by Sarah Blake
“What is it?” she said, letting the door slam behind her.
“This is perfect!” Evelyn said, turning to her with the sample of striped blue fabric in her hand. “It’s just right.”
Joan frowned, looking for the bluebells.
“Mum and I thought the other.”
Evelyn sniffed. “God no, that’s as bad as the Lowells.”
“I thought it was pretty.”
“Yes, but it’s so old-fashioned. Let’s bring some spirit into the old girl.”
“The old girl?”
“Here.” Evelyn picked up the pillow that Dickie evidently had bought. “Look—isn’t it darling?”
Across a field of bold red stripes had been embroidered the phrase Reader, I married him.
Joan only smiled.
“You see why we have to go with the blue stripes now, don’t you?”
Joan looked at her sister. “To match Dickie’s pillow?”
For the first time Evelyn heard the trouble in Joan’s voice. “Yes, Joanie. To make him feel welcome. To make him feel like the place is his.”
“His?”
“Don’t be an old stick-in-the-mud; you know what I mean.”
“I’m not an old stick-in-the-mud.”
“Joanie.”
For an answer, Joan reached across her sister and very carefully retrieved the bluebell swatch and placed it along the back of the chair, then turned around and walked out of the room.
“Oh, for god’s sake, Joan,” Evelyn sighed behind her.
* * *
THERE WAS LUNCH on the lawn in the front of the house and a sail on the Sheila in the long afternoon. Roger Pratt napped in the shade. There was the pock of tennis balls hit across the cove on the court, and old Mrs. Hunnicutt arrived with her boatman for tea. Croquet was set up on the flat spot by the dock and the whack of a wooden ball hit too hard floated up to the house spun with protests and laughter. They were a comfortable group, the Pratts and the Miltons, joined as they had been by Anne and Joan’s friendship at boarding school, and now even more resolutely by the young couple and by the bringing in of Dickie to Milton Higginson. The day unfurled slowly, as lightly as one of Kitty’s irises, the hot drive up, the city forgotten, all of it peeled off them, so that by the end of the afternoon, they had fully arrived. The Island held them all in its hand, Kitty thought, sitting on the green bench in front of the house and shelling peas for dinner.
The prow of a lobster boat coming from the mainland crossed out of the sun in the middle of the Narrows and into the cooler dark of the shadowed cove.
“There,” Kitty said from where she sat on the bench, as Ogden came round the side of the house with a pair of clippers and a saw, “that must be Priss.”
He nodded. “That’s all of us now.”
Or almost all, she thought, and stood up.
“Hullo!” She waved as Priss appeared in the boathouse doorway in an enormous purple sunhat, carrying two small bags in either hand and making her way slowly up the hill.
“Leave your luggage,” Ogden called to her. “I’ll come down and get it later—Joan.” He held up the clippers. “Let’s get to the trail down to the picnic grounds before tonight.”
“All right.” She pushed herself up off the lawn, coming to stand beside her father and mother as Priss arrived at the top of the hill, dewy with the exertion, smelling faintly of bourbon.
“All in one piece?” Ogden smiled down.
“Hullo, Priss.” Kitty kissed her.
“Hello, Miltons.” Priss kissed them both.
“Hello, Pratts,” she said brightly to Sarah and Roger coming round the corner of the house.
“Hello, Evelyn. And Dickie, hello! Hello, Joan dear.”
“Come in.” Kitty patted Priss on the shoulder. “I’ve put you downstairs.”
“Come on.” Ogden looked at Joan. And she took the clippers from her father and followed him into the woods.
They went at the trail in silence, clipping branches and sawing boughs and dragging the brush farther into the woods, clearing the path of what the winter had wracked, the winds and furies of January raging through these same trees. Snow in here where they only knew rain, or fog, or the single shafts of sun stretched across the deep green. They worked together as the two of them always had, with a patience and a memory restoring the path of the previous summer, clear from the dock to the rocks at the edge of the picnic grounds, where dinner would be tomorrow night. Distantly the foghorn in the Thoroughfare moaned. A woodpecker worked away high above their heads, his sound like corks popped from bottles, pock pock pock.
Ogden reached up, testing the limbs of the tree that had been hit by lightning and now leaned across the path in front of them.
The clippers snapped the wood, and the bough fell with a soft thud into the moss at his feet.
She dragged it off. Her father lifted the clippers to the next. The branch fell. Ogden threw it to the side of the path and straightened, looking through the cleared brush to the water. He seemed far away.
“Dad?”
He turned. “One is never enough, Joanie. It’s never enough.”
“What isn’t?”
He looked at her. “When you are young you think you can change the world—make it over, straighten it out. I did—your godfather, Dunc, did too.”
She waited. She couldn’t make out what he was telling her.
He looked back out at the water. “But the world doesn’t change; only you do. And then you are left with the places that remind you—”
He toed at a mushroom on the side of the path, looking down at the moss.
“Damn it, Joanie.” He was soft. “Dunc should be here.”
Joan glanced at him in surprise.
“I thought he was coming?”
“He’s not feeling himself.” Ogden put down the clippers and slid the curved saw out of its leather casing, setting the teeth on the biggest bottom branch. “Priss phoned last night.”
Wordless, Joan went to hold the branch steady as Ogden drew the blade back and forth. The branch cracked, and she leaned on it as her father sawed. It cracked further and then snapped off in her hand. She turned and tossed it into the brush behind her. Her father put his saw on the next big limb and looked up, and she moved to stand across from him, her hand on the wood to put the pressure where it was needed. He drew the saw once across to mark the line and then went at it, his arms working in a steady even rhythm, his chin and cheek all she could see under the visored hat.
How she loved him, she felt, standing there waiting for the tree to split. He stood for the good; he was everything good. She moved her hand farther down the limb.
After a few minutes, the limb fell. Joan bent and dragged it off the path and into the brush.
“You know, Dad,” she said, coming back to stand beside him. “Up here, on the Island, is the only place I ever want to be.”
“Isn’t that funny.” Ogden smiled. “It’s just what I’d say myself.”
She nodded at him. “And you can count on me. I’ll take care of it. I won’t let the place down.”
Ogden turned around and looked at her, clearly moved.
“You are a good soul, Joan Milton,” he said gruffly. “But don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
She lifted her chin. “But that’s one I can keep.”
Ogden shook his head, though he smiled. “You’ll have your husband to consider.”
“My husband?”
“He may not want to have anything to do with the place,” Ogden pointed out.
Joan flushed. “But I may not marry.”
“Don’t say that, Joan. I’m sure you will.” Ogden looked at her seriously. “I hope you do.”
“What about my—”
“It shouldn’t matter.” Her father shook his head. “You haven’t had a seizure in years. What the doctors said at the time has been borne out, hasn’t it? The medicine is working.”
She didn’t answer.
“If I
ever marry,” she finally said, “it will have to be someone who will love this”—she nodded at the trees—“all of this, as much as I do.”
Ogden considered her a minute, then broke into a smile.
“That’s the stuff,” he said as the kitchen bell rang from the house, a distant clang through the trees.
Twenty-seven
“GRAB THAT, WILL YOU, dear?”
Jimmy Ames pointed to the bumper on the stern, and Evie tossed it over the side as he brought the Katherine smoothly into the dock, the bumpers nudging them back from the wooden edge. He cut the engine, and the sudden quiet tightened the evening into parts: the stark angle of the boathouse roof, light on the water splashing the granite rocks as the boat’s wake shuttled in, shuttled out. Evie stood in the stern, staring up past the boathouse, where the great green lawn stretched to the Big House perched on its granite foundations on the hill overlooking the cove of Crockett’s Island. Granny K’s green bench sat beneath the front windows, and on either side the white wooden slat-back chairs with the arms wide enough for a book laid out flat. The high corner of the oldest Crockett’s gravestone poked up to the left of the house over the shoulder of the hilly field of timothy grass. The flag blew a straight rectangle at right angles to its pole.
No matter that she arrived just like this, every summer, year after year, there was always this moment when she felt that she had cheated time, that this was the place on earth that unfolded and opened, bending toward her and saying, Child. Standing there in the boat, looking up at the house, she felt the hand of the place; the sky and the water retook her. She forgot this moment as soon as she left the place, and then always, on the return, there it was, there she was. Here, like nowhere else, she belonged.
The first time Evie had brought Paul to the Island, twenty-five years ago, their books, bathing suits, and some sweaters crammed into duffel bags, they had rounded the point, and when it sprang free and separate on the water, the line of spruce trees arching into the sky, Evie couldn’t deny the flush of pride. See that, she would never have said aloud, but felt—see that, that is mine. I am that. And the picture of the two of them, in the stern of her family’s boat ferried by Jimmy Ames, their caretaker, unimaginable to Paul’s family, like something out of a postcard, also made her proud. Look what she could bring him. An island in Maine. Look what she could offer, her hands full.
“So,” he had teased. “This is your ‘little old place’?”
“Come on.” She smiled. “Admit it. It’s beautiful.”
He slid his hand around her waist. “Of course it’s beautiful.”
But now, twenty-five years later, it was Paul’s words in her head as Jimmy and she stood in the stern of the Katherine looking up at the “little old place.”
“Same as always,” Jimmy commented in the silence. A heron lifted from the rocks beside the boathouse.
Evie nodded at him. But it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t at all the same.
“When is your cousin due in?” Jimmy pulled her bags out of the hold and slid them down the boat deck toward Evie.
“End of the week.”
“So you’ve got a little time on your own, then.”
“That’s right.” She smiled at him. “I thought I’d clear out some of the closets, get ready for this guy.”
“He sounds nice enough.”
“A stranger renting Crockett’s? Granny K would turn over in her grave.”
Jimmy hoisted himself up and over onto the dock. “She might have surprised you.”
Well, yes, thought Evie, she certainly has. She looked away.
“Will Min come in the same time as you?”
“I don’t know what she’s doing.” Evie tried to keep her voice neutral. “She ought to call you.”
“Just like her mother,” he chuckled. “Keeps us all on our toes.”
“It would be nice if she let people know what she’s planning.”
“Sure.” He whistled appreciatively. “Sure it would.”
The first wave of annoyance washed over Evie. Just like Aunt E, Min was going to be given a free pass by Jimmy, showing up and simply expecting to be taken care of, to be driven. As if Jimmy worked for her alone.
They piled her two duffels, the boxes of groceries, and her laptop into the back of the tractor, and Jimmy pulled away. Evie followed slowly, her eye on the house looming above him.
When she was alive, her grandmother would climb to her feet, holding on to the branch of the lilac by the front door for balance, and stand there, watching as her children and grandchildren walked up the lawn to her. Every summer, no matter how many times they’d seen her throughout the winter, or even just weeks ago in the spring—it was this veil of scrutiny, this gaze that they all passed through that seemed to mark the beginning of the year. How you appeared to her on that day, the first day, was who you would remain.
“You’ve put on weight,” she’d say, eyeing Evie. “What’s happened to your hair?”
“Aren’t you sleeping, then?” she’d ask Joan, though her voice was softer, always softer, with her.
And Evie’s mother would tilt her head to the side and say nothing, leaning forward to kiss her mother’s cheek. Silence had been Joan’s weapon and her shield, though Evie hadn’t understood the difference until well into her forties.
Her mother was all around her now as the tractor climbed in low gear up the hill toward the Big House door her grandmother had vanished from twenty years ago.
Jimmy rolled in a wide semicircle and parked the tractor to the left of the steps. He kept the engine running and slid off the seat, reaching for the luggage and walking it up to the top of the stairs, where he left it for Evie to carry the rest of the way in. She was one of the grandchildren, after all. Not her grandmother, her mother, or her aunt, whose bags he would have carried all the way up the stairs to their rooms.
“Need anything?”
She looked up at the house from the bottom of the steps, the box of groceries in her arms, then turned around to him and shook her head. The paint around the front door was peeling, and the green bench where Granny K had poured tea, watched capture the flag, and waited for picnickers to come up the lawn tilted dangerously backward on a rotten leg. The lilac’s dead wood had grown so dense it blocked the outside light. Evie reached for the handle of the screen door and noticed Jimmy had filled the pot on the granite step below the door with geraniums, like lipstick on a dowager. Someone else knew how it had looked once, how it was meant to look now.
“It all looks great, Jimmy,” she said.
He nodded. “It made it through. Hard winter.”
He had stopped at the bottom of the steps, facing the water, and she turned around beside him, trying to think what else to say. Though the sweep of the lawn, the late afternoon draped golden on the great rocks either side of the boathouse was what there was to say.
“Will you need the boat tomorrow?” Jimmy asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m all set.”
“I’ll be going into town, then, to pick up the inspector.”
“Inspector?”
“You can’t make any changes without calling in the state these days—even minor ones.”
Evie looked at him. “What changes?”
“To the boathouse.”
“What?”
Jimmy frowned.
“Sorry,” Evie said. “Catch me up.”
“Your cousin thought a dressing room down by the dock would be handy.”
“Which cousin?”
“Shepherd.”
“Shep did? Handy for whom?”
“His passengers, I guess.” Jimmy reached for his cigarettes. “Not a bad idea. It’s a long way to come all the way up to the house to change or freshen up.”
“But…” Evie tried to think whether Shep had said anything about this in Dick Sherman’s office. “We haven’t paid anybody.”
“It’s all done. He wrote a check.”
Did Shep just think because he had pai
d for it, he could go ahead and make a change like that? Did he expect to get reimbursed?
“It’s a good idea.” Jimmy bent over his cigarette, cupping his hand around the flame. “You could do with a place to store things while you’re out on picnics.”
He climbed back up on the tractor and shifted into gear, the growl of the engine his goodbye.
“See you in the morning,” she called, and he waved. Sound followed him down the hill, trailing like gulls behind a lobster boat, leaving her standing with the box in her arms, staring after him, the thick, familiar territorial rage rising as she watched Jimmy pull the tractor into the boathouse. Shep’s “improvement” was the kind of thing Aunt E would have done, making little changes here and there “because they made sense,” catching her mother off guard at the start of every summer, changing the house in her own image, not consulting anyone else, so the hurts and slights of years up here walked hand in hand with the beauty of the place itself. Don’t be ridiculous, Joanie, Aunt E would say summer after summer. Don’t be a stick-in-the-mud. It’s only wallpaper. Or curtains. A spot of paint. What did it matter? Though of course it mattered terribly to Aunt E, too.
Evie turned around and yanked open the screen door. She needed Paul, she realized standing in the doorway, alone in this house for the first time in her life. He would have been right behind her now, would have heard Jimmy’s comments about Shep, about Min, would have walked up the hill with her, carrying his books, and known exactly what those comments meant to her and how they pricked. How Evie’s good manners would have triumphed over her outrage, and what not saying anything more to Jimmy had cost. He was the one who’d been beside her all these years, watching, all this time. But their fight had opened a gap between them that was raw and frightening. And she didn’t know how to stitch it closed.
“Listen,” he’d said as she got in the car that morning, “I’ve got to nail a draft of this essay down, and then Seth and I will be up Sunday or Monday.”
Evie had turned the key in the ignition.
“You don’t have to,” she said stiffly.
“I want to be there to bury your mother with you,” he said quietly. “Of course I do.”
