Beach Plum Island

by Holly Robinson

  The doctor frowned. “I should think that would be enough for anyone.”

  “Yes, of course. But if my brother was born blind, but with a normal IQ and no other physical handicaps, he might have been educated instead of institutionalized,” Ava said. “It’s also more likely that he’s still alive.”

  Dr. Mansfield gave her a sympathetic look. “Well, young lady, then I can set your mind at ease. I’m remembering this particular baby now, too, because of that rigamarole about your mother. As I recall, he was quite healthy.”

  As they said good-bye a few minutes later, Ava thanked him with a hug.

  She arrived home by late afternoon. Gigi had already left. The band didn’t practice on Thursdays, which was why Ava had felt comfortable leaving the house for as long as she did. By the time she returned, however, Sam was hunkered down on the living room couch with his new girlfriend, Sarah or Sally or Shawn—he had introduced her, but Ava couldn’t remember the girl’s name—and Ava saw only the tops of their heads as she passed by. She cleared her throat noisily as she continued down the hall and took the stairs two at a time, making a thunderous noise and feeling flustered.

  As she passed Evan’s room, Ava could hear the sounds of gunfire behind his closed door. She poked her head in, said hello, and was rewarded with a grunted “You made me die, Mom!”

  She sat down at the desk in her own bedroom and opened her laptop, Googling “schools for the blind and visually impaired.” It took all of a minute to find the site she’d discovered the day she spoke with the woman from the adoption registry. There were only forty-five schools listed in the entire country. She could start by contacting those that were geographically closest and gradually widen her search.

  The tricky part would be figuring out Peter’s last name. If he’d been adopted at seven or eight, say, after spending a few years in foster families, Peter’s new family surely would have kept his first name but changed his surname. To do otherwise would have been cruel. Anyway, she had to start someplace. It was the best she could do.

  Ava began scanning the list of schools. There were only a handful in New York, plus one each in New Jersey and Massachusetts. If the baby was adopted in Maine, the Thompson School for the Blind in Boston would have been the closest residential school. If, that is, Peter’s family had spent the money on tuition at an academic school and not sent him to a vocational training center.

  So many ifs.

  Ava glanced at her watch. It was after five o’clock already. She could call Thompson, but the administrative offices would be closed. Besides, her experiences over the past few days had taught her that she’d find out more if she went to the school in person. That would have to wait until tomorrow; they seemed to have summer programs, according to the Web site, but like any school, probably the official personnel dispersed well before five o’clock and the offices would be locked by the time she got down there.

  She’d go tomorrow, Ava decided, and get a good night’s sleep first.

  • • •

  Ava probably would have sneaked off without her again if Gigi hadn’t arrived at the studio earlier than usual to glaze her own pots. She pedaled up the driveway on her bike, head down against the stiff sea breeze, just as Ava was getting into her car. “Hey. Where are you going?”

  “Boston.” Ava had one hand on the car door, already open. Her big orange canvas purse lay on the passenger seat. She wasn’t wearing her usual jeans and T-shirt, but a short black dress, tan sandals, gold hoop earrings, and clunky wooden beads painted in bright colors. Her hair was fancier than usual, too, smoothed down and pinned up in a complicated way, exposing her long neck.

  Gigi always thought Ava looked nice, the way your favorite teachers look nice: kind face, clear eyes, nothing skanky. But today Gigi realized that Ava was beautiful, maybe even prettier than her own mom because she was different looking. This gave Gigi more hope for herself. Still, why was Ava so decked out? It had to be a guy. This thought, too, was exciting, since the whole way here Gigi had been fantasizing about kissing Neal.

  Ava was still talking, giving Gigi instructions about studio work. “When you’re done glazing your own pots, you can do the two shelves of bisqued pots near the door.”

  She meant the newest racks of vases and bowls. Gigi was excited; she loved glazing, that mysterious process where you painted on chalky pale colors, the glaze cold to the touch, and somehow the heat of the kiln turned that chalky liquid into glass in the most beautiful deep jewel tones and browns and golds. She was pleased, too, that Ava trusted her to do it without supervision.

  Still, her curiosity was too big to contain. “So what are you doing in Boston?”

  “Just a few errands.”

  That evasive answer confirmed Gigi’s suspicions. It also pissed her off. Why would Ava run errands in Boston?

  Suddenly, Gigi knew the answer. She folded her arms. Her torso felt hot and foreign beneath them. “Are you going to that school for blind kids? Thompson or whatever it’s called?” Gigi knew exactly what it was called; she had been on the school’s Web site just last night, trying to find lists of past graduates.

  Ava slammed the car door and gave her an exasperated look. Gigi hadn’t realized that the keys were in the ignition until the door was shut and the pinging sound stopped. “Yikes,” Ava said. “You’re like Sherlock Holmes or something. How did you know?”

  “I’ve been using a computer practically since I was born,” Gigi reminded her. “Seems like a pretty logical step to check schools for blind kids. That’s the only one in New England.”

  To her relief, Ava smiled, her green eyes narrowing against the sun. “Wow. Impressive. Somebody else had to help me think of checking schools.”

  “I probably thought of it because I’m still in school,” Gigi said. “Unfortunately.”

  “You don’t really hate your school that much, do you?”

  Gigi sighed. “Don’t even go there. Of course I hate my school. It totally sucks. But quit trying to change the subject. What’s your plan?”

  Ava shrugged. “I thought I’d go to the admissions office and ask around, see if anybody there will show me school records from back when Peter could have been there.”

  This didn’t sound like much of a plan to Gigi. “They’ll show you the school records, just like that?”

  “Probably not. That’s why I wasn’t going to bring you. I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”

  Gigi stared at her in disbelief. “Me? But what about you? I thought you cared about finding Peter even more than I do.”

  “I’m having mixed feelings about it now, actually,” Ava said. “But I still want to go down there. I’m guessing you’d rather come with me to the city than stay here and glaze pots.”

  Now that the offer was there, Gigi felt uncertain. Ava was in her city clothes and Gigi wore her usual ripped cutoffs and faded Green Day T-shirt. Did Ava really want her company? Ava was always so nice it was hard to tell. Besides, going to Boston meant giving up a day here on Beach Plum Island, with her pottery and practicing with Evan and Sam, and maybe with the chance of Neal coming by to go to the beach with her later.

  She’d go insane waiting around to hear what Ava found out, though, and they should do this together. Gigi parked her bike in the shade and got into the front seat of the car. “Maybe if I’m with you, the people at the school will be less suspicious,” she said.

  “Maybe,” Ava agreed.

  Gigi went to Boston several times a year, usually for special dates with her grandmother, but the sight of the city was still pretty cool. Boston was such a small city that, in a single drive, like today, you actually passed the things they put on postcards of Boston: the Fleet Center, where she’d seen a few concerts with Dad; the Charles River with its sailboats and Hatch Shell; the Kenmore Square Citgo sign.

  Once they were downtown, she and Ava had to stop talking so the GP
S lady could give them directions in her annoying know-it-all voice, directing them west into a section of Boston Gigi had never seen. Here, the street they were on was wide and the buildings were mostly brick, and there was a strip down the middle of the avenue for the rattling green trolley cars.

  Then they turned left into a neighborhood of mostly grand, serious-looking houses. The houses had broad porches and shade trees that made every lawn look like a park. They drove up a hill, where Ava said the bell tower was part of the school. In a few minutes, they were turning into a driveway through wrought iron gates.

  Gigi had been expecting the school to look like a hospital. Instead, Thompson looked like any fancy private school or college, and it was nearly deserted.

  They parked near a brand-new technology center with floor-to-ceiling glass windows and followed a path between brick dormitories with funky arched windows. The pond in the center of campus was protected by a tall fence; Gigi supposed that was to keep blind kids from tumbling into the water.

  At last they reached what must have been the original heart of the school, a castle of a brick building with the bell tower Gigi had seen from the car. It looked like the Hogwarts school in the Harry Potter movies, she thought; it had gargoyle statues, a huge clock, and low brick wings fanning out from its center with classrooms and offices.

  “Here we go,” Ava said, pointing to a sign that said LIBRARY. Under that, of course, were Braille letters; in fact, every room they passed had Braille. There were classrooms in here, and a cafeteria, and somewhere there must be an auditorium because Gigi could hear kids singing to a piano.

  In one of the rooms Gigi saw a girl about her own age, a black girl with long braids whose eyes were sapphire blue. She couldn’t see out of those eyes, Gigi reminded herself—they were just contacts or something—but still they looked cool.

  “I thought we were going to Admissions. Why are we going to the library?” Gigi asked, hurrying to catch up. Even in sandals, their footsteps sounded like noisy hammer blows on the shiny flagstone floor.

  “It occurred to me that they must have student yearbooks in their archives,” Ava said.

  Now Gigi got it. “Since we don’t have Peter’s real name, you’re thinking it’ll be easier to find him if we look at pictures of students instead of asking for names in the Admissions Office. That’s brilliant!”

  In her excitement, she took Ava’s hand and held it the rest of the way to the library. Ava didn’t seem to mind, and Gigi liked how Ava’s hand was stronger and bigger than her own. With her mother, Gigi always felt like she had to protect her.

  With its tall shelves of books, soft carpeting, and long tables, the Thompson library looked like it could be in any high school in the world, other than having signs in Braille everywhere. Gigi supposed the books must be in Braille as well.

  The librarian’s office was a glassed-in room so cluttered with books and papers that it took a minute for Gigi to realize an actual person was in there. She had been afraid the librarian would be blind—well, why not, it would make sense that this place would hire blind people—but the woman blinked at them behind big round glasses, looking more like a cartoon owl than a person as Ava asked if it would be possible to see the yearbooks from 1986 to 1989.

  “I suppose so,” the librarian said, sounding uncertain. “Are you looking for something in particular?”

  “Our brother,” Ava said. “He was adopted out of our family and we’re trying to find him. We think he might have gone to school here.”

  Gigi held her breath as the librarian considered their request with pursed lips. She was afraid Ava had done the wrong thing by telling the truth, and that the librarian might kick them out because they didn’t belong. But no, the woman was nodding, now, saying, “Please wait here. I have to go downstairs to get the yearbooks you need from the archives.”

  They sat in the matching leather chairs outside the librarian’s glass office. Looking at it, Gigi thought of a terrarium she’d made years ago out of an old glass kitchen bowl. She’d kept a garden toad in it until her mother made her set it free.

  It took the librarian fifteen minutes to return. She carried an armload of navy blue hardbound books with white lettering, ten in all, each from a different year. “I thought you might want to look at the whole decade,” she explained. “Not every student appears in every yearbook. We don’t have the resources for individual photos, just group graduation pictures. But there are some candid shots. You might get lucky with those.”

  Gigi saw Ava frown a little as she considered the task, and knew she was probably thinking the same thing Gigi was: this was going to be a lot harder without individual student photos labeled by name. But Ava took a deep breath as they followed the librarian to a long wooden worktable in the far corner, near a trio of tall arched windows, and suggested they divide the books.

  “Remember, we’re looking for any photograph of a boy whose first name is Peter,” Ava said. “Then we can compare all of those photos with the one we got from Aunt Finley. He probably changed a lot as he grew up, so it might not be easy.”

  Ava gently placed the photograph they’d gotten from Aunt Finley between them. Gigi tried to memorize her brother’s face so she could compare it to the yearbook photos: Peter’s dark eyes; his hair, darker and straighter than hers. His eyes were what made him look like their family, Gigi thought.

  After a while, she didn’t bother looking at the pictures, only the names, skimming photo captions for boys playing sports—how did they run a cross-country course, she marveled, if they were blind?—and doing science experiments and having barbecues. It seemed like a normal enough high school experience, but maybe the school was selective about what pictures it chose to use: nothing showing students weeping or getting lost or falling down, no photographs of kids tripping over their canes or running into walls.

  Gigi flipped slowly through three books, four, five. Then, in the sixth yearbook she opened, she found a photograph of boys dressed like sailors, singing on a stage under the headline “Students Set Sail in South Pacific.” Those are wicked lame costumes, Gigi thought, good thing those kids are blind and can’t see how they look.

  Then she’d immediately felt bad about thinking that and skimmed the caption. She spotted “Peter” in the list of names and went back to look at the photographs more closely.

  What she saw—a handsome dark-haired teenager whose eyes were identical to Elaine’s—made her gasp. Ava immediately dropped the yearbook she’d been holding and circled around to Gigi’s side of the table.

  “Oh my God,” Ava said, for she’d seen it at once, too, of course. She touched her brother’s face with a trembling finger. “He was really here.”

  Gigi put her finger next to the photo caption. Now both of their hands were on the page. If only Peter could know his sisters were here, acting as if one touch could free him from the page and bring him to life, he would have to know he was loved. “Peter Winslow,” she whispered. “That’s our brother’s name.”

  • • •

  It had been another frenzied day at work. At least she’d made it to spin class early this morning so she wouldn’t have to stop at the gym between leaving the office and going to her shift at the suicide hotline. Elaine picked up a salad—God, how many leaves of lettuce had she eaten in her pitiful life? Entire fields full, probably—and ate it while driving to the help center’s office.

  Never a good idea to eat anything with blue cheese dressing in the car, but nobody at the crisis center would care. Or even notice, probably. Mostly Elaine took shifts with four other women who were at least ten years older than she was, all of them undereducated, overweight, and motherly. Elaine could arrive with a head of lettuce jammed between her front teeth and wash her hair in blue cheese dressing, and not one of them would criticize her.

  In the year she’d been volunteering, Elaine had learned that each woman she worked with had a s
tory that had led her here. The stories were all mind-blowingly tragic, involving parents, children, or siblings who’d found ways to off themselves. The most spectacular—if that was the right word—death involved the daughter of one of these women who drove herself off a cliff somewhere in California after her first attempt, a wrist-cutting episode, had failed.

  Elaine had managed to snag a bottle of vodka and a bottle of cranberry juice at that cute new shop on Boylston Street to help ease her frantic brain. So convenient, a block from their building. She’d mixed the two together in the car in the stainless steel water bottle she took to spin class. The nice thing about vodka was that nobody could smell it, and cranberry juice was a guarantee against bladder infections. She’d been restrained, drinking only one bottle of the mixture before coming to the hotline. She’d save the rest for the ride home.

  Not that she didn’t deserve the whole thing now, Jesus, Elaine thought as she searched for a parking space. As if that free-for-all with Ava the other day wasn’t enough, this morning Ava had called her even before Elaine left for spin class, saying she planned to go on some wild-goose chase at a school for the blind in Boston to ask questions about Peter.

  “I wanted you to know, just in case you want to change your mind and come with me,” Ava had said. Her voice sounded stiff, formal.

  Elaine was proud of herself for not flying off the handle, considering she hadn’t yet had her coffee and her sister was springing this on her. “That’s considerate of you, but I meant what I said before. Even if I could take time out of the office—which I can’t, we’ve got a slew of tight deadlines at the moment—I don’t have the energy to do this. Or the interest. Sorry. Good luck. Let me know how it turns out.”

  She’d sounded mature. Thoughtful. And then Elaine had thrown the phone across the room after pressing the button to end the call. Fortunately, her iPhone bounced off the wall and landed on the white carpet, unharmed.

  Elaine fielded seven calls during her two-hour shift. Only one was bad. It came from a woman who told Elaine she was standing on the Tobin Bridge, staring down at the water and thinking about jumping. From the sound of traffic on the woman’s cell phone, Elaine knew the caller was probably telling the truth. She wrote a note and passed it to the supervisor, who dialed 911 to report the potential jumper to the police.