Moon Island (7 page)

The look of Aaron had shocked her. It was her first sight of him since last fall and he had turned other-worldly, as dry and leaf-brittle as if only the most fragile stalk held him connected to life. He and Hannah had barely spoken to Elizabeth beyond expressions of politeness. Even now, it was difficult.

On the mahogany sideboard under the senator’s portrait was a silver-framed photograph. It was Spencer, Elizabeth’s only child, on the day he graduated
summa cum laude
from Harvard. Bob would have been proud of his boy, but he had died the year before the photograph. Elizabeth picked it up and stared into Spencer’s eyes. She could almost hear the dust, gathering and layering itself in invisible soft motes all through her empty house.

Tonight she was oppressed by the relentless passing of time, by the accumulated, stifling deposits of wasted and missed opportunity.

Three

The morning sun shone into the room again, driving a bright wedge through the salt-veiled window.

May checked that the bedroom door was properly closed, then tried it again to make sure. In the absence of a lock or bolt, she came up with the idea of wedging the back of the armchair under the handle. But when she trundled it across she discovered that the chair back was too low.

Nobody would come in, logically she knew that. John was playing tennis with the Beams and Ivy was on the beach with Lucas. When she leaned on the window-sill to look for them she saw her sister wearing Lucas’s wetsuit, perched on his sailboard in the shallow water. Waves no bigger than ripples fanned around the board and ran out into the glittering shingle. Lucas himself stood alongside to encourage her, but as Ivy braced her arms and pulled on the bar, she wobbled and toppled backwards into the water.

May’s mouth curled with pleasure, but Lucas waded forward and hoisted Ivy in his arms. As he set her upright she turned her face up to his and they kissed. It was only the lightest brush of a kiss, but it filled May’s teeming imagination with images of other less public embraces. Her smile turned stiff and bitter. It felt like a Hallowe’en mask on her burning face.

Lucas.

As far as Lucas was concerned she was invisible. Since the night on the island he had hardly glanced at her. She didn’t really expect otherwise, but the glaring hopelessness of her attachment intensified the pain of it. May felt diminished and squat, trapped at the wrong end of some monstrous telescope. Sometimes it was hard to breathe when she covertly stared at him, her arms and legs seemed to waver and soften, and threaten to buckle underneath her. She didn’t know how to position herself, even how to sit or stand when he was around. The only solution seemed to be to hide in the room she shared with Doone and her secrets.

Nobody
would
come in.

Only there was nothing logical about her fears that someone might. May left the chair pushed hard up against the door and knelt down in front of the loose section of skirting.

She had resisted the impulse of curiosity for two days. Part of her recoiled from the very idea of reading the diary. The act of invading the other girl’s thoughts, making this intimate connection with somebody
dead
, was as much fearful as fascinating. But now the desire to read what Doone had written overcame her misgivings. Without giving herself more time to think she pushed the board so it fell forward and revealed the space behind. She slid the diary out of its hiding place and sat down with it in the armchair. Holding the book in her lap she began to read one of the earliest entries.

Six more weeks until 4 July. Six weeks, forty-two days. I can
see
the days lined up in front of me, like brown empty envelopes. Mom says we can go up to the beach house right at the beginning. Then at least I’ll be there, seeing the same places, the old places, even if I have to wait… but I’m used to waiting and watching. I know how to be patient. I can keep it all wrapped up inside me, my secret. Mine.

Then a whole summer, a long chain of days, shiny beads in a necklace …

Do I feel happy or scared?

I don’t know, I don’t know.

Sometimes I wish I could tell someone, just talk, but who? Imagine telling Amy, or Mel. Ha ha. That is so weird it is almost funny.

May frowned. The next line was just numbers.

66 7 10 146 12 2 67 10 9.

And then the writing resumed.

Went to Amy’s last night. We just hung out and painted our nails and watched TV. She talked about Scott T. all night. That is just so dumb.

Forty-one more days.

What did the numbers mean? They weren’t dates, nor did they suggest anything else May could think of. She flipped forward through the blue-lined pages and saw there were more groups of numbers, of two and three, sometimes whole paragraphs of them. Interspersed between the numbers were ordinary jottings, about school and sleep-overs and parties and friends, reassuring to May because they sounded so familiar. If the names were changed they could have applied to her own life as readily as to Doone’s.

Then, among the numbers and the scribbles about everyday events, there were the other paragraphs. These were passages of introspection, which caught May’s attention and held it hooked as if the barbs bit into her mind.

Argument with Mom.

I know everyone has rows with their mothers. You’re supposed to, even. Only I know there’s a difference with ours.

I’m like two people. There’s the one they all want me to be and I pretend that I am, the A-student and the choir leader and the student councillor; and the one I really
am
, that’s so dark and strong and deep that sometimes I can’t stop it bursting out of me.

Like tonight when we were arguing, about nothing at all, just what time I should come in on Saturday nights, and I couldn’t keep up the control: I felt the real me speaking.

Not shouting or any of that stuff. Just cold and quiet and sure. I said I didn’t care, their rules didn’t touch me, nothing really touches me except things they would never know about.

I could see Mom staring at me like I’m an alien. And fear in her face that she kept trying to rub out.

She said did I want to talk, I could trust her, I could tell her anything I wanted.

And I had to keep my mouth still to stop it making this crazy smile. Because I know what I am and what I have, and I know what I hold on to, and it’s nothing I could tell. Never.

Sometimes just the knowledge, the memory of it does make me feel so strong. Like I could hike up the highest mountain or live alone on a deserted island – oh, an
island
– just with this for food and drink and warmth and company.

And if I’m truthful there are other times when I doubt it all. All the wishing and waiting. Miss Straight-A says in my head,
who are you kidding
?

But it’s easy to quieten her. And the easiness makes me sure that I’m real and what I have experienced is real.

And then I feel happy.

After that there was a long sequence of numbers, scribbled and jumbled close together so that the hasty digits were barely legible. They looked as if they had been written in high passion.

Because May read too quickly she sometimes missed the sense, so she went back and made herself study each line. After a while she yawned, and the yawn caught in the back of her throat and swelled into a greasy surge of nausea.

She realised that the diary frightened her.

It was the combination that was unnerving. The way the accounts of normal everyday experiences were linked by the fierce jumbles of numbers to the passages of declaration. And Doone’s declarations of strength made her uneasy. If she was so strong and happy, why did she keep writing it down and why did what she wrote make her sound so lonely? What secret was hidden in the numbers?

May looked at them again. They were usually groups of three, sometimes only two. Once or twice the same number or similar ones occurred several times close together, but otherwise there was no apparent link or pattern. If it was a code, she had no idea how to break it. The thought of what the numbers might spell out increased the sick pressure so that May wondered if she might actually vomit. Holding her legs tensed against the chair’s worn slipcover she closed the book and waited.

Slowly the nausea subsided, but she couldn’t get Doone’s words out of her head.
I could never tell. I could live on a desert island with nothing but this for food and warmth and company
. It made her sound so isolated. And yet, May thought,
I know
her. This bed was where she had slept. From the window she had looked at the view of the island and had gone out and drowned in the blue water.

Somehow, with her diary and her introspection and her coded secrets – and her loneliness – Doone Bennison was slipping under her skin. Now that the knowledge of her was there, hooked in beneath the surface, May did not know how she might rid herself of it. She remembered how finding the diary had made her feel that she hugged the secret to herself like a shield.

Perhaps I’m like her
, she thought. As if she were looking down from some vantage point up under the cracked ceiling, she saw herself sitting splay-legged in the old chair, with the closed diary in her lap and the chair wedged up close against the door to keep out intruders. Or, maybe, was it Doone she was seeing and not herself at all?

‘I would tell my mother,’ May said. The words sounded startlingly loud in the enclosed room. ‘I wish I could tell her.’

One grey, sleet-filled afternoon in the weeks after Alison’s death, driven by an impulse she didn’t understand, May had gone to the boxes where John had stored her clothes. She had taken out the dresses and jackets one by one and cut them, making long tattered ribbons, with the kitchen shears. ‘See?’ she had angrily demanded as she did it. ‘Do you see what I’m doing?’

She hadn’t expected her mother to hear the question, or to be hurt by the destruction of her clothes. Nor had the frenzy been a relief, only another shame to add to the ones May was suffering already.

The therapist John took her to see after this episode had advised May to search for something in nature that reminded her of her mother, and to look at it and think about her when she felt overwhelmed by grief or anger. Reluctantly May had chosen a tree, one particular tall, graceful tree, which grew in a little park near to their house, and in a way the strategy had worked. She thought of it secretly as Mom’s tree and tried in a stilted way to address her mother through it. Now she felt a sudden urge to run out and put her arms around the rough trunk.

There didn’t seem to be much variety in the trees around here. They were mostly hostile pointed firs.

May jumped to her feet and the diary fell to the floor. She shoved it back into the hole and clumsily wedged the skirting back in place, then pulled the chair away from the door. She didn’t have to trap herself in this room. Ivy was with Lucas but she could try her father. There were enough reasons why she didn’t usually turn to him, but she dismissed those for this moment.

May ran down the steep stairs. As her head came below the upper floor level she saw that he had come in from tennis; he was in the kitchen with Leonie Beam. The corners of the room were thrown into deeper shadow by the slices of light that angled from the windows. Dust specks floated in the sunlight, making the old beams and the blackened hearthstones seem darker and heavier.

John was making coffee in the old-fashioned percolator. Leonie was leaning against one of the counters. She was wearing white tennis shorts and shoes, and her long legs were crossed at the ankles. Both of them looked up at May in momentary surprise and smiled at her.

‘Hi,’ John said. ‘I wondered where you were. We had a good game, Leonie and I won both sets.’

Her smooth dark hair was damp, sticking to her forehead, and his shirt was darkened in a great patch across his chest. The two of them were smiling in exactly the same way – the neutral way that covered up other things. May had interrupted something.

‘Do you play tennis, May?’ asked Leonie.

‘No. I can’t think of anything more boring.’

‘
May
…’ John began, but she didn’t wait to hear him out. She marched across to the porch screen and slammed it open, leaving it gaping behind her.

After a second’s awkward silence Leonie gently closed the screen again. She took the mug of coffee that John handed to her.

‘Sorry,’ John said shortly.

‘No need.’

The child had materialised like some avenging angel. Her eyes had skewered them both, as if she could have uttered something much worse than mild rudeness. But her reaction at the sight of them had been so quick that Leonie knew jealousy was a familiar feeling for her. John must have plenty of girlfriends. Not surprising, she thought with resignation.

‘May didn’t like Suzanne, the woman I was involved with until recently. Neither did Ivy, really, although it mattered less to her.’

‘I see,’ Leonie said. She sat down at the over-large oak table and looked through the window at the pillars of the porch and the sky, waiting for what he would say next.

Out on the deck May hesitated, blinking in the brightness, remembering the people down on the beach and her sister’s golden limbs twined around Lucas’s. There was no going back into the house either, so she slipped down the dank space that separated the Captain’s House from Elizabeth Newton’s garden. She moved quickly, because Elizabeth might be working with her pruning shears again amid the thick greenery. She didn’t want to talk to Elizabeth now, or even to be seen by her.