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.
Chapter Two: The Wish
James was up at six forty-five.
Not a decision — just what happened when you stopped setting an alarm and let four years of early calls do what they’d been trained to do. He lay still for a moment in the grey morning light of the front bedroom, listening to the house. Window open. Curtain moving. Gull somewhere busy already.
He thought, for a second, about the sound through the wall the night before. Cora’s voice, low, talking to someone who never answered. Who had she been talking to? Had it been one of the other girls? In the daylight it seemed like less of a thing. But it still triggered the memory of how Cora had acted after their mother became ill. Maybe this college stuff was impacting her more than he thought. He should have noticed before now. She’d get mad at him if he called her out on it.
He paused and looked blankly at the wall before getting up for the day. Maybe today, if there were any other signs, he’d figure out what he could do to help.
He made his way to the kitchen and started coffee from the beans he’d brought from Boston. They were ground strong enough to stand a spoon in. It was a small indulgence he’d started keeping for himself sometime during his last year of grad school, when very little else about his life had felt like his own choice, and had never gotten around to stopping. The house coffee was a tin of something that had been in the cabinet since at least 2022. He stood at the counter and opened the structural report he’d been meaning to finish for two weeks. The house was quiet around him. Salt and old wood. The light came through the back windows at the low angle it had before the sun was fully up for the day, and two streets off, the tide was rolling in.
He got through eleven pages before he heard the first sounds from down the hall.
Priya appeared in the doorway, hair still deciding what it was doing as she made straight for the coffee pot without a word. He poured her a mug before she asked.
“You’re a good man,” she said, both hands around it like it might get away.
“I try.”
She took the first sip and shut her eyes for a second, like she was savoring the morning beverage. “How many pages?”
“Eleven.”
“You’re on vacation.”
“It’s not really a vacation.”
“It’s a beach house. There’s a beach. That’s vacation.” She then nodded at the bridge book under the report. “And that’s the leisure reading?”
“Firth of Forth, 1890.”
“It’s a bridge.”
“It’s an excellent bridge.”
“You’re going to tell me about the bridge, aren’t you.”
“Only if you ask.”
“I will never ask.” She topped her mug anyway, pleased with herself. “Cora’s going to see the report before she sees you. You know that.”
“I know.” He turned it face-down, mostly to see what she’d do.
She didn’t say anything. She just looked at the gesture like she was filing it away. He’d noticed that about her every one of the three summers they’d been coming here. She’d take a book to the back porch and read until the light went and never explain why, and she noticed things about people and mostly kept them to herself.
“She talks about you,” Priya said, after a while. “When you’re not there to hear it.”
“Good things, I hope.”
“Complicated things.” Not much weight to it, just precision. “Like you’re a building she’s been trying to find the door into for years.”
He let a smile cross his face appreciative of Pryia’s architectural reference.
“She doesn’t say it like a complaint,” Priya added. “More like she’s still looking.”
The back door opened, and Serena came through the kitchen barefoot, sunglasses on, and hair a wild mess. She didn’t stop at the coffee pot. She didn’t stop at all.
“Morning,” Priya said, carefully.
Serena lifted two fingers in something that wasn’t quite a wave and kept going, straight down the hall. Her door closed a second later, softer than a slam, but not by much.
James noticed the sand tracked across the mat by the back door, gritty underfoot when he crossed it. A faint smell came off the hallway after her, woodsmoke or something close to it, gone almost as soon as he placed it.
“She never came home last night,” Priya said, once the door had shut. She wasn’t looking at either of them.
“She didn’t waste any time.”
“No.” She turned her mug slowly between her hands. “But it’s not what you think…or not exactly. She got an email from her school yesterday, before we even got here. Didn’t say what it said. She’s been somewhere else since.”
James didn’t ask. It wasn’t his to ask, and it wasn’t fully his to know either. He’d learned that difference the hard way, with Cora, more than once.
“Don’t be like Serena. Be present this week for you and for Cora.” Priya gave him a nod and then took her coffee and pulled out her phone before collapsing on the couch.
He’d gotten through the front section of the report and started on the second when Cora came out already mid-sentence, phone in her hand
“—no, that’s fine, I’ll just move the lab section, it’s not a big—” She saw them and lowered the phone. “Sorry. My advisor.”
“At nine in the morning?” he mouthed.
Cora quickly waved him off and finished the conversation.
“He does early calls. He’s very Blackwick about it.” She set the phone face-down and reached for a mug, her eyes catching the report on the counter.
“Seriously,” she said. Not sharp. Not yet.
“I warned you,” Priya offered without looking up.
“I read some pages before either of you were up, and then people keep interrupting me.”
She didn’t bite. “I needed to fix my schedule. I added a class.”
“Which one?” Priya asked.
“Architecture history. Well, it’s called Structures and Story. It’s about how buildings hold cultural meaning, not just how they’re build.” She said it fast, like something she’d practiced saying fast. “I know I told you I’d take a writing seminar and gen-ed math and then I could coast this first semester, but I looked at the actual list and there’s this whole thing about—”
She stopped.
James kept his eyes on the report. “You added an architecture class,” he said, when the silence had gone on a beat too long.
“It’s not a big deal.”
He looked up. Something had gone warm and unguarded in his chest that he hadn’t expected. Plain, immediate pride. And underneath it, before he could stop it, the beginning of a list.
“That’s great,” he said. “Chen’s cousin teaches a seminar at the GSD that covers a lot of the same material, but it goes deeper. I could email—”
“James.”
“I’m just saying, if you’re actually interested, a gen-ed isn’t the best entry point. There’s a whole—”
“I didn’t ask you to reach out to anyone.”
He stopped. He heard himself, half a second behind saying it, a habit he’d never quite managed to lose.
Cora set her mug down hard. “I mentioned it. I didn’t ask for a syllabus review.”
“I wasn’t reviewing anything, I was just—”
“You were already three steps ahead of me. You’re always already three steps ahead of me.” She looked at Priya, then back at him, like she’d decided to say the rest of it in front of a witness on purpose. “I get excited about one thing — one thing, for the first time in months — and you’re not even excited with me. You’re already planning it. Like it’s a project.”
“I’m not planning anything—”
“You made a list in your head just now. You are already trying to correct my decisions.”
He didn’t deny it, because he couldn’t.
“I want this to be mine,” she said, quieter, which he’d learned meant she was more serious, not less. “Blackwick is supposed to be the place where I get to be someone who isn’t ‘James’s little sister’ before I’ve even unpacked. Somewhere nobody already has an idea of me. And you being in my inbox before orientation even ends kind of defeats the whole point.”
“It’s not about—”
“I’ve spent three years being handled,” she said. “Gently. Lovingly. Completely. I need one thing that’s just mine before I even get there.”
“I know why you do it,” she went on, before he could answer. “I’ve known why since Mom got sick. Understanding it doesn’t make it less—” She looked for the word. “Suffocating.”
The word landed and sat there between them.
He didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say to it. She was right, and the knowing didn’t help with the weight of being a person who suffocated the people he loved while trying to take care of them.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I know you are.” She picked up her mug, calmer now, which wasn’t the same as okay. “You’re always sorry. You mean it every time. And then you—” She gestured at the counter, at the report, at the whole architecture of him. “It’s just who you are, James. I don’t know if you can actually change it or if I just have to figure out how to—”
She stopped herself.
He waited.
She looked out the window. “I love you,” she said. “I need you to know that’s not in question. I’m grateful for three years of it, and I’ve never once said that properly. But being grateful and being suffocated can happen at the same time. I just need you to let me have this. Let me be bad at it, or fall behind, or change my mind in October. Let me do it without you already knowing better.”
He sat with that.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?”
“I won’t contact Chen.”
“I’m going to go wake up Serena,” she added. “We’re doing the beach in an hour whether she likes it or not.”
“I wouldn’t—”
Cora gave him a look before he could continue. James smiled and let her go.
She disappeared down the hall.
“She’s got a point.” Priya offered.
James looked after his sister then back at Priya. “Doing my best.”
She stood and walked her mug back to the kitchen. “Maybe for this week, listen before you try to solve.”
He thought about lists he made without meaning to, and the architecture of loving people badly. He had an opportunity in front of him to show he could do better.
***
The beach was the beach. The organized chaos of late summer, a hundred people’s good ideas in one place, the light off the water that James had been looking at since he was eight and had never managed to describe. He’d brought the report down out of habit more than intention and made it two pages further in before Priya confiscated it without looking up from her own book.
“You’re not doing that today.”
“I wasn’t going to—”
“You were absolutely going to.” She handed him a novel instead. “Read about the murder.”
He set the umbrella at the angle that worked for the afternoon sun. Serena, flat on her towel with one arm over her face, made a small sound of protest every time he adjusted it.
“Could you not,” she said, to the general concept of daylight. “I have a headache.”
“It’s two-fifteen. Maybe you should have slept last night.”
“I’m aware of the time, James. You’re not my mother.”
Priya dropped onto the towel beside her, unsympathetic. “You brought this on yourself.”
“Things happened to me.”
“Things you walked toward. Repeatedly. Of your own volition.”
Serena lifted the arm enough to look at her. “I liked you better before you got accepted to medical school. Now your insufferable.”
“I was always insufferable. You just didn’t have the vocabulary yet.”
Cora dropped onto her own towel, still damp, and shook water at both of them, an old habit. “You still smell like a bonfire.”
“I do not.”
“You do. It’s in your hair.”
“Then it’s a very good bonfire smell.” Serena put the arm back over her face. “I’m not talking about it.”
“Now if you don’t mind,” she added, a minute later, to no one who’d asked. “I can handle things myself.”
It was clear by the look exchanged between the group that no one believed her. Nobody pushed, either, which was its own kind of care.
Cora turned to James. “You know, maybe some of your lists could help Serena. Maybe you could invest time making suggestions for her.”
“She’s not my sister.”
“Well maybe you could try.”
Something shifted in her voice, tired in a way that wasn’t sharp yet. “You know exactly when to back off from her. You have no idea how to do it with me.”
“That’s not—”
“You don’t get it,” Cora said. “You never have. You know how to let people have their own thing right up until it’s me, and then I feel like I’m under a microscope.”
“I’m sorry. Look, I heard you this morning. I’m going to try this week, to really lock in and be more aware.”
Cora looked out over the water. “I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t have brought it up. We said our piece this morning.”
“Maybe you should give him a little grace,” Priya offered.
The expression on Cora’s face darkened. “What, now you’re on his side?”
Priya’s hands raised defensively. “I’m not picking sides. But I’ve seen how the two of you are. There has to be a middle ground somewhere.”
“James doesn’t do middle ground,” Cora shot back. “Dana will tell you that.”
James slammed the pages of the murder mystery shut. “Let’s not bring up Dana again. We don’t need to revisit that.”
Cora shot to her feet.
“You do this — this careful, respectful distance — with everyone except the people you actually want something from. And then you wonder why this happens.”
He looked at her. “I’m not talking about Dana.”
“I know you’re not. I am.” She grabbed her towel and beach bag. “Forget it.”
“I think my head is starting to hurt now,” Priya said.
“Where are you going?”
His phone buzzed once, face-up on the towel.
“Chen?” Cora asked.
James saw Chen’s name appear on the phone. “No, just spam.” He swiped the call away.
“You just don’t get it,” Cora said before stomping her way up the beach.
“Didn’t mean to make things worse,” Priya offered.
James watched Cora walk back towards the street.
“It’s not your fault.”
James knew he had been right. There was something else bothering Cora and despite his better judgement he was determined to find out what.
***
Dinner was pasta, because Priya made it and nobody wanted to take ownership. James did the salad. Serena, upright and marginally rehabilitated, set the table without being asked, which he took as her way of trying to act normal while hiding her own issues. Cora opened wine and poured four glasses, generous with Priya’s and Serena’s, more careful with her own.
They ate on the back porch while the evening came in off the water. It was good, actually. The kind that didn’t need anyone to perform having a nice time, because they were having one. Cora told a story about the last week of school, something involving a teacher, a fire alarm, and Serena’s car, and Serena added corrections until the whole thing had the shape of a story that had been told a hundred times and still worked. James was horrified to learn what they had done, but he had been younger and stupid once and ultimately there had been no harm. He bit his tongue and let them enjoy the moment.
His phone buzzed on the table. He was sure it was Chen but he didn’t check it and turned it face-down without looking. He saw Cora notice. Something in her expression eased again, smaller this time, but she didn’t say anything about it.
The report sat where he’d left after the beach. He didn’t go back to it that night.
Despite the voice in his head telling him he was wasting valuable time, he was trying to be present.
At ten, the girls started moving inside. He stayed a moment longer, looking at the dark water. He felt the week ahead of him like something with actual dimensions. Nine days, the house, the sound of the girls through the screen door, the hydrangeas that needed trimming, the porch board that needed replaced and whatever it was he was supposed to be doing differently with Cora.
He took a deep cleansing breath, then went inside the house. As he was passing Cora’s door on his way to bed, he heard her voice.
Not loud. Cora spoke quietly. Their mother did it too when she had a lot on her mind. But there was a raised quality to it, the register of someone at the end of a conversation with herself that had gone further than she’d planned.
He knocked.
There was a quiet moment in the room. “Yeah,” came Cora’s voice.
He opened the door and let himself in.
She was on the edge of the bed, still dressed. She held the pendant in her hand that he had seen her pick up on campus.
“I heard you,” he said. “I didn’t mean to listen. Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” She looked at the pendant instead of him. “I was talking to myself. It’s fine.”
“You’ve been doing that since you were six.”
That got something close to a laugh out of her, brief and involuntary. “Rude.”
“Accurate.”
She looked at him properly then, and whatever she saw in his face made the decision for both of them that this wasn’t over. He walked across the room and sat in the chair across from her.
“Today,” she said.
“Which part.”
“All of it. The architecture thing. The beach.” She turned the pendant. “Dana.”
He went still. “I told you, I’m not—”
“I know what you said.” She wasn’t finished. “I want to actually talk about it, though, because I think it’s the same thing you did this morning. I think it’s exactly the same thing.”
“Enlighten me.” He meant it lightly. It didn’t land that way.
“You do the math,” she said. “On everything. You did it on the architecture class before I finished the sentence.” She paused, like she was deciding whether to say the rest. “And I’d bet money you did it on Dana, too. Some version of it where you weighed the risk against the odds and decided the timing was wrong. Or the numbers didn’t work. Or whatever you call it when you’re too careful to just—” She stopped, hunting the word. “Reach.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“Then what happened?”
He didn’t have a fast answer, which was its own kind of response.
“You want to manage everything because it feels like love,” she said. “I know that.”
“It’s not just — managing.” He tried and heard how thin it sounded even as he said it.
“I know that too,” she said, gentler than he expected. “But some things aren’t a load-bearing problem, James. Some things you just have to want badly enough to risk getting wrong. And you never do. Not with her. Not with anyone. So you carry my weight instead, because you won’t carry your own, and I am so tired of being the place you put it.”
The room went quiet in a way that had a texture to it.
“I should have checked,” he said, eventually, and knew as he said it that it wasn’t the right thing, wasn’t enough; it was itself a kind of managing, an attempt to close the conversation by agreeing with it fast enough.
She saw that too. “Don’t do that either. Don’t agree with me so we can be done.”
“I’m not—”
“You’re doing it right now.” There was an edge in her voice now. “You’re finding the correct response and handing it to me so the situation resolves. I don’t want the correct response. I want you to actually feel something about it instead of solving it.”
He sat with that. It had the kind of weight he recognized before he was ready to.
“After Mom,” he said slowly, feeling for it, “I didn’t know how to stop managing things. If I stopped, I didn’t know where it would all go.”
“I know,” she said, and some of the edge went out of her, replaced by something more tired. “I’ve known that for years. But knowing why you do it doesn’t make it easier.”
“I just want to look out for you,” he said.
“I know. But that’s not the issue. It’s never been the issue.” She looked down at the pendant, turning it, quiet in a way that meant she wasn’t finished. He’d gotten, over the course of the day, marginally better at waiting for it.
“I just—” She stopped. Started again, her voice dropping into the register she used when she’d been carrying something a long time without naming it. “I wish you knew what it was like. To be me. To be loved that way — taken care of that completely — and to have no room left to figure out who you are without someone catching you before you fall.” She looked up at him, real anger under it now, and under the anger, something rawer. “I wish you knew what it felt like to be on this side of it. Just for once. To be the one who needs things instead of the one who provides them. To not know what you want because you’ve spent so long making sure everyone else is okay.” She stopped. “I wish you knew what all of this actually feels like from here.”
He felt every word of it. He understood every word of it. He had nothing to say to any of it that wasn’t smaller than what she’d said.
She stopped fidgeting with the pendant.
The room seeming to hold its breath for just a moment.
“I wish there was a way I could understand. I will work harder. I promise. Now, get some sleep,” he said. Because they were the only words he had.
She nodded and set the pendant on the nightstand without looking at it.
“Goodnight.”
He went to his room and lay in the dark with the window open and the curtain moving. His mind raced but the water crashing waves helped to slow its pace. He turned everything she’d said over in his mind the way he turned structural problems over, looking for the load path, the place where the weight was actually sitting.
He couldn’t locate it. It was in him somewhere. He just didn’t know where yet.
End of Chapter Two