The bridge at Sagamore was closed when the Graingers arrived in the summer of 1956.
It was a prophetic moment for twelve-year-old Lily, who, while apparently ‘safe from communists and the Pope’, finds her family suddenly adrift.
The budding musician, encamped with her family on a Cape Cod salt pond that summer, longs to capture her mother Lydia’s love and attention.
But Lydia Grainger is distracted, distressed by the family’s financial uncertainties and by the often confrontational rivalry between Lily’s father, music-loving Weston, and his brash brother, George.
In her struggle to help relieve the rancor in her parents’ marriage, Lily draws on her weekly cello lessons as well as her love for a pre-Kennedy Cape Cod infused with beach plums, cormorants, stranded pilot whales, a decommissioned Liberty Ship, and the shipwreck of the Andrea Doria.
As Lily discovers the small ways in which people try to rescue each other, she must find the courage to venture beyond the relative safety of her salt pond to taste the larger world of the open ocean.