Chapter Two - Trespass

Spruce Street - 6:05 AM

The Cole house on Spruce Street woke up the way it had woken up every summer morning of Madison Cole’s life: with her father’s boots on the stairs at six, the radio in the kitchen at five past, and the smell of coffee and toast coming up through the floor of her bedroom.

She lay in bed for one more minute, looking at the ceiling. It still had the glow-in-the-dark stars on it that she had stuck there when she was eight. Her mother kept saying she would paint over them. Her mother had been saying that for fourteen years.

Maddie was twenty-two. She had three weeks of summer behind her and ten more in front of her, and then her final year at university, and then the rest of her life. She was head of student government. She was captain of the cheer squad. She had a contract with a modelling agency in Boston that sent her to shoots twice a month during term, and an offer from a bigger one in New York waiting for an answer, and a boyfriend called Tyler who played lacrosse and texted her every night at eleven to say goodnight with three heart emojis, always three, never two and never four. She had a life that ran like a machine, because she ran it like one.

And every summer, for ten weeks, she came home to Wexley Harbor and her father’s boots on the stairs, and the machine stopped, and she did not know what to do with herself.

So she trained.

She got up, pulled on a red bikini, pulled a grey university hoodie and a pair of running shorts on top of it, tied her long dark hair up in a high ponytail, and went down to the kitchen.

Her father was at the table with the coffee pot and the Portland paper. Tom Cole was fifty-eight, six foot three and broad as a door, with grey hair cut short and a face like the side of a cliff. He had been the chief of police in Wexley Harbor for sixteen years and a deputy for twenty before that, and he had arrested half the men in town at least once, usually for something they had done on a Saturday night, and most of them still liked him.

‘Morning, Bug,’ he said, without looking up.

‘Dad. I am twenty-two. You cannot call me Bug.’

‘Watch me.’ He turned a page. ‘Running?’

‘Running.’

‘Where?’

‘The beach. North.’

Now he looked up. ‘How far north?’

‘Just north.’ She took a banana from the bowl on the counter. ‘Past the rocks.’

Tom Cole looked at his daughter over the top of the paper with the eyes that had looked at a great many people who were not telling him everything. Then he looked back at the paper.

‘That’s Ashby’s beach,’ he said.

‘Is it?’

‘You know it is. He has a sign up.’

‘I can’t read signs,’ said Maddie. ‘I’m a cheerleader.’

Her father did not laugh. That was strange. Her father always laughed at that one. He sat there with the paper and his coffee and his face had closed up like a door, and for a moment there was a silence in the kitchen that she did not understand.

‘Stay off his beach, Madison,’ he said.

He only called her Madison when he meant it.

‘Why? He’s like, sixty. He’s a writer. What’s he going to do, read at me?’

‘Stay off his beach,’ said her father, and went back to the paper, and that was all.

The Kitchen Door

Her mother came down at twenty past six, already dressed for work, in a pale green linen dress and gold earrings, with her dark hair blow-dried and her make-up done, carrying her phone in one hand and a folder of house listings in the other. Diane Cole was fifty-two and the most successful real estate agent in four counties, and she looked it. People said Maddie looked just like her. Maddie could not see it. Her mother was elegant. Maddie was tall.

‘You’re going out like that?’ said Diane, looking at the hoodie.

‘Running, Mom.’

‘Put on sunscreen. You’ll burn.’

‘I never burn.’

‘Everybody burns, sweetheart.’ Diane poured herself coffee, standing up, reading something on her phone. ‘Kristen is coming for lunch. And your brother says he’ll come for dinner if the boat’s in. Will you be home?’

‘Probably.’

‘Did you finish the book I gave you?’

Maddie did not answer. Her mother had given her a novel at the beginning of the summer, a thick hardback with a dark blue cover and the author’s name across the top in letters bigger than the title. Edward Ashby. The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife. Her mother had a whole shelf of them in the living room, all signed, all first editions, all bought at signings in Boston and Portland over thirty years. She ran the town book club. She talked about him the way other women talked about actors.

‘Not yet,’ said Maddie.

‘You haven’t even started it.’

‘I’ll start it, Mom.’

‘It’s the best thing he ever wrote,’ said Diane, and for a second her voice was different, softer, as if she were talking about something else entirely. Then she looked at her phone again and was herself. ‘I’ve written to him, you know. To ask him to come and talk to the Readers’ Circle. He never answers anybody, but you never know.’

At the table, Tom Cole turned another page of the newspaper, very slowly, without a word.

Maddie looked from one of her parents to the other. Then she grabbed her water bottle and went out through the kitchen door into the morning.

The Run

It was three miles from the bottom of Spruce Street to the rocks at Cutter’s Point.

At low tide she ran it along the beach, the whole way, on the hard wet sand at the edge of the water. At high tide the rocks at the end of the town beach cut you off, and you had to go up onto the coast road and along the top of the cliffs and down a steep little path through the grass on the other side. She preferred the beach. The tide that morning was low and still going out, and the sand was flat and firm and shining, and she ran.

She loved the run. It was the only part of the day when nobody wanted anything from her. Not her parents, not Tyler, not the squad, not the student government, not the agency in Boston with their emails about her skin and her weight and her availability. Just the sand and the sea and her breath and the slap of her feet. Three miles, twenty-two minutes. She knew every rock.

She came round the rocks at the end of the town beach and onto the long empty curve of Cutter’s Point at six minutes to seven, and slowed, and pulled off the hoodie and the shorts as she walked, and stuffed them in the little backpack she carried, and stood on the sand in the red bikini with the cold air on her skin.

And looked up.

The house was there, as it always was, white on the top of the dune, with its blue shutters and its long porch and its wooden staircase coming down through the grass to the sign. And on the roof, at the white railing, as he had been for eleven mornings in a row, a man.

She could not see him well. He was too far away. A tall figure, grey hair, a grey sweater, a cup in his hand. Edward Ashby, the most famous writer in America, standing on his roof drinking coffee and looking at the sea.

Except that he was not looking at the sea.

She had noticed it on the third morning. She had been in the middle of her kicks, and she had glanced up at the house, the way you do, and he had been there, on the roof, and he had been looking down at the beach. At her. And when she looked up, he had turned away very quickly to the sea.

On the fifth morning he had been there again. On the seventh. Every morning. Standing up there by something big and covered, like a lamp, or a barbecue, she could not tell. Every morning when she looked up, he was looking down, and then he was not.

On the ninth morning she had stood and looked straight up at him for half a minute, just to see what he would do, and he had vanished from the railing altogether.

She had laughed out loud.

She did not know what she thought about it. She knew what her friends would say. Jess, her roommate, would say that was creepy, that he was old, that she should go somewhere else. And she supposed it was a little creepy. But it did not feel creepy. It felt like a game. A famous old man on his roof, pretending to drink his coffee, pretending not to look. It was funny. It was a little flattering. It was the most interesting thing that had happened to her all summer.

So that morning, the twelfth morning, she did not run past the house to do her routine. She walked up the beach to the bottom of his staircase, to the white post with the sign. She stood beside it with her hands on her hips. She looked up at the roof.

He was there.

She smiled, and waved, very slowly.

Then she walked past the sign, dropped her towel on his sand, and walked into the sea.

The Water

It was freezing. It was always freezing. Fifty-four degrees, her father had said on the radio report that morning, and it felt like forty. It went into her like knives, and she gasped and swore and dived under the first wave anyway and came up with her heart going like a drum and every inch of her skin on fire. Then she swam.

She swam out past the small waves to the rocks at the northern end, the dark low line of them running out into the sea below his house, and climbed out onto the biggest, flattest one, and sat on it, dripping and shivering and grinning, with her knees pulled up and her arms around them.

It was his rock. She had seen him swim out to it from her end of the beach, once, early, before she started her routine. A grey head in the water, going out and back, very fast and very straight for an old man.

She sat there on his rock with the sea running off her and waited to see what he would do.

It took four minutes.

The door onto the porch opened, and he came out, and came down the wooden staircase. Not hurrying. He wore the same grey sweater and old canvas trousers, and his feet were bare, and he still had the coffee cup in his hand. He came down the stairs, past his sign, across the dry sand and down to the wet sand, and stopped at the edge of the water, directly opposite her rock, about twenty metres away.

He was taller than she had thought. As tall as her father. Not heavy like her father, but broad in the shoulders and straight in the back, with grey hair cut short and a lean, lined, brown face. He looked like a man who spent a lot of time outside. He did not look sixty. He looked like somebody who had decided a long time ago that he was not going to look sixty, and had made that happen.

He looked at her across the water.

She looked back.

‘Miss,’ he said. His voice carried easily over the small sound of the waves, deep and dry and very polite. ‘You are trespassing. This is a private beach.’

‘Is it?’ said Maddie.

‘There is a sign.’

‘I saw it.’ She looked up the beach at the white post. ‘It’s a very nice sign.’

‘It says no trespassing.’

‘It does say that,’ Maddie agreed.

He stood there with his coffee. She sat there on her rock. A wave came in and washed over his bare feet and he did not move.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you will go.’

‘In a minute,’ said Maddie. ‘I’m cold. I need to warm up.’

‘You are sitting on a rock in the sea.’

‘It’s a warm rock.’

Something happened at the corner of his mouth. It was not a smile. It was the place where a smile would have been, if he had let one out.

‘Come out of the water,’ he said. ‘Please.’

The Rocks

She swam back. She did it slowly, because she knew he was watching, and because the water was so cold that she could barely feel her arms. She swam to the shallows and stood up and walked out of the sea towards him, with the water running off her body and her bare feet sinking in the wet sand.

When she was three metres away, she stopped.

Up close, his eyes were very blue. And they did a thing she noticed, because she had been a model since she was eighteen and noticed what eyes did. They went down. All the way down, from her face to her feet, quickly, and back up again to her face, and stayed there, very firmly, as if they had been nailed in place.

Her hair had come out of its tie in the water. It hung down her back, long and heavy and soaked, all the way to her waist, dripping. She lifted both arms and gathered it in her hands, all of it, and twisted it into a thick rope, and wound the rope round and round on the top of her head, and took the hair tie off her wrist with her teeth and wrapped it round the knot to hold it, twice, three times, and tucked the ends in. She did it without thinking, the way she had done it ten thousand times, standing in front of him with her arms raised above her head and her back arched. With her arms up like that, her breasts lifted and pushed forward against the tiny red top. The wet fabric clung to them and had gone almost see-through, and her nipples stood out hard through it from the cold of the sea. Water ran from her hair down her throat, between her breasts, over her flat stomach and into the bikini bottoms. She did not try to cover herself. She did not seem to know she should. He knew he should look away, and he did not.

When she finished and looked at him, he was not looking at her face any more.

‘What?’ she said.

His eyes came back to her face. ‘Nothing.’

He looked at the sea. She smiled.

‘I’ve seen you,’ she said. ‘On your roof. Every morning. With your coffee.’

‘I drink my coffee on my roof every morning,’ said Edward Ashby. ‘That is what roofs are for.’

‘You watch me do my routine.’

‘I watch the sea.’ He turned the coffee cup in his hand. ‘I cannot say I have ever noticed you.’

She laughed. She could not help it. It was such an obvious lie, and he told it with such a straight face, standing in the shallows in his good grey sweater with his trousers wet to the knee, that it was the most charming thing anybody had said to her in months.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Sure. You never noticed me.’

‘Never.’

‘Eleven days. Seven o’clock. Never.’

‘I am an old man,’ said Edward. ‘My eyes are not good.’

‘Your eyes are fine.’ She folded her arms, which made her shiver, which made her lose some of the effect. ‘I’m Maddie.’

‘I know exactly who you are,’ he said.

‘You do?’

‘You are a young woman who is trespassing on my beach.’ He looked at her shivering arms. ‘And who is very cold. Sit down, before you fall down.’

She was shivering. The sea had been fifty-four degrees, and the morning air was not much warmer, and now that she was standing still the cold caught up with her all at once. Her whole body was covered in goosebumps, from her arms to her thighs. Her skin was pale gold and wet everywhere, beaded with drops of sea water that caught the low sun, and it had gone pink at her knees and her elbows and across her chest from the cold. Her lips had a faint blue tinge, and her teeth were starting to chatter, and she clamped her jaw shut to stop them, and glared at him as if it were his fault.

Her face was flushed and bare, with no make-up, with wet dark lashes stuck together in points and a few strands of hair plastered to her cheek, and she was more beautiful like that than in any photograph he had ever seen of anybody.

Her breasts were small and high and very firm in the tiny wet red top, and her nipples stood out hard through the thin fabric. Her stomach was flat and tight, with the muscles showing faintly under the wet skin, and it quivered every time she shivered. The red bikini bottoms were tiny and tied at each hip in a small wet bow, and the strings stuck to her skin.

And her legs went on forever: long and smooth and strong, with the hard muscle of a cheerleader in her thighs and her calves, wet and shining, goosebumps all the way down, her bare feet pressed together in the cold wet sand and her toes curling against it. She hugged her arms round herself and bounced a little on her toes to keep warm, and everything moved when she did.

Edward Ashby, who had written about women for thirty years, could not think of a single word.

An Hour

She sat on the flat dry rock above the tide line, at the foot of the dune, with her towel around her shoulders and nothing else over the red bikini. She had her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped round her shins, with her bare wet feet side by side on the warm stone and her toes curled over the edge of it, and her long legs were still shining and covered in goosebumps below the towel.

He sat on another rock two metres away, with his coffee, and they argued.

They argued about the sign. She said that beaches in Maine belonged to the public below the high water mark. He said that was true in most states but not in Maine, where a colonial law from 1641 still gave the owner the beach all the way down to the low water mark, and that she was sitting on his property in every possible sense. She said nobody cared about a law from 1641. He said the law did not need people to care about it; that was the whole point of laws. She said she would ask a lawyer. He said any lawyer in Maine would tell her the same thing, and charge her two hundred dollars for it.

They argued about the water. He said fifty-four degrees was warm. She said he was clearly crazy. He said he swam a mile in it every morning. She said she had seen him, and he swam like a seal, and that was not a compliment. He said it was the nicest thing anybody had said to him in four years.

They argued about books.

‘My mother,’ said Maddie, ‘has every single one of your books.’

He went quiet. ‘Does she?’

Half the women on this coast owned his books. He had signed thousands of them, in Portland and Boston and Bangor, for women who ran book clubs and talked about him like a rock star. He did not ask her mother’s name.

Afterwards he would wonder, more than once, whether he had not asked because he did not want to know. ‘It is not,’ said Edward. ‘It is the fourth best. What did you think of it?’

‘I haven’t read it.’

He turned and looked at her.

‘I haven’t read any of them,’ said Maddie. ‘Not one. Sorry. I do not really read novels. I read for school. I read business stuff. Marketing. I read the cheerleading rules, which are very long.’

Edward Ashby looked at her the way a man looks at somebody who has just told him that they have never seen the ocean. Then he looked out at the sea. Then he looked back at her.

‘You,’ he said slowly, ‘are sitting on my beach, on my rock, on my towel...’

‘It’s my towel.’

‘...on my rock, in my sea air, having trespassed on my private property, and you are telling me to my face that you have never read a single word I have written.’

‘Yes.’

‘Not one.’

‘Not one.’

He stared at her. And then the thing at the corner of his mouth gave up, and he laughed. A real laugh, short and surprised and a little rusty, as if he had not used it in some time. It changed his whole face. He looked about ten years younger.

‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘Do you know how long it has been since I talked to somebody who has not read my books?’

‘How long?’

‘Thirty years,’ said Edward.

She laughed too. And they sat there on the rocks at the foot of his dune, the famous old writer and the half-naked young woman, laughing, while the tide went out and the sun came up over the sea and the gulls walked along the wet sand in front of them.

They talked for an hour. About Maine, and the town, and the sea. About her university and her squad and student government, which he said sounded like a dictatorship, and she said it was, and she was the dictator. About his house, which she said was too big for one person, and he said it had fourteen rooms and he used three. About Boston, and modelling, and what it was like to stand under hot lights for nine hours while men told you to turn your head a quarter of an inch to the left.

He listened. He actually listened. He asked questions and waited for the answers. Most men she knew asked questions to fill the gap until it was their turn to talk again. He was not like that. When she talked, he looked at her face and listened as if what she was saying mattered.

At eight o’clock she noticed the time on her watch, and stood up, and pulled the towel off her shoulders.

‘I have to go. My sister’s coming for lunch and I said I’d help.’

He stood up too.

She stood in front of him in the red bikini with the knot of wet hair on top of her head, her skin dry now and warm from the sun, and looked up at him. She was five foot eleven and she was not used to looking up at men. She had to, a little, with him.

‘Thank you for the rock,’ she said. ‘And the law of 1641.’

‘You are welcome,’ said Edward. ‘Do not do it again.’

‘Same time tomorrow,’ said Maddie.

She did not pull her hoodie on. It was in her backpack, and she left it there. The red bikini had dried on her in the sun, and it was the smallest one she owned, and she knew it. She stood in front of him in it and let him have the whole of her in the ordinary morning light: the long legs, the flat stomach, the small high breasts in the tiny red top, the strings tied at her hips. She watched his eyes go down her, all the way down, and come back up to her face, and she did not help him by covering anything. She did not even move her hands.

He looked at her.

She picked up her backpack and slung it over one shoulder and walked past him, up the beach, past his sign. At the edge of the wet sand, before she started to run, she turned round and walked backwards for a few steps, grinning at him.

‘Try not to look, Mr Ashby,’ she said.

Then she turned and ran.

Front Street

She did not go straight home. She ran the three miles back along the beach, and up the steps at the end of the town beach onto Front Street, and walked along the harbour with her hoodie on and her heart still beating faster than the run explained.

At the top of the steps she stopped and took her phone out of the pocket of her hoodie and messaged Jess.

Met the writer. On his beach. He is a jerk. He is hot. Do not say anything.

Jess answered before she had put the phone away. Jess always answered before she had put the phone away.

SAY EVERYTHING. Which beach. What time. What were you wearing. I need the whole thing Mads.

Maddie laughed out loud on Front Street, and two old men outside the hardware store looked at her, and she put the phone back in her pocket and did not answer. She would tell Jess tonight. She told Jess everything. She always had.

Front Street at half past eight on a summer Monday was the whole town in one place. The fishing boats were already out, but the lobster pound was open, and the hardware store, and the bakery, and the gift shop with Wade Lindqvist’s lighthouse photographs in the window, and a hand-lettered card in the corner of the glass that said LONG LENSES FOR RENT, ASK INSIDE, and Wade himself on a ladder outside, hanging a new sign, who raised a hand to her as she passed. Father Dennis was walking his old golden dog along the harbour wall. A deputy’s cruiser went past slowly, and Josh Kimball leaned out of the window and grinned at her and said, ‘Looking good, Cole,’ and she gave him the finger, and he laughed and drove on.

And at the end of Front Street, where the harbour wall turned, the Harbor Diner, with the red EAT sign in the window.

Her grandmother was in her usual place on the high stool by the register, smoking. Maddie went in and kissed her on the cheek and stole a strip of bacon from a plate on the counter that was waiting to go out.

‘You smell like the sea,’ said Ruth Cole.

‘I’ve been in the sea, Gran.’

‘Which sea?’

Maddie laughed. ‘There’s only one sea.’

‘There’s a lot of beaches, though.’ The old woman looked at her through the smoke with her black bird’s eyes. ‘Which one?’

‘Just the beach.’

‘North?’

Maddie stopped chewing.

Ruth Cole took a long pull on her cigarette and blew it out slowly towards the ceiling. ‘Your brother says there’s a light on the roof up at Cutter’s Point,’ she said. ‘Every morning. Flashing. Like somebody up there with binoculars.’ She tapped ash into a saucer. ‘Your brother says it’s been going on since about the time you started running north.’

‘Gran...’

‘I said nothing,’ said Ruth. ‘I’m eighty-four. I never say anything. I sit on a stool.’ She looked at Maddie for a long moment, and something passed across the old lined face that Maddie had never seen there before. Not disapproval. Something more like worry. Or like remembering. ‘You be careful up there, Madison.’

‘Why does everybody keep saying that? Dad said the same thing this morning. He’s just a writer. He’s old. He’s, like, nice. He’s funny.’

‘Funny,’ said her grandmother.

‘He laughed when I told him I’d never read any of his books.’

Ruth Cole was quiet for a long time. Then she put her cigarette down in the saucer, and took Maddie’s hand in her small dry one, and held it, which she had not done since Maddie was a child.

‘They’re all funny, at the start,’ she said. ‘Go home. Your sister’s coming.’

Maddie went home.

Kristen came at noon, in a yellow sundress, three months pregnant and only just starting to show, carrying a bag of tomatoes from her garden and a list of complaints.

Kristen Cole-Pratt was twenty-eight, six years older than Maddie and six inches shorter, round-faced and freckled and pretty, with their father’s laugh and their mother’s love of other people’s business. She had married her high-school boyfriend, a quiet carpenter called Doug, and lived four streets away in a yellow house with a cat and a vegetable patch, and was so bored by the pregnancy that she talked about it all the time.

‘I am going to be the size of a lobster boat,’ she said, sitting down heavily on the back porch. ‘By Christmas they will need a crane to get me into the hospital. Doug has started calling me the Harbor Queen. Like a ferry. I am going to murder him.’ She looked at Maddie. ‘Why are you smiling?’

‘I’m not smiling.’

‘You are smiling at the tomatoes. Nobody smiles at tomatoes.’ Kristen narrowed her eyes. ‘Did Tyler call?’

‘Tyler texted. Three hearts. Like always.’

‘So not Tyler.’ Kristen leaned forward as far as her stomach would let her. ‘Who?’

‘Nobody, Kris. I went running. I had a swim. It was nice. The water was freezing.’

‘Your face is pink.’

‘It’s sunburn.’

‘You never burn,’ said Kristen. ‘You told Mom that this morning. I heard about it. Mom tells me everything.’ She picked up a tomato and turned it in her fingers, watching her little sister. ‘Fine. Keep your secrets. But you know I’ll find out. I always find out. I found out you backed Dad’s cruiser into the harbor wall before you even got home.’

‘That was one time and it was a very small dent.’

‘It cost four hundred dollars and Dad still does not know it was you,’ said Kristen, delighted, and their mother came out with the salad, and the conversation turned to cribs and paint colours and whether the baby would have Doug’s ears, and Maddie laughed in the right places and said the right things.

And all afternoon, all evening, through dinner with her brother home from the boat smelling of bait, through Tyler’s three hearts at eleven o’clock, she thought about a deep, dry voice saying, I cannot say I have ever noticed you, and about blue eyes going down, all the way down, and back up, and staying very firmly on her face.

At midnight she got up and went downstairs and took The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife off the coffee table, where her mother had left it for her with a bookmark on page one.

She took it to bed. She read the first page.

Then she read the second.

At three in the morning she was still reading, and she had to be on his beach in four hours.