We walked back through the village toward the town dock where Chet Toohey’s massive yacht, the Plunger, waited. Pepper and I were up front, followed by Pike and his girlfriend, now clinging to his side like a barnacle. They’d have to scrape her off with a putty knife before she’d get separated from him again. Behind us, Pixie walked with a chubby redheaded boy. Two other cousins said goodbye and headed back to the house. They were from the Connecticut branch of the family.
The Plunger dwarfed every other boat in Keech Harbor. It was usually moored at the Dock n’ Dine, with Chet Toohey moored inside at the bar. But today, it sat waiting for us at the end of the pier, its masts towering above the smattering of boats that bobbed along beside it.
“Welcome aboard,” a man said to me. He was tall and broad-shouldered, which offset his giant beer belly so well you almost didn’t notice it. His hair was a weird color somewhere between blond and gray, and his face was bright with wicked bad rosacea, blossoms of red covering his cheeks. My dad had a touch of it, and he was always yelling at me to wear sunscreen and showing me pictures of worst-case scenarios—and this guy was a textbook case. This had to be Pepper’s Uncle Chet. Pepper introduced us.
“Oh, you’re Paul Hart’s girl, the valedictorian. Congratulations, well done! Paul’s a grand fellow. Good to have you aboard, Claire. Just a grand fellow, your dad. We picked blueberries together as kids.”
How well I knew. That was one of Dad’s favorite Toohey stories. He had worked with Chet—they called him Cheddar then—and with one of the Pikes—Pepper’s dad—one summer up on the blueberry barrens.
“Our generation, we learned to work hard, so you kids wouldn’t have to,” he said, patting me on the back.
I couldn’t wait to tell Dad I now had one of my own Toohey stories. And that he worked hard so I wouldn’t have to. There it was—his theme for my summer spoken by a Toohey!
“Have you met my son, Cheddar?” he asked, pointing to the doughy redhead.
The boy smiled, showing rows of tiny teeth that, with his copious collection of freckles, made him look like a jack-o’-lantern.
I smiled back and then had to quickly defend my crotch as a little black dog rested its paws on my knee and sniffed me in the most embarrassing way. I gently directed it away and patted its head.
“Please don’t mind that dog. It’s my mother’s. She used to breed German Shepherds—I swear some of those dogs could read. Then she went and fell in love with this foolish creature—the only Schipperke in the world who’s afraid of the water. Aren’t you, you little dope? Dumb thing sinks like a stone,” he said, patted the dog on its head, and excused himself.
“Pepper, I don’t know anything about sailing,” I confessed as I pulled her in close enough to whisper. She answered loud enough for everyone to hear.
“That’s okay. It’s better to be honest and say so than try to fake it, fall overboard, and need the Coast Guard to come rescue you, right, Meredith?” Pepper said.
“It was only the harbormaster, Pep, jeez,” Pike said.
Pepper smiled at me and lifted her eyebrows a couple of times like we had a private joke. But then she took me aside and whispered, “Don’t worry about it, we won’t be under sail. Uncle Chet hardly ever sets the sails on the Plunger.”
We motored out into Keech Harbor, cruising around its dozens of motley islands and finally mooring in a sheltered south-facing cove on one of the bigger ones. This island was tall, like it might have been part of a headland once upon a time (geology camp fun fact). Most were insignificant—so small they didn’t even warrant a name—and some had names, but they disappeared at king tides, leaving just a few scraggly pines poking out of the water. Some were just seal haul-outs. This island was one of the three biggest in Keech Harbor.
There was Pregnant Island. My dad told me it was named this because of its shape, but Flo said it was where young girls went to ruin their lives and that I had better never, ever go there in a million years.
Little Rest Island was where the kooky Toohey aunt lived. You can only reach it by a causeway that appears at low tide. She kept a car in her garage on the side of the road near the causeway and timed her grocery runs so she could haul her groceries out to Little Rest in a child-sized red wagon.
And then the biggest was this one, where we moored. It was Alden Island on the map, but the Tooheys called it Mount Saint Picnic.
It looked like all the others from the shore—chunky granite lumps crowned with pines. But Alden Island was shaped like a crescent, and the inner curve, hidden from view from town, held a rare sandy beach. It was tiny as beaches go, maybe just the size of our house, but it shimmered with a natural blanket of soft sand, nestled in the curves of the cove.
The Tooheys had a little skiff and a mooring for the Plunger just offshore. Cheddar piloted the skiff and took Pepper, Pixie, and me ashore in it to the sandy beach. He dropped us off and returned for Pike, Meredith, and his dad. The dog yipped until it was clear she was being left on the boat and then went below to sleep.
I had heard a story that the Tooheys owned an island in the harbor with a secret beach with the warmest waters in New England. I thought it was just a story, like the one where they said the Tooheys kept a crazy cousin locked up in the lighthouse. They said you could see the lights inside the vacant old keeper’s quarters at night, but I never saw them.
But the thing about the water turned out to be true. The saucer-shaped cove was shallow and sandy. At low tide, the sun beat against the sand, and in turn, the hot sand heated the returning water. Usually, the bay is numbingly cold in August. Here, it was only June, and the water was pleasant enough to wade into up to your shins. It was like I had stepped into some fairytale version of my own town. I followed Pepper’s lead and kicked my shoes off and waded along the shore.
Cheddar leapt out of the skiff, causing a big splash that wet and annoyed Meredith. He secured the skiff to a tree that grew out over the water. Pike helped him pull it up onto the sand and then had to carry Meredith until she determined they were far up the beach enough for her to touch the ground.
Cheddar opened a little shed on the beach, and out came a few pieces of ancient lawn furniture, a camp table, and a wooden crate of what I guess you could call their beach toys: a cribbage set, some pails, nets for harassing minnows. Cheddar set up the furniture. Pixie sat down and tried to organize a cribbage game; Cheddar was her only taker. Meredith and Pike made out in the hammock. Uncle Chet fell fast asleep on a rickety chaise, his hat balanced on his face to shield it from the sun. I kept expecting the chaise to collapse. But it stood strong while Uncle Chet snored away on top of it, the ancient, musty canvas straps straining against the wooden frame.
“Who wants to hike around the island?” Pepper asked.
Meredith whispered a “no” to Pike, and he relayed their answer.
“Come on,” Pepper said to me. It didn’t occur to me that I had a choice. I just went because she told me to. We put our shoes on and followed a footpath that led away from the beach and up to where the island exposed its rocky heart, over tangled knots of pine roots and along treacherous patches of poison ivy.
“Hate this stuff!” Pepper shouted at the vines and whacked their shiny leaves of three with a fallen branch. I jumped back and lost my footing. But she grabbed me with her other hand and dropped the branch.
“Sorry. I hope that’s the only patch of it. Gran’s gardener came out here last year and got rid of most of it.”
Neither of us were wearing the right shoes for hiking, and even though a hike around the entire island couldn’t be much more than a half a mile, the trail was still difficult and steep, rocky in some spots and sandy and unreliable in others.
Pepper pointed out small red berries—juneberries,–she called them—and told me to try them. I did and hoped she knew what she was talking about. But she ate a handful, too. They were tart, nothing special—the sort of thing that once upon a time, people were probably grateful for after a long winter, like fiddleheads. Fiddleheads are gross. My grandmother gathered, cooked, and made us eat them every spring, served up with heaping piles of fiddlehead stories—where to find them, how to cook them, and how delicious they are. Maybe they were—after a long winter during the Great Depression. In retrospect, I wonder if she cooked those ferns just to piss my mother off.
The trail turned inward to the center of the island, and we reached its bare bedrock top. I had climbed places like this before. They’re everywhere around here—rocky outcrops that were fun to climb and rewarded those that did with great views. But unlike every other trail like this I had ever been on, there was not one piece of litter—not one broken bottle or beer cap or tangled nest of fishing line. It was pristine. And it gave me a view of Keech I had never seen before.
Stepping onto the highest part of it, we could see all of the village—the entire arc from the cliffs at Black Point to the Toohey compound and lighthouse on Hazard Point.
Hazard Point was the name of the rocky peninsula that curved around Keech Harbor like a protective arm, like the next bay over was trying to copy its paper. The sprawling Toohey colony sitting atop Hazard Point’s dark cliffs and the recently decommissioned lighthouse provided the picture-perfect backdrop that made people cough up twice as much as they should for a plate of fried fish. You could even get a view of it on a postcard, flapping flags and all. It was a far cry from the factory in the shabby mill town where they made toilets and pipes and tanks and all kinds of other shitty things, miles and miles inland and down the coast.
“Cool view, huh?” Pepper said. “We used to always walk up here together. It’s part of a visit to the island. Part of the reason we come here. Gran says it’s good to get another perspective on things. Now, Pixie and Cheddar are too lazy, and Pike does whatever Meredith tells him to. I’m really glad you were game or I’d be sitting up here getting another perspective all by myself. It’s not much of a hike, though,” she said, yanking a pinecone off a twisted tree branch and winging it over the treetops. For a moment, I considered what would happen to it—would it float somewhere and grow, choke a fish that tried to eat it, or sink to the bottom and die unfulfilled?
We stood at the summit and looked around. Keech Harbor seemed silent. Occasionally, I could make out a little motion along Water Street if a big truck went by. From the island, it was like the streets had disappeared. It looked static, like a Christmas village inside a souvenir snow globe. The buildings looked small and quaint. All those places I worked along Water Street—my entire employment history—would never matter outside the bubble of the village. There was no sign of the state highway; Keech Town, my high school, my house, the mountain lion, Bigfoot, and everything beyond the village disappeared into the trees along with the secret locations of those parties and bonfires I was never invited to. They were all just specks somewhere amid the pine forest.
Maybe her gran’s right; it’s good to get another perspective on things.
“Ready?” Pepper said. I guess that meant it was time to go. We crossed the island’s rocky top and followed another trail down. By the time we got back to the beach, Cheddar had packed everything up, and in no time, we were back on the Plunger. We weighed anchor—a phrase I learned just then and there—and started our cruise back.
Then, with a bark, a scream, and a splash, the Schipperke went overboard and sank into the cold dark water. Without a thought, I dived over the side of the Plunger after her.