1989
My eyes fly open with the first ring. Daddy is gonna be so fucking mad—this intrusion into our calm, dark night. He hates that telephone and would have gotten rid of it if not for our begging to keep it. He doesn’t sleep well, sometimes not at all, so if this wakes him up, we are dead. All of us dead. This is bad. Henrie’s birthday is only two days away. Carrie is still missing, and we can’t have things more fucked-up than they already are. We cannot.
The question is, What the hell do I do?
My body is rigid with the urge to rise and rush downstairs. I need to make the ringing stop.
My toes push into my mattress, palms hover at my sides to lift me, but, lately, my first instinct is not always correct. So, I wait.
The third ring trills, long and rattling, the handset humming against the cradle loud as a fire alarm. It’s a rotary phone, rust red. Old even for this island. With a dial that clacks as it spins, slow and ancient. The air outside is summer hot, dark, and still and humid between the rings, seeping in our open windows as thick as mist. This wave of humidity began eight days ago, the day Carrie woke up, poured us some shitty, stale cereal, and said she was going for a walk. We haven’t seen her since.
Whatever. Everything is fine. Everything is fucking fine. As I shut my eyes, I hear the fourth ring.
My sister rustles in her bed. Downstairs the kitchen floor creaks. Dad is already awake?
I sit up in my top bunk and turn to look at Henrie on her top bunk. She is sitting up too. We each have our own set of bunk beds, and in the winter, we turn the bottoms into warm little caves, but now, in the summer, we sleep on the top to be closer to the ceiling fan. Henrie is looking at me. She’s always looking at me, and I feel a flash of irritation. What if I wasn’t here? What if I wasn’t paying attention? I push the irritation away. I do not mean it. I love you, Henrie. I send the thought through the air, and I see her catch it. Smile.
Five rings.
Two nights back I went down to the kitchen for water and found Daddy standing in front of the phone, staring at it, as if he didn’t trust it. I backed away and drank water from the bathroom faucet upstairs instead.
Six rings.
I gesture to Henrie that we should sneak downstairs. She shakes her head no, but I give her a hard look, and we begin lowering ourselves from our creaky upper bunks without making any noise.
In the kitchen doorway, we freeze. Our father stands with his back to us, staring down at the phone. The fingertips of his right hand brush the receiver, but he doesn’t pick it up.
“Daddy?” I ask.
Henrie inches up behind me, presses her cheek to my back.
Our father shirtless, wearing his lucky blue jeans. He’s been wearing them for days.
“Should I answer it?” Henrie asks in my ear.
“Go to bed,” he says, but we both stand as still as we can. One statue.
“I can do it.” I step forward.
“Go to bed.”
“Daddy, let me—”
“Now!”
We turn in unison, running up the stairs, and have already climbed into our individual top bunks when we hear Daddy pick up the heavy receiver. He does not say hello. He does not say anything.
Carrie is just taking an off-island break, he’s told us, but she left the car, and from what we can tell, all her clothes are still here.
Then from downstairs we hear, “Carrie? I can’t hear you.… You did what?”
A sound comes next. A screaming, a rumbling that feels like it comes rushing to our bedroom. It crashes against the frame of the door, angry and loud. It sounds like Nooooooooo—a gut-wrenching scream of rage that comes up from the roots of the house. The pain of it vibrates my teeth. I taste blood and clamp my hands over my ears as hard as I can. Our bodies rattle, so I start to scream back. I pull the sound up from my belly and open my mouth wide. I sense Henrie is doing the same thing. We roar until our vocal cords ache, loud enough to set the house on fire.
I hear the clang of the receiver being slammed back down and it’s suddenly quiet. My hands come away from my ears, blood under my fingernails from where I’ve dug into my scalp.
We do not breathe. I hate this family.
The phone rings again. He picks up right away.
“Carrie, you’re scaring me,” he says, quieter this time. “Come home.”
My sister’s eyes are dark, her body shaking. I breathe in, breathe out.
It’s okay, Henrie. We’re okay.
She nods to show that she’s caught the thought.
“There is no way you’d do that. You don’t have it in you.… I love you. I’ll fix this,” he says. “Tell me how to find you.”
Silence.
“Why the fuck would you do that?” He is angry now. His voice sounds loud and suddenly convinced by her confession. “This was your home. We had a plan.
“Don’t you ever come back here! You hear me!” We hear the receiver smash down on its cradle, then Daddy is ripping the phone from the wall.
“Daddy!” Henrie wails. She is sobbing, and I am off my top bunk and onto hers. In the kitchen, things clatter and bang and crash.
“Play dead, Henrie,” I hiss as I hear this new sound from the walls, and next to her I begin to transform myself. Lying flat on my stomach with my face to the plaster. My shoulders relax, my arms drop into the mattress, my body puddling. I feel her do the same next to me. The two of us letting it all go, my left leg flopped over the two of hers.
The noises downstairs stop. He is done and his feet are heavy on the stairs. Thumping toward us.
He reaches the second floor, pausing before his study door, then his feet shift over the boards toward our room. Quickly, I turn my face to the doorway. He always pauses there. Touches the doorframe on either side with his palms, a gesture that may be entirely involuntary, like someone testing for a shock. He starts to cry, deep sobs as if he can’t breathe, and he sinks to his knees.
I’m up and off the bunk before I can even think if it’s the right thing to do. I wrap my arms around him. “Daddy. Daddy. It’s okay.” Henrie leaps down too and wraps herself around the both of us. For a second, in this hug, with our father gasping for air, we are all safe. We need one another and that will make everything okay.
“What’s happening?” I ask.
“Is she dead?” Henrie asks.
This makes him stop. “Jesus.” He wipes his face. “No. She’s not dead. Do you think she’s dead?” The last question is not reassuring.
“She’s not dead,” I say with authority. “She needs a break from us. That’s all. Come on, Daddy. You need to sleep.”
He shrugs me off, but when Henrie reaches for him, he doesn’t fight. He lets her lead him down the hall to his study as I think, Fuck both of you. Then I remind myself it isn’t Henrie’s fault. I shouldn’t be mad at her. I shouldn’t.
“She killed it,” he whispers to Henrie, his voice thick with mucus, but I can still hear it.
“Killed what, Daddy?”
“This family.” I watch as he stumbles and puts his weight into Henrie to keep from falling. She almost drops to her knees, but she rights herself at the last second.
“You need to sleep. Tomorrow it will make more sense,” Henrie tells him. “Mom will come home.”
“I can’t stop. I’ve tried. I’ve tried to stop it.”
“I know, Daddy,” Henrie says.
“Promise me.”
He wants Henrie to promise something she doesn’t understand, and I will her to do it, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t know what he wants her to promise, and honestly, neither do I, but she could at least fake it. I will her to fake it. I almost jump in and holler it from our bedroom doorway: We promise, Daddy. We are strong!
“You’re hurting me,” Henrie says instead.
“There won’t be a choice, Hattie.” He’s weeping again, a quiet sound. “Not if you stay here. Maybe, just maybe, it will end with me if you leave.”
They disappear into his office, and I imagine Henrie as she sits him on his old green couch. She is getting him to lie down, covering him with that ugly afghan—the one we call the beehive—and she is telling him everything is all right.
“What did he say to you?” I ask before we are even back in our room.
“Nothing. He isn’t making sense.”
“Was it about Carrie?”
Henrie says nothing, and I’m so fucking tired, I don’t know if I even care.
“I’m scared, B.B. Something is different. Something is wrong.”
I want to tell her to shut up, my head hurts, and I’m scared too, but I manage to keep quiet.
“Will you sleep with me in my bed?” she asks.
We climb into her top bunk. My body curls around hers, our backs are to the door.
“What happens next, B.B.?”
A voice cackles in my head, Tell her, B.B. Tell her what’s next. Tell her to jump.
The suggestion is unkind. Dark. I will not offer it.
I wake up late, our legs twined like tree roots. Henrie is snoring lightly, her lips barely parted. She smells sour. I breathe it in, then untangle my body from hers, lie faceup on her bunk, and look at the ceiling where she’s scribbled notes on the bumpy plaster. Her name. Printed and in cursive. Henrie Volt. Hattie. Hen. Henrietta Sophia Volt. THE VOLT SISTERS. There’s also a family tree of sorts with all the names of our ancestors, but it spirals out from the center rather than branching out like a tree. In the tiny middle she’s written Elizabeth Volt and Eileen Fowler—the original island sisters who made the downtown area and the Island Museum and even commissioned the first roads before our great-great-grandfather Seth Volt showed up and started blasting away, stealing Elizabeth from her sister. He was the cause of the rift between the two, and after Elizabeth gave birth to their son and our great-grandfather—James the first—folks say she jumped off the cliff, the first woman to disappear in the Killing Pond.
Next to our names, there’s a space for a third. A little blank spot where a sibling would go. I look at my sister. Her eyelids are still closed, and I wonder what she is keeping from me and if it’s more than I’m keeping from her.
Henrie wakes up, tilts her head toward mine so our skulls touch. We listen to our father downstairs in the kitchen. He’s cleaning. The sound of glass being gathered into piles, then dropped into trash bags. The back door opening and shutting; the bags slung outside make hard thonks on the porch boards. We do not climb down out of Henrie’s bunk until the smell of breakfast wafts up the stairs.
In the kitchen doorway, we watch him cook. His back is to us. A hole is in his white T-shirt near his left shoulder blade and another along the hem. The phone is gone from its spot on the small table where we usually keep it; a chunk of plaster is missing from the wall where he’s ripped the cord free. Most of the cupboard doors stand open—not unusual for us since no one but Carrie sees any point in closing things you are just going to open again—and the shelf where we keep our drinking glasses is empty. Not a single glass left.
“Morning, ladies!” he says. It’s false cheer. “Let me pour you some juice.”
We take our seats across from each other at the table. Henrie’s chair wobbles under her in a new and precarious way, but she quickly compensates. I nod at her: Good job.
Daddy stares for a beat too long at the open kitchen cupboard where the glasses should be, then reaches higher and grabs two coffee mugs, fills them with juice, and puts them on the table.
“Did I ever tell you how I met B.B.’s mother, Olivia Rose?” He looks to me for a response.
If you were watching us from the outside, our little fucked-up family, and you’d caught the midnight show when the phone rang and our father had a tantrum and two little girls went back to bed scared, this would seem a strange question, insensitive perhaps, and maybe it is. There are other things we should talk about. For us, however, the topic is normal. Dad loves to tell us the same stories over and over, none more than the ones about our mothers.
I used to worry that the stories about my mom made Henrie feel bad—Carrie can worry about her own damn self—but Henrie told me once that when he tells these stories, she likes to pretend we are the same person, she and I. She falls into my rhythm. Her head nod is my head nod. Her bite of soaked pancake is my bite. We play it often, this game where we morph into one, or better yet, we are Siamese twins, attached by the head and the heart. We put on one of Dad’s large shirts and try to maneuver about the house as if separation were not possible.
“I was just returning to the island from graduate school. I didn’t want to be here, but I had to move back. My father was sick. There was no choice. He needed me, and if he died, I knew the island would need me next.”
Legend says that our great-great-grandfather made a deal with the island when he began digging into it. He promised that in exchange for the island’s limestone—and the creation of a big unscabbable hole—there would always be an heir living in Quarry Hollow to look after the island. That little blank spot in Henrie’s family tree pops into my head.
“I’ll die in this house at my desk,” my father says. “You can bury me under my books, lock the door, then throw the key into the quarry.”
“Where’s Mom?” Henrie interrupts.
“Your mother…” He turns back to the stove. Pours pancake batter onto the skillet. Watches it for a while before flipping it too soon, its underbelly raw.
“Wait, Dad,” I say. “Finish telling us how you met my mom.”
“She was beautiful, your mother. Our Olivia Rose. Perfect feet. Little toenails like half-moons. She hated wearing shoes. Rarely wore them, in fact.” He slaps a pancake on each of our plates. I poke at mine, gooey in the middle. “On that day, we were on the ferryboat. She was coming to the island for the first time, and I was returning. I didn’t have a car, so I’d walked onto the ferry and was watching the water when this woman beside me throws up right over the rail into the lake. Vomits, but then stands with her hands on the railing and her eyes closed for so long that I think she’s passed out standing there. I put my hand on the middle of her back and said, ‘Are you okay?’”
“You called her ‘miss,’” I say, knowing my lines, “and she corrected you. She turned her blue eyes on you and said, ‘Ms.’”
“That’s exactly right, B.B. I said, ‘Excuse me?’ And then she said, ‘My name is Ms. Olivia Rose Mitchell. Not Miss or Mrs.’ I’d made her mad, so I tried to change the subject and asked, ‘Your first time on the island?’ And she looked at me like I was a fool! I got so nervous, I could have thrown up right alongside her. Can you imagine that? Your daddy nervous?”
“No,” we answer, and Henrie shifts a little in her chair, making an awful squeak. I shoot her a look.
“I managed to say, ‘How long are you planning to stay?’
“And she said, ‘I’m seasick, so I might be stuck forever.’
“And I said, ‘Don’t joke. That’s how my family came to own half the island.’”
Henrie interrupts, “Then you said, ‘I’ll gladly show you around your new home.’ She laughed at you, but you were inseparable after that.”
“She made me feel coming home was the perfect thing.”
“Two peas in a pod,” I say. The phrase our father uses to describe us as well.
“Olivia Rose was the strongest woman I’d ever met. I never thought the island would eat her.”
My spine straightens.
“Daddy,” Henrie says softly.
“She dove in. Just like the others.”
I picture my mother. Her body long and lean. Her blond hair falling thickly over her shoulders. Her arms raised over her head, ready to point into the water, her direction already determined. A woman that brave, that beautiful, would know how to dive, she’d have a plan. She’d shoot for the center.
“I hear her sometimes. She talks to me from the walls,” Henrie says. “Maybe we can still pull her back to life!”
“Don’t be stupid, Henrie,” I say. Her enthusiasm also cruel. “Carrie dove in too, didn’t she,” I spit it out. “She’s dead and you just won’t tell us.” I want Henrie to feel the hurt. I want our Siamese selves, one big, bruised heart. “They both killed themselves. They didn’t love us enough.”
This gets my father’s attention. He looks at us both, settling his eyes on me, coming back from Middle-earth.
“No. Your mother loved you.”
“You don’t jump off those cliffs unless you are ignorant or want to die. She knew this island. She knew the quarry. She wanted to get away from us!”
There is silence in the kitchen. Outside the birds sing, their voices muffled by the thick of the house. The ghosts in the hallway have begun to wake up, I can hear them holding their breath. The bright heat of the noon sun barely makes it into the kitchen, the never-cleaned windows covered with quarry dust.
“I never wanted kids. I had a plan. But then I met Olivia Rose … and then, when you were born, well, I thought, maybe, just maybe … and it seemed okay, so Carrie had you, Henrie.”
I will Henrie to stay quiet because it is such an odd thing to say. He sounds so sad. Regret dripping off him like lake water.
“I love you, Daddy,” she says, all desperate, and I am so mad at her. Dumb, dumb girl.
“I love you too, Hattie.”
“Is what B.B. said true? Did my mom jump?”
“Oh, sweetie, no.” He pauses, looks somehow even sadder, then adds, “Carrie is just leaving me. She’s not leaving you, Hattie.”
“It’s Henrie’s birthday tomorrow,” I offer, gathering myself together.
There are little family traditions to uphold. There are fireworks that we pretend are meant for Henrie and store cake—the kind with thick, sugary red and blue roses and colored confetti. The island bakery always rubs out the 4th of July part of Happy 4th of July and replaces it with Birthday Henrie so that the remnants of the wrong holiday can be seen as a red-icing stain on the fierce white of the cake. The whole family sleeps together in the quarry on the night of the Fourth, and at midnight, Carrie wakes us all to say, “Henrie, you are fully here now, sweetie. Present and accounted for.”
“Fourteen is a big number,” our father says, but no joy is in his voice. The pan is starting to smoke.
Daddy, pull it together. Don’t mess this up. “Tell the story of the day Henrie was born.”
“I should,” he says, but then nothing.
Our dad has a graying beard and mustache. Today the hair on his head shoots out from his scalp and his chin in wiry, electric bolts. He stands over the hot skillet with the spatula raised, then reaches out and picks up the ladle, pouring the batter into careful shapes. But what began as another H for “Henrie” oozes into a swollen capital A. And I can smell the butter under it burning.
“Carrie’s decided to move off island,” he tells us. “And I agree it’s for the best.” He puts the shapeless pancake on a plate with several slices of bacon and sits at the table, the gas burner still on.
I reach my hand out and hold on to Henrie’s upper arm. The ghosts hold their breath.
“Henrie, your mother has found a place on the mainland. Great schools and all that. You can summer on island.” He has a piece of bacon stuck in his mustache.
“I want to stay.” Henrie’s voice is barely a whisper.
“We will still be a family, but Carrie and Henrie will live off island.”
“Let’s all go,” I say too quickly. “We can get an apartment on the mainland and go to school, and you can get a teaching job and we won’t complain about anything ever. You can write.”
“You know we can’t do that,” he says, and his eyes flit to Henrie.
Jealousy flairs in me. It is red and hot and angry.
Breathe. I move my gaze to Henrie, realizing three important things: (1) there will be no rubbed-out holiday birthday cake or quarry slumber party; (2) she is moving off island, but even off island she’ll still be his favorite; and (3) we will no longer live together. Three is the most impossible to swallow—I can feel my mouth fill with saliva, my throat refusing to open. I know that for the rest of my life I will associate that combination of sticky syrup touching the salt of bacon fat with sorrow.
“I won’t go. I won’t,” Henrie tells me later that night as we lie on a ledge of the quarry, looking down at the dark water, using each other’s bodies as pillows.
“It’ll be okay,” I assure her. “I have a plan.”
“What is it?”
“I mean, I will have a plan. I need to think.”
“When?”
“Soon. Tomorrow.”
Henrie trusts me. She always has. Still, something sits uneasy with us both, and so to keep from thinking, Henrie asks me the question she loves to ask me: “What happens next?”
This time I do not miss my cue.