by Lisa Duffy
He pauses, looks at his suitcase in the corner, open and overflowing.
“We need to talk,” he says.
She turns her head slightly, as though she’s listening.
Problem is, he has no idea what to say.
21
She follows Leo down the street, waiting for him to say something. He hasn’t spoken since they stood in the bedroom doorway and he said, “Come with me.”
She thought they might sit at the kitchen table and talk about whatever he wanted to talk about.
Instead, he walked right out the front door, down to the street, and turned left.
Now their footsteps match each other’s as they walk.
They pass Joe’s house in silence. A sprinkler is on across the street at Maggie’s house and Sky skips over, runs through it, the cold water making her gasp.
When she joins Leo again, he reaches out, tugs on a strand of her hair.
“Give me half your energy,” he says.
There’s a car in the driveway of the house where nobody lives, and she points to it. “Is she here?”
He nods. “I think so,” he says, and then steps around Sky so he’s on the inside of the sidewalk. Between her and the house. She glances up at him, but his eyes are on the sidewalk, as if nothing happened.
She’s not sure what to think about her grandmother living down the street. Which seems weird to her. It’s her grandmother. But she barely remembers her.
“It’s weird that she’s living there,” she says out loud. It feels good to say it. She doesn’t want to pretend it’s not weird. “How does she know Mrs. Coffin?”
Leo shrugs. “They’re friends, I guess,” he says.
“I thought Maggie was her only friend,” Sky whispers. She doesn’t like Mrs. Coffin. Never has.
“Speak of the devil,” Leo says as Mrs. Coffin backs out of the driveway of her house across the street.
Leo puts his hand in the air to her, but Mrs. Coffin drives away without acknowledging him.
“Why didn’t she wave back?” she asks.
Leo glances at her. “Maybe she just didn’t see me.”
She snorts. “She looked right at you.”
Leo shoves his hands in his pockets and kicks a pebble out of the way. “You don’t miss a trick.”
“My father said she’s racist.”
Leo stops, faces her. “He said that? To you?”
“No. He said it to my mother once. They got in a fight about it. My mother said she worked with Mrs. Coffin and she would know if she was racist. And my father said all she needed to do was open her eyes to know it.”
“Has she ever said anything to you? You know… that made you feel bad?” he asks, walking again.
“No. She’s nice to me. Frankie hates her though. She got called down to the nurse’s office because of some form her mother forgot to send in. But when she got there, Mrs. Coffin brought her in the office alone and shut the door behind them and told Frankie she should stop dressing like a boy if she didn’t want to get teased.”
“Frankie gets teased at school?” he asks, stopping again.
Sky laughs. “Frankie? Are you kidding? Everyone likes Frankie.”
“Why did Agnes—Mrs. Coffin—say that, then?”
“I don’t know. I guess she doesn’t like the way she dresses.”
Leo sighs, starts walking again.
“So Mrs. Coffin invited her to the island?” she asks.
Leo looks over at her. “You know, Sky—I’m going to be honest. I think Mrs. Coffin would like your grandmother to be in your life. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. It just is. I don’t know what happened between your mother and grandmother. But I do know that we have to see your grandmother at some point. Like soon. I could be there the whole time. I won’t leave. Even if she wants me to.”
“How much do I have to see her?”
“Not all the time. I’ll call her and we’ll see her. Then you call the shots from there. Deal?”
She nods. “Where are we going anyway?” she asks, looking around.
They’re at the end of the street, standing in front of the last house on the dead end.
Leo looks at her then at the house in front of them. “Here, actually.”
“Mrs. Pearse’s house?”
“It’s my house. I was renting it to Mrs. Pearse. Come on, let’s go in.” He starts to walk up the path but stops when he notices she isn’t next to him.
She’s still standing on the sidewalk.
“What’s wrong?” he asks her.
“I’m not going in there.”
He looks at the house, then at her. “Why?”
“Me and Frankie don’t even come here on Halloween. Mrs. Pearse would sit on the porch in her rocking chair like a real live witch. It’s probably haunted.”
Leo laughs, waves for her to come with him. But she crosses her arms and stays where she is.
“You’re not afraid of anything,” he says.
“Except Mrs. Pearse’s ghost. She was mean when she was alive. Who knows what she’s like dead?”
Leo tilts his head, waits.
She steps back and leans against the tree behind her.
“All right,” he says finally. “Will you walk around back with me? Can I at least show you something?”
She eyes him. “Is it inside?”
“You don’t have to step foot in the house. I promise.” He waves for her to follow him, and she walks up the steps, makes a wide path around the house to the backyard.
Leo has his back to her, looking at something in the distance. The lawn is overgrown, tall grass stretching out and sloping down to a line of trees. She can’t stop looking over her shoulder at the old house.
“Come here,” Leo says, and she walks forward to where he’s standing, still glancing behind her.
When she’s right next to him, she turns.
The view in front of her makes her blink. The ocean sparkles in the distance, only visible from their spot on the lawn.
She doesn’t know what to say. The ocean has always done that to her. Left her with a loss for words.
Leo looks down at her. “For years, I wanted to knock this place down and build something for my parents. The back of the house all glass, so you can always see the ocean.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Lots of reasons. Money, for one. And my father was a stubborn old goat.” He smiles. “He liked his house the way it was. I’d say, what about the view, Dad? And he’d look at my mother and tell me that she was the only view he needed.”
She looks back at the house now too. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem so scary.
“You can build it now,” she says.
“If you want, we can build it now. But it’s not that simple—”
She turns and looks at the ocean while he talks. She’s only half listening because she already knows what he’s going to say. That they either move here or stay in her home. The only one she’s ever known.
They can’t live in both. It’s one or the other.
Leo says that he’s sorry she has to choose. She thinks it’s the craziest thing to apologize for.
For the first time in her whole life, she gets to decide what happens next.
* * *
After they eat lunch, she convinces Leo to let her go to the cliff to paint. The air is cool even though it’s the middle of August, the sun only peeking out now and then from behind thick white clouds.
The backpack on her shoulder is heavy as she walks past the tree house and sees the first glimpse of blue water far off in the distance. Leaves snap under her footsteps, and her heart speeds up, remembering the strange clapping that had startled her and Frankie the night they’d lit the sparklers.
They hadn’t talked about it again. After Frankie said it was nothing. And it was nothing.
Nothing at all.
She repeats this in her mind as she walks. Makes a song out of it that she steps in time to until she’s suddenly at the end of
the path, a wide rock ledge spreading out in front of her. She and Joe had set up the easel earlier in the week. Joe had secured it to a tree set back from the ledge, the tall, thick branches above creating her very own canopy.
There’s a wooden box on the ground at the base of the tree. After they’d put the last coat of stain on the easel, Joe had a million questions. How was she going to carry her paints to the cliff? Where would the painting dry? What about paintbrushes?
She wasn’t able to answer him. In her mind, the easel was the first thing she needed. And that was still drying in the corner.
The next day, they met in his garage. Joe had told her he’d help her set up the easel on the cliff. But when she walked over to where he was standing, he pointed to a box on the worktable. It was wooden. The size of a briefcase.
When he opened it, the lid rested straight on its hinges.
“What do you think? It’s an old humidor I picked up somewhere. Thought it was kind of neat, but I don’t smoke, so it’s just been sitting out here. After you left, I was thinking about how you were going to get a wet painting back to your house and I saw this. Put a couple coats of stain on it so it’ll stand up to some light weather. But I figure if we tuck it under a tree, won’t be a problem.” He closed the lid, ran his hand over the smooth top. “What do you think?”
Sky touched the box, lifted the lid, put her nose to the wood, and breathed in.
“I think it’s great,” she said after a minute.
Joe lifted an eyebrow. “Great? Shucks—I was only going for not bad.” He clapped once. “All right. We’ve got work to do.”
Before he could walk away, she leaned forward, rested her head against his shirt, and put an arm around his back.
“Thanks, Joe,” she said.
“You’re doing me a favor putting this to good use. No thanks necessary,” he told her, straightening under her arm. But she didn’t move, and he put his hand on the back of her head, his fingers gently tapping her braid in a way that reminded her of a mother comforting a baby.
A drop of rain lands on her shoulder, and she looks up, waits for the next one. But the sun slips out from behind a cloud, and the day is suddenly bright again.
She gets started before the rain changes its mind and returns.
She reaches into the backpack and pulls out the supplies Frankie lent her before she left for camp. Small tubes of paint, a handful of paintbrushes, a small water bucket, and an oval wooden palette. She digs out a water bottle and pours some in the bucket, then pulls out a pad of paper and clips a fresh sheet to the easel.
Next, she squeezes a circle of each paint color on the palette, chooses the right size paintbrush, and looks at the blank paper.
She takes in the view in front of her. The harbor off to the left, way down where the ferry’s come in. So far off in the distance, the boats are only specks in the water. There’s the lighthouse to her right. The outline of a seagull perched on the railing.
But she’s not good enough to paint that. Not yet. Not the way she wants to, with the water and the sky not blending to make a blue mess, which is what happened when she tried to paint it earlier in the summer when Frankie brought her paints to the tree house and they’d walked out to the cliff for inspiration.
“What am I doing wrong?” she’d whined to Frankie.
Frankie had glanced over at the painting. “Start smaller. Like, one thing. Not the whole ocean with a big boat in the middle.”
“It’s a lighthouse. Not a boat. And that’s the sky on top. Not the ocean. Why would I paint the ocean in the sky?”
Frankie took the pad from her, flipped the page, and handed it back to her. “Pick one. Ocean. Sky. Lighthouse. Just one.”
Now she looks out at the water, dips her paintbrush and begins.
By the time she’s done, the sun is low on the horizon, and her stomach is growling. There’s a lighthouse on the paper in front of her. Not a great one, but not a boat either. She can’t get the color right—the shade of the red stripe through the middle looks pink—and the more she plays with it, the worse it gets.
She puts the painting in the box to dry and cleans up her mess, using the water to wash the paint off the palette and wrapping it in the small towel she brought with her.
It’s not until she’s walking home, past the tree house, that a shiver goes through her, a feeling suddenly that she’s not alone. She keeps walking, turns in a circle, but there’s nothing but trees and bushes.
Not a single sound besides her own footsteps.
22
She tells herself she’s going to stay away. Promises herself! And then, as if drawn by an irresistible force, she finds herself among the trees.
Waiting. Watching.
It’s not hard to be invisible.
A thick line of arborvitae runs the length of the property. Even when she slips through the massive green hedge, there’s a forest between her and the tree house. Scrub oak and blueberry bushes, wild and overgrown, line the path where the girls walk. Tall spruce and wide-trunked elms conceal her—not difficult these days. She’s thinner than she’s ever been in her life. Even when she was in her modeling heyday, she still had breasts. Skin on her bones.
Now she’s a skeleton in the mirror. A ghost walking the earth.
But she still has some strength. She’ll know when it’s time to end her life. It’s why she’s here. She’ll do it her way. It’s just a matter of when. She’ll choose when she steps off the cliff. She won’t let herself get too weak.
She wants to see the girl again. She leaves the house in the afternoon, hides in her spot by the tree house. But nothing. Just her and the birds. She sits and waits, but the mosquitoes chase her away. So she retraces her steps, walks on the farm property to the cliff, leans against the massive tree on the edge, and looks out at the water.
It would be easy to step off the cliff right now, fall through the air to her end. But she’s not ready yet. Then she hears it. A noise down the path. She ducks behind the trees, follows the sound.
When she finally sees the girl, the sight brings her to her knees. She crawls quietly behind a large holly bush, the sharp leaves nipping her hand when she peers through.
But she doesn’t care.
The view in front of her is all that matters.
23
August is the month of reckoning. That’s how she comes to think of it.
Just her and her miserable self, trying to sort out what’s become of her life.
With Leo out of work, she doesn’t see Sky as much. Pete’s on a surfing vacation in Costa Rica. Without her, of course.
A guys’ trip is what he called it. She hasn’t spoken to Agnes since they argued in the driveway.
As the middle of August settles in, Maggie’s alone. She’s always hated to be alone.
The first day Pete left, she fidgeted. Tried to think of ways to fill her time.
Then she went to the beach, but it wasn’t very much fun without Sky or Joe. She’d asked them to come, but they were in the middle of a woodworking project.
She went for walks then stopped when they felt like a chore. All her body really wanted to do was lie down. She tried to force herself out of her awful mood. She picked up a handful of books at the library, but when she sat to read, her mind wandered, and she found herself on the same page twenty minutes later.
She could have argued that she was depressed. Had her doctor give her some meds. And she probably was depressed. But there was a reason behind it. She could feel it just waiting there, begging for her to name it.
Finally she gave in. Forced herself to just sit with her thoughts and face the unpleasant reality that she was unhappy.
That’s where she stays as the August heat descends on Ichabod.
Her first thought when she opens her eyes in the morning is that she’s unhappy. With her marriage. Her life.
Herself.
Sweet Maggie.
This is the person she frowns at now in the mirror. Stares at until the
serious look on her face doesn’t make her insides squirm.
Angry is ugly. Unladylike, the voice in her head insists.
Still, she looks at her reflection. Allows the words to fill the room until they fade.
By the time Pete is supposed to come home, she’s worked through some of her anger. There’s a whole pad of paper with stuff she’d like to discuss with him.
Maybe they can fix things.
Or that’s what she’s thinking when she gets out of bed on Friday.
Pete’s landing on the mainland late this afternoon. It will take him several hours to get home from the city. Which is fine with her. She’s not even sure what she wants to say to him. Or she knows what to say, but not a clue how to say it so he’ll hear her.
She walks downstairs, makes coffee and opens the windows. The day is warm, but she’s tired of the AC. The hum is too loud for her already distracted mind.
She opens the front door, grabs the newspaper from the stoop, and walks to the mailbox. She’s sorting through the mail, the paper tucked under her arm, when she hears someone shout her name.
She jumps and turns to see a woman walking over to her.
“You must be Maggie,” the woman says in a softer voice when she reaches her.
She knows it’s Lillian.
Yet she’s not what Maggie expected. Ann had been so blond. So preppy. The woman has dark hair and tanned skin. She’s dressed casually in jeans and flip-flops with some sort of stone medallion around her neck that glints in the sunlight. Artsy is the first word that comes to mind.
“I am,” she says. “I’m guessing you’re Lillian?”
“Yes. I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s so quiet here; I’m used to shouting in the city.” She laughs self-consciously while Maggie tries to reconcile this Lillian with the Lillian she’d conjured in her mind.
She pictured a mean old lady. Uptight and rigid, wearing pearls around a high-necked, old-fashioned, shapeless dress.
“You’re Agnes’s friend, right? She said you went to college together.”
Maggie doesn’t answer. Instead, she thinks about how to say what she wants to say. It’s best to just say it. Pretending everything is fine when it’s not is what she did with Pete all last year. And look where they are now.