“Everything is so green and blue,” Aunt Gwen said for perhaps the third time. Her red curls as wild as Medusa’s snakes in the wind, she was yelling over her shoulder to Heath. Robo-butt, with Heath in it, and Wily grinning on her lap, was firmly lashed in the aft of a small outboard motorboat piloted by a gruff cliché of a New Englander. At least seventy, maybe older, he smelled strongly of tobacco and bay rum, had a couple of days’ worth of beard, squinted from a leathery face, and clenched an unlit pipe in his teeth. Central Casting couldn’t have done it better, Heath thought.
Aunt Gwen sat in the seat next to him, no doubt charming the pants off Matthew. Luke? Something biblical and manly. Elizabeth, her back toward the rest of them, perched on a gunwale to Heath’s right, her mouth set in a rigid line that added years to her face. The rest of the boat’s limited deck space was piled with the women’s luggage.
Anna had been sent to Acadia several days earlier. Left in Boulder, Heath felt childishly helpless and exposed without her friend. It was embarrassing. A big chunk of the eleven days since Heath found E in the bath with the Lady Schick had been spent getting ready for this trip. The other chunks had been spent watching Elizabeth turn from the compassionate, resilient girl she’d watched grow up to an angry, whining teenager, whom she felt like she didn’t know.
Who she sometimes felt hated her.
The change depressed and confounded Heath. E wanted to escape the bullying, yet seemed angry and afraid to leave it behind, as if, unattended, it would metastasize until the cancer destroyed her life. The promised solitude had gone from a reprieve to a prison sentence in the girl’s mind. In Heath’s as well, on bad days. Like this one. Only Gwen had maintained her optimism. It had been temporarily damped by the news of her old friend Chris’s heart attacks, and finally a stroke. The sadness was touched, Heath guessed, by a fear of her own mortality; Chris was sixteen years Gwen’s junior.
No one was equipped to fight invisible monsters, Heath realized. Monsters of the Id or the Internet. The kind that worked in the dark, unknowable, motives as twisted and murky as eddies in a polluted river. Creeping poisonous fog that insinuated itself through the cracks of the mind.
The kind Anna couldn’t shoot and E couldn’t run from.
“That be Boar,” the pilot said. He lifted an arm and pointed with a hand that looked to be carved from an old oak tree. Arthritis bent his little finger at the second joint, poking it out to the side at an odd angle.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Elizabeth said.
“It’ll be fun,” Heath insisted with more determination than faith. The island was right out of The Count of Monte Cristo, or some other nineteenth-century romance. It looked like a broken molar thrust a hundred feet up from the ocean’s surface. In the cavity of the jagged tooth, protected by a rugged cliff to the northeast, was the house they would be staying in for the foreseeable future. As luck—bad for Gwen’s friend, the island’s owner—would have it, it was unoccupied for the present. Chris was recuperating—or dying—in a medical facility in Bangor.
Heath hoped the house would prove less forbidding than the land it rested atop, and their sojourn there more salubrious than that of the former occupant.
The boat pulled neatly up to a stone jetty. The pilot turned off the engine, then, line in hand, jumped nimbly onto the jetty to tie the boat off. Wind keened around the granite base of the island. None of them spoke; Heath, Gwen, and E were staring up a fifty-foot cliff, steps carved into the stone.
“John, are you sure this is the right island?” Gwen asked the pilot. John Whitman, Heath remembered.
“Yup.”
“This is not happening,” E said.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Heath asked.
“Didn’t ask,” John said.
“Anybody mind if I shoot your pal Chris?” Heath asked.
“Ms. Zuckerberg is ailing.” John said with mild rebuke. He tied a second line to secure the stern of the boat. Wily hopped from the boat to the jetty. Not hopped—his hopping days were behind him; scrambled was more like it.
John scratched Wily behind the ears.
“I think I might be able to do the stairs on my butt,” Heath said. “Might” was the operative word. Leah had grudgingly given her permission to bring Dem Bones, but she was not to use it anywhere there was salt or damp. Not all that useful under the circumstances.
“Slippery as eel snot if there’s any wind. And there’s always wind,” John said around the stem of his pipe, which he was lighting.
“That’s insane,” Elizabeth said. “This whole thing is insane.”
“You could lose your balance and be killed,” Gwen said.
“That would take the fun out of it,” Heath admitted. She didn’t have the kind of money it would take to stay in a hotel. The airfare had just about cleaned her out.
“Does this mean we get to go back to Boulder?” Elizabeth asked.
“Can you spell ‘stalker’?” Heath wasn’t going to let E anywhere near anywhere until she found out who was stalking her. The police didn’t much care about cyberstalking—or, more probably, hadn’t a clue what to do about it. Private detectives charged a fortune, and Heath doubted they could do anything she couldn’t do if she put her mind—and Gwen’s and Anna’s—to it.
All she needed was three things: to know E was safe, a Wi-Fi connection, and time.
“This place has everything we need. I’ll just carry my butt up those stairs, and we’ll be moving in,” she said firmly.
John puffed on his pipe and said nothing.
Wily watched with the somber attention of a fan at a tennis match.
“It’s too dangerous, Heath,” Aunt Gwen said.
“Could we just not do this?” Elizabeth whined.
“Can’t be as hard as it looks,” Heath said with the desperate good cheer she’d taken to injecting into the platitudes she seemed incapable of avoiding.
Elizabeth snorted. She sounded like Anna, Heath realized, and was careful not to smile, not to notice at all.
A metal ramp borrowed for the occasion was laid from the boat to the jetty. Heath and Robo-butt debarked in a maneuver as complex and intricate as the landing on Omaha Beach. Gritting her teeth against what she knew was going to be an event fit for the Special Olympics, she rolled to the first of the stone steps soaring in zigzags up the face of the cliff.
That she wouldn’t make it, that she would slip off and tumble into the Atlantic, or worse, the rocks, that she’d get halfway and give out, and there’d be the huge humiliation of a ranger rescue: These thoughts she shoved deep into the well of hopeless thoughts in the back of her brain.
She wasn’t taking Elizabeth back to Boulder. She was taking Boar Island. The temptation to yell, “Charge!” was tempered by the fact she’d be advancing butt first.
“I’m not climbing that,” Elizabeth said. “No wonder Ms. Zuckerberg had heart failure.”
“Elizabeth!” Gwen admonished, then said to Heath, “Let’s wait and call Anna.”
“For what?” Heath responded irritably. “Her to carry me up on her scrawny back?”
“Maybe she could drag you like a sack of laundry,” E suggested.
“That I’d like to see,” John said. “Still and all, if it was me, I’d take the lift.”
Heath and Gwen glared at him. He squinted into the wind and puffed his pipe complacently.
Heath’s hope of a Batcave-like super-elevator bored into the living rock was quickly dashed. The lift was a wooden platform with rails made of old pipes. Steel cables were attached to the four corners, then tied off ten feet up on a ring at the end of another cable that snaked to the top of the cliff, where it disappeared into a rusted iron wheel.
“Electric winch,” John said as he led them to where the conveyance sat, graying wood and dull pewter-colored metal rendering it almost invisible against the granite. “When Ms. Zuckerberg had her first heart attack, and Mrs. Hammond came to look after her, she got this put in. Steps too hard for carrying groceries and what-all.”
“First heart attack?” Aunt Gwen asked.
“This was the third.”
“She didn’t tell me that. Neither did Dez,” Gwen said, her voice sharp with concern.
The boatman swung open a hinged section of the welded railing. “Who’s first?”
“Don’t look at me,” Elizabeth said.
“I’ll do it,” Gwen said tentatively.
“No,” Heath decided. “It has to be me.”
“Right,” Elizabeth said scornfully. “Who’s going to hold it while you roll off? Could we please go back to the real world now?”
“The real world sucks at the moment,” Heath said.
“Will it haul us all at the same time?” Gwen asked.
“Might could,” John said.
“Forget it. I’m not getting on that thing,” Elizabeth said, and got back into the boat.
Gwen and Heath would go first, leaving John to unload and get the luggage on the lift. Heath harbored no expectations that this new Elizabeth would help him. Wily whined and yipped and showed no inclination whatsoever to get on the thing, with or without people.
“Come here, Wily,” E said. She lifted the dog back into the boat with her.
Once Heath, with chair, was rolled onto the lift, she locked her wheels. John handed her a small metal box hooked to a cable. The box had two buttons on it, one red, one green.
“After you’re off, just push the button. That’ll send the lift back down,” John said.
“I take it green is up,” Heath said with a look at John.
“We’ll see,” he said.
“Tally ho,” Heath said idiotically, and punched the green button. Had she not been half blind with terror, the trip up would have been stunning. Through the waves of panic that crested each time the lift lurched, or Aunt Gwen squeaked, she barely managed to register the glittering expanse of unbelievably blue sea and sky, the dense green of the hardwood forest above the cliffs, breaking waves painting white lace around their feet. These were the good things. Heath kept her eyes resolutely on them. The one time she looked down, her daughter, her dog, and John were growing ever tinier, looking more and more like specks of chewed food caught in the sharp teeth of the rocks.
She wished controlling what she heard was as simple. Fear honed her ears to batlike sensitivity. Each creak of the winch wheel or groan of the platform signaled failed machinery and a splatty death before the eyes of her only child. In the end, she gave up, stared skyward at the wheel reeling in the cable, and prayed that God would not let a nice lady in a wheelchair die on such a sunny day.
“We’re here,” Aunt Gwen said as the last terrifying clank announced the end of the line. Heath was pleased to hear the quaver in her aunt’s voice. It was not good to be the lone coward in a group. Moving from platform to clifftop wasn’t as formidable as Heath had feared. The lift rose through a square hole in a larger platform, where it could be secured in place by four sliding metal plates about the size of a magazine. Ms. Zuckerberg had clearly envisioned a day when she might be commuting by wheelchair.
When the plates were set, the lift was as stable as the platform. Heath wheeled easily out onto solid ground. High, certainly, but solid, and worthy of a quick word of gratitude to the almighty.
The luggage followed, with John to unload it. He sent the lift back down. Heath refused to roll near the edge and holler at E to come up. Not yet.
“Used to be only a lighthouse here until city folk began piddling around in 1922,” John said. “Waste of a good rock, if you ask me.” He left them to get a cart for the luggage.
High on an island in the ocean, Heath could feel the elements in a way she usually didn’t. The sun was a force against her skin, the wind a living thing twining in her hair; the light refractions from the sea were as sharp as the salt smell. Suddenly she felt very alive. Leaning her head back, she looked up a hundred and fifty feet to the top of the old lighthouse. The base had to be at least forty feet in diameter, and the walls fourteen feet thick, at least at the bottom.
The lighthouse was the single bit of architectural grace. The rest reminded Heath of the Winchester House in California, as if each owner had been driven to keep on building regardless of how haphazard the design. Forming an awkward V, with the lighthouse at the point, two wings—one of them two stories, the other three—blew back from the original tower, then petered out in drunken angles to finally die in piles of stone and timber. A century of winds had piled the debris along the skirt of the high granite wall on the northeast side of the island.
“If this place isn’t haunted, I want my money back,” Gwen said.
“I’m afraid we’ll turn out to be the evil spirits,” Heath said, thinking of the sudden—and to her, inexplicable—changes in her daughter. “Elizabeth has gone from Junior Jekyll to Rising Senior Hyde. It’s like she’s turned into a different person in a matter of days. Did I ever act like that?”
“For a year or two. You went through a bad patch when your dad remarried.”
“Everything I do is wrong.” Tears of self-pity and frustration flooded Heath’s eyes. “Wind,” she said, wiping them away. “I haven’t a clue how to respond to her this way.”
“Do what she asked you to do about a million times,” Gwen said.
Her aunt’s sharp tone offended Heath. It was as if Gwen thought she was a fool, or worse. “And what is that?” Heath snapped.
“Give her electronics back,” Gwen said.
“You’re joking,” Heath said, aghast. The night of Lady Schick and the tub, Heath had taken everything of E’s that needed a charge to run.
“That’s what she wants. I think she’s made that clear enough,” Gwen said.
E had complained bitterly for a few days, then quit speaking of it. Why? Heath asked herself. Because she accepted that Mom was right? Decided her cyberlife sucked and she was glad to be out of it?
“Give her back her iPad, iPod, iPhone—whatever-all teens carry these days. Life as she perceives it is in the toilet, and now you’re forcing her to go through withdrawal. Electronic media is an addiction of E’s generation,” Gwen said with exasperating patience.
“Addiction my ass!” Heath grumbled. Cocaine was an addiction. Heroin was an addiction. A telephone was not an addiction. It was an affectation.
“You saw the crap she’s getting on her phone and laptop,” Heath said.
“So did she. She knows what is there; is it any worse imagining what’s there? Not being able to communicate with friends because it is there? Because we don’t understand being addicted to social media doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Addicted isn’t even the right word. It is the new normal. She feels like you’re punishing her for something she has no control over,” Gwen said.
Heath resented the intrusion into her maternal bailiwick as much as she wanted her aunt’s advice. Lose-lose situation. “The last time I checked, there was one of a threesome with her face Photoshopped over the woman’s. I can’t bear the thought of her looking at that stuff,” Heath said.
“How do you think she feels having you see it? Or me? Though I’ve delivered hundreds of babies, she sees me as a little old lady who doesn’t know where babies come from.”
“She doesn’t see you that way, you know,” Heath said.
“Elizabeth is drowning in shame.”
“She’s been through worse, real threats, and she was so strong,” Heath almost wailed, and cursed herself for being a weakling. For respectable mothers, children are Achilles’ heels.
“But she can’t fight this one. You can’t fight this one. The enemy has no face. The enemy might be her friends. Her friends might be sniggering at the pictures and talking behind her back. It’s anonymous, horribly personal, and public all at the same time.”
“We should have stayed in Boulder. I should have gotten her a psychiatrist,” Heath said. A second mortgage on the house and it would have been feasible. Cheap if it helped E.
“Maybe. Since you didn’t, you have to let her be an adult with you. She survived the Fox fiasco because she fought back. This is her fight, and you’ve confiscated the field of battle. You two have to come to terms about how you’re going to deal with this as a team.”
“So sayeth the goddess of youth,” Heath said with a wry smile.
“So sayeth the goddess,” Gwen affirmed.
The winch groaned to life and began spinning up steel cable.
“Give her back her electronics,” Gwen said. “I’m going to help John.”