by Unknown
He tried to fight the laughter, afraid Hannah might see. But it bubbled up inside, little bursts coming out of his mouth as he shook, trying to stay still. Alone! She vants to be alone! Ha! Ha!
Shaking with uncontrollable laughter and terror, he steered the boat blindly away from the island and prayed that Hannah would give up, go home to wherever she lived. No good could come from her being on the island, and if Rose found out…, Phil didn’t want to think about that.
Go home, Hannah! He prayed. Please, go home!
Chapter 17
Sitting and eating her tuna fish sandwich on Pam’s back deck, she spotted a white heron flying over the marsh that alighted in the estuary. Seeing something so gracefully beautiful usually filled her with peace, but for the first time, she wished she had someone to share it with. Was her relationship with Daniel changing her and her naturally solitary nature?
She had always been so good by herself, so at ease in her own company. She had thought being on this deserted island would be like a private party, a chance to be free, away from people and their endless demands. Instead, it was as if this island, usually crowded with people she loved, was filled with their echoes, their voices and laughter. Maybe it was just that – the fact that Captain’s had always been about people.
Chewing her sandwich and looking out over the wide green and gold marsh, it hit her again that she finally had what she had desperately wanted: a key to that house and all its telltale memories. Albums and albums filled with photos and other clues and artifacts. Exactly what she had dreamed of, and the key was sitting in her pocket.
Hannah put down her half-eaten sandwich. She wasn’t hungry anymore. Why wasn’t she in the Barefooter house right now? That was why she was here, right?
She took her plate inside and left it in the sink. She would clean up later. She had to go now, enough! She ran out of the house, heading south toward the house.
When she arrived at the house she was panting, and had to bend over and put her hands on her knees to catch her breath. She looked up at it. What was she waiting for? What she needed was there, not the albums of the Barefooters these days, but the ones from their shared childhood. The ones that held pictures of her mother as a little girl. The little girl in the diving contest who was both proud and afraid. Who was that girl? Why did her mother never speak of her childhood?
Hannah climbed the stairs, unlocked the door, and went straight to the shelves near the door stacked with all the photo albums. As she opened each to check which one it was and set it aside, she was amazed at how much there was here. Vacations the women had taken together all over the world, each fully documented in individual albums. There were albums depicting different eras of their lives. Hannah lifted the one from the shelf she had always loved the most, the one dedicated to the Barefooter’s children. In the first half of that album, Hannah was the star, their Barefoot Baby. The latter half of the album showed the other Barefooter’s children as they appeared. There was Pam’s son, Jacob, born when Hannah was eleven years old and a year before Pam’s brief and seemingly-happy marriage dissolved. Five years later came the first of Amy’s three boys, Ryan, followed by Elliott and then Sam. Even after all the other the Barefooter children had been born, Hannah was still called their Barefoot Baby and treated like their collective child.
Hannah, though tempted to go through its pages again, put the baby album down. Now, where was it? She piled album after album on the couch until she found it sitting at the bottom of the pile. Unlike the others, dressed up in fine leather, canvas, or pretty printed cloth covers, this one had a cheap brown vinyl cover that was cracking and peeling. Why hadn’t they replaced it? Sentimental feelings for vinyl?
She opened it to the first picture, the biggest in the album that covered a full page. It was all four of them sitting with their legs dangling from the boardwalk in front of Amy’s parent’s house. Amy’s father dead of a heart attack, her mother in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s, and her three older brothers living on the other side of the country, the family house on Captain’s was occupied by Amy and her family now, only the occasional brotherly visit filling the house beyond capacity with their combined families. The house looked different in the photo, somber in gray rather than the sunny yellow it wore now.
It must have been that first summer. They looked about seven years old, but what was notably different was their body language. They sat next to each other, yes, but there was space between their bodies. The only exception was Pam and Keeley, whose thighs were touching. They leaned more eagerly toward the photographer than toward each other. Their smiles are tentative, eyes squinting against the sun. Amy really did look like a tiny curly-headed doll and Zooey, sitting at the end next to Amy, was as ridiculously tall and skinny as described, even seated.
Looking closer at her mother, Hannah noticed that the usual wide confident grin wasn’t there. This girl looked self-conscious, her smile tentative, her shoulders up around her ears instead of down and back. Her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.
Hannah turned the pages, looking closely at each photo of her mother. All of them that summer are the same, smiling but not quite. The space remains between the girls, though they are captured again and again throughout that first summer playing together. Whatever made that space disappear hadn’t happened yet.
Who had taken the photos? Hannah went back to the beginning and looked at each photo carefully. They were all taken near Amy’s house. Had Amy’s parents taken them? Maybe her older brothers?
Hannah closed the album. She couldn’t stand the guessing, the wondering. If only the album could speak. That’s it; she was going to call Aunt Amy. Let her hang up the phone on her again. Fine, but Hannah was going to try.
Having left her phone sitting in its charger back in Pam’s house, she ran back down the boardwalk to get it. Inside, she let herself catch her breath, and then she dialed, walking out onto the back deck to stare out over the marshes.
Amy’s phone rang. Two rings. Three. “Hello?” Amy, impatient sounding, at the other end.
“Aunt Amy, please don’t hang up,” Hannah said quickly.
A sigh. “No, I’m not going to hang up. But I’m mad at you. You want to know why? Because you should have made that reporter retract what she said about your mother. The book was a work of fiction, and you let her make it personal. That was wrong, Hannah. You’ve got to learn to stand up for yourself! And your mother, in this case!”
It was an old refrain. A true one, too. When pushed down, Hannah tended to stay there, usually in shock. But this time was different. “But-“
“No, don’t start making excuses. If that’s why you called, then I am hanging up,” Amy said, her voice rising in warning.
“Don’t! That’s not why I called. First of all, I want to thank you and all the Barefooters for the key to your house. It’s like a treasure trove.”
“It’s your house as much as it’s ours. I always disagreed with Keeley shutting you out when you hit your teens. You’re still a Barefooter, even if you’re not a baby anymore. Well, you’ll always be our baby, no matter what. I’m glad you’re enjoying it. Have you had Daniel there yet?”
“Uh,” Hannah said. Was she going to keep her end of the bargain? She didn’t know if she should marry anyone at all. Was this even about Daniel?
“Hello?”
“Uh, not yet,” Hannah said, crossing her fingers. “Soon.”
“Good. So, what else? What’s up?” There was a snapping sound on Amy’s end. Amy was either signaling one of her dogs or one of her boys. Amy’s whole family used snapping to indicate and discipline. It seemed to work; all three of Amy’s boys, though boisterous, were as well behaved as any young boys could be expected to be.
Suddenly, something was stuck in Hannah’s throat. She cleared it and coughed. “I was looking at the albums from when you guys were little, and it made me wonder about something.”
“No! Over here!” Amy called out and then spoke into the phone. “So
rry, Sam wasn’t paying attention. You were wondering about something?”
“Well, the album from when you guys were really little. The summer you met?”
“Yeah, we were seven when we became friends. I know what album you’re talking about.”
Hannah tried to keep her voice neutral, remembering the condition and quality of that particular album. If there was anything Aunt Amy hated, it was petty judgment. “What’s the story with that album? It’s different from the others.”
Amy chuckled, “You’re trying not to comment on the super-classy vinyl and its pitiful condition, are you? Good, I’m glad we raised you to be polite, after all. That album will stay just as it is forever, a peeling plastic totem to our childhood. We bought that album together the next summer, when we were eight, and put it together all by ourselves.”
“But who took all the photos? Your parents?” Hannah asked.
“My brother, Jim. He was camera-crazy that summer, just got one for his birthday. He took pictures of everything: us, the dogs, neighbors, our parents. Oh, and then there were tons of “artistic” photos of the boardwalk that didn’t work out so well. Basically, shots of boards. He got bored with it by the end of the summer and left the camera on the island over the winter, but somehow the camera survived the salt air. I found the negatives in his room and we took off with them, had prints made right across the channel at a general store that used to be there, Clark’s, where that bar is now.”
“We used all our savings making prints of stuff like thumbs, people covering up their faces, and the tail-end of a passing boat, but at least there were plenty of shots of us, too. That cheap album was all we could afford after we blew most of our money on the prints. Luckily, the store carried that, too. Ah, it was great, though. We spent a whole rainy day piecing it together. So, other than the gorgeousness of the album itself, how do you like it? Weren’t we the cutest?”
Hannah thought of Jim Dougherty, just two years older than Amy, one of three older brothers, running around Captain’s with a camera. Jim was energetic even now. Whenever he came east to visit Captain’s with his family, he was always on the move and doing something, never just hanging out. He probably made quite a pest of himself that summer. She was glad he had, or she wouldn’t have seen such a different Keeley than the one she knew.
“Yes, you were all very cute,” Hannah said. “Well, Aunt Zo was pretty skinny and awkward looking.”
“Skinny in a cute way! Zo was such a pushover back then, you’d be surprised. I think it was her parents, coddling her the way they did. They made her a softie.”
Hannah wanted to hear about her mother. “Speaking of surprised, I was looking at the shots of my mom and she just didn’t seem like herself in them. She didn’t really smile. It’s weird, kinda Mona-Lisa-like. Why didn’t she smile like she does now back then? She’s all grins now.”
There was a pause. Amy said, “What do you mean, didn’t smile? Of course she smiled. We all did!”
“Mom smiles with her entire face, that’s how she smiles. But not in the photos in that book, the photos from that first summer. I looked to see if there were other albums, the next one’s when you guys were nine, I think. You look older. Well, in that one, she smiles like she does now, a whole-face smile. Why didn’t she do that when she was younger?”
There was another pause. “Your mother, she…, I don’t think…,” Amy said and then paused again. “Listen, Hannah. Your mother didn’t have an easy childhood. Most of us have troubles, but she had more than most. But that’s all water under the bridge.”
“What troubles? What happened?”
“Hannah, I can’t tell you that. That’s your mother’s story. When she’s ready to tell you, she will.”
“Aunt Amy,” Hannah said, trying to keep the angry frustration out of her voice. “Mom never tells me anything. Nothing. Not one word.”
A sigh. “I’m sorry, Hannah. That’s just your mom. The past is the past as far as she’s concerned. Maybe it’s a way for her to deal with it.”
“I can’t deal with it!” Hannah said, and then lowered her voice. “You don’t understand. I’m just trying to come to terms with her, with our relationship. I know, I just know that it’s the key to fixing what’s wrong with me. There’s something wrong, Aunt Amy. It’s like I’m shut down. It didn’t matter before, but now there’s Daniel, and it matters. Please help me.”
“Oh, Hannah! You’re not shut down. You’re as sweet a girl as you could be. And you and Daniel are going to be fine. What is this really about?”
Hannah hesitated. Should she? “You know my novel?”
An intake of breath on the other end of the line. “Yes?” Aunt Amy said softly.
“Well, it wasn’t all fiction.”
Aunt Amy was quiet. A minute ticked by. Hannah waited.
“Hannah, honey? I’ve got to go. We’ll talk soon, okay? Bye now.” She hung up.
Hannah put the phone down on the table and sat with a thud. She shouldn’t have said that. What was Aunt Amy thinking now? She sat and watched the birds fly over the marsh and waited for the phone to ring, hoping.
Chapter 18
Amy stood in her kitchen clutching the cordless phone against her chest and feeling sick. There was a clatter in the den and then the bang of the toy chest shutting. Sam was putting away his toys so they could go to the park. First lunchtime, then playtime, then clean up, then the park for a little bit, then naptime. After napping, they would run errands together, while he was still sleepy and complacent.
“All done, Mommy! I all done!” her youngest son called to her. He was waiting for her to come and check his work like she always did. But suddenly, Amy stomach was turning over, the acid from the tomato soup they’d had for lunch bubbling up.
She tried to remember what Zo had said about the book. Why hadn’t she read it, too, so she’d have something to grab hold of? Of course, she knew why. She didn’t read it for the same reason she didn’t read any novels, they didn’t hold her interest the way that nonfiction books did. She just couldn’t get over the fact that the whole thing was made up.
Except, maybe this book wasn’t made up.
“Mommy? I’m all done!”
Amy put the phone down on the counter and went in to the den. Sam stood next to the toy chest, pointing at it. “All done!” he repeated.
Amy glanced around the room to see if he’d forgotten anything. “Okay, good! Let’s get your jacket on and we’ll go to the park. Do you have to go to the bathroom?”
Sam shook his head, bright eyed. He couldn’t wait to go play on his favorite slide, the tall red one that he’d just graduated to from the little blue one next to it. He could play on that slide, sliding down and climbing back up the ladder, over and over for hours.
“Well, we’re going to try before we go. Come on,” Amy said. She knew that in his excitement he would ignore any urge until it was too late and they were at the park. The park, though wonderfully handy being located only two blocks away, had no bathroom facilities.
Sam protested as usual, but Amy insisted. Then, once he used the toilet and they had his jacket on, they walked to the park, Sam running ahead on the sidewalk and then waiting for his mother to catch up when she yelled to him. It was a warm early autumn day, and halfway there Amy ended up having to carry Sam’s jacket when he grew too hot. It already looked like fall, though, due to the cold snaps they had over the past few weeks, leaves changing on some of the trees in bursts of yellow and red.
Once at the park with Sam happily playing on the slide, Amy sat down on a nearby bench, her stomach still clenching. She let herself think about Hannah and Keeley again.
Ever since that review of Hannah’s book and the awful accusations it had made about Keeley, Amy’s argument was that the book was a novel. It was made up! She reassured Keeley and herself with that fact, pointing out that the reviewer didn’t even know them. Obviously, the book was so well written that the woman had assumed it was a true story. It was a sl
anderous idiotic thing that the woman had written, and she should be sued for libel. Keeley declined starting a lawsuit, saying that she just wanted to forget the whole thing, which was just like Keeley. After the hubbub died down and they sent Hannah the keys to the house with the hope that it would give her a chance to think and realize what an idiot she was being about Daniel, Amy had filed the whole novel and the review away in her mind and forgotten about it. It was a relief. She felt guilty about not reading their Baby Barefoot’s novel, and the less she thought about it the better.
Now, in one swift stroke, Hannah had not only brought back the guilt, she had said something patently untrue. This lie, and a horrible one about Amy’s dearest friend, was being told by the girl she had helped raise, had helped mold into a good person. How was this even possible? What was happening to Hannah?
Amy thought about Keeley, the best, brightest, truest person Amy had ever known. Keeley probably had her faults as a mother; she was so young when she became one it would’ve been impossible to be perfect. But even though the Barefooters came together to help her raise Hannah, Keeley had been the one to carry the heaviest load, who gave up college and all the fun the other girls got to experience, who lived paycheck to paycheck, who had to make sure one of the Barefooters could babysit when she wanted to go on date or even have a break.
And yet, Keeley did it all with style. She rented a sweet little house in Fairfield so her daughter would have a yard to play in and a good school to attend. The rent was high and she was only able to pay for it by not buying anything else as well as accepting gifts and donations of food, clothing, and other necessities. She refused to take cash, though. Even with Zo, who tried to insist on paying the rent and other large-ticket items, Keeley still wouldn’t budge, saying it was her responsibility. And she hated accepting even the hand-me-downs and donated boxes of groceries, feeling that old pride and fighting it for her daughter’s sake. The root of their financial problems was that Keeley could never keep a job for long because she always put Hannah first, leaving work on a dime if Hannah needed her. One too many flake-outs and Keeley was on the receiving end of another pink slip. Plus, every year she made sure Hannah had a real Captain’s summer, and that meant a whole season on the island with no income. No company ever rehired her in September. Back then, the two of them lived in the tiny Barefooter House from mid-June through August and Hannah slept in a sleeping bag on the couch while Keeley slept in a hammock strung across the corner in the living room.
