The Islanders (2 page)

 

Here's the question: Love. What is it? Absolute and unshakable? Eternal and undying? Faithful and true?

Oh, really?

Have you ever been to a dance? Ever seen the way a guy will look right over his girlfriend's shoulder while he's slow dancing with her and give some other girl the eye?

Ever kind of thought about your boyfriend's best friend, or even his brother? Don't lie. You know you have.

So what's love? Something that lasts a week or a month and that's all you can expect? Or is it just that some loves have a short shelf life? You know, like yogurt: after a week or two they go bad.

And how do you recognize the other kind of love, the kind that isn't like yogurt? The kind that is more like . . . I don't know, like peanut butter, that lasts forever and always tastes good?

Okay, maybe not peanut butter. But you get the idea.

So, getting back to the point, what's love? I guess no one can ever be totally sure, and after all, I am just seventeen. Cut me some slack; I can't be expected to know everything. I finally understand the War of 1812, and that's hard enough without
having to worry about defining love in a hundred words or less.

Still, I have learned some things about love, especially lately. And I know a lot more about it now than I did, say . . .

. . . two years ago.

 

“JAKE. JAKE. JAKE! WOULD YOU . . .
would you stop it? Jake, I'm serious. Look, stop it, get your hands . . . I'm getting pissed off now. I'm serious; stop it right now.” Zoey Passmore slapped her boyfriend's hand away, a startlingly loud sound that made several passersby turn and stare in amusement.

“Jeez,” Jake said, looking wounded and rubbing the back of his hand.

“It's
my
ice cream. You ate yours and you've already eaten half of mine.” She held it up as evidence. “I'm down to the waffle. You pig.”

“The waffle?”

“You know, the waffle cone. What do you call it?”

“The cone,” he said, shrugging his big shoulders and staring at her as if she'd said something utterly idiotic.

“What? What are you staring at me for?”

“It's not called
the waffle.
It's the cone. Ice cream
cone.”
He shook his head. “Man, you think you know somebody.”

“Well, I'm a complex, mysterious woman.” She licked a big dollop
of the chocolate ice cream.

“That's so sexy the way you do that,” Jake said.

“Oh, shut up.” She glanced around self-consciously, wondering if anyone else had heard him. The crowd on the narrow, cobblestoned street was mostly tourists, people in big, bright shorts and golf shirts, old people and couples dragging small children through the souvenir and fudge shops that lined Exchange Street. Still, here and there were familiar faces, some of Chatham Island's three hundred full-time residents.

“Sorry,” Jake said without any hint of remorse. “I'm just feeling good today.”

Zoey softened, letting a smile form on her lips. It had been two months since Jake had felt good. “What do you want to do today?”

He leered comically, an expression that seemed out of place on his serious face. “Same thing I want to do every day.”

Zoey sighed. Yes, Jake was getting back to normal, for better or worse. “Okay, if you want to go watch sports on TV . . .”

“You know what I meant.”

“Yes, but I'm ignoring you.” She dodged around a stroller and rejoined him, reaching for his hand. “Why are you feeling good today, anyway?”

Instantly his innocent, happy expression changed. His smile grew cold. “Today's the day Lucas goes off to jail.”

She felt her own face stiffen. “Are you sure?”

He nodded. “Of course I'm sure. I thought we might get lucky and
run into him. I'd enjoy seeing him go. Just like I'll enjoy thinking of him locked up.”

Zoey released her grip on his hand. “You shouldn't talk that way,” she said softly.

“Why not? He deserves it. He killed my brother.”

“I just don't think it's right. What happened to Wade was terrible, but still, what's happening to Lucas isn't something to be happy about.”

“Is to me,” he said darkly.

A cute ten-year-old girl came running up, a tornado of knobby knees and silken brown hair. “Jake!” she yelled.

“Hi, Holly,” Zoey said.

“Jake, Dad said you're supposed to help him take Mr. Geiger's boat out of the water.”

“Oh, crap. I forgot.” Jake winced and looked at Zoey apologetically. “I told my dad I'd help out down at the marina today.”

“Great, so you just eat my ice cream and take off?” Zoey asked.

Jake leaned close and kissed her lightly on the mouth. “I knew you'd understand. Sorry. But come over tonight, okay?”

“I'll check my calender,” Zoey called after his retreating back.

She wandered on through the crowd, feeling the sunshine of the brief Maine summer on her shoulders. This strange, tragic summer was finally close to an end.

She walked past all the familiar shops, following the gentle downhill slope toward the dock. There, in the wider spaces, the crowd was
less dense. She could see a line in front of her parents' restaurant and hesitated, unsure what to do. If she went anywhere near the place, she'd get drafted into working. Of course, she could use the money. Sophomore year was about to start, and she needed to replace her now dorky freshman clothes.

But it was just too nice a day to bus tables.

She ate some more of her ice cream, biting off chunks of waffle.
Yes, waffle,
she thought defiantly.

The crowd opened up suddenly, and to her surprise she found herself staring at a guy, standing alone, leaning against a pole by the ferry gate. His blond hair tossed and fretted in the breeze. There were people all around, but it seemed as if a force field surrounded him, leaving him utterly separate and apart.

Lucas.

The image leapt at her, a picture of loneliness. He was gazing with sad, despairing eyes at the bright town, seeking to memorize every image, seeking to hold on.

The ferry whistle shrieked and she saw him flinch, a strange and telling action. No islander raised to the sound of that whistle ever reacted. Yet Lucas had flinched as if he'd been stung.

Were his eyes filled with tears? She couldn't be sure from this distance. Was he searching the crowd for a particular face, hoping that someone, anyone, would come to say good-bye?

A false hope. No one on Chatham Island would break the isolation
that had been imposed on the boy who'd brought tragedy to the island. His father, hard-faced and grim, stood on the bow of the ferry, waiting to escort his son.

Zoey eased closer, moving in dreamlike slowness. Lucas's gaze at last focused on her, his attempt at a smile crumbling, his attempt to hide his tears failing, too.

“Hi, Lucas,” she said, lowering her eyes to the ground.

“Hey, Zoey,” he said without expression.

She stood there, an arm's length away, not knowing what else to say. He said nothing, only brushed surreptitiously at his eyes. She stared at the remnants of her ice-cream cone. Then she looked up.

She had never looked into sadder eyes.

She reached out with her free hand and gripped his arm. “Look, take care of yourself, okay?”

Lucas looked as if her kind words might destroy his last reserves of control. He nodded.

Zoey started to turn away, but some unseen force stopped her. She stepped forward, paused, then with infinite gentleness kissed his lips.

He stared at her uncomprehendingly.

She gulped hard, flustered and amazed at what she'd done.

“I . . . I just thought someone should say good-bye.”

The ferry whistle shrieked again. The final warning.

“I have to go,” he said.

“I know,” she answered.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Here.” She held out the last of her ice-cream cone. “You may not get any ice cream for a while. . . .”

He smiled sadly as he accepted her gift. “I guess not.”

“There's not much left,” she apologized.

He stared at her long and hard. She felt his eyes move from her long yellow braid, to her bare, tanned arms, to her freckled nose . . . and settle on her eyes.

“That's okay. The waffle's my favorite part,” he said before he turned away.

 

“FIVE DAYS, FIVE LOUSY DAYS.
Not a month or several months or a year, no, not even a full week. Five days.” Nina Geiger drew deeply on her cigarette and exhaled clear, pure Maine sea air. “Five. Tomorrow it will be down to four. The next day—”

“I'm guessing three?” Zoey said.

“Two.”

“One.”

“Then . . .”

“Blastoff?” Zoey suggested.

“School,” Nina said, crumpling the unlit cigarette in her hand and tossing it toward the trash can. She was allergic to smoke, but the cigarette went with a certain image she liked, so she smoked without lighting. The cigarette missed the trash and landed on the chipped gray-painted steel deck of the ferry. The bay breeze blew it in little circles.

“Better get that. Skipper Too will throw you overboard for messing up his boat,” Zoey said. Skipper Too, who was really
named Tom Clement, was the captain of the
Minnow
, which was actually called the
Island Breeze. Gilligan's Island
reruns were always popular on the island.

Nina looked defiant for a moment, then leaned forward to retrieve the cigarette. She was wearing black fishnet stockings, thigh-highs that were artfully ripped in several places. Over them she wore baggy army shorts. She had on a brown leather jacket that clashed with her black Doc Marten boots.

“So you're looking forward to school?” Zoey asked, deliberately provocative.

“Just like I look forward to my period every month. Like I look forward to going to the dentist to have my molars drilled.” Nina pulled a second cigarette from her pack of Lucky Strikes and popped it in the corner of her darkly lipsticked mouth.

Zoey waited. There was bound to be a third example.

“Like I look forward to finding out the milk has gone sour after I've already taken a swallow.”

“The three-part comic tautology rule,” Zoey said.

“You remember that?”

“Nina's First Rule,” Zoey said. “Funny examples work best in threes.”

“Going from least funny to most funny,” Nina added. She sighed. “At least you're going to be a senior.”

“Yeah, you'll just be a lowly junior. Whereas I will have all
the glory and power associated with being a senior.” She shot her friend a sidelong look.

The breeze freshened, caught the bow spray, and flung it against Zoey in a fine, cold mist. She grimaced and zipped up the front of her red fleece L.L. Bean jacket. She wore khaki shorts, white running shoes, and a white cotton blouse. It was just right for the warm day ashore in Weymouth, but the twenty-five-minute ferry ride to Chatham Island always had the potential to grow cold, even on a bright, late summer day.

She bent over to rummage in her ferry bag, a stretch net affair that no islander would dream of traveling without. It was loaded with college-ruled notebook paper, yellow plastic pencils, soft-grip pens, and a three-ring binder decorated with abstract pink triangular designs. It also held the items that had been on her father's list: a dozen bulbs of garlic, an annoyingly heavy bag of eggplant, and a glass jar of saffron. Finally, concealed beneath everything else, Zoey found the cookies.

“Want one?” she asked.

“What are they?”

“Fig Newtons.”

“Fig Newtons suck.”

Zoey glared at Nina. “Five more days,” she said. “And by the way, junior girls play a lot of basketball.”

Nina shivered. “Don't be cruel just because I don't like your taste in cookies.”

“Lots of dribbling and running.” Zoey opened the cookies and popped one in her mouth. “Basketball separates the dorks from the near-dorks.”

“At least I won't be the one showering with Claire,” Nina said slyly, reaching into Zoey's bag for a Fig Newton. “She separates the melons from the lemons.”

“I don't let your sister bother me anymore,” Zoey said. “It's stupid to be annoyed at someone just because they have a perfect body and once compared you to the Great Plains. While doing an oral report in front of the class.”

“That was years ago,” Nina said. “You're not the Great Plains anymore. Of course, you're not the Rocky Mountains, either.”

“Jake thinks I'm perfect,” Zoey said. She looked ahead toward Chatham Island, drawing closer now. From this point, she knew it would take exactly six minutes to round the breakwater, slow down into the enclosed harbor, sidle up to the town dock, and tie off the ferry. She'd taken the trip a few million times during her ten years on the island. She also knew that as they rounded the breakwater she'd be able to look up the ridge and see Jake's house. He might even be on the balcony, using his dad's telescope to watch them come in.

“You know, these aren't horrible,” Nina said thoughtfully as she chewed on a cookie. “You just have to get past the fact that they're all mushy. I like crisp.”

The ferry rounded the concrete breakwater and brought the island's only town into view across the calm, gray water. North Harbor was a cluster of red brick, painted wood, and weathered gray-shingle buildings. Shabby-looking wooden lobster traps piled five deep lined the docks around several high-bowed, rough-looking fishing boats with names like
Santo Cristo
and
Santa Maria.

The highest point in the town was the needle-sharp church spire. But behind the town, the green and pine-wooded ridge rose higher still, forming a barrier to the growth of North Harbor. A few buildings peered out through the trees on the slope, quaint inns that catered to the warm weather tourists.

“Why exactly do you hate school, anyway?” Zoey asked. “When we were little, you liked it better than I did.”

Nina sucked on her unlit cigarette. “I was young and unformed then. That was before I realized that school is specifically designed to crush the spirits of people like me.”

“It's designed to crush everyone's spirits, Nina. Don't take it so personally. I told Mrs. Bonnard—you'll have her this year for English—I told her I wanted to write romance novels when I grew up, and she said the people who wrote those kinds of
things were literary whores. I had to use a bicycle pump to reinflate my dreams.”

Nina smiled. “Better to be a literary whore than a literal whore.”

“Oh, that's deep. Tell that to Mrs. Bonnard when you see her. You didn't think the bicycle-pump line was funny?”

“I smiled. What am I supposed to do, laugh till I pee?”

Zoey looked up the east slope of the ridge and made out Jake's cedar-sided house. Sure enough, there was a tiny figure standing on the balcony outside his parents' bedroom, no bigger than a fly from this distance. Zoey fought a sudden impulse to aim a rude gesture in his direction. Which would have been inexcusable, she knew. It was just that sometimes it got on her nerves, thinking how ever present Jake could be in her life.

Most of the time, though, it was nice knowing he was always there for her.

She grimaced, confused by the contradiction. Well, consistency was the hobgoblin of little minds. Someone famous had said that. Someone famous who knew what a hobgoblin was.

She let her gaze travel left. She could barely make out the brass weather vane her father had put on their house. Just a few yards up the slope something caught her eye. A guy, far too distant to recognize, standing on the Cabrals' deck.

She glanced at the dock. No, Mr. Cabral's boat was still out
at sea. So who was that on the deck? She felt a shiver skate down her spine. Not Lucas. It couldn't be. Lucas was in jail. Or Youth Authority, or whatever they called it.

The thought touched her with gloom. It had been some time since she'd thought of Lucas Cabral. His was not a name that came up very often. Unconsciously she touched her lips, remembering that single, strange, inexplicable kiss almost two years ago. Then she thrust the memory out of her mind.

She looked back at the Cabral house, but the light had shifted just enough so that the deck was hidden in glare. Well, it was probably nothing, anyway.

Zoey said a casual good-bye to Nina at the dock. Nina's house was at the northern end of town, overlooking the lighthouse.

Zoey turned right and crossed the paved open square that served as a parking and dropoff area for the ferry and McRoyans' Marina. It was mostly empty, dotted here and there with island cars—rusted, pathetic wrecks without license plates. North Harbor was only six or eight blocks long, and all of Chatham Island was no more than three miles long, with roads over less than half of that, so people didn't see much need for expensive luxury cars. Real cars were kept on the mainland in a covered lot for trips to the mall, south to Portland, or even to Boston.

Passmores', her parents' restaurant, was only a few feet away,
facing Dock Street. Its tiny, three-table outdoor café had one table occupied. She went down the alley to the back door, pausing to stick the lid onto an overflowing trash bin.

The door was open, and she stepped into the cramped stainless-steel kitchen area. A large aluminum stock pot bubbled on the stove, and the dishwasher roared, sending up clouds of steam.

Her father had his back to the door, his hair tied back in a ponytail. He was chopping parsley in quick, decisive strokes, pausing every now and again to shovel the parsley into a pile and take a swallow from a sweating bottle of beer.

“Hey, Dad,” Zoey called out.

Her father half turned to look at her. The front of his white apron was stained green and brown. He wore wooden clogs on his feet and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. The mocking, laughing blue eyes were the model for her own. People who saw them together always pointed it out, though the rest of her, the unruly blond hair, the smile that rose more on one side than the other, even the ears that seemed to stick out just a little, were straight from her mother.

“You get my eggplant?” her father asked.

She held up her ferry bag as evidence and began to empty it on the counter. “These were the smallest they had.”

“They'll do. You hungry?”

“No thanks,” Zoey said. “I ate some cookies on the boat. Is Mom here yet?”

Her father stopped chopping and wiped off the knives. “Yeah, we're both stuck here tonight. Christopher had something or other to do, so I gave him the night off. Your mom's in front, but I wouldn't go out there unless you want to get roped into stocking the bar. Plus she's pissed at me, so she's in a bad mood.”

“Thanks for the warning. What are you guys fighting about?”

“I have no idea. She said something about getting fat, I said no, you're not, aside from your butt maybe, you're the same as you always were, and suddenly she's mad. You're a woman, why don't you explain it?”

Zoey shook her head. “I think I'll stay out of it. I guess I'm going over to Jake's house, if you guys are going to be here.”

Her father eyed her pile of school supplies. “So, are you looking forward to starting school again?”

“Kind of,” Zoey said. “I mean, I'll be a senior.”

“Well, you're lucky. I hated school myself. About the only part I liked was cutting classes to go get stoned with my friends.” He winced in embarrassment. “You don't do stuff like that, do you?”

“This isn't the eighties anymore, Dad.”

“Nineties. Give me a break. I'm not that old.” He gave her a comically menacing look. “I could still send you out to count bottles with your mom.”

Zoey went over and gave him a quick peck on his stubbled cheek. He smelled of fresh parsley and beer. “I'm out of here.”

She walked along Dock Street, swinging her much lighter ferry bag. To her right was Town Beach, a narrow strand dotted with driftwood and seaweed that the tourists avoided, preferring the broader beaches along the western shore of the island.

It wasn't yet five o'clock, Zoey realized, but the sun was already weakening, sliding down toward the low brown-and-gray skyline of Weymouth and turning it into a flat, dark cutout.

No wonder Nina was feeling that sense of impending doom—the days were already growing shorter. Soon the daily routine would involve freezing, predawn ferry rides to school, huddling below in boots and parkas and earmuffs. And return trips in the afternoon would take place with blazing sunsets at their backs.

The island seemed unnaturally quiet, as it often did after a trip to Weymouth. Weymouth was a busy little city, full of rattling delivery vans and gasping buses, music escaping from shop doors and car windows. North Harbor, by contrast, was a place of long silences, broken occasionally by barking dogs, screeching gulls, and the many soft sounds of the water.

Across the harbor, through the masts of the sailboats in the marina, Zoey saw the ferry pulling away, heading toward the two outer islands, Penobscot and Allworthy.

How many trips had she taken on that ferry? Thousands? Tens of thousands? No, not ten thousand. Not that many. Of course, if she lived out the rest of her life here, then it would pass ten thousand eventually.

Not that that was going to happen. She was going to college in California, either UCLA or USC or UC San Diego. Anything involving the letter
C
. She planned to apply to all three and she'd probably be accepted at all three, if she could get the loans and grants worked out.

UCLA would be perfect. Year-round sun, year-round warmth, everybody in convertibles. Lined winter jeans that made you look ten pounds heavier would be a thing of the past. She'd go to classes all week, go to Disneyland or the beach on the weekends. Get a tan. Get two tans. Meet some guy who looked like Liam Hemsworth, only nicer. Fall totally in love and end up having to write Jake a terribly sad letter telling him it was over.

“My dearest Jake,” she said aloud to an audience of gulls perched on the seawall. “My darling Jake. Dearest Jake. Dear Jake. Jake. I would do anything to avoid writing you this letter, because I know it will cause you great pain, and that is the last thing I want. You have always been kind and honorable with
me, and I know your fondest hope has been that we would wed. Alas, that is not to be.