Barrier Islands Read online

2

  The next morning Brooke bundled up Jodie and headed out for Greta’s cottage a quarter mile away through narrow sand lanes. A dense and cold fog had settled over the island, a not uncommon occurrence this time of year as cold air mixed with the warm water. It made the island, already set off from the mainland and the twentieth century, seem all that much more isolated. It would have been easy for Brooke, raised on scary stories and screamer movies, to imagine all sorts of frightening things hiding in the fog. But she was a parent now, and parents didn’t indulge in frivolous anxieties. It was a different fear, one still buried deep in her unconscious, that unsettled her as she wrapped Jodie in the soft Shetland wool blanket and then used Bridge’s spare oil-cloth shrimper’s hat as a tent to keep the mist off her baby. She was not near so conscientious about protecting herself, simply pulling on a hooded gray sweatshirt over her t-shirt and khaki shorts, leaving her legs and feet bare. One of the great liberations of living out here was being free to go barefoot year-round—well, at least nine months out of the year. And it wasn’t yet December.

  Greta’s cottage set off by itself on the sound-side. It’s only land-side approach was by a narrow path between dense head-high boxwood hedges. She bought it as a fisherman’s shack a year after moving out here using a small inheritance from her grandmother, then traded labor and other favors with local craftsmen to upgrade it to year-round usage. It was now quaint and charming and cozy but also very “Greta,” filled with small paintings taped to the wall and knickknacks that had the feel of folk craft and art but were most likely just items she’d collected from trash bins and flea markets on her occasional trips to the mainland.

  Brooke and her living bundle stepped into the screened entry porch. She hung Bridge’s rain cap, now dripping wet, on a peg, checked to confirm that Jodie was dry, felt that she was and also saw that she was asleep. She set the baby gently on the slat-wood swing, then shook herself off and wiped herself down using the somewhat dry sleeve of the sweatshirt. This process rattled the floor of the cottage, as she knew it would, and brought her aunt to the front door.

  Greta opened the door with a scowl. “What in the world, child?”

  “Hi, Greta!”

  “Don’t you know there are spirits live in this fog?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Best not, child. Nuff to battle out here without putting them in the mix. Least you didn’t bring little Jo-jo out.”

  “But I did, Greta. Look!” She gestured to the bundle wrapped like a mummy resting on the swing.

  “My Lord!” Greta exclaimed, though her broad grin betrayed her words.

  She leaned over with Brooke to peer at the infant. Brooke gently eased back the fringe of the blanket to uncover Jodie’s pale face. With her closed eyes, downturned mouth, and slightly furrowed brow, she looked like a shrunken old man.

  “See,” Greta whispered. “Spirits took her.”

  “Naw. She’s just asleep.” Brooke ran her finger ever so lightly over her baby’s cheek. Jodie responded by moving her lips as if to nurse and mewing faintly, but didn’t open her eyes. Something about that combination of gestures in this isolated spot on this shrouded day produced in Brooke a visceral will to protect her one offspring. She was generally attentive to Jodie. But the island’s close-knit community, and her in-laws’ extensive and insistent clan, tempered individual possessiveness and its flipside, jealousy, in favor of shared ownership and responsibility. That communal character had been much of what had attracted Brooke to Shawnituck. So why this sudden new urge to safeguard her safely sleeping baby?

  Greta looked first to the baby then to Brooke. “Let’s get inside, child, before you both catch pneumonia.”

  Once inside the cottage’s one main room well-warmed by a woodstove of in the corner, Brooke unwrapped Jodie’s head and upper body but left the blanket loosely pulled around her legs and cloth-diaper (which still smelled clean). Jodie roused and blinked at the light of the lantern on the kitchen table, then focused her eyes on Greta. Brooke handed the bundle over to her aunt.

  “Come here, darling,” Greta cooed. She sat gently on the chair pulled out beside the table.

  Brooke laughed. Jodie was the only one she’d ever seen who could make Greta instantly lose her cantankerous nature. She’d been told by Momma that Greta had treated her the same way when she was a baby, fawning over and doting on her like she was “the princess of England!” Maybe that was the origin of the special bond she’d always had for her aunt. “Can I make some tea?” Brooke asked.

  “Since when do you have to ask?” Greta said.

  “Since when I ask if you’d like some.”

  Greta scoffed. “Never drink the stuff less it’s iced and loaded with sugar.”

  “I know. Just checking.” She found the tea bags on the shelf where she’d left them while living here before marrying Onion—a year and a day past. “Missed you at the party last night,” she said as she put water in the teapot.

  “Didn’t know there was a party,” Greta said, though she knew very well what her niece was referring to.

  Brooke laughed. “Me either. I looked like a beach bum!”

  “I’m sure they loved you.”

  “Who?”

  “Them Howards.”

  “Thought you didn’t know there was a party.” Brooke caught the kettle just before it whistled and filled the Wedgewood cup with the teabag.

  “No party out here without Howards present in force.”

  Brooke laughed. Greta had ample bluster but she mainly spoke simple truths amidst those gales. Out here, her in-laws were one of two dominant families, along with the Garrisons who controlled the east-end (ocean side) of the village and mostly kept to themselves. Little happened on the sound side without the Howards at least knowing about it, if not initiating it. “They threw a surprise anniversary party for me and Onion at the restaurant. Well, it was a surprise to me. Onion knew about it and led me in there unawares.”

  “Like a lamb to slaughter,” Greta said, though in her quiet cooing voice.

  Brooke brought her tea and sat opposite Greta and Jodie. “It wasn’t that bad, Greta. The food was good. Everybody was nice.”

  “Long as you march to the beat of their drum.”

  Greta had introduced Brooke to Miss Polly and the Howard “hoard” as she called them on Brooke’s second day out here. Back then they got along well enough. But a little while after the birth of Jodie, Miss Polly had sent word via an untraceable sequence of intermediaries that she thought it was time for Greta to quit her open-secret liaison with Andy Lawson, the light-keeper, who was still married to a Howard cousin, Judy Lawson, though they hadn’t lived together for decades and Judy now kept house with Buck Blackburn. That’s when Greta stopped having social contact with the Howards, though she nodded to them when passing in the lanes and still did barter trade in their shops. One couldn’t live on Shawnituck and not interact with the Howards to some degree. “Guess I’ll be marching to that drum here on out.”

  “Jodie too?” Greta looked down at the baby cradled in her arms. She was calm and quiet, as if asleep; but her eyes were open, fixed on the wizened, gray-haired face above.

  Brooke laughed. “She’s Island property now.”

  Greta’s head jerked up as if slapped. “She is not!”

  Brooke was used to her aunt’s heartfelt declarations; still, this one caught her by surprise with its sudden vehemence. “Her last name is Howard. She was practically born with sand between her toes. Can’t get much more ‘island’ than that.”

  “Look at me, Brooke.” She waited for her niece to raise her eyes from the now empty cup in her hands. “You are in charge of Jodie’s future. You choose—not Polly or Bridge or Onion. You!”

  “Jeez, Greta. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were channeling Momma.”

  “I was all but raised by your mother, and generally kicking and screaming, or sneaking out the window. But even then I knew Mary was blessed with calm good sense. I just never
listened.”

  “So coming out here was a mistake?”

  Greta’s eyes lost their spark and flash, and squinted in recall. Her weathered cheeks lifted into a grin. “If you’d seen Andy back then, you’d never use the word ‘mistake’ to describe my choice to follow him from Coastal back out here. I would have followed him to the ends of the earth.”

  Brooke laughed. “Back then, Shawnituck was the end of the earth!” Greta had met Andy Lawson at the state-college branch on the coastal plain, when he was a senior and she a sophomore. He’d returned to his home on Shawnituck to marry Judy Howard. Greta had followed in hopes he’d change his mind about the marriage, then chose to stay on anyway.

  “So it was,” Greta agreed. “Weekly Sound transit on the mail boat if you were willing to sit next to the pigs and chickens.”

  “Why did you stay?”

  Greta considered the question. No one had ever asked her outright, though she’d asked herself many times, the answer changing frequently over the years. “I told myself it was for love.”

  Brooke laughed. “I know about that one.”

  Greta fixed her with a fresh hard stare. “Then you know it’s a lie.”

  Brooke didn’t answer.

  So Greta continued. “Even after he married, I somehow convinced myself he’d leave her and join me. Many a night in this very room before it had windows or wall boards, I’d lay awake on my cot waiting for Andy to appear above me and take me in his arms.”

  “How romantic,” Brooke purred without a trace of irony.

  “How foolish!” Greta barked.

  “Andy eventually came.”

  “No, I went to him—after the accident, and Judy had driven him out with her sharp tongue and wandering eye.” Andy had shattered his ankle on his father-in-law’s shrimp boat. A year or so later, he’d quietly left his wife and childless home and taken up residence at the light-keeper’s house next to the island’s lighthouse that he tended for a very small government stipend.

  “But you love him.”

  Greta nodded. “I do. That part never changed.”

  “Then what did?”

  “I became this hardened old coot, worn and shaped by this place every bit as much as that live oak out front.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “That’s what this island does to you.”

  “No. Why did you stay?”

  “You mean after the glow of romance wore off?”

  Brooke nodded.

  “Shame, I think. Maybe fear—of failure, of not fitting into the rest of the world. It was easier to be an outcast on a cast-off island than one more spoke in the world’s big wheel.”

  “You make it sound so attractive.”

  “Mainland?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve always rejected it. No reason to change now—too late anyway.”

  Brooke nodded, not sure if she felt sorry for or proud of her aunt.

  “But not for you,” Greta said, then looked down on Jodie, now starting to stir in her blanket wrap. “And certainly not for her.”