THE BEACH IS deserted. The reeds are dancing to the sound of the northwesterly wind. The sand makes little whirls on the dunes. It’s not cold, even though it’s January 1. A man is standing on the shore, hypnotized by the sea. I can’t see his face. I don’t need to see his face. His hair is disheveled and frizzy from the salt breeze. He’s barefoot, with khaki pants rolled up a few times. The waves break with a wild beauty. The receding surf traces furrows around the soles of his feet. I come over slowly, as if I want to surprise him or am worried I’ll frighten him. I’m naked, except for a baggy turtleneck sweater that hangs almost to my knees. I think I just made love to the man, and the sweater is his. The neighing of wild horses. A seagull suspended in the air. Peace is what I feel. Love for the man. That’s why I don’t want to scare him away. I want to embrace him. I want to run up to meet him. Do it, what’s stopping you? Trap the moment and preserve it forever. He’s yours. You’re his. Run. Two people cross my path. Where did they come from? Who cares. Now I’m closer. Twenty people. They turn their backs to me. I dodge them. I don’t see Chris. Thirty people. They all love Chris. Forty people going toward him. Fifty. I almost can’t move forward. Sixty, eighty. I drag myself across the sand, begging them to let me through. A hundred people. I make it to the shore and see Chris’s footprints, but he’s not there. I get up and howl his name to the sea. Chris! I can hardly breathe, because the whole island is there behind me. Alice, I recognize the voice. It’s Ruby. Even if she doesn’t talk yet, I know it’s her voice. Alice, she repeats. Don’t turn. It’s a trap. Why doesn’t she call me Mommy? Mommy, she says. I turn. Ruby isn’t there. Neither is Olivia. Or Pony. Or Chris. All the people who aren’t us are there. My daughters aren’t there; they’ve taken my daughters. I try to shout their names, but my voice doesn’t come. Chief Margaret unholsters her revolver. Chris is ours, she says before she shoots me.
I fell; I lost consciousness, like in a lacrosse game I played long ago, when they hit me in the eye with the ball. When I woke on the shore of the New Year, I thought hours had passed, but people were still celebrating and toasting. I heard fireworks coming from the beach. The first thing I thought of was my daughters. That relieved me. Then the noise was gone. In the end, there was a bit of calm waiting for me after the storm. Enough to get on my feet, feel terra firma, and realize where I was and, above all, that I had the wrong book.
You’re a shipwreck, Alice. A shipwreck on an island. On Robin Island. You’re Robinson Crusoe. It’s not about finding a treasure. It’s about survival.
Curiously, New Year’s Day fell on a Friday.
I got up and went over to Diego’s picture. I turned it around. I didn’t want to see any more of myself. But that wasn’t enough. I didn’t even want to feel my presence. I took it down to the garage, and there it stayed, leaning against the wall. All $20,500 worth of picture wedged in among junk and boxes. I had the feeling I was saying goodbye to myself. But it didn’t bother me. I was relieved.
Olivia woke up, peeped out the window, saw there was still snow in the yard and started crying.
“What’s going on, honey?”
“There’s snow.”
“Of course there’s snow. There was snow yesterday.”
“But it’s New Year’s. We changed years, right?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“But everything should be new.”
I considered explaining to her that it wasn’t the first year of her life, that she should know how this worked by now, that it’s not starting from zero, it’s continuing. But strangely, I identified with her attitude since I too felt paralyzed, disoriented and blocked, as if I had forgotten how to walk through life and distrusted the white blanket that was covering everything.
“Oli, last year there was also snow on New Year’s Day, don’t you remember? We were skiing in the mountains.”
Of course she remembered, and that’s probably why she didn’t like this new beginning. Because a year ago, there were three of us—well, four, since I was already pregnant—in Wachusett Mountain, in northern Massachusetts, where Olivia put on skis for the first time and learned to make a wedge turn.
For some reason I started wondering how many mistakes I had made since Chris’s death. I remembered how cold it was in the funeral parlor room when I’d agreed to let Olivia see Chris in the casket. In trying to avoid one trauma, I’d created another. My first error, without a doubt, had been not telling anyone the truth. Being incapable of saying that Chris wasn’t at Yale, that he’d had an accident on US 6, during his drive along the Weweantic River. And my last mistake . . . What had been my last mistake? Drinking too much wine last night? No, my last mistake was the same as the first: not telling anyone what I was doing. The moment I sat down in front of anyone with a bit of common sense and told them what I was up to, the house of cards would collapse, everything would fall in under its own weight. The parallel universe I was living in would vanish, and I would come back to reality.
While considering how to address Olivia’s latest episode of chionophobia, I suggested she go downstairs to watch her daily dose of Dora the Explorer on TV.
Her shout a few moments later shook my entire body.
“Mommy!!! There’s a man in the living room!”
I rushed downstairs, looking for a blunt object to defend my daughter and my home. All I found was a toy train.
“Get out of here!” I shouted, brandishing the train. One of the cars detached.
It was Frank from Family Pet Land. He was sitting on the sofa in silence, looking at us disconcertedly, without understanding what all the fuss was about. He had a briefcase in his lap. A portable record player from the sixties, a Victrola.
“Frank? What are you doing here?” I asked while I hugged Olivia, who was crying again. “It’s Frank, Oli; you know him.”
“Hey, sweetie,” Frank said, smiling at her. Olivia seemed to calm down.
“Frank, you scared the hell out of us.”
“Sorry, I should have called. But I didn’t want to wake up Rose.”
“Sure . . .” I said, not very sure how to get out of the situation.
“Who’s Rose, Mama?” Olivia asked.
“Rose is Frank’s wife.”
Frank laughed.
“I wish. She’s my girlfriend. Is she up yet?”
Olivia was going to say something, but I covered her mouth.
“We’ll go see if she’s up. We’ll be right back.”
I thought about calling Barbara to see if she would come pick her father up, but seeing Frank sitting there, calm and affable, lost in his own world, made me think of my own father and above all of the last conversation we’d had. All I’m trying to tell you is that I think Olivia needs something that inspires her as much as painting did you. And that probably it’s something simple, something within arm’s reach.
Until then, I hadn’t dared to go near Horse Rush Farm because I knew that as soon as I did, Olivia would become crazy with excitement and complain all the more about how I needed to buy her a pony. I knew that sooner or later it would be inevitable. Anyway, Barbara had made a good impression on me at the dinner at Karen’s Petite Maison. She told me we could go to the farm whenever we wanted so Olivia could feed the horses and even ride a pony. Barbara had three. Perhaps it was time to buy Olivia a pony or a horse. She was little and light. She could be a great Amazon. Better to jump obstacles than to devote herself to counting them.
I told Frank that, against all odds, Rose had decided to get up early that day and had gone to the farm, that they must have crossed paths on the way and that I would happily take him over there. I got Olivia, wrapped her in several layers of clothes, gloves, a hat and a scarf. She complained a lot. I got mad. I put her in the car against her will, grabbed Ruby, and then we went with Frank to the horse ranch. My final wildcard, my last ace in the hole. If this didn’t work, I was throwing in the towel.
When Olivia opened her eyes—she’d kept them shut the whole way in protest—and saw the horses in the snow, she was mute for a few moments until finally she looked at me and asked me with a beaming face, “Mommy, are we still on the island?”
“Of course, Oli.”
“Why didn’t you ever bring me here?!”
The complaint didn’t go any further because just then Olivia saw a precious white pony with black spots that seemed to have been placed all over its body by a haute couture designer.
The ace in the hole had worked. But unfortunately, the pony in question had an owner and wasn’t for sale or for rent or anything. Barbara was enormously grateful to me for taking care of Frank, after searching for him for two hours. She quickly grabbed the reins of the situation, put a saddle on Panda the pony—that was its name, for obvious reasons—and helped Olivia to hop on. “I’m sure the owner won’t show up here today,” she said, winking. I knew that as soon as Olivia got on the pony, she’d never want to get off. The good thing was, Olivia wasn’t cold anymore. Or rather, she no longer cared about the cold.
The bad thing: a pony cost between $5,000 and $6,000, and the board was $600 a month (or $7,200 per year). But after the expenses I’d incurred to get where I was right now, it didn’t seem right to use money as an excuse.
The really bad thing: there weren’t any ponies for sale. Snow White, Panda’s mother, was pregnant and would give birth in the spring. So we’d have to wait, which wouldn’t make Olivia any easier to handle for the rest of the winter. But Barbara winked at me again and said: “No problem, she can go on riding Panda. Hardly anyone comes around here until spring.” The farm was only open to the public in the spring and summer, when they organized camps for the kids and guided horseback rides on the island. In fall and winter, she maintained the stables and trained horses for their owners.
Olivia didn’t stop smiling for the whole ride. She barely spoke, as if she wanted to savor every second. I also didn’t hear her counting, though sometimes, when other people were around, she did it silently. As Barbara held the bridle, controlling the pony’s pace, she told me about Frank’s Alzheimer’s.
“They diagnosed him a couple of months ago. For now, he just has occasional episodes. He gets disoriented, especially at night, when he wakes up and doesn’t know where he is. Normally he goes to the clinic. He’s usually good during the day. It’s weird he showed up at your house . . .” She immediately realized something. “Unless . . . Wait. Where do you live? No, don’t tell me. Forty-eight Shelter Road, right?”
I nodded.
“That house belonged to my grandparents on my mother’s side over fifty years ago. When my mother was a teenager, my father used to go there to visit her. They’d listen to music together on my mother’s portable record player. Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ritchie Valens, Johnny Cash.”
Mystery solved.
“And thanks a lot for not chewing him out or making him figure out his mistake. The neurologist told me it’s best to just treat it like it’s normal and be caring.”
“It’s nothing. It must be embarrassing enough for him when he gets the sense something’s not right, without adding to it by rubbing his nose in it.”
In fact, a little before arriving at the farm, Frank came back to normal—or to the present—and told me: Alice, it was high time you came to the farm. How intricate the human mind is. Or on the contrary, what a basic mechanism: when everything starts to disappear, it grasps the fundamental, the heart, his eternal love for his deceased wife.
“Don’t you worry, I’ll keep an eye on him,” I told Barbara to ease her fears.
“Great, well, every time my father sets foot in your house, which will be frequent, it’s one free pony ride for Olivia.”
“Yes, yes, let Frank come to the house every day!” Olivia shouted blissfully.
Finding out Chris had spent a night at Karen’s Petite Maison, probably his first night on the island, had been a milestone for me. But it did nothing but make the next question more urgent: Where did he stay the rest of the times he came to the island?
Therefore, the first chance I had, I snuck into the inn, because Karen had caught the ferry to go to the hairdresser in Hyannis. I wanted to take a look at Room 202, where Chris had stayed. I took Ruby with me. I left Olivia doing homework with Wendy, one of Reverend Henry’s daughters, who was in her last year of secondary school and made a mint as a private tutor. Not that Olivia needed help with her homework. On the contrary, Wendy challenged her with more advanced math problems. Something fundamental for keeping her obsessions up-to-date.
Room 202 is undoubtedly the prettiest one in Karen’s Petite Maison, but three years had passed since Chris was there. What did I hope to find? Maybe I just wanted to stoke up rage, imagining him there with another woman, in the Jacuzzi on the balcony, enjoying the sunset over Pleasant Beach.
Besides, that expedition helped me to discover how—presumably—John had figured out Chris had died. After going over the whole house in search of yearbooks or photos from the University of Virginia, I ended up finding the quarterly journal from the university’s alumni association in the magazine rack in the bathroom. And there it was, in the copy from the third quarter of 2015, in the obituary section:
Chris Williams, alumnus. Class of 2002. Deceased at thirty-five years of age. Graduated cum laude in business administration. NCAA national champion with the Virginia Cavaliers tennis team. Ranked third by the ITA. US Open Junior Tennis Championship semifinalist. Our sincerest condolences. Our prayers are with the friends and family of this authentic Cavalier.
I was happy to see the obituary was so normal, one among many, with no personal data, no family photos, no mention of my name.
My telephone buzzed; I had it on silent. When I saw it was Karen, I instinctively looked for somewhere to hide. Under the bed. I’m busted, I thought, then realized she couldn’t have caught the ferry back so soon. Since I didn’t pick up, she sent me a message:
Alice! Just a reminder—today is the residents’ meeting at city hall. Don’t ditch me when I need your support, things are going to heat up!!! I hope you haven’t forgotten! OK, time to get these damn gray roots dyed.
I quickly answered her message:
Of course I’m coming! See you later. And give those four gray hairs of yours hell! You’re such a drama queen.
Once a month, there was a residents’ meeting at city hall, where subjects proposed beforehand by the island’s inhabitants were discussed. In general they dragged on and seemed more like an excuse to eat, drink and band together, criticizing the other surrounding islands. But that day, it was about a subject that had already raised a ruckus before: the installation of closed-circuit television cameras. One side favored having the island monitored for security purposes—So our women and children can rest at ease without fearing for their safety. The former mayor had started the fight, insisting that the island wasn’t bucolic just because, that it was bucolic because people made it that way. Things needed to be controlled. He lost the battle by a slim margin, and ended up quitting his job and leaving the island. That’s how the new mayor, Gwen DeRoller, and Chief Margaret were elected: they insisted that trust built trust, that since we all knew each other here, it was precisely that feeling of community that brought security, because we all covered each other’s backs.
“Sure, great, but then I go and find out my son’s smoking marijuana, and I want to know where he got it from, who gave it to him? How did the drugs make it onto the island?” said Karen, the one who had brought the debate back up. “Because if I don’t, my husband will find out his own way, and believe me, the consequences will be much worse. For my son and for whoever gave it to him.”
Various voices, pro and con, followed. You think that’s going to keep them from dealing drugs? This community is fragile and vulnerable; we have to protect it. Many of us are here precisely to escape the paranoid world out there. Exclusivity means feeling protected. Exclusivity means feeling free. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Yeah, then what’s next? Putting cameras inside the houses? Because once we’ve started . . . Throughout the controversy, I thought about how much it could have saved me if there had already been a system of cameras on the island, but I also thought that it would have been my punishment, or else my liberation, because I wouldn’t have been able to do anything I was doing.
“And you, Alice? What do you think of all this? Because I’m bored with hearing the same arguments all the time,” asked Miriam, who was sitting beside me and was from the pro-CCTV faction. Did she want to run Mike off?
All of them looked at me as if the decision depended on me, as if I was the person who had to clear up the dispute once and for all.
“I haven’t been on the island long. I don’t feel it’s my place to take sides on this issue. I’ll accept what the majority decides,” I said, even though I had no doubt that I favored no, both for conviction and for self-interest.
“Coward, red, anarchist, agitator. If I knew it, I wouldn’t have pushed you to come,” said Karen between her teeth, without a trace of ill will.
Later she would confess to me that deep down, it didn’t matter to her. She just wanted to rile up the meetings a bit. I was on the debate team in my high school, and it gets me going, she said.
Especially when you’ve downed a few glasses of wine, I thought.
The proposal was knocked down on this occasion as well, the ninth time in four years, with twenty-nine votes against, twenty-five for, and two abstentions: one from Mayor DeRoller—who was firmly opposed, but said it was her job to enforce what the others decided—and one from me.
Once the session was adjourned and we were all eating, I caught sight of a bulletin board announcing the annual Cherry Blossom Art Fair from March 7 to 14, with photos from the previous year. The fair supposedly coincided with the blossoming of the cherry trees, celebrating the end of the harsh winter, though in reality this did not usually take place until late April or early May. But the year the fair was first organized, 1977, saw record temperatures in March, and the cherry trees blossomed early. The event was mentioned in lots of tourist guides, and the exhibition booths were highly prized. Everyone on the island had the right to set one up, but if you were from somewhere else and wanted to set up a booth, you had to pay a subscription fee and go through a selection process the year before.
I saw there was a $7,500 dollar prize for the best stand and decided I was going to win. I had a little over two months to prepare. Not that I needed more motivation. It was time to change strategy, come up with more ambitious plans that would produce results, dig even deeper into the intimate lives of the island’s inhabitants. And the fair would be the key.
“Are you going to do a stand?” Mark asked me as he approached. I tensed up.
Since sleeping together for the first time, we’d made a tactical decision to keep a certain distance in public.
“Probably,” I said, trying to look intriguing.
“So what are you going to sell?”
“You’ll have to wait till March to find out.”
Just one second sharing a fond glance was enough to cause me to throw my first New Year’s resolution in the trash.
It didn’t last as long the other times. There were fewer words, fewer prologues. It was more sexual. More animal. Less inhibited. And though I was angry with myself for doing it—for not being able to invent some official excuse that would justify the encounter, given that I’d already gone through his agenda and put a snitch in his place—of the three times we’d slept together, it was undoubtedly the best. And that disconcerted me. I guess until then, I thought of Mark as little more than a pawn to be sacrificed—and enjoyed—on the game board of the island, among other reasons because I had experienced, for the first time since Chris’s death, something akin to a surge of love.
“Tell me the truth: you no come here to spy other people. Come here to spy me.”
“You got me, Antonio. Your English is getting better . . .”
“Thanks, Blondie. Happy New Year.”
Could Antonio be my man Friday? He was sufficiently eccentric, distant, enthusiastic and seasoned to keep from judging me.
“I need more cameras.”
“There’s a word for people like you: spy junkie. Every time need more, dose more frequent. Careful, Blondie, spying more addictive drug than heroin.”
“Antonio, I don’t think it’s a great business strategy to make your customers feel bad for buying your products.”
“Right, Blondie. How many fixes are we talking this time? One? Two?”
“Let’s just say I’m going to become your best customer.”
“You best customer from moment you come into store.” I smiled. And after a pause: “You no nursing baby today? Ask me, look like she very hungry.”
On the way back to Robin Island on the ferry, I felt like an arms trafficker with several grenade launchers and bodies in the trunk. I had two twenty-seven-inch monitors from Best Buy, signal relays, routers and the fifty cameras I had bought at Night Eyes. They were different brands, because Antonio didn’t have enough of the same kind in stock. But hey, though at the end of the day, some were better, some were worse, all served the same purpose: winning first prize at the Cherry Blossom Art Fair.