1

Obsessive love is always about rejection—always, always, always.

Phoebe Allen was old enough, experienced enough, and rejected enough to know this as fact. But before the night of her annual barbecue, she did not consider it a fact with much bearing on her present life, her present self. Self-employed, self-sufficient, self-assured—all those good, sturdy “self” words shoring up her place in the world, working like a charm, keeping her safe.

Phoebe always scheduled her barbecue for the second Sunday in August. Today, as she set out the last raspberry pie to cool, everything seemed under control. Through a kitchen window, she could see her neighbor Ivan clamping chinook salmon into wire racks, readying them for the coals. Another neighbor, Amelia, was in the garden, cutting cosmos, dahlias, delphiniums, and zinnias for buffet-table vases on the deck. With days of preparation nearly complete, not a finger had blistered or bled, nothing had burned or broken, Phoebe hadn’t forgotten a single crucial ingredient for any of her recipes. Not one provoking incident had occurred to augur how troubled she soon would be. Or that she would look back on this year’s barbecue as marking when everything began to change. Not only for her, but for nearly everyone living on Owl Island. Still, it would be easier getting a consensus about what caused the change than it was finding agreement on the topic of why the road they all lived on bore the name it did: Spit in the Wind.

Summer took its time coming here. Sandals and shorts were seldom seen in June. Fourth of July firecrackers had to be lit under cupped hands before being launched into wet, chilly air. August was the blessed month. In August it was warm enough in the afternoons to splash in the shallows of Little Pritchard Bay and cool enough in the evenings to wear a sweater while you sat outside cracking fresh-caught crab for dinner. Schools of spawning humpies—pink salmon best suited for canning—crossed the bay. Fledgling bald eagles swooped down from their aeries, learning to fish. Sunsets behind snowy westward mountain slopes occurred so late at night only the youngest of children surrendered to sleep before ten o’clock. Mornings brought the scent of blackberries warming in the sun, mingled with saltwater tang and alder smoke from woodstove fires. When a brief shower of rain hit, it reminded everyone they still lived in the Pacific Northwest, and nature required payment to sustain so many different shades of green in the landscape.

Not one of Phoebe’s barbecues had ever been cancelled or moved indoors on account of weather. And by now she couldn’t keep them all straight without looking at snapshots. Then she’d recall each event’s details. When Ivan brought that frizzy-haired photographer who broke his heart, when Amelia made a pit for throwing horseshoes on the beach, when Laurienne, Phoebe’s daughter, was caked pink with calamine for nettle stings. As the pictures revealed, these parties of hers were hardly exclusive affairs. The only requirement for invitation was residence along Spit in the Wind Road; the only purposes, good food and fellowship. Everyone regarded Phoebe’s barbecues as their own equivalent of the Indian salmon feasts once held on these shores, occasions to celebrate the season’s sumptuousness.

Although many years had passed since any Indians lived on Owl Island, the island still belonged to a local Salish tribe. In the thick of the Great Depression, the tribe’s chief hired a Seattle surveyor to map the island, and it was the surveyor who gave Spit in the Wind Road its name. The chief’s minions grumbled. If they didn’t want to live on craggy Owl without plumbing or electricity, or dock their boats in Little Pritchard Bay, a body of water that drained to mud flats at low tide, why would anyone else? But just as the chief foresaw, plenty of white people felt otherwise—especially after a bridge got built linking Owl to Port Pritchard, allowing easy access to the mainland and the docks of Big Pritchard Bay. Power lines came, eventually. So did gas and water lines and telephone cables. But the rock-ridden, plow-resistant hills and moody waters were there to stay.

When Phoebe had first moved to Spit in the Wind, she’d asked Ivan about their address. Just what did the surveyor have in mind, giving this road the name he did? Ivan’s only answer was another question: “What do you think?” Voiced in a curious, genial tone, as if the road were a poem open to interpretation, or a prediction that could only be borne out by the passage of time.

Standing on a hillside overlooking the bay, Phoebe’s house was so solid and snug a structure, so replete with modern comforts, it hardly seemed possible that it had started out as the surveyor’s rustic summer place. Willing as she’d been to alter the cabin—most notably with a new deck and second story—Phoebe led the resistance when more recent arrivals lobbied for a statelier address in keeping with their year-round homes. Like, say, Shoreline Drive. Or, even worse, Mountain View Way. “If that’s what you want,” Phoebe would say, “why not move to the suburbs?”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with people from the suburbs.” This usually from some diplomat who had just fled them, and Phoebe would be obliged to respond.

“Hell no, it’s sidewalks and cul de sacs I hate.”

Phoebe had grown up sleeping beneath a large map of the Land of Make-Believe, a narrow island shaped much like Owl, and she preserved all the rips and frays acquired over the years by framing the map under glass. To her fairy–tale-tuned ear, “Spit in the Wind Road” sounded as if it would fit right in next to Breadcrumb Lane, Troll Alley, or Castaway Avenue. So, for that matter, did the name of her business—Westerly Webs. At community meetings, though, she sounded every inch the historian’s daughter that she in fact was, defending her preference in the name of character, culture, continuity.

That was about as heated as arguments on Owl Island got, and a good thing, too, considering the differences that divided it. Except for Phoebe’s barbecues, Spit in the Wind gatherings generally developed along geographical lines. On the north side, where the homes of Phoebe, Ivan, and Amelia sat strung out on cliffs among dozens of others, were those who tended to build their own dwellings and often bartered for the plumbing and wiring necessary to bring them up to code. They lived well but frugally, a collection of craftspeople, artists, and fishermen whose social affairs featured salsa, chips, and whatever jug wine was on sale in Port Pritchard at the Pioneer Market. On the south side people hired architects to design fancier places. More of a crowd that entertained with recipes out of gourmet magazines and bought wines that needed to breathe.

How the word “wind” got into the name of the road they all lived on was obvious; Owl Island’s firs and cedars grew at a slight tilt, shaped by southwesterly gusts, and could snap under the pressure of freak gales from the north. Some of Phoebe’s neighbors contended the surveyor was punning with the word “spit,” using it to mean not saliva but a point of land surrounded by water. Others believed “spit” referred to the gentle rains that in the wet months fell more frequently than major downpours, with drops so scattered it seemed possible to walk between them. Still others cited the old expression “Spit in the wind and it’ll come back to you” as evidence the surveyor was dispensing cautionary advice, a karmic warning.

After tonight, Phoebe would be inclined to endorse this last definition, placing herself at the center of the causative chain.

         

Ivan stood over the brick barbecue checking coals as Phoebe brought out a bucket of her secret basting sauce. She was an unusual woman in her early forties who appeared youthful despite having hair streaked with gray. Except for bangs feathering across her high forehead, Phoebe’s hair hung thick and glossy to her shoulders—silver threaded into coal-black strands—casting a glow on her olive skin, so smooth it seemed poreless. Tonight she wore a rust-colored rayon jumper over a gauzy white tee shirt, thin loose clothes offering only a suggestion of her body’s shape.

“You look good,” Ivan said as she emptied the bucket into a bowl by the grill.

This was nothing new, Ivan admiring Phoebe. He’d done it for years, expecting only friendship in exchange. But he’d been away for a while, in Japan on a Guggenheim to master slow-firing ceramic glazes. Over time, the postcards they sent each other had turned into long, revealing letters, and since his return she had felt him out on subjects they’d never before discussed. Touched him more. Invited him to extend their light, customary hugs and kisses into softer, longer, sweeter events.

“I know you like me in orange,” she said.

She caught the pleasure in his smile and a bit of doubt, too, as though this shift in her was something he wanted, but couldn’t quite count on yet.

He had come by yesterday to lure her away for lunch on Heron Island. Already at work in the kitchen for hours, she covered and stored the huge bowls of spiced hummus, black bean, and potato salads she’d been preparing, and just before the tide turned they set out in his dory, leaving Little Pritchard Bay for the far deeper waters beyond.

Because of its tiny size, Heron Island was untouched by developers. Although campers sometimes spent the night there, none were in evidence when Ivan and Phoebe arrived. After they built a fire on the beach and readied the clams Ivan had raked up that morning, Phoebe stripped down to her black Speedo and jumped from a red-skinned madrone bough into a salty slice of Puget Sound. Total immersion—the best way to go if you were set on swimming around here, even in August. Ivan stayed on shore with the bubbling steamer pot while she churned through lucent water, warm for a few inches on top but iced below with mountain snowmelt. Stepping out, she slashed her foot on a barnacle-covered rock. A shallow cut, but so much blood. Ivan rushed out in his wave walkers and carried her back to a padded blanket laid over a swatch of secluded beach. “I’m fine,” Phoebe protested as he cleaned the wound and ripped off a strip of his tee shirt to bind it. “And I’m really starving.”

They ate the clams, sopping up buttery lemon broth with sourdough bread and drinking icy bottles of Anchor Steam.

Kayakers swung their paddles like slow-motion propellers in the distance, bobbing alongside crab-trap buoys in the foamy wakes of motorboats. Closer to shore a seal looked up from the water, craning its head as though taking bearings from Mount Baker’s snowy steeple.

As dappled shade fell on their blanket, Ivan unwrapped and examined Phoebe’s foot. “It stopped bleeding,” he said.

“I told you it was nothing.”

But it wasn’t nothing. It was something, how glad she was to be scooped up and attended to by him. It was something, the loosening of pleasure his touch brought, coursing through her like heavy, hot liquid. It was something, how each of them seemed to realize at the same moment that they ought to make love. Something because of how this could not be reversed. It would either lead somewhere new, somewhere worth going, or spin them in circles—misspent energy better left behind, scattered over clamshells and heron nests. Phoebe felt her skin pulse, animated by the elements and their slow, sensual certainty. They went on. Together and alone. Lost and found. Strange and familiar. Surprised but in the end settled on their risk.

“I’m not sorry,” he had said as she lay across his chest and he tipped out the last of his beer. “How about you?”

She rested a finger on the close-trimmed beard that covered his long, Nordic chin. “I’m glad.”

When they got back to Owl Island, another question from him: “Stay with me?”

“Amelia’s coming over to make some chutneys and piecrusts.”

“Tonight?”

“She probably won’t leave until late.”

“What about afterwards?”

“You know how it can get around here. Let’s keep our stuff private awhile. Wait for things to settle down.”

         

Now, standing over the barbecue, Ivan squeezed Phoebe’s shoulder. “Where’s Judge?” he asked. Judge was the name Ivan had given Laurienne when she was very young and other children along the Road counted on her to settle disputes. “What do you think, Judge, where’s the best place to drop our line?” he’d ask on their fishing trips, and he swore that her decisions, made only after pumping him for pertinent information, were better than his. Laurienne turned out to have too tender a heart for measuring matters on grown-up scales of justice, but “Judge” stuck anyway with everyone on Spit in the Wind. Everyone, that is, but her widowed mother. For Phoebe, Laurienne’s name was necessary music.

She had only the foggiest notion of the work Laurienne did now in Seattle, writing programs in a language that could be understood only by computers and other people like herself. But maybe her talent for communicating in code made sense, on some invisible, cellular level. After all, she herself was a mystery, conceived under circumstances her mother had yet to figure out how to explain.

All afternoon, Phoebe had been listening for the sound of Laurienne’s old Volvo crunching gravel out front. “Doesn’t look like she’s going to make it,” she told Ivan. Her husky voice, suggestive of bourbon and cigarettes, was actually attributable to the jagged, puckered scar on her throat, centered above the delicate bones of her clavicle. “Laurienne’s up to her eyeballs in work, has been all summer.”

As Ivan slathered sauce on the fish, hissing splats and puffs of smoke rose off the coals below. “That’s a shame. You’ll be busy playing hostess to the mob. If Judge doesn’t come, I’ll just be dodging people I don’t really want to talk to all night.”

“Well, there is an upside,” Phoebe said. “If she doesn’t come, I’ll be free when it’s over.”

“Now, that was a good thing to say.”

Phoebe knew the people whom Ivan particularly wanted to avoid were south-side residents. Ivan himself was an unmistakable north-sider, an artist living in a home-cum-studio he had built himself, a place that in its early years had featured as clean and pleasant an outhouse as ever was made—but still, most south-siders found just the concept of an outhouse tragically déclassé. Phoebe herself didn’t fit neatly into either camp, north or south. On the one hand, the work she did required that she be capable of figuring out how a medium-sized trawler might fish a bigger net without adding horsepower. Basic north-side material. On the other, she freely loaned items from her meticulously cataloged collection of books, music, and film videos up and down the Road with scholarly zeal. More like a culturally wired south-sider. Then there was her house. Simple enough to be friendly with all the others on the north, but so smartly designed and detailed it wouldn’t have been out of place sitting on the south.

If Phoebe was a conundrum to her neighbors, she was transparent to Ivan, a close observer over the years. The men she had tested as lovers were kept, if at all, only as distant friends. While the first category held appeal for Ivan, the second did not. Long as he’d known and pondered Phoebe, he still couldn’t quite nail all the origins of her wariness. What he understood was how the confusion she generated gave gifts, too. Privacy, and a considerable measure of control.

Ivan kept to himself differently, as if belonging to some atavistic religion that mandated limited contact among adult creatures bereft of wings, gills, or fur. His leeriness of south-siders stemmed from knowing how many among them resented north-siders like him for getting there first and tying up all the prime sunset views, often with houses the south-siders considered downscale.

Such sentiments seemed petty to Phoebe on an evening fine as this, when Little Pritchard Bay bulged with a glistening high tide, pocked by jumping humpies, and the August splendors of Owl Island were ample enough to make her feel rich as anyone on earth, not just south-siders on Spit in the Wind Road. “They’re perfectly decent people, Ivan,” she chided. “Talk to them, you’ll see.”

No one on the island had a better sense than Ivan of where in the sky to look for a meteor shower, or of the exact day when wild yellow irises would burst into blossom on riverbanks. He knew all the best places to find chanterelle mushrooms in midsummer, morels in spring. The single can of cat food he lured crabs into his trap with worked better than any amount of the rotting chicken parts everyone else used. But Ivan shared such wisdom only with longtime familiars, and his unfortunate idea of social conversation meant re-creating episodes of a late-night radio show broadcast out of Idaho by a host obsessed with crop circles, alien abductions, and conspiracy theories. Phoebe had a hunch Ivan wasn’t intrigued by the ideas expressed so much as by people’s need to believe in them, their intolerance for ambiguity. But if she couldn’t be positive about why such stuff intrigued him, what were south-siders who barely knew him supposed to think? Should one of them come to visit, interested in buying his pottery, Ivan wouldn’t mention any of the museums or galleries that had exhibited his work, wouldn’t encourage sales by dragging out catalogues featuring his pieces, wouldn’t do anything to feed their need to know the significance of his reputation before settling on a price. Instead, he’d decide he wasn’t ready to part with what they wanted, or describe, in stomach-turning detail, how it was made using the ground-up bones of mice he’d caught in his house over the winter.

He was an artist’s artist, temperamentally unequipped for the schmooze of self-promotion. Only now, after his decades of monklike devotion, were curators and serious collectors taking notice. With the Guggenheim and a big show coming up, it looked as though before long he’d at last be able to live on his earnings from art alone—no more temporary fishing-boat, carpentry, or net-repair jobs to buy him time in the studio. Phoebe was ecstatic, but Ivan was, well, Ivan. So steady and sure of who he was that compared to him the more single-minded south-siders seemed like a bunch of hyperactive strivers. “I know what they’ll all be buzzing about tonight,” he said. “Some Californian wants to buy the Miller place.”

Ivan was right. It had been such a long time since anyone on the island had put their house on the market that this news was bound to cause a stir. “Well,” Phoebe said, “good for the Millers.”

“And too bad for us.”

Phoebe laughed. “Californians are not by definition evil, Ivan.”

“He might come tonight.”

“Who?”

“The Californian.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Carl Brown invited him.” Carl Brown, who had a streak of gray in his black beard that reminded Phoebe of a skunk, was a recent émigré from Boston and a real estate attorney for the tribe. He had hired a Seattle architect to design a screamingly modern boxy house on the south side, then set about establishing himself as the island’s resident wine expert. This morning, when Phoebe ran into him at the Pioneer Market, all he mentioned bringing to the barbecue was a case of good pinot.

“Don’t listen to Ivan,” Amelia called down from the deck, where she was finishing up with the flower arrangements. “He got the news secondhand from me. Being from California is not the most interesting thing about this person.”

“Spare me,” Phoebe told her. She wasn’t so pure as to abstain from gossip, but Amelia’s flair for exaggeration was well known. Men initially attracted by the snap and energy in Amelia’s sunny demeanor soon came to consider her a desperate divorcée reading soul-mate potential into such slender affinities as a shared taste for slack-key guitar or anchovy pizzas.

But Amelia was not to be deterred. “We’re getting a celebrity in the neighborhood,” she went on. “He’s famous.”

One liability of living on an island was that newcomers held an allure—or, as in Ivan’s case, prompted an antipathy—way out of proportion to whatever might in fact be significant about them. Amelia’s penchant only amplified the local one. “Someone famous” could be a maker of goat cheese who was well known in the region, a “celebrity,” someone who inherited fragments of a family lumber fortune. As Amelia trotted down to the grill with bottles of beer and a bowl of chips, Phoebe teased, “I better get on the phone right now and invite the paparazzi.”

“Go ahead, make fun, but he’s a big cheese in Hollywood. Carl told me, but I can’t remember his name.”

“Right,” Ivan said. “He must be really famous.”

Phoebe’s left eyebrow inched upward. “Why would someone like that want the Miller place? Doesn’t make sense. I mean, the site’s fantastic.” And it was—sitting on the western point that divided north from south, with views in three directions. “But the house isn’t much.”

“Come on, Phoebe,” Amelia said. “Ever hear of renovation? Anyway, those people have houses everywhere.” As a heron squawked overhead, she indicated the loveliness all around them with a sweep of her hand, like a game-show girl showing off a prize appliance. “Why not here?”

“I’ll bet he just stopped off on his way to the San Juans,” Phoebe said. “Once he gets there, he’ll like the scenery even better. So high-priced, ordinary people can’t afford it. That’s where he belongs, with all the other billionaire actors and assholes. On land you own instead of lease. Something risk-free but sure to appreciate.”

Amelia breathed an exasperated sigh. “It’s a done deal—Carl says the guy paid a fortune for the place. And he’s not an actor, he’s a director. I saw one of his movies, something about an artist’s model in Paris. Made me want to run right out to smoke and drink and be risqué.”

Phoebe glanced at Amelia as though she had just spoken in tongues. Then she dropped the empty sauce bucket on Amelia’s foot. Amelia yelped, more in surprise than pain. “What? What did I say?”

Phoebe’s heart pounded; heat rose to her face. “I’m so sorry,” she said, bending down for the bucket. Rising up, she knocked the beer from Amelia’s hand. “Oh God, sorry, sorry again—I’ll go get another.”

In the kitchen, Phoebe leaned against the refrigerator, letting her pulse return to normal. While uncapping Amelia’s beer, she tried to imagine a lighthearted comment to show Ivan and Amelia her disinterest in continuing their previous conversation. “It’s not my policy to talk about neighbors until I’ve met them,” she might say. But that lie could catch up with her fast as fire. She considered letting them know the movie Amelia mentioned came out an awfully long time ago, and it wasn’t just Phoebe who felt no other film its director made since had been as good. That wasn’t exactly lighthearted, though, and it begged the question of why Phoebe was so well informed about this still nameless man. She might actually have to say his name, something she had pretty much avoided for over twenty years. Best to keep it simple. And change the subject.

“I saw that movie, too,” Phoebe told Amelia as she returned. “So, how do you think this guy’s paying a fortune for the Miller place will affect the value of our houses?” Then, before anyone could answer, Phoebe checked her watch. “Look at the time—I’ve got to get dressed.”

“Phoebe.” Ivan spoke as though addressing an adorable but confused child. “You are dressed. You look fine.” He was right, she did look fine. But not as fine as she suddenly wanted to look. No, it was worse than that. Not as fine as she needed to look.

         

Phoebe rifled through her closet, ignoring the half taken up by boiled-wool sweaters, overalls, gumboots, down vests—apparel that kept her warm whether she was working on the docks or in the largely unheated Port Pritchard warehouse she leased for her net-making business. Instead she went straight for the closet’s other half, which contained clothes that might have belonged to a completely different woman, one whose taste ran to vintage velvet capes, cashmere jackets, long linen skirts, and decidedly feminine getups like the hand-painted chiffon dress that Phoebe pulled out on its hanger. Standing in front of the full-length mirror, she held it to her chest while wondering if it was possible to co-opt yourself with a secondhand garment already in your wardrobe.

Lily, Phoebe’s aging wheaten terrier, had followed her upstairs. Now, head on paws, she dozed while Phoebe slipped out of her jumper and tee-shirt. Phoebe’s stretch bra and utilitarian underpants wouldn’t do for the chiffon, so she shed them, too. After putting on a sexier, silkier set, the memory of getting underthings like this once for him—with him, actually—hit in a way that felt like having the wind knocked out of her.

A car door slammed outside. Lily pricked her ears, jumped off the bed, and ran downstairs like a puppy, whimpering with joy. Phoebe looked out the window to see Laurienne saying hello to the first flurry of arriving neighbors, who were carrying their own platters and bowls of food to the deck out back. When the front door opened, Phoebe called out, “I’m up here.”

It took Laurienne a good five minutes of petting Lily before the dog would let her go upstairs. Reaching out to hug her daughter, Phoebe noticed that the pale, lightly freckled skin beneath Laurienne’s green eyes was tinged blue, and her long, curly auburn hair hung limp, in need of washing. The old jeans she had on looked at least one size too big, gaping out around her hips. Her Pearl Jam tee shirt looked as though she might have worn it to bed several nights running. It wasn’t hard to guess the explanation for all this. Where Laurienne worked in Seattle, twelve-hour days were such a given that Phoebe had only seen her in the city this summer. Laurienne had never been away from Spit in the Wind for so long.

“I cranked extra hard so I could make it,” she said in her girlish, feathery voice—a voice that made it almost impossible for her to sound angry, even when she was. For Laurienne, barbecues had always been more enjoyable than birthdays (not so many people focused so exclusively on her, and whether she was having enough fun).

“I hope you didn’t break any land-speed records.”

“I drove the way you taught me, Mom. Like a little old lady.” Laurienne took in Phoebe’s half-clad state. “Why aren’t you dressed?”

“Just running a bit late, sweetie.”

Laurienne scratched Lily’s belly while Phoebe pulled the dress over her head and sat to apply lipstick. Now that she was no longer alone, Phoebe felt ridiculous dolling herself up. And for what? To impress someone who might or might not appear tonight, to earn back his regard, to make him sorry he ever shoved her aside. All bad enough, but she’d forgotten until this moment how this someone, should he show, would no doubt meet her daughter—and who knew what would come of that?

Laurienne caught the change in Phoebe’s face, but misinterpreted its cause. “Sorry I wasn’t here to help,” she said.

“Don’t worry, everything’s under control.”

“Everything but you.”

“I’m ready now.” Phoebe fastened a suede belt around her waist and smoothed out the dress. “What do you think?”

Laurienne frowned. “Too fancy. You need to funk it up for a barbecue.” She went down the hall to her own room and returned with a beaded cowgirl belt. “Much better,” she said after Phoebe put it on. “Now you don’t look like you’re trying so hard.”

Ivan hollered from the deck. “Judge! I got the telescope set up.” Laurienne clambered downstairs to look at the eagles’ nest she hadn’t seen since this year’s chicks hatched.

The longest dry spell of Phoebe’s adult sexual life—more of a Sahara, really, lasting almost three years—played a big part in how she began to consider Ivan differently. Laurienne’s increasing absence was a factor, too. But now, with the island gossip fresh in her ears and Laurienne at home, it was a struggle not to slip back into her old way of regarding Ivan—as a good neighbor who required good fences, someone too close, too important, to risk wrecking things with an affair.

She had long favored men who were, in either geographic or emotional terms, remote. A few times she’d hit pay dirt, getting both in one package. When Laurienne was younger, Phoebe used another, more selfish reason for orchestrating her sex life this way: reluctance to share her daughter with someone who might press to adopt. Accustomed to having all the parental love and authority, she couldn’t imagine ceding even a tiny piece of it away. Oh, she encouraged an uncle-like Ivan, or an auntlike Amelia. But more than one lover had been dismissed for showing insufficient tenderness, sensitivity, or intelligence while stepping unawares into territory she reserved exclusively for herself. Territory where she had made herself impossible to please.

Once more, Phoebe assessed herself in the mirror. Turned out like this, only her hands, chapped and raw no matter what lotions she slathered on them—and she’d tried everything, from homemade comfrey balms to expensive department store concoctions to salves meant for softening cow teats and horse hooves—betrayed the years she’d spent knotting nets to heavy leaded lines and sewing mesh to mesh. For all her success in the net-making business, her involvement had begun in much the same way that she’d anchored herself on Spit in the Wind Road. By accident. An accident she could only recall as a flash, a car coming at her in the wrong lane and the swerve she took to avoid it. An accident that killed her husband and left her alone in this house with a child to support, turning a knack for knotting nets into a regular job, a regular business.

Now the accident’s only visible trace was the scar on her neck, made plainly obvious by the cleavage-revealing chiffon. She decided a piece of jewelry was required—a good one. Her mother’s single-pearl-drop necklace.

She connected the clasp behind her neck and the pearl fell into place just below her scar. The necklace emphasized not only the fullness of her breasts but the scar, too. Almost as if the pearl had been secreted from the place where she was once cut open, like a tear from an eye.

         

When the first batch of salmon was done Phoebe served all the children, using paper picnic plates so they could eat on the beach and be as rambunctious as they liked. Then she laid out ceramic plates Ivan had made and filled one of them for Laurienne, going heavy on the protein and starches, wanting to put some fullness back into her drawn cheeks.

All the while, Phoebe kept an eye out for Carl Brown. As Ivan took the last fish off the grill, Carl arrived carrying a case of wine. Only Carl’s wife, Ellie, was with him, navigating the steps up to the deck on high-heeled sandals, and balancing a pewter tray filled with breads and cheeses sure to be unusual, imported, pricey. Phoebe met her halfway. “Here, let me help you with that.”

“I’m the one who needs help,” Carl grunted, heaving his case onto a table. He uncorked a bottle, poured a little for Phoebe, and waited for a reaction. When she said “Swell,” he started shoving lesser wines aside.

“Sorry we’re late,” Ellie said, an edge of exasperation to her voice. “Carl thought we might have some company from out of town joining us tonight, but it wasn’t to be.”

It almost sounded as if she blamed Carl for blowing it with the Californian. If only things were that simple. Who knew? Maybe they were. Phoebe poured herself a full glass. “More for us, then.” But, blending into the crowd, she kept chewing over why their new neighbor hadn’t come, whether it had anything to do with her. Ivan had been right, lots of people were buzzing about him. But the information she craved was personal—how he looked, spoke, behaved—and all their gossip was about reputation and real estate. Before long, she’d drunk enough to giggle at the thought of Scarlett O’Hara at her fabled barbecue, complaining of how bored she was with everyone’s talk of war, war, war. Now there was a girl who knew how to change the subject.

“What’s so funny?” Amelia asked.

“You. Me. Scarlett O’Hara.” Phoebe shrugged, her face falling, and folded onto the bench behind her.

Amelia took a stuffed mushroom from her hors d’oeuvre–filled napkin and popped it into Phoebe’s mouth. “Drinking on an empty stomach—sure way to tears before bedtime. Stay here, I’ll fix you a plate.”

Phoebe ate, sobered up some, and started circulating again, too proud to ask for further details, to go fishing for information like some starstruck bumpkin and risk learning nothing more than what she’d known to begin with. Her rattled anticipation from earlier in the evening careened wildly from acceptance (What I need to know will come to me), to anger (I’m not coming to him, he can damn well come to me), to fear (What the hell’s coming at me?). She was settling back into acceptance when Ivan caught her eye from across the deck where he sat eating pie with Laurienne, tilting his head in a way that asked everything from Are you okay? to Can I help?

I’m fine, Phoebe mouthed. But she wasn’t. Even when conversation turned to topics her right-minded self found interesting, she couldn’t concentrate long enough to contribute more than a scanty thought, idea, or experience. Luckily she was the hostess, with plenty of excuses for flitting from one group to the next, never staying in one place long enough for anyone to realize the intensity of her distraction.

As she lit candles and put out pots of coffee, Carl Brown crept up and grabbed her waist from behind. “I think I know what your secret is, Phoebe,” he whispered.

She spun around, hand flying to her heart. “Jesus, Carl.”

He went on, unperturbed. “It’s taken me a while to figure this out, but now I bet I’ve got it. Will you tell me if I’m right?”

How to respond? Her best option: “Maybe.”

“Okay. Here goes.” Carl cocked his head and regarded her with a tipsy squint. “Rice vinegar.”

“What?”

“Rice vinegar—that’s the secret to your basting sauce, isn’t it?”

No surprise there. Carl had been trying to wheedle the sauce ingredients out of her ever since last May’s Copper River salmon run. So why this perverse twinge of disappointment? “Sorry,” she told him.

“Okay,” he said, waggling a finger, “but I’m not convinced you’re telling me the truth.”

She elbowed him in the ribs. “Why don’t you just lay off the sauce, Carl.”

“Ah, Phoebe,” he sighed. “None of ’em around here is man enough for you. But if I were suddenly single—”

“If you were suddenly single, your wife would add years to her life.” This from Margaret, a semiretired therapist who lived on the south side. “Providing, of course, she didn’t get married again. You, on the other hand, would drop dead a whole hell of a lot quicker. It’s true, they’ve done research.”

“Once again you’ve saved my marriage. Margaret, I’ve got a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“Rice vinegar, what do you think?” Then, without waiting for a response, Carl headed down to the beach crying out the li-li-li chorus from The Boxer in unison with several musically inclined Owl Islanders, who were playing guitars and singing around a bonfire.

“I’m off, Phoebe,” Margaret said. “It was wonderful, you outdid yourself this year.”

“I just made the same old things. You guys bring all the special stuff.”

“You look gorgeous, too.”

“It’s the dress.”

Margaret shook her head, bronze disc earrings swinging beneath a fringe of well-tended pale blonde hair. “We really have to talk sometime.”

The biggest plus of having a therapist as a friend—especially one old enough to be your mother—was also the biggest drawback: She paid attention to everything you said. “What’s the topic?” Phoebe asked.

“Why it’s so hard for you to accept a compliment.”

“That sounds like fun.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“It’s against the rules, having friends as clients.”

“I know.” Margaret leaned in to kiss her once on each cheek. “But there’s no rule against sharing tools with your neighbors.”

Laurienne, Ivan, and Amelia helped clean up. So did Sophie, Phoebe’s office manager. Phoebe tried to hurry them all off, pleading fatigue when, really, she just couldn’t wait to be alone. Only Sophie lingered on, labeling plastic bowls and bags of leftovers. “You’re as compulsive in the kitchen as you are at work,” Phoebe told her.

“I’m not compulsive,” Sophie sniffed as she left. “I love organizing. People who don’t just haven’t given it enough of a chance.”

         

After Laurienne went to bed, Phoebe poured a shot glass of homemade Himalayan blackberry cordial and opened the kitchen junk drawer to fish a long brown cigarette out of a flat, square box of Nat Shermans. Whenever she felt under siege, it comforted Phoebe to summon her dead mother’s spirit by smoking her brand. She’d tried other, more common brands for this purpose, but they didn’t work. So once a year she went to a specialty tobacco shop for cigarettes she kept on hand the way other people did seldom-used medications.

She sat at the kitchen table, the room dark except for a candle lit so her streams of cigarette smoke would be visible—a crucial part of the ritual. With the first slow exhale, she blew out her anger. With the second, her fear. With the third, she finally let herself form what she had learned tonight into a simple statement of fact:

Whitney Traynor bought a house on Spit in the Wind Road.

Darkness made it easier to conjure up what her own house was like when she and Mitchell first bought it—bats nesting in the ceiling, mice scrambling in the walls, only a woodstove for heat. They hadn’t lived here for long when the accident happened.

Sometimes it seemed she went to sleep then and when she finally awoke she was in this room stringing nets. She had a toddler instead of a baby. And Mitchell was dead. She knew there were still a few people in town with memories long enough to gossip. “Never quite herself again after the accident,” they’d say. True, she didn’t sing anymore, and singing had been one of the ways she once earned money. But singing for a paying audience was something she’d done more for the love of Whit than for the love of performing. Besides, her vocal chords were damaged when emergency medics intubated her at the accident scene, changing her register so much that after recovering, she sang for no one but her baby.

Awful things affected people—where was the surprise in that? And just what exactly did it mean, anyway, to say someone was never quite herself again? Whose self was it that Phoebe was supposed to be inhabiting if it wasn’t her own? But now she felt compelled to examine that self for damage, like she would a net that had been working a while. Looking for frayed strands, places that had lost resilience. Spots Whit might rip apart.

Whit had never been inside Phoebe’s house on Owl Island. It held no memories of him. One of its attractions, really. Only a few items remained in her possession that, when she came across them, brought him back to her with thrumming immediacy. A box full of letters, an old pink GE radio—both stored away on a high shelf in the garage, easily avoided. Not that she didn’t think of Whit. Just that when she did, it was like silent conversation with a ghost, an imaginary person. It’s time for you and me to be imaginary friends. Almost the first thing she ever heard him say, his voice coming out of the pink GE’s sound holes. She wasn’t ready for him to be real again.

Could she be such a grand magician at disappearing that Whit had no idea he was buying a house down the road from her? Or could Whit be such a one himself as to find her?

Once, when Laurienne was twelve and they were visiting Phoebe’s father in Seattle, Lily bolted and couldn’t be found. Three days later, when she appeared trotting down the Road, limping a little from her long journey, it seemed as if she were connected to Phoebe’s house by an expandable band of invisible energy that pulled her back.

Maybe something like that could happen over far greater reaches of distance and time between humans, too. If they had once shared a great love. If traces of it still surfaced in their sleep. If they remained somewhere in each other’s hearts.

         

Phoebe had made Laurienne promise not to leave in the morning without waking her, but it was so late when Phoebe finally went upstairs to bed that she considered reversing herself, writing a note to say goodbye. Laurienne was sure to be up at dawn, not so many hours away. But if Phoebe stayed in bed, Laurienne would head straight back to Seattle and work with nothing but coffee in her.

Phoebe was proud of Laurienne, more than holding her own among male fellow workers, all smart as whips. Her bosses were not much older than she, and they were so competitive, so driven. Phoebe wondered if lacking a father had anything to do with why her daughter would be drawn to prove herself to them, to perform for them—damaging herself in the process, judging by her appearance.

Phoebe had always been loath to discuss Life Before the Accident with Laurienne. The paralyzing questions she put to herself on the matter had evolved like this: Why spoil Laurienne’s childhood, her adolescence, her supposedly carefree college years by giving her reason to think she needed to take care of Phoebe? Would Laurienne be embarrassed by her mother’s past? Had Phoebe missed her moment to reveal the truth? Had too much time gone by to tell it?

Phoebe stopped by Laurienne’s moonlit bedroom. Laurienne was sleeping on her stomach, splayed out like a wildly overgrown baby put down for the night. Phoebe unfolded an afghan at the bed’s foot, pulled it up to Laurienne’s shoulders, and kissed the top of her head. Hanging above the bed was the Land of Make-Believe map that Phoebe had first put in Laurienne’s room when her daughter was still in diapers—a time when Phoebe thought she knew exactly what Laurienne needed, and how to give it, because of how enchanted her own earliest years had been. When the map of the Land of Make-Believe was new and whole and hanging over her bed.