Ed’s birthday was looming in August, along with his annual vacation. Where should he go? Maybe one of those European packages promoted by his college alumni association. Aiming for something different this year, Ed had collected a stack of travel brochures and cruise offers. “How about Hawaii… if it isn’t still on fire.” He poured another two fingers of Scotch. “How about a distillery tour in Scotland?” Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, all in a week.
“Or maybe not,” Ed said. “I’d buy a souvenir kilt and wear it to work and the boss would give me shit.” Ed spoke aloud to the void of his bedroom. It was an early-onset feature of his late father’s dementia. “I’m only turning fifty-six, please, no.”
Occasionally, the void spoke back, as it did with his dad too. “Go to Maine. You’ll regret it otherwise.”
“Okay, fine,” Ed said, “sort of wanted to feel like I had a choice.”
He shrugged and reached for the phone. Press one for this, press two for that, press three to speak to a space alien. He booked a plane ticket to Bangor and made a reservation with Rosey’s taxi service for a ride down to the ferry. Somehow, Rosey was still in business, despite zero online presence. Just hearing her voice was a boost, along with her long exhale of cigarette smoke.
“Sure thing, Eddy. I’ll come fetch you myself,” she said, “next Monday afternoon.”
“You want me to email the flight info?”
“Hell, no. It’s written here on my pad.”
Face it. Maine had him by the short hairs. Ed couldn’t not go this summer. What was he thinking? What would his parents say? Never mind that they’d been dead for ten years, buried in the cottage’s backyard cemetery, beyond the stone wall. The island was a place where people died, but did not disappear. They loitered on benches and at the wharf and gossiped. “Eddy put on a few pounds over the winter, looks like.”
He packed a few items in his carry-on roller. He didn’t need much because the dresser drawers in the cottage were full of familiar, moth-eaten clothes that had been retired as ‘island casual’. The old man’s tattered cardigans, for example. Ed also enjoyed being reunited with a pair of lobster-claw suspenders.
Opting for a bus to the airport, he showed up two hours early. The lines moved along and the boarding process happened and the flights took off on schedule and went smoothly enough, except for the turbulence. Ed hated turbulence. As a career insurance guy, first as a fraud inspector and now a manager for corporate agriculture accounts, he depended on stability.
In Boston, he had to switch terminals. Ed hoisted his bag, hoofed it to the gate, and made the connection. From twenty-thousand feet, he peered down at the coast, looking for his iconic cliffs and the fishing village nestled in the harbor, but the ocean was blurry with fog. Lacking a car ferry from the mainland, the island remained difficult to access. The only public transport was a twice-daily mailboat.
In Bangor, Ed spotted Rosey outside the cordon line for arrivals, holding up a piece of cardboard with his name on it. “Rosey, how long have we been doing this? You don’t need a sign. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize you?”
“I changed my hair color,” she said, turning left and right, so he could take in her profile. Streaks of bright pink and turquoise. “All the kids are doing it, so I decided, what the heck.”
“It’s a good look for you,” Ed said.
“We’d better shove off, to stay ahead of the rain,” Rosey said.
She reached for his bag and he jerked it away and they did their little dance and Rosey carried the bag to the trunk of her Subaru. Pedal to the metal, occasionally slowing for the curves amid a gusty squall, she crossed the causeway and made the wharf with minutes to spare. Ed tipped her fifty bucks.
“Don’t spend it all in one place.”
She said, “Honey, anymore, we only have one place.”
The harbor was thick-o-fog invisible, which didn’t stop the sounds and smells from vortexing Ed back to a previous century, when he’d arrive on the dock after three days in the backseat of his mom’s station wagon, wearing shorts and knee socks.
Ed carefully pulled his bag down the slick, rattling gangway. On the mailboat, graybeard Captain Carl greeted him with a fist bump and said, “Welcome aboard, Eddy. Now the fun can begin.” Captain Carl and Ed interacted briefly, twice a summer, when Ed came over and when he went off island, yet they considered themselves close.
“I wish,” Ed said.
“Whatsamatter, cowboy?”
“The wet weather, for one.”
“Hey, it only rained twice this spring. The first time for nineteen days, and the second time for twenty-four,” Captain Carl said.
Ed said, “At least with the rain and fog, you don’t have to live up to the day.”
That was the problem, he realized, living up to the day. The island required it. Because the place was so picture-book beautiful, summer residents had to ‘oooh’ and ‘ahhh’, hike, swim, and fish for squid off the town dock and make the most of every moment. All a ruse, Ed realized, and every year he fell for it.
Typical scenario: with his faith in humanity restored, like a delicate, shining soap bubble, Ed waved to every passerby on the dirt road and played his dad’s squeezebox at the square dances and drank fizzy cocktails with his neighbor, Gloria, out in the cemetery beside his parents’ gravestones and thanked them for the gift of life.
Then, boom, so predictable. Shortly after returning to Indianapolis on Labor Day, something shitty happened at work, or he witnessed horrific events on the evening news, and it punctured his bubble and made him feel like a chump. “I need a thicker skin,” Ed said, to the void of the musty cottage in Deep Cove.
The place welcomed him, as usual, with the skittering of mice in the walls, and the mellifluous trill of a wood thrush in the forest, and the steady gurgle of the creek. “I am done setting myself up for disappointment. I’m going to hunker down in my shell and do crossword puzzles for three weeks.”
The void said, “Good luck with that.”
Ed said, “Crosswords are supposed to keep my brain healthy.”
The void said, “Only for so long.”
Ed said, “Give me a break. I’m on vacation.”
He heard a knock at the door. His neighbor, Gloria, pushed her way in. A former schoolteacher (like Ed’s mom), Gloria, summered in the cabin by the trailhead to the cliffs. “Yoo-hoo, darling.” She handed him a bouquet of fresh-cut daisies. It was their ritual. Ed reached for one of his mother’s vases, arranged the flowers just so, fluffed the pillows on the couch, and offered Gloria a drink.
“How’s the birthday boy?’ she said.
Ed immediately went off-script. “Don’t remind me,” he said.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m sick of these mice. Do you have any traps?”
“Are you trying to get a rise out of me?” Gloria asked. In retirement, she volunteered as an animal rescue person, caring for injured fawns and seagulls. Her oft-stated position on mice and carpenter ants was, “it’s their island too”.
“The birthday boy had a rough winter,” Ed said. “I had to deny claims from two of my biggest clients. Crop failure claims, because of the drought.”
“But you made it back! You’re here, safe and sound, behind the Blueberry Curtain,” Gloria said. “You can rest and restore and eat pancakes for dinner.”
“What if I’m just over it?” Ed said.
“Over what?”
“The island. It’s a hassle to get here and it’s a hassle to exist here. Something is always breaking. My Jeep has a flat tire and there’s a leak under the sink.”
Gloria recoiled from this blasphemy. She didn’t even finish her drink. “I’m headed to the pond for a swim. We’ll talk later, when you’ve had a chance to unpack and are feeling better.”
Ed slept for a week. That was normal. The salt air caused it. Underneath his thickening skin, Ed felt murky with memories. Random stuff. Faint noises floated up from the shore, kids racing on the sand, their squeals and yells reminding him of the neighbors playing outside his bedroom window in fourth grade, while inside, he recovered from scarlet fever. “Is that what’s happening here?” Ed wondered, “Am I recovering from a virus or something? What’s a five-letter word for ‘cogitate’?”
Other stuff surfaced. A tearful visit to the principal’s office, after being busted with a pocketknife in the cafeteria. This was during his mother’s pomegranate phase. She had packed the knife in his lunch sack, to cut open the hard skin of the fruit. “Mom, I know you didn’t mean to get me in trouble. We all make mistakes. What’s a five-letter word for ‘rejuvenation’?”
Eventually, he needed to go into town for some groceries. An attempt to inflate the Jeep’s flat tire failed. Ed was not as handy as his dad. He borrowed a bike pump from Gloria and was able to successfully inflate the tires on his blue Schwinn, the one with baskets. Halfway into town, on the switchback near the end of the pond, Gloria pulled over in her pick-up.
“Want a lift? We can toss your bike in the back.”
“No thanks, Glo,” Ed said, smiling and catching his breath. “I’m actually having fun. It’s been a while since I rode this bike.”
Gloria nodded. “Sure, of course.” Her smile shifted. “By the way, speaking of things we haven’t done in a while, I walked out around Eastern Head yesterday, all the way around to Shark Point. Do you remember the crumbling bait shack over there?”
“The bait shack is still standing?” Ed said. “It’s all conservancy land now.”
“More like leaning,” Gloria said, “and somebody is squatting in it. A guy wearing a Red Sox cap, backwards. I don’t like it when kids wear baseball caps backwards. That’s a gang thing, right?”
“No, dear,” Ed said, “it’s just something people do these days, like Rosey tinting her hair pink.”
“Do you think we should inform Captain Carl?”
“Why would we do that?”
“Because he’s the town constable, and what’s more, I saw the guy trying to bury a kayak underneath some leaves. Odd, hunh?”
“Could be, but first, let me mosey on over there to check out the situation,” Ed said.
His reasoning was that the town constable position was purely ceremonial. No town constable on the island had been required to do anything in the way of law enforcement for decades. The laws of the mainland only vaguely applied. Nobody registered their car, which had to be barged over, and no vehicle had plates. Captain Carl was capable and knew his way around boats, but Ed just couldn’t see him making an arrest.
When Ed returned home with his groceries, Captain Carl was waiting for him on the porch. “I ran into Gloria up to town, and she spilled the beans.”
“She never was one to sit on a piece of news,” Ed said.
“It’s good that she told me because, as it happens, I had a call from the sheriff on the mainland yesterday,” Carl said.
“About what?” Ed said.
“A general alert to all the island communities, about a capsized sailboat washed ashore near Camden. No sign of passengers or the skipper. The boat is registered to a guy from Boston. Sheriff says it could be a case of someone trying to fake his death and collect on the insurance money.”
“Cap, would you like something to drink?” Ed asked.
“Yessirree, please,” Carl said.
The way Captain Carl sucked down his beverage seemed to confirm that he was feeling unsure about his next step. “Should I fetch my handcuffs?”
“Do you have a pair?”
“Stowed somewhere in my barn,” Carl said. “Truth of the matter, I haven’t really had much in the way of training for this kind of thing.”
“Tell you what,” Ed said, “I’ll hike over and scope it out. I used to work in fraud inspection for fire claims.”
“Sure, if you think it would help,” Captain Carl said. “I’ll wait for you here.”
It was a forty-minute hike across marsh, scrub, and up and around a rock promontory. Ed pushed through swaths of cattails and pearly everlasting. He could feel his blood pressure rising. His steady, off-duty demeanor gave way to a nervous, check-engine intensity. More and more, he was feeling angry, pissed at the sailboat guy for invading and besmirching the pristine innocence of the island, and pissed at himself for ever having thought he was over it.
The void said, “You just need to get over yourself.”
Ed said, “Shut up. I’ve got work to do.”
As he approached the crumbling bait shack, originally on an open bluff above the shore, and now surrounded by a thick grove of spruce, Ed began to whistle. He whistled a simple melody to signal peaceful intentions, one of the tunes from Saturday’s square dance. I did not want to spook the guy; just let him know he had some company.
The backwards Red Sox cap was sitting on a stump by the front door, whittling a stick with a pocketknife. Sunglasses hanging from a chain on his neck. He appeared to be in his early thirties, hipster whiskers, slightly disoriented, probably in shock. He stared up blankly at his visitor. Ed had seen that look before. Desperation forces otherwise rational people into foolish schemes that rarely happen as planned.
“Ahoy there,” Ed said.
The guy nodded but did not respond. Ed glanced around and spotted the kayak half-buried in leaves. “What brings you to our fair island? Ed asked.
Again, the guy did not respond. Ed quelled an urge to slap him across the face. Understandable but also unprofessional. “Or maybe this is not where you intended to land,” Ed said. He turned toward the water and pointed across the channel. “Maybe you were aiming for Little Crab Island, because it’s uninhabited and you could lie low there for a week until being officially declared missing or dead, and then somebody posing as next-of-kin could file a claim.”
The guy slowly reached up and tugged at the brim of his baseball cap. He pulled it around to cover his eyes and mumbled, “Things kind of got away from me.”
“What things?”
“It has nothing to do with an insurance scam.”
“Maybe or maybe not. What happened?”
“It’s embarrassing to admit,” he said. “A wedding. I was supposed to get married next week, and I just couldn’t go through with it.”
Ed did a quizzical head cock. “So, you decided to capsize your boat and fake your death?”
“Apparently, yeah. Bad move.”
Ed swallowed and stifled a sneer. Talk about worlds colliding. The sad irony of the situation hit him like a fever spike. Long ago and far away in Indiana, Ed had done something similar, not quite so extreme (not Ed’s style), but similar enough to evoke sympathy for this jerk.
Ed coughed, cleared his throat, and said, “Look, as you might expect, there’s an all-points bulletin out. I’m here as the advance man for our island constable, sitting on my front porch back in the cove, waiting for my return. He’s about forty-five minutes away, a bit more if I walk slowly. So… that would give you about an hour of lead-time to get in your kayak and paddle for Little Crab. When I get back to my cottage, I’ll inform the constable that I hiked out here and found nobody in residence.”
“Why would you do that for me?” the guy asked, peering up directly at Ed.
“I’m not doing it for you,” Ed said. “I’m doing it to protect and preserve some semblance of the status quo. We don’t need any headlines here. We don’t need any case reports. If Captain Carl had to hike this trail and drag you off the island in the mailboat, with the entire town ogling from the wharf, it would be all anyone would talk about for years.”
On his way back to the cottage, to give the guy more of a chance, Ed stopped once or twice to explore the storm beaches and poke around amid the flotsam and jetsam, washed-up buoys and lobster traps and sea glass. He picked up loose chunks of quartz and examined the crystals. He picked up whelks and periwinkles from the tide pools and examined their intricate, swirled shells.
Remembering a trick Gloria boasted of using with her third-grade science class, Ed held up a periwinkle shell close to his lips and began humming. He hummed and glanced down, and hummed and glanced down at the glistening shell, and finally, the miracle of miracles, a tiny, pink gob of amphibious animal slowly beginning to emerge.
*
Ian Woollen lives to write in Bloomington, Indiana. His recent short fiction has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Five South, and Westchester Review. A new novel, SISTER CITY, is out from Coffeetown Press.