Dear James,

My professors always said that when someone dies, patients always want to talk, even years later. I know you’re not my patient but my friend, and maybe not even a friend anymore with all the years that have gone by. But I want to say that when I lost my father, I realized how hard it must have been for you to lose yourmother. I’m incredibly sorry for your loss, but I’m sorrier that I didn’t write.

Your summer friend,

Betsy

With a hint of pink in the sky, Betsy untied the ropes and hopped on boardSenatorialto start the motor and find the wind. Right as she turned the wheel to pull the sailboat away from the dock, Betsy heard her name. She rose from the leather-style captain’s seat. She’d been home nearly a week and a half, and this was the first time she was taking the boat out. They’d watch the fireworks from the lawn later.

“What is it?” Betsy yelled back, spotting Aggie coming down the dock slats in her sweat shorts. The sailboat rocked in another boat’s wake while Aggie breathlessly rearranged her elastic headband from her position at the dock. “Mom offered to stay with the kids. Can I come with?”

Betsy glanced back at the house, noticing for the first time that the awning over the patio had discolored so much in the sun that the stripes were barely visible. “Yes, come.” Betsy shielded her eyes. “I’m only going to round the point, but it will be beautiful.”

The boat puttered away from the dock, and Aggie fell into the seat beside her, within her a bouncing energy that reminded Betsy of a golden retriever. Letting out the jib, waiting for the sail to pull taut and catch the wind, Betsy killed the motor. The lap of the water, the world turning in on itself. That’s how sailing could feel, like truth and beauty all at once.

“I always loved watching the house get smaller, didn’t you?” Aggie said, the boat gliding deeper into the harbor. “Like we could do anything once we got out of range.”

The houses were bigger now than when she was a child. New money from Boston and Washington had trickled in, everyone coming to claim their piece of the reedy green shores, the summer peoplemorphing into something unrecognizable, something fancier and well-oiled. Families with deep tans and color-coordinated outfits. Young fathers who parked big, shiny sailboats at the dock like a Kennedy-esque accessory, sometimes never even moving them. Even the grass at the golf course seemed lusher. Over the last few years, restaurants had opened one by one, each with a sixteen-dollar steamed lobster on the menu. Some of the locals, who had always bemoaned the price of housing, couldn’t even afford to buy a house here at all.

Aggie must have spotted James’s house at the far end of the harbor, her mind also turning back in time, because she stared at it, saying, “How is James?”

Betsy steered the boat toward his house. “Fine. He’s teaching at Berkeley.”

“I never really understood why Dad disliked him so much.” Aggie’s face glowed in the pink of the setting sun. “He was just a kid.”

There was a light on in James’s living room, and Betsy wondered if he was reading. As a kid, he could spend an entire day buried in a book. One summer when they were about fifteen, he’d begged her to read his favorite novel,David Copperfieldby Dickens. When she finished, the two of them snuggled up in a lounge chair under a blanket to discuss their favorite lines. Why did she still remember his:I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world. It had struck her even then how much he’d wanted to be loved. How much she wanted to be the one to love him.

“I asked Dad about James when we were out on the boat. I didn’t get why he wouldn’t let me go to a movie with him for his sixteenth birthday. He didn’t answer at first, it was one of those windy days where you had to really pay attention to what the boat was doing, but finally, he said, ‘There are some people, Betsy, whose problems are bigger than you’ll ever need to understand. The Sundays are one of them.’?”

“That’s ridiculous. James was so different from his mother,” Aggie said.

“Of course he was. But I think Dad believed James wouldn’t leave the island, and he thought it would hold me back. I mean, his mother was in bad shape.”

A gust of wind shifted the boom, both sisters ducking their heads. Once the wind was tight against the sail, Betsy relaxed again, the boat gliding along the sea. Aggie pointed her toes out, then flexed her feet, stretching with a yawn. “I always felt sorry for James, hanging around our house all the time like he had nowhere else to go.”

Betsy elbowed her. “Maybe he just liked me, Ag. Could that be it?”

“Of course he liked you, but I’m talking about when you were little.”

“When I was little, I thought his mother was so sad, but after a year studying psychology, I can tell you she was clinically depressed and an alcoholic. She needed help,” Betsy said.

The lighthouse was in view now, and Betsy perked up at the sight of the inlet curving through the marsh at low tide, the tall grasses shining in the sunlight, the familiar natural world the anchor she could moor to.

“Ready?” Betsy asked Aggie, who nodded. She tacked, the sails shifting in the opposite direction. They ducked once more. As the sailboat drew closer to the old Sunday property, Betsy could see that the back of his family’s small cottage had been freshly painted. There was a screened-in porch with a table positioned inside. The large oak tree stood at one end of the yard.

“I feel like I haven’t slept in months,” Aggie said. “I swear if Mikey came first, I may not have had another.”

Betsy turned the wheel away from her old friend’s house. “Henry wouldn’t have let you have just one. He wanted a girl too.”

“Well, he got them. He got everything he wanted, didn’t he?”

Betsy studied her sister’s face. “What’s wrong, Aggie?”

Aggie fiddled with the hem of her skirt. “Oh, it’s complicated. You’ll see when you have a baby someday. Marriage just creates this uneven playing field. I couldn’t even think about running another marathon—even with me feeding the baby bottled formula. I can barely find timeor energy. I play tennis, sure, but my body can’t do what it used to. Mom says I should just start training again, but it’s not like she offers to watch the kids so I can get out.”

“If Mom could hear you right now, she’d say stop building roadblocks for yourself. Get a sitter. Mom would say, ‘Aggie—’?”

“?‘You’re only stopping yourself.’ I know,” Aggie sighed, knowing that their mother somehow pulled off whatever she wanted, and she always had.