by Lisa Duffy
Maggie nods. “Poor Leo looks like he’s dropped twenty pounds since he got here, and he didn’t have it to lose in the first place. Wait—how was your checkup in the city? I thought you and William were going to stay an extra day? Stay in a fancy hotel. Make a little vacation out of it.”
“I changed my mind. We came home right after the appointment. He wanted me to be cheery, and I didn’t want to be cheery after I was poked and prodded.”
“Was that the argument behind the laundry?”
Agnes waves away the question. “It’s about his work, as usual. How he’s never home. It’s not worth talking about. I’ll only get mad again. By the way, I saw Lillian on the ferry. I went over and told her I was very happy to see her and that I hoped she was staying for a while.”
Maggie looks at Agnes blankly. “Lillian?”
“Lillian, Maggie. Ann’s mother. Sky’s grandmother!”
“Why are you saying it like I should know who you’re talking about? I haven’t met her.”
“Well, you’ve heard me talk about her. I was the one who had to call about the accident.”
“I seem to remember you volunteered to call Lillian.”
“It came down to either me or Leo, so I was the obvious choice. I mean, Lillian and I are friends.”
Maggie frowns. “Friends? I never heard you talk about this person until two months ago!”
“We were friends until she left Ichabod. She’s a native, you know. Her mother and my mother went to church every Sunday. She moved away when we were ten. Eleven, maybe. I remember she was very nice.”
“Nice? Agnes. She didn’t come to her own daughter’s funeral. Maybe she’s changed in the forty years since you were friends.”
“That’s not fair. Lillian explained that she wanted to hold her own services on the mainland. And the only reason she didn’t come to the funeral was because of Sky. They haven’t seen each other for quite some time, and she didn’t want to make things even harder for the girl. Frankly, I think she was still in shock. Losing her daughter and finding out that her own granddaughter is now being raised by a man. A man she hasn’t even met!”
“Leo isn’t just some random stranger. He was Brian’s best friend. And Ann loved Leo. Did you bother to ask her why she hasn’t seen her daughter or granddaughter in ‘quite some time,’ as you put it?”
Agnes rolls her eyes. “Yes, because that would have been an appropriate thing to ask at that particular moment. Hello, Lillian—I’m calling to tell you there’s been a tragic accident and your daughter was killed. And by the way, what exactly was the issue between the two of you?”
Maggie tilts her head at Agnes and sighs. She’s fairly certain Agnes getting involved in this is really about Grace, Agnes’s only child.
Grace lives in Vermont with Julie, who Agnes refers to as Grace’s roommate, even though Grace is a twenty-six-year-old woman who has lived with Julie in the same one-bedroom condo for four years.
Grace doesn’t come to Ichabod often. Never with Julie.
Agnes has never said out loud that she has a problem with Grace’s sexuality. Maggie learned early on that Agnes’s faith came first in her life.
If the church didn’t support something, there was a good chance neither did Agnes.
Maggie wasn’t religious. But she couldn’t deny that Agnes’s faith was a source of support for her friend, even if it was hard sometimes to understand why. Especially when Agnes kept going to church regularly, straight through the sexual-abuse scandal. When every headline in the news seemed to name another parish. Another priest.
Maggie had long ago settled with the decision that she would love Agnes for her quick wit. Her huge heart. Her capableness.
They didn’t talk about religion or politics. That’s how they stayed best friends.
“Don’t get in the middle of something you don’t know anything about,” she says.
“All I’m saying is Lillian has a right to be in that child’s life. And I wanted her to know that I support that—she should be in Sky’s life. Don’t tell me you disagree—what if PJ or Michael had a child and, God forbid, something happened? Wouldn’t you want a chance to raise your own grandchild?” Agnes clears her throat. “I’m not the type to meddle. But this is important.”
Maggie snorts. “You were born to meddle. Despite this, I still love you. Let’s just change the subject. Pete was on the ferry yesterday. Did you see him?”
“See him? The whole boat was watching him. You know your husband, always the center of attention.”
Maggie wants to kick herself for bringing Pete into the conversation. Agnes has never liked him. Hasn’t from the first day he showed up on Agnes’s island all those years ago with his beat-up Jeep loaded down with surfboards.
Maggie and Agnes had been kids just out of college. They were shopping in town when Pete pulled over in his Jeep, asked them for directions to Crane Beach.
“It’s Crane’s,” Agnes told him. “Crane’s Point.”
He smiled. Two rows of perfect teeth in his perfectly tanned face. “Right on. Big swells there, right?” He held out his arms, surfing an imaginary wave.
Agnes scowled at him, but Maggie nodded, mesmerized. Agnes had told her later that she looked like one of those bobbleheads people stick to their dashboards. But Maggie couldn’t take her eyes off Pete. He was the most handsome man she’d ever come even close to standing next to.
“The best,” Maggie said. “Is this your first time on the island?”
He nodded. “You guys locals?”
“Agnes was born here. I moved here a month ago. You’re going to love it. It’s the best,” Maggie gushed.
“I think I already love it,” he said, winking at her.
Maggie giggled. “Where are you staying?”
“Wherever I land.” He winked again and drove away. Agnes muttered that she hoped he landed somewhere off her island.
But a week later, Maggie showed up with him to dinner. And then Bam! they were married, and Pow! two kids came along, and Splat! just last year, twenty-six years in, Pete cheated on Maggie. With his secretary no less.
The secretary. How predictable, Agnes liked to say.
It was a sin Agnes couldn’t forgive.
She didn’t care that Maggie had forgiven him. That they’d spent months in therapy trying to save their marriage. Agnes never cared for Pete. And she wasn’t about to let him off the hook for shattering her best friend’s heart.
She knows she shouldn’t ask Agnes what happened with Pete on the ferry. But she can’t stop herself.
“He does like a crowd,” she agrees. “What happened?”
“One of the pretty young galley girls cut her finger. Pete came to the rescue.” Agnes rolls her eyes. “Mr. First Aid himself.”
Maggie doesn’t mention that Pete is a trained EMT. Or that some of the ferry crew are hired through the town, which is technically under Pete’s jurisdiction.
“I’m sure he was just helping one of his employees,” she offers instead.
As soon as it passes her lips, her cheeks color. His secretary had been his employee. The one who texted him heart emojis and called him Babe.
“Well, I took a picture. You can judge for yourself.” Agnes digs in her pocketbook for her phone.
“You took a picture of Pete with the galley girl? What—as some sort of proof?”
“Calm down. Of course not. I was trying to take a picture of the rainbow in the doorway behind them. But I didn’t have my cheaters on. And by the time I snapped the picture, the rainbow was almost gone and all I got was Pete leaning over the counter with the girl’s hand in his arm and his lips nearly touching her swanlike neck.” Agnes holds up her phone. “See? Look.”
Maggie shakes her head and pushes the phone away. “I know you’re just trying to protect me, but I have better things to do than worry about Pete bandaging some teenager’s finger.”
“Suit yourself.” Agnes drops the phone in her pocketbook.
They do
n’t speak. She feels Agnes’s eyes on her, but she tilts her face, pretends she’s just relaxing in the sun instead of wishing Agnes would go back to the tent with the other teachers.
Agnes clears her throat loudly, as though she can sense Maggie’s desire for her to leave.
“So, what’s wrong with you anyway? That’s what I came over to ask. Why are you over here all alone?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Maggie lies. “I just wanted a little sun. When do you get your results from the MRI?”
“I don’t know. Let’s not talk about it.”
They sit in silence while Maggie takes a bite of her burger and Agnes eats her ice cream.
After thirty years of friendship, they both know when to leave well enough alone.
7
Across the field, Leo flips the last hamburger on the grill, presses the spatula against it until the juices run clear.
Then he puts it on the platter where it’s whisked away to the food table. He places six more burgers on the grill, even though they’re probably not needed. Most of the kids have gone back to playing, and there’s still a stack of burgers left on the table. But he’s happy to be doing something useful.
Grilling, he can do. Parenting is another story.
He’s here as a volunteer. Sky’s parent. Which, at this moment, seems laughingly absurd because he’s just learned that he forgot to send the paperwork and the payment to the day camp where Sky is supposed to start tomorrow at eight in the morning.
And now, she can’t go. Because of him.
An epic fail, Xavier would say.
Leo learned this bad news the way all bad news seems to find him these days. Suddenly and without warning. Not even a whiff of premonition.
He was having a perfectly nice conversation with a young woman named Lori while they stood at the grill.
He cooked. She set the buns on the plate.
In the interest of small talk, he asked Lori if she had any special plans this summer. She looked at him with a puzzled expression and told him she ran a day camp on the island.
“You run it? By yourself?”
“Well, no. I’m the director. It’s a pretty big camp.”
“Oh, yeah? Which one? Sky is going to camp too. I forget the name of it. Camp Tekawho or something like that.”
Lori paused. “Tekawitha.”
“That’s it. I forgot to get the paperwork in and thank God they called me. The principal even sent home a letter in Sky’s backpack.”
She paused again. “That was actually me. I’m Lori Ward. The assistant principal… Ms. Ward.”
He looked up, startled. The hamburger he was flipping slid off the spatula and landed on top of a cheeseburger. He sorted the mess while studying her out of the corner of his eye. How was it possible that she was the assistant principal? Fresh-faced and sporty with her long dark hair pulled back under a coral Lululemon headband, she could’ve blended in with the senior girls at the high school.
When did he get so old?
He groaned, gave her an apologetic look. “I’m sorry—you just look so young. I didn’t put two and two together. Thank you, of course. For following up. I have some big shoes to fill, and I seem to be stumbling here.”
Her face colored. “I, um, well—I never heard back from you. I sent the stuff home with Sky and then I called too. When I didn’t hear back, I figured she wasn’t coming this year.”
The minute she said it, Leo saw the letter on the table. He’d read it. Put it aside until he had more time in the day. And somehow, in his mind, he wrote the check and sent the paperwork. But he hadn’t.
The day with more time in it had never come.
He felt her hand on his arm.
“Look—I can’t do anything this session, but I’ll put her on the wait list for the other sessions. Sometimes kids drop out. I’m sorry. I would make an exception—it’s understandable how this happened—but we’re at capacity, and once I bend the rules for one person, it’s a nightmare. A lesson I learned the hard way.”
She left him standing at the grill, wondering how to tell a ten-year-old girl, whose whole world had recently collapsed, that her summer was off to a similar start.
* * *
By the time the school bell rings at the end of the day, Leo has forgotten about Camp Tekawitha and his epic fail.
He has bigger problems.
He’s missed three calls from Xavier. Three voice mails that Leo listens to, each making him feel a little bit worse.
The first is Xavier telling him that he’s leaving for the city a day early, but he went downstairs to get his laundry and there’s a foot of water on the basement floor.
The second voice mail relays that by the time Xavier made it back upstairs, after wading through ankle-deep muck, there was a message on the answering machine from Sky’s grandmother.
The third one is an apology—or so Xavier says, but Leo’s never heard an apology sound so unapologetic.
Xavier feels bad for dumping things on Leo. But he has no idea what to do about the water. Ditto for the grandmother. And Xavier would have come up to the school to say goodbye, but he’s late for the ferry, and since everything takes ten times longer here, he has to go right now if there’s any chance of getting a goddamn latte before the ferry takes off.
The seasonal coffee shack on the dock opened last week. Overpriced and overrated to the locals, but Xavier can finally get his preferred caffeine fix. Now that the summer shops are beginning to open, Leo has heard less grumbling from his city-loving husband.
Lola’s sushi bar, set to open on Saturday, seems to be the only reason Xavier is excited to come back to Ichabod next weekend.
When Xavier had gone on and on about it, Leo briefly wallowed in the thought that his husband had more interest in a selection of raw fish than in him. Then he felt melodramatic and selfish for thinking it—Xavier had made it clear that he missed everything about their life in the city—even the noise!
It’s so goddamn quiet. I can’t sleep! Xavier said every night of his first weekend on the island.
Most weekend nights now, Xavier falls asleep in front of the television. The volume droning out the chirping of the crickets, the tinkle of the wind chime, the call of the owls—sounds that Leo listens for in the quiet of the bedroom, where a peacefulness settles inside of him that he has no right to feel given that his husband is miserable.
Xavier is tired of commuting to and from the city, tired of living inside this cramped house that once belonged to people Xavier barely knew—he’d met them only once, at their wedding ceremony last year.
Leo never could get him over to the island to visit his childhood friends. Xavier didn’t like boats. Or water, for that matter. He’d had a near-drowning experience at the town pool as a kid, but Leo didn’t know how much of that was true. Xavier’s sisters always rolled their eyes when he told the story and spent the next ten minutes laughing about how much Xavier loved to exaggerate.
Leo can’t fix how Xavier feels about the island. He hopes Xavier will just give Ichabod a chance.
Because Leo’s not going to leave Sky. And he would never ask her to move.
Leo didn’t ask for this life, but now that he’s here, back on the land where he grew up, somehow, someway, he’s calmer.
And, so, Ichabod has become a thing between Leo and Xavier.
This single island alone in the water.
A glacial deposit formed into cliffs and beaches, forests and inlets that has risen up between them like an enormous summit, wind-whipped and avalanche prone, with their new marriage, just one year old, sitting in the path of destruction.
Each time Xavier tells Leo he hates the island, Leo feels the earth shift, the land beneath his feet shudder.
For this reason, and others he can’t put words to, when he replays each voice mail for the second time, he doesn’t call Xavier back.
He just puts the phone in his pocket and walks off the field, in search of the child he’s been entrusted to care for, h
is mind on how best to deliver the bad news about camp.
* * *
When Leo finally finds Sky in the crowded parking lot, she is surrounded by women. And nobody is speaking.
Ms. Ward is studying Sky. Maggie has her arm around Sky’s shoulders. Agnes has her hand on Sky’s forehead.
“She’s not warm,” Agnes announces just as Leo reaches them. “But sometimes that doesn’t mean anything.”
“I feel fine,” Sky says. “I just don’t want to go.”
The three women frown in unison. Leo clears his throat.
“Go where?” he asks, and they all turn.
“I just found out we have an opening in Sky’s age group for the first session,” Ms. Ward says. “Molly Bench broke her ankle this morning. I was telling Sky that she’s welcome to come to camp tomorrow, but she said she doesn’t want to.”
“Could be Lyme too. Makes everyone lethargic. Have you found any ticks on you lately?” Agnes asks Sky, who shakes her head.
“I feel fine. I’m not sick. I just don’t want to go.”
“But you love camp,” Maggie offers. “You go every year.”
“Well this one’s different,” Sky says, in such a way that the women simply nod.
Leo clears his throat again, feeling as though maybe he’s to blame for the whole mess. “Sky—this is my fault. Not yours. I forgot to sign you up. But everyone wants you to go.”
“You didn’t forget. You left the stuff on the table, and I threw it out,” Sky tells him.
Agnes clucks, and Ms. Ward holds up her hands in resignation.
“Oh, Sky,” Maggie sighs.
“I’ll keep the spot open until the end of the day, Leo,” Ms. Ward says. “I have a wait list and frankly, I’m bypassing that right now. I hope you change your mind, Sky. You know we’d love to have you.” She pats her lightly on the back and walks away.
Sky turns to Leo.
“Can I go?” she asks. “Frankie’s waiting for me to walk home with her.”
“I can drive you both,” Leo says, but he knows the answer is no. Sky has two favorite places in the world: one is next to Frankie, and the other is roaming Ichabod.
