“Do you still have Jessica?” I asked, remembering scanning the Gulf before dawn, picking out the ghostly outlines of trawlers heading out, their mast lights glowing dimly over the water, trying to imagine which was theirs. Tate shook his head.
“Nah. I was never the shrimper Dad was,” he said. “I sold it a few years back, fixed the house up. I make enough to stay afloat. Don’t need much.”
“Leonard Tobias could bring in more shrimp than any five shrimpers combined,” Estella intoned, her eyes still shut, and we all burst out laughing. It was the way most of the stories about Len began.
“He could,” Tate said, “he really could. What about you, Estella? How’s the genius gig going?”
She slowly opened her eyes and stared at him. “About as well as the shrimping gig for you, Tate. I’m a tutor, not a genius.”
Tate seemed unfazed, but I jumped to my feet and got busy, folding the wet newspaper over the piles of empty shrimp and oyster shells, holding the entire soggy mess as far away from my clothes as I could. Tate opened the slider for me and Estella closed her eyes again, leaning her head back against the seat and allowing us to clean up.
As Tate and I dried our hands on the same towel after the kitchen had been put to rights, Estella walked by, placed her empty beer bottle on the counter, and muttered a terse good night before heading down the stairs without a look at either of us. Tate looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I shrugged.
I followed Tate downstairs and stood on the front porch as he backed his pickup out the driveway and drove away. As I locked the door, Estella’s light went out, and I stood in the dark corridor, listening to the hum of the air-conditioning and the swish of the Gulf, wishing I had come alone after all.
Estella
I leave them alone, the way they prefer it, and head to my room. I thought I had stopped embarrassing myself over Tate long ago. I love Paul desperately, and I cannot figure out why the perpetual beach rat can still affect me like this. The thought that I am simply still competing with Connie enters my mind, but I will it away.
I listen to her lock up and quickly turn out my light so that she will not be tempted to knock on my door. I am too mortified to face her.
My head hurts.
I blame it on the beer, and then wonder if I should have eaten raw oysters. I lie on the bed and gently probe my stomach with my fingertips, searching for pangs, forewarnings of a contaminated oyster, but feel nothing amiss. I ache to hear Paul’s voice but don’t reach for the phone.
Instead, I remember pulling Tate toward the sofa upstairs by the front of his T-shirt. His protests and my insistence. Connie had been off with Luke, our parents were in New Mexico, and I’d arrived on Big Dune with a plan.
He left me there on the sofa, untouched and humiliated. He’d been kind, apologetic, and that made it even worse. I can feel the shame of it even now, twenty years later, creeping up my neck and making my face warm. My stomach cramps, and I gasp and turn on my side, curling around the pain as the tears roll down to the pillow.
I didn’t get a bad oyster.
I got a bad memory, and more are on their way.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I slept later than I intended the next day, my dreams a mixture of memories and strange, watery visions of Estella and Tate. When I finally arrived upstairs Estella was already gone. I made myself some coffee and took it out to the porch. A couple was walking their dog on the beach, and I watched the mutt bound up to a woman who was stretching in front of the boardwalk next door. She patted it and it frolicked around her for a moment before racing back to its masters.
She continued her stretch, and as I watched her I recognized the movements of tai chi. She looked as if she were swatting at no-see-ums in exquisitely slow motion. It was mesmerizing. I watched until Estella caught my eye.
She was in the water, swimming, but her strokes weren’t fluid or elegant as they had been years ago. I didn’t know how long she had been at it, but it seemed to me that she was struggling.
She chose that moment to stop her stroke and head for the beach, hauling herself up the gentle slope as if truly exhausted. I watched her flop herself down on the sand and could see the heaving of her shoulders as she caught her breath. She turned her head and watched the tai chi woman bend and turn. In a moment she rose, and, slapping sand off her rear, slowly approached the woman, who stopped for a moment and then shook Estella’s hand. I wondered again at this Estella, an Estella who walked right up to strangers and shook their hands.
Estella pointed up toward our house and the woman turned, her hand over her eyes, and looked up. I shrank back into the chair, although I knew she couldn’t see me behind the screen at that distance. Then they both turned and looked at the house next door. The woman nodded, and I was surprised to see Estella take up a stance next to her and carefully follow the woman’s movements as she began again.
Estella was like a naturally graceful dancer trying out a new routine. Her movements were fluid but imprecise as she tried to follow along. Occasionally the woman stood in front of her and adjusted Estella’s arms, or showed her with her own movements what she was doing wrong. My coffee grew cold as I watched.
Estella finally stopped and gave a little bow to the woman, who bowed in return, and then Estella started toward the house. I could feel the vibration of her steps as she came up the boardwalk, and called out to her when I heard the door open.
“I’m up here. Coffee’s ready.”
“Great,” she called up the stairs. “I’ll grab a quick shower and be right up.”
I got my phone calls out of the way: to Luke, leaving a message with his secretary; to Gib at home, leaving a message there too; and to Carson at camp, where I was told he was at field practice. The feeling of being cut loose from the needs of my family might have been freeing last night, but here in the light of day, with the weeks stretching before me, I felt a slight sense of panic. I kept myself busy making a shopping list until Estella appeared and poured herself a cup of coffee.
“Hmm,” she breathed, smelling the coffee before she took a sip. “I went swimming,” she said.
“I saw. You met the next-door neighbor?”
“Yes, Vanessa. Did you see her? I took a couple of tai chi classes at the hospital and really enjoyed it.”
“The hospital?” I asked.
“They had a wellness seminar I went to,” she said quickly, taking another sip of coffee. “Anyway, she says she’s down there every morning. You should try it.”
“Maybe,” I said, uncertain if it was an invitation to go with her or just a general observation. “I was making a list,” I said, holding it up for her inspection. “I was thinking we should get ourselves set up before we start packing so we don’t have to go out after a long day.”
“That’s a Very Sensible Plan, Connie,” Estella said. I flushed, and she gently pulled the list from my fingers, reading over it. “Should we call Mother?”
We hadn’t talked about Mother yet. I shrugged. “You can if you want,” I said.
“So, why didn’t she come?” she asked.
“She said she had too many things to do,” I said. I didn’t tell her about Mother’s sisters, the hatbox. I was uncertain whether she wanted Estella to know, though she could have told her years ago and kept me in the dark, parceling out important history when it suited her. Why I felt any loyalty to Mother at that point was beyond me, but I hadn’t been in the habit of confiding in Estella in a very long time, and so I said nothing.
“You think she wanted to get out of the packing?” Estella asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “Call her if you want, but I don’t feel like talking to her right now.” Estella looked at the phone and then at me without comment. We finished our coffee in silence.
Our shopping trip to the mainland was uneventful, and by the time we returned and hauled our groceries and the stack of collapsed packing boxes up the stairs, we were too tired to bicker about anything. Estella made sandwiches for lunch and
we ate sitting on the sofas in the living room.
“Have you been up there yet?” Estella asked around a mouthful of chips.
She meant the library, of course. The jewel box that sat on top of the house. Container of all that was prized in our family. The rugs, the piano and violins, the books, the oil paintings.
I shook my head. “You?” I asked, thinking she might have poked around, anxious to have a look at her books.
“Nope. I guess that’s where we should start. Everything up there stays in the family, right?”
“I have a list,” I said and retrieved it from my purse. Whatever Daddy hadn’t been explicit about in his will, Mother had been explicit about in her instructions. “She wants the paintings,” I said, as Estella read over the list. “We’ll have them packed and shipped. All the books go to you, rugs to me. She said we could choose whatever furniture we wanted, what we don’t want offer to Tate, what he doesn’t want we’ll donate to the Parachukla Youth Haven. They have a truck and they’ll pick up for free.”
“Think we’ll be able to fit all those books?” Estella asked.
I hadn’t given it any thought. They were hers; she could do whatever she wanted with them. “Whatever we can’t fit you can have shipped,” I said. “The small rugs will fit, but I think I’m going to have to have the big Bokhara shipped, and the paintings for Mother, so we’ll be making trips into town to do all that anyway.”
She continued to read the instructions and didn’t say anything. I cleaned the lunch dishes, taking longer than I needed. Estella watched me load the dishwasher, making me nervous when I saw her brows knit together as I separated the silverware and rearranged the glasses Tate had placed in the top rack the night before.
I finally dried my hands, and we climbed the stairs to the library together. I had to lean on the door to get it open. It finally began to move, slowly, with the familiar low shhhh of the foam moisture barrier that wrapped the edges of the door as it slid across the wood floor. The library seemed to expel musty paper air and then pulled in fresh air around us, like an ancient tomb unsealed.
The entire third floor had been built to keep the pervasive and damaging humidity away from the books. A humidistat was in constant use, a separate air-exchange system ran in cycles, and all the windows had been sealed. The widow’s walk could be used, but never had been. Its door, set into the ceiling atop yet another short flight of stairs, had been sealed with foam, locked, and never opened.
We stepped over the high threshold in quiet reverence, like pilgrims entering a shrine. Light-blocking drapes pulled over the windows cast the library in shadow, even in the midday brilliance, and I switched on the desk light. The rugs, with their thick pads underneath, felt lush as grass under my feet, and I breathed in the leather scent of the club chairs that flanked the desk and the odd, vaguely metallic scent of the piano.
A shaft of sunlight cut through the room as Estella pulled the drapes, widening across the back wall where the gallery of Sykes ancestors hung. Their faces appeared startled as the white light hit them, revealing closed-mouth grimaces, strong chins, high foreheads. There were eleven paintings in all, only two portraying women.
My gaze flitted from painting to painting, and I repeated the names I knew by heart, saw my father in their faces, saw, to my surprise and fascination, my own sons. Especially Gib. I was suddenly filled with a longing for my boys.
“Creepy, huh?” Estella said from behind me.
“No,” I said. “I used to think so; now, I don’t know. It’s sort of sad, I guess.”
We toured the library together, running our fingers over the spines of the books.
Estella leaned against the shelves with a slim volume in her hands, carefully turning the pages with a fingertip. “I want this one,” she said.
“You get them all,” I reminded her.
“Yeah, but I really want this one.” She sank to the rug and began reading aloud, looking at me every few minutes. It was an old game. I searched my mind to place the characters and smiled when I found it.
“The Awakening,” I guessed, and she nodded. I sat next to her on the rug and she handed me the book. The raised-band spine was slightly browned and there was light wear on the cover, but it was otherwise in excellent condition. I looked up the tall expanse of shelves and wondered how many books the library contained.
“Is it worth a lot?” I asked Estella as I handed the book back to her. She shrugged.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess we should pull Daddy’s records out and get some idea of what we’ve got here.”
I didn’t bother pointing out that she’d used the collective rather than the singular again. We didn’t have the books, she did.
“Well,” I said as I got to my feet, “I’ll go get the boxes.” I clattered down the stairs without waiting for her, and when I returned, breathless, with a stack of boxes under my arm, Estella was holding my tiny Mittenwald, peering inside the f-hole. It was even smaller than I remembered it. And more decrepit.
I let the boxes fall and Estella jumped, looking up at me guiltily. “The violins are mine,” I said brusquely.
“I know,” she said. “I was just looking. What are we going to do about the piano?”
I sighed and shook my head as I looked at it. It would fit in my house. I could see the perfect spot for it, just as I knew exactly where the rugs would go. But it had been swung in by crane and the back of the house built in after it, and it wasn’t coming out again except in splinters.
“Goes with the house, I guess,” I said. She plinked a few keys while I built boxes, then finally joined me. We worked slowly and silently under the watchful gaze of our ancestors. By late afternoon we had a stack of empty boxes lining the back wall, waiting to be filled, and had spoken to each other only when necessary.
The doorbell rang as Estella taped the final box, and she seemed as relieved as I to have something outside our own Sykes world to distract us. It was Tate, his sunglasses hiding his eyes, with a red cooler. He held it up and grinned as I opened the door.
“You guys up for scallops?” he asked. I wanted to tell him we were up for anything that might prove to be a buffer between us, but instead I took the cooler and led him upstairs to the kitchen.
“You can’t keep feeding us,” I said as he unpacked the cooler. He gave me a bemused look as he dumped the scallops, glistening white and light pink, into a colander.
“Why not?” he asked. “I’ll stop coming by if I’m bothering you.”
“Oh, God no,” I protested. “It’s great to see you again. I just don’t want you to think you need to check on us. I’m sure you have other things to do.”
He shrugged and began sorting the scallops, his long, tanned fingers like a school of fish searching for the most succulent morsel to dine on. “I don’t have anything better to do, Connie,” he said quietly. “It’s nice to see people in the house. See people I know.”
“Everyone’s a renter now, aren’t they?”
“Not everyone, but most. You should see the way these people leave the houses. Makes me shudder to think what their own homes look like.” He stopped sorting scallops, his hands stilling in the colander, and stared at me with an intensity I hadn’t seen from a man in years.
“They don’t give a shit about this island,” he said, and I almost flinched at his vehemence. “All the work our families did to preserve it—they don’t know, and they don’t care.” He shook his head and looked up as Estella came down the stairs.
“What’d you bring us tonight?” she asked. I was relieved that she was making an obvious effort to be nice.
“Hey, Estella. Scallops. You up for them?”
She nodded. “Sure. And Tate? Sorry I was snippy last night. I was pretty tired.”
He shrugged it off. “No problem. I was pokin’ at you anyway. I deserved it.”
“That’s true,” she said seriously and laughed when he threw a tiny scallop at her.
“These will keep for a while,
” Tate said as he placed the scallops in the refrigerator. “Y’all want to walk down to the cut?”
The narrow band of water that separated Big Dune Island from Little Dune Island had been aptly, if unofficially, called “the cut” for almost fifty years, when a hurricane had swept through the Gulf, leaving a devastated coast and slicing through the north tip of Big Dune Island like a knife through the end of a finger, forming Little Dune. The lighthouse was now an official Historic Landmark along with the old tender dwelling, a tiny, two-room stilt house.
No other man-made structures stood on Little Dune, which had been allowed to revert to its natural state. Native scrub, cabbage palms, live oak, slash pines, and a small tidal marsh provided refuge for hundreds of varieties of wildlife. Whitetail deer and wild hogs roamed freely, and ospreys, peregrine falcons, wood storks, and bald eagles all made the island across the cut their home.
Growing up on Big Dune, Tate and I had spent more than a few sunsets at the cut, watching our group of friends split into couples, merge into groups, and then split into different couples. I didn’t flatter myself that Tate might want to relive those sunsets, and I wouldn’t have known what to do if he had. Broken down sobbing over my marriage, most likely. But there was no hint of romance in his invitation, and the three of us set off down the beach with a bottle of wine and a few plastic cups. The sand was softer beneath my feet than I remembered, and the coastline was empty up and down island.
“I can’t believe nobody’s out,” I said as we walked.
“It’s like this every day,” Tate said. “All the renters go inside, bathe the kiddies, overcook their shrimp, and turn on the television. Some come out on their screened porch for the sunset, but the beach itself is pretty deserted. It’s the best time of day.”
“Just because the tourists are off the beach?” Estella asked. “Don’t they sort of keep you in a job?”
“It’s not that the tourists are off the beach; it’s more than that.”
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