by Natasha Boyd
“Pete, I’ll give you a hand.” A man of few but certainly effective words.
I sat where indicated on the hard and cold white seat and pulled my hoodie up, securing it with my scarf and tucking some wayward strands of black hair away so I could see better in the wind. Then I pulled my backpack off my shoulders and tucked my disconnected ear buds into my ears in an attempt to shut out the mistrust I could feel directed at me. I hugged the pack to my chest. I missed my phone, needed my music so badly right now.
Turning my head, I took in the lightening sky and the silver hue of the water. The marsh reeds of the Bull River that I always remembered as vivid green were brown and beige, casting a gloomy lens over my romantic memories of visiting down here. But then I’d never been here in winter.
My blood felt thick and heavy in my veins. It was a large dose for my body weight. “How long does it usually take to get to the island?” I asked Pete as he caught a final rope from his other passenger. Lion guy pushed the boat away from the jetty and leapt in the back with hardly a sound. Just like a cat.
“About twenty minutes normally, but around to Bloody Point, more like thirty.”
Shit. I hoped I made it. But already I felt my eyelids getting heavy and my arms slipped slowly from around my pack. I gripped with my hands, looping the straps in my fingers. If I could just lay my forehead down on my bag. Just rest for a bit. The motion of the boat was so soothing.
I dreamed of my sister. I dreamed of Abby.
Six Years Earlier
I COULD SEE Abby through the crack in the door. I’d heard the argument Mom and Dad had with her. Well, odd disjointed words actually.
“This boy…” My father.
My mother’s voice. “…financial sacrifices.”
“…slap in the face after what we’ve done for you.” Again, my mother.
“Fuck you both.” My sister.
Her words had stopped the fast rhythmic strokes of my brown pencil where I’d been sitting in my room shading in the tail of the little mermaid. The real one. Or at least, my sketch of the bronze statue of her in the water off the coast of Copenhagen, Denmark. I’d see it one day, I swore it.
Now my parents were downstairs, their raised voices muffled enough for the words to be indistinct. I moved to stand quietly in the hallway outside Abby’s room and watched through the tiny gap in the doorway as she rummaged in her bedside drawer before moving her thin, willowy body around the bed to the window. Her shoulder-length wavy blonde hair was mussed and careless; her pajama shorts made her look even taller. She would turn eighteen in a few days.
She pushed the white sashed window up as high as it would go and slung a long, bare limb over the sill so she could sit half in, half out. Then, sticking a misshapen cigarette in her mouth, she fumbled with the box in her hands and after a few tries struck a match, bringing it to the end of the white cylinder. After a deep inhale, a pause, and an even longer exhale that pushed swirls of white clouds around her body, she rocked her head back against the window frame and spoke.
“Come in here, Livvy.”
I jumped.
“Come on in,” she said more softly and looked over to me as if she knew exactly how long I’d been there. “And let me tell you about the fucked up but so-called perfect life we lead here in the Baines family.” Her hand held her cigarette out the window.
I glanced over my shoulder, my heart lurching, but I could still hear my parents downstairs. Inching open the door, I eased inside my older sister’s room that I’d hardly set foot in during the past year, and closed the door behind me. I was elated I’d finally been invited back in and terrified of who this sister was, who seemed so changed, yet still so eerily familiar.
The room was bigger than I remembered, or something seemed different, but I kept my gaze on my sister.
Abby watched me with her blue eyes. They were a shade darker than mine. Daddy always said she got the deep end of the pool while I got the shallow end. I used to love it before I knew that might not be such a good thing.
“You don’t question anything, do you, Livvy?” Abby took another deep inhalation of her cigarette, holding it between her thumb and forefinger, her eyes slitting up as she assessed me.
I stood still, wondering what she meant, afraid to say anything in case she changed her mind about talking to me.
She removed the homemade cigarette from her mouth and held it toward me in offering.
Swallowing hard, I shook my head. Worse than the idea of sucking hot, dry smoke into my throat, the idea that I might not be able to do it without choking held me firm. I’d seen enough in the movies of people’s first try with a cigarette to know that when I did it, I wanted to be on my own. Worse than this Abby who looked annoyed at me would be an Abby laughing at me.
“Well,” she continued slowly, letting out the fragrant smoke she held in her lungs, “I don’t think I questioned why Uncle Mike was so involved in our lives when I was eleven years old either.”
Uncle Mike. Who cared about Uncle Mike? He was such a bore—trying too hard to be fun and funny with me and my friends. Asking us what music we liked and singing along in the car from swim practice. So embarrassing.
Abby beckoned me closer, her mouth a hard line, but I stayed put. The look on her face, the eerie distance in her eyes as if some other person inhabited her body, was giving me the willies.
When we’d been little, she’d treated me like a doll, dressing me up and playing with me, even when I got up to about five or six and didn’t want to be ordered about so much. I still loved her attention. But after her thirteenth birthday—“Teenage-hood” my mother had trilled and rolled her eyes—Abby’s time for me plummeted exponentially with each year. As far as I could tell, teenagers were boring and it only got worse. Abby had pretty much ignored me for the last year. Not that she’d paid much attention to me before that. But at least, even with her vastly reduced attention, she’d been sweet, always quick with a hug or ruffling my hair. Indulging my adulation.
I glanced warily about the room, noticing for the first time that she’d ripped all her posters down, leaving pockmarks and torn paper corners all over the walls. It looked bare and cold. No wonder it had seemed bigger when I first came in.
My eyes finally found their way back to Abby, and hers softened, her pupils darker. She gestured me closer again, and when I didn’t respond she leaned out the window and banged her cigarette to stub it out before bringing it back inside, wrapping it up carefully and sliding it into a baggie. Getting up, and folding her long limb back in through the window, she moved to the bed and sank to her knees on the rose-colored carpet. Her hands reached under the bed and pulled out the monogrammed black duffle Mom bought for her swim tournament in ninth grade. It was packed full, and she slid the clear plastic bag into the side pocket.
When she turned back to me, her eyes were shiny dark pools. “I know you won’t understand yet, Livvy, but I’m leaving tonight.”
“W-what?” Confusion moved through me. I felt the swell of fear in my chest. I didn’t understand what was happening.
“I’m leaving. For good—”
“No!” I burst out, fear exploding into full-blown panic in my chest. Lurching forward I fell toward her, my arms out to grasp her. I knew, I knew, in a way I’d never be able to explain that I was losing her. Perhaps forever.
“Not you, Livvy.” I heard her voice, as I pressed my face into her neck, inhaling the scent of our youth that came from the same bottle of pineapple shampoo currently sitting upside down on the edge of our shared tub. “I don’t want to leave you. But I can’t take you, and I have to leave.” She grabbed my upper arms, squeezing tight and shaking me. “I have to leave.”
I winced with the pressure of her hands as they held me away from her body.
Her face was grim. “I’m sorry. But I have to go.”
“But where are you going? I don’t understand.”
She shook me again.
And shook me.
And sho
ok me.
“WAKE UP, WE’RE here.” A deep voice. Not Abby.
I snapped my eyes open, disoriented. Lion eyes stared back at me.
I pulled away and blinked, looking around. The island ahead was a wild tangle of grey green, making it look as primitive and isolated as I remembered. It was so familiar, and so strange all at once. “I’m sorry. I’m really tired.” I’d missed the ride in. I’d missed the dolphins in the marshes around Turtle Island. My favorite part.
Pete the pirate was looping a rope onto a metal cleat on the dock. He looked over at me as he finished. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
I nodded, pulling my coat tighter around me. The dock was newer looking than I remembered it.
“Who did you say you were visiting?”
I hadn’t, and he knew it. If I said my grandmother’s name, he might ask too many questions seeing as her house had most likely been abandoned for years. I wasn’t sure how much Pete knew about the goings-on of the island. “Actually, I’m just visiting a house. It belongs to my family. Thank you for the ride.”
“I’ll make sure she gets there, Pete.”
I swung my head up.
“All right. Tommy here’ll get you safely to where you’re goin’.”
Tommy? No, Tommy didn’t fit. Not at all.
Pete went on, “Just give me a holler should you be needin’ a ride back. I’ll be fishing up the cuts most o’ the mornin’s this week.” He held out a grimy card with even grimier fingers, black under the fingernails.
Captain “Fishy Pete” White.
I nodded and slid it into my bag, knowing these gestures were less about helping me out and more about what my business was here. Small waves rocked against the boat, and I grabbed Pete’s outstretched hand and stepped up onto the steady dock. “Thank you.”
Tommy stepped out after me, and I didn’t wait for him. I didn’t need him making sure I got to the cottage. Or knowing where I was headed. I strode forward.
The landing we’d come in at was on the New River side, where the island curved away from the Atlantic. It wasn’t technically Bloody Point, although it was referred to as such, being the closest you could bring a boat. As the crow flew, the house was less than half a mile away. But of course, with the dense foliage and the marshes cutting inland, I had farther to travel.
Heading over the sandy pine needle strewn ground, I could see through the saw palmettos, and I made for the dirt road that wound through the trees, not even stopping to appreciate the surroundings I’d missed over the years. The wind was still cold off the Atlantic, and I inhaled the fresh salty gust, hoping its chill would permeate all my senses and keep me alert and awake until I got to the cottage.
A few minutes along the cleared earth track that passed for a road, the whir and buzz of an electric cart closed in behind me, crunching over the coarse ground. I glanced back to see my fellow boat passenger riding a golf cart that had seen better days, and I remembered that no one used cars here. The expense of having them ferried over probably wasn’t worth it to most locals. Especially if this was what most of the roads still looked like, and I suspected it was.
He pulled up in front of me, effectively cutting me off.
I stopped short. Annoyance had to be etched all over my face.
“We’re headed the same direction,” he said, leaning forward, one arm slung over the wheel. I expected his eyes to be assessing me, but instead they slid away uneasily. “May as well give you a ride.”
“No. Thank you,” I muttered and stepped sideways so I could continue. I seriously hoped this guy was on the up and up.
“Suit yourself.” He sighed. “See you in a bit.”
What the hell did that mean? See you in a bit? He took off, the cart shuddering along the track.
It was eerily quiet as I walked through the trees. Just once I heard the thwack of a golf ball and some low voices and realized I must be passing close by one of the tees of the Bloody Point Golf Club. It had been abandoned and in disrepair the last time I’d been here. Abby taught me to ride my bike on the fourteenth fairway, the grass all patchy and brown in spots.
Sure enough, as I rounded the corner, the fully restored clubhouse rose up to my right, painted white with a fancy looking porch and a dark red roof. It didn’t seem to have much activity—not surprising in winter on an island with so few residents—but it was clearly operational. Maybe I could see about getting a job tomorrow. The thought lightened my mood, hatching a small kernel of hope.
After veering inland, and then heading right on another dirt track through the dark and eerily silent vegetation that towered above me so the sky was only periodically visible, I finally got to the turnoff for our road. My relief at the lack of development on this part of Daufuskie was acute. It meant I could be here in relative peace, and my grandmother’s cottage, while it was probably overgrown, would be largely un-messed-with.
I could almost make the house out through the trees as I got closer. Forcing myself to slow down in my excitement and relief, I breathed deep and turned into the driveway. Okay, driveway was an overstatement. There was a gap in the vegetation and the cottage sat nestled in a clearing, embraced by a massive live oak to one side that was for sure several hundred years old. I remembered Gran saying it could even be a thousand years old. Thick with leaves, dripping moss and iced with green revival plants, the branches reached out majestically before snaking toward the ground and up again, as if they were arguing about whether to grow out toward the surrounding forest or reach for the sky.
The two-room-wide cottage was smaller and older than in my memory, but in that moment it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. And not as overgrown as I’d imagined. Sanctuary. The word rocked through me. A place to heal.
The white paint could no longer be called that, though from what I could see, the metal roof looked good. It jutted out over the porch that spanned the front. There were two missing spindles in the railing to the left and the porch sagged there a little but… wait. I swept my eyes from left to right. There was fresh white paint on the opposite end. New unpainted wooden spindles every so often.
No.
I turned my head all the way to the left and confirmed what my brain had already processed in the periphery. Golf cart. The same golf cart, if I wasn’t mistaken. The screen door squeaked open and he stepped out, the door banging shut behind him.
“What are you d-doing here?” I swallowed. There must be some mistake. There was no way my parents could have sold this. They couldn’t! It was mine. Anguish and exhaustion closed around my throat. My eyes stung.
“I live here,” he said matter-of-factly. I couldn’t see his expression beneath all that facial hair.
This was not happening. I locked my knees and clung tightly to the straps of my bag to stop the shaking.
And then I was angry. So angry. This was mine. Mine. Mine. And I was so tired.
“Who the fuck are you?” I spat, because it was all I could do to speak through the indescribable helplessness that was threatening to do me in. Oh my God. I had nowhere. I had nothing.
“You must be Olivia,” he said, his voice gruff and oddly flat. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”
“HOW DO YOU know my name?” I asked. Was he some kind of caretaker?
“You’re Abby’s little sister.”
The shock of hearing my sister’s name on this stranger’s lips jolted me.
He stood, strong legs braced apart, arms crossed over his checked shirted chest. He looked imposing. Almost savage.
“If you knew who I was, why didn’t you say something on the road? Or on the boat for that matter?”
He cocked his shaggy head to the side, a lock of light brown hair falling across his face, and let out a breath I could hear from where I stood uncertainly, looking up at him on the porch. “Why don’t you come in.”
It wasn’t a question.
It sounded more like resignation.
He turned around and went through the door
into the dim interior.
Questions and vague memories whirred in kaleidoscopic fragments through my mind, too disjointed for me to grab onto. For a moment, I stood in place before the one-story cottage that now held such mystery. This person knew Abby? Or did he just know of her? He looked vaguely familiar, like I’d maybe seen him on the island as a child.
He could be a creepy serial killer recluse. The recluse part was right. But I could hardly pass judgment on that since I was here to be the same.
A cold gust of wind made me shiver, and my stomach growled loudly. I climbed up the steps, my eyes sweeping side to side. My grandmother’s white wicker love seat was still there, the chintz faded to white, the paint peeling and dulled to a shade of gray.
“Are you going to stand out there like the angel of death all day? What’s with all the black?”
I gritted my teeth in annoyance and pulled open the screen, stepping into a chamber of memories. I slid my backpack to my feet on the warm wood floor. It smelled the same, but different. Cedar, but also something lemony. Whitewashed wood walls surrounded the one-room living room/kitchen, the huge scarred farm table that doubled as a kitchen island dwarfing the space. A string of seashells I’d collected with Abby one summer was still hanging at the kitchen window. Missing was the clutter and the floral touches that had made it the place I associated with everything good, but it was close enough. Waves of conflicting emotions tumbled through me, bringing the sting back to my eyes and the thud to my chest. My breath caught as I tried to breathe. I couldn’t cry, I wouldn’t cry, but I couldn’t hold it in. The relief of being here, coupled with the stark reminder of everything I’d lost since the last time I’d visited, hit me deep in my gut. And I was tired. So tired. I tried to control it, but my breath released in a sob.
Strong arms took mine and steered me toward a chair. I shrugged him off. All I wanted to do was be alone here and I couldn’t be. “I need to lie down, and you… you need to go,” I said, not looking up. I stood and headed toward the bedroom on the right where Abby and I had slept.