The little house we lived in only had one bedroom so I had to be sure not to get up at night in case my parents were having sex on the couch, but I liked that the kitchen opened onto a small backyard. We sat outside as the sun went down and separated the flowers from the stems, rinsed them, and let the water run off into the grass. She ground the mint down into a paste for the pesto while I boiled the rice. She sautéed the greens while I tossed the salad. And then my dad came in. He slammed the front door, and then the bedroom door. My mother stopped and listened. The bedroom door slammed again.
He charged into the kitchen, almost frantic with confusion. “Where are all the boxes?”
“Boxes?”
I knew what he meant, and I knew I had to answer him, but it was hard to think. “Outside,” I coughed finally.
“Where?” He glanced out the window to the backyard.
“No, I mean, you told me to take the trash out last night.”
“You threw them away?”
“I thought you told me to.”
“So I tell you to do something, and you can’t use any common sense? Do you think moving boxes are free, that I have nothing but time and money to get new boxes?”
“I didn’t think . . .”
“That’s right, you didn’t. You just don’t think, do you? Huh?”
He’s pressing me for an answer but I don’t understand what I did wrong. I try to say yes, try to admit whatever he’s accusing me of, but my body feels totally solid and nothing comes. Looking back, I can see that it was probably the casper or tina talking, but I was only twelve or something, and it wouldn’t have helped to know that he was just on an aggressive high, because I couldn’t walk away from him, not when he was chewing me out and especially not when he was as lit as that.
Just as he growled, “Answer me when I ask you a question,” my mother handed me a stack of plates and forks and nudged me out of the line of fire to set the table for dinner. She made a plate for me, shiny fried mixed greens, a green dollop of rice coated in sharp mint pesto, and a frizzy green handful of leaves that passed as a salad in our house, and asked my father if she could speak to him outside.
He paused in the doorway, not quite finished with me. “Eat your dinner.” He slammed the kitchen door behind him and the bag with the dandelion blossoms spilled onto the floor. I thought maybe I should go and pick them up but I didn’t dare get out of my seat. To the muffled noise of my parents trying to keep their voices down outside, I conjured up unhelpful images of the lot the dandelions came from—the pile of dog shit with loads of flies and a couple of wasps swarming all over it, the stale yeasty smell from a pile of cans, the clump of weeds I stepped in that released a must of cat piss. I concentrated on the hum of their fight and breathed after every bite, determined not to be sick.
Soon their voices were harder to detect. I turned cautiously and saw them through the kitchen window. She was speaking, holding his face and looking into his eyes, then kissing his chin and his cheeks. He lowered his head onto her chest and she held him while he sobbed.
Dad stepped in the puddle of dandelions when they came in, but before he could get angry, my mother put her hand on his shoulder and whispered, “Never mind.” She cupped her hand, swept them back into the bag, and threw them away.
They joined me at the table, and we ate in silence. My mother told me to clean up, and she and my father gathered up the things we’d bothered to unpack, put them into trash bags, and loaded the car. We’d been driving for an hour or so before I asked my mother where we were going. She told me to hush.
* * *
On Swan, the houses get closer to each other the further inland you get, and soon it starts to look almost like a normal town. A small town, obnoxious in that cute New England way. Some of the houses are original from the time the island was first settled. The Wrinklies love to tell me stories about the island’s history, only it’s hard to follow because nothing really happened. It has something to do with the slave trade, and something to do with pirates, and after that it was a popular summer resort with vacation homes and a hotel, You know, like the Hamptons (right . . . ), until it fell out of fashion in the twenties.
Swan is one of ten islands in a little archipelago called the Shoals, ten miles off the coast of New Hampshire. There’s a marine research center on Duck; people have retreats and conferences in the summer on Star. There was a poet who lived on Appledore, the island just south of Swan, in the 1800s. Celia Thaxter. I’d never heard of her but it seems like she’s famous enough. Tourist boats make trips through the Shoals most days in the summer and they always get off on Appledore (I didn’t mean that to be a pun or a double entendre or whatever, but they do, I guess) and check out Celia Thaxter’s garden.
I went over there once with Lolly. It was one of those days when March pretends it’s summer, only to kick your ass with freezing rain two days later. She was worried that I was getting depressed and said that I needed to get some air and exercise, so we got a lift in Ted’s boat—he rows people over when they need to smuggle stuff or themselves back to the mainland—and walked around Celia Thaxter’s garden. Lolly asked what I thought about it. I said it was nice. She was clearly disappointed that I didn’t start skipping through the crocuses and humming a little tune and chasing little Disney chipmunks and blue birds and bunnies. Maybe it wouldn’t have killed me to put on more of a show. Celia Thaxter’s garden looked exactly like a picture of Celia Thaxter’s garden, so it really wasn’t necessary to force me into a boat and drag me over a body of water to check out something that was obviously just going to disappoint us both in the end.
We didn’t talk when we got home. She went to her room and didn’t come out. I cooked something and made a salad with some red and yellow nasturtiums on top—like a peace offering. It was really pretty. But when I yelled up to her she just called back and said she wasn’t hungry. And neither was I, really, so when I got sick of just sitting alone at the table I packed everything up and cleaned the kitchen till it was totally spotless and went to bed before it was even dark. And now Lolly’s dead and it would have been so easy to make a little bit of an effort when she took me to Appledore. It doesn’t matter, but I can’t stop thinking about it. I never thought my sparkling personality would be a miracle drug, but maybe it would have made a difference or something. Never mind.
But I was talking about the houses on Swan. Most of them look like Lolly’s house—old, white with gray roofs, wooden and straight and, I don’t know, really house-shaped, like the picture of a house you’d draw if you were a kid who was really good at drawing. But there are a couple of exceptions. Some people have gone all out. Marie is a widow in her eighties who’s made her house look exactly like it belongs to a witch in a story. It’s short and purple and surrounded by wildflowers and grasses taller than I am. The air around it is thick with bees and butterflies and whatever she’s got on the stereo. Jefferson Airplane or Fleetwood Mac. She dresses to match her house in long skirts and lots of jewelry that looks like it performs some kind of magical function, sucking up moonlight to save for later, or hiding poison or medicine or blades. The kind of thing my mom likes to wear. Marie calls herself the Island Crone, but actually a lot of people call themselves that, so many that I had to go and look up what it meant.
The Psychedelicatessen is another building that stands out. It’s the island’s only café, run by a husband-and-wife team, Suzie Q and Johnny Come Lately. They seem to know how weird they are, which is comforting and funny because otherwise they would be pretty scary. They wear matching leather jackets with Hell’s Angels written across the back, even when it’s way too hot. Their motorcycles are two of the only vehicles on the island, along with some mopeds and three or four golf carts. I don’t know if electric wheelchairs count. The Psychedeli looks just like the name sounds, like a tie-dyed shirt with skeletons wearing top hats and Come on inside for a little touch of grey . . . graffitied underneath. The couple next door helps them when they get really busy—Helen an
d Nancy, who are only sixty-six and sixty-seven. People under seventy are usually called “youngsters” here, which got more complicated when I arrived, ’cause some people started calling me “the youngster” and then people got confused about whether someone was talking about a youngster or the youngster, but it’s not such a huge problem that we have to call the Coast Guard or anything and we have plenty of free time here, so sometimes it gives you something to talk about.
A bunch of Swans are doing tai chi outside the chapel. They really do look like birds when they do it. When I manage to leave the house on time in the morning I like to stop and watch them. Secretly, I’d like to join in, but the Swans usually don’t like it when I join things. Today there’s no time to stop, but I slow my pace a little. I like the dinky Quaker chapel. It’s compact, made of white stone and wood. It doesn’t think it’s the shit like big cathedrals do. The chapel’s just another house, really. The only thing that sets it apart is the one tower, square like a chimney but taller than any of the others, with a big iron bell hanging inside.
God, I really want to stop today, watch for a while, go into the chapel and sit in the pews and think, or maybe ring the bell a couple of times. Something about this morning is starting to sting. A few minutes with Rose will help. The pie gives me an excuse to pop in.
Rose has little chimes above the door that tinkle gently when you walk in. It’s a nice touch.
Rose lifts her warm, walnut face from her accounting book. “Hi, Sugar!”
“Hi, Rose. Brought you something.”
Her hands slide against mine, just for a moment, soft and cool and comforting, as she takes the pan from me. Rose pulls back the dishcloth and takes a whiff before she pulls off a pinch with her thumb and forefinger and munches away. “A little stingy with the cinnamon, but the crust ain’t half bad. Must be them cold hands you got. Cold hands make the best pastry.”
She likes my pie; the relief is almost painful.
“Nice boots,” I offer, not ready to leave yet.
“Good, eh? My niece sent ’em from the Bad Place with a tourist and Ted rowed them over from Appledore.”
The Bad Place is where we all come from. Some people think it’s nasty to call it that. Mostly it’s referred to as the mainland or off-island but some people are adamant. They left for a reason and they aren’t going back except maybe in a mahogany box. Rose says she wants to be dropped in the sea, that she’d rather be fish food than go back there. She’s really sweet, I don’t want to give you the impression that she’s hateful and twisted, but she is a bit fucked up and she’ll admit it. She was raped by two teenage boys when she was sixty. She’s seventy-two now. They followed her home; it was still light out. One of them held her down while the other one raped her. And then they switched. She said she screamed the whole time but apparently no one heard, which is fucking typical. She still limps on account of they fractured her hip. She said it helps to talk about it, and that that night is the reason she came to Swan. She needed a place to be old where she’d be safe and where she could be herself. I told her I hated people who did that, preyed on the weak. She looked angry and said, “I am not weak.” And I said I didn’t mean her. I think she understood. So I guess it’s fair to say that me and Rose are pretty close.
But anyway, her new boots are like knee-high moccasins with fringes and turquoise beads. With her brown legs and denim mini-skirt she looks like that Native American princess. She even has her long gray hair in two braids to match. She once told me that she used to dress like Mother Teresa on her day off, but that all changed once she moved out to Swan.
“They’re great. You look like that Native American princess.”
She laughs that big, chicken-and-dumplings laugh of hers. “Pocahontas, you little ignoramus. Shouldn’t you be at school?”
“Mental-health day.”
That’s our little joke.
“Well, Miss Mental Health Day, you better move that caboose. You’re late.”
I am, or nearly anyway.
Before I can make an excuse, Rose starts shaking her head and clears her throat. “Got a call from Nick a minute ago,” she says with deliberate lightness, like someone calling a hurricane a spell of windy weather. “Says the slip last night rumbled the cat awake and it went skittering across his bed. Everything all right down at Violet’s?”
I don’t miss a beat. “It’s fine. I didn’t notice anything last night. Slept like a baby.”
This makes Rose roll her eyes. I wish I could remember not to say stupid shit like that.
“You know I don’t like you in that house,” she says flatly.
“No one likes me in that house.”
“And that’ll do with the back talk.”
“Sorry, Rose.” Just before I say goodbye, I build the courage to put myself in the way of disappointment. “By the way, when Ted brought over the boots from your niece, was there any mail for me, like bills or whatever?”
“Nothing for you, sugar.” She does that head-tilt thing that people do when they’re trying to be affectionate or sympathetic, but when Rose does it, it doesn’t seem fake. It doesn’t make me feel better, though. It’s like, come on, if they’re not going to call, they could write me a letter, send a postcard. Even if they couldn’t remember where they’d written down the address, even if they couldn’t even remember my name, they could just write: The Kid, Swan Island, New Hampshire and it would have gotten to me.
“He did bring a stack of newspapers, not even that old.”
“Just a paper then, Rose.”
I slide my nickel across the counter and she pulls a copy of the New York Times from two days ago out from under it and drops it down with a satisfying slap. That’s just the way she likes to do things, like everything needs a big yee-haw at the end. I know that five cents is cheap for a newspaper. The community subsidizes the price for nostalgic value so it only costs a nickel. This fat, ridiculous coin that’s pretty much good for nothing. Even pennies make up odd amounts, so they’re useful even if they’re practically worthless. On Swan Island selling newspapers makes a loss because the newspapers cost a nickel and that’s the way they like it.
“Go on now, scoot.” She turns away to switch on the radio—she likes Top 40s in the morning—and I catch her limping as she goes to take a box down from a far shelf. The little bells jingle behind me, laughing at a private joke.
Next to Rose’s grocery is the Relic, Swan’s tavern, then a rocky hill I have to climb up to get to Mrs. Tyburn’s house. The Relic is full every night and plays on the whole pirate island thing, the way that Bluebeard or Blackbeard or one of those dudes was supposed to have spent some time here, marauding or hiding treasure or whatever. I forget. It has one of those cute signs out front that swings from a chain old-fashioned-style with a picture of a ship on it. The blackboard outside always says the same thing:
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Eat, Drink, and Be Merry
For Tomorrow We Die!
Another thing about this place is that the island is so small that you can see the ocean from wherever you are, which I really could do without. Seeing all that water is when it comes back to me: Lolly and my parents are gone, and however nice Rose and Suzie and Johnny are, I’m alone.
But the Swans are really proud of being able to always see the ocean. I’ve had at least four of them corner me at one point or another and whisper, like it’s the most amazing secret ever, “Have you noticed that you can see the ocean from every point on the island?” And I play dumb every time and say something like, “Wow, that’s amazing,” and then look around and say, “Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. Wow.” Older people really need you to put on a little show for them sometimes. It’s annoying.
The terrain flattens out to the last stretch leading up to Mrs. Tyburn’s house. Hers is taller and broader than most of the others, the same age as the chapel and the Oceanic, with fancy gables perched on top like a tiara. It’s just before nine when I let myself in. Mrs. Tyburn’
s the only person I know with those long, old-fashioned keys, the kind that jailers have in old movies. And, as far as I know, the only one who bothers to lock her door on Swan. Even though I’ve done this a hundred times I’m still nervous when I walk through the foyer over floorboards dark and serious enough to be part of a musical instrument. The huge portrait of her late husband hangs on the far wall. It’s one of the parts of this job I’m looking forward to the least. I can doctor vacation snapshots and tweak home movies, but I’m not sure my skills will stretch to cinching the waist of a large man in an oil painting. I’ll do what I always do. Break life up into its parts, make it soft, blow it up, and fix it a pixel at a time.
Chapter Two
I spend three days a week editing Mrs. Tyburn’s life. No anxiety here about becoming a youth-unemployment statistic; there’s plenty to do. Boxes of photographs and slides, dozens of hours of 8 mm films. Letters, diaries, insurance inventories, wills, deeds.
I go through to her kitchen, bigger and brighter than the last few apartments I lived in with my parents, light the stove, put on the kettle, and drop two bags of Earl Grey into the porcelain pot with the violets on the side. The grandfather clock chimes in the hall. In moments like this, when it’s quiet and I’m surrounded by her Victorian array of specialist dishes and utensils that have only one very particular use—the olive pitter, the grape shears, the tiny saw for slicing lemons, the silver sugar tongs—I know that this job could go on forever. And then I start to wonder if maybe she’ll just die soon and let me off the hook.
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