Eleanor (31 page)

She says, “What’s in the backpack?”

He shrugs out of the straps and pulls open one of the flaps to show her plastic baggies stuffed with sandwiches, and a red cotton blanket, and a green plaid-printed thermos. Eleanor eyes the blanket, then Jack.

“I thought it would be nice to just go somewhere quiet and just—I don’t know. Breathe, for a second,” Jack says, embarrassed.

Eleanor looks closely at his brown eyes, then looks at the fogged-over ocean, and the distant, pale island.
 

“Where’s the boat?” she asks, finally.

“I don’t think it belongs to anybody,” Jack says.

Eleanor follows him. They trudge across the beach, and the mist kicks up around their feet, revealing the texture of the gravel below. There isn’t any sand, not really, just a trillion million pebbles, damp and smooth and gray. Jack takes her to the stubby pier, and tells her to come with him. The pier is wet and dark, its planks slick and worn glossy by the sea and the rain.
 

“My dad told me once that he can’t remember ever
not
seeing the boat here,” Jack says, and as he says it, the gloomy fog on the water thins, and the boat appears, a small thing that looks a hundred years old, maybe more. “It was yellow once,” he adds, but the paint has flaked and bleached, and it is now mostly pale and bone-colored. It bobs gently on the calm water. The dock creaks beneath their feet.
 

“It looks like it’ll sink,” she says.
 

Jack only smiles.

Eleanor shivers despite her scarf and hat and mittens and raincoat. She thinks of the blanket in Jack’s backpack, but she worries that she’ll seem greedy—or needy—if she asks for it, so she doesn’t.
 

Aside from Jack’s voice, the only sounds out here are the churn of the oars in the water, the worrisome groan of the boat itself, the quiet lapping of the sea.
 

“I’ve been out here before,” Jack says.
 

“You never told me that,” she says, her teeth chattering audibly.

“Cold?” he asks.
 

She tries not to nod, but she can’t help herself.
 

“Here,” he says, taking off his windbreaker. Underneath he is wearing his hooded sweatshirt, and he lifts it over his head. There is only a T-shirt beneath it. He stops rowing for a moment, and tosses the sweatshirt to Eleanor.
 

“You’re going to freeze,” she says.

“I’m built for the cold,” he says. “I’ll be fine.”

“No,” Eleanor says. “You’ll freeze, and then I’ll be out here alone, and that will make me very sad. And then I’ll be very angry with you for being so
stupid
.”

She throws the sweatshirt back. He looks down at it, then at her.
 

“Come on,” he says. “Are you sure?”

She nods. “But give me the stupid blanket.”

He grins at her, and it makes her smile, too.

Huffnagle has never been a tourist attraction. There are no shops. There aren’t any roads. Nobody lives on the island. It juts up from the sea like a hunk of shrapnel, twisted and dark. The view from its summit is lovely, but to witness it, a visitor must scale a jagged, steep path to the island’s peak. There are no handrails. There’s no proper dock for a boat. The island’s condition serves as its own
No Trespassing
sign.
 

The shops along the waterfront sell T-shirts with Huffnagle’s silhouette printed in the center, above a legend that reads
The Island of Lost Boys.
Eleanor has never been fond of the shirts. No boys were ever lost to the island.

But her grandmother was.
 

“Dad told me that nobody goes to the island because it’s too much work,” Jack says, pulling the oars, lifting them, pulling them again. “He said that now and then someone wrecks their boat on the rocks and gets stranded, or gets hurt, and the Coast Guard has to send out a special rescue boat, and it’s embarrassing and expensive.”

“No,” Eleanor says. “People go to the island. They just don’t talk about it.”

Jack grins.
 

“What?” she says. “I’m not lying. Kids go out there to have sex. It’s like the worst make-out point in the whole state.”

Jack laughs. “I don’t think you’re lying,” he says.
 

“Good.”

“I know you aren’t lying.”

She doesn’t take his meaning, and stares at the faint shape of the island, growing slowly darker as they draw nearer.
 

“I know you aren’t lying because I’ve been there,” Jack says.
 

Eleanor stares at him. “You have not.”

“I told my dad I wanted to,” he says. “You know what he said to me?”

Eleanor shakes her head.

“He said, ‘I’ve been there,’” Jack says.

That was the summer Jack climbed everything, Eleanor remembers. He scaled the water tower behind the school. He skipped class and climbed onto the roof of the school itself. During a basketball game—the last game before they threw him off the team—he ignored a pass and shimmied up the goal post instead, then just sat there, behind the backboard, kicking his feet and dodging projectiles chucked at him by the crowd.

“I thought about swimming out there,” Jack says. “But it’s a really long way. And Dad said he heard a rumor that someone drowned swimming out there, a long time before we even moved here. He was the one who told me about the boat, and how he went out there once when my uncle was in town. They didn’t do much, just got drunk and then rowed back, but he did it, so I figured I could, too.”

“It was my grandmother,” Eleanor says.

Jack looks confused.
 

“Who drowned. It was my grandmother.”

Jack’s jaw slides open. “I—are you serious?”

“My mom’s mom,” Eleanor says. “I was named after her. She was a competitive swimmer. This was where she used to train, swimming to the island and back.”

“Oh, my god,” Jack says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

Eleanor shrugs. “I never met her. Mom was only—five, I think.”

“Jesus,” Jack says.
 

The blanket keeps her warm, though the damp chill of the mist pecks at her exposed face.
 

“What did you do?” she asks. “On the island. Did you take some girl out there?”

Jack wrinkles his nose. “
No
,” he insists. “I went by myself.”

“I bet it was boring,” she says, smiling behind the scarf.

“Did you know they call the water around the island ’the boneyard’? Did you know that?”

She shakes her head.
 

“Because of all the rocks,” he explains. “I guess way back in the old days, pirate ships used to run aground on them. Before the lighthouse.”

“There weren’t pirates out here,” Eleanor says.
 

“Well,
old
ships. Whatever.”
 

“This boat is going to crash on those rocks, isn’t it,” she says. “We’re going to die, aren’t we.”

“We’re going to be fine,” Jack says. “I know where to land. Try to relax.”

She does. She tries very hard to relax, but
trying
is often relaxation’s undoing. Jack falls silent, and works harder at the oars, and Eleanor closes her eyes. She thinks about her mother, alone in the hospital room. Being diagnosed with liver disease has not improved her disposition, or made her any less inclined to drink. Eleanor has taken to staging daily interventions, and Agnes, her eyes fiery and her breath toxic, has slapped her a few times, and pushed her to the floor. There have been no apologies, and Eleanor expects none to come. Her mother will die, but it will not be because death has found her mother. It will be because her mother dared death to come visit.
 

She cannot relax. The world around her is a living, breathing metaphor. The boat is her mother’s frail body, groaning under Eleanor’s weight. The sea is the poison that waits below, ready to consume her when she stumbles. The island is death, and she carves a resolute path—
a straight shot,
as Jack said—to death’s very door.
 

Eleanor’s hips throb. Her body aches from the cold.
 

Her father worries her. His concern for Agnes on the day they found her had moved Eleanor. She had watched him take her mother’s hand, and stupidly pinned a hope on that moment, a hope that one day her family might reunite, that she might be her father’s daughter, her mother’s daughter, again.
 

For years now her father has hated her mother. Hated her for the accident. Blamed her for Esmerelda’s death. Hated her for failing Eleanor. But at that moment in the bedroom—
Ags
, her father had whispered—Eleanor had thought that maybe her father would discover how to forgive her mother.
 

She thinks now that his anger has only retreated. She can see the signs. It will come back. And it horrifies Eleanor to think that this is what adulthood is like: two people, cowering behind their grief, lashing out at each other like injured animals.

“You aren’t the only ones who miss her,” Eleanor mumbles behind her scarf.
 

Jack doesn’t hear her. He rows, and rows.

And Huffnagle looms ominous and large with every fresh pull of the oars.