Stone Cove Island (3 page)

Charlie walked me home. I couldn’t help thinking that under any other circumstances, that event would have made prime Stone Cove gossip.
What is Charlie Pender doing with Eliza Elliot?
But today there was no such thing as “bizarre.” Today everything was bizarre. Besides, there was no one around to whisper about or watch us; we were all alone. I kept looking for people. What was everyone doing right now, our friends and neighbors? The ruined streets were eerie and deserted, no signs of life behind the dark windows. I reminded myself there was no power. That my own mom was too afraid to go out. They must be inside, trying to stay warm, figuring out how to face the devastation.

Our house sat part of the way up the hill, still within the village. From there it was another ten-to-fifteen-minute walk up to the inn. Most guests took advantage of the inn’s loaner bicycles to get back and forth to town, or a couple of golf carts the inn made available.

“It’s always weird to be back,” said Charlie out of nowhere.

I almost jumped. “Yeah,” I said.

“This place is always so its own world. But today …”

“Today it’s like being on another planet,” I finished. “What’s Jay going to do if his house is gone?”

Charlie shook his head. I pictured Jay and Sparkler moving into the
Gazette
offices permanently, making coffee on the hot plate and eating ramen noodles every night.

“Can we swing by Meredith’s? Do you mind? I just want to make sure she’s okay.”

I’d said “we” without thinking. But it did feel like we were in this together, tossed into the same hole that we’d now have to crawl our way out of. I suppose you picture getting through a disaster with your closest friends and family, but instead you’re thrown into random situations with people you would never expect. There was no question of making plans.

“Sure,” said Charlie. He didn’t seem to be in a rush. The problems were too big; you couldn’t go straight at them. Addressing them would mean chipping away over a very long time. It made me itchy though. I wanted to jump in, start, figure out some way to put things back, fix it
now
.

I hurried ahead. Meredith would get it. Meredith, my best friend since we were toddlers, lived nearby in one of the Rose Cottages: a tourist-friendly neighborhood of really old, tiny houses—all adorned with roses trellised up the sides and over the roofs. Stone Cove Island is famous for these. People buy mugs and T-shirts decorated with pictures of Meredith’s house. That was usually something we laughed about, but today I didn’t feel like laughing.

Trees were scattered over her street like Pick-up Sticks.
But Meredith’s house had been spared, mostly. The beautiful roses, which normally cascaded over the roof, had been torn away and were sticking up wildly, in a thorny Mohawk. The last blooms, which had lingered in the warm fall weather, were gone and so were all the leaves. The trellis was broken and dangling. It looked like a punk rock skeleton, not a tourist attraction.

“Phew. I guess they’re okay.” The house was standing, roof and windows intact.

Charlie trudged up behind me and nodded, his eyes far away.

When I ran to the door and knocked, nobody answered, but I could see through the taped-up windows that the inside looked relatively undisturbed as well.

“Maybe they’re out getting provisions?” Charlie suggested.

“Or helping out at school.” Meredith’s parents taught music and art. Her mom was my favorite teacher. If they were running a storm shelter there, the whole family was likely pitching in. That antsy feeling came back. If I didn’t join them, do
something
, I’d lose my mind.

TEN MINUTES LATER, WE
stood side by side at the end of my pebble drive. Our house, cottage-sized by anyone’s estimation, looked like a dollhouse under the massive oak.

“That is a seriously big tree,” said Charlie. “You guys are lucky it only landed on the porch.”

“I know. I don’t think Salty is ever coming back out of my parents’ closet.” Salty was our ten-year-old schnauzer. He had taken cover at the first cracks of thunder last night
and, last I’d checked, was still huddled in the dark with my mom’s shoes.

My dad appeared from behind the trunk, sweaty under his bundled clothing and holding a chain saw. He waved hello but didn’t come over. I didn’t invite Charlie in.

“You okay?” Charlie asked quietly. He was looking at me now. It seemed like he could see me sinking into myself. I suppose I stared back. For the first time, I really registered the gold-flecked warmth of his brown eyes. Meredith had always harped on how Charlie had such great eyes.

“Yeah. I’m fine,” I said, trying to rally. I thought of the time a few years earlier when Salty got lost on the golf course. Charlie had been nice then too, waiting with me on the steps of the inn while my dad walked up and down the links with a flashlight, calling Salty’s name and shaking a bag of treats. Of course Salty eventually trotted out of the brush, covered in burrs and something stinky, acting like nothing had happened.

“I’ll see you around, okay?” he said. “Stay safe.”

“You too,” I said. After one more glance at our house, he hurried away. I wasn’t anxious to head inside. Just the thought made me a little claustrophobic. I wondered if my dad would let me try the chain saw. Honestly, it looked kind of fun. I stepped toward him.

“Forget it,” my dad said, following my eyes and pursing his lips. “Go help your mom dry out stuff inside.”

I smirked, and to prove I could handle a chain saw, showed off my tree-trunk-climbing technique, landing with a thud near the front door.

“Nice,” he said. “Next time try going through the back.
You’re going to take down the porch completely if the tree doesn’t get it done first.”

“What? You fixed the door? Maybe I should check your temperature. You’re clearly delirious.”

“Ha-ha. Hilarious, missy.” He reached for the chain saw cord, then paused. “Wait, tell me about things in town.”

My smile faded. “It’s bad,” I said. “Ferry’s out for at least a couple of months. Plus, no power and no phone lines, obviously.”

“Damn. We knew it could happen, but I guess we never believed it.”

“But we’ll fix it, right?” I knew I sounded like a little girl, but I couldn’t help myself.

“Of course, kiddo. This island’s seen worse.”

I wasn’t sure that was true, but it made me feel better to hear him say it.

Inside, Mom had stripped the wet sheets off my bed and was hanging them to dry in the bathroom. She had rolled up the rugs from the first floor and dragged them to the back door. We had a small generator and a camp stove that ran on Sterno, but the generator was not going to power the clothes dryer. She looked up as I came into the bathroom, her forehead lined with stress, her blonde hair in a mess of a bun. Her lips were pinched in a tight smile that wasn’t fooling anyone, especially me. It was an expression I’d seen often. I tried to picture her at my age. Her hair was pretty and silky, more golden than mine. She was tall and slender, but so much tension and fatigue radiated from her body.

“Oh, good, Eliza, you can help me. Hold this up while I grab the other side.”

“Mom, why don’t we hang them outside?”

“What if it rains? Or if there’s another storm?”

“There is not going to be another storm like this. Hurricane season is almost over. This stuff’ll never dry in here. It’ll stay damp and the house will stay damp.” I could see the new worry of toxic mold fluttering behind her eyes. She had never been seventeen, I decided. It was impossible to imagine her having one beer too many at a beach party, giggling on a bike ride with friends or daydreaming over a crush, her marriage to my dad notwithstanding. I turned on the sink faucet to wash my hands.

“Don’t touch that!” she yelped. I jumped back and banged my head on the medicine cabinet door, which was open.

“Why?”

“It might be contaminated. We don’t know if the water is safe. You’re supposed to boil it—”

“Mom. I’m just washing my hands. I’m not drinking it. Stop freaking out.” I left the room without helping with the sheets. I felt bad, but I just couldn’t take it. Wasn’t she supposed to be calming me down?
I
was the kid, not her. She was so exhausting.

I lay down on my stripped bed. The edge of the mattress felt wet. I stared at the ceiling, the only part of my room that looked unchanged. My rug was gone. My dresser had been dragged to the middle of the floor. The pictures on the wall along the window were ruined. There were brown, rusty stripes running down the walls where the roof had leaked through the ceiling and under the paint. My entire last semester of life drawing had melted into a leaden, gooey, newsprint brick in the corner.

My mom hadn’t even asked about my trip to town. The whole place could have washed away and she hadn’t given it a second thought. Her self-absorption was insane. I was not going to be like her. I was going to pitch in and do something—in fact, I would organize something. Something big. Our house was fine. We could survive with a little water and having to use the back door. Other people had bigger problems, and I was going to focus on the future of the island, not my mother’s petty neuroses. I got back up and headed out the newly operational back door to climb the hill to the Anchor Inn.

Before I had time to reach the top of the steps to the inn’s service entrance, Charlie opened the door.

“Oh, hey,” he said, looking surprised. “What are you doing here?”

Jay at the
Gazette
came through. On cleanup day, we had twenty-four kids from the high school including me, six from the middle school, a handful of volunteer parents and Officer Bailey, our town sheriff, who offered to organize transportation and garbage removal.

Granted, there had been some awkward weirdness in organizing the whole thing. Colleen Guinness, local lacrosse star and part-time waitress at the Anchor Inn, wanted to know why I’d come up to see Charlie that morning after the storm. She wasn’t mean about it, and a part of me was just relieved that she had shown up to work that day. Besides, if she were curious about my motives for seeing Charlie, it meant that Stone Cove Island was still itself: small, familial, and gossipy.

My memory of the conversation with Charlie had blurred over the three days, but I thought it consisted mostly of me rambling. “I want to organize a cleanup day. Kids from the high school. Younger kids, too. The island
will be ours eventually, right? Shouldn’t we be the ones to help rebuild it? So I was thinking if you talked to Jay, and if Jay put it in the
Gazette
, people would show up. I really feel like it’s the only way to get through this: get outside your head and your own problems and help someone else. If we sit home feeling miserable about what’s happened to us, we’ll just be stuck. We have to all pitch in if we want things to go back to the way they were …”

Charlie had interrupted me there. “Listen, Eliza. You love it here. I get that. I love it too in lots of ways. I just think that one way people keep everything so perfect, the same way it’s been for two hundred years—”

“Two hundred and fifty years,” I corrected. It was obnoxious. I knew that. It just came out.

“Yes, excuse me, Miss Island History.
For two hundred and forty-seven years
, is by keeping out any new ideas.”

“My cleanup crew is a new idea,” I pointed out.

“Not what I meant. But yes, I’ll help. You want some more coffee? I’m going to get a refill. We should drink the good stuff while we can, because I have a feeling we’re in for months of FEMA coffee.”

Standing there with Colleen—my not-quite-friend but Stone Cove sister and survivor—I could imagine soon, without regular food shipments, coffee would come to stand in for gold. Through the window, I watched guys in white jumpsuits from FEMA unload supplies from the driveway up to the inn kitchen. Fast work. They must have come in by helicopter. I was certain that Charlie was wrong. The reason the island was able to preserve its way of life was because everyone here shared a common vision
of how they wanted to live. Not because anyone was telling anyone else what to do.

At least I thought so then.

THE DAY ITSELF WAS
not the crisp, sunny autumn day I had pictured. It was humid, weirdly warm and raining on and off. There was hardly any wind. Harney’s hardware had donated work gloves. I put on jeans, rain boots and a windbreaker and took off on my bike at dawn. For three days I had felt trapped and helpless, fixated on the state of Stone Cove and wondering how we would ever be able to rebuild it. The good news was nobody had died. An older lady from the bluffs was initially unaccounted for, but it turned out she had evacuated to her sister’s house in Salem, just like she was supposed to. Two ten-year-old boys were feared drowned. Really, they had decided to camp out in the lighthouse during the storm, and then were afraid to go home the next day and find out how much trouble they were in.

I met Meredith at the Little Kids’ Park. She was already waiting, straddling her bike, dressed from top to bottom in foul-weather gear. Despite the many years of lessons we’d taken together, I was the one who ended up the big sailor. She hated cold water and soggy shoes. I was surprised she still even had that old slicker. Meredith was a dancer. She had started ballet at six and had stayed serious about it ever since. We made friends instantly in that first class our moms had signed us up for. I’d only lasted about six weeks. It was too slow and I was too fidgety. I had thought dancing would mean, well, dancing, not standing still, holding onto a bar and bending your knees.

We called Putney Park the Little Kids’ Park because it’s where our parents used to take us when we were in nursery school. Only a few trees remained standing. The playground, which sat in a low spot in the center, was completely flooded. The baby swings hovered over a deep pool of brown water that stopped a few inches below the rubber tire seats. The little slide was half submerged. Crews were working on clearing streets and damaged buildings first, so the parks and beaches had to wait.