The Islanders

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  The Caribbean, anticipated Anthony.

  “The Caribbean!” finished Dorothy. “And, Anthony, when I stopped in for our coffees there was the sweetest young girl working behind the counter, she must have been twelve or so.”

  “Thirteen,” said Anthony softly.

  “She had the funniest T-shirt, Anthony, you would have loved it. You always did love a pun. It said— Now, let me see, let me get it exactly right. It had a picture of a bear, and then a picture of a deer, and the bear was saying, ‘Oh dear.’ No, wait, that can’t be right. That’s not funny at all!”

  Maggie was wearing the shirt he’d bought her! The knowledge made him immeasurably happy and enormously sad at the very same time. He felt the weight of his fight with Joy, of all of their almosts, anew.

  “‘I’ll fight you with my bear hands,’” said Anthony morosely. “And the deer says, ‘Oh deer!’”

  “That’s it!” said Dorothy. “How’d you know?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  His regrets about deceiving Joy, and about the fight, were fierce, palpable. He wanted them to meet Max, and he wanted to show Max the island with Joy and Maggie. But Joy’s final words sat there, like a boulder he couldn’t move. No more. We’re all done here. Forever.

  Chapter 45

  Maggie

  Maggie is allowed to go back and forth to Lu’s to work, because Maggie’s mother values commitments and remembers what it was like when she was the mother of a young child and occasionally dependent on other people for help, and she’s allowed to help in the shop, but other than that, she is stuck at home. No beach, no clamming, no nothing. No recreational phone use, although her mother hasn’t been very good about enforcing that one. She keeps forgetting to take the phone.

  But tonight Joy comes home from the shop and disappears into the bathroom and then into her bedroom and comes out wearing a turquoise sundress Maggie has never seen before; she announces that she and Holly are going to dinner. “Holly?” says Maggie. “Not Anthony?” She is still hoping, despite her earlier nastiness, that he and her mother will get back together. She liked Anthony: he was funny and interesting and curious. It was fun to show him around. He let Maggie teach him to clam; he seemed to enjoy her mother’s weird and occasionally lame sense of humor; he even bought Maggie a T-shirt that was not half bad.

  Her mother sighs and says, “Not Anthony. You know that, Mags. No more Anthony.” She says that Holly and Riley’s father, Brent, had a reservation and at the last minute Brent couldn’t go. Her mouth droops in a sad way and Maggie almost feels bad for her until she remembers that her mother is the reason she is grounded. She steels herself and says, “Okay.”

  Maggie watches out the window as her mother’s turquoise dress disappears into the summer evening foot traffic. Left to her own devices, Maggie wanders through the house, switches on the TV, turns it off when she realizes there is nothing she wants to watch. It is day four of the grounding. There is no way she is staying in this house, alone, all night. She checks her phone: no texts, nothing. Even the “Videos You Might Like” on Instagram are videos she definitely does not like. She considers taking Pickles on an adventure but decides that her mother loves Pickles more than she loves Maggie right now, so should Joy come home to find Pickles missing Maggie would probably be charged with dognapping, and that is a headache she does not need.

  In the end she grabs her bike and heads up Spring Street. She thinks she might bike all the way around the island. That will show them. (Who it will show, and what, she isn’t one hundred percent sure of.) She leaves her phone at home because she knows her mother can track her location when she has her phone with her. She has considered turning off all location services, but leaving them on is part of the deal she struck with her mother when she got the phone and she’s not about to risk her phone for longer than the grounding period.

  Maggie’s anger at the injustice of it all is a smoldering fire, ready to ignite. Riley is not grounded, which just goes to show you that Riley’s mother is nicer than Maggie’s. Riley was not pleased that Maggie threw her under the bus regarding the vaping equipment, and she did lose her phone, so she is currently not speaking to Maggie. If they don’t make up by the time school starts, it’s going to be one long year. Of the five girls in Maggie’s class at the Block Island school, Riley is the only one Maggie can stand. The rest she thinks of like siblings she hasn’t chosen but is more or less stuck with for the rest of her life.

  Riley also has a crush on Hugo, but it is Maggie he has been giving leftover macarons to at the end of the day, and Maggie to whom he’s been offering his e-cigarette. (I declined every single time except once, Mom, she thought, and the injustice of her grounding boils anew.) It would be so like Riley to use Maggie’s incarceration as an opportunity to pursue Hugo.

  Maggie knows that sunset will be at 8:11 and last light at 8:43, which is something that, as an island kid, she looks up most mornings if she hasn’t seen it posted around town. She’s not worried about darkness because her bike has lights on both the handlebar and the seat post and she knows enough to turn them on. She is worried about what will happen if her mother comes home from dinner with Holly to find her gone, but they are eating at the Spring House, which is not known for its fast service—it is where couples go when they want to gaze at the ocean over cocktails before they even order an appetizer.

  It’s a tiny bit of a risk taking the route she’s chosen because she goes right by the Spring House, but she holds her breath and rides extra-fast as she takes the curve by the restaurant, which sits on a hill above the road, and nobody calls out to her. The reservation is for seven o’clock and so her mom and Holly have probably completed their ocean-gazing by now and are likely settled at one of the back tables in the dining room.

  All thoughts of her mother are put on hold when she sees Hugo’s little red sports car passing her, moving considerately into the other lane to give her plenty of space. Her pulse starts to race. She follows it—why not? If he is in his car, and he is going this way, he is not anywhere near Riley.

  Maggie pumps her legs hard to make it up the hill on Spring Street, and after a good mile or so she sees Hugo’s car in one of the parking spaces at Mohegan Bluffs. She follows, and tips her bike into the rack. There’s nowhere to go here but down the little path that leads to the steps. The sun has begun to set.

  Maggie, like every Block Island kid, knows the history of the clay bluffs that rise up like great monsters on either side of the steps. She knows that in the middle of some long-ago century (sixteenth? seventeenth?) two Native American tribes, the Niantic and the Mohegan, battled it out for supremacy of the island. She knows that the Niantics forced the Mohegans over the bluffs to their deaths. She knows that on a clear day, you can see all the way to Montauk, on the tip of Long Island. She knows that there are 141 steps leading down to the beach below and that you can see all five of the offshore windmills from here and that in the summer bunches of small white flowers line the steps. But she does not know why Hugo has come here, alone. She gives him enough time to make it all the way down, and then she follows.

  Then all at once, she knows.

  Down on the beach, which spreads out like a half-moon below the steps, stands Olivia Rossi. She has her hand on the back of Hugo’s neck, and he holds her cheeks in the flat of his palms, and they are kissing each other so passionately, and the sunset is illuminating them so beautifully, that Maggie, who has never seen a real kiss like this in person, feels an ache in her center. She doesn’t have time to think yet (she won’t for some time) that this kiss, with the ocean air and the sunset and the great gray Mohegan Bluffs, will be the paradigm for all of the kisses to come in her still-young life. She doesn’t know if she starts to creep down the steps to stop the kiss or to see more of it or just to impress upon herself how very wrong she’s been about Hugo, about what he might have thought or not thought about her.

  She also doesn’t have time to figure it out, because her sneaker catches and she
tumbles down, down, down the last five steps. She lets out a little wail. The rest of her fall is surprisingly silent, but it is the wail that makes Hugo and Olivia disengage and turn in her direction.

  “Maggie!” cries Olivia. She makes her way over the rocky sand, graceful even in this journey that would be awkward to just about everybody else.

  “Olivia!” croaks Maggie.

  “What de hell?” says Hugo. He does not look happy to see Maggie, and his French accent is less charming than it once was. He is the same boy who works the crepe machine masterfully, who could sell a half dozen macarons to a poverty-stricken anorexic, but tonight he seems older, different, harsher.

  “What are you doing here?” asks Olivia.

  Maggie checks herself for injuries. She has miraculously avoided landing on the bigger rocks, hitting mostly soft sand, though there is a smaller rock wedged under her knee, and she landed with her palms flat out. She pulls herself into a sitting position and tries to hold back her tears. “I was on a bike ride, and I saw—I saw—” She can’t get any more words out. Finally she says, “Never mind.”

  Olivia Rossi fixes Maggie with her chocolate caramel eyes. Maggie finds there a mixture of sympathy and pity and she suddenly feels very, very young, and very, very stupid. She closes her eyes for an instant and when she reopens them Olivia is still gazing at her. Olivia is wearing a beautiful white sundress with spaghetti straps. She has a flower—a real live flower—tucked behind her ear; with her suntanned skin and her long perfect hair she looks like Moana. Maggie, in her T-shirt that has one atom saying to another I Lost an Electron and the other one answering Are You Positive feels like Heihei, Moana’s bumbling rooster sidekick. She is such a loser. (She has not one but two science shirts! The other one features the periodic table of elements and the words I Wear This Shirt Periodically.)

  “Come on, Mags,” says Olivia. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  They climb all 141 steps together. Maggie notices that Hugo is panting and lagging behind and she considers the possibility that vaping and the actual cigarette smoking haven’t done him any favors. Every now and then he kicks at one of the steps.

  “Hugo,” says Olivia. “Put her bike in the back of your car. We’ll drive her home.”

  Hugo says, “In dis?” and looks doubtfully at his small red car. Then, “What de fuck?” His accent, which Maggie once found charming, now sounds ominous.

  “Yes,” says Olivia firmly. “We’ll put the bike in the back and leave the hatchback up.” They accomplish this quickly, and Maggie is grateful that Olivia says nothing when a grease stain from the pedal appears at the hem of her beautiful white dress.

  “Okay,” says Olivia. She seems so in-charge and efficient, so adultlike, that Maggie can hardly believe she is only three years older than Maggie is. Olivia flashes Maggie her megawatt smile (no wonder Hugo has chosen her) and says, “Where to? Home?”

  There is a physical pain attached to Maggie’s shame: it scorches like a sunburn, and she feels sore and tender all over. Every time Hugo looks at her, his glare seems to deepen. Also, there is an actual physical pain in her wrist.

  “Maggie?” says Olivia. “We’ll take you home, okay?”

  Maggie isn’t sure if her mother is back from dinner yet but she can’t take a chance on finding out. Her mother will re-ground her, or double-ground her. Can you be double-grounded? She’s not sure, but it doesn’t seem out of the question.

  “Actually I’m supposed to babysit,” she says. “Can you take me to Corn Neck Road?”

  Chapter 46

  Lu

  Lu couldn’t drive Maggie home because the boys were asleep upstairs. She’d wanted Maggie to call her mother, but Maggie wanted to ride home on her bike. She said she’d be fine; her bike had headlights.

  “No,” said Lu. “I’m sorry, but I’m not letting you ride your bike home. Not until you have some of my chocolate Heath bar ice cream and tell me what happened.”

  It came out in fits and starts at first, and then, as Maggie spoke, she became more animated, or more indignant. Poor thing.

  “Oh, Maggie,” said Lu. “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you think— I mean, is it possible . . . ?”

  “Yes?” said Lu encouragingly. “Do I think what?” She spooned more ice cream into Maggie’s bowl.

  “Never mind,” said Maggie. “It’s stupid.”

  “Nothing is stupid,” said Lu. “Nothing you can say right now, right at this minute, in this house, is stupid.”

  “Do you think I have a broken heart?”

  It was such an in-between age, Maggie’s age. Painful from the inside, of course, to Maggie, but really rather miraculous from the outside, like watching a caterpillar emerge from its chrysalis as a butterfly. While Maggie ate, Lu studied her. Her braces. The little bit of childhood pudge left in her cheeks. Her completely adorable T-shirts that were probably mass-produced in Nepal but that Maggie firmly believed were one-of-a-kind.

  Lu tried to speak carefully. She considered Maggie’s question. “I don’t think you have a broken heart. But I understand why you’re asking. I do understand.”

  She understood that while Maggie’s escapade at Mohegan Bluffs seemed humorous to Lu, to Maggie it was possibly the most important thing that had happened to her that summer.

  “I feel like such an idiot,” said Maggie. “What should I do?”

  “I think you should go home and you should talk to your mother.”

  Maggie rolled her eyes.

  “You know I adore you, and the boys adore you, you’re practically part of the family. But your mom knows you best. She should be the one talking to you about this. She would want to be the one talking to you about this.”

  “I doubt it,” snorted Maggie. “All she wants to do is get mad at me. She’s looking for the slightest mistake so she can jump all over it.”

  “I guarantee you that’s not what she’s doing.”

  Maggie pushed her ice-cream bowl away and winced.

  “Maggie?” Lu asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s nothing,” said Maggie. “I just bumped my wrist.”

  “Let me see it.” Lu frowned at Maggie’s outstretched arm. “Hang on a second,” she said. “Is it tender here?”

  “Ouch!”

  “What about here?”

  “Yes. Ow. Super-tender.”

  “I think this might be broken. I think we need to call your mom, Maggie.”

  Chapter 47

  Joy

  First I lose the only boyfriend I’ve had in ages, thought Joy. Then I lose Bridezilla’s wedding. And now I’m losing my daughter. She’d also lost the half of her dinner she hadn’t had time to finish.

  Maggie’s bike was leaning against the side of Lu’s cottage. Joy stomped up the steps, being careful not to look over at Anthony’s. She stood outside the door for a moment, torn between rapping loudly to display her displeasure and knocking very, very softly because Lu’s little boys might be asleep. In the end she chose in favor of the boys, and when Lu opened the door, her cute little ponytail swinging, her snub nose snubbing, Joy wanted to shake her by the throat and growl, Give me back my daughter. Thankfully she’d had only a single cocktail at dinner—a Moscow mule. She hadn’t expected to be driving tonight; any other time she would have had another, but she was very conscious of the fact that Holly was paying, and she didn’t want to be greedy.

  “Come in,” said Lu. She swung the door open and Joy stepped inside.

  “What’s going on?” Joy asked. “You weren’t very clear on the phone.”

  What Lu had actually said was, “Everything’s fine, Joy. Maggie’s here and I think you should come and pick her up.” In retrospect, Joy appreciated that—mothers, well-trained babysitters, and school nurses all knew to begin a phone call with everything’s fine, unless, of course, it wasn’t.

  “Come into the kitchen,” said Lu. She was speaking in a near whisper. “The boys are sleeping,” she added. She pointed toward the stairs, wh
ere Joy could see a hall light turned down low.

  The first thing Joy noticed was how natural Maggie looked. Maggie wasn’t supposed to look natural in other people’s kitchens! In front of her was an empty bowl with a spoon and traces of chocolate in it. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she said immediately. Her mouth was set in a defensive grimace.

  “You’re supposed to be grounded,” said Joy. She hated the way her voice sounded, desperate and tight. “What’s going on, Maggie? Why’d you leave without telling me?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Maggie again, without answering any of the questions.

  “Ice cream?” Lu suggested brightly. She was watching the two of them carefully, her eyes moving back and forth. Joy saw now that there was a second bowl with a spoon in it on the counter. Wasn’t that lovely: a nice little ice-cream party for two.

  “No, thank you,” she said curtly.

  “It’s homemade,” said Maggie, too eagerly. “Lu makes her own.”

  I’m sure she does, thought Joy. Which she has plenty of time to do, because she doesn’t have a job and she has a doctor husband, a helpful mother-in-law she complains about for being too helpful (Maggie had told her that), and her very own babysitter.

  “Sounds so good,” she said. I’m sure she churns her own butter too. “But I had a big dinner. I’m completely stuffed.”

  Maggie had a strange look on her face. It reminded her of the look Maggie had had that time she flew off the swing at Ball O’Brien Park and had the wind knocked out of her—there had been an excruciating few seconds before she opened her eyes when Joy was positive she had died. “Maggie?” she said. She could hear the way her own voice cracked. “What’s the matter?”