Enchanted August (10 page)

Caroline must have spied Lottie down at the springhouse earlier that day: she had done a small interpretive dance after she drew the water. She had wanted to feel like a wood nymph, and it had worked.

Rose was snipping chives with vigor. “All ready,” she said after she'd tossed them into the salad. “I guess we'll have a feast tonight.”

Beverly tasted Rose's carefully made vinaigrette. “It could use a bit of a kick,” he said. “No need for a dressing to be anemic.”

Caroline tasted it too. “Umm, yes. More salt, at least.”

“I'll set the table, shall I?” asked Lottie. “Caroline, flowers would be lovely.”

“Did you get any wine on your peregrinations?” asked Caroline. “A glass of white would be delicious just now, don't you think?”

“There's a bottle in the fridge,” said Rose. “If you'd like to open it.”

“
Where
in the fridge?” Caroline asked.

“Oh, for God's sake,” said Rose.

Caroline leaned into the refrigerator, her flawless profile silhouetted by the light. “Oh,” she said. “Chardonnay.” And she closed the refrigerator door.

“It's
French
chardonnay,” said Rose, taking it out herself.

“Still,” said Caroline, pregnantly. “I'll have that last drop of water. Lottie, will you go down to the spring again tomorrow?”

“I love the spring.”

Rose's attempt to open the bottle of French chardonnay ended when the elaborate corkscrew broke the cork.

“You'll need to tell me when the lobsters are done,” said Beverly. “They'll want to be thoroughly red, but of course I'm color-blind.”

D
inner did not get much better for the entire first week. Caroline would have skipped it entirely, but she was ravenous every evening and there was nowhere else to eat on Little Lost. And now she'd have to face yet another one. Tonight would be especially bad, she thought, as it had rained the entire morning and it was still raining now, in the early afternoon. Added to that, they had missed the fabled market boat on Monday—a floating farmers market!—as Lottie had misread Robert's handwriting and mistaken his European-style 1 for a 7, insisting it came on Monday nights and not Monday afternoons. That put everyone in a bad mood.

She'd gone through all the books on her iPad and couldn't download any more. Plus, like an idiot, she'd forgotten her charger, and apparently she'd have to drive to Bangor to get another or wait four days for FedEx, which only delivered to the island sporadically.

Acting like a regular person was not that much fun.

There were plenty of books to read in the cottage, but none of them really engaged her. No juicy Victorian novels. Either they were hoary old volumes like
Flower Stories for Little Minds
or they were leftover paperbacks from the seventies—
Trinity
, or a biography of Betty Grable.

The sound of the rain on the roof was hypnotizing, and Caroline was almost ready to close her eyes for a nap up in her turret room when she noticed something else about the boards in the ceiling. There was a rectangular outline cut through the wood. It could be a patch in the ceiling, or it could be another way to the third floor—a secret way for the most enterprising of the boys. As she studied it carefully, she thought it looked like a trapdoor with one of those folding staircases. There was no rope pull, but no lock, either. She decided to investigate.

Caroline got up from her bed and made an inspection. If she climbed up on the chair right below it she could pull the door down. She stepped up, teetering a bit.

Even with the added height she wasn't quite tall enough to reach, so she grabbed a couple of thick volumes from the bookshelf. With the
Armed Forces Hymnal
under one foot and
The Thorn Birds
under the other, she could just get a grip on the unfinished wood. It was hard to do without a pull of some kind. She imagined there was a tool that would hook into the gap between the door and the ceiling, but she had no such tool. She had only her nails and her curiosity. They worked. She pulled down the door.

Caroline was half-expecting a cascade of dust, but the door was well oiled, and it and its hidden stairs came down neatly. She realized that perhaps the reason there was no rope pull was not that the attic was old and unused, but rather because its owner did not want anyone going up there.

There are such things as locks, even in Maine, Caroline thought, and started up the steps.

The rain was much louder here, almost deafening, really. It could have been oppressive if it didn't sound so comforting. Caroline craned her neck and looked around the room in the dim light.

She didn't know what she was expecting, but not this. It wasn't really an attic at all—it was an entire third floor, very open and surprisingly airy and light. She took in the overstuffed sofa with its faded chintz, the pale braided rug, the starched white curtains, the ancient leather trunks promising antique treasure. And so many guitars and stringed instruments hanging on the walls. Whose room was this? Hers now. Separate from all the others and made to fit her perfectly.

She felt not like the madwoman in the attic but like Goldilocks. This was just right.

 • • • 

It only took about three days for Rose's sleep schedule to change utterly. No sooner had the sun's rays finally left the sky and the stars shone their brilliant pinpricks of light than Rose sought her soft eiderdown and fell into a deep sleep. She still felt bad about the first night, with the lobsters. Now that she was waking with the dawn the house was finding its own rhythm, and everything started to melt away.

Lottie woke early too. They got into the habit of picking up Beverly's shopping list, which perfectly complemented Max's fresh produce and fish, and taking it into town as the little IGA opened its doors. Only once had they left the car keys in the cottage and found themselves in the parking lot on the other side with no way to get into town. “A rookie mistake,” said one of the islanders, though he said it with good humor. “I'll be your ride, if you like.” Rose was beginning to accept, if not rely on, the kindness of the strangers here.

Generally, they were back on the eleven o'clock ferry, in time to spend the late morning picking out sea glass on Sea Glass Beach, which was what the islanders in fact called it, before the tide came in. That left them free to watch a bit of Little Lost tennis in the afternoon—Lottie had introduced Rose to her island friends—and then to get ready for dinner in the evening. Then another glorious sunset and the day would have flown by. Considering they did next to nothing all day, the first week went quickly. Even so, it took Rose that long to register that she was truly away.

Before they did their shopping in the mornings, loading the groceries in canvas bags to make boarding the ferry easier, they took themselves to the West Dorset Public Library. It was a sweet little structure that looked like a humble wooden Greek temple, but it had sadly been “improved” inside and lost most of its architectural character. Still, the librarians were friendly and the Internet was strongest here, even out under the portico, where they sat before the library opened at eight thirty. Lottie was on the brick steps, absorbed in texting on her phone, when the librarian came by and unlocked the doors. Rose wasn't much of a texter, so she waited till she could use the one free terminal to check her e-mail. There was no message from Fred.

She considered. No news was good news, supposedly. It meant the twins were fine. It meant there was nothing to worry about. It meant Fred wasn't interested in how she was.

Should she write him? Would it make it worse to say, “I'm away from you and I love it here”? Could she say, “Wish you were here,” and mean it?

She wondered what Lottie would say about the idea of asking Fred to come to Maine. Even just for a weekend. Actually, she didn't have to wonder. She knew.

“He wants to be with you, Rose,” Lottie replied when she broached the subject. “Why would he not? You're beautiful—”

Rose shook her head.

“No, you are beautiful. This whole state suits you. Probably in Park Slope you look kind of tough and severe because you have to keep your guard up. But here you can let your guard down.”

Lottie's compliments were always hard to take.

“I look better too. Jon will like that.”

“Jon?”

“I'm going to ask him up. Oh but wait, I forgot to tell him about his shirts.”

She texted quickly, talking as she typed.

“I feel so different here. It doesn't seem right that I have all this and he doesn't have any of it. I think he'll come. He'll come for Caroline Dester, but he'll stay for me.”

Rose glanced at her screen again, in case anything had come in from Fred.

“I told him the ferry schedules,” said Lottie. “This is what his mother wanted for us, anyway.” Lottie had gone into painstaking detail on the trip up about who would be watching Ethan and when. Her mother-in-law was her staunchest ally, apparently. “She wanted us to be alone. Her husband had a wandering eye too.”

Rose wished Fred's mother were so wise.

She stared a long time at her Gmail. Maybe she had missed something. There were lots of messages from the poetry e-mail lists she was on, and a few from her sister asking questions about the twins and what her nanny needed to know for when they arrived. Not a word from her husband.

“We've got to get back, Rose,” Lottie said. “We'll miss the ferry.”

Rose pressed Refresh one more time, just to make sure she missed nothing.

A boldface message appeared:
From Robert SanSouci.

She leaned in closer to read it.

Hope you are in fine fettle & enjoying Little Lost. I will be in nearby Brooklin for a visit with a friend on August 19 & would like to come across on the last ferry to pay a visit and pick up one of my instruments there if it is not too inconvenient for you, Lottie, et al. Horseshoe Beach is lovely & not so easy to find without a native guide & interpreter. I would like you to see it.

Regards,
Robert.

What to make of this?

“Rose, come on.”

“I'm coming, Lottie.”

She hesitated, and was lost. Did she write him back and say come, come? Did she bar him from his own house? Should she consult with the others?

“Rose—the ferry!”

Her hands hovered over the keyboard.

Come,
she wrote. It was all she had time to say.

J
on opened the bathroom door to the heavy heat of August in New York. The bedroom air conditioner was jacked up too high: but it was the only room in the house that was cool. His feet stuck to the bathroom tiles. He was already starting to sweat. He turned the shower on, let the water run cool, and got in. The lukewarm stream sluiced down his scalp. At least he had a full head of hair. Women liked his hair.

The phone rang but Jon couldn't bring himself to get out of the shower to answer it. Probably one of the Happy Circle moms. They were constantly calling and they were all sexless, like Lottie was now. The moms left messages about who had an ear infection, whose babysitter hadn't come in on time, what party was where. How was he supposed to keep all this straight? Even with Ethan gone to his parents—thank God they'd come through for once—Jon was still hearing from the moms way too much. The one he wanted to hear from was Carla.

He turned up the water hotter and reached for the soap.

Clearly it would be a mistake to get involved with a firm associate. But Christ, was she firm. Ha!

Carla had tits that she didn't mind leaving mostly exposed. They'd be nice and heavy, a real handful. And a trim little ass. She wore short skirts all spring and favored jeans on dress-down Fridays that showed a thin slice of skin when she sat down. Sometimes she wore those summery dresses that would cling. He liked to think about what she'd look like with nothing on. He thought he pretty much knew.

But it was Lottie's name he called out when he came.

Jon wrung out the washcloth and shut off the water.

The icy blast of the air conditioner hit him as he stepped back into the bedroom. At least without Lottie here he could keep it as cold as he wanted. He went to get a shirt from the drawer and found he was on his last one. Jesus, Lottie. She knew he'd need shirts for the whole time she was gone.

The phone buzzed. It was her.

hi sweetie— shirts being delivered later today. Ethan sounds like he's having a great time w ur folks. caroline dester says hello. did you open the pics? i think you should come here this weekend. love you, Lx

The only thing that registered in her note was the name Caroline Dester. Caroline Dester was in Maine with
Lottie
?
The
Caroline Dester?

Jon wrapped the towel around his waist tightly and started a text. Then he thought he'd better phone. He pressed her speed dial but of course he couldn't get through. This whole week it had been impossible to reach her. She must be e-mailing from the coffee shop on the mainland. Why couldn't he get through?

The phone swooshed again.

PS: I think Beverly Fisher could use a good lawyer. Lx

“Lottie, what are you talking about?” he said aloud. He didn't know who the hell Beverly Fisher was but Caroline Dester was worth a fortune. The Desters were surely represented by some ancient white-shoe firm, but there could be some billing for a scrappy IP attorney like him if he had an in. What was Lottie doing hobnobbing with Desters? Wasn't she sharing the house with that other mom from Ethan's school?

Jon pressed Lottie's speed dial again. Where the hell was she? And now he was getting late for work. It was another rotten day in August and the last thing he wanted to do was have to walk fast and sweat through his jacket. Carla sweated, but in a good way.

The landline rang.

“Lottie?” But it was his mother. He couldn't believe he hadn't checked before he picked up.

“Jon, dear.” He could tell from the sound of her voice that something wasn't right.

“What's the matter? Is Ethan okay?” His heart raced.

“No, Ethan's fine,” she said. Jon let out his breath. “But we need you to take him back home this weekend. Your stepfather has a summer flu and I can't take care of them both. I'm sorry, Jonnie. I called Lottie so she could break it to you but I couldn't get through to her.”

“Can't you have him sleep over at Mrs. what's-her-name next door and watch him during the day?”

His mother didn't respond, as she tended not to when Jon turned into the eleven-year-old version of himself. Which happened every time he spoke with her.

He sighed extravagantly. “Okay, Mom, I'll take him for the weekend. But I can't deal with him next week, too.” His stepdad was probably not that sick. “Somebody in this family has to work every day and right now that person seems to be me.” God, I am a spoiled brat, he thought. “Are you going to bring him down?”

“No, Jon, I am not going to bring him down. You're going to come here, pick up your son, and take care of him. Come up tonight after work and then the two of you can leave in the morning. I'm sorry for Ethan but I can't take care of both of them. Call in sick.”

“People don't get sick at law firms, Mother,” Jon said. “I haven't taken a sick day since I got there.”

“All the more reason to now,” she said. Her tone was irksome but reasonable. “They won't fire you for being sick.”

“Ha.” Little did she know. Partners were fired for sneezing too much. And the goddamn Acela cost a fortune.

“I'll pay for the train fare, Jon. I know money is tight. Here's Ethan.”

“Hey, bud,” said Jon. All he heard was Ethan's breathing. “Buddy?”

“Daddy?” said Ethan.

“Yes, little buddy?”

“Can you come get me?”

God
damn
his mother.

“Okay, guy. Daddy will come get you.”

He'd have to call in sick. He hoped no one would move into his office—such as it was—while he was gone. He'd take his mom's car and drive up to Maine like Lottie said he should for the weekend. Leave Ethan there for the week or even the month. And then he'd head back to the office to see that narrow slice of skin again.

 • • • 

The next morning, after a dreamless night of uninterrupted sleep, Rose did not feel the urge to go into town, either to get groceries or to find a signal. Now that they'd stayed more than a week on Little Lost, having days at a stretch without getting in a car and going to the mainland was much more appealing than not. Nor did she want to knock on the door of another cottager to use his landline, especially since now she awoke with the sun. Fred used to kiss her hands and call her Rosie-fingered Dawn.

Hopewell was on the west side of Little Lost Island, so they did not get a direct view of the sunrise from anywhere at the cottage. That was a small price to pay for the sunsets they saw, looking at another cluster of islands off in the distance (Mount Desert? Deer Isle? Rose wasn't sure). Even so, the ambient light of dawn, and the stillness of the earth as it awakened, was enough to get Rose out of bed, into something resembling clothing, and out of the cottage to greet the day.

The coffee situation was still not settled but Lottie had found one of those drip cones for pour-overs and made a filter out of a paper towel, so Rose did the same, as they kept failing to add coffee filters to their shopping list. She'd do it now if she could find a pen.

It was cold down here. Rose wrapped herself in a blanket from the couch. She'd had no idea she should pack flannel pajamas and wool socks for an August vacation. While she waited for the coffee to filter down she stared absently at her favorite Hopewell mug, a coffee-stained seventies
KEEP ON TRUCKIN'
model that was just the right size and had an excellent handle. She had found it the first morning in the cupboard, where it sat next to a piece of ancient spatterware and an insulated cup that spelled out something in semaphore.

Rose added milk to her coffee, then grabbed a dark green fleece from the line of hooks next to the front staircase and quietly opened the screen door to the front porch. The deck was slick with dew and the old wicker chairs were damp. She found a dryish towel on the railing and used it as a cushion.

The wind came up and breathed in the rich molecules of the atmosphere on the island. The air was wet and cool and gray. Anywhere else you'd call this damp, but
damp
was such an insalubrious word. Better to call it sea tinged, redolent, complicated. Healthy, too. And fresh.

She liked to read early in the morning. Now that her life was such a mess she went back to the old books, the words that were a comfort to her.
Persuasion
never let her down.

She was undisturbed on the porch for an hour. Then she heard Lottie's soft tread down the hall toward the bathroom. She wasn't ready for Lottie yet, so she put the book down, patted the front cover, which was curling from the humidity, and headed toward the beach.

She was still surprised by how different the little beach looked at low tide versus high tide. Low tide exposed a wide swath of tiny rocks and weird-looking seaweed. It looked to her as if the tide was on its way in now. She walked down to the water's edge. This same water had seemed so treacherous when they had first arrived: black, cold, wet, hostile. She wasn't sorry that they had flooded the engine; the ferry was their rescue boat that night. She wondered about laconic Max as she let the water run up against her ankles. It was cold now; how frigid it had seemed that dark night.

She wasn't frigid—not at all, in fact—even though she and Fred didn't have sex as much as they did in the old days. It used to be they couldn't keep their hands off each other. They had no money, back when they were both in grad school, but the few times a check arrived from a generous aunt or an unexpected prize, they spent it on travel. They couldn't go far, of course, but the Greyhound got them out of the city and into deep country within two hours. If they left early enough and got off where they could camp, it was that much cheaper, so that's what they did.

Rose wasn't much of a camper before she met Fred. Her family was indoorsy: two bookish sisters and a much older brother whom Rose rarely saw then or now. Fred always liked her to go first on the trails, though she would have been happier following him. “That's no fun,” he would say. “This way I get to follow that great ass of yours. Very motivating.”

She grinned.

In those days Fred had had a fantasy of pushing her down on the moss and having his way with her in the forest—his words, of course. That was half the reason they went camping at all. Rose wouldn't let him do it right away; that was too predictable, and anyway half the fun was to work themselves into a lather as they hiked. He'd never know when she'd come across the right bed of moss (it wasn't the most comfortable place for sex, to be honest). And she'd never know when she'd feel like being taken. Plus, both of them were aware that they could be spotted by other hikers. One time she knew they had been but she had not let on. She felt a thrum through her body at the memory of it.

Fred wasn't here, though.

She thought about Robert SanSouci. Did he really have a thing for her?

She was beginning to get the impression he was fantasizing about the cottage as matchmaker. He wants someone to stay at Hopewell, fall in love with it, come back to New York, fall in love with him, marry him, open him up, adore his lute playing, and live happily ever after.

“Fat chance of that,” Rose said to the cormorant spreading its wings on a rock. Cormorants have no oil in their feathers, a fact that popped into her brain from nowhere she could locate. They look like little pterodactyls. Rose thought about the twins in their preverbal stage. They squawked back then. Like pterodactyls.

I'm a married woman with two children. She didn't have to wait for the familiar pang as she thought the words. Pangs, really. Two pangs came: one for happy little Bea and a fierce one for her darling misjudged Ben. And then another one. For Fred.

Rose crouched over to pick up a bit of greenish sea glass. Lottie had gotten carried away yesterday and come home with a bucketful of bits and pieces in all different colors, many of which looked like Heineken bottles only recently rendered unto the sea. Rose was more discerning. Her eyes adjusted to the details of the tiny rocks that covered the sand of the beach. Each stone was different. Why are we all so entranced by snowflakes? It's stones that should blow our socks off. She wiggled her bare toes.

She felt a few pieces of sea glass in her pocket. The fleece she had pulled on before coming down to the beach now felt like the plastic bottle it once was. It didn't smell great either. The sun had burned off the haze and it was already warm. To say the island's weather was changeable was an understatement by any standard. In her small bedroom under the shadow of the back of the cottage, it was cool. On the sunporch it was predictably cozy. On the path up and over the top of the island it was chilly, and here on the point it had gone from rainy and cool to bright and hot. Very hot. At least in a fleece. She would have peeled it off if she had anything more than a holey tank top on underneath it.

She peeled off the fleece. Not everything is a metaphor, she thought.

The pull of the water was much greater once she had stripped down. The sun was brazen—suddenly, real August heat, the first she'd felt here. Rose didn't know too much about seas and tides, but even she could tell there was a big difference between low tide and high. It took her just a couple of paces or more to reach the water's edge. Her feet came into contact with much alien flora and surely some fauna. Deadly slippery green slime, sharp-edged rocks glittering with something that begins with an
M
, the name of which eluded her. A bird that sounded like a car alarm called out. Branch-long fronds of seaweed with stems as thick as a garden hose sometimes blocked her way. By the time she waded ankle-deep into the soft waves and belatedly registered their icy cold with a shock, she realized she was freezing.

On an island I live within the weather; I do not battle it.

It was a good thought, and it made Rose happy as she picked her way—more nimbly now—back to her fleece. It was there as she'd left it, only she wasn't cold anymore. She climbed up a bank of imposing boulders. How old can these be? she thought. What a history in their past. Each one had its own pattern of stripes or cast of glittering sparkles (she must look it up; Fred would know it). Some were smooth as a baby's behind—giant versions of her sweet twins' bottoms, when they were tiny—and who cared if her metaphors were mixed? No one, not a soul, was in sight. Rose was sweating now from the sun and the exertion and she knew she had to get into the shade or she'd be slathering on the aloe.