The Island (49 page)

Grant, meanwhile, was striding right for Birdie.

“Back up,” Grant said. “For God’s sake, Birdie, back up!”

He picked the water pitcher up off the table and dumped it over the flames. There was a hiss and a billow of bitter smoke. Grant checked to see that the fire was out. He grabbed the Sancerre off the table and doused the smoldering remains. Birdie thought,
Not the Sancerre!
But of course this was the right thing to do.

Barrett and India and the girls were looking on, mystified. Birdie was embarrassed. She said, “I threw my cigarette in the bag by accident.”

Grant said, “You were smoking?”

“Kind of,” Birdie said.

India laughed. “Kind of,” she mimicked.

Birdie said, “What on earth are you doing here, Grant Cousins?”

Grant took her hands. His eyes were a clearer blue, it seemed, and his hair was longer than he liked to keep it; it curled at the ends. He looked “cute” in the way that teenage girls thought rock stars were “cute”—he was shaggy and sexy.

He said, “I came to see you.”

Birdie found she couldn’t speak. Her mouth gaped open. He kissed her—Grant Cousins
kissed
her in front of everyone. And further surprise: desire stirred. God, she had forgotten all about it.

INDIA

S
he regarded her bed—that squishy sinkhole with the five firm new pillows to compensate—and knew she wouldn’t sleep. She had felt her insomnia coming on; it was a ghost ship on the horizon drawing nearer and nearer. Her head held an electronic buzz; it felt like someone was grabbing her by the back of the neck and wouldn’t let her go.

Grant’s arrival had thrown everything off. India hated him for showing up unannounced and stealing the spotlight. Birdie was ecstatic, the girls were elated, Barrett was impressed. The
man
of the house had arrived! As if what they had been waiting for all these weeks was a man.
Hardly,
India thought. They had been just fine here, the four of them, on their own. As far as India was concerned, Grant was an egregious interloper.

Grant had approached India nervously, and she thought,
You’d better be nervous! You’d better be shaking in your boots!
This was the Tate house, their house, not Grant’s house; he had done nothing, in the years of India’s memory, but defile the Tuckernuck lifestyle by spending hours on his cell phone on the bluff and poring over the sheaf of documents FedExed to him each day. He used to turn the picnic table into his personal office, weighing down papers with rocks from the beach, asking Birdie to bring him more coffee. Birdie had obeyed like a dutiful wife, but deep down, India knew, she found it as despicable as India did.

Grant said, “India, I’m sorry for horning in here…”

He was about to make an excuse or give a good reason, but India shook her head at him. At PAFA she did this to great effect.

Grant lowered his voice. “I came for Birdie.”

India wasn’t sure how to take this comment. He came for Birdie. Meaning he came to get Birdie, claim her, take her home? Or he came because Birdie asked him to. Birdie had gone on a lot of mysterious errands with her phone, so this last interpretation was not unfeasible.

India was old enough to be self-critical. She wondered if what was really bothering her about Grant’s arrival was that he had come for Birdie—and no one had come for her. Her anger was based in the sibling rivalry of nearly six decades. Birdie was happy—she was luminous!—and to begrudge her this happiness was also despicable.

They might have been stretched at dinner, but Tate left with Barrett. In addition to feeling jealous about Grant and Birdie, India also felt jealous as Tate and Barrett sped away in the boat called
Girlfriend.
Barrett had returned, the romantic hero, and had whisked away the young, beautiful niece. He had given India a kiss on the cheek and she, in turn, had pinched his behind. Then she thought,
Woman, get a grip on yourself!

After dinner, they all retreated to the screened-in porch. Grant had brought a bottle of scotch for himself and a bottle of vodka and some tonic for India. (He knew who his toughest critic would be, calculating motherfucker.) Since there was no reason to hold back, India got wickedly drunk. She and Grant got into a storytelling contest in which all the stories were about Bill. For a while there, Bill and Grant had been involved in some serious prank one-upmanship: short-sheeting the beds, hanging a bluefish from the doorway of the bedroom, stealing each other’s alcohol, cigarettes, and cigars, putting fiddler crabs in the beds, water in the beer bottles, itching powder in the talcum, condoms in the salad. Grant, being a man’s man, had an enormous appetite for this kind of practical joking, but Bill was the creative one. They had been well matched, worthy adversaries, proving their love for each other by how much time, thought, and effort the prank took.

The reminiscing left India close to tears. Grant had orchestrated a Lazarus-like return from the dead, but Bill couldn’t. And Michael Morgan couldn’t either. Chess might have been thinking this exact thing, because she stretched, stood, and excused herself. She kissed her father first, and said,
I’m glad you’re here, Daddy.
Then she kissed her mother. Then she came over and hugged India fiercely, as if in some kind of solidarity, and India felt the tears fall despite her most fervent wishes, and she wiped at them quickly, and said, “I’m going to retire, too.”

And when India set eyes on her bed, she thought,
There is no way I am ever going to sleep.

She had been granted twenty-seven nights plump with sleep, eight, nine, sometimes ten hours at a stretch, a smooth white kingdom of sleep. Now, she was faced with the cold hand, the red room, the buzzing alarm in her brain. The insomnia was a taskmaster, a torturer. She took off her clothes and lay upon the strange mattress that had given her so many gifted hours of slumber. Slumber lumber, she had slept like a fallen tree. She was drunk—maybe that was the difference. For the first time in weeks, she had moved beyond wine; it was the vodka keeping her up, or the tonic, or the quinine in the tonic. It was Grant. Not Grant, but Grant’s stories about Bill. It was Bill keeping her awake. It had always been Bill that kept her awake. He was piloting the ghost ship on the horizon; he wanted her for some reason. He wanted her to do something. He wanted her to listen. He needed to tell her something.

Fine,
she thought, angry now.
Just say it: It was my fault! You did it because of me! You did it to keep me captive! You saw me retreating, you needed to reel me in, hold me prisoner. I am your prisoner! I have been your prisoner for fifteen years!

Her thoughts were interrupted by a sound. Sounds, noises: At first India didn’t know what it was. A bang, something dropping to the floor or hitting the wall, followed by a voice. Grant. Then there was a rhythm, permeating the wall in waves. Then Birdie’s voice, a cry or a whimper. They were making love. India closed her eyes. She couldn’t believe this was happening. Of course it was happening. She had to leave her room, go downstairs, smoke on the porch, or leave the house altogether—walk to the beach or take the Scout for a drive. But she found she couldn’t move; she was pinned to the bed. She thought of all the nights when she and Bill had made love on this Gumby mattress, never caring who heard them. She had known back then that Birdie and Grant were lying cold and stiff in their narrow, coffinlike twin beds, listening (or in Grant’s case, oblivious, snoring), and that had turned India on. She was getting some and Birdie wasn’t!

This, then, was her just deserts, and she accepted it as such.

She fell asleep for two minutes, three, four—this always happened on her sleepless nights, and it was agonizing. A taste of something unspeakably sweet—sleep, real sleep!—and then she lost it. It was a kite string ripped from her hand. She rose from bed; the other room was quiet, and India imagined Grant and Birdie entwined in one of those spinsterish beds, spent and happy.

Something in the room was calling to her. Okay, she was nuts, she was as mentally ill as Bill had been at the end. Inanimate objects had spoken to him all the time. That was what it was like to be a sculptor: he heard forms speak. It was then his job to give the voices a body.

Fifteen years he had held her captive.

She looked out the window. She didn’t have the good view; Birdie did. Because this was, truly, Birdie’s house; their parents had left it to Birdie, and India had gotten the equivalent in cash, which she used to buy their house and acreage in Pennsylvania. It was all fair, and Birdie never mentioned that the house was hers, and she took on all expenses and never asked India for a dime and India was free to use the house anytime. Birdie was a good egg, a tiny woman with a solid-gold heart. She deserved to have the man she had divorced out of frustration return to her on his knees.

Something in the room was calling to her. There was nothing outside, no suitor beneath her window, no meandering drunk neighbors or rowdy teenagers on ATVs, nothing but Tuckernuck, its dirt trails, its mysteries.

Was it Roger? He stood on the dresser, small and light and perfect. She picked him up as she might a baby chick and cradled him in two hands.
Are you talking to me, Roger?

Silence. She was losing her mind. She set Roger down. Roger wasn’t a real person; he wasn’t a talisman or a mystical object. He wasn’t a totem or an idol. He was a sculpture.

Something in the room was calling to her. She listened. Was it Chess from the attic? Was there another bat? Was there a bat in this room? Or a mouse? Or a garter snake? Or a black widow? India removed Lula’s painting from the wall. It was the only foreign presence in the house; aside from the pillows and linens Birdie had ordered this summer, every other object and piece of furniture had been there for decades.

It was so dark India couldn’t see the painting, but that didn’t matter: she knew what it looked like. It was, after all, her body. Her hip, the shallow bowl beneath her hip. A sand dune. The inside of a shell. She remembered lying on Lula’s white suede sofa; the memory itself was as strong as sex. Lula sketching, her pencil ravishing the page. It had been sensual, Lula’s eyes devouring India, Lula’s hair falling in her face, her skin lightly perspiring, the kohl around her eyes smudged. There had been a scent in the room, the smell of women, of sex—it had been her musk, or Lula’s, or hers and Lula’s intermingled. She had been fantasizing about sex with Lula—whatever that might look like—but Lula had been thinking of work. India’s body was Lula’s work, her greatest work to date, the subject of her genius. India had never been Bill’s muse in that way. His work was too blocky, too masculine, too civic. But she had been Lula’s muse.

Was I wrong about you?

What do I have to do?

Try?

What would a life with Lula look like? It would be unconventional, shocking even. In a few short weeks, India was to become a grandmother: Could a woman with a new baby grandchild take a female lover half her age? What would her sons say? What would the faculty, the administration, the board of directors—Spencer Frost!—say? (Spencer Frost would approve, India decided. He was a worldly man, with European sensibilities.) What would Birdie, Chess, and Tate say? Did India care what other people thought? Did she, at the age of fifty-five, care?

Something else was standing in her way, keeping her from embracing happiness, from saying,
Yes, I’ll try.
It was the pilot of the looming ghost ship. It was the ghost himself.

Something in the room was calling to her. India hung the painting back on the wall. She cast around the room. The voice was getting stronger, louder; she was getting closer, like a child in a game of Marco Polo. She lay on the bed. Her eyes were burning. Her eyes. She turned to the nightstand—her book lay there, and… Bill’s reading glasses.
His glasses.
They were practically glowing. The lenses caught light from the moon out the window, except there was no moon. So where was the light coming from?

India picked up the glasses. They were cool to the touch, as they should have been. The frames were green plastic, a mottled jade green that people commented on.
I love your reading glasses. Oh, thanks. They belonged to my late husband.

India had taken the glasses from the hotel room in Bangkok. They had been on the night table next to a small pad and pen, standard issue from the hotel. India imagined Bill wearing the glasses as he held the pen over the blank page, trying to decide what to write. If there had been a suicide note, she would have taken that, but because there had been no note, because Bill had not found a single word to say in his defense, India had taken the glasses. They were nothing remarkable. India knew Bill had gotten them at the CVS in Wayne. But she took them as her memento of her husband, and for fifteen years they had hung around her neck. They had rested against her heart.

India opened her door, stepped out into the hallway, and tiptoed down the stairs. She passed through the living room and kitchen and out the door. The night was brilliantly dark. There was a sprinkling of stars—diamonds against the obsidian—but no moon. They had outlasted the moon. India should have gone back for a flashlight; she couldn’t see a goddamned thing. But this was Tuckernuck: she could make it to the beach blind or sleepwalking. She floated across the yard and felt for the railing at the top of the stairs; it was right where she knew it would be. She descended to the beach. The new stairs were sturdy. She remembered the summer that Teddy put his foot through one of the old boards and got a wicked splinter. Bill had pulled it out with his sculptor’s tweezers. There was a memory for everything, India realized; it was pointless to try to escape the memories.

But that didn’t mean she had to spend the rest of her life haunted by the ghost of her dead husband. She was still young. She didn’t have to spend the rest of her life looking at the world through Bill Bishop’s eyes.