Enchanted August (20 page)

“He's having it
done
for just the six of you? That's not very Hopewell.”

“What
is
very Hopewell?”

“To do it ourselves!”

“Do you think we can manage? There are only”—she counted—“seven of us. And one is three years old. Is that enough?” Rose had no idea what a lobster bake entailed. Lottie said you bury the lobsters in the sand, but that seemed fairly unlikely.

“We just need people who are willing to put some muscle into it. I'll be one of them, if you could really see me staying that long.”

“Perfect. And Jon can be the other. We're doing it on Wednesday night because it's apparently a full moon.”

“It's a blue moon, in fact,” Robert said.

“But it's only the middle of the month. That doesn't seem right. Isn't it supposed to be the second full moon of the month?”

“There's some technicality about it this year,” Robert said. “I can't remember what.” Fred would know, Rose thought. “But Google says it's a blue moon so I believe them.”

They didn't spend a whole lot of time in Dorset Harbor, which pleased Robert. He preferred to keep away from town. They left the library, went back down to the dock, and looked for their Whaler. It had been moved by another boater, with a larger craft.

“Do they just do that? Move boats?” asked Rose.

“It's the law of the sea,” said Robert.

“Or the law of the jungle.”

Robert untied this time and started up the engine. The ride back to Little Lost was smooth, as the tide had just turned. The clouds looked a little ominous, so Robert concentrated on getting them back quickly. He was pleased that, for a musician, he was pretty good with boats.

They were easy in each other's company and quiet on the path back up to the cottage. The ominous clouds had quickly blown over and the sun looked like it was going to make a comeback.

“I think that cottage needs a lot of people in it, doesn't it?” Rose remarked. “Otherwise it could be kind of a lonely old barn.”

“A lonely old barn, yes,” said Robert. She was so right. “But it doesn't always have to be that way.” He looked at her again with his soulful eyes. “You really do look like Helga,” he told her. “The Andrew Wyeth woman. I didn't need to stop at a museum to see her. She's here.”

“You've had too much sun,” said Rose, who knew she looked exactly like Helga. “Time for you to meet the others.”

“W
hat's that box, Beverly? Want me to open it up?”

Jon was at the point of taking the box right out of the suitcase before Beverly could stop him.

“That's not letters,” Beverly said. “That's mine.”

“Not to worry,” Jon said, and Beverly was pleased that he used that more old-fashioned phrase. But this box was nothing but worries. This box was all he had left of his dearest friend.

Beverly slept little, even here where the night was so inky black and so deeply quiet. When he'd opened his eyes this morning he'd looked to the sky to see if there was even the smallest glint of light in the east. That, or a single bird in song, would be enough to tell him that the night was over. He did not enjoy sleeping alone.

The porch of his turret room stretched around the side of the house—the cottage—so he could see the dawn break from there. He had taken the old coffeepot back up to his room, so he made a cup of coffee, used the bathroom (without flushing—noises were very loud this time of morning), and went outside to watch the dawn.

He took Possum with him.

Possum was in the box—well, the remains of Possum. The
cremains
of Possum, as the awful people told him when they gave him what was left of Possum after they had killed him. The vet had killed him, after all. He had still been living some kind of life before Beverly broke down and took him to the pet hospital downtown. He had thought Possum would come out better, but he came out dead. And now he was in this box.

Gorsch would have known what to do. Damn Gorsch for leaving everything to me.

Gorsch had truly left everything to him—the houses, the money, the music rights. Beverly was a very rich man, no doubt. But Gorsch had also been good at
facing
things, making the right decisions. And now he had left that to Beverly too.

The wretchedly noisy lobster boats began their assault on his senses. Their motors were as loud as any garbage truck lumbering down Madison. And their music! Radios playing at top volume as the lobstermen yelled over the sound. They weren't even the craggily handsome lobstermen of those television programs that Beverly flipped through too late at night when he couldn't sleep. He couldn't see them properly from up here at the cottage, but he could tell by the way they moved that they were not his type. Brawny, though.

Beverly had never thought much about how a lobster got to a plate, but Jon had explained that all those buoys in the harbor were actually painted different colors, and each color was the mark of a different lobsterman. Another occupation that's out for me, Beverly thought. If 12 percent of those lobstermen are color-blind, they must be pulling up the wrong lobsters.

That's what the buoys were attached to. Traps, down there on the seafloor. The traps were complicated affairs—Beverly had seen them in stacks on floats in the water, in driveways on land, in piles on wharves; they were everywhere. Lottie had looked it up in the library. Apparently there was bait in one compartment and then for some reason of physics that she had not taken in, the lobster would get caught in another compartment where it would wait till it was pulled up and taken out by the lobsterman. There was some complication about size and tail notching that Beverly had not paid attention to. He was more interested in eating lobsters than in hearing about their capture.

He liked that they were about the freshest thing you could eat. Alive one minute, hot and steaming the next. They didn't have nerve endings, anyway.

Possum had shrunk to almost nothing by the end. Everyone in Beverly's life was always dying, first when they were all young and now when they were all old. And all he could do about it was watch the sunrise.

“Good morning, Beverly!” He was startled by Lottie's bright voice. She was like one of these birds: a little too energetic but not unwelcome. “I know this is your private balcony but I wanted to share the sunrise with somebody and you're the only one up. Do you want some company?”

Of course he didn't want company.

She looked at the box. “Oh no, Beverly. It's Possum, isn't it?”

How did this woman know things? She came nearer. Don't touch that box, he willed. Do not touch Possum.

But she didn't touch Possum. She knelt down at his side and took his hand.

“Shall we sit here with Possum for a bit and watch the sunrise?”

It was a question that did not need an answer. They sat with Possum as a solitary lobster boat churned its way across the channel and the buoy bells sounded, Beverly with Possum in his lap, and the deep and lasting impression of Lottie's hand on his.

 • • • 

Rose had promised Meredith she would finish the book reorganization in the library. Robert did not notice when she slipped out of the cottage and headed to the east shore. She was relieved that she had managed to shake him for a bit. Yesterday, just after he arrived, he had shown her the other two springhouses on the island; the meadow hidden on the far side of the west shore; the old stone wall built far before the leisure class made their way in steamboats to Little Lost. And yesterday evening as she read, wrapped in a blanket, in a green rope hammock, he picked up his guitar just before sunset and played (hauntingly) from the porch. She was flattered by his attention, and rueful. Right time, right place; wrong guy.

She heard the banging before she went through the library door. There was Max, building new shelves.

“Morning,” said Max.

“Morning,” said Rose.

She got to work. There really were a lot of good books here. It must have been heartbreaking to see so many of them wrecked by the leak. She leafed through the sticky pages of an old one on Maine seabirds. It made her want to see a puffin.

She and Max worked in comfortable silence, other than the hammering. She salvaged quite a few more Maine volumes, and she was ready to start shelving when suddenly the door banged open. The girl who walked in was wild-eyed. She spotted Rose. “Is Max here?” she said. It was almost an accusation. Rose looked at her blankly. “Oh, sorry,” said the girl. “Where are my manners? Kitty van Straaten.” She extended her hand.

The hammer banged. Hard.

“Max!” The handshake didn't happen. This girl Kitty headed straight for Max. She was going to either throw him down on the floor of the library and ravish him or hit him with the hammer. Rose shrank back.

Max kept hammering.

“Max, stop! I need to talk to you!”

He didn't stop.

“We can't talk if you keep doing that. Don't keep doing that!”

He kept doing it.

Kitty was so angry she was shaking. I know you're furious but please don't mess up my books, Rose thought. She didn't mess up Rose's books. Instead, she swept up Max's brown paper bag of nails, tore it open, and threw the bag across the floor. Hundreds and hundreds of nails went everywhere.

Then she left.

The hammering stopped. Rose wasn't sure whether to stay or go. Max started picking up the nails, one by one.

“You from New York?” he asked.

It seemed an irrelevant question under the circumstances. “Yes—Brooklyn,” she said. “Let me help.” She started sweeping up the nails with her hands.

“I'll do that,” he said. “There's a lot of rich bastards down there, aren't there?”

That was a little bit of a shock. Did he think she was a rich bastard?

“Some.”

“Good, then she'll have her pick,” said Max. “Or she'll just end up with one they pick
for
her.”

Rose didn't say anything for a while. Kitty must live in New York, Rose thought. Max was picking up the nails deliberately, one by one. “Wouldn't want to miss one, since the islanders are paying for these.”

Whoa.

Rose wanted to put her arms around him. “Love's hard,” she said.

Max said nothing.

Rose left the library a little while after that, her books unshelved. She thought about Max and his problems, and about her own, too. The attentions of Robert SanSouci, rather than leading Rose away from her husband, drew her to him. She wasn't what Robert thought she was: she loved the cottage, but she didn't want to move in there with him, as he seemed to think she did. She missed the twins desperately, and she missed Fred. She just wanted things to be simple and easy again. She wanted to connect with him without always putting the twins first.

Not to mention, he would love to be here for the lobster bake.

She got up very early the next morning, with the crows. It was too early to go down to the ferry, so she listened to them argue for a while. Ben would have liked hearing them. They were loud. She wondered what they were saying, because they were definitely saying something.

She was fully awake now. The crows might as well have been inside the house, they were so noisy. Maybe they were telling her to go down to the seven thirty ferry and drive into town to send Fred an e-mail to come up in time for the lobster bake tonight. There was a lot one could read into a series of caws.

Rose crept out of bed and went down the hall to the bathroom. Beverly was usually awake at dawn—she could hear him padding about his turret room—but she could easily avoid seeing him. Only Lottie could deal with Beverly in the morning. She slipped some clothes on, not even thinking about a shower or coffee, and went into the kitchen. She had gone to bed early last night, when the kitchen was still a mess from dinner. Now it had all been cleaned up. Was it the fairies? Or possibly Jon?

There was a note on the kitchen table in what she thought must be Jon's handwriting. It was an invitation, or a command:

You are cordially invited

to attend

a celebration of the life of

POSSUM

on Sunday, the twenty-third of August,

at three o'clock in the afternoon.

Please RSVP below.

Jon and Lottie had already signed up. Caroline, too. Rose smiled, and signed her name with the stubby pencil next to the invitation. It turns out Jon was a good guy, even though from the way Lottie had described him before they got to Maine, she'd thought he would be a monster. Not a monster, but an unfeeling prick. He certainly had the capacity to be an unfeeling prick—ambitious lawyer, status conscious; plus, he was tall—but he was more like a kid than a grown man. He followed Lottie around like a Labrador. He and Lottie were having fun and Ethan was easy to have in the cottage. The place needed kids. Ethan spent all day with a passel of island boys and girls and was too exhausted to wake during the night. Plus, Jon seemed to like doing dishes. As she headed out the back door she noticed some changes to the cottage decor. Now the multitude of dusty pillows on the windowsill in the little west sitting room had been removed too—gone with the curtains, Rose supposed. Without the clutter of the motley cushions, the deep amber of the old wood shone in the morning light.

Rose was relieved that she got out of the house without seeing any of her fellow housemates, especially Robert. She took a deep breath of the spicy, clean air. In the stillness of the morning, she could see the spiderwebs of the night before, the dew on the grass. There were a few other islanders heading down to the early boat. Some of them she had met at the hat party and to those she nodded hello. There was a garrulous group of trim older women in shorts and running shoes going over to the mainland for their early morning walk.

“Can you join us for our walk?” one of them asked. Rose could not remember her name.

“Thank you. Not today,” Rose said.

“Maybe tomorrow,” said the walker. “We'd love to have you.”

Rose was touched by the unerring politeness and genuine generosity of these tough old New England birds—not just the early morning walkers, but the much older women who were taking boats back and forth, hauling carts of groceries up and down hills. It was like a conveyer belt: towheaded kids to harried blond parents to ash gray tennis-playing grandmothers. Did they just go on forever?

“I don't see why renters would want to walk with you, Susan.” This was said by an imposing woman sitting in a corner of the ferry. She wore crisp white pants and a cotton sweater, with pearls. Was this the woman who'd stolen Caroline's strawberry-rhubarb pie? “She won't know anyone you're talking about. And she'll be leaving before you know it.” Rose took her place inconspicuously on the ferry's upper deck. There always had to be a bad fairy in the mix, and this lady was it.

The woman called Susan untied the ferry from the dock and it backed out into the channel. Max was not driving it today. It was a high school kid who did the seven thirty run: Warren.

The water was glassy and the wind was still, and they were over on the mainland before Rose could really settle into any thoughts, except that she had yet to see a seal. She got off, walked up to the car, was massively relieved that she had remembered to leave the car keys in her bag, and drove into town before she lost her resolve.

Fred really should have e-mailed her by now. Maybe he'd decided to surprise her, and was already on his way. She looked at her phone as she drove—no bars till she was right down in Dorset Harbor. There were only a few cars parked in the lot near the library, so she had her pick of spaces. She turned in to a spot that faced the water, still not quite over the fact that there was always a parking space, and almost always a parking space with a killer view.

Under the portico of the library she checked her phone. No texts and no messages from Fred. Never mind—she wanted him here, Lottie saw him here, he would love it here, they would be themselves here. It took her six drafts, then she texted:

Hi sweetheart. It's me. Could you come up to Maine? Maybe today even? If you start now, you'll be here in time for the lobster bake tonight. Hopewell Cottage, Little Lost Island, Maine. Love you, Rosie xx