Elin Hilderbrand - The Island

The drill for disembarking hadn’t gotten any easier or more glamorous. Barrett anchored the boat and then hopped into the knee-deep water to help them down. Poor Birdie! She was okay; she was only fifty-seven, still small and spry and, as her name implied, birdlike. She removed her white tennis shoes, hopped down into the water, and waded to shore. Aunt India was wearing a gauzy skirt with an asymmetrical hemline, which probably cost six thousand dollars; it made disembarking gracefully a challenge. She ended up sort of falling into Barrett’s arms like a new bride, and what could Tate do but admit she felt jealous?

There was a new set of stairs from the beach to the bluff. The staircase, always treacherous and rickety, was now sturdy, built from bright yellow pressure-treated lumber.

“Wow!” Birdie said. “Look, girls!”

They ascended to the bluff. There was the lone tree with its gnarled branches, the very same tree Tate had meant to hang herself from. Nice to know they had both survived. In the yard, the old picnic table was centered in an oval of dirt, and from the oval was a white shell path that led to the front door of the house. The house had been reshingled and it smelled like resin. The door was the same weather-beaten blue, and next to the door hung the driftwood sign that Birdie and Aunt India had made when they were girls. Using thumb-size slipper shells, they had formed the word TATE. The sign was the closest thing the house had to an antique; it was taken down when they left for the summer, stored in a kitchen drawer, and brought out again to harbinger their arrival. TATE.

On the far side of the house, where the white shells widened to form a driveway, sat their jalopy, a 1969 International Harvester Scout with a white vinyl roof and a stick shift that was longer than Tate’s arm. The Scout had, once upon a time, been fire-engine red, but it had faded to a grayish pink. Tate looked upon the Scout as a long-neglected pet, a trusty though beat-up veteran of Tate family summers on Tuckernuck Island. The Scout had been brought to Tuckernuck on a car barge by Tate’s grandfather in 1971; Tate and Chess and all three of the Bishop boys had learned to drive in that car at the age of twelve. Tate remembered her own initiation, with her father in the passenger seat coaching her about the gearshift and the clutch. Despite its appearance, shifting the Scout was like cutting through butter, which was good because the Tuckernuck “roads” were challenging; they were dirt, gravel, or grass, potholed and ridged, a bitch to navigate. Tate had always had an affinity with machines; she had learned to drive with incredible ease and had savored every second of freedom behind the wheel. Freedom! At thirteen and fourteen, she had taken the Scout out by herself, she had explored every inch of Tuckernuck’s roads, she had given her mother a heart attack, staying out until after dark when the Scout had only one working headlight.

Tate ran her hand over the hood. Did it still run? She believed it would, like a magic car-Herbie the Love Bug, or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It would run for her.

Birdie had discreetly mentioned that the girls’ father had agreed to put “some money” into the house for necessary improvements as prescribed by Barrett Lee, and Tate had feared this meant the house would be different-shiny, new, unrecognizable. But the house looked the same. Tate was the first one inside; it smelled the same-like mildew and mothballs and pine sap and ocean air. She walked right into the galley kitchen-long and narrow, with a working sink and a gas camp stove and a half-size fridge lining one wall, and a Formica counter over the cabinets on the other side, with three feet of pale linoleum separating them. The “dining room table,” which sat three, four in a pinch, and therefore was never used except when it rained, was pushed up against the outside kitchen wall. Beyond the “dining room table” was the “living room,” which featured a braided rug, a sofa and two chairs upholstered in an abrasive bottle green fabric meant to survive a nuclear holocaust, and a “coffee table” fashioned from a slab of glass over a lobster trap. The “coffee table” was another house antique; it had been made by Birdie and India’s grandfather, Arthur Tate.

Birdie and India both sighed when they saw the table, and Tate sighed, too. Chess didn’t sigh. Chess, Tate realized, wasn’t in the house. She was outside, sitting at the picnic table with her head in her hands.

Tate pushed open the screen door. “Hey,” she said to Chess. “We’re sharing the attic, right?”

Chess nodded morosely. Well, okay, it wasn’t great, sharing a room with your sister for a month, but wasn’t there a certain slumber-party appeal for all of them in this venture? Wasn’t part of the idea that they would all have constant sisterly-motherly-auntish comfort? They would never be alone, and because they were all related, there was no need for Tate to shower, clip her toenails, worry about deodorant. Tate could fart or burp or pick her teeth with abandon. The others would love her anyway.

There wasn’t much of an option in the way of bedrooms. On the second floor of the house, there were two bedrooms-the Cousins bedroom and the Bishop bedroom. The Cousins bedroom was slightly bigger; it was “the master,” though incongruously it had two twin beds. This was where Tate’s parents had always slept. (Had they ever had sex in those narrow, spinsterish beds? They must have, though Tate didn’t want to imagine it.) The Bishop bedroom had a queen bed with a squishy mattress that was low to the ground. This was where Aunt India and Uncle Bill had slept when Uncle Bill was alive. Tate peeked inside on her way up to the third floor. She was delighted to see Roger, the name given to the quixotic sculpture of a man that Uncle Bill had fashioned out of driftwood, shells, seaweed, and beach glass. Roger was recognizable as a Bishop sculpture, though far smaller than Uncle Bill’s other works (which were made of copper and glass and which populated nearly every major metropolitan area in the first and second worlds). Roger could have been sold to a museum for tens of thousands of dollars, and that was what was remarkable about having him just sitting on the dresser in the long-abandoned family summer home.

Tate heard footsteps and turned to see Barrett coming up the steps with the bags.

“Third floor?” he said.

“You guessed it,” Tate said. “Kids sleep in the attic.” She reached for her bag.

“Allow me,” he said.

“You’ve done so much already,” Tate said. “The place looks amazing.”

“I hope you weren’t expecting Jacuzzi tubs and granite countertops,” he said. “I think maybe your mother was…”

“No, she wasn’t,” Tate said.

“It cost a fortune just to get the place back to zero,” Barrett said. He took the narrow stairway to the attic, and Tate followed him. The attic was, as ever, hot and gloomy, ventilated by one small window, too high up to provide any breeze. The attic slept six: there were two double beds and a set of bunks. The idea was that all five cousins (Cousins cousins and Bishop cousins) could sleep here at once if need be, though the three Bishop boys-Billy, Teddy, and Ethan-had preferred to sleep downstairs on the screened-in porch. Easier to sneak beer from the icebox and piss in the yard, Tate supposed. The screened-in porch was awful in rain, so the attic beds had gotten used in inclement weather. Tate noticed a large cardboard box from Pottery Barn at the foot of the bunks. She peeked inside and found brand-new summer linens in bright sherbet hues.

“What’s this?” Tate said. The sheets and blankets of the Tuckernuck house were supposed to be threadbare and as full of holes as Charlie Brown’s Halloween costume-that was part of the charm. “Does UPS deliver here?”