“She never had any intention of coming,” I said, seeing the truth, knowing that May would rather give us up than leave her island, ever.
“It’s not that simple,” Eva said, reading me, but I wasn’t having any of it.
“It is too that simple.”
“For God’s sake, Sophya, have some compassion.”
“It’s the same thing all over again.” I was unable to sit, I was so agitated.
“What do you mean?”
“Like with Lyndley.”
“What about Lyndley?” She said the words slowly, as if she were trying to find out how much I knew.
“She gave away Lyndley, and now she’s giving away Beezer and me.”
“What are you talking about?” Eva stared at me.
“What’s happening to Lyndley, what he’s doing to her.” My skin crawled when I thought of that night in Lyndley’s room. “None of it would be happening if May hadn’t given Lyndley away in the first place. Everyone knows what he does to her!” I was crying uncontrollably as I said the words. I couldn’t breathe.
Eva held me for a long time. “It’s going to be okay,” she said.
I didn’t see how.
She took me to a therapist in Boston. The doctor put me on a mild antidepressant. Eva had hoped I would talk to him. I couldn’t seem to do it.
“Tell me about your sister,” he would say. But I couldn’t do it. I could tell Eva, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you could tell to a stranger. After six sessions I refused to go back.
She gave me a job helping with the dancing lessons instead. She was trying to keep me busy. The fact that she was expecting me to go to Hamilton Hall and behave like a lady was part of that plan as well. I learned to follow the leads of the most tentative dancing partners. Eva bought me long gloves that extended up past my elbows, and she taught me to tuck the hands of my gloves up when I ate dinner, leaving just the sleeves, and to eat chicken à la king while sitting at a crammed banquet table without moving my elbows and without dropping any peas on my formal dress. When I asked what I should do if they served something besides chicken à la king, Eva just laughed and told me that would never happen, “not in a million years,” she said.
A few weeks before the cotillion, I got an invitation from a girl at Pingree to ride to the dance in a small bus her parents had rented for the occasion. I hardly knew the girl; the only thing I remembered about her was that she was really preppy-looking and liked to say “fuck” a lot, just for the shock value. I told Eva I thought it was ridiculous, since the bus was leaving from Beverly Farms and I could walk to Hamilton Hall from our house, but Eva said I was missing the point. She made me accept the girl’s “kind invitation” in writing and had her driver chauffeur me all the way to Beverly Farms and drop me off so that I could take a crowded, smelly bus all the way back to Salem.
The dance wasn’t terrible, even if it was from another century. Each girl had two partners going in, one on each arm, and one of my escorts was a kid I knew from the Pleon Yacht Club in Marblehead. Each time the orchestra took a break, they threw felt hats into the audience with the band’s name embroidered across the brim, and boys tried to catch them to give to the girls they liked. And even though the kids hated the music, they liked the hats. They fought one another for them, jumping into the air to catch them as if they were at a baseball game or something.
During one of the breaks, someone hid the conductor’s stick, and the dance stopped while the chaperones searched for it and interrogated the kids. The guys went outside to smoke, including both of my escorts, and I decided it was a good idea considering the Spanish Inquisition that was going on inside. We stood in the park across the street, and a kid with a madras cummerbund lit up a Marlboro and started his own inquisition about Cal and how he was doing in San Diego.
Up to that point, no one had gotten the connection. To the sailing boys who knew about him, Cal was a local hero, the kind of man they could hope to become if they were lucky and everything went their way. “He’s probably the best sailor in the world,” the kid said in closing. “And he’s rich. He owns that whole island, for God’s sake.”
“He doesn’t own the island. My mother’s family owns the island,” I said with a little too much edge.
“Same difference.”
“I saw his picture in the paper,” one of the girls said dreamily.
“He looks like Paul fucking Newman,” the Rental Bus Girl said.
I could feel my muscles tense.
One of the girls was shivering. “How long are they going to make us stay out here?”
“Until they find the perpetrator.” The Cummerbund winked at me.
“Which gives us some time,” the Yacht Club Kid said, with a side glance at the Cummerbund, who pulled a silver flask out of his jacket pocket and stood there passing it around.
“I’m going home,” I said.
“What?”
“No way.”
“You can’t go home. The bus won’t be here until eleven.”
“I’m not waiting until eleven o’clock for a bus to drive me when I only live six blocks away.”
“Party at Towner’s house,” one of the boys said.
“I live with my Great-Aunt Eva.”
The Rental Bus Girl shot me a look.
“Party at Towner’s great-aunt’s house,” the boy declared.
“Eva will be asleep.”
“Trust me, you don’t want to party there,” said one of the other girls.
“Yeah,” said the Rental Bus Girl, “Eva Whitney is fucking Emily Post.”
“Excuse me?!” The Cummerbund raised an eyebrow. “Did you say her great-aunt is fucking Emily Post? I didn’t even know that Emily Post was still alive.”
The girl started to giggle as if she thought it was the funniest joke she’d ever heard. “You know what I mean.”
I left before anyone could concoct an alternate plan that included me. I realized halfway down the block that my coat was still inside, but I didn’t want to go back for it because I was afraid I wouldn’t get away so easily the next time. Instead I tucked the hands up inside the gloves and worked the long sleeves up as high as I could get them to cover my arms. As I turned the corner, I could hear the orchestra tuning up, and I saw the kids file back inside.
I walked by the house, but Eva was still awake, and I didn’t want to go in yet, so I just kept going. As I walked along, I started to get really angry with May for letting this happen: for putting me in this situation and making me live in Eva’s house and go to cotillions. And angry because Beezer was gone for good, wasn’t he? Because after boarding school was…what? Prep school, then college? Going, going, gone. I was starting to realize how much things had changed and how quickly. We’d probably never all live on the island together again. In the blink of an eye, our whole world had changed, and none of us could make it go back to the way it was. Lyndley was gone, my brother was gone. And my mother, May, was depressed or crazy or just plain didn’t care.
And then I started getting this really crazy idea. I started thinking that maybe I could change it, if I acted quickly, that maybe it wasn’t too late if I went home right now, tonight. If I called Beezer and told him to come home, he would. I still had that much power over him, although it was fading quickly. I went to the pay phone on the dock and tried Beezer at school, but it was lights-out already, and they wouldn’t answer the call. I figured it didn’t matter. He’d be home for Thanksgiving in a few days, and when he got to Eva’s and found out I was on the island, he’d get himself over there, and everything would be all right again. I knew him. He’d get there somehow. Even if he had to take a helicopter, my brother would do it.
And so I found myself at the boathouse where the Whaler was put up for the winter, and I checked the tank, and it actually had some gas left, and it was a pretty calm night, so I shoved the boat into the water and got into it, ruining my dress in the process, but who cared? If I was ever going to go home again, tonight was the
night. It couldn’t wait.
I pushed the boat off, and it drifted into the harbor. The tide was dead low, the moon almost full, but there wasn’t another boat anywhere around, so at least no one was going to ask me any questions or try to stop me.
I figured I’d waste some gas starting her up, but it was easier than I’d thought. I picked up the gas can. It was about half full. There were no swells, and with the moon so bright it was easy to spot the rocks. I knew I’d be fine if I didn’t do anything stupid, if I didn’t fall in. I remember Eva telling Lyndley once that a fifty-year-old had a 50 percent chance of surviving a fifty-yard swim in fifty-degree water. It was one of the reasons you weren’t supposed to swim if you fell in. You were supposed to just stay there, using as little energy as possible, and wait until someone rescued you. If you started to swim, you’d force all your blood to your extremities and away from your vital organs. You’d die a hell of a lot faster that way, and that was in fifty-degree water. This water hadn’t seen fifty degrees since early October.
When I got out of the harbor and away from the shelter of land, a cold wind rippled the water, and I noticed that there were some swells, too, although they weren’t very bad and it wasn’t very far to the island, so I wasn’t worried about them. Still, the whole thing seemed sort of strange and out of place to me. The stars had the brightness of winter to them, and I remember thinking that even though I’d stayed out on the island in previous winters and seen these same skies, I’d never actually been on the water this late in the year. We took our boats out early, right after Columbus Day. Even if it stayed warm, the float had to come out by Veterans Day, because that’s when the boatyard closed down for the season, and the boatyard workers are the ones who did all the work. The only boats running this late in the year were the big boats out of Gloucester. And a few of the lobster boats.
I was almost to the island when I got the joke. It was a great cosmic kind of joke, and I got it in a flash. And then I started to laugh. I laughed so hard I had to cut the engine, because I was afraid I’d fall out of the boat if I didn’t sit down until it passed.
What was it Eva said? You can’t go home again. That was the joke. It wasn’t figurative, though, or metaphorical. It was literal. When I got close to the island, I realized that the float was gone. The ramp was there, hanging high above the water, just the way it was every night I could remember, when May pulled it up. But the float it connected to was gone. It was pulled out of the water for the winter as it was every year by Veterans Day, but for some reason I hadn’t remembered that. It’s what Eva had been worried about when she went to fetch May and why she went out there when she did, because once the float was pulled out, May couldn’t get off the island until spring except by helicopter, which she would never do. I knew it; we’d been talking about it just last weekend. But what I’d forgotten was that if May couldn’t get off the island, I couldn’t get onto it either. The only way on was Back Beach, but not in winter waters. It would tear a boat apart this time of year. Here I was making this grand gesture, trying to go home again, but my Aunt Eva was right when she said you can’t go home again. And for some reason, now I found it really funny.
I sat in the boat, the engine turned off, looking at the island, which was just a few hundred feet away but might just as well have been a million miles away for all the good it did me. I knew I should start the engine and head back to town, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t go forward and I couldn’t go backward. I just sat in the boat in my party dress, laughing my ass off.
Jack thought the boat had broken down or something. He was coming from the back side of the island, where his father still kept a few traps. He’d been hauling them out for the winter, and the boat was full of them, a maze of little boxes. He hadn’t wanted to come out that night—he told me that later—but his father had been nagging him for weeks, and he was tired of hearing his father’s voice. He just wanted to get it over with, so he could get some peace. Because the moon was so bright, Jack saw the Whaler right away. I don’t think he realized it was me until he pulled up alongside.
I saw him take in the dress, the gloves. He didn’t ask what I was doing out there, didn’t even ask about the engine. Instead he grabbed an arm and pulled me aboard, tying up the Whaler to the back of his boat, shoving his jacket at me. He didn’t greet me. I could tell he was pissed off. In fact, he didn’t speak to me at all for a long time, and when he finally did, it was to ask me, “Are you just stupid, or do you have a real problem?”
I wasn’t sure which was the correct answer, so I didn’t say anything.
Summer again…
The following summer I did go back to the island. It was a decision I made with Eva and with my shrink. May was doing better, and so was I. She sent me a letter saying she hoped I’d be out for the summer, that she was looking forward to it. Beezer didn’t come back. He got the opportunity to attend a science camp at Caltech. Everyone, including May, agreed he should go.
Things weren’t the same between May and me. But they were tolerable. And she was all right. The depression that had hit her so hard was gone now, and I started to wonder if maybe she really did know what was best for her. That maybe, unlike the rest of us, May knew her own limitations and worked within them.
In early August, Lyndley arrived. She wasn’t scheduled to come. She just showed up out of the blue, saying she missed me and wanted to spend our birthday together. She seemed happy. She’d been accepted at two art schools, RISD and CalArts. Lyndley told me that Cal and Auntie Emma were insisting on CalArts. They wanted her to stay close to home.
I had been seeing Jack since Christmas, since the night of the Hamilton Hall dance. It happened with the inevitability of a dream. He didn’t even seem to like me at first; he just seemed angry at me, probably because I looked like my sister, and I know how much Lyndley had hurt him. Everyone knew. As Jack and I got more involved, I told myself it didn’t matter, that it was okay because Lyndley had been the one to break it off with Jack. She had made the decision.
I’d been hauling traps with Jack all summer, which is how I began not coming home for days at a time. We’d work three days here, then four up in the Maritimes, just over the Canadian border. He had three hundred traps there. Plus another three hundred behind our island and over by Baker’s. Jack’s father was sick. “From the drink and from the drink,” was the way Jack put it, referring to years of fishing and years of frequenting the waterfront bars. His liver was shot. He had bad arthritis. He couldn’t fish anymore.
Jack had tried to get his brother Jay-Jay to take over the local traps, but Jay-Jay wasn’t interested in lobstering. He got seasick. So Jack hired me. Although I was officially living on the island with May, most of the time I just stayed on the boat with Jack.
The week Lyndley came home, Jack and I had been up in the Maritimes, stopping back by the Isle of Shoals, camping out on a beach there, because by then we both needed to get off the boat. By the time we got back, I was ready to spend a few days on the island, just to be on dry land. It was past midnight, and May wasn’t expecting me for another day at least, but the lamp in the kitchen was burning. I knew that Beezer was out in California. It was late, and I was hoping like hell that May wasn’t waiting up for me.
But it wasn’t May. It was Lyndley who was sitting at the table in the kitchen. She hugged me for a long time. “I missed you so much,” she said. “I didn’t think I’d ever get back here again.”
“God, look at you,” she said. “You got so pretty this year.”
“I thought you were going to CalArts.”
“Forget CalArts,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere near CalArts.”
She slept in my bed with me, said she didn’t want to be alone. I lay there all night, looking out the window, trying not to disturb her, until the sun rose in the reddest sky I’d ever seen.
She was carrying Jack’s graduation picture with her. It fell out of her pocket when I went to pick her jeans up from the floor where she’d dro
pped them. It was wrinkled and worn. I owned the same picture, although mine was in better shape.
I was on the radio with Jack when Lyndley came down for breakfast. She looked thinner than I’d seen her, older, although it was only a month before our eighteenth birthday.
“Who were you talking to?” she asked me.
“Jack.”
“My Jack?”
I stood up and got her some cereal. I could tell she wanted to know what was going on, but I didn’t want to talk about it yet.
“Did you tell him I was back?” she asked. It was a tentative question. She wasn’t sure how he would feel about it.
“Not yet,” I said, as if it were some big secret. It was, but not the kind she thought.
I cut up some strawberries for the top of the cereal, because I knew they were her favorite.
“Happily-ever-after granola,” was what she said. But she took the strawberries and three whole spoonfuls of sugar. She finished the entire bowl. And then she did something strange. She took off the silver earrings, the ones I’d picked out in Harvard Square. She slid them across the table to me.
“What are you doing?” I asked, suspicious.
“What’s mine is yours,” she said, and that’s how I knew she knew. She held my gaze for a long time, then picked up her bowl and went to get more cereal.
I left the earrings on the table between us. I had no idea what to do. Lyndley came back to the table and ate a second bowl of cereal as if nothing unusual were going on.
The Lace Reader Page 25