Beach House Rules
Prologue Charlotte The May Flower Moon
PROLOGUE Charlotte The May Flower Moon
It was the cicadas that sold me. That, or maybe the May Flower Moon. The May Flower Moon. Has there ever been a more beautiful term? Even now, I can close my eyes and picture the otherworldly orangeness of it, the way it glistened on the surface of the ocean. I remember leaning my head on my husband Bill’s shoulder, watching our daughter, Iris, walk down the beach a few yards away with a neighbor girl.
Thinking of our friends back in New York City—the place I thought I would call mine forever—unable to leave their apartments, I felt guilty. I envisioned them finding scraps of joy by performing nightly singing and cheering rituals for the healthcare workers leaving the hospital, world-weary in their hazmat suits. It was a small dose of reality, of remembrance that what they were living was terrifying, that what we were facing, even down here, was unprecedented.
What had given us the foresight to escape to Bill’s stepmother’s house in Juniper Shores, North Carolina, while we still could, I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that that apocalyptic scene felt a world away right now as the spring warmth wrapped around us, the cicadas singing their song in a way that, if you listened closely, felt in time with the ebb and flow of the tide, in rhythm with the croaking of the bullfrogs, in step with the sweet sound of crickets.
Iris hadn’t wanted to leave the city, of course. But even she—at the sometimes surly but often very sweet age of eleven—had managed to make new friends in this socially distanced world we had been dropped into. Everything was outdoors here anyway. Covid numbers were low. I knew how intensely lucky we were.
Lulled into contentment by the feel of Bill’s arms around me, the sand beneath my bare feet, that mesmerizing flower moon, I didn’t hesitate when Bill broke the silence. “Maybe I’m crazy, but, well, what would you think about building a house here, in Juniper Shores? With everything virtual, my work is online. I could fly back to the city some, maybe keep a smaller place there?”
He said it quickly, the way he did when he was nervous, a fact I knew about him so very well after thirteen years together. I marveled at that, at how one person could come to know another person so intimately that their quirks and tiny traits simply were . They required no thought at all.
“Yes,” I said. Yes . As easy a yes as when he asked me to share his banana split the night we met. As easy a yes as when he asked me to marry him. As easy a yes as when the doctor asked if I was ready to bring Iris home from the hospital. Above me a million stars shone, showing off for the flower moon, as if declaring that they still belonged amid its fierce beauty.
Bill pulled away from me and looked down at my face. “Yes? Just like that?”
“Just like that,” I said. “Sure, in some ways it feels like we’ve plunged into an alternate universe, but it’s a universe where, against all odds, I want to stay.”
If you had asked me, even during the chaos of the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, if I would move to a sleepy beach town in North Carolina, my home state, I would have said no way. Not a chance. But here, now, I felt like I had found where I was meant to be.
We were a family here. We were happy here. We were part of a small town that, somehow, seemed like it could protect us.
That’s the thing about protection, though. It’s fleeting. Because the people who know best how to protect you also know the very thing that will rip your heart out.
At that moment, though, I only knew the happiness of the sand beneath my feet, the water lapping my ankles, that mesmerizing flower moon. And the cicadas singing me into complacence, chanting a lullaby that I would hear forever, even in my dreams.