Elin Hilderbrand - The Island

What do I have to do?

Try?

What would a life with Lula look like? It would be unconventional, shocking even. In a few short weeks, India was to become a grandmother: Could a woman with a new baby grandchild take a female lover half her age? What would her sons say? What would the faculty, the administration, the board of directors-Spencer Frost!-say? (Spencer Frost would approve, India decided. He was a worldly man, with European sensibilities.) What would Birdie, Chess, and Tate say? Did India care what other people thought? Did she, at the age of fifty-five, care?

Something else was standing in her way, keeping her from embracing happiness, from saying, Yes, I’ll try. It was the pilot of the looming ghost ship. It was the ghost himself.

Something in the room was calling to her. India hung the painting back on the wall. She cast around the room. The voice was getting stronger, louder; she was getting closer, like a child in a game of Marco Polo. She lay on the bed. Her eyes were burning. Her eyes. She turned to the nightstand-her book lay there, and… Bill’s reading glasses. His glasses. They were practically glowing. The lenses caught light from the moon out the window, except there was no moon. So where was the light coming from?

India picked up the glasses. They were cool to the touch, as they should have been. The frames were green plastic, a mottled jade green that people commented on. I love your reading glasses. Oh, thanks. They belonged to my late husband.

India had taken the glasses from the hotel room in Bangkok. They had been on the night table next to a small pad and pen, standard issue from the hotel. India imagined Bill wearing the glasses as he held the pen over the blank page, trying to decide what to write. If there had been a suicide note, she would have taken that, but because there had been no note, because Bill had not found a single word to say in his defense, India had taken the glasses. They were nothing remarkable. India knew Bill had gotten them at the CVS in Wayne. But she took them as her memento of her husband, and for fifteen years they had hung around her neck. They had rested against her heart.

India opened her door, stepped out into the hallway, and tiptoed down the stairs. She passed through the living room and kitchen and out the door. The night was brilliantly dark. There was a sprinkling of stars-diamonds against the obsidian-but no moon. They had outlasted the moon. India should have gone back for a flashlight; she couldn’t see a goddamned thing. But this was Tuckernuck: she could make it to the beach blind or sleepwalking. She floated across the yard and felt for the railing at the top of the stairs; it was right where she knew it would be. She descended to the beach. The new stairs were sturdy. She remembered the summer that Teddy put his foot through one of the old boards and got a wicked splinter. Bill had pulled it out with his sculptor’s tweezers. There was a memory for everything, India realized; it was pointless to try to escape the memories.

But that didn’t mean she had to spend the rest of her life haunted by the ghost of her dead husband. She was still young. She didn’t have to spend the rest of her life looking at the world through Bill Bishop’s eyes.

By the time India made it to the water’s edge, the glasses had warmed in her hand. Try? she thought. Try? She cranked her arm back in a classic windup (she had pitched so many balls to the boys through endless seasons of Little League. She had been a good mother and she had been a good wife. She had been a good wife, damn it!) and wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee… she let the glasses fly.

She heard them plunk in the water and hoped they had landed far enough out for the tide to carry them away. If they washed up on shore, she decided, she would bury them.

She headed back up the stairs lethargically. Her eyelids were drooping. The alarm had been shut off; the room in her head was dark and hushed. She was ready for bed.

She awoke in the morning in Barrett’s bed, with Barrett holding her.

Perfect happiness, she thought.

The kids were asleep in their rooms. When Tate walked in last night, they jumped into her arms, they cheered and made happy noises, and Tate felt like Bruce Springsteen. She felt loved. It was intoxicating.

Barrett wanted to tell her exactly what had happened. He was talking quickly, and Tate had to tell him to slow down.

Slooooooooow down.

He had promised himself, no matter what happened, that he would work for Anita for three days. It started out oddly, he said, with Anita leading him up to her bedroom, flinging open the doors to Roman’s closet, and telling Barrett he could wear whatever he wanted. There was, he said, a Jay Gatsby collection of beautiful shirts handmade in London. There were cashmere sweaters, golf pants, Italian loafers.

Barrett said to Anita, “I don’t need clothes. I have clothes.”

She implored him to wear a pink shirt of Roman’s, a simple polo shirt, but still, it was Roman’s. Barrett felt uneasy. What was Roman going to do when he saw Barrett wearing his shirt?

Anita said, “Oh, don’t worry. Roman isn’t coming back.”

She then explained that she and Roman had separated. They were going to test it out; he hated Nantucket anyway. That was one of the reasons Anita had hired Barrett full-time. She was on her own now.

Barrett wore the shirt. He hung a new painting for Anita, then cleaned her Hinckley picnic boat bow-to-stern and took Anita and her girlfriends on a cruise around the harbor. There was a catered lunch on the cruise, but the women ate nothing except for the stray lettuce leaf and a few grapes, so Jeannie, the cook, offered the entire gorgeous lunch to Barrett. He stuffed his face and would take the rest home.

“It wasn’t bad,” he said to Tate. “That part.”

At five o’clock, when he had to go pick the kids up from his parents’ house, Anita didn’t want him to leave. She wanted him to stay and have a glass of wine. She wanted him to give her a massage.

“A massage? ” Tate said.

Anita had a masseuse come to the house every day, but the masseuse had been canceling a lot lately, he had canceled that day, and Anita’s neck and shoulders were sore. Wouldn’t Barrett just rub them a little? All she needed was a pair of strong hands.

No, Barrett said. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t stay for wine either. He had to pick up his kids.

She pouted but seemed to accept this answer.

The next day, he said, there was another shirt. Blue, with white stripes.

He said, “Is there something wrong with what I have on?”

She said, “Please wear it.”

He considered it a uniform of sorts. A uniform to make him look like her husband. It didn’t feel right, but he couldn’t find anything blatantly wrong with it. She sent him to the post office to mail a box to her sister in California; he drove her to the Galley, where she had lunch with the same friends from the day before. He offered to wash the windows of the house, and she said, “I’ll hire someone to do that.”

He said, “You did hire someone to do that. Me.”

She said, “Don’t you dare wash the windows. I’ll call someone.”

He said, “Let me do it, Anita. There’s no reason to pay someone else.”

She said, “Are you the boss here or am I?”

While she was at lunch, he started washing the windows. The windows that faced the harbor were coated with a salty grime. When Anita got home, she found him on a ladder with a squeegee. He had changed into his own shirt.

She stood at the bottom of the ladder with her hands on her hips. From the look on her face, he could tell that she had had wine with lunch.