2000
B.B. has taken to constantly rubbing her belly. She does it all the time. Sometimes she lifts her shirt up to tuck it under her breasts and then she rubs away, prodding and poking with a pained expression on her face as if it hurts. Her belly is tanned and beginning to round out more than I think it should. I keep resisting the urge to tell her to be careful. Don’t push too hard or rub too much. I resist because I know it’s absurd. B.B. can’t break her belly or hurt the babies by rubbing, but the action of it bothers me all the same. As does the size of her belly. It’s been a long time since I was pregnant, but I know her belly is too big too soon, and I’m worried. When I questioned her, asking, “How far along are you exactly?,” she accused me of calling her fat, so I dropped it.
I thought time together would help repair our relationship, but now it seems that I know less about both my daughters than ever before. Henrie barely comes out of the attic, and when she does, it’s to collect the bizarre handmade cameras she puts all over the house that she won’t let any of us touch. She is not eating enough, and she looks skinny and pale. She spends most of the rest of her time with Joshua. He’s found a spot in her life, and I suppose I’m grateful for that, but I am lonely and sad and I miss my work, and no one here needs me. Not even Sonia.
I hardly sleep anymore. I lie in my bed and worry, wake in a sweat if I fall asleep at all. I am more muddled with each passing day. Every night I think, If B.B. doesn’t tell Henrie this house doesn’t belong to her tomorrow, then I will. I will tell her and then Henrie will leave the island with me, and it will all be okay again.
I’ve come down to the kitchen to find coffee, but I’ve stumbled on B.B. and Wally instead. Wally is on the kitchen table, poking about at the ceiling. B.B. is trying to discourage her.
“I told Sonia I’d take a look at it,” Wally is saying, as B.B. swats at Wally’s calves with a dish towel. “She’s on her way over so leave me be!”
It’s a playful conversation on the surface, but when B.B.’s eyes meet mine, I see again that anger she had when I confronted her at the bottom of the stairs.
“Hand me something. A spatula will do,” Wally says to B.B. Despite having a houseguest, Wally, here, B.B. has come down in a sports bra and what are probably Wilderness’s boxers.
“Do you think you might put on some more clothes?” I ask B.B., but she ignores me, keeping her eyes on Wally. I’m standing in the kitchen doorway. I’ve just gotten out of bed myself, but I’ve still managed to pull on pants and a tank top.
“Morning, Carrie. Did you sleep well?”
“I wouldn’t say well. Thanks for asking though, Wally.”
“B.B., hand me a spatula.”
“It won’t be long enough to reach,” B.B. says, leaning against the stove, rubbing her belly.
Wally lets out a loud exhale.
“Are you mad at me?” B.B. asks sharply.
“Nope. But I do wish you’d stop rubbing your belly like that.”
“Ha!” I say, then cover my mouth.
B.B.’s hand freezes in place, and then cautiously, as if too quick a motion might cause the belly to fall right off her body, removes her hand. I see her skin ripple; a dark thread spreads out just under the surface of her pale belly. It reminds me of a night long ago in the quarry when I stood over the pond and thought about sinking in. It’s a veiny dark ink that rises to the surface of B.B.’s skin, then ducks back in, hiding deeper in her center. It’s nauseating, that vision. It pulsates before it’s gone, and I am so scared for her, for me. What is happening?
“You’re both just jealous,” B.B. says.
“Don’t be absurd,” Wally says so I don’t have to. I’ve suspected that B.B. and Wally knew each other before this. That maybe there was a breakup at some point. Watching their banter this morning confirms it.
“What’s wrong with you then?” B.B. asks Wally.
“Nothing’s wrong with me.”
“I know you. You won’t let yourself be content. Anytime too much good comes your way, you get nervous.”
“Excuse me?” Wally puts her hands on her hips and straightens her spine. She towers over us, her rage pointed at B.B., upstaged only by her red hair, backlit by sunlight streaming through the window behind her. She looks like fire.
“Wilde!” B.B. exclaims, and is off onto the next thing.
“Excuse me,” he says from behind me. He puts his hand on my shoulder as he moves past me into the kitchen. I put my hand over his hand to say, Good morning. He nods his sheepish Good morning as he enters the kitchen, but then B.B. is wrapping herself around him, marking her territory.
“What are you after?” he asks Wally. He is a good man, kind enough to give B.B. his full attention before turning to look at Wally, who is still standing on the table.
“I was just gonna poke around and see how delicate this plaster really is.”
“It’s a nasty spot.”
“Yeah, I’m not quite tall enough to reach it.”
“I told her not to do it. She’s not listening to me,” B.B. says.
“Hop down,” he says.
Wally does as she’s told. I watch as Wilde sweeps one long leg up onto the table, then the other.
“You’re like a grasshopper,” I say, teasing Wilde.
“Particularly if grasshoppers had a magnificent third ‘leg.’” B.B. gives me a little nudge with her arm.
“Beatrice!” An automatic response from me that comes at just the moment Wally says, “Gross,” with full disgust.
“B.B.,” Wilderness says from his great height, his fingers already pushing on the ceiling. His voice is low and deep, and I admire the way he can warn her with just one word. A bit of a puppy dog is in him, a following of B.B. that I can tell she loves, but something else too. He shuts her down in a way no one else does. “Can someone hand me something I can use to poke at this with? It’s pretty wet.”
B.B. is wiggling her eyebrows and smirking.
Wally rolls her eyes. “Jesus, B.B.”
“What? The babies are making me horny.”
“It’s the hormones making you horny. Not the babies.”
I decide to intervene and move over to the stove, grab a spatula from the metal bin, and hand it to Wilderness.
“Thank you, Carrie. How long has this stain been here?” he asks.
“My whole damn life,” B.B. answers.
“That’s not true,” I interrupt, knowing or rather believing that it must have appeared when James died and B.B. locked his office door, as if something is left of James in that room—his spirit, his unresolved anger, his worry—and it is leaking through the floor as a means of escape. I can barely manage to think that thought through, let alone say it out loud, so instead I say, “I don’t remember it from before.”
“Seriously, B.B.” Wilderness pokes at it with the rubber end of the spatula and then flips it, uses the metal end to poke at the ceiling, and with the first poke there is a loud sucking sound and then a small hunk of plaster hits the table between Wilderness’s big, bare feet. A string of moisture hangs between the hunk and the ceiling. It looks like saliva.
“Gross.” Sonia’s voice makes me jump a little. She’s standing in the kitchen doorway with four coffees in a carrier. The kind of cups one gets from the deli at the island grocery—surprisingly good coffee if I remember correctly. I step around the table, ignoring the pulpy mound resting at Wilderness’s feet and the string that is now breaking between it and the ceiling.
“Huh,” B.B. says, grabbing a spoon from the same metal bin where I got the spatula. Suddenly able to be of use when it is her idea. She moves up to the table and pokes at the lump. “I told you to fucking leave it alone. It’s like the Blob. Better make sure it doesn’t swallow us all up.”
“Don’t joke.” Sonia looks alarmed. “Hey, how about you come down from there?” she says to Wilde, but she’s too late.
What happens next is sudden and nasty. With a noise that can only be described as a tummy grumble, a huge chunk of rust-red plaster comes down. It splashes over Wilderness’s head and clunks down on the table. Instinctively, we all take as many steps back from the table as we can. Wilderness scrambles down. The goo of it all sticking to him like spiderwebs. He swipes at it madly, trying to get it off. It’s the first time I’ve seen him lose his cool. I grab a dish towel and toss it to him.
“What the fuck?” B.B. says. Rust red has splashed on her bare belly. Wilderness has it on his face, and a moldy smell has taken over the kitchen.
Sonia hands me the coffees and moves to the far end of the table so she can peer at what is now a large hole in the ceiling. I swear I see her flinch.
“You can see straight up.” Sonia’s already taken steps back from the table. The house groans, a growl of sorts, and the light shifts above us.
“What the fuck is in that room?” Wally asks B.B.
“It’s private, goddammit.”
I step forward to look for myself. The floorboards to the room above are clear. The cracks between the boards are too wide and uneven, as if whatever has moistened the plaster also got to those boards. I have the sudden urge to say James’s name, but I swallow. I remember hearing his typewriter the other night at dinner. Maybe at night too? In those times when I was crossing over into sleep? Typewriter keys thundering away. My brain is so fuzzy; I can hardly tell reality from dreams.
“Well, I guess it wasn’t a pipe.”
“Not a pipe,” Sonia agrees.
“We will need to go in that room and see what’s happening. This is not good.”
“No one goes in there,” B.B. hisses.
We all look at her. The others are startled by her ferocity. I am not.
“This is my house. No one goes in.”
“I thought it belonged to you and Henrie,” I say, poking the bear.
“B.B.,” Sonia starts, “this is absurd. You have a huge hole in your ceiling that needs to be fixed.”
“No one is going in there,” B.B. says, adamant.
“Guys!” a voice comes from the front of the house. I hear the screen door slam. “Where is everybody?” It’s Joshua. He sounds out of breath, running through the house to find us.
He stops short in the doorway. His face flushed. “What’s going on?”
“Wilde broke the house,” B.B. offers.
“Where’s Henrie?” he asks.
“In the darkroom,” I offer.
“I’m gonna go shower,” Wilderness says in his calm way. “You’ll need to hire someone to fix that, Beatrice. I think I’ve done all I’m gonna do.”
I look at Wilde. He has it in his hair, on his face. The red of it rests thickly on his right shoulder. It’s foul.
“I’ll go with you!” B.B. says, noticing for the first time that Wilderness is coated in the muck of the house.
“What about this mess?” I ask.
“Leave it or clean it. I don’t care,” B.B. says, already following Wilderness down the hallway and upstairs to the shower.
Joshua grabs some paper towels and takes a swipe at the table. He gags a little.
“Hey,” Sonia says. “Let’s go outside. Drink coffee. Walk away from this mess for a while.”
“Fantastic idea,” I say, a feeling of dread growing in me, and I think if I don’t get some fresh air that I may faint.
Joshua has something to tell us—we can all feel it—but he also wants to get the hell out of the kitchen.
We meet on the front steps—Joshua, Wally, Sonia, and me. The morning is gorgeous. The coffee is strong and black. Things feel instantly better.
“How is the inn?” Joshua asks Wally. He’s still trying to catch his breath.
“Strangely empty,” Wally says. “It’s always been erratic, except of course for Masquerade weekend, when we’re full, but there are usually a few guests. Right now, I have no one. A guest checked out yesterday and I’ve had three cancellations this week. It’s weird.”
Joshua is trying to listen to Wally’s answer—after all, he asked the question—but his impatience is clear, so I say, “Let’s have it, Joshua. What weird shit has happened now?”
“I was just down by the ferry,” he says and sets his coffee cup down on the porch step.
“And?” Sonia asks.
“First, I should say that last week I was getting ice cream at the stand on Main, and I overheard Mr. Cooper talking with some other island folks—Weaver and someone else I can’t remember—about ‘giving up.’ Leaving. It was like he was trying to convince them to go too.”
“That’s not possible,” Sonia says. She has gone pale. “Those are Island Council members. They’d have told me if they were thinking of something like that.”
“They clammed up pretty fast once they realized I could hear them,” Joshua says. “And this morning, just now, the ferry was packed, and I saw several islanders getting into private boats.”
“So?” I ask, not quite getting it.
“So, people are leaving. Locals. Not tourists. There was a line of cars waiting for the next ferry. I’ve only ever seen it that busy on Masquerade, and that’s never islanders.”
“Those fuckers.” Sonia stands. She’s angry.
“I want to leave too,” I say, trying to lighten the situation, the implications of which don’t seem that dire to me. Perhaps everyone is finally coming to their senses.
“Has Henrie mentioned anything?” Sonia asks me, but then thinks better of it and directs her question to Joshua.
“No! I didn’t even tell her about the conversation I overheard. It was odd, but not that odd. I kind of forgot about it until now.”
“Well, they certainly wouldn’t have told B.B.,” Sonia says. “Which means they deliberately kept this from me and the Volts. Jesus.”
“Why wouldn’t they tell B.B.?” I ask.
“No one likes B.B.,” Wally says.
My heart hurts for B.B. and I am about to jump to her defense when it suddenly feels like the front porch is shifting under us. Joshua’s coffee falls over, dark liquid spills down the stairs.
We all move off the porch, spill like the coffee, but the ground isn’t much better. The whole world is moving.
I’ve been through a small earthquake once in southern Ohio, but I have never felt the earth move like this. This upending of everything is a terrible feeling, like there is no solidity left, nothing to grasp on to. It’s rather like being on the ferry crossing the lake when it hits a big wave and, for a moment, you lose your footing, have no sense of where you will land next. I remember how sick I was on the way here, how I sank to my knees in the parking lot. That was so long ago. I sink to my knees now too, dig my fingers into the dirt as if to hold on, but the ground is soaked. Did it rain last night? And as quickly as it started, the earth stills.
“What the fuck?” Wally asks.
I am up and on my feet, running to the house. It looks to have tilted backward, like it’s looking up at the sky, leaving a big gap between the first porch step and the ground. The sidewalk leading up to the front door has cracked and zigzagged, looking like an escalator laid on its side. Sonia grabs my arm, pulls me back from the house.
“Henrie! B.B.!” I scream. “Let go of me!”
“Carrie! Breathe. Give it a damn second.”
Sonia does not let go of me. Somewhere far off a siren wails.
“Earthquake?” Joshua asks. “Is that something that happens here?”
Inside, I hear B.B. and Wilderness clattering down the stairs. I shake myself loose of Sonia. Try to slow my heart.
Wilderness and B.B. are with us on the front lawn by the time Henrie appears on the porch, face bright red, sweat stains under her arms. She’s looking at us oddly, as if trying to guess something. “Did you feel that? The house shaking?”
I run to her, risking the porch steps and the porch itself to wrap my arms around her for as long as she’ll let me. She half-heartedly hugs me back.
“It wasn’t just the house. It was the whole island,” Sonia says.
“You’re dripping with sweat,” I say to Henrie, as I release her from the hug. Her sweat is on me now, transferred to the insides of my arms and the crook of my neck above my right shoulder. A thick drop rolls off Henrie’s nose and hits the porch boards as if to confirm my observation. It spreads out salty, leaving a ring on the wood. “Let’s get off the porch, please.” I take her hand, and she listens, following me to stand on the lawn.
“It isn’t the first time,” Henrie offers under her breath.
“Excuse me?” I have no idea what she’s talking about. I look at the others and am relieved to see that they don’t either.
“Forget it. I’m going back in.” Henrie turns as if to head back inside and up the stairs.
“The hell you are,” I say.
“I can’t leave my … my project in there.”
“You can and you will. What the hell is wrong with you?” I am angry now. Really and truly fed up. She may be an adult, but I’ll tackle her to the ground if she’s going to be straight-up stupid.
“I should check on the station,” Wilde says. “B.B., come with me? I’d feel better if you stayed close.”
“I’ll be fine, Wilde. Don’t be silly. I’m staying with my sister,” B.B. says, but I notice that even she looks uneasy, as if the earthquake wasn’t part of her plan. What is her plan?
He looks questioningly at Henrie. She isn’t looking particularly reliable either.
“I’ve got her,” I offer. “Let’s stay together. The three of us,” I say to Henrie and B.B., and neither objects, so Wilde nods appreciatively before tucking his uniform shirt into his pants and heading to town.
“They kept it from us,” Sonia says. “All of us.” She is dazed, disbelieving perhaps that her fellow islanders have betrayed her, or maybe, I think more cynically, she can’t believe that she’s lost control of things. Your arrogance has finally betrayed you, I think, and immediately feel bad. I didn’t even know I thought Sonia was arrogant. But I did and I do. All that information she keeps. The secrets that have always been just as big as the ones James kept from me. Do they think I’m a child?
“We need to leave too,” I say, never more certain of anything in my whole life.
“They’re evacuating. The council. Everyone. Leaving the island, and no one told us because they knew we’d tell the girls,” Sonia says, totally ignoring me. She can’t believe she’s been cut out of her stupid, secret club.
“They’ve always been selfish shits,” B.B. says, vehement.
“Why would they do that?” Henrie asks. “They wouldn’t leave us here. They wouldn’t not tell us we were in trouble.”
“Don’t be naïve,” B.B. spits out with certainty.
“Shit,” Joshua says.
“This is fucking insane,” I say, truly beginning to lose my temper. “It hardly matters who knew what when. That was an earthquake and it seems others knew to leave before it hit. The only thing we need to talk about is how and when to get the hell out of here.”
“It’s okay, Mom.” Henrie is looking at me strangely now, as if concerned about my well-being.
“I’m the only one speaking sense—” I begin, but a second quake comes. It’s short this time, the island giving us one good shake. The group of us hold still, dig in. We aren’t going anywhere yet or maybe ever. I feel true terror as this sinks in and a need to protect my children—B.B. and Henrie—who may not let me protect them at all. I’ve waited too long.
It’s been twenty-four hours since the first earthquake, and the little quakes that have followed have felt more like a slipping under than a cracking apart. It’s taken less than a day for the beaches to disappear, the water climbing up to the roads. Anyone who didn’t flee the island before is now on their way out. Except, of course, for us—B.B., Henrie, Joshua, Wilderness, Wally, Sonia, and me.
I had to calm down and give up on leaving immediately in order to convince them that we all need to leave together. Wally and Joshua were easy. Wilde and Sonia too with the caveat that they would make sure everyone else was off first. Henrie agreed, and B.B. said she’d go if Henrie went, and only if she and Henrie could say goodbye to the island on their own. B.B. has dragged Henrie away somewhere. They wouldn’t tell me where they were going—I’m not sure Henrie even knew—but B.B. said she wouldn’t leave until they got this one last thing done. All I could do was make Henrie and then B.B. promise me that they’d be back at the house before the afternoon. I know Henrie was being truthful when she said she’d be back within a few hours no matter what, but B.B.… she was saying what she needed to say to be free of me.
I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling crazy, feeling alone, but I’ve never felt this scared or confused about the people around me. What motivates them seems so foreign and absurd when all I can feel is the need to survive. To get the people I love far from here. I can feel the danger of it in my bones; every minute that passes we come close to something terrible, yet when I look up at them, they are calmly planning, maneuvering. It’s absurd, but I can’t leave Henrie or B.B., not ever again.
I find myself standing in front of the door to James’s office, and it’s not clear to me why I’m standing here. I can’t remember stopping or how long I’ve been staring at the door, but it feels intentional. A rumble shakes the house. It’s slight enough that all I need to do is soften my knees to keep my balance, and it’s over.
The door to the office is heavy. I remember that much. It has a lock that keeps outsiders out, but it was always James’s temperament that eventually kept us out. I have fond memories of being on the old green couch at the beginning. Little B.B. and littler Henrie playing on the floor in front of me. The strike of James’s typewriter keys sounded like hope back then, like ambition. The floor pillared with the books that would no longer fit the shelves. There was always something new to discover. He seemed, at first, so happy to have a second daughter. He’d lie on the floor with her. Marvel at her bright blue eyes. But soon after her first birthday he started drinking more, a bit too much became the norm. He seemed worried. Three women—one of them an islander we knew—disappeared in a short period, and I found him drunk on his green couch, mumbling about how it wasn’t going to work. He said, “Once a year would be enough. One life. It’s enough. But he’s still hungry. Always hungry.” I held a cold washcloth to his forehead and asked him what he meant.
“Who are you talking about, James?”
He sobered enough to know I was with him, and he grabbed both my wrists, held them too tight, and sat up. “Let’s have another baby, please. A boy. Wouldn’t a boy be nice?”
If he’d asked me when he was sober or without holding on to me so tightly that I grew scared, I might have said yes, but as it was, I didn’t have to say anything at all for him to sink away from me back into that couch, back into drunk. “Never mind. It’s my mess.”
After that, he wrote less and fretted more. The books gathered dust and our kitchen cupboards would be bare of dishes because he never remembered to bring them back down. His office smelled like coffee and sweat—the latter, borne of fear and frustration, becoming more and more pungent as the years passed. Henrie and B.B. were always pushing their way in, fighting the mess of their father. Cleaning, organizing, bringing glasses back down to the kitchen. Ever the optimists about his work: “He’s writing again! There are pages piled up on his desk!” And books were published, up until about a decade ago. Lovely poems but nothing remarkable. The summer or two before I left, I would sneak in sometimes to look through the piles of his papers. The indent of each letter stamped into the paper like violence, and the pages were more notes about his family tree or the island than anything else. I remember thinking, If you make the world too small, your art gets too small too.
Now, as I stand here with my hand reaching toward the doorknob, I see something shift on the other side. A shadow, thick as velvet, slides past. A low growl follows.
“Hello?”
The shadow stops. Holds itself still.
“B.B.? Henrie?”
There is no answer. I step forward. One step. Two. The shadow moves, disappearing. I smell pipe smoke.
My heart is pounding, beating noise into my ears, my cheeks hot, the skin around my nose cold. I take another step forward. Two. I could reach out and touch the skin of the door with my fingertips, but I don’t. The sound of typewriter keys being punched begins, hesitantly at first and then frantically.
“James?” I ask.
The typing stops. Footsteps rush toward me on the other side of the door, a gallop, like four large feet on the floor. I jump back. A shadow as thick as tar closes the gap under the door, then one slip of that old typewriter paper glides out from the crack: Where are they? The typed words are pressed into paper, the whiteness of the sheet dulled by years, but the ink is black and the rectangle perfect. I step toward it, bend my knees a little, and another sheet pushes out from under the door: He’s coming. And then another: You need to find them. The shadow moves away from the door and the typewriter starts up again.
“James.” I say his name. No question this time. “Let me in, James.”
I put both palms on the door, and I can smell his pipe. That sweet smell from when I first met him. I rattle the door. It’s locked tight. Then the tar of him is back on the other side of the door, and another sheet of paper comes rushing out: The island is sinking. Then another: He’s coming for all of you. Then another: Where are they? Why aren’t you with them?
I pick the pages up in my hands. They are hot with worry. The indictment in the last typed question is cruel but deserved. I want to say, Why aren’t you with them? But I hold back. I put my forehead to the door instead.
“James, you know I don’t know what to do. I never have.” Tears well up in my eyes. A big ball of failure and fear and self-pity that quickly turns to anger. I did not ask for this. No one warned me what I was in for when I first moved to this damn place, and once I was here, in all the madness, not a single person told me what was going on. And it’s happening again. Here I am. On my own in this stupid house. Sucked back in.
“Asshole!” I scream, and pound both hands on the door.
I did not mean to come back. I did not want to stay. He, whatever is left of him, smashes into the door in response. Over and over. He has no time for my weakness or my anger. The thud of him, it blocks out all else.
Another piece of paper flies out from under the door. And, downstairs, the phone begins to ring.