Barrier Islands
by
Jeffrey Anderson
Copyright 2016 by Jeffrey Anderson
This story is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
1
Brooke Fulcher Howard sat on the blanket spread on the sand gazing at the black ocean in the night. At first it seemed there wasn’t much to feel and absorb. The sound of the surf breaking at the first bar twenty yards offshore, the warm marsh-laden breeze out of the west, the fluffy gray-tinged clouds racing past on the horizon east, even the rocking-horse moon settling in the south were all of a dream, a vast all-encompassing soothing dream of rest. Had Brooke been of an introspective sort, she would have found this an odd dream for a twenty-two year old woman.
Then a slash of silver like a meteor’s streak only down at the horizon cut across the murmuring ocean and was gone. The sight evoked a gasp, stirring her from the daze. She laughed at herself, more for the idle dream than for the sudden fright that woke her from it. Without looking she reached out to her right and found the anchor of Jodie’s foot cased in the pink bootie Miss Polly, Jodie’s paternal great-grandmother, had knit for her.
“Your Daddy is showing off,” Brooke said as if her daughter could understand though Jodie was only six and a half months old and asleep in any case. “What do you think of a guy surfing in the dark in November with a shark sighting just last week?” She shook her head and chuckled. “But that’s what he wanted to do on our anniversary—our anniversary! He’s out there surfing, and I am left to sit here in the dark watching over you.” The baby was lying in her collapsible canvas and metal-tube cradle that Bridge Howard, her paternal grandfather, had fashioned from his garage full of junk with the hand-painted sign Wind and Wave Salvage out front.
It was Brooke and Onion’s first anniversary. Onion’s real name was Roger Howard, but he’d been known as Onion to everyone on Shawnituck Island since his days breading onion rings as a youngster in the family restaurant. It was November 20th, certainly late in the season to be doing anything in the water. But the day, which had been bright and surprisingly hot, had given way to a warm evening. And when Brooke had asked what he wanted to do for their anniversary, Onion had tied a pirate’s skull and crossbones kerchief over her eyes and led her by one hand while she carried Jodie on her shoulder and he carried who knows what all else in his other arm along the twisting paths from the converted garage where they were living behind his parents’ house through the sand roads and across the paved highway—the only pavement on the island— and over the dunes to the beach sloping to the ocean.
Of course Brooke knew where they were going, knew every step of this path from her many times traversing it at all hours of the day and in every weather, sometimes alone, sometimes with Onion, more recently with Jodie on her hip or shoulder, finding her way to the closest approach of the sea, to her place of peace and regeneration amidst all the trials of her life. But this night, with Onion’s hand leading her blind, she thought of the first time she’d been led down this path, led by this same hand and blindfolded then too, that time carrying nothing but each other and the seed of love that would be planted as they sat on that same beach in that same dark, June that time, only their hands touching, nothing more, as they talked quietly and then sometimes not at all and stared off toward the vast and gently murmuring ocean.
This time she was carrying her daughter, and whatever Onion was carrying made him winded by the time they cleared the top of the final dune and stumbled downward to a spot partway to the ocean. He let go of her hand and ran off without even stopping to untie her blindfold let alone help her spread out the blanket and assemble the cradle that he’d dropped when he took off. She had to do that alone while keeping Jodie from getting sand in her diaper.
Yet she someway dodged annoyance at Onion’s insensitivity, insulated or entranced by that memory of the first night down that path to this spot. She let the warm and soothing salt breeze carry her mind back to her original vision of this island as home to her future, a future that blended seamlessly with the touch of the boy that would become her husband and father of her child. Her dream progressed seamlessly to her half-memory half-idealized vision of this boy rising above her in the dark for them both to claim their prize.
A scream shattered her dream and cleaved the darkness. Something thrashed in the water just off shore then another scream. A dark shape silhouetted by the moonlight stumbled out of the surf and collapsed.
Brooke leapt to her feet. “Onion?” she yelled. “What’s wrong?”
“Help me,” a weak voice croaked. “Brookie, help me!”
“Onion!” Brooke screamed. She ran toward the figure writhing by the waterline. Though she was running as fast as she could, her feet seemed to get stuck in the sand at each step, making the short jog interminable. The night was throwing off sparks in every direction. “Onion!”
Finally she reached her husband. She knelt beside his body and gently rolled him onto his back. He said nothing. Was he in shock? Was he dead? He had on a wetsuit over his swimming trunks. It was cool and slick and shiny in the dark. She grabbed his bare ankles and gently pulled his two legs out straight. They moved normally, no breaks or obvious injury there. She slid her hands up over his thighs and waist and stomach, fearing that at any moment she’d come upon a gaping wound or a protruding bone. But nothing—all felt normal. Then she reached his arms. The left was fine—floppy but intact. She crossed his chest to the right. But there was no right arm. The wetsuit’s shoulder and sleeve were empty, just loose rubber. She gasped. She thought she’d throw up. Her mind raced. Where was the nearest help? How long would it take to summon? How could she leave him, but how could she get help without leaving him?
“Brookie,” he moaned. “Brookie, save me.” The words trailed off to silence.
Brooke leaned over, pressed her mouth close to his ear. “Tell me what to do!” she hissed.
“Save me.”
She pressed her lips to his cheek. It was surprisingly warm, warmer than her lips, warmer than anything in the night.
At her kiss he groaned and rolled onto his stomach. He thrashed around in the sand. She wanted to hold him but feared she might get hurt or she might hurt him. She started to cry. She was watching her husband in his death throes.
Then the thrashing stopped and the body lay utterly still. She was afraid to touch it. After an excruciatingly long pause, the body rolled over and sat up. Onion, both arms now properly fitted in the wetsuit’s sleeves, reached forward and hugged his wife. “You saved my life, Brookie!” he cried. “How can I ever repay you?” Then he burst out laughing.
Brooke pushed him away and leapt to her feet. “You jerk!”
He fell backward in the sand, his laughter coming out in shrieks.
“You freaking jerk!”
Between gasps for air, he managed to say, “You saved me. Your kiss reattached my arm.” Then he collapsed in a new spasms of laughter.
Behind her, Brooke could hear Jodie crying. She kicked sand toward her prostrate husband then turned to the sound of her baby’s cries. Jodie was hungry and needed to be fed. The timer in Brooke’s body already knew this fact, as somewhere in all the commotion her breasts had begun to leak into her padded maternity bra.
She’d just finished nursing Jodie when Onion’s wetsuit shiny in the moonlight resolved itself from the inky dark and came up to where she sat. He dropped his surfboard beside the blanket, tossing a light spray of cool sand across her feet and legs. She grunted in disgust but didn’t say anything as she pushed her face into the soft feathers of her daughter’s hair, breathing in the soothing aroma of baby shampoo and talcum p
owder. Jodie was already drifting back to sleep, led there by her now full stomach and the embracing dark.
Onion flopped down on the thin strip of available blanket, his wetsuit brushing against her near shoulder.
“Don’t touch me!” she growled in a fierce whisper.
“Aww, come on, Brookie! You got to admit it was pretty funny.”
“You scaring me to death isn’t funny!”
“You saved me, Baby! Maybe I hadn’t got bit by a shark, but you still saved me. It’s like a symbol for our love, how you came out here and made me whole. That’s my anniversary vow.”
Brooke lifted her face from Jodie’s hair and looked at him. He faced her from a foot away. His skin was pale and silver in the moonlight, his black hair slicked back and gleaming like a halo. She wondered again how much of this was vision, how much real. “A metaphor.”
“Yeah, a metaphor, a symbol for our love.”
She faced forward, toward the ocean lapping invisible in the near distance. “Next time send a dozen roses.” She made no move to touch him. Jodie was still on her chest. But her tone had softened.
“Where am I going to get roses in November out here?”
She didn’t say anything. She clung to Jodie to keep from surrendering.
He leapt up and disappeared into the dark.
She shook her head and cooed to her floppy headed sleeping baby. Then she set Jodie gently in the canvas cradle.
Onion returned carrying a large bouquet of dune grass tassels held together by a woven reed band. He got down on one knee, held out the bouquet, and said, “Brooke Renee Fulcher, would you be my lawful wedded wife, to have and to hold in sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer, from this day forward?”
Brooke hesitated before accepting the bouquet. “I will,” she whispered.
Onion then took her left hand, gently prized her loose fist open, and said, “With this ring I plight thee my troth.” He slid a shell over the knuckle of her ring finger and pushed it against the simple gold band. “Let this ring be a symbol of our undying love.”
Brooke laughed. “A metaphor.”
Onion said, “That too.”
Brooke rolled the shell ring around on her finger. It was a perfect fit. “How did you find this in the dark?”
“Cat’s eyes.”
She thought a moment. “Did you have this stuff stowed behind the dune?”
Onion was silent.
“Did you have this planned all along?”
“My lips are sealed,” he said, still kneeling in front of her, like her prince emerging real from her dream.
She set her bouquet to one side and reached forward to take his hands in hers. She pulled him toward her till his sealed lips touched hers. She slowly fell backwards to lie on the blanket, making sure his body followed to its rest atop her. She discovered then that he’d somewhere shed his wetsuit and was clothed only in his nylon bathing suit. This made the subsequent series of actions, another metaphor, far simpler than it would have been with the tight-fitting wetsuit.
When they’d completed the consummation of his vows, he rolled off and exhaled to the night and the stars.
She twined the fingers of one hand in his loose counterpart and found Jodie’s booty-clad foot with her other hand. She was happy but also very hungry. “Did you bring anything to eat, Mister Sneaky?”
He snorted. “How many hands do you think I have?”
“You had enough a minute ago.”
“That helper isn’t load-rated for heavy lifting.”
“If it can’t carry a lunchbox, what good is it?”
“Want me to show you again?”
Her hand drifted to the fork in his legs, the nest of charms he’d covered with his loose swimsuit. “I’m tempted to call your bluff, but first I need something to eat.”
“I thought we’d go by the restaurant on our way back and grab some take-out.”
“That’s good, because I haven’t cooked anything.”
“So who’s the Sneaky now?”
“Wives don’t cook dinner on their first anniversary.”
“Says who?”
“The Bible.”
“Missed that commandment.”
“It’s there.”
Onion sat up and reached into his canvas knapsack. “How about sharing a doobie on their first anniversary?” He passed a crudely rolled joint under her nose.
She’d quit smoking pot soon as she knew she was pregnant and continued the prohibition after Jodie was born for fear of making her baby stoned through her breast milk. “I don’t know, Onion.”
“Come on, Brookie. You splitting a doobie isn’t going to make Jodie retarded.” He lit the joint and took a long drag, then offered it to her.
She hesitated then said, “No more retarded than the DNA from her one-armed shark-bit father.” She sat up and took the joint.
He released the air smoke from his lungs, coughed once, then said hoarsely, “My thoughts exactly.”
“A metaphor,” Brooke said, before taking a long hit off the joint.
“Yeah.”
Onion dropped his surfboard, the collapsed cradle, and his slimy wetsuit at the foot of the side steps leading up to the restaurant’s front porch. Brooke, with the awake again and wide-eyed Jodie on her hip and the canvas tote over her shoulder, paused at the foot of the steps. “Why don’t you go in and get dinner. I’ll head back to the house, change Jodie, and put out some plates.”
“But I don’t know what you want.”
“The usual”—by which she meant fried clam strips, onion rings, and slaw.
“You know Miss Polly will be mad if she doesn’t get to snuggle Peach Pie.” Miss Polly was Onion’s grandmother and owner of the restaurant, and Peach Pie was her nickname for Jodie.
Brooke glanced around the restaurant’s entry. Though the parking lot was full, there was no line on the porch or inside the foyer; so Miss Polly wouldn’t be busy seating customers. She’d probably already spotted them (she has eyes in the back of her head, Brooke well knew from her days of waitressing), and there’d be hell to pay if she snuck off with the baby without saying hi. She looked down over her rumpled shorts and smudged gray sweatshirt, and she knew her hair—formerly in a short boyish crop but now letting it grow out shoulder-length like before she’d come to Shawnituck—must be a tangled mess. “I must look a fright,” she said in half-hearted resistance.
“Since when did that matter?” Then he noted her frown and deftly bent and kissed the side of her face, nibbling gently on her ear before he rose back up. “You’ll always be the pearl in my oyster,” he whispered.
She gave in. “Just for a minute.”
He laughed. “Of course.”
“Yeah, sure.” She dropped the tote beside the surfboard at the bottom of the steps. She considered digging out her worn sandals but decided not to bother. Onion did pull on his tie-dyed t-shirt but remained barefoot also. Had he even brought shoes? They walked up the steps and across the wide porch. The boards were rough and splintery; but with their feet callused from months going barefoot, they didn’t notice.
Inside, the bright foyer with Sanford Jones’ watercolors hanging on the walls was unusually empty and quiet. This shocked Brooke. She knew from her stint as a waitress that Miss Polly never left the cash register unattended. But there it was, unguarded, sitting atop the glass-sided counter with the ship in a bottle displayed below. Brooke turned and looked into the dining room—really, two rooms with a wide wood-framed arched opening in the middle. The tables were all set and laid out but there were no diners seated at them.
“What the heck?” she said. Without waiting for Onion, she strode across the entry foyer to the open doorway leading into the dining room.
“Surprise!” What seemed a hundred voices shouted in unison, followed by the racket of whistling party horns and kazoos and accompanied by thrown confetti and streamers. A sign reading Happy Anniversary Brooke and Onion hung across the back wall over the windows
that looked out onto the now dark harbor.
Before she could turn and curse her husband for leading her into this trap, she and the baby were swallowed by the crowd of well-wishers, with Miss Polly leading the way followed closely by Onion’s parents, Bridge and Lil, and his younger sister.
“Let me see my slice of Peach Pie,” Miss Polly said as she lifted Jodie off Brooke’s hip and held her up to the crowd like a trophy. “Now I got my great-grandbaby, you can finally eat!” she shouted.
All the crowd cheered.
“Almost had a mutiny,” Miss Polly said to Onion over Brooke’s shoulder. “Where have you been?”
Onion laughed. “You know how Brookie is about her hair and make-up.”
Brooke kicked him in the shin without turning around.
“Oww,” he cried but also managed to find a little opening between her sweatshirt and shorts and slide a finger under the waistband. His hand remained there as he came alongside her and together they waded into the crowd of well-wishers.
Awhile later after they got separated (and who knows where Jodie was), Brooke was cornered by Malcolm White who was again trying to convince her to help him start a line of “island” shell jewelry (it would be bought from some overseas supplier) in his small gift shop. “You choose and manage the inventory; I’ll provide the shelf space; we split the proceeds,” he said with his usual blend of enthusiasm and authority.
Brooke wondered if he and Polly had had a fling. Malcolm was decades younger than Polly, but they sure shared that overbearing and imperious manner. Maybe he was her son, she thought for the first time. Then she laughed to herself. That would be impossible. Out here it was O.K. for a man to sow his seeds wherever he could find a willing partner, but heaven forbid if a women became pregnant with the fruit of those seeds. Then it was the altar or off the island—voluntarily or not on either choice. There were no other options. “I told you, Malc—we don’t have the money to invest.” She was the only youngster who called him by his first name. All the island kids called him Mr. White with an air of fear or respect depending on the situation.
“Polly would give you a loan.”
“I’m not taking money from my in-laws.”
“Greta then.”
Greta was Brooke’s mother’s younger sister, an unmarried island immigrant of twenty years standing who made a scratch living painting watercolors and framing them with shells and driftwood for sale in island gift shops. She was Brooke’s connection to Shawnituck. Brooke had come here the summer before last, between her sophomore and junior years at Center, to live with Greta and find a summer job. She found the job (at this restaurant) and then Onion and never left. “I’m not going to ask Greta for money either.” Where was Greta, anyway? Brooke hadn’t seen her for days. Was she feuding with Polly again or shacked up with Andy at his light-keeper’s house?
“Your parents?”
Brooke laughed at that. Her mainland parents, safely couched in their country-club lifestyle, had quietly distanced themselves following the wedding. Momma still sent newsy letters once a month, and Brooke responded with sterilized accounts of island life and a few snapshots of the fast-growing Jodie. But neither Momma nor Father had been out there since the wedding and had only seen Jodie at the mainland hospital after she was born. Brooke planned to correct that situation by going home at Christmas, with or without Onion. “Malc, give up. I’m not a salesgirl or a businesswoman.”
“Got to do something, and out here it’s sea or sales,” he said, repeating his favorite slogan.
Just then Onion’s younger sister Daphne, nicknamed Daffy, used a plate brimming with items off the buffet to wedge her way between Mr. White and Brooke. “You must be starving,” she said to Brooke. “I brought you a plate.”
Brooke had all but forgot the original reason they’d stopped at the restaurant (or what she thought had been the reason). But on seeing—and, more importantly, smelling—the plate of fried clams and pork barbecue and French fries and slaw and hushpuppies, she realized she was ravenous. “For me?” she exclaimed, genuinely touched at Daffy’s thoughtfulness. Since marrying Onion and settling into their garage apartment, she’d lost the newcomer status and favors she’d enjoyed that first summer. Now it was, most times, serve yourself or don’t get served at all.
“Let the girl eat,” Daffy told Mr. White with an uncommon assertiveness. She was the only student in the senior class of the K through 12 island school across from the church in the center of the village. She was homely but bright, bashful but inquisitive; and she looked to Brooke for hints of the world beyond the island.
Brooke turned toward Daffy, leaned over and delicately kissed her sister-in-law on each cheek, then took the plate of food. By the time she turned back, Malc White had moved on to some other prey—in this case Lorelei Bradford, immigrant wife of island native Sloop Bradford. She owned the shop across from Malc’s, and he was pressing her to merge. Brooke breathed a sigh of relief for both the escape and the food. “You’re a darling,” she said.
Daffy smiled broadly, her large mouth suddenly dominating her face in a manner that was simultaneously endearing and haunting. “I wouldn’t be much good at a water rescue, but I can lifeguard with the best at a party.”
“Didn’t know you had such talent,” Brooke said between French fries.
Daffy lost her smile and glanced to the floor. “Lots of things you don’t know about me.”
Brooke looked at her sister-in-law’s dull taupe-colored hair. Some blond highlights would do wonders, and a volumnizing conditioner and maybe some rouge on her cheeks. These were products from a bygone mainland existence, when appearances dominated daily life and preparations. She no longer used (or could afford) them herself, but suddenly wanted them for Daffy. “Like your college plans?”
Daffy looked up with a fresh glint in her eyes. “You went to Center, right?”
Center was the main campus of the state-operated college system. As its name implied, it was near the center of the state, a world away from remote Shawnituck in distance and lifestyle. “Two years.”
“Major?”
Brooke laughed. “Partying.”
Daffy frowned.
“Biology,” Brooke corrected. “Though I was thinking of switching into the new computer science department before I washed ashore out here.”
“Really? I want to be a vet. That’s pre-med, right?”
“I think so.”
“Must be tough.”
“You could do it.” Brooke suddenly wanted success, and a life beyond the island, for her reticent sister-in-law.
“You think so?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“Do you know anyone at Center who could help me get in?”
Brooke laughed. “Probably don’t want to use me as a reference.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say there were a few incidents that didn’t exactly endear Brooke Fulcher to the school’s administration.”
“Nothing too awful?”
“Just student pranks.”
“I’d love to go to Center.”
“Then do it.”
“Daddy would never agree.”
“Why not?” Bridge had always been kind to Brooke and seemed more open-minded than most of the island’s natives.
“He says I’m too naïve.”
“What’s he want you to do?”
“Stay here.”
“And?”
“And marry some island boy, have more grandchildren.”
Brooke glanced around the room and spotted Jodie, cradled in her mother-in-law Lil’s arms. As if on cue, Bridge bent over his only grandchild to-date and tickled her stomach. Jodie’s face scrunched up in what was surely a giggle, inaudible amidst all the talk and laughter; her tiny hands reached out and pulled her Pap’s whiskers. He laughed in delight, that low bellow rumbling across the room. At just that moment, Brooke felt a trickle of wetness high on her inner thigh, the real leavings of her dream-like tryst with On
ion on the beach. She shivered with something akin to terror at the thought that Bridge’s second grandchild might already be started.