The Turning (6 page)

“It
is
pretty, isn’t it?” Flora said. “We hardly notice anymore.”

In the bright morning light, the black house had a reddish cast that made it look less alarming. As I followed the kids past the clay tennis courts, I told them how you and I used to play sometimes. Flora didn’t seem to know what tennis
was
. Miles said he remembered seeing some old wooden rackets in the attic somewhere. Maybe we could find them and play, if I wanted. But he didn’t sound all that enthusiastic.

“I could teach you!” I said.

“That would be lovely,” said Flora politely, but she didn’t seem excited about it.

We passed a dilapidated windmill and the large brick structure that, Miles explained, housed the propane-fueled generator that powered the island. Then we headed toward a marsh thick with tall reeds and crisscrossed by a wooden walkway that zigzagged over the bog.

“Awesome boardwalk!” I said. “What’s with the zigzag, anyway?”

Miles and Flora looked at each other, and for the first time that morning, I remembered how often they’d exchanged those knowing, slightly disturbing glances the afternoon before.

Miles said, “I believe the ancient Chinese used to build them that way in order to confuse the evil spirits.” I looked at him, wondering where he’d learned that.

We spent a long time running back and forth along the zigzags. I told the kids to be careful not to fall in, but Flora only giggled.

Beyond the bog was a moss garden with rocks that looked like mountains, and clumps of moss like tiny forests. Then I found myself on another lawn, like a brilliant green sky dotted with cloud forms of tiny white flowers.

“Look!” said Miles, and I glanced up to see a giant hawk above us. I watched it catching the currents over the meadow. It looked so delighted to be up there, doing its dips and whirls and glides, that it seemed like a good sign about my summer with Miles and Flora. How could I have been so ridiculously nervous? What had I been worried about?

We wound up on the shore of the lake. On the opposite bank was a wooden boathouse, decorated, like the main house, like a gingerbread castle, though in this case, more like a dollhouse. Moored to the dock was the little rowboat I’d seen from my window, and I helped the kids untie the heavy ropes that kept it from floating away.

Flora said, “Let’s have our picnic out on the lake.”

It hadn’t been all that long since breakfast, but I said, “Sure, why not?” We could hang out and talk awhile before we ate lunch. Get to know each other.

Miles and Flora and I took turns rowing, and in no time we were in the middle of the lake. We rested our oars against the sides of the boat and leaned back and drifted. I asked the kids what they liked to do for fun, and for some reason—maybe they didn’t understand the concept of fun—both of them thought I was asking what their future plans were. Flora said she wanted to be a botanist or a horticulturalist, and she told me she was learning the names of every plant on the island. She said she would tell me them sometime, if she and I went for a walk without Miles, who thought plants were boring. Miles told me he wanted to travel, and he listed, in a dreamy voice, all the countries he wanted to visit.

Outer Mongolia was at the top of the list.

“Why Outer Mongolia?” I said.

“Because—” said Flora.

“Be quiet, Flora,” Miles said, and Flora fell silent. I let it go but decided that at some point I’d have to have a talk with Miles about being rude to his sister.

After that I did most of the talking. I told them all about you and my dad. They didn’t ask about my mom, maybe because they could tell that I didn’t want to talk about it. If we did, they might start thinking sad thoughts about their own parents. When I finally ran out of things to say, I asked Miles how he liked school.

He said, “It’s good. I like it a lot. Let’s eat our sandwiches now.”

The sandwiches were delicious—ham and cheese and some kind of butter with fresh herbs. And homemade chocolate-chip cookies that tasted especially great with the orange juice we drank from the cap of the thermos we passed around. It felt comfortable and friendly, as if we’d known each other longer than we had. Flora neatly folded the paper in which the sandwiches had been wrapped, and Miles just as neatly put the paper and the thermos into the backpack, to take home.

After a while I felt sleepy, and the children looked like they could use a nap.

Miles said, “Let’s row to that shady patch.” It was still warm, but we were out of the sun, and all three of us dozed off. Maybe the sun and rocking of the boat had knocked us out, or maybe it was the strain of trying to get to know each other.

When we woke up, the sun had moved in the sky. It was late afternoon. We rowed back in and tied up the boat, and with the children skipping ahead, we made our way back to the house. We found Linda in the vegetable garden alongside the house, picking peas from a row of tall vines that grew along a mesh fence.

Linda’s garden was lush and beautiful. All the plants and vegetables grew in neat rows with straw between them and mulched paths you could clearly see so you didn’t step off and accidentally trample the broccoli, like I did sometimes in my dad’s garden. I wished my dad could see Linda’s garden. He would really like it and maybe even learn something about gardening.

But there is one peculiar thing about Linda’s garden. Instead of wooden or metal posts marking the vegetable rows, she has golf clubs sticking out of the ground at the end of every furrow.

“What’s with the golf clubs?” I asked.

Linda said, “They belonged to my husband, and after he died, I didn’t know what to do with them. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them out because he’d loved them so much, and then I got the idea of using them as row markers in the garden.” I guess she thinks it’s sort of funny or touching, sentimental or practical, I can’t really tell. But the truth—which of course I would never say to Linda—is that they’re kind of ugly, all these rusting golf clubs sticking out of the ground.

“Cool recycling idea,” I said.

“Did you guys have a good day?” she said. “It looks like Miles and Flora got a little sun.”

The kids nodded, and I did, too. And I was pretty sure they meant they’d enjoyed themselves, which made me feel hopeful about the two months ahead. Linda handed me a pea pod.

“Go ahead, taste it,” she said. Inside were five perfect green bombs of crunchiness and sugar.

“Fresh pea pasta for dinner?” Linda said.

“Awesome,” said Miles and Flora.

Linda made homemade pasta, and chicken breasts pounded thin and fried in butter. I could tell how much the kids liked being in the kitchen when Linda cooked, sitting at the long wooden table and helping her measure flour and shell peas. I held down the pasta machine so it wouldn’t shake the table as Linda cranked out the sheets of dough, which got thinner and thinner each time she fed them through. Maybe it was the promise of dinner, but the kids were almost chatty, telling Linda how much I’d liked the zigzag walkway and how tasty the sandwiches she’d packed for our lunch were and how I’d promised to teach them to play tennis if we could find the rackets in the attic.

After dinner the kids and Linda and I played Scrabble. Linda won, and I came in second, but I couldn’t help noticing that the kids knew an awful lot of long, obscure words for children their age.

Finally, Linda said, “Bedtime.” The kids stood up and kissed Linda on the cheek and shook my hand and said good night and left. By then I shouldn’t have been surprised by their superpoliteness, but I couldn’t help thinking of your little brothers and of the screaming racket they made that night when I was having dinner at your house and your mom said they had to go to bed.

After they left, Linda said, “I adore those kids.”

“I can tell,” I said.

“I adore them,” she repeated, “but even so, this is my favorite time of the day. In the winter I sit by the fire. In summer there’s the screened porch. Let’s go out on the porch.”

Linda and I took a pot of chamomile tea out on the porch and sat in the comfortable rocking chairs while around us moths and June bugs bashed themselves against the screens. Because we were far from the electric lights of the nearest city or town, the stars seemed especially brilliant, like tiny holes punched in the black sky so that the brightness could shine through. I could pick out all the constellations you showed me that night we went to the beach, and it made me happy to think about you, and to think that this was the same ocean you and I had waded into, holding hands, freezing our feet in the water, which was way too cold for swimming.

After a while I said, “Linda, can you tell me a little bit more about the kids? Mr. Crackstone didn’t say much and I don’t want to bring up anything that’s going to upset them.”

In a quiet voice, Linda filled in the story I’d heard from Jim Crackstone. Their parents had been traveling to visit the mom’s family in Varanasi, India, when they’d been killed in the train wreck. It was really remarkable, Linda said, how well-adjusted Miles and Flora were, considering how suddenly they’d been orphaned and their uncle’s decision to raise them on the island, in complete isolation, without TV or movies or other children to play with, taught by a series of tutors, some of who had been excellent while others had been … Linda hesitated.

“Problematic,” she said at last.

I wanted to ask what the problems had been. In fact I wondered again how I could turn the conversation to the subject of the deaths and the investigation that the blind man’s wife had mentioned. I knew I should let it drop, but something in this place made me uncomfortable. I’ve never believed in ghosts before, or anything supernatural. You know that. And yet I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling I’d had since I set foot on the ferry.

But it was so calm and peaceful on the porch in the beautiful warm night that I began to think that the blind man’s wife had gotten it wrong. Probably she was thinking of some other island altogether. Anyhow, I didn’t want to ruin the mood and the nice time I was having with Linda.

Linda told me how glad she was that this year Miles had gone off the island to go to school. Though Flora had missed her brother terribly, she also was very excited, because the school experience had gone so well for Miles that their uncle had started talking about eventually, though not immediately, sending Flora away, too.

“What will you do then?” I asked Linda. “If they both go away.”

“I like solitude,” she said. “And I’ll be happy to see them come home for vacations and in the summer.”

Then Linda talked about her husband and how much she missed him and how hard it had been for her to see him die slowly of a kidney ailment.

She said, “He died here on the island. I insisted on taking care of him till the end. It was fine with the children’s uncle, but you wouldn’t believe how difficult the authorities on the mainland made it for me.”

So that was it! I wanted to say. The blind man’s wife had thought that some horrific crime had happened here, when the so-called problem had been Linda’s brave insistence on letting her husband die at home, surrounded by people who loved him. Not only did hearing the truth make me like and admire Linda even more but I was relieved to learn that at least one of the scary stories people told about the island was based on a terrible misunderstanding of something tragic—but innocent and loving, all the same.

Linda said, “He’s buried in the family graveyard at the other end of the island. So I guess I’m here forever, whether I want to be or not.”

Then I told Linda how my mom had died suddenly, in the school yard, at recess. She’d been a teacher. I sometimes wished she’d died at home with my dad and me there, so she wouldn’t have been alone, though my dad told me the whole thing had happened too fast for her to know what was happening. Linda said she was sorry, and I said I was sorry about her husband.

After that there wasn’t much to say, but still it felt good to sit there in the silence and watch the stars blinking their secret messages at one another. It was all so peaceful and comforting, the steady rocking of our chairs, the buzzing of the insects, and beyond that the quiet, calming splash of the waves against the beach.

Just describing it is making me feel calm and relaxed. So I guess I’ll shut this down for now and go to bed and write you again tomorrow.

Have a good sleep.

Love,

Jack

DEAR SOPHIE,

A week has gone by since I got here, and it’s been amazingly pleasant. Mostly I play with the children. Sure enough, we found the old tennis rackets Miles thought he’d seen, and they work all right—well, they kind of work—with the dead tennis balls we found lying around near the rackets. There’s not a lot of bounce to the tennis balls, so everything goes pretty slowly, which is just as well.

Miles is not exactly the world’s most athletic kid. Flora’s pretty coordinated, but you can tell she hasn’t spent a lot of time playing strenuous games. She gets tired easily, or maybe she just gets bored and says she’s tired. We searched for the pool cues for a while, but we couldn’t find any, which was probably just as well, because when I offered to teach the kids to play pool, they gave each other those funny looks again and said they really didn’t want to.

I’ve learned my way around the house, which no longer seems like the confusing maze it did when I first got here. Everything’s wide open now … except for that one room that’s still kept locked. Every so often I pass by it and turn the knob just to see. I kind of wonder what’s in there. But I’ve never found the right moment to ask Linda, and I don’t want to seem nosy and pushy. If Linda has the room sealed off, there’s probably a good reason. I have to say it’s a good thing that Linda’s so nice and normal. If I was stuck out here with a nasty cook and two odd kids and a locked room, I’d probably think it was one of those secret chambers like in this horror movie I saw where the evil king killed one wife after another and kept their bodies in the cellar, where he would go and hang out and have formal dinners with their corpses as if they were all still alive.