I heard the sound of the girls’ feet pounding up the stairs, they took a look around, then pounded back down. After we’d all seen every inch, we ended up back in the kitchen together, standing around the rectangular island, our elbows on the cream ceramic tile, almost afraid to speak. As if talking about us actually getting to stay there would jinx it. As if the house was a mirage our voices would make disappear.
“It’s a long way from the trailers, huh, girls?” Linda whispered. The house must have been real because even after she spoke, Mariner’s Passage stayed standing.
It’s light years away from the trailers, I thought.
That beautiful house with the magazine view and the rich-people vibe was one happy marriage (Andrea and Steve’s), one divorce (Jill and Marty’s), a second marriage (Jill and Tony’s), two healthy babies (a daughter for Andrea and a son for me), and one forever-departed sister away from the trailers.
“I say we do it,” Linda said. “It’s going to mean another thirty dollars each, but I think it’s worth it. Who’s in?”
I believe all of us would have been, if given the chance to say so. We weren’t. The rumbling of a diesel engine outside interrupted any thought of housing we might have been entertaining and replaced it with a more primal one: escape.
The door to the garage was the nearest exit and we all ran toward it.
Linda put her hand on the knob and yanked it open.
“Dave!” she said, as the rest of us dominoed against her back.
“Ladies?” he said.
Parked in the garage was a big black pickup truck with a front-loading washer and dryer wrapped in plastic and sitting in the bed.
“Hi!” Bev said.
“Nice place,” Linda said, giving Bev the look. “We’ll take it.”
Dave’s face broke into a smile, and he said nothing about the breaking and entering. Though technically, since the place wasn’t locked, it had really only been entering and giddily roaming around.
“I thought you’d like it,” he said.
While the rest of us jumped up and down like lunatics, Susan was the one with enough presence of mind to take care of the details. She wrote down Dave’s mainland address and arranged to mail him a check for $425. The deposit for next year’s trip.
Sunday afternoon it rained and we all lounged at Fairview. Some girls took naps and I tried, with mixed results, to find the Michigan State Spartans football game on the little TV’s foil-wrapped antennas. When everyone was awake again, I decided it was a good time for the reflection I’d planned for Mary Lynn. I’d told Linda about it, she called the girls to the kitchen table, and I set something down in the middle of it.
“It’s for Mary Lynn,” I explained.
There was a pause while everyone stared at the heart-sized metal orb.
“I don’t get it,” Andrea said.
It was a small brass doorknob polished to a high sheen from years of use. I’d found it at a store south of Traverse City that sold hardware salvaged from old buildings. I didn’t know what Jimmy had done with Mary Lynn’s ashes—and I hadn’t felt like it was my place to ask—but I still wanted to leave something of her on the island. My fondest memory of Mary Lynn was the night she’d stood on that chair at Chuck’s and yelled out, “Door! Bitches!” and so that’s why I’d bought the doorknob. When I made the plan, I hadn’t known we’d be moving houses; now that it was going to be our last year at Fairview, a place Mary Lynn had loved, the gesture seemed even more important.
The hard rain of earlier in the day had drained to a light sprinkle. We put on our jackets and went outside. Most of the houses and cabins on Drummond Island had only tiny yards or none at all. The woods were vigorous and could reclaim a yard in a single summer if it wasn’t constantly mowed. There was a thin strip of grass around Fairview, then a rocky, mossy cedar forest. I hadn’t thought to bring a shovel so we grabbed a few dinner knives from the kitchen, stood in a circle, and started digging. When we had a little hole a foot or so deep, I dropped the doorknob in, we refilled the dirt, and Jill arranged a thick piece of moss on top. We found some flat rocks and built a small cairn for a marker.
Sunday night we had dinner at Pins, Drummond Island’s bowling alley, and made cursory stops at Northwoods and Chuck’s, and everyone but Andrea and Jill said they wanted to head back to Fairview early. It would be our last night in the little cabin in the woods we’d stayed in since 1998—five whole years, and it felt like the end of an era. It would also be our last night in the cabin where we’d stayed with Mary Lynn. We were excited about moving to a newer, more lavish home next year, but I was feeling a little melancholy about it, too. As if we were officially leaving Mary Lynn behind.
Andrea and Jill tried to settle in that night but were acting jumpy and still full of energy—from the excitement of the new house, from Jill’s return, from reckoning with their own mortality, or perhaps from all three. They didn’t want to play euchre, they didn’t want to play Pictionary, they didn’t want to make a snack, and they certainly didn’t want to work on the intricate puzzle of the United States Linda had spread out on the dining room table.
“We’re headed back to Chuck’s,” Andrea said, jacket on, car keys swinging from her finger. “Anyone else?”
Until Linda and Pam’s scouting of Dave’s house the night before, we didn’t split up when we were on the island. If one car was going somewhere, the other car was going there, too, sometimes whether the occupants wanted to or not. Whether for safety, unity, loyalty, or tradition, that’s just the way it had been ever since two cars of girls had traveled to the island.
But that year, we’d felt surrounded by changes. We’d lost Mary Lynn and gained back Jill. We were staying an extra day again and had made arrangements to move to a new house. We’d always be together in our hearts, but that didn’t mean we always needed to be within a few feet of each other, too.
Linda must have approved because when Andrea announced she and Jill were going back out, she gave Andrea forty dollars from the kitty and then returned to her puzzle.
“Anybody else?” Andrea asked.
“Me,” I said, grabbing my purse and a flannel shirt and looking over at Bev. “Wanna go?”
“I’m tired,” she said.
I was tired, too; I needed a shower; there were tangles the size of wolverines in the back of my long hair; I had sloppy joe grease on my jeans, and I was going.
The drive from Fairview to Chuck’s was about ten miles and involved a complex series of two-tracks, dirt roads, familiar objects (turn left at the old bulldozer stuck in the clay), and guesswork. It was weird, the way you could get lost on an island you’d been on every year for a decade, but that was Drummond. After a few minor turnarounds and an attack of forest vertigo (didn’t we already go by that tree?), Andrea finally navigated us to our destination.
“Where is everyone?” she’d said, disappointed by the nearly empty parking lot.
“This island is obviously uninformed,” Jill said. “Because if they knew we were coming, I’m sure they would have been here.”
By “everyone,” Andrea didn’t mean people we actually knew. We did have acquaintances on the island—Frank, Garthalene and Missy, bartender Beth, a friendly pool-playing guy named Duane, Worm, and now Dave, our future landlord—but it wasn’t like we ever made plans to meet up with them. By “everyone,” Andrea had just meant a collective everyone, the people of Drummond, the tourists, the locals, and random travelers.
What we’d forgotten was that we’d arrived on the island on Thursday. By the time the three of us broke ranks and drove to Chuck’s, it was Monday night. We were still on vacation, so we still felt like whooping it up, but Monday was just Monday for the people who lived on Drummond. The start of another workweek and the last day most of them would even think of looking for some late-night fun.
If we’d realized that, the mood inside Chuck’s wouldn’t have been such a surprise. But we didn’t. For us, Monday might as well have been a Saturday, an
d a Saturday-night feel for us meant a Saturday-night feel for the whole world. Obviously, no one had informed Chuck’s of that, because there was just one table of two couples, and then two men at the bar, and all six were slumped down and tired looking.
“What the hell happened?” Andrea asked the bartender.
“We had a very bad night,” she said. “Someone didn’t like their soup and all hell broke loose.”
The three of us laughed, sure it was a joke. The place was empty enough that everyone had to have heard what she said, but the other customers only glared.
“I know you,” a beefy, fair-skinned blond man at the end of the bar said, pointing a hefty finger our way. “You girls are from Hessel. You were at the football game.”
If it got a little levity into that somber room, then sure, we’d be from Hessel. We’d have been from Kalamazoo, Timbuktu, or bippity-boppity-boo.
“Yeah! Hessel!” Jill said, hoisting her beer in salute. “Whoo-hoo!”
More glares.
Andrea tried a new tack. She had the forty dollars from the kitty in her pocket and told the bartender to get the big guy a beer on us.
“What about my wife?” he’d said, in lieu of a thank-you.
“Take it easy, Hamberg,” the bartender said, but there wasn’t any authority in her voice. She wasn’t Garthalene; she wasn’t even Missy; she was someone new, someone we’d never seen before.
The big blond looked like the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island. And the Skipper was in a very bad mood. I wondered if even Bev could have softened him up. But Bev wasn’t there, and it was actually the person sitting next to the Skipper who had concerned me. He wasn’t just irked, but rather doing a slow, infuriated burn. That person was built like a mini Hulk Hogan. A zombified mini Hulk Hogan. When we looked closer, though, we saw that there was a purse hanging off the back of the barstool. Yup, a woman.
“And a beer for the little lady,” Andrea said, with false cheer and a paralyzed smile on her face. She leaned in to us and whispered, “Drummond Girls order beer, then torn limb from limb.”
“I can take him,” Jill whispered back, smiling and trying hard not to move her lips. “But I’m not going anywhere near her.”
“You’re a bunch of cheaters!” the Skipper yelled. He’d cracked open his free Budweiser and had slopped some into his mouth. Ms. Hogan stared straight ahead, not touching her beer, not even looking at it.
What we did not know then was that because there was no high school on the island, Drummond children went to DeTour for tenth through twelfth grades. And for decades, the towns of DeTour and Hessel had been locked in a vicious high school football rivalry. Three nights before, Hessel had defeated DeTour in an important game. The Hessel boys were going on to the play-offs; the Drummond boys were going nowhere.
“These colors don’t cheat!” Jill said, smacking herself hard in the breastbone.
Maybe his insult had taken her back to her own high school days when she was a cheerleader and ran track. But she wasn’t wearing Traverse City Central’s black and gold, and it wasn’t 1985. It was 2002 and she had on a plain gray sweatshirt.
The Skipper eyed her chest and looked confused.
“We’re from Traverse City,” Andrea explained, as if he were a boy at her preschool in the grips of a tantrum. “Not Hessel. We thought you were from Hessel.”
Wrong assumption. Skipper’s wife turned her jaw four clicks to one side, then four clicks to the other, and we heard the bones in her neck crack. She looked right at us then, as if finally noticing we were even in the bar. Three powder puffs about to be slammed by a folding chair.
“You Traverse City girls are a different breed,” the Skipper said.
“You rich girls from Traverse City,” his wife corrected.
“Time to bail,” Jill said, not even bothering to whisper it.
Andrea threw a twenty on the bar and we left.
Once safely inside Bruno, I thought of the glee we’d felt the night before, secretly running through that beautiful log mansion, trespassers in a wealthy person’s home. I thought of my own house, with its bad insulation, single-pane windows, ancient furnace, and chipping plaster. And finally, I thought of Mary Lynn. How she’d missed what would have been her last year because she couldn’t afford it. And I thought of her immaculate bi-level. The one with hardly any furniture. The one that Jimmy lived in all alone now.
At breakfast the next morning, we told the rest of the girls about our encounter. They were as surprised by what had happened as we had been. We loved Chuck’s and had never felt anything but welcome there.
“It was really weird,” Andrea said. “It was like that Hamburger guy hated us.”
What I thought was strange was that we’d never seen that big blond guy or his wife before. But the bartender had called him by name, so they must have been regulars. For reasons we didn’t know, they’d despised us.
“Oh, well,” Bev said cheerfully. “They’re probably just unhappy and taking it out on you.”
“You weren’t there,” I told her.
Bev always tried to see the good in people. Always tried to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Even belligerent, angry people who drank their bitter feelings about a high school football game and radiated what I could only describe as hate. I couldn’t imagine being as serene as Bev was, but I did admire the quality in her. Even at fifty-eight, she had remained amazingly innocent.
Bev’s assessment of Hulk and the Skipper was in the minority, though, and we decided to stay clear of the bars and town, at least for the afternoon. It’d been a few years since we’d spent much time two-tracking, and when Linda suggested we do that instead of staying at the house, we realized how much we’d all missed just driving slowly and randomly through the woods.
There was something inexplicably transporting about sitting in the passenger seat as one of your best friends drove her SUV down a rugged dirt path deep into uninhabited woods at five miles an hour. After only a few minutes, you’d forget the impossibility of your work deadlines, forget your shrinking bank account, and even forget the alarming fissures in your marriage.
You could just sit in that seat instead, without a single care, without even your purse, lean your head back, and turn your face toward the open window. Your mind would fill up with the smell of pine needles and moss, and your friends would be so overcome by the beauty of it they’d stop talking and turn off the music. You’d all just listen as the median of switchgrass polished the undercarriage and even finally feel that one stubborn muscle in the back of your neck relax.
And it was right there, in the backseat of Bruno with Andrea at the wheel, that I felt truly present.
“I have to pee.”
And I watched the chickadees flit, so delicate they could perch on a fern frond, and breathed in so deep I could’ve almost OD’d on all that chlorophyll, and the very best part was that—
“I have to pee,” Bev said again, “like right now.”
We were far back in the woods when Andrea flashed her headlights at Linda and hit the brakes. Linda stopped, too, and all seven of us got out to stretch.
“I gotta go so bad I don’t think I can even make it to the woods,” Bev said, struggling with the button on her pink pants.
“Well, my bumper’s right there,” Andrea said, pointing.
Before we’d stopped, we’d been looking for the stone chimneys that were supposed to be all that was left of the original Fort Drummond. We’d driven far back into the center of the island, and it had been at least an hour since we’d seen another vehicle. There were no power poles, no tire tracks in the road but ours, no sign of human life anywhere except for the two-track itself.
The forest was so dense, civilization so far away, that if I’d have been alone, even there in the bright afternoon sunshine, I might actually have been a little frightened. Sixty bears on the island. Wolves and cougars. Megabear still perhaps at large.
Bev got her pants unbuttoned, and the rest of us moved o
ff and stood in a little group between the two vehicles, just talking about our day, the trip, and what we might want to do that evening. For the first few seconds, all we heard was the unmistakable sound of liquid under pressure meeting hard-packed dirt. Bev’s relief even quieted the birds and the cicadas. But then it was joined by another sound: truck tires and a chugging engine. Big truck tires and a big-sounding engine. It wasn’t like the diesel of Dave’s pickup truck; it was more like the rumble of a semi. And it was getting louder.
“Bev?” I said. “Someone’s coming.”
“I know that!” she’d said.
But she didn’t stop making her sound. Judging by the intensity of it, I didn’t think she could.
From around the corner came a rusty black dump truck, with thick smoke chugging from two dirty exhaust pipes attached to either side of the cab.
It steamed closer, but Bev was still perched on Andrea’s bumper, her underwear and folds of pink corduroy bunched around her knees. She had no choice but to hold her position, and we all knew that feeling. Every woman knows that feeling. Sometimes, you just have to see your pee all the way through.
“Oh, well,” Bev said, fully accepting her situation.
The truck churned closer, though, so we gave her the only support we could. We stood in a half circle in front of her. We couldn’t see the driver very well, but we could at least tell that it was a man. If he wanted to see Bev’s lady parts, he was going to have to run us over in order to do it.
The truck finally stopped twenty feet away. More black smoke choked from the exhaust pipes, and to our shock a man’s blond head popped out of the driver’s side window. He pulled on a cord and a horn blew. Loud.
“That’s him!” Andrea hissed. “That’s the asshole from the bar!”
“What?” Linda said, just as Bev pulled up her pants.
“Oh yeah, that’s him all right,” Jill said.
Our Secretary of Defense kept her eyes on the Skipper, but she bent down, felt around in the dirt, and closed her fingers around a grenade-sized rock.
The Skipper was alone, unprotected by his fierce wife, and when he saw what Jill had in her hand, his expression changed from glee to alarm. He pulled his head back in the window, and the truck engine revved.
The Drummond Girls Page 20