The House on Fripp Island

by Rebecca Kauffman

  The basement bedroom was charming, with a white wicker chair that held several American dolls and some vintage copies of children’s classics: Peter Rabbit, The Rainbow Fish, Goodnight Moon. There were two sets of sturdy bunk beds, the frames a striking dark-stained maple. Blue comforters. A box of Kleenex and two candles on the bed stand, one that smelled like cake, the other like fresh laundry.

  Kimmy and Alex both opted for the bottom bunk. After this had been established, Alex had come up with the idea to remove the sheet from the top bunk and tuck one edge of it under the top mattress so that her bottom bunk was like the interior of a tent.

  Kimmy immediately copied this idea. “I’ve always wanted a canopy bed,” she exclaimed. “You are so smart.”

  Once the girls had been tucked in and were convinced the grown-ups were far from earshot, they got out of their beds, all toothpaste whispers and giggles, crept outside their bedroom and into the rec room, then up the stairs, slowly and quietly in case somebody was still awake in the main room, but no one was. The blue flashing light of a TV was on in John and Poppy’s room, but that was the only sign of life.

  The girls hadn’t developed any sort of plan beyond “Let’s sneak upstairs!” “Yes, let’s!” “But we have to be careful in case anyone is still awake.” “We can’t get caught!”

  But now that they were here, this space and everything in it held infinitely more intrigue than it had in the daytime. They snuck around the main room exploring, a need to touch everything, nighttime adrenaline surging. They wordlessly picked up coasters, set them across the coffee table in a nice pattern, collected and stacked them as they had been before. They drew fingers across all of the shelving, examined the dust they recovered. Lifted the cushions of the couch, sniffed beneath them, stifled giggles.

  Eventually, the appeal of this activity was depleted and they returned to their bedroom. On the way, the girls were distracted by the fact that the TV was still on in Poppy and John’s room, and so they failed to notice that, curiously, the light was now on in Ryan’s bedroom, where it had been dark just a few minutes earlier.

  Back downstairs, they crawled into their beds, tucked their canopy curtain flaps back so that they could see each other, and chattered happily in the dark. Kimmy said, “That was really fun.”

  Alex said, “I can’t believe we didn’t get caught, especially since my mom and dad are still awake watching TV.”

  “Would they have been mad if they caught us?” Kimmy said.

  Alex thought. “Maybe a little.”

  Kimmy said, “I don’t think my mom and dad would be too mad either. But it’s still better that we didn’t get caught.”

  It was quiet for a bit, then Alex said, “Maybe we should sneak outside tomorrow night. Not just out of our room, but like outside outside.”

  “Whoa . . . We would have to be really quiet and careful then,” Kimmy said. “Because I think my parents would be really mad if they caught us sneaking outside.”

  “We could go out the rec room door down here,” Alex said. “They wouldn’t probably hear us then.”

  “You are so brave,” Kimmy said. She lay on her stomach, facing Alex, the canopy sheet pulled back just enough for her to see across the room. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and she could make out Alex’s round head, wet teeth that gleamed.

  “I think we should,” Kimmy said. “Let’s do it tomorrow night.”

  Alex said, “My dad keeps a flashlight in his tackle box. I’ll try and steal it tomorrow morning when we go fishing, so you and me can have it for tomorrow night.”

  Kimmy said, “And my sister has that pair of really nice binoculars. I’ll try to sneak into her room tomorrow sometime and get those for us too.” Kimmy paused. “I’m not sure what we’d use them for, but it would be cool to have them with us when we sneak out.”

  “Good idea.”

  “It’s a plan,” Kimmy said, shifting her face to the very edge of her pillow, which was overly fluffed and practically suffocating her.

  “It’s a plan,” Alex agreed, turning onto her left side, pulling her canopy flap down for the night, readying for sleep. Kimmy did the same.

  After a bit, Kimmy said, “My dad’s usually not so rude as he was tonight. He’s actually a really nice dad. Even when my mom’s pretty nasty to him, he’s never mean back to her.”

  Alex said, “OK.”

  It was as quiet as a tomb for several minutes.

  Eventually, Kimmy said, “I would shave my head like yours if my face was prettier,” but there was no response.

  7

  KEATS WAS LATE getting in that night, and Roxie had fallen asleep on the couch, next to Leo. She wore a large Cleveland Browns T-shirt and nothing else. The TV was on but very quiet, one of those local channels that played around-the-clock community theater and talent show productions out of Beaufort. All the windows in their small apartment were open—they were trying to save on utilities—so the air was hot, heavy, strangely harder to breathe now than during the day, when the sun seemed to cut through it and open up the lungs. Roxie was perspiring in sleep and dreaming of thirst.

  Keats entered the home quietly, expecting that Roxie would be asleep and hoping not to disturb her, but Leo startled to attention at Roxie’s feet, the collar tinkled, the jaw muscles went tight. Leo emitted a cautionary rumble until he recognized that it was Keats.

  Roxie yawned, sat up, and rubbed her eyes. Keats untied his work boots at the door, went to the kitchen sink, and washed his hands with dish soap.

  Roxie kneaded Leo’s haunches absently. “Time is it?” she rasped.

  “Eleven thirty,” Keats said. He opened the refrigerator and withdrew a Tupperware container of leftover lasagna. He brought this and a fork to the couch, where he took a seat next to Roxie.

  She peered into the container. “That still good?”

  “Smells fine.”

  “What kept you so late?”

  Keats took a big bite and chewed slowly. “House on Greenmont I was telling you about?” he said. “Sewage backed up, shit all over the lawn. Had to drive into Beaufort to get the right part, then back a second time when the first one had the wrong attachment. Old pipes. Gotta have just the right connecting tube or it’ll be backed up again in a week.” Keats ate another large bite of cold lasagna, then licked ricotta from the fork. “How was your evening?”

  In the far corner of the room the cricket started up. It had been in their apartment for weeks, although neither of them had set eyes on it. Its chirp was distinctive, uncharacteristically low-pitched, a loose whirring pattern that wheezed and swelled at the rate of human breathing.

  “That darn thing,” Roxie said. She combed through her glossy blond hair with her fingers, wincing when her wedding ring caught a tangle. “My evening was good. Took Leo out the pier before sundown, and I pulled in a good-sized mackerel, three or four pounds, using that new bar spinner.”

  “Nice. I haven’t had any luck with that lure yet.”

  “He’s out in the cooler whenever you wanna fillet him. It’ll be fine for the night if you’d rather wait till tomorrow.”

  “I’ll wait. So hot out, the guts’ll stink to high heaven by dawn if I do it now. I’ll do it in the morning, let the gulls carry off the scraps.”

  Roxie was quiet for a bit. “You OK?”

  “Sure,” Keats said.

  “Lady from earlier isn’t bothering you, is it?”

  “Nah,” Keats said. “Just tired.”

  It was hard to say which of them was more affected by interactions like he’d had with the red-haired woman that afternoon. It humiliated Keats and brought on some version of shame, but mercifully it evoked no sense of guilt whatsoever; he could still hold his head high because his conscience was clear. Roxie, on the other hand, shouldered a tremendous amount of unnecessary guilt. Even all these years later. Keats knew she put on a strong face for his sake, but the whole situation turned her heart to ash if she thought on it too long.

  Keats reac
hed over to squeeze her knee. “I’m just tired.”

  “That job tonight did take you awful long. I mean, you got the call, what, around three?”

  Keats exhaled a long, whistling plume. “Yeah, round about then. Sometimes it drags out, you know how these people are, can’t stand to have me out there hosing shit off their lawn while they sit down to dinner. Force a burger and a beer on me.”

  Roxie yawned again. “And yet you still come home hungry.” She nodded at the Tupperware in his lap.

  Keats grunted. “Bottomless pit.”

  “Anyway,” Roxie said, her head lolling sleepily, “I need to get to bed. I’m trying to get a long run in early tomorrow.”

  After Roxie had left the room, Keats took his lasagna to the back window of their apartment, overlooking the ocean, and he stood there by himself, noticing the quiet corrugations of low tide and the wide beach stippled with large and small footprints. The brush decorating the landscape was still an awful mess since the storm that afternoon—big patches of it tangled in the fencing, brambles bundled together like tumbleweed, tough vines angled weirdly upright like broken black skeletons.

  The cricket had gone silent for a minute or two, but now it started up again, purring and carrying on like a lovesick little buzz saw.

  Roxie was fifteen years old when she first set foot on Fripp Island.

  Vacationing with her parents on an exclusive and exotic island was no more or less miserable than living under the same roof with them in Boston for the rest of the year. Her mother was a drunk, and her father was a violent rageaholic. Both of her parents came from money, met at prep school, married at twenty-one. Roxie’s father became a successful hedge-funder, and her mother worked several volunteer shifts a week in the accounting office of the Archdiocese of Boston. Roxie’s parents despised each other and were dangerously addicted to their own dramas. Fights culminating in murderous threats and broken glassware were a regular occurrence. Roxie envied her classmates whose parents had gotten divorced and lived separately almost as much as she envied her classmates whose parents were happily married.

  Keats’s mother died of cancer when Keats was very young—he had no memory of her. His father, Joe Firestone, was the go-to handyman on Fripp Island, where he did jobs for half the homeowners. He worked hard and eventually saved enough money to afford a small, ramshackle cottage on the island, which smelled powerfully of cat piss and only had an outdoor shower. But after commuting to and from Beaufort for many years, actually living on the island was a dream come true.

  Keats had been going to the public school in Beaufort, which was in walking distance from their home prior to the move, and he was working with his father only on the weekends. But once Joe bought the place on the island, it was wildly inconvenient for him to drive his fourteen-year-old son to school every morning, as no buses came to Fripp Island for pickups. For his whole life, Keats’s only ambition was to work for his father; he had no desire to pursue anything outside of the family business. So one week into his eighth-grade year, he begged his father to allow him to drop out of school and work full time as Joe’s right-hand guy. Joe agreed to this, on the condition that Keats would study from home to pass the GED, so that he would have the diploma should he need it down the line.

  Once Keats was no longer in school, the two of them had time to renovate the cottage together, on top of the handyman work elsewhere on the island. They worked long, happy days together, sometimes on the same project if it required two sets of hands, and sometimes Joe would send his son out on house calls that he knew Keats would be able to manage on his own. Keats was capable, and a handsome and affable young man. He was quickly accepted by the homeowners’ community. He and his father were known all across the island for their professionalism, friendly service, and reasonable rates.

  Several years after Joe and Keats moved to Fripp Island, Keats met Roxie at a golf tournament. She was competing in the under-thirty women’s division, and Keats was caddying for a woman whose toilet he had unclogged the day before. (Caddying was a great way to make a hundred bucks for a few hours of easy work, if his father didn’t have other projects lined up for him.)

  Wearing a T-shirt advertising an angry band, frayed denim cutoffs, and flip-flops displaying silver stacks of toe rings, Roxie looked like she hailed from a different planet than the other women on the course. She was also bored and playing terribly; she had by far the worst score of all the competing women. She struck up a conversation with Keats on the fifth hole, introducing herself and commenting on the humidity. He asked where she was from, and she said Boston. She asked if he’d been, and he said he’d never gone north of North Carolina or south of South Carolina. This stunned Roxie, who had been to Cancun and Hong Kong and the south of France and all over Europe three or four times, at least that many times to Hawaii, and she’d recently spent her birthday weekend in Key West, although she didn’t mention any of this to him.

  Keats said he liked how she had dyed the tips of her long blond hair blue. She said she used Kool-Aid to do it, and her mother kept threatening to cut it off in her sleep, like Samson and Delilah.

  The two of them chatted in the sun and in the shade and then in the clubhouse when the tournament had ended.

  Keats wasn’t like the guys from Roxie’s high school, who were all hair gel and dirty magazines and Lacoste polos. Keats had gentle eyes and a shy way of talking to her, head bowed and voice so soft, almost like he hoped she wouldn’t catch every word.

  He was eighteen years old at the time. He had never been on a date. Roxie was a sophomore in high school, and she’d had sex with two boyfriends, although neither of the relationships had lasted more than a month.

  Roxie asked him which part of the beach he liked to hang out at, and at what time of day, and Keats described his favorite part of the island to her and said he was usually there around four o’clock in the afternoon, unless he was on a house call.

  Roxie found him at his favorite spot at four o’clock the next day. He was throwing a tennis ball into the water for a little brown puppy to fetch. He waved when he spotted Roxie approaching, her rolled-up towel tucked under her arm. She wore a black bikini and round wire-rimmed sunglasses.

  “Cute dog,” she said.

  Keats said, “His name’s Leo.”

  They went for a swim together, then Roxie spread her towel out next to his. They chatted and laughed and tousled with Leo as the afternoon became evening.

  Roxie was due back at her house for dinner with her parents at seven, but she said she’d try to come to the same beach at the same time tomorrow. She asked for Keats’s phone number, and gave him hers.

  The next day, they fished off Pritchards Island, scoped out some gators in the marsh near Gram’s Diner, then got milk shakes.

  The day after that, Keats was tied up with a house call until the evening, but he invited Roxie to join him for a fire on the beach around sunset.

  On the final day of Roxie’s vacation, her parents were registered to participate in a couples golf tournament, so she invited Keats to come to their house, where she wanted to make a few mixed drinks with her mom’s gin while her parents were away.

  Keats drank a beer or two with his dad now and then, but Joe drew the line at underage liquor, so Keats let Roxie mix up the drinks. Roxie said she had been doing this for years. They took their gin and tonics out to the pool and went for a swim. Keats told her he was pretty sure he’d replaced the pool filter at this house the previous summer. Roxie made him laugh with her impression of a dolphin, and they had a handstand competition.

  She went to make a second round of drinks.

  When she returned, Roxie said she was sad she had to leave the island the next day. She slipped into the water and blew bubbles to the surface. When she came back up, Keats said, “Me too.”

  After they had finished their cocktails, Roxie took his hand and led him out of the pool and inside, to her bedroom.

  She hesitated for a moment, looking incredulous when h
e told her he’d never even kissed a girl. They couldn’t go all the way, she said, because she didn’t have condoms, but they could do other things.

  Roxie’s parents had gotten into it on the ninth hole at the tournament. Her mother went to the clubhouse and ordered a triple vodka soda, and her father stormed straight back to the house by himself.

  He found Roxie and the maintenance boy in bed together, and Keats wasn’t even one foot out the door before Roxie’s father was on the phone with his attorney up in Boston, then with the local police department.

  Despite Roxie’s tears and rage and threats and protestations, her father moved forward with the statutory rape charge.

  Joe Firestone put up his house as collateral in order to afford a decent attorney for his son’s trial.

  Keats was arrested and pled no contest, of course; Roxie was fifteen years old at the time of the incident, and he was eighteen.

  He was given a light sentence on account of Roxie’s refusal to participate in the trial, and after multiple appeals she made directly to the judge, attempts to intervene on Keats’s behalf. Keats was able to avoid prison by agreeing to a stint on probation, and his name would be placed on the sex offender registry for eight years.

  Joe Firestone was relieved that his son could avoid jail time, but he ended up losing the cottage as a result of the financial burden caused by the whole ordeal. Once the house was gone, the only affordable rental he could find on the island was a tiny loft apartment above the garage of a homeowner for whom they had worked for many years. It was too small for two grown men, but they made it work.

  Business suffered. People looked at them differently.