Elin Hilderbrand - The Island

Tate said, “I’ll do it as long as you promise never to get divorced.”

“I promise,” Chess had said.

“Okay, then,” Tate said.

Since “all that had happened,” Tate had been unstinting with her support and love, despite the fact that Chess hadn’t told her anything. Tate wasn’t known for her emotional depth. If Chess told her about the seaweed jungle or the stones in her pockets, Tate wouldn’t get it. Chess was going to have to come up with a reasonable explanation about her hair. A friend with cancer. Temporary insanity.

Chess’s heart slammed in her chest. This was depression: the constant urge to escape herself. To say, I’m done here, and step out of her life. Outside the car window, the landscape-endless trees punctuated by obnoxious rest stops (McDonald’s, Nathan’s, Starbucks)-streamed by. Robin had promised that getting away would feel good, but Chess experienced a sick panic rising in her throat like vomit.

“Bird?” Chess said. Her voice was barely a whisper, but Birdie was so attuned to any sound or movement from Chess that she immediately turned down the radio and said, “Yes, darling?”

Chess meant to ask Birdie to slow down; they were driving like they were on the lam. But Chess couldn’t form the sentence; she couldn’t find the tone that would do the trick. If Chess asked Birdie to slow down, Birdie would stop the car altogether. She would pull over to the shoulder to make sure Chess was okay. Did she need air, or ice water? She would offer Chess India’s seat up front.

Chess said, “Nothing. Never mind.”

Birdie eyed her in the rearview mirror, her voice already an octave higher with concern. “Are you sure, darling?”

Chess nodded. Your mother is very worried about you, Robin had said. Worried, yes; Birdie was treating Chess like she had a terminal disease. But things between Chess and her mother had always been unbalanced. How to explain? When Chess graduated from college, her mother handed her a thick binder, painstakingly prepared, replete with all of Chess’s accomplishments. The binder contained every single report card from twelve years of school, the program from every dance recital and every awards ceremony; it contained the short story she’d published in the high school literary magazine, her valedictory speech, her first byline in the college newspaper. It contained letters of recommendation from her high school teachers and her letters of acceptance from Brown, Colchester, Hamilton, and Connecticut College. Her mother had saved all this stuff? She had included snapshots of Chess throughout: in her sleek black dress before prom, on the diving board at the country club pool, as a toddler in a diaper, holding a dripping Popsicle. Chess paged through the binder, amazed and embarrassed. Her mother had believed that her life was worth careful documentation, whereas Chess hadn’t given her mother’s life a single thought. Her mother, Chess realized, had never interested her.

Chess had started calling her mother “Birdie” at the age of twelve, which was the age Chess felt like her mother’s equal-and neither her mother nor her father had commented. Birdie might have thought Chess would grow bored with it, or that it meant she and Chess were becoming friends, when in fact it was Chess asserting her adolescent power. Now, she continued the practice out of habit.

Things between Chess and Birdie changed with the divorce. Chess gained a new admiration for her mother: Birdie had thrown Grant Cousins out. At the age of fifty-five, she had changed her life. She had said no to unhappiness; she had opened herself up for other possibilities. Chess had encouraged her mother to get a job, and her mother seemed receptive to the idea, if understandably hesitant.

What would I do? Who would hire me at my age? If I go to work, who will take care of you?

Chess had said, Birdie, I’m a grown woman. I can take care of myself.

And yet now that Chess had run her life through the meat grinder, she was a full-time job for her mother.

Could Chess tell her mother about “all that had happened”? Could she tell her mother she had fallen in love with Nick Morgan? If she told her mother this, her mother would love her anyway. After all, Birdie was her mother. But Birdie would be mortified, and the vision that Birdie held of Chess-the glowing, golden girl celebrated in that binder-would be tarnished.

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

The person that Chess felt the closest to now was her aunt India. India had been to hell and back on her own express train. Chess remembered the October morning when India had called to say Uncle Bill killed himself. It had been Chess’s senior year, the weekend of the homecoming dance. Birdie had received the call at four in the morning; she had climbed into the family minivan in her nightgown. She was going to drive all the way to Pennsylvania even though the sun was not yet up. It was Tate, at age fifteen, who had run out to the driveway with an overnight bag haphazardly stuffed with their mother’s clothes. Chess had wanted their mother to wait until the following day, Sunday, because of the home-coming dance. Chess was a senior and both her parents were expected to be at the dance to present her when her name was announced. If her mother wasn’t there, it would look weird.

Chess implored her mother to stay. She remembered the stricken look on Birdie’s face through the open car window in the breaking dawn. Her mother had said, “I am going because India is my sister. There is no one else. ”

It was only later that Chess understood what it meant for Uncle Bill to commit suicide and leave behind a wife and three sons and a hulking artistic legacy. And it was only now that Chess realized what it must have felt like for her aunt. Yet look at India: She was laughing at something Birdie was saying. She could laugh! She was a whole person. She had been as badly broken then as Chess was now, or worse, and yet you couldn’t even see the cracks.

Chess slid her notebook and pen back into her bag, and the vision came to her unbidden: Michael, slipping, letting go, falling. Falling! Letting go! His arms flailing, his eyes popping. Wait! Wait! He was dead at the age of thirty-two. Death sometimes made sense-when a person was old, when a person had been sick for a very long time. Michael dead-his new business dissolved, his careful plans rendered meaningless. This did not make sense!

Chess thought of Nick with a spray of cards in his hand, his eyelids hooded, his fingers worrying his chips. When she pictured him, he was always gambling. Why? Chess needed air. She could hear the tinny sound of Bruce Springsteen playing on Tate’s iPod. She couldn’t do this! She couldn’t pretend she was okay. She needed her mother to pull over. She would get out of the car and walk all the way back to Nick. But Nick wouldn’t have her. Put that in the silk-lined drawer.

She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. This was the breathing pregnant women used for pain management. She rested her head against the window, where it vibrated with the tires speeding over the highway.

A chicken salad sandwich, she thought. Blue, she thought.

Tate had never been in love before, and this, she felt, was for the best. What did love get you? Misery. Exhibit A in the seat beside her was her sister: Mary Francesca Cousins. Chess fell in love, Chess fell out of love, and then-wham! Instead of her being able to pick herself up, dust herself off, and move on, her jilted boyfriend died. When Tate had heard Chess was getting married, Tate had felt sorry for her (and sorry for herself for having to wear a four-hundred-dollar Nicole Miller bridesmaid dress in ruched bronze satin). When Chess had announced that she had thrown Michael Morgan off her back like she was a feisty bronco in a rodeo, Tate had felt a sense of kinship. Maybe she and her sister were related after all and, much to their mother’s dismay, would, by choice, spend the rest of their lives as single women. When Michael Morgan died, in an accident that Chess believed to be her fault even though she was twenty-two hundred miles away, Tate thought, Oh, shit. Drama followed Chess around like a smell. Some people, Tate had learned, were like that, and it was for people like her to sit and watch the show.