by Lisa Duffy
“Sit,” Maggie says. “Do you want some lunch?”
He shakes his head, resisting the urge to say, No, thank you, Miss Maggie. She was his fourth-grade teacher all those years ago, and old habits die hard.
He’d called her Miss Maggie once when they’d passed each other in the bank, and she’d rolled her eyes.
“You’re not a kid anymore, Leo,” she’d said. “That’s my name during school hours to people who are only as high as my waist. Call me Maggie, please!”
Maggie walks to the counter, returns with a napkin and puts it on the table next to Sky.
“I just got off the phone with Xavier. He said you were walking over. My friend here and I were just talking about these nightly adventures. How they need to stop. We agreed to it. Didn’t we, Miss Pope?”
Sky looks up and nods, returns to her bowl. Maggie glances at Leo and sighs, gives a slight shake of her head, as though she knows no such agreeing has taken place.
Leo clears this throat. “I was worried, Sky. It scares me when you leave.”
His voice is gentle, soft. He wishes he were more like Xavier. He’s never been able to sound firm. Like someone in charge.
“Don’t be scared.” Sky wipes her mouth with the napkin and sits back in the chair. “It’s not like I’m lost or anything. I’m just in the tree house.”
“I don’t want you sneaking out in the middle of the night. Do you understand that?”
“I didn’t sneak. I walked out the back door,” she says innocently.
Maggie turns in his direction, shielding a smile from the girl, and brings Sky’s bowl to the sink.
He pauses, decides to stay quiet.
They’ve had this conversation before. Three times to be exact. She’s never apologetic. And she never lies—she hasn’t once promised to stop leaving in the middle of the night. She just listens to him, tells him not to worry.
That she’s perfectly safe. It’s her tree house. On her island.
And somehow, he can’t summon the will to argue with her. No—he doesn’t want to argue with her. He doesn’t want to make her afraid. He doesn’t want to tell her all the horrible things that could happen. That might happen.
He’s willing to be the one who’s afraid. He doesn’t want to change who she is.
A fearless girl who doesn’t just think she’s safe alone in the dark on an island in the Atlantic.
She knows it.
* * *
They don’t speak on the way home. It’s maybe thirty yards, door to door. No need to fill the silence on the short walk.
But Leo wishes they were talking. Mundane conversation. Stuff they used to talk about before her parents died.
He’d visit Brian and Ann, and Sky would sit at the table and tell him about scoring a goal in her last soccer game. Or what her favorite school subject was (gym!).
The only thing he can think to ask her now is: How can I help?
But he’s asked several times, and the blank look in her eyes tells him everything he needs to know.
He remembers feeling the way she does. Or something similar to it. He remembers feeling lost. Untethered. Broken.
He was about her age when it happened.
Ten or eleven—he doesn’t remember exactly. Only that he was in sixth grade when he fell in love for the first time. Or lust. It didn’t matter—the feeling inside of him was the thing that took his breath away. Split him open.
The way the substitute teacher introduced himself wove itself into the seams of Leo’s existence.
Mr. Baxter is what they want you to call me, the teacher had said. But that’s my father. So Mr. Ethan will have to do.
Mr. Ethan Baxter, with his canvas backpack and worn jeans and unshaven face and no clue that four seats back, in the center row, young Leo Irving had just discovered something about himself that would change his life.
Leo had gone home after school, locked himself in his room, and refused to come out for dinner. Told his mother through the door that he was sick.
Because wasn’t he, for Christ’s sake?
All his buddies were obsessed with girls. The entire cheerleading team, it seemed. Brian never stopped talking about Charlotte’s breasts and Karen’s ass and Meg’s everything, and all Leo could think about was the substitute teacher in English class.
The male substitute teacher.
Leo had stayed in his bedroom all night, staring at the wall. His father had come in the next morning, sat on the edge of the mattress, asked if everything was all right. A sob had slipped out of Leo before he could choke it back. He’d felt his father’s hand on his shoulder, but he hadn’t turned. He couldn’t face him.
How can I help? his father had asked.
And Leo had only shrugged, stayed silent.
What was there to say?
Even now, all these years later, Leo considered that question. If he could go back to that morning and answer his father—what would he say?
The closest Leo can come to an answer is this:
Just love me.
So that’s what he does now with Sky. He just loves her.
* * *
Later that afternoon, while Xavier is packing for his early-morning return to the city, and Sky is in her room, Leo sits on the patio.
He looks at the backyard, the tree house barely visible in the distance. It still seems strange to sit here without his friends.
How many times had Brian and Ann fed him dinner right in this very spot? He’d nearly grown up in this yard—it was Brian’s childhood home. They’d played a million games of tag football on the grass. They’d camped in tents as boys, and later, had prom pictures over by the stone wall.
He remembers not wanting to leave Ichabod. It was the only place he’d ever lived for the first eighteen years of his life.
When he got accepted to his first choice of colleges, he knew it would break his father’s heart if he didn’t go. Never mind all the money his parents had put away over the years for his college tuition. A remarkable feat on his father’s harbormaster salary. His mom contributing with her job as a nurse’s aide at the hospital.
Leo was the first in his family to go to college—but his mother wanted degrees. More than a thermometer, she always told him.
After college, he was offered a job at one of the top architectural firms, and he took it, even though it was across the country, and he missed the island so much it hurt his bones. A constant ache no amount of promotions or raises eased.
Eventually, he moved east again, joined a firm in Boston, and after his parents passed away, he’d take the ferry over to the island to visit Brian, his best friend from childhood.
Brian had married Ann by then, and Leo would sometimes tease them when Ann would snap a picture on her phone of the three of them: Brian and Ann, blond and pale, and Leo, so dark, standing between them.
“You’re so white,” he’d joke, eyeing their matching Vineyard Vines pullovers. Ann would laugh and roll her eyes.
“Oh, please,” she’d say. “You’re the whitest black person I know.”
“I’m the only black person you know.”
Ann would laugh, but not Brian. He’d stay silent, his face clouded, and Leo would have to tell him to lighten up.
To not be so damn serious.
But he’d grown up with Brian. They’d been best friends since preschool, went to Ichabod High School together, and when Leo left for college, Brian stayed on the island, joined the fire department, and tried to start a family with Ann.
Brian didn’t say out loud what they both knew—the color of Leo’s skin wasn’t invisible on an island that was mostly white.
Of course, Brian didn’t know what was coming his way. He couldn’t have known that one day, he and Ann would be parents to a girl who dropped from the clouds. A girl with dark skin and eyes so light looking at her was like tumbling into the crystal-blue sea.
And now Leo is her guardian.
It took him by surprise, even though Ann had told him y
ears ago she was putting it in their will—that if anything happened to Brian and Ann, Leo would get Sky.
Leo had shrugged it off. Brian didn’t drink. Neither did Ann. Most nights they were in bed before Leo was home from work. He’d been convinced that life wouldn’t take away people like Brian and Ann, erase them from the world so brutally, so easily, when they were so good.
So loved.
My kind of people is what his father always said of Brian and Ann.
And then two months ago, they went out on a date.
They left Sky with a babysitter to celebrate their anniversary. Someone at the bar sent over two glasses of champagne while they ate dinner, but the bubbly sat untouched—Ann wasn’t a drinker, and Brian gave up alcohol years ago.
No one will ever know why their car missed the turn by the cliffs and plunged to the rocks below. Ann was driving, and the detective said the car left the road at a high rate of speed. Nobody saw anything. The night had been clear. The full moon the only witness to the accident.
They don’t know if they died instantly or if they suffered—the fire erased all the answers. Left only dust and ash and charred wreckage.
And a girl waiting all alone in her bed across the island.
Waiting for parents who would never return.
4
When they ask her why she runs away, Sky doesn’t answer. She can’t find the words to describe her house now that her parents are gone.
How the silence is what hurts the most.
She can’t hear her mother humming in the kitchen. Or the low rumble of her father’s voice at the table, the snap when he’d straighten the newspaper in front of him.
After they died, the thought of never seeing them again left an empty space in the middle of her body.
She keeps her mother’s perfume on the table next to her bed; her father’s sweatshirt under her pillow. She can hold on to their scent. Imagine their touch. Feel the stubble on her father’s cheek, her mother’s hands braiding her hair.
But the quiet is something different.
She stares at the wall when she’s supposed to be sleeping. She listens for the clomp of her father’s boots on the wood floor. The whistle of the teakettle at night.
But there’s only quiet. A silence threatening to swallow her.
It’s worse on the weekends, when Xavier is there, because the house feels different. Like it’s not hers anymore. She knows he doesn’t want to be in her house—he doesn’t even want to be on her island.
She’s an outsider when he’s there.
That’s when she runs.
Outside, the night surrounds her, fills her ears and lungs. She runs to where the sound of the waves is deafening. High above the water on the cliffs, the surf pounding the rocks below, the noise of the island around her.
She sleeps in the tree house that her neighbor Joe built for her last year—a birthday present from her parents—although mostly from her mother. They’d all walked out to the woods behind the house, a blindfold over her eyes until her mother took it off and shouted, “Look up, birthday girl!”
Sky had blinked. It took a minute to see the square box through the thick leaves, a small house built into a big oak tree, tucked in the space where four large limbs reached out like fingers touching the sky.
“How did—?” her father had asked.
“Joe did it,” her mother interrupted, then laughed. “Don’t you love it?”
Sky nodded and hugged her mother, who couldn’t stand still, her excitement spilling over to Sky.
Not to Sky’s father, though.
“It’s not good for the tree,” he muttered, frowning. “And how’s she supposed to get up there?”
“The tree’s fine. And there’s a ladder—” her mother began, but Sky already had her foot on the first rung. She could have reached the house without the ladder. As high as it was in the tree, the branches from the ground up were good for climbing. But she’d wanted them to stop fighting.
She’d thought then that her parents had just disagreed on her birthday gift. A minor fight. Looking back, it was the beginning of everything. The start of her family breaking apart.
When she sleeps in the tree house now, a small lantern lights the room, making a ring of yellow on the ceiling. Otherwise, the darkness would be so black, she wouldn’t be able to see her hand in front of her face.
She lets the hum of the forest sing her to sleep. Safe inside the walls, she listens to the hoot owls calling back and forth, singing a song she likes to imagine is her very own lullaby.
Here, her heart stops racing. She’s a hamster on a wheel, running and running, until she’s curled tight in the feather bed on the wood floor.
The guilt weighs heavy each time she runs away.
She likes Leo—she’s old enough to know she’s making a bad situation even worse. And Leo is struggling too; she knows he misses her father.
The other day she walked into the living room to see him holding a picture up to his face. The one of her father on the town dock with a large fish in his hands, his smile big. She remembers that day. He’d won the fishing competition, and they’d brought the fish home and cooked it on the grill for dinner, the whole fire department in her backyard, eating off paper plates.
Leo had looked up, caught her watching him. He’d put the picture back on the table and smiled at her, but his lips were crooked, and she turned and left the room before the tears spilled down his face.
She’s known Leo her whole life, but now that he’s living in her house, things have changed between them.
He walks around her carefully. She catches him watching her out of the corner of her eye while she eats breakfast. She feels his eyes on her while she does her homework at the table, the night closing in on them, the quiet so loud she can’t think.
She doesn’t know anything about the will everyone keeps talking about. The one that says Leo is her guardian.
Her parents never asked her about that. Not that she would have had anything to say. In her worst nightmare, she couldn’t have imagined losing them both.
Most days it doesn’t seem real. Two months have passed since the accident, and she’s still waiting for the front door to open. For the jingle of her father’s keys dropping on the table. Her mother’s voice calling her name.
She thinks about it all the time. Wonders if her parents are gone because they never belonged to her in the first place.
She said this out loud to Frankie the other day. She wouldn’t have admitted this to anyone but Frankie Murphy—her best friend since the beginning of time.
They were walking home from school, and Frankie was telling Sky that she’d lost her favorite necklace at the beach. It just disappeared from the towel where she’d put it.
Frankie was sad until she remembered that she found the necklace in the first place. Right on that same beach the previous summer. That made it better.
“Maybe certain things are only meant to be ours for a little while,” Frankie said.
Sky nodded. “Sort of like my parents, I guess,” she said, kicking a pebble from the sidewalk to the hedge next to her.
Frankie screwed up her face and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “How are your parents like my necklace?”
Sky shrugged. “I don’t know. They adopted me. So we never really belonged to each other.” She shrugged again. “Just like you said. Some things are only supposed be ours for a little while.”
Frankie eyed her. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said finally.
“Why? You just said the same thing about your necklace.”
“My necklace was a cheap piece of metal. Yours is… people!”
“Come on. I have to pee.” She pulled Frankie’s arm, and they started walking again, but Frankie kept stealing glances at her, as though she wasn’t sure at all if Sky knew the difference between jewelry and human beings.
“Plus,” Frankie said, out of the blue, “you had the best parents in the world. Doesn
’t matter if they adopted you. If anyone gets to say they don’t belong in their family, it’s me, not you.”
Sky didn’t answer, because she couldn’t argue with that.
Sky always thought the Murphy family Christmas card could have been ripped from the pages of the L.L.Bean catalog her mother used to keep on the coffee table.
Frankie’s mom and dad, her two brothers, and Frankie all sitting on the steps in front of their huge house. All of them pale and blond, dressed in plaid, even their dog, with his yellow fur and matching outfit.
But Sky knew what went on in that house. Frankie’s mother had wanted Frankie to be just like her star-athlete brothers, twins and seniors at Ichabod High School, cocaptains of every team they played on.
Sky only knew them as Big Murph and Little Murph, just like everyone else on the island. Their faces looked identical, except Big Murph was over six feet and thick and Little Murph was shorter and wiry.
Sky would sit in the bleachers with Frankie at one of their games and she’d hear someone ask, “Who scored that goal?” Big Murph. Or “Who hit the home run?” Little Murph.
Mrs. Murphy never missed a game. She dressed in the school colors and cheered the loudest. She insisted she wasn’t competitive—just happy that her children were involved.
By the time Frankie was five, she was on six teams. Soccer in the fall. Basketball in the winter. Softball in the spring. Gymnastics throughout the year. Summer was swim club. Tennis every Sunday.
It’s how Frankie and Sky met.
Frankie was the only other girl who could keep up with Sky. Forwards on the soccer team, they traded goals like playing cards. Sky loved playing on a team with Frankie.
Except Frankie hated it. Even at five years old, all Frankie wanted to do was draw. And sketch. And paint.
Frankie’s mom thought it was cute—but hobbies like art didn’t get you into an Ivy League school. By the time they were seven, both Frankie and Sky would mimic Frankie’s mother when she said this. They’d mouth the words behind her back, giggle when Mrs. Murphy caught them and frowned.
