The Ocean House. Mary-Beth Hughes

the night on the other side of the wall and woke up the girls, they decided that their father was shaking catsup on her bottom. This was the funniest thing in the world but also nauseating. Paige would go into the yellow bathroom and put her finger down her throat until nothing came up but green. She’d come back into bed, stinking of stomach juice.

      Are the boys nice to you? asked Courtney.

      What boys? said Paige.

      Let me show you something, said Courtney. She got up and gathered her seashells off the top of her dresser. Sometimes, if I put these in a special order—she arranged a circle of shells with two brownish sand-encrusted fragments in the center—Mama just appears.

      Shut up, said Paige.

      Not in the firm way, more in a dreamy way.

      On your canopy, I suppose. Just shut up.

      That was only a story, said Courtney. That was pretend. Then she swept up her shells and put them in a drawer where they wouldn’t get contaminated.

      It wasn’t Paige, as they’d sworn to Ruth, but Courtney who first found their mother. And right away, Courtney knew she was the lucky one. Worse to have to make up a picture in your mind to fill such a giant meaning. The actual picture was of their mother asleep on the lion rug. Curled almost like a kitten, one leg stretched out, the other tucked in. She lay on her side, and the cheek not covered by her hair rested close to but not exactly on the lion’s paw. Her cheek was mottled and only slightly gray. Courtney came in to tell her that nothing Mrs. Hoving said on the ride home from school made sense yet and it had been a whole week of speaking French in the car and it still didn’t mean anything beyond bonjour and je t’aime. Her mother’s sundress was lifted all the way to her waist as if to cool her legs off. Bonjour, Maman. Je t’aime. Her favorite bathing suit, the black one, was loose around the tops of her thighs. Je t’aime, Maman. Her mother was being too careful lately with her diet.

      Thirty-three years old is awfully young to have a tricky heart, said one of the women in the den. My goodness.

      It wasn’t quite so simple, said Ruth and then whispered her motto about small ears and big mouths. They could all see Courtney at the kitchen counter.

      Looking for the oranges, dear? called out Ruth like she was the darling wife and mother in a black-and-white movie. So many people liked her for what she was doing. The neighborhood women who sat with her, drinking gin and tonics, admired her and said so. You’re a trooper, Ruth.

      They’d never seen her in the days when she wasn’t a trooper at all. Ruth at the Beach Club snack bar, dipping the French fry basket into bubbling oil. Then she was Mrs. Carter, and one day she had a chevron-shape burn like a red arrow stuck on her forearm. Hard not to get hurt in such tight quarters.

      She’s blind and foolish just like me, their mother said. It was a hot day and her temper got the better of her. That’s how she explained it. Later when they were back over the fence, back on their own rocks, tiptoeing toward the back steps. The heebie-jeebies, the creeps.

      It’s not that poor woman’s fault, their mother said.

      The first summer on Honeysuckle Lane and the first without the Beach Club. In fact no ocean at all, which was strange. They were still quite close. But Ruth preferred a day camp for the girls, with itchy woodland hikes and swim practice in a scummy chlorine pool.

      They were both older now than their mother had been on the day she returned to London from the safe countryside to find only the crater where her house had been. And when Ruth was being annoying, going through their dresser drawers, insisting on a particular order to their underwear, Paige would whisper to Courtney: At least she’s not as bad as the crater. Which was funny but not very.

      When she was returned by train to London, with the other children, their mother was able to find an aunt to help her—really only a courtesy aunt, a neighbor named Florence Kinney. And their father liked to say how resourceful their mother was and, for a little girl, how very brave.

      In the ocean house, down the hall from her bedroom, their mother made a kind of dressing room of a windowless storage closet. There, inside a cigar box, she kept the striped handkerchief she wore around her neck in case she needed it as a mask at the end of the war. In Hampstead the air was often filled with ash. And every single day, Florence Kinney would say it was all beyond her. The care of a child in this misery was completely outside her ken. Every other person had a crater, after all, but not everyone had an orphan thrust her way.

      That’s why when their mother was very tired or had the heebie-jeebies or the creeps, their own father knelt beside her and put his arms around her legs, as if she were only a tiny girl, like them. In the house by the ocean everyone who needed a mother had one. This was their joke as a family. A surplus of mothers. Mrs. Hoving thought this was funny, too, because of course she was one of them. Their father held their mother tight around her knees until she laughed, saying: Off! you’re a nuisance, her fingers curled soft around his wrists.

      In mid-August, everyone on Honeysuckle Lane was asked by the Long Branch township to stay home and indoors as much as possible while the authorities cleaned up the mess and the danger after the surprise hurricane. This came over the radio.

      Though the rain itself lasted less than a day and a night, the rivers and creeks overflowed, taking bits and pieces from the waterfront inland. A dinghy landed as far as the lawn at the end of Honeysuckle Lane. And the Beach Club and all the towers went dark.

      As soon as Ocean Avenue was passable, defying municipal orders, Ruth loaded the girls in the car for some fresh air and a little snooping. She’d had some news, she said. Through the grapevine. They’d go investigate if it was true.

      The ocean house belonged to their father, of course—­completely, irrevocably. But now the town—in a plot!—was considering some kind of eminent domain. All because the seawall had been breached for half an hour!

      They were going to see this travesty in motion. The girls didn’t know what Ruth was talking about. But now they waited on the sodden salt-burned grass behind the cypress trees while Ruth spoke to a police officer who’d set up a table in their old seashell driveway. Firemen in high waders came by and drank water from Dixie cups then pulled masks down over their faces and went up the high white-painted back steps where the girls once liked to hang their bathing suits on the railing to dry.

      Inside, said the policeman—a grouchy man with a wide flat nose—the water had made a mark, like a finger run all along the dining room wall. A grubby, little girl’s finger, he said to Paige. Someone who didn’t wash her hands before dinner.

      That’s enough of you, said Ruth. But too late, they could see the slimy trail marking their mother’s Japanese silk wallpaper. Through the white herons and the reeds. About three feet high, said the policeman to Ruth. I swear it.

      All a charade, said Ruth. I don’t believe a word. A finger mark on a dodgy wallpaper? And you’re taking a house? Every one of us will be out on our keesters at this rate.

      A fireman slogged toward them. He lifted a Dixie cup in a soot-black hand. The house is deserted, he said and smiled down at Ruth in an ugly way. A way that Courtney recognized as pleasure. And felt a funny twitch of being glad for him. Glad for his happiness.

      Nothing like it, said Ruth. Not for a minute.

      The girls were marched back to the car, and Ruth made the sign—a zip on the lips—of not saying a thing about this adventure to their father.

      Despite their silence, at dinner that night their father looked downcast. So he knew. Though he said it was just the weather. That and something about taxes and a faulty plan. A thieving accountant. No recourse. He was speaking in code, to Ruth only, but they could tell by her face the news was shocking and bad. There was a very long pause after he finished talking. Chewing was impossible. Courtney remembers this night after the hurricane, the feeling as if her jaw had been welded shut by all the electrons Ruth said were flooding the air.

      Wait, Paige said, as if she’d figured the whole thing out. Maybe things would be much easier if Ruth could just have her wish.