“It’s about time you brought her up here.”
We sit on the screened porch and eat oysters, which we suck down with a lemon sauce, and Shirley tells us stories about the island. “He says you’re a Blackwood.” She nods at Miah.
“Distantly. One of the poor ones. I was named for my great-great-aunt Claudine.”
“I knew her when I was a little girl. I thought she was a queen because she carried herself like one, those dogs following her wherever she went. She always had a pistol on her belt, and some said it was the one from long ago, the one that her mama used to kill herself.”
“Do you know what really happened?”
“To Tillie?” Bram throws more oysters on our plates and passes me the sauce.
“In true Southern form, no one talked about it after,” Shirley says. “But most likely a kind of postpartum depression made worse because she lost her baby. People didn’t call it that, though. They said, ‘Oh, poor Tillie. Did you hear? That poor young woman died of a broken heart.’ ” Shirley smiles at me. “You would have liked her. She was good people. Vibrant people. Kind people. Hilariously fun and funny people. Alive people. She was so alive.” She shakes her head. “My great-grandmother Clovis was maybe her best friend. She took it hard when Tillie died.”
“Your great-grandmother was the root doctor.”
“For fifty-two years. She died at age one hundred.”
I ask her then about her ancestors—Clovis and Aurora, the lighthouse keeper, and Beatrice, the storyteller and collector.
Shirley gets up from the table and walks into the living room, where she stands in front of the bookcase, hands on hips, clearly searching for something. Bram says, “Bottom shelf, three from the end.” He winks at us.
She bends over, pulls something from the shelf, and comes walking back with a photo album. “This man,” she says, nodding at Bram. “He always knows where everything is.”
“It’s a good thing, too,” he says to her. Then, to us: “This woman would lose her own nose if it weren’t on her face.” But I can hear the love behind the words.
Shirley sits and opens the photo album and then slides it over to me. She taps a hazy black-and-white picture of a woman in white, who looks as if she can barely sit still for the camera. “That’s Clovis. The only photo we have of her.”
I stare at Clovis and she stares back at me, and I think of all the stories she must have lived and collected—long before Beatrice could record them—and taken with her when she died.
The talk turns to their work with Outward Bound. They had been involved with the organization for sixteen years when they met Miah.
“You never saw such a pain in the ass as this one here,” Bram says, waving his glass at Miah. “That first time he was here, Shirley threatened to quit every day.”
Miah looks at me. “Told you.” He points to himself. “Shit-heel.”
Shirley shakes her head. “But we could see the good in there behind the hurt. There’s usually good hiding in people somewhere if you look hard enough.”
Miah says, “No one bothered looking for it before you all.”
And I can suddenly see him at thirteen, the boy who had to take care of everyone whether he wanted to or not. Believing he could never have a life of his own because other people’s lives were more important. I reach for his hand and he takes mine without breaking away from the conversation, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
They want to know about me then—where I’m going to college in the fall, what I’m studying, what kind of work my mom does. They don’t ask about my dad, and I’m not sure if Miah’s told them why I’m here on the island.
Over dessert the conversation turns to Outward Bound again.
I say, “Do you leave at the end of the summer, or are you staying through the year?”
And Shirley says, “We head to Montana soon with this one.” And at first I think she means Bram, but she’s looking at Miah. “It’s his first year as a guide.”
I look at Miah. He glances down at his plate.
“That’s amazing,” I say, and the pie is stuck in my throat. I drink. Swallow. But the lump is still there.
* * *
—
In the truck afterward, we don’t talk about Outward Bound. It’s as if he knows not to bring it up and I’m definitely not bringing it up, so we