Elin Hilderbrand - The Island

Tate was going to Tuckernuck out of love and concern for her sister. Because look at Chess now: she had shaved her head down to the scalp like an NBA star or a white supremacist. Birdie had been stricken by this. She had called Grant, who told her to call Chess’s therapist, and Robin had told Birdie not to overreact. Shaving her head was just Chess’s way of letting the world know she was hurting. Chess had always been vain about her hair, for good reason (long, thick, naturally wavy, the color of spun gold), and so to shave herself bald, she must have been in some exquisite pain indeed. And yet, Tate thought, it was damage she did to herself. It wasn’t as though she had cancer and had lost her hair to chemo. This was an ungenerous thought, and since Tate was here out of love and concern for her sister, she tucked that one away.

Tate had her own agenda for Tuckernuck, and that agenda was to run the circumference of the island each morning, swim across North Pond and back, do 150 sit-ups a day while hanging by her knees from the branch of the only tree on their windswept property. She was going to lie in the sun, do Sudoku puzzles, drink wine, and let her mother feed her. Just like Chess, Tate wanted to escape the world. On Tuckernuck there would be no screens, no keyboards, no interfacing with anyone’s goddamned crashed system, no hackers, no viruses, no hardware, no software, no incompatibility. No checking her iPhone for e-mails or texts, no checking the weather, no checking the stock market, no playing beer pong, no streaming E Street Radio. Good-bye to all that.

Tate was a level 4 ++ computer programmer, she was a wizard, she could fix absolutely anything short of a martian blowing your system away with his beta gun or a system overtaken by saltwater (it had happened once, at a five-star hotel in Cabo). But what Tate Cousins really did for a living was travel. She was constantly en route to Toledo, Detroit, Cleveland, San Antonio, Peoria, Bellingham, Cheyenne, Savannah, Decatur, Chattanooga, Las Vegas. Her life was one long concourse; it was an endless string of Au Bon Pain and Hudson News. It was barf bags and foil packs of square pretzels and in-flight magazines. Shoes on, shoes off. Any liquids or gels? There was a stocky, red-haired TSA employee in Fort Lauderdale who remembered Tate and called her “Rosalita” because that was the song she had been listening to on her iPod when she first came through his security line. Tate had 1.6 million frequent-flier miles; she had enough bonus package points to buy either a time-share in Destin or a Range Rover. She was sometimes struck by images of Home: a house somewhere in the suburbs, Mom, Dad, kids, dog-all out on the front lawn, washing the car or throwing the Frisbee. It occurred to Tate that this was what she was supposed to want: a home, an end point. She was not supposed to be constantly in transit. She was supposed to stop somewhere and feel a sense of belonging.

The noteworthy thing about today, July 1, was that there was an end point. There was a home. Tate’s mother, Birdie (which was short for Elizabeth, which was also Tate’s given name), delivered them safely to Hyannis and nestled her Mercedes into long-term parking. The four of them then hopped the short flight to Nantucket. They took a taxi from the airport to Madaket Harbor. Once they were in Madaket, Tate’s heart started to settle, like a dog on its canvas Orvis bed, like a baby in its quilted Moses basket. She had crisscrossed the United States of America dozens of times with little expectation or fanfare, but the mere sight of Madaket Harbor, sparkling blue and green in the July sun, smelling salty and swampy, and presenting itself exactly as she remembered it when she was last here at seventeen years old, was turning Tate to jelly.

Home!

And there, whistling, waving his bronzed arm in an arc, cutting a frothy swath through the placid water of the harbor, was her prince on a white horse-it was Barrett Lee on a thirty-three-foot Boston Whaler Outrage with dual 250s off the back. In gold letters across the back of the boat, it said, Girlfriend, NANTUCKET, MASS.

“Barrett Lee,” Chess said. Her voice sounded surprised, as if he’d appeared out of the recesses of her deepest memory. Tate, meanwhile, had thought about nothing but Barrett Lee since her mother had first mentioned his name.

She wondered if Barrett Lee was married. She had searched for him on Facebook and come up empty handed. She had googled him but had been unable to find evidence of her Barrett Lee amid the 714 other Barrett Lees who had left footprints in cyberspace. She searched the online archives of the Inquirer and Mirror, the Nantucket weekly newspaper, and discovered-aha!-that Barrett Lee had been in the Thursday night dart league in 2006 and 2007.

Tate wondered if she would still have feelings for Barrett Lee, and if she did, would these be new feelings, or old, resurrected feelings? She wasn’t the same person she’d been thirteen years ago, and he wouldn’t be either. So did resurrected old feelings even count, if she didn’t know him anymore?

This was all pretty deep thinking for Tate. She preferred to work in tangibles, and what was tangible was this: Barrett Lee was more attractive than ever. The kind of attractive that made Tate feel like her heart was being pulled out through her nose. Was that tangible enough for you?

“I got his girlfriend right here,” Tate said. Chess may have been heartbroken, medicated, and shorn, but there was no way she was getting Barrett Lee. Tate planted her feet, removed the earbuds of her iPod, and waved back.

Barrett Lee was the person from Tate’s past who evoked the deepest and most poignant longing. In Tate’s memory, she had loved him since he was six and she was five. At six, Barrett had been what her parents called a towhead; his hair was white, like an old person’s. Tate’s most intense memories centered on the summer she was seventeen, the last summer she’d been to Tuckernuck with her family. It was for Tate, as it no doubt was for many other seventeen-year-olds, the seminal summer of her life. She had been headed into her senior year of high school. Barrett Lee, she remembered, had just graduated, and although Plymouth State had expressed interest in him as a wide receiver, he wasn’t going to college. Tate found this very exotic. Chess had just finished her freshman year at Colchester in Vermont, which epitomized the New England collegiate experience that absolutely everyone in Tate’s New Canaan high school was seeking: the scholarly brick buildings with white pillars, the green quadrangle, the flaming orange maple trees, the cable-knit sweaters, the ponytails, the keg parties, the a cappella singing groups strolling among the tailgaters as Colchester took on rival Bowdoin in football. Instead of going to college, Barrett Lee was going to work for his father; he was going to learn to build houses and then take care of them once they were built. He was going to tile bathrooms, plumb dishwashers, wire stove burners. He was going to build bookshelves and window seats. He was going to make money, buy his own boat, fish for striped bass, ride his Jeep to Coatue on the weekends, go to the Chicken Box, drink beer, see bands, pick up girls. He was going to live life. God, Tate could remember clear as day how much better that had sounded than going to college, sharing a dorm room, sponging off her parents.

She had spent that whole summer watching Barrett Lee. He was the one who brought the family their groceries, their firewood, their newspapers and paperback books. He picked up their bags of trash, which he took to the dump, and their laundry, which he took to Holdgate’s and returned in neat white boxes like treats from the bakery. On very good days, he did repairs around the house, usually without wearing a shirt. Tate couldn’t get enough of him-the deep tan of his back, the impossible sun-bleached lightness of his hair. He was gorgeous, and that would have been enough for Tate; she was, after all, only seventeen. But he was nice, too. He smiled and laughed with all of the members of the Cousins family-even Tate’s grouchy father, who in that final summer demanded a Wall Street Journal by 10 A.M. each day, crisp, so that Barrett took to bringing it in a Wonder bread bag. Barrett Lee made their vacation on Tuckernuck pleasant; he made it possible. Everyone remarked on it.