Summer of the Gypsy Moths (3 page)

I
t's hard to sleep with a dead person sprawled out in the room below you. I didn't remember falling asleep at all, but I must have, because how else could I have awakened all those times…and remembered, again and again. Each time, I'd lie in the dark praying hard that I would hear a sigh from the den, and then the heavy creak of Louise hauling herself out of her chair and plodding up the stairs to bed.

Angel was stuffing a half-empty package of Fig Newtons into her backpack when I came downstairs the next morning. She looked the way I felt. She shouldered her backpack, then blew some hair away to look back at me.
She started to say something, but I raised my hand. “I remember. I'll wait fifteen minutes and then I'm going to call. Go.”

“And you'll tell them I stayed over at a friend's, but you don't know which one. Right?”

“Right. I came home late last night, after something at school—”

“After a rehearsal. For the play. Like we said,” Angel insisted.

“I know. I'll remember. And I just found her now. Go, Angel. Get out of here.”

There was a knock at the front door. Angel and I both jumped, and she dropped her backpack. We froze, gaping at the door. I was sure it was the police, come to arrest us. My stomach started to heave, as though everything inside me had just been cut loose. The door swung open before either one of us could move.

It was an old guy, dressed in regular work clothes, not a police uniform. He poked his head into the living room. “Louise, you ready?” he called. Then he saw us. He waved into the kitchen. “Morning, girls,” he said. “Pretty day.”

I risked a glance at the closed den door and gulped back a hysterical giggle—it was so
not
a pretty day.

A dog barked. The old guy leaned back out to yell, “Hold on, Treb.” Then he turned back to us. “Is Louise ready?”

Angel walked into the living room. “Who are you?”

“George Nickerson.” He stuck out his hand. Angel crossed her arms and glared at him until he dropped it. “I own the cottages next door? Didn't Louise tell you I'd be here this morning?”

“She did,” I said. When I have to lie, I get really nervous, and my mouth goes into blabbing mode. “Oh, yeah, she's been talking about it for days. ‘Oh, by the way,' she said, ‘George Nickerson will be over on Saturday. He owns the cottages next door.'”

Walking closer, I realized he wasn't so old after all. His wrinkles looked like the kind people got from being outside a lot. He had gray hair, but he was like Heloise that way—her silver hair fooled you. “She definitely told us. But she's sick today,” I said.

“Sick?” He smiled as if he figured Louise was pulling a fast one on him. “That's convenient…the day we open up. Now where is she?”

He took another step in, but Angel moved to block him. “She's lying down. She can't even move. You have to leave.”

“We're opening the cottages,” he repeated. “I only have the weekend, and there's a lot to do.” He walked to the stairs and called up. “Louise?”

“We're going to do it,” I said. Angel spun around to shoot me a glare, but I didn't see any other way. Besides,
my blabber mode had really kicked in. “That's what she told us: ‘You girls help open those cottages, since I'm sick.' She told us to help you open up the cottages today, Mr. Nickerson.”

Mr. Nickerson cocked his head to eye me. “You're the niece, right?” he asked.

“Great-niece,” I said. “Stella. And this is Angel. We're ready to help open the cottages for my great-aunt. Who's just sick today, that's all.” I held my breath and tried to look innocent and helpful.

After a minute, he shrugged and lifted a bunch of keys from his belt and thumbed up a long iron one. “All right, then. This is the master.” He pointed over my shoulder to an identical key hanging from a hook beside the door. “That's yours. Grab it. And my name is George, okay?”

“Okay. Got it. George.” I wrapped my fingers around the key, hard and knobby as bone, and thought suddenly of Hansel and Gretel, of how they fooled the witch.

 

We followed George out to his beat-up green truck, parked next door in front of the cottages. He opened the cab door and a yellow lab bounded out and tore around in circles, as if he'd just been sprung from prison. George pulled a wooden sign, painted with the words
LINGER LONGER COTTAGE COLONY
, from the bed of the pickup and headed
over to the signposts next to the road.

The cottages were laid out in a semicircle at the bottom of the horseshoe driveway next to Louise's house. When I'd first arrived, I had tried peering into the windows, but all the shades were down. “Puh! You'll see 'em soon enough,” Louise had answered when I'd asked to go inside. “You'll be sick of the sight of them, after you've done a couple of changeovers this summer.”

As George hung the sign, I noticed for the first time that the cottages were identical, except for the names lettered above the front doors:
SANDPIPER
,
TERN
,
PLOVER
, and
GULL
. Identical. The same pink roses climbed up the shingled sides of each one and tumbled down again; all the trim was whitewashed, and the doors all the same pale blue. Everything about the scene looked old and soft, as if it had been drawn in pastel. Lucky Charms colors, I'd called them when I was little.

It looked as if the same artist had drawn George—he wore a faded blue denim shirt rolled up at the sleeves and paint-spattered khaki pants. His hair was a little shaggy, as if he was the kind of person who liked it short, and he kept meaning to get to the barber, but it just hadn't happened for a while. George belonged with these cottages, and so did his dog, with his soft sandy fur, snuffling in the hydrangea bushes beside us.

Angel, on the other hand, looked like a neon sign with her hot-pink tank top and lime-green track pants. Beside her, I probably looked like a pencil sketch with my gray cutoff sweats and my black T-shirt and my boring brown hair. Neither of us fitted in with the Linger Longer cottages, settled there along their good-luck horseshoe driveway. No connections. Anyone could see that.

“Well, what are we waiting for?” George said. “Those cottages aren't going to open themselves, you know.”

With each step away from our house, and what was in the den, I felt lighter and calmer. George unlocked the first cottage, Tern, and waved us inside. His dog took off to sniff out the place, but George stayed put in the entryway. “Now, Louise said you two might be helping out with the changeovers this year. We talked Thursday. She didn't say a word about feeling poorly, so it musta come on sudden.”

I caught Angel's eye when he said Louise's name, and she looked as guilty as I was feeling.

George didn't seem to notice, though. “We might as well go over things from the beginning,” he said. He pointed to a long iron key hanging from a hook on the inside of the door. It looked like the master keys, except for a waxy paper disk, hand-lettered with
TERN
, tied to it. “They show up, you open the cottage with your master, you hand 'em this key—their key. You remind 'em of what's in
the agreement: They lose that key, it's fifty dollars, period. Only one locksmith on Cape Cod I even know of who'll make a key like that anymore. It hasn't happened in at least twenty years—hard to lose a key that big, I guess, but still, that's the rule, okay?”

Angel and I nodded. Then George walked around, snapping up the shades and shoving open the windows. Dust motes whirled up through bars of sunlight against dark wood paneling. I looked around the brightening cottage. Three doors stood open on the back wall: two tiny bedrooms and a bathroom. The room we were standing in had a living area over to the left and kitchen stuff on the right. The kitchen was painted white. It had just room for a table with four chairs, and barely enough counter space to make a sandwich. You'd have to be efficient in a place like this; you could only have the essentials, and you'd have to keep things tidy. I liked that.

“Now, checkout time.” George tapped a yellowed notice on the wall. “It's ten o'clock, no exception, because the next tenants come in at three. That doesn't give you much time for the changeovers.”

He paused and then nodded at Angel and me as if we'd just said something and he was agreeing with it. “I'm glad she's got you two this year. Tell the truth, I've been a little worried about her, what with her heart.”

Angel and I exchanged a quick glance at that.

“Her heart?” I asked. “What's the matter with her heart?”

“Never mind. I shouldn't have said anything. But you two do the heavy cleaning, all right?” George said. “Course, that means you keep the tips—don't go splitting 'em with her if all she's doing is running the laundry through, you doing all the rest.”

“Tips?” It was the first time since we'd left the house that Angel had said a word. There was a look in her eyes I couldn't figure out—like she was just now waking up. “They leave tips?”

George nodded with a little chuckle. “Usually. Depends on what hoodlums their kids were. Cleaning fee's built into the rental charge—they already paid it. Louise says they tip outta guilt: Their kids track sand everywhere, fill the teacups with hermit crabs, leave Popsicles melted on the furniture, that kinda thing. Fifteen, twenty dollars—you should ask her, though. I'd better get the linens.”

“Each cottage?” Angel asked, and I could practically see her ears perk up. “Each cottage leaves fifteen or twenty dollars? Each week?”

“That's about right. I'll get those linens now.” And before we could think of anything to stop him, George left.

Angel and I sprang to the window. I could tell by her
face she was as scared to death as I was. But he didn't go toward our house, only to his truck. “Maybe we should tell him,” I said, my heart still hammering in my chest and my legs going cottony again, as if a puff of wind could knock me off my feet. “Angel, I'm scared.”

Angel stared at me, looking like she was caught between snarling and fainting. Before she could do either, George was back, talking over a stack of sheets and towels as if he'd never left. “There are two twins and a double in each cottage. Three sets of sheets, three blankets. Towels for four.”

He went into the bedroom on the right and we followed. The room was barely big enough for two twin beds and a narrow bureau under the window between them. A row of hooks hung over one bed, and a bookshelf over the other. George dumped the linens on a bed. “There's a backup set of everything, means you don't have to do the wash at changeover time. Store the extras up in the main house, otherwise they get musty—can't help it in the cottages, no heat, so close to the water. That's the next thing….” George nodded out toward the kitchen. “We'll have to give the counters and cabinets in the kitchens and bathrooms a good wash. They're all cleaned in September, but things get a little moldy over the winter—”

“Bleach kills mold!” If I hadn't still been so nervous, I would never have blurted that out with Angel standing
there. I bit my lip before I could say anything else, but it was too late—Angel was rolling her eyes, setting up for a sarcastic remark about Heloise.

But George spoke before it came to her. “That's right. That's exactly what we use. It's in the shed. I don't leave it out, all these kids coming,” he said. “What'd you say your name was?”

I told him.

“Stella. ‘Stella by Starlight.' I'll remember that.”

And then I didn't care that Angel was in the room. “You know that song? My father named me after that! He thought it was the prettiest song in the world.”

“It is—that's the truth,” George said. “Pretty song for a pretty girl.” He dropped his head then, as if he was worried he'd said something wrong. I smiled at him to show him he hadn't, and he smiled back—a nice smile, which crinkled his eyes nearly closed. “Your daddy's got good taste,” he said.

I fought to keep my smile in place, but my mouth filled with salty water, as if I'd been hit by a wave.

“Oh, now…oh, now, sorry,” George said. He took a step toward me, and then shoved his hands into his pockets. “Stupid of me…. I guess if you're here, he's not…I'm sorry.”

I swallowed. “It's okay. I never knew him. Bleach and
soap,” I said. “I'll start in the bathroom.” And I walked out, keeping my back straight.

In the bathroom, though, I forgot about everything. I know it sounds crazy to think that a tiny bathroom could fill a person with joy, but this one did. The pine boarding was painted a pale yellow, the color of butter. Whenever I'd pictured the perfect house, it was this exact color. The shelves and windowsills were whitewashed, and the curtains were checkered crisp blue and white. I raised the window and a breeze immediately pillowed the curtains out, as if the room had been waiting all these months to take a nice breath of fresh air.

The bathroom reminded me of a summer day at the beach, with all those sunny colors and the salty breeze. And with all those seashells.

A huge clamshell, cupped like a palm, sat beside the sink ready to hold a bar of soap. Drifts of various shells ran along the windowsill and the long, narrow shelf that spanned the whole wall; they were mounded on top of the medicine cabinet and heaped at the clawed foot of the sink. I wondered how many kids it had taken over how many summers to fill this bathroom.

I picked up a little moon snail shell. It spiraled down, as if it knew where it was going, as if the center of all things was right inside itself. I had a funny urge to swallow it,
to make all that perfect wholeness part of me. Instead, I pressed it to my cheek, felt its cool, smooth thinness, and closed my eyes.

Suddenly I was aware of someone in the doorway. I dropped the shell, and it cracked on the tile floor.