Elin Hilderbrand - The Island

The tide was high. The tip of the point was covered by water. How high was the water? Birdie was in her nightgown, a simple white cotton affair that came to her knees. And she was wearing underwear. India slept in the nude; when she wandered the house, she put on a silk kimono but wore nothing underneath. India couldn’t cross Tuckernuck at night.

Birdie stepped into the water on the ocean side. It was warm, warmer than the air. She waded out toward the tip of the point, and when the water encroached, she lifted her nightgown. The water was at midthigh. The water was so warm, Birdie felt the urge to pee. She would satisfy her urges one at a time, starting with the most important. The most important was Hank.

She called Hank at home. He would be sleeping, but he kept a phone right by his bed in case someone from the facility called about Caroline. Hank was a light sleeper. In the times that they had spent the night together, Birdie never failed to wake him when she rose to use the bathroom or startled from a dream. When the phone rang, Hank would hear it. Hank would answer it.

The phone rang. Four times, five, six, seven. Then there was a clicking noise. It was Hank’s voice on the answering machine. Birdie hung up.

She called right back, praying, Please, Hank, wake up, pick up.

Again, the machine. Birdie called back again. It was the middle of the night. He might be fast, fast asleep, in the deep REM stage, where he heard the phone but thought it was part of his dream.

Again. Again. Again.

Birdie tried his cell phone next. It was quarter past three. There was no reason for Hank to be out at this hour, no way, but he might have been doing sleepover babysitting duty for Nathan or Cassandra.

Hank didn’t answer his cell phone. Birdie called four times. Then, she called his house again, and when the machine picked up she left a message. She said, “Goddamn it, Hank.” And then she hung up.

Goddamn it, Hank: not very eloquent, but it got her point across. She was tired of this. She wanted to talk to him.

She realized the water was getting higher, and in her frenzy to get ahold of Hank she had dropped the hem of her nightgown and now it was soaked. And her underwear was wet; the water was that high. This being the case, Birdie peed, sweet release, then wondered if her urine would draw sharks. The beach looked far away; she might have to swim, which would leave her drenched from head to toe in the middle of the night two miles from home. And in swimming to shore, she would ruin her cell phone. She started to cry-not because she was wet or afraid of sharks, not even because she was bone-crushingly tired. She cried because of Hank.

As she waded back to shore, she once again did the unthinkable and called Grant. He answered on the third ring in his middle-of-the-night voice, a voice that sounded alert and awake but that was, in fact, buried.

“Hello?” he said.

“Grant?”

“Bird?” he said. She was grateful that he knew it was her. The day might come, she realized, when that would not be the case. “Are you okay?”

“Hank doesn’t love me,” she said.

“Hank?” he said. “Who’s Hank?”

“My boyfriend,” she said. “The man I’ve been seeing.”

“Oh,” Grant said. “Where are you?”

“Tuckernuck,” she said. “Bigelow Point.”

“It’s the middle of the night,” he said.

“I know,” Birdie said. “Hank doesn’t love me.”

There was a long pause. Long enough that Birdie wondered if Grant had fallen back to sleep.

“Grant?” she said.

He started. Yes, she’d caught him trying to sneak back to sleep. He had done this often in their life together. “What do you want me to do?” Grant said. “Beat the guy up? Call him and tell him he’s an idiot?”

Birdie reached the shore. She found the flashlight in the sand and poked the beam into the dark sky. “Would you?” she said.

She had nothing to wear. She hadn’t, in her wildest dreams, been expecting to attend a fancy dinner party at some flashy house on Nantucket. She had running clothes, bathing suits, shorts, and T-shirts. But Chess, thankfully, had carted along her entire closet.

Tate said, “Is it okay if I borrow something? If you say no, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

Chess said, “Take whatever you want.”

Tate said, “Will you help me?”

Chess huffed, but Tate wasn’t fooled. Chess considered herself to be too depressed to help with something as frivolous as outfit selection, but Tate knew that secretly she was flattered and welcomed the distraction. And in this case, outfit selection was everything. If Tate wore the right outfit, she would feel sexy and confident, and if she felt sexy and confident, Barrett Lee would fall in love with her. Tate had been worried that perhaps Chess harbored feelings for Barrett herself, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Barrett Lee fell into the same category with everyone else: Chess was too self-absorbed to give him a second thought.

Chess’s dresses hung from a wooden pole in the makeshift attic closet. Tate selected a white sundress with blue flowers. She slipped it on. Pretty, but maybe a little prim? Chess lay on the bed.

She said, “I wore that dress the first time I met Michael’s parents. Family dinner at the house. Nick was there, and Cy and Evelyn, of course.”

Tate’s arms hung at her sides. Was this how it was going to be? Tate shucked off the dress. She reached for an orange halter dress with white polka dots.

“I bought that for the rehearsal dinner,” Chess said. “Try it on.”

Tate hesitated. Chess had bought this one for the rehearsal dinner? Tate tried it on. It was adorable, cute and flirty, and Tate loved the idea of wearing orange. What a statement; she would liven up the party with a juicy sunburst. But something about the dress screamed, Chess! It was the polka dots, maybe, or the ruffle across the top. Chess had bought this dress for her rehearsal dinner. It was off-limits.

“I don’t think so,” Tate said.

Chess said, “I’ll never wear it.”

“You’ll wear it,” Tate said. She regarded the riches in the closet. There were so many dresses! Chess’s life with Michael Morgan had been… what? One cocktail party after another?

“I will never get dressed up and go out again,” Chess said.

“You will so,” Tate said. “Your hair will grow back.” Already a blond fuzz was coming in; Chess’s head looked like a peach.

“I’m not saying that to evoke pity,” Chess said. “I just want you to know you can borrow whatever you want.”

“Okay,” Tate said. Even at home in her own closet, Tate didn’t have one single appropriate outfit for an evening like tonight. She didn’t own summer dresses meant for dinner parties because she didn’t get invited to dinner parties. She didn’t have dinner with her boyfriends’ parents. She was, she realized at that second, socially retarded. All she did was work, and occasionally she spent a whoop-de-do night performing karaoke in a hotel bar with clients and their much more spirited secretaries. Just as Tate was about to wallow in self-pity over this and move from there into panic-would she know how to act at this dinner party?-Chess said, “Try on the red one.”

Tate pulled a red dress out of the closet. It was a simple silk sheath. “This doesn’t come with some devastating memory attached?”

“Well, sort of,” Chess said. “That was what I wore to Bungalow Eight the night I broke up with Michael.”

“Jesus, Chess,” Tate said. This was the dumping dress?

“Try it on,” Chess said. “For a while there, I considered that my lucky dress. And I have killer red Jimmy Choo heels to match.”