The inside walls of the cabin were made of thin panels of wood, so in addition to the ocean I could hear my father’s raspy deep sleep breathing and my mother’s little snores. With all that racket I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I got up to take a tour of the cabin in the early morning light. (Forget “house,” it definitely was a cabin.)
The kitchen, dining area, and living area were all in one room. A counter separated the kitchen from the rest of the room. In that section there was a round table with four chairs, a couch, and two armchairs. The chairs were pretty comfortable to sit in, but if you looked under the bedspreads that covered them you’d see that the upholstery was ratty.
I was pretty interested in the porch, so I went out there. The breeze off the ocean surprised me. It smelled salty and cool and (I had to admit) it did have a nice clean pine smell that beat bathroom deodorant by a mile.
But what was in the woods that surrounded us on three sides? And where were the snakes? Did they hang from trees and slither down onto your head? Or were they creeping along the forest floor waiting for a chance to curl around your leg and strike? And what about bears?
An arm went around my shoulder. I screamed and jumped about a mile in the air.
“Sorry if I scared you,” my mother said. She was looking out to the ocean and doing that deep breathing again. “Isn’t it beautiful, Stacey? I can’t believe we’re really here.”
“I believe it,” I said.
I went inside to get dressed. There wasn’t a closet in my “room,” so I’d stacked all of my clothes on the bottom bunk. I dressed in my thickest pair of jeans, my red high-top sneakers, and a long-sleeved blue polo shirt. Over that I’d wear my white denim jacket. I was glad I’d brought my wide-brimmed straw hat with the red checked bow. That would protect my head. Nothing was going to bite me.
Back in the kitchen-etc. room my parents were making breakfast and oohing and ahhing about the great night’s sleep they’d had.
While they were enjoying their breakfast I watched nervously as my father buttered himself a fourth piece of toast. If he did that every day we’d run out of bread and butter in no time.
After breakfast I told my parents I was going for a walk. They seemed pleased that I was enthusiastic enough to go exploring on my own. That surprised me because in New York City they wouldn’t let me go half a block by myself. Weren’t they even a little concerned for my safety?
“Be back by noon,” my mother said.
My father said, “If you stick to the dirt road that starts behind our house you won’t get lost. That’s the only road and it circles the island.”
I went to the road, which was more like a path. I made sure to walk right in the middle so I was as far away as possible from the towering pine trees. As I walked along I got glimpses and sometimes big views of the rock ledge and the ocean beyond that. There was no denying that it was beautiful. And I really liked the salt air.
I hadn’t gone far when I saw a house. There were chickens running loose in the yard. As I got closer a dog pushed out through the screen door and stood in the yard with its head up in the air barking at me. I stopped to consider my options. I could retrace my steps and start over in the other direction. But since the road was a circle, sooner or later I’d have to pass that house and that dog. I wasn’t going to make the island any smaller for myself by cutting off one major section of it.
“Tippy! Come here, Tippy.” A girl came out of the house. The dog ran back to her. I took a few steps closer.
“Hi,” I called. “Is your dog friendly?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “Sure.”
I was going to keep on walking, when I thought, use your head, Stacey. This could be the only other kid on the whole island and two weeks is a very long time in such a small place without anyone to play with.
I pointed in the direction I’d come from and said, “I’m staying in the cabin over there.”
The girl and the dog were walking toward me. The girl said, “You must be the kid staying in the Andersons’ cabin.”
“How’d you know?” I asked. As I reflect on it, this is not the nicest way to introduce yourself to someone new, but she answered me anyway.
“Mr. Stanley told me.”
“Oh-hh,” I said. “I think he told me about you, too.”
About then, with this red-haired, freckle-faced girl grinning at me, and her brown mutt of a dog happily wagging its tail, my manners came back. “I’m Stacey McGill,” I said.
“I’m Mara O’Connell,” she answered. “I was just going over to your place to see if you wanted to go blueberry picking with me. The blueberries are really good this year.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure. There isn’t much else to do around here.”
“I’ll get us some buckets,” she said.
As we continued down the road swinging our empty buckets Mara didn’t talk much. That surprised me. Since there couldn’t be any kids for her to play with you’d think she’d have been yakking a mile a minute.
I broke the silence by saying, “I can’t believe there aren’t any phones here. I was supposed to call my best friend Laine as soon as I got here. We talk on the phone all the time. How can you live without a phone?”
“It’s no big deal,” Mara said. “We have a two-way radio.” She said it in a cold way that kept me from asking how a two-way radio worked.
“So do you stay here all summer?” I asked. “It must be so boring.”
“I live here all year round,” she said. “I’ve lived on this island all my life.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, what about school?”
“My brother and I take the boat to school on the mainland,” she said. “Unless the weather’s really terrible. Then we use the two-way to get our assignments.”
I was still absorbing the idea that she’d lived her whole life, even winters, on the island, when we made a turn that brought us to the end of the land. We were standing on a rock ledge facing open ocean on three sides.
Mara looked out and let the wind whip her hair. I held on tight to my hat. “This is Pirate’s Point,” she said.
Instead of saying, “Wow, it’s beautiful,” or “How come they call it Pirate’s Point?” I said, “How big is this island anyway?”
Mara ignored my question and said to follow her if I wanted to pick blueberries. We took a path so narrow that we had to go single file. I got spooked on that trail. I thought a snake had landed on my hat when it was just a tree branch that hit it. Wide-brimmed straw hats aren’t too cool for hiking in the woods.
We climbed up and up through those woods until we came to a clearing. Mara said, “This is Blueberry Hill.”
I was so grateful to be out of the woods that I said, “It’s nice.”
I copied what Mara did when she bent down in the middle of the low shrubbery that covered the clearing and started picking blueberries. As we picked and ate I asked her again, “How big is this island anyway?”
“Three-quarters of a mile long and a third of a mile wide,” she said.
I did some quick math in my head and told Mara, “That’s only fifteen New York City blocks long by six or seven city blocks wide. You’ve spent your whole life in a space that goes from Seventieth Street to Eighty-fifth Street and from, say, Riverside Drive to Central Park West. Now that I think about it, Central Park is a lot bigger than your whole island.”
“So?” she said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you live in an incredibly small place.”
“So what if it’s small? There isn’t any crime here, is there? Or homeless people. Or who-knows-what-all that happens in big cities. No pollution either. I like it here.”
I had a feeling that Mara wasn’t too thrilled with me. I wasn’t too thrilled with her either. It was pretty clear that we had nothing in common.
When we were walking back with our buckets of blueberries I tried to get the conversation going again by asking her, “What do you do around here? I mean r
eally.”
Mara had that cold note in her voice again, but she told me anyway. “I fish with my father and brother sometimes. I take care of my little sister. And the chickens are my responsibility.”
“But what do you do for fun?”
“Just living here is fun,” she said. “You came here for vacation, didn’t you?”
“It wasn’t my idea. My parents dragged me here. I wanted to go back to Ireland.”
I noticed her eyes light up when I said “Ireland,” but she didn’t ask me anything about it.
“And,” she said, “I check the lobster traps. That can be fun.”
“Do you eat the lobsters?”
“Sure. We could have a lobster for lunch. We could cook it outside. That’s fun.”
“You cook them while they’re still alive, don’t you?”
“Of course. That’s the way it’s done. They die instantly.” She gave me that cold look again. “You’re not one of those city people who gets all sensitive about the poor lobsters, are you?”
“Why shouldn’t I be?” I asked. “How would you like to be thrown into boiling water?”
“If people didn’t eat lobsters my father wouldn’t make a living.”
“I just can’t say I approve of it, that’s all.” We’d reached her house. “Anyway,” I said, “I have to go. I told my mother I’d be home by lunch.”
I handed Mara the bucket of berries I’d picked. “Thanks,” I said. “It was fun.”
“You can have them. You picked them, didn’t you?” She was glaring at me. “Or are you afraid you’ll hurt them? After all, they’re alive.”
“That’s different,” I said. I turned and walked off without saying good-bye.
My parents were grilling hamburgers outside and had set a little table on the porch for lunch. They were delighted that I had met a girl my age and went on and on about the blueberries I picked. My mother dished them into white bowls and said we’d eat them with cream for dessert.
While we were eating, Mom and Dad asked me lots of questions about Mara and her family. I told them I thought it was disgusting to make your living capturing innocent lobsters. My mother asked me how I thought a cow got to be hamburgers. And my father said, “I just hope we can buy our lobsters directly from the O’Connells.”
At that moment I saw Mara coming toward our house. We all got up and went into the yard to meet her. She was carrying a bucket that she placed on the ground in front of us, saying, “My father said to give these to you.” We all looked in the bucket where three huge lobsters tried to move around in that cramped space. I was the only one in my family who didn’t say thank you.
My father offered Mara a hamburger, but she said she’d already eaten. My mother asked her if sometime she would give us a tour of the island. She said, “Sure. I could do it now.”
My father said, “Maybe we could do it tomorrow. I’d hoped to do some — ” He stopped abruptly, but my mother finished the sentence for him.
“Work,” she said. “I know that you brought your briefcase, Ed — after you promised me you wouldn’t work during our vacation.”
My father, seeing that Mara and I were just standing there watching them, said, “You know what, Mara, I think this afternoon would be just perfect.”
Mara seemed to like my parents a lot more than she liked me. She smiled and talked a blue streak while we traipsed behind her. She pointed out this field and that cove and told us who lived where. We heard about the worst hurricane, the biggest snowstorm, and the best lobster season. I was definitely b-o-r-e-d. But my parents loved the tour and seemed to have made up, at least for the moment. I thought, Maybe I can go back to New York and Mara can live with Mom and Dad for the next two weeks. Not just because I was bored but because I was suddenly afraid that my parents would spend the next twelve days arguing about my father and his work.
When we got back, Mara said she had to go home to clean out the chicken coop, and asked me if I wanted to help. I said, “No thanks.”
“Too messy for you?” she asked. There was that cold look again.
“I’ve got to write to Laine since I can’t call her,” I replied.
Mara jumped off the porch and said, “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Fat chance, I thought.
* * *
The next morning my parents announced that we were going to spend the day in Caddy’s Cove on the other side of the island. Their big plan was to dig for clams, lie on the rocks, and eat a picnic lunch of the lobster salad they’d made with the lobster I hadn’t eaten the night before. When I said I didn’t want to go, they just said, “Okay. Do whatever you want.”
So an hour or so later when Mara showed up I didn’t have much choice but to hang out with her. I showed her around the cabin, which of course she’d been in before. We played checkers on the porch and I kept asking her things such as if she’d ever been on a subway or an escalator and if she’d seen this movie and that movie. Since the movie theater closest to Pine Island was a boat ride and a twenty-mile drive away, Mara didn’t see many movies. She didn’t even have a VCR.
She asked me things such as whether I’d ever eaten a raw egg or driven a truck and how could I think I was such a big shot if I was afraid to sleep on Blueberry Hill alone at night. Sleeping outdoors without even a tent over her head was Mara’s idea of a thrill. I couldn’t imagine being brave enough to do that. But I didn’t let her know I thought she was brave.
And even though I knew she was dying to know all about my trip to Ireland I wasn’t going to tell her a thing about it unless she asked.
We played five games of checkers and Mara won four of them. Instead of saying she was a good player I said, “I guess since there’s nothing to do around here you play a lot of checkers.”
She ignored my comment and suggested we hike the rocks around the island. She said we’d start on the rock ledge in front of the cabin and climb the ledge around the whole island until we got back where we started.
Here’s why I wasn’t about to do it. If you slipped (or were pushed), you’d fall hundreds of feet into the crashing surf. Fun, huh?
I said, “Let’s play with my Barbie doll.”
I could tell that Mara was impressed with all the outfits I had for Barbie and that she liked playing with her. But she never said so.
The next day was cloudy and drizzly, so my mother was going to cook and my father was going to take out his briefcase. When I heard them start to argue about that I decided to bring my Barbie doll to Mara’s house. I was surprised to find that Mara was alone with her little sister. Alice was this cute one-year-old who was just learning to walk. I liked her better than Mara. So I played with Alice, and Mara played with my Barbie doll.
I couldn’t get over it. While Mara’s mother and father were fishing they trusted her with the baby. I didn’t know any other ten-year-olds who got to baby-sit like that. I pretended that I was the one who was responsible for Alice, which was a lot of fun.
Mara and I weren’t talking much, but after I’d put Alice down for her nap, Mara asked me, “Want to sleep out tonight? We don’t have to go far from the house if you’re afraid.”
“I’m not afraid and I don’t want to sleep out,” I said. “I think it’s stupid to sleep out-doors if you can be in a comfortable bed.”
“You’re just a snob,” replied Mara.
“Well, you’re just a hick,” I shot back. “So stay away from me, okay?”
“No problem.”
I stormed out of the house and ran all the way back to the cabin.
By the time I got to the cabin I was so filled with angry thoughts and feelings toward Mara, and toward my parents for bringing me to Pine Island, that I thought I’d burst. But I was quickly distracted from my anger. As I stepped onto the porch I heard this huge crash, and a scream from my father. I couldn’t get inside fast enough.
My mother and I reached Dad at the same time. He’d fallen off a step stool and was lying on the floor. “Ouch,” he s
aid. “Oh-hh, it hurts. Help me up.”
My mother told him to wait and not try to stand. “It’s my ankle,” he said. “I was trying to get a book from the top shelf.” I knew right away that he slipped off the step stool because he’d climbed it in stocking feet. When I was taking care of Alice I took off her socks so she wouldn’t slip all over when she tried to walk.
Even through my dad’s socks I could see that his ankle was getting puffy.
My mother said, “It must be sprained.”
“I’ve had sprains before,” he said. He grimaced in pain and I noticed how pale he was getting. “I think this time it’s broken.”
“Quick, Stacey,” my mother said. “Run to the O’Connells’ and see if Mara’s mother or father can take us over to the mainland. We’ve got to get your father to a hospital.”
I was so frightened that I was halfway to Mara’s before I remembered that her parents weren’t home. But I figured she’d know someone else who could take us to the mainland, so I kept going.
I spilled out my news and asked who could take us. “Me,” Mara said. “I can take him in the motorboat.”
“You can drive a motorboat?”
“Sure,” she said. Then she mimicked me, “What else is there to do around here?”
I didn’t care that she’d thrown that in my face. I was just glad someone could help my father. “You wake up Alice,” Mara said. “Her life jacket is hanging next to the kitchen door. Bring three adult-sized ones for you guys. I’ll drive the boat over to your dock.”
“How can I carry the life jackets and Alice?” I asked.
“Oh, right. I forgot you can’t drive. I was thinking you’d take the pickup.” By then Mara was in the kitchen. I was right behind her. In an instant, she was out the door, loaded down with life jackets.
I tried to imitate her efficient manner by remembering to grab extra diapers and bottles of juice and milk for Alice.
By the time I got to our cabin Mara had tied her motorboat to the dock and was running up the steps. That’s when I thought, how are we ever going to get my father down those stairs? But Mara had already figured it out.