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“I believe that's what Isaiah told him, except more diplomatically.”

Rocky said, “How do you stand it? This was a perfectly good island until the population tripled with tourists. The island is four miles around. How many people can we fit on it before it topples over into the ocean?” Rocky sat up and reached for the water and downed the remainder in two gulps.

“I've lived here for fifteen years, so I've built up a certain immunity to the summer people. Not immunity, they're not like smallpox. But their reason for being here is different. Just like yours is different. This is your first summer, so it will be your worst, the same way teachers have to endure their first year of teaching. Teachers catch every cold and flu that blows through their classroom during the first year, until they build up a resistance. But you get used to it. There's a flow to life here.” Tess slipped off her sandals and dropped them on the deck. “You do realize that you are a newcomer and that we all had to adjust to you. Some very wonderful people first came here as a tourist. Like me.”

Rocky had not come to Peaks as a tourist, more like a refugee, but Tess was right: she had felt a level of acceptance that was slow and qualified, but acceptance nonetheless. Rocky tapped her foot and frowned. She had been sufficiently chastised, and it had worked its magic. Her brain was now only filled to 95 percent capacity with the strange girl who had called her.

Tess said, “Let's keep moving. Walking helps to soothe the anxious beast in us.” They walked around her house to her backyard, skirting her piles of rocks, stacked in gravity-defying cairns. The desire to arrange the rocks, smoothed by ocean and sand, tempted nearly everyone.

“The back side of my house looks like an archery range,” said Tess. Rocky used her friend's backyard for archery practice. A plastic-coated paper target had been tacked securely to a triple pile of hay bales on the far right side of Tess's yard.

“I should post a sign that says, D
ANGER.
Y
OU HAVE ENTERED A WEAPONS AREA.
I used to live in fear that you'd overshoot the target and nail one of my neighbors. Fortunately, your accuracy has improved,” said Tess.

Archery was one of the things that had saved Rocky—the repetition, the rekindling of the desire to challenge herself, to dare to learn something so incredibly hard that her shoulders screamed in the first few weeks. She had found an archery teacher, Hill Johnson, and he had prodded her competitive spirit, which had gone dormant after Bob's death. She had been humbled by the deceptive simplicity of the action: you pulled back on a bow and released an arrow. Starting on a child's bow, she had imagined that her swimmer's shoulders would help her, but her improvements had been microscopic; gradually, however, she had moved up. Now she relished the way she had to still her breath, drop her energy to the soles of her feet, and ease her body into the rhythm of slow, exacting power, projecting her vision to a point on the target, then the release.

Archery practice was the one time when Cooper was banished from her side. When she had first found him, he had been abandoned and left with a nearly fatal injury by an archer. Tess had agreed with Hill: neither of them could bear the thought of Cooper seeing her with a bow in her hands.

“There is a predictability, a cycle to the year, and summer on the island has its own color. In my world, summer is orange and purple, unless you add in the horrible loud music played at the dock on Saturday night, and then you've got to factor in the strips of red. Maroon, really. This is what my life used to be like, before my gorgeous synesthesia evaporated,” said Tess.

The phone call had obliterated everything from Rocky's mind, even the loss that plagued Tess. In late winter, Tess had experienced a medical convergence of appendicitis and bowel obstruction. The emergency surgery had saved her life, but her lifelong condition of synesthesia abandoned her in the aftermath.

“I can't imagine what it must be like to lose your wonderful multisensory world,” said Rocky. “But remember? Len said that anesthesia does weird stuff to people.” Len was Tess's ex-husband, a retired surgeon. “It's a poison, and it ran laps in your bloodstream for five hours while you were in surgery. The docs told you that surgery on your intestines should not change a neurological condition, that your synesthesia could return at any time.” Nothing that Rocky said sounded as consoling as she wanted it to. She hoped that her friend's Buddhist approach to life might offer a buffer to sadness.

“You have no idea how rich my multisensory world was. This is like seeing the world through a black veil and constantly wearing thick leather gloves. It's not your fault. There's no way for you to know. You're right. I should try not to catastrophize,” said Tess, unconvincingly.

Cooper chewed a piece of wood, securing the stick with one large black paw. He trimmed the stick to his satisfaction and delivered it to Rocky.

“You want me to throw this, big guy?”

Cooper kept his eye on the stick and slowly backed up, bumping into a low stone wall that serpentined through the yard.

She heaved the stick as far into the surrounding woods as possible. It bounced off a tree trunk, and Cooper was there before it even hit the ground. The faded prayer flags suddenly fluttered to a burst of sea breeze.

“Dealing with tourists takes a special kind of finesse with the human condition that you may not currently possess, despite being a psychologist,” said Tess. “If you want to deal with animals, you have to learn how to deal with humans again. May I remind you that you have lived here since last October, and some of these tourists have been coming back every summer for fifty years? They could show you amazing things about Peaks and about continuity.” Tess stretched her arms over her head, and her slender body moved like beach grass. “You look like a storm is hovering over your head, and I suppose it is. Stray children don't show up every day.”

“I guess we're done talking about my job and tourists, aren't we?” said Tess.

“Yes. Did the distraction help?”

“A little,” lied Rocky. Natalie's voice had already hummed into the marrow of her bones.

S
he did not remember exactly when Bob had first looked at her, dreamy-eyed from sleep, night crust in the corners of his eyes, and said, “I can see a baby of ours.” It was during the year before he died, in the innocent months when Rocky never contemplated life without him, when they woke entangled, talking of children. The idea had pumped low and insistent in her belly. “I can see a baby too,” she had whispered, and she had pulled his hand to cup the soft pouch below her belly button, where a baby would grow if there was one, which there had not been. If Bob hadn't died, she would be thirty-nine years old, a baby in her arms, and Bob would be an unbearably proud, strutting father at the ripe age of forty-three. Instead, he was dead. He got to be forty-two forever. She was a thirty-nine-year-old widow. And someone out there in the world believed she was Bob's daughter.

Chapter 3

R
ocky held out for three hours before calling Isaiah to say that she had to talk to him and that she'd meet him at his office in the Public Works Building. She had walked the circumference of the island and ducked into a narrow path called Snake Alley. She moved a lilac branch out of the way and trotted along the dirt path, with Cooper twenty feet ahead of her. Alleys were really footpaths, and if you lived on Peaks all your life, you knew how to avoid downtown altogether by staying on them. There were no signs for paths like Snake Alley; you either grew up knowing about them, a knowledge passed down through generations like a secret language, or someone had to take pity on you and tell you. Isaiah had only recently told Rocky about Snake Alley.

“It's called Snake Alley because it winds around like a snake, not because it's loaded with snakes. You've lived here the better part of a year and no one has seen fit to tell you about Snake Alley? That's a shame,” Isaiah had said.

Rocky dropped off her monthly report to Isaiah's office. He took it and said, “I'll read this later. Let's see if they have coffee left at the dock.” They walked along the sidewalk to the Island Café with Cooper leading the way, his thick tail ticking like a metronome. It was late afternoon, and the tiny eatery was set to close in thirty minutes.

T
he café hung personal coffee mugs for regular customers on hooks above the counter. When Isaiah walked in, Francine, the owner, immediately reached up and grabbed his cup and handed it to him. She never made a mistake about who had which cup. Isaiah's cup said M
UTUAL
L
IFE
. Rocky went to the far end of the counter, picked up a paper cup, and filled it with Ethiopian dark.

“Was it just an oversight or have you guys been hazing me? I still haven't rated my own coffee mug at the café.”

Francine put a cinnamon roll on a plate and handed it to Isaiah. “The thing is that you have to be a resident to rate a coffee mug, and you made it clear to us that you'll be gone by the end of the summer. This is how we keep our hearts from being broken. You wouldn't want us to get overly attached, would you?”

Rocky's stomach clenched. The idea of leaving Peaks was suddenly front and center, gnawing at her each day. She had promised her boss on the mainland that she'd be returning for fall semester, and now the idea filled her with dread. Each September the new college students arrived with their ill-fitting clothes, wearing too much makeup and perfume, terrified of making social mistakes and thus guaranteed to make tons of mistakes, waiting for their parents to drive away so that they could start drinking and hooking up. She found them genuinely interesting because grappling with mistakes (having sex with the wrong people, ending up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning, getting bounced out of the residence hall for possession of a joint) was the stuff of becoming really human. Rocky called them neo-adults, and she adored them. How could she not go back?

Rocky and Isaiah were among the last customers. Cooper was allowed in the café, and he had wedged himself under the table. Two carpenters walked in. One wore work boots with socks rolled down over the tops. His shorts ended below his knees. His calves were pumped to a thirty-year-old ripeness, fresh from climbing ladders all day. Rocky imagined Bob's calf muscles when he was twenty-four, tangled up in someone else's bed.

Isaiah tipped his head to the two men. He knew everyone who lived on the island year-round and made a heroic attempt to get to know tourists who stayed on the island more than a week or two. Isaiah's face stretched into a smile that produced a series of facial folds emanating out from his lips. His dark skin was suddenly etched in even darker lines, highlighting the smile. He and his wife, Charlotte, were the only black family on the island. His hair—and he still had a full head of it—was leaning heavily in the direction of white.

“There's something I need to ask you about. I got a phone call from a girl who said she's looking for her biological father. She was looking for Bob.”

Isaiah was mid-swallow when he sputtered out a brown spray and his cup hit the table so hard that an explosion of coffee erupted, landing on his forearm. The coffee was a few shades lighter than his skin, and Rocky took one second to admire the aesthetic impression while Isaiah wiped down the table and himself.

“You were leaving this as a secondary agenda item to your report? Tell me what she said.”

Rocky told him almost all of the little bit that the girl had offered on the phone. She left out the part about the sound of Natalie's voice, the way it had settled in her. As Isaiah listened, his brow folded into the accordion frown that she had grown to love.

“It's too convenient,” said Isaiah. “Now that your husband is dead, this girl shows up. How old did she say she was?”

“She said she had just turned eighteen. If it's true, Bob would have been twenty-four. That was four years before I met him. I've been working the math all day.”

“Do you know anything about his girlfriends before you?”

Rocky shrugged her shoulders. “I never actually quizzed him on all his previous girlfriends. I mean, I did in a global kind of way. He had a couple of girlfriends in college. But if he'd had a child, that would have been the kind of thing he would have told me.”

“Most young men don't worry too much about the consequences of sex. It's when we get older, and I've seen it happen, that one day you get a phone call, or a letter, or a fully formed human being, allegedly sprung from your own loins, shows up and turns out to have been living thirty minutes from your backyard, put up for adoption by the woman you had sex with once. Very likely, both of you woke up the next day trying to act casual, but you had turned shy again and wanted to button up your pants and had nothing to say.”

“That's the longest sentence I've ever heard you say,” said Rocky.

“Men have very little to say about a lot of things. This is one of the things that I have a lot to say about.”

“Do you mean this happened to you? Did you get the phone call from a fully formed human being sprung from your loins?”

“No. But I could have. I was not a careful young man.”

With his head on Rocky's feet, the dog, having successfully pinned her in place, heaved to his side, stuck his legs out straight, and created a four-foot perimeter around her. Having done so, he went back to a semi-sleep state.

“I know what you're saying, and I've thought the same thing. I understand that it's possible Bob didn't know. A lot of things are possible. Someone might have given this kid the wrong information too.”

“And it's possible that it's not true. How did you leave it when she called you?”

“I told her that I'd call her back,” said Rocky.

Isaiah put his elbows on the table. He rubbed his forefinger with his thumb. “I know you. This is not an injured dog. I want you to proceed with caution.”

“Oh, I will,” said Rocky, remembering the sound of the girl's voice, the way something had pulled her out of the sky like a shotgun, the familiar catch in the throat that sounded so like Bob. And if there was anyone out there who could bring a bit of Bob back to her, then Rocky had to take a chance. “I promise, I'll wait until tomorrow before I call her back.” She looked down at Cooper, avoiding Isaiah's gaze.

“I want to ask you something else,” Rocky said. “I was out running this morning, down the spine of the island, near the dump, and I saw the most amazing thing out by the old Costello house. Wisteria has gone wild out there. Big gobs of purple wisteria are hanging from all the trees, as high as thirty feet up. I couldn't believe how beautiful it was. I've never seen anything like it.” Rocky had felt like she'd been struck in the chest by the wisteria, as if she'd found the heart of the island. It was like she had stumbled on a personal message, and since the phone call from the girl she was looking for anything that made sense. The sound of the girl's voice had left a seed in her chest that had already carved out a space there.

“That's a sight, isn't it? I'll have to tell Charlotte that the wisteria bloomed late after all. It must be the climate change. The lilacs went early this year by two weeks.”

“But why is there wisteria gone wild out there?” she asked.

“There used to be an old farmhouse out there, but it burned down to the ground over sixty years ago. If you want, I could show you the foundation. The only living thing that survived was the wisteria. And since there's been no development on that property, it's been undisturbed. It must be the perfect conditions for wisteria. The property is smack up against the Costello house.”

“Is the Costello place still for sale?” she asked.

“It's been for sale for three years. Half the houses on the island are for sale. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

Isaiah tapped his fingers along his full lips. “And you're suddenly pondering real estate here? If I had to put your two topics of child and house together, I'd be flabbergasted at your impulsivity.”

Why was she suddenly looking at a house? Rocky was getting pressure from all sides about when she was going to return to her job in Massachusetts. A perfectly good job awaited her, a job that she had loved, along with her house and her former life. Cooper would chew sticks endlessly in the dense forests behind her house near the Berkshires.

Ray had called five times with long messages, bursting her message machine with his insistence that she come back to the university. Her brother, Caleb, wanted to know when she was moving back. Melissa, her teenage neighbor on Peaks Island and Cooper's chief fan, had asked her, “Will Cooper be going with you when you leave?” even though they had been over this point many times before.

Rocky pulled out her chair, and Cooper scuttled to attention, his black claws finally gaining traction on the rug.

“If I was acting impulsively, I wouldn't be asking for advice from the smartest man I know,” she said with what she hoped was a convincing smile. Francine flipped the
OPEN
sign to
CLOSED
as Rocky, Isaiah, and Cooper left the café. She kept to the alleys and dirt roads on the walk home.

The second Rocky walked into the little rental cottage, she walked directly to her phone and dialed Natalie's number. There was no answer and no message machine.