In my memory, which is sometimes as hazy as a foggy beach, the island is a painting in only four colors: gray, white, pink, and green. The gray houses shuttered in white. The tender pink climbing roses. The brighter Rosa rugosa freckling the sedge grass that brushed your legs as you ran down to a pearly dollop of private beach.
The people, though… Well, that’s all changed. Used to be everyone was someone’s friend or brother or cousin or college roommate. The summer people were tethered together like settlers, thirty miles out to sea. Not for us the Jersey shore, the pull of northern Lake Michigan. No. We were willing to go farther, haul more, last longer, to be in a more interesting place. We had that in common too.
People speak of the whaling history of the island, hold it out as its central fascination. Someday, perhaps people will look back at our colonization, our industry, as being more important. The best kind of people, gathered to make the best kind of product: fun.
That has changed. I know change is inevitable, but I hold tight to the idea that a family can still gather, still laugh, still pose for our group portrait the day after the Fourth at the lighthouse. I’d called Earl Greenway to schedule it, and his young camera assistant told me it was already on the calendar. To compare all those photos, throughout the years, lined up, is to see that some things hold fast. Even that one dreadful year, when Caroline’s eyes were ringed with red and her face was still bruised from crying, even then, when she refused to stand next to her father or her brother, when she insisted on settling herself at the edge, almost out of frame, we were a family. And this year, even though Tripp looks different and acts different, we will document it too. Even if it’s the last year, we’ll have a record of it.
Back in the day, Tripp and I used to stay up late, discussing which of our two children was stronger, smarter, funnier, more likely to succeed. This is precisely what children fear, that parents keep everything equal on the face of it—tracking the cost of Christmas presents, doling out equivalent compliments, and then, behind closed doors, discussing them like racehorses.
And I confess: I put my money on Tom. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? She is stronger than he is. Just as I am stronger than Tripp. And I wonder if my children did the same calculations, trying to figure out which parent they’d have to bury first?
When Tripp started getting sick, I found four bloodied monogrammed handkerchiefs crumpled in the wash. I walked down the hall to his study where he was filing something or other and demanded to know if he was having nosebleeds. And he confessed that it was just this damned cough, a cough he couldn’t shake, and it was nothing. But I took him to the doctor—made his appointment, drove him, followed up with the tests. Because I knew: it was lung cancer.
Caroline lived in New York, and Tom lived in Boston, and Florida was just far enough away to make it a pain for either of them to come down, so we told them not to. They sent flowers; they sent food. (Well, Caroline did. Tom called and left messages that said if we needed anything to just ask. As if we would ask!) Tripp didn’t want his children watching him getting nauseated or having trouble walking, all of which happened right away.
We soldiered on, prepared to get through it. But the light at the end of the tunnel never seemed to appear. The chemotherapy did something to his brain. Six weeks of it, to shrink the tumor, and shrink it it did. But in its place, an expansion somewhere else. A man’s mind in free fall—that’s the part no one tells you about, that no one on earth can describe. They call it chemo brain, like mommy brain, like wine brain, like—oh, what do you call it when the kids drink milk shakes?—brain freeze, as if it’s just temporary. But no. Something seeped into his brain, contorted and squeezed, releasing it into a whole new shape and size. He is a changed man, my husband. It’s as if I am living with a stranger.
So there were my son and my daughter, arrived before us, walking up the ferry ramp, each taking a bag from our shoulders. There they were, making small talk as if everything was okay. Tripp was loud, voluble. Did they not notice? He sounded drunk. Shrieking “Caro” and “Tommo” at the top of his lungs.
I stood with Caro near the trolley of luggage, waiting for the rest of our bags, and watched Tripp and Tom take the golf clubs to the car. Tripp walked differently, faster, on the balls of his feet, like an effeminate racewalker. I wanted to take a picture, a video, and go back through it with them, frame by frame. There it is, right there. The evidence. Don’t you see?
“Dad looks good,” Caroline said.
“You don’t really think so!”
“Yes,” she said. “I wouldn’t say it otherwise.”
And I thought, Oh, what a lie that is. There is nothing worse than an inauthentic person who thinks they are authentic, openhearted, honest. Caroline had always put a gloss on things, said what people wanted to hear, then turned her head away, to hide her cheeks, burning with fury. That blush was the only true thing about her some of those years.
“Caro, look carefully. He’s…not well.”
“So you say.”
“It’s true. You’ll see. That’s why I couldn’t let him drive.”
“You drove the whole way?”
“We stopped overnight in Connecticut.”
“At the Braziers’?”
“No. At a hotel. I didn’t want Bob Brazier to see him like this.”
“Like what, Mom? He seems completely fine.”
I looked to the sky and blinked back tears. I had to save them, I knew, for worse things. I really did know that. I just didn’t know what.
“He’s not fine. Nothing’s fine!”
When the luggage trolley came, we each rolled a bag back to the car, where Tripp and Tom stood laughing at something on Tom’s phone. Something fluttering beyond them from the streetlight, a handbill of some sort, and it drew Caroline’s attention.
I glanced over her shoulder. A crude drawing, a vague headline: Have you seen this man?
I ripped the poster off the pole.
“Mom!”
“People can’t post things willy-nilly. It’s against the zoning,” I said.
“Mom, that’s a police sketch! They’re warning the public about that guy attacking girls on the beach!”
“No one wants to arrive on vacation and see this kind of thing! Now, did you go to the supermarket, Caroline?”
I suppose she had never heard me ask that before. I’d always done everything, after all, short of mowing the lawn, and some summers, I did that too. I certainly knew how to mow a lawn. But caring for an unpredictable adult who weighed 190 pounds? That was proving beyond me.
“Yes, Mom. Everything’s ready.”
Tripp sat in the front with Tom. He drove his own car, not the island car. Tom always liked things that were newer and nicer than we did. I understand that now; I can’t handle the dents and dings. After all these years of living with antiques, I’m changing too: I want Tripp newer, the way he was.
After we moved away from the dock, we drove along the harbor, past the White Elephant, past Brant Point Lighthouse, the long way along Hulbert that Tom knew I preferred. With all the remodeling of the waterfront homes, every year, the views between properties were diminished to tiny slivers of blue. The only true vista now was from the widow’s walk. How prescient we were to build that twenty years ago. Who would know it would come down to that?
Tripp rolled down his window and exclaimed over the sea air, the salt, the smell of roses still floating through. He asked Tom to stop at the Moores’ house. He got out, and I wondered if he was going to open the curved wooden gate and walk right across their crushed-shell driveway and make himself a drink, sit out on their porch overlooking the lighthouse. The door was open, of course. All the old gang’s were. But no. He went to the split-rail fence climbing with wild roses and sniffed them extravagantly.
“See?” I said to Caro.
“How many times have you told us all to stop and smell the roses, Mom?” she whispered. “Maybe he finally listened to you.”
“No,” I replied.
“Dad has always liked roses,” Tom said. “Don’t you remember?”
“No, Tom.” I sighed. “No, I don’t.”
We watched as his father bent over, nose in pink petals, Nantucket reds from waist down to his ankles.
“Well, smelling roses is sweet. And it’s harmless,” Caroline added.
“Not everything he does is harmless. You’ll see.”
“Okay, Mom,” Caroline said, her voice filled with disbelief and condescension.
“Let’s pick some, Alice!” Tripp called from the fence. His smile just a little too wild. “Whaddya say?”
I got out and took his arm. “There’s plenty of flowers at home,” I said, keeping my voice calm and low, hoping it worked. Sometimes it did. “There are big, blue hydrangeas ringing the porch, remember?”
“Yes,” he said, but his eyes were vacant.
“And there’s honeysuckle along the public way to the beach. You can smell it when you sit out and have your tea.”
“Yes.”
“And later, we’ll walk down to the beach, and there’ll be star grass and chokeberry.”
“There are roses in ’Sconset,” he said suddenly.
“Yes, where your parents lived, everyone had roses climbing up their cottages; that’s right. And on the Polpis path, you could see bayberry and all kinds of other things too.”
“And poison ivy,” he said suddenly. “Damned ivy.”
“Yes, but beautiful things too,” I said, as if it were a good-night story, and a happy ending had to be emphasized.
I got him back in the car, and he started planning a fishing trip with Tom. I took a deep breath. The thought of him in the boat, in waders, water over his head, hooks near the fleshy parts of his hands, made me ill. The worrying came back to me all over again. It was like having a toddler, the constant concern, the visions of falling, the impending doom. I looked at the crumpled paper in my lap. Tripp could run away, go deep into a wave thinking he could surf. And then I suppose we’d have to post a sketch of him. Have you seen this man too?
It has begun, I thought to myself.
The slow drowning. The unraveling. The beginning of the end.
This, I think, is why people always say they want to die in their sleep.
So they don’t see it coming.