A feeling had come over me, as we picked through furniture and disintegrating cereal boxes and a pair of eyeglasses. A man’s work boot, a hooded sweatshirt, items of clothing so filthy and sodden we couldn’t identify them, heaped over driftwood, branches. I remembered reaching out to touch them — wanting to uncover the logs, maybe? And realizing they weren’t logs. I had looked at Katie, and her face mirrored the unease that had settled in me. She had climbed up onto a giant downed tree and reached down for my hand. I took it and joined her, staring over the wrecked shore below us, the clouds of flies hovering over the heaps. We jumped down the other side into the grass and ran back into the woods. We never talked about it; but we both knew. We had been breaking a cardinal rule. And it was obvious he was already dead. What could we do to help him? We couldn’t tell anyone without getting in trouble ourselves, so we didn’t.
The body wasn’t my father, who never did wash up, at least not on Orwell or Marrow, convincing my mother that he had been trapped in the refinery by the fire. I laid the flowers across his headstone. There was a plot next to my father, for my mom. She was remarried, so I figured the plot would be mine, someday.
I spent the rest of the day going over the cottage, making lists of things to be fixed or assessed by a professional. The water heater was ancient, as was the electrical panel. I couldn’t believe my mom hadn’t needed to replace them after the quake — but then she’d probably hired an out-of-work ArPac friend of my dad’s who wasn’t going to bother with bringing things up to code. It didn’t matter what she had done then anyway; a couple decades of island weather and winter vacancy had left peeling paint, moldy cabinets, leaky pipes.
I stood at the screen door drinking a beer, letting the breeze cool me, and staring up through the mesh at Rookwood. I had pulled up the drive when I got back, knocked on the door again. There was no movement at all from inside, no sounds. I felt the hairs on my arm rise and looked down to see a mosquito lifting off, full of my blood. She flew straight for the screen and knocked herself against it, up and down, until she found a hole — probably the hole through which she had come. I turned to the counter and added screens to the list.
Evening was coming on, but there was still plenty of light, so I spent it in the yard, wrangling a season’s worth of weeds. In the shed were the tools and more notes from my mom to visitors or hired hands: how to oil and clean the blades on the manual mower (carefully!); how to plug in the weed-whacker (run the cord through the bathroom window); how and where to find the strawberry patch and the raspberries so as not to mow them down (Follow the birds and the bees in June!); encouragements to pick the wild irises for bouquets; where to put the hatchet when not splitting logs (on the wall in the shed); and random admonishments and warnings (Wear gloves! Watch for nettles!).
By dusk my muscles were spent; I had blisters on my hands (didn’t wear gloves!). I dropped to the ground, fibrous shards of crabgrass stabbing me through my sweaty T-shirt. The lawn slanted steeply, and my head was pointed downhill, toward the water, arms thrown up, watching the tide upside down for a while, letting my mind drift. I rolled my head to the side, where I could just spy Rookwood’s long wide lines through the trees. There were no signs of life at the house other than that one light, still burning. No cars had come or gone. I thought about the red car in the carriage house.
I sat up and downed the last of my beer. Eyes tired, or maybe just dusty, I saw everything through a filter of spores. I felt watched, but also called, beckoned by the glowing window.
“You’re drunk,” I said. I counted how many beers I’d had and how little food.
In the cottage I pulled on a sweater and found a working flashlight. He wouldn’t mind, I told myself. No one on the island would mind if a neighbor saw to a light left on. There were probably still keys to Rookwood somewhere in the cottage. I thought of Marla Sharpe at the clerk’s office — she knew my family; she could vouch for me. I was a landowner! I let myself follow the drunken logic, emboldened by my legitimacy as a remade local and a newly minted property owner, as I crossed the lane in the dark. I knew enough not to pause, not to think. On Rookwood’s dark porch, I didn’t hesitate as I reached for the latch on the door. Like most doors on the island, it was unlocked. I gave it a shove and watched it swing heavily over the flagstones of the entry.
I called out a loud hello. My voice didn’t even echo, lost to the heavy walls of the house.
“It’s your neighbor, Lucie Bowen,” I called again, closing the door behind me and standing there in the silence, flashlight aimed at a mirror opposite the door. An arch to the left led to the parlor, an arch to the right led to the hallway and carved staircase. I felt twelve years old again; I wished Katie were there with me.
I found the light switch — an old-fashioned one, two Lucite buttons with circles of abalone inlay — and the chandelier above me lit up. It made everything beyond its glare seem darker and more forbidding. Being alone in a half-lit house seemed scarier than being in a dark one, so I turned it off.
I kept the flashlight trained ahead of me and headed for the staircase. The house smelled dusty, stale. Unlived-in. I stopped on the landing and sneezed a few times, wiped my nose on the back of my sleeve. I looked down at my feet, at the carpet on the stairway, faded and worn to threads in places.
Above me was Maura’s famous self-portrait, lifelike and imperious. She was probably in her forties at the time, brown-gray hair pulled up and back, wearing a pale blue dress, not a trace of a smile on her face. It wasn’t a beautiful portrait, but it was striking. She painted it between the wars; art had changed then, Julia had told me, because of the shock of modern warfare. I was ten at the time, in shock myself from the quake. Maybe that was why she had said it. Because she wanted me to know that there was a world full of tragedies besides my own.
I continued up the stairs, telling myself I had no intention of snooping, just turning off the light. The adrenaline was killing the beer’s soft buzz. A long hallway ran the width of the house at the top, and I turned to the right, following the glow at the end, the last door on the right. It opened on a large bedroom with a perfectly made four-poster, a suitcase open and half-filled with clothes on top. The sight of something in progress like that made me doubt myself: Maybe he was home? Maybe he had been home and I had missed him? But the rest of the room was off: there was a through-breeze; the window of the dormer was open wide, and there were two lamps lit, not just the one visible in the window. The other was tipped on its side on a bedside table, the shade hanging over the edge. I closed the window, noting water stains on the sill and leaves on the carpet below. It had been open for some time. When was the last rain? It had been a few days, a hard rain after weeks of unseasonable warmth.
When I turned to the lamp on the table, my foot bumped what was left of a broken highball glass on the floor. On the bed, the suitcase lay open like a book. Men’s clothes, folded neatly. I ran my hand over the cool cotton shirts. A belt, a pair of casual leather loafers, an eyeglasses case, a toiletries bag. I couldn’t help myself; I was in this far, wasn’t I? I opened it. There were shaving supplies, a toothbrush, contact lens case, and a prescription bottle of Klonopin with Jacob Swenson’s name on it.