The Islanders (3 page)

“Alas?” Zoey laughed out loud. “Right. Try
sadly.
Sadly. Yes. Sadly, Jake, that is not to be. Who can predict the human heart? Who knew I would meet the youngest member of One Direction while in Hollywood? Who could have foreseen that we would fall deeply, hopelessly in love? Who could have guessed that our wedding would be invaded by photographers from
TMZ
?

“Who knew I would suffer from strange delusions about Hollywood boy toys?” she asked herself. “Who knew I'd end up talking to myself?”

A vehicle rattled down the road, a familiar rust-red pickup truck. It braked beside her and Jake stuck his head out of the window. “Hey, babe. I spotted you on the boat with Ninny.”

Zoey crossed over and kissed him quickly on the lips. “Funny, I was just thinking about you.”

“I'm always thinking about you. Jump in.”

Zoey went around, reached through the passenger side window, and used the interior handle to open the door. The outside handle didn't work. She climbed up onto the high bench seat. Jake kissed her again, longer this time. He had great lips for kissing, Zoey had decided. Not too full, but not thin, either. And whenever he kissed her, even if it was just a peck on the
cheek, he always closed his dark gray eyes slowly, as if he were falling into a dream. And, of course, he had a major bod, too, all muscle-y and tan, with tic-tac-toe abs and a hard rear that made watching him at football practice a major spectator sport.

Not that Zoey cared much about such superficial things.

His only possible failing was that he wore his dark brown hair fairly short. She would have liked to be able to run her fingers through it.

“Where are we going?” Zoey asked. “I was heading to your house.”

Jake shrugged. “I've been home all day. I'm tired of home. I thought we could drive down island and watch the sunset.”

“You mean park and make out?”

He grinned. “If we go to my house, my mom will force you to help her make dinner. She's making that scallop thing and those apple things for dessert.”

“If I wanted to cook, I could have stayed and helped my dad,” Zoey said. “On the other hand, your mom makes great apple things.”

“Your dad's still down at the restaurant?” Jake asked.

Zoey made a face. She hadn't meant to mention that. “Yes. That Christopher guy bailed.”

“So you're saying there are no parental units at your house?” Jake asked. “It's all ours?”

“Benjamin's home,” Zoey pointed out.

“His room's downstairs,” Jake argued.

“He has supernatural hearing,” Zoey said.

“Right. Just because he's blind does not mean he has any better hearing than anyone else. He told me so.”

“That's just what he wants you to believe.”

“So we'll be quiet.”

“Jake, is making out all you ever think of?”

“No. I also think about what should come next, after making out.”

Zoey sighed. “You need to broaden your horizons.”

“You're right,” he said testily. “And I'd like to broaden them with you. I mean, Zo, we've been going out for three, almost four years. We'll be seniors this year.”

“I suddenly have a great desire to be home, watching TV by myself,” Zoey said. She opened the truck door.

“Oh, come on, Zo,” Jake complained. “Peace. All right?”

Zoey closed the door again. “Okay. Let's go to my house and watch some tube or something.” She shot him a sarcastic look. “I think Dr. Phil's doing ‘Guys Who Think of Nothing But Sex.'”

 

My romantic life started when I was just thirteen years old. At the time I had long, knobby legs, no chest at all, and stringy blond hair done in a style so awful I've tried to destroy every last photograph ever taken of me in those days. Oh, sure, a person with a keen eye and unusual perception might have looked at me and thought, Well, there's potential there somewhere. But I'm telling you, when I would just stand there in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom, stand there in all my pink, well-scrubbed glory, the image that always came to my mind was of a stick figure. Stick body. Stick arms. Stick legs. A circle for a head. A circle with bad hair.

Jake was my pal in those days. We'd known each other since I moved to the island with my family back when I was seven. We used to play catch, Jake and me, with my best friend, Nina, looking on disapprovingly. And we'd hike up the ridge. And we'd, all of us, Jake and me and everyone, take the ferry into town and buy ice cream and hang at the mall and just generally waste time.

I thought about boys in those days, sure. But I guess it didn't really occur to me that Jake was a boy. Jake was Jake. So you see, it came as a major surprise to me. We were walking
up the trail along the ridge one afternoon, the whole gang. Jake and I were well out in front of the others, so we stopped to wait for them by a stream flowing with melting snow. I bent over to take a drink, and when I straightened back up, he kissed me. Kind of clumsy, kind of hurried, and we both blushed and looked away and were glad when the others caught up.

Jake's been my boyfriend since that day. Everyone says we're great together, the perfect couple, and I guess we are. He's a very nice guy. The kind of guy whose arms, wrapped tight around you, make you feel small and protected.

And I really like his parents.

“BENJAMIN? ARE YOU HOME?” ZOEY
knocked lightly on the door to her brother's room.

“Yeah. Come in.”

Zoey opened the door and stepped inside. Her brother was sitting in gloom, his feet propped up on his antique rolltop desk, his fingers tracing the tiny bumps of a Braille book. Zoey reached automatically for the light switch. Benjamin turned to look back over his shoulder, aiming his sunglasses in her direction. He had worked hard to maintain the habit of looking at the person he was speaking to.

“Jake with you?”

“He's in the family room, channel surfing.”

Benjamin nodded. “What's up with you?”

“Dad's working the dinner shift tonight,” Zoey said.

“Yeah, I know. Nina's coming over later to read for me. She just called.” He reached with perfect precision for one of the built-in shelves of his desk and pulled out a book. He held it up
backward for her to see.

Zoey sighed. This was one of Benjamin's running jokes. Like the way he'd decorated his room with maps and posters but had turned half of them upside down. He lived for the times when someone new visited the house and he could point to some upside-down poster of kittens playing with yarn and go on proudly about how much he loved that particular Matisse print. It was a test of character, he said. People who got the joke were all right. People who froze up or played along out of pity were hopeless.

Benjamin laughed and turned the book so she could read the cover.
The Plague
, by Albert Camus. “It's on the suggested list for this year.”

“Great,” Zoey said. “Nina was already depressed on the boat. That should send her over the edge.”

“Nina is always depressed,” Benjamin said. “It comes from living in the same house with Claire.”

Zoey shook her head. “No one's forcing you to go out with Claire.”

Benjamin shrugged. “I hear she's great looking. And she has a nice speaking voice.”

Zoey turned off the light and went back out into the front entryway, then down the hall to the family room. Jake was sprawled on the shabby brown couch, a throw pillow under his
head, watching
Dateline.
When he saw her, he muted the TV. “Hi. How's Benjamin?”

“Nina's coming over in a little while to read to him,” Zoey said.

Jake groaned. “Great. Your brother and Ninny. So much for time alone.”

“You shouldn't call her that. She's my best friend.”

“How about when she calls me
Joke
?”

Zoey sat on the couch. Jake put his head in her lap and she stroked his cheek, looking down at him affectionately. “That's different. You're just my boyfriend.”

“I think she started it,” Jake said. “Back when I was in, like, fourth grade. She was in third.”

“Since fourth grade. You ever think maybe we're all falling into a rut here?” Zoey said.

Jake looked up at her. “Me and Ninny?”

“All of us. You, me, Benjamin, Nina, Aisha. Even Claire. My parents, your parents.”

“See? This is the way you get when you've been talking to Nina. That's why I rag on her. She has the power to destroy a romantic mood from clear across town.”

“It's not Nina. It's just this feeling of things going on the same way forever and ever.”

“You have the end-of-summer blues, that's all.” Jake raised
the volume on the TV.

Zoey pushed his head off her lap and stood up. She walked over to the window restlessly and looked out at the backyard. It was already growing dark. She stood watching as the color faded from the daylilies in the failing light.

The backyard ended in scrub brush at the base of the ridge. The ridge rose sharply from that point, broken granite boulders and gnarled, stubby trees brightened in the warm seasons by dustings of wildflowers. A few houses were propped on the slope where Climbing Way began its ascent along the ridge. Lights were flickering on in their windows, and curtains were being drawn.

She looked up toward the Cabral home, just above hers on the ridge, remembering the impression she'd had on the ferry that someone was up there.

A movement in the shadow caught her eye. She stared. A dark figure stood there, leaning against the railing, his face red and shadowed in the slanting rays of the setting sun.

“Oh, my God,” Zoey said, pulling back from the window. She felt her heart pounding.

“What?” Jake asked, looking at her upside down from the couch.

“There's someone up at the Cabrals' house.” Zoey pressed her hand over her heart. “I think it may be Lucas.”

Jake froze for a moment, then with sudden speed and grace he was beside her. He leaned against the window and looked up the hill, his eyes intense. “I can't see him very clearly.”

“It's probably just someone visiting them.”

The figure on the deck moved, and for a moment he was clearly outlined in profile before turning away and disappearing.

Jake stepped away from the window. His lips were drawn back in a snarl. There was an ugly light in his eyes. “It's him. It's Lucas. He's back.”

Claire Geiger paced slowly around the rails of the widow's walk, pausing from time to time to look in one direction or another before resuming her regular pacing.

The night was cool, and where she was, high atop the three-story house, the breeze was stiff, bringing with it the smells of salt and seaweed and, occasionally, the faint but unmistakable scents of the roses and fringed gentians in the garden below.

Down in the front yard she could make out a shadowy shape closing the gate and trotting toward the front door. Her sister, Nina.

As Claire leaned over the railing to call down to her, she heard the front door close. Too late. She stayed there for a moment, leaning out into space, her long black hair falling
forward, before pulling back.

The rail was just barely waist high, and she sometimes worried that she might fall off, sliding helplessly down the pitched roof, careening between the dormered windows and landing on the hard ground below. Sometimes she wondered if those sorts of worries were secret hopes.

The lighthouse, a squat whitewashed tower on a granite islet, blinked and swept its beam over the corrugated black water. Warmer lights from the rooms below spilled out into the front yard, casting shadows among the bushes and trees. As she paced left, she saw the blinking light on the end of the breakwater, the harsh blue-white lights at the ferry landing, the pinpoints of light shining from the portholes of the boats in the marina. Beyond that were the brighter lights of Weymouth, projecting rippling beams and reflections on the mirror of water. Streetlights blazed, car headlights winked and disappeared.

Another quarter turn and she was gazing out over the town proper, dozens of lights in curtained windows, a green warning light atop the church steeple, floating, disconnected lights poking through the trees on the ridge.

She wasn't sure if she had always been so fascinated by light. She suspected it had begun when she started going out with Benjamin. Being around a blind person made you think about being blind yourself, and somehow that made every color seem
more vivid, every light seem brighter.

Right at her feet, a square of buttery light suddenly appeared. Nina's face stared up at her from Claire's room below.

“You up there?” Nina called out.

“Yes,” Claire said.

“You coming down?”

“I wasn't planning on it. Not just yet.”

Nina climbed the ladder, but kept her head below the opening. She had a fear of heights, at least of wide-open areas like the widow's walk.

Claire stood looking down at her sister's upturned face, so like her own—the same wide Geiger mouth they'd inherited from their father—and yet unique. Nina's eyes were gray, laughing eyes, one just slightly out of alignment in a way that gave her a look of perpetual skepticism. Claire's own eyes were dark within dark.

“How's the weather out there?”

“Didn't you just come in?” Claire asked. “It's the same weather up here as it is down on the street.”

“I know. I was being droll.”

Claire nodded. Nina found it hysterical that Claire was interested in weather and planned to be a climatologist someday. “It's getting chilly. Some high cirrus clouds to the south. You want the barometer reading?”

“Cirrus? Are you sure they're
cirrus
clouds?” Nina asked mockingly.

Claire pulled her hands up into the loose sleeves of her baggy sweater and decided to let the remark pass. “So, where have you been?”

“I was supposed to be reading some novel to your boyfriend, Benjamin.”

“Don't call him my boyfriend. We just go out sometimes. What do you mean
supposed
to be reading?”

Nina gave her a meaningful look. “Reality suddenly got more interesting than fiction.”

Claire inhaled the crisp air deeply. “Are you going to explain, or am I supposed to guess?”

“Think good old days.”

Claire sighed.

“Now think bad old days,” Nina said.

“Nina, you just keep getting stranger. Or are you just getting more droll?”

“Both. Thanks. That's a cool thing to say.” Nina met her gaze for just a second. “Lucas is back.”

Claire felt her heart miss several beats. She reached for the nearest railing and gripped it tightly. “Are you sure?”

“Zoey and Jake said it was him, up at his mom and dad's house, hanging around the deck, looking Lucas-like.”

“Jake saw him?” Claire asked sharply. “What did he do?”

“Nothing. Yet,” Nina said. “But he was definitely wired. It was a very tense scene. Jake took off right after I showed up. Zoey was halfway thinking we should go and warn Lucas. Benjamin talked her out of it, though. He said he didn't think Jake would really do anything.”

“Warn Lucas?” Claire bit her lip. “I don't waste a lot of sympathy on Lucas Cabral.”

“He used to be your one true love,” Nina said provocatively.

“That was a long time ago.”

“Two years.”

“I didn't think he'd have the nerve to come back to the island,” Claire said. She looked toward the south, toward the few wan lights at the base of the ridge. One of those lights must be the Cabral house. One of those lights might be his window. He might be gazing out at this very moment, searching for her with his coolly penetrating gaze. She turned away.

Nina shrugged as well as she could while still gripping the ladder. “Where else is he going to go? I guess he's done his time, as they say. Paid his dues. Made his amends to society.”

Claire rubbed her right wrist. A bump on the head and a broken wrist, that's all she'd gotten from Lucas Cabral. The wrist still ached when the weather grew cold and damp.

Wade McRoyan, Jake's brother, had died.

Claire shivered, suddenly penetrated by the cool breeze. Something deep inside her had awakened at the mention of Lucas's name. Anger, an urgent, demanding anger. And fear? No. Why should she be afraid?

“I wonder if he'll be going to school,” Nina said.

“I doubt he'll stay on the island for long,” Claire replied. “I doubt he'll feel very welcome here.”

 

I had just turned fifteen. Sweet fifteen? Maybe. I don't know if I was ever sweet anything. I guess I wouldn't have been in the car if I were all that sweet.

And I was in the car, that much I can be sure of. And I guess I'd been drinking, too, just like Wade and Lucas. Beer that Wade had somehow gotten hold of. We had driven down Coast Road, past the end of the paved part onto the rutted dirt road that winds back into the woods, with trees closing in all around and deer leaping into our headlights to stare.

We were feeling pretty cool. Lucas and I grabbed a couple of the beers and went deeper into the woods, intoxicated as much by each other as by the alcohol. We were massively in love. I'd have done anything for him, and I believe he'd have died for me if I'd asked him.

Wade stayed by the car, kicking back and listening to the stereo. He'd just broken up with a girl from the mainland and was a little bummed.

I guess Lucas and I made out for a while in the woods. I guess we eventually came back and collected Wade and drove back toward town. I say I guess because I don't remember exactly. I've tried, and sometimes in a dream, or in one of those
strange moments of clarity that come when you see a certain picture, smell a certain fragrance that triggers memory, I'll . . . but then it's gone.

I do know what happened later. I know they took me to the hospital with a concussion and a broken wrist. I know that Wade died. And I know that my heart broke when Lucas admitted that he had been the one driving.

Jake came to see me in the hospital. His eyes were empty, his voice barely audible. I told him how guilty I felt. He told me, No, Claire. Lucas was driving the car. Lucas had rammed that tree. Lucas had killed his brother. Lucas was guilty.

And what was I? Just another one of his victims.