week. The sun pours in through that east window, so be prepared to wake early or pull the covers over your face.”
Leah nodded and smiled.
Brooke hoisted the suitcase onto the bed with a grunt, then led her sister back into the main room. She directed Leah to a seat at the breakfast table, placed a bottle of soda pop in front of her, and set about preparing dinner. She took a container of barbecue from the restaurant out of the fridge and spooned it into a saucepan and set the pan to warming on the small stove. She spread some hushpuppies on a cookie sheet and slid them into the oven. Then she uncovered a bowl of slaw and put it on the table. She layered plates, napkins, and silverware onto one forearm and grabbed two glasses with her free hand and carried it all across the kitchen to the table. She quickly and almost effortlessly distributed the items into two perfectly arranged place settings, pausing only a fraction of a second (accompanied by the slightest frown) as she waited for Leah to lift the bottle of pop blocking free access to the table spot in front of her. She then returned to the stove to give the barbecue a stir and the tray of hushpuppies a quick shake.
Leah watched all this in amazement. Brooke never voluntarily did anything in the kitchen back home; and when Momma demanded she help out by setting the table for dinner, Brooke performed the chore with a grudging reluctance that caused it to take much longer than it should have. She also had a habit of mixing up the placement of the silverware or the glass, always shrugging when called on the mistake and asking with petulant disdain, “What’s it matter which side the fork is on anyway? Maybe I don’t want to grab it with my left hand,” leaving the listener to wonder if her misplaced fork was a mistake or an act of defiance.
But more so than the smooth efficiency of her table-setting technique—which, after all, had surely been refined in her weeks as a waitress—Leah was shocked to the point of unease at how relaxed and natural Brooke was, not only in the kitchen but in the cottage. Leah had no trouble, in principle at least, with a relaxed and content Brooke—though, truth be told, she couldn’t remember having tested the principle in Brooke’s case. Leah was troubled by a more basic question—where had her sister gone?
Brooke brought the hushpuppies in a hand-made sea-grass basket lined with a blue-checked napkin balanced on the crook of her left elbow while her left hand cupped a pottery bowl containing the steaming barbecue and her right hand held a plastic pitcher filled with iced tea. She set it all beside the bowl of slaw on the table between them then sat down. She pointed to the bowl of barbecue and said, “Be careful. That’s very hot.”
Leah pointed to Brooke’s left hand that had just been holding that bowl with no protective buffer.
Brooke looked at the hand as if it belonged to someone else then raised her eyes and laughed. “Asbestos palm!”
Leah could only shake her head in wonder, but at much more than Brooke’s burn-proof hand.
They ate the meal, which was all very tasty and perfectly seasoned and prepared, with a minimum of conversation. Brooke asked after Momma and Father and their Boston terrier Roscoe who had a bad hip and incontinence and might have to be put down soon but Momma still said “Not yet.” Leah asked after Greta, who had left on the first ferry that morning for the all-day trip to her friend’s house in Virginia. After Brooke said how sad Greta was not to get to see Leah (she’d be returning late on the night Leah, and Paul, were scheduled to leave in the early afternoon), she added an unlikely thanks. “I can’t say how much this means to me.”
Leah stared at her, not sure she’d understood her sister’s words.
Brooke held her stare across the table and said these words directly to her face. “I don’t think any of this was real until you got here.”
Leah wanted to respond that it still was not real to her but kept the thought to herself. Whatever it was her sister needed, she’d do her best to provide it.
Brooke broke the long silence with a laugh. “You are not going to believe this blackberry cobbler! I made it myself—at the restaurant of course and with Mrs. Polly’s own recipe, but still my little old hands and effort. You stay put while I warm it up.” And with that she stood and consolidated all the dishes and cleared the table completely in one trip. A few minutes later she returned with two huge portions of blackberry cobbler in white china bowls steaming around large scoops of vanilla ice cream that melted in white rivulets running down through the purple fruit and brown crust. Brooke was right—Leah couldn’t believe it.
That night Leah lay in Aunty Greta’s bed staring out through the screen of the east-facing window propped open with a stick. A weather front had come through just after dark and blown all the mist and dampness away from the island and replaced it with dry cool air and a brisk north wind that blew more or less constantly. Though Leah couldn’t hear that wind’s howl, she felt it as a steady roar across her face and arms outside the covers. She considered closing the window but knew she’d still feel the wind’s force through the vibrations in the floor and walls of the house. Besides, she wanted to smell the rich salt air the wind carried with it. That unmistakable odor, in whatever form it took—from fetid to rank to tonight’s clean freshness—had always eased Leah’s mind, intimated a vast munificent world beyond her knowing that was out there waiting to be discovered. That she’d brushed against that larger world and steadily explored its edges in their annual trips to the beach provided further assurance of safety and welcome.
But tonight that was all turned on its head. This isolated dot of sand in the middle of the ocean was a domain beyond any she’d encountered or even imagined in all her reading. She didn’t need to get taken up in a biplane (its own exercise in vulnerability) to fully appreciate this spit of land’s tenuous hold on existence. If this gale didn’t scour that sand clean (as it seemed destined to do at any second) then the waves would. Yet in the face of nature’s lack of welcome if not outright forbiddance, Brooke and Aunty Greta and the villagers and the village itself, the harbor, the breakwater, stood out in their will to persevere, seemed to thrive in the struggle, gain strength from it. What kind of order was this, thriving in pitched battle?
Or maybe thriving in the independence that could only be found out here on the edges, where no sane person would be. Was the struggle the price of their independence or its reward? These abstract questions would have been little more than interesting diversions—the subject for a sociology paper or a short story topic—about the island and its inhabitants, or family ruminations about Aunty Greta’s life choices. But once the place grabbed hold of Brooke, or she to it, such questions stopped being arbitrary to Leah, became the latest and most urgent of the ponderous life questions life was so adamantly placing in front of her. If she didn’t know the reasons behind her sister’s actions and choices, then what did she know, what could she count on?
Why was she in Aunty Greta’s bed anyway? Why wasn’t she lying beside Brooke, reading while Brooke did her nails or doodled in her scrapbook, the occasional brush of one’s knee against the other’s thigh or the rocking of the mattress under shifting body sufficient assurance, sufficient answer to all questions? Why were they separated on this reunion by the wood-planked wall, the wind-stirred, salt-laden darkness impenetrable as pitch? Why?
Ah, Your Highness, you ask the wrong question. It was white dolphin, standing beside her in white world with no water anywhere near.
Then what is the right one?
What is a good one but who is a better one.
Who?
White dolphin nodded, his white snout going up and down. With Brooke it is always ‘who?’
People are her reasons?
Her heart is her reason, but it settles on people.
Leah had long known this but had counted on being the ultimate resting place of that heart’s desire. If this weren’t so, where did that leave her? Where did it leave Brooke? Leah asked, Aunty Greta?
Affirmation but not destination, white dolphin said.
Shawnituck?
A place is not a person.
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Onion?
White dolphin smiled.
Leah didn’t know he could smile. But he is just a diversion, the latest in a long line.
Sometimes one crosses a line.
In the sand. Now it was Leah’s turn to smile.
Very good, Your Highness. But this is a line no one, least of all Brooke, saw.
Then what should I do?
White dolphin shrugged.
Leah didn’t know he could shrug either. I should do something.
You should be yourself, Your Highness. There is no one else to be.
And nothing else to do?
Being yourself is doing something.
But is it enough?
It will always be enough.
Enough what?
Enough, Your Highness.
Leah laughed. Let us go for a swim.
A swim?
Yes. You know—in the water, your tail moving us along.
I have never done that.
What do you mean? It is all you do.
White dolphin was adamant. No, it is not. I would know.
Leah sighed, fell finally beyond the white world into sleep.
Mere feet away, on the other side of the dividing wall, Brooke lay on her back somewhat more than half awake amidst a compelling vision of her own, a vision of something that hadn’t happened yet but seemed oh so near—Onion rising above her here in this bed: him to claim her, her to claim her destiny, or it her.
Leah propped