Afterward, we sprawled apart, the sheets twisted between us. Joe traced my collar bone with his thumb and asked if I was sure I had to leave in the morning.
“I’m sure.”
He ran a finger from the hollow of my neck down my chest, through the flat valley between my breasts.
I propped myself up with an elbow. “You’ll miss me, right?”
“Absolutely. For at least a day or two.” He laughed and pulled me closer, so that my head was resting beneath his, and his expression was hidden.
I wanted to ask him what happened next, if we would pick up the pieces at the end of August when I came back to Scofield. But I could hear his answer, as sure as if I’d phrased the question. Yeah, sure. If that’s what you want. Noncommittal, unattached, impersonal, flexible. In other words, he wasn’t going to fight for me, but if I showed up on his doorstep, he would open the door.
“You have my number, right?” Joe teased, and the hand resting on my stomach moved lower, in a way that signaled the end of reasonable conversation.
I stayed with him late that night, only breaking away when the television went from the late show to an infomercial to dead air. Back at Keale, I cried in my car in the parking lot, watching the shadows of girls pass in front of the dorm windows. For most of them, it was their last night on campus until the next semester, and there was a flurry of packing and binge-eating the last of the Pop-Tarts and the extra-butter microwave popcorn, all those pantry staples that would otherwise go in the trash.
I had Joe’s number, but I wasn’t going to call it, not from The Island, not with a horde of Mabreys passing through the house, not with Megan there, not with my mother examining the long-distance phone bill, wondering who it was I kept calling in Scofield. If he’d been an email kind of guy, we could have kept in touch that way—but Joe didn’t have a computer, and he hadn’t been interested in anything I’d shown him on my laptop.
Megan wasn’t in our room when I went upstairs, tears wiped from my cheeks. I threw the last of my textbooks and school supplies in my storage box, extinguished the overhead light and crawled under the covers. What if I’d invited Joe to The Island with me, instead of Megan? We could have slept together in my childhood bed, limbs never not touching. We could have waded into the surf each day, pant legs rolled to our knees. We could have suffered through dinner together, holding hands under the table and smirking at inside jokes. But of course, for more reasons than I could count, none of that would ever happen.
* * *
In the morning, Megan and I loaded the Saab for the drive to Holmes House. She chattered on about the fun I’d missed the night before—some cheesy ’80s movie, a bottle of something called Purple Passion, and the fire alarm that had evacuated the building next to ours when someone burned a pan of pizza rolls.
“I heard the fire alarm,” I murmured.
She laughed, her glance darting in my direction. “What’s wrong with you, anyway? Missing Scofield already?” The top half of her face was hidden by an oversize pair of sunglasses with red frames. She’d worried they made her look too much like Sally Jessy Raphael, but of course they didn’t. On Megan, they were adorable. She’d bought quite a few new things over the last few weeks from the Target in Litchfield; the neatly clipped tags with their sharp plastic ends had lined our wastebasket—a surprise, since Megan almost never spent anything on clothes, unless it was musty-smelling secondhand things from the Scofield thrift store.
I yawned. “Just tired.”
“Yeah, I bet you couldn’t wait to get out of there. I know I couldn’t. I’m looking forward to seeing the ocean, getting a tan, eating lobster rolls...” She ticked the items off on her finger, as if from a list she’d memorized.
I pressed down harder on the gas pedal, and the Saab gunned forward.
* * *
We spent the night at Holmes House and repacked the car in the morning following Mom’s directions. In five weeks of treatment, her hair had gone from full to papery thin to nonexistent, a fact concealed by a short blond wig and carefully penciled eyebrows. She wore a tunic that floated around her body but couldn’t disguise the fact that she was puffy all over from water retention, an effect of the chemo. When she gestured about which bag to load next, I noticed that her wedding ring bit into her flesh, like she was wearing a child-size trinket.
The drive from Simsbury to Yarmouth was uneventful. Mom dozed in the back seat, a scarf wrapped around her wig and tied under her chin. From the passenger seat, Megan peppered me with questions about The Island, as if we were heading to some all-inclusive resort.
“I keep picturing those tiny islands from cartoon strips, the ones with only a single palm tree,” she confessed.
“It’s bigger than that, but no palm trees. They’re mostly evergreens, I think.”
She persisted, “But how big are we talking? Like the size of Bermuda?”
I laughed. “I have no idea how big Bermuda is. But I’m pretty confident that The Island is bigger than what you’re picturing on the cartoon and smaller than Bermuda.”
She smiled. “That’s not very helpful.”
“Okay,” I sighed. “It’s probably like five acres. But—you’ll see—a lot of it is rocky and steep, so it feels smaller. There’s the main house, and then some cottages, a gazebo, the dock and a whole lot of trees and rocks.”
Megan was quiet for a while, looking out the window. It was the sort of perfect late-spring day that promised happiness. Then she said, “I actually have no idea how big five acres is, either,” and we laughed so hard that Mom stirred in the back seat, before collapsing back onto a pillow.
We were somewhere in Massachusetts by then, and I could feel the pull of it already—summer was beckoning, The Island was calling. I told Megan everything I knew, cobbled together from family stories, probably part truth and part exaggeration, but which part was which, I didn’t know. On a map, it was officially named Codshead Island, although the Mabreys never called it by that name. Mom had inherited it from her parents, who had inherited it from the Holmes patriarch, that scion of steel manufacturing and what I suspected was exploited labor. According to one version of the story, he’d bought it to impress a woman who had turned down his proposal, after he’d rowed her all the way out there with a wedding ring in his pocket. In another version, he’d inherited it himself as part of a business deal or a bribe.
“My dad once won five hundred dollars in a poker game,” Megan said, but my laugh felt hollow. I was missing Joe, and rushing to cover that with as many words as possible.
“When my parents married,” I continued over her interruption, “they tore down the old house and built the current one.” I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that Mom was sleeping again, her mouth falling slightly open. In a lower voice, I told Megan that my parents had seen The Island as a political asset—there was enough room to wine and dine, to house guests, to throw parties. I remembered summers where we entertained all sorts of people in government and business, who’d temporarily shed their suits for polo shirts and khaki shorts. But accessibility was a definite problem—the only way to The Island was by boat or water taxi, and once you were there, you had to be able to move on foot. And this summer, with Mom sick, there weren’t any plans to entertain visitors.
“Except me,” Megan murmured.
“That’s not what I meant. Plus, they’ll probably put us to work running errands.” I told her that we had some kayaks and Jet Skis stored on The Island, and that we had an old fishing boat for getting to and from the mainland. “Do you know how to operate an outboard motor?”
Megan shook her head. “I can barely go underwater without plugging my nose.”
“Well, I’ll show you. It’s not that complicated.”
* * *
It was midafternoon by the time we reached Yarmouth and found a spot in a parking garage near the wharf. Mom rallied, producing her
credit card for the weekly parking rate and summoning enough energy to tip the man who lugged our bags to the boat. We sat on different benches in the empty water taxi, Mom huddled against the center beam with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. Next to me, Megan said, “It’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful.” And that was before we even left the wharf.
Out on the water, my nostrils stung with the scent of salt and brine, a smell that I wouldn’t notice after a day or two. I brought out my camera and took the first of a thousand shots for that summer—the sky wide and blue, the water immense and endless. I shot Mom with her eyes closed, Megan with one hand on the side of the boat for balance, the other hand holding back the hair that whipped into her face.
The Island was only a few miles from the mainland, but it always felt like it was a world away, as if time were being manipulated as we crossed the water, expanding and contracting. And then it was in front of us, first a gray spot in the distance, then a towering cliff with a white house perched on top—just a single speck of civilization under a wide sky, surrounded by miles and miles of bluest blue.
Looking around, I remembered what Dad had said, back in New Haven when Mom was coming out of the anesthesia. This might be our last summer on The Island, and we needed to make the most of it.
OCTOBER 12, 2016
Lauren
It turned out that Mom was right after all.
Anna Kovics dropped her complaint on Wednesday, less than two days after she’d first come forward with her trembling lip and her convincing story. It was impossible to pretend it was a normal day, although I went through the motions—taking Schnauzer for his morning run, dropping off the girls at school and then sitting in front of my laptop, willing myself not to click on any more links about Senator Mabrey’s sex scandal.
The trouble was that my work happened online, and it was too easy to switch to another tab, something I did almost unconsciously, so that one minute I was eliminating the creases from an old photo and the next I was replaying the attorney’s statement about wishing Anna Kovics well on her road to healing.
I’d worked for various photo services over the years, including a one-hour photo booth and a national company that took school portraits. These days, I worked for Lovingly Restored, an online photo restoration business, where clients uploaded high resolution images of their damaged photos, and we turned back the clock—removing folds and water stains and sun exposures, restoring colors and contrasts. Today I flipped back and forth between a wedding picture that had been water damaged, a dark brown stain settling on top of the glossy black-and-white finish, and the unraveling story of Anna Kovics.
Based on the online backlash, Anna was a liar and a slut and a money-grubbing bitch. The trolls were out in full-force misogyny, debating everything from her breast size to her flexibility.
If Anna had wanted money, wouldn’t it have been easier to show up on the doorstep of Holmes House with a demand—a figure scrawled on a piece of paper, as if she were orchestrating a bank robbery?
And if Anna’s story had any merit, wouldn’t that mean that there had been others, too? Another staffer, or an intern, someone young, someone relatively powerless? The internet was silent on this point. If there had been other allegations, they’d been squashed before they reached the magnitude of Anna Kovics.
Eventually, I searched again, as I’d done dozens of times before, for Megan Mazeros. She wasn’t on Facebook, at least not under her own name, nor on Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn. There were no status updates or résumés, no “Likes” on Washington Post articles, nothing “pinned” on Pinterest. The only hint of her existence was on the staff page for a community college in northern Massachusetts: Megan Mazeros, Academic Advisor. Even that nugget was buried nineteen pages deep in a Google search. There was no picture, and no way to know if it was the same Megan Mazeros. Maybe she wasn’t a Mazeros anymore; maybe she didn’t live on the east coast.
There was an email address listed on the site, however, and I hovered the cursor over the hyperlink, wondering if I should click on it, send her a message. Are you the same Megan Mazeros who attended Keale College until 2002? Or maybe simply It’s me, Lauren. But I had no idea what to say after that.
There was only one thing I really wanted to know, and it didn’t seem like the sort of thing that could be asked out of the blue, fourteen years later, by someone who was now a stranger, someone who she was probably happy to forget.
But still, I wanted to know. The urge was more pressing now that Anna Kovics had dropped out of public view, now that I was beginning to question everything in my own memory. What happened that night?
* * *
After dinner, Brady settled into the den with the girls, and I went up to the attic with a flashlight, digging around until I found the prints I’d boxed up years ago. Each one had been labeled with a thick Sharpie, although the writing was now fading with age. Camp Watachwa, 2000. New York City, September 2001. It was like peeling back the layers of an onion—each lid I opened was another layer, pictures of Megan and me, pictures of Joe Natolo, pictures of all of us Mabreys lined up on the stairs of Holmes House in our red Christmas sweaters, our smiles newly polished and perfectly timed.
The last box was from that summer—The Island, 2002. I’d printed the pictures that fall at Keale and packed them away, the pain too fresh, salt in the wound I was trying to heal. That was the last of the boxes, because after that I was on to other things—graduating, getting pregnant with Stella, marrying Brady. Sometimes, when I looked back on it, it was amazing how quickly I’d given it up, filling my hours not with scouting out the perfect shot or developing the same negative over and over, trying to achieve the right effect, but cuddling with a fussy infant, stenciling a nursery rhyme on the wall over her crib, learning for the first time how to cook something more complicated than pasta. I switched to digital photography, later to inexpensive point-and-shoot cameras and then to the built-in lens on my iPhone. There were literally thousands of pictures of Brady and the girls on various flash drives, snapped on the fly as we walked to the park or waited in the pediatrician’s office. Every now and then I pulled one up to run it through a filter, to add text and reduce red-eye and send it to Costco for printing.
Opening these boxes was like revisiting the darkroom, my nose tingling with the smell of chemicals, eyes squinting to adjust to the red glare of the safelight. I’d spent so many hours there, the door locked behind me, alone with what I’d created. How many times had I missed dinner because the hours had flown by? How many times had Megan and I gone down to the river, her bike basket containing whatever book she was reading while mine contained nothing more than the Leica in its weathered case?
I opened the box that read THE ISLAND 2002 and spread the prints in a semicircle on the floor around me, grouping them according to subject. Faces appeared from nowhere, surprising me with their youth. It was too much, immediately. There was my mother, a scarf wrapped over her perfect bob, her body encased in wispy fabric. Kat, her belly heavy with pregnancy, looking greenish and wan on a chaise lounge. Lizzie, running in a blur of toddler motion, arms pinwheeling, golden brown curls escaping her barrettes. There was my father, dress shirt and pleated wool pants swapped for a polo and some khakis. And there was MK, fresh from law school graduation, throwing his head back and laughing. He had all of his life ahead of him.
I saved the pictures of Megan for last, unable to face them head-on. She was blindingly young and more beautiful than I’d remembered. The camera had captured the blond curls twisted on her head in a topknot while we hiked on a rugged end of The Island, and those same curls loose on her shoulders while she sat on a bench at the picnic table, a paper plate balanced on her knee. She was uncomfortable being the subject, so half of my shots were of Megan’s tongue out, eyes crossed, lips pouting in an exaggerated kiss. In the best ones, she wasn’t looking at me, but out over the ocean, a churning gray in the distance, or down a
t a book in her lap, her brows knit with concentration. In my favorite picture, she was holding Lizzie’s chubby toddler hand, and the two of them were dipping their feet into the shallows, water foaming white around their ankles.
And yet, there were so many things the pictures didn’t capture—not what I was feeling that summer for Joe Natolo, a smarting ache every time I thought about him back in his apartment over the garage in Scofield. It didn’t show how sick Kat really was, or how things would work out for her later, years down the road. It didn’t show anything that might have been brewing between MK and Megan. The pictures had captured moments in time, but they weren’t crystal balls, and they weren’t capable of seeing all the trouble in the future, only days away.
There were footsteps on the rickety pull-down attic stairs, and then Brady’s head was at the opening, peeking out like one of Emma’s meerkats on Animal Planet. “What are you doing up here?”
“Just looking through some old pictures,” I said.
Brady picked his way around the boxes, most of them labeled for winter clothes or Christmas decorations. He knelt down next to me, reaching for a photo of my parents in their Adirondack chairs on the deck. “It’s hard to remember they were this young.”
I nudged him with an elbow. “That was only six months before we were together.”
“I’ll never understand how time works.” He put the photo down and picked up one of Megan sitting on the railing of the gazebo, a tanned leg dangling down on the ocean side. “Who’s this?”
“My roommate,” I said, my voice catching.
“Oh, right. Megan.” He picked up another from the stack, and another, all those young Megans flashing before me. Young and beautiful and stupid, too. He stared longer at a picture of MK shirtless, balancing in the fishing boat.
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