A Simple Thing (2 page)

“We had to do something,” Susannah said. Katie was still turned away from her, toward the big window, looking down at her magazine.

“You overreacted,” Katie said.

“I overreacted?” Susannah said. “My
father
was an
alcoholic
. You're fourteen. You drank so much you were unconscious—”

“Stop it!” Katie said. “I know! I could have died! I've had the lecture a million times.”

Katie threw her magazine down, pulled her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around her legs. All at once she looked young, wounded.

“Katie,” Susannah said, her voice soft, “it scared us. If Annie hadn't called . . .”

“It was one time, Mom,” Katie said, her voice muffled against her knees. “
One
time.
I told you. We were just messing around and didn't know we were drinking too much. It's not like I was doing that every day, or was about to. It's not like other kids don't experiment, too.” Her voice was thick now, on the brink of tears. “But
their
parents don't use that as an excuse to pull them out of school and exile them.”

One time,
Susannah thought. That's what Susannah's father used to say, too, at first—until it became such a clear and obvious lie that even he couldn't choke it out anymore. She could picture him standing in the kitchen, his back to the sink, looking at her mother—first pleading, then angry—while she and Jon tried to disappear into their chairs, heads pulled down, shoulders hunched, curling over and into themselves like snails.

“It's not exile, Kate,” Susannah said.

“Right.” Katie turned her face to the glass, her back to Susannah. “It's just pulling me away from all my friends and dragging me someplace where no one can even come visit me. Where even
Dad
can barely visit us.”

“Mom.” Quinn materialized at her elbow, his face flushed with wind and cold, his nose dripping.

Susannah put a hand on Katie's leg, a touch meant to comfort, to reassure. But Katie pulled away like she'd been burned.

“Mom
.
”

She turned to Quinn. “What is it? You look frozen.”

“It's just windy.” Quinn rubbed his nose on the sleeve of his orange sweatshirt. “Mom, I met someone who lives on San Juan Island. He said he's lived up here twenty-five years and he's never been to Sounder. He said the people on Sounder don't like outsiders. He said one time he went over to take pictures because there were some cormorants nesting there, and the people there wouldn't even let him step off the dock.”

“That's one person's point of view, honey. Our landlord was very friendly when I talked to her.”

Katie lifted her head. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew it was crazy to come to Little House on the Stupid Island.”

Susannah saw the crease between Quinn's brows, the concern in his bright blue eyes. Over the past months he'd become more and more of a loner. Susannah and Matt had talked to his teachers, talked to the principal, but the bullying had been subtle, insidious—taunts hissed in low voices on the playground, accidental bumps in the hallways when the teacher's head was turned. They'd taken him to a therapist about his germ phobia, but the social damage had already been done. Sure, he'd stopped wearing bandannas around his mouth and nose, but he was still the kid who loved turtles, the kid who could (and all too readily would) quote a million obscure facts about everything from earthworm digestion to rabbit reproduction, the kid who felt things so keenly that tears sprang to his eyes too often to allow him to fit in. Two weeks ago he'd come home bloodied from the bus stop, the day before Katie's drinking binge. The last straws.

“What if no one on Sounder likes us?” Quinn said. His eyelashes were so pale they seemed to disappear, giving his face a look of wide-eyed innocence.

“It's not going to be like that, sweetie. You'll see. You're going to make some great new friends.”

“Yeah, if they don't burn you at the stake first,” Katie said. “Did you ever see that movie
The Wicker Man,
about the police officer who went to that remote island and it turned out all the people there were involved in some bizarre cult and they made him a human sacrifice and burned him up?”

“Kate! Shut up!”

“Fine,” she said. “I'm just saying.” She took her iPod out of her backpack, put the earbuds into her ears, and turned it on.

“Mom?” Quinn said. “Is that true? Did you see that movie?”

She looked at the two of them and recalled snapshots of other Katies and Quinns: four-year-old Quinn at the park, filling her pockets with his gifts—a stone, a maple seed pod, the cap of an acorn. Katie, not yet one, taking delighted baby steps with her bare feet in the new grass on the first warm morning of spring, crowing with delight. These were her children, and yet not her children; she loved them as much as she ever had, but also, at times, felt almost like she couldn't stand them. The things that had happened this year had required so much attention and vigilance—not to mention raw emotion—that she felt completely spent.

Susannah looked out the window of the ferry. The skyline was sharp, pointed with the tips of the firs—unlike the soft, rounded skyline of the deciduous trees back home in Virginia. The snow-capped summit of Mount Baker floated on the horizon. Friday Harbor, the ferry's destination, was the biggest town in the San Juans, yet it didn't even have a traffic light. From there they'd have to travel another hour and a half on a small boat to Sounder, where there were no paved roads, no landline phones, no electricity, and just seventy-five people.

Susannah glanced at her daughter, curled in a ball of anger in the corner of the booth, at her son standing next to her, wide-eyed and afraid. She thought of her husband, all alone in their big house three thousand miles away. She thought, with some guilt, about the relief she felt in leaving him behind.

She hoped she wasn't making the biggest mistake of her life.

Chapter 2

Betty 2011

Betty Pavalak stood at her kitchen sink and gazed out the window, although she could see nothing but her own reflection. Dusk came early now. Night up here in the San Juans was dark and blacker than anything she'd ever known. She had hated that at first—the nights so dark you couldn't take a step outside without stumbling, unsure of where the ground began beneath your very feet. After the bright lights and wide skies of Seattle, those early nights tucked in here at the edge of the woods had pressed in on her like a crowded elevator. More than once she had gotten out of bed, ripped open the buttons at the neck of her nightgown, and stumbled onto the porch to breathe, facing the ocean, the escape.

Betty lit a cigarette and took a long drag, watching the tiny red glow light up her reflection in the window. Funny, this new tenant, Susannah, was coming here because she
wanted
to. Betty had wanted to come here, too, for about six months, until she realized that living on a remote island was not going to change one good goddamned thing about Bill Pavalak, and that she had just signed herself up for the kind of lifestyle you couldn't pay someone to do—up at the crack of dawn to feed chickens and goats, chopping wood to feed the hungry stove, boiling and washing and tending things all day long, all without even a decent light bulb to make it
that
much easier. But after six months she was pregnant, and the only thing she wanted more than going back home to her family in Seattle was a baby. So she had stayed.

She liked the nights now, found the darkness soft and comforting. When she went to the mainland to see her sisters in Seattle or the doctor in Bellingham, the glow of light everywhere seemed harsh and intrusive, a visual cacophony. She didn't remember at what point the darkness here had become friendly to her, just as she couldn't remember exactly when the sound of the rain beating against the roof had taken on a soothing rhythm, no longer the steady, insistent patter that had threatened her very sanity that first year. It was all how you decided to look at things.

Betty took a last swig of coffee and put her mug down on the counter. She stubbed out her cigarette in the mug and picked up her parka from the hook by the back door. Did she need to bring anything? She opened the door and peered out at the sky. The sun wouldn't set for another hour yet, so if the ferry had been on time and the waters in Governor's Channel were not too rough, then Jim should be at the dock in ten minutes and they'd be able to get this new family settled into the cottage while there was still some daylight. But she picked up the flashlight from the counter to bring with her, just in case.

“Hey, Grim.” Hood, her oldest grandson (if you wanted to count the two minutes he was in the world before his twin was born), appeared in the doorway. “Ready to go?”

Even in the soft light she could see his green eyes, exactly like his father's and grandfather's.

“Yes, I'm ready,” she said. “Let me give the stew a final stir.”

Hood rolled his eyes. “Come on. We want to be there when they get in.”

“You'll be there,” she said. “Here.” She handed him the flashlight and looked around the kitchen for her wooden spoon until she found it in the sink. She knew the twins were excited; there hadn't been a child their age on Sounder since Sally Lewis moved away three years ago.

“Where's your brother?”

“Waiting in the truck. Let's go.”

Betty lifted the lid from the cast-iron skillet and gave the stew a slow, careful stir. She planned to feed this Susannah and her kids tonight, and give them some supplies for breakfast tomorrow. She was willing to bet that Susannah—used to all-night grocery stores and convenience stores and restaurants—hadn't even thought about bringing a day or two's supply of food with her. Ah, well. Betty hadn't thought of that, either, her first night on Sounder. She and Bill had arrived on the dock with two sandwiches and their duffel bags and their mutual resentments and not much else. Susannah would learn soon enough that you could take nothing for granted when you lived in a place like this.

“
Grim,
” Hood said. The boys had called her “Grim” since they could talk, a term of endearment coined by Jim, her clever son, when she'd objected to being called “Gram.” “Can we go now?”

“What's the rush?” She dipped the spoon into the stew, ladled up a small taste of the broth, brought it to her lips, and blew on it to cool it off. She was teasing him, and he knew it. She was almost as excited about the new tenants as he was. Susannah's rent would add a comfortable amount to Betty's small income, and, to be honest, Betty was a bit lonely since school had started, with Jim teaching and the boys at school all day and Fiona, her daughter-in-law, away. It would be good to have Susannah around. And since Susannah would be here without her husband, she'd likely be lonely, too.

“Okay,” she said to Hood. “Let's go.”

They climbed into the truck. Hood drove, even though he was only fourteen, because that's the way it was on Sounder. Betty didn't like to drive much anymore, and Hood and Baker were both competent enough.

The truck bumped along the dirt driveway. Three gates stood between the cottage and the main road, although the main road itself was little more than one lane of hard-packed dirt filled with gravel in the low spots. At each gate, Hood stopped the truck and Baker hopped out and opened the gate, then Hood drove slowly through and stopped on the other side until Baker had closed and latched the gate and climbed back in the truck. It was so routine to the boys that neither of them complained, even though they were in a hurry. They didn't want to end up hunting goats or alpacas through the woods if the gate were left opened.

“So do you know if she's hot?” Hood asked, as they turned onto North Shore Road. Even after fifty-five years here, Betty was amazed by this paradox, the contrast between the magical beauty of the Sounder roads and their prosaic names. The dirt road that cut through a meadow of blue camas and yellow prairie violets that blazed with color every spring was called “Gravel Pit Road.” The road that wound alongside a stream and past bigleaf maples that turned golden in the fall was “Hill Road.” And this road, which passed through a forest of ancient hemlocks and cedar and Douglas firs that towered upward like giant arrows pointing directly to God, was “North Shore Road.” Sounder pioneers may have had guts, but they didn't have much creativity.

“What?” Betty said.

“The new girl,” Hood said. “Is she hot?”

“I didn't ask for photos with the rental application,” Betty said, her voice dry. “My mistake. I don't think I can break the lease if the daughter is ugly.”

Hood rolled his eyes. “Very funny, Grim.”

“Susannah also has a son,” Betty said. “I think he's ten or eleven. I hope you'll make him feel welcome, too.”

“It's weird they're coming here in October,” Baker said. “School's already started. Why are they moving?”

“I've told you everything I know,” Betty said. “Susannah said they needed a change, and she's had some interest in the San Juans since she was young.”

“It's weird they're coming here at all,” Hood said.

Betty didn't add that Susannah had mentioned her daughter had had some “behavior problems,” and that she hoped the different pace of life on Sounder might help. Let her come to Sounder with a clean slate, Betty thought. It's what she herself had tried to do when she'd arrived with Bill all those years ago. They'd purchased the farm sight unseen and arrived with all kind of hopes for their fresh start, even though they'd been married four or five years by then.

And Sounder had worked its miracles, for a while. Those first six months, once she got used to the hard work involved in living without electricity or indoor plumbing, she had relaxed deep inside in a way she'd never experienced before. What had undone her then, and driven her off the island for a while, had had nothing to do with Sounder, and everything to do with the man she'd married.

When she returned, it was with a different kind of hope: hope for her child. That's what drew her back to Sounder, and that's what had kept her here over the years, through bouts of loneliness and boredom. Sure, she'd get letters from her sister Bobbie in Seattle about a party she'd thrown or a movie she'd seen or the fabric she'd bought to redecorate her living room, and Betty would think,
I could leave. I could take Jim and go home, and I could see a movie and live in an apartment with a dishwasher and electric light and never have to look at another goddamned chicken as long as I live.

But then she'd look at Jim, at her sensitive, brilliant boy, and see the ways Sounder nourished him, from the long wild rambles he took alone in the woods to the library of books and comic books he read over and over (since they had no television) to the gang of kids he'd known since birth—and God knows there was a gang of them back then in the early sixties and seventies, when forty-five children had filled the schoolhouse and swelled the old post office (now the Laundromat) almost to bursting at parties. It wasn't just the kids; it was the parents, too, who knew each other's children as well as their own, encouraged them and disciplined them as their own, who were a community in every sense of the word.

When she thought of moving to Seattle and trying to find a job—at thirty-three or thirty-four, with no employment history, and her only skills things like the ability to pluck a chicken in five minutes flat or to stitch up a man's arm with boiled white cotton thread and a sharp needle—she grew afraid. She couldn't support herself and Jim, and even if she did find a job, what then? Who would watch Jim while she went out to work eight or ten hours a day? They'd have to live in a small apartment, and who knew what neighborhood they'd be able to afford. One sister was ill and still lived at home; her other sister was married, with a house and family of her own. No, the best thing for Jim was Sounder, so she'd stayed.

Then, after thirteen years, after the accident, she had little desire to leave. If she'd been out in the world after the accident she might have gone crazy, she thought. On Sounder she'd been someplace where no one judged her for what had happened, and where Jim, who was twelve and a handful, was safe, or as safe as one could be in a world full of surprises.

Betty shook her head.

“What, Grim?” Baker said.

“Nothing,” she said. Something about this younger woman coming to the island, to live in the cottage where she herself had raised her child—Betty felt a deep connection to this woman she'd never met. Feelings and thoughts she'd thought long gone arose inside her like the saplings on the forest floor—steady, insistent. Some of them were things she didn't want to think about or feel again. Not now. She shifted her angular body on the front seat of the truck.

“So do you know why they're coming here?” Baker said.

Betty shook her head. “No idea.”

She knew. Susannah was bringing her daughter here to keep her safe—that much was clear. But suffering found everyone sooner or later, whether you ran away or stayed in place.