Elin Hilderbrand - The Island

Chess raised her head. Her face was melting. She was trying to speak, but the words were gibberish. Birdie shushed her and handed her a tissue. Chess blew out a faceful of snot and said, “This is my fault.”

“No, Chess, it isn’t.” She reached for Chess and rocked her. “Honey, it isn’t. He fell. It was an accident.”

“But there are things you don’t know.”

“We can talk about it if you want to. We can look at it sixteen different ways, and in none of those ways will this be your fault.”

Chess buried her head under the pillow. She was moaning.

“Okay,” Birdie said, and she stood up. Was it safe to leave her? She needed a pill, that was for sure. “I’ll be right back.”

Birdie was trembling as she got into her car. It was a spectacular late afternoon, as green and golden as a day could be. Birdie smelled charcoal. Her neighbors were having the first cookout of the year. Birdie had been thinking of grilling hamburgers herself just an hour before, when she and Chess pulled into the driveway. It wasn’t fair how things happened without warning. Someone fell, a neck snapped, a phone call came, and your whole reality was changed forever. Birdie backed out into the street, incredulous.

Going to the pharmacy to get sedatives reminded her of something. It’s my fault. The beautiful day mocking what was happening inside the house. It reminded Birdie of… what? And then it came to her: it reminded her of India.

The next day, Tuesday, Birdie phoned India at her office at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. India’s assistant seemed to want to screen the call; she claimed India was down in the vault until Birdie said, “This is her sister and it’s urgent.” Then the assistant, magically, put her right through.

Birdie said, “India, it’s me.”

India said, “What’s wrong?”

And so Birdie explained it frankly, the way she could only explain something to her sister: the broken engagement, Chess quitting her job, Michael Morgan dead.

“Dead?” India said, as though maybe Birdie had gotten this detail wrong.

“Dead.”

“How old?”

“Thirty-two.” They both paused for a moment, and Birdie imagined herself at age thirty-two: married to Grant, the mother of Chess, age seven, and Tate, age five. Still so, so young. Then Birdie said, “I have a proposition.”

“Oh, God,” India said.

Birdie said, “I’m taking the girls to Tuckernuck. It was going to be for two weeks, but now I want to stay the whole month of July. Chess is going to need time… away, really away away… and I thought… well, you’ve dealt with things like this before. You can help Chess in ways that I can’t. I want you to come with us.”

“To Tuckernuck?” India said. “For the month of July?”

“It’s crazy,” Birdie said. “I know you have work. But I had to at least ask you.”

“You don’t know how lucky you are,” India said. “Because it just so happens I need to get away. Don’t get me wrong-I was thinking Capri or the Canary Islands. I was not thinking dowdy old Tuckernuck. I was thinking cold limoncello, not a month of cold showers.”

“Please?” Birdie said. “Would you come?”

“Are you sure you want me? Are you sure I’m not going to be infringing on your time with your girls?”

“I don’t want you,” Birdie said. “I need you. And they’re your girls, too, you know that.”

India sniffed. Birdie could picture her polishing the lenses of her late husband’s reading glasses the way she did when she was at a loss for words. “Who are we kidding?” India said. “It’s me who’s lucky.”

Later, Birdie cracked open the door to Chess’s bedroom. Chess was asleep, snoring like the old man who bumped his head. Birdie heard bells. She hunted around the room and found Chess’s cell phone in the trash. Birdie checked the display: Nick Morgan calling. Gently, Birdie set the phone down and waited until the ringing ceased. (She had a vision of India and Bill’s driveway once the news broke that Bill had killed himself. There had been so many cars: lawyers, reporters, art dealers, all of them on the phone. India had looked out the picture window and screamed. What Could they be Saying? Make them stop, Bird! Make them stop! )

Thirty days on dowdy old Tuckernuck, Birdie thought. It would do them all some good.

Before she left for Tuckernuck, she cut off all her hair.

And when she said all her hair, she meant all her hair: twenty-six inches of honey blond was wound around the stylist’s forearms like a skein of yarn. Chess had made him shave her scalp, and the last bits of downy fluff floated to the polished floor like out-of-season snowflakes.

She was at an expensive salon in Nolita where anything went and nobody asked questions. She had felt compelled to tell the stylist she was donating to Locks of Love. She paid at the receptionist’s desk; the girl handed her the credit card receipt and smiled as though nothing were wrong. Chess’s skull felt as thin and exposed as a helium balloon. She’d brought along a blue crocheted cap, which she put on, not out of vanity, but because she didn’t want anyone to pity her. She didn’t deserve anyone’s pity.

Her mother had looked upon her in fright, or revulsion, or sadness-Chess couldn’t identify her own emotions, much less anyone else’s. Shaving her head had been-what? Some kind of statement? An alternative to slitting her wrists? A denunciation of her beauty? A shedding of her identity? A tantrum? As a child, Chess had once cut her own hair out of anger, using a pair of blunt-nosed scissors. The bangs had been hacked down to a mere quarter inch at her part. Her mother had reacted with openmouthed shock then, too, but Chess had only been five years old.

“Your hair,” Birdie said.

“I cut it,” Chess said flatly. “I shaved it all off. I gave it away.”

Birdie nodded. She reached out and touched the crocheted cap.

Now, Chess, along with her mother, her sister, and her aunt India, was in her mother’s Mercedes, cruising north on I-95 toward Cape Cod, toward Nantucket, toward Tuckernuck Island, where they would live in rustic simplicity for a month. Neither Tate nor Aunt India had said one word to Chess about her shaved head, which meant that Birdie had intercepted them and given them fair warning. What had Birdie said?

She’s worse off than we imagined.

Chess touched her head under the cap, a new, irresistible habit. Her scalp was rough and bumpy; it itched. Her head felt so light she had to check that it was still there, attached to her neck. She supposed she had wanted to do something, something big, something drastic, something to express a small fraction of her pain. She might have set herself on fire in front of the Flatiron Building, or dangled by both hands from the top deck of the George Washington Bridge, but she had settled for visiting the Nolita salon, which was, Chess understood, a cowardly option. Her hair, after all, would grow back.

For the past twenty-eight days, Chess had seen a therapist named Robin. Robin told Chess that she should put “all that had happened” in a silk-lined drawer and revisit it when it was less painful. In the meantime, Robin said, Chess should try to think about other things: what she would have for lunch, the color of the sky.

Robin was a psychiatrist, a real doctor of the mind with a degree from Johns Hopkins. Chess’s father had insisted on the very best, and for Grant Cousins, the very best translated to the most expensive. And yet, for $350 an hour, Robin (she wanted Chess to call her Robin and not Dr. Burns) talked about silk-lined drawers, a mental exercise that was beyond Chess. Telling her not to think about “all that had happened” was the equivalent of telling her to spend all day standing on her hands, when the most she could manage was three or four seconds.