looked up at her sister. Brooke’s mouth fell open.
Then Brooke grabbed Leah’s hand and they ran down the road toward the next house—the Taylors’, empty this time of day—and ducked behind the hedge just as the Miltons’ car emerged from the drive and headed for the main road. It cruised slowly past the Taylor house and the Fulcher girls peeking around the end of the hedge. Mr. and Mrs. Milton were in the front seat, staring stone-faced straight ahead. Sally was in the back, gazing out the side window and straight toward Brooke and Leah. If she saw them, she didn’t let on. Her gaze appeared distant and sad.
Once the car had turned right and disappeared on the main road, Brooke turned without speaking and headed in the same direction. Leah got ahead of her and asked about the cats.
“I’ll come back tonight and feed them,” she said. “It’s the least I can do.”
There were a handful of times in their childhood when Brooke’s actions totally confounded Leah—well, maybe more than a handful. Of those times, there were a select few when Brooke seemed to be acting from something or someone outside herself. Conscientiously tending Sally’s cats that week, then bringing her school assignments every day and leaving them beside the door, then not participating in the vicious gossip that spread around the school before Sally returned a month later, or the continued gossip that greeted her return with those loose-fitting clothes (to hide her residual weight gain) and wounded gaze—that was one of those times, perhaps the single most inexplicable, especially in light of the fact that Sally never again spoke to Brooke, let alone thanked her.
The Ring
At some point early in her teens (Leah couldn’t say exactly when), Shawnituck Island became Brooke’s vision of Shangri-la. They’d known about the small island off the coast accessible only by ferry for years—with no paved streets (just boards laid across the sand) and a few hundred year-round residents tripled during the summer months with the influx of renters and hardy or poor or ignorant souls sleeping in tents in the no-see-um infested campground (with swarms of mosquitoes waiting outside the tent if anyone attempted to flee the no-see-ums). They received these and many other details about the island from Aunty Greta, the self-described “Black Lamb” of Momma’s family, the youngest of six children. She’d followed a native islander from the coastal state college out to the island one summer long ago; and though the boy married a local girl (“first cousins” Greta said), she’d chosen to stay on anyway, living in a small cottage and painting watercolors she sold to tourists for a pittance and swapped with locals for services or supplies.
Brooke and Leah would see Aunty Greta once a year, the day after Christmas at Mim and Pap’s house—Momma’s parents—for their annual family gathering. Father and Momma and the sisters and Matt (sulking in one corner of the backseat, far back as anyone could remember) would leave mid-morning for the two-hour drive down east on thinly travelled but well-maintained roads. Aunty Greta (according to her version) would have to rise before dawn and brave stormy seas on the decrepit ferry then drive for interminable (her word) hours through swamps infested with snakes and cloaked in spooky fog just to reach the highway pointed west toward her birthplace. “From there on it was smooth sailing,” she’d always conclude, letting the girls, and anyone else who was listening (most weren’t), know that mainland travel was an exercise in privilege and pampering.
She gave the sisters hand-made presents—animal figures made of shells when they were younger, then photos of the ocean or sunsets mounted in driftwood frames lined with shells, and more recently jewelry—bracelets and necklaces—with the shells held together by monofilament fishing line. She’d always dismiss their awe and praise with a wave of her arm and an aw-shucks “That’s nothing.” But then later, after dinner and a couple of glasses of sherry, she’d sit in the soft upholstered chair in her old bedroom with a sister on each knee (or each armrest, once they’d grown taller) and describe in detail where she’d found the shells she’d used in their gifts, and how from the moment she’d spotted them in the water or on the sand she had a vision of their final placement, a vision that linked that particular shell to either Brooke or Leah through the hand and heart of Aunty Greta, her face weathered and worn beyond its years.
Maybe that was what had captured Brooke’s imagination at a formative moment—Aunty Greta’s passion, and the romance implicit in her life story. Or maybe it was the romantic appeal of the Shawnituck Island itself, cut off from the world and time, even its language preserving the Elizabethan accents and vocabulary of its seventeenth century settlers, idiom that would make Brooke laugh and cause Leah to tilt her head, in much the way she had on viewing Romeo and Juliet. Leah for her part never understood Brooke’s fascination. The Shawnituck Island she knew, both from Greta’s stories and her face, seemed a harsh and demanding place that shaped its residents, human and otherwise, far more than they shaped it. Though she loved all the gifts Aunty Greta gave her, it was a watercolor Greta had given her parents that most vividly represented both her aunt and her aunt’s adopted home. It was of an ancient gnarled live oak shaped by and locked in perpetual battle with invisible gale-force winds.
So starting at about age thirteen, every spring Brooke would ask Momma if they could go to Shawnituck this summer for their annual beach vacation. And every year Momma would give the same unbudging answer—it was too far, the ferry service was unreliable, and what would they do if a hurricane came along during their stay. She never mentioned that Father and Greta “had a history” and an even greater hurricane might form if those two were kept in proximity for days, let alone weeks. Instead, each year they made their mid-July pilgrimage to the same second-row cottage on Bogue Beach, a thin strip of barrier-island sand firmly anchored to the mainland by a four-lane drawbridge and stocked with many of the amenities of home—supermarkets, arcades, movie theaters, libraries—and even some of the same residents, when the vacation dates coincidentally overlapped.
The summer Brooke was sixteen and still on her learner’s permit (but not in the vagaries of beach traffic, Father made clear before they even left home), the Garrisons overlapped their first week on Bogue, staying at a plush beachfront place a block to the east. Within a day, Brooke had decided that Jennifer Garrison, a year behind her in school, was her new best friend, perhaps in part because Stuart Garrison, a year ahead in school, looked a whole lot more alluring dressed in swimming trunks and backlit by the beach’s sunshine than he did back home. Jennifer was happy for Brooke’s attentions, whatever their origins, as they palled around with long walks on the beach, afternoons at the pier’s arcade, and evenings strolling (or, as Brooke said, “trolling”) the beach and gently rocking pier thrust far out into the ocean and stocked with fishermen lolling and smoking and watching the teenaged girls strolling past out of the corners of their eyes. By then, Momma had reluctantly allowed Brooke to start wearing two-piece suits (“But not too skimpy!); and her sister’s breasts, though still small, were perkily displayed in those suits or under the bright tank top with her bra strap peeking out beneath the thin shoulder straps.
Leah, with no breasts displayed within her one-piece suit, was not invited on any of the girls’ excursions and, truth be told, just as glad. She didn’t like Jennifer, who talked too fast and with the annoying habit of looking down when she spoke, leaving Leah confused about her words and acting stupid in her presence. Leah was this year content with their old beach pursuits—taking long walks with Momma and Father (Matt was off at Boys State, a two-week on-campus retreat for rising high-school seniors), collecting shells in her plastic bucket, making a sandcastle or two, burying Father’s legs in mounds of fragrant and sloppy dark sand. It was as if she knew, by watching Brooke change, that these family moments were fleeting; and she should enjoy and preserve them long as she could.
And all the other times she read—on the beach under the umbrella, on the chaise on the cottage’s screened porch, curled up in the soft-cushioned chair in the open family room, or in the top bunk before going to sleep or
on waking. The books she brought from home, borrowed from the library, were all nineteenth century novels by women—Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch. There were also a few recent additions on the cottage’s bookshelf, and she read all those by women—The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Delta Wedding, and If Morning Ever Comes. Between her real parents and her imagined lives, Leah hardly missed her sister during her Garrison week. She was almost glad to be on the sidelines, spared the burden of having to try to understand her sister’s choices and evolving behavior.
Brooke would go out every evening—“Oh, just hanging out with Jen”—while Father wrestled with the rabbit ears of the T.V. in hopes of getting a snowy version of Kojak or Bonanza and Momma sat at the dining table and leafed through her Redbook magazines, smoking her daily cigarette, and Leah escaped into her fictional worlds that generally seemed more real than the cottage world her body occupied. Then the three would retire and Leah would lie in the upper bunk with the lights out and nothing but the smell of salt air and the