The Lace Reader (27 page)

May turned around at the top of the dock. “Come!” she yelled to me, clapping her hands together as if I were one of the dogs.

“Now!”

May walked ahead of us back to the house. Beezer waited for me. He took another hit of his inhaler.

Beezer grabbed my arm as we walked, just in time to keep me from falling into a rabbit hole. It was a hole I’d never seen before, right there in the middle of the path, and it was a dangerous one. It surprised me to see it there. I thought I knew where all the rabbit The Lace Reader 243

holes were, but this was a new one. The rabbits must have dug it sometime last night, while everyone was sleeping. I heard the boat pull out, but I didn’t turn back. I was trying not to think about what it meant. I couldn’t believe that Auntie Emma was really going. I couldn’t believe it was all going to end like this.
Winter to summer . . .

I like the hospital. I like being here. It feels safe. But I miss the smell of the ocean so much. I just wanted to say that. I’m trying to remember what happened that winter, but I can’t. Most of the memory has been lost to the shock therapy. I only remember being very cold and very lonely. I don’t think I heard from Lyndley at all. I don’t remember.

The next time I remember seeing Lyndley was the following summer. The weather was beautiful the day she arrived. I was finally warm. When the school term ended, Lyndley came back to Salem by herself.

Since neither Cal nor Auntie Emma would allow Lyndley anywhere near May, my sister was officially staying with Eva in the rooms that later became mine. But Lyndley came to the island anyway. She spent her time moving back and forth between the island and the mainland, and no one ever really knew where she was staying on any given night, so no one really worried about her if she didn’t show up, which suited Lyndley just fine. When she stayed on the island, she slept in the room that May had prepared for Auntie Emma. It was the happiest I’d ever seen her. Lyndley was free. She had liked school and was looking forward to her senior year. She had a lightness I’d never seen in her, and her natural wild streak was unleashed. She had always been pretty, but now she was magnetic. In the same way May was. The beginning of legend. Everyone wanted to be with her. I had to fight to get equal time. 244 Brunonia

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“Let’s go to Harvard Square,” Lyndley suggested one day, and I jumped at the chance. “Bring your jacket,” she said. “It’s going to get cold later.”

We rode the bus to Haymarket, which took forever, then the T

into Harvard Square. It was hotter in town, and Lyndley traded my jacket to a hippie panhandler for a pair of huarache sandals, because her feet hurt, but the sandals were one size too big, so she went barefoot unless we went into a store, like this head shop she found. Then she’d put the sandals on and flop around, her feet making tiny farting sounds as she walked. The guys at the counter were getting a kick out of it, but guys always got a kick out of anything Lyndley did, because she was so pretty, and besides, their eyes were really bloodshot, so I think they were stoned, which makes anything funny. Every once in a while, when the sound was really outrageous, she would blush and say, “Excuse me,” or
“Pardonnez-moi, s’il vous plaît,”

and they would about fall off their seats. By the time we left, Lyndley had gotten a 20 percent discount on a silk sari and a five-finger discount on some rolling papers that they pretended not to notice her pocketing. She got away with this only because she had promised one of the guys that she would give him her phone number, a good trick since she didn’t even have a phone. She hoped he’d forget about it, but he followed us out of the store with a pen, and Lyndley ended up scribbling Eva’s phone number on the guy’s arm.

“Hey, what’s your name?” he yelled after her, tripping over the curb as he tried to read his arm.

“Eva Braun,” she said.

Lyndley thought this was very funny, but the guy didn’t get the joke, and I wasn’t laughing, because not only was it not funny at all, but I was starting to get pissed off about the jacket, although it wasn’t one I really liked. Even I knew that you didn’t give away a fifty-dollar jacket for a pair of ten-dollar sandals. That was just plain stupid. By the time we got out of there, I could tell that Lyndley felt bad The Lace Reader 245

about it, too, because she took me into Marimekko, where she was going to buy me something, but the designs there were too cheery for her, or anyway that’s what she told me, so we went to Pier 1 instead, and she bought us two Indian-print bedspreads. She was going to cut hers up and make pants out of them, she said, because Eva had a sewing machine she could use. But I didn’t have to make pants with mine, she said. I could keep it as a bedspread if I wanted to. At another head shop down the block, I saw a pair of earrings that were really pretty, and I pointed them out to Lyndley, who went ahead and bought those, too, but not for me, for her. It kind of pissed me off that I was the one who had found them—not that she hadn’t bought them for me, she had already bought me too much, but that she had to buy them at all. When she asked me what I thought, I told her they looked good on her, but she could tell I was mad.

“Where are you getting all this money?” I asked.

“Eva gives me an allowance,” she said. “She doesn’t know how much kids should get, so she gives me way too much.”

I looked at her. She could tell I was judging her. We are all readers, even Lyndley, who likes to pretend she isn’t.

“Come on, let’s go get some incense,” she said, grabbing my arm. Lyndley bought some frangipani incense and a purple tie-dye T-shirt. Then we stopped for oolong and Earl Grey at Tivoli, and she paid for that, too, but we both agreed that it wasn’t very good, because they didn’t warm the pots the way Eva did when she made us tea. We took the bus back to Marblehead, getting off at Fort Sewall just at sunset, as the blasting cannons from the yacht clubs shot their echoes all around us. We ran down the stairs to the Whaler, which we had tied up to someone else’s mooring, and luckily our boat was still there. We arrived back at the island just as May appeared at the top of the dock, Lyndley losing one of the sandals as she ran up the ramp, like Cinderella or something, but she ran back for it herself instead of leaving it for some prince to find.

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“I thought you were in Salem,” May said to us, and I could tell she’d been watching where the boat came from.

“Marblehead,” I said.

“You told me Salem.”

“No I didn’t.”

She looked at us, then at the bag and at Lyndley’s one sandal. I was really scared for a minute that she was going to ask to see what was in the bag, and I was hoping that Lyndley had kept the rolling papers in her pocket and not transferred them to the bag or anything, but May didn’t ask. Instead she started pulling up the ramp.

“Next time you’re late,” she said, “I’m just going to pull this up, and you can sleep on the float all night.”

My mother was so weird.

It did get cold, and rainy. For the next few days, we stayed inside playing gin rummy with Beezer, who was starting to wheeze. Lyndley kept trying to cheer him up by drawing fake tattoos on his arms with a ballpoint pen, dotting the ink on—a phoenix on one arm and a killer shark on the other. Then she took out her sketch pad and drew pictures of Skybo lying on the rug, but he was dreaming and his feet kept twitching, so she finally gave up and just started writing her name over and over in different styles, trying to find a new style of penmanship that suited her. By Thursday, Lyndley was itching to get out, and May needed some groceries and some ephedra for Beezer’s wheezing, so we volunteered to go to town. Eva was on her way out when we got there, but she had the ephedra and some other herbs ready for us to take, as well as some tea, and then Lyndley asked if we could borrow some furniture from the coach house while we were at it.

“You want my furniture?”

“Just old stuff. Stuff you don’t want anymore.”

“For what purpose?” I could see Eva’s wheels turning, wondering what we were up to now. She looked at me to a get a better read of The Lace Reader 247

the situation, but I clearly had no idea what Lyndley had in mind, so my thoughts told her nothing.

“We’re going to redo the playhouse,” Lyndley said. “It looks like a bomb struck it.”

It was one of Eva’s expressions, and Lyndley used it to get her favor. Still, you could tell that Eva was suspicious, since we hadn’t touched the playhouse in years. I watched her mulling over the idea.

“There’s some old junk piled in the coach house. If you want to haul it away, that’s your business. It’ll save me paying somebody to do it.”

Lyndley kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said, and started out the door. “You are a wonderful woman and a great American.”

Eva stopped, as if just remembering something. “By the way,” she said, “some young man called here and asked me out last night. I assume he was looking for you.”

It stopped Lyndley. “What did he say?”

“He said he met me in some store in Cambridge and that he can

‘get ahold of a car next Thursday night’ if I want to go out and ‘shoot the shit.’”

“What did you say?” Lyndley was trying not to laugh.

“I told him I was grounded for the rest of the summer.”

This cracked Lyndley up. “Good one,” she said, “really good.”

“Consider it done,” Eva said.

“What?” Lyndley asked.

“No more trips to Boston,” Eva answered. Then she thought about it. “More specifically, town limits to the island. And consider yourself lucky. If your mother finds out you’re even going out to Yellow Dog Island, she’ll kill me.”

“Okay,” Lyndley said, but her voice was quiet.

“And I want to know ahead of time where you’re staying each night,” Eva went on.

“Okay.”

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Eva was waiting. “Starting now,” she said when Lyndley didn’t pick up the cue.

“On the island,” Lyndley replied. “For tonight.”

“All right.” Eva nodded and started toward the door, leaving Lyndley standing there, slightly stunned. “And, by the way, it’s pronounced
Ava
Braun, not Eva Braun. And that reference is not even remotely funny.” And I could tell that there was something else going on. I’d never seen Eva this edgy.

I held the door for Eva, and she went through it without a thankyou or a look back. When she was out of earshot, I turned to Lyndley and said, “I can’t believe you gave them the real phone number.”

She shrugged. For someone so smart, Lyndley could be really stupid sometimes.

“Come on,” she said finally, “let’s go.”

“Where?”

“To fix up the playhouse.”

“We’re really going to do that?”

“Yeah, what do you think we’ve been talking about all this time?”

I had to admit I had no idea.

“And why would I want to help?”

“Because you’re my sister, and you love me, and I need your help.”

“No sale.”

“All right. How about this one? Because you’re my sister, and I love you, and I know you haven’t got anything better to do.”

The playhouse was actually Eva’s boathouse. It stood on stilts down by the docks right on the water. From my room on the island, Eva’s boathouse looked like a huge open mouth facing out to sea waiting to catch whatever came into the harbor. It was originally built as a rigging shed when the Whitneys were in the shipping trade, but it The Lace Reader 249

had later been moved and placed on the stilts, and the huge opening was cut into the harbor side, exposing it to the elements and making it look as if it were always just about to fall down. Toward the rear of the building was a closet where we left the sails and oars in the winter. At the back of the closet was a tiny staircase leading to a loft. There was a barn window off the loft, but the window had not been there originally; like the door, it was cut in much later. When the tide was high enough, that window was a great place for diving into the water.

May says the original loft was probably built for smuggling or avoiding British taxes, as the tunnels under the common were, and only later used for more altruistic purposes, like the Underground Railroad, maybe, but it doesn’t matter. The point is that the loft was our playhouse, and it was a great place. Eva had given it to Lyndley and me that first summer that Cal had gotten so bad, so she’d have a place to get away to, somewhere he couldn’t find her. No one from our family came anywhere near the boathouse in the summer, so it was very private. In the winter we left some of our boats here: Beezer’s Whaler, a dory, and anything else we didn’t want to leave out on the island to get slapped around. The water level varied with the tides, going from ten or twelve feet at high tide to just a few feet when the tide was dead low. That made it bad for anything with a keel, and even with a small boat you would have to pull up the outboard when you left, or you’d come back and the boat would be spinning around or even balancing on its propeller, which wasn’t great for the engine. For that reason no one used it as a real boathouse anymore, so it became ours during the summer. It smelled of salt, mildew, old sails, and seagull guano, and you’d have to use a lot of bleach to get the place smelling halfway decent, but it could be done. At the height of summer, the whole building became a steam bath, and that’s usually when we abandoned it in favor of other locations. But it was still a great place. When the loft window was open, 250 Brunonia

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you couldn’t smell anything from down below even if it was ninety degrees out, which was almost never.

We made several trips to and from Eva’s coach house, dragging chairs, a table, even an old horsehair mattress that was no good to anyone, really, but that Lyndley couldn’t live without. Except for the chairs, we couldn’t fit anything up the stairwell, so we had to go back and get some rope and pull the table and mattress up through the loft window. The sky was black to the north, and even though the thunderstorm was going to miss us, it was getting pretty windy, and we almost lost the mattress once into the water. When we finally pulled it through the window, it flopped onto the loft floor, kicking up years of dust. Lyndley dragged it into the corner and covered it with the new Indian-print bedspread she’d brought with her.