Breathless

by Jennifer Niven

  “Sazzy?”

  “What?”

  “Are you scared about college?”

  “A little. I wish we were going to the same place.”

  “Me too.”

  “I wish you and your mom didn’t have to leave so soon.”

  “I know.”

  “When are you coming back from Atlanta?”

  My throat is aching, right at the swallowing point, and all I can do is shrug. I’m not going to Atlanta the entire time. I’m going to an island, and I won’t be back from there until the end of July, maybe even early August. Ever since I chose Columbia and she chose Northwestern, I knew it would be hard to say goodbye to her, but I didn’t expect to have to do it so soon.

  She says, “I’ll miss you more than the stars and Dairy Queen Blizzards and Françoise Hardy.”

  I say, “I’ll miss you more than my room with the green walls and my daisy sheets and my bookshelves stuffed with books.”

  And my dog and my dad and my house and even this town. And you, Saz, most of all. You.

  THE ISLAND

  ONE

  DAY 1

  I stand at the rail of the ferry, my hair blowing like a kite, wearing the oversize sunglasses I found at my grandparents’ house in Atlanta, where, for the two weeks we were there, we completely avoided the subject of my dad. In this moment, I hate the wind and I hate the salt water that is stinging my face and I hate my hair. My dress is sticking to me because the air is as heavy and humid as a hot, wet towel, and I’ve never felt this kind of heat before. Dandelion’s carrier is wedged between my ankles so he doesn’t go sliding away. To get here we have driven nearly eight hours from Mary Grove to Atlanta, and then another five hours from Atlanta to the coast on the southern tip of Georgia, where we boarded this boat. It is another forty-five minutes to the island, and this is what it feels like to be exiled.

  There are just nine of us on the ferry, including the captain and a young white guy, maybe college age, who loaded the bags onto the boat in a bright red wheelbarrow. The captain looks like he’s been in the sun for a hundred years, and the young guy has bleached hair, the color of an Ohio winter, that pokes out from underneath his baseball cap. They speak in these languid, drawling voices, which make me know I’m in a completely foreign place. A couple of the passengers sit under the little covered area and the rest of us sit—or, in my case, stand—in the blazing sun.

  We pass paper mills, hulking on the banks of the mainland, and the hot, heavy air smells like sulfur. The factories are ugly and I’m happy they’re there. They keep this place from being too beautiful. Then suddenly we are turning and the mainland is at our back.

  I stare down at my phone, and there is one little bar. And a text from Wyatt Jones.

  Let me know when you’re home. I’ve been thinking about that kiss.

  Normally I wouldn’t type back right away, but this is an emergency—who knows how long that one little bar will last? I write:

  I’ve been thinking about it too.

  As I hit send, I feel a pang of guilt over Lisa Yu, but it’s overshadowed by the enormous panic I’m feeling over that bar disappearing.

  Another text appears from him:

  I should’ve asked you out last year. I want to kiss you again.

  Me: I want to kiss you too.

  Him: Get home soon, Claud Henry.

  He spells my name wrong, but I don’t care. After all, he’s the only one who knows my secret, which in some cheesy-movie kind of way means we’re bonded.

  Me: I can’t wait to see you.

  And then a photo. Him without a shirt, lying on his bed. My heart nearly stops because he is that beautiful. I want to lick the screen, but instead I scroll through my photos and try to send him one of me from spring break in my bikini to remind him what I look like and to show him that I have curves—such as they are—and legs and skin that would feel good against his own. I press send and wait. And the phone is trying and trying, but of course my picture doesn’t go through because now there are no bars, which means no service, which means no Wyatt.

  I want to shout all my frustration and anger into the wind and the warm salt air. I want to fling my phone into the water and have a full-on kindergarten tantrum. Instead I grab onto the railing so tight, it’s a wonder my fingers don’t snap.

  I’m glaring over my shoulder at the paper mills when I feel a thump on my foot. A giant bear of a red dog sits there, one paw on my shoe.

  “That’s Archie.” The guy with the baseball cap leans on the rail beside me. He smells like weed and incense and wears too many skull rings. “Island dog.” Archie looks up at me, panting, and then trundles off into the covered area and the shade.

  All these little boats are going by us, and the people aboard wave at our captain and us, I guess, because this is what people on boats do. Except for me. I am still gripping the railing with both hands, because if I don’t I might pitch myself over the side.

  “That’s Palmetto Island,” the boy says. He nods at the one we’re passing. “That was where they quarantined smallpox victims, like, two hundred years ago. Now there’s nothing on it but wild hogs and gators.” I can’t tell if he’s trying to impress me or if he’s just doing his job by passing along information.

  “Grady!” The boy turns to look at the captain and then ducks back into the covered area, leaving me to think about how I am no better than a smallpox victim from the 1800s or whenever it was they had smallpox. The island is scrubby and desolate, no signs of life anywhere. No wild hogs in sight. No gators. We are getting farther and farther away from the mainland.

  There are islands on either side of us, but we keep going.

  And going.

  And going.

  Until I half expect to see the coast of Ireland on the horizon. We are sailing through the world’s largest moat. Not only do we have to move to a different state to give my dad the room he needs, but we apparently have to put an ocean between us.

  “Look,” Mom says, coming up next to me, and there is another island rising up to the right of us. We stand side by side as the ferry follows the shoreline, cruising through dark blue water, cutting through the marsh. There is something grand about this island, which makes it seem more important than the others. For one thing, it’s bigger than I expected. According to Mom, it’s twenty miles long and three miles wide, a third larger than Manhattan. It has a full-time population of thirty-one. The only vehicles allowed are those belonging to residents or the Parks Department. There is a general store that supposedly has Wi-Fi. There are no paved roads. There is no cell service.

  My immediate impression is that it’s very green. Uninterrupted green from one end to the other. This is more nature than I have ever seen in my entire life, and it’s hard to take it all in. The island looks wild and untouched. I don’t see a single house or structure.

  “It’s beautiful,” Mom says, and I can hear the surprise. She’s been here before, growing up, so the surprise is for something else—maybe the fact that she can feel something like awe after all that’s happened. “You can’t see it from the shore, but through there is what remains of Rosecroft, the Blackwood family home. It was the gathering place, not just for the family but for everyone who lived on the island. It’s where your aunt Claudine lived. Two months before she died, the mansion burned down, and all that’s left is ruins.”

  She knows my love for ruins and ghosts and haunted places, for finding the story in everything. Not a love she had to teach me, but one I was apparently born with, inherited from her. And even though I want to ask her all the questions that are now buzzing around in my head—How did the fire start? Is this the same house where Claudine’s mother shot herself? Why did Claudine stay here on the island?—I don’t take the bait. After all, my mom is in this too. It wasn’t just my dad saying, Don’t talk about it. She’s also been keeping secrets. So
I stand there, mute, hands on the railing, staring blankly at all that green.

  Mom is still talking when one of the other passengers lets out a yell, and everyone comes flocking to the rail to take pictures of the lone gray horse that is galloping on the beach. She has already told me about the wild horses that live here, descendants of the Spanish and English horses that were brought over centuries ago, but seeing one for myself makes my heart—so recently laid to rest—jump. The horse is running, paying no attention to us, just doing what horses are meant to do, and suddenly I think, You can be anyone here.

  I feel the butterflies stir somewhere deep and distant.

  I imagine myself as free as that horse, and for a minute I’m nowhere and everywhere. Floating. I imagine an entire summer of becoming the person I want to be, whoever that is. Doing the things I want to do, whatever those are. Not thinking about anyone else because no one is thinking of me. I see flashes of myself as the girl I think I used to be—happy, secure, a floor beneath my feet. Fuck everyone, I think. Fuck them all.

  Then, just like that, the butterflies go still and my mouth goes dry. And this is what happens when someone takes away your voice. Don’t say a word. Don’t talk about it. Don’t let your feelings out. Keep quiet. Keep it inside. Silence. You just smile and smile until your mouth goes dry.

  All at once the sky is too bright. The water too choppy. The forest too dense. The trees feel like they are gathering, ready to march toward the ferry, toward me. What sort of world is this? I look down at my arm and I have goose bumps. I look at my mom’s arm and she has them too.

  There is a dock ahead and the boat slows and a smiling boy wearing glasses and a bright yellow shirt stands waiting for us. He is slight and wiry, tan skin, light brown hair, and looks all of sixteen. I feel this relief and surprise that there’s at least one other person around my age here. Our luggage is tucked under benches amidst all the duffel bags and backpacks. As I grab my suitcase, I think, This should be even heavier. After all, my entire life is in here.

  “I’m Jared,” the boy says. He has an earnest, friendly face. “Leave that there and we’ll take it up to the inn for you. You can wait for me up under the trees at the end of the dock if you want and I’ll show you where we’re going.”

  “We’re not staying at the inn,” I say.

  “We’re at the Birches’,” Mom adds, her hand on my shoulder. I shrug it off.

  “I’ve got it, Jared.” The voice belongs to a boy who’s my age, or maybe older, and who has what I call resting wiseass face. He’s suntanned and barefoot, baggy shorts hanging off his hips, black T-shirt, dirty blond hair. He’s taller than Wyatt, and his voice is a lazy Southern drawl.

  I step off the ferry and my eyes meet his. And, for a fraction of a moment, less than a millisecond, I freeze and he seems to freeze too.

  Then he looks me up and down and flashes this big old grin, dimples, the whole nine yards, and goes, “Here comes trouble.”

  I roll my eyes and make a point to look away. The air is a hot, wet blanket and I’ve just traveled five hundred years to get here. My hair is matted to the back of my neck, my dress is plastered to my skin, and my makeup has completely melted off my face. Even my elbows are dripping. But this boy isn’t sweating like the rest of us. He looks like he just rolled out of bed and landed here from somewhere cool and shady.

  I turn to look at him and he stares back. And then Archie the dog goes running past and nearly knocks me over.

  “You okay there, sunshine?” The boy says it like I’m just so, so amusing.

  “Amazing.” I give him my fiercest smile, one that tells him, Your charms don’t work on me. Take them somewhere else. Because I don’t plan on getting to know anyone here. I will stay in Addy’s house until it’s time to go back to Ohio.

  He arches an eyebrow and then collects all our bags and leads us up a white sand path littered with crushed shells. He is talking to my mom but looking at me out of the corner of his eye. I put on my headphones and walk behind them, looking at everything but him, listening to the same Françoise Hardy song I’ve been listening to since we left Mary Grove: “Tous les garçons et les filles.” Which roughly translates into “All the boys and girls in the world are happy but me. I, Claudine Llewelyn Henry, will be alone forever.”

  Suddenly we are under this canopy of trees, and it’s like nothing I’ve seen before. They’re live oaks, right out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, grotesque, knotted, twisted creatures that look as if they could come alive at night. An ancient wood from a fairyland, a strange, haunted-looking place. Spanish moss hangs off them like spiderwebs, like ghosts, and it is impossible to see the sky.

  The inn sits majestically in the midst of this, like a genteel and elegant old lady, all polite good manners. Wide porch, white columns, red roof. As I told Jared, we’re not actually staying in the inn itself, but in a house across the way, the one belonging to Addy.

  I follow the boy and my mom down a path that leads past a handful of shotgun shacks painted bright green, yellow, and pink, and past a barnlike building with an old gas-station pump in front and kayaks stacked inside and outside. There are wild horses grazing underneath the live oaks. When we get to the two white columns that sit on either side of the main path—the one that continues round in a circle past two more shotgun shacks and back to the inn—we are there. At a coral-colored one-story house with a broad porch, blue shutters, and a red tin roof that looks like a squashed hat. It sits, surrounded by blooming flowers, on the edge of the tree line, forest on two sides.

  I cut through the grass, ahead of my mom and the boy. He yells something, and I pull off one of my headphones and turn.

  “What?”

  “I said you don’t want to cut through there because of cactus spurs.”

  “What’s a cactus spur?”

  “You’ll see.”

  He and my mom head up the path, but I keep going just to show this boy that I don’t care about cactus spurs or snakes or anything else that might live in the grass. I step up onto the porch, which creaks like an omen, and look down at my shoes, now covered in tiny green balls. I reach down to pluck one off, and it pricks my finger, drawing blood. I take off my shoes and leave them there. There is a single animal skull sitting by the front door.

  Inside, I’m hit with a blast of air-conditioning, which I wish I could drink. The house is divided in two, a bedroom and bathroom on each side. A note from Addy welcomes us. Make yourselves at home. I love you. See you soon. The kitchen and dining room and living room kind of blur into each other, and there’s a fireplace opposite the couch. The ceilings are high. There’s a cramped office off the kitchen. And the best thing of all: a reading nook with built-in bookshelves on either side of a window seat and a large dormer window looking out toward the inn.

  I take the bedroom on the left, closer to the inn, so that my mom can have the larger one facing the woods. I go into the room and shut the door and stare out at the wall of trees and at the horse that stands outside my window. I suddenly feel this punch of homesickness, right in the throat. The floor is bare and dark. The bed is too large. There are two windows, not three, and they are in the wrong place. The walls are pale yellow, not bright green, and covered in someone else’s art. It’s too quiet here, and I miss my mom, even though I can hear her in the next room talking to the boy.

  I check my phone, and there’s no signal. I text Saz anyway and hope by some miracle it goes through. When there’s a knock on my door, I don’t bother looking up. “Come in.”

  It swings open and the boy is there with my bag. He comes right in, lifts the bag up onto the trunk at the end of the bed, and says, “Holy shit.”

  “Thanks. Bye.”

  “What’s in there?”

  “Bricks, books, maybe a body or two.” I turn my back on him, hoping he’ll get the hint.

  “I’ve found when carrying bricks or bo
dies or—for example—an attitude, a backpack works better. Easier on the shoulders. It’s all about weight distribution.”

  I set the phone down because apparently it’s useless and frown at him. “Is there anything to do here? On this island? In hell?”

  “So you’re glad you came.”

  “It’s a dream.”

  He gives me a look and it’s hard to read, a little less I’m so charming, a little more real.

  “What?”

  “You just remind me of someone. Anything else I can do for you, my lady?” Just like that, the I’m so charming is back.

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  In the doorway he turns. Beyond him I can see my mom in the kitchen, putting things away. He says, “There’s everything to do here. Depending on your attitude, of course.” He walks out, and I sit watching as he helps my mom, as they talk and laugh, as he scratches Dandelion under the chin. I get up and close my door.

  * * *

  —

  In an hour, everything is put away in the closet, which is too narrow, and the dresser, the one that wobbles when you open it. There is a framed photo hanging on the wall above the dresser of a freckled and grinning twelve-year-old boy. He is shirtless and barefoot, standing on a beach, dunes rising up behind him, and this is Addy’s son, Danny, the one who drowned.

  I sink onto the bed and write Saz a real message: So my mom and I took off and I didn’t tell you. We’re living on a remote island now because my dad is having some sort of emotional midlife crisis and can’t have a family anymore. You’re in love and I’m still a virgin and probably always will be because Wyatt is 10,000 miles away. And we’re not going to the same school in the fall, so I don’t know what that means for you and me.