by Susan Wiggs
But she saw him cry that day, when he was seventeen and sitting on a rock in a deserted section of the island. He thought he was alone when he sat there and sobbed in his knees.
That day she had walked right up to him and picked up the letter.
He cursed at her and tried to grab it away from her, but he could only see blurred images through his wet eyes.
She quickly stuffed it in her bra and ran away.
He didn’t have the energy to chase after her, so he just stared off into the distance, trying hard to picture his dad’s face and seeing nothing but the shadow of a tall man.
In a few minutes she came back, walking quietly.
From her tentative steps and her somber manner he could tell she’d read the letter.
She sat down next to him and handed him the crumpled paper.
He didn’t take it. Didn’t look at her. He only wanted to be left alone.
She began to smooth the paper against a rock, a lame effort to try to flatten it back to the way it had been.
It was a stupid thing to do. Like not having his dad anymore would hurt less if the letter weren’t creased.
She stopped after a minute and said nothing. Time passed in awkward and tense seconds that seemed to last an hour, one of those moments where you want to run away and hide from everything.
But she just sat there right next to him, so close that he could feel the warmth from her where their shoulders almost touched. She folded her hands in her lap and hung her head. Then she did the one thing he’d never expected.
She cried with him.
Summer, 1966
For the first time since 1963, the Wardwells had come back to the island. It was the same day he got his draft notice.
Dear Mr. Packard,
Greetings from the President of the United States…
There was no doubt the letter would change his future. The draft situation had newspapers and television stations full of protests and debates where activists argued against war, declaring the draft was archaic and unfair. Claiming you couldn’t buy beer, but you could die for your country. You couldn’t vote for the president of the United States, but you had to kill if he ordered you to.
Some who got the same letter went off to war. Some ran to Canada. But Michael just read the notice and set it down. He didn’t know how he felt about any of it. To him war seemed so far away, farther away than Vietnam. He went off into the woods to work so he wouldn’t have to think.
He hadn’t known the Wardwells were back this year. They hadn’t been back for two years so there was no reason to expect them. The moment Michael saw her leave the old house and walk down the beach toward the dock, he forgot all about the draft notice.
He was hidden in a group of cedar and maple trees that circled the cove. He was cutting wood from a tree that had fallen during the winter when he heard the hinges squeak and a screen door slam. He cast a quick glance toward the old Victorian rental house where a girl in a bright pink bikini came down the front porch steps and crossed the lawn.
He leaned a shoulder against a tree and just watched her. She had a body that was better than last month’s centerfold.
Then he recognized her face.
Gone was the pudgy and awkward blonde teen who wore too much makeup and followed him everywhere. She was taller now, a good three inches, and her shape blew him away. He remembered a poster he’d seen in Seattle, one of a soaking wet Ursula Andress dressed in a wet skin-colored bikini, her hair slicked back and her face and body guaranteed to make a man wake up in one helluva sweat.
He shook his head in disbelief. Gawky little Catherine Wardwell—the pest who knew all about sex, spied on him through windows, and had seen him cry—could have put the sexy Ursula to shame.
He felt a stab of something earthy and carnal go clear through the center of him. The ax slipped from his hand and hit the ground with a dull thud. He swore under his breath and shifted slightly.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. And he didn’t want to.
Her hair was lighter, longer and straighter; it brushed her shoulders as she walked down to the end of the dock where a red and blue nautical beach towel lay spread out and a transistor radio with a tall silver antenna played the Lovin’ Spoonful.
He leaned against the tree and crossed his arms, then blew out a breath slowly, kind of a half whistle of amazement that a girl could be put together that way.
She bent over and tossed something on the towel.
He groaned and closed his eyes. He heard the music throbbing through the air with the same beat that his heart pounded. He opened his eyes because he couldn’t hide any longer. He had to see her.
She was standing with her toes curled over the edge of the dock, her stance stiff and straight, her arms raised high, ready to dive.
He shoved off from the tree and moved down toward her. This year things had changed; he was following her.
She dove in.
When she hit the water, his breath caught and held as if he had to hold his own breath along with her. He walked faster, down the dock toward the water. But when he reached the towel, he stopped. He stood there staring at the rings of water she left behind, while the music from the radio blared out over the cove.
Her head broke through the surface, sleek and golden and wet. He bent and flicked down the volume on the radio, then he straightened and waited until she turned in the water.
She froze the instant she saw him. “Michael?”
Her voice was older and throaty. It made him think of things like smooth soft skin. Hot deep kisses. And Trojans.
He took two steps to the edge of the dock and squatted down, resting a hand on his thigh. He just looked at her and enjoyed the view. The air grew hotter and tighter and felt heavy.
She swam toward him.
He reached out a hand to her. “Hi, Squirt.”
She put her hand in his and he straightened, pulling her up with him while he watched the water run down her body.
She stood close to him, so close that all he had to do was lean forward and their bodies would touch. Chest to chest. Hip to hip. Mouth to mouth. He had a strange and laughable vision of them touching and steam suddenly fogging up the air around them.
She was five foot ten or so. No longer a little squirt. But it didn’t matter because she still had to look up at him. He was six foot two.
She slid her hand from his grip, turned away and grabbed the towel. She used it to cover herself while she awkwardly pretended to dry off.
He hadn’t moved, only watched her. He said nothing until she finally glanced up at him. He gave her a long look she’d have to be blind not to understand.
She got it. Her face flushed and she looked down quickly, rubbing the hell out of her legs so she missed the grin he had to bite to hide. She straightened then, still holding the towel. She raised her chin a little, defiant and challenging, the Catherine he remembered.
A moment passed. A minute maybe two. Neither said anything. They just stood on the dock and looked at each other under the warm and unpredictable sunshine. He felt like a thirsty man staring at an icy cold beer.
She dropped the act and returned his look, then whispered his name in that raspy grown-up voice he felt go all the way through him. “Michael.”
Just Michael.
And he was lost.
Time seemed to pass quickly after that. On days when it rained that misty rain that sometimes clouded the islands, they walked on the beach together, not minding the moodiness of the weather. The sunsets grew later and later as summer crept into the Northwest, and they fell in love.
They swam in the cove where the water was shallow and warm enough to enjoy. He taught her to sail. The first time a heavy summer rain hit, they moored and took shelter inside the sailboat’s small cabin, laughing at the foolish weather and eating a lunch of egg-salad sandwiches and barbecued potato chips she’d brought along.
The flavor of salt and barbecue spices lingered on her lips. Years later he
could still not eat barbecued potato chips without thinking of that day, where a six-foot by six-foot sailboat cabin was too small and things quickly grew intense, so much so that they ended up moored to an old buoy and necking for most of the afternoon.
After that day, whenever they took the boat out he silently prayed for rain. Finally, rain or not, they spent afternoons in the cabin of his boat, where things got hot and heavy, where they would steam up the small mirror above the hard bunk and leave the sloop with their lips swollen and their bodies tense with need.
Michael learned the true meaning of wanting a woman that month. He learned the dark side of sex: the forbidden guilt and hunger that was teenage love. He would lie awake at night so hard from the mere thought of her that he couldn’t sleep. And when she would look at him in that way she had, as if he knew the answers to all the questions in the world, he felt real and alive, as if he could take on the world just for her. He learned that when you were young, nothing else mattered but the girl you loved.
One day he oiled the hinges on the old screen door because it gave him an excuse to be near her. She slipped out of the old house for the first time that night and met him walking in the woods where he pinned her against a tree and kissed the hell out of her, unhooked her bra and felt her up.
All he had to do was touch Catherine and both of them burned up. But they didn’t just touch and kiss and steam up the glass. Sometimes they would sit, hidden by those big old gray rocks near the cove, and watch the night drift by them.
And they would talk. About her hometown. About the war. About the poetry she loved. About the music he loved. About how Bob Dylan and Paul Simon were both poets and musicians. They talked about life and death and dreams.
She taught him the names of the stars because she said when he touched her and kissed her she always felt as if he took her clear up to those stars.
He didn’t care that she was seventeen and he was almost twenty. He didn’t care that the world thought he was a man who was ready to go to war, while she had one more year of high school and was jailbait.
He didn’t care because when he kissed Catherine Wardwell, nothing else in the whole goddamned screwed-up world mattered. Until the night they couldn’t stop and went all the way, the same night he’d carved their initials in the wood.
The same night her father caught them in the boathouse.
Four
San Francisco, 1997
Catherine slipped off her glasses and sagged back in her chair, staring out at the pink Victorian across the street from her office. It was four o’clock and almost every ten minutes there had been an urgent call.
She pinched the bridge of her nose and saw stars. When her vision cleared, she was looking at her desktop, where a cluster of silver-framed images of her daughters Alyson and Dana were grinning back at her.
In a frame with delicate ballet shoes decorating the corners was a photograph of Dana, her oldest daughter, dressed in a pink tutu, her blonde hair scraped back off her small heart-shaped face. She had been six then and had no front teeth. Her gummy smile looked almost too big for her face. There was another shot next to it of her sitting on Santa’s knee, her eyes turned up to him in complete awe. And the last photo was taken only a few months ago when Dana went to the Sadie Hawkins dance.
She turned to Alyson’s pictures. There was her second-grade photo taken the day after she’d tried to cut her own bangs; she looked like she’d had a fight with a lawnmower. Every time Catherine saw that photo she smiled.
There was no picture of Aly on Santa’s knee. Aly had always preferred animals to humans. She had liked Disney’s Robin Hood better than Sleeping Beauty. She wouldn’t go near Santa because when she was three the older kids at her preschool had told her there was no such thing as Santa Claus. After that day, Santa meant nothing to her.
Now the Easter Bunny, well, that was different. Those kids hadn’t said anything about the Easter Bunny. So instead of a Santa photo, there was one of Aly sitting on top of the Easter Bunny’s furry knee, her hands cupping his pink fuzzy cheeks while she demanded to know how he got around to all the houses in the world and managed to hide all those eggs in only one night. One of Aly’s typical questions—the kind that were hard to answer.
Catherine glanced back at the stack of report folders in a jagged pile on her desk, then up at the smiling images of her daughters. She picked up the phone, punched in a series of numbers and got Seattle information.
Fifteen minutes later she had rented the same quaint Victorian house in the same cove on the same secluded San Juan island where she’d spent so many summers.
This June, she vowed, would be different for her girls.
It was different. Her girls didn’t want to go.
Dana had to turn down a free ticket to a rock concert at Great America and Aly was going to miss a birthday party at the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. Aly had eventually accepted Catherine’s decision to go to the island, especially after Catherine had bribed her by letting her bring along her cat Harold. But fifteen year old Dana was still scowling at the world. Nothing worked with her. If there had been a high school course in sulking, Dana would have aced the class.
Over an hour ago they had left the ferry at Orcas, purchased their supplies and loaded everything into a boat run by Blakely Charters. Until January, when daily ferry service would start to Spruce Island, the charter company made two runs a week. Sundays and Thursdays. Other than by seaplane, hiring a boat was the only way to get to the more remote and secluded islands of the San Juans.
It was late and the sun was sliding down the horizon; it turned the cotton clouds in the western sky gold, purple and red. Catherine leaned over the bow of the boat and pointed west. “Girls! Quick! Look at that sky!”
She had forgotten how gorgeous the sunsets were here. The color. The sheer beauty of nature. No one could possibly visit this part of the world and not believe in the perfect hand of God.
She turned toward her silent daughters to share their first sight of a Northwest summer sunset, and her heart sank.
Dana sat with her back to her, staring out at the water like a prisoner heading for death row. In her lap was an open copy of Stephen King’s Green Mile series. Without looking at Catherine, she blinked once, then buried her nose back in the book.
Dana’s sulking hurt Catherine. She didn’t want to let on that Dana had gotten to her, so she looked away. Aly had on a set of headphones. She was head-bopping to some song that shrieked through the headphone earpieces.
Catherine reached over, picked up the empty CD case, and read the name.
Alanis Morrisette.
She felt as if she were a hundred years old. She hated that music. Then she remembered how much her dad had disliked her Bob Dylan albums. She asked herself the question she always asked when she was dealing with the girls.
Will it matter in five years?
Dana’s sulking wouldn’t matter and hopefully some other hot young singer would be Aly’s favorite—if she still had her hearing.
The generation gap between her and her daughters felt as if it were as wide as the Grand Canyon. But she did know one thing—her relationship with her daughters would matter in five years.
She wanted her girls back, not these two young people she didn’t know anymore. She desperately wanted what few memories they could make this month, something special for them to look back on the same way she looked back on the island and those summers from her childhood.
She thought of this trip as a fresh start; she needed to be a mother again.
Catherine reached across and snatched the book out of Dana’s hands. “You can read this later.” She tucked it inside her duffel bag, then she punched the off button on Aly’s CD player and gestured for her to take off the headphones.
Both girls gaped at her.
She pointed ahead of them. “That’s Spruce Island,” she told them in a classic mother’s tone that demanded their attention—now.
Against the horizon the island
was a camel-shaped lump of rocks and trees and natural coastline that grew larger the closer they got.
“I loved that island when I was your age. My favorite memories are there and it’s important to me that we spend time together so you can see what a wonderful place it is.”
They continued to look at her, then turned in unison to look at the island ahead of them.
“There are no houses,” Dana said in a voice that implied it was the very ends of the earth.
“There are summer houses, a few cabins and a village on the other side of the island. You can’t see them on this side. It’s more isolated. The island has always been a place where people go to get away.” She paused, then added, “Like us.”
They turned back around. From the looks on their faces you’d think she had just spoken Greek.
“The first houses were summer homes built late in the nineteenth century. Those hills are parkland and there are hiking trails.”
Dana frowned at her. “You hate hiking. You said you’d rather chew on foil than traipse up some mountain.”
“Yeah,” Aly said, siding with her sister. “You said smart people leave mountain climbing to the goats.”
Catherine realized she would never have to worry about losing her memory. She had her daughters to remind her of every single thing she had ever said.
“Fine. Forget about hiking. As I was saying, the house is on a cove on the western side of the island. There’s a private dock and a mooring. The rental agent said the owners still keep a sailboat. We’re free to use it. There are supposed to be bikes, too. When we used to come here there was a handyman’s cabin on a nearby inlet and a small harbor where boats from the mainland could moor. Other than that the island is pretty isolated.”
Twenty minutes later they stood at the end of a gray weathered dock, their bags and supplies stacked like building blocks and Harold whining in his cat carrier. There was nothing before them but silvery water. Catherine watched the boat turn around in a wide swath and head back for the mainland.
