The alternative to getting old is dying young, thought Christina. What have the Shevvingtons been saying to her?
“Mom’s having a fish fry,” said Michael. “We haven’t had decent fish since we left the island. Come on, Anya. Chrissie’ll fold your shirts.”
But Anya just kept folding, smiling at the T-shirts as if she were tucking tissues in her trousseau.
Christina, Michael, and Benj sat on the dock, feet dangling toward the water. A stiff, biting wind blew in from the Atlantic but in the sun the boards were warmish. They felt splintery and familiar. Bird-lovers who visited Burning Fog Isle every autumn to witness migrations, binoculars and cameras hanging around their necks, waited with the children for Frankie’s boat. Out on the rocks, seals sunned themselves and cormorants spread their wings to dry. They looked like dirty shirts hanging on the clothesline.
Christina thought of the island as heaven, a place of autumn colors and Thanksgiving coming. But she was not there, and she could not go there, and sometimes she wondered if it even existed.
Autumn was Christina’s favorite season. She loved fall: the carving of pumpkins, the early dark of afternoons, the cutting out of construction paper turkeys for Thanksgiving.
All these seemed a distant memory, something that grandmothers told their grandchildren about and nobody quite believed.
She made herself think of the letter Frankie would bring from her parents. The tape from Dolly.
If she knew Dolly, it would be a good tape, full of gossip and laughs.
“I just like to sit around aggravatin’ people,” Dolly liked to say. (That was what her grandmother liked to say, actually, and Dolly had just copied. But she was right. The trait had skipped a generation. They were both excellent at “aggravatin’ ” people.)
Dolly, as far as Christina knew, was ignorant of what had happened at Schooner Inne and school. Mr. and Mrs. Romney were silenced by shame and Michael and Benj by confused loyalties. As for the tape she had recorded when she was talking to Blake, it had vanished. Anya had been holding it, but by the time the ambulance came and Blake was taken away and the police had questioned Christina about the wet suit, Anya no longer had the cassette recorder in her hands and could not remember ever having it.
Frankie’s boat nosed into the harbor. Rindge barked a greeting. Frankie tossed Christina a line, which she whipped around the cleat on the dock. Frankie unloaded the boat, saying good-bye to passengers who thought he was an exotic, exciting sea captain, posing for tourist photographs and helping nervous day trippers who were afraid they would fall between the boat and the dock.
Then he handed her something better than a letter: her mother’s own baked beans.
Christina’s mother put sliced onions, salt pork, brown sugar, and molasses into the beans, adding a little salt and dry mustard and a pinch of ginger. Her beans were wonderfully moist. Even people who didn’t like beans loved Christina’s mother’s beans. Baked bean suppers had raised money for repairing the island fire engine and adding to the tiny school playground. Christina had loved that, but Anya used to yearn for a city, where they would raise money with art auctions and opening-night theater tickets.
And now Anya just wanted to fold other people’s shirts.
Christina held the casserole in her two hands and warmed herself on her mother’s love. She’s not so mad at me after all, thought Christina. She baked me a dinner.
Benj was roughhousing with Rindge. Frankie was saying to a birder, “Course, it’s exactly a century now since the last big one. So you can kinda feel it coming.”
“Feel what coming?” said Christina.
Frankie shook his head. “Ocean gets tired of lying there, I reckon. Every fifty, every hundred years, she’s got to kick up. Been fifty years since the hurricane that ripped down half the North Woods, tore the summer people’s houses off the island. Figure we’re due.”
Christina shivered.
“Yep,” said Frankie, looking out to sea at perfectly ordinary waves, “I think I see a swell. Beginnings of our own hurricane.” Frankie sounded happy about this, as if, like Michael, he had been yearning for his very own hurricane. “Got to get back to the island and batten down,” he said. “Got to close up shutters, tie down everything that moves, lay in a supply of bottled water and canned hash.”
“That sounds like fun,” said Michael. “Bottled water and canned hash. Gosh, Frankie, can I come live with you during the hurricane?”
“Yeah,” said Benj, “at least lay in a supply of chocolate chip cookies, Frankie.”
Frankie kicked the boys on board. He chewed on his pipe stem, looking Christina over from top to bottom. He knows, thought Christina, hot with shame. They know on the island; somebody talked; somebody said that Anya went crazy and Christina turned to crime. Do they all believe it? Do they all think I’m bad?
“You want to come, honey?” said Frankie. His eyes were full of affection. She wanted to kiss his weathered face a hundred times; somebody out there still loved her.
More than anything on earth she wanted to come with him. But she was not wanted. She shook her head, the barest movement, trying not to cry. “Say hi to my parents,” she whispered.
Frankie grinned at her. “You’re a tough kid, Chrissie. Now you lissena me. Don’t let them get you down. I went to school on the mainland once, too. Hurricanes are easier.” He rumpled her hair.
He was right; hurricanes had to be easier. But it was not school she was fighting. Why were all grown-ups so sure that if she only “adjusted to school,” everything would be perfect? She could adjust for a hundred years and the Shevvingtons would still be evil. “I don’t know if I’m that tough,” said Christina.
He chewed on his pipe. “What you need is sumpin’ to hang onto when the wind is bad. Take my baseball cap.” He put his old red-and-white cap on her head with the bill backwards and yanked it down over her eyes. “Bye, kid.”
She watched Frankie’s boat until there was nothing left to watch, only a silver gleam on a satin sea.
The sea whispered to her, soft as a caress, lapping her ankles like a kitten. I am your friend. Come to me. You’ll be safe with me.
“Never!” cried Christina Romney, straight into the wind. “And you can’t make me, either! I am a horse in the granite! I am of the island and you will never win!”
The wind argued, flinging her words back into her mouth again. It tugged at Frankie’s baseball cap until she had to hold it on with one hand. She pressed the baked bean casserole into her ribs and toted it on her hip.
The wind attacked.
Flags stood straight out, painted against the cruel sky, and people on sidewalks tilted their bodies to fight the force of the wind. Children laughed. Dead leaves went berserk.
Christina staggered up Breakneck Hill. The wind pulled her back down. Out at sea she could see the boats scudding at great speeds. Speeds that would be fun if you were Michael and not so much fun if you had a long way to go before you found a safe harbor.
Christina had no safe harbor.
The only place she could go was the Schooner Inne.
Mr. Shevvington closed the huge green front doors behind her. It took all his weight to push them shut against the wind. The wind screamed in anger, trying every crack in the house, finding some. The house whistled and shrieked like a demented orchestra. Candle Cove lashed its waves into the cliffs, which threw them back in a chorus of crashes.
She was locked in the sea captain’s mansion, alone with crazy Anya, the Shevvingtons, and the poster of the sea.
Chapter 14
THE HOUSE WAS COMPLETELY silent.
Christina looked into Michael and Benj’s room before she entered her own. How terrifying empty beds were. The neatness of the sheets and blankets was like the neatness of a mowed and trimmed graveyard.
Anya lay alone in her room, staring at the poster of the sea. The poster shimmered in the dusty dark of early evening, neon tremors of life struggling to be free. “Anya, at least turn on the ligh
ts,” said Christina.
“You can’t see the poster smile except in the dark,” explained Anya.
Christina’s hair lifted on her head. She could actually feel the colors of her own hair: brown, silver, and gold, trembling for Anya.
“I can’t leave the room, either. The poster will come back off the wall again. I’ll drown in a paper sea.”
Christina backed into the hall, hands feeling the walls, stretching for the banisters of the balcony. She’s already drowned. She drowned inside her mind.
Behind her the house lay quiet, dark, and expectant.
Christina turned to face the house, and the house seemed to whirl behind her, laughing. She turned again, and again, spinning dizzily at the top of the stairs, trying to keep safe, as though something might attack her from behind.
She ran into her room, the house closing at her ankles, catching at her hair, and she dived, fully clothed, into her bed.
Under the covers, under her mother’s quilt, she wept till she could weep no more, for Anya and for herself — unloved and alone. Out in Candle Cove the tide began to hum. Ffffffffff.
The wind rose and cried out, and the house seemed to talk back, so they were screaming at each other, as if the house and the sea had different plans for the dark of night. Tonight, Christina, tonight! they both said.
There were nights when the dark seemed to be her friend, keeping her company through the night — Christina and The Dark — but now the dark was her enemy, keeping her prisoner.
She could feel the evil in the house gathering its forces. Alone she was weaker. She had been separated from her allies, from Michael and Benj and Jonah and Blake — like a gazelle cut from the herd by the lions who would destroy it.
She could not get warm. The bed was piled with blankets and still the cold got under the covers with her and entered her bones.
Chrissie! Chrissie!
It was the tide calling.
It was the poster of the sea beckoning to her.
Christina whimpered under the covers. Then she remembered that she was granite, not a tern. That Mr. Shevvington did not have the eyes of a mad dog, but of a man who wore contact lenses.
Christina slid out of bed. She wrapped her mother’s quilt around herself like a huge calico cape. Within the hood of the quilt she felt protected by her mother’s love.
Christina stepped into the hall.
Christina’s head and ears filled and pulsed with the huffing. It whirled around her like fans in summer. Humming like bees. Chrissie, said the house, Chrissie, Chrissie.
Her eyes and spine burned with fear. Anya was right. The house truly spoke. The sea kept count. It was demanding Christina herself.
A weapon, thought Christina. I need something to hit it with.
She would smother it in the quilt.
Christina walked forward, holding her quilt out like butterfly wings to wrap it in.
She walked into Anya’s room. It was wet in there.
The sea is already in here! thought Christina, fear closing over her eyes like lashes. She heard the sea speak her name.
“Chrissie,” moaned Anya, “Chrissie, something is wrong. Chrissie, I’m afraid of the poster.”
The window was open. Anya was dampened by the rain coming in like cotton waiting to be ironed. The sea said nothing but its usual crash of wave and rock. It was Anya speaking her name.
Christina yanked the sash down, holding the quilt in her teeth so it would not slip off her shoulders.
Then she faced the poster of the sea. Its terrible fingers, its dim, drowning figures, stared back at her.
“I’m in charge here,” she said to it. She kept her eyes fastened on the poster. She felt around in Anya’s desk and came up with a handful of tacks. She swung the quilt off her shoulders and held it up as if to a charging bull. She rushed the poster.
Outside the wind screamed and the tide rose and Candle Cove fought a war with the rocks and the waves.
Christina covered the poster with the quilt. She tacked the quilt firmly right into the wall. The poster was gone. Calico squares and triangles and tiny firm stitches covered it.
“So there,” said Christina.
Anya looked stunned.
“Come on, Anya, let’s go downstairs. It isn’t healthy up here.” Christina dragged Anya out of the bedroom. They marched down to the kitchen, where Christina had her book bag. Anya sat in front of a TV she did not remember to turn on.
Christina tried to read.
From the school library Christina had checked out a murder mystery Vicki and Gretch had been talking about. At the time she had thought she could read her way into the friendship. It seemed unlikely now. She held the book with her left hand and set the table with her right. Almost before there was a murder, she had figured out who the murderer was. How annoying to be able to add up the clues as easily as third-grade arithmetic.
Mrs. Shevvington had made eggplant lasagne.
“But — but my mother sent baked beans,” Christina said.
“You should have refrigerated it,” Mrs. Shevvington said. “I had to throw it out. It was no good.”
All that love stirred into the molasses, to stick to her ribs like a hug on the island.
Thrown into the trash.
Christina began to cry.
“Everything you do is wrong,” said Mrs. Shevvington. She put her hands on her hips, and her weight seemed to double. She rocked back and forth as if planning to topple onto Christina and crush her. “Take that silly baseball cap off.”
I need padding, thought Christina. I should wear a soccer goalie’s outfit around the house. She found Kleenex and blew her nose and mopped her eyes. Mrs. Shevvington caught the bill of the cap but Christina was ready for her. She whisked the cap behind her back, clutching it with white-knuckled fingers. It may be an anchor, Frankie, Christina thought, but what good is an anchor without a safe harbor?
There is nobody, she thought. I am a ship at sea without a crew, without a harbor. Nobody loves me. Not Anya, who is hardly even in the room because she hardly even exists. Not Michael or Benj — they never paid enough attention to see anything. Jonah and Blake aren’t here. My parents … Oh! my parents!
She knew she could never eat the eggplant. She wondered now if she could ever eat again. She felt cleaned out, like a scoured pot. There isn’t much left of me right now either, thought Christina.
“Christina, honey,” said Mr. Shevvington. He drew her close. He cared. His touch was loving, his embrace warm. Christina leaned on him, absorbing his kindness like a drug. Nothing else could evaporate loneliness. The texture of his jacket made her think of Blake and true love.
“Poor Chrissie,” he murmured. “It’s been a hard autumn, hasn’t it? A girl has daydreams about junior high, and none of them come true, and it’s hard to keep going, isn’t it?”
Christina nodded, sniffling. The silky tie touched her cheek like a cool finger soothing a fever.
“Tell me all about it,” said Mr. Shevvington. His hand closed over hers, warm and comforting.
How she wanted to blame her fears and failures on Mrs. Shevvington, or the seventh grade, or even Anya.
“What are you afraid of, Christina?” he said. “I’m here to help. I know you feel I’ve been against you, but it’s not true, Chrissie. You have me on your team, honey.”
His eyes welcomed her home, saying you’ll be safe now. Come to me.
Very softly, he whispered, “Tell me your fears.”
She had so many. They multiplied every day.
Being alone.
Having no friends.
The tide and the wet suit and the glass in the cupola.
The sea captain’s bride and the honeymooners and the boy on the bike.
Anya going crazy, Blake gone forever.
How safe were his fatherly arms. His blue eyes were like robins’ eggs in a nest, cozy in the tree.
“Tell me about Miss Schuyler,” whispered Mr. Shevvington. He patted her hair, dividing t
he strands into their three colors, and braiding them as her father used to do. “Is Miss Schuyler really tutoring you in arithmetic?” His fingers folded around the baseball cap. His eyes were as soft as a baby blanket.
Perhaps he had looked into Anya’s eyes like that, and Val’s.
“I have this terrible fear of fractions,” Christina told him. She put the baseball cap safely behind her back. “Miss Schuyler thinks she can conquer it. Also a fear of running out of popcorn. Nothing could be worse than going to a movie and they don’t have any popcorn, you know?”
“This is not a joke, Christina,” said Mr. Shevvington. His grip tightened. His fingers were half white, half tan. “I am trying to be kind, but I expect cooperation from you.”
Christina said, “I know about the girls before Val.”
The room turned utterly silent.
Mrs. Shevvington stood motionless at the stove. Mr. Shevvington’s eyes lay like stones in his head. Beneath the veneer of his blue contact lenses she could see his real eyes. They were not blue. They were ice in winter, gray and cruel.
The Shevvingtons pivoted. Slowly. They faced her. Their eyes drilled into her skull.
“All about them,” lied Christina. “All the ones before Val.”
She thought of her ancestors who had drowned at sea, and she knew now how they felt: how they saw the power of the wave and the density of the water and knew that their end had come; that their ships were only pitiful bits of kindling in a great and powerful sea.
She had made a mistake. She had gone to sea in a storm. The Shevvingtons would destroy her now as easily as the Atlantic destroyed a sandcastle.
But they did not move toward her. They did not squash her between them. They did not discuss the girls before Val. Instead their horrible eyes met above her head, and their little mouths smiled secretly, and she knew that they had plans she knew nothing of.
Outside, the storm quickened and raged.
All Maine went behind doors and shutters, hunkering down; there was nobody to hear a scream for help, nobody who would be looking out any windows.
The Fog Page 14
