2000
I’m outside the VFW dressed in the darkest outfit I could find—black jeans and a gray T-shirt. My glasses—thick and plastic and black in a way I hope is ironic and sexy—keep slipping down my nose. Funeral appropriate, I thought, until I stepped out into the evening light. The jeans are too long, and I hadn’t noticed a spot of something is on the shirt. My hair isn’t even fully dry, and I’m sweating enough that dark circles are forming under my armpits. The perspiration is certainly more about seeing Carrie than the temperature. What will I say? What will she think of me? Will Henrie be with her? I want to see them separately, at least for the first time. The idea of seeing them together is somehow more terrifying, because I won’t know whom to focus on or how up-front to be with my emotions.
When I was a kid, my father visited this VFW weekly. He worked for the USPS and delivered the post and other goods from off island to Fowler. My mother, a former islander, died when I was young, and my father became lonely. The island, this VFW, was his happy place—old men drinking and talking about their one bad knee.
I grew up on the edge of the mainland in a small blue house bleached lighter on its face by the wind and whip of Lake Erie. My father bought it for my mother, who was the one who wanted to leave her life on Fowler but was also not willing to let it out of her sight. There were winters so cold we could walk across the lake, hiking backpacks full of supplies. I loved those winters—the idea that the world could turn from liquid to solid, that everything below our feet was fixed in time. We’d spend the night on island on occasion, especially when the weather was harsh, borrowing a bed from someone my father knew, or we’d just roll out cots at the VFW.
If the day was long, and it always was, my father would manage the deliveries on his own and leave me with Ms. Millie. She would brew me the same loose-leaf tea, lend me books, ask me to move boxes. She loved to gossip. She was full of island stories. She’d settle into her fading-pink armchair and drink tea until she seemed as drunk as my father.
“Seth Volt was a horrid man. An invasive species. He cared only about making money and creating a world in which his name would be associated with success and power. He’s the one who opened a hole right through the damn island. That first stick of dynamite went so deep it woke the devil.”
Back then I only knew of the Volts, like everyone else connected to the island, and I liked to walk by the house called Quarry Hollow. The huge old Victorian teetered on the edge of the quarry, fierce and precarious, as if daring someone to push it over.
“I don’t believe in the devil.” I was ten years old and just noticing that adults knew far less then they pretended to.
“Child, he doesn’t give two shits about your belief. And you shouldn’t be so literal. The devil can take many forms. It’s just a nice, short word pulled together to get the feeling across. D-E-V-I-L.”
“I don’t believe in God either,” I said. I was stubborn back then, and I know my father would have smacked the back of my head if he’d heard me. But he is the one who made me look at my mother in her casket so that I could see her one last time. I imagine he meant well, but when I looked, I saw that my mother was just a carcass, like the shell of a peanut or the peel of a fruit—the goodness eaten, gone.
“Well, child, you’re gonna need to believe in what I tell you. You’ve got work to do, and I’m not always gonna be around for it.”
The VFW doors snap open, startling me from the memory, and a young woman rushes out. An unmistakable flash of long pale limbs, blond hair, and a camera swinging from her neck. For a moment, I imagine a small dog at her heels.
“Henrie.” My voice is too small. It doesn’t register with the blur of a woman speeding past me, and before I’ve even stood up, she’s gone, heading up Division toward the state park. My heart aches, a throbbing that comes so strong and sudden that I now know it’s been there since the day Henrietta left.
“Sonia?”
And just like that, I’m in the moment I’ve been bracing for.
“Yes,” I say, as if I’m answering a phone call or indicating I’m present in class. She has stopped midstride to look at me. She is as beautiful as I remember. Her blond hair past her shoulders, lightly curled and spilling over a red scarf.
Those clear blue eyes flash above her cheekbones. She says my name a second time, and I wish she wouldn’t. The feeling rising up in me is old—the madness of young love. It once took up all the space in the world. The freckle in her left armpit. The scar on her upper thigh from the time she took a hammer to Quarry Hollow and it fought back. The deep dimples in her lower back that peek through the space between T-shirt and jeans. The way we’d spoon, and I’d practice sending my thoughts to her, catching hers when she sent them back.
“You look good,” she says.
I’ve loved you for so long, I want to say. Instead, I say, “Henrie looked upset.”
“Which way did she go?”
“Toward the grooves.”
Suddenly Carrie bends at the waist. Puts her hands to her knees as if she is going to throw up. I wait. Say nothing. Slowly she rights herself. “Sorry. I haven’t felt right since I stepped off the ferry. I don’t want her going in that house alone. Or in the quarry for that matter. You’ll help me find her?”
Someone watching might mistake us for friends.
“Carrie.”
“Fine,” she says, as if I’ve always been a disappointment. She is moving away from me. So swift it tears at my gut.
“Wait! I didn’t say no. First, you need to know something.” Even as I holler this, I know it is not true. It’s not something Carrie needs to know. Not yet. I should be telling B.B. Telling Carrie is all about me wanting to keep her near, but she is the only person that could hear my thoughts, would let me root around in her brain, explore. We were connected for a time. Really and truly. Body and soul. It was a time when I felt my true purpose, my calling.
She stops, turns, walks back to me. “You sound scared.”
I step closer. “When they dug the plot for James, it filled with water.”
“So?”
“It’s been happening all over the island. I dug a few holes behind the museum, pretended I was building a fence, and those holes filled too. Lake water.”
“How could you possibly know it’s lake water?”
“I know this island.”
“Please.”
“Listen to me,” I say firmly, and she flinches a little. “I know this island. I know its waters. I know that when I look into one of those holes, stick my arm down into it, I can’t touch bottom.”
Saying it out loud makes the sensation come back. Evening light and my body resting on its side against the cooling grass. The water is cold on my fingers, my wrist, my elbow. I reach in slowly until I’m in up to my shoulder, my fingers stretching down into the dark.
“Where will they bury James?”
Her mind is moving too slowly. She doesn’t get what I’m driving at, but then again, who would? B.B. would. I should be telling this to B.B.
“Listen to me.” My voice is steady. It doesn’t reveal my frustration. “Something’s happening to the island. Started the night James passed, but I didn’t notice right away.”
“Like it’s sinking or something?” she asks, incredulous.
“Thinning, maybe. I run much of the perimeter every morning, but it has a frailty to it. Like it will snap away if I put pressure too close to the edge.”
“That’s sand, Sonia. The tide. The moon. Jesus. That’s how an island works.”
“You aren’t listening.”
“Oh, I’m listening. You’re losing your damn mind. You need to get off this island. Trust me. I know.”
“Look at me.”
She does. We’ve been standing right next to each other staring at the ground, but now her blue eyes lock with mine—I concentrate on an image, the beach that’s begun to thin and then the water filling up the holes I dug farther up in the sand. I don’t know if she catches the image or is just convinced by my steady stare, but she nods her head, once, agreeing to listen.
“Who else knows about this?”
“James knew. The Island Council knows.”
“You’re making this up.”
“Follow me.”
I grab her arm. She makes me drag her at first. My palm to her bare skin feels good, but soon she is walking with me and there is no reason to hang on. Our pace speeds up. When we see the museum and the graveyard, she trips a little but catches herself. I wonder if she remembers how happy we were here in my house. Curled up through the winter, researching the island, making plans to build and reshape. Playing with the girls.
As if she can catch my thoughts, she asks, “Why didn’t you leave with me?”
Our pace makes her words breathy, and I have a sudden flashback to a night in the quarry, her last night on island, the girls soaked from the quarry pond. Carrie too. Water gushing out of her mouth, an endless river of it coming up, up, up.
You know why I couldn’t leave, I think. I had to stay for B.B. For the island. Letting Henrie go meant the ecosystem rested on my shoulders, on James’s.
We reach the plot that belongs to the Volts. James’s gravestone is already here. His birth year clear but his death date not yet carved.
The hole is still open. Dirt piled high next to it. Water up to the lip.
“This doesn’t prove anything,” she says, but I hear in her voice a new nervousness.
I bounce up and down on my toes. The earth squishes like a sponge. I picture my arm down there in the hole, reaching. Why was I slipping my body into this unknown space? Why wouldn’t my first instinct be to find a stick, a tree branch? In my dreams since, there is, of course, always something reaching back. Its ivory teeth are sliding over my fingertips when I wake up. Sometimes this creature is Millie’s devil, or, more disturbingly, Millie is the creature. Rising up out of the under-island swamp, her fading pink chair a raft, her jaw thick with teeth, and I know, in that dream of a moment, that I had no choice but to stay on island. I was where I was always meant to be, and if all I knew was right and the end point was coming, I’d need Carrie and Henrietta and Beatrice on my side.