Lucy
Once they’re all set up, Vivian insists Lucy drive. She’s apparently never driven with the boat attached and is too afraid to start now. Lucy sits ramrod straight and crawls the hilly back roads to the launch at ten miles an hour, hoping Vivian doesn’t notice her nerves. She’s never done it, either.
“It’s so packed,” Vivian says when they arrive.
The line of cars snaking toward the water is practically backed up to the road.
Lucy groans. “Gosh, I can’t believe we forgot. Today’s the boat parade.”
“The what?”
“The parade. For the Fourth.”
“They do that?”
“Every year.”
Vivian peers out at the mass of people gearing up for the festivities. “I didn’t know.”
Lucy inches the car forward. Vivian glares and drums her fingers against the door. The silence between them is suffocating. Lucy tries to think of something to say, but none of her ideas feels right. She doesn’t want to ask about Vivian’s life. She knows enough of the answers, and the one-sidedness of it all is pitiful. Asking about the funeral she missed would be too painful for them both. Instead, she flicks through radio stations. She skips past a Sam Hunt earworm she likes, not wanting to give Vivian the satisfaction of labeling her a country bumpkin.
Eventually, they reach the front of the line. They unhook the boat from the trailer and back it into the water. Vivian jumps in and lowers the engine. Lucy will drive the car back to the house as Vivian zips across the lake.
“You’ll pick me up in five?” Lucy asks.
If she were doing this with Hank, she wouldn’t even need to ask.
Vivian yawns. “Yep.”
Back at the house, Lucy’s almost surprised when she sees their boat cruising toward her. Vivian waves and even offers a tight smile—not with her teeth, but it’s something. Maybe all they needed was a minute to cool off separately.
Once Lucy’s on board, Vivian takes a hard swerve to the left and zooms away from shore. Wind blasts Lucy in the face, making her tear up even from behind her glasses. She wants to tell Vivian to slow down but keeps her mouth shut.
They’ve barely gone two hundred feet when Vivian cuts the engine.
“What’s wrong?” Lucy asks.
“Maybe this is the right spot. Between the house and the island.”
Directly in front of their property, a quarter mile out, there’s a tiny island just big enough to house four scrawny trees and a few shrubs. The water is shallow and rocky around its perimeter, making it accessible only by kayak, or, as Hank liked to do with Lucy once every summer, by swimming there and back. It isn’t grand or impressive or remotely habitable—but by virtue of its location, it’s always felt like theirs.
Lucy dreads conflict, but this decision feels important. She’d hate to let Vivian steamroll her.
“Too close to home.”
“But the island’s, like, ours.”
It isn’t.
“Not here, please?” Lucy tries to summon a firm statement, but it comes out like a shaky question instead. Still, her effort pays off.
“Fine. Do you want to drive?”
She doesn’t mind. “Sure.”
Lucy takes the wheel. The roar of the engine relieves them from the pressure of conversation. The lake is more crowded today than it’ll be all year, swarming with mostly summer people and some locals. A line of boats circles the perimeter. They pass a pontoon draped in an American flag and a skiff with a hand-lettered sign that reads “God Bless America.” Another sign taped to a speedboat proclaims “FIVE generations growing up on Fox Hill Lake!” There are dads everywhere, clutching beers, cranking up classic rock, fishing with their little life-jacketed kids, steering their spouses through the sunshine. One cruises by on a Jet Ski with a full-grown golden retriever in his lap. Lucy has never been less in the mood for a parade in her life.
Actually , she thinks, feeling bittersweet nostalgia washing over her, that’s not true. The summer she was nine years old, there was almost nothing she loved more than marshmallows. She’d eat them for every meal if she could. The morning of July Fourth, she secretly tucked a bag of Kraft Jet-Puffed in her lap beneath the kitchen table. Over breakfast, whenever Hank was immersed in The Economist , she’d cram another one into her mouth.
They had barely boated into the lake when the gentle rocking turned Lucy’s stomach. She threw up over the side. Hank went out to get a box of Fla-Vor-Ice popsicles and a carton of apple juice to settle her stomach. Outside, the sky was a spotless blue and the sun danced across the water, but they spent the rest of the day together watching another Star Wars on the couch. As much as she enjoyed it, she was sad to miss the parade.
The morning of July 5, before Lucy was awake, Hank hung red, white, and blue streamers from the boat’s windshield and loaded up the back seat with the signs Lucy had made with Magic Markers two days prior: “Happy birthday, America!” and “May the Fourth be with you!” (featuring—what else?—a painstakingly drawn illustration of Princess Leia wearing a George Washington wig gathered into space buns).
“You know, the parade’s not over yet, Lucy Goosey,” he said over breakfast.
She scowled. “Yes, it is.”
“You don’t believe me?” His eyes shone with mischief.
She’d been skeptical, but by the time they were out on the lake waving at the other boaters and swimmers, even though they were the only ones honking and cheering, her doubts were long forgotten. Even back then, she knew her dad had another daughter out there somewhere, one he spent nearly all his time with, which made her feel like the last-picked kid in gym class. But that day on the boat, she felt so special.
Lucy and Vivian pass the quaint white house with blue shutters where Dawn’s best friend, Cindy Monahan, used to live. Lucy never sees the Monahans around the lake anymore—they rent out their property for an arm and a leg to a different family every week from Memorial Day to Labor Day. When she was growing up, there weren’t quite so many out-of-towners, but since Airbnb took off, plenty of Massholes have discovered Fox Hill Lake. The more they fall in love with it, the more longtime locals are tempted to sell their properties for outrageously inflated prices. Now “For Sale” signs dot the lake. For the first time ever, the locals are dealing with litter and obnoxiously loud wake boats.
Vivian peers at a row of modest homes on the more affordable end of the lake. They’re smaller and more run-down than their own house, and many of them are only comfortable as seasonal cabins instead of year-round buildings. Some have peeling paint; others have no-frills utility boats tied up to their docks, or no boats at all. Lucy wonders if Vivian’s proud to have one of the nicer spots around, or if it doesn’t even occur to her to be grateful. Hank sent money to Dawn every month and paid for most of Lucy’s college tuition, so she was better off than some of her classmates. Even so, the wealth gap between her and Vivian is significant—less of a gap and more of a canyon.
When other boats pass by they wave; the other passengers return the gesture. It’s the language of the lake. To strangers, maybe they look like real sisters. Off in the distance, loons float by: two parents with their signature striking black heads and white-flecked wings, and between them, two babies covered in downy dark brown fluff. They always travel in groups. Perfect, intact families. This early in the summer, the little ones could easily fit in Lucy’s palm.
Motoring through all of Hank’s most beloved spots takes forever because of the parade. When the crowd thins out, they drive past Wilson Cove on the southern side of the lake and into the Narrows, a peaceful stretch of three small basins with a five-miles-per-hour speed limit. With the engine barely rumbling, one of them will eventually have to break the ice first.
“So, you’re a wine director?” Lucy prompts, using the title she spotted on Vivian’s LinkedIn rather than risk mispronouncing “sommelier. ” “What’s that like?”
Vivian cocks her head. “He told you that?”
Lucy admonishes herself for being so obvious. “I googled you once.”
“I run the wine program at Della.” When Lucy doesn’t immediately nod in recognition, she adds, “Which is a Spanish-Mediterranean fusion place in the West Village. So, that means I select which bottles we carry and make recommendations to our guests.”
“Do you ever wait on celebrities?”
In a bored, matter-of-fact tone, Vivian rattles off a list of names Lucy doesn’t recognize, then says, “Leo DiCaprio came with a date recently. I think they were celebrating her twenty-first birthday. They ordered a French rosé.”
“Ew.”
“What do you do?” she asks languidly, as if she doesn’t really care about the answer.
How many hours has Lucy spent studying Vivian online? For close to two decades, she’s lurked on Vivian’s Facebook statuses and Instagram posts, scrolled through tweets and abandoned Pinterest boards, stalked her friends and developed theories about whom she might be dating. She’s kept tabs on every job Vivian’s ever had. Lucy still remembers the twinkly pink background of Vivian’s MySpace.
In twenty-four hours, Vivian hasn’t displayed the slightest inkling of curiosity about Lucy.
“I teach high school English.” She praises her favorite parts, trying to sell it: the unparalleled satisfaction she gets when a lesson clicks for a student who had been struggling; the ones who geek out about books the same way she does. “My kids are juniors and seniors, so they’re starting to think about what’s next. It’s interesting, watching them figure it out.”
Lucy doesn’t have the heart to tell them that deciding who to become is the easiest part. Making it happen is another problem altogether. When she was that age, she wanted to study at a liberal arts college, somewhere with a grassy quad ringed by stately buildings dripping in ivy. She wanted to spend four years immersed in classic novels, influential feminist texts, and new titles by emerging geniuses who would shape the face of twenty-first-century literature. Then she’d go off to Portland, or even New York. She’d write, or work in publishing. What a life that would be: a ticket out of Fox Hill based on sheer passion for books and a dash of intelligence. A dream.
Obviously that did not pan out. Even with some academic scholarships and help from Hank, she still felt it was more practical to turn down Bowdoin and Colby for UMaine. Lucy likes to teach. She’s good at it. She has no right to complain about her circumstances. But on dull days, it’s hard not to wonder what her life would look like now if her dad had given her the same opportunities he lavished on his other daughter.
“Maybe here,” Vivian suggests.
They’ve cruised slowly into a particularly pretty section of the third basin. It’s quiet here, with a lush stretch of uninhabited woods and no parade. People think trees are just plain forest green, but packed together so tightly like this, the variety is visible if you care to look for it. There are teardrop-shaped elm leaves the color of sautéed spinach, bristling pines tinged silver-blue, sun-bleached ash trees that soar like vibrant stalks of celery, and all the shades and textures in between: emerald, kelly, fresh-cut grass, even streaks of lime on bright afternoons. The basin is scattered with tiny islands, giving the impression that a few miniature forests have sprouted up from the lake floor at random. Maine has a million people and five billion trees.
“He used to fish over here,” Lucy recalls. “With his dad, I think.”
She contemplates the area. The water glitters a luxurious steel blue; the clouds above have turned a thick, pale gray. Grief rises up like bile in her chest. Losing someone, she’s heard, isn’t something you ever get over. Instead, you learn to live with it. The pain becomes a sidekick you can’t shake.
“We could do it on his birthday at sunset.”
Vivian grimaces. “You want to wait all the way ’til August?”
“I think it’d be nice. And we could play some of his favorite music.”
Vivian looks skeptical.
“Like ‘Blackbird.’ He used to play that all the time around the house.”
“He was really more of a Billy Joel guy.”
“We can pick out the exact songs later. No need to worry about details now,” Lucy says, frustration rising. They sound like her students squabbling over a group project. “And there should be readings.”
“Like what?”
Lucy has only been to a few funerals, for her grandparents, Caleb’s uncle, and Barb, the high school’s ancient secretary. She squints. “Something from the Bible?”
“Seriously?”
“I know he wasn’t much of a religious guy, but isn’t that what people typically read at funerals?”
“Lucy, we’re Jewish,” Vivian says incredulously. “You must know that.”
Heat rises to Lucy’s cheeks. “Of course. But I’m half and half.”
Only by blood. She’s never celebrated a single Jewish holiday, since none falls in July and Dawn wouldn’t know the first thing about where to begin—not that Lucy would admit as much to Vivian right now.
“And I’m his daughter, too. It’s not the most far-fetched idea.”
“ Oy vey iz mir ,” Vivian mutters.
Lucy doesn’t need to know one lick of Yiddish to translate Vivian’s disdain. She shifts hard in her seat to face her.
“Grief is universal. A Christian hymn, a Jewish prayer, a Buddhist teaching, a nondenominational poem—they’re all basically expressing the same ideas in different ways.”
“But he was Jewish,” Vivian repeats. “So, a Christian verse is inappropriate.”
Lucy chews her lip, not wanting to say something she can’t take back. This isn’t a harmless dispute over his taste in music. These roots go deeper.
Understanding dawns on Vivian. “He never passed it down to you, did he?”
Lucy’s heritage was never kept secret from her. She liked the Hanukkah episode of Rugrats, and Hank once bought her a copy of Anne Frank’s diary. But aside from her close friends, her classmates at school didn’t know. Nobody thought to ask; it never came up. After she heard Matt Cunningham spit out, “Don’t be such a fucking Jew,” at the lunch lady when he was fifty cents short for a carton of chocolate milk, she wasn’t eager to broadcast that fact.
The truth is, Lucy has never felt Jewish. The more she tried to learn about the religion and culture, the more alienated she felt from it. She felt no spark of familiarity while reading Anne Frank’s words; their lives couldn’t have been more different. She went to a single Shabbat dinner at Hillel in college, and while it was lovely—the wine, the candles, the prayers—she was a clear outsider. She stayed mute while the others recited prayers in warp-speed Hebrew. She wasn’t moved to return.
“Look, he raised us differently, okay? I would’ve been happy for him to teach me more about Judaism.”
“The daughter of Hank Levy wants to read a psalm or something at his funeral,” Vivian says, shaking her head.
Humiliating tears well up in Lucy’s eyes. Vivian is just some stuck-up city girl who was born with a silver spoon of God knows what (merlot?) in her mouth. She’s not worth crying over. Not now. Not over this.
Lucy spurs the engine to a sputtering start. “Let’s go.”
Vivian doesn’t protest. Wind rips ominously through the trees fringing the shoreline and whips up white caps of froth. A storm is coming, and they’re all the way in the third basin, where speed is strictly limited. Violators are photographed and admonished in the lake’s Facebook group.
As they slowly make their way into the mouth of the second basin, a crack of thunder rolls in from the west. If the rain could hold off for another fifteen minutes, they’d have enough time to safely navigate out of the Narrows and around the curling eastern edge of the lake to their dock. But that seems unlikely.
Vivian glares at the speedometer. “We’re screwed.”
“Nothing I can do about it but drive,” Lucy says tightly.
“Can’t you go faster?”
“Not allowed to.”
“Who cares? It’s about to pour!”
Rules are rules. Lucy ignores her, even as the first cool droplets fall from the white sky. At first, it’s not so bad—refreshing, even. Soon, though, the rain splatters more heavily, slicking the windshield. Vivian finds a baseball cap in the glove compartment and jams it over her head. It’s one of Hank’s: long-faded pale blue with an interlocking “CU” for Columbia University.
“Come on, come on,” Vivian urges the sky.
As soon as they crawl past the threshold into the main part of the lake, Lucy guns the engine. Vivian shrieks as her hat flies off, sailing backward into the water. It bobs at the surface for a moment. Even a summer kid should know how to hold on to a hat.
“Turn back!” she shouts.
In the rain, Lucy might not be bothered to retrieve one of Vivian’s, or even one of her own. It’s a fact of lake life: Hats and sunglasses get swept away more often than you’d like. Except Lucy remembers this one shielding Hank’s face year after year. He’d hand it to her for safekeeping when he water-skied. Lucy wrenches the steering wheel hard to the left.
Vivian nearly trips before steadying herself. “It’s sinking!”
The gear shift is already down. Theirs is the only boat still out.
“Hold on tight,” Lucy says, slamming it harder.
Three seconds later, Vivian yelps, “Stop!”
Lucy yanks it back.
Vivian scrambles onto the front tip of the boat and flings herself off, fully dressed. She dives, skimming beneath the choppy surface with one arm outstretched. Here, the lake is probably thirty or forty feet deep, and waterlogged, the cap could be impossible to see. Vivian pops up and treads in a frantic circle. As she dives again, Lucy feels sick. She can’t lose another piece of her dad.
When Vivian resurfaces, she lets out an anguished screech. “It sank! It’s gone.”
They’re both drenched and it’s still pouring, so it isn’t immediately clear, but when Vivian climbs back aboard with her shorts and tank top glued to her body, Lucy realizes she’s crying. She slumps in the passenger seat, squeezes out her ponytail, and crosses her arms angrily. Despair renders Lucy speechless.
“Go!” Vivian says, annoyed, gesturing toward the house.
Jolted from her grief, Lucy remembers she is wet to the bone. A chill seeps through her as she pushes the boat into gear once more. Eventually, they make it home.
“Wait!” Lucy calls as Vivian rushes up the stairs. “Aren’t we supposed to cover the boat?”
Hank was careful about protecting it from rain.
Vivian throws her arms up. “It’s already soaked!”
“He’d want us to cover it,” Lucy insists, even though deep down, she knows it’s already a lost cause. Vivian is right. They stare at each other through the torrential downpour.
Vivian groans. “Fine.”
Lucy’s pretty sure she’s only acquiescing out of guilt, but still, she conceded. It’s hard to feel victorious, though, considering the circumstances. With their clothes plastered to their skin and their hair clinging to their necks in dripping hanks, they haul a pair of tarps and poles down from the garage and race to fit the covers on properly. If their dad were here, he wouldn’t rest until every snap was secured, but time and weather have warped and shrunk the fabric. As hard as they try—and they do their damnedest, precariously perching barefoot on the rain-slicked lip of the boat—they can’t finish the job. It hits Lucy: He’ll never be able to help her again.
“We’re close enough,” Vivian says. “It’s not gonna work.”
Lucy hates to agree, but she’s shivering. “Fine.”
They speed up the stairs.
Inside, panting hard, Lucy says, “We should shower to warm up.”
“Yeah. You go ahead.”
She’s about to give Vivian first dibs, thinking of how pitiful she looked climbing out of the lake empty-handed. But then a flare of fury shoots through her. Vivian let something precious slip away with a careless mistake. Furthermore, she made Lucy feel like the most backward, insignificant speck.
So, Lucy takes her time in the sole shower, lathering her hair and thawing her chilled body until the modestly sized, ancient boiler runs out of hot water. When she’s done, she wraps one towel around her body and the remaining one over her hair.
“All yours,” she says sweetly, ascending the stairs.
Vivian
Vivian runs the shower, steps in, and— shit. It’s freezing. She fiddles with the faucet. A good hot rinse would restore her at least halfway to life, but no dice. Rather than toughing it out, she wrenches it off and reaches for a towel, but comes up empty-handed.
“Damn it.” It hurts to ask for help, but she needs it.
Shivering, Vivian pokes her head out of the doorway. “Lucy?”
She waits.
“Yeah?”
“Could you grab me a towel? I forgot to get one.”
“Sorry, what did you say?” Lucy asks from the living room. She probably heard her perfectly well.
Vivian repeats the request. She’s surprised she dove in for the hat—and even more surprised by the lump that sprang up in her throat once she realized it was permanently lost. The hat didn’t mean anything to her. She shouldn’t care.
A minute later, Lucy returns with the thinnest, oldest towel they have. “I’m going to my mom’s for lunch.”
The storm has passed as quickly as it came on.
Vivian glares. “Hope you enjoyed the last of our hot water.”
“I’m sorry, did it run out on you?” Lucy’s not a good enough actor to pull off her innocent shtick.
Later, after she leaves, Vivian pulls on cashmere sweats and lounges on the couch while catching up on her phone. There’s a text from her mother.
Just thinking about you. Hope you’re having a nice afternoon. It’s beautiful here today.
Below that, there’s a selfie taken in their backyard. Half of Celeste’s face is glamorously hidden behind tortoiseshell sunglasses and a wide straw hat. Beyond her, there’s a riot of green leaves spilling over the fence, then the backs of other brownstones poking into adjacent gardens. It’s somewhat of a sweet gesture—until she sees the same photo on her mother’s Instagram, posted an hour before she apparently thought to send it to her daughter. Vivian sends a thumbs-up.
There’s a missed call and text from Oscar. Just tried you , he wrote ten minutes ago. As she calls him back, she jams her feet into the crevice of the couch for warmth. She knows that if she flipped that cream tweed couch seat over, she’d see an old splat of pinot noir. Her fault.
At seventeen, she’d raided Hank’s liquor cabinet on one of the rare nights he went out with friends at the lake. He promised he’d be home at nine. She only wanted to have one glass—not enough for him to realize it was gone, and definitely not enough for her to still feel a remote buzz by the time he got home. All told, the plan was practically wholesome. A harmless night of youthful indiscretion.
Vivian didn’t expect him back at 8:30. She startled at the sound of his car pulling into the garage and knocked the glass over. Hank walked in as she was frantically soaking the stain with wet, soapy paper towels. He looked furious.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!” she’d wailed.
“Don’t rub it in ,” he’d snapped. “Here, let me—grab me some seltzer.”
She had never seen him so angry. Not about the drinking (“I believe it was only one glass, and half of it ended up on the couch anyway”), but about the furniture. His own dad had bought it for his mom as a birthday gift not long after they bought the lake house. It wasn’t just a couch. It was a memorial. A shrine like the rest of this whole damn place. Hank lifted most of the wine from the fabric, but there was still a reddish stain they could only hide by flipping the cushion. Vivian doesn’t drink wine on this couch anymore. She used up her one mistake. They can’t flip the pillow again.
The phone rings and rings and rings and rings. She hangs up only when she gets his voicemail. A moment later, he texts, Can’t talk now , which is likely just one of those autofill responses. He runs a major restaurant, he works odd hours, he’s busy . She knows this; she’s never complained. And yet something feels off. He once carved out time to take care of her when her biggest problem was a bad UTI. One would think a dead parent and a long-lost sister warranted at least a call.
She types, Oscar, my entire life is falling apart. Any chance you could pick up the phone? and then deletes it. She tries again. I miss you. Too needy, too useless. She settles on Got it.
Too amped up to sit, she needs a task to burn off her buzzing frustration. What had the Realtor said? Declutter. She takes two large, empty trash bags upstairs to her dad’s closet. With an angry rock playlist blaring in the background, she sweeps the contents of each shelf and drawer into the garbage. There are familiar old swim trunks, plus jeans and short-sleeved button-downs with holes or stains that Celeste forced him to retire from his New York wardrobe. None of it tugs at her heartstrings; all of it goes in the trash. She ties the plastic handles into a sloppy bow and leans it against the bed.
The rest of the afternoon is consumed by tasks: sorting the linens for items to donate, doing her best with a screwdriver to straighten the hanging shutter outside, dusting away the gray fuzz that accumulated on windowsills over the offseason. Rage powers quick, efficient work until the click of the front door jars her back to reality. Multiple voices stream through: two girls and a guy, overlapping with casual, long-held intimacy. Ugh. Vivian’s in no mood to entertain.
Grudgingly, she goes downstairs to say hi. There’s Lucy, of course, with an Asian woman toting two bags of groceries, and a tall guy with chestnut hair in board shorts. Her stomach drops. She recognizes that man.