When I was 14, my mother fell in love with a man named George. He was short and stout, bald except for a trim ridge of gray around the back. He wore thick glasses with clear plastic frames and had a pursed mouth that could burst into a delighted O that altered his whole face when you made him laugh. My mother and I moved out of our apartment across town and into his house the weekend of their wedding. On the little pad of paper in the kitchen, George left my mother cryptic messages before he went to work at a bank in Boston, which I could make no sense of but made her chuckle when she found them. In his station wagon, at the table, on our walks with the dog around the block after dinner, they delighted each other. The marriage had its complications, but she loved him and he loved her, and it was the first example of married love I got to see up close.
That first summer after the wedding, George brought us up to his house on an island off the coast of Rockland, Maine, for the last two weeks of August. I fell hard for Maine, for islands, and, the next year, on a rocky beach called Tar Tank, for a tall boy in a corduroy jacket named Matt. I loved this funny, awkward, adorable boy in secret, in silence, for the next seven summers.
Every year on the ferry going to the island I made sure to be on the side with the clearest view of his house. I strained for a glimpse of him on the porch, in the field of wildflowers, on the dock, in a dinghy. Was he here? Had he come? Sometimes we would only overlap a few days. One August we passed each other at the top of the ferry ramp: He was getting off and I was getting on. But even that hello and goodbye, his scratched voice, his quick humor, and a few new inches in height were enough to feed the flame for another year.
Once, the summer I turned 19, he ended up giving me a ride home from a party in an old VW bus. I was leaving the next day, and when he pulled up to my house, I stood halfway up in the van and bent over to give him a hug and a kiss on the cheek. The kiss landed closer to his mouth than I’d intended, at the edge of our lips. Our eyes met as we pulled away, but I was a coward and got out of the van.
The eighth summer of my crush—now I was 23—I went up to Maine in early July with my mother and George for the long weekend. I’d just come back to the States from France, where I’d been working for a year and a half as a nanny. A month earlier, in Paris, I’d met an American who was heading home for his brother’s college graduation from the same university that Matt, who had taken time off, would also be graduating from. I told the American guy Matt’s full name and asked him to say hi for me if he met him.
I hadn’t seen Matt for several summers, maybe not since the edge-of-the-lips kiss. But I knew he wouldn’t be here in early July. Still, on the boat I searched for him as we passed his house before docking.
The phone rang as soon as I walked into our house. He said he’d heard I was on the ferry. He was here. And he was calling me. He’d never called me before. He told me there was a party that night at a house down the road. I went to the party and he beelined it for me as soon as I came through the door. He fetched me a beer, sat next to me on the couch, and pummeled me with questions. I finally had his attention. I didn’t know why. But it felt so good. We played Nerf hoops and he walked me home. At my door he asked if he could come in, and on our window seat he asked if he could kiss me.
If you have ever waited eight years to kiss someone, you know how I felt. Like it wasn’t real, like it had to be yet another daydream. It was too early to speak of my long wait, but I must have, in some way, asked about the sudden attention. He told me that at his graduation some guy had sought him out and said, “Lily King gives you a big, fat kiss.”
I no longer remember that guy’s name, but without him this story might have ended right here.
I didn’t leave the island as I had planned that summer. I stayed. Matt had a job clearing land for new construction and I started waiting tables at the inn. We stayed into the fall, long after the rest of the summer people had gone. We had two empty houses to ourselves, and we went back and forth. Once I woke up in the middle of the night in his house and went downstairs and ate a bowl of cereal at his kitchen table. I remembered being in that house as a teenager, mooning over him from a corner of the room. I looked out at the thoroughfare, where the ferry had passed so many times with me on it, my heart pounding at the first sight of his white clapboards, his field of lupine and goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace. And here I am, I thought, in his kitchen in my underwear eating cereal.
In mid-September the temperature began to drop. Our houses had no heat. We made fires. He played “The Harder They Come” on the piano and sang in his beautiful scratchy voice and I secretly taped him. I have the cassette still. One morning we stepped outside and his field was white with snow. It was time to go.
I moved down to Cambridge and got a job at a bookstore. He went home to New York and landed a spot as a researcher on a boat going to South America. Before he left, he visited me in Cambridge. He built me a bed frame for my mattress, so high I needed a stepladder to get up onto it. Then he gave me a much bigger gift. He introduced me to two of his best friends: his college roommate Jos and Jos’s girlfriend Electa. The weekend with Matt was not like it was on the island. He was leaving and we weren’t talking about what we were to each other. I loved him, had always loved him, and didn’t know if his feelings had caught up. We’d gotten weird and quiet. Meeting these two friends loosened the pressure valve. I liked them immediately. I felt myself with them. They were nearly as funny as Matt, and had four years of stories to tell me about him, about his thespian phase when he only wore black turtlenecks, and how he or Jos would strike a pose just before the other came into their dorm room, upside down in a chair or suspended horizontally in air across the side walls of a dormer window. They adored him as much as I did, and our love for him bonded us quickly.
A day or two later, Electa stopped in at the bookstore and we talked and laughed at a display table I was rearranging until my manager shooed her away. We made a plan for dinner. Electa was outspoken and confident—the opposite of me—but from the moment we met there was never enough time for all we had to say to each other. We became, over that winter, really good friends. The next summer I was back on the island waiting tables. Matt had come back to the States and brought Jos and Electa up to Maine in August and the four of us spent a week together, frolicking. We made human pyramids. His mother took a video with a camcorder of us running naked from the house through the field down the ramp onto the dock and into the water.
After that we all scattered. I went to grad school in western New York, worked in Spain for two years, then went to California. Matt moved to DC then Vermont for law school. Electa and Jos broke up and she moved to Savannah then Connecticut, he to New York then Providence then to DC with Matt. Jos and Electa got back together and moved to Rhode Island.
Matt and I didn’t last. But Electa, Jos, and I did. We wrote letters and sent each other change-of-address cards. I drove once from Maine to Savannah. Electa visited me in Portola Valley in California. And somehow, when we were in our early 30s, the three of us landed back in Boston. I remember going over to Jos and Electa’s apartment for the first time—they were married now; I’d been too broke to fly out for their wedding—and feeling that ease all over again. It had been years since we made human pyramids, but the time evaporated. I had the exact same feeling around them that I always did, that I could be entirely myself. There are not a lot of people who make you feel that way.
For the first year they were my refuge, my only married friends. I would go over there and make them laugh with tales from the dating world. Finally I met a guy I wanted them to meet. I brought Tyler over and he and Electa realized they’d met before. A friend of hers had had a crush on him a few years earlier. Was that a sign? The dinner went well. There were more dinners. I married him. We had a baby. Jos and Electa had twins. Tyler and I had another. Our toddlers quickly became the kind of friends who screamed with happiness when they got in the same room together, then took off all their clothes.
Our kids grew up together: family dinners, holidays, sleepovers with games like Wink and Mafia, living room shows with crazy costumes and incomprehensible plots. We all grew up together. The four of us talked each other through the stages of parenting, job crises, the decline and loss of our parents.
Matt and I didn’t keep in close touch. I stopped going to the island. I heard about Matt mostly through Jos and Electa. He married a few years after I did, moved to Nashville, had a child. But every time I published a book, he would come to a reading. He’d sit in the front with a huge smile on his face the whole time.
It was Electa who told me he had cancer. The next time I went to Nashville, we had dinner after my reading. He described the rhythm of chemo, the terrible days, the increasingly better days, the dread of the next round. He drove me around the city, pulled into the parking lot of his son’s elementary school. He said he’d made a promise to himself that he would stay alive until his son turned 10. He kept that promise.
The last time I saw him was on the island. I had a reading up there, and afterward we talked till one in the morning on the porch of the inn where I was staying. George had died, my mother had died, and Matt was dying. But the whole island, its low tides and tall firs and thick fogs, smelled of their lives and of my great love for each of them that would never die. Stars streaked across the clear black sky. Matt and I spoke only of the past.
Jos called me the day Matt died. We told each other all the Matt stories we always told. We laughed and we wept on the phone together.
A few years ago, Jos, Electa, Tyler, and I bought a little piece of land in Maine. Matt will never see it. He’ll never stay in the house we built together on a peninsula 50 miles south of our island, and where I am writing this now, the goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace in full bloom. He’ll never know that when our kids, in their 20s now and living in different cities, were all here with us last weekend they made a pact that their future children would be friends from birth like they’ve been, then stayed up late playing Wink and Mafia while their parents fell asleep to the quick swells of their laughter. But Matt brought us all here. We are all together, we are all so close, because of my teenage infatuation on a rocky beach, because of my mother’s middle-aged love for a man named George. They are each a vital link in this long chain of love that connects us, that binds us tight.
Love changes form, but not strength. It rushes through our lives like a great river. It is unpredictable. It changes course. And all we can do, all we must do, is keep our heart open and let it come.
