That Old Cape Magic

newcomers. (At the wheel of his convertible, some forty-five years in the future, Griffin could feel himself smile at the sight of them.)
    “Wonderful,” his mother said, no doubt envisioning an army of bratty kids, every cottage swarming with them. “Just great.”
    “Mary, it’ll be fine,” Griffin’s father said. “Next year we’ll do better. They never freeze salaries two years in a row.”
    “I like it,” Griffin piped up from the backseat, sensing his father needed an ally. There was a tiny window under the eaves on the cottage’s second floor, and he’d intuited correctly that this room would be his.
    His mother stared straight ahead, incredulous. “We’re paying
how
much?”
    “It’ll be fine,” his father repeated, “unless you
prefer
to be miserable.”
    “It’s like an oven up here,” she remarked when they shouldered open the door to the tiny room under the eaves. Not much bigger than a closet, it was only about five feet in height from floor to peak. His father, no giant, had to duck when he entered. “This is the kids’ room, all right,” he said when Griffin’s mother, shaking her head in disgust, went back downstairs. Three cots with thin, stained mattresses crowded the room, two along opposite walls, the third folded up behind the door. His father threw open the tiny window, and together he and Griffin repositioned one of the cots directly beneath it to catch any stray breezes. At the base of one wall, where the A formed by the roof was at its widest point, were built-in storage compartments.
    “Wanna bet that’s where they keep the games?” his father said, pulling on the stuck door. His parents never brought games of their own on vacation, preferring to see what each new rental provided, though they were usually very old board games with pieces missing, unplayable. When the door didn’t budge, he yanked it harder. This time it opened and his father yelped, pulling his hand back fast, as if from a fire, and then made the mistake of straightening up, the crown of his head smacking the low roof beam. “Ow!” he said, rubbing it with both hands. Whenever he injured himself, he looked betrayed, as if somebody else, maybe Griffin, was responsible. He complained of having what he termed a “low threshold of physical discomfort,” what Griffin’s mother termed “being a big baby.” He came over now, bending low so Griffin could examine his scalp. “Is the skin broken?”
    “Sort of,” Griffin said. An impressive knot was rising where his father’s hair was thinnest. The skin was abraded, a dozen tiny spots of blood just starting to form.
    “Bleeding?”
    “Just a little.”
    Now his father was examining his injured thumb, where a darksplinter had been driven under the skin. “This vacation isn’t starting very well, is it?”
    Griffin admitted it wasn’t.
    “Your mother …,” he began, but broke off in order to chew at the splinter.
    Griffin waited.
    “Damn,” he said, showing Griffin this wound, too. “It’s
in
there.” The thick end of the splinter was close to the surface, the slender end, a mere shadow, much deeper.
    “What about Mom?”
    “Right now she’s on the warpath, but she’ll calm down.” He seemed to be talking to himself more than to Griffin. “She just needs …” He let his voice trail off again, as if to admit that he had no idea, really, what his wife needed, then went back to gnawing on his thumb.
    They could hear her opening and closing kitchen cabinets downstairs. “No wineglasses,” she muttered. “Not a single goddamn wineglass.” Then, calling up: “Bill! You’re
not
going to believe this.”
    “Gotta go,” his father said, grinning sheepishly, and headed downstairs.
    There was no chest of drawers in the room, so Griffin laid out his week’s worth of vacation clothes on the extra cot and shoved his suitcase under it. When he thought he heard scurrying in the shadows of the storage cabinet, he quickly shut the door with his foot. Kneeling on the bed, he peered outside. Even with the window open, the room was still stifling hot, with barely enough breeze to flutter the curtain. On the sill a big green fly, dazed, was buzzing around on its back. It had been trapped between the window and the screen, but now, with the window up, its freedom was at hand. Its mind, though, if it had one, hadn’t adjusted, the old hopeless reality holding sway. Griffin watched the stupid thing spin and buzz until he heard a door open