Stone Cove Island (4 page)

“Ready?” Meredith asked, her eyes bright. Despite being a devout herbal tea drinker, she always looked way more awake than I felt.

“Storm’s over,” I joked, giving her outfit a once-over. Meredith rolled her eyes. “My mom made me change out of my regular raincoat. She didn’t want me to get it dirty. It was this or one of her painting smocks.”

“Well, we’ll probably be inside mostly. We’re on lighthouse duty.”

THE FANCIEST HOUSES ON
the island sat along the bluff on the west side, just north of Jay Norsworthy’s (luckily still inhabitable) house. Normally the bluff was fairly protected from wind because it faced the mainland, but I had heard some summer people were now rethinking that location. The cliff had been eroding slowly for years, and the hurricane had speeded the process. A few houses would either need to be braced on pilings and tied into the hillside or end up in the ocean.

There were also rambling, huge, old-fashioned summer houses out on East Beach, past the lighthouse. I loved
that part of the island. The houses there felt gracious, stretching out into the surrounding open fields. Some kept horses or cows. Few were occupied by year-rounders though, unless they were caretakers. We tended to live in the central section of town just up the hill from Water Street—my neighborhood—or else up behind the inn, or down in the little row houses along the harbor. A few people lived near the marina off East Beach, but in the winter, you really wanted to be close to town. People farther out could get snowed in for days.

As we rode, I tried not to take in the flattened trees, half-collapsed houses and sad debris washed from people’s basements: endless sodden photo albums, ruined toys, lost sports trophies, mud-encrusted kids’ snowsuits. On the steep hill down from the harbor, we passed the road sign that said
DO NOT COAST
. We coasted, letting our bikes fly, no brakes until we neared the bottom, and the bikes were rattling so hard our bones shook. The wind pulled at the skin on our faces. I looked over at Meredith. She was grinning like I was. We did this every time, without thinking. We had always done this. When we were kids, we would take our hands off the handlebars.

“What did your mom say about school?” I asked her. They were trying to decide when to open again. The building wasn’t damaged, but they were still using the gym as temporary housing and weren’t sure if they could operate the whole building off generators alone.

“Next week,” she said. “Tuesday. Wednesday at the latest.”

I wrinkled my nose, the wind whipping through my hair.
I was getting used to having free time and I liked it. Meredith and others, who were more worried than I was about college admission tests and applications, were anxious for the high school to open. Meredith wanted to get into Barnard, where there was a really good dance program.

We distracted ourselves talking about the Halloween dance, pretending that the immediate future was predictable. Meredith had a crush on Tim McAllister, a junior. She was obsessed with what people would think about her dating a younger boy. If she ever got around to dating him, that is. So far the whole thing was theoretical.

“Tim’s birthday is March twenty-second,” she said. “That means I am really only four months older.”

“So you’ve pointed out at least eight billion times.”

She shot a quick smirk at me as we slowed, approaching the beach. “I’m picturing what Lily Kirby and those guys would say, but it’s not like I couldn’t go with someone in our grade. I could. I just happen to like Tim.” Meredith had worked the whole thing into a star-crossed drama in her mind, though I was pretty sure Tim would be thrilled to go to the party with her if he had any clue she even liked him.

“You know what I think,” I said. “Just ask him.”

“Who are you going to go with?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe Josh again. Or maybe I won’t go with anyone.” Josh and I had had a thing for about a second last year before deciding that we were better as friends, which we still were. My mind flitted to Charlie. But Charlie wouldn’t be here by then, and could anything be lamer than going to a dance at the school you
just graduated from? “We should just go as a group again. Do a theme costume. The seven deadly sins or something.”

“That could be fun,” she said. But I could tell she was still thinking about Tim.

As we dismounted and ditched our bikes, I took in the long expanse of sand. Yes, it was littered with garbage, broken branches and broken bits of dock, but it was still there, still recognizable as East Beach. I took a big stack of heavy-gauge garbage bags from Officer Bailey. Meredith kept her distance. Most kids did when it came to our chief local law enforcement official. She was a stocky woman about my mom’s age, built very straight up and down. She wore her uniform’s belt buckled in tight, but didn’t really have a waist. Officer Bailey was the first woman sheriff in the island’s history, and the jokes and rumors flew: she was really a man; she was a closet lesbian; she couldn’t get a job off the island on a “real” police force because of her weight. Personally, I thought it was cool that she was the first female sheriff of Stone Cove Island, even if she had zero social skills.

Some of the boys were dragging garbage cans onto the beach where kids had started stacking wood and raking up debris.

Colleen was among them. She held up a bright green, high-heeled shoe she’d dug out of the sand.

“It’s my size! Maybe I’ll find the other one.”

I laughed, but was also thinking it would be a good idea to come up with some way to connect people with their lost belongings, maybe start a website where people could post pictures. I could put that together. I would need someone more tech savvy than I was. Once again, my mind flitted to
Charlie.
He’s going back to Boston
, I reminded myself.
And you already asked your favor. Leave the guy alone
.

“Thanks for coming!” I called.

“No worries,” Colleen yelled back. “It’s a great idea!”

Meredith and I handed out extra work gloves and then went into the lighthouse carrying rakes and shovels. The tall tower was painted outside and in with wide black and white stripes all the way up to the lantern room. It had been in operation until the early nineties, marking the channel that led back to the marina. Park rangers checked in on their rounds, but mostly it sat empty, open to tourists who wanted to climb up and take in the view.

That wasn’t a possibility now. Standing water and soaked papers and cardboard carpeted the floor. We winced at the odor: dank, stale mildew. Sand had blown inside and formed a mini dune against the far wall. Meredith and I hung garbage bags off the metal stair railing and began to fill them with the rotten paper. We moved shovelful after shovelful of sand back outside where it belonged. The wet sand was heavy. After ten minutes, my T-shirt was dripping. I tied a bandanna over my hair, hippie style, to keep the sweat off my face. After a while Colleen joined us.

“I came in here thinking this job would be easier,” she said, struggling with the sand.

“Ha!” I grunted. Meredith just shook her head.

“You got a good turnout, Eliza,” Colleen said.

“I’m just happy people actually showed up.” It was funny how in the last few days Colleen had come to feel like a friend. Before the storm I couldn’t remember more than two times we’d said anything other than hello. “Hey, did
you happen to see Charlie this morning? He’s still here on the island, right? Do you know if he’s coming out to help?”

It came out before I really thought. She shot me a huge grin.

“Not a joiner. I told you,” said Colleen. “Seriously. You two are ridiculous. He’s about to leave. What are you wasting time for?”

“You and Charlie?” Meredith piled on. “Why didn’t you tell me you hooked up?”

“Because we didn’t. He helped me with cleanup day; you know, by getting Jim to put it in the
Gazette
. I want to thank him. That’s all.”

“You should invite him to Halloween,” said Meredith.

Colleen rolled her eyes. “You snooze you lose, Eliza.”

“There’s nothing
to
lose,” I groaned. But I could feel myself blushing. It was true, I had been looking around the beach for Charlie, feeling disappointed—okay, even annoyed—that he hadn’t shown up. But this wasn’t about me. We were doing this for the island. It wasn’t like he hadn’t shown up to my birthday party or something. “I’m going to check the windows upstairs,” I announced, even though I knew they were fine. I could see from outside they weren’t broken.

As I climbed the spiral staircase, away from the pesky questions, the air became fresher. I could taste the tang of salt. The view was still as beautiful as ever. The ocean was calm, rolling in leisurely, innocently, as though nothing had happened. On the upper landing, a narrow stairway led to the observation deck. To the left there was a door, normally locked, the former office of the lighthouse
keeper. Now it sat halfway open, blown in from the force of the storm. I pushed my way into the office and sighed.

The place looked like that illustration in
Alice in Wonderland
, the one where she’s standing in a mad swirl of playing cards. The papers—seemingly every scrap from the entire lifespan of the place—were plastered across all available surfaces. It looked like a bomb had exploded. It would take a week of cleanup days to put this right.

“Wow.” I think I actually said it out loud. There was almost no water damage up here, and I couldn’t figure out how the storm had created a little tornado in here without tearing out the windows in the process. I reached down and picked up something at my feet.

It was a letter.

It had been written on a typewriter, not printed from a computer. The paper was heavy stationery, the formal blue kind people use for thank-you notes. This was no thank-you note.

After I read the letter a second time, I realized I wasn’t breathing. What was this? There was no date. The paper was damp, as though it had been sitting out for a long time, but every piece of paper on the island was probably damp at this point. I recognized the bits of nursery rhyme, of course, but parts of it sounded biblical: “Do not await the last judgment.” What kind of person had written this thing?

My first thought was that I should show it to Officer Bailey. But it was so hard to tell if it meant anything. It was creepy, definitely, but it could have easily just been the start of someone’s short story for creative writing class. Officer Bailey would think I was overreacting. I almost certainly was overreacting. I folded it and put it in the pocket of my windbreaker. I closed the office door behind me and went down to help finish cleaning up the lower floor.

For the rest of the afternoon, I felt cold and couldn’t warm up. I didn’t show Meredith. I still don’t know why. Instead I took the letter home.

MY BED WAS STILL
stripped. The rug hung outside, drying. My mother had conceded one point to the side of rationality. The sun was already low in the afternoon sky.

I’d been sitting on my floor for almost an hour, rereading the letter over and over. I thought about my parents and their constant reminders:
You can talk to us about anything. We are here if you need us. Any problem you have, bring it to us
. Platitudes every teenage girl hears.

Normally I thought of myself as pretty self-sufficient. But I didn’t know what to do with this. This time, I
did
want their help, but I didn’t know how to ask. So I sat there, waiting for it to be time for dinner. And when my dad finally yelled for me to come down, I brought the letter with me.

“How was cleanup day?” he asked as we gathered around the kitchen table.

“Good. Really good,” I said. “Look. I found this in the lighthouse.” I thrust the paper at him. I couldn’t beat around the bush when I didn’t even understand what I was showing them.

My dad’s eyes met Mom’s as he took the blue sheet. He had a crescent-shaped scar on his left hand; a hammer had fallen at a construction site during one of his first summer construction jobs in high school. It seemed to quiver as he read the page. I glanced up and saw his eyes zigzag, zigzag and stop. He sat frozen—so frozen that when my mom plucked it from his hand, he didn’t stop her. My mom’s eyes only completed the zig of the first line and without
zagging, she was up, crying, arms flailing and tearing from the room.

I was used to my mom’s histrionics. But frankly, this scared me. My dad was looking at me in a fixed, parental, trying-to-be-calm-but-I-have-no-idea-what-to-do expression. Finally he spoke. First he said, “Eliza. It’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong.” There was a long pause as he figured out his next move.