Enchanted August (3 page)

T
he drive to Maine was longer than either of them had imagined. Lottie and Rose had decided on renting a Subaru in a burst of enthusiasm about New England, but now, as Rose pounded along the endless grayness of I-95 North, she felt driving up together had been a very bad idea.

They had crossed the Maine border hours ago. She had done her reading about what to expect during August in Maine—good weather and fewer bugs, apparently—but how big could this state be? Lottie had been mercifully quiet for the past fifty miles—she had put Ethan's bedtime music on the car stereo and honestly it was pretty soothing—so Rose had some time to think.

She thought about the twins, of course. Where had she gone so wrong? She was a lactating cow for the first year, pumping and expressing when she didn't have the two of them latched on. She loved her two babies fiercely, of course she did, but they sucked her dry in every way. And those names—their private nicknames for the two swimming fishes in her womb—had somehow stuck. Now she was a stay-at-home mom with an unfinished, unpublished dissertation in poetry. A husband who was sleeping on the couch. And a problem child nobody knew what to do with, least of all her.

“Don't cry, Rose,” said Lottie. “This music makes everyone sad.”

By the time they picked up Route 1 it was already starting to get dark. Rose couldn't tell whether it was because there was rain coming or because it was getting so late. They had badly misjudged the time. As they passed the careworn businesses that lined the roadway, Maine didn't look so hot. The sky was threatening and bruised. There was a smell of ozone in the air, even through the air-conditioning. Rose was a rusty enough driver as it was (Lottie had driven the first three hundred miles), and now, if it rained and roads were slick and it got dark . . . She did not want to think about that.

Lightning flashed in the sky in front of her. “How much farther can it possibly be?” Lottie checked her directions, which were hard to read in the struggling light. Robert SanSouci had not done them any favors by writing the whole thing by hand on onionskin and sending it by snail mail. Why couldn't they just follow GPS once they got off Route 1? Was the place that remote? Was the whole thing an elaborate ruse?

“Robert says the exit for 286 is coming up,” said Lottie, as if Robert were a close personal friend. “A while more on Route One, then a few miles on twisty roads, through West Dorset and then Dorset and then Dorset Harbor—a lot of Dorsets—and over a bridge to Big Lost. Then a short boat trip from Big Lost to Little Lost, and we're there.”

“If we don't end up in Stephen King country,” said Rose.

“At least it will be an experience,” said Lottie. “I'm glad we told the others they couldn't come till tomorrow. We'll get to claim the place for ourselves. I want to sleep in the round part.”

“The turret,” Rose said. “Me too.” Her back was killing her and she had a literal pain in the ass from sitting so long. Twenty minutes passed in silence. She thought she might scream just for something to do when Lottie piped up, “West Dorset two miles! You've done it, Rose!”

Rose turned off 286 and headed confusingly east to West Dover, and the heavens opened. At least for now they were on a fairly decent road, but the rain was bucketing down and the headlights of the oncoming cars were strafing Rose's eyes. Lottie was a competent navigator but Robert's directions were discursive rather than practical. The windshield wipers' frantic back-and-forth was making them both crazy.

“I can't even see the road, much less a ‘yellow farmhouse on a verge with a large oak tree opposite,'” said Rose after one of Lottie's instructions. “Can't we ask directions?”

“There's no one to ask,” said Lottie. “Turn here!”

“Don't yell at me!”

“I'm not yelling!” Lottie yelled.

Rose missed the turn and made a hairpin U-turn but she kept her voice even. “Since we missed the ferry, Robert says there'll be a boat for us at the landing.” Lottie had insisted on stopping at L.L.Bean. She was almost an hour late to meet Rose in the parking lot. She thought they'd parked in the Muskrat lot, not the Moose.

“A couple of miles on this road and then we go over a causeway . . . that'll be Big Lost Island.”

“Where I bet they have a motel,” said Rose.

“Then we look for a dirt road next to a really tall lone spruce on the right.”

“Every tree in this whole state is a tall spruce,” said Rose.

“Now!” said Lottie.

Rose made a sharp right turn and sprayed up gravel on the car. “This car will be wrecked by the time we're done.”

“This car is the state car of Maine,” said Lottie. “It's supposed to get wrecked. Follow this road for eight miles and we'll be at the landing.”

They headed over a causeway and Rose thought of Bea and Ben and Fred all safe together at home. She pictured them eating their Annie's mac and cheese and laughing at Road Runner cartoons online.

“I can't believe we have to take a boat over,” said Lottie. “And I still think you said we were in the Muskrat lot.”

“There was no Muskrat lot,” said Rose.

“Honestly, I think it's supposed to be right here. Bear right again.”

At last the Subaru's headlights illuminated a very small, very fragile-looking wooden dock. A hand-painted white sign with black letters read
LITTLE LOST ISLAND
.

Rose heaved a huge sigh. “We made it” was all she could say.

They pulled into a small field, with a couple dozen hulking cars parked in two haphazard rows. Rose stopped the car. Silence, except for the sound of the pounding rain on the rooftop. For a moment, neither of them said a word. They had not seen another living being for the past twenty miles. They did not see any on the dock. They had missed the last ferry some three hours ago. They had bags and suitcases enough for a monthlong holiday and now they'd have to face going across the water in what Robert called “a serviceable skiff.” Rose had imagined she could handle a skiff but now, in the dark, in the rain, in her despair, she could only think of the possibilities for failure. This was supposed to be my time to regroup, she thought. She let her head drop to the steering wheel.

“I think we wait here a little for the rain to let up. It's already clearing,” said Lottie, her optimism grating on Rose, not for the first time. “And take it from there.”

“I think we just go and get it over with,” said Rose. “Let's take what we need for the night. If we don't go there now I am going to turn around and never come back.”

She blasted the door open and got pelted with rain in the fifteen seconds it took to get her slicker on. “I'll head down to the dock and check out the boat,” she called. She looked back and could see that Lottie was carrying the bottle of Laphroaig they'd picked up in a moment of giddiness at the New Hampshire liquor superstore. We both need a drink, she thought, the second we get there. Maybe even now. I need one now.

There was only one boat that could possibly be called a skiff tied up to the dock, a twelve-foot Whaler, as Robert had promised.

Rose spotted a Clorox half bottle floating in the boat and grabbed it. “I'll start bailing!” she called. “Here, take my bag. Don't get in yet!”

“Do you know what you're doing?” Lottie asked.

“Yes!” Rose had occasionally taken a boat out on Lake Michigan, back when she and Fred were so poor and so happy in graduate school. But Fred did the bailing then.

“Do you know how to get it started too?”

“You pump the gas bulb, make sure it's in neutral, pull out the choke—” She yanked the starting handle twice, hard. Nothing happened. “Come on,” said Rose. She looked up to see that both duffle bags in Lottie's care were already sopping wet.

“Don't worry, Rose!” she called. “It'll catch! I can see the Little Lost dock lights from here, I think.”

Rose pulled again. Nothing. She pulled again. Still nothing.

“Let me try,” said Lottie.

Lottie got into the boat without falling in, which was the best that could be said of her seamanship. They cautiously changed places. “I think I can do this,” she said.

“Just don't flood it,” said Rose. “I've already—”

Before Rose could finish her warning, Lottie had pulled the cord a half-dozen times. The air was pungent with the smell of gasoline and Rose knew the engine had flooded. Then Lottie pulled the handle a half-dozen times more, just to make really sure they'd go nowhere.

“You flooded it, Lottie. Do not pull it again for at least ten minutes. If it doesn't start, we can sleep in the car if we have to. Or we can go home. We can just go home.”

“You need a hand?”

A figure appeared on the landing. The halogen light made him seem ghostly in the rain. He walked down the ramp toward them and Rose saw he wasn't ghostly at all. He was solid and competent-looking, and very male.

“Oh my God, yes,” said Rose.

“Sounds like you flooded the engine. I'll take you over in the ferry if you don't want to wait it out.”

The male voice belonged to a kid. He couldn't have been more than twenty, twenty-two.

“But the ferry isn't running now.”

“It is when I'm drivin' it.”

He walked around to the far end of the dock and they heard an engine burble to life with one turn of a key. Lottie gathered her bags and Rose's and clambered out of the Whaler, and they followed him onto the
Eleventh Hour
, a large, generous, stable, covered double-decker boat. They stood clutching the railings, mercifully sheltered as the rain poured down. The water was choppy and the ferry bounced, but it cut through the water as if it knew by instinct how to get to the other side.

The journey seemed endless, although Robert had said Little Lost was no more than two nautical miles from the dock. Nautical miles were longer than regular miles—Rose knew that much, but even if someone had given her the formula for calculation, her brain was too numb to figure it out. The boat slowed appreciably. “We're here, Rose,” Lottie said, and the ferry driver drew them up alongside a dock, dimly illuminated by a couple of floodlights, and cut the engine.

“Can we leave our bags? I don't think I can manage.”

“Can't leave 'em in the ferry.”

If anything, it was raining harder now, yet their nameless helper swept up their bags with a sure hand and carried them up a ramp and along the dock to the island itself. “I'll get you a cart.” The way he said it sounded like “caht.”

“A Maine accent!” Lottie whispered.

“This is yours,” he told them, proffering a large, wet, plasticky wheelbarrow that did not seem quite in keeping with the idea of a precious Maine cottage. “See, it says Hopewell. You stay on this boardwalk, up the hill, all the way to the top. I'll lend you a flashlight.” He took a small, battered, rubber-covered flashlight out of his jacket pocket. “When you get to the top of the hill, shine the light and you'll see a sign that says Hopewell and Grundys. Keep on the path for Hopewell. The door's open.”

Before they could thank him or even ask his name, he turned and was gone.

It was a long, hard, wet slog up the hill with their heavy bags and they slogged it in silence, sometimes pushing the cart, sometimes pulling it. When they tentatively rounded the last bend on the path to the cottage, Lottie commented that she'd left the Laphroaig in the Whaler. But by then they didn't need a drink; they needed sleep. Lottie steadied the cart at the base of the wooden steps as Rose walked up to the small screened back door. The rain had let up for a moment, and the clouds parted enough for a slender moon to shine through. Rose remembered reading there would be a blue moon this month, which she'd planned to watch rise on the east side of the island. Ha! If I stay that long, she thought. Now, in the darkness, their struggling flashlight barely illuminated a sign that read
HOPEWELL COTTAGE
, the letters picked out with bleached shells. They regarded the looming house for a few moments from the wooden porch. Then they climbed up the slick steps and pushed open the sticky wooden door.

“We're here,” said Lottie. “Our own cottage in Maine.” Rose flipped on a couple of light switches but the electricity was evidently not working. The flashlight's weak beam showed them the house was all wood: wood floors, wood walls, wood ceilings. It smelled of old pine, salt air, mildew, dust, wood smoke. They pushed open two of the most likely doors and found a couple of bedrooms.

“Thank God the beds are made up,” said Rose. “I'll take this one for now.” She dropped her waterlogged baggage on the floor of her room. “Good night,” she said.

Before she could close the door, Lottie stopped her. She leaned in close and gave Rose a kiss on the cheek. “I promised myself, the first thing to happen in this house,” Lottie said solemnly, quietly, “would be a kiss.”

Rose stumbled into her small bedroom. She oriented herself, had a badly needed pee in a tiny adjoining bathroom. Then she peeled off her clothes, felt her cheek for Lottie's kiss, and softly cried herself to sleep.