Page 5

Chapter Five

TWO weeks!

I scribble these words in the notebook on my lap.

I look up and think of GiGi.

What is time? What is its value? It must hold more for someone at eighty than it does at twenty-two? Some of my favorite days in college were ones that I could simply waste, going to the Big House for a football game, drinking beer with my friends, ordering pizza at midnight to talk when there was a dating emergency.

Right now, I feel as if time is against me, as if it’s against my whole family.

I want to use it as wisely as I can, and part of me just wants to wile it away.

Fourteen days!

Three hundred and thirty-six hours!

I constantly write down any random thought that runs through my head in case I might use them one day in a book.

I have a laptop filled with file folders and dozens of such notebooks, saved since childhood, filled with words, phrases, quotes, memories, scenes, themes, questions I seek to answer. They are often indecipherable scribbles at midnight. Sometimes, they are nonsense, arrows that point to other arrows that point me to another page where I have simply jotted a question mark.

And yet they are my guide to where I’ve been and where I’m going.

I jot the following in my notebook.

Obviously, our money was well spent on that English degree from Michigan.

It’s a damn good line, delivered by a well-known author, and I’d probably laugh if it weren’t directed at me and said by my mother.

Fine line between truth and pain , I add below the quote. Fine line between life and literature.

My journals have grown up like I have over the years, from diaries filled with girlish confessions to lined journals filled with things people have said over the years—observations, turns of phrase, colloquialisms…

Painful truths.

…that I have collected for use.

When I told my father as a girl that I wanted to be a writer, he looked me in the eye and said, “Writers are the unicorns of this world.”

He told me the world is fascinated by such creatures, and their goal is to capture them—not whole—but a piece of them, their spirit, magic, muse.

“Everyone wants a piece of a writer to take root in them,” he said, “just as everyone wants a writer at their parties, until they see themselves—even just a single unflattering glimpse—depicted in one of their books. Then writers are persona non grata.”

I can hear my sister on the phone in the cottage.

“The Swans,” she is saying, “would love to consider your client’s book for promotion.”

I glance at my notebook and think of my novel, my sister and family thinly veiled behind fictionalized characters.

Truman Capote once quipped of his infamous feud with the real-life Swans of Fifth Avenue when he aired their dirty laundry, “What did they expect from me? I’m a writer.”

Is that really why I’ve kept my book a secret from my parents and Jess?

Is it a fear they will know I’ve written about them, even though I’m not shy about hiding how I feel?

Am I scared of losing the rest of my family like I lost GiGi?

Or is it that I know I will be judged yet again, dismissed for my uneducated use of words, held to an invisible standard that shouldn’t even exist?

The gull takes flight and sails down the arc of golden sand.

I put down my notebook, pull on my socks and running shoes, and head to the beach.

Often, the only way I can deal with my emotions, past and guilt is to—quite literally—run from them.

There is a perfect stretch of beach that I run nearly every summer afternoon when I’m in South Haven. It stretches from GiGi’s cottage to the South Haven Lighthouse.

I have traveled the world with my parents, and there is nothing more beautiful than a South Haven summer. Cottages peek from the dunes, verdant dunes grass framing each scene. South Haven is set on the shores of grand Lake Michigan—our unsalted ocean—at the mouth of beautiful Black River.

South Haven is known as The Catskills of the Midwest for its abundance of natural wonders: water, boating, hiking in stunning state parks, maritime museums, charters, fishing, wineries and fresh fruit.

As I run, I see a family seated on the beach having a picnic lunch. The faces of a little boy and girl are Willy Wonka blue, and they are stuffing fresh blueberries into their mouths.

I wave.

South Haven is famous for its National Blueberry Festival. The festival has been celebrated annually in August for over sixty years. Michigan produces over one hundred million pounds of blueberries each year, and Van Buren County, where South Haven is located on the shores of southwestern Michigan, produces more highbush blueberries than any other county in the nation.

The little boy and girl wave a blue hand back at me.

My grandmother signed our entire family up for the National Blueberry Festival’s Pie Eating Contest one year, unbeknownst to my parents. When we arrived in the tent and were seated before blueberry pies, GiGi and I shoved our faces right into our pies.

When I came up for air, my parents and sister were watching us in horror—pies untouched. GiGi—wanting to win—refused to stop, and didn’t lift her head until the Blueberry Queen yelled, “We have a winner!”

A strapping farm boy in overalls seated on GiGi’s other side—who looked as though a pie might just be an appetizer for him—had his arms raised in victory.

“You were so close, GiGi,” I said, pointing at the last bits of crust and filling sitting in the aluminum pan.

“So close,” she said, pie falling from her blue face, before belching loudly to the delight of the crowd.

“Why would you embarrass us like this?” my mother, in a crisp white shirt, asked.

“This has nothing to do with you,” GiGi said, glancing at me and Jess. “It’s a pie-eating contest, not the National Book Award, Piper. Why would you spoil a summer memory for everyone?”

My father handed GiGi a stack of napkins.

“Clean yourself up, Mother.”

In one sweeping motion, GiGi took my father’s uneaten pie and smashed it into her own face.

“You both used to be so much fun,” she added, with great emphasis. “Remember that time?”

My parents stormed out of the tent. I remember watching my sister stand frozen, torn, not knowing which way to run, until my mother yelled, “Jess!”

I felt as if I’d done something wrong, chosen one side over another in a war that would never end.

“What do we do now?” I asked GiGi.

“We get ice cream.” She shrugged.

I know I am at fault in our family war. I feel as if I chose GiGi. I feel as if I always chose GiGi.

And now my alliance is down to one.

Me.

My parents don’t see the beauty I see here, the beauty GiGi saw. They run as fast from their memories as quickly as I am running the shoreline right now.

How did time damage my parents? I wonder. What is their war?

I look up. A flock of gulls, heads tucked into their sides, are before me.

“Fly!” I yell, waving my arms.

And they do, mini white masts sailing onto the lake.

I do not stop when I reach the lighthouse, which sits at the west end of the south pier at the mouth of Black River. I race onto the long pier, zigging and zagging between walkers and pylons, not stopping until I reach the end.

I bend over at the end of the pier, catching my breath, and turn, stretching high into the air, facing the South Pierhead Light.

The lighthouse was built in 1872. It’s a huge tourist attraction. If you googled “quintessential lighthouse,” South Haven’s would undoubtedly pop up. It’s painted bright red and reaches some thirty-seven feet, and it features one of only four boardwalks built to connect the shore to the lighthouse that’s still standing.

And it is spectacular.

The elevation provides a 360-degree view of the entire area, water lapping into infinity one direction, beach arcing forever in another.

It looks so similar to the one on the cover of the book I took from GiGi’s collection.

I’ve stared at this lighthouse my whole life.

Whenever I’ve returned home, it has greeted me like an old friend.

Today, however, it seems more like a stranger, and that makes my heart ache.

How much time do I have left with this old friend?

A gust of wind scoots across the lake, and I steady my body against it on the pier. Gulls ride the current down the beach.

I turn and fly home.