The Islanders

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  She wondered what would happen if she texted back, Im losing my fucking mind. Jeremy didn’t want to hear that; when he was at work he wanted to think of Lu and the boys packaged up nicely, tied with a bow, the perfect family.

  Great! she texted back. Just packing up for the beach.

  Wish i could be there with you!

  Lu watched a family of five, two parents and three daughters—maybe college age down to ten or eleven—crowd around a table made for four. The youngest daughter said, “Cecily, you’re not giving me any room,” and the father, maybe catching Lu looking, smiled ruefully and said, “The magic of family vacations!”

  She smiled back and returned to her phone.

  Me too, she typed to Jeremy.

  In theory, yes. In theory more time together would be wonderful. In practice, well. If Jeremy were there right now he’d be another person to make lunch for and clean up after, another person to hide her laptop and her secret life from. He might want to talk about Baby Number Three; he’d probably want to start working on Baby Number Three! She knew it bothered him that Sebastian was already four—he’d wanted the children parceled out every two years.

  She should have added an exclamation point.

  Me too! she revised. He’d be happy to get it twice. She added a smiley emoji.

  Fourteen more years of picking up dropped towels and unloading the dishwasher and loading it right back up again so the next day she could unload it yet another time: a Sisyphean task if ever there was one. Her mother would be horrified if she knew that Lu was thinking this way—what she wouldn’t have done to have no responsibilities other than the home and the kids. Lu could never reveal her dark thoughts to her mother.

  “Is that a lake?” Sebastian asked, pointing at the computer screen with his toy tow truck. The thumb of his other hand was hooked into his mouth. They’d let him get too familiar with the pacifier, which he’d then traded for the thumb, and they hadn’t been able to break him of the habit. She was supposed to be working on that.

  “It is,” Lu said. “Isn’t it pretty?”

  Sebastian nodded, his little face grave. “I want to go to there.”

  “Yes,” said Lu. She pulled him toward her and stuck her nose deep into his hair. “Yes, baby, I want to go to there too.”

  She heard the tinkling of the bells on the door and then a voice said, “Hey, girl!” but Lu was facing away from the door and she didn’t turn to look; she didn’t know enough people here to get hey-girled in public. (Or private, really.) But then a shadow fell across her computer screen and suddenly Jessica, the daughter of Nancy’s friend, was sitting down across from her, and Lu was caught remembering that she hadn’t texted her back about going out for drinks. “Fancy meeting you here!” Jessica said. She was head-to-toe lululemon, sweating tastefully, and as Lu watched, she reached (with some nerve, Lu thought) out her arm and helped herself to one of the whoopie pies Lu had bought. “Ohmygod, these things are so good,” said Jessica. Her eyes rolled back in her head in an exaggerated display of pleasure and she picked up her phone.

  “I grew up eating these, in Pennsylvania,” said Lu, when what she really wanted to say was, What the hell? I was saving the raspberry for myself.

  Jessica was tapping away at her iPhone, but she glanced up long enough to smile politely. Chewing.

  “That’s where these came from, you know,” said Lu. “A bigger version of them. Long ago, they were called ‘gobs.’ Coal miners brought them in their lunch buckets.” She was visited by an overwhelming sensation of nostalgia, though she had never worked in a mine (probably a good thing). She might think about a gob-inspired post.

  “Funny!” said Jessica absentmindedly. She was scrolling through Instagram, tapping the photos with what Lu thought was indiscriminate haste. “I’m going to have to run, like, three extra miles to make up for this indulgence,” she said, when she looked up. “Hey, we should totally run together! Do you like to run?”

  “Er,” said Lu. “Not really.”

  Jessica nodded. A little crater popped up between her eyebrows. It disappeared when she smiled. “I see. More of a gym girl?”

  “That’s it,” said Lu. “That’s exactly it. Gym girl.”

  “Then you must have taken Tommy’s class. I just came from there.”

  Lu gave a half nod. “I think so . . .”

  “Oh, you’d know it if you had, girlfriend. You’d know it if you had.” Jessica tapped the side of her hip. “You’d feel it right here.”

  “Yes!” said Lu, tapping her own hip in the same spot. “Exactly. Tommy.”

  “Anyway,” said Jessica. “I’ve got to zip on out of here. We should totally do this again.”

  “Totally,” confirmed Lu.

  Jessica waved at Chase and Sebastian on her way out. “Bye, boys.” The boys didn’t look up from their electronics. Lu knew she should also be working on their manners.

  Lu looked around the shop. A young teen with a purple streak in her hair was giving a vigorous, robust wipe to the counters. Lu told the boys she’d be right back and went in search of cinnamon. She didn’t really need the cinnamon but she wanted to ask a question.

  “What’s reinventing the whoopie pie mean?” she asked the streaky-haired girl. She had seen the phrase on the sign, and was intrigued.

  The girl turned her attention to filling the napkin holders. Her shirt read That’s Too Much Bacon, Said No One Ever. “It just means whoopie pies used to be made with all sorts of crappy things, like Crisco and stuff. My mom makes them with all-natural ingredients, and they’re smaller. So you can have, like, ten of them.” She smiled. Her smile was charming, with a mouthful of metal that announced, My body is growing in crazy ways over which I have no control. Lu had wanted braces when she was a kid, but her mother couldn’t afford them. Jeremy said he liked the space between her two front teeth. Lu hated it. Chase and Sebastian, of course, would be given sets of braces along with their middle school locker combinations, the way children of means were.

  “I see.” Lu filed this information away for the future. “So this is your mom’s store?”

  The girl nodded. She moved along in a calm, unhurried manner—relaxed while being efficient. She reminded Lu of Lu’s sister, who taught at an inner-city high school in Baltimore with metal detectors at each door and not enough pencils to go around. Lu’s sister would probably kill to stay home with her children, but she was married to a cop and they needed both incomes. Which made Lu a privileged jerk for wishing she could work when she didn’t technically need to. Lu couldn’t reveal her dark thoughts to her sister either.

  Before Lu could really sink her teeth into her guilt sandwich she heard a crash, a little scream of dismay. She whipped around to the table to see that a mug was broken and the family iPad was sitting in a pool of coffee. Chase, who was normally a pacifist, had his little fist raised like he was about to punch Sebastian. “Mommy!” said Sebastian, his eyes big and scared. “Mommy!”

  Lu grabbed a handful of napkins from the newly filled dispenser and hightailed it over. The iPad’s screen was dark: not a good sign.

  “Let me help,” said the girl, who brought industrial-sized rags and soaked up the coffee puddle almost immediately. To Sebastian she said, “It’s okay, buddy,” which was something Lu hadn’t yet thought to do. “This case looks pretty solid, it’s probably going to be fine.” The case was one of those indestructible rubber ones, so Lu had done at least one thing right, anticipating a liquid tragedy.

  Lu took a deep breath. She felt like she was falling. Jeremy wouldn’t like this—he wouldn’t like this at all. She wasn’t supposed to need help.

  “Is there any chance you’re looking for an additional job?” Lu asked the girl. “Because I’m hiring a mother’s helper.”

  Chapter 10

  Anthony

  T. S. Eliot might have told us that April is the cruelest month, thought Anthony, but sometimes June is no great shakes either.

  It was a surprising but welcome dis
covery for Anthony that Fitzy’s uncle had a meaty cable television subscription and a cable box attached to a small but impressively modern flat-screen television hidden inside a dusty armoire. He turned it on and flicked through the saved programs, out of curiosity. The uncle’s taste was eclectic and somewhat bewildering—he recorded NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt every evening, but also America’s Got Talent, Halt and Catch Fire, and reruns of Friends. Also: Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

  It was early morning; the networks were still running their usual shows. Anthony stopped on one of them, thinking he should probably catch up on some current events. He’d been so wrapped up in the implosion of his own world he sometimes forgot there was a wider one out there. The climate was changing, nuclear dangers were proliferating, immigrant children were suffering. In comparison, his own troubles were minuscule.

  “Up next!” said the announcer. “This month’s book club pick is one of the summer’s hottest thrillers, an instant number-one New York Times bestseller. Stay tuned—after this word from our sponsors, we’re going to tell you all about it.”

  “Oh, no,” said Anthony. “No, no, no.” He wanted to push the off button on the remote but his fingers wouldn’t move. On one side of the split screen appeared the cover of The Thrill of the Chase. On the other, his father, freshly shaven, wearing a tweedish jacket, giving a coy little wave to the television viewers.

  Anthony sat on the uncomfortable sofa for three minutes, while he learned about Ultra Soft Charmin and fresh-squeezed orange juice and gummy vitamins for those over fifty-five.

  His phone buzzed: his mother. He ignored it. He knew she was calling to tell him to turn on the TV.

  Turn it off, he told himself. Turn it off, walk away. Go to the beach, look at the waves.

  But of course he couldn’t, he didn’t. He sat there, and he watched as the host—Travis Weaver—announced the presence of New York Times bestselling author Leonard Puckett, and the finale of the Gabriel Shelton series. When the camera panned back, all the world could see that next to Travis on the studio sofa was Anthony’s father, one foot casually resting on the opposite knee, a little smile playing at his lips, his fingers tented together.

  They shot the shit for a while, Travis and Leonard, and caught up the three people in the world who had never read a Gabriel Shelton book on who the guy was and why he was so consistently out for blood. (Gabriel Shelton was a con artist who traveled the world, conning people, sleeping with supermodels, staying in one glossy, hard-edged penthouse apartment after another, engineering successful heists, and forever eluding his nemesis, CIA agent Rex Chapman.) When they were done with that, Travis said, “Leonard, I’m sure I speak for our live audience and the folks at home as well—what everybody really wants to know is, how do you do it? How do you keep going, year after year, book after book after book?”

  “I can answer that,” Anthony told Travis. “I can tell you the whole history. There he was, a mid-level corporate accountant . . .”

  “There I was,” began Leonard, “a mid-level corporate accountant . . . but what I really wanted to do was write. So I wrote in the mornings, and I wrote in the evenings.”

  First came A Pirate’s Penance, which sold modestly, but well enough to secure a contract for a second book. Murder by Moonlight built respectably on the audience of the first book. Then A Sea Change, which catapulted Leonard Puckett from the fringes to the core: a household name.

  After sales of A Sea Change reached a million, Leonard’s publisher set up a long-term contract, and Leonard agreed to write two books a year: like clockwork, like magic, or some unknowable combination of the two. Four months to write, six weeks to revise, two weeks off in between. A pattern was established from which Leonard never wavered. Work began at nine. Lunch with Dorothy at noon, four more hours of writing, and then scotch at five, while he fiddled around with what he’d written that day. Dinner at six-thirty sharp. He averaged twenty-five hundred words a day, which meant he could complete a draft of one of his one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word books in forty-eight working days, taking the weekends off. While his editor took a red pen to that draft, he began the next one. He chugged along and along, the Energizer Bunny of the publishing house, as reliable as the tides, a man whose work habits you could set your watch by.

  They moved out of their condo and into the five-bedroom home on Marblehead Neck when Anthony was eleven. Anthony’s sense of his father became the sound of the heavy oak door to his office closing, the tinkle of ice in a rocks glass, the Puccini he played at full volume when he was stuck on a plot point.

  But in truth Leonard Puckett was so rarely stuck on a plot point. He was rarely stuck on anything! The ideas kept coming, as if to a river fed by an endless supply of tributaries. The Gabriel Shelton series. The Delgado Marina series. The series that took place entirely on board a Navy submarine in the Indian Ocean. There were foreign editions by the bucketload, film rights and audio rights and large-print rights and mass-market editions. You couldn’t take a plane, a train, a goddamn Greyhound without being offered the chance to buy the latest Puckett.

  Leonard Puckett, in the reviews he never read (“Those who can’t, review,” he said), had been called both formulaic and thrilling. He’d been called a genius and he’d been called a cad. Talentless and overhyped and underhyped and a faker and a realist. None of it mattered, none of it. The books kept selling.

  “I’ve got one word for you, Travis,” Leonard said on the television screen.

  Travis leaned forward, riveted, almost drooling. He looked like he might start making out with Leonard right then and there.

  “Discipline.”

  Travis sat back, disappointed. Discipline wasn’t magical; it wasn’t even interesting.

  “You don’t write a book if you don’t log those hours in the chair,” Leonard added. “You certainly don’t write fifty-nine of them.”

  “Fifty-nine,” breathed Travis, his disappointment tempered by grudging respect.

  “A cup of strong black coffee in the morning,” Leonard went on, “a scotch at exactly five o’clock. Lunch with my wife every day. Those are the things that keep me going.”

  “You heard it here!” cried Travis. “Right out of the horse’s mouth.”

  They went to another commercial break; Anthony’s phone rang again. This time he answered. He owed his mother that.

  “Your father is on the television, Anthony.”

  “I know. I watched. Are you with him?”

  “Oh, no. I stayed home. He did a nice job, didn’t he?”

  Anthony sighed. “He always does.”

  “Please call your father, Anthony. Tell him you saw him. Tell him he did a nice job.”

  “He doesn’t want to hear from me.”

  “Of course he does.”

  “He doesn’t! Or he would have called. Emailed. Something.”

  “He wasn’t sure how to handle it, that’s all.” There was a pause, and he pictured his mother’s pristine silver bob, her classy pants and blouses. She was a woman who dressed up to go shopping, who never left the house without lipstick and perfume. After a beat Dorothy said, “Can you blame him for that?”

  Anthony didn’t answer. Yes, he thought.

  “How long are you going to hide out there, Anthony?”

  “Mom. I’m not hiding out.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “I had to leave! Cassie threw me out.” His voice cracked. “She doesn’t want me around right now, and I can’t say I blame her. I had to find somewhere to go.”

  “You could have come here.”

  He thought about the study door, always closed, the Puccini, the heavy silence of the great man at work. “You know that wasn’t an option.”

  “It’s always an option. This is your home.” When Anthony didn’t answer, Dorothy said, “I have to tell you about what Max said the other day. Such a funny thing.”

  Anthony’s pulse picked up. “You saw Max?”

  Dorothy paused, then sa
id, “Yes. I had him for two nights.”

  “Two nights? Where was Cassie?” His mother had had Max for two nights and Anthony couldn’t even get five minutes on the phone with him? Every time he asked, Cassie said he wasn’t available. He was four years old! Of course he was available! No, said Cassie. He was at camp. He was at a playdate. A swimming lesson. A birthday party. Some of this was true, probably (Cassie kept him remarkably busy), but it couldn’t all be true. Cassie thought Anthony was a bad influence on Max; Cassie wanted to keep him to herself.

  “She had to go away for work,” Dorothy said cagily.

  Right, thought Anthony. Because art that sat in an expensive boutique in Boston’s South End (and really, if they were being honest, didn’t sell a hell of a lot) required so much business travel. Could his mother be so naïve? “Where’d she go?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Dorothy.

  “Interesting.”

  “In the end, I didn’t care,” said Dorothy. “Because I was so happy to have Max.”

  Again he thought of their wedding, on the grounds of an old horse farm in Shelburne, Vermont. Cassie’s blond hair was in those braids with the wildflowers woven in. Her dress was held up with the aid of two slender straps that looked like pieces of braided ribbon. She was paler than dawn, with minimal makeup. Her skin was luminous; everything about her was luminous. She walked down the cedar path that led to the wildflower arch completely barefoot, her toenails painted a pearly pink. The irony must have struck Dorothy immediately; after the ceremony she pulled Anthony aside and whispered, “Your new wife is already barefoot and pregnant!”

  The reality was that though Anthony had flicked Dorothy’s comments away like they were a fly, she had seen Cassie’s true colors long before he had. Cassie was in it for the money and the prestige. They’d written their wedding vows themselves; Cassie had insisted they use none of the usual, hackneyed phrases, no ’til death do us part, no for richer or poorer. Anthony had thought that was further proof of Cassie’s stylishness and charm, but in retrospect it just seemed prescient.