The Island

India was in her bedroom when the screaming started. She could tell it was coming from the beach, but it took her another second to realize it was Chess and Tate. India sat on her bed and closed her eyes. God, the pain of having a sister, another girl, another woman, not you, but nearly you. A friend, a confidante, a rival, an enemy. She remembered the summer that… Billy was three, Teddy was fourteen months old, and India was pregnant with Ethan. They were here on Tuckernuck, down on the beach; India was in a low-slung beach chair with Teddy in her lap, and Billy was at the water’s edge. India had been so tired, first trimester tired, she couldn’t keep her eyes open, and then the next thing she knew, her eyes were open and she was watching Billy go under, whoosh, like he was being sucked into a vacuum. India tried to cry out-Help! Billy!-she tried to jump out of her chair, but Teddy was asleep and as heavy as lead in her arms. India’s lethargic body was betraying her. She couldn’t make herself move fast enough.

“Bill!” she shouted. Where was Bill? “Billy!”

Birdie had appeared out of nowhere. She had dashed into the water and scooped Billy up; he was sputtering water at first, then wailing. Birdie pounded Billy on the back, expelling the seawater, and then she was shushing him against her chest. India had hated Birdie in that moment, had hated that Birdie was the one to pull Billy out of the ocean, to save his life. And India had loved her, too. She had loved her with a depth and passion that she couldn’t explain. When no one else was there, Birdie was there.

The screaming continued. India went downstairs.

Birdie was pouring herself a glass of Sancerre when the screaming started. At first, she didn’t know what on earth… so she walked out to the edge of the bluff. It sounded like Chess and Tate. Could it be? She saw them at the bottom of the steps. She heard Tate say, I hate you!

Birdie turned and walked back to the house. With each step, her heart shrank. It was awful to hear her daughters speak to each other like that. It felt as bad as it must feel for a child to hear his parents fighting. At least she and Grant had never fought in front of the children. There wasn’t a lot they could be proud of, but they could be proud of that.

India was standing at the picnic table as Birdie approached. She reached out for Birdie. Wordlessly, they embraced. Birdie smelled India’s musky scent; she felt the bristles of India’s short hair and the soft skin of her cheek.

They separated. India handed Birdie her glass of wine and then offered her a cigarette.

“Thank you,” Birdie whispered.

“You’re welcome,” India whispered back.

CHESS

Nick and I had agreed: Clean break with Michael first. Clean, meaning I was not to mention Nick. This left me with no reason to break the engagement other than the stark and unapologetic I’m not in love with you anymore.

My conversation with Michael, which was a series of conversations, went something like this:

Me (crying): “I can’t marry you.”

“What?”

“I can’t marry you.” (I had to say everything six or seven times for it to sink in.)

“Why not? What happened?”

“What happened” was the big question-put to me by Michael, my mother, my father, my sister, by Evelyn, by my friends, by my assistant. When Michael called Nick to tell him the engagement was off, I wonder if Nick said, “What happened?” I was pretty sure he didn’t say that, but I didn’t know for sure. We had agreed not to speak again until the smoke had cleared.

“Nothing ‘happened,’ ” I said. “I just don’t feel the same way anymore.”

“Why not?” Michael said. “I don’t get it. Did I do something wrong? Did I say something wrong?”

“No, no, no,” I said. I didn’t want to make this his fault. The only thing he had done “wrong” was to propose in the public way that he did. It forced me to say yes. But I could have undone the proposal immediately after accepting; the knot had been loose at that point. No plans had been made, no bridesmaids asked, no deposits plunked down. I could have asked for time, then more time, and slipped out.

“I should never have said yes.”

“Because you didn’t love me even then?” Michael asked. “You never loved me?”

“I loved you. I love you now.”

“Then marry me.”

What I didn’t say was this: I don’t love you enough and I don’t love you the right way. If I marry you, bad things will happen. Maybe not right away, but down the road. We will be at a family gathering and I will stare longingly at Nick. I will bump into him behind the shed in your parents’ backyard, where one of our kids has thrown his Frisbee, and he will kiss me. And then, as we drive back into the city, I will be moody, and when we get home, I will pack my bags. Or I will have a full-blown affair with someone who reminds me of Nick but who doesn’t have your best interest at heart the way that Nick does. This man will steal me away; he will steal your house and your children. You will be left with much less than you have now.

What I did say was: “I can’t.”

“You can.”

“All right, then I won’t.”

He didn’t understand. Nobody understood. Michael and I were so perfect together. We liked the same things; we seemed so happy. People fell into two categories: Those who understood the intangible quality of love and thought I was smart to get out while I could. And those who didn’t understand the intangible quality of love. These people looked at Michael and me and saw a match-perfect on paper!-and thought I was making a whopping, self-destructive mistake.

I explained myself until there was nothing left inside me except for the nugget of truth that I would not reveal: I loved Nick.

Michael suspected someone else. He asked me over and over again in every conversation: “Is there someone else?”

“No,” I said.

And this was true. Nick wasn’t mine in any real sense. He had no claims on me, nor I on him. But I knew he was waiting.

We talked after about ten days. I gave him the rundown, and he gave me the rundown. Because Michael wasn’t only talking to me; he was talking to Nick.

Nick said, “Man, this is tough. This is weighing on my soul.”

I said, “What should we do?”

He said, “I’m leaving for Toronto to make this album on June tenth. I want you to come with me.”

“Come with you?”

“Come to Toronto with me. Live with me. Let’s find out if this thing is real.”

It meant leaving my job. It meant leaving New York. The job was easy enough. I had been food editor for three years; what had been the most exciting challenge of my life was now a spin on the lazy Susan. January/February: comfort foods. March/April: lighten up. May: foreign issue. June: garden fresh. July: BBQ. August: picnic. September: football tailgates. October: harvest flavors. November: Thanksgiving. December: Christmas/Hanukkah. I was ready to hop off.

We put the July issue to bed early, finishing at two o’clock. It was a lovely spring day and I gave my assistant, Erica, the rest of the day off. Then I walked into the office of my managing editor, David Nunzio, and told him I was leaving the magazine. From there, I walked to the office of the editor in chief, Clark Boyd, with David Nunzio trailing behind me saying he hoped I wasn’t serious, I couldn’t just leave, boom, like that, and what could they do to get me to stay? Did I want more money? I told Clark Boyd that I was leaving.

“Leaving?” he said.

“I’m done,” I said. “I quit.”

Both Clark Boyd and David Nunzio studied me for a moment, as if realizing at the same time that I might not be in my right mind. Indeed, some essential part of me was missing; I loved this job, I was good at it, and yet here I was, walking away.

Clark said, “I know you’ve been through a rough time…”

I laughed, but the laugh sounded like a hiccup. I wasn’t even getting the laugh right. But I found it funny that Clark Boyd would have any inkling about my broken engagement, although of course the offices of Glamorous Home, just like any other workplace, was a nest of gossip and rumors. I had tried to keep it under wraps; I hadn’t taken a single personal call.

“This has nothing to do with…,” I said. Then I stopped. I didn’t owe them an explanation.

“If you need time…,” Clark said.

“I’m done,” I said. “Finished. I’ll get you a letter of resignation.” Although this seemed such a stupid formality. I just wanted to walk free.

Once I was down on the street, I felt better. I watched the other New Yorkers in their spring suits and high heels carrying bags from Duane Reade and Barnes and Noble, and I thought, Okay, what now?

Nick and Michael were going rock climbing in Moab over Memorial Day weekend. Nick was going to tell him. He had to tell him because I was coming to Toronto. I wanted to travel to Canada secretly. Michael didn’t need to know yet; it would be wiser to give him time, to let him start dating again. But Nick was a straight shooter, and Michael was his brother. Nick would tell him when they were alone in the desert. Michael could yell as loudly as he wanted; he could throw punches. Nick would take them.

It was the ultimate gamble. I was afraid that was what appealed about it to Nick. He never lost at cards, but what if he lost here?

“What are you going to say?” I asked him.

“The truth,” Nick said. “That I love you. That I’ve loved you from the first second I saw you.”

I had sublet my apartment to a friend of Rhonda’s from the New School (that apartment was my baby, so I couldn’t let it go) and packed my things and arrived on my mother’s doorstep just about the same time that Michael and Nick were landing in Utah. I wasn’t doing well. I was anxious, nervous, morose. I couldn’t imagine being Nick, nor could I imagine being Michael. I tried to throw my phone away, but my mother picked it from the trash, thinking I would thank her later.

I slept most of the weekend. I hid behind Vogue; I tried to read a novel, but the story of my own life kept inserting itself in the pages. I tried to remember who I had been before meeting the Morgan brothers. Where was the happy girl who had walked into the Bowery Ballroom that October night? I tried to come up with a plan; I had always been big on making a plan and sticking to it. I would go to Toronto, leave for Tuckernuck for two weeks with my mother and sister (I would tell them then), and then return to Toronto. And if the thing turned out to be real, if I was in love, if I was happy, I would go with Nick on tour. And do what for money? Freelance? Start a novel? It sounded so cliché. It sounded so midlife crisis. I was only thirty-two.

When it happened, Nick called his parents first, me second. On the phone, his voice was calm; it was dispassionate. I didn’t understand this. I still don’t. Robin, my therapist, said he was most likely in shock.

In shock.

“Michael’s dead,” Nick said. “He fell. He woke up this morning at dawn and went climbing alone. He wasn’t harnessed properly. He fell.”

I didn’t ask. I knew. I didn’t ask.

Nick said, “I told him last night. He seemed fine with it. Angry, really fucking angry, yep, he punched a hole in the hotel wall, right through the plaster, and I thought, Okay, that’s a start. I told him the truth: We had kissed, but only kissed. I told him if I could change how I felt, I would, and I knew you would, too, but that we couldn’t change it. It was there, it existed. I had big, scary feelings for you, and you had feelings for me. Yep, he said, he understood. We went out to a bar, drank beers, did shots of tequila, ate burgers. He got drunk and I let him. Why not? He was handling it okay, he was being a really good fucking sport, a gentleman as ever. We walked back to the hotel, he asked me if I hated him because things had always come easier for him, and I said, ‘No, Mikey, I don’t hate you. That’s not what this is about, man.’

“He asked me if I hated him because of the punch he’d thrown years ago, the punch that broke my nose. That fight had been over a girl, too, a girl at school named Candace Jackson. He’d won that fight and he’d won Candace. And I said, ‘No, man, it’s not about Candace or my nose.’

“He said, ‘Okay, I believe you.’

“And then in the morning, he headed out to climb in Labyrinth by himself. It wasn’t safe to climb Labyrinth alone and he wasn’t harnessed properly.”

Nick broke down crying. “Chess,” he said. “Chess.”

“I know,” I said. “Jesus, I know.”

“I told my parents he wasn’t harnessed properly,” Nick said. “But Chess?”

“What?” I said. “What?”

“He wasn’t harnessed at all.”

Michael hadn’t died because his safety equipment failed. He had died because he went climbing without safety equipment.

The difference between these two realities, between the accidental and the intentional, was monstrous. It was the monstrous secret that now bonded me to Nick.

Chess closed the notebook. Her confession ended there. At the funeral, Nick stood on the altar and said to everyone in the church, He really loved you, Chess. He hadn’t said, I really love you, Chess. He may have felt it, Chess knew he felt it, and wherever he was-in Toronto still, or on the road somewhere-he felt it right now the way she did, like an arrow shot through her from front to back, pain, longing, love, regret. But he didn’t say it because Michael was his brother, now dead, and to say the truth out loud would be profane.

Tate took the Scout and disappeared in a cloud of dust and a spray of gravel. India and Chess sat at the picnic table while Birdie made dinner.

Chess said, “She’ll never speak to me again.”

India said, “Oh, you’ll be surprised.”

Tate missed dinner. She stayed out until sunset; she stayed out until dark. Birdie and India and Chess sat on the screened-in porch, Birdie doing her needlepoint, India doing her crossword puzzles, Chess pretending to read War and Peace, but really she was trying not to scratch her face and pretending not to listen for the car.

Chess said, “She can’t stay out all night.”

India said, “Don’t worry, she’ll be back. Getting some time away will be good for her. I’m sure she’s doing some thinking. I’m sure she regrets the things she said to you.”

But Chess knew she didn’t regret the things she’d said. She had been waiting her whole life to say them. Chess, by virtue of being who she was, had always outshone and overshadowed Tate. She had stunted Tate’s growth. But she had not done so on purpose, and she certainly hadn’t meant to pose a threat with Barrett.

Birdie sighed. “I wish Grant were here.”

Chess went to bed before Tate got home. She laid her confession on Tate’s pillow.

When Chess woke up, Tate’s bed was empty. It hadn’t been slept in and the confession was right where Chess had left it.

Chess went to the bathroom and peered out the window. The Scout was in the driveway.

Chess slipped downstairs, her heart tiptoeing. Chess was afraid of her own sister. She felt guilty for years and years of infractions, involuntary as they may have been. She wanted absolution; she needed Tate’s unconditional love, but it had been retracted. I hate you! You make me wish I had never been born! So Chess was toxic after all, as she feared when they started this trip. Chess had been slowly, silently poisoning Tate’s drinking water, polluting her atmosphere. You suck up all the air and I can’t breathe! This, Chess thought, was the awful end. She could lose Michael, she could lose Nick-they were boys-but she could not lose her sister.

When Chess got downstairs, she saw the scratchy crocheted afghan spread out over the ass-tearing green couch.

“Did she…?”

“She slept on the couch,” Birdie said. Chess couldn’t tell what Birdie thought about this.

“Did she say anything?”

Birdie held out a plate with two eggs over easy and a piece of wheat toast, lavishly buttered. Chess accepted it.

“She’s still pretty angry,” Birdie said.

“I didn’t do anything, Birdie,” Chess said. She wanted her mother to understand this. “I’m not out to steal Barrett away from her.”

“Oh, heavens, I know,” Birdie said. “And she knows that, too. I think she’s dealing with older issues.”

Birdie wasn’t helping set Chess’s mind at ease. Birdie and Tate had always been closer than Birdie and Chess. Tate courted Birdie in a way that Chess found unnecessary. But right now, she realized, it would be nice to have her mother on her side.

“I guess,” Chess said.

“Your sister has been jealous of you your whole life,” Birdie said. “Just the way I’ve been jealous of India.”

“Jealous of me?” India said, descending the stairs. “What the hell are you talking about?”

A few minutes later, a young man appeared in the doorway.

“Is this the Tate house?” he asked. He was about nineteen or twenty and he looked enough like a young Barrett Lee that Chess blinked in surprise. The blond hair flopping in his eyes, the lean build, the visor, the sunglasses, the flip-flops.

“Yes!” Birdie said.

“I’m Trey Wilson,” the boy said. “I work for Barrett Lee.”

India said, “You could be his stunt double.”

Birdie said, “Where’s Barrett?”

“He’s at another job,” Trey said. “So he sent me. I’ll be doing deliveries from now on. He said I’m supposed to get your trash and your laundry and the… list?”

Birdie said, “I’m confused.”

At that second, Tate walked in. She looked at Trey and did a double take; then she stormed up the stairs. Trey gathered a dripping bag of ice and a bag of groceries from the picnic table.

Chess took the ice. “Barrett has another job, so he sent Trey. Trey is going to be coming from now on.”

“But what about Barrett?” Birdie said.

“He’s gone!” a voice from upstairs shouted.

INDIA

India missed Barrett more than she expected she would. The new kid was cute-he looked enough like Barrett to be his long-lost little brother-but he didn’t connect with people the way Barrett did. Trey Wilson was a kid who could drive a boat. He didn’t care about Tuckernuck and he didn’t care about them. There was no history and no intrigue. It was too bad, India thought, that they had to end the vacation this way.

There had been only one time that India could remember when Chuck Lee had failed to appear, and that had been India’s fault. It was the summer after Bill had killed himself; India had come to Tuckernuck as usual, but from the beginning her heart wasn’t in it. She had two of the three boys with her; Billy had taken a counselor job at a basketball camp at Duke for the summer. Birdie and Grant and the kids were there, and they went through the motions of doing the same things-the driving lessons, the clambake, the walks to North Pond and East Pond-but India always felt like she was watching from half a mile away. Chuck Lee had been the one coming twice a day then, though he frequently had Barrett with him, in training. When Chuck came alone, he always said something nice to India, complimented her hair or earrings, told her she was getting tan; on several occasions, they shared a cigarette down on the beach. In those days, there was no smoking up at the house because Grant hated the smell. Chuck never asked about what had happened to Bill, though India assumed he knew. Once, he picked a perfect sand dollar up off the beach and gave it to her. He said, “Here. Tuckernuck souvenir.” India had kept the sand dollar-she still had it-because Chuck had given it to her and Chuck had been the first man she’d ever noticed, back when she still wore a training bra. She had thought that maybe-just maybe-something would happen that summer, but she was too buried to make a move, and Chuck had a wife on the other side of the water. Eleanor, her name was, Barrett’s mother, Chuck’s wife of a million years, a real battle-ax, he said, whatever that meant.

Near the end of their stay, Chuck showed up with bluefish fillets that he had caught; he presented them to India in a heavy-duty Ziploc bag, and India could tell by the set of his shoulders, and by the way he pretended it was no big deal, that it was a big deal. India acted very grateful. But the bluefish fillets were a lurid red, they were slick and oily, and India, as well as everyone else in the family, abhorred bluefish. India thanked Chuck profusely and promised they would grill the fish for dinner that night. Chuck seemed pleased by this, as pleased as he ever got, with the touch of a smile lifting the cigarette in his mouth.

“All right, then, good,” he said. “I’m glad I brought them.”

As soon as Chuck was gone, India threw the bluefish fillets out on the bluff, and the seagulls swooped in to devour them.

The next morning, India made a point of raving about how delicious the bluefish had been. Again, Chuck gave the half smile. And not five minutes later, India’s youngest son, Ethan, came out, and when Chuck asked him how he liked the fish, he said, “Mom threw the fish out on the bluff and the seagulls ate it.”

India was mortified. She remembered her face burning; she remembered being at a complete loss for words. Chuck wouldn’t look at her. He collected the trash and left without the list. He didn’t come that afternoon nor the following morning. Grant was bellowing about his Wall Street Journal, and India kept to her room, watching out the window, like the old Nantucket widows waiting for their husbands to return from the sea. She couldn’t believe how bad she felt. She had already suffered through the worst of the worst; she hadn’t believed that anything else could affect her. But she cared about Chuck. She explained to Birdie what had happened, and this helped because Birdie understood how India felt about Chuck Lee; Birdie felt pretty much the same way herself. Chuck Lee had been the romantic hero of their youth. Birdie and India fretted together; they worried he would never come back.

He did eventually return, but India sensed things had changed. He didn’t like her anymore. Didn’t he realize that she had only lied to spare his feelings? She couldn’t confront him about it; he wasn’t the kind of man you could apologize to. He was the kind of man you tried to keep happy because one slip and…

Well, it was never the same. There were no more compliments, no more shared cigarette breaks, no more offerings of sand dollars or fish. They left that summer, and when they returned the following summer, Barrett was doing the deliveries.

And now Barrett, too, was gone. India couldn’t help feeling a bit bereft.

On the afternoon of the second day, Trey Wilson appeared with a package for India. He wasn’t even sure which one of the women India was, so it was fortunate that India was sitting at the picnic table, smoking. Chess was down on the beach, Tate had driven the Scout to North Pond-the two girls still weren’t speaking-and Birdie had gone for “a walk,” which meant she was off to either secretly console Tate or make another one of her clandestine phone calls.

“India?” Trey said. He was so young that he rightfully should have called her “Mrs. Bishop,” but they were on Tuckernuck, where things were insistently casual, and the kids’ friends had always called her “India” anyway. Trey held out the small, flat package to her.

“For me?” India said. She put on Bill’s reading glasses. The familiar handwriting, the absurdly sparse address. “Well, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Trey Wilson said. He smiled at her. “What should I do with the groceries?”

“Just leave them on the counter, thanks,” India said.

He did this, then loitered at her elbow as if he expected to be tipped. He didn’t expect to be tipped, did he? India hadn’t touched money in weeks; she wasn’t even sure where her wallet was. She smiled at him, and he said, “Do you have anything for me?”

What was he asking?

“Trash?” he said. “Laundry? The list?”

“Oh!” India jumped up. Barrett had emptied the trash automatically, and he had taken the list from its usual spot-under the jar of shells and beach glass on the kitchen counter. India wasn’t the woman of the house, but it was falling to her to teach this young man the ropes. Was there really any point, with only five days left?

She said, “The trash is here.” She lifted out the liner and cinched its yellow plastic handle; then she set in a new liner, even though this was something Barrett had always done himself. “And the list is always kept right here.”

Trey nodded glumly and accepted the list.

“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”

“Thank you,” India said.

The boy loped away. India missed the real Barrett. And she missed Chuck Lee, the original man of her dreams.

At the picnic table, she turned the package in her hands.

She wanted a glass of wine or a cigarette-or preferably both-but there wasn’t time. The others might appear at any second. So open it, open it!

It was a painting. Rather, it was part of a painting, part of one of the nudes of India, which Lula had cut into a five-by-five-inch square and reframed. India studied the small canvas; she turned it in the sun. Then she got it: it was the curve of India’s hip, delicately shaded to accentuate the sensual sweep toward what lay south. India immediately knew which canvas Lula had cut up: it was the magnificent canvas that Spencer Frost had bought for the school. India gasped at the thought of that breathtaking painting now vandalized; Lula had snipped the hip from the painting like a woman clipping a coupon. But the act was anything but casual, India knew. Lula would have had to lift the painting off the wall and carry it to her studio. This would have been a fairly easy thing to do undetected; in the summertime, the halls of PAFA were deserted, and the school had zero budget for security measures for student work. Although Lula had withdrawn from the school, she wouldn’t have to turn in her keys or vacate her studio space until mid-August.

India pictured Lula’s studio: She had one of the coveted corner units, with a big window looking south over the city. She had a battered leather sofa, which was smudged with paint, and an old steamer trunk that she used as a coffee table. She had a half fridge, a full-size drafting table that she had salvaged from outside a big architecture firm, and stacks and stacks of art books and magazines-Vogue, Playboy, Nylon. She had a docking station for her iPod, and a makeshift closet, where she kept clothes so that she didn’t have to go back to her apartment to change before she went out at night. The studio was her holy space. Lula had laid the canvas on the drafting table, perhaps, and studied it to decide where and how much to cut. Her procedure would have been as serious as a surgeon’s. In cutting the painting, she was cutting herself. What she had sent, India realized, was her own version of van Gogh’s ear. It was love and it was insanity.

In some ways, the small painting reminded India of the details of paintings shown in art history texts-portions of paintings were zoomed in on to show the reader the exquisite brushwork or technique. But in another way this small piece became something else. It could be the inside of a shell, or the swirl of a sand dune. Lula was, as ever, a genius. This small painting was its own whole.

There was a tiny white envelope with the painting, the kind used by florists when delivering flowers. India ripped it open. One word.

Try?

The question mark got her. Lula was asking, begging, pleading.

Try? Could she try?

Barrett kept a tool box in the bottom of the downstairs closet. India raided it and found a hammer and a nail. Upstairs in her bedroom, she pounded the nail into the wall. Her first try punched the nail right through the plaster. She had to find a joist. She tried another spot, and the nail met with resistance. India hammered; the walls of the house shook, and India imagined them folding like a house of cards. She got the nail in, however, and she hung the painting. It was perfect here, she decided. It looked like the curve of Bigelow Point, or like the peachy inside of a whelk shell that the kids had picked off Whale Shoal.

She regarded Roger. “What do you think?” she asked.

His seaweed hair waved in the breeze.

BIRDIE

From the tip of Bigelow Point, she called Grant.

“He’s in a meeting,” his secretary, Alice, said. “Shall I have him call you back?”

“No,” Birdie said. “That’s okay.”

She hung up the phone, immediately disenchanted. Now see? This was the Grant Cousins she had known for thirty years. In a meeting. On the eighth fairway. On a conference call with Washington, Tokyo, London. At dinner at Gallagher’s. Unavailable. Can I have him call you back? Can I take a message? Yes, tell him I need him. Tate pushed another child off the slide and that child has broken her arm. It will be a miracle if the parents don’t sue. It’s urgent. I’m miscarrying, again, on my way to the hospital. Please make sure he picks the girls up at preschool. It’s an emergency. Tell him I’d like to speak to him about Ondine Morris. Someone overheard her praising Grant’s fine physique in the ladies’ locker room at the club. Have him call me immediately. I’m bored, I’m lonely, I should never have left my job at Christie’s, I loved carpets, the stories they tell, the hands that knot them, he knew that. Why did he ask me to quit? Tell him earning ten million dollars a year doesn’t mean he can effectively ignore his children. They’re clamoring for him.

I am clamoring for him. Please have him call me.

Birdie wanted to talk to Grant about the girls. He was their father. But when he learned the girls were fighting, what would he say? Would he be as concerned as Birdie was? Or would he wait, as always, for Birdie to tell him how to feel? She had thought, in the weeks since she’d been here, that she’d sensed a change in Grant. An emerging sensitivity. He had been sweet and attentive on the phone, supportive about her travails with Hank; he had been wistful and romantic. He had sent those flowers and worded the card perfectly. Birdie found it hard to admit, but she had been entertaining notions of being with Grant again. She would never, ever live with him, but they could be friends. They could do things together, alone, and with the children. She had thought she was immune to the old hurt. He’s in a meeting. Shall I have him call you back?

But she wasn’t.

She stumbled across Tate by accident, although Tuckernuck was small and Birdie knew where to look. At first she guessed Tate would be at North Pond, and when she wasn’t there, Birdie guessed East Pond. East Pond was smaller than North Pond and not quite as beautiful, although it had its own charms; the part of the pond that was farthest inland was bordered by fragrant Rosa rugosa and beach plum. Birdie guessed that Tate was in the mood for East Pond, feeling smaller and not quite as beautiful herself.

Birdie was right. Tate was there, with her earbuds on. She was propped on her elbows, but when she saw Birdie, she fell back flat. Birdie had half a mind to keep walking. Tate didn’t want to see her, and Birdie didn’t belong in the middle of whatever was happening between her daughters. When the girls were teenagers, Birdie had such a hard time with their squabbling that she went to see a family counselor, who advised Birdie to let the girls work it out themselves. Had she listened? No. They were her daughters; she wanted them to love each other. She had brokered the peace treaties then, and here she was, doing it now.

She marched over and sat next to Tate. She touched Tate’s arm and Tate removed an earbud and sat up halfway.

“Hi,” Birdie said.

Tate said, “Birdie, don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t try to make me feel better. Because it’s not going to work. This isn’t something a mother can fix.”

“Okay,” Birdie said.

“I miss Barrett,” Tate said. “I sent him away and now I want him back.”

“I’m sure he misses you, too,” Birdie said.

“You never thought we had a chance,” Tate said. “But I did. Because I love him. I’ve loved him forever.”

“It wasn’t that I thought you didn’t have a chance…”

“You thought it was a pipe dream. A stupid summer fantasy.”

“Tate, don’t be mean.”

“You’re the one who’s mean. You and my sister.”

“Tate.”

“I told Chess I hated her, and I meant it. I hate her. Everything I wanted in life, she took away.”

“That’s not true,” Birdie said.

Tate pressed her lips together, and Birdie saw her as a little girl, stubborn, defiant, angry. She had always been full of love, but she had also always been angry. Nothing Birdie had done in the past thirty years had been able to change that.

Birdie stood up and wiped her palms on her shorts. “I’m going to let you girls work this out yourselves,” she said.

Tate muttered something as she flipped onto her stomach, but Birdie didn’t hear what it was and she wouldn’t ask Tate to repeat herself as she might have done when Tate was a teenager. But as Birdie walked the path back to the house, she wondered what Tate had said. Probably “Whatever,” or “Yeah, right.” Or maybe she had said, “Thank you,” which was the best that Birdie could hope for.

TATE

That night, Tate left the house during the communal screened-in porch hour and descended the stairs to the beach. The moon, which had been fat and full the night of the bonfire, was now a waning crescent, which made Tate sad. Tomorrow there would be four days left, and the next day three-and then they would start to pack up. Across the water, the lights of Nantucket twinkled.

Barrett!

What was he doing tonight? Was he at home with the kids, or out with Anita at some fancy benefit because Roman was stuck in the city?

He had to be missing her. He had to be thinking about her. He was in love with her. He had told Chess he was in love with her (unless Chess was lying, but even she wouldn’t cross that line).

Prayer worked, she reminded herself. And so she prayed. Please please please please please please please.

Tomorrow, Tate decided, he would come.

The next morning, Tate was standing on the beach when Girlfriend pulled into the cove.

Trey was driving the boat.

Tate thought, So much for prayer.

She said, “How’s Barrett doing?”

Trey shrugged. “He’s busy.”

A few minutes later, she knocked on Aunt India’s door.

“Entrez!” India said.

Tate stepped in and noticed something different right away. A painting. A small, square painting on the wall.

“What is this?” Tate asked.

“The inside of a whelk shell,” India said. She was on her bed, smoking and reading.

“Oh,” Tate said. “Yeah, I guess I can see that. Who did it?”

“A student at PAFA,” India said. She exhaled smoke. “Are you visiting for a reason or is this a purely social call?”

“A reason,” Tate said. She wasn’t sure she could go through with this. She didn’t like asking people for help. People asked her for help. That was her job; that was how she ran her life.

“Shoot,” India said.

Tate sank onto the bed. The mattress was truly unusual. It was like it was filled with quicksand; you sat on it and it sucked you in. Tate was sure that if they ever cut it open, they would find it was filled with something bizarre and horrifying, like the blood plasma of all her dead ancestors.

“Barrett has this client, Anita,” Tate said.

“I met her.”

“She wants to buy Roger,” Tate said.

“Yes, I know,” India said. “Barrett told me. Fifty thousand dollars.”

“So you told him it wasn’t for sale, and he told Anita. And Anita got mad. And she pulled a power play where she offered Barrett a full-time job, working for her only, with a salary he couldn’t turn down. He owes her a bunch of money anyway, from before, when his wife was sick and she needed private nurses.”

“Oh,” India said. “I didn’t know any of this.”

“Which is why I’m telling you,” Tate said. “That’s why Barrett doesn’t come anymore. That’s why he sends Trey.”

“Ah,” India said.

“And he doesn’t come for me because I got angry that he was working for Anita.” Tate stared at India’s new painting. There was something compelling about it. “I guess you could say we broke up.”

“Thank you for explaining,” India said. “I wondered, but it’s really not my place to ask. I’m just the aunt.”

“No, you’re way more than that,” Tate said. “You’re one of us.”

“Well, thank you for saying that. And you know I love you and Chess like my own children.”

Tate nodded. She swallowed. Her throat was coated with a film of despair. She said, “So anyway, I came up here to see if you would reconsider selling Roger.”

India’s eyes widened, but more in recognition, Tate hoped, than in shock or anger.

Tate said, “I thought if I went back to where the problem started, I could fix it. If you sold Roger to Anita, Anita would leave Barrett alone.”

India said, “I want you to hold Roger.”

Tate picked Roger up off the dresser-but carefully! He was delicate and valuable. He was whisper-light, made of driftwood and dried seaweed, beach glass and shells. He had style, though. His hair looked like dreadlocks and his eyes were round, like funky Elton John glasses.

“How did Uncle Bill get the glass and shells to stick?” Tate asked.

“Chuck Lee lent him a glue gun. Secretly, I guess. And then he filched the electricity off the generator. Bill was resourceful.”

Tate stroked the driftwood, which had grayed over the years, making Roger seem as if he were aging like a real person.

“Your Uncle Bill made him for me after we had a terrible fight,” India said.

Tate nodded. A terrible fight.

“I can’t sell him,” India said. “He doesn’t belong in Anita Fullin’s house or in a museum. He doesn’t even belong at home with me in Pennsylvania. He belongs here, in this house. He will stay here-forever, I hope. And that’s the secret about certain pieces of art. They have their own integrity, and we, as humans, must respect that.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “I would do anything for you, Tate. And I know you love Barrett and I know you’re hurting, but I can tell you that selling Roger to Anita Fullin isn’t going to bring about the kind of change you’re looking for. Only you can do that.”

Tate set Roger back on the dresser. Childishly, she felt hot tears of disappointment fill her eyes-like when she lost the hundred-yard dash at the Fairfield Regional Championships to Marissa Hart, whom she detested. Like when her father grounded her for a D in English and she missed seeing Bruce Springsteen at the Meadowlands. She hadn’t progressed emotionally since she was a teenager-that was the problem. She needed, somehow, to figure out how an adult woman would act.

“I know,” she said. “I just thought I’d ask.”

“I’m glad you asked,” India said. “I’m glad you feel you can come to me when you have a problem. And believe me, if I could help you, I would.”

Tate nodded. The fact that Aunt India was being so nice made things worse. When Tate stood up, her eyes were drawn to the painting. The inside of a whelk shell? Tate could see that, sort of, but to her, the pale, flesh-colored curve represented something else: loneliness, desolation.

CHESS

Tate hadn’t read the confession, and this was an infraction Chess couldn’t forgive. Tate had said she wanted to understand about “all that had happened,” and there it was, written down in minute detail, and yet Tate hadn’t even opened the front cover. She’d moved the journal to the dresser, but Chess could tell it hadn’t been opened.

There were only three days left. On the one hand, Chess was glad. She couldn’t stand the tension between her and her sister. They weren’t speaking except when absolutely necessary. Chess had accidentally opened the bathroom door while Tate was on the toilet, and Tate had barked, I’m in here!

And then at dinner, she said, Pass the salt.

The discord between Chess and Tate was a fog settling over the house. And yet Chess didn’t want to leave Tuckernuck. One thing had become true: she was safe here. She wondered if she could stay here alone, and if she did stay here alone, what would happen? She would become some kind of strange hermit, unwashed and unshaven, who talked to herself. But she could read and write and cook certain things; she could take up astronomy or fly-fishing. She could be self-sufficient, and after a while, she guessed, her memories of other people would fade away.

After dinner, Chess retreated to the attic. Tate had taken the Scout and gone to watch the sunset off the west bluff; Chess wanted to go, too, but hadn’t dared ask. She lay on her bed, knowing she should go downstairs to sit on the screened-in porch with her mother and her aunt, but she lacked the motivation. She shouldn’t be allowed to stay on this island by herself; it wasn’t healthy. She would have to go back to New York and start over. The mere thought exhausted her. She lay on her bed until the light faded and the evening purpled. Chess listened for the Scout pulling in. There was nothing but the thickening silence.

And then she heard a noise. A whooshing sound. A presence, there in the room. She knew what it was, somewhere around her head, the flap of black, scaly wings. She sat up in terror. Oh. My. God. Her whole life she had been afraid of this: evil black sacks unfolding into the vampire’s spawn. A bat! It flew past her head; she could feel the air from its beating wings. And then another one. There were two of them, diving for her.

Chess put her arms over her head. She considered crawling under the covers, but she didn’t want to trap herself. She needed to get out of the attic, but she was too terrified to move. Tate had always belittled Chess’s fear of the bats-first saying there were no bats, then saying that even if there were bats, they echolocate and would never brush Chess’s hair or face. But these bats must have been genetic mutants because they were going crazy; she could hear them keening, a sharp, high-pitched whine.

Chess didn’t know what to do, so she started to shriek. She shrieked at the top of her register. Aaaaaaaheeoweeee! Help me! Aaaaaaaaheeowee! She waved her arms over her head. Then she was afraid she might accidentally touch one. She didn’t want them near her with their beady eyes, their sharp little teeth, their creepy, black lace wings, which would cover her mouth and suffocate her. She screamed. The screaming felt good, letting it out, expressing not only her terror but her sadness and her anger. Aaaaaaaaaheeeowee! She shrieked until her throat was sore.

The door flew open and Tate burst in, wielding the broom from the kitchen. She was wearing work gloves, which she must have snatched from Barrett’s tool box. She had always told Chess that bats ate mosquitoes, not people, yet if she believed this, why was she wearing work gloves? Chess wanted work gloves; she wanted a suit of armor. Really, she thought, she had never been so glad to see her sister.

Tate swung at the bats with the broom. They flew around her, dodging her attacks. There was a third one now-Chess was able to open her eyes and see three bats!

Tate said, “I’m trying to encourage them toward the window.”

Chess nearly smiled. It was such a lovely word, “encourage,” when what it looked like was that Tate was trying to beat them to death. Chess remained huddled on the bed while Tate ran around the attic with the broom, swatting in the bats’ general direction. The one pathetically small window was open, but getting the bats to move toward it-toward open sky, night air, the all-you-can-eat mosquito buffet-didn’t seem to be working.

Tate said, “I have another idea.” And she left.

“Nooooooo!” Chess screamed. She tented her knees and hid her face, then covered her head with her hands, the preferred posture for most emergencies and natural disasters. “Tate! Taaaaaaaaaate!”

Tate returned with a long-handled net, the net their grandfather had used for fishing and crabbing. She ran around the room trying to scoop up the bats in the net, and as Chess watched her-Tate was still wearing the work gloves and now an ancient baseball cap from a tackle shop on Nantucket, probably long defunct-she realized that Tate was afraid of the bats, too. She was afraid! This made Chess feel better, and watching Tate chase the bats around the room with the net in what was clearly a fruitless endeavor suddenly seemed… funny. A chuckle erupted from Chess’s throat; then she laughed. She laughed and laughed until she was holding her stomach and hiccuping.

Tate glanced at her and stopped dead still. She dropped the net to the floor with a clatter. Then she came over to the bed and hugged Chess.

She said, “I give up. Let them come and get us.”

“Let them eat us,” Chess said.

“Maybe we’ll turn into vampires,” Tate said. “Vampires are very hot these days.”

They sat quietly, half-embracing, to see what would happen.

Chess whispered, “Where are Birdie and India?”

“On the porch,” Tate said. “I told them whatever it was, I’d take care of it.”

“Oh, you took care of it all right,” Chess said.

They were quiet. The bats seemed to calm down. They circled, they swooped, they did figure eights. They were graceful, Chess decided. The bats moved upward toward the ceiling, and then they would swoop down-one, two, three-in their own particular ballet. Their movements became hypnotic as Chess watched. What were they after? Chess wondered, though she knew the answer was prosaic: they were after bugs. The bats gathered in a cluster; for a split second, they seemed suspended in the hot attic air. And then, one by one, they discovered the open window, that square of opportunity, a gateway to their wildest dreams of freedom.

Chess and Tate stayed up most of the night. They were worried about the bats returning, so they closed the window and endured the stifling heat. Tate poked and prodded the far corners of the attic to make sure there were no more bats lurking. They were safe from bats.

Chess read Tate her confession by the beam of her flashlight, and Tate listened in rapt attention. It reminded Chess of long-ago years when she would read to Tate from their storybooks. Tate didn’t comment on what she heard; she might have been appalled, or she might have been accepting, Chess couldn’t tell. Tate just lay back with her eyes glued on Chess. The confession read like a story, a piece of fiction, and God, Chess wished, she wished, it were fiction.

After Chess shut the notebook and the truth was out, floating in the air around them, Chess said, “So what do you think?”

“What do you think?” Tate asked.

“I should have told Michael how I felt about Nick,” Chess said. “But I wasn’t sure my feelings were real, and since they were maybe not real, they were easy to hide.” She looked at Tate, and even in the near darkness, she saw a new expression on her sister’s face. Chess startled; it was almost like she was here in the attic with someone else. Tate looked serious; she looked thoughtful.

Tate said, “I know why you didn’t tell Michael. You didn’t want to. You liked Michael. You loved him. You didn’t want to be the person who had an unshakable obsession with his younger rock-star brother. You never wanted to veer off-course, Chess. You got into this pattern, this mold, with Mom and Dad and everyone else, where everything you did was right. Michael was the kind of man you expected to marry. He fit right into your perfect life. If you had married Michael-do I even need to say it?-you would have had a six-thousand-square-foot house, a manicured lawn, gorgeous children-and you would have been miserable. You didn’t betray Michael by not telling him about Nick. You betrayed yourself. You didn’t want to be the person who had feelings for Nick, but guess what, Chess? You were that person. You are that person.”

Chess stared at the woman lying across the bed, who may or may not have been her sister.

“You’re right.”

“I know I’m right.”

Chess pinched the bridge of her nose. “I can tell you one thing, little sister.” She said “little sister” with irony; in this instance, Tate was most definitely the big sister. “Love is not worth it.”

“Ah,” Tate said. “That’s where you’re wrong.”

TATE

She wrote on the list for Barrett, which was now the list for Trey: Don’t leave without me!

And when she got back from running, Trey, dutiful young man, was waiting for her on the beach. She hadn’t said why she was going to Nantucket, and he didn’t ask. He wasn’t curious; he didn’t care. This was for the best.

He had learned-from Barrett-that Tate was a Springsteen fan. And guess what? So was he! He wanted to talk about the Boss, the new albums, the old albums. This kind of conversation used to delight Tate, but now she could barely find a word to say about how much she loved “Jungleland” and found it a work of genius on the scale of West Side Story. The things that used to matter, the person she used to be, had been usurped. She had room in her mind only for Barrett.

Love is worth it.

After they arrived and anchored and after they paddled the dinghy to shore (it physically pained Tate to do these things with Trey instead of Barrett), Trey asked Tate if she needed a ride anywhere.

“I have Born to Run in my truck,” he said.

She accepted a ride to town and they listened to “Thunder Road” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” Trey tapped the steering wheel and bobbed his head like the dedicated fan he was. Tate asked to be dropped on Main Street in front of the pharmacy.

He said, “How are you getting back?”

She said, “Taxi. I’ll be at Madaket Harbor at quarter to four.”

He gave her the thumbs-up and grinned. In his mind, they were buddies.

Main Street was bustling. There were people everywhere: two lovely ladies outside Congdon and Coleman Insurance selling raffle tickets for a needlepoint rug benefiting the Episcopal church, a swarm of people surrounding the Bartlett Farm truck buying zucchini and snapdragons and corn on the cob, tourists with maps and strollers and shopping bags. Everyone looked happy. Had everyone on this street found love, then, except for her?

She wandered through town and stopped twice for directions to Brant Point. Gradually the streets became more residential, and then Tate found the familiar corner and she turned right. Inside, she was quiet, which surprised her. She was a calm, cool pond.

She found Anita’s house with ease; it was impossible to forget. She peeked through the rose-draped trellis. The lawn and front gardens were peaceful and serene except for the whirring of the sprinklers.

Okay, so now what? Should she knock? Should she walk in?

She didn’t see Barrett’s truck. Was he running one of the countless errands that Anita Fullin and her house required? Tate studied the picturesque front of the house-the gray-shingled expanse, the many white-trimmed windows, the fat, happy hydrangea bushes with their periwinkle blossoms.

Tate opened the gate and marched to the front door. She was here to talk to Barrett; she wouldn’t leave until she had. For Tate, men would forever fall into two categories: Barrett, and those who were not Barrett. She knocked with purpose. She waited. She thought about Chess and all that had happened. Chess believed that her chance to be happy was over; her system had crashed and couldn’t be saved or restored. Michael was dead; Nick wouldn’t be coming back. She would, Tate pointed out, meet someone else down the road.

Yes, Chess said. But it won’t be Nick.

And Tate conceded: it wouldn’t be Nick.

And Michael is dead.

Tate said, Michael’s death was an accident.

Chess said, It was a suicide.

Tate said, You don’t believe that?

Chess said, Yes, I do believe that.

Tate was ready for anything when Anita Fullin opened the door. Or so she thought.

Anita Fullin was wearing an orange bikini. Her hair was in a bun and her face was slick with sunscreen. She had been lying in the sun. Through the house, Tate could see an orange towel draped over a chaise on the back deck; she could see a Bose radio on the table and a glass of white wine. Was this how Anita Fullin spent her days? It wasn’t fair of Tate to judge; she had spent the past twenty-five days doing pretty much the same thing.

Anita’s expression was mildly pleasant, expectant, wary. Why was her sunbathing being interrupted?

She doesn’t recognize me, Tate thought. She has no idea who I am.

Okay, this was infuriating. Her anger felt good; it felt like firepower.

She said, “Hey, Anita! Sorry to bother you. I’m looking for Barrett.”

Anita smiled manically, and then she laughed once, like a gunshot. “Ha!”

Oh, dear, Tate thought.

Anita said, “Would you like to come in and sit down?”

Tate took a breath. “No, thank you. I’m just looking for Barrett.”

Anita Fullin placed her index finger under her nose and inhaled. She said, “Well, you won’t find him here.”

“I won’t?”

“He left this morning.”

“Left… for where?”

“For where, indeed!” Anita Fullin said. “For his little business, for other clients, people who need him, he says. For his pathetic, lonely life, where he will never have the money to do anything interesting and never have the opportunity to grow into a real man. He left because he thinks I’m behaving inappropriately. I’m married, he says, and I’d better start acting like it or he’s going to call Roman and tattle on me like a six-year-old.” She let loose a trill of laughter, which fluttered like a flock of birds. “He thinks he can blackmail me. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

Tate took a step back. Anita snatched her arm. “Please come in. We’ll have a drink.”

“I can’t,” Tate said.

“Please?” Anita said. “I’m not the monster he makes me out to be.” She stepped back and opened the door a little wider, and Tate stepped over the threshold. Immediately she thought of Chess, doing what was expected of her instead of following her basic instincts. Tate knew better than to step into Anita’s home territory-but what did she do? She walked right in.

Anita seemed energized by Tate’s presence. She shut the door firmly behind her and said, “Come, come, sit right here and I’ll get you a glass of wine. Is chardonnay okay?”

“Um,” Tate said. It was not yet ten o’clock. “Do you have any iced tea?”

“Iced tea?” Anita said. She disappeared into the kitchen and came back a few seconds later with two glasses of wine. “Here you go,” she said brightly. “Please sit.”

Tate was perched tentatively on the arm of a chair, which she realized was quite rude, but that was all the commitment she was willing to give. She didn’t want to sit. Anita set the glasses of wine on the glass coffee table and plopped down ever so casually on the sofa, and what could Tate do? She had been raised by Birdie. She sat in the chair and smiled at Anita and said, “Your house is lovely.”

Anita picked up her wineglass. “Cheers!” she said. She reached out to clink Tate’s glass, forcing cheers upon her. That was fine, but Anita couldn’t make her drink. Tate brought the glass to her mouth. Anita was watching her. She took the tiniest sip, just enough to dampen her lips.

“You like it?” Anita said.

“Delicious,” Tate said.

Anita said, “You look nervous. Are you nervous?”

“Kind of,” Tate said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

“Oh!” Anita said. “You aren’t interrupting a thing. I was just relaxing in the sun. I’m really very lazy.” She smiled as she said this and Tate thought she was joking, so Tate laughed what she thought was the appropriate amount. But Anita set her wineglass down harshly on the glass table, and there was a noise like a dissonant bell. And Tate thought her laughing must have been inappropriate; she should have said something soothing instead, like, Well, you are on vacation. Tate wasn’t great with social cues despite Birdie’s tutelage. Anita said, “Roman thinks I’m completely useless, sitting here on Nantucket, going out for lunch, going out for dinner, spending his money, not working, not contributing to my local community or what he refers to as ‘the wider world.’ So we’ve separated, he’s in New York and I’m here, we’re no longer a couple, and that is fine with me.”

“Oh,” Tate said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Sorry?” Anita Fullin said. “Sorry?” She threw back some more wine and her hair fell into her face, and Tate wondered exactly how much Anita Fullin had had to drink that morning already. Had she poured a glass with her Grape-Nuts? “So of course what Roman doesn’t know, what I could never have told him, is that I had hopes for Barrett. I became very close with Barrett when his wife was dying and then even closer after she died. I lent him a lot of money, but that didn’t matter because I adore Barrett and would do anything for him. And then, just recently, last week, when I hired him to work for me exclusively, I thought it would be a good opportunity to make him into something.”

“Make him into something?” Tate said.

“Make him into a successful man,” Anita said. “Introduce him to the right people, find him a job…”

“He has a job,” Tate said. “He owns a business.”

Anita stared at Tate. Her face was tan and absolutely unlined. Her lipstick was perfect. “He can do more. He can be like Roman: An investment banker, a man of the world. A man with money and power. He deserves that. He deserves so much more than what’s befallen him.”

“You think so?” Tate said.

“Yes,” Anita said. She finished her wine. She stared at Tate’s untouched wine, and Tate nearly offered it to her. “I do.”

Something about the way Anita said these last two words made Tate realize that, for Anita, men fell into the same two categories: Barrett, and men who weren’t Barrett.

Anita said, “But he blew it today. He walked out on me. I’ve decided to give him until noon to come back. Otherwise I’m going to sit down and make the calls.”

“Make the calls?” Tate said.

“I’m going to call all of his clients and tell them what a selfish bastard he is. I am going to call all of my friends and have them call their friends. I’m going to repossess his boat. I’m going to speak to my attorney about the money he owes me. I’m going to cut off all his other options so he has no choice but to come back here.” She picked up her empty wineglass and stood. “I would have called you, too, but you don’t have a phone.” She smiled. “So it’s lucky you stopped by!”

Tate excused herself to use the ladies’ room. Anita repaired to the kitchen for more wine. Tate walked to the end of a long hallway, past the powder room, onto a sunporch. It didn’t have what she was looking for. She tried another door and found a sitting room with two yellow cats reclining on a love seat. Tate turned around and saw a set of back stairs. She climbed the stairs and crept around-master bedroom, guest room, guest room-until she found the study. The home office. She sat down at the desk in front of the computer and lightly tapped the keyboard. The screen jumped to life. Tate grinned; it was a good, expensive model, a Dell, one of Tate’s favorites. Tate felt like she was seeing an old friend. She checked out the configuration of the desktop and got to work. Her fingers flew. She could do this in her sleep. It was scary, really, but being a computer genius cut both ways. She heard Anita downstairs calling out, “Hello? Hello?” Tate scrambled to work faster and faster until she had the system on its knees; if she pushed one more button, she would wipe out the entire hard drive-all the documents, all the e-mails, all the pictures, all the music, everything. Wipe it out! Tate was giddy.

“Hello?” Anita called up the stairs. “Tate?”

Tate waggled her fingers in the air above the keyboard, a piece of personal theater she liked to use to remind herself of the witchcraft she was capable of. Just having the ability to visit a technical hurricane on Anita Fullin was good enough. Tate stood up from the desk. She experienced a bloom of unexpected satisfaction. Anita Fullin knew her name.

Tate descended the stairs. Anita was waiting at the bottom.

“I think you’d better go,” Anita said.

Tate held up her hands to show she hadn’t stolen anything. Upstairs, the computer waited, hanging by a thread. Maybe Anita Fullin would push the magic button herself.

“I think you’re right,” Tate said.

Tate walked down the hot street toward town. This was where Barrett was supposed to appear and scoop her up so they could drive off into the midday sun. He had quit Anita Fullin; he had set himself free. But where was he?

She bought two bottles of cold water in town and walked all the way back to Madaket Harbor. It was sunny and hot, and unlike on Tuckernuck, the bike path here was paved and populated; people zipped around Tate on bikes, chiming their bells. On your left! Cars zoomed past, and she thought each one might be Barrett. But no.

She reached Madaket Harbor at two o’clock. She bought a sandwich and another bottle of water at the Westender store, and she ate on the dock with her feet dangling in the water. She wanted to swim but hadn’t brought her suit. She considered jumping in in her shorts and T-shirt-but she was determined, from this point forward, to act like a grown woman. Not a woman like Anita Fullin or like Chess or like her mother or like Aunt India-but like the woman that was inside herself.

Then she thought, The grown woman inside me is hot and sticky. And she jumped in.

She was asleep on the deck in her drying clothes when Trey nudged her with his Top-Sider.

“Hey,” he said.

She opened her eyes, then closed them. When she opened them again, it would be Barrett standing over her, and not Trey. She understood then why Chess slept all the time: when life wasn’t going your way, it was much easier to snooze.

“Come on,” Trey said. “We’re going.”

Tate sat up, bleary eyed. Madaket Harbor was spread in front of her like a painting. Blue water, green eelgrass, white boats. Trey had a bag of ice and a bag of groceries; he was untying the dinghy. She stumbled down onto the beach. Her clothes were stiff with salt, and she didn’t even want to think about her hair.

They got situated in the boat, and Tate said, “Where is Barrett?”

Trey said, “He went to the airport to get the husband.”

“The husband?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Meaning Roman? I thought he was all done working for Anita.”

“He’ll never be done working for Anita,” Trey said.

Tate’s heart tumbled. This was probably right. Anita must have called him to lay down the ultimatum: Come back by noon or I will ruin you. And Barrett would have done the only thing he could and gone back. He had the kids to think of. He was like a bluefish that Anita had hooked painfully through the lip. No matter how hard he struggled, she wouldn’t release him.

When Tate got back to the house, she found Birdie, Aunt India, and Chess sitting at the picnic table, drinking Sancerre and eating Marcona almonds. Tate’s eyes welled up with grateful tears.

Birdie said, “How was your day?”

Tate said, “Awful.” And she sat down in the fourth spot, where she belonged.

Chess and Tate set the table. Normally, with only a couple of nights left, Birdie would throw together bizarre combinations of leftovers such as scrambled eggs with corn and tomatoes, but tonight they were having steaks, campfire potatoes, salad with buttermilk dressing, and rolls.

Chess set down the place mats and Tate followed behind her with the silverware. Chess said, “Did you find Barrett?”

“No,” Tate said.

“Are you okay?” Chess said.

“No,” Tate said.

Pssst. There was a noise like air leaking from a tire.

Tate looked around, fearing it was the Scout.

Pssst.

Coming up the beach stairs was Barrett.

It was Barrett, right? And not Trey looking like Barrett?

He was windmilling his arm, beckoning her over. “Monkey girl!” Yes, she was coming, she was running, just like in the movies, running into his arms, God, he smelled good, she kissed his neck, he tasted good, he was real, he was here, she loved him, she loved him. His arms were around her and he was laughing. She kissed his mouth. He… let her kiss him, but he didn’t kiss her back, at least not in the fully passionate way she wanted him to. Something was off, something was wrong. He was going to tell her he was still working for Anita. Was that it? And what would Tate say? Could she live with that? Could she? He looked happy, that was for sure. He was grinning.

She said, “Oh, my God, I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in all my life.”

He squeezed her. He whispered. “I have a surprise.”

A surprise? She heard footsteps. He had brought someone. Again? Tate’s neck stiffened. She tried to pull away; Barrett held her. She peered around him at the person huffing up the stairs.

It was her father.

BIRDIE

She supposed it would become part of the Tuckernuck family legend, the day she nearly set the house on fire.

It took Birdie a second to figure out what, exactly, was happening. She was startled to see that Barrett had returned; she was delighted for Tate. Of secondary concern was who Barrett had with him. An older man, tanned, trim, good looking. A man who reminded Birdie of… who looked just like… who was… Grant! It was Grant! Here on Tuckernuck! Here! Then Birdie realized she was smoking and she couldn’t let Grant see her smoking, so she flicked her cigarette to the ground, which was very unlike her. She hadn’t meant to litter; she just wanted to get rid of the cigarette before Grant saw her holding it. By chance, it landed, not in the dirt at her feet, but in the paper bag where they kept the news-papers for recycling. The bag and the newspapers went up in flames in a matter of seconds.

India pointed and shouted. Birdie was too addled to notice; she was assaulted by an avalanche of thoughts, rolling, tumbling. Grant looked good, he looked fantastic, he had lost weight, he was tan, he looked different. He was wearing a white polo shirt, blue and white seersucker shorts, and flip-flops? The most casual Grant ever got was golf shoes and driving moccasins. But here was Grant in flip-flops, looking relaxed, at ease, and present in the moment, three things Birdie had asked for for thirty years.

Then Birdie smelled smoke-not grill smoke but smoke smoke- and she saw the flames licking the shingles of the house. Birdie had a momentary vision of her grandparents’ beloved house burning to the ground. She looked at Barrett in panic. There was a fire truck on the island, with a 250-gallon tank, everyone who lived on Tuckernuck knew this, but what Birdie didn’t know was who drove that truck or who to call to get it to their property.

Grant, meanwhile, was striding right for Birdie.

“Back up,” Grant said. “For God’s sake, Birdie, back up!”

He picked the water pitcher up off the table and dumped it over the flames. There was a hiss and a billow of bitter smoke. Grant checked to see that the fire was out. He grabbed the Sancerre off the table and doused the smoldering remains. Birdie thought, Not the Sancerre! But of course this was the right thing to do.

Barrett and India and the girls were looking on, mystified. Birdie was embarrassed. She said, “I threw my cigarette in the bag by accident.”

Grant said, “You were smoking?”

“Kind of,” Birdie said.

India laughed. “Kind of,” she mimicked.

Birdie said, “What on earth are you doing here, Grant Cousins?”

Grant took her hands. His eyes were a clearer blue, it seemed, and his hair was longer than he liked to keep it; it curled at the ends. He looked “cute” in the way that teenage girls thought rock stars were “cute”-he was shaggy and sexy.

He said, “I came to see you.”

Birdie found she couldn’t speak. Her mouth gaped open. He kissed her-Grant Cousins kissed her in front of everyone. And further surprise: desire stirred. God, she had forgotten all about it.

INDIA

She regarded her bed-that squishy sinkhole with the five firm new pillows to compensate-and knew she wouldn’t sleep. She had felt her insomnia coming on; it was a ghost ship on the horizon drawing nearer and nearer. Her head held an electronic buzz; it felt like someone was grabbing her by the back of the neck and wouldn’t let her go.

Grant’s arrival had thrown everything off. India hated him for showing up unannounced and stealing the spotlight. Birdie was ecstatic, the girls were elated, Barrett was impressed. The man of the house had arrived! As if what they had been waiting for all these weeks was a man. Hardly, India thought. They had been just fine here, the four of them, on their own. As far as India was concerned, Grant was an egregious interloper.

Grant had approached India nervously, and she thought, You’d better be nervous! You’d better be shaking in your boots! This was the Tate house, their house, not Grant’s house; he had done nothing, in the years of India’s memory, but defile the Tuckernuck lifestyle by spending hours on his cell phone on the bluff and poring over the sheaf of documents FedExed to him each day. He used to turn the picnic table into his personal office, weighing down papers with rocks from the beach, asking Birdie to bring him more coffee. Birdie had obeyed like a dutiful wife, but deep down, India knew, she found it as despicable as India did.

Grant said, “India, I’m sorry for horning in here…”

He was about to make an excuse or give a good reason, but India shook her head at him. At PAFA she did this to great effect.

Grant lowered his voice. “I came for Birdie.”

India wasn’t sure how to take this comment. He came for Birdie. Meaning he came to get Birdie, claim her, take her home? Or he came because Birdie asked him to. Birdie had gone on a lot of mysterious errands with her phone, so this last interpretation was not unfeasible.

India was old enough to be self-critical. She wondered if what was really bothering her about Grant’s arrival was that he had come for Birdie-and no one had come for her. Her anger was based in the sibling rivalry of nearly six decades. Birdie was happy-she was luminous!-and to begrudge her this happiness was also despicable.

They might have been stretched at dinner, but Tate left with Barrett. In addition to feeling jealous about Grant and Birdie, India also felt jealous as Tate and Barrett sped away in the boat called Girlfriend. Barrett had returned, the romantic hero, and had whisked away the young, beautiful niece. He had given India a kiss on the cheek and she, in turn, had pinched his behind. Then she thought, Woman, get a grip on yourself!

After dinner, they all retreated to the screened-in porch. Grant had brought a bottle of scotch for himself and a bottle of vodka and some tonic for India. (He knew who his toughest critic would be, calculating motherfucker.) Since there was no reason to hold back, India got wickedly drunk. She and Grant got into a storytelling contest in which all the stories were about Bill. For a while there, Bill and Grant had been involved in some serious prank one-upmanship: short-sheeting the beds, hanging a bluefish from the doorway of the bedroom, stealing each other’s alcohol, cigarettes, and cigars, putting fiddler crabs in the beds, water in the beer bottles, itching powder in the talcum, condoms in the salad. Grant, being a man’s man, had an enormous appetite for this kind of practical joking, but Bill was the creative one. They had been well matched, worthy adversaries, proving their love for each other by how much time, thought, and effort the prank took.

The reminiscing left India close to tears. Grant had orchestrated a Lazarus-like return from the dead, but Bill couldn’t. And Michael Morgan couldn’t either. Chess might have been thinking this exact thing, because she stretched, stood, and excused herself. She kissed her father first, and said, I’m glad you’re here, Daddy. Then she kissed her mother. Then she came over and hugged India fiercely, as if in some kind of solidarity, and India felt the tears fall despite her most fervent wishes, and she wiped at them quickly, and said, “I’m going to retire, too.”

And when India set eyes on her bed, she thought, There is no way I am ever going to sleep.

She had been granted twenty-seven nights plump with sleep, eight, nine, sometimes ten hours at a stretch, a smooth white kingdom of sleep. Now, she was faced with the cold hand, the red room, the buzzing alarm in her brain. The insomnia was a taskmaster, a torturer. She took off her clothes and lay upon the strange mattress that had given her so many gifted hours of slumber. Slumber lumber, she had slept like a fallen tree. She was drunk-maybe that was the difference. For the first time in weeks, she had moved beyond wine; it was the vodka keeping her up, or the tonic, or the quinine in the tonic. It was Grant. Not Grant, but Grant’s stories about Bill. It was Bill keeping her awake. It had always been Bill that kept her awake. He was piloting the ghost ship on the horizon; he wanted her for some reason. He wanted her to do something. He wanted her to listen. He needed to tell her something.

Fine, she thought, angry now. Just say it: It was my fault! You did it because of me! You did it to keep me captive! You saw me retreating, you needed to reel me in, hold me prisoner. I am your prisoner! I have been your prisoner for fifteen years!

Her thoughts were interrupted by a sound. Sounds, noises: At first India didn’t know what it was. A bang, something dropping to the floor or hitting the wall, followed by a voice. Grant. Then there was a rhythm, permeating the wall in waves. Then Birdie’s voice, a cry or a whimper. They were making love. India closed her eyes. She couldn’t believe this was happening. Of course it was happening. She had to leave her room, go downstairs, smoke on the porch, or leave the house altogether-walk to the beach or take the Scout for a drive. But she found she couldn’t move; she was pinned to the bed. She thought of all the nights when she and Bill had made love on this Gumby mattress, never caring who heard them. She had known back then that Birdie and Grant were lying cold and stiff in their narrow, coffinlike twin beds, listening (or in Grant’s case, oblivious, snoring), and that had turned India on. She was getting some and Birdie wasn’t!

This, then, was her just deserts, and she accepted it as such.

She fell asleep for two minutes, three, four-this always happened on her sleepless nights, and it was agonizing. A taste of something unspeakably sweet-sleep, real sleep!-and then she lost it. It was a kite string ripped from her hand. She rose from bed; the other room was quiet, and India imagined Grant and Birdie entwined in one of those spinsterish beds, spent and happy.

Something in the room was calling to her. Okay, she was nuts, she was as mentally ill as Bill had been at the end. Inanimate objects had spoken to him all the time. That was what it was like to be a sculptor: he heard forms speak. It was then his job to give the voices a body.

Fifteen years he had held her captive.

She looked out the window. She didn’t have the good view; Birdie did. Because this was, truly, Birdie’s house; their parents had left it to Birdie, and India had gotten the equivalent in cash, which she used to buy their house and acreage in Pennsylvania. It was all fair, and Birdie never mentioned that the house was hers, and she took on all expenses and never asked India for a dime and India was free to use the house anytime. Birdie was a good egg, a tiny woman with a solid-gold heart. She deserved to have the man she had divorced out of frustration return to her on his knees.

Something in the room was calling to her. There was nothing outside, no suitor beneath her window, no meandering drunk neighbors or rowdy teenagers on ATVs, nothing but Tuckernuck, its dirt trails, its mysteries.

Was it Roger? He stood on the dresser, small and light and perfect. She picked him up as she might a baby chick and cradled him in two hands. Are you talking to me, Roger?

Silence. She was losing her mind. She set Roger down. Roger wasn’t a real person; he wasn’t a talisman or a mystical object. He wasn’t a totem or an idol. He was a sculpture.

Something in the room was calling to her. She listened. Was it Chess from the attic? Was there another bat? Was there a bat in this room? Or a mouse? Or a garter snake? Or a black widow? India removed Lula’s painting from the wall. It was the only foreign presence in the house; aside from the pillows and linens Birdie had ordered this summer, every other object and piece of furniture had been there for decades.

It was so dark India couldn’t see the painting, but that didn’t matter: she knew what it looked like. It was, after all, her body. Her hip, the shallow bowl beneath her hip. A sand dune. The inside of a shell. She remembered lying on Lula’s white suede sofa; the memory itself was as strong as sex. Lula sketching, her pencil ravishing the page. It had been sensual, Lula’s eyes devouring India, Lula’s hair falling in her face, her skin lightly perspiring, the kohl around her eyes smudged. There had been a scent in the room, the smell of women, of sex-it had been her musk, or Lula’s, or hers and Lula’s intermingled. She had been fantasizing about sex with Lula-whatever that might look like-but Lula had been thinking of work. India’s body was Lula’s work, her greatest work to date, the subject of her genius. India had never been Bill’s muse in that way. His work was too blocky, too masculine, too civic. But she had been Lula’s muse.

Was I wrong about you?

What do I have to do?

Try?

What would a life with Lula look like? It would be unconventional, shocking even. In a few short weeks, India was to become a grandmother: Could a woman with a new baby grandchild take a female lover half her age? What would her sons say? What would the faculty, the administration, the board of directors-Spencer Frost!-say? (Spencer Frost would approve, India decided. He was a worldly man, with European sensibilities.) What would Birdie, Chess, and Tate say? Did India care what other people thought? Did she, at the age of fifty-five, care?

Something else was standing in her way, keeping her from embracing happiness, from saying, Yes, I’ll try. It was the pilot of the looming ghost ship. It was the ghost himself.

Something in the room was calling to her. India hung the painting back on the wall. She cast around the room. The voice was getting stronger, louder; she was getting closer, like a child in a game of Marco Polo. She lay on the bed. Her eyes were burning. Her eyes. She turned to the nightstand-her book lay there, and… Bill’s reading glasses. His glasses. They were practically glowing. The lenses caught light from the moon out the window, except there was no moon. So where was the light coming from?

India picked up the glasses. They were cool to the touch, as they should have been. The frames were green plastic, a mottled jade green that people commented on. I love your reading glasses. Oh, thanks. They belonged to my late husband.

India had taken the glasses from the hotel room in Bangkok. They had been on the night table next to a small pad and pen, standard issue from the hotel. India imagined Bill wearing the glasses as he held the pen over the blank page, trying to decide what to write. If there had been a suicide note, she would have taken that, but because there had been no note, because Bill had not found a single word to say in his defense, India had taken the glasses. They were nothing remarkable. India knew Bill had gotten them at the CVS in Wayne. But she took them as her memento of her husband, and for fifteen years they had hung around her neck. They had rested against her heart.

India opened her door, stepped out into the hallway, and tiptoed down the stairs. She passed through the living room and kitchen and out the door. The night was brilliantly dark. There was a sprinkling of stars-diamonds against the obsidian-but no moon. They had outlasted the moon. India should have gone back for a flashlight; she couldn’t see a goddamned thing. But this was Tuckernuck: she could make it to the beach blind or sleepwalking. She floated across the yard and felt for the railing at the top of the stairs; it was right where she knew it would be. She descended to the beach. The new stairs were sturdy. She remembered the summer that Teddy put his foot through one of the old boards and got a wicked splinter. Bill had pulled it out with his sculptor’s tweezers. There was a memory for everything, India realized; it was pointless to try to escape the memories.

But that didn’t mean she had to spend the rest of her life haunted by the ghost of her dead husband. She was still young. She didn’t have to spend the rest of her life looking at the world through Bill Bishop’s eyes.

By the time India made it to the water’s edge, the glasses had warmed in her hand. Try? she thought. Try? She cranked her arm back in a classic windup (she had pitched so many balls to the boys through endless seasons of Little League. She had been a good mother and she had been a good wife. She had been a good wife, damn it!) and wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee… she let the glasses fly.

She heard them plunk in the water and hoped they had landed far enough out for the tide to carry them away. If they washed up on shore, she decided, she would bury them.

She headed back up the stairs lethargically. Her eyelids were drooping. The alarm had been shut off; the room in her head was dark and hushed. She was ready for bed.

TATE

She awoke in the morning in Barrett’s bed, with Barrett holding her.

Perfect happiness, she thought.

The kids were asleep in their rooms. When Tate walked in last night, they jumped into her arms, they cheered and made happy noises, and Tate felt like Bruce Springsteen. She felt loved. It was intoxicating.

Barrett wanted to tell her exactly what had happened. He was talking quickly, and Tate had to tell him to slow down.

Slooooooooow down.

He had promised himself, no matter what happened, that he would work for Anita for three days. It started out oddly, he said, with Anita leading him up to her bedroom, flinging open the doors to Roman’s closet, and telling Barrett he could wear whatever he wanted. There was, he said, a Jay Gatsby collection of beautiful shirts handmade in London. There were cashmere sweaters, golf pants, Italian loafers.

Barrett said to Anita, “I don’t need clothes. I have clothes.”

She implored him to wear a pink shirt of Roman’s, a simple polo shirt, but still, it was Roman’s. Barrett felt uneasy. What was Roman going to do when he saw Barrett wearing his shirt?

Anita said, “Oh, don’t worry. Roman isn’t coming back.”

She then explained that she and Roman had separated. They were going to test it out; he hated Nantucket anyway. That was one of the reasons Anita had hired Barrett full-time. She was on her own now.

Barrett wore the shirt. He hung a new painting for Anita, then cleaned her Hinckley picnic boat bow-to-stern and took Anita and her girlfriends on a cruise around the harbor. There was a catered lunch on the cruise, but the women ate nothing except for the stray lettuce leaf and a few grapes, so Jeannie, the cook, offered the entire gorgeous lunch to Barrett. He stuffed his face and would take the rest home.

“It wasn’t bad,” he said to Tate. “That part.”

At five o’clock, when he had to go pick the kids up from his parents’ house, Anita didn’t want him to leave. She wanted him to stay and have a glass of wine. She wanted him to give her a massage.

“A massage?” Tate said.

Anita had a masseuse come to the house every day, but the masseuse had been canceling a lot lately, he had canceled that day, and Anita’s neck and shoulders were sore. Wouldn’t Barrett just rub them a little? All she needed was a pair of strong hands.

No, Barrett said. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t stay for wine either. He had to pick up his kids.

She pouted but seemed to accept this answer.

The next day, he said, there was another shirt. Blue, with white stripes.

He said, “Is there something wrong with what I have on?”

She said, “Please wear it.”

He considered it a uniform of sorts. A uniform to make him look like her husband. It didn’t feel right, but he couldn’t find anything blatantly wrong with it. She sent him to the post office to mail a box to her sister in California; he drove her to the Galley, where she had lunch with the same friends from the day before. He offered to wash the windows of the house, and she said, “I’ll hire someone to do that.”

He said, “You did hire someone to do that. Me.”

She said, “Don’t you dare wash the windows. I’ll call someone.”

He said, “Let me do it, Anita. There’s no reason to pay someone else.”

She said, “Are you the boss here or am I?”

While she was at lunch, he started washing the windows. The windows that faced the harbor were coated with a salty grime. When Anita got home, she found him on a ladder with a squeegee. He had changed into his own shirt.

She stood at the bottom of the ladder with her hands on her hips. From the look on her face, he could tell that she had had wine with lunch.

She said, “What are you doing?”

He said, “What does it look like I’m doing?”

She stormed into the house.

On the third day, she stayed out of his way. There was a list of mundane things on the counter-take the recycling to the dump, order the flowers, run to Bartlett Farm for lobster salad and broccoli slaw. (She liked to have these things in the fridge, though she never ate.) At the bottom of the list, it said, Dinner 7 P.M.

She stayed on the deck off her bedroom for most of the day, and to interrupt her would be like waking a sleeping lion. As he wrapped things up at five o’clock, she came down the stairs in a white waffled robe. She was holding a navy blazer. He got a bad feeling.

She said, “Where are you going?”

He made a show of checking his watch. “Home to get my kids.”

“But you’ll be back at quarter to seven?” she said. “We’re expected at seven.”

“Expected where?”

“Dinner at the Straight Wharf. The Jamiesons and Grahams invited me and I can’t go alone.”

“Well, I can’t go with you.”

He thought she might pull a power play. He thought she would remind him how much she was paying him. (He reminded himself of that constantly. It was a lot of money.) Instead, she said, “You can’t?”

He said, “The kids.”

She said, “Can’t you get a sitter? This is important to me.”

He relented.

“Why?” Tate asked him. “Couldn’t you tell she was using you?”

He felt bad for her. She was deeply unhappy. He called a sitter for the boys. He wore his own navy blazer. He met Anita at the restaurant. She kissed him on the lips in greeting. She touched his leg under the table. He moved away. He talked to the other men at the table about fishing. He was the resident expert; the other two men listened intently. Barrett had thought he would be outclassed at this dinner, but he ended up feeling good about himself. These people wanted the real Nantucket; he was the real Nantucket.

Anita had been hitting the red wine pretty hard throughout dinner, and then with dessert, she had a glass of champagne. She was drunk, blurry-slurry, sloppily affectionate. Barrett drove her home. She tried to persuade him to come inside; he declined. She asked him to walk her to the door. Okay, he would walk her to the door. She lunged for him.

He said, “Good night, Anita.”

“So those were the three days,” Barrett said to Tate.

“And then what happened?” Tate said. “You just decided to quit?”

“No,” he said. “Then your father called.”

Grant Cousins called Barrett at eleven o’clock at night, as Barrett was driving back home to Tom Nevers. Mr. Cousins was going to surprise the ladies on Tuckernuck. He would land at five o’clock the following afternoon and needed to be picked up at the airport and transported to the island.

Barrett said, “I’ll send Trey. He’s the kid who works for me now.”

Grant said, “If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like you to come, Barrett.”

Barrett was about to say that he no longer ran the caretaking business day-to-day. He was about to say it would have to be Trey or nobody. But Barrett found he wanted to be the one to deliver Mr. Cousins to Tuckernuck. He said, “Okay, yes, I’ll see you at five.”

In the morning, Barrett told Anita he had to leave fifteen minutes early. He explained why.

Anita said, “But you don’t work for that family anymore.”

Barrett said, “Right, I know. This is a personal favor.”

Anita said, “Well, you’re not leaving here one minute early to do a personal favor for that family.”

Her tone bothered him. He said, “What did they ever do to you?”

Anita sniffed. She said, “Will you change the paper towel roll in the kitchen, please? We’re out.”

Change the paper towel roll? He had become the butt of his own joke.

“That was it?” Tate said.

“That was it,” Barrett said. “I left. Anita made her phone calls starting at 12:05, just like she promised she would, and by two o’clock in the afternoon, five people had called and hired me as caretaker.”

“You’re kidding,” Tate said.

“Including Whit Vargas, who has a huge estate in Shawkemo, and who said he will pay me double what Anita was paying me just because I left Anita. He said he’s very good friends with Roman Fullin and he’s a client of your father’s as well. He asked if we were still dating.”

“And what did you say?” Tate asked.

“I said yes.”

Tate felt both elated and panicked. She had Barrett back! But she was going to lose him.

She said, “I leave tomorrow.”

He said, “I know.”

She thought, Ask me to stay! Ask me to move in! I can help you pay Anita back! I can help you with the kids! I can fit right into your life here! I can, I can, I can!

Slowly! she thought.

She said, “I start a job in Reading, Pennsylvania, for Bachman pretzels on Monday.”

He squeezed her. “How long will that take?”

She said, “It depends on how bad it is. Five or six days?”

“And then you’ll come back?”

“Back…?”

“Back here?” he said. “Will you come back here when you’re done with that job? I know it’s expensive, but…”

“Oh, my God!” Tate said. “Expensive? I don’t care if it’s expensive. I don’t care if I have to fly back and forth a dozen times. Being with you is worth it. You, Barrett Lee, are worth it!”

He shushed her and pulled her close. He didn’t want her to wake the children just yet.

BIRDIE

She had heard of couples who divorced and then remarried each other. Everyone had heard of such couples. The story had a romantic ring to it, especially for the couples’ children, who had the singular experience of watching their parents get married. But in the case of her and Grant, Birdie wasn’t going to be such a sucker. She wasn’t going to be a pushover or a Pollyanna. She had divorced Grant for a reason: after thirty years of emotional wasteland, she was moving on. She would either live alone and have a full and stimulating life, or she would find someone new who enjoyed the same things that she did.

Birdie allowed herself one last, long, wistful thought about Hank.

Hank!

Grant Cousins was a known quantity to her. Lawyer, strategist, financial wizard, expert in accounting loopholes, golfer, aficionado of scotch, aged beef, cigars, and high-end automobiles. He had been an adequate father, she supposed, though only with Birdie’s direction. He was a generous provider, she would give him that.

How likely was it that, at the age of sixty-five, Grant Cousins was going to change? Not likely. It was more likely that a mountain would change, or a glacier. And yet the Grant Cousins who had shown up on Tuckernuck was a different man from the man Birdie had been married to.

The mere fact that he had shown up at all! Spontaneously!

“What are you doing here?” she asked him. “Really.”

“I told you,” he said.

“What about work?” she said.

“What about work?” he said. “I’m due about five years of vacation and I’m going to take it.”

“Yeah, right,” she said. She sounded like a sullen teenager, but could anyone blame her?

Later, after dinner, after an hour of reminiscing on the screened-in porch with India (Birdie noticed how kind Grant was with India, telling all those funny stories about Bill), they faced the awkward decision about where Grant would sleep. His suitcase remained in the living room.

Birdie said, “You can take the other bed in my room.”

“Are you sure?” he said.

“I’m sure.”

He had changed, Birdie thought. Either that or she was being duped. He had mellowed; he had loosened and lightened. And his hair! It was so long.

They climbed the stairs together. Birdie had consumed her usual glasses of wine, but because of Grant’s presence, she drank more-or because of his presence, it affected her differently. She felt tipsy, giddy, girlishly nervous like she hadn’t since those long-ago weekends in the Poconos when Grant used to visit her room in the middle of the night.

In the bedroom, she changed into her white cotton nightgown. She gave thought to changing behind the closed door of the bathroom, but that seemed ridiculous. Grant had been her husband for thirty years. He had seen her naked thousands upon thousands of times. And still, she felt self-conscious and shy, especially since she heard the rustlings of him changing on the other side of the room. When she was in her nightgown (it wasn’t exactly lingerie, but it was new that summer-bought for nights with Hank-and pretty and feminine) and he was in his pajamas (ones she had bought him at Brooks Brothers years earlier), they looked at each other and smiled. She was nervous!

“Here,” he said, beckoning. “Come sit with me on the bed.”

She obeyed, grateful for the directive. She sat on the bed and Grant sat next to her and the bed groaned and Birdie thought they might snap it in half. They had made love in these very same beds. Birdie remembered those occasions as ones of fulfilling a spousal duty; she remembered being worried that the children would hear or Bill and India would hear (because Birdie and Grant could certainly hear them) or her parents would hear. She remembered the acrobatics and flexibility required to copulate in these narrow beds. She wanted Grant to speak before she embarrassed herself.

He said, “I meant what I said about taking a five-year vacation. I’m retiring, Bird.”

She gasped. Men like Grant didn’t retire. They worked and worked until they had a massive coronary sitting at their desks. “When?”

“At the end of the year.”

She was tempted to express some skepticism; he wasn’t really retiring. He would say he was retiring, but he would still go in to the office each day to keep tabs on his clients and his cases.

“Honestly?” Birdie said. “I can’t believe it. I never thought you’d retire. I thought you’d die first.”

He said, “My heart’s not in it anymore. The fire has gone out.”

“Really?” Birdie said. She was tempted to ask where his heart was and what would restart the fire, aside from her flicking away her cigarette.

“Really,” he said. He turned her face and kissed her. He kissed her like some other man. God, it was weird-this was Grant, right?-and it was thrilling, too. They fell back on the bed and Birdie realized she was going to make love to her ex-husband and she nearly laughed at the amazing wonder of it. Grant!

Later, when it was over and she lay spent and light headed on the bed, and Grant was heavy and snoring on the other bed (sleeping together in the same bed had seemed unnecessary), Birdie wondered about other couples who had divorced and then remarried. Had they been drawn back to their marriages out of loneliness, because they could find nothing better? Had they been drawn back out of habit? Or had they been drawn together as if they were two new people with new things to discover and appreciate about each other?

As she fell asleep, Birdie prayed for the latter.

They had one full day left, and one half day. Normally, Birdie spent the last day packing up, cleaning, gathering laundry, and cooking strange meals with the odds and ends left in the fridge. But as Grant reminded her, a cleaning crew came in after they left, and if they ended up throwing away half a stick of butter, the world wouldn’t end. Grant wanted to make a few sandwiches, walk to North Pond, sit on the beach, swim, and do a little fishing. He wanted Birdie to come with him.

“And look,” he said, setting his BlackBerry on the counter, “I’m leaving my phone here.”

Birdie said, “What about Chess? And India? It’s our last day…” It was all well and fine for Grant to want a romantic day with Birdie alone, but she had come to the island for a reason, and that was to spend time with her daughters and her sister.

“We’ll all go,” Grant said.

Birdie made coffee and bacon and blueberry pancakes. Grant ate seconds, then thirds. He smacked his lips and said, “I’ve missed your cooking, Bird. I haven’t had a home-cooked meal since we split.”

Birdie tried to think of a response to that (she didn’t believe him), but before she could, Tate and Barrett walked into the kitchen. Birdie beamed. She had feared Tate wouldn’t come back, but of course, here she was. She wouldn’t miss their last day.

“Breakfast?” Birdie said.

“Starving,” Tate said.

Barrett dropped off the final bag of ice as well as the cleaning supplies Birdie had requested. “This is it,” he said. “The last drop-off.”

India descended the stairs. “I think I’m going to cry.”

“It must have been quite a month,” Grant said.

“Oh, it was,” Tate said.

“Can you come for dinner?” Birdie asked Barrett. “And bring the boys? Please?”

“And spend the night?” Tate said. “Please? The boys can sleep in the bunks.”

“The boys are with their other grandparents this weekend,” Barrett said. “But I’ll come for dinner. And that means I can spend the night. But I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

“Damn right you’ll sleep on the sofa,” Grant said.

“I want to sleep with Chess anyway,” Tate said. She misted up, and Birdie handed her a paper towel; they were all out of Kleenex. “I can’t believe this is over.”

They still had today. One last, brilliantly blue Tuckernuck day, which seemed incredibly precious. Birdie had let other days slip by carelessly, it seemed now. She hadn’t appreciated them enough; she hadn’t wrung the life out of each minute; she hadn’t lived as fully as she might have. So much time wasted longing for stupid old Hank!

She would not squander today! She made lunches for everyone and packed chips, drinks, plums, and cookies. They walked together along the trail to North Pond. It was a bright, hot day, though the air was pure and clean and decidedly less sticky than it had been, and Birdie thought that what she would miss the most when she was back on the mainland tomorrow was the sterling quality of this air, the absolute purity of it. She wondered if Grant could appreciate the unadulterated beauty of this island now that he wasn’t consumed with the SEC’s pending case against Mr. So-and-so. There were wild irises blooming and red-winged blackbirds and the pervasive scent of Rosa rugosa. Tomorrow, Birdie would be back on I-95 with the Cracker Barrels and the Olive Gardens and the Targets; even the rarefied acreage of the New Canaan Country Club and her favorite bistro and independent bookstore would seem like offensive, man-made artifice. Would she be able to bear leaving? She had no idea. It felt like this every time she left: like her heart was being ripped out.

They reached the pond and they set up camp: chairs set firmly in sand, towels spread, lunch cooler placed in the shade of the chairs. Grant had brought his fishing pole and he took Tate with him to the other side of the pond. India wanted to walk out to Bigelow Point; she couldn’t finish her book, she said, because she’d lost her reading glasses.

Birdie was aghast. “You lost Bill’s reading glasses?”

“Lost them,” India said. She seemed strangely unconcerned. The glasses she had treated like a pet-washing them with Windex and a paper towel each morning, keeping them around her neck at all times except when swimming and sleeping-were lost? “They might turn up, but I kind of doubt it.”

India then wandered off toward the point in search of whelk shells. That was what she wanted to bring home to everyone as a gift: perfectly spiraled bone white whelk shells with satiny peach insides. She wanted one for the president of the board, Spencer Frost, as well as one for her assistant, Ainslie, and one for a student.

“Are you playing favorites?” Birdie asked.

“Sort of,” India said.

That left Birdie alone with Chess, who was lying facedown on her towel. Birdie suddenly felt the pressure of twenty-nine days. She hadn’t had the talk with her daughter that she’d meant to have. She hadn’t heard the whole story, or any of the story. To force a talk now would be awkward and unfair. Wasn’t that typical of the time on Tuckernuck, or of any summer vacation, for that matter? The hours had stretched out like an endless highway, and then all of a sudden, they were gone. Evaporated. And here was Birdie on the very last day, trying to cram it all in.

She sat down in the sand next to Chess’s towel.

“Chess?” she said.

There was no response. Chess’s breathing was deep and steady. Her sleep seemed peaceful. Birdie didn’t have the heart to wake her.

CHESS

Everybody was going to get a happy ending but her.

Her parents were reuniting. That was what was happening, right? Her father had come here to Tuckernuck, a place Chess would have said he’d never liked in the past-but now he was liking it. And he was looking at her mother in a way that Chess had never seen him look at her before. He was attentive-doting, even; he carried the chairs and the cooler to the pond; he ran after Birdie’s straw hat when it blew off down the dirt trail. He set up Birdie’s chair and rubbed lotion onto her shoulders. He kissed her on the lips in a way that was very tender, which left Chess embarrassed. She knew her parents had slept in the same bedroom the night before, and when she saw the kiss, she thought, Sex. Her parents had had sex. She felt confused-possibly more confused than she’d felt when they told her they were separating. The divorce had hurt her somewhere deep inside, but it had made sense. This reunion made her happy somewhere deep inside, but she worried. If her father disappointed her mother again, it would be far worse than if some other man disappointed her mother. If her father was coming back, he was going to have to do everything right.

He would; Chess felt this in her bones. Theirs would be an unlikely love story, one to be envied. Chess wished it was Nick who had shown up out of the blue. If it could be her father, why couldn’t it also be Nick?

Tate had Barrett. She told Chess the story of Barrett and Anita Fullin as they walked to the pond.

Chess said, “So what are you going to do? Stay here?”

“I have a job in Pennsylvania on Monday. I’m going to work there, then come back for a few days, then go out to Beaverton to do a job for Nike, then come back. I’m trying not to think too far ahead. Do you know how hard that is?”

Chess did know. She was facing a vacuum. But she’d had one idea, like a spark in a dark room. She wanted to cook. She had a culinary degree, after all. She knew the restaurant life was punishing-the hours, the heat, the chauvinism-but a little punishment would suit her. Cooking was the first thing she had felt a stir of passion about since Michael died. Cooking-somewhere good, somewhere market driven, clean, consistent, uptown, downtown, East Side, West Side. She would have choices.

Choices: it wasn’t true love, but it was something.

Chess stood at the edge of North Pond and threw rocks into the water. Get rid of the heavy stuff. Get rid of it. Then she lay in the warm sand by the pond. She had only one more day to nap in the sun.

She awoke to Birdie staring at her.

Chess thought, She wants to see me smile. She wants to know I’m going to be all right.

Chess smiled.

Birdie smiled. She said, “I love you.”

Chess said, “I love you, too, Bird.”

And what about India? India had been the wild card when they started out on this vacation, an unknown quantity. Chess knew her better now. India was really and truly strong; she had gone through what Chess had gone through, only worse, and she had come out on the other side whole. She would pursue a relationship with the female painter or she wouldn’t, and either way, India would be okay. India was the person Chess was the most envious of. India was the person Chess aspired to be: she was her own happy ending.

BARRETT

Thank God for his sunglasses. No one could see how close he was to tears.

There were logistics to deal with: Emptying the cooler and defrosting the refrigerator, checking and double-checking that the windows were shut and locked, gathering the sheets and towels for the Laundromat, shutting down the generator, storing the propane gas from the camp stove, buttoning up the Scout and hanging the key back on the hook by the front door. Storing the picnic table and, finally, taking down the TATE sign and stowing it away in its place in the kitchen drawer. A cleaning crew would come in after they were gone; later, Barrett would bring the sheets and towels back wrapped in plastic, and he would weatherproof the windows and doors.

Grant had taken a load of luggage down to Barrett’s boat. This left Barrett and the four women staring forlornly at the front of the house.

“Is it going to be another thirteen years before this island sees you again?” Barrett asked.

A sob escaped-from Birdie. Suddenly she was in Barrett’s arms, hugging him.

“I don’t know what we would have done without you,” she said. “I just don’t know what we would have done.”

India was on him now, too, hugging him from the left. “Those days you sent Trey were a complete hell,” she said. “He just wasn’t as cute as you were. I couldn’t even bring myself to whistle at him.”

Chess grabbed his right side. “Thank you for taking me to the hospital,” she said. “You saved my life.”

And from behind, Tate grabbed him. His girl. “I love you,” she said.

The four of them were on him at his cardinal points: north, south, east, and west. They hugged him and squeezed him and someone pinched his butt; he suspected it was India.

Grant came huffing up the stairs. India said, “Grant, take our picture! Quick-the four of us with Barrett!”

India handed Grant her disposable camera, and Barrett and the women arranged themselves into a pose and smiled.

“Life is good!” Tate said.

“Life is good,” Birdie said.

“Life is good,” India said.

There was a pause. Grant was waiting before he took the picture. Barrett himself was too choked up to speak.

“Life is good,” Chess said.

Grant snapped the picture, then another one for backup. He looked at Barrett over the top of the camera.

“You are one lucky guy,” he said.