The Islanders

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  “Maybe when I get back we can start working on that baby . . .” Jeremy said. Before Lu could (had to) respond, she was saved by the ding of his cell phone. A text. Jeremy looked at it and said, “Just my mom. She wants to know what we’re up to for the weekend.”

  “Ungh,” said Lu—a sound that she hoped conveyed a friendly interest in her in-laws but not a willingness to commit to any specific plans.

  “They have friends coming for dinner Saturday,” said Jeremy. “And they’d love for us to join.” He glanced at Lu. “But I can tell them we’re busy.” Admittedly, it was hard to fake busy when you were living on the same very small island, on your in-laws’ dime. Hard, but not impossible.

  Lu and Jeremy had borrowed a stupid amount of money from Jeremy’s parents for the down payment on their home in Connecticut. They’d borrowed, in fact, eighteen of the necessary twenty percent. It made Lu sick to think about. The piddling efforts they made to pay the elder Trusdales back, a couple hundred dollars every month, were never going to be enough. They’d never get that boulder all the way to the top of the hill. Not without Lu.

  “Let’s talk about it,” said Lu, which was code for, There is nothing I would rather do less.

  Jeremy looked at his phone again, scrolled through his emails, sipped his coffee, until Lu said, “You’d better go! If you don’t want to be late.” She stood, to encourage Jeremy’s exit. Sometimes the boys slept late in the summer; it was six o’clock now, and on a good day they’d sleep at least until seven. “Look at the time.” She held out her hand for the empty coffee cup and said wife-ily, “Here, sweetie. You have a long day ahead of you. Let me take that for you.”

  Lu had worked as a trial attorney before Chase was born and even after—up until she’d been very pregnant with Sebastian. They’d had a top-notch El Salvadoran nanny who took the bus in from the city every morning. By the end of Lu’s second pregnancy there’d been complications requiring four weeks of bed rest. Sometimes during those four weeks, Chase would come into her bed, lay his perfect little-boy head on the pillow next to hers, point at her belly, and say, “Baby in dere?” and in those moments Lu’s attorney fire felt dampened down, like the oxygen that was keeping it alive was increasingly far away. Then Sebastian had arrived, the nanny had found a job closer to home, and Lu had looked at her husband and said, “I’ll stay home with them.”

  Jeremy, bless his heart, curse his heart, hadn’t tried to hide his pleasure—relief came off his skin like heat off an August sidewalk. He had never liked having a nanny. They’d have to borrow more money from his parents while he finished up his surgical oncology residency, and then his fellowship, but his parents would give it to them gladly so that Lu could stay home, because no matter what anyone said about feminism or the new equality in today’s marriages or any of that other bullcrap, Jeremy now had what all of them really wanted deep down: a housewife. Lu could hardly blame him. Who didn’t want a housewife? She’d goddamn kill for one.

  She walked out onto the cottage’s back deck, from which she could just see Scotch Beach. There was a solitary man walking close to the water’s edge, his head tucked, his hands in his pockets. That man, thought Lu, looks like the loneliest man in the universe.

  Chapter 4

  Anthony

  The closest beach to Fitzy’s uncle’s cottage was Scotch Beach, and Anthony could get there in under thirty seconds, but it still took him four days to complete the journey.

  For the first three days of his sojourn (euphemism) on Block Island he ventured out rarely, and when he did, it didn’t go well. He tried a trip downtown. Just as he was parking, his mother called. She proceeded to describe her most recent afternoon with Max in such detail that Anthony’s heart pulsed and throbbed, and if that weren’t painful enough he was publicly chastised for blocking an angry woman’s parking space. The woman gave him the finger, and after he reparked he laid his head on the steering wheel and allowed the tears to overtake him.

  That was his last trip to the center of town.

  The next day, he went again to the island grocery store. Eight dollars for toothpaste! Seven-fifty for butter! That was dismaying, but even more dismaying was the display of mass-market paperbacks near the checkout. He waited in line facing several copies of Downtown Train and Child’s Play, both by Leonard Puckett.

  At the cottage he kept the curtains drawn because the relentless sun was an insult, the worst kind of affront. In a place where everyone around him was happy and suntanned he was positive he was contracting rickets. He stared at the decanter of mysterious golden liquid on the sideboard and imagined pouring it down his throat, erasing all of his pain. He tried Unisom—first a single dose, then a double—but the medicine made him restless at night and foggy in the morning. It made his legs quiver and shake like an unseen hand had hold of his ankle.

  If he were still a writer, he might have described his plight thusly: Anthony was thirty seconds from the beach and yet he grew paler. He seemed to be drying out, in danger of blowing away, like an old husk.

  There was no momentum in this story, nobody to root for. He stopped.

  And so, on the fourth day, he made his way through a bit of underbrush to reach a sandy path bordered by proudly waving beach grasses and some sort of yellow flower he supposed to be indigenous but didn’t know enough to identify. He had never been much of a flower guy—he knew only that his mother’s favorites were delphiniums, although his parents maintained (with expensive professional help) a substantial rose garden.

  The Caribbean of the East! Anthony had seen this phrase plastered on Block Island tourist materials at the Chamber of Commerce the day he’d first arrived. And he’d thought, Yeah, right, because from the ferry the water had looked like every other stretch of New England coastline he’d known in his life—somewhat gray, a little bit foreboding, Yankee-proud. But in fact, when the sandy path gave way to the wider stretch of beach, he thought the marketing wasn’t too far off. The water here was a pale turquoise, with just a few whitecaps off in the distance. The sand was soft and unsullied by seaweed or other ocean debris, and it caressed his feet in a way Anthony, who so rarely found comfort these days, could only describe as comforting.

  He started walking early, but he stayed out so long that the beach began to populate. Off to the right Anthony could see a dad wrestling with a pop-up beach cabana while two little children ran heedlessly toward the water. To the left a clutch of teenagers was beginning to form. The boys were shirtless, lean-torsoed, suntanned, and floppy-haired, and the girls were the same, except bikinied, with long, silky, shampoo-commercial hair and come-hither postures. Anthony was pretty sure they didn’t want him to come hither.

  His phone rang, and the name Shelly Salazar popped up on the screen. Without thinking, he answered it.

  “Where’ve you been, Anthony Puckett?”

  “Shelly?” said Anthony. Shelly Salazar was the freelance publicist Cassie had hired for Anthony before his career went downhill faster than a German bobsledder. Shelly Salazar was in her late twenties, Anthony guessed, and she possessed a sort of off-color fearlessness that Anthony was both cowed by and envious of. Very millennial. She claimed, when Cassie had hired her, that she’d worked with the Annes/Anns (Tyler and Patchett) as well as the Richards (Russo, Ford?).

  “Where. The ef. Have you been? I’ve been calling you, calling Cassie, calling everyone. Nobody answered! Didn’t you get my messages?”

  “I got them,” Anthony admitted.

  “We have work to do on the PR front, Anthony!”

  As Anthony watched (in, he assured himself, an appropriately avuncular fashion), one of the girls shimmied out of her shorts and waded into the water. Anthony thought it would have been a little bit cold—it was still early in the season, and also early in the day!—but she didn’t so much as flinch. Maybe this really was the Caribbean of the East.

  “I’m taking some time away,” he explained, squinting at the threads of clouds. “Thinking about starting something new.�
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  “Yes,” said Shelly Salazar. “That’s exactly what you should do! Write something new, write something better, and begin it all with an apology.” Her voice took on a different timbre, low and sonorous, like she’d just tasted an exotic fruit and was reporting on the sensation. “If you start with an apology, and if that becomes the thing, we can get you into every magazine, on every read-this list. Bustle, Lit Hub. Lenny Letter! The Times.”

  At the mention of the Times Anthony shuddered.

  “Well,” said Anthony. “I don’t know if I can write something better.” Simon’s Rock had been good—it had been really, really good, he’d funneled all of himself into that book, until— “But I can definitely write something new. I think.”

  “Doesn’t have to be better.” Now Shelly sounded like a forties lounge singer hopped up on cigarettes and absinthe. “It’s the apology we’re going to sell. If people buy the apology, they’re going to buy the book. So you’d better make sure that apology is a goddamn piece of art.”

  “Right,” said Anthony. He sighed. “Okay.”

  “Holy shit,” said Shelly. “I just had the Best. Idea. Ever. Do you think we can get a picture of you and your father together?”

  “I don’t know . . .” said Anthony. “We’re sort of on fragile ground right now, I don’t want to push it—”

  “Seriously, Anthony, I’m dead serious. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. This could be the answer to everything. I can see it in my mind’s eye.” Shelly’s voice flew up an octave. “And my mind’s eye is pretty prescient, always has been. If he was sort of, I don’t know, laying his hands on you, on your shoulders maybe, like he was giving you absolution. Oh, my God. We could get Annie fucking Leibovitz to take that photo, it would be so big.”

  “Shelly,” said Anthony. “No. I really don’t think so.”

  “The golden child, tarnished, fallen. And risen again.”

  Anthony begged to differ on two of those points, but could find neither the energy nor the vocabulary to do so. “Shelly—”

  “Remember when Michael Phelps got busted for DUI? And then he won all of those gold medals in Rio? People eat that shit up.”

  Anthony winced and held the phone a little bit away from his ear, but he could still hear Shelly. “They really eat it up,” she added.

  “I don’t think he would go for that,” said Anthony. We never really knew about the inner lives of our parents, did we? But Anthony knew enough about his father to know that a photo shoot with Annie fucking Leibovitz and his own tainted son would fall at least in the bottom third of his wish list.

  “I bet Cassie would go for this. I bet she could help convince him! I can’t get her to call me back, though—”

  “Trust me,” said Anthony. “Cassie is not the way into this.” The night before, during the few wretched hours the Unisom had lurched toward its goal, he’d dreamed about his wedding day. For Anthony and Cassie’s wedding somebody had woven wildflowers in Cassie’s hair and braided the whole mass together, and she’d worn a simple silk sheath that could have doubled as a nightgown. No shoes. (His mother had been horrified.) Her bouquet had been wild and green, more fern than flower. She’d looked wholesome and stunning, like a woodland fairy in a glossy magazine layout of woodland fairies. They’d been married under a wildflower archway. Last night Anthony had dreamt the wildflower archway was falling down during the vows. “Anthony!” cried his mother. “Anthony! Move out of the way! Move out of the way!” But Anthony was confused and paralyzed. He remained where he was, while Cassie ran barefoot into the crowd, saving herself.

  He woke sweating under Fitzy’s uncle’s sheets, pulling at the air above him. But even awake he could find no peace: He couldn’t stop thinking about Glen Manning. He imagined Cassie and Glen in bed together, the article in the Times spread out beneath them. “What did he think, he wouldn’t get caught?” said Imaginary Cassie. She threw back her head and laughed long and hard, showing the perfect white pearls of her back molars. “I mean, what was he thinking? Right, Glen? Right?” Laughter, laughter, so much laughter. “Oh, baby,” said Imaginary Glen Manning, the rustic, masculine-yet-artsy stubble on his chin gently catching the nascent sunlight. (It was morning in this scene, but where was Max? Asleep? Awake? Probably with Dorothy.) “You get me so hot when you laugh like that.” He rolled over and made mad, passionate love to Cassie on top of Anthony’s stupid grinning photograph. “Harder!” cried Cassie. She took a fistful of the newspaper and crumpled it. “More, Glen, more!”

  “Anthony?” said Shelly now.

  “Here,” he said. “I’m here.”

  “Let’s just keep it on the table for now,” said Shelly.

  Anthony pictured the table: farmhouse, distressed dark wood, seating for twelve. The kind of table Cassie had been seeking for their dining room. Maybe she’d found it by now—maybe Glen Manning had bought it for her. “Fine,” he said resignedly. “We’ll keep it on the table.”

  “I’m so glad we caught up, Anthony!” Shelly Salazar actually did sound glad, which heartened Anthony a bit. “Now, you go start writing that apology.”

  Anthony imagined himself sitting at the dining room table in Fitzy’s uncle’s fusty living room. The disgraced novelist sat for a long, long time, staring at the golden liquid in the crystal decanter. The temptation was great, and yet he resisted, aware, always, of the importance of the task at hand. Pen to paper, he began to write.

  No, that wasn’t a realistic scenario. He had nothing to write: nothing to say. His writing days were over. That scene belonged in the fantasy genre. Anthony Puckett didn’t read fantasy, and he certainly didn’t write it.

  He took one last wistful look at the beautiful water, the beautiful teenagers who presumably had the worst of their mistakes ahead of them. Then he walked back up the little sandy path and pushed back through the underbrush and made his way to the cottage, where he found a woman standing outside his front door wearing a pair of ripped denim shorts and flip-flops and holding an empty measuring cup. She smiled at him.

  “Sorry!” she said, with such familiarity he wondered if he knew her. “I know, it seems so old-fashioned, coming to a neighbor for this. But I thought I’d give it a try. I’m making an essence-of-summer cobbler and I don’t have enough sugar. So, I said to myself, I’ll ask my closest neighbor.”

  “Sugar,” said Anthony. He peered at the woman. A little younger than he was, probably. Across her nose was what, if it had not been a giant cliché, he would have called a smattering of freckles. She had a small gap between her front teeth, all very girl-next-door. Which she was, literally.

  “It seems like something neighbors in Mad Men would do—you know, the depressed housewives living in the suburbs.” She thrust out the measuring cup. “But anyway. Do you have any? Just half a cup?”

  “I’m not sure if I do,” he said.

  She switched the measuring cup into her left hand and stuck out her right. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have introduced myself first. I’m Lu.” Her face was open, easy, nonjudgmental—the opposite of most of the faces surrounding Anthony these days. There was something about her that reminded him of Amanda Loring, who had been his best friend in fourth grade. Fourth grade was paradise; fourth grade was before puberty, before middle school and girls in lip gloss and everything that came after, before his dad got famous, before he learned that women like Cassie could guile you with their beauty and charm and then leave you to roast in the juices of your own mistakes.

  Ever so slightly, his spirits began to lift.

  But then he remembered that he was shunned and probably toxic. He remembered that the only people in his universe who would talk to him were his mother, whose pity and concern he couldn’t bear, and Shelly Salazar, who wanted him to do a photo shoot with his father and Annie fucking Leibovitz. He remembered that he wasn’t even fit to be a good father to his son, and he felt his heart close up like a crocus after sundown. He didn’t deserve a new friend.

&n
bsp; “Sorry,” he said gruffly, trying not to look in the woman’s eyes in case he had hurt her feelings. “No sugar.”

  Chapter 5

  Joy

  As they walked to the eleven-fifteen ferry, Joy watched Maggie carefully for signs of confusion or stress. Maggie was going to visit her father, Dustin, and Sandy (his newish wife) and Tiki (their two-year-old daughter), as per their usual arrangement. One weekend a month Maggie would don one of her clever T-shirts—Never Trust an Atom, They Make Up Everything; I Don’t Want to Taco ’Bout It, It’s Nacho Problem—and cross Block Island Sound to spend the weekend with her father.

  Joy knew from Holly, whose mother was a child psychologist in Boston, that childhood stress could manifest itself in unrecognizable ways, and even though Maggie had been making this trip for nearly two years now, ever since Dustin had resurfaced, taken up residence in Newport, and expressed a desire to reconnect with Maggie, Joy wanted to be watchful. Thirteen was a vulnerable age.

  Did Maggie possibly have a stomachache that she was trying to hide from Joy? No, she was just brushing some confectioners’ sugar from her T-shirt. (Lemon ricotta pancakes, Dinner by Dad, ab-so-freaking-lutely phenomenal.)

  Was she showing signs of reluctance to leave the island? No, she had merely stopped in front of Mia’s Gelateria to tie the laces on her Converse. New England, read today’s shirt. Because Old England Was Wicked Stupid.

  Pickles walked between Joy and Maggie, looking eagerly from one to the other. “Sorry, Pickles,” said Joy. “No ferry ride for us.” Pickles, like many island dogs, loved the ferry.

  The girl working at the ferry terminal was a soon-to-be senior at the high school (one of seven): Madison Blevins. She had a cast on her left arm from wrist to elbow. “Hey, Madison,” said Maggie, and Madison said, “Hey, Maggie.” Madison wore a dark blue polo shirt with the ferry insignia on the upper left side. Joy tried to unremember the story about Madison Blevins getting drunk at a house party the evening of the last day of school and falling down on her wrist, because this was a tiny island and even teenagers who made mistakes probably deserved more privacy than they got.