I imagine him after that, driving all over town to collect my favorite things, even if it meant not getting to eat all the thumbprint cookies himself. And then home again to box it all up, arranging everything in Christmas tissue paper. Writing me a card and having no clue what to say because he knows I’m mad at him, and I’m with my mom, who’s also mad at him. But writing it anyway and sending it all anyway because for whatever reason he wants me to have these things.
And suddenly I can’t swallow because there is a lump in my throat that has grown to the size of a baseball. The pain is so sharp that my eyes instantly tear, and I blink and blink and blink until the newspaper in my hand blurs away.
* * *
—
It takes me eight minutes to run to the beach, and I’m there at ten a.m. exactly. Miah’s not here yet, so I wade into the water and watch for him.
Ten-twenty.
I strip down to my bikini and lie on the sand, which is so hot it burns my back. Every few minutes I sit up to look for him.
Ten-thirty.
We are supposed to have an adventure. He was the one who suggested it. He said last night, “I’ll meet you on the beach at ten a.m.” Right before he picked me up, my legs around his waist, and kissed me.
Eleven.
I flip over onto my stomach, even though this is too much sun exposure for my poor freckled Midwestern skin. I pop a thumbprint cookie in my mouth and savor it because I want to make them last. I rest my chin on my hands and keep my eyes on the path through the dunes.
Eleven-thirty.
I walk into the water to cool off. My skin stings from the sand and the sun. A wave rushes in and something brushes the top of my foot, but it’s only a shell. I pick it up and throw it back into the ocean. Goodbye, insecurities, I think as I watch it fly. It disappears, and I imagine it sailing away into the deepest depths of the ocean.
I bend down, pick up another shell. Goodbye, worry. I toss it in. I find another and another. Goodbye, disappearing floors. Goodbye, heartbreak. Goodbye, fear.
By noon I’ve filled the ocean with all the things I’ve been carrying around since I left Ohio—maybe even before that—and Miah still hasn’t come.
* * *
—
At home, there’s no note, nothing to say why he didn’t show. I slather myself in sunscreen, pack a bag with water and snacks, headphones, pen, notebook, phone, and head back out into the day. Before I leave, I stick a note to the door telling him that I waited for him and where I’ve gone.
I end up at the general store. When I walk in, Terri says, “I haven’t seen you in a few days. Someone got too much sun.”
“I’ve been busy.” I don’t say with who. I try to look as preoccupied as possible so she won’t ask me. I spread my things out and take a seat, scooting one of the other chairs close enough so that I can prop my feet on it.
There are four voice messages from Saz. Three left over the past three days, all about sex. The last one, from this morning, just: Hey. Call me when you can.
My first thought is, Oh no. I play it again and again, my stomach turning over each time. Saz usually uses up every minute of available message, and if it cuts her off, she calls back to leave another. More than that, though, there’s this color to her voice—a dreary gray, a dull brown, the way it sounded when her grandmother died. I try her back, but it doesn’t even ring. I tell her voice mail, “This is me calling you. I love you more than kissing and foreplay and sex itself.”
I set the phone down, faceup, ringer off, and try to write, try to focus. Terri is reading a book, and the only customer who comes in is a middle-aged man who buys ice cream and a soda.
After he leaves, I say, “Hey, Terri?” Her nose is back in The Thorn Birds. “What do you think is an acceptable excuse for someone who stands you up?”
She tears her eyes from the page, but I can see the effort it takes. “Depends on what you were supposed to be doing and who he was.”
“Say he’s your boyfriend and you were supposed to have an adventure.”
“Do I know this person?”
“It doesn’t matter.” The last thing I’m in the mood for is another lecture on Jeremiah Crew.
She frowns because of course she knows who I’m talking about. “Hold on.” She marks her place with her finger and starts flipping through the book until she finds what she’s looking for. “I would say, ‘There are no ambitions noble enough to justify breaking someone’s heart.’ ” She waves it at me. “Colleen McCullough.”
“That’s a wise book.”
“It is.”
I write this quote in my notebook and circle it a hundred times. I replay our last conversation again and again, looking for plumes of smoke, earth tremors, something I did wrong or he did wrong, some clue as to why he didn’t show up. If I had his phone number, I could text him or call him, but he hasn’t given it to me and he doesn’t have mine because he gave it back.
He could be with another girl, someone from Jacksonville. Someone I don’t even know about who has a lot more experience and is easier and loves nature and has long, flowing hair and skin that doesn’t burn in the sun.
I tell myself: Calm down. Be rational. Be Thinking Claude, not Emotional Claude. Why do you always have to assume the worst?
He could be dead somewhere. I should be worried, not angry, because what if something horrible has happened to him? He could have been attacked by wild hogs or drowned in the marsh or eaten by a gator. I picture every scenario, including the look on his face as he’s swallowed whole and then spit back out onto the ground, nothing but bones for someone to take photos of or turn into a mobile.
I feel so, so stupid.
Because he made me trust him and tell him all my things, when he probably never really cared to begin with and was always going to stand me up as soon as something better came along. This is what I get for letting myself stop thinking for, like, a second about all the things he could do to my heart. And now he’s left and taken the floor with him, along with all the things I’ve told him and my virginity. This is what you get for caring.
But when I get home to Addy’s and my note is still attached to the door and there’s no sign that he was ever there, I know what this is. This is Miah fucking things up because he’s happy.
DAY 16
At ten the next morning, Jeremiah Crew shows up on my front porch—bare feet, swim trunks, The Endless Summer T-shirt—like nothing ever happened. He bangs on the door and I come outside, and from what I can see, he appears to be intact from head to toe, no bruises, scars, or missing limbs.
“Oh, good,” I say. “You’re alive.”
“I said I’d meet you at ten.” He cracks a smile, trying to make things light, trying to be my best friend. The dents at the corners of his mouth are flashing at me, attempting to seduce me into forgiveness.
“Ten yesterday. At the beach. Where I waited.”
“Shit, is it today already?” He pretends to look for his phone, even though he never carries one.
“I thought you might be dead or off with another girl. I mean, as far as I know, there are hundreds of them.”
“That’s why I like you, Captain: you’ve got an incredible imagination.” He leans against the doorframe—so casual but not casual. I catch a whiff of him and he smells like the ocean.
I stand as rigid as one of the columns on this porch, not about to bend toward him even a little. “I’m being serious. I don’t even have your phone number.”
“Even if you did, you wouldn’t have been able to call me.”
“That’s not the point.”
“So I’ll give it to you.”
“I don’t want it.”
He straightens, abandoning the doorframe. “Okay, so you’re basically saying, what? You can’t trust me? Or is it that you can’t trust anyone?”
&nb
sp; “Don’t turn this around on me. Where were you?”
“I had something I had to take care of. Come on, let’s go. We could both use an adventure.” And he turns around, expecting me to follow him.
“Was it work-related?”
He pauses on the steps, one hand on the railing, squinting up at me. “No.”
“Are Shirley and Bram okay?”
“Yes.”
I wait for more but he doesn’t offer it.
“So that’s it?”
I can see him trying to decide what to say to me, just how much to tell me, and after all I’ve shared with him and confided in him, this burns me up, as in I can feel my ears and face catching fire. He opens his mouth and what I hear is, I’ve changed my mind about you. I just don’t like you anymore. What he actually says is, “Something came up. I couldn’t be here. But I’m here now.” His voice goes completely Southern, the way it does when he doesn’t want to get too serious. But there’s an edge to it. He’s here, but not here.
“If something came up, you could have found me or left a note or told someone to find me. You know what, not that it matters. I mean, you’re free to do whatever you want. It’s just rude to make someone wait around for you.”
“So let’s go now.”
I could tell him I have plans, try to make him jealous, but instead I’m honest: “I don’t want to.” And I go back inside and shut the door.
I stand against it, face and ears hot with anger and something else—the sting of betrayal, but not quite that strong. Disappointment, maybe. I feel let down. He’s letting me down by not telling me the truth about where he was. I wait for a good minute or two before looking out the window, and by that time he’s gone.
* * *
—
The museum sits on the water on the southwestern side of the island, a simple white building that was once used as an icehouse for Rosecroft. I can tell Mom is surprised to see me, but all she says is, “I’m glad you’re here.”
I step inside and suddenly I’ve gone hurtling back in time. The building itself is old, with worn, cracked walls made of tabby, a concrete mixture of lime and crushed oyster shells. The air is musty, as if the windows haven’t been opened in a hundred years, or however long this place has stood here. My mom locks the door behind us because the museum is only open on Fridays and Tuesdays or by appointment.
The glass cases hold mostly animal bones, an old tortoise shell, arrowheads of all sizes, and china and silver engraved with a B for Blackwood, among other things belonging to the family—a Bible, a guest book opened to a page covered in signatures, candlesticks, several pieces of jewelry. Framed photos and paintings of the more famous island residents line the walls, going all the way back to the Native Americans.
I follow Mom into the musty back room, which is smaller than the general store and stacked floor to ceiling with books and boxes and old peach crates. In that moment, I suddenly see what she’s been doing the past two weeks: the labeled file boxes, the papers in piles, marked by names and eras. It’s like all of the island—its years and years, its people—is right here. And this is one of the things that amaze me about my mom. She is bringing order to the history of this place, finding universal stories in the scraps. She has done this in fourteen days in the midst of her greatest heartbreak.
She says, “Before I got here, these papers were just sitting out on display, where anyone could pick them up and take them home. No one had ever bothered organizing them before now. Still no word from Tillie, though, and I’ve pretty much laid eyes on everything. I’m worried Claudine might have destroyed whatever existed, because otherwise it’s so strange. Like, who leaves nothing behind?”
I recognize the tone in her voice and the expression on her face. When a project catches hold of her, she is flushed and dusty and her eyes shine like quarters, and you can almost hear the crackling and popping of her brain, even when she’s doing something completely unrelated, like eating dinner or watching TV. When she’s deep in a project, a part of her is always in it, no matter what.
“You’re in the throes,” I say. Because that’s the way she’s always described it—like falling in love with someone for the first time. You’re swept away and it’s all you can think of, and you feel it everywhere, not just in your mind.
She holds up her hands like, I have no choice. She says, “I’m in the throes.”
I want to be in the throes too. I want a project like this that will fill every inch of me and float me around like I’m a helium balloon.
She shows me her filing system and then drops onto the chair behind the old wooden desk by the window. I sprawl on the floor, filing and organizing the papers by date. Every now and then I stop to read some of the words there. Descriptions of parties or hunting trips or dinners. Illnesses. Arguments. Love affairs. Children born and lost. The big and the small, the significant and the mundane. Pieces of lives.
There is pain and love and ache here. All forgotten now. I think of the heartbreak of my dad and the ache I’m feeling over Miah right now. Life is an accumulation of aches. They fill you up and take your breath away and you think you’ll never breathe again, but before you know it, you are just words on paper, gone quiet and asleep until someone finds those words and reads them.
For a while I lose myself in the history. Then Mom and I take turns telling each other some of the things we come across, and I’m suddenly transported back to Ohio, back to other projects I’ve helped her with over the years.
She tells me:
According to a letter from Tillie’s husband, the two of them would set up a table on the beach, where they would play cards and then drink under the live oak trees.
They took midnight sailing trips to the surrounding islands.
They dressed in their finest and drank champagne and danced on lawns like Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby.
For the first time I’m seeing Tillie in moving, vivid color, and I don’t know why this is surprising, because of course she was a living, breathing person once.
Mom tells me:
On the north end of the island, Shirley’s great-grandmother Clovis became the first female root doctor, and people—including Tillie—would come from as far away as Savannah and Charleston to see her.
I tell her:
Clovis’s daughter Beatrice collected stories, creating the first oral history of the island. She set out one day from her house on the north end, carrying a walking stick and a knife, and told her family she would be back when she’d spoken to every person who had a story to tell.
Clovis’s other daughter, Aurora, became the lighthouse keeper after her father and brothers were lost at sea.
She tells me:
Claudine returned to the island from Miss Porter’s School for Girls when she was nineteen. She never left again. She married the son of the Rosecroft landscaper, a man named Tom Buccaneer.
After Tom was killed in a plane crash, Claudine armed herself with a pistol and started patrolling the beaches, watching for poachers, prepared to protect her home at all cost.
She tells me:
Rosecroft was supposedly burned by one of those poachers. The family saw the flames from the inn, but by the time they reached the mansion—the hub of Blackwood life on the island—it was gone.
I tell her there are other rumors about the fire, mainly that Claudine herself burned Rosecroft down two months before she died so that it would die with her, ensuring that no one else could ever live there.
All these words and stories. My mom calls them the color of a human life: those little moments that are so uniquely ours. I think, Claudine—just like all of us—was writing her story as she went.
I stop thinking about Jeremiah Crew and where he is now. I lose myself in this other world. I begin to recognize names I’d never heard before today. I begin to piece together this person’s life a
nd that person’s life. I learn about the separation of blacks and whites on the island, the Geechee at the north end, the Blackwoods at the south. Clovis Samms was the first to cross that invisible boundary line.
And then I come across a letter about twenty-two-year-old Samuel Blackwood Jr. and his marriage to nineteen-year-old Tillie Donaldson of Indianapolis, along with a newspaper clipping. Following a whirlwind courtship and a honeymoon to New York City, Samuel and Tillie were planning to head to their winter home, “an island off the coast of Georgia, abounding in natural beauty.”
I feel a pang in my heart for young Tillie, who believed her whole life was ahead of her, only to have the floor drop out beneath her feet.
I ask my mom, “How did Tillie meet her husband?”
“I believe he was friends with her older brother and came to visit one holiday break from college.”
“You know, I used to be fascinated by Aunt Claudine and the fact that she stayed here her whole life. All because the floor disappeared. Or was pulled out from under her. But that disappearing floor didn’t seem to stop her. She wrote and collected family history and married the man she loved and protected and guarded the home she loved. It’s Tillie I want to know more about.”
“Me too. I think part of it’s not knowing why she died. And part of it’s not being able to get to know her because she didn’t leave us any clues.”
“Have you heard the ghost stories?”
She is on her knees now, hands in a file box. She stops sorting and looks at me. “No.”
I recount the real story of Tillie—the one Miah told me. How she died of a broken heart due to losing her baby and her brother and her mom. Then I tell her how Jeremiah Crew and I got locked in the basement of Rosecroft.
Breathless Page 22
