Islands

By CASEY WALKER

Twelve years ago, in waters off the Azores, my father was thrown overboard on a whale-watching skiff and my mother thought she could save him. The trip had been my mother’s dream. She hadn’t seen the islands since she was a child, visiting her grandparents. My father’s overconfidence about boating in bad weather, an unanticipated storm surge, a possibly intoxicated boat pilot—that was the tragedy of my mother’s ancestral homecoming. No bodies were ever recovered. In lieu of caskets, the funeral director set up an oversized portrait taken on my parents’ wedding day. That young couple, with expressions formally posed, was all but unrecognizable to me.

I was in college when it happened. I had declined—actually, refused—my mother’s offer to go to the Azores with them. It would have meant a lot to her, to show me that place, but at eighteen I regarded being stranded with my parents on a mid-Atlantic island as nothing more than a punishment. My twin brothers hadn’t been included at all. They were still in middle school, and Dad’s sister had come into the city to watch them. She was the one who’d had to deliver the news. Years later, I still felt guilty that I wasn’t with my brothers when they heard.

The administrative aftermath of my parents’ deaths, the years-long settling of accounts, had a way of prolonging them in the act of dying. Lawyers told me the Riverside Drive apartment would have to be sold to settle our parents’ debts, which were, to my immense surprise, considerable. They’d always seemed to me like cautious people. But I suppose New York City has a way of compelling people to live above their heads, awaiting tomorrow’s windfall, and in the end my parents proved as susceptible as anyone else to a belief in the rich future. My brothers went to live with Dad’s sister in Connecticut, where they remained through high school.

What was left of my parents’ estate—after liquidated retirement accounts and a failed lawsuit against the holding company of the Azorean hotel that owned the boat—was a vacation house in Maine. As the years went by, it was my brothers who insisted on keeping the house, no matter the cost of its upkeep. They remembered it as the happiest place of their childhoods, and though my teenage memories of the place were much less blissful, for their sake, I did try. By the time I turned thirty, I’d spent over a decade trying to hold together a vacation house that was occupied, at most, a couple of weeks a summer. None of us could live there full time—what jobs were there?—and I was left scrounging for every insurance and tax payment, fighting the grim persistence of frozen pipes and mold in the basement. My brothers were in no financial position to help, each buried in scandalous debt to private universities, and managing roofers and handymen in coastal Maine from a studio apartment in Brooklyn had made me resentful of everyone.

When my wife, Elle, became pregnant, the Maine house shifted from sentimental nuisance to unsustainable burden. Elle and I lived together in a 330-square-foot Brooklyn apartment where we had room for a crib only if we got rid of the coffee table. One night over dinner, Elle made the gentle suggestion that, if we sold the Maine house, we might use my share of the money for a down payment in a co-op building where we’d have an actual bedroom door. We could live right on the edge of one of those neighborhoods with an abundance of ambitious preschools. I’d long fantasized about ridding myself of that house, but I needed Elle to say it, and to supply me with the defensible public reasons.

Armed with this story—that I had a child on the way, someone I needed to provide for—I told my brothers it was time to give in, and they were in no financial position to argue. They knew my sentiments about the house were not the same as theirs—I’d largely avoided the place—but I suggested that we take one final trip together before throwing the house to the real estate wolves. Matthew, out of spite, told me he was going to spend his share of the sale on “street pharmaceuticals.” John was more tactful, but less honest: he was deeply angry with me but refused to admit it, insisting my decision was the right one. Matthew and John—people usually assumed my brothers’ names were the work of devout parents, but in truth our mother had named them Mateus and João, after her father and an uncle in the Azores. The twins discarded the Portuguese names after she died.

The Maine house sat on Gerrish Island, just across the Piscataqua River from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The front looked out on a quiet road, but the picture windows on the backside faced a salt marsh and the mouth of the river where it drained into the Atlantic. The shoreline was tame, far south of the rocky, wild coast.

For the farewell trip, Elle and I arrived at the house to find Matthew and John already unpacking in their upstairs bedrooms. I stood for a moment in my mother’s study, just off the entryway. It was still filled with her legal books and paperback mysteries. Someone would have to sort those books, discard them, and probably the job would be mine.

John came downstairs, and I pulled him into a half embrace that he gave in to like a cat that doesn’t like to be picked up. The kitchen and living room had double-height windows on the water, and I pretended to fixate on the marsh outside, rather than on John dumping three jiggers of cabinet-temperature gin into a water glass and topping it up with a fig leaf of tonic water.

He’d been through a recent breakup. Despite all his careful defense with me, he seemed eager to talk it over with Elle.

“I guess you could say I pushed her away?” John said to her.

Matthew entered the kitchen.

“Yeah,” Matthew said, “like Lee Harvey Oswald pushed Kennedy away.”

“Fuck off,” John said.

Elle rubbed John’s arm, giving him a look that suggested they could return to this conversation at a private time.

John had snorted cocaine for two years at Pratt before quitting both drugs and sculpture.

Now he made short, narrative-resistant films he showed in basement art galleries, and to pay his rent he tended bar at a forgettable lounge on Avenue C. Matthew worked in film, at the accounting end, and lived in a railroad apartment on the east side of Morningside Park. The twins looked exactly like our father. He’d been tall, soft-bodied, and pale, his head shaved bald to hide thinning hair, an appearance that verged on English soccer hooligan, though he wasn’t English and was never in a fight in his life. He was a gregarious, happy amateur at everything—a good-enough cook, who’d made a good-enough living (title insurance), and was a good-enough player of the upright bass. I was much shorter than my brothers, and olive-skinned, like our mother. Her intelligence was stunning—that’s what everyone said about her—but she was also serious, bordering on humorless, and did nothing that she couldn’t do perfectly. How she got along with our father was nothing any of us ever understood.

After unpacking, we sat on the deck with drinks, facing the marsh as night came on. Elle hung back inside, as though she didn’t want to intrude. But I think all of us would have preferred to have her with us, if only to rescue us from collapsing entirely into our sibling roles. John’s eyes were fixed on orioles circling a beaver dam in the marsh. Matthew had somewhere found his old BB gun. He raised the weapon and fired a BB in the birds’ general direction.

“Stop doing that,” John said.

“I’m not even hitting them,” Matthew said.

“So you’re malicious and incompetent.”

John was wearing sunglasses, though it was twilight. Matthew called him a creep. I didn’t want to be involved—every fight between the twins was a joke right up until it wasn’t. I got up and paced the deck, testing weak beams the way my father used to do.

“What should we do tomorrow?” I asked them. “The lobster place up the creek? Hike up to the old fort?”

They nodded, only half listening.

“We could pull the canoe out from under the house,” I said. “But I don’t know—the wood might be rotted.”

An inside lamp came on, shining through the double-height windows. The bright panes gathered insects by the hundreds. Elle appeared at the window, her oval belly pushing out from under a loose T-shirt. I realized that I could see her but she couldn’t see us. She puffed her cheeks like she was being pumped full of air.

Matthew nodded toward me and said to John, “Is he going to be Mom or Dad?”

“As a parent?” John said. “Mom. Mom exactly.”

Matthew continued, as though I wasn’t standing right there with them. “The last upstanding example of all that is right in the world. The demands of perfection that no kid can live up to.”

“Mom didn’t think she was perfect,” I said.

“Well, that should be a lesson for you,” Matthew laughed.

I knew the rise he was trying to get out of me.

“I don’t think I’m perfect,” I said.

The twins had long mistaken the responsibility I’d been forced to take for their lives for some suggestion that I always knew better than they did.

Matthew said to me, “Name one thing in your life you think you’ve ever done wrong.” I was looking across the water at the lighthouse. When I was a teenager, there was a girl who lived in a house on the far side of the river. We used to row out to an island to meet. It was nothing I liked to remember. I didn’t say anything.

“He stole that pack of M&Ms at the 7-Eleven,” John said.

I decided that was enough for tonight, and told my brothers I was going to bed.

The house had a small granny flat above the garage, only accessible from an outside staircase. The room had its own bathroom and kitchenette, tucked under a low, pitched ceiling. As a teenager, I’d been allowed to secede from the main house and take this apartment for my own. I’d felt like a king. My parents were baffled. Sure, they said, go sleep in the one room of this house where you can’t see the water, the one with the old furniture, the one that smells like mildew.

The first time I’d brought Elle up to Maine, she’d asked why we couldn’t sleep in the master bedroom—my parents’ bedroom—but by now she didn’t ask. The granny flat was our place.

I got into bed with one of my father’s old books, a turgid history of naval submarines. Elle was unpacking. She had a way of unzipping her suitcase where I could hear in the zip that she wanted to talk. She pretended to search for something until I looked up.

“I thought John had quit drinking?” she said. “He says he’s cutting down,” I said.

“Did that look like cutting down?”

“I don’t know.”

“He was crying,” she said.

“When?”

“Just now when I said goodnight to him,” she said. “He needs someone to talk to.” I picked up my father’s book again. She was right, and I knew it. It annoyed me, sometimes, the way she made my own limitations so apparent. “Talk about his breakup?” I said.

“About all of it. About being here.”

“It’s hard for all of us.”

She wanted to say something sharp, but sniffed and held back. That was Elle when she was angry: she sounded like she had a head cold. She swallowed a prenatal vitamin and pulled on a pair of compression pantyhose.

“The baby’s been quiet today,” she said.

“Are you worried?”

“No,” she said. “I’m just sharing.”

I moved my head enough to get credit for acknowledgment. She got into bed, and took a long while settling herself against the unfamiliar pillows. I’d long thought talking in bed was one of the unsung attributes of a marriage, lulling each other to sleep as though around a fire in a cave, safe from the howling animals. The day gets sorted, without much pressure to be articulate. But I missed the time when we grunted about books and other people, when we covered subjects beyond the cloudbank that drew across my eyes each time the birth plan was mentioned.

“I didn’t realize John was so upset,” I said. “I’ll tell Matthew to lay off.”

“That’s it?” she said.

“What else do you want me to say?”

“I just want you to do it,” she said.

My reluctance, my avoidance. These were common topics, especially of late. What’s your worry about a baby? Elle had sometimes asked me. You think you won’t be a good parent? You think the world is too ugly to add to? You don’t want to inflict your tragedy on anyone else? And what I wanted to say was: It’s all of that, but it’s also none of that. It was a mute, boggy fear, and whenever it attached itself to reasons, the reasons shrank until they were too small to encompass the dread. Here was the closest I’d come: It was the kiln of parenthood I was afraid of, that nothing else was so superheated to expose the cracks in your character. What if you were forced to admit, every day, that you were too selfish, too bound to your own needs and your own grief, to be oriented toward the future of someone else? In the oldest tragic stories, family sins are visited down through the generations—the sins of the father pass down to the son.

I was talking to myself in this vein long after Elle turned out her light and rolled onto her side. I’d never told her about what happened here—what I had done—and I’d never told my brothers. Only my mother knew—and the girl, of course, A. She would remember, if she still thought of me at all. Whenever I come back to Maine, I have to meet that teenager again, my old self. He’s me, and he isn’t. He’s like a distant relative I don’t like but am forced to visit. I’d like to say there’s nothing left that binds me to him, but maybe that’s wishful—maybe he’s all that I am and will be. Through the skylight, I caught sight of dark wings beating away from the marsh, and wondered: bats or birds?

In the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, I met a girl—A—who lived across the water. Her parents wouldn’t let her have a cell phone, so the number she gave me was the house landline. We arranged a way of calling where, at 11:00 p.m., she would pick up the phone and call an automated number for the Naval Observatory that read out the time— that way, when my call came in, it would click on the other line and she could answer without the phone ringing through the house. We spent hours on the phone this way, night after night, until we devised a way we could meet. We decided we would row out to an island in the channel that was equidistant from our two houses.

That July night, I sat up waiting for the light in my mother’s study to go out, so I could tread quietly across a slatted-board walkway, through a hundred yards of marsh, to a shoreline filled with driftwood and beach pea. I remember the green light rotating at the peak of the lighthouse, the foghorn sounding. I stood on the beach trying to will every wisp of fog away, because if the fog was deep, A said she wouldn’t row out. It was dangerous enough, she said, to kayak through a shipping lane in the dark.

I studied the island in the moonlight. I could see A’s house beyond it. The river was only a mile across, and at some points it was half that. The water was still as I pushed out. The canoe was hard to steer alone, and I rowed in a zigzag until I reached the island and its pebble shore.

The sight of A’s red kayak, its paddle still dripping—I thought it would burst my heart. I climbed through the scrub brush, and there, beyond two large trees, I saw her, sitting knees to chest on an outcropping, looking toward the lighthouse. How it felt to approach her was how nothing else feels. I was sure that there was no life without that girl.

She stood and we hugged, awkwardly. She wore jeans underneath a simple summer dress. Her neck was slightly elongated, like a Modigliani, though I wouldn’t see those paintings for years. When I did, in college, I would feel A again in every nerve ending. The day would be almost ruined. Almost, I thought, because at least that remained of her.

She made space for me to sit next to her. She’d brought beers, and held a bottle up near her face in between sips, sometimes rolling it along her cheek, other times pulling her lower lip down with the bottle’s opening. Her mother, like mine, was from the Azores, and though we didn’t talk about our mothers much, we seemed to share an understanding—both raised by these fierce, exacting women who were descended from a beautiful but impoverished place.

It was a relief when our talking lagged and she turned her face to me. The moon fell behind clouds. She rested her hand on my neck. I kissed her, and she seemed to have waited for this, as I had. I did not yet know how rare that was—equality of conviction, desire met measure for measure.

We spent that first summer kissing, and nothing else, on that island. And when summer ended, I dragged myself through sophomore year, a brutal winter, school before sunrise, geometry, months where all I did was think of her, until finally—finally!—enough days had passed that summer arrived.

All through sophomore year, A and I hadn’t spoken, but the day my family arrived back in Maine I saw her at a lobster shack along the creek, waiting in line with her parents. I called her that night, 11:00 p.m. We agreed to row out to meet. I pulled my canoe from the row of them near shore, where all the neighbors left them through the season, lying neat as spoons. When I reached her on the island, she said, “I missed you,” and I thought that was the kindest sentence in the English language—not only had I been thought of, longed for, but when you put “miss” in the past tense, it meant the separation was now closed.

We each reduced our humiliating year of high school to a handful of incidents. I hung on every word of her stories—the school drug-sniffing dog that walked right by her backpack with the joint in it. A P.E. teacher fired for peering into the girls’ changing room through a hole drilled in the wall. And then we kissed like there was nothing more to know about love. And when my hands ventured further, or hers did, it was like we were daring each other. I shared with her the news that, finally, my parents had allowed me to move up into the granny flat—it was like I had my own apartment, I said. I added something like “You have to check it out” or “It’s pretty cool; you should see it”—a casual sentence so rehearsed in my mind that I must have sounded like a customer service representative. She moved her head so faintly that what she meant—yes or no—I couldn’t even tell. But it stayed with me, the difficulty of asking, and how easy it was to ask too much.

In the morning, I found Matthew drinking coffee on the back deck, the day brilliant and clear, the kind of bountiful skies travestied in guest-room watercolors in hundreds of inns up the coast. Pleasure boats filled the channel. I assumed John was still sleeping, but Matthew pointed him out to me on the water—John was rowing my old green canoe. It looked aimless, until I saw him repeat the same circuit twice more around the islands. I’d once seen a beluga whale swimming in circles like that at an aquarium, and its keepers grudgingly admitted that confinement had driven the creature insane.

For lunch, we walked to the creekside, tore lobsters down to their roe, dipped steamer clams in drawn butter. Elle couldn’t eat shellfish, so she met us afterward, at the old fort, where reenactors were staging the French and Indian War. A man in a feathered headdress, his face clouded with war paint, got out of a car alongside two soldiers in tricornered hats.

At sunset, deer skirted the marsh below clouds of mating insects. This was my parents’ favorite time of day, on the deck with cocktails at golden hour, talking about the world they’d left behind—mortgages, alternate-side parking, the sleet and black ice of February, the city street salt that stained your shoes and wore away the casings on underground power lines. Often it sounded to me like they were complaining away the most beautiful hour of the day. But now I understood it was a ritual cleansing. They were renewing the year. It was summer in Maine.

At dinner that night, Matthew and John were drunk before I even lit the grill. They were arguing about something I couldn’t trace back to its origin, a story that involved bribing a building super. After the meal, John stormed off, and I wanted no part of it. Elle went to go talk to him, while I went outside to scrape down the barbecue.

Matthew followed me onto the deck, tossing his empty beer cans in the air and pinging them with BBs. Pretty soon, he wandered off alone, through the marsh, toward the shore. We were all lost in thoughts we couldn’t share, I supposed. I had the thought that maybe it was good that the house that contained all these memories was being passed along to people who would be free of them.

The largest building in view was a naval prison across the water, long abandoned, but too expensive to demolish. I was staring at it when Elle came out looking for me. She moved arthritically, one hand dug into the small of her back. The baby had kicked a hairline crack into one of her ribs. She reached her hands around my waist from behind. Beneath my shirt I could feel her warm fingers.

“Where are you?” she said. “Talk to me. Where did you go?”

The last summer I saw A, between junior and senior year, was the summer when she avoided me. I never knew why. I saw her at the lobster shack. We even talked, lamely. She told me her family was going to the Azores—some old patriarch was sick. I took it for an excuse, but maybe it was true, maybe they did go, for a week or two. But I know I saw A in the Market Basket not long later. I saw her at a bakery. I saw her, I’m nearly positive, whip past me on a sailboat. And on all those occasions, she’d stopped meeting my glances. We never met on the island for the whole of that summer. I was miserable in a way I thought I could never recover from.

Then, by chance, one late-October weekend, A and I crossed paths at a hardware store. I was with my father in a lumber aisle, and A was with hers. I wasn’t even going to wave, but she brushed right past my unconvincing coldness and came up to talk. She asked what we were doing here, beyond the summer season, when all the clam shacks and boat rentals were shuttered, when the weather was already verging into the iciness of winter. I told her my parents had come to supervise contractors sealing up the basement. She said hers were up to take care of a furnace problem. I thought our conversation had reached its end. But then she suggested, for no reason I could discern, that we meet that night on the island. She said we could bring blankets, make a fire. I agreed, fumblingly, and at first I was relieved. But as I left the store with my father, my relief turned to a worry that she was meeting me to clarify an ending. She was going to tell me why she’d avoided me all those months. I was going to learn what was wrong with me, or my kissing, or my hands. I thought I would hear that she had some other boyfriend.

That night, a hard Atlantic wind was blowing down from the northern ice caps. I had to pull my canoe twenty yards across spongy mud at low tide before I could row out. But I would have pulled it fifty, or a hundred, or across the whole of the goddamn river. The island was double its size at low tide, and I arrived carrying wool blankets, kindling, firewood, and a lighter.

She wore a coat and a heavy sweater, and together we tried to make a fire. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was good at, and the wood was wet from sitting on the canoe bottom, so all I got was a mouthful of smoke for my effort. We sat, shivering, facing her side of the river. I was waiting for her to tell me something about the summer, and why she’d avoided me, but she never did. She made vague allusions to the intolerability of her parents, but it was all the usual stuff— strict curfew, confiscated alcohol. She lived under house arrest, she said.

We shared my wool blanket, but she was still shivering. I was stunned when she asked about my room—my apartment. Why don’t we just go there? she said. It’ll be warm. My heart was pumping too hard for me to remember what I said in response.

We left her kayak on the island, and she climbed into my canoe. We rowed to my beach, and crossed the marsh together. Walking up through the trees, I reached my hand back for hers, and she held it. I’d come back to life, I thought.

In my room above the garage, she looked over the peeling leather loveseat, the rocking chair with the split back. I stood beside her, and she turned toward me. But even as we began to kiss, I had a presentiment of everything that was being stored up that night that would later make me hurt. Her unclasped bra would become a destroyer of afternoons. Her hip bones and unbuttoned jeans were a hundred lost conversations with friends who would see my eyes go blank and wonder where my mind had wandered. I would even have days when I tried to convince myself that she wasn’t especially beautiful to me—a lie that was never compelling.

When we leaned into my bed, when we kicked apart the sheets, I did not think I was inventive or in any way skillful. I’d avoided the conversation about whether she’d done this before, though I had not. She settled herself on top of me. I remember adjusting the angle of my legs beneath her, the mysterious pull this exerted on the muscles in my stomach, which were sore the next morning. At moments, she seemed entirely lost in herself. Her head brushed the ceiling, and she raised one hand above her, palm flat on the low slope, not just holding the ceiling off, but pushing her body down onto me, closer.

On our last night in the house, I played bartender, back and forth to the kitchen to mix martinis. It was a skill of mine, something I did for my brothers that they liked me to do. Maybe the one thing. John, who, when he was sober, always said he wanted to drink less, was already drunk and asked me for one more. It would be the last drink of the night, and of any night, in this house— that was my excuse.

In the kitchen, I stirred and stirred, two minutes for the gin to bloom in the ice. I strained the shaker into cold glasses rinsed with Cinzano. Always a twist, never an olive. I was careful around the lemon, extracting a long, curled rind the full circumference of the fruit, without any bitter pith.

Matthew found me as I was extruding lemon peel into the drink. He picked up the bottle of gin.

“Dad never used gin,” he said.

“Vodka isn’t a martini,” I said.

“You always know better,” he said, smiling.

Matthew opened the crisper drawer and chose a beer. He popped the bottle open with his teeth. He took a long drink of the beer and took up the martini with his other hand.

I carried the cocktails out for John and myself. Elle gave me a look that I understood to mean I shouldn’t be offering and John shouldn’t accept. She and John had been deep in conversation. His words were coming out slurred.

“I think she’s the only person I’ve ever loved who didn’t make me feel miserable about it,” John said, his voice tight, “but I left because of that. Like it wasn’t enough. Like misery is the sign of love.”

Matthew interrupted, “My God, still? Who in the fuck needs to hear this?”

“He’s talking to me,” Elle said.

“This weekend was supposed to be about…” Matthew paused, longer than he seemed to mean to, “you know… everything. But all I hear is poor sad bastard over here.” John immediately got into Matthew’s face.

“You’re an asshole,” he said.

Matthew smiled, beckoning this bestial version of his twin brother forward. “Come on, big boy,” Matthew said. “Keep going.”

“Fuck you.”

“Get it all out.”

“I don’t mean you’re ‘being’ an asshole,” John said. “I mean you are one.”

“Is that everything?”

Matthew was dancing around a bit now, taunting. I was slow, I admit, to get between them. Spectating. John’s eyes were glazed, and there appeared to be no sentience in them.

“I’m glad Mom and Dad didn’t live long enough to know what you are,” he said to Matthew.

When it was over, there was glass everywhere. The neck of John’s shirt was stretched and torn, and Matthew was bleeding from the ear. Our parents’ glass-top coffee table was shattered from their bodies falling over it.

John stormed out into the front yard, slamming the door. I helped Matthew up onto the couch, and Elle went for ice. At first, I worried that John’s punch had busted Matthew’s eardrum. But, on closer inspection, the cut was on the lobe.

“You okay?” I said to Matthew.

He wouldn’t look at me.

“Burn this place down,” Matthew said. “Everything in it.”

As kids, Matthew and John shared a bedroom, and all those years in school, they were in the same class, the same grade, forever mistaken for one another. Their roots were entwined in ways I couldn’t see. Matthew was the only person on Earth I could imagine John taking a swing at.

“Go find John,” Elle said to me.

But, for a moment, I didn’t move. I felt suddenly very distant, from my brothers, from Elle, like they didn’t know me and I didn’t know them. I was sure my brothers would get past their fight, they always did, they would even tell it as a funny story—Remember when I threw you through the coffee table?—but I didn’t know what my place was, what I was supposed to do or not do, and that disquiet spread all around me like shards of glass from the table.

Elle was waiting for me to say something. I felt like I was looking at her through a telescope, studying the faintest light of an astral body a million miles from me.

Fed up with my silence, she turned to Matthew. “Can you make peace?”

“With John?” Matthew said. “Fuck him.”

Then he was gone, storming upstairs. I heard his bedroom door slam. He could have been thirteen. Elle found a broom and started sweeping up glass. Under her stretched shirt, I could see a tremor on her stomach, like a garden snake slithering beneath a rug. Her face was stricken. I told her it wasn’t as serious as it looked. She looked at me like she didn’t understand what I was saying. We heard a car start up in the driveway.

“John’s not driving,” she said, “is he?”

I was rowing A back to the island. Love? she said to me. What’s love? She couldn’t believe what I was saying. We’re too young, she said. This isn’t serious. Was I being serious? She’d had sex before, with two other boyfriends. Neither of them had reacted this way. I loved her? She found that ridiculous.

I was silent. The tide was high. Light was breaking over the river. Weary and disheveled, my clothes smelling like her, my whole body smelling like her, I beached my canoe. Her summer-long disappearance, this brief renewal, our bodies ecstatically together, and now her disbelief at what I’d said to her as we got dressed—it was too much for me. I’d told her I loved her, expecting to hear the same confession back, and instead I’d watched her disbelief edge into repulsion. And I’d meant it, too; I didn’t feel I was trying it on for size, or that this was just what I was supposed to say. I would say it again in my life, to other women, and I would mean it just as much, but I would never mean it more.

In my canoe, A sat as far away from me as she could—which, being in a canoe, was not far. I don’t know how I moved the oars. My arms had no strength. Finally we landed on the island and she leaped out of the boat. She went to the side of the island where she’d beached her kayak, but she didn’t see it anywhere. I helped her look, through brush and bramble. I tried to absorb myself in the task. But the island wasn’t big enough to misplace a kayak. The lapping tide was swallowing the shore. My guess was that she hadn’t beached it high enough, hadn’t accounted for the tides. The water rose up and took it.

“My parents are going to murder me,” she said.

“I’ll row you home,” I offered. It meant a long haul there and back, and I knew I couldn’t make it home before my parents were up drinking coffee, looking out at the marsh and the river. But I would do it.

“Let me think,” she said.

And I could see in her face how much she didn’t want to be near me, let alone share a tiny canoe. She walked to the far side of the island, peering beneath a rocky overhang where loosed buoys and trash sometimes washed ashore. She was hoping for deliverance—a miraculous return of her craft, freedom from me. I yelled out to her that there wasn’t any point in looking any longer. We had to go. The sun was rising.

I got into my canoe.

“Are you coming?” I said.

She didn’t answer.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“God, stop talking,” she said. “Just leave me alone.”

That’s a rote phrase, I know, not a literal one. She wanted a moment to herself, to consider, that’s all. The deep chill of that morning was something I thought of often later—how cold the water was, far too cold to swim. I picked up my oars, shivering as the water splashed up my pants. It wasn’t until I was midway into the channel that I considered what I was doing. I’d shoved off from the island without her. I was rowing away from her, hard and fast.

I heard A’s voice call after me. The water carried her plea so clearly that it was like she was sitting next to me, though she was by then a hundred yards away. I kept rowing, clear to my shore. I left her on that island—left her, without a boat, on a frigid morning about to storm.

I beached my canoe and took the long way around to my apartment. I changed into pajamas, as though I’d just woken up, and went down to the house. I found my parents awake, slumping happily on the couch. They were surprised to see me up so early—surprised but, I noticed, happy to see me. This was the hour of quiet they allowed themselves. My mother would soon collect case files she’d brought from work, and my father would close up the house, shuttering the chimney flues and covering the furniture with bedsheets. There was so little relaxation in their short lives—only the hours of Maine.

I went to the windows, looking out at the water, fixated on that island. The rain had started by then. I looked for A’s small shape. It began to pour with increasing intensity. My mother came over and put her arm around me, cozy with hot coffee, remarking on the ferocity of the storm. The inlet frothed. Clouds swallowed the lighthouse. There was thunder on the wind, marsh plants blowing sideways, the islands in the channel lashed with freezing rain.

“Hey, bud,” my father called behind me, “can I fix you some eggs?”

John’s car was gone, and I drove out after him. The roads were dark and empty, but lights were on in the summer houses. I made the lip of island and crossed the bridge. By the time I reached the interstate, I gave up. There were too many possibilities. I imagined John driving all the way back to New York. I turned back for our house, taking the rotary in a long loop. But, at the last moment, I took the exit toward Newcastle, the town across the river.

I drove along a tongue-shaped point toward the lighthouse, scanning along the row of houses until I found the one I was looking for. I realized that, for all the years I’d gazed at A’s house from across the water, I’d never seen where she lived up close. The fronting was colonial-style, but it had been updated with scallop siding and a deep porch with Adirondack chairs. The second story had a pair of dormer windows facing the water. The left-side dormer was A’s bedroom, or had been. Tonight it was dark. The other upstairs window was lit by a soft, blue glow, as from a television. I parked across the street. I looked for a sign with a family name but couldn’t see one. I sat there awhile, looking between the house and the water.

What I remember most clearly is being in the car with my parents on the drive back to New York. The storm has let up. My dad is stopping for gas. He tells me to pump, while he takes my brothers inside the mini-mart. I’m fumbling over the gas cap, the pump handle, thinking of A, stranded on the island. I don’t know what I’ve done. No, I do know. I don’t know how it ends. I put my hands on my knees, trying to find my breath. My mom is getting out of the car to ask what’s wrong. To this day, I don’t know exactly what I said to her. I only remember watching her face alter. I remember that she asks for a phone number. I remember the smell of gasoline. My mother is on her phone. I hear her say, “Good morning.” Her voice changes to her professional one—may it please the court. She holds a finger in one ear, against the road noise, and walks away from the highway. I can’t hear what she’s saying. My father and brothers come out of the mini-mart holding bags of candy and potato chips. My father sees my mother on the phone, and his shoulders fall. In normal life, he is unbothered by time. On the road, he loathes every delay. He buckles my brothers back into the car. My mother is walking purposefully toward me. I stare at the sky, asking it to rain fire.

My mother’s face—that small, pursed, olive face. It’s what I recall of her. It outlasts her death.

“Your friend says she was home last night,” my mother says.

“She’s home now?”

“She answered the phone.”

I fall back on my heels.

“What did you say?” I ask.

“I told her you were worried she hadn’t made it home.”

“Is that all you said?”

“She claimed not to know who you are,” my mother said. “Then she hung up.”

I wonder for a moment if my mother thinks I’m insane, as though I’ve concocted this story, for attention or punishment, out of some deep psychosis. Maybe she’d have preferred that. “She’s okay,” I say.

My mother grabs me by the shoulders.

“She’s not in a hospital. She’s not dead. Do you know how lucky that is?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry to me? To her?”

“To everyone,” I say.

“What did you…” my mother says. But here she trails off. It’s maybe the first time in my life I witness her at a loss for words.

I still don’t know, in fact, how A got home that night. Fishing boats were always out before sunrise, hardcore trawlers undeterred by bad weather. Or perhaps her kayak hadn’t floated very far, and waves lapped it back to the island. I don’t know if A suffered the storm or was home before it arrived. I have come to suspect that she answered the phone that morning because she believed it would be me calling. I’ve always wondered what she would have said. It took me years to understand why she hid the story from her parents: she kept quiet about what was done to her because she knew she would bear the blame.

My dad taps the car horn, gesturing for my mother and me to hurry up. The return traffic is every minute worse on I-95.

My mother looks at me with that face again, the one I still see when I think of her.

“Listen to me,” she says: “Everything you do—everything, at every moment—it all matters. You are making or unmaking your life at every single instant, with every single decision. You can throw your life away in seconds. One bad impulse—it doesn’t take more. I see people every day who’ve done it. They’re standing there explaining it all to a judge. Do you know the gravity of that?”

I did, I said. But I didn’t, not really. That would come later. I expected a much longer conversation with my mother was still to come. She would sit me down, somewhere far from an I-95 gas station, and she’d bring in my father, and they’d take my full confession. I’d be punished in some way, or counseled, or both. I waited all winter for that to happen. And then it was spring, and still nothing had been said. My dad brought up summer in Maine with an innocence that told me he didn’t know a thing. I told him I wanted to leave for college early and clear out a couple of gen-ed classes in summer session. He looked crestfallen, but agreed it was a good plan. A few days after my announcement, my mother bought flights to the Azores. When she died, I was still waiting for a conversation we never had. I think sometimes I’m waiting there still.

Sitting in the car, across the street from A’s house, I was so lost in these memories that I didn’t see the figure approaching until I heard knuckles rap against my window. A lanky teenage boy loomed behind the glass, inches from my face.

I turned on the car to roll down the window. “This is a private road,” he said.

“I know the people who live here,” I said.

“You some kinda creep?” he said.

Only then did I see he was holding a baseball bat down at his waist. He hadn’t raised it, but he sounded like a kid who’d been in fights and knew his business.

I said A’s last name, and it seemed to put the boy momentarily back on his heels. Maybe he was a nephew, a cousin. It’s not like A had vanished forever. I’d actually seen her once, years after my parents died. She was in a giant liquor store off the interstate in New Hampshire, with a group of boisterous friends—a college reunion sort of weekend, I’d guessed. I’d thought of stopping her, apologizing. But I suspected my absence from her life forever was the better restitution. Whether that was cowardly or correct, I hid in the whiskies until she was gone.

The teenage boy stepped in front of my car like he was about to beat in my headlights. He started to laugh, taking practice swings.

“Better get going, man,” he said. “Better go.”

I realized he was a little drunk. He was puffed up, performing. I heard laughter. I sensed his friends were out there on the lawn, hidden by the hedge, a bunch of summer kids getting blasted on stolen rum. I pulled slowly onto the road, and the boy stood behind the car and called, “That’s right, get outta here, you old fucking weirdo!”

When I arrived back at the house, the downstairs was dark. Up in the apartment, Elle was still awake.

“Where have you been?” she said. “Searching for John,” I said.

She looked confused.

“John’s here,” she said.

“He’s back?”

“I called you six times.”

“I didn’t have my phone,” I said. “Did they make up?”

“Believe me, I tried.”

Elle pulled a black band from her hair and shook out the tangles.

“Are they still awake?” I asked.

“Probably,” she said.

I stared into the sloped ceiling. I could feel how near Elle was to me in the dark.

“I’ll go talk to them,” I said.

“Will you?” she said.

I admit, I wanted some reaction from her—her approval—but I’m not sure she believed me. She came forward, hugged me, her full belly pressing against me.

Back outside, the marsh was quiet. No frogs, and above the silence, no moon at all. I couldn’t see any movement on the river, no wind, no boats at this hour. The lighthouse glowed against the fog. I knew my brothers, each one stewing in recriminations. Even as I knocked on their bedroom doors, to ask them to come talk with me, and with each other, I didn’t know what I was really going to say, or what I wanted to say, or that there was anything to be said. I didn’t know if I could fix anything, for them or for me. I just wanted to be near them, at a moment when nearness was still possible. It doesn’t last long. You are making or unmaking your life at every single instant.