The Guest House (22 page)

Three

L
exi made a knot of her hair, set it snugly with a clip, and stepped out of the car into the damp morning air. The great house was quiet, just as she’d expected. It had been more than a week since the For Sale sign had arrived at the end of Birch Drive, a few less days since she’d learned that Jim and Hudson and Cooper had returned to their Southern homes, leaving the property empty and awaiting a new owner.

In all the confusion, Lexi had neglected to get the last of her photos. Today she would complete her shot list and compile the images to send to the historian in Raleigh.

She unpacked her camera bag and tripod from the trunk and carried them down the grass toward the small cottage on the edge of the lawn. The scaffolding had been taken down, and the grass around the foundation cleaned of loose sanding pads and dropped nails, but the blue tarp still remained over the roof, at her mother’s urging. Lexi turned the knob and felt the door resist a moment before it gave way to reveal the interior of the guest house.

With a deep breath, she stepped inside.

What a shame,
she thought as she wandered through the space, seeing the half-finished repairs everywhere as she drew down the boards her mother’s crew had put up to protect the windows. They had made such progress, and now all their work might be for nothing. Lexi knew there was a good chance whoever bought the property wouldn’t bother to finish what they had started. “Teardown” was the term used, a term she hated when it was so often code for developers who wanted an excuse to demolish instead of repair, to build new instead of restore old.

She reached out and touched a patch of fresh drywall, its seams not yet taped and floated, and ran her fingers lovingly over the smooth wallboard, imagining the old timbers beneath it, timbers her parents had helped cut and carry and finish.

This was her way of preservation, she thought as she snapped the cover off the lens of her Hasselblad and centered her first shot.
Your history will never be forgotten now.

“I’m really going to miss this place.”

Startled, she lowered her camera. Cooper stood in the doorway.

“Cooper.” She swallowed. “I thought you left. I thought everyone left.”

He came into the room. “We did. Jim and Hud drove back together a few days ago,” he said, “and I moved into a place in Wellfleet.”

Wellfleet?
Excitement coursed through her. “You’re staying on the Cape?” she asked.

“I thought I would. I got someone to sublet my apartment for another month, so there’s no rush for me to get back to Raleigh. Especially since you aren’t finished with your work here yet.”

“It’s the one place I hadn’t photographed,” she said, motioning to the interior. “Seems fitting I should leave it for last, I suppose.” She looked at Cooper, sure he would make the connection, but his expression remained doubtful. “It was the last place I was that night too.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk about that night anymore,” he said.

Lexi nodded, regret washing over her. She’d accused him of trying to match Hudson’s gift, of using the past to reach her, when she’d been the one to keep them bound to Hudson’s memory, not Cooper. She was the one always making comparisons between the two brothers, the one who refused to detach herself from the ghosts of this house, this property. It was Cooper who’d tried to push them forward, to build something outside of the past. The roadblocks keeping her and Cooper apart had been of her own construction.

Now maybe she had a chance to fix it. Could she?

Would he let her try?

“I’m sorry about your darkroom,” Cooper said. “All the equipment’s still up there. The Realtor insisted we move it, so I packed it all up in one of the closets. I hope you’ll take everything.”

“I’ll have to,” she said, holding up her camera with a small smile, “if I ever want to see these shots.”

“How’s the new house?” he asked.

“It’s getting there.”

“Your mom said you have a few more jobs lined up. A lighthouse—and something else in Brewster, was it?”

“The Nickerson mansion,” Lexi said, giving him a quizzical look. “You went to see my mother?”

“She came to see me, actually.” Cooper met Lexi’s expectant gaze. “She wants me to finish the story. She wants me to publish it.”

“She does?”

He nodded. “What about you?”

“It’s not up to me.”

“It’s your story too,” he said.

Was it? She wasn’t sure anymore. Maybe it was; maybe it wasn’t. Or maybe that was all it was: a story in the past. It was the stories of the future that moved her now.

“I thought you didn’t like to change your work space in the middle of a book,” she said.

Cooper shrugged, circling a stack of boxed tiles. “I thought a new setting might do me some good,” he said, catching her gaze and holding it. “Might do a lot of things some good.”

She lowered her eyes to her camera. “I saw Hudson,” she said.

“He told me.”

“Did he also tell you what I said about you being right?”

Cooper came toward her, near enough that Lexi could smell the warmth of his skin, the piney scent that brought back memories of him in bed, above her, inside her, with startling speed.

“I don’t want to lose this,” she said. “I don’t want to lose
you
.”

“Then don’t.” Cooper took the camera from her hands and set it down on the tiles. He searched her face.“I’m not saying it won’t be complicated. All I know is that my father and my brother were too weak to fight for what they wanted. . . .” He lifted his hand to the silver teardrop of her earring and rolled it suggestively between his index finger and thumb. “I’m not.”

Lexi closed her eyes, exhaling as his knuckles drifted down her throat.

“This must be the part where you say we have to start writing the story to find out how far it will go, isn’t it?” she whispered.

“No,” Cooper said, reaching back to close the guest house door. “This is the part where we don’t have to say anything at all.”

With this book, my third, I understand more than ever how much of a collaborative effort publishing a novel truly is—and I am so fortunate to have the talents and kindness of so many people to partner with on this journey. My wonderful editor at New American Library, Danielle Perez, who always sees the best route on my characters’ maps even when I feel lost on the road; thanks as well to Heidi Richter, Jessica Butler, Kayleigh Clark, Christina Brower, and Tiffany Yates Martin. To Fletcher and Company, and my phenomenal agent, Rebecca Gradinger, whose guidance remains a gift to me, and to Sylvie Greenberg for all of her help. My thanks to dear friend, gifted photographer and Cape resident, Roe Osborn, for answering all of my photography questions as well as giving me wonderful insight into Cape life. Any errors describing either subject are entirely my own.

To James Schroeder and his beautiful family, who brought me to the Vineyard and his aunt’s “cottage” that summer—and inadvertently brought me to this novel. Thank you, Jimmy.

To talented authors and treasured friends, Marybeth Whalen and Kim Wright, who invited me to be a part of their writing circle when I first moved to North Carolina. Here’s to sharing many more Eureka moments together, ladies—in writing and in life.

To the readers who have given their precious time to my books and buoyed me with their kind words. It means the world. I can’t wait to share more stories with you.

To Ian, Evie and Murray, who are my everything, and who write the story of my heart every minute of every day. Who would have thought a writer could say there aren’t words to express how much I love you?

Courtesy of the author

A native New Englander who was raised in Maine,
Erika Marks
has worked as an illustrator, an art director, a cake decorator, and a carpenter. She currently lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband and their two daughters. This is her third novel.

The Architecture of Love: Writing
The Guest House

After my freshman year at Hampshire College in my native New England, I had the chance to spend my summer at a classic shingle-style “cottage” on Martha’s Vineyard. It was old and rambling, yet still steeped in a rustic elegance, and I was smitten with the home from the first moment I came down the driveway and saw it rise up behind a wall of pines. With its shingled mountain range of gables and dormers, it was everything I had imagined a traditional cottage of that era to be. It had been in my friend’s family for generations, though it had seen fewer and fewer summer guests in the past few years. And although my time there was far from languishing (I worked six days a week at the town bakery), the romance of the house’s past was never lost on me. I loved to walk its halls and imagine the socializing that had gone on there in its heyday, the various dramas that had played out in its many rooms or in even more secretive spots outdoors. And it was that summer—and subsequent visits to Cape Cod in the years after—that inspired me to write
The Guest House
.

As in my first novel,
Little Gale Gumbo
, and even in my second,
The Mermaid Collector
, I am constantly fascinated by the things that unite us as people, no matter our cultural differences. For the characters in
The Guest House
, the differences are immediately apparent. One family is local; the other family is from away (“wash-ashores”). One family is Northerners; the other is Southerners. And yet, for all of their differences, the cottage enchants them equally. They walk its halls, its lawn, marvel at its rooms and its scale, savor its beaches and expansive piazza—all of them drawn by the magic of its decadent setting.

Yet even though its decor and design are decidedly modest in comparison to the more ostentatious summer cottages elsewhere on the coast (e.g., the Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island), the house still manages to reinforce the class distinctions among its visitors. Several times in the novel, even when the main house is virtually empty, Lexi Wright can’t help but be reminded of the struggle she felt to be truly included in the Mosses’ social sphere. Just standing at the top of the stairs at the juncture of the servants’ wing and the family wing reminds her of the times Hudson Moss might have led her physically (and symbolically) into his world, but chose to steer her away from his family’s space and to the rooms of the servants’ side instead. Even though the rooms are no longer used to house a summer staff, their function remains clear.

The Moss guest house is an extension of that simultaneous unification and division of the two families’ social standing—albeit on a smaller scale. Like the main house, the guest house is built to host visitors, yet nearly all of the story’s main characters face a defining moment in the smaller cottage—and it is, of course, the guest house that brings everyone back together again in the present story, as Jim points out to Edie.

I also wanted to use the house to explore how we process moving forward in our lives. At the novel’s end, it is clear that the cottage (and the guest house) will be put up for sale, and doing so will finally cut the ties that have joined the two families for several generations. While it is a sad possibility, it will bring about an opportunity for everyone to move on from the tumultuous past they experienced on the property, signaling a chance for change—most specifically for budding lovers Lexi and Cooper to start fresh and give their attraction the new beginning they need to see whether—as Cooper says about writing—“it’s going to go the distance.”

Like the main house in
The Guest House
, the shingle-style “cottage” of my summer memory was eventually sold and torn down to make room for new construction, and the news of its demise—though many years after my time there—crushed me. I can only imagine how the family who’d grown up there felt, men and women whose hopes and dreams, loves and losses may have lingered in the walls like fireplace smoke, or clung to the sheets of unmade beds like the scent of sea air, full of secrets, and the promise of summers to come.