The Island (45 page)

When it happened, Nick called his parents first, me second. On the phone, his voice was calm; it was dispassionate. I didn’t understand this. I still don’t. Robin, my therapist, said he was most likely in shock.

In shock.

“Michael’s dead,” Nick said. “He fell. He woke up this morning at dawn and went climbing alone. He wasn’t harnessed properly. He fell.”

I didn’t ask. I knew. I didn’t ask.

Nick said, “I told him last night. He seemed fine with it. Angry, really fucking angry, yep, he punched a hole in the hotel wall, right through the plaster, and I thought,
Okay, that’s a start.
I told him the truth: We had kissed, but only kissed. I told him if I could change how I felt, I would, and I knew you would, too, but that we couldn’t change it. It was there, it existed. I had big, scary feelings for you, and you had feelings for me. Yep, he said, he understood. We went out to a bar, drank beers, did shots of tequila, ate burgers. He got drunk and I let him. Why not? He was handling it okay, he was being a really good fucking sport, a gentleman as ever. We walked back to the hotel, he asked me if I hated him because things had always come easier for him, and I said, ‘No, Mikey, I don’t hate you. That’s not what this is about, man.’

“He asked me if I hated him because of the punch he’d thrown years ago, the punch that broke my nose. That fight had been over a girl, too, a girl at school named Candace Jackson. He’d won that fight and he’d won Candace. And I said, ‘No, man, it’s not about Candace or my nose.’

“He said, ‘Okay, I believe you.’

“And then in the morning, he headed out to climb in Labyrinth by himself. It wasn’t safe to climb Labyrinth alone and he wasn’t harnessed properly.”

Nick broke down crying. “Chess,” he said. “Chess.”

“I know,” I said. “Jesus, I know.”

“I told my parents he wasn’t harnessed properly,” Nick said. “But Chess?”

“What?” I said. “What?”

“He wasn’t harnessed at all.”

Michael hadn’t died because his safety equipment failed. He had died because he went climbing without safety equipment.

The difference between these two realities, between the accidental and the intentional, was monstrous. It was the monstrous secret that now bonded me to Nick.

Chess closed the notebook. Her confession ended there. At the funeral, Nick stood on the altar and said to everyone in the church,
He really loved you, Chess.
He hadn’t said,
I really love you, Chess.
He may have felt it, Chess knew he felt it, and wherever he was—in Toronto still, or on the road somewhere—he felt it right now the way she did, like an arrow shot through her from front to back, pain, longing, love, regret. But he didn’t say it because Michael was his brother, now dead, and to say the truth out loud would be profane.

*   *   *

Tate took the Scout and disappeared in a cloud of dust and a spray of gravel. India and Chess sat at the picnic table while Birdie made dinner.

Chess said, “She’ll never speak to me again.”

India said, “Oh, you’ll be surprised.”

Tate missed dinner. She stayed out until sunset; she stayed out until dark. Birdie and India and Chess sat on the screened-in porch, Birdie doing her needlepoint, India doing her crossword puzzles, Chess pretending to read
War and Peace,
but really she was trying not to scratch her face and pretending not to listen for the car.

Chess said, “She can’t stay out all night.”

India said, “Don’t worry, she’ll be back. Getting some time away will be good for her. I’m sure she’s doing some thinking. I’m sure she regrets the things she said to you.”

But Chess knew she didn’t regret the things she’d said. She had been waiting her whole life to say them. Chess, by virtue of being who she was, had always outshone and overshadowed Tate. She had stunted Tate’s growth. But she had not done so on purpose, and she certainly hadn’t meant to pose a threat with Barrett.

Birdie sighed. “I wish Grant were here.”

Chess went to bed before Tate got home. She laid her confession on Tate’s pillow.

When Chess woke up, Tate’s bed was empty. It hadn’t been slept in and the confession was right where Chess had left it.

Chess went to the bathroom and peered out the window. The Scout was in the driveway.

Chess slipped downstairs, her heart tiptoeing. Chess was afraid of her own sister. She felt guilty for years and years of infractions, involuntary as they may have been. She wanted absolution; she needed Tate’s unconditional love, but it had been retracted.
I hate you! You make me wish I had never been born!
So Chess
was
toxic after all, as she feared when they started this trip. Chess had been slowly, silently poisoning Tate’s drinking water, polluting her atmosphere.
You suck up all the air and I can’t breathe!
This, Chess thought, was the awful end. She could lose Michael, she could lose Nick—they were boys—but she could not lose her sister.

When Chess got downstairs, she saw the scratchy crocheted afghan spread out over the ass-tearing green couch.

“Did she…?”

“She slept on the couch,” Birdie said. Chess couldn’t tell what Birdie thought about this.

“Did she say anything?”

Birdie held out a plate with two eggs over easy and a piece of wheat toast, lavishly buttered. Chess accepted it.

“She’s still pretty angry,” Birdie said.

“I didn’t
do
anything, Birdie,” Chess said. She wanted her mother to understand this. “I’m not out to steal Barrett away from her.”

“Oh, heavens, I know,” Birdie said. “And she knows that, too. I think she’s dealing with older issues.”

Birdie wasn’t helping set Chess’s mind at ease. Birdie and Tate had always been closer than Birdie and Chess. Tate courted Birdie in a way that Chess found unnecessary. But right now, she realized, it would be nice to have her mother on her side.

“I guess,” Chess said.

“Your sister has been jealous of you your whole life,” Birdie said. “Just the way I’ve been jealous of India.”

“Jealous of me?” India said, descending the stairs. “What the hell are you talking about?”

A few minutes later, a young man appeared in the doorway.

“Is this the Tate house?” he asked. He was about nineteen or twenty and he looked enough like a young Barrett Lee that Chess blinked in surprise. The blond hair flopping in his eyes, the lean build, the visor, the sunglasses, the flip-flops.

“Yes!” Birdie said.

“I’m Trey Wilson,” the boy said. “I work for Barrett Lee.”

India said, “You could be his stunt double.”

Birdie said, “Where’s Barrett?”

“He’s at another job,” Trey said. “So he sent me. I’ll be doing deliveries from now on. He said I’m supposed to get your trash and your laundry and the… list?”

Birdie said, “I’m confused.”

At that second, Tate walked in. She looked at Trey and did a double take; then she stormed up the stairs. Trey gathered a dripping bag of ice and a bag of groceries from the picnic table.

Chess took the ice. “Barrett has another job, so he sent Trey. Trey is going to be coming from now on.”

“But what about Barrett?” Birdie said.

“He’s
gone!
” a voice from upstairs shouted.

INDIA

I
ndia missed Barrett more than she expected she would. The new kid was cute—he looked enough like Barrett to be his long-lost little brother—but he didn’t connect with people the way Barrett did. Trey Wilson was a kid who could drive a boat. He didn’t care about Tuckernuck and he didn’t care about them. There was no history and no intrigue. It was too bad, India thought, that they had to end the vacation this way.

There had been only one time that India could remember when Chuck Lee had failed to appear, and that had been India’s fault. It was the summer after Bill had killed himself; India had come to Tuckernuck as usual, but from the beginning her heart wasn’t in it. She had two of the three boys with her; Billy had taken a counselor job at a basketball camp at Duke for the summer. Birdie and Grant and the kids were there, and they went through the motions of doing the same things—the driving lessons, the clambake, the walks to North Pond and East Pond—but India always felt like she was watching from half a mile away. Chuck Lee had been the one coming twice a day then, though he frequently had Barrett with him, in training. When Chuck came alone, he always said something nice to India, complimented her hair or earrings, told her she was getting tan; on several occasions, they shared a cigarette down on the beach. In those days, there was no smoking up at the house because Grant hated the smell. Chuck never asked about what had happened to Bill, though India assumed he knew. Once, he picked a perfect sand dollar up off the beach and gave it to her. He said, “Here. Tuckernuck souvenir.” India had kept the sand dollar—she still had it—because Chuck had given it to her and Chuck had been the first man she’d ever noticed, back when she still wore a training bra. She had thought that maybe—just maybe—something would happen that summer, but she was too buried to make a move, and Chuck had a wife on the other side of the water. Eleanor, her name was, Barrett’s mother, Chuck’s wife of a million years, a real battle-ax, he said, whatever that meant.

Near the end of their stay, Chuck showed up with bluefish fillets that he had caught; he presented them to India in a heavy-duty Ziploc bag, and India could tell by the set of his shoulders, and by the way he pretended it was no big deal, that it was a big deal. India acted very grateful. But the bluefish fillets were a lurid red, they were slick and oily, and India, as well as everyone else in the family, abhorred bluefish. India thanked Chuck profusely and promised they would grill the fish for dinner that night. Chuck seemed pleased by this, as pleased as he ever got, with the touch of a smile lifting the cigarette in his mouth.

“All right, then, good,” he said. “I’m glad I brought them.”

As soon as Chuck was gone, India threw the bluefish fillets out on the bluff, and the seagulls swooped in to devour them.

The next morning, India made a point of raving about how delicious the bluefish had been. Again, Chuck gave the half smile. And not five minutes later, India’s youngest son, Ethan, came out, and when Chuck asked him how he liked the fish, he said, “Mom threw the fish out on the bluff and the seagulls ate it.”

India was mortified. She remembered her face burning; she remembered being at a complete loss for words. Chuck wouldn’t look at her. He collected the trash and left without the list. He didn’t come that afternoon nor the following morning. Grant was bellowing about his
Wall Street Journal,
and India kept to her room, watching out the window, like the old Nantucket widows waiting for their husbands to return from the sea. She couldn’t believe how bad she felt. She had already suffered through the worst of the worst; she hadn’t believed that anything else could affect her. But she cared about Chuck. She explained to Birdie what had happened, and this helped because Birdie understood how India felt about Chuck Lee; Birdie felt pretty much the same way herself. Chuck Lee had been the romantic hero of their youth. Birdie and India fretted together; they worried he would never come back.

He did eventually return, but India sensed things had changed. He didn’t like her anymore. Didn’t he realize that she had only lied to spare his feelings? She couldn’t confront him about it; he wasn’t the kind of man you could apologize to. He was the kind of man you tried to keep happy because one slip and…

Well, it was never the same. There were no more compliments, no more shared cigarette breaks, no more offerings of sand dollars or fish. They left that summer, and when they returned the following summer, Barrett was doing the deliveries.

And now Barrett, too, was gone. India couldn’t help feeling a bit bereft.

On the afternoon of the second day, Trey Wilson appeared with a package for India. He wasn’t even sure which one of the women India was, so it was fortunate that India was sitting at the picnic table, smoking. Chess was down on the beach, Tate had driven the Scout to North Pond—the two girls still weren’t speaking—and Birdie had gone for “a walk,” which meant she was off to either secretly console Tate or make another one of her clandestine phone calls.

“India?” Trey said. He was so young that he rightfully should have called her “Mrs. Bishop,” but they were on Tuckernuck, where things were insistently casual, and the kids’ friends had always called her “India” anyway. Trey held out the small, flat package to her.

“For me?” India said. She put on Bill’s reading glasses. The familiar handwriting, the absurdly sparse address. “Well, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Trey Wilson said. He smiled at her. “What should I do with the groceries?”

“Just leave them on the counter, thanks,” India said.

He did this, then loitered at her elbow as if he expected to be tipped. He didn’t expect to be tipped, did he? India hadn’t touched money in weeks; she wasn’t even sure where her wallet was. She smiled at him, and he said, “Do you have anything for me?”

What was he asking?

“Trash?” he said. “Laundry? The list?”

“Oh!” India jumped up. Barrett had emptied the trash automatically, and he had taken the list from its usual spot—under the jar of shells and beach glass on the kitchen counter. India wasn’t the woman of the house, but it was falling to her to teach this young man the ropes. Was there really any point, with only five days left?

She said, “The trash is here.” She lifted out the liner and cinched its yellow plastic handle; then she set in a new liner, even though this was something Barrett had always done himself. “And the list is always kept right here.”

Trey nodded glumly and accepted the list.

“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”

“Thank
you,
” India said.

The boy loped away. India missed the real Barrett. And she missed Chuck Lee, the original man of her dreams.