Yes, the drugs were making her fat like they always did, but this time she was fighting back. No beer. No snacks. No desserts. Plus, most nights after she finished at the Nest, she jogged the four-mile circuit around the island even though it was late, even though it was cold. Abby was too self-conscious about her jiggling flesh to even consider jogging in the daylight. Someone would see her and laugh at the crazy lady trying to get her floppy body into shape. The Voices might even wake up and start mocking her. No. That wasn’t acceptable. Night offered cover, and cover was good. If she could keep up the diet and exercise, maybe in the spring she’d enroll in a couple of courses at USM. Get a few more credits toward her accounting degree. Yes, she decided. That’s what she’d do if she could stay on her regimen and lose the weight and could keep the frigging Voices quiet.
Her psychiatrist told her over and over the Voices weren’t real.
‘No,’ she insisted, ‘they are real. I can hear them.’
‘Hearing voices is a symptom of your illness, Abby. A symptom we can control with medication.’
She didn’t answer. Her shrink was full of shit. The Voices were real.
‘When you hear them,’ he asked, ‘are they loud? Or are they quiet?’
‘Sometimes quiet. Sometimes loud. Sometimes so loud I can’t hear anything else.’
‘When they’re loud, do other people hear them? Or just you?’
‘Other people hear them. They just pretend they can’t.’
He thought about that. ‘Do you ever hear them in this office?’
‘Sometimes. Yes.’
‘Do you hear them now?’
She listened. ‘Yes.’
‘What are they saying?’
She smiled slyly. ‘They’re saying that you’re full of shit.’
He returned her smile. ‘Sometimes I am full of shit,’ he said, ‘but not about this. I can’t hear them, Abby. Really, I can’t. I’m not pretending.’
She didn’t buy it. The Voices were real. They hated her. They wanted to kill her. She didn’t tell him any of that. She just thought it.
But he always seemed to know what she was thinking. Maybe he had a way of listening in.
‘In one way the voices are real, Abby,’ he said. ‘They’re real to you. But they’re real only in your brain. Not outside. And while we can’t get them out of your brain, we can control them. We can keep them quiet. Keep them from interfering with your life. Isn’t that what you want?’
She nodded silently. Yes, that’s what she wanted. If only he knew how desperately she wanted it. She nodded again, this time more vigorously.
‘Okay. If that’s what you want, you have to take your medication every day. No slipping or skipping or pretending you don’t need it.’
‘The pills make me fat.’
‘We can’t totally prevent that, Abby, but you can minimize it. Watch what you eat. Exercise. You were an athlete in high school, weren’t you?’
Yes, she was. Emphasis on the past tense.
Was.
Seven years ago. Varsity field hockey and lacrosse for the Portland High School Lady Bulldogs. The Barkin’ Bitches, the boys called them.
‘Weren’t you?’ he asked again.
She nodded.
‘Tell me in words, Abby. Don’t just nod.’
‘Yes, I was.’
‘Then train your body like you’re still trying to make the team.’
She listened, and together they wrote out a diet and exercise plan. And she was sticking to it, It seemed to be working. She felt normal. She was still fat, but not as fat as before. She was getting stronger. Even though, when she looked at her naked body in the bathroom mirror, it still looked more bloblike than she could bear.
Tuesday was a quiet night at the Nest. Only two couples came in for dinner all night, and they were early birds. Paid up and gone by seven o’clock. After that, just a couple of the regulars hung out at the bar. Hard-core drinkers who wanted a break from the bar at the Legion. Lori was annoyed about staying open with just a couple of drunks for customers. But what the hell else did she expect on a freezing Tuesday in January with nobody but year-rounders still on the island? The big spenders, the summer people, had long since drained their pipes, boarded up their windows, and fled back to their real lives in Boston or New York, Dallas or Atlanta.
Abby spent the hours till closing sweeping the floor, putting stuff away, and bullshitting with Travis Garmin, who was tending bar and, as usual, hitting on her. Sometimes she was tempted to take Travis up on it. He wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box. In fact, Lori said Travis was so dumb if a customer gave him a penny for his thoughts, he’d have to give ’em change. Still, he looked good and didn’t seem to mind that she was fat. Didn’t even notice when she started getting weird. Just smiled at her with that goofy grin of his.
By eight thirty, Lori said the hell with it and announced they were closing early. They finished putting stuff away and locked up around nine. Travis asked if she wanted to go park on the backshore, look at the waves and maybe smoke some weed. She said no, she wanted to go for her run. He didn’t push it. Just said okay and dropped her off at her mother’s house behind Tomkins Cove. She climbed out of his truck and stood on her front steps for a couple of minutes. She watched his taillights disappear up the hill. Probably going off to smoke by himself. Or maybe find some other island girl to fool around with. Abby breathed in the cold fresh air and gazed at the full moon and the million stars that were spread across the dark sky in a wide swath. She sometimes thought that’s where the Voices came from. They were visitors from
a galaxy far, far away
, and they were taking over the bodies of earthlings one by one by one. Sooner or later they’d control everybody. One time she told her shrink about this theory. He got this worried look on his face that made her wonder if he might not actually be one of the aliens. Maybe he planned to kill her to keep her from telling the authorities. So she backed off real quick. Told him she was just kidding. He didn’t laugh. Just asked her if she’d gone off her meds. Afterward Abby tried telling the police about the aliens and about how humans were controlled by them. She was pretty sure they didn’t believe her either.
She went inside. No key needed. Her mother’s front door hadn’t been locked in twenty years. She shut it fast to keep the heat from escaping. What heat there was. Inside, she could hear some jerk screeching away on
American Idol.
What crap. Even the Voices sounded better than that. She clicked the TV off and glanced at her mother, Gracie, to see if the sudden silence would wake her up. It didn’t. She was lying nearly prone on the recliner. Her head was back, her mouth open. A wet rasping sound, half snore, half gurgle, was coming out. Abby picked up the half-dozen empty Bud Light cans scattered on the floor around the chair and tossed them into the recycling bin. She’d try to remember to return them to the store before work tomorrow. Thirty cents was thirty cents. She tossed a log into the woodstove and checked the monitor. It was throwing about as much heat as it was capable of. Before heading upstairs, she studied the worn face of the woman who’d given her life. Not fifty yet but fat and pasty looking. Like the Pillsbury Doughboy’s grubby older sister. Gracie was stuffed into a dirty Old Navy sweatshirt that was two sizes too small for her and baggy jeans that were two sizes too big. Her teeth were brown and stained, the ones she had left, anyway. Even counting the broken ones Gracie’s mouth was a whole bunch short of a full set. Please God, Abby thought, don’t ever let me end up like her.
She went up to her room and pulled off the black pants and white button-down shirt she wore at the Nest. She stepped on the bathroom scale. Not bad. Down another half pound. She still looked blobby in the mirror, though. Still had a ways to go. Her running clothes were piled on the chair in her bedroom. She put them on, layering them for warmth. Long polypropylene underwear over her bra and pants. A long-sleeve cotton turtleneck. A Thinsulate-lined shirt. A pair of black Gore-Tex storm pants. A fleece vest. Some thermal socks and her Nikes. Last, she ripped open a plastic bag and pulled out a brand-new Blue Lightning Neoprene Face Mask. She slipped it on and checked her image in the mirror. She smiled broadly. Spider-Man was looking back at her. Only this Spider-Man was blue, not red. Either way she’d scare the shit out of anybody she passed on her run tonight. The idea pleased her. She growled at herself in the mirror.
Downstairs, Gracie looked like she was out for the count. ‘Go to bed,’ Abby yelled in her ear. No reaction. ‘Say good night, Gracie.’ Her father’s old joke. Still no reaction. The hell with it. Abby sat on a kitchen chair and pulled on her ice cleats over the Nikes. The last thing she needed was to slip on the ice and break something. Finally she put on her black Gore-Tex jacket and her fanny pack with a mini flashlight and her meds already inside. She clipped a key ring to her belt. It held thirteen keys. One for the back door of the Crow’s Nest. One for each of the twelve summer cottages Abby kept an eye on while their owners were away. Her jogging route took her past all twelve. Easy work. Easy money. More important to Abby, it proved that a whole bunch of people could trust her with their expensive homes.
The thermometer nailed to the tree in the yard read twelve degrees. There was no wind. Abby figured that’d change when she hit the backshore and the open ocean. No worries. She was prepared for the cold. She took off and broke into an easy jog. Hard-packed snow crunched under her feet. A full moon lit her way. A moon made for creatures of the night. Weirdos and werewolves and crazies like her. She followed the dirt track that led for about a half mile from her house to the backshore. The ice cleats slowed her down some, but that was okay. They made her feel sure-footed climbing the icy rises.
She passed the Healys’ log cabin. One of her houses. Only deer tracks marred the crunchy layer that covered the snow, and she ran on. Watching the cottages involved little more than keeping an eye out for storm damage or signs of a break-in. Nothing much ever happened. One time she did notice a broken window at the Morrisseys’. A B&E, the cops called it. Breaking and entering. Turned out vandals had spray-painted dirty pictures all over the walls. Men with big dicks and dangling balls banging away at bent-over women with huge boobs. Some stuff was stolen, too. A flat-screen TV, some stereo equipment, and, according to Dan Morrissey, three bottles of Kahlúa. The cops thought stealing Kahlúa was weird, but Abby knew lots of island kids who loved the stuff. Shit, why wouldn’t they? It not only got them drunk, it tasted like dessert. The cops never caught anyone. Just wrote up an incident report so the Morrisseys could file an insurance claim. That was the cops for you. Do-nothing assholes.
One other time Abby saw a light flickering from one of the bedrooms at the Callahans’ place. She went in and found Marie Lopat and Annie Carle, stark naked and going at it hot and heavy on the Callahans’ bed. She told them to get dressed and go home before she called their parents. Abby never figured Annie and Marie for lesbos, but hey, whatever turns you on.
She emerged from the woods and turned left onto Seashore Avenue. A cold wind from the northeast smacked her right in the face, but thanks to her Blue Lightning mask she barely felt it. Big breakers slammed into the rocks below the road, creating plumes of spray twenty feet high. The full moon glittered on the water. There were now even more stars than before. Abby felt good. She was running. She was laying off the beer. She was on the meds. The Voices were mostly quiet. She was even starting to feel good about herself as a woman again, the way she did seven years ago at Portland High and for two years after that at USM. That was before the Voices invaded her head. Before she tried to shut them up by jumping off the rocks at Christmas Cove. Not once but twice. That was before the two years locked up at Winter Haven, and a chunk of another year living with a bunch of runaways and druggies at John Kelly’s halfway house in town. Now she was home, but not home free. Abby knew from experience she had to be vigilant. The Voices lived. Meds or no meds, it could all come crashing down.
She picked up her pace on the paved, nearly level surface. Most of the houses were newer and bigger on this side of the island, none of them owned by island families. About half belonged to rich retirees from away. They mostly left for four months in Florida right after New Year’s. The other half belonged to even richer summer people who spent most of the year in places like New York or Dallas or L.A. One couple even came over from London and built a McMansion right on the water near Seal Point. Probably cost two million bucks. More money than most islanders made their whole lives. And they used the place all of four weeks a year. The other forty-eight weeks it was locked up and empty. There had always been summer people on Harts Island, but never people rich enough to live like that. The island was changing, and Abby was sorry about that. She liked it better the way it was when she was little. She wished the Londoners would just go home to London and take their big fat house with them. Or let it float out to sea. Yes, they paid her to watch the place, and yes, she liked getting the money. Still, she wished they weren’t here.
A hundred years ago, most islanders would never have dreamed of building anything more than a fishing shack out here on the open ocean. Even twenty years ago when Abby was a little girl there were only a few houses on the backshore, and most of those were pretty modest. It was too damned cold and the nor’easters too punishing. People today had no problem coming to the island, changing the place, pushing real estate prices and taxes ever higher and challenging nature in ways that seemed to Abby arrogant and wrong.
If Abby had been running a step or two faster, if she’d rounded the bend at Seal Point a second or two sooner, or if she’d just been looking out to sea when the match flared in the second-floor window, she never would have seen it. In this, however, as in so much else in her life, luck didn’t fall Abby’s way. The match flared. She saw it. Then it was gone. It happened so fast, she wasn’t sure it happened at all. She stopped running, then stood and looked at the window where it had been. Todd and Isabella Markham’s house was a large, gray-shingled, neo-Victorian designed in what Isabella liked to call ‘the island vernacular.’ It was built high up on about ten truckloads of fill to give it an even more commanding view of the ocean. It had a triangular front roofline with a rounded turret on the right. A dozen steps led up to a large, open wrap-around porch. Abby stood in the shadows, gazing at the window and wondering if she’d just imagined the whole thing. Then, just as she decided that maybe she had and was about to resume her run, another match flared. Whoever lit it must have used it to light a lantern or a candle, because this time the light stayed on, flickering dimly.