The clinical theories did not play out as expected. The effect of Rob’s boneheaded move on his brothers was that they became increasingly solicitous of their parents. Duncan and Anthony called home more frequently, trying to soften the blow to the family’s reputation. Anthony invited his parents to reunion week at Yale. “Don’t worry,” he said, “at the tenth and fifteenth everyone is still trying to impress. By the twenty-fifth, life has pretty much beaten the shit out of everybody, so people are just people again.”
Anthony had been inching closer to officially ‘coming out’—with Trip’s encouragement—but Rob’s disgrace made that impossible for now. Duncan felt compelled to announce that he would be the one returning home to attend Indiana University in the fall with Kathryn, and also that he wanted to work part-time for Wangert Public Relations. He shared ideas about using computers for a client database.
Meanwhile, no word from Rob on the island, or from Clyde, who was supposed to alert Ward to Rob’s arrival.
Instead, a series of postcards began to appear at the Wangert residence in Indianapolis. Two words in Rob’s poor handwriting, “getting closer.” They were postmarked from little towns in Massachusetts and Vermont. Some of the towns were so little that they were not on the roadmaps in the glove compartment of Mary’s car.
It was Kayla who finally figured out the mystery, during a commiseration gathering at Rusalka and Ruby’s house. Staring at a thin, squiggly line in an atlas, Kayla said, “Robbie is on the Appalachian Trail. He got on right at the school so the cops wouldn’t pick him up on the roads. He’s hiking it all the way to Maine.”
It would be tempting to describe Rob’s experience on the Appalachian Trail as a visionary quest. Actually, he was in a traumatic state and didn’t notice much. He could have been hiking in a tunnel. His shock allowed him to trudge fifteen hours a day through all weather and temperatures. His down jacket and vest doubled as a sleeping bag, with the vest wrapped around his legs while he slept briefly in the shelters. Blisters be damned. He subsisted on bare rations, peanut butter, raisins, and chocolate bars, purchased in the trailside towns where he stopped to mail the postcards. He didn’t talk with anyone. In Vermont, attempting to stabilize his deteriorating mental condition, he began to sing, or rather, grunt songs from church choir. He dredged up the Frost lyrics from “Choose Something Like a Star,” not as any kind of inspiration, just something to repeat, over and over, adding footstep to footstep.
He acquired a walking stick and found a canteen and began to notice the arriving spring birds. White Mountain vistas and streams beckoned, as did a lone, high-altitude, spiraling hawk that seemed to be urging him on. Gradually, his thoughts shifted to Great Tusk. It would be mud season. No driving around in mud season. Barely warm enough midday to sit out on the porch. That’s what he was aiming for, the green Adirondack chair on the porch. It would tell him what to do next. Somewhere along the trail in the White Mountains he realized that a decision had been made. Twenty miles back, fifty miles back maybe, he wasn’t consciously aware of having debated or mulled over a choice to live year round on Great Tusk. The decision was simply presented to him as irrevocable—with no specific details or plan—Geneva or no Geneva. He was going native.
The decision brought flashes of exhilaration. Rob produced the first and only poem he ever wrote, squeezing it onto a postcard that he sent to Anthony at the next trailside town to show he did have an opinion:
we grew up with Vietnam
it lingered in the newspapers
I glanced at before going out to play
in the cool spring evening
that did not reek of destruction
Vietnam is like a mother’s caress
or stickball in the street
all gone
except a futile itch of guilt
we grew up stepping on broken glass
Rob exited the Appalachian Trail in Bethel, Maine. He hesitated at the trailhead, ran his dirty fingers through his matted hair. He thought about continuing on to Mount Katahdin, but Route 2 offered him a relatively direct shot over to the coast, and with some hitchhiking luck he might make the late boat to Great Tusk.
His luck came in the form of a bread truck making deliveries all the way to Blue Hill. It was driven by a curly bearded hippie who stopped just long enough for Rob to jump aboard. The step-van smelled of a recently smoked joint. The driver nodded and gunned the engine and pulled back onto the road, as if Rob were a scheduled pickup, as if this were already planned.
Feeling awkward about his first human conversation in weeks, not to mention his first contact with a real-life hippie, Rob said nothing. The driver turned on some music. He nodded to a red-tailed hawk swooping low over a marsh. He honked and waved at a passing school bus. Pointing to Rob’s dusty, torn varsity sweatshirt, which read ‘Rokeby Lacrosse,’ he said, “Believe it or not, I played for Exeter.”
“And now you’re driving a bread truck?” Rob blurted.
“Live on a commune near Skowhegan and we each take turns working a day-job for a few months.”
“I’m trying to get over to Stonington,” Rob said, “down at the tip of Deer Isle.”
“I know where that is,” the driver grinned, “and, man, I sure hope there’s a place in Stonington where you can get a bath. I usually admire a natural fragrance, but you seriously need to groove with some soap and water.”
In response to a few knowledgeable questions about Appalachian Trail terrain, Rob slowly spilled his story, including the expulsion from Rokeby. He surprised himself by providing a vivid account of the showdown with Gus and the girl in his closet and the fight with Duncan and details of animal encounters along the trail.
The driver cheered appreciatively at each episode, such that Rob began to feel that maybe it had all been a kind of adventure, and not just a desperate nightmare. He hoped that someday he would be able to tell the story with a flourish. He recognized it would not be smart to try that on the phone with his father.
The bread truck driver, whose name was Wolf—Rob was never sure if that was his first name or his last or a nickname—took him the extra twenty miles down to Stonington after his last delivery in Blue Hill. Arriving ten minutes before the ferry, Rob decided to postpone the mainland payphone call to his parents until he’d had a couple days to get settled on the island.
Wolf gave him a thumb-lock handshake and slid a freshly rolled joint into Rob’s pocket as a goodbye present.
He said, “Lemme know if you stick it out on Great Tusk and I’ll bring the gang down for a visit.”
“That would be a gas,” Rob said.
If Rob was expecting an island welcome like his last fog-lifting one, he was disappointed. The tree squirrels jeered at him. The mice sauntered openly across the kitchen floor. If he was expecting that his announcement of year-round residency at the general store would bring invitations to dinner, he was doubly-disappointed. Marsden recommended the beef jerky.
After three days alone in a cold summer-house, Rob began to have doubts. The house seemed indifferent to him out of season. Everything seemed indifferent out of season—the walk to the pond, the low tide beach—as if the stones themselves were saying, “What are you doing here?” He slept a lot. He bathed in a washtub of lukewarm water, heated on the woodstove.
Sitting out wrapped in a blanket on the porch, Rob wondered if he had made a huge mistake. He knew the islanders routinely saw year-round wannabes come and go, lasting a few weeks or a few months, and nobody was going to accord him citizen status until he had endured at least one full winter.
He tried to focus on ideas for earning some dough. To justify his decision to his parents, he would need a business plan. He found a pencil and paper. He wrote “Business Plan” at the top of the sheet. The only real job on the island was sterning for a lobsterman. That was dangerous work and Rob knew his mother would never allow it.
The wind changed and blew away the paper on Rob’s lap. He saw the gulls tilting against the stiff updrafts over the cove. He wrapped the blanket tighter around his legs and remembered a day of kite-flying with Geneva down on the shore, one of those daylong ‘activities’ that Mary engineered for them as kids. Home-made kites. What about that for a business idea? The Great Tusk Kite Company. He and Geneva would be partners. Rob flinched at this bittersweet fantasy. More than bittersweet, it hurt to be thinking about her again.
He reached for the joint lurking in his pocket. Other than a few faked tokes at parties, Rob had never really smoked pot. He stared at the fat, crinkly joint and saw a shred of connection to Wolf and his commune and whatever kind of ex-preppie hippiedom he was about to enter and maybe the joint would tell him a better way to make a buck on the island.
He stepped inside again to find some matches. He lit one against his pant leg. It flared out. He suddenly got nervous about smoking in his parents’ house.
Outside, a vehicle without a muffler skidded to a stop in the dirt turnaround. Still slightly nervous from the Rokeby bust, Rob feared another one. He hid in the windowless pantry. A knock at the door followed by her voice calling his name, only it wasn’t a kid’s voice anymore, or a teenager’s. It was a womanly voice. Geneva’s womanly voice.
Chewing gum, sniffling slightly, wearing a knife on her hip, she looked as if their childhood had been erased, as if she were just delivering a message. Geneva said, “I came to tell you that your dad called the ship-to-shore at the harbormaster’s and you’re supposed to go there and call him back at his office.”
Rob said, “Now?”
“Or never,” she shrugged and squinted at him. “Are you okay?”
Rob forced back a surge of something in his chest. “That depends on who you ask,” he said.
“I’m asking you,” Geneva said.
“What’s the knife for?” Rob said.
“I’m sterning on my brother’s boat.”
“Tough work,” he said.
“It’s work.”
“I want to be your friend,” Rob blurted.
“Is that why you came here?” Geneva asked.
Rob replied, “There were a number of reasons. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it on the trip.”
Geneva peered around behind him. “The house looks good,” she said. “I haven’t been inside since the remodeling.”
Rob bowed and ushered her into the parlor. He dropped a log into the woodstove and poked at the embers until they sparked.
“I suppose you want to know about my brother,” he said.
“Who?” Geneva smiled by crinkling her upper lip.
“Right. The less said, the better,” Rob agreed.
Geneva reached for the poker and stirred the fire. She said, “I heard you took a long hike to get here.”
Rob nodded, “Thanks to you, I made it. A lot of times I remembered things you taught me. Simple stuff, like how to start fires with birch bark.”
The fresh log flared and crackled. Geneva pointed at the joint tucked behind Rob’s ear. “Well, are you going to share some of that?”
Rob gulped and grinned and stammered, “Uh, sure! But just so I won’t be feeling all strange about smoking pot in my folks’ house, how about we sit out in your truck?”
Geneva said, “Let’s walk down to the shore.”
They hunkered out of the wind behind the boulder at the mouth of Zippy Cove. Leaning against an immense slab of granite that felt like it had been custom contoured to their backs, Rob and Geneva smoked some homegrown commune weed and ate gorp and sniffled and sighed away any unspoken resentment lingering from a period of their lives that was understood to be—as soon as Geneva pulled out a couple of toothpicks and silently handed one to Rob—a closed case.
Rob palmed a small stone and threw it up backward over his head and over the boulder. They heard a brief clatter and a splash. “Tide coming in,” Geneva said.
“That means we’ll have to move,” Rob said.
“Another ten minutes,” Geneva said.
“We could go play guitars,” Rob said.
“Or hike out to the cliffs.”
“Or cook up some mussels.”
“The possibilities are endless.”
“Except that at some point I have to call my father,” Rob said.
Geneva contemplated her toothpick. “Probably don’t want to do that when you’re stoned,” she cautioned.
“Why not?” Rob said. “Hell, maybe I should.”
Geneva gestured, using her toothpick as a tiny wand, to the grove of budding shiver trees and the deer path leading down to the shore. “A thousand times I’ve seen it,” she said, “and every time is like the first.”
“It’s the best. But what does that have to do with calling my dad right now?”
“Because you might just tell him that we’re planning to live here forever,” Geneva said.
Rob wanted to hear this as an invitation. He asked, “Aren’t you supposed to be going off to Bangor for dental hygienist school?”
Geneva nodded and answered slowly, “That was the idea. I hated the mainland. It’s not for me.”
Rob agreed, “Fortunately, we’ve got our island fortress.” They slapped five, and played percussion on the boulders. He leaned into her and she leaned into him and some long-overdue nuzzling ensued.
By the time he finally called his father five hours later, Rob and Geneva had hatched a plan to build matching guitars and amps with scallop shell inlay and charge lots of money. They’d only have to sell a couple per year to get by.
“We’ll call it ‘Island Instruments,’ ” Rob announced to his father.
“That sounds kind of like the scheme you and Geneva used to concoct to sell broken lobster traps to day-trippers,” Ward chided.
Rob made his pitch, and Ward was having none of it.
“You don’t understand, Dad. You’re just mad because I got kicked out of your fancy establishment boarding school and they won’t refund this year’s tuition.”
Ward made the mistake of mentioning the lost tuition, and also the cost of the plane ticket waiting for Rob at the Bangor airport and the taxi fare to get him there tomorrow.
“Your mother and I are very disappointed. And we can’t let you continue to compound your errors. You will be on that plane. And I won’t let you continue badmouthing the Rokeby School. You broke their rules. If you’ll remember, it wasn’t so long ago that you were pleading with us to send you there.”
“That was just so I could get out of Indianapolis.”
“Son, please don’t denigrate your birthplace either. Indianapolis has its faults. But it’s been hometown to the Wangert family for a long time, and by God, you’re going to have to get used to it, because you’ve screwed up any chance to live elsewhere.”
Ward’s gravelly voice crackled through the static from the ship-to-shore connection. Rob’s voice crackled back through his escalating bravado. Emboldened by Geneva’s presence, Rob said, “I’m not leaving, Dad. I’m the one who crosses over. I’m staying on the island. You can’t stop me.”
Ward was unaware that, in the next room, Geneva, Marsden, and the harbormaster were overhearing his amplified end of the conversation. He proceeded to make some unflattering comments about the Great Tusk gut and the year-rounders’ small-mindedness. When Rob refused to back down, Ward swore an oath that set them more at loggerheads, “Dammit then, you won’t be living in my house out there!”