Tighter (2 page)

“You just want me out of the house,” I’d complained.

“Of course I do. You’ve been mopey, Jamie. And now here’s a job—a paying one, a fun one—that’s dropped right in your lap. At the very least, it’s an adventure.”

“You said it.” While Mom didn’t push it right there, I knew the plan was all but tied up in ribbons.
Mopey
was Mom’s determinedly cheerful shorthand for the thick-walled depression I’d been trapped behind all spring. A taste of her old life, those carefree days when she’d been freckle-nosed Sandy Henstridge, might be just what the doctor ordered.

Time away. Sea air. No parents. I’d return suntanned and worldly.
Pussy cat pussy cat, where have you been?
Maybe Mom was onto something. Maybe that’s how the mopeys got zapped. Of course, my other Atkinson relatives hadn’t exactly mastered solutions for moping. My dad’s brother Uncle Jim had hanged himself on his twenty-first birthday, and my second cousin Hank Wilcox had put a bullet in his brain three years ago after the bank repossessed his house. And what neither of my parents knew was that Uncle Jim and Hank had started to appear to me, claiming me in secret hours as one of their own. My eyes would open into darkness—not in terror, not yet—to find them right there, in my room. The rope skewed around Uncle Jim’s neck and Hank staring blankly, the bullet wound black as a cigarette burn at his temple.

And then I’d wake up for real, in a gasp, my heart beating fast as rain, my newly identified lumbar muscles—extensor, flexor, oblique—pulsing the nerve roots of my spine.

By then, they’d be gone.

Maybe they wouldn’t follow me to Little Bly. It was another hope to hold on to.

The pill and the rock of the train lulled me
old mother goose when she wanted to wander would ride through the air
and I slept.

TWO

Connie was awful.

She was also my first bad news of the day. Until then, I’d been caught up in the Bly mystique—the water slapping the sides of the ferryboat, the brine-y cup of chowder I’d purchased minutes before boarding and sipped while leaning over the rail, the mineral sweep of ocean and breeze full in my face.

Then there was the Kindly Old Salt who’d helped with my bag and told me I reminded him of a young Audrey Hepburn. On impulse, I’d dressed nostalgically, in an outfit that teenage Sandy Henstridge might have worn, white camp shirt and capris and my ballet flats. Better than pretty, the Salt had made me feel legitimate—
bonjour!
I
summered!
—as I popped my nylon wheelie suitcase along the dock, maneuvering around baby strollers and straw bags and ice coolers.

She saw me first. She was short, with a gray poodle perm and matching gray, wide-set shark eyes. “Linen panth,” she said, her voice lisping on her
s
, a speech impediment I instantly disliked. “One way to tell you’re not a local.” Beneath what she seemed to think passed for a charming opener, I detected an annoyance that she’d had to drive out here and fetch me.

When adults suck, as Connie clearly did, it’s been my experience that you’ve got two choices. You can spend all your time buttering them up, plaster-casting your grin and molding your body language so that it silently exclaims
like me, please—I am harmless.
Or—and I promise, this is the better idea—you detach. Let them be their own drippy selves, and don’t try to win them over, because you never will.

I slung my bag into the trunk and allowed Connie the full embrace of my small-talk-free silence as we drove along the harbor and then up the rocky coastline. She herself didn’t speak until we turned inland onto a stretch of road bordered by sea grasses long as hula skirts. “Buhth Road’th the main artery of the island,” she told me. “Nearly everything runth off it.”

Not a question, no need to answer. Though I did wonder about the road’s actual name. Both Road? Booth Road?

We stayed silent a few miles.

“Thkylark’th the highetht point on the island,” was her next fact. “Everyone knowth it by name.” Stated with pride. Connie was probably one of those creepy locals who’d never been on an airplane, or, for that matter, had ever left Little Bly.

But Skylark was astonishing. Mom had mapped it online, and then estimated its property worth based on other prime oceanfront real estate, but I still wasn’t prepared for its beauty, its fanciful gables and turrets, its crisp white latticework and trellises of climbing roses. The flat emerald sail of lawn complemented the pressed pearl-gray sheet of ocean behind it. Everything ironed smooth to suit the view.

“Holy crap.” The words fell out before I could stop them, and shamed me. I didn’t want Connie to think I was some loser townie who’d never seen a mansion. But I hadn’t, not one like this, and I actively repressed speaking my next thought—
and this is just their friggin’ summer house!

Connie said nothing, but I sensed she enjoyed my awe. She seemed to be driving extra slow, allowing me time to marinate in Skylark’s splendor versus my comparative irrelevance. I braced myself as the tires ground hard against the bleached crushed-shell drive, then strained against gravity as we shifted gears and rumbled up.

I never stopped looking at the house. It reminded me of a ship. A ship that had been tossed clean from the sea by some monster storm to survive intact on the cliff above.

From a third-floor window, I saw the shadow of someone observing us drive in, but once the car stopped, the curtain twitched and the figure moved off. It’s never a good feeling, that prickle of being watched. Who was it? I frowned up. Then yawned, fake and on purpose—as if to ensure that whoever was looking down on me didn’t think that I cared.

We got out, and I followed Connie up the planked steps that led to a wraparound porch, and through the front door, which looked too big to spring open at the turn of the knob, though this is exactly what happened as Connie made it clear that she was Top Dog by bullying in ahead of me. The foyer—a term with which I was now familiar from Mom’s reading off the Little Bly real-estate sites—was big enough that you could park a couple of cars inside it, and was decorated in a harmony of tropical Life Savers colors: banana, melon, fruit punch. Walnut floors buffed to glowing bordered the carpets, and the living and dining rooms were filled with delicate antiques. Painted vases crowded every surface and bloomed with arrangements of starflowers, baby’s breath and elephant’s ear. One thing was obvious: Connie was nuts for this house. Every room she showed me was immaculate. All it needed was a bride descending the stairs.

Instead, it only had us going up; Connie lisping house rules in the rushed voice of a person who loves to talk more than she gets to, and me stubbornly silent and frankly still grumpy about that linen-pants comment.

Colors deepened as we ascended. At the landing, the stained-glass window of Noah gathering animals into his ark filtered hues of orange, cherry and lemon into a pattern of light over the carpet runner. Down wide corridors hung with family portraits, I noticed the ancestral repeat of teardrop nose and gingery hair. Not beautiful, but dramatic features that carried all the way around to the full-length painting at the end of the hall. Where two redheaded boys and their raven-haired but drop-nosed sister, swathed in dark velvet and white lace, were grouped around a chunky Saint Bernard.

Here, we stopped.

Gawking at the children’s sweet faces, I was acutely self-conscious of my blundering intrusion into this cloistered world of genteel innocence. I didn’t belong here. I should go while I could.

I hardly noticed the door opposite, until Connie opened it.

“You’re in the blue room. Which you’ll thee ith more than enough.” Connie’s tone suggested that this wasn’t her choice, that I didn’t deserve the honor. In her hesitation before she stepped through, I wondered if she hoped I’d do the right thing here and request more suitably humble quarters—preferably nearer to an attic or washing machine.

But I knew from the moment I entered that I wouldn’t trade squat. The room was perfect, fit for the princess I would pretend to be. And wasn’t that what I needed, most of all? To jump-start myself into the more substantial, confident Jamie Atkinson than the girl who’d whimpered away from the stick in the eye that had apparently qualified as my junior year?

At the very least
, as Mom might say, I could play it for laughs. Dig up a tasseled shawl or strip of mink and send pics of myself at the dressing table with a caption like “And how’s
your
summer going, dahling?”

“Duth everything thuit you?” Connie asked, all Sylvester the Cat sarcasm, as she opened another door to the en suite bathroom.

I turned from the window in a slow circle, my eyes tracing a line of the room’s encompassing beauty, its fireplace and four-poster, its paintings and bookshelves, skirted dressing table and crowned armoire, back to the window with its view of green lawn, blue sky, oyster sea.

“It’s the shite.” A Maggie-and-me word, a joke word, with a hint of Euro-cool.

But Connie frowned. “Remember your language. A child livth here.”

I moved to look out the bathroom window, which had a view of the pool, an imposing bluestone rectangle so meticulously landscaped that the idea of going for a swim in it seemed disruptive, like a prank. “Where is she, anyway?” I’d been listening for Isa since I’d walked in, but the house was silent. No thumping feet from the upper floor, not a giggle, not even a whisper.

Connie was looking through my bedroom window. I left the bathroom to follow her gaze outward to the lighthouse that stood on a high outcropping of rock, facing Skylark and separated by an inlet. I’d seen it as we’d driven up, but from this angle, the window framed it neat as a painting. “Likely gone out.”

I pointed. “As in all the way out there?”

“She yoothed to go out there quite a bit, latht year.” The housekeeper turned on me. “The Mithter didn’t tell you about what happened here latht year, did he?”

My mind sped through Miles’s email. The punch points. The time zone. The request not to bug him. “Is there something I should know?”

Connie didn’t answer. She smoothed a pinch in the curtain, stooped to pick a bit of fluff off the carpet, pulled out the handkerchief she kept in her watchband and honked into it. Then retucked the snotty cloth into place. “Go find her, when you’re thettled. It wath Jethie who encouraged her to do anything and everything. Though the differenth between a free thpirit and completely thpoiled I mutht be too old to tell.” And with an old lady’s sigh to prove it, she heaved my suitcase onto a small luggage rack at the foot of the bed and unzipped it, preparing to unpack my things.

I stepped in front of it. “I’ll take care of that.” Nasty snoop. I’d have to watch out. Find a good hiding place for my Ziploc, for starters. “Who’s Jessie, anyway?”

“The girl from latht thummer,” said Connie, reluctantly backing off my bag. “The girl who had your job?” Her voice quizzed me.

I shook my head. No, Miles McRae hadn’t mentioned Jessie.

Her eyes squinted me in, as if she had special powers to detect me to my core, truthful self. “Jutht ath well. The patht hath no bearing on today.” Her lisp made this proclamation sound weirdly ominous. If Maggie had been with me, we’d have laughed.

With no Mags, the moment was unsettling.

I was glad when Connie moved to go. “Our water’th from a cold-thpring well, tho be careful with it; it’th not bottomleth. Try to limit yourthelf to three flutheth per day. With training, it thouldn’t be difficult. And it might get chilly early morning, tho cover your feet when you walk on the bare floor. Be back with Itha by theven, for dinner. It’th thpaghetti tonight.”

I wanted to ask more about Jessie—like why hadn’t she wanted her old job back this summer?—but I’d save my questions for Isa. The less time spent with Connie, the better. So I stood there, unwilling to yield any pleasantries (“Thpaghetti, yum!”). Waiting for her to leave me so that I could unpack, and use up one of my precious toilet flushes.

THREE

After I’d traded my
panth
for jeans, hid my pills behind my books in the bottom bookshelf and texted my parents a quick
hi im here all ok
, I had over an hour to kill before dinner. Connie hadn’t pushed too hard for me to find Isa, as long as I got back before the all-important “theven” dinner hour, so I decided not to make it a priority just yet. Besides, I wanted to spend some time adjusting to Skylark.

As I brushed my hair in the mottled mirror over the fireplace, I wished there were more of me to ground the space. I was tall, not thin by any stretch; “strong-boned” was what Dr. Gamba said—which always sounded like a euphemism for something crueler, though nobody could call me fat and be right. But in the rigid grandeur of this room, I felt formless and misplaced. Like I could float to the ceiling and bob around the amber-globe chandelier.

Or maybe it was just the effects of the pill.

Once, Mr. Ryan had said I was beautiful. That I reminded him of a cat. His imagination transformed my round eyes, flattish nose and mini-bite mouth into something playful and feline. He was just out of college, he’d confessed during one of our chicken-nachos afternoons in the way-back booth of Ruby Tuesday. Not only was he hardly earning any salary, but his student loans were killing him. He’d wanted to quit every single day, he said. He felt like he’d sold his soul to the “collective critique of suburban high school entitlement.” Except for me, he’d said.

“Again and again, I looked to your gentle face as a beacon.”

I had a feeling he’d practiced these poetic phrases beforehand, though Sean Ryan was a chemist at heart, the way he knew how to ignite my imagination and dissolve my willpower … no, I wasn’t going there.

I was months and miles past all that.

Halfway down the corridor, I doubled back for another pill. Whatever I’d taken on the train, it was waning.

A late-afternoon mist had drifted over the sea, hiding the sun and weighting the air. I’d kicked off my flats, and my feet felt the sting of unfamiliar objects, shards of mussels’ shell and nips of rock, as I picked my path to the lighthouse. At first it had seemed like a no-brainer. Down the hill, bisect the inlet; find the uphill path and billy-goat up, up, up.