Local Girls : An Island Summer Novel (9781416564171) (12 page)

“Hello?” I called out, and then took the final steps toward the doorway, prepared to jump out of the way if a family of raccoons decided I wasn't welcome.

But instead of raccoons, there she was, in a pair of paint-splattered jeans and what looked like one of Malcolm's faded Edgartown Yacht Club T-shirts. “Izzy?”

She turned around, her ponytail skimming the paintbrush in her hand and leaving a streak of blue in her blonde hair. “Kennie, what are you doing here? I didn't hear you.”

I stepped into the barn and was immediately enveloped in the slightly tangy smell of oil paint. “I just came by to see the house.”

“Well, I'm glad you did, I didn't even get to say good-bye to you when you left the other day,” she told me. “I hope we'll be seeing more of you this summer.”

“Well, I'm working almost every day, so I don't have much free time,” I explained, hoping she wouldn't press the issue and make me tell her about my fallout with Mona. “I didn't know anyone was here, there were no cars out front.”

“Malcolm dropped me off on his way to the ferry this morning. I'll call Mona or Henry to pick me up when I'm ready.” Izzy waved me over to her. “Come, tell me what you think.”

Canvases were scattered throughout the barn; huge squares and rectangles, some taller than me, leaned against the weathered walls. I didn't know what you'd call Izzy's painting style; it wasn't completely abstract, because I always recognized places and objects, but it wasn't exactly realistic, either. No matter what you called it, one thing was for sure.
Izzy always worked big. Only, unlike the large blossoming flowers she'd painted for as long as I could remember, the images on these canvases weren't magnified versions of petals and pistils and stems, they were faces. Magnified faces filled canvases like close-ups on a movie screen, but unlike the realistic faces in movies, Izzy's were drawn loosely, fluidly, their features exaggerated.

“I didn't know you still painted.”

“Of course I still paint. Why wouldn't I?”

“I guess I thought you'd stop once you moved to Boston.”

“God, no. I could never stop.” She placed the brush in her mouth and stared at the still-wet canvas. That explained the bite marks along the handle. “So tell me, do you think it's working?”

“It's Poppy.”

“Well, at least you could tell who it was, so that's a start.”

“It looks like him,” I told her, but then stepped back. “But it doesn't look
exactly
like him.”

“Good. I wasn't really trying for something too literal.”

“Is he in front of the potbellied stove?”

Izzy's mouth dropped open. “How did you ever figure that out?”

“I don't know, something about the light here.” I pointed to some dark shadowing where I saw a reddish glow reflected. “It looks like it's warm.”

“What else do you see?” she wanted to know, and I took another step back to get the full effect.

Izzy frowned as she watched me stare at the canvas. “What? Is it really awful? You can tell me the truth, I can take it.”

It wasn't awful. It was wonderful, like Poppy was magnified
a hundred times, every part of him more vivid than anything in real life.

“He looks like he's getting ready to laugh.”

She tipped her head to the side and tapped the narrow end of the paintbrush on her thigh. “I guess he is.”

“It's not awful, Izzy, it's just . . .” I hesitated, wondering if I should believe that she really wanted to know the truth. “Isn't it a little weird to be painting him now?”

Meaning, of course, now that he was gone.

Izzy shook her head at Poppy and smiled. “Actually, no. That's sort of why I started painting him in the first place, as a way to remember. Not just as my dad, or Mona and Henry's grandfather or the guy everyone knew from the bank, but to try to understand who he really was. I guess I thought it would help.”

“Has it?”

She nodded. “Maybe not right away, but now, I think so somewhat.”

“When did you start working on it?”

“Around Christmas. Christmas was tough.”

“I thought you were going to sell the house.”

“Me, too. I guess I thought there was really no reason to keep it. Without my dad it would never be the same.”

“Malcolm's house is definitely big enough for everyone,” I said.

“That's true, but that's not what I meant. If anything, being with Malcolm meant I didn't
have
to sell it. So when I came back in January to clean out the house and get it ready to put on the market, I decided to keep it, even if it's just so I can have the barn. It's nice being here. Do you think I'm crazy?”

I shook my head. It seemed Izzy and I felt the same way. “Not at all.”

“This isn't the only one I've been working on by any means.” Izzy stepped back from the canvas and waved her hands around the barn. “Go ahead and take a look at the rest of them. I haven't completed any, so they're all works in progress, but you're more than welcome to explore.”

I accepted Izzy's invitation and walked around the barn to look at the other portraits. The portrait of Malcolm was nearly complete, as was the one of Henry, his hair slightly matted and damp, his cheeks flushed a rosy pink. Even without recognizing the colors surrounding him, I knew Izzy had decided to paint what Henry looked like after a hockey game.

I continued wandering, recognizing a few faces here and there, friends of Izzy's I'd met at the house and a woman I recognized as Mona's grandmother—from the photo they'd kept on a bookshelf in the living room. There had to be at least fifteen paintings leaning against the barn walls, some stacked in front of others, so I had to remove the front one to see what was behind it.

I walked up to one of the canvases, a four-by-four-foot square tucked behind a portrait of a woman. “Who's this?”

Izzy looked up from the canvas of Poppy and paused for a minute. “Oh, nobody in particular. I was just fooling around. I'm still working this whole thing out. I wanted a new challenge, but portraits are a lot harder than I thought, actually. Especially when working from memory. Like this . . .” Izzy started explaining something about Poppy's lips, and even though I was sure she had a very valid point, I couldn't take my eyes off the unknown boy on the canvas in front of me. He
looked to be around my age or a little older. The background had a wash of color but the rest of his face was simply an outline. There was something familiar about the eyes, even though the pupils and lashes were just rough gray strokes of pencil. Maybe it was the way his eyes crinkled in the corners as if squinting against the sun. He was definitely outside, with vivid turquoise blues and greens and hints of yellow reflected behind him. Whoever he was, Izzy had painted him looking away, as if something caught his attention and he'd turned toward it.

“Do you see what I mean?” Izzy asked.

I hadn't been listening, so I had no idea what she meant. “No, show me.”

Izzy went on explaining something about how she wanted to capture the essence of the person, not necessarily a physical likeness. And even though I knew Poppy, and even loved him like a grandfather myself, it was the boy in the corner behind the other canvas that kept my attention. Because even though I couldn't put my finger on it, I felt like I knew him.

I watched Izzy paint a little longer and she told me more about Boston and how she'd come back to the island every week since January, sometimes without even telling anyone.

“Why?” I wanted to know. I couldn't imagine my mother going somewhere two hours away every day and not even knowing about it.

“I guess I just wanted to have something to myself. I love our place in the city, but it still feels a little like Malcolm's. This still feels a little more like home.”

I knew that's how my parents felt, that the island was home, which was probably why they never even considered moving, although my dad had an opportunity to transfer to a post
office in Hyannis when I was in middle school. I remember hearing them talk about it, my mom and dad weighing the pros and cons. As far as I was concerned, there were plenty of pros (which included things like shopping at places I could only get to on the Internet, and being able to go more than twelve miles without getting on a ferry) and few cons, leaving Mona pretty much the only one I could come up with. It wasn't like they were debating whether to pack up and move to another continent, it was just Cape Cod! Fifty miles away and you would have thought it required a passport and vaccinations. Needless to say, they chose to stay on the island.

“Do me a favor, don't tell Mona I was here,” I asked Izzy when I started to leave.

Although I expected her to, she didn't ask me for an explanation. I guess if anyone understood about keeping secrets, it was Izzy. “If that's what you want, okay.”

“Your paintings are amazing, Izzy. Really, I love them.”

“Thanks, Kennie. You're more than welcome to come and visit anytime. There are days I could use the company.”

With the summer just beginning, I was sure there would be days I could use the company, too.

Henry was picking me up at five o'clock, and when you've been up all night tossing and turning, five o'clock comes early. And fast. First, I was afraid I'd oversleep. I kept reaching over to make sure my alarm clock was set for an ungodly hour, and then I'd lie there debating whether I should set the alarm for music or the buzzer. Second, I still hadn't decided what I should wear. Granted, it was just Henry, but in another way he was no longer just Henry. Our mornings together had taken him out of a familiar context; it was like suddenly viewing someone you previously knew only in black-and-white in a whole new range of colors. And because I wasn't used to actually talking to Henry at any length, or without Mona there to mediate, part of me was afraid we'd used up all our good stuff in the baking aisle of Stop & Shop. What if I spent two hours sitting on the bank of the pond watching Henry fish in silence? What if he took one look at the dark circles that would undoubtedly be ringing my eyes and decided that not only was I really not a morning person, but I was actually not meant to be seen in public that early?

At 4:29 I leaned over my night table and turned off the
alarm before it even buzzed. My bedroom window was open just a crack, but I could feel the morning chill coming into the room, which made me want to get into a hot shower all that much faster.

I thought half an hour would be plenty of time to get ready. It was fishing, not the prom. It wasn't even a date. It was sitting on dirt next to a bucket of worms. But as I pulled my sweatshirt on it occurred to me that it would be the first time all summer that Henry would see me in something other than my yellow polo shirt and khakis. And that made me reevaluate my choice of clothing. Then I remembered that Henry was used to seeing girls who wore lip gloss and bronzer to the beach. And that made me wonder if I should try to hide the dark circles under my eyes with a little concealer. While I was at it, maybe I should put on some mascara. And blush. And eyeliner.

With ten minutes to go I began to wish I'd gotten up at four o'clock instead. Which, in addition to being hindsight and therefore useless, was also crazy. I ended up putting my wet hair in a ponytail and sticking with my blue shorts and sweatshirt. But I went with the concealer. It couldn't hurt.

At 4:59 there I was, sitting outside on our front steps, watching the sky begin to lighten in the east. And at five o'clock sharp I heard Henry's truck pulling up our driveway, his windshield wipers moving from side to side as they pushed away the dew that had collected overnight.

I opened the passenger-side door and slid in next to Henry. Usually I placed my Stop & Shop purchase on the seat between us, but this morning there was nothing separating me from him.

“I was almost sure you'd still be sleeping,” he told me,
and all of a sudden I was even more conscious of the small amount of empty space between us.

“No way. I was up before the alarm even went off.”

“Just couldn't wait to get fishing, right?”

I smiled and Henry smiled back. “Right. So where to?” I asked.

“Same place as always.”

Henry put his hands back on the steering wheel and we headed toward Seth's Pond.

The roads to West Tisbury were empty and we made it there in less than fifteen minutes, during which I realized Henry and I could, in fact, spend more than two minutes in the truck without running out of things to say. The ride to Seth's Pond was actually easier than the ride from the ferry with Mona, probably because we'd had a few days to work up to it.

Henry parked the car along the side of the road and we walked down to the pond. I offered to carry the tackle box, but Henry insisted on carrying all of the gear himself, so I followed him, making sure to keep far enough away that I didn't impale myself on the fishing rod resting over his right shoulder. Henry led me past the small sandy beach and then along the edge of the pond, holding the tree branches aside so they wouldn't snap back and hit me. Finally, when we could no longer see the beach or much else, Henry laid the pole on the ground and dropped the tackle box.

“Is this it?” I asked, pointing to a spot that was sandy and rocky and not exactly a spot where I'd choose to sit for the next two hours.

“This is it.” Henry kicked aside some rocks and then squatted down and unlocked the tackle box. “Take a seat.”

I did as I was told.

It was still early enough that the mist hung over the water, lingering like a cloud that wasn't quite ready to lift. We couldn't even see across to the other side. For the next five minutes I just sat there, observing everything around me, while Henry went through what I assumed was his daily routine.