Chance Harbor (16 page)

“What would be the point?” Grandpa used to say. “Everyone in Massachusetts thinks of me as Canadian, but here, they say I’m from away, even though I was born on this island. Might as well roll with it.”

It took Nana two tries before she got the sticky front door unlocked. Then they stepped into the hallway and smelled musty basement, mothballs, red dirt, fields, wildflowers. Willow had always wanted to make a perfume out of PEI smells.

Bryan, the man who took care of the house when they were away—one of Grandpa’s hundred cousins—had turned on the heat and lights for them; he’d even plugged in the fridge. The wood floors gleamed and Mike skittered around on them when Willow set him down. Willow staggered after him, saying, “I’m going to bed.”

“Oh no, you’re not,” Catherine said. “You’re helping us unload the car.”

“Let her go,” Nana said. “She’s exhausted.”

“And you and I aren’t?” Catherine asked. “Remember, Mom. There’s a lot more for us to do on our own now that Dad’s not here.”

Nana turned to face Catherine, her face cracking into seams like it had been stitched to her bones. “You think I don’t know that?”

Willow went to her then and put her arms around Nana’s waist. “I miss Grandpa.”

Nana patted her back. “Me, too. But he’d be glad we’re all here together.”

Catherine snorted. “A lovely sentiment, Mother. But we’re not exactly all here together, are we?” She went back out to the car, letting the screen door slam shut behind her.

“What a bitch,” Willow muttered before she could stop herself.

Her grandmother snapped her head down to look at Willow. “My goodness. I guess we’re all letting our hair down this week,” she said, and smiled.

T
hey spent the first morning in Chance Harbor sorting through dishes and linens until Catherine’s fingers ached. She didn’t care: she just wanted to get the necessary tasks done and go home.

Then, out of the blue, her mother had announced, “Beach break!” and led them outside to the steep wooden staircase descending down the rocky red cliff face to the beach. She had packed a bag of peanut butter sandwiches, apples, and three bottles of water. Like this was summer vacation instead of the kind of weather where you had to keep your back to the wind even in a fleece jacket.

Their house was located at the mouth of the inlet; Chance Harbor was the small area where people moored their sailboats and small outboards. It was just over a mile in one direction to East Point, though you had to wade across the inlet to get there, and a little over a mile the other way to Basin Head, recently voted as Canada’s best beach in some tourist magazine. Her parents had worried that Basin Head’s sudden media attention might cause an influx of people, but as far as Catherine could tell, little had changed.

Catherine shivered and jammed her useless phone back into her pocket. No service: she couldn’t even e-mail or text Bethany to gripe.

She walked the beach, deliberately flicking up sand with the toes of her sneakers. Every morning of every summer of her life, she had walked along this beach. Now Catherine felt irritable, too restricted by her corduroys, stiff and tight against her knees, and by her coat, zipped to the neck. Suffocating.

Out on the water, the ferry was headed from Souris to Îles de la Madeleine. The long white boat looked flat against the blue horizon as it inched its way across the Northumberland Strait. Beyond it, Catherine could make out the humped shape of Cape Breton Island.

As she shaded her eyes against the glare to look at Cape Breton, she suddenly remembered a trip she’d taken there. She was little, maybe three years old. It must have been before Zoe was born. Now she remembered something else: her father standing on the dock at Wood Islands and crying as he waved good-bye to them. That had stuck with her all these years because it was the only time she’d ever seen Dad cry. God, she missed him.

Being at Chance Harbor made her miss Zoe, too, in a way she hadn’t in a while. She and Zoe had been so excited every time they arrived that they’d jump on the beds, sometimes high enough to hit their heads on the slanted ceilings upstairs.

They’d ridden bikes everywhere, following red clay roads into pine forests and wide fields overlooking the sea. Every red road led to a secret cove. They’d come home with fingers and mouths stained from picking blueberries or raspberries, sick and giddy from too much fruit and sugar, because of course they always stopped for ice cream, too, at the little shop by the East Point lighthouse or at the corner store at the bottom of their road.

Where had that sister gone? She’d lost her long before Zoe had actually disappeared.

Zoe had started going off the rails in high school. The summer she was fourteen, for instance, she had actually stolen Dad’s car. How did she even know how to drive? Somehow, she’d managed to get that car to Basin Head to meet some boy, another summer resident. She made it back in one piece except for an unexplained scrape on the passenger side. Their parents grounded her, as usual, and as usual that only caused Zoe to sneak out through a window after their parents were asleep.

Her parents were smart, yet Zoe always outsmarted them. Why hadn’t they done more to stop her? To help her? Zoe might still be here today if they had.

Catherine wrapped her arms around her torso and stopped walking. No, that was wrong. Her parents had loved Zoe. They’d tried their best.

In fact, it had seemed like her mother had loved Zoe best of all. Standing here on the beach, Catherine thought about the time she’d gone swimming with Zoe on the other side of the island, where the surf could be ferocious and unpredictable. She and Zoe had gotten caught in the undertow. It was horrible, a moment when her world tumbled green and black and salty all around her. Catherine had screamed and then choked on water.

When she came up for air, her mother was swimming toward them with her long brown arms, calling their names, saying, “Hang on. Hang on!”

Catherine had gone under again, terrified as the undertow grabbed her ankles like a giant hand to pull her farther out from shore but convinced her mother would save her. Yet, when she came up again, she realized that her mother wasn’t nearby anymore; she had Zoe under one arm and was swimming to shore, just the backs of their heads bobbing on the green water.

Uncle Ron had swum out a minute later to rescue Catherine. In retrospect, of course her mother’s choice made sense: Catherine was older. Probably a stronger swimmer, though that was debatable. Her mother wasn’t strong enough to rescue both girls and had to choose one of them. Yet Catherine had never been able to let go of the idea that her mother had chosen to save the daughter she loved more.

She finally felt warm enough to take off her sneakers. Her mother and Willow hadn’t even bothered with shoes, of course; Catherine was afraid of getting splinters on the stairs. She squeaked her bare feet along the beach, shuffling to hear the famous singing sand as she watched the new game her mother had started with Willow. This one involved seeing how fast they could leap over a rapidly assembled obstacle course: a couple of huge chunks of driftwood, an ancient lobster trap, the prow of an old rowboat. They laughed whenever one of them fell.

This was a game Catherine remembered playing with Zoe. She’d loved it, too. But today she wasn’t in the mood. Her mother always let Willow do whatever she damn well pleased, just as she had Zoe. This morning, for example, Willow had eaten only biscuits and honey for breakfast, followed by three squares of bittersweet chocolate. No wonder she was screaming like a seagull.

They spent an hour on the beach, Catherine occasionally interrupting their antics and trying to bring things down a notch. She pointed out a giant jellyfish—eggplant purple, as delicately transparent as glass—and suggested they collect sea glass. That quieted things down finally.

Still, no matter how adult and restrained she was trying to be, the island was working its magic on her. By the time they had walked up to Basin Head and back, Catherine’s head felt clearer and her body was so relaxed that even her jaw felt unhinged.

They fried sausages for dinner and ate them with boiled potatoes. There were carrots, too, and spinach; her mother opened a bottle of red wine, but Catherine was afraid to drink it. Wine would make her weepy. Bad enough that everywhere she looked there were reminders of her childhood. Zoe’s wakeboard was still leaning in the corner of the sunporch off the kitchen with her own. Her father, too, was present on the porch: his gardening tools and fishing poles, his floppy-brimmed sun hat, his birding binoculars. The sum of family.

Seeing these abandoned things made Catherine’s throat tighten with grief. She didn’t need any more reminders of how their family had shrunk. Yet her mother had seemed relentlessly cheerful as she’d greeted the flotilla of neighbors and cousins arriving this afternoon with snowflake rolls and pies, biscuits and canned fruit, homemade jams. Enough food for the whole damn winter.

As always, there was a great deal of talk about the weather, family, and house repairs: the steady tides of island life. “This summer was some hot,” the women kept repeating, and several of the men pointed out the stains on the loose roof shingles and rotten boards. All of them offered to help with repairs, shifting uncomfortably in the kitchen chairs when Mom said she was putting the house up for sale. Catherine imagined them going home and turning over in bed to say, “Well, what can we expect? She’s from away.”

From away
. Like her mother hadn’t made Prince Edward Island her second home for the past forty-five years.

For Catherine, there were stories of cousins out west, mostly in Alberta. They asked vague questions about her job—everyone approved of her nursing career—and no questions at all about Russell. She wondered why, until her mother mentioned telling Cousin Jane, her father’s oldest cousin, about Catherine’s situation.

Cousin Jane was a square-bottomed, gray-haired woman of seventy who had been principal at the tiny elementary school that once occupied the site of the community hall at the end of the road. She was also the family’s town crier. Catherine could imagine Jane calling each family member in turn, saying, “I’m bringing the pecan tarts, so you bring the rolls. But, whatever you do, don’t ask Catherine about her husband. And for heaven’s sake, don’t you dare mention that wild daughter of Eve’s, either.”

Everyone knew your business on the island. Catherine knew she ought to feel relieved by that, but didn’t. It was just more evidence of her failure as a wife and mother that here, generations of the MacLeish family still cozily inhabited seed and potato farms they divided into lots in case their children and grandkids returned from out west and needed a foothold on the land, while she couldn’t hold on to her husband, keep her sister out of harm’s way, or have a baby of her own.

And now her family was leaving the island completely. What would they do with all of these things in the house? Catherine’s eyes roamed the kitchen as she finished dinner, taking in the egg cups shaped like hens, the baskets that had always held dried hydrangeas or fresh blueberries. Just leave them here?

Even without having had any wine, the thought of never being in this house again made Catherine feel overcome by the sorrow she’d been holding back all day. She covered her face with her hands and cried at the kitchen table. Grief was like the flu. You thought you were over the worst of it and then the fever and shakes returned. She longed for her father: his warm laugh, the way he read the newspaper aloud at breakfast, his capable square hands that could tame any machine. She mourned the absence of her sister’s silly laugh and relentless energy.

Willow stood up and wrapped her arms around her shoulders. Her mother reached across the table to awkwardly pat her arm. Even the dog got into the act, dancing around Catherine’s ankles and whining to be picked up.

“What is it?” Mom said.

“Everything,” Catherine answered.

“I know exactly what you mean,” Mom agreed. “Willow, how about if we do the dishes and let your mom go to bed?”

Catherine dropped her hands. “How can you be so functional, Mom? How can you not miss Dad every minute?”

“Who says I don’t miss him?” her mother said. “Why do you think I can’t stop functioning? Keeping busy gets me through the day. At least you still have a job. A schedule. Things to make you feel
important
.” She turned her back on Catherine and started filling the sink with hot water.

Stung, Catherine watched in silence as Willow stood beside her grandmother, dish towel in hand. Willow was competent and quick, rinsing the dishes carefully before drying them and using a gentle hand to stack them on the open shelves above the counter. Her wavy hair was a tangled thicket around her shoulders. Catherine was shocked to realize that Willow was nearly as tall as Eve. When had that happened?

Soon Willow would be gone, off to college. And Catherine would be alone.

After dinner, Willow took the puppy outside and then tromped upstairs with a fat, musty mystery novel she’d found on the shelf beneath the coffee table. Catherine sat in the living room, listening to the clock tick and trying to read. She and Zoe used to play a memory game with their father where they’d stare at the objects in a room, then close their eyes and try to recite them all.

“It’s like taking a picture with your mind,” Dad had explained when he taught them the game. “If you do it enough, you’ll have photographic memories and get good grades in school.”

Catherine already got good grades, a fact she often hid from her sister, who did not. Now she played Dad’s game, consciously noting every object in the room in case she was never back in this house again. Then she closed her eyes and recited the list of objects to herself: the ancient camel-backed sofa with its pair of needlepoint pillows, the pink ceiling lamp, the painting of milk bottles and eggs done by her great-grandmother, a floral pitcher on the end table.

So many treasures in this house.
Their
family’s treasures. How could her mother bear to give them up?

When she’d asked her mother this question on the drive here, Mom had said, “Because sometimes you have no choice but to move forward.”

Tonight her mother looked peaceful. She was knitting a dark green sweater, a complicated cable pattern that caused her to frown and keep recounting stitches. Those ticking needles had provided the rhythmic background noise throughout Catherine’s childhood.

Catherine put down her book and went to the shelves. She pulled out a few jigsaw puzzles and settled on the five-hundred-piece puzzle of Nova Scotia. It was a map with various icons representing Nova Scotia’s major industries: coal mines, fishing boats, lobster traps, logging trucks, paper mills.

She sat back down on the couch and dumped the puzzle pieces out of the box, then started flipping them right-side up on the coffee table. Maybe she and Willow could work on the puzzle together; she had to find a way to stop barking orders and simply enjoy being with her.