Their mom rolled over the perfect sine wave of the Maine Turnpike. It was as if they were driving up and down along the humped back of a giant sea serpent.
Perry bobbed her head back and forth as she mouthed the words to some tinkly Taylor Swift song. Their mom had gotten Perry a new phone when she got Cam one, just to be fair, which, if she hadn't been so sick, would have really pissed Cam off. But that was the thing about dying. It made you shrug off the truly petty concerns in your life. Let Perry enjoy her Taylor Swift. Even if she had lost Tweety.
“This must be it,” Alicia called from the driver's seat. It was still daylight, but a street lamp shone on a bulbous pink and orange Dunkin' Donuts logo that sat right smack in the middle of the Exit 33 sign. Exit 33 had absolutely no other amenities, apparently. No gas. No lodging. No special attractions. Just a Dunkin' Donuts.
“I thought you said this was hard to find,” she said, glancing up the exit ramp. One winding path led straight to a white brick Dunkin' Donuts at the top of the hill. The edifice itself was tiny, but it was lit up by the enormous three-story-high neon sign.
“It's a miracle!” Perry exclaimed, and she reached again for the notebook.
The Dunkin' Donuts driveway was not even paved. Tiny rocks popped beneath Cumulus's tires as they pulled in.
“You're supposed to go through the drive-through,” Perry remembered.
Alicia steered the car toward the rusted squawk box in the back. It seemed to have been dented by some teenage vandal's baseball bat. The speaker scratched with a staticky crackle. They heard a woman's tired voice ask, “Ayuh?”
“Um,” Alicia started. “Three whoopie cakes,” she said.
Cam exploded in laughter, and Perry squealed.
“I think it's whoopie
pie
,” Cam corrected.
“What difference does it make?” Alicia asked, beginning to giggle herself. They were all punchy from having been too long in the car. “Whoopie pies,” she said into the squawk box. “And three chocolate milks.”
“Whoopie cake just sounds so wrong.” Cam laughed as they pulled around to the pay window.
“Whoopie pie. Whoopie cake. It's all just very wrong,” Alicia agreed.
A large woman with greasy black hair tied back in a bun must have heard them laughing because she scowled at them as she took their money and handed them their whoopie pies, which were basically big flat Devil Dogs, and chocolate milks.
“Apologize, Mom. You made fun of their cuisine,” Perry whispered.
“Thank you,” Alicia said out the window. “We're just very tired.”
“Ayuh,” said the lady.
Before pulling out of the parking lot, they idled for a second. “When in Maine,” Alicia said before the three of them took simultaneous bites from their whoopie pies.
“Cheers,” giggled Perry. She held up her chocolate milk carton, and they clonked them together. A sudden breeze blew, rocking their little car and parting the underbrush to reveal a gravelly path.
“That must be it,” said Alicia. She maneuvered the car around the Dunkin' Dumpster and plunged Cumulus in through the bushes. After about a quarter mile, the trees opened up to reveal the most beautiful (as even Cam had to admit) hidden cove of Penobscot Bay.
The sheer authenticity of it blew Cam away. She had never been to a place that was not trying to be someplace else. It wasn't pretending to be Maine. It wasn't Maine-like or Maine-ish. It wasn't McMaine, or MaineWorld, or MaineLand. There wasn't even a giant lobster billboard welcoming them to town. It was just Maine.
The gray wooden shanty buildings near the docks provided a splintery buffer against the wavy blue harbor. As buildings moved up the slope away from the water, they became sturdier and more permanent. The brick buildings of Main Street housed a fire station, complete with a jumpy Dalmatian pacing back and forth in front of it; a hardware store; and some art galleries in what used to be the gristmill. The big waterwheel, still in operation, provided entertainment for the toddlers who watched it from behind a fence while they ate their ice cream cones from the parlor across the street. At the end of the street the sharp white needle of the church's steeple poked into the sky as if heaven were a big balloon that needed to be popped.
Cam rolled down her window and pulled the earbuds from her ears. The sound of the buoys clanging in the distance harmonized with the sloshing of the waves against the dock and the squawking of the gulls. The bright light of the setting sun was tempered just enough by the mist so that you didn't need to squint. The air was not too cold or too hot, not too dry and not too wet. It was perfect, and it felt like climbing into a bed with fresh, clean sheets.
“I forgive you,” she told her sister, still focusing on the view. And because they were sisters, Perry understood exactly what she was talking about.
“I won't feel better until you're in a good mood.”
“That's going to take a while.”
“Maybe we should have gotten rid of his cage,” said Perry, and they both looked at it, still strapped to the back seat with a seat belt. Tweety's little swing creaked back and forth with the swaying of the car.
“No. I want to keep it,” said Cam.
“Keep your eyes peeled for a hotel or something,” said Alicia as they drove down the main street past a bookstore, café, post office, and lobster pound.
Every time they turned off the main road, they seemed to get lost and have a hard time getting back to it. And when they did get back to the main road, each time it looked a little different. The bookstore seemed to have morphed into a pub with a hand-painted, golden beer mug sign swinging on its hinges. The post office seemed to have become the bakery. It seemed to Cam like the barbershop pole she had seen on the far corner had now become an upside-down blue tuna fish sign advertising the fishmonger's. On their third pass, Cam finally saw a real estate office, but it was closed for the evening. They tried to find the gravel path that brought them into town from the Dunkin' Donuts, but it seemed to have completely disappeared. There was no place in town to stay and no way to get out.
Alicia was starting to sweat a bit. She sat slumped over the steering wheel as she drove, and she couldn't stop cracking her gum. Cam could tell she was having one of those single-mother moments where she felt totally alone with no one to turn to. She was doubting herself, wondering what she had gotten them into. It reminded Cam of the time she took them to Sanibel Island with every penny of her savings, and it rained the entire time.
Cam hated how she could feel her mother's emotions, her desperation, as if she were still symbiotically connected to her with some kind of tortuous emotional umbilical cord, while Perry sat happily in the back seat licking the cream out of her whoopie pie. Cam hated being the oldest.
“It's okay, Mom,” she said. “We'll figure something out.”
“Thanks, hon,” said her mom. “Why don't we take a break at the lobster pound?” It was the only building that seemed to stay put.
Cam didn't get why it was called a lobster “pound” except for the fact that this was where lobsters went to die. Like a dog pound. Were they bad, vagrant, stray lobsters? Or just law-abiding crustaceans minding their own business at the bottom of the ocean? “Lobster pound” was just a misnomer and an unappetizing name for a place to eat.
It was a gray-shingled shack on pilings jutting out over the ocean. Someone had nail-gunned plastic lobsters to the outside wall and then trapped them cruelly in an old fishing net. It had a red roof and a little cupola topped with a brass lobster weathervane. Inside were a bunch of picnic tables with red-and-white checkered tablecloths.
The door slammed behind them, jingling the leather strap of sleigh bells tied to the handle.
“We're about to close up,” said a handsome boy with broad shoulders. He had wavy shoulder-length hair that started out brown, but got more and more golden toward the ends that haphazardly looped in all directions as if they were trying to grow toward the sun.
“I'm Asher,” he said. “You guys new to town?”
“What gave it away?” asked Cam. “The U-Haul?”
Asher looked up and seemed confused. She was trying to be funny, but she realized how abrupt it sounded.
“I mean, yes, we are new to town, and we have a U-Haul because it has all of our stuff from the old place and we wanted to take it with us to this place. A town . . . to which . . . we are new,” Cam said, her cheeks reddening with every bumbling syllable.
Asher grinned. He must have thought she was autistic or something and looked as if he felt sorry for her. He kindly held out his hand and said, “Welcome to Promise.”
“Thank you,” said Cam. “I'd like to adopt a lobster.” That probably did nothing to dissuade him from his autism diagnosis, but she was determined to rescue one. Especially when she saw the crowded conditions in their tank.
“Adopt?” Asher wore a faded blue Red Sox cap to hold down the hair and a gray sweatshirt with three little holes in the elbow. Cam liked that. She didn't trust men who were too neat and put together. His five o'clock shadow caught the sunlight and glinted with golden specks. He wore a leather apron and white terrycloth wristbands.
Wrangling lobsters must be hard work
, thought Cam.
Like shoeing horses or wrestling gators.
“Yes. Is this a lobster pound?” she asked.
“It is. Yes,” he said, taking off his cap and scratching his head.
A little serious for my taste
, she thought.
“Well, I'd like a lobster for a pet. Can I rescue one of them, please?”
Asher smiled a little, revealing a dimple in his left cheek. “Sure. I guess. They're ten bucks a pound.”
“We've had a long trip,” Alicia said, ignoring them. “Is it really too late to get dinner?”
“Let me check in the back and see what we can do,” he said, and he went into the kitchen, where, after a moment, Cam heard someone angrily tossing about some pots and pans.
“Have a seat,” said Asher as he came back to the front with some bendy laminated menus.
“Are you sure?” Alicia asked. They heard some more clanging from the kitchen.
“He'll get over it,” said Asher with a smirk. “Let me know when you're ready to order.”
Cam, Alicia, and Perry settled into a booth and ordered from the menu. They had been in town for almost an hour, and the sun was still setting. Stripes of orangey peach and purple hung like a backdrop behind the lighthouse, which stood on its own little island about ten feet away from the peninsula that shouldered the bay. Seagulls and pelicans dive-bombed for their dinner and pecked at the mussels glued to the sharp black rocks silhouetted by the waning half-light. The scene evoked in Cam some words she had never actually used in conversation. Words like
craggy
,
shoal
, and
cockles.
It was a barnacly, salty place. An entirely new ecosystem.
“Is it weird to anyone that the sun has been setting for like two hours now?” Cam asked after Asher had delivered their piles of fried shellfish in paper boats.
Vespertine
, she thought,
of or related to twilight: gloaming
. Another SAT word she had never used in conversation. Then she noticed the white dot of the evening star slowly materialize above the lighthouse. Normally she wouldn't think of making a wish, but tonight she actually had one.
I wish Lily would call
, she said to the star. She couldn't imagine going through the end of this disease without her.
“It's a miracle!” Perry exclaimed. She opened up the damn notebook and wrote
Everlasting sunsets
with a flourish of her pencil.
Alicia was finished with her fried clams, and she talked to Izanagi, the phone in one ear and her fingers covering the other. “We're okay,” she said. “Everything will be okay. Here, say hello to the girls.”
Her mom held the phone out to Cam, who curled her lip, stuck out her tongue, and swept it away with Lily's hand-broom trick.
“Cam!” her mom insisted, covering up the phone. “He just wants to know you're all right.” Cam had never been expected to talk to any of the other creeps her mom had dragged home from Epcot. This was a first.
Cam grabbed the phone and made scratching interference noises with her throat. “Hi,” she said, then made some more noises. “I think we're breaking up. Here, talk to Perry.”
“Oh, Cam,” Alicia said with a sigh.
Cam handed the phone to Perry, who gladly recounted for Izanagi the highlights of the trip. When she was done with her long, meandering account, it was still sunset.
Asher arrived at their table with a live lobster in a box. It scratched at the sides a little as he set it down on the floor.
“Cam,” said Alicia, “where are we going to put a lobster? We don't even know where we're staying tonight.”
“You don't actually have to take him,” Asher offered.
“Sorry,” Alicia apologized. “It's just we've driven all the way from Florida. We tried to call the hotel, but no one ever answered.”
“They're renovating it,” he explained.
Cam kept her gaze focused on his feet. He even had holes in the toes of his construction boots. Weren't those things impossible to destroy?
“They could have said that on their voicemail. Does Maine not have voicemail?” she asked.
“We have it.” The banging from the kitchen started up again, and it seemed like their cue to hurry up and leave. “Sorry about him. Hey, you could stay with me if you like.”
“Really?” asked Alicia.
“Mom!” Cam glared at Alicia. She envisioned a beer-drenched bachelor pad with gray, sheetless futons on the floor. “Stranger Danger,” she said.