by Abi Maxwell
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ll have to go.”
It was no wonder that the man at the campground would next tell Alice to track down Oscar. He was the one who liked to talk to outsiders. He’d had a wife once, long ago, who had come here from the city. Eventually she left with their daughter—he could admit that his own drinking had done it. But he had long since quit that. Cici had been in his life for more than twenty years now. He wanted to marry her but she would not, but he loved her and was happy all the same.
At the wharf Oscar told the girl that he would take her on the boat the following day. He did it because she was young and nice enough and because it wasn’t often that someone had the courage to ask.
Also it might work out well for Oscar. He and Cici, after all these years, had had their first fight last month. It was over a vacation he wanted to take—he’d planned the whole two weeks, even paid ahead for some of it. They would go to the Bay of Fundy and then down to the city. They would eat French food and stay in hotels and they would be tourists and it would be grand. Cici had refused—she always refused, she would go nowhere—and Oscar had stormed out and now a month had gone by and neither of them had had the sense to apologize. Now with the girl Oscar could. Cici loved a visitor, so he could bring her over and the three of them would eat lobsters.
In the morning Oscar outfitted Alice in a yellow rain suit much too large for her and told her to expect to be sick, what with the waves and the stench of the bait. She said she wanted to see whales, that she had meant to be a scientist but had never done well enough in school. A camera hung from her neck and she said that she had also thought to be a photographer but had never been good enough at that, either. Just seeing them would be enough, she said. And maybe the library in her hometown might like to hang a few photos.
She did marvelously on the boat. Not once did she hang her head over the edge. She didn’t complain and she didn’t speak too much and she had a way of speaking to Oscar’s teenage stern man that seemed to put him right at ease.
“I have a wet suit,” Oscar heard her tell the boy. “I don’t have the nerve to scuba dive but I’m going to snorkel. What are the chances of seeing a whale underwater?”
“Might see that old van,” Oscar called to her from behind the wheel. “Old town legend. Gus at the campground best to tell it. Says a young couple parked there and he watched their van go over into the water. Says their baby was inside. That’s why they disappeared. They stole his truck and it didn’t turn up until two days later, down in the city. Now the whales keep watch over the baby, that’s the story.”
Alice looked out over the still blue water, waiting for a whale to appear. Her father had told her of this place, and he was right—the beauty, she had seen nothing like it. But there was something else, too. The danger of the cliff, it may have been that. The poverty perhaps. Something here scared her. When she stood at the edge of the cliff in the night she became afraid not that she would fall over the ledge but that she might jump.
“Got lobsters,” Oscar said later, when she was back at the campground. It was just about dinnertime and she was going to heat a can of beans by the fire but here he was, wanting to take her for dinner. She got in his truck.
When Cici opened the door she was already a bit drunk. She embraced Oscar and whispered something in his ear and then she put her hands on Alice’s cheeks and asked, “Where are you from?”
“Kettleborough,” Alice said, as though that was a place people would know.
“Yes, yes you are,” Cici said back.
They ate lobsters and listened to Alice talk about the lake where she had grown up, the courses she had taken in college. Before the meal was through, Cici said, “And your father? Tell me how your father is.” Alice went still at that, and in a moment Cici just excused herself and went to the bedroom, closed the door.
“I’ve never seen her like this,” Oscar said. “I’m sorry.” To try to keep the conversation going, he told her again that maybe she’d see that van underwater. Maybe a whale lived in it, he announced foolishly.
Cici, in her bedroom and a little drunk but not near so bad as Oscar and Alice thought, heard that. She lay on her quilt with her arms spread wide. She had brought this quilt from home—the one belonging that stretched back into the space of her previous life. A woman out on Bear Island had sewn it for her when she’d first married, and she had loved it for the colors, which matched the lake. She turned over and dug her nose into the blanket as though there would be an old lake smell trapped in there from more than two decades ago. The love she’d had then, she thought of how desperate and vital it had been. The entire time she and Paul had been together, people had always mistaken them for honeymooners. She’d been pretty then, she knew that, pretty and self-assured, and he could have walked right out from a movie screen.
When she woke up it was still the dark of morning and Oscar was asleep beside her in all his clothes. He wouldn’t go out on the boat today. Cici started a fire and put a saucepan of coffee grounds and water atop it. When Oscar rose he stood in the picture window for a long while. When he turned to her she knew he was angry. He’d always known there was something in her past that sent her away—a woman wouldn’t come here alone without that. He had accepted it. He didn’t tell her everything, either. But there had been rumors about her—Gus at the campground started them way back. He said she was the one who had killed her own baby. That circulated right around until Oscar put a stop to it without Cici’s ever knowing a word had been said.
“Ain’t her name, look right there in your book,” Oscar had told Gus.
“Changed it, maybe she has,” Gus had said.
Back then Oscar had understood that the town wanted her to be some criminal, at least just a little bit they wanted that, for it would provide excitement and years of storytelling. But Gus was wrong, Oscar had been sure of it, and on top of that Oscar had already begun to fall in love with her.
“I’ll go away,” Cici said now. “Anywhere you like.” On a trip with him is what she meant, but she knew it didn’t come out that way. Oscar left. He had intended to drive home but from the top of the cliff he could see Alice down there in her wet suit, a mask on her forehead and a snorkel hanging next to her mouth. She looked helpless and it would be cruel and even dangerous to let her go out there without someone watching. He drove down to the beach.
“I’ve practiced plenty,” she said.
“Who knows what’s down there.”
“I know,” she said. It wasn’t said in agreement. It was a claim she was making.
The lupines were out in full bloom, and before she went into the water she walked up the hill and took one careful photograph of the flowers. This morning, just when the light had begun to spread across the cliff, she’d heard a rustle and peered outside her tent. Cici, on her tiptoes. The woman had held her breath as she opened Alice’s car door and placed something inside. She closed the door, turned, and then turned back, opened the door again. From her view in the tent, Alice could see only that Cici went to the car twice; she couldn’t tell that all Cici had done was move the envelope from the seat to the dashboard and then back to the seat. When the car door was closed once more, Alice expected her to walk off again, but instead she approached the tent. Alice froze in her upright position, unsure as to whether Cici could see in or not. Cici froze, too, and Alice felt certain that for a moment their eyes locked in that dim morning light that was dimmer still with the screen of the tent between them. Neither said a word. Cici left. When Alice was sure that Cici would be out of sight, she crawled out of the tent to see what was there. She had expected a letter, an explanation. An apology. Instead there was a deed for a cabin and a small plot of land out on an island on the lake, along with an old map and a scribbled note: Left to you by a Kettleborough woman named Signe. For a moment the coldness of the exchange shocked Alice, and her instinct was to chase Cici up the road and return the envelope to her. But then neither of them had ever dared speak blunt
ly to each other; Alice had made her attempt and now Cici had made her own. She left the envelope on the seat and returned to her tent until the sun was high.
Now, with flippers on her feet, Alice made her way into the frigid water. Her steps were awkward, but still there was no hesitation in them, though in truth she had not practiced, not in the ocean. She had practiced plenty in the lake, but that had been years ago, and anyway there was a current here and the water was so cold and there was that terror, too, this ocean so vast and the life in it unknown. Underwater, darkness occupied most of her sight, with only an occasional beam of light. She kept the edge of the cove in view but did not go too close to it, in case a wave should change direction and sweep against the side of the rock rather than the shore. The seaweed was tall and she had the sense that she was drifting atop a forest canopy. There were no fish, none that she saw. When the light glinted she knew she had found the van. It was where she had imagined it to be. She came up and held tight to a rock, lifted her mask from her face and looked to shore. It wasn’t but twenty feet away. She had worn a life jacket but now she removed it and hitched it with its strap to a tangle of seaweed on the rock. She took a deep breath and plunged herself under.
The van still stood straight up, as though it had grown out from the seafloor and longed for light. Without knowing what she was looking at she might have known only that a large hunk of rusted metal lay beneath the water. The water down there was gentle, and in it one open door swayed lightly back and forth. So this was what she had come in search of. Not a thin, cold, unknowable woman whose features would never match her own, but the proof, drowned and rusted, that she herself had impossibly clung to life. That no matter how little she felt she belonged in this world, she had known, in her infant self, how to reemerge into it.
“Any whales?” Oscar asked when Alice returned.
Alice was dripping and cold and in her hands she held her life jacket, snorkel and mask, and flippers. Wet and burdened as she was, she looked nothing but pathetic.
“The baby didn’t die and the van’s still there,” she said. “You can tell your Clara that.”
Back home, the woman who had become Cici put water on for tea. She took out her stack of records but decided instead on silence. In the bottom of her underwear drawer she had a picture. She locked the doors of her place and took that picture out. Sun poured in. It had been like that then; all of her memories of that time were filled with light plunged down for their small family alone. And that had been good, full, and surely would have grown. But now what was she to do? She could not ever say that when that great beast with barnacles on its back rose from the depths she had chosen to leave her family and instead join with that animal in a flight far above all that her life had ever been or would be. But that is what she had done. It might not have been a mistake.
The Island
1982
ALICE RECEIVED HER first letter in early spring. It wasn’t expected. The last stretches of ice had vanished from the lake just days ago. In her time so far on the island, Alice had performed this ritual of checking mail every day. It began at her cabin. She would sit on her porch in the late hours of morning, the spread of empty lake before her, and when the mail boat drifted across the horizon like a slow, sure animal, she would slip her shoes on and begin her short run to the mail dock. When she arrived, Kenneth, the mailman, would just be docking his boat. His job was to deliver mail to all the islands. Here, though no one ever got mail, there stood a spread of boxes, one for each summerhouse that speckled the shore of Bear Island. Until today, the mail itself had never been Alice’s purpose, though she had imagined, more than once, that Josh had tracked her down and sent her a letter. Not that she would take him back—she felt sure she would not. Since she came to the island, the mornings of immobility, those days when she felt she could sleep for a hundred years, had vanished. Yet there was something she felt she still wanted from him. It had scarcely been two months since she had left that cold place, and though she felt impossibly wiser now, some part of her wanted to know that in her days in the north, distant though it all seemed now, she had not been a fool. That he had loved her then—a small piece of her still wanted and would always want to know that. But of course such reassurance would never come, and during these long days on the island it simply felt good to have a ritual, and a person to greet each day. Now, as she withdrew her letter, Kenneth the Federal Agent—as he liked to call himself—peered over her shoulder.
“Bet I know that handwriting,” he said. “But that ain’t for a Federal Agent to be saying.”
Alice placed the worn envelope in her back pocket and flushed. Kenneth, that’s who she imagined had written it. A bit of a gift. He untied his boat and was off.
Door to your cabin says Wickholm Ice Cream & Candy. Heavy door with a mail slot. So I’m no stranger. Guessing you know the Wickholms since you’re out there at Signe’s place. Malcolm Wickholm been like family to me, but he don’t know about the cabin far as I know. No one but Signe knew, don’t know why. Signe wanted the cabin fixed up and she hired me to do it, five years back, maybe a few more. Simon Wentworth is my name.
Anyway I got out there and the place had been destroyed, rotted right through and the roof sunken in with snow, so I cleared it all away and fixed up another. Something you might like to know, your cabin is an old chicken coop. I went over there to the Phillipses’ farm and I see the coop they’re all set to burn and I buy the thing. Jack that thing right up, put it on runners, tow that place out right over the water. Fixed it up. Now you’s living in an old chicken coop.
I ain’t on the island now. Up north working on an old barn. Don’t know what you like, but it’s something. Old notched beams. Maybe I’m speaking down to you by saying there ain’t a nail in the place.
I seen you fixing up that cabin, that’s all. I got a place out there inland so I seen what you done and Patty Jean told me who you were, and once I heard your name I realized I remember you from school, you were a few grades younger than me. All I’m saying is the thing was liable to fall into the ground. Now you’re there and you painted the porch. Raise the flag in the morning. Flag ain’t my kind of fixing but looks nice in the wind all the same.
Also I seen you read. Signe’s books are good but if you want something else you go inside your cabin. Top shelf behind the door, find an old property map all rolled up. Find Wentworth easy. Only place inland on the island. Combination 5731. Old ice cream store number, Malcolm’s store. Don’t know why I chose it but I did. You go right in. Don’t need to check no books out. If there’s food eat it. Be on the island soon.
As far as Alice knew, the only other living soul on the island was Patty Jean. That woman lived just one cove down from Alice, and Alice had made something of a ritual of visiting her, too, but only in the evenings. That was because she didn’t want to intrude. “How I love my lonely days,” Patty Jean had said once, when Alice asked her how she kept herself busy. She was an old woman, her husband gone and her daughter off with her own life somewhere. In winters, Patty Jean lived in an apartment in New York City, but each spring, as soon as the ice cleared enough for passage, she found herself a ride out to her island house, and there she stayed until the freeze began in fall. On her walls hung framed notes from her late husband, things written on scraps of paper and even napkins. Gone to pick mushrooms, don’t eat all my dinner up. Me and the dog and the cat love you, and we’re all sorry for being cranky. Also she kept framed photos of herself, black and white, alone or with a baby on her lap. In these photos she sat bold and so serene. Evenings, Alice would sit with her on the screened porch, and together they would listen for loons while they cut squares for the quilts Patty Jean sewed.
With Patty Jean sharing this strip of land Alice had never before been afraid out here, but now she looked behind herself wondering what man might be lurking in the woods. She put the letter into her pocket and heated that great big, freshly seasoned pan over the fire. The entire lake was dark now. A deep wind h
ad set in and the whitecaps were picking up speed. She wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and peeled her garlic and threw whole cloves into the hot oil, and as it sizzled she kept her vision fixed on the waves, and it wasn’t long until her thoughts boiled down to become nothing at all. Nothing but her cabin soaring across the water, this Simon at the bow as though he were aboard a great ship.
Dear Simon,
I have received your letter, what a special gift. Also I have found my way up to your cabin. I must say that it was an offer I did not originally intend to accept, yet with all the free time on this island it simply became too tempting a journey. And as you say, I suppose we two are not strangers, though I am afraid I do not remember you from school; sometimes I marvel at how I was able to keep so to myself in a town as small as ours. Anyway, how grateful I am for your books, as I have recently committed myself to the Classics.
Your cabin is something—so well thought out, such reasonable, usable space. And insulated! Do you stay on through winter? These cold nights I often start a fire in my small woodstove, but the heat vanishes straight through the thin walls.
Save for Patty Jean I have not yet seen a soul out here. Except of course Kenneth, the mailman. It was he who first delivered me to the island—though he said it was against the law to carry a passenger aboard the federal mail boat, and insisted I keep the small journey a secret. I’m confident that my secret is safe with you. When were you here? Why didn’t you introduce yourself? Know that incurable shyness is certainly something I understand. I often curse myself for being incurably shy.
I look forward to meeting you out here on Bear, Mr. Simon Wentworth.
With her first letter written from the island, Alice walked early to the mail dock and waited for Kenneth. When his boat arrived she headed to the end of the dock and caught the line he tossed to her. After she’d tied the stern of the boat up, and Kenneth had come off to tie the bow, she walked to him and waved her letter his way.