Chance Harbor (3 page)

“I’m not a tourist.” Eve waited for him to ask how long she’d had the house, or why she—someone whose accent clearly marked her as from away—was staying so late in the season. Those were the usual questions. When Darcy didn’t ask them, she felt compelled to say, “Actually, I always felt sorry for Lucy Maud Montgomery.”

“Really? Why?”

“I don’t know how she could have written
Anne of Green Gables
, spitting out pages and pages of gossipy good cheer and platitudes, when she was so depressed.”

“She was depressed? Huh,” Darcy said. “I had no idea. The only thing I know about Montgomery is that her books about Anne have inspired busloads of Japanese women to come here and buy those straw hats with red braids attached.”

“Oh, yes. Lucy had a tough time,” Eve said. “She committed suicide when she was about my age. Pills, I think. They found a note. Something like, ‘I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare think what I might do in those spells.’ Then she goes on to ask for God’s forgiveness. Her depression probably had a lot to do with caring for her wreck of a husband.”

“Or maybe something to do with her mother dying and her father marrying a stepmother who didn’t like her,” Darcy added.

Eve stared at him, then laughed. “So you
do
know all about Lucy Maud Montgomery.”

“Only what my daughter tells me. She read
Anne of Green Gables
when she was a kid and was psyched when I got a job up this way. She’s been up here twice already this summer and spent most of her time at the museums.”

“My older daughter loved the books, too. What kind of work do you do on the island?”

“Wind energy,” Darcy said. “I’m a solar engineer. I’m up here as a consultant, monitoring the turbines at East Point.”

“A lot of people around here complain about them,” Eve said, thinking of Cousin Jane, who lived across the street from the turbines and was always fearful that one of the blades might shear off and fly into her house.

“Yes, well, tell the complainers that these ten turbines produce enough energy for twelve thousand homes and are displacing seventy thousand tons of greenhouse gases each year.”

As Darcy continued talking about the project and a grant he was writing to install a wind farm at another location on the island, Eve wished she’d put on a little makeup. Strange to be standing next to a man so much taller than she was. Eve was five foot ten. She was an inch taller than Andrew and had always thought they fit well together in bed. Malcolm, too, was about her height. What would it be like to be with a man so much taller than she was? Darcy must be well over six feet.

Abruptly, Eve felt self-conscious as she realized Darcy had stopped talking and was watching her curiously. She hoped he hadn’t asked a question. Even more, she hoped he hadn’t guessed her thoughts. Heat flamed in her cheeks and she turned away. “Where did Bear go?” she asked, scanning the backyard and gardens.

“Who? Oh! You mean Sparrow.”

“Sparrow?”

Darcy grinned. “The dog’s named after Jack Sparrow the pirate, not the bird. My son named him. I’m just dog-sitting while my son’s in California.”

“What’s he doing there?” Eve asked, thinking with some relief that being married with children probably meant Darcy was a normal, reasonable man and not one of those off-the-grid types you found living here, the escapees from New York or Boston who saw how cheap the houses were on Prince Edward Island and snapped them up. They all thought they’d go native until the first winter hit and the roads disappeared under blowing snow. Then the houses went up for sale again.

“He’s getting an MBA at Stanford. Looks like you’re doing a fall clear out,” Darcy said as they walked back toward his truck and passed the barn. He whistled for the dog.

Eve had left the barn doors open while she had lunch; the boxes were visible to one side. “Yes. It’s a good time of year to do it.”

“Too bad you missed the seventy-mile yard sale a couple weekends ago.”

She made a face. “I’ve been to that yard sale. I always come away loaded down with more junk than I sell.”

Darcy laughed. “You’ve been up here in the fall before, then.”

“I’ve been on this island in every season. But I’m still ‘from away,’ as far as everyone here is concerned.”

“Me, too, even though my grandparents immigrated here from Scotland before they moved to New York.”

“So where do you live now? I mean, when you’re not here.”

“Vermont. I was at the university there, in the engineering department, for many years. I still teach a class or two when the mood strikes.” Darcy whistled again. The dog finally wandered out of the barn, blinking in the sudden sunlight and making them both laugh. “Well, better let you get back to things. Thanks for looking after the dog.”

“No problem. It was nice to have company,” Eve said.

They shook hands good-bye, and she was struck by another jolt of recognition. What was it about this man that made her feel so comfortable?

•   •   •

You’d think sophomore year of high school would be less about pranks and posers, but so far none of the kids seemed to have gotten that memo. Matt Tracy had already set fire to a trash can during English, making the smoke alarm go off, and the alpha girls were taking selfies of themselves in geometry.

Willow might have to throw herself out a window if she had to stay in geometry one more second. The teacher, Mr. James, was scary clean, using hand sanitizer every twelve seconds.

He had tried teaching them about angles and vectors by having the class make paper airplanes while ranting about “making math fun.” This would have been okay if Mr. James weren’t so totally OCD. The poor guy folded and refolded the same stupid piece of paper, while the robotics nerds and gamer geeks made airplanes with weights and counterweights out of bent paper clips or whatever. The student planes zoomed around in circles until one of them hit Mr. James right between the eyes. Bitchy Shelly Paradiso practically peed her pants laughing.

Now Mr. James was back at the board and Willow was drawing in her notebook. The only class she liked was art. She’d spend all day in art if she could. Last year, when Mrs. Lagrasso (whom the kids called “Mrs. Fat Asso”) taught her freshman art class, Willow had fallen in love.

That’s what art felt like to her: love. She got goose bumps of happiness every time Mrs. Lagrasso showed them another series of paintings or sculptures. Willow had been to art museums with Catherine and Russell, of course, but when she saw art through the eyes of Mrs. Lagrasso, it was different. Mrs. Lagrasso understood the power of art to surprise you with feelings you didn’t know you had.

“What are you drawing? A monkey?” a voice said over Willow’s shoulder.

It was the new kid, Henry Something-or-Other the Third. Pretty much every boy in her school was named after somebody else, or two somebodies. Like it was too much work for their parents to think up original names.

“It’s not anything. Just trying not to slit my wrists while we listen to this crap.” Willow flipped her notebook shut.

“Man, you got that,” Henry said, leaning back again.

They’d been seated alphabetically on the first day of class and had to keep those seats all year—another thing Willow hated about geometry.

Henry’s desk was next to hers. He was a ginger giant, with hair the color of paprika, long legs, and eyes like pennies. He said something else, but Willow pretended not to hear him and focused on the board, which Mr. James was filling with formulas, while she thought about her drawing.

It wasn’t a monkey, but it wasn’t nothing, either: it was actually a sketch of a homeless woman she’d seen this morning as she and Russell crossed Boston Common.

Not even eight o’clock in the morning, and the woman was sitting on a bench by the Frog Pond with her metal cart stuffed with trash bags. She was blind; a white cane was leaning on the bench beside her. The woman was playing a scratched-up old guitar. A handful of coins lay in her open guitar case.

Russell was speeding along ahead of her, but Willow slowed down to look at the woman. She was beautiful, in a strange cartoony way, with giant yellow sunglasses, a bright rainbow tam over shiny black licorice hair, a long black skirt, and a bright red shawl. Like a human-shaped piece of art.

What kind of homeless person got pimped out to play music for a few coins before the benches were even dry? Had the woman slept here?

Willow waited until she was about a dozen feet away, then turned around with her camera. She’d taken a photography class using a manual camera this summer; now she tried to always shoot in black-and-white. In geometry, she’d been sketching the woman because she was thinking about how to hand tint the photographs of her. She wanted to make hand-colored pictures like the ancient ones hanging in Nana’s house in Chance Harbor.

Spanish II came after geometry. A brutal class. Senorita Yolanda didn’t assign seats, but Henry sat next to Willow anyway, wrapping his long legs around the chair rungs.

Willow was thinking about her photographs when Senorita asked her a question in Spanish. Henry bailed her out by answering it for her. She answered the question after that, though, even using the right preterit tense for
ir
, always tricky:
fui
.

“Thanks,” Willow said as she walked to lunch with Henry towering next to her. “I owe you.”

He shrugged. “Thirty percent of our grade is participation, right? So, hey. I participated. What do you have next? Lunch, right?”

“Lunch, then art and chemistry. You?”

Henry looked pathetically hopeful. “Lunch. We could sit together. After that, English and European History.”

He’d have Russell for history, Willow realized. She was about to say this, to give Henry a heads-up on Russell as a teacher, when there was a commotion in the hall. A group of senior girls was headed their way.

One of them, Nola Simone, was the queen bee: wherever she went, the drones buzzed around her. As Willow watched, Nola shook her shining hair around her shoulders. Her hair was the color of oak leaves in fall, bright gold and yellow. Nola held her phone at arm’s length, taking selfies of herself surrounded by her friends as they moved through the hall, oblivious to the fact that everyone else had to paste themselves against the walls to make way.

Not that anyone would have tried to stop them. Watching Nola walk by, with her heart-shaped face and hot bod, her hair like all of the autumn months captured into a single elastic, was like seeing a unicorn: all you could do was stand there with your mouth open and hope she might kick magic fairy dust in your face.

“Hey, Willow,” said Trent, one of the juniors in Willow’s geometry class, a hockey player and a douche bag. He didn’t usually bother her, though; Willow prided herself on her high invisibility factor. She dressed to blend in and kept her mouth shut. Now she cringed as Trent shouted, “Why aren’t you walking with Nola and her posse? You should definitely be in that photo. Get in there, dude!”

Willow gave an elaborate shrug. “No, thanks. Why should I?”

“Because you’re one big family now,” Trent said, elbowing the guy next to him, another hockey kid whose fuzzy beard looked like a wild animal sleeping on his face.

“Me? Right. Like Nola and I are even the same species.” Willow started walking again.

Trent was trailing her, still talking. Henry kept up with her. This should have made Willow feel better. Instead, now she had to worry that Trent might start harassing Henry because he was with her.

“Hey,” Trent said, still using his fucking hockey-rink voice. “Is it true Nola’s been getting some extra-special help in history? A little one-on-one? Some
hands-on
learning from your dad?” He cracked up.

“Whatever,” Willow said without slowing down. She’d heard the rumors about Nola and Russell, too, but so what? Every guy in school wanted to hook up with Nola—teachers, students, coaches.

“Wow, you sure shut down Trent,” Henry said, letting his breath out in a whoosh after they’d rounded a corner and made sure Trent wasn’t trailing them to the cafeteria. “So that girl with the phone is Nola?”

“Right. Nola Simone. Senior,” Willow said.

“Mean girl alert?”

“Not really. Don’t worry about her. Nola doesn’t bother with the small stuff. She probably won’t even notice you.”

“I am but dirt on her shoe?”

“A speck,” Willow corrected. “One speck of dirt on her Jimmy Choo.”

Henry laughed as they kept moving with the flow to the cafeteria, where they sat with Willow’s only two friends at school, Kendrick and Carly.

Lunch was surprisingly okay. Not because of the food, but because it was different, sitting with a guy instead of being three fringe chicks. Kendrick was seriously Goth, all in black: eyeliner, T-shirt, hair dye, boots. Willow and Carly went more for grunge, both of them wearing hoodies and high-tops like a uniform. Easy, cheap, and your body was camouflaged. Nobody could say you were too fat or too skinny or had booty or whatever. They just wrote you off as artsy freaks and geeks.

By the end of the day, Willow was feeling like she might survive sophomore year. Mrs. Lagrasso had shown them slides from a MET exhibit of Matisse’s paintings and the textiles that had inspired them. Then she’d given them free time and Willow had made progress on her sketches. She booked time in the darkroom for Monday.

She usually rode the subway home with Russell. He stayed after school for office hours or faculty meetings while she worked with the newspaper staff or went to Spanish club, but none of the after-school activities would start until next week. Willow thought about hanging out in the music room, where Kendrick played drums in a way that made Willow’s entire spine feel like it would crumble into dust.

No, too nice a day to waste more of it inside. She’d rather go to the Common with her camera and sketch pad, maybe wait for Russell by the Park Street station. Catherine wouldn’t be home until dinner, and Willow still got freaked-out in empty houses since that time her mom passed out on the couch and set the apartment on fire with her cigarette. Willow’d had to call the fire department when she was like seven years old.