Elin Hilderbrand - The Island

They should turn the car around now. Chess couldn’t handle this trip. She was “depressed.” The label had been slapped across her forehead; it had been whispered between her mother and sister and aunt. (And with the trip to the salon, “depressed” had taken a step closer to “crazy,” even though everyone in the car was taking great pains to make all this seem normal.) Chess was taking an antidepressant, which, Robin promised, would make her feel like her old self.

Chess knew the pills wouldn’t work. Antidepressants couldn’t turn back the clock; antidepressants couldn’t change her circumstances. And this drug wasn’t particularly effective at quelling the voices in Chess’s head, soothing her panic, easing her guilt, or filling her emptiness. She had thought that “depression” would be like sitting in a rocking chair and not being able to make it move. She had thought it would descend over her like a fog, turning things fuzzy, coloring them gray. But depression was active, it paced back and forth wringing its hands. She couldn’t stop thinking; she couldn’t find her way free from apprehension. Everywhere she turned, it was there, the situation, all that had happened. Chess felt like she was swimming through an endless jungle of seaweed. She felt like her pockets were filling with rocks: she was growing heavier and heavier, she was sinking into the ground. Robin had once asked her if she harbored any suicidal thoughts. Yes was the answer, of course; all Chess wanted was to escape her present circumstances. But Chess didn’t have the energy to commit suicide. She was doomed to sit, mute and useless.

In her rare moments of clarity, she realized that her situation wasn’t original. She had been an English major at Colchester. Her situation was Shakespearean; it was, in fact, Hamlet. She had fallen in love with her fiancé’s brother-madly, unreasonably, insanely in love with Nick Morgan.

Acknowledging this love had been like throwing a grenade-killing Michael, leaving Chess emotionally amputated. If surgeons sliced her open, they would find a time bomb where her heart used to be.

Put that in your silk-lined drawer and revisit it when it is less painful.

How had this happened to her? She, Mary Francesca Cousins, had lived easily in the world. She’d belonged; she’d succeeded.

From the time Chess was young, she had been marked as a shining star. She was pretty and she smiled, she was graceful and she twirled and curtsied. Her ballet teacher placed her up front, in the center. She had the best posture, the most compelling presence. She excelled at school, she outscored all the boys, hers was always the first hand in the air; teachers who taught two and three grades above hers knew her name. She was well liked, a queen bee; she was a kind and benevolent leader. She edited the yearbook, she was on the pep squad, she was president of the student council. She played tennis, the country club variety, social rather than competitive, and she played golf with her father. She was a good swimmer, a great skier. She had been accepted at Brown but went to Colchester because it was cuter. She was the social secretary of her sorority; she wrote for the college newspaper for the first two years, then became the editor. She aced all her classes and graduated Phi Beta Kappa, despite the fact that she could be found on any given Saturday night drinking keg beer and dancing on the bar at the SigEp house.

After college, Chess moved to New York City. She got a job in the advertising department at Glamorous Home; then she was promoted to editorial, where they could make better use of her talents. She indulged her lifelong love of cooking by attending the French Culinary Institute on the weekends and learning the proper way to dice an onion and how to measure in metric. She discovered Zabar’s and Fairway and the greenmarket in Union Square. She threw dinner parties in her apartment, inviting people she barely knew and making difficult dishes that impressed them. She went to work early and stayed late. She smiled at everyone, she knew all her doormen by name, she joined the Episcopal church on East Seventy-first Street and worked in the soup kitchen. She got promoted again. She was, at age twenty-nine, the youngest editor in the Diamond Publishing Group. Chess’s life had been silk ribbon unspooling exactly the way it was supposed to-and then it was as if she’d looked down and the ribbon was a rat’s nest, tangled and knotted. And so Chess threw the ribbon-spool and all-away.

Chess’s therapist suggested that she keep a journal. She needed an outlet for her feelings while she was away. Chess bought a regular spiral-bound notebook at Duane Reade, seventy pages, with a pink cardboard cover-the kind of thing she had written her chemistry labs in during high school. She could write about “all that had happened,” Robin said, but she didn’t have to. She could write about the scenery on Tuckernuck; she could write about the sound of the birds, the shape of the clouds.

Silk-lined drawer, the shape of the clouds. Robin Burns was a medical doctor? A diploma from Hopkins hung on her wall, but Chess was skeptical. Chess wasn’t sure she would be able to write at all. It was a yoga position she couldn’t achieve.

Try, Robin and her medical degree said. You’ll be surprised.

Okay, fine. There, in the car, Chess pulled the notebook out of her bag. She found a pen. The effort of this was enough to leave her short of breath. To express a thought or feeling in writing… she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t swim out of the seaweed. It was thick, bright green, and twisted like crepe paper, strangling her, binding her wrists and ankles. She was a prisoner. Michael. Nick. One dead, the other gone. Her fault. She couldn’t write about it.

She glanced at her sister. For the first ten years of their lives, they had been constant companions; for the second ten years, they had not. In that seminal decade-say, when Chess was ten to twenty, Tate eight to eighteen-they did the best they could to disentangle the burrs of their identities. This was easier for Chess because she was older and more at home in the wide world. Chess was smart and popular and accomplished, and so the predictable way for Tate to distinguish herself was to underachieve and hang out with complete losers. Tate was good at math and a genius on the computer; at the age of fourteen, she acquired a bordering-on-freakish taste for the music of Bruce Springsteen. While Chess was participating in Junior Miss and spearheading the senior class trip to Paris, Tate was hanging out in the computer lab, wearing ripped jeans, communing with the school’s population of nerds and geeks, all of them boys, all suffering from poor eyesight, acne, and cowlicks.

To look at Tate now, you would never guess the severe degree of her loserdom. Now, she was thin and toned, she had great hair-blond and thick, cut well-and she had a career that knew no limits. She was single and hadn’t had a boyfriend that Chess could remember since her senior year of high school. Did Tate care about this? Was Tate lonely? Chess had never asked; since they had grown up and moved out of their parents’ house, they talked only when circumstances required it-about their mother’s birthday present, holiday plans, and, more recently, their parents’ divorce. Tate had been leveled by their parents’ divorce. She just didn’t get it: They had made it so far, thirty years, they had made it through the years when the kids were small and Grant was building his practice. Now they were rich and the kids were out of the house. Why did they have to split? There had been some tough conversations, with Tate crying and Chess comforting, and these conversations had knit the two girls together closely enough so that when Michael Morgan proposed, Chess asked Tate to be her maid of honor.