I grab the fisherman’s cap and my shoes. I leave so fast that I forget to bring an umbrella, and in minutes I’m soaked through. The cap has the smell of wet dog.
* * *
—
As I walk, I am thinking about the fact that my parents loved each other until my dad decided he didn’t anymore, that he wanted a family and then he didn’t. What makes someone stop loving you? One day there’s love; the next day there’s not. Where does it go? Something that lived and breathed like that—how can it just vanish as if it never really existed? I imagine a room or maybe an entire planet where all the love goes to live once we’re done with it. Like a kind of junkyard. Little remnants of love scattered everywhere. People picking through, collecting the strongest, biggest pieces, and trying to make something of them again. Isn’t this what we do every time we meet someone new or fall for someone new or start loving someone new? Pick up the old battered bits of ourselves and try again?
Eventually, I see a house just off the road. A bright blue shotgun shack underneath an enormous live oak. Bright blue rocking chairs on the front porch. Lights in the windows. It looks like a storybook house, cozy and inviting, and I want to go in and make myself at home.
I keep walking, because if I don’t, I might stay here forever. Just down the road there is another shack, this one a sunflower yellow. The next house is a soft green, the one after that a kind of rose color. From the outside they all look warm and welcoming, as if nothing bad could ever happen to the people living there.
* * *
—
The general store is just two short aisles packed with candy and cereal and junk food and calamine lotion. There is an ice cream freezer and a refrigerator with cold drinks. There are postcards of the island that look like they’re from the 1970s and a small counter where a woman with a round, scrubbed face sits reading a magazine. Her name tag says TERRI.
I clear my throat. “How often does the ferry run?”
She glances up at me, magazine still open. People. “Three times a day to the mainland and back, but if you’ve got money, you can charter a boat.”
“If only,” I say. “What are your hours here?”
“Whenever I feel like showing up.” She looks down at her magazine and continues reading.
Past the counter, over in one corner, there are a couple of round tables with chairs. I sit, dig out my phone, and call Saz. It rings once before she picks up.
“Sazzy?”
“Hen! Are you still in Atlanta? When’re you coming home?”
And all the pieces of me that I’ve been holding together for the past few weeks start talking at once, fractured and separate, but united in their ache. In the pain that comes with saying, “I’m not coming back for a while because my mom and I are literally on an island and this is where I have to be. Because my dad doesn’t want us and my mom is trying to figure out what comes next, so we came here. And I still can’t make sense of it. If he wanted out so badly, why didn’t he go away instead? Why did my mom and I have to be the ones to leave everything, like fugitives, like convicts on the run who’ve done something so horrible that no one can speak of it and who don’t even deserve to say goodbye?”
I don’t say home because Mary Grove isn’t my home any more than the island is. It’s just a place where I used to live. I’m not sure where home is. Maybe living in the junkyard with all the ruins of love.
Saz listens and listens, even when I tell her about my hair and how I cut it all off, and when I start to cry, she says, “Motherfucker.” And keeps listening. I can hear her sitting very still, not breathing, so that I can say everything I need to say, and after a while I’m not even sure what I’m saying because it’s not me saying it; it’s the pieces of me. And even as I’m crying, I can feel them slowly, slowly stitching themselves together again. Very loose. But together.
When I’m finished and there are no more words and the pieces of me are breathing hard and holding on to