herself on her elbows on the blanket, looking up and down the miles of nearly deserted beach. There were a pair of fisherman about a half mile north looking hardly any bigger than toy men, their poles stuck in the sand like exclamation points at the end of their brief sentence written out on a white sand sheet (Leah thought the metaphor—it was not a reassuring one). A quarter mile to the south a young couple with a toddler daughter (apparent from the pink sun bonnet) huddled in the small shade of a beach umbrella in rainbow colors.
And that was it, plus the two sisters of course, splayed out on Aunty Greta’s blanket the pale beige of the sand, all the more to set off the girls’ rich tan and bright colored suits—Brooke’s a lime-green bikini, Leah’s a purple one piece—and multi-colored beach towels. There weren’t even any boats visible in the endless water stretching from here to England, and no planes since the Navy fighter had roared past at wave-tip height just as they were descending the dunes that hid the highway and dirt parking lot.
Brooke reached up and tapped her sister’s shoulder. “Would you relax,” she said from behind big round sunglasses with half her face buried in the towel she was using as a pillow.
Leah glanced at her sister then quickly back at the desolate seascape. Her furrowed brow said all she needed to convey—this empty beach has me weirded out! Leah had never seen anything quite so stark. She couldn’t help but picture what they looked like from high above (there were a few seagulls gliding on thermals barely visible in the hazy blue)—a tiny island of human flesh on a larger island of beach on a larger island called Shawnituck and all dwarfed by endless blue—the blue of the ocean, the blue of the sky.
“I told you the beaches were empty,” Brooke said.
Not this empty.
“Empty is empty, Leah. There’d be a few more people on the weekend but not many—might have to go a couple turnouts farther north to get some privacy!” Brooke laughed. Last weekend she’d made Onion tote their heavy cooler all the way back to the car twice after she’d got to the top of the dune and seen other people within a few hundred yards of open beach. At the third turnout, Onion had kept the cooler in the trunk while she rose to the top of the dune, then dragged it out and lugged it up the slope after she gave the all clear—meaning no humans in sight.
For Leah, empty was unsettling—not just at the beach (though she was long trained by stays at Bogue to expect at least modest crowds) but anywhere. It may have been related to her deafness, as she needed others nearby to signal when, and when not, to be concerned or alert. But in her mind the fear went beyond compensation for her limits (which were, after all, innate in all people, whether they knew it or not). To her such total isolation was unnatural, for humans anyway and also for most creatures, if you spent much time watching the world. She had no problem being set apart; she was set apart every minute of every day. What she had a problem with was the absence of the purpose that came from interactive exchange and obligation. She’d not fully understood till just this minute how important casual interaction with others—even if only a glance or a smile or a wave—was to her sense of self-worth. She’d spent her whole life learning to integrate with the public; now momentarily deprived of that public, she felt lost.
Brooke ringed Leah’s near wrist with her thumb and forefingers. “I’m here.”
Leah looked down, her eyes still clouded with doubt.
“So relax,” Brooke said and pulled Leah’s arm to the side and caused her to fall flat on the blanket.
Leah looked miffed but didn’t try to sit up again. She rolled her head to face Brooke across the gap of blanket. When you decide to flee, you flee! She tucked her hand under her opposite arm at the end of her signing, to denote not only flight but hiding.
Brooke nodded. “Like Greta.”
Leah refused the bait of diversion. Are you coming back? Her hand ended this time squarely in the middle of her chest—back as in to their home, to her heart.
Brooke frowned.
Are you? Leah repeated.
Brooke rolled from her stomach onto her back and stared up at the sky. Without looking, she found Leah’s near arm and pulled it across her waist. She turned the wrist up and slowly, ever so gently, ran her fingers up and down the soft pale flesh, recalling the games of tickle-flesh they’d play for hours on end as kids.
Leah understood Brooke’s answer, and also understood there’d be no changing it. The realization made her sad but was not a surprise. She elected to close her eyes and enjoy Brooke’s touch for as long as it lasted in the present, for all it recalled of the past. And with her eyes closed, she could almost forget how utterly alone and vulnerable they were in this place, how utterly alone she was now.
A little later Brooke roused from her shallow daze and sat up. She was instantly awake and clear-headed, no momentary confusion about setting or circumstance. Though she’d always been so—a quick riser—this reaction in this location was for her a silent affirmation of rightness of place and trajectory. She’d always known this was where she’d end up.
She looked down at her dozing sister, lying on her stomach, her face turned away. Not seeing that face made it easier for Brooke to believe what she’d been subconsciously telling herself for months—that Leah could stand on her own, was safe outside her protective radius. Leah’s long legs, tanned and toned back set off by the purple suit, strong shoulders, and blond hair radiant in the hazy sunshine all combined to affirm this aspect of sufficiency, of independence. Brooke gladly ignored the fact that she, or anyone else (were anyone else in the vicinity) could scream at the top of her lungs inches from Leah’s resting head and Leah would not rouse. But as if fate chose not to let Brooke shrug off her obligations so conveniently, a Navy fighter jet roared out of the south, its rumble audible seconds before is silver skin came visible a few hundred yards offshore and not twenty feet above the waves. It streaked past in barely a blink but its rumble lingered for almost a minute after it was gone. Brooke couldn’t help but gasp at the sound then again, a minute later, when she recalled her sister’s presence and discovered Leah unruffled by the intrusion, still resting with her eyes closed.
Brooke forced aside the reminder by reaching for Greta’s wicker picnic basket and their simple lunch stored inside. In the effort she intentionally brushed Leah’s leg with her forearm.
Leah rolled her head to face Brooke, her blinking eyes clouded by sleep. Unlike Brooke, Leah took awhile to rise from her sleep and the dreams that companioned it.
Lunchtime, Sleepyhead, Brooke mouthed without sound. She couldn’t have said if it were silence she was preserving or solidarity with Leah. It just felt right.
Leah grinned, not at the prospect of lunch but at Brooke’s reliable presence. At that moment she saw nothing except her sister, could not have said where she was or why she was there, could have cared less.
Brooke smiled and shook her head at her sister’s blind and helpless trust. She raised the basket’s leather-hinged top and unpacked its contents onto the blanket between them. First were peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, their oldest and still favorite shared picnic lunch (neither ate them at any other time), though these had the crusts still in place, the bread was whole-wheat sunflower seed from Sally’s All Things Baked in the village, the jelly Greta’s fig preserves, and the peanut butter all natural unblended. Then there were four squares of wax-paper wrapped brownies, some rinsed grapes (scuppernongs from Mrs. Polly’s vines) in paper towels, and a thermos of iced tea spiced with spearmint sprigs from Marybelle’s herb beds.
Leah, back in the present now but trying hard to ignore the sense of isolation that had unsettled her earlier, sat up and crossed her legs opposite her sister. That morning she tried to help prepare the lunch but had been waved away by new homemaker Brooke, so this was her first view of their fare. It didn’t take heightened powers of observation to see the message in Brooke’s careful choices—all old standbys in new renditions—but Leah was unsure whether to be impressed or depressed by the mixed reference. Was the menu a new
phase or the end of the old? She was sure Brooke intended the former, but was Brooke right? She gave her sister an ambivalent grin.
“What? Don’t like sunflower seeds?”
Leah laughed. Love them. This is wonderful. Her eyes donned a mischievous glint as she pointed at the brownies.
“What?” Then Brooke caught her meaning. “Leah, how could you think such a thing? From scratch from our recipe, no supplements added!”
No Onion grass?
“I wouldn’t do that!” Then she added, “At least not without asking. But if you’d like some—.”
Leah waved off the suggestion—Thanks but no thanks! But then she asked, after unwrapping her sandwich and pouring a paper cup full of tea, When do I meet this mystery man? She passed her hand across her face as in a shroud.
Brooke laughed. “Onion is a lot of things, but mysterious isn’t one of them! I asked him to come over after work tonight.”
Leah nodded over bites of her sticky sandwich. The mix of ingredients gave the old standby a totally new and exotic cast.
“It might be kind of late.”
Leah shrugged—That’s O.K. I will wait up.
Brooke looked out at the water, sparkling blue in the midday sun, with her hand holding her sandwich resting on her knee. “I was thinking maybe