The Island (8 page)

Tate had her own agenda for Tuckernuck, and that agenda was to run the circumference of the island each morning, swim across North Pond and back, do 150 sit-ups a day while hanging by her knees from the branch of the only tree on their windswept property. She was going to lie in the sun, do Sudoku puzzles, drink wine, and let her mother feed her. Just like Chess, Tate wanted to escape the world. On Tuckernuck there would be no screens, no keyboards, no interfacing with anyone’s goddamned crashed system, no hackers, no viruses, no hardware, no software, no incompatibility. No checking her iPhone for e-mails or texts, no checking the weather, no checking the stock market, no playing beer pong, no streaming E Street Radio. Good-bye to all that.

Tate was a level 4 ++ computer programmer, she was a wizard, she could fix absolutely anything short of a martian blowing your system away with his beta gun or a system overtaken by saltwater (it had happened once, at a five-star hotel in Cabo). But what Tate Cousins really did for a living was travel. She was constantly en route to Toledo, Detroit, Cleveland, San Antonio, Peoria, Bellingham, Cheyenne, Savannah, Decatur, Chattanooga, Las Vegas. Her life was one long concourse; it was an endless string of Au Bon Pain and Hudson News. It was barf bags and foil packs of square pretzels and in-flight magazines. Shoes on, shoes off. Any liquids or gels? There was a stocky, red-haired TSA employee in Fort Lauderdale who remembered Tate and called her “Rosalita” because that was the song she had been listening to on her iPod when she first came through his security line. Tate had 1.6 million frequent-flier miles; she had enough bonus package points to buy either a time-share in Destin or a Range Rover. She was sometimes struck by images of Home: a house somewhere in the suburbs, Mom, Dad, kids, dog—all out on the front lawn, washing the car or throwing the Frisbee. It occurred to Tate that this was what she was supposed to want: a home, an end point. She was not supposed to be constantly in transit. She was supposed to stop somewhere and feel a sense of belonging.

The noteworthy thing about today, July 1, was that there was an end point. There was a home. Tate’s mother, Birdie (which was short for Elizabeth, which was also Tate’s given name), delivered them safely to Hyannis and nestled her Mercedes into long-term parking. The four of them then hopped the short flight to Nantucket. They took a taxi from the airport to Madaket Harbor. Once they were in Madaket, Tate’s heart started to settle, like a dog on its canvas Orvis bed, like a baby in its quilted Moses basket. She had crisscrossed the United States of America dozens of times with little expectation or fanfare, but the mere sight of Madaket Harbor, sparkling blue and green in the July sun, smelling salty and swampy, and presenting itself
exactly
as she remembered it when she was last here at seventeen years old, was turning Tate to jelly.

Home!

And there, whistling, waving his bronzed arm in an arc, cutting a frothy swath through the placid water of the harbor, was her prince on a white horse—it was Barrett Lee on a thirty-three-foot Boston Whaler Outrage with dual 250s off the back. In gold letters across the back of the boat, it said,
Girlfriend, NANTUCKET, MASS.

“Barrett Lee,” Chess said. Her voice sounded surprised, as if he’d appeared out of the recesses of her deepest memory. Tate, meanwhile, had thought about nothing but Barrett Lee since her mother had first mentioned his name.

She wondered if Barrett Lee was married. She had searched for him on Facebook and come up empty handed. She had googled him but had been unable to find evidence of her Barrett Lee amid the 714 other Barrett Lees who had left footprints in cyberspace. She searched the online archives of the
Inquirer and Mirror,
the Nantucket weekly newspaper, and discovered—aha!—that Barrett Lee had been in the Thursday night dart league in 2006 and 2007.

Tate wondered if she would still have feelings for Barrett Lee, and if she did, would these be new feelings, or old, resurrected feelings? She wasn’t the same person she’d been thirteen years ago, and he wouldn’t be either. So did resurrected old feelings even count, if she didn’t know him anymore?

This was all pretty deep thinking for Tate. She preferred to work in tangibles, and what was tangible was this: Barrett Lee was more attractive than ever. The kind of attractive that made Tate feel like her heart was being pulled out through her nose. Was that tangible enough for you?

“I got his girlfriend right here,” Tate said. Chess may have been heartbroken, medicated, and shorn, but there was no way she was getting Barrett Lee. Tate planted her feet, removed the earbuds of her iPod, and waved back.

Barrett Lee was the person from Tate’s past who evoked the deepest and most poignant longing. In Tate’s memory, she had loved him since he was six and she was five. At six, Barrett had been what her parents called a towhead; his hair was white, like an old person’s. Tate’s most intense memories centered on the summer she was seventeen, the last summer she’d been to Tuckernuck with her family. It was for Tate, as it no doubt was for many other seventeen-year-olds, the seminal summer of her life. She had been headed into her senior year of high school. Barrett Lee, she remembered, had just graduated, and although Plymouth State had expressed interest in him as a wide receiver, he wasn’t going to college. Tate found this very exotic. Chess had just finished her freshman year at Colchester in Vermont, which epitomized the New England collegiate experience that absolutely everyone in Tate’s New Canaan high school was seeking: the scholarly brick buildings with white pillars, the green quadrangle, the flaming orange maple trees, the cable-knit sweaters, the ponytails, the keg parties, the a cappella singing groups strolling among the tailgaters as Colchester took on rival Bowdoin in football. Instead of going to college, Barrett Lee was going to work for his father; he was going to learn to build houses and then take care of them once they were built. He was going to tile bathrooms, plumb dishwashers, wire stove burners. He was going to build bookshelves and window seats. He was going to make money, buy his own boat, fish for striped bass, ride his Jeep to Coatue on the weekends, go to the Chicken Box, drink beer, see bands, pick up girls. He was going to live life. God, Tate could remember clear as day how much better that had sounded than going to college, sharing a dorm room, sponging off her parents.

She had spent that whole summer watching Barrett Lee. He was the one who brought the family their groceries, their firewood, their newspapers and paperback books. He picked up their bags of trash, which he took to the dump, and their laundry, which he took to Holdgate’s and returned in neat white boxes like treats from the bakery. On very good days, he did repairs around the house, usually without wearing a shirt. Tate couldn’t get enough of him—the deep tan of his back, the impossible sun-bleached lightness of his hair. He was gorgeous, and that would have been enough for Tate; she was, after all, only seventeen. But he was nice, too. He smiled and laughed with all of the members of the Cousins family—even Tate’s grouchy father, who in that final summer demanded a
Wall Street Journal
by 10
A.M
. each day, crisp, so that Barrett took to bringing it in a Wonder bread bag. Barrett Lee made their vacation on Tuckernuck pleasant; he made it possible. Everyone remarked on it.

It had been Aunt India who said that having two teenage daughters lying on the beach in bikinis helped to keep Barrett Lee on-task. Tate’s heart trilled at the insinuation, but in the back of her mind, fear and jealousy festered. If Barrett Lee was interested in one of the Cousins girls, it would be Chess—and really, could Tate blame him? Chess had the long, wavy, honey blond hair, she had magnificent breasts, she had college-level expertise about how to smile and chat guys up, how to flirt, how to exude the confidence that came with acing her art history survey course and mastering the beer bong. She was reading thick books that summer—Tolstoy, DeLillo, Evelyn Waugh—that gave her an aura of intelligence and inapproachability, which Barrett Lee was attracted to. Tate, on the other hand, was stick thin and flat chested. She bounced a tennis ball incessantly on an old wooden racquet she’d found in the attic; she listened to her
Born to Run
tape on her Walkman until the Walkman ran out of batteries and Bruce warbled like a ninety-year-old man after ten shots of whiskey. Whenever they needed something from the store on Nantucket, they were to write it, in Sharpie, on “the list,” which was most often kept on a panel of brown grocery bag. But Tate’s grouchy father refused to pay for the sixteen-pack of AA batteries to power Tate’s Walkman until she had finished her summer reading,
Their Eyes Were Watching God,
which Tate found impossibly tedious. Tate didn’t do her reading, and Barrett didn’t bring the fresh batteries that would have so improved her summer.

Tate had been a tomboy and a late bloomer. One night after dinner, she overheard Aunt India ask Birdie if she thought Tate might be a lesbian. Birdie said, “Oh, heavens, India, she’s just a child!” Tate had filled with embarrassment, shame, and rage. In high school, she had once been called a dyke, but that was by an extremely ignorant girl who didn’t understand Tate’s devotion to the Boss or to the Macs in the computer lab. To have Aunt India, a woman of the world, suspect her to be a lesbian was confusing on another level. Tate lay in bed in the dark house—and darkness on Tuckernuck was far darker than in other places—listening to the rustle of what she knew to be bat wings (Chess slept with a blanket pulled over her head even though Tate had explained that bats echolocate and therefore would never accidentally brush her face or hair), thinking of how ironic it was that Aunt India would question her sexual orientation when she was suffering from the worst crush of her life. She came to the conclusion, too, that whatever it was that made Aunt India think that she, Tate, was a lesbian, was exactly the same thing that was keeping Barrett from looking at her the way he looked at Chess.

Predictably, that summer, things came to a head. One day, Barrett was invited to stay for lunch, an hour involving the whole family eating char-grilled burgers around the picnic table on the bluff that overlooked the beach, during which Tate’s father interrogated Barrett about his aspirations and plans for the future. The answers formed the sum of what Tate knew about Barrett Lee. During the lunch, Barrett looked at Chess fourteen times. Tate counted, and it was like fourteen nails in the coffin of her hopes for love.

She had spent her entire life losing out to Chess, but she couldn’t stand the thought of losing out to Chess with Barrett, and so she employed the only tactic that had ever been successful for Tate with a boy: she showed an interest in what he was interested in. This had worked organically for Tate at school—she liked Lara Cross, she liked Bruce Springsteen, and so did certain boys. These boys paid her attention; they thought she was “cool,” unlike the rest of the female high school population, who only cared about makeup and Christian Slater.

What did Barrett like? He liked fishing. Toward the end of that fateful lunch, Tate had proclaimed several times, too loudly to be ignored, her burning desire to go fishing. She was
dying
to go fishing. She would do
anything
to go fishing. If only she knew someone who could take her… fishing.

Her father said, “We get the hint, honey. Barrett, would you be willing to take my daughter fishing?”

Barrett smiled uncomfortably. He flicked his eyes at Chess. “Uh, both of you, or…”

“God, no,” Chess said. “I think fishing is just one more form of animal cruelty.”

Tate rolled her eyes. This sounded suspiciously like one of the radical positions Chess had picked up, like a flu bug, at the Colchester Student Union. “You
eat
fish,” Tate pointed out. “Is that cruel?”

Chess glared at her. “I don’t
want
to go fishing,” she said.

“Well, I do,” Tate said. She grinned at Barrett, not caring how transparent she was. “So you’ll take me?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “Or my father could…”

Tate’s father said, “I’m sure Chuck is too busy to take Tate fishing. If you agree to do it, Barrett, I’ll be happy to pay you.”

Tate was mortified.

Barrett said, “Okay, yeah, sounds good. So… we’ll have to go pretty early. I’ll pick you up at seven, okay?”

She was nothing more to him than an hourly wage, but what could she do now?

“Okay,” she said.

That night, Tate didn’t sleep. She closed her eyes and imagined Barrett’s arms encircling her as he showed her how to cast. She imagined kissing him, touching his bare chest, warmed by the sun. She sighed and relaxed in the fact that she was most definitely attracted to the opposite sex.

She was up at dawn, dressed in a bikini, a pair of jean shorts, and a skimpy T-shirt that she had stolen from Chess’s drawer. Chess was sound asleep and wouldn’t notice until Tate got back, at which point it would be too late—the magic of the T-shirt would have worked. If Chess wanted to bitch about Tate borrowing her T-shirt without asking, she could go right ahead. Tate would be anesthetized by the power of Barrett’s love.

At quarter to seven, Tate carried a waterproof bag containing a sweatshirt, three peanut butter and honey sandwiches, two bananas, and a thermos of cocoa down to the beach to wait. The bikini and Chess’s skimpy T-shirt didn’t offer much in the way of warmth, and Tate waited on the misty shore with her arms crossed over her chest, her nipples as hard and cold as the pebbles under her feet. When she heard the motor of Barrett’s boat, she tried to appear sexy and enticing, even though her teeth were chattering and her lips, she was sure, were blue.

Tate’s heart was hammering in her chest as she waded out to the boat; she was convulsing with the chill.

Barrett offered her a hand up. They were, for one sweet second, holding hands! He said, “I packed a picnic lunch, some beers and stuff, for after fishing.”

It was, Tate saw now, a testament to her low self-esteem that she never once considered that the picnic had been meant for Barrett and
her.