A NOTE ON BLACKWICK

Blackwick University sits in Harwick, Massachusetts, and has been there longer than most records account for. It offers the usual degrees. Its faculty are distinguished. Its architecture is older than it should be.

Things happen at Blackwick that its administration prefers not to document. Objects arrive in unusual ways and depart more unusually still. The university has learned to accommodate this with the particular discretion of an institution that has been doing so for a very long time.

Arrivals is a standalone story. You don't need to have read anything else to find your footing here. The magic will explain itself.

— Hadley Morrow

Chapter One: The Drive

The call came in outside Worcester, which was either good timing or bad. Good because James had another ninety minutes of highway and nothing to do but drive. Bad because it was Marcus calling about the load calculation on the third-floor cantilever, which meant the drive was no longer a drive so much as a conference room he happened to be steering.

"Walk me through the numbers again," James said.

"I sent the revised spec this morning."

"I'm not at my laptop."

"I know you're not at your laptop, James. It's Saturday."

"So give me the numbers."

Marcus gave him the numbers. James drove and listened and did the math in his head just as he'd been doing math in his head since he was eleven, which his mother said was a gift and his college roommate said was a problem and which James had decided was simply a feature of how he was built. The cantilever was fine. The calculation had been fine from the beginning. Someone on the structural team had second-guessed themselves, Marcus was second-guessing the second-guess, and the whole thing could have been resolved with thirty seconds of arithmetic that James performed while navigating a merge onto the Pike.

"It's fine," he said. "Eighteen inches of clearance on the load path. Tell Chen not to change anything."

"I told him that."

"Tell him again. From me."

"You're on vacation."

"I'm driving to collect my sister and chaperon her and her friends at the beach house. Not exactly a vacation."

"Most people would argue it could be."

"Most people don't have the cantilever to worry about."

Marcus made the sound he always made when he thought James was being James — somewhere between a sigh and a hmm. James had learned it was an endearing way Marcus showed his affection. He ended the call and allowed himself four seconds of something that might have been satisfaction before his phone lit up with a text from Cora.

Please tell me you're not going to rearrange all the bags again

He typed: I don't know what you mean.

Three dots. Then: james

He replied: How’s orientation?

She answered immediately: could be better. trying not to think about how you're going to embarrass me this week

He typed: You're going to miss me when you're on your own.

The dots appeared and disappeared twice. He'd watched her do this her whole life — think something true and then decide how much of it to send. Finally: you wish.

James smiled and put the phone in the cupholder.

He had a structural report in his bag he'd been meaning to finish for two weeks and a suspension bridge book he'd bought in April and a loose plan to use the week to get into both. It was a reasonable plan. The kind he was good at making.

The GPS brought him in through the back of campus. The standard New England institutional confidence was all there — old brick, wrought iron, the architectural posture of something that had stopped explaining itself generations ago. He'd read what he could find about the place when Cora got in. The buildings told a different story than the records did. He wasn't sure yet what story that was.

But.

Blackwick was wrong in a way he couldn't name.

Not badly wrong. Just something that he couldn’t quite explain.

The light on the main quad didn't sit right for a northeast exposure at this time of day. He stood at the entrance and did the mental geometry and came up with an answer that didn't match what he was looking at. He filed this under tired-from-the-drive and moved on. He'd be back here plenty.

The orientation fair was winding down — tables starting to fold, small groups peeling off. He checked his phone. Nothing from Cora.

He collected a laminated campus map from the welcome table to supplement the one he'd printed at home. He put both in his jacket pocket without opening either.

He had fifteen minutes before Cora's final session ended.

He ended up in a longer conversation than planned with a graduate student at the Architecture Department table — she knew her load-bearing theory and had strong opinions about the north wing's foundation that were mostly correct. At some point she asked if he was a prospective student. He laughed. She didn't seem convinced by the laugh. In a different life, maybe, he thought. He was still half-engaged when he saw Cora through the thinning crowd.

She was at an almost museum-like display table, back half-turned, looking at something on the surface. Old photographs behind glass, a carved wooden sign, the slightly dusty authority of something set up the same way every year. She didn't hear him approach.

He watched her pick up a pendant on a silver chain. She turned it over slowly — the way she considered things she'd decided she wanted, a gesture he'd been watching since she was four. He thought she was going to put it back. She didn't. It disappeared into her jacket pocket with the ease of a decision already made.

“What was that?” he said.

“Just a memento,” she said turning to reveal several other pendants and chains. “This campus has a thing for things.”

“I see,” he replied. The woman at the table handed another necklace to another student.

Cora followed his eyes and gave him a serious look. “You thought I stole it.”

James raised his hands defensively. “No, no. You are eighteen and about to be on your own. No judgement.”

He'd been working all year at not being the person who monitored what his adult sister did with her friends, chose to wear, or put in her pockets.

"You're late," she said.

"I'm exactly on time. You said three."

"I said around three."

"Around three means three."

She looked at him with their mother's eyes — the careful inventory of someone who'd learned not to ask directly because asking directly produced the word fine and nothing more. Whatever she found, she filed it. "You look tired."

"I'm fine."

"You always say that."

"Because I'm always fine."

She held the look. "Priya and Serena will meet us at the car. When did you park?"

"I brought a hand truck to carry all the luggage."

Cora stared at him. "James."

"It folds flat. Fits in the trunk."

"Please, don’t. That was one time. A long time ago. Plus, like I said, I want to give a good first impression. I want people to know that I can do this on my own."

"One. I’m never going to let you live down the Aspen trip. No one takes that much luggage anywhere. Two. Even when I’m around, people know you can manage on your own."

"We talked," she said, "about how you saying things like that makes me feel like a project you're managing."

He absorbed this. She wasn't angry — she'd said it with the particular calm of someone who'd been waiting for the right moment to land something true. He'd heard that calm before. He recognized it.

"I know," he said.

She studied him. Let it go. She turned toward the car park and he fell in beside her and she started talking about her experience at orientation — a professor whose opening lecture she'd liked, food choices in the dining hall, a trail behind the arts building that supposedly led somewhere that wasn't on any map — and he listened the way he always listened to her: fully, and without interrupting, the part of him that wasn't running the cantilever numbers on a background process.

The campus moved around them with its slightly-wrong light and its old buildings, and then they were through the gate and in the parking lot.

Priya and Serena were leaning against the car.

He knew them. They'd spent weeks together before over the years. It was enough to know their faces and their rough shapes without knowing them really well. Priya was the one Cora called when something was actually wrong, the one who showed up. Serena was the one who made everything look easy. She had been the social center of their group since middle school. She was one of those people who, not from effort, but from a quality of attention, that drew other people into her orbit.

Priya lifted her chin when she saw him. "James. Good to see you. I have ten bags. Cora said you'd have something for them."

"Hand truck," James said. "Folds flat."

“Shut up,” Cora shot back. “Don’t encourage him.”

Serena had her sunglasses on despite the trees blocking most of the direct light. She pushed off the car and looked at him with the particular look she'd always had around him — not unfriendly, assessing. She'd been doing it since she was about fifteen. He'd never been entirely sure what the assessment concluded.

"Hey, James," she said.

"Serena. Good to see you."

She picked up her own bag — she only had one, which he suspected was strategic — and looked at him for a second longer.

"Is it going to be weird?" she said. "You being there in a house full of college girls?"

"Serena," Cora said.

"I'm asking. Maybe if you’d be willing to get us a couple cases of beer, we would all be more comfortable." She gave a flirty smile.

James looked at her. "No and no," he said. "I've been going there since before Cora was born. You won’t even notice me. And, if it's weird it's because you make it weird."

Serena considered this. Something in her expression shifted — not quite a smile but the precursor to one. "Fair," she said, and got in the car.

Priya, loading a bag into the trunk, caught his eye briefly. She had the look of someone analyzing a data point.

He finished arranging the bags next to the ones Cora had prepacked. The bags went in correctly. He closed the trunk, and started the car as they headed toward the ocean.

***

The coastal road east of Harwick was the part of the drive where something in James's shoulders let go. They did every year on this stretch. The pressure dropped, the smell changed, and the water appeared in the distance doing what it always did in July — flat and gold, the promise this part of Massachusetts made and mostly kept.

He'd been coming to Saltwick since he was eight. His parents bought the house the year before Cora was born, when his father found a grey-shingled three-bedroom two streets back from the water and decided that was enough reason. His father had been good at deciding things were enough reason. James was less good at it.

Cora had the music. Priya and Serena were in the back talking about something from the end of school year — a party, someone who said something they shouldn't have, and whether it had been forgiven yet. He listened without engaging. He was good at this. He'd been listening to the edges of Cora's life for years and he knew enough what mattered to be careful not to crowd it.

They'd been coming to the house as a group for three summers now, the three of them — Cora and Serena and Priya and whoever else Cora assembled. He hadn't always been there. But he knew the texture of what this trip was: the last one before it all changed. Priya heading to Michigan in the fall. Serena to somewhere in California that Cora had mentioned and James had filed. Cora to Blackwick. The specific gravity of a last summer that everybody felt and nobody said directly.

He knew what that felt like. He'd had one too, though his had been different — quieter, more internal, the summer before their mother's diagnosis when everything still seemed open and he hadn't known yet what the next three years would ask of him.
He didn't think about that summer much.

"Dana said we should come by," Cora said, to him specifically, the conversation in the back having found a natural pause.

He kept his eyes on the road. "When did you talk to Dana?"

"She texted. She's excited you're all coming." Cora shifted to look at him. "You should go see her while we're there."

"I know she's there."

"That's not the same as actually going." She asked about you.

He said nothing.

"She always asks about you. I always tell her you're fine and working a lot and she does this thing where she goes—" Cora made a brief, quiet sound. "She goes very still for just a second and then says of course he is."

In the back seat, the conversation had stopped. He was aware of Priya and Serena pretending to not listen, but failing miserably.
"I'll go see her," he said.

"James."

"I'll go. I mean it."

Cora looked at him for one more second. She let it go — she'd gotten better at landing a thought or idea and walking away from it rather than pressing until he got defensive. He wasn't sure if it was maturity or strategy or a little of both.

She turned the music back up. He drove.

He thought about Dana.

They'd grown up three houses apart. It built the kind of closeness that happened when parents knew each other and summers kept returning you to the same places. She'd moved to Saltwick three years ago for the ceramics program and stayed because that was what Dana did: she found where she wanted to be and went there. He'd always admired that about her without ever quite managing it himself.

Two summers ago, late August, they'd sat on her porch with a bottle of wine and let the evening become something other than what it started as. He'd understood what he was feeling and understood that she was feeling it too — and he'd said goodnight. He'd driven back to Boston the next morning and they'd texted the following week as if it had simply been an evening. He was good at that. Feeling something clearly and then finding somewhere else to put it.

It was the agreement they'd made without discussing it. He'd honored it because honoring it was easier than the alternative, and because by the following month their mother had had the bad scan and everything that wasn't essential had narrowed down to what was, and he'd told himself the timing had been wrong and tried to believe it.

He'd go see her. This week. He'd call when they got to the house.

He took the last turn off the main road — the same slight drop where the land settled toward the water, the same row of grey shingles. Their house was third on the left. The hydrangeas his mother had planted were crowding the porch railing. He'd trim them Tuesday.

He parked and the girls were out of the car before he cut the engine.

***
He did the walk-through.

Twelve minutes. Water pressure fine. Smoke alarms: his father's handwriting on the covers in black marker, July 2019, and below it James's own, July 2021, July 2023, two different hands accumulating on the same covers without either of them having discussed continuing the practice. Left burner: still ran hot, always would. Front bedroom window: stuck, worked it twice until it moved freely. Back porch: soft spot, third board from the left railing, same place as last year, not worse. He put it in his phone.

When he came back through, Cora was unpacking food onto the counter with the systematic energy she deployed when she was happy and trying not to perform it. Priya had located the good mugs without being told where they were, which he noted. Serena had taken the back porch and was in a chair with her legs up on the railing, face tilted toward the water.

"Walk-through complete?" Cora said.

"Everything's fine. Left burner still runs hot. Don't use it on high."

"We know about the left burner," Priya said, from the cabinet she was investigating. "We've been here."

"Still don’t want you to burn it down."

"I don’t forget things. I have excellent spatial memory. I don’t burn things down either."

He almost smiled. He poured himself a glass of water and stood at the counter and looked out the back window at Serena on the porch. She was still, for once. Whatever the assessment had concluded, out here she seemed to have put it down.

Cora handed him a mug of iced tea without asking if he wanted one.

"Thank you," he said.

She leaned against the counter beside him and they both looked out at the water for a moment. The light was doing the thing it did in the late afternoon here, going long and particular, and the house was doing the thing it did when they were all in it, holding the weight of them lightly, as it always had..

"I need you to really be here," Cora said. Not accusing. Not a complaint. Just true. "This week. Not doing the report on the sly and taking calls in the other room and managing everything from a distance." She kept looking at the water. "This is the last summer we're all…it's the last one like this. I need you here for it."

He looked at his iced tea.

"I know I make it hard," she said, quieter. "I know I'm always asking things from you too. I know that."

"You don't have to—"

"I do, actually." She turned to look at him. "I've been doing it since mom got sick and I've never said it. So I'm saying it. You give me a lot and I don't always make it easy for you to just... be a person. I know that."

He looked at her. She had their mother's eyes and she was going to Blackwick in the fall and she was the most honest person he knew at eighteen and he had no idea how she'd gotten that way.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"I'll be here." He meant it when he said it. He did. "I'm not promising no email. But I'll be here."

She studied him for a moment, decided it was enough, and pushed off the counter to go back to unpacking. He stood with his iced tea and looked out at Serena on the porch, still and rare, the water behind her going gold.

He called Dana from the back porch after dinner, when the girls had moved inside and he could hear them through the screen door, the three-way rhythm of people who had been talking to each other for years.

The phone rang four times. He'd already composed the voicemail in his head — just checking in, we should get dinner — when she picked up.

"James." Her voice, warm and immediately recognizable. "You actually called."

"You sound surprised."

"I figured you'd make Cora text me you'd arrived and get to calling sometime around Wednesday."

"I said I'd call."

"You say a lot of things." The warmth in it took the edge off. She wasn't wrong. "How's the house?"

"Same. Left burner, soft porch board, window in the front bedroom."

"You fixed the window?"

"I unstuck it. It needs the track replaced. Thursday project."

"Of course it is."

He could hear her moving around with the ceramics studio sounds in the background, the acoustics of that space. "How are you?"

"Fine."

"Dana."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"Come by the studio tomorrow. Or whenever. You don't have to call ahead." Her voice had the texture it had always had with him — warm, direct, and careful around the edges of certain things, dancing around topics you'd agreed not to touch. "The girls too, if they want. Cora knows where it is."

"She does," he said.

"James."

"Yeah."

"I'm glad you called." Enough weight behind it that he felt it. The same weight he'd felt on that porch two summers ago, the weight he'd made the decision to put down and hadn't entirely managed. "Actually called."

"Me too," he said. And he meant it, which was both simple and not simple, which was exaclyt how things tended to be with Dana.
"I'll come by this week."

"This week," she said.

"This week."

He sat on the porch for a moment after the call ended, looking at the dark water and the lit windows of the houses on either side and the hydrangeas that needed trimming. The summer was doing what it always did at the start of a week here. It felt long. It always felt long at the start. It never was.

He went to bed at ten-fifteen. The front bedroom, window two inches open, curtain moving. He read three pages of the suspension bridge book. He did not check email.

He was tired in the way he'd been tired for a long time. Not the project tired or the drive tired — the under-layer kind. The tired that required stopping long enough to feel it, which was why he never did. He lay in the dark and let the house settle around him, the girls' voices through the wall, low and overlapping, the sound of people who had been talking to each other long enough that they didn't need to finish sentences.

He was almost to sleep when he heard it through the wall — Cora's voice, distinct and low, saying something he couldn't quite make out. He waited for someone to answer. No one did.

Just the house, and the curtains, and the water.

End of Chapter 1

Comments and kudos keep the chapters coming. Chapter 2 will post soon— I'd love to know what you think of James before everything changes.