That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (read more books .txt) 📕

“I don’t even know if you ever wanted to sell the place,” she began.

“Actually, I’ve been giving it quite a bit of thought lately,” Dr. Levy replied. “I think—wait, hang on.” Diana waited. A few seconds later, Dr. Levy, sounding sheepish, said, “I had to close my office door before anyone hears me saying anything this woo-woo. But here’s the truth: I think that people and things, and, maybe, sometimes houses, come into our lives for a reason. That cottage mattered a lot to my parents, and it was important to me when I was a young woman. Now, though, I think that you’re the one who’s meant to be its caretaker. Well, you and Michael.”

Dr. Levy accepted their offer. Michael gave up the lease on his apartment in Wellfleet and moved in with his clothes, his collection of spy novels, and his television set. Diana worried that the cottage would feel cramped and claustrophobic, as the novelty of cohabitation wore off, but as soon as the weather was warm Michael started work on an addition, a living room with a second loft bedroom above it. In the warm months, they would use the deck, with its firepit and picnic table and the outdoor shower; in the winter, when it got dark early, they were happy to build a fire and huddle indoors, on the couch or in bed, tucked up underneath the eaves with Willa snoozing at their feet.

Michael replaced the creaky, drafty windows with double-hung, weatherproof ones that glided up and down at the touch of a finger and fit snugly in their frames. The next year, Michael dug up a patch of sandy earth and had a friend at a landscaping company haul in a truckload of soil, to make Diana a garden. That summer, they had a garden, and grew tomatoes and peppers and eggplants and corn.

Diana learned to bake, and Michael took up birding. They both became expert kayakers and proficient surf casters, standing on the beach in their waders, watching the horizon for signs. When they spotted clouds of birds massing, and the water roiling beneath them, they’d cast their lines and, more often than not, pull in a fish or two.

Michael bought a smoker, which he set on the corner of the deck and would use to smoke sea bass and make bluefish pâté. Diana began selling her embellished oyster shells to shops in Eastham and Orleans, and, just as Michael had predicted, when she raised the price, her sales first doubled, then tripled. For her birthday, Michael signed her up for watercolor lessons at the Castle Hill Center for the Arts, and Diana added painting to her hobbies. That summer, she displayed a few paintings at the farmers’ market, next to her shells, and watched, surprised, as the summer people bought them. The year after that, she was showing her watercolors at local art fairs, and as the new century began, a gallery in Provincetown took her on. Diana Carmody is a self-taught artist whose work explores the contradictions in nature and in the landscapes of the Outer Cape, where she makes her home. In still lifes and seascapes, Carmody forces the viewer to consider the spaces between the tranquility of sea and sky, the beauty of dunes and marsh grass, and the potent violence of wind and rain, thunder and lightning, the gallery’s brochure about her said. In her work, nature is restless, motion is constant, the threat of danger implicit in the churn of the waves or a darkening sky or an animal lurking at the border. Her work invites the viewer to consider her own expectations about safety and beauty. (“I don’t know what it means, exactly,” Diana confided to Michael, who’d replied, “It means they can charge five thousand dollars.”)

Eventually, Diana found a therapist, one of Reese’s friends, a woman named Hazel with short white hair and a thoughtful, quiet manner, who specialized in treating survivors of sexual assault. She taught Diana techniques for staying grounded, how to distinguish between her “emotion mind” and her “wise mind.” In her soothing, melodic voice, Hazel would point out when Diana was catastrophizing or personalizing, and urge her to reframe her thoughts, to look for benign interpretations, and consider the facts in evidence when Diana talked about feeling empty or worthless or inconsequential, or on the days when she woke up so full of rage it was all she could do not to scream at everyone she saw.

Michael’s sister, Kate, and her husband, Devin, eventually had three children, two boys and a girl. Diana’s sister Julia’s daughters were in elementary school, and Kara’s son and daughter were seven and eight years old when Kate and her husband had their third (and, Kate swore, their final) baby. Diana watched her sister nurse the latest addition, a girl they’d named Addison. She watched Michael take the baby, his arms engulfing the blanket-wrapped bundle until it all but disappeared, his smile crinkling his cheeks and turning his eyes into slits, and waited to see if it would hurt. She probed her feelings the way she’d sometimes poke at a bruise, testing to see how it felt. The babies, she found, didn’t break her heart the way she worried they would, and toddlers were exhausting. It was not until years later that she had cause to question her choices.

“I love it here,” her fourteen-year-old niece Sunny said, her voice dreamy, when she and her sister came to stay for a long weekend while Diana’s sister Julia and her husband celebrated their twentieth anniversary. “Aunt Diana, will you show us how to do the oyster shells?” Sunny asked, as Sasha, her twelve-year-old sister, stood slightly behind her, awaiting Diana’s answer. Sunny and Sasha both had dark hair and dark eyes, but Sasha was a petite girl who moved in lightning-quick darts, like a lizard, while Sunny was taller, good-natured and tranquil, with hair that fell in ringlets