Hurt people hurting other people. Now Mae’s fears are tight on her heels, when she had come here to get away from them. She keeps her eyes on the shack, finds herself wishing it didn’t exist, that Gabe had been given the childhood he deserved.
“Gabe is a good man,” Viv says, as if she can read Mae’s thoughts.
“I’m afraid something is going to go wrong.” She closes her eyes, and the shack is gone, finally.
“Something might. But you need to focus on other things, rather than how scared you are.”
She tries to do that. She tries not to be afraid. “I really messed things up back in New York.” She opens her eyes again, lets herself breathe. “I made so many mistakes.” It feels good, now that her heart rate is returning to normal, to talk to Viv this way. Familiar in a way Mae can’t put her finger on.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. If I let fear of failure stop me, I’d never have accomplished anything. I’d have stayed in this town forever. Now, come on, Mae, go back home, stop scrabbling through the past. There’s a man over there who adores you. Also, let him worry about the boat. Men like to have their little projects. And you’re going to be fine.”
A mist has formed over the river, and as Mae walks home, she can’t see anything out there. Island 51 is completely obscured, like it never existed.
She goes straight upstairs to the attic. She opens a box that says “Mae/High School.” Inside the cover of an eleventh-grade science notebook, her girlish script reads Mr. and Mrs. Gabriel Broadbent. Mae Summers-Broadbent. Mae Summers, wife of Gabe Broadbent. That last one had been her favorite, she remembers. She traces the handwriting with a fingernail now. Then she hears footsteps on the stairs and flips the notebook shut. Stop scrabbling through the past. This is the present.
Gabe is standing in the low doorway. “You’re only up here, and I’m in the kitchen. I miss you. Is that idiotic?”
“Yes,” she says. “Completely. Come here.”
Visit the Fitzgerald & Lee boat shop, where magnificent boats have been crafted since 1930-and my grand-father, Angus (Lilly’s dad), worked as a boatbuilder. Look for his picture in the archives.
Gabe is alone on Island 51. He’s been out here every day or so for the past week, first to finish cleaning his father’s things out of the cabin, and then to rake the grounds. He knows he could easily sell the island and be rid of it, that the islands around here rarely go up for sale, and when they do there’s a bidding war. But every time he thinks about selling, he also starts to consider the other things he could do with the island. Tear down the cabin and build himself a little office, perhaps, a log shack where he could work every day. He imagines a fireplace there in winter, sees himself crossing the ice with his laptop. He’d be out of Mae’s way then, because she can’t possibly want him around all the time, can she?
But then he wonders if it’s selfish, doing something here that’s just for himself. He’d seen a flash of hurt in Mae’s eyes when he came home and said he’d bought the boat, and it had occurred to him then that he needed to work on being a partner, on making decisions that included her, too. That maybe the river was still a sensitive topic for her. When he’d tried to apologize, she’d waved him off.
He rakes one side of the shoreline and moves to the other. He could build a cabin they could spend summer weekends in. Maybe something unique, a modern treehouse, a shipping-container structure. He can picture Mae on the newly immaculate shore, dipping her toes into the water, swimming out and beckoning him to join. Maybe he’ll go home and talk to her about this. He wants to make plans that will mean that he’s staying, that will mean she wants him to, that prove they have a future.
One last pass of the rake, and he hits an obstruction. He digs in harder, and a fishbone rib cage is revealed. He bends down and starts brushing away the wet dirt with his hands. As he reveals more of the skeleton, he sees how huge this fish was. Once he gets to the head, Gabe knows it’s a muskie: there’s the wide, beaklike mouth, the big jaw and jagged teeth, still intact. No wonder he was so afraid of these fish as a child.
The skeleton is about five feet long, and wide, too, maybe two feet in diameter. Gabe knows the muskie record in the bay is just over four feet, sixty pounds. Virginia caught it. Her name is on the list on the side of the town hall, right at the top, a rare female name among all the male anglers, and the most accomplished of all of them. Sometimes when they were kids, Gabe and Mae would walk into town and stand in front of that list. “I just need to make sure,” Mae would say. “I just need to make sure she existed.”
Gabe peers inside the giant jaws, and inside is his father’s signature lure. Jonah whittled his lures from birch branches, then added red paint, little flashes of metal. Gabe’s father definitely caught this fish. But he didn’t tell anyone. It makes Gabe think of how he didn’t tell George the truth about the money, even though he could feel it hanging between them, George’s cautious acceptance tempered by mistrust, before he took off on them. “Why not tell him next time he calls?” Mae had asked him one night. “You’re not a thief, and he should know that. Maybe he’ll come back if he does.”
“But she doesn’t deserve that, Lilly doesn’t. You know I’m right. She’s not here to defend herself, and just because I am doesn’t mean I should.”
She had told him she loved him then, and she had cried, and he had known that there were too many things he was never going to be able to say to her.
A cold wind comes out of nowhere and cuffs Gabe in the side of the face, a remnant of winter, straight from the north. Gabe leaves the rake lying in the sand. He gets in his boat and heads for shore. Mae is sitting on the end of the dock. She smiles and waves. He’s not going to talk to her about building anything together on this island, he decides. He’s going to list it and sell it because the specter of Jonah still lives there, no matter that Gabe tossed his ashes into the river. Your mom wasn’t the best angler in the bay after all. He can’t say this to her, but he can imagine it, and he hates that. And George, he isn’t really your grandfather. And what Lilly did, it still hurts me, even though I pretend it doesn’t. You can’t imagine how badly I wish she were still here, too, so I could tell her that. So I could prove to her that I’m enough for you and then maybe truly believe it myself.
“Let’s go to the real estate office,” he says. “I need to get rid of that place for good.”
Mae looks up at him, tilts her head, and for a moment he thinks she’s going to ask him what happened out there. But all she says is, “Of course. If that’s what you want, let’s go.”
Virginia turns toward the opening of the river. There’s a dark shape up ahead, a gaping hole in the ice and a boat, their hovercraft, upside down. She cries out, “No!” In her mind, over and over, she thinks, Oh, God, please don’t let him be gone. I’ll stand by him and get him through this. I’ll pay more attention. I won’t fight with him. We’ll get him through this.
She runs through the rain. She calls his name, but the wind carries away her voice. As she gets closer, she realizes the problem. How will she do this? How exactly will she get close enough to the hole and the flipped hovercraft without falling in? How will she move the craft and what will she find when she does?
Then she sees it: an arm, a hand—his—reaching out from under the boat. Or maybe not reaching. Maybe just floating. But she tells herself, It’s not too late. Never too late. When she’s a few feet away, she starts to crawl. She gets close enough to grab the hand and she pulls as hard as she can, but he’s stuck under the hovercraft. “Hold on. Just hold on.”
The ice around her is starting to crack. She slides her legs into the water. She pushes the hovercraft and it moves, a little at first and then a lot. She sees tools spilled out of a toolbox, onto the ice, and all at once realizes he went out in the craft without her because he was going to their island to work on the cabin. “Oh, Chase . . .” His hand and arm and then the rest of his body come free of the craft. But when her husband’s face is in view it�
�s not the face she knows. It’s all wrong. Not the right color, and his eyes are open, unblinking, staring at nothing.
The ice gives way and she’s falling into the river. The water is cold and then suddenly hot. She reaches for Chase, wraps one arm around him and grasps for the edge of the hole. She tries to pull him up, but instead, they’re sinking.
How is it that she sees Mae’s face? She knows Mae is not here. But if she doesn’t save Chase, save herself, then what of Mae? She strains for the surface, makes it over the lip of the ice and pulls them both up and over, somehow. “Chase,” she whispers through lips swollen with cold. She lays her body over him, puts her head against his chest, waits to hear a heartbeat. But there’s only silence. She’s failed.
The rain is slowing down. Someone will come. If only Virginia can stay awake.
And then she sees him: an apparition, Jonah in his cutter, coming toward her.
Soon, he’s there, by her side. “I’m so sorry,” he says.
“It’s okay, it’s all right. Don’t cry, Jonah.” She would have forgiven anyone anything, just to have Chase back, just to be with Mae again, but she does mean it when she says, “You didn’t do anything wrong, it’s all right, it’s okay.” Then she closes her eyes and succumbs to the darkness. He holds on to her for a moment, and he cries, but she’s too far gone to hear his sobs. Then he lifts her carefully, and carries her to his cutter. He returns, lifts Chase, and brings him there, too.
PART THREE
Go see a movie at the Bay Drive-in Theatre.
I have a story for you,” Lilly says after a few miles. This has become her habit: appearing to him while he’s driving and telling her stories. “There was a dance, at the high school, in the gym. For the end of the year. Viv was on the committee, it was a ragtime theme, do you remember? I was sixteen and you were eighteen.”
“I don’t remember any of the dances. Too painful. I couldn’t dance to save my life. I’d stand in a corner and wait for it to be over.”
“I walked up to you while you were getting yourself some punch, thinking I might ask you to dance. But I lost my nerve, because I saw it in your eyes—your eyes, I had just noticed, were very nice and very blue.”
“Saw what in my eyes?”
“That when you looked at me you saw a pal. Tommy’s little sister, Viv’s friend, just plain old Lilly with her dishpan hair and muddy green eyes.”
He can see the moment clearly now. She’s wrong about her eyes not being beautiful. Her eyes were the color of the river in spring and that was the moment he noticed it. “I wanted to dance with you, but I didn’t know the bloody one-step and the cakewalk and whatever it was. Everett knew all those. You should have danced with him.”
“I did,” she says. “But there was a slow song, and it was you I wanted to dance with to that one.” She starts to sing, Irving Berlin. “ ‘How much do I love you? / I’ll tell you no lie. / How deep is the ocean? / How high is the sky? . . .’ ” She laughs like a young girl, the one he remembers. His car hurtles down the highway, through time and blue sky, and for just a moment, he feels good. “I loved you,” she says. “I always have. It just took you awhile to catch up.”
He’s about to tell her he’s always loved her, too. But when he looks over, she’s gone again. Then there are lights blinking in his rearview mirror. A police car. And the lights are for him.
* * *
George was upset about his first ever speeding ticket initially, but then he propped it on his dash like a badge of honor. “Rebel without a cause, that’s me,” he says, but Lilly still isn’t back. There’s no one but the dog to talk to. He’s not going to pay this ticket. Once he’s done with this trip, it’s not going to matter if they take his license away. Once he’s done with this trip, he’ll be done with everything.
He decides to delay his final destination a little more, to drive to Niagara Falls, just for the hell of it, and goes all the way back the way he came, almost to the border again. He likes it there a little. He stays for almost a week, at a pet-friendly dump of a hotel at the edge of the tourist area, with its garish haunted houses and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museums. He goes for walks, he goes to a wax museum, he stands and looks out at the falls and remembers his and Lilly’s short honeymoon, over on the American side. He misses her. There are moments when he believes her, believes that maybe she really did love him. There are moments he feels like a regular person. But those moments are fleeting.
Eventually, he gets back in the car, fills up the gas tank, consults his map, starts driving again. He can’t avoid it any longer. He has a task. He likes the name of the road he’s on: Queen Elizabeth Way. And about a mile in, there’s Lilly, at his side again. He turns the talk-radio station down.
“You never ran away from anything before,” she says.
“I never could. I always had to stay. How could I have run away from you and our obligations?”
“Did you ever want to run the inn?”
Silence. And then, because there’s no point in lying to her, he says, “No. Actually, I would have loved to be a rancher. Did you ever know that? I used to have a dream about getting out of the bay, away from the river, going somewhere completely different, maybe west, with mountains and wide-open space and just— I used to imagine you and me and the little family we would have, out somewhere in the middle of nowhere, just us and the sky. I didn’t tell Everett that on the ship, but that’s what I dreamed of most of the time. You, and the stars. Our stars.”
“You could have told me. We could have said no to Everett’s parents.”
“How could I? When Everett’s family wanted to give me the inn, how could I have said no? And I thought it was what you wanted, to live there, to raise his child there, because that was the right thing to do to honor him.” He realizes what he has said. Raise his child.
“You always knew the truth.”
The truth. Did he? Did he know everything? And who else knew? “Did Vivian know about Virginia?” His tone has an abrupt edge. He is able to grasp at the edges of his anger again. For Vivian to know, to officially know, and for him not to, for him to be the one who had to pretend, that would be a betrayal of a different kind.
She doesn’t answer.
“Lillian?” he presses.
“Don’t, George. Don’t. She was yours in all the ways that matter. I saw it from the day Virginia was born. I felt it, and you did, too. Don’t say you didn’t.”
Morning light shining in the window of the hospital room and illuminating Virginia’s red-gold peach fuzz just so. And a love so strong he had to sit down. Yes, he remembers. It rendered him helpless and intensely grateful all at the same time. Sitting there, his head fogged up with the mystery of childbirth—when moments before he had been surrounded by nurses, had been trying not to look at the blood on the floor, had felt like a fish out of water—suddenly he could feel Everett there beside him, offering his approval. Guardian. Father. For once, George hadn’t felt like a second choice.
George thinks he needs to turn on the windshield wipers, that it has unexpectedly started to rain. But it’s not rain at all: he’s crying, tears so thick he has to veer off the highway, pull the car over to the shoulder of the road. He wishes he could reach out and bury his face in Lilly’s neck. But he has nothing to reach for.
Alexandria Bay has the best flea market. You never know what surprises you’ll find.
The phone rings while Mae is in the pantry looking for stewed tomatoes; Gabe answers it. “It’s a Detective Lamoglea,” he says, concern in his eyes.
She takes the phone, listens while Lamoglea tells her that Peter has been apprehended in South Africa and is in the process of being extradited back to the United States. This can’t be her life he’s talking about, this can’t be something or someone she was ever involved with. When he had called that night, had he been looking for help? Had he actually thought she might help him hide, or something crazy like that? She looks down at the can of tomatoes in her hands and can’t re
member what she wanted with them.
“Do you need anything from me?” is all she says, glancing at Gabe, trying to keep her tone level.
“Not for now. A trial will take awhile. I don’t expect to be back in touch anytime soon. I just thought you should know, before you read it in the news.”
After she hangs up, she tells Gabe her apartment was broken into back in the city. She’s amazed at how easily the lie pours out. “We should be honest with each other about everything,” she has told him during the nights when they stay awake, pouring their hearts into each other’s as the moonlight pours across their bed. But it applies only to him, apparently. This is a cave she’s rolling a boulder in front of. These are things he can never know. “The police had a lead on the break-in, that’s why they called.” He seems to believe her. As she heats the tomatoes, he tells her a story about his first apartment being broken into, about how the intruders trashed the place when they couldn’t find anything good to take. He laughs a little—“Who would want six hoodies and a bunch of Philip Roth novels, right?”—and the moment passes.
* * *
Mae can’t sleep that night. She lies awake beside Gabe until the morning light grows strong enough to put to rest any idea of sleeping. Her nausea grows along with the light. It never went away after Lilly died, but it’s been getting worse. It must be the anxiety she feels about Detective Lamoglea’s call. Or she ate something that didn’t agree with her. That’s all it is.
She’s forced from the bed and into the bathroom, and she barely makes it. After, she rinses out her mouth and stares at her pale face in the mirror. Don’t panic. But as she turns on the shower, she tries to remember the last time she had her period. She can’t. She imagines a tiny swell when she places her hand low on her belly.
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