d never said why to anyone, just silently packed up a few suitcases and left it all behind to rot.

Orla assumed that it was too painful to carry on looking out to sea and wondering what had become of her daughter.

Speculation about why she’d never sold what had to be a valuable piece of property was rampant on the island, but Orla had always had a feeling it was superstitious, in case Alice ever returned.

Maybe her mother didn’t want her to find another family living there instead.

Either way, the vines started to claim the house soon after.

Her old twin bed sags when Orla lies down on it, the springs creaking like they are ready to give up.

She pulls her grandmother’s afghan blanket from the foot of the bed up over herself, willing herself to sleep.

She reaches for the switch on the bedside lamp, and the room is submerged in darkness.

Orla lies still trying to shut it all out.

She wants nothing more than to escape into a delicious oblivion but her mind spins on the periphery of sleep replaying the last few miserable months in New York.

After a yearslong hiatus it was meant to be her big return, a solo show at the prestigious Ornament Gallery in Chelsea.

Orla was so confident in its success that she’d shown up to the opening in a gown by Ala?a, a shimmering black number with one sleeve.

She had learned how to dress the part by now, taught herself to carry herself like a real artist. She’d learned in New York that to be given a chance, half the battle is to take yourself seriously.

Even though she didn’t feel like herself, Orla had gotten the cool shaggy haircut with curtain bangs and made sure to stand with her shoulders down and back instead of up by her ears.

But this time, none of her posturing was enough to bring in a crowd.

This time, the reviews had already spoken.

“A dearth of imagination,” Artforum pronounced, rather gleefully it felt to Orla, in their review of her paintings, which were not portraits like her earlier work, but images of boxes, stacked on top of one another.

Before she could recover from that blow, a write-up in The Times agreed. “This transparently eager attempt has none of the confidence of her earlier work.”

The boxes, shadowy cubes, some open, some closed on a stark white background, were meant to be symbolic. “Of what?” the writer was quick to ask. “It is hard to be sure.”

“Of solitude and hidden trauma,” her agent assured the gallerists, who’d grown nervous about the reviews.

“They just don’t understand,” he’d scoffed dismissively at the time.

But even Orla could hear the doubt creeping into his voice.

She saw the flicker of worry as it passed over his eyes that he might have bet on the wrong horse after all.

The show was the one that was meant to resuscitate her stagnating career, and Orla put everything she had into it, working methodically on the cubes, their sharp edges and geometric sides imprinting into her brain late into the night.

Somewhere in that time she’d convinced herself that it was going to work, that the feeling she had while painting them was inspiration, not exhaustion, but even Orla had grown skeptical by the time she’d dropped them off at the gallery.

At the opening, her agent had been solemn and frantic on his phone in the corner while Orla wandered around the empty room.

She hadn’t put in the effort to get anyone to come.

So she drifted around in her dress feeling increasingly ridiculous in a room full of boxes she’d made for herself.

In the bright lights they looked less impressive than they had in her studio.

Amateurish. Empty vessels with no purpose.

The same could be said of her, she’d thought then.

After the fiasco, the intimate dinners and party invitations had slowed to a pathetic trickle.

Not that Orla wanted to go to them anyway.

She hardly had the stomach to show her face outside her apartment building by that point, let alone to posture inside the snobby museum atriums and at the self-conscious dinner parties of the elite art world.

She didn’t need her agent dumping her to tell her that her career was over.

She had lost something in her work. Something as an artist that is necessary to survive.

And then, her dad called with an escape plan.

“Think about it, Orla. You’d be doing us a huge favor,” he’d said.

Pressing the phone to her ear, Orla had regarded the congealing take-out noodles sitting in front of her on her coffee table.

She could barely afford the rent on her apartment even before the gallery flop.

The art that people once clamored for sat stacked against the walls, unviewed, gathering a layer of dust. She’d stopped painting months ago, paralyzed by the strong suspicion that no one would like it even if she did finish a piece.

But Orla knew that if she didn’t do something drastic, soon, she was going to start having to make portraits of people’s dogs to make ends meet.

And so, she’d agreed to come back to Hadley Island.

Partly as a favor to her parents, who so clearly would rather keep drinking cocktails on their Miami patio than return to Hadley, but mostly because Orla knew that to survive, she had to do something .

And right then she had no strength to come up with anything else.

Orla’s mind finally starts to drift, and her thoughts blur toward the edge of sleep, when the sound of a voice jolts her back into her childhood bedroom. It is familiar and close, a whisper into her ear like the rush of a wave. You lie you lie you lie, it says.

Her eyes fly open. She sits up, pulling the scratchy blanket to her chest, her ears pricking.

Orla scrambles to switch on the bedside lamp, which casts a dim yellow light across the bed.

She looks around the room, dark in all the corners.

Her heart roars in her ears. The curtains blow out on a strong breeze revealing the black tangle of trees, and just through them the window to Alice’s old room.

She imagines her friend coming to the window.

The way the light would flash on and off sending a beam of light across the ceiling.

The breeze stops abruptly, and the curtains go slack.

Orla yanks the covers off and flees the room, scrambling downstairs, not stopping until she is under the bright kitchen light trying to catch her breath.

Her fingers are clammy as they paw at the bottle of Xanax, pulling out a single pill.

She gulps it down at the kitchen sink, cupping her palm under the running water.

The glass rattles in the window above the sink.

Startled, she raises her eyes. As she peers through her own reflection out at the darkness a strange prickling starts in her neck and radiates up through her hair and down her spine.

It is the strong sensation that someone is watching her.