The Beach House
By: Courtney Jenkins
The sliding door was opened allowing the crisp ocean breeze to fill the spacious beach home. Maggie inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with the salty sea and taking in all she could before the home was no longer hers. She had been neatly boxing up her memories since the sun crept over the horizon, and its current position high in the sky told her it was almost noon. She heard her sister Caroline humming in the spare bedroom where she was busily dusting the now empty shelves. Maggie rose from her crouched position on the floor, deciding she had earned herself a break. As she stood over the box she had been filling, the photo album that lay on top beckoned her to have a look inside.
“Caroline,” she called into the bedroom, “come take a break.”
Caroline swept into the room, wiping the perspiration off her brow, and sunk into the plush couch next to where Maggie stood.
“Phew,” she sighed. “You are quite the slave driver Mag. Have you ever dusted this place?”
“It’s a vacation home. I don’t think I should be required to clean when on vacation.” She slumped down next to her sister and placed the album, now opened to the first photo, onto her lap.
They both smiled inwardly as the image brought back those forgotten memories of years past. The grainy quality dated the photo back to the mid-eighties, but a lack of resolution was not enough to dull the brightness of their smiles. Taken on the beach thirty feet from where they sat, posed Caroline and her husband Jack and their daughter Emma- just a toddler at the time- wearing her inflatable floaties and sunbonnet. To their right stood Maggie, caught mid-laugh with her arm draped around her now ex-husband Alexander. He grinned handsomely and a large fish he caught off the dock was displayed proudly in his left hand.
As she stared, Maggie felt herself be consumed by a wave of bittersweet nostalgia. She quickly turned her gaze from the image before the emotion could register on her face, but the small gesture was still enough to elicit the “older sister look of concern” from Caroline.
“So how are you actually doing with all this?” she asked Maggie cautiously.
She spared her sister the knee-jerk response of “I’m fine” that she had grown accustomed to giving, and finally allowed herself to find the true response to that nagging question.
Within the past year, Maggie had turned fifty, filed for divorce, and lost her job–– drastic changes in her once comfortable life that had happened too quickly for her to fully process. Fifty was a milestone that Maggie welcomed, renewing within her that zest for life that had seemed to diminish in recent years. The divorce was a product of that diminishing zeal. She and Alexander still cared deeply for each other and maintained a stable friendship. But they had fallen out of love, and with no children to tie them together, they mutually agreed to go their separate ways.
Even the loss of her job was a blessing in disguise––twenty-five years in a thankless career as an editor of a Boston based financial magazine. While it filled her bank account, it was a far cry from her youthful dream of becoming a field reporter or local columnist and it dulled her spirit. When the magazine fell victim to the burgeoning economic crisis, Maggie was offered an alternative editing position with their online financial journal, but she politely declined––vowing instead to reclaim her life.
But divorces and demotions bring financial burdens, and she recently had to make the painful decision to sell her beloved beach home. This had proven to be the most painful consequence of the recent upheavals. The memories made there reverberated off the walls and filled the space with sentimental warmth, but Maggie knew that finding happiness in her future required closure of her past.
She pulled the photo from the cellophane album sleeve and slipped it into her purse on the floor in front of her. As she closed the album and placed it back into the box, she finally answered her sister with a smile:
“I’m fine.” This time she meant it.