2

Elizabeth flew from Boston to Bangor, Maine. It was the first time she had been on an airplane. She sat next to the small, scratched window, looking down on the earth below. Much of the land seemed arranged in patterns so precise they might have been drawn with a ruler. “It will look sort of cubist from up there,” Gran had told her on the telephone when she spoke with Elizabeth about arrangements to meet her. “You’ll find it a different view.…”

Last summer, Gran had had a show of her work at a Camden gallery. Despite Elizabeth’s faint discomfort at being introduced as the artist’s granddaughter, she’d been pleased, too. Gran was wearing small turquoise earrings and a long clay-colored linen skirt and shirt when she arrived at the gallery. She had looked pretty good. But Elizabeth didn’t like her new paintings, about which Gran had also said to her, “sort of cubist.”

Fortunately, Gran never appeared to expect her to make comments about her work.

As the plane began its descent to Bangor, Elizabeth felt a kind of anticipation she couldn’t account for. She was still resentful that her parents, Mom carrying Stephen Lindsay, ridiculous in a sun hat that made him look like a cream puff, had left her much too quickly at the airport gate.

Gran was waiting for her at the gate. She hugged her briefly, held her arm by the wrist, looked at her steadily for a minute, and said, “Let’s get your stuff and get out of here.”

They drove for over two hours, the road following the Penobscot River part of the way, until they arrived at a small settlement, Molytown, whose narrow wooden housefronts, like the faces of old, quiet people, overlooked Penobscot Bay.

Gran parked her dusty, noisy old car in a roughly carpentered garage, where it would stay for the month, near an open shed filled with stacks of lobster pots. She’d gone on and on about the car during most of the drive—how it had cost only three hundred dollars, how Ray, a local mechanic, had done a lovely job fixing it up, how salt air affected cars. Elizabeth had been silent.

Now, as she stood waiting while Gran locked up the car, she sniffed the air. It had a prickling, lively smell, different from the dampish country air at home that she was used to in August. She was suddenly eager to go out onto that vast bay that was like a tray holding bits of land on its metal blue surface.

“We have to call your father and tell him you arrived safely,” Gran said. “I’ll pick up a few things at the store.” She pointed down the street that ran past several long wharves standing on tall spider legs, to a small store that bore a sign: SADIE’S FOOD. “There’s a public telephone just outside. Would you like to make the call?”

Elizabeth shook her head. She tried to smile, aware of how long she had been silent. Gran shrugged and went off along the street, and Elizabeth sat down on a wooden crate near the shed.

She was actually in Maine with Gran. She realized that she’d been hoping for a reprieve at the last moment, even as her parents had said good-bye to her in Boston. It seemed to her, now, that the bicycle she had so often imagined herself pedaling through New Hampshire villages had rolled away on its own to collapse in a corner of the farmhouse cellar. Yet there was another feeling, strong and insistent, that—despite herself—she was about to be happy.

Gran appeared soon, carrying a paper sack.

“Your daddy says hello and love,” she reported. “There’s our transportation.” She waved at the nearest wharf, where Elizabeth saw a small boat bobbing at the end of a long rope tied to a piling.

“We’re going in that?” exclaimed Elizabeth. “It’s like a pea pod!”

“We’re going in that,” Gran said brusquely.

They walked out on the wharf, which swayed and creaked beneath their feet. Gran pulled on the rope until the boat was close to a ladder that descended into the water. “It’s easier when the tide isn’t so low,” Gran said.

Along the bottom of the boat lay a pair of oars, a rolled tarpaulin, and rags. To Elizabeth’s relief, a small outboard motor clung like a claw to the stern.

“I’ll go first. Then you start down and hand me your suitcase and backpack and the groceries,” Gran said, descending the ladder with sure steps.

Elizabeth handed down the things and stepped into the rocking boat herself. “Do you have to cross over from the island every time you need something from the store?” she asked.

“Oh, no! I’d be at sea all the time. See the launch over there? The one with El Sueño written on the bow? That’s Jake Holborn’s. He brings it over to Pring Island once a week. I give him a list. Next time, he brings me what I asked for, and the mail. The launch was built seventy years ago. It used to carry servants and supplies out to the rich people who once owned many of the islands in the bay. It’s a beautiful old thing, isn’t it? Like my car. Jake keeps the brass polished.”

A gull flew to one of the pilings and folded its wings. It seemed to stare coldly at Elizabeth.

“But what if you need something in a hurry? Do you have a phone?”

“Put the stuff in front of you, Elizabeth, and sit in the middle of the seat. We don’t need a phone. There is a family on the island, the Herkimers.”

The motor roared, then settled down to a modest grumble. The boat nosed its way past the wharf. Elizabeth was preoccupied with the news that there were other people on the island. She didn’t even glance up when Gran announced they were passing El Sueño.

“John Herkimer has a battery-run shortwave radio. And Jake has a receiver on the launch, so we can reach him when he’s on it, which is most of the time. When there are storms, John’s radio doesn’t fail like a telephone might. It’s the same for electricity and water. The hand pump in the cottage works no matter what the weather is doing. And as long as we have matches, we can keep the kerosene lamps or candles lit.”

Gran put on a scarf and tied it with one hand, her other on the tiller. Elizabeth’s dark straight hair was blown into tangles by a low, brisk breeze. She saw islands everywhere. Some were quilled like porcupines with evergreen trees. Some were large jagged rocks stained with pale green lichen. As they passed one such tumbled, stony place, Elizabeth cried out, “There’s a seal!”

“They like to sun themselves,” Gran shouted over the sound of the motor, which had grown loud now that they were out on the bay, away from Molytown’s sheltering harbor. “And that’s where I found Grace, my cat.”

“How did a cat get there?”

“She’d been abandoned. Someone must have put her off a boat. She was dehydrated and terrified but managed to scramble into my lap. I had to grab on to barnacles to keep the boat steady while she slid down. Fortunately, it was high tide.”

“How could anyone do such an awful thing?” Elizabeth stared at the rocks, trying to imagine the people who could have left a small animal in such a desolate place. What had they thought?

“I don’t know,” Gran answered. “I tend to believe in demons. Other explanations for such behavior seem wanting.”

The boat had changed direction. They were heading straight for a heavily wooded island.

“That’s Pring,” Gran said.

As Elizabeth stared, the island appeared slowly to emerge from the bay. An uneven ridge along the center of it suggested the menacing rise and fall of a dinosaur spine. Between the ranks of pine, glimpses of sky were like silent explosions of brilliant blue.

Gran cut the motor speed, and they moved slowly past a stone-strewn beach. Beyond it lay a sloping meadow of tall, tawny grass.

Elizabeth dipped her hand in the water and withdrew it quickly. It was like ice.

Gran glanced at her. “A person can’t last more than two minutes out here,” she said. “But closer to shore, in the coves, the sun warms up the water and you can swim if you can bear it.”

At the foot of the ridge, Elizabeth saw a large, rambling house. Near it stood a small barn, its roof collapsed, tendrils of vine wound thickly around the walls. Here and there, great patches of bramble sat bristling like indignant fowl.

“Is that your house?” Elizabeth asked.

“It’s the Herkimer place. He’s a high-school teacher in Orono. She runs the local historical society there. The family has been coming here for twenty years. We’re going to have supper with them tomorrow. Hold on now.”

They rounded a point of land that was no more than a splinter of coarse sand and pebbles. At once, they were in a small cove, and the Herkimer house was hidden by a slight rise, upon which stood clumps of oak and pine. Gran brought the boat to a dock, tied up next to a ladder, and said, “Pring.” She smiled at Elizabeth, who was staring at a shell path that led to the door of a ramshackle, dark little cottage.

“That’s your house?” Elizabeth asked, unable to conceal the disappointment she felt.

“That’s it,” Gran said shortly, her smile gone. “Begin unloading, please.”

After Elizabeth had transferred everything to the dock, Gran unrolled the tarp and spread it over the boat. The journey was done. Pring was a piece of earth covered with stones and rocks and scraggly trees. The cottage had a dull, blank look.

Mom and Daddy were playing with Stephen Lindsay at home. On the marble-topped kitchen table, there was probably a big bag of fresh corn and warm tomatoes from the farm stand down the road. Elizabeth looked inside Gran’s grocery sack. She saw a carton of milk and a can of navy beans.

Gran came to stand beside her. “It will be twilight soon. I like that time of day best. And very early morning,” she said. “Tomorrow, you can explore the other shore of the island. It’s quite different from this side.”

She was standing so close! Elizabeth stared down at the splintery surface of the dock.

“You don’t much want to be here,” Gran stated. “I know that.”

Elizabeth looked up, but away from her grandmother. A small bird flew toward the squat oak trees on the rise.

“We’ll make the best of it,” Gran said. “That means we have to find something more interesting to think about than your disappointment at being here.”

“I’m not disappointed,” Elizabeth protested weakly. “It’s just that I’m not used to islands—the water. Anyhow, you don’t have to think about it.”

“Never mind all that,” Gran retorted sharply. “Life is all getting used to what you’re not used to.”

Then she smiled. “Look! There’s Grace!”

From a side of the cottage, a small smoke gray cat walked toward them, her tail straight up like an exclamation point.