“What the?”
Chloe was supposed to be in London. She said she was so busy, she couldn’t even take her mother’s calls. And yet, here she was lounging on a beach in a hashtag-less picture where the location services were clearly turned off…right next to a pair of feet she was almost certain belonged to Arden. She’d recognize the small diamond-shaped birthmark on the instep of her daughter’s left foot anywhere.
And in the far corner of the picture, a pair of slim, tanned legs practically posed in the romantic “foot pop” position, toe to toe, with hairier male legs dusted with gray. On the female calf, Ana could make out a tattoo—an infinity symbol with what Wren claimed was the Sanskrit word for “inner peace.” Ana had noticed it often enough during her Pilates, wondering if Wren would ever regret such a cliché, probably misspelled tattoo.
Her girls were with Bash, wherever he was hiding. They’d taken a fugitive vacation with their father and his mistress. They’d more than left her on read. They had more than chosen him in the divorce. They’d written their mother off completely.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuck,” Ana gasped.
She wanted to wallow. So badly.
Ana had wanted to crawl under her borrowed covers and cry out her hurt and horror and the bone-deep betrayal into a pillow. She figured she’d earned the right, but amongst Irma Gustavsson’s pearls of wisdom were several sayings about feeling sorry for yourself and crying over spilled milk. She wondered what pithy advice her mother would have had about spilled cheater fuck-face husbands who lured one’s daughters out of extradition territory with free first- class flights and unlimited room service.
So instead of wallowing, she slipped into the nicest of the cashmere sweaters she’d shoved in her duffle and into the Eddie Bauer down jacket she’d found at a…internal sigh…consignment store in Grand Rapids. It was as light as a croissant, but was a definite improvement over her too-thin trench. She let her anger propel her down the sidewalk to Main Street, around slushy islands of ice frozen to the concrete. The forecast might not have called for snow this late in March, but Ana could smell it on the wind—a sort of sixth sense all islanders developed that never left her, even when she lived in New York.
She glanced toward Fitzroy’s Pub as she passed, spotting Ned standing behind the bar, pouring pints for the crowd cemented to the barstools. With little else to do in the winter, the pub was one of the main social outlets for locals. Tom Fitzroy had resisted putting in a TV for games up until Ana left the island, but she could see ESPN playing on a wall-mounted big screen through the window. Ned and Nell had to wait until Mr. Fitzroy passed, which was…not at all surprising.
A strange pang of loneliness hit her right in the gut as she walked by, feeling very separate from the warm cheer inside the pub. It made no sense. She’d rarely spent time at Fitzroy’s when she lived on the island. She’d been too young and Mr. Fitzroy couldn’t stand her, what with her “dangerous ideas” about living off-island. Maybe it was because she passed without Ned so much as looking at her. Which was ridiculous, because they’d spent weeks together in the house without Ned so much as looking at her or speaking beyond the instructive grunts. Ned might be willing to fix her house, but he wanted nothing to do with her beyond barely civil conversation. She needed to stop looking to him for notice or…companionship…or anything beyond carpentry. If she did, it would be twice as hard for her to leave again. It had been hard enough the first time.
Her boots crunched over the snow as she approached the Espoir Island Public Library, a tiny cement block building that shared walls with the county courthouse, for heating purposes. They’d only built it in the 1950s because the old library burned in an incident involving old books being stored near a coal furnace…which should have surprised her more, but it never had.
It was very intimidating, walking into that humble little building. Just as she suspected, it was crowded with her former classmates and neighbors, and it felt like they were all staring at her. And whispering. While Nell gave her a friendly nod and Bailey waved enthusiastically, Ana scanned the chairs arranged in the children’s section for other less friendly, familiar faces.
She realized that she’d either done something very right or very wrong by staying in Fishscale House, mostly isolated, since she’d returned. Given their shocked expressions, it was if people didn’t really believe she was back on the island until they saw her with their own eyes. She recognized her former history teacher, Mrs. Larsson, who’d once told her she’d be a much more pleasant girl if she wasn’t so mouthy. And Terri Boylan, former head cheerleader—the school only had three—who had given an interview to the New York Daily News and E!Online stating that she hadn’t been surprised by the lash bar fight, because Ana was a violent, erratic teenager who frequently terrorized her classmates. And Mrs. Eskind, a friend of her mother, who had sent her a condolence card reading “SHAME ON YOU” in bright red ink, when Ana’s parents died.
“Well, this was a huge miscalculation on my part,” Ana muttered to herself, turning back towards the door. Suddenly, an arm slipped through hers. Ana jumped at the sight of Jackie Sanditon, class president and valedictorian, grinning at her. Jackie was wearing a thick navy wool coat, not by a designer Ana recognized, but exquisitely cut, with a Burberry scarf even New York Ana would have envied.
“So good to see you, Ana!” she said—loudly and with very deliberate cheer as her mother, Bette, passed and sat with Mrs. Hotchner in the back row.
“Come sit next to me!” Jackie shooed a smirking Terri Boylan down the row of folding chairs to make room for her and Ana. The spell of staring and whispering seemed to have broken and the twenty or so people seated were content to review the mimeographed copies of the meeting agenda. Ana didn’t even know mimeograph machines still existed.
“Thanks,” Ana whispered out of the side of her mouth.
“No problem,” Jackie murmured, keeping her eyes trained on the agenda in her hand. “I remember in eighth grade, I had a nosebleed all over my shirt in English class. You were the one who offered me your gym clothes to change into, instead of laughing at me.”
Ana’s brows rose. “Wow.”
“What, you didn’t remember that?”
“No, not really,” Ana said, tugging her knit cap off of her head and shaking out her hair. “It’s just nice to have a good deed thrown back at me instead of fist-fighting and general selfishness.”
Jackie patted her arm. “I’d like to talk to you after the meeting, if you don’t mind. How about we go get a beer?”
“That is the best offer I’ve gotten in weeks,” Ana sighed.
“That’s really fucking sad, Gustavsson.”
“All right, all right, let’s get down to it,” Nell told the crowd. She stood at the head of the room, her Fitzroy Pub baseball cap firmly in place. “We’re here to review the press package and poster designs for the upcoming tourist season. Mrs. Larsson suggested that we reuse last year’s posters in order to save some money and devote that to new shelves at the museum. I’m sure that has nothing to do with the fact that Mrs. Larsson’s grandson designed the posters.”
Light laughter ran through the crowd, and Nell’s expression became more serious. “We all know that tourism doesn’t bring a lot of money onto the island, but it brings in enough to keep us afloat. And if we can’t bring in better numbers, it’s gonna hurt us all.”
Ana watched as fear and dread rippled across every face in the room. With that, Nell launched into an explanation of the historical society’s public relations strategy for the next year. It seemed that—in the absence of a real tourist commission on the island—the historical society had became a sort of de facto commission, attempting to draw tourists to town. And now that Ana saw the full package of posters and planned advertisements set up on easels, she could see that the situation was much worse than she thought. It was like they were planning some sort of bizarre Opposite Day campaign where they were trying to talk people out of visiting the island.
; The message was inconsistent and emphasized the wrong things. For instance, almost every ad mentioned how cheap the island was. Ana knew from experience that people might want low prices, but they didn’t like the word “cheap.” They wanted to feel they were getting high quality for a low cost, that they were beating the system.
Ana sat squirming as these bad ideas were being bandied about like casually unpinned grenades. But when Nell got to the museum poster, Ana couldn’t take it anymore.
“OK, OK, hold on.” She stood up. Nell shot her a displeased look. “Nell, I have a little bit more experience with branding than most of the people here. Would you mind if I pointed out some issues with the posters?”
Mrs. Larsson harrumphed. “I don’t see why the flatlander gets to speak at the meeting.”
“With all due respect, Mrs. Larsson, my family’s been here for five generations and you just moved here thirty years ago. If anybody here is the flatlander here, it’s you,” Ana shot back. “Also, your grandson couldn’t design his way out of a maze with no turns.”
“Are you going to let her take over this meeting, Nell?” Terri barked.
“Well, I did check her Facebook page a couple weeks back and she does have about fifty times the likes as the Espoir Island page, so yeah, she has a little more expertise than we do,” Nell said, gesturing for Ana to join her at the front of the room.
Ana took her copy of the poster and attached it to the easel. “If you want people to come to the island, you need to change your focus. This poster emphasizes nothing…really. I can’t see anything that would make me want to visit the island versus literally any other place in the greater Midwest. Also, people can eat bland bean soup, pretty much anywhere, including from a can in their kitchens. Bean soup isn’t exactly a treat or a delicacy, and frankly, it kind of reminds me of prisons and suffering. Suffering is always bad and again, not the sort of thing people leave their homes to seek out… unless we had some sort of serial killer that operated on the island and the people who visit those sort of sites…”
When no one responded, Ana shook her head. “Never mind. My point is, what’s the one thing this island has?”
“Mold?” Nell suggested.
“Artisan lutefisk?” Jackie guessed, her lips twitching.
“A collection of weather vane-specific blacksmithing tools from throughout the years?” Bailey shouted from the back of the room.
Ana laughed. “No. Struggle. Espoir Island has struggle out the ass. Battles, hardships, illness. And people love struggle. What do people build museum exhibits around? Struggle. What inspires young people to shit all over their parents and rebel? Songs about struggle. What do they give Oscars for? Movies about struggle. The people who have lived on the island have struggled from the moment they set foot on the godforsaken rock. And yes, it’s more than a little depressing, but it’s also inspiring.”
“How is ‘struggle’ different from suffering?” Nell asked. “You said suffering was bad.”
“Struggle means you’re working to overcome the suffering. There’s a happily ever after,” she said.
For the briefest moment, she allowed herself to feel the shame of a complete fraud for even muttering the words “happily ever after” in public. Why was she trying so hard? She couldn’t say that she felt a great wellspring of pride or loyalty to her hometown. She didn’t owe these people anything. Hell, some of them had celebrated when she hit rock bottom. Terri actually mentioned the word “celebrate” in her interviews. She supposed it was because she knew what it was like to be discounted, discarded. And if she could use her limited skills to keep other people from feeling that way, she should.
“So we reframe the history around the theme of ‘The Winds of Fate,’” Ana said, and seeing Nell opening her mouth to protest, she raised her hands. “We keep it true, but we put the emphasis on how the people of Espoir Island won in the end, that no matter how the wind blew the weather vane, we found our way. Surely, there are some stories hidden in the archives, some people who succeeded here, when all else failed.”
Nell turned to Mrs. Larsson, who was frowning. “I think I could find some stories like that.”
“If you give me access to a decent laptop with a basic design software package, I could lay the posters out myself. No charge. Because I’m not a professional and I wouldn’t feel right charging you,” she said. “Also, I know we don’t like to change things around here, but I would seriously consider renaming the weather vane museum. You’ve still got all the archive stuff there, right? Old family trees, marriage and birth certificates, baptism records moved over from the church?”
“Yeah,” Nell said, nodding.
“Well, I would rechristen the museum the Espoir Island Historical and Genealogical Center. People go crazy for all that family tree-tracking stuff. How else do you explain spitting in a tube to find out where they come from?” Ana said. “You can keep all of the weather vane exhibits intact, but emphasize how all of these wonderful families sprang up from the island. They may have been scattered by the winds, but Espoir Island never forgets its own.’”
“Yeah, but what are the odds that people’s families came from Espoir?” Bailey asked.
“Are you kidding? More families have moved off of Espoir to greener pastures than have ever stayed on it,” Ana scoffed. “And even if they don’t find connections here, at least we get them on the island long enough to buy stuff. The rebranding would be fairly easy and cheap. All you would have to do is print up some new signage, posters, and maybe register a new domain name. You’re going to have to redesign all of the websites on the island. All of them. Oh, and the social media, too. And while you’re at it, please consider all of the other tourism type signs in town because…damn.”
Everybody was staring at her.
“What?” Ana asked, checking her sweater for offending stains. “Do I have to make a motion or something to make the proposal official?”
“No, I can do that, since you’re not officially a member,” Nell said. “The motion has been made to redesign the posters and advertising plus rebranding the museum into a genealogical center?”
“That seems like a lot for one motion,” Ana said.
“I’m in charge. I do what I want,” Nell told her. “Do I have a second?”
“Second!” Bailey called.
“All in favor?” Nell asked.
Most of the room voted “aye” with the notable exceptions of Terri and Mrs. Larsson.
“Motion passes,” Nell said, grinning. “All in favor of Ana Gustavsson handling the redesign and rebranding?”
“What, what?” Ana cried.
Again, with the exception of Terri and Mrs. Larsson, the motion carried.
Ana shook her head, her expression horrified. “I think this is a violation of how the ‘motion’ thing is supposed to work.”
5
Ana walked out of the meeting responsible for a lot more than she intended, but honestly, a part of her was proud that she’d been asked to handle something so important to the island after all this time. Of course, she was also acutely aware that she’d been asked because no one else wanted the job, but still…
Yeah, she didn’t have a follow-up to that.
She tried to see the silver lining. Having a project, other than Fishscale House, would keep her busy. It would keep her from wallowing…and maybe she wouldn’t come across as someone who was using and abusing the island for her own gain if she left the island a little better this time around.
Nell patted her on the shoulder. “We’re never going to get you to come to another meeting again, huh?”
“Let that be a lesson to me,” Ana said, though she was smirking. “Nell, people here still make weather-vanes, right?”
“Sure,” Nell said. “We have six or seven people who make the vanes for demonstrations, but we hadn’t had enough demand for more than one person to work the old forges. And no one was really buying them from the gift shop.”
“I need them to mak
e a lot of them. As many as they can—shiny and stately as possible. If they need money for materials… I think I have some in my house budget,” she sighed. “I’ll have to give up some of the upgrades I was thinking of—granite counter tops and this absolutely divine tiling for the bathroom. But I can’t sell a house on an island with no attractions, can I?”
“And why would we make a large stock of weather vanes that no one will buy?” Nell asked.
“I have a plan,” Ana said, grinning broadly.
“I am serious when I say this—I have never been so frightened in my entire life,” Nell told her. Ana wriggled her eyebrows.
“You still up for that drink?” Jackie asked, slipping her arm through Ana’s. “I just need to drop my mom at home.”
“Oh, you go have your beer,” Bette Sanditon said, waving her arthritic hands towards the door. “I’m gonna go by Inga’s for a few hands of euchre. Pick me up when you’re done.”
“OK. Goodnight, Nell.” Jackie kissed her mother’s cheek, and a pang of longing struck Ana so hard, she thought she might double over. Her parents worked so hard every day, they never seemed to have time for anything beyond quick, quiet dinners and dozing in front of the TV. Her own relationship with her mother had been cordial, but distant. They’d never had the warmth between them that Jackie and Bette so casually enjoyed.
Jackie wrapped her arm through Ana’s again, as if she sensed that Ana might bolt as they walked closer to Ned’s family bar. She wasn’t too far off, carefully securing Ana to her side as she talked about attending law school at Michigan and living near Whitefish Point. She traveled into town about once a week to check on her mom, who didn’t want to admit how bad her driving was getting.
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