head because I’ve forgotten my fisherman’s cap—and sailing down the lane.
* * *
—
We ride side by side down Main Road, the sun on our faces, hair blowing. At Rosecroft, the two of us pick our way through the grass and the brick until we get to a broad staircase at the back of the house, the one closest to the marsh. I go first and she follows me, up the stairs to the second floor. Most of the floor is gone, but at the top of the stairs is a single room, broad and airy, blue sky for ceiling, and smelling faintly of flowers.
We walk in and I catch my breath.
The closet door sits open, and she shows me the bullet hole. I fit my finger inside it, the way she said she did when she was young, and wonder if Claudine ever did the same. Did she come in here or close off the room? Is this where she slept? Or did she stay as far from here as she could? I think of her in this grand old house, roaming its halls, sitting alone in these giant rooms, walking down the stairs—as I’m doing now—to the main floor, only the ghost of Tillie to keep her company.
Standing there, I’m suddenly filled with all this love for Tillie, this beautiful and sad young woman who died too soon. And in that moment it hits me. This is why Claudine stayed here all those years. She didn’t want to leave her mom.
* * *
—
Back outside, on the ground, we walk the length of the house, up one side and down the other—Mom describing the way the place once looked, room by room. The blue wicker furniture on the north veranda. The big wooden swing. The golden oak doors with black iron hinges. The square entrance hall. The brass container used for outgoing mail. The card room, where the guest book was kept. The archway into the great hall with its fireplace, the Blackwood motto chiseled into the mantel: VIVIS SPERANDUM. WHERE THERE IS LIFE THERE IS HOPE. The large red sofa where Claudine took her naps, the one nobody dared sit on because it was hers and hers alone. On and on.
By the time the sun starts to set, we’ve put the house back together again, rebuilding the ruins.
* * *
—
I sit in my bed rereading Zelda for the five hundredth time. Fitzgerald is in Hollywood trying to be a screenwriter, while Zelda is at Highland Hospital in North Carolina being treated for her schizophrenia. He is having a wild and flagrant affair with a gossip columnist named Sheilah Graham, who will later write a book about it, while Zelda is locked up in a mountain sanitarium, where she will literally burn to death.
Fuck you, Scott Fitzgerald.
I lay the book down and fall back, head on my pillow, and wait for Miah to come.
* * *
—
We lie on top of the sheets, clothes on, facing each other. At first there’s the feeling again of not knowing whether I should touch him. He is Miah but not Miah, or maybe it’s me. Maybe too much has happened—my dad, Grady—for us to be like we were before Addy came to the island. I say this to him now.
“Well, what are we going to do about it, Captain?”
“I don’t know.”
He takes my hand and places it over his heart. “Let’s start here.” And then he kisses me. I kiss him. This goes on for a minute, maybe two.
We break apart.
He says, “You know, we don’t have to do anything. Sometimes your head’s just not in that space, and that’s okay.”
“Do you still want to?”
“Pretty much always. Yeah.”
“I mean with me.”
“So do I. As in I pretty much always want to with you.”
I kiss him. He kisses me. I rest my hand on his heart again and I can feel the beating of it, slightly faster than normal, but steady, so steady.
DAY 27
We are up before sunrise, riding bicycles to the beach. We leave them by the footpath, the one that will take us over the dunes and onto the sand. I carry my bag and he carries his camera. As we come over the last dune, I see it. The sky is a palette of soft blues and pinks and gold. The water has captured all these colors and holds them there so that everything, ocean and sky, is bathed in the same dazzling light. The universe feels new and washed