Storyline:
Maggie must face her grief to help save what’s left of the Sweeney family.
Antagonist:
Maggie’s alcoholic oldest sibling, Danny, who passed away the year before.
Danny haunts Maggie, and her siblings, who can barely tolerate one another. In their 30’s, both their parents also gone, the siblings all have separate lives, away from painful memories, with Maggie, a married mother of two. When their aunt’s will requires them to spend a month together in her once loved beach house, Maggie’s filled with dread, because that was where Danny died, and she’d rather avoid even the thought of him. Deep down, Maggie blames Danny for their mother’s death, something she’s never admitted.
Yet from the start of their stay, Danny’s inescapable, in physical items they try desperately to avoid, memories they can’t forget, simmering anger they struggle to control. He represents everyone the family’s lost, the sadness and the longing, the bottled up resentments and regrets, the unspoken betrayals. He’s always present, showing them what to keep, discard and remember. Finally, Danny forces Maggie and her siblings to face their loss, the part they played in giving up on each other, so that in the end, they recapture what they meant to one another, long ago, and try to be a family once again.
Title:
What’s Left of Us
Genre/Comps:
Commercial Fiction
The Nest, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
Malibu Rising, Taylor Jenkins Reid
We are the Brennans, Tracey Lange
5. Hookline/logline
An uptight, married, mother of two, haunted by death and estranged from her siblings, faces her grief and inspires a true reconciliation during a month of forced togetherness in a once-loved home by the sea.
Inner conflict
Maggie’s inner turmoil, already significant, is heightened because she is also keeping a secret from her siblings. Her Aunt Kate's will includes a private addendum that tells Maggie if her siblings do not decide to keep the beach house at the end of their month together, Maggie will inherit it by herself. And she isn’t allowed to acknowledge that fact until the decision is made. At the start of the story, Maggie has no desire to step foot in the house and no intention to keep it, so the secret addendum is like a little gnat, momentarily uncomfortable, but easily dismissed. As the story progresses, she is surprised to find the idea more alluring, and the stakes of her silence are raised. Over time, the secret forces her to consider what she values most – a house she has grown to love again or the siblings she has given up on.
A secondary, related conflict for Maggie is her sibling relationships. Maggie has always been dominated by her older siblings, Bridget and Patrick, who are tough, direct and capable of being bullies. She’s insecure about “just being a mother,” and has never learned to stick up for herself in the sibling dynamic. Her relationship is particularly complicated with Caroline, her younger sister, going back to childhood. Caroline had major issues growing up, and those crises impacted Maggie. In the eyes of a teenager, everything revolved around Caroline, to the exclusion of Maggie, and those resentments and old roles remain. Maggie has never been able to see Caroline beyond that screwed up kid who wrecked Maggie’s (and her own) teenage years, and even now, she watches her movements with suspicion and concern. She fails to see that Caroline has grown into a wise, interesting and healthy woman. It isn’t until major confrontations and revelations that Maggie is finally able to bury the past and see her sister as she really is.
Setting
The story is set on Beach 127th street in Rockaway Beach, Queens, a wobbly finger of a peninsula jutting off Long Island between Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic. It’s a remote place. To get there you have to travel highways and neighborhoods, pass by sanctuaries and waterways, and finally, there’s the first glimpse of it over the expanse of the last bridge and somehow, regardless of how long the journey took, you have an immediate feeling it was worth it. Endless summer days, soft sand under foot, expansive, clean beaches, meditative, powerful surf, neighbors friendly in a New York kind of way, the smell of barbeques the only signal it’s time to leave the beach. A working class paradise.
Aunt Kate’s house is a ramshackle cottage three doors from the beach. It’s a house proud street otherwise, tidy and pretty, with flowerpots and American and Irish flags, tiny postage stamps of grass glistening from sprinklers, the sounds of basketballs and bikes, the near constant scratch of carts lugging beach paraphernalia up and down the block like camels crossing the desert. It’s 2016, a few years after Hurricane Sandy, which devastated the area, so there’s clear signs of renovation, with distant echoes of hammers and back-hos and everywhere, evidence of re-birth.
Except for, at first glance, Aunt Kate’s cottage. The small A frame appears neglected and abandoned, with no sign of life when Maggie first arrives. Sand obscures the windows, the siding sags, the wrought-iron fence surrounding the tiny front porch is chipped, even the Claddagh knocker on the front door is hanging off its hinge. The spit of grass in the back and front is brown and dead, the back porch splintered and falling apart, the outdoor table covered in cobwebs. It is as if everything transforms from vibrant color to a suffocating black and white the second you step onto the property.
Inside is a time capsule, sprinkled with modernity. The kitchen was redone following the Hurricane, and the basement, where the five Sweeney kids slept in single beds akin to their very own summer camp, has been obliterated into a cement storage room, like basements everywhere. The rest of the house is filled with history, some poignant – their Nanna’s things, Aunt Kate’s personal items, Maggie and her siblings’ creations – others devastating, even paralyzing – the couch in the living room, where Danny died, the room itself, dark, covered in a light sheen of sand, and upstairs on Aunt Kate’s floor, an array of Danny’s art.
The beach itself, like going back in time for Maggie, who sees herself in pockets of families playing at the shore, siblings diving into the surf to catch thrown footballs, mothers and daughters holding hands on long walks towards Brooklyn in the fading dusk light. The beauty of the place is breathtaking in its simplicity and power. Its impact on Maggie both uplifting and painful. It was here, on this beach as children, that Maggie and her siblings were a true family.
As the story progresses, the house is slowly transformed by Maggie and her siblings. The outside is cleaned, beautified and in some cases, redone, the inside packed up, stripped bare, and then slowly put back together, incorporating both old and new.
