Kimmy changed. It was hard to watch. Terrible dreams woke her so often throughout the night that she was dark and sluggish and sometimes disoriented during the day. Other times, it wasn’t dreams that woke her but constant racing thoughts that prevented her from falling asleep at all. A therapist suggested: “Have you tried turning your thoughts off at night? Picturing them in a box and closing the lid? Or cutting each thought off, stopping it in its tracks before it goes anywhere?”
Kimmy thought this was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard.
She misplaced her set of Lip Smackers and made no effort to replace them. There was no joy at her first period. No celebration when she got braces to fix the rabbit teeth, or when she got the braces taken off two years later, when people commented in hushed and pained tones about how much she looked like Rae. Kimmy grew increasingly hostile and cynical to many who tried to help. She rolled her eyes and scoffed openly when people spoke of Rae waiting for them in heaven or receiving signs from Rae in a butterfly or a bird, or when therapists referred to the five stages of grief and the possibility that Kimmy had gotten tripped up somewhere between denial and anger. Kimmy felt so far from the person she was before Fripp Island that sometimes it seemed to her that she was operating on a completely different plane of existence, like the universe had performed some sort of uncanny swap.
When Kimmy thought back on the days at Fripp Island, her memories were cloudy and indistinct. One time not long after Rae’s death, in an attempt to share some happy family memories at a therapist’s recommendation, Lisa said to Kimmy, “Remember how we all played Crazy Eights together? Or when you made caramel corn?” Kimmy stared at her mother blankly and said, “Huh?” There was no caramel corn in Kimmy’s memories, no Crazy Eights. There were no facts from those days, from that house on Fripp Island, only feelings.
Alex remained her closest confidante as Kimmy’s school friends fell away. Among one another, Kimmy’s former friends said that Kimmy had gotten quiet and weird and sometimes mean. When their attempts to engage her fell flat, they took it personally and withdrew. Alex was the only one who seemed willing to accept who Kimmy had become after her sister’s death, rather than trying to cajole her into the person she was before. She was unbothered by Kimmy’s silent spells and her sharp tongue.
Carol went into remission not long after her extended trip to Warrenton. She lived several healthy years in Wheeling and enjoyed frequent visits from Lisa, Scott, and Kimmy.
The cancer eventually returned, and this time it was apparent that it would not be worth attempting to treat. Lisa insisted that Carol come to live with the family in Warrenton, so she could provide full-time care. Carol stayed in Rae’s bedroom, which had been transformed into a sparsely decorated but comfortable guest room. Lisa did her best to make her mother comfortable as the cancer spread. They gave Carol medications to manage the pain and help her sleep. She grew very weak, and the medications muddled her mind so that conversation swirled over and around her and she found it impossible to keep up or contribute. Impossible, too, to move her eyes at will; they drifted and rolled, seemingly independent of each other and the muscles that had once brought things into focus. The world was garbled, yet not harsh or unpleasant. She enjoyed the presence of her family but couldn’t follow their comings and goings. Everything felt like sleep except sleep itself, which was as dense and colorless as wet concrete.
Carol passed away on a bright winter morning while Scott was at the grocery store and Lisa was cooking breakfast in the kitchen. Kimmy was at her bedside. Kimmy, fifteen years old now, was reading aloud from Great Expectations, which was assigned reading for her literature class. Lisa had encouraged her to keep talking to her grandmother, explaining that even when Carol could no longer respond, she would find comfort in familiar voices. The sun was shocking on the fresh snow outside, and it burst through the windows like a scream. Kimmy paused her reading to reach over and adjust the curtain so her grandmother’s face was shielded from the light. This was when she noticed a difference in Carol’s breathing. It was quiet but raggedy, a little wet. Her eyes were closed.
Kimmy said, “Grandma?” The book fell from her lap as she leaned forward. “Grandma?”
Carol’s lips were parted and her expression was untroubled. There was a very long break after her next exhale, and when the inhale finally came, it was shallow, noncommittal. Kimmy thought to call out to her mother but didn’t want to disturb her grandmother’s rest. She also realized that there wasn’t time; Lisa wouldn’t make it up the stairs before it happened. She held her own breath as a powerful whoosh seemed to suddenly flow not in or out of Carol’s mouth, but through the air all around them, and when this sound dissipated, Kimmy was alone in the room.
Alex and Kimmy remained close through high school. They attended summer camp together, and their mothers coordinated visits. When they got their driver’s licenses, they drove to see one another for long weekends. When the time came to consider college, they applied for the same ones. Both were admitted to WVU in Morgantown, where Ryan was in the PhD program, and they were roommates for all four years.
Alex was offered a full-time coaching position with the university’s archery team upon graduating. Like Ryan, Kimmy had majored in ecology, and after she graduated, Ryan helped her get a job at the research center where he was doing his postdoc. In field research, Kimmy spent nearly all her time outdoors and by herself, classifying flora in George Washington National Forest, assessing regrowth after forest fires, and studying the impact of new agricultural practices in the region.
26
IT WASN’T UNTIL Kimmy (who now went by Kim) and Alex were in their forties that they finally managed to plan a vacation for their two families together. It was something they had talked about doing for many years, but scheduling and logistics were tricky to coordinate with work and all the kids’ camps and extracurriculars. Alex’s husband’s work had taken them to the West Coast, whereas Kim and her family had settled in Warrenton, just a few blocks from Scott and Lisa, so a joint vacation would mean flights for at least one of the families.
Kim and Alex cleared the dates far in advance and settled on a week’s rental on Fontana Lake, nestled in the Smoky Mountains.
The house was a newly renovated timber A-frame that sat right on the water, with its own dock for swimming, a motorboat called the Barbara Marie, a fire pit, a hot tub, fishing equipment, hammocks, tetherball, a roomful of novels and board games—something for everyone.
Kim and her husband had twin boys, aged twelve, and a nine-year-old daughter. Alex and her husband had two girls, one thirteen and one ten.
Although the children had never spent time together and Kim and Alex didn’t know quite how it would go, they all got on even better than expected. The house was soon vibrating with laughter, bare stamping feet, card games, plans for fishing and water-skiing if the Barbara Marie had enough horsepower, opinions about dinner and a late-night movie.
One evening midway through the week, the men decided to take the boat out for a sunset spin, and all the kids joined. This left Kim and Alex alone at the house for the first time since they had arrived. They gazed out the kitchen window to the west, where the Barbara Marie could be seen snaking its way across the lake in smooth, wide arcs, and the bright sky seemed to crash into the mountains. They finished loading the dishwasher, then took a bottle of red out to the dock.
They sat with their toes dangling in the water, which took on a strange black-gold hue in the dusk light and was entirely still except for the ripples created by their feet. Far away, some hound was belting out its sorrow. The sun had just set into a cleft between two mountains, and the V-shaped western sky, flanked by deep blue mountain land, was still fiery and glorious.
They sipped their wine and looked out across the water in silence. Kim rubbed out goosebumps on her thighs.
Alex said, “Ryan and I were texting earlier. He said to tell you hi.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Fine, I thi
nk,” Alex said. “Haven’t seen him since the holidays, and he’s not great with keeping up. Did I tell you he moved back to Wheeling after his divorce? He got a job at the university there; she kept the house and stayed in Philly. Far as I can tell they kept it civil. That’s how it was with his first wife too. I don’t really know what went wrong either time—he doesn’t get into that kind of thing with me. Keeps it all close to his vest, he’s always been that way. Sort of makes me sad. Anyway, he’s just a few miles from my folks now, so he sees a lot of them.”
“That’s good. Your mom’s been in remission now for, what, three or four years?”
Alex nodded, then shook her head. “What a scare. She’s been clear for almost four years, but I still get nervous as hell every time she goes in for a scan.”
The sky was darkening, star-filled and navy overhead, purpling into a thin strip of fuchsia to the west.
Kim created small circles in the water with her toes and said, “You know, Rae was actually a really good swimmer.”
Startled, Alex felt her head lift as though jerked upward by a string. Rae’s name hadn’t come up in conversation between the two of them for many years.
Alex said, “What do you mean?”
Kim was quiet for a bit, her eyes sweeping across the horizon. Her hair color had deepened in adulthood to a rich, dark mahogany, and it was long, tied back into a braid that reached her waist. She swatted a mosquito on her bare shoulder. “Before Fripp Island,” she said, “this would’ve been the previous summer, our family was on vacation in Florida. Rae and I were in the ocean. All of a sudden I got pulled into a riptide and carried farther out. In no time at all, the water was over my head and I was terrified. Helpless. I panicked, flailing and screaming, gulping in water. Rae was sort of far away, but she swam over to save me, and she did it like it was nothing. She didn’t hesitate—as soon as she heard me calling, she paddled over and pulled me up to the surface. I looped my arms around her neck and she swam me in to shore. She was fighting that current, but she was so strong, she just barreled through.”
Alex stared at her. “Did your parents see?”
Kim shook her head. “They were far enough up the beach that they hadn’t heard me, or maybe they weren’t paying attention. And once Rae had got me to safety, I begged her not to tell them, because I was afraid they wouldn’t let me swim by myself anymore.”
“She didn’t tell?”
“No, and I don’t think she and I ever talked about it again either. She didn’t seem to think it was a big deal, what she’d done. But the way she saved me was really something, not what you’d expect from a girl her size. And the way she came for me without a moment’s hesitation . . . She could’ve easily gotten herself in the same trouble I was in—it could’ve easily ended with us both drowning. But she threw herself right into that danger, heard me cry, and a moment later she was right there next to me. I remember thinking . . . Well, from then on, she was like a god to me.”
Alex considered this and said, “When . . . Fripp Island . . .” She hesitated. “Didn’t they say Rae was a weak swimmer? That and the riptide and the alcohol? Everyone kept saying that.”
Kim nodded. “And I remember thinking, ‘That’s not true. I’ve seen Rae swim.’ ”
“You didn’t want to say anything?”
“It didn’t seem important, I guess. Wouldn’t have made any difference to what anybody was feeling.” Kim paused. “I never mentioned any of this to a soul, not until you, now. But I think about these things sometimes . . . I wonder.”
Alex gazed at her. “You’re not sure her death was an accident.”
Kim rubbed her eye sockets with the heels of her hands.
Alex said, “Do you think someone . . . or do you think Rae . . .” Her voice shrank.
Kim sniffed, leaned back, and placed both her hands on the dock. Her eyes were bright with fresh moisture, but her voice was steady. “I have a hard time remembering much at all from that week, but when I try to think really hard about who Rae was, the feeling I have, the memory, is that she was . . . teetering. Right on the brink of something.”
“She was fourteen, so she was on the brink of something. Everything, really.”
Kim scratched at an old, scabbed-over mosquito bite on her neck. “I’ll never know what actually happened that night. But . . .” She gripped the damp wood on the underside of the dock and felt algae or mildew or some other sort of muck wedging deep and soft into her fingernails. “I think maybe some part of Rae wanted to die. Or at the very least, some part of her wasn’t so sure about the alternative. She wasn’t totally sold on it.”
It surprised Kim that she could say such a thing aloud and yet all around her the world simply carried on: the bullfrog belched, insects thrummed away, reeds shuffled and whispered against one another. No dark cloud appeared, nor any celestial ray of light. Kim felt calm and unspeakably weary. A few tears limped down her cheeks.
Eventually Alex asked, “Is that what’s been keeping you up at night?” In the months leading up to this vacation, Kim had mentioned to Alex several times that she felt tired and disorganized on account of sleeping poorly. Ever since she was a kid, really; it was nothing new, although she went through spells that were better or worse, and lately it was worse.
“Not entirely,” Kim said. “The real trouble I have with sleeping is that when I’m up in the night, I have to think every thought to its end. Not just about Rae, about everything. I have to take every single thought to its weirdest, wildest, furthest-away end. A thought won’t go away until it’s got nowhere else to go.”
Alex said, “Can you ever make it through all of your thoughts in a night? Do you ever empty yourself completely out?”
Across the lake, a single yellow light suddenly came into view. The Barbara Marie. The light winked gold against the horizon, then grew larger and brighter.
“Sometimes I do, yes,” Kim said. On the nights when she made it through all her thoughts, when she reached all their furthest-away ends and it felt like her whole mind had been scooped out clean, she would shuffle out of bed, blank and witless as a newborn, make her way to a window, and look outside. In these moments, when the world shimmered like a miracle and nothing obeyed time, she could believe in all sorts of things. Fake moons. Gray Men who roamed beaches in search of broken girls.
Soon, voices could be heard, skimming bright and clear across the surface of the water. The Barbara Marie was a black silhouette, and small, shadowy figures bobbed and danced within it. One of the twins was hollering about fish guts, and the girls were laughing. Someone tooted the horn. It struck Kim that the difference between seeing through the dark and imagining that you could was so indistinct that perhaps there was no difference at all. Like the difference between opting into life versus not opting out of it. Though the children were still too far away and it was too dark to make out their faces, Kim lifted both her arms and waved.
Epilogue
Kimmy never stopped wondering if I knew I was drowning while I was drowning. Over the years, she asked it of our parents, her therapists, her friends, her boyfriends. She never got out from under it; she asks it to this day. The answer is, only for a moment. After I became aware but before it actually seized me, my mind went scuttling backwards, depositing me in a faraway time and place. If I could reach her now, I’d explain:
You were a scream before you were a face.
You were thrashing, purple, and wrinkled like a raisin. Not cute.
Mom said, “This is your little sister,” and asked if I wanted to hold you.
I hesitated, even though I had been eagerly anticipating your arrival for many months.
I said, “I’m scared.”
Mom laughed because she thought I meant that I was scared of you. But I wasn’t scared of you, I was scared for you. Already I knew that there were all sorts of ghastly, fearsome things in this world, and you were so small, I couldn’t imagine how you would ever survive them all. But I reached for you anyway—this was the la
st thought I had, the last feeling I felt before death, how in one instant the universe gave up all its secrets, showed its full hand, pulled back the curtain, and laid itself bare right before me.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my wonderful agent, Michelle Tessler. Thank you to Helen Atsma, for your encouragement and guidance in raising and refining this manuscript, and to Larry Cooper, Jenny Xu, Emma Gordon, Lisa McAuliffe, Chloe Foster, Emily Snyder, Kimberly Kiefer, and Mark Robinson at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Thank you to Vi Dutcher and Eastern Mennonite University for a lovely office and supportive community. Last, my deepest gratitude, as always, to my friends and family, for the immense joy of sharing life with you.
A Conversation with Rebecca Kauffman
The novel is structured with a mystery and a death at its heart, yet there’s also humor and irony throughout. Can you tell us a little about how you created such a unique emotional contrast in the narrative and in the characters? Are there any favorite moments that you particularly enjoyed writing?
The most intense emotions—ecstasy or grief, for example—often seem to carry contrary impulses for me. Joy is quickly cut short by fear of its inevitable end, or the absence of its source, and grief is mediated by laughter and moments of inexplicable euphoria. I have a hard time looking death directly in the eye. I imagine most people do, but the specter of loss is such a profound part of existence that it plays a natural and perhaps even essential role in most stories. Death being something that we are rarely prepared for, and that never happens in a vacuum, it seemed important to fill the pages leading up to the death in this novel with moments that capture the humor and irony of life.
The House on Fripp Island Page 24