“You want my furniture?”
“Just old stuff. Stuff you don’t want anymore.”
“For what purpose?” I could see Eva’s wheels turning, wondering what we were up to now. She looked at me to a get a better read of the situation, but I clearly had no idea what Lyndley had in mind, so my thoughts told her nothing.
“We’re going to redo the playhouse,” Lyndley said. “It looks like a bomb struck it.”
It was one of Eva’s expressions, and Lyndley used it to get her favor. Still, you could tell that Eva was suspicious, since we hadn’t touched the playhouse in years. I watched her mulling over the idea. “There’s some old junk piled in the coach house. If you want to haul it away, that’s your business. It’ll save me paying somebody to do it.”
Lyndley kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said, and started out the door. “You are a wonderful woman and a great American.”
Eva stopped, as if just remembering something. “By the way,” she said, “some young man called here and asked me out last night. I assume he was looking for you.”
It stopped Lyndley. “What did he say?”
“He said he met me in some store in Cambridge and that he can ‘get ahold of a car next Thursday night’ if I want to go out and ‘shoot the shit.’”
“What did you say?” Lyndley was trying not to laugh.
“I told him I was grounded for the rest of the summer.”
This cracked Lyndley up. “Good one,” she said, “really good.”
“Consider it done,” Eva said.
“What?” Lyndley asked.
“No more trips to Boston,” Eva answered. Then she thought about it. “More specifically, town limits to the island. And consider yourself lucky. If your mother finds out you’re even going out to Yellow Dog Island, she’ll kill me.”
“Okay,” Lyndley said, but her voice was quiet.
“And I want to know ahead of time where you’re staying each night,” Eva went on.
“Okay.”
Eva was waiting. “Starting now,” she said when Lyndley didn’t pick up the cue.
“On the island,” Lyndley replied. “For tonight.”
“All right.” Eva nodded and started toward the door, leaving Lyndley standing there, slightly stunned. “And, by the way, it’s pronounced Ava Braun, not Eva Braun. And that reference is not even remotely funny.” And I could tell that there was something else going on. I’d never seen Eva this edgy.
I held the door for Eva, and she went through it without a thank-you or a look back.
When she was out of earshot, I turned to Lyndley and said, “I can’t believe you gave them the real phone number.”
She shrugged. For someone so smart, Lyndley could be really stupid sometimes.
“Come on,” she said finally, “let’s go.”
“Where?”
“To fix up the playhouse.”
“We’re really going to do that?”
“Yeah, what do you think we’ve been talking about all this time?”
I had to admit I had no idea.
“And why would I want to help?”
“Because you’re my sister, and you love me, and I need your help.”
“No sale.”
“All right. How about this one? Because you’re my sister, and I love you, and I know you haven’t got anything better to do.”
The playhouse was actually Eva’s boathouse. It stood on stilts down by the docks right on the water. From my room on the island, Eva’s boathouse looked like a huge open mouth facing out to sea waiting to catch whatever came into the harbor. It was originally built as a rigging shed when the Whitneys were in the shipping trade, but it had later been moved and placed on the stilts, and the huge opening was cut into the harbor side, exposing it to the elements and making it look as if it were always just about to fall down. Toward the rear of the building was a closet where we left the sails and oars in the winter. At the back of the closet was a tiny staircase leading to a loft. There was a barn window off the loft, but the window had not been there originally; like the door, it was cut in much later. When the tide was high enough, that window was a great place for diving into the water.
May says the original loft was probably built for smuggling or avoiding British taxes, as the tunnels under the common were, and only later used for more altruistic purposes, like the Underground Railroad, maybe, but it doesn’t matter. The point is that the loft was our playhouse, and it was a great place. Eva had given it to Lyndley and me that first summer that Cal had gotten so bad, so she’d have a place to get away to, somewhere he couldn’t find her.
No one from our family came anywhere near the boathouse in the summer, so it was very private. In the winter we left some of our boats here: Beezer’s Whaler, a dory, and anything else we didn’t want to leave out on the island to get slapped around. The water level varied with the tides, going from ten or twelve feet at high tide to just a few feet when the tide was dead low. That made it bad for anything with a keel, and even with a small boat you would have to pull up the outboard when you left, or you’d come back and the boat would be spinning around or even balancing on its propeller, which wasn’t great for the engine. For that reason no one used it as a real boathouse anymore, so it became ours during the summer. It smelled of salt, mildew, old sails, and seagull guano, and you’d have to use a lot of bleach to get the place smelling halfway decent, but it could be done. At the height of summer, the whole building became a steam bath, and that’s usually when we abandoned it in favor of other locations. But it was still a great place. When the loft window was open, you couldn’t smell anything from down below even if it was ninety degrees out, which was almost never.
We made several trips to and from Eva’s coach house, dragging chairs, a table, even an old horsehair mattress that was no good to anyone, really, but that Lyndley couldn’t live without. Except for the chairs, we couldn’t fit anything up the stairwell, so we had to go back and get some rope and pull the table and mattress up through the loft window. The sky was black to the north, and even though the thunderstorm was going to miss us, it was getting pretty windy, and we almost lost the mattress once into the water. When we finally pulled it through the window, it flopped onto the loft floor, kicking up years of dust. Lyndley dragged it into the corner and covered it with the new Indian-print bedspread she’d brought with her.
“I thought you were going to make pants out of that.”
“I said you should make pants, I never said I was going to.”
I hated it when she twisted the story like that. Usually I would call her on it, but I was so tired from hauling the furniture that all I wanted to do was lie down on the mattress. I was glad she’d covered it.
She’d brought two things with her in her backpack: the bedspread and a bottle of burgundy she had stolen from Eva’s wine cellar, which was odd, because the one thing Lyndley didn’t do was drink, and she hated anyone who did.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“You’ll see.”
She didn’t have a corkscrew, so she took an old rigging stick and pushed the cork down into the bottle. The wine squished around it, up and over the top, and she got some on her T-shirt, and it pissed her off, but then she went to the window and dumped the rest of the wine into the water below. I watched as the deep red turned pink, then gray, then disappeared altogether. It was somehow satisfying to watch as the wine lost its power; I thought maybe I was watching some kind of healing ritual or something, Lyndley exorcising the power that demon alcohol had over the life of her family, something like that. But then she sat down on the mattress and rolled herself a joint, and my theory went out the window along with the wine.
I thought about pointing out the irony of the situation, but Lyndley wasn’t as into irony as I was, and besides, I didn’t really know what she’d been doing with the bottle anyway, so I didn’t say anything. I was starting to get tense, not because I cared if she smoked a joint
—I hardly knew anybody who didn’t—but because I was one of the only straight kids left, and I was self-conscious about it. I’d tried smoking one last summer with Lyndley, and basically nothing happened. It just made me choke, which made me feel grouchy and very uncool.
I was getting kind of pissed off at Lyndley again. “Is this what we’re building here? An opium den?”
“It’s not opium.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
I’d moved across the room, sitting as far away as I could get, over by the window, in the better of the two chairs we had taken from Eva. It didn’t have any caning left on the seat, so I sat balancing on the rim, trying not to fall through.
I frowned. Lyndley took another toke, drew it deep, then got up off the mattress and walked over to me. I figured she was going to breathe it on me. We’d tried that last summer, but it hadn’t worked; my clothes and hair had just stunk of weed. Instead of blowing it, she leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. I say she kissed me because that’s what I thought she was doing, and I pushed her off me, and she ended up laughing, choking out the smoke.
“Jesus, Towner, you are so damned uptight.”
“Fuck you very much,” I said, trying to prove her wrong.
She finally took the paper wrapper from the candles, made a little tube, and blew the smoke into my lungs, which I let her do.
I didn’t choke, and after several tries I did get high. I only know this because I sat back down on the mattress and watched as Lyndley dumped a bag of candle stubs onto the table. Then she took the empty wine bottle, lit the candle, and melted the colored wax down the side in tiny drips. When one candle was finished, she’d light another and another, until the wine bottle had disappeared and there was nothing left but a rainbow of wax. I know I was high, because I remember thinking it was one of the most fascinating things I’d ever seen.
“I think I’m stoned,” I said finally, and Lyndley started laughing.
“You think?” she said, and we both laughed until we couldn’t laugh anymore.
She took the one candle stub she had left and stuck it in the top of the bottle and said, “Voilà.”
And then I fell asleep. When I woke up, Lyndley was sitting in the chair looking out the window. She reminded me of those pictures you see of the captains’ wives gazing out to sea, searching for a mast on the horizon. The room was finished. It looked good. In the half-light of sunset and the glimmer from the candle, she looked beautiful. Not that she wasn’t always beautiful, but the sun was lighting her hair, and it glowed golden and red around her like a halo on an angel or something, which is not a way you’d ever picture Lyndley normally. It took a moment for the stoned sleep image to fade.
“Oh, my God, what time is it?” I said, snapping back to reality and bolting up from the mattress.
“It’s not that late.”
“May’s waiting for the ephedra,” I said.
“She knew you’d be a while.”
“She’ll pull up the ramp.”
“No she won’t. She’s bluffing,” Lyndley said.
“No way. May doesn’t bluff.”
I scrambled around the room, messing things up, trying to find the little bag of herbs that Eva gave us.
I found it, gathered up the rest of my stuff, and headed toward the ladder.
I looked back. “Are you coming?”
“I’m going to stay here for a while.”
“You told Eva you were staying on the island.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Why?”
“It’s nice here…. I want to stay.”
I could tell she was lying.
“You can’t sleep here.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll get in trouble.”
“Who’s going to tell? You?”
“No, but it’s not a good place to be.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s the docks.”
“The docks are safe enough.”
I saw Jack’s boat pull in then. It sat low in the water, loaded with lobsters, probably from Canada, where there were more of them these days. I watched from the window as he tied up. He looked up then, flashed a smile. He was shirtless and very tanned.
The smile was intimate. I could feel my face go red with it, which really made me mad, and then I felt Lyndley behind me, and I immediately knew that the smile was meant for her.
He was standing next to a man with a clipboard, pointing to the hold, negotiating a price for his catch. An offer, a shake of the head, and then the man went down and took another look in the hold. Jack held up his index finger rolling his eyes, indicating that he was going to be a minute. The man turned, catching a cleat, ripping a huge hole in the back of his pants. Jack’s eyes went wide. A quick “what should I do?” look at Lyndley, and she put a “don’t say anything” finger to her lips, and Jack tried then to keep a straight face as the man ambled back to him, totally oblivious. There was more discussion and finally a handshake. Jack and Lyndley kept looking at each other as the man calculated the numbers. Then Jack signed the receipt, the man got out his checkbook, and it was a done deal.
“You’re going to get caught,” I hissed at Lyndley as Jack started toward the boathouse. I was trying to be the voice of reason, but I sounded more like a demon from some weird cartoon.
“Not unless you tell.”
“Pregnant, then, you’re going to get pregnant.”
“I haven’t gotten pregnant yet.”
“One time. You were just lucky.”
“I’ve been seeing him all year. Besides, I’m using birth control. I’m not stupid, you know.”
But I was stuck on her first sentence. “You’ve been seeing him all year?”
“He’s been driving down to school…on weekends.”
I stared at her.
“I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you wouldn’t like it.”
Major betrayal.
“We’re in love, Towner. He wants to get married and go to Canada.”
She didn’t get it. Everything she said was only making things worse. It wasn’t that she’d been seeing Jack that was bothering me so much, it was that she hadn’t told me she’d been seeing Jack.
“He wants to get married,” she said again, as if that would help.
“That’s the oldest line in the book.” I was aiming for one of Eva’s clichés, but I ended up channeling Cal.
It was a direct hit.
“You’re not going to tell me you believe in that happily-ever-after crapola?” I had to keep it going.
“Why wouldn’t I?” She was trying to be defiant, but her voice was already weakening.
“Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” I didn’t mean to say more, but the momentum of anger was carrying me. It was so very easy. I didn’t have to use Cal’s foul language; all I needed were Eva’s old bromides. With just a few well-aimed barbs, I’d managed to propel Cal Boynton into the room as if he had walked up the stairs himself, spewing his profanities and accusations. My aim was dead-on.
“You should come home,” I said, knowing by the look on her face that I’d taken this way too far and feeling bad about it.
There were footsteps downstairs then, and she flinched. Then Jack called hello. His voice was bright and happy, a sharp contrast to the mood I’d just created.
“I’m not going home,” she said. She was trying to be happy, too, but the spirit had gone out of her. I had taken it.
I wanted to tell her I was sorry. I wanted to cry and hold on to her. But I didn’t want her to stay here with him. Something about Cal’s accusations the summer before had stayed with me. Some part of me, a small, strange part, thought maybe he was right. That maybe my sister was what he said she was, a whore. I tried to erase the thought. But she knew what I was thinking. “I’m not covering for you, if that’s what you think,” is what I finally said.
“No on
e asked you to,” she said, going for toughness, but her voice was flat. She could not have read my thoughts any more clearly if they’d been printed on the wall.
I went down the stairs just before Jack headed up. The tide wasn’t high enough for jumping, or I would have gone out the window. I hid in the shadows so he wouldn’t see me. Then I got into the Whaler. I could hear them talking from above. I watched them silhouetted in the frame of the window.
“What’s the matter?” I heard him say to Lyndley.
“Nothing,” she said as brightly as she could, “everything’s fine.” He went to her then and kissed her.
Her arms hung limply at her sides. She didn’t kiss him back.
It was growing dark when I got back. Lyndley had been right. May hadn’t pulled up the ramp. She had been bluffing.
I was obviously in a bad mood. Neither May nor Beezer asked where Lyndley was, so I didn’t have to lie. No one liked to talk to me when I was in one of my moods, and mostly they just let me be.
Lyndley had been right on both counts. May hadn’t pulled up the ramp, and I didn’t have to cover for her. But I would have. If it had come to that. I was the one who’d been bluffing.
In late August, Cal pulled Lyndley out of Miss Porter’s. There had been an “incident” at the yacht club he’d been sailing for, and he’d been thrown off the team. He was devastated. He started drinking in the daytime. He made a phone call to Lyndley’s school and called the headmistress some terrible names. He blamed her and the school for the corruption of his daughter. By the time Eva called the headmistress, the damage had been done. Even if they’d wanted to take Lyndley back (and there were some implications that she hadn’t been the easiest student to discipline), they didn’t want to deal with Cal Boynton…. It was over.
Eva was livid. Nothing she could say would change their minds. Finally Eva called someone she knew at Pingree School and secretly enrolled Lyndley for the fall term. Then she put Lyndley into May’s protective custody and left for Florida, where the Boyntons lived. “Don’t let her off this island,” Eva said, “and keep that ramp up.”
Living in captivity should have put a serious crimp in Lyndley’s style. She had been playing house with Jack at the boathouse for most of the summer without getting caught. It should have bothered her. But she seemed resigned to her fate. She seemed almost relieved.
The Lace Reader Page 23
