Chapter 3
THE FIRST SUMMER, FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
Sammie and Didion sat on the front step of their father’s house in Charleston, waiting for the return of their mother.
Sammie—fourteen years old and thrilled about being so grown-up—was anxious, excited energy, sitting on her hands the way her fourth-grade teacher once encouraged the wiggly child to do.
A fifteen-year-old Didion was gnawing on her thumbnail, already conditioned to fear the worst, afraid her mother wouldn’t show at all.
Sammie had spent the morning spinning in circles like a clumsy ballerina while Didion ran around remembering all the last-minute things they’d need for the summer and which hadn’t occurred to their father.
The tube of salicylic acid (for her own pimples; fourteen-year-old Sammie still had poreless skin), the box of tampons (for both of them), and the small stack of summer reading her sister had been assigned for her entrance into high school.
Their dad had remarried already, just less than a year after the divorce from Babe was finalized. The new wife, Anne, was a quiet, frail woman, as beige and neutral as the thousands of hard pillows and scratchy blankets she’d moved in with.
It was Babe who had left. It seemed so sudden.
One day she was in the daily routine, packing lunches and watching old episodes of Sabrina the Teenage Witch with the girls on the sofa, and the next she was explaining that she hadn’t been happy in a long, long time, and that she needed to change things.
Didion had initially assumed that it meant they were all three leaving, that she and her sister would be part of whatever came next.
She’d been excited even. Her dad was boring, their house was boring, and her mom was the best part of it all.
She envisioned a girly house, one where they could make noise without worrying about waking up their dad and eat pizza all the time.
That wasn’t what happened.
Babe was moving to the beach house on Mercy Island. It was her family’s house, and with her parents getting older, no one was there most of the time.
Didion and Sammie’s parents had talked to them about it, saying things like don’t want to uproot you girls and so as not to disrupt your schooling.
Babe’s childhood had been so inconsistent, she wanted to make sure it wasn’t that way for her girls.
Neither of them knew what this meant at first, but Didion eventually realized it meant they would not be going with their mom.
They’d be staying with their dad. Whatever Babe was changing, it included getting away from them.
Don’t worry, she had told them. You can come stay with me during summer break.
Then when Anne came into the picture, it all got even bleaker. Didion suddenly identified with Cinderella and with Sarah in A Little Princess. She was left behind with the strict, dreary people, and her beloved mother had gone. She felt melodramatic, brave, stoic, and sorry for herself all at once.
It was a new life Didion had not chosen, and the lack of control threatened to send her into a spiral. Everything was different.
Didion and Sammie had been inseparable and so similar for so long. The same things made them laugh and they borrowed each other’s clothes. Suddenly it was becoming clear how different they were.
Didion picked up on the tensions between the adults around her, while Sammie could tap out a jaunty rhythm with her hands on her knees for an entire tense car ride, not clocking the biting tone of their new stepmother or the weary frustration in that of their father’s.
Didion would see things that needed to be done and do it, even if it bothered her, where Sammie seemed not to care if she had to—for example—go to school wearing a pair of pajama bottoms with a button-down because no one had thought to check the laundry basket in the girls’ bathroom.
Didion suddenly found herself washing their clothes and double-checking their backpacks, packing lunches and untangling Sammie’s fine hair that was always getting caught in tight knots.
It was temporary, she told herself. She ignored herself when she added on the question What’s going to change?
At least now it was summer. Time to be with their mom.
Babe’s Ford Bronco pulled up. She left it running and got out, pushing her sunglasses back into her freshly shorn hair.
In that moment, Didion knew that everything about their mother was different.