by Phoef Sutton
Neil offered further condolences for three or four uncomfortable minutes, after which we climbed into the Mustang and followed Neil’s pick-up truck to his place, where he had the spare key Mom and Dad had given him so that he could check on our house during the winter.
“Bosnia?” I said to Charlotte as we drove.
“It was the first thing I could think of.”
I told her I didn’t see why she had to think of anything. Neil was a friend, he wouldn’t judge her.
“Maybe Neil wouldn’t, but word would get around. This is a small town; I don’t want to get a reputation.”
I pointed out that un-wed parenthood was the second-favorite pastime on Fox Island, but Charlotte wasn’t amused.
“Look, one of the best things about coming here when we were kids was that no one really knew much about us, right?” she said. “I mean, pardon me, but back home we were just nerdy kids who never fit in, but here we were exotic children from the mainland. We could make up any stories about ourselves we wanted, right?”
I admitted that I might have fibbed about a few track and field medals.
“So, what’s the difference?” she asked.
“The difference is, you’re supposed to be a grown-up now. And also, I don’t think we ever invented a whole person and killed him off back then.”
“Speak for yourself,” she said.
I followed the pick-up past the town museum and the old cemetery, up the hill to Neil’s house. “I think you like him,” I said.
“We always liked Neil,” she replied, noncommittal.
“I think he likes you.”
“Neil always liked us,” she replied, noncommittal.
Neil was my age, exactly. We even shared the same birthday, as we discovered one afternoon some twenty years ago while we were swimming in the quarry. We’d grown up together one summer at a time. When I would arrive on the island, the first thing I would do was force Dad up the stairs to the attic to pull down my old bike and inflate the tires so I could speed off to Neil’s house. Together, we covered every inch of the island, learning to sail in Percy’s Cove, catching frogs in Biggin’s Pond, learning to drink beer under the Brown’s Head Channel pier.
I never had a friendship that lasted so long or so faithfully, perhaps because it thrived only two months out of every year and went into hibernation for the rest, perhaps because we simply trusted each other so much. Whatever the reason, it had always been the way it had been just then outside the market; when we saw each other, we picked up where we’d left off, as if no time had passed.
Perhaps in our hearts, we Kehoes had always felt a little sorry for Neil, a bright, imaginative boy trapped on a picturesque but back-water small town. What kind of future did he have on Fox Island? Now Neil was grown up, a successful lobster fisherman, with his own boat and his own house and a thriving winter business making and selling wire lobster traps. And me and your mother, what had we done with all the opportunities offered by the fabulous mainland?
Neil ran into his house, got the keys, and told us to follow him to the Thorofare. The dirt road was barely intact, and we were bumped and jarred around in the car until we reached the crest of the hill and heard it scrape the bottom of the car. We skidded down out of the woods into the meadow. I felt a lump in my throat as the sky opened up before us. A part of me couldn’t believe the house would still be there.
It was there.
But this winter it looked a bit forlorn. The meadow hadn’t been cut for a long time, and the dead grass was long and tangled and exhausted, with sapling trees growing here and there. The white paint was peeling, and the screen door had fallen off its hinges. But the windows were all intact. Neil had made sure of that. No local vandals would mess with anything under his watchful eye.
We slid onto the gravel driveway and climbed out. You immediately dashed from the car and ran into the meadow, rushing toward the freezing water. Danger always attracted you like a magnet.
We followed, the wind whipping our hair and snatching Neil’s “Jones Boat Company” cap off his head. We sat down on the rocky beach while you played with a neon orange buoy that had washed onto one of the stone ledges.
“Who lives there?” you asked, pointing to Brown’s Head Island across the Thorofare.
“Nobody much,” Neil said.
“C’mon! In the house with the green roof.” I squinted and could just make out a house with green shingles on the shore. Man, you had good eyes. “It looks like th’Emrald City! Can I go there?”
“Sure, I’ll take you in my boat.”
“You have a boat?” you asked Neil, as if he’d claimed to have his own spaceship.
“Yep. I’m the captain. And the crew. You can be my sternman.”
“Yeah! What do I do?”
“Scoop dead fish into a nylon bag.”
“Gross,” you said, laughing at this absurdity.
Charlotte was standing in the meadow looking back at the house. I knew we were both holding back from actually going in.
We walked up the meadow, barely able to find the old footpath, tripping over the well with its tar-paper cover. You ran ahead of us all, and your mother hurried to keep up. I stayed with Neil, who never hurried in his life.
“Good to see you, Sammy,” Neil said.
“Good to see you.”
“How you holding up?”
“Eh. So-so.”
“Mmm.”
That was going to be the extent of our soul searching about the past five years. But before you start rolling your eyes and making jokes about insensitive, uncommunicative men, try to understand how eloquent shared silence can be.
“Charlotte’s looking good,” Neil said.
I agreed that she was.
“Seeing anybody?”
I said she wasn’t. “How ‘bout you? You get married?”
“Not that I noticed.”
He pulled out his keys and sprinted (yes, sprinted) to the porch to open the door for you and your mother.
Stepping in was like tripping back in time. The house didn’t look deserted; it looked like it did at the beginning of every summer. Empty and waiting for us. I half expected to see Dad’s short, roly-poly figure come strolling in, chuckling over some witticism from The Mill on the Floss and demanding that we sit and listen.
Something about the sea air keeps things remarkably clean on the island, so there wasn’t even a layer of dust on the counters of the kitchen. The plates and pots were all stacked and waiting for us. The only sign of abandonment was a family of field mice that had made itself at home in the downstairs bedroom, but we didn’t discover them until the next morning.
As you know, it’s a terribly old house; the middle section dates back to before the Revolution, and it’s been added onto in a haphazard fashion ever since so that it sprawls out sideways, with low doorways and uneven stairs so steep that they are almost ladders. When Mom and Dad bought it for almost nothing (he was only a university professor, remember) way back in the sixties, it had been a dilapidated wreck, and we’d been fixing it up in our own incompetent fashion ever since. It was never finished, and I assume it never will be.
Any solemn feelings we had on walking in were fortunately spoiled by your yelps and laughs as you dashed from room to room, opening every door, jumping on every bed.
Neil said he had to go repair the fuel line on his boat if he wanted to go hauling tomorrow.
“Jesus, Neil, you’re going out in wintertime?” I said.
“It’s my business. I got to take it seriously,” Neil said. I wondered who he was trying to impress and knew it wasn’t me. Before he left he asked me, as he always did, if I wanted to go out hauling with him tomorrow. In a weak moment, I said I did. He reminded me that the day started early for fishermen, and then he was gone.
You ran in with an old Chinese kite made of flimsy plastic and painted like Pegasus. You whipped it around the room and wanted to know what it was, so I took you out to fly it. With a strong breeze lik
e that, all I had to do was unwind the string from the spool and it took off like an eagle. We unwound it further and further, until the kite was just a tiny speck in the gray sky. You wanted to hold it yourself, and I let you, though I was half-afraid the kite would lift you off and carry you over the trees. You held on tight, though, racing back and forth across the meadow as if it was you flying and not the kite.
I glanced back into the house and saw your mother standing in front of the fridge, head down. You seemed to be having enough fun without me, so I went in to check on her.
The refrigerator was covered with pictures held in place by magnets. A big metal family photo album. Charlotte was looking at them and crying.
You know the pictures, I’m sure. They’re probably still up there, covered, I hope, with a new layer of photos of you growing up, becoming a woman. Your mother was looking at decades of summers; us as kids playing ball in the meadow, swimming in the quarries, learning to sail, having food fights by the stove, playing games at the kitchen table—backgammon, Scrabble, gin, Oh Hell, all the games in Hoyle, and a few we made up ourselves. And sunsets. Dozens of sunsets, out there in the meadow, with us blurred and poorly lit in the foreground. A massive, out of focus, collage of memories.
This was why we hadn’t come back, of course. Facing these memories was overpowering. This island, this house, had come to be the concrete embodiment of our family life. Being here pointed out more than anything else how shattered our family was.
“How can there just be the two of us?” Charlotte asked. I put my hand on her shoulder and felt just as helpless as she did. Two people couldn’t be the Kehoes.
Then you called out to us from the meadow, and I remembered that we were three now. Maybe that’s why we’d had the strength to come back.
I walked out in time to see you let go of the string and watch the kite fly away into the clouds.
“You’re supposed to hang onto it, Maggie.”
But you just laughed and said how pretty it was and danced as it disappeared.
We picked out rooms next. You got my old bedroom upstairs. Charlotte kept hers next door; the walls were still covered with pictures from fashion magazines and old art books she’d cut out and pasted up. I took Mom and Dad’s room downstairs just to show that we were making the place our own again.
While you fought against taking a nap, I went into town and bought you a new kite at the hardware store. The fishermen still sat there; I even joined them for a while, discussing the weather and reactionary politics. Then I dropped by the electric co-op to see about getting our power turned on and found Mike Jensen, the family plumber, and asked him to come out and get the pipes running and the heat turned on. These were all things Dad used to take care of, and it almost made me feel grown-up to do it myself—that’ll give you an indication of just how not grown-up I am.
By mid-afternoon, with the sun setting in its usual spectacular way, the water was running and the steam heat was rattling in the radiators. I sat on the porch, bundled in two sweaters, watching you fly your new kite, listening to fish bubbling in a fry pan on the stove, feeling safer than I had in years. The house always had that effect on me, as if it held me in kind and protective hands. Our family was never more of a family than when we were there. It was the house, more than any person, who taught me how to take care of you. To be the Good Mother. Like I said, I never believed in guardian angels, but if I ever had one, it was that house.
I walked into the kitchen, where your mother was making fish and chips. We could see you through the glass doors, running like a wood sprite across the lawn. It was all too perfect.
“I think we should stay here,” I said.
Charlotte laughed. “You mean for the rest of our lives?”
“Why not?” I asked.
“What would we do for a living?”
“I could fish. I’ve gone out with Neil lots of times. I’m going out with him tomorrow. I could start out as his sternman, then after I’ve saved up enough, I could get my own boat. And I can still sell articles to Filmfax and Fangoria and Video Watchdog. That’ll supplement things.” After all, I reasoned, we owned the house free and clear, so we wouldn’t need that much money. There’d be no problem paying for your schooling; the public schools on the island were safe and drug free—unless you counted beer.
“What about me?” Charlotte asked.
“I don’t know. Be creative. You could go back to giving massages.”
“I’m not ready to see a bunch of fishermen naked.”
“C’mon, Charlie, think about it.”
She scooped a piece of fish out of the pan and let it drain on a paper towel. “You know, you’ve got a real commitment problem.”
“I commit,” I protested. “I commit all over the place.”
“Yeah, that’s your problem. Don’t you see that’s the same as not committing at all?”
If she wanted to get off the point, I was willing to go with her. “Hey, I’m the one who asked Anne to marry me.”
“When you knew it would scare her off.”
“I didn’t know it would scare her off.”
“You knew.”
“You’re saying I maneuvered her into dumping me?”
“All I’m saying is, it’s a pattern, isn’t it? You get yourself rejected so you don’t have to commit to things. And do you think it’s a coincidence that the day you decide on a teaching career is the same day you punch out your first student?”
“Now you’re saying I didn’t want to be a teacher?”
Charlotte sighed. “I’m not saying anything. Get Maggie, dinner’s ready.”
“And I don’t really love Anne?”
“Maybe you do. Maybe that’s why you scared her off.”
Your mother reads too many self-help books. I don’t read enough.
“Look,” I said, coming to my feet, “I admit I have self-destructed a few times, but this is different. This place has always felt like home to me. And to you, too, I think. We can make it work. Just think about it, okay?”
Charlotte smiled, a little too fondly. “It’ll be a nice thing to think about.”
“Lookit, lookit, lookit!” you cried from outside.
We turned to see you, laughing and twirling little Gypsy arabesques as your new kite sailed off, string dangling, over Brown’s Head Island and out of sight.
SEVEN
Falling asleep is not my best thing. I hear for other people it’s this simple matter of closing the eyes and relaxing and drifting off. I figure they’ve got to be lying, but that’s what they say. For me, it’s work. Like digging a ditch; I have to physically make a hole in the dark and throw myself in. Sometimes the dark is awfully hard to plow through.
It was particularly difficult that first night on the island because with you and your mother there I couldn’t listen to music or watch TV, my usual sleep aids. It was just me and a whole lot of silence.
I know that’s why you always have to have stories and songs before you go to sleep, Maggie—so you can drift off before the quiet comes. Because as any kid will tell you, when all the noise is gone, that’s when the monsters come out. All those thoughts you’ve been avoiding, the ones that have been waiting through the hurly-burly of the day, building up strength; when the lights are out and the lullabies are sung, that’s when they pounce.
But I did it. I went straight to sleep with none of the expected depressing funk about my hopeless love life and bleak future. And I’d probably have slept through the night if Anne hadn’t come in.
She walked right up to me and sat on the edge of my bed. She was wearing that lace teddy I’d bought her as a joke on her birthday. The fact that she was wearing it said she was sorry before she said she was sorry.
Sorry for putting me through all this. Sorry for making such a horrible mistake. Bill Zacharias was a jerk. He was dull. He was boring. A total nerd. What’s more, he was a sexual deviant. He beat her and made her wear rubber panties. He also stole from her bank account and se
duced her sister. How could she have been such a fool?
She wanted to know if there was any way I’d take her back.
I was a big man. A forgiving man. I took her into my arms and told her it was all forgotten. I was even generous enough to say some of it was my fault, since I was sure we both knew it wasn’t.
She stretched out in bed next to me and grew large enough to encompass my whole body in warmth, in softness, in love.
Even before I woke up, I could feel reality coming and tried to shoo it away. It was going to be so damned depressing to wake up alone in that bed. I asked Anne if she could stay just a little longer, and she said I was crowding her and moving too fast and she needed more room.
Awake, I looked at my watch. 11:31. I’d been asleep for twenty-five whole minutes. I tried to think of other things. Happy things. That girl on the passing lobster boat, for instance. Instead, I kept wondering if Anne had noticed I was gone yet. Was she wondering about me? Worried? Maybe she was missing me. Maybe that dream had been her soul crying out to me.
Well, if I didn’t believe in ghosts, I sure as hell couldn’t believe in shit like that.
But I could call her, just to make sure. Just to let her know I was okay. Just in case she was worried.
“Oh, you’ve been gone?” I could hear her answer in my imagination. I couldn’t call her.
But she could call me. She might have already called. At least to apologize for being such a cosmic bitch the other night.
I should check my messages. I leapt onto the icy cold floor and tiptoed into the living room, quiet as a shadow. There was enough moonlight for me to find the phone without turning a light on. I didn’t want to be caught; I knew in my heart it was a stupid enough thing to do that I didn’t want to have to explain it to Charlotte.
I grabbed the receiver, ready to punch in my number and my PIN code, then stopped, dumbfounded, staring at the wheel on the phone. A rotary phone. Mom and Dad had never gotten around to putting a touch-tone phone in here. I suddenly felt cut off from my century, isolated from the technology that made my world work. With no touch-tone pad, I couldn’t check my messages. I was lost. Adrift.