by Phoef Sutton
Charlotte hurried to Neil, grabbing her down coat with one hand, taking his arm with the other. Going to him. Instinctive. Grateful.
“I’ll follow you in the Mustang,” she said. “That way we can split up and cover more ground.”
I stayed, because odds were you’d pop your head out of the woods as soon as they were gone.
I hate waiting more than anything. Time hanging heavy. Knowing that a second is coming that will change everything or put it right back the way it was. I couldn’t sit, couldn’t perch anywhere. Couldn’t stand still, couldn’t keep walking. Just milled around the meadow, aimless, eyes scanning the horizon like a sandpiper.
But I really couldn’t believe that anything bad had happened. Not here. Not on Home Base. I thought again about my lack of night terrors here. I’d had doozies as a child. Big, bearded, masculine monsters, half-man, half-Muppet, shaggy and wooly, snorting in my closet all night. But only back in Virginia, never here. Nightmares were banished by the ferry ride or by the warm embrace of these walls. Was there something odd in that? I wondered for the first time. Was it normal that a worried child should feel that secure?
The phone rang. I bounded up the hill, over the rail of the porch, skidded open the sliding screen door, dodged a kitchen chair, grabbed the phone.
“Hello?” All out of breath. The Good Mother on overdrive.
“Is this Sam Kehoe?”
“Yep.”
“This is Kathleen Milland.” This was another call I’d been waiting for, but it hardly seemed to matter now.
“Hi.”
“Your niece is here.”
You feel the fear after everything’s okay; when you can afford to. “Thank God.”
I didn’t even have to ask Kathleen to put you on; she handed you the phone right away. I liked her for that.
“Hi, Unca,” you said, bright as ever, “I went for walks.”
Kathleen’s truck was in the shop (a bigger deal than it sounds when “the shop” is across eighteen miles of choppy salt water), so she couldn’t bring you back. I would have to wait for your mother or Neil to get back and send them for you. It was either that or walk.
I put a big note on the fridge and walked.
It took me about forty minutes, trudging the twisting, unnamed roads, taking wrong turns and doubling back, to find her house. If you’d walked along the shore, climbing over boulders and racing across the stony beaches, it probably took you half that.
My body wasn’t used to spending that much time in the cold. Tears thickened, glistening on my eyes. Cheeks and fingertips sang with vibrating pain. I walked fast, to warm myself, to get there quicker, so I sweated, and the sweat chilled on my skin. I felt like a bucket of ice cream when it gets that scummy layer of cream frost on the top.
Only two roads on the island have names, and they aren’t marked. Kathleen lived on the fourth road that branches off the road that branches off Old Quarry Road. People who live on it call it Eyre’s Cove road, but I didn’t know that until I asked a guy who was working on his car in the front yard of a mobile home. He pointed down the dirt track, sloping to the cove.
“White house with blue trim,” he said, then went back to work.
White-house-with-blue-trim was down the hill, sitting on stilts at the edge of the water like a crane. Somebody’s old boathouse, I supposed, tiny and tidy. Freshly painted, with a garden lying fallow in the winter. It reminded me of Kathleen’s boat—too clean. Like she had too much time on her hands. And small. Aggressively small. Not intended as a living space for more than one—probably not intended as a living space at all.
I hurried down and hammered on the door. The closer I came to the warm inside, the fiercer the cold outside felt. Kathleen opened the door. I hadn’t been mistaken. She really was beautiful. Hair swept back, trailing little fiery wisps along her slender neck.
“I thought maybe you got lost,” she said.
“Only once or twice.”
“Hi, Unca!” You didn’t run to me; you just danced from leg to leg while you played with an old Rock’em Sock’em Robot set. “Lookit. Lookit!” You bopped one of the robot’s heads off and screamed with ecstasy.
“Haven’t seen one of those in years,” I said to Kathleen, pointing at the plastic game.
“Yeah, well, I don’t really have any toys. Had to borrow that from the Angstroms up the road.”
She cleared a space on the kitchen table. Or the dining room table. There was only one room, and I didn’t know what she called it. Kitchenette to one side; pull-out sofa bed against the window; no TV; a boombox playing some cool Peanuts jazz. It was a studio apartment that somebody had slipped out of its building and stuck on the Maine shore.
“How’d you find her?”
She raised a laconic eyebrow. “I looked out the window and saw her walking up from the shore.” It really was a nice eyebrow.
“Thank God,” I said. But it was amazing that you would turn up here, of all the places on the island. Like something out of one of those Incredible Journey movies. “What are the odds of her coming here?” I said.
“That’s what I wondered.” Her smile was odd. Did she think I’d sent you here, to give me an excuse to pay a visit? If so, she didn’t seem angry.
I moved to you, as you bopped your head to the music and pushed the buttons to keep the boxers punching. “You shouldn’t have wandered off like that.”
“I sorry. I was playin’ hide-and-seek, but I couldn’t find her, and I found this lady instead.”
“Who were you playing with?”
“Ida know. Some girl.”
I looked over at Kathleen. It didn’t sound too convincing. “What was the girl’s name?”
“I don’t bemember.” The gray robot lost again. You shoved his head back in place.
I shrugged, feeling like the featured display in an Irresponsible Parent exhibit. “It’s hard to keep an eye on her. She likes to run wild.”
“Kids should be able to do that,” Kathleen said.
“You like kids?” I asked, then immediately wanted it back. Why didn’t I just ask if she was seeing someone; if she believed in marriage; how many children she wanted?
But she didn’t seem to mind. “I love ’em,” she said, simply.
“I don’t know if I do,” I said. “But I love her.”
“She’s a good kid.” It sounded like she meant it. Her lips were full and grapefruit pink. It was going to be hard not to say something stupid.
You came to my rescue. “I wanna go home.”
“We’ll have to walk. It’s cold out.”
“I know the way!” you said, proudly. “The girl, she showed me.”
I hesitated, not wanting to brave the cold and certainly not wanting to leave Kathleen. Kathleen stood up and grabbed a down vest. “I’ll come with you. I could use the walk.”
This couldn’t have worked out better for me if you’d planned it. Did you plan it?
We walked along the shore. The tide was low and the rocks were slippery with cold sea. The sun was bright and the sky was blisteringly clear. A wispy fog prowled low on the water. If heaven doesn’t look like that I’m going to want my money back.
You dashed ahead, sure-footed as a mountain goat, examining shells and broken sea urchins. Kathleen and I strolled behind, placing our feet carefully on the unpredictable stones. Every few yards the patterns beneath us changed; rolling smooth boulders to sharp, jagged flagstones to flat gray expanses with currents of white quartz running through them like ripple fudge ice cream.
“You can never learn this coastline, no matter how many times you come here,” I said.
“You’ve been here a lot?” Small talk. I knew I was making progress.
“Every year since I was a kid. How did you find the place?”
“Oh. I just ended up here,” she said.
I wasn’t sure whether to push it. I pushed it. “It’s funny for somebody from away to decide to come here and start fishing. Is that something you always w
anted to do?”
She shrugged. “Like I said, it just happened.”
Okay, so she didn’t like to talk about herself. That just made her more unusual.
“Well, it’s a perfect place to be a kid.” I gestured to you, standing on a great boulder, looking out to sea, wind whipping your hair, looking like a selkie about to dive in and swim for home.
“When I first saw her, I thought you were her father,” Kathleen said.
I nodded. “Yeah. A lot of people think that.”
“And you are, kind of, aren’t you?”
Well, if she wanted to talk about me, that was fine. “Kind of. She’s my sister’s kid and the father…he isn’t really in the picture. So, I kind of stepped in. I was there when she was born. When she took her first steps. I’m always there. I just don’t live with her.”
“So you’re better than a real father.”
I laughed, even though I wasn’t sure what she meant. “Do you want to have kids?” My God, did I really ask her that?
She stood squinting into the wind, looking at you from very far away. “I can’t imagine being that brave.”
I laughed again. “Yeah, well, you do spend a lot of time worrying. And the rest of the time actively terrified. But things have a way of working out.”
She looked at me, surprised. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
“Well, they don’t work out always, but most of the time. Or a lot of the time. Some of the time.”
She kept looking at me, like she was testing me. “You have to tell them there are no monsters, just so they’ll sleep at night. But how can you lie like that?”
We connected in that moment, one sadness to another. “Sure, I know,” I said. “Terrible things happen. But you can’t live that way. You have to go ahead and take the risk.”
She shook her head and walked on. “No, people just say that ’cause they have to. Trying to make the best of a bad deal. If I’m going to take risks, I’ll take them on my own.”
If I wasn’t in love with her before, it happened right then. I knew why her boat was so clean and her house was so small. Something had hurt her and made her retreat to a world small enough for her to control. I wanted to take her in my arms and make it all better, even though I was too old to think such things.
The way got too steep, so we had to go inland a little. You played hide-and-seek in the pine trees until we found an old dirt road with a sheriff’s car parked on it. Kathleen rapped on the window and the barely post-teen cop sleeping in the driver’s seat sat up with a jolt. He grabbed the wheel and tried to look official for a Barney Fife moment; then he saw it was Kathleen and blushed.
“Catch any perps, Donny?” she asked.
“Jesus, Kathy, you’re going to give me a heart attack.”
“This a stakeout?”
“No, I just, I thought I’d take a tour of the outskirts and I started getting sleepy.”
“This town is nothing but outskirts, Donny.”
This joshing, good-natured side of Kathleen was something I hadn’t seen before.
Donny got out of the car to stretch his long legs. Deputy Sheriff Donald Beirko, face red with acne scars, shoulders sloping from his neck like the sides of a teepee. I’d never envied a cop’s lot on the island. There were no police permanently posted to the town. Just some loser of a deputy sent out from Rockland three days a week. The town resented him; no one here believed in state-enforced justice. If a crime happened on Fox Island it was a personal matter. Somebody stole something of yours, you just went and stole it back. Why get all official about it?
“I hate this place,” he said, “it’s boring.”
“You could try doing your job,” she said. “That might keep you occupied.”
“They won’t let me. If I pull somebody over for speeding, they act like I’m infringing on their civil rights. They send letters to the Rockland office telling them what an asshole I am. They already think I’m an asshole in Rockland, that’s why they send me here. It just keeps getting worse. I don’t know what to do.”
“You could try solving some crimes,” I said, trying to be funny.
“They don’t have crime here,” he said, plaintively.
“There’s plenty of crime,” Kathleen said. “Domestic violence, drug abuse—”
“Oh, I don’t like to get mixed up in that kind of stuff,” he said.
Kathleen bundled him back into his car and sent him back into town, watching him drive off with a fond smile.
“How do you know him?” I asked.
“I don’t really, I just feel sorry for him,” she said, taking you by the hand and heading back toward the shore. “He starts out wanting to do good and winds up doing nothing. That’s the way of the world, isn’t it?”
We were almost home when the Mustang and Neil’s pickup came down the hill behind us. Charlotte was out of the car almost before she’d stopped it, rushing to pick you up. Scolding and kissing you, all with the same breath. I don’t think you realized you’d done anything wrong till then, but when your mother started crying, you started crying, too. The both of you howled as she carried you to the house.
Kathleen and I stood by the Mustang, motor still running. Neil waved as he passed us on the way to the house. I paused by the open driver’s door, not sure what to do next.
“I could take you home,” I said. “Or you could come in to warm up. Have some coffee?”
“I’ll have some coffee.”
Yes.
Your mother sent you up to your room as punishment. We could hear you talking to yourself up there, as if to prove you could have a perfectly good time without us.
Neil and Charlotte sat in the dining room. She was just over her tears and Neil was patting her hand and saying kids did stuff like that, it was perfectly natural, and Charlotte was saying she didn’t know what she’d do if anything happened to you, it would be too much, more than she could stand, and Neil patted her hand some more. This had clearly been a bonding experience for them, as well as for me and Kathleen. When was the last time one child running off had done so much good for so many people?
Kathleen watched them from the kitchen, sensing the intimacy of the moment. “Are they together?” she asked, sipping her coffee.
“I’m hoping,” I said.
She nodded her approval. “Neil’s a nice guy.”
“Yeah. Are you seeing anybody?” Yes, I was ticking through my list of stupid questions.
She didn’t seem put off. “No,” she said, simply.
“Too much of a risk?” I asked, figuring I might as well go for broke.
She laughed and shook her head. “No, no. That’s a risk I can handle. How ’bout you?”
I shrugged and uttered a series of nonsense syllables that were intended to be a cool dismissal.
“Is the lady with the robots downstairs?” you yelled from up in your room.
Kathleen laughed and called up, “My name’s Kathleen!”
“Katleen, I wanna show you my bed.”
“She loves to show people her bed,” I explained. “We hope she grows out of it by the time she’s eighteen.”
Kathleen laughed again. I liked making her laugh; I made a mental note to keep doing it. She called to you that she was coming.
“An’ my drawring,” you said. “I wanna show you my drawring.”
“I can’t wait to see it.”
I let her go up first so I could check on Charlotte, who gave me her significant look.
“What?” I asked.
“She is pretty,” Charlotte said.
I shushed your mother and told her to be quiet. And she was quiet, which was why we could hear it so clearly when Kathleen started screaming.
ELEVEN
It wasn’t one of those high-pitched, operatic screams like they do in the horror pictures. This was deep and rock-and-roll; appalled and offended and heartbroken. It wasn’t loud, but it spoke such injury, such bone-deep woundedness, that I was up the stairs befor
e I could think, knowing only that something dreadful had happened.
You were sitting at your little drawing table looking up at Kathleen with wide, teary eyes. Kathleen was staring at you as if you had 666 tattooed on your forehead.
She jerked her head around when I came in. “What the fuck is this!?”
You ran and hid under the bed. Kathleen flinched; crouched down and called to you. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
I moved to her side, and she straightened and backed away. “Why are you doing this?” Bizarre as she was behaving, she wasn’t acting crazy. Something had truly appalled her.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She snatched your drawing off the table and held it up to me with a shaking hand. All I could see was a vibrating mass of black and green. “Where did you find this?”
“She drew it.”
She dropped it onto the table. “I know she drew it. Don’t play fucking games with me!”
I tried to take her shoulders. “I swear, Kathleen, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She twisted away. “You know! On the boat. I never said her name.”
She shoved past me and ran down the stairs. I followed and heard her slam the front door.
I had to go back and check on you. Crawling out from under the bed, you looked totally freaked out.
“She got real mad,” you said.
“Yeah. Not at you. I don’t know why.”
I looked down at the picture on the table. You had a very particular style of drawing—tiny scratch marks that carefully linked together and made up your images of dragons and stick people—but this wasn’t done in that style. This was drawn in bold, dark lines. Two figures, a stick-woman with a skirt and long yellow hair in a blue suit. Next to her, a tiny figure, with short squiggly yellow hair, holding the first figure’s hand. The little figure was surrounded by vivid yellow lines, like the bars of a cage. Surrounding both of them was a dark mass of black and green, scribbled with ferocious intensity, crowding them in. Crushing them. Punctuating the scrabbled darkness around the two figures were dozens of white blobs with three black circles on them; staring eyes and open mouths. These bodiless faces filled the dark picture with almost audible moans.