Tighter Read online

  Instead, it only had us going up; Connie lisping house rules in the rushed voice of a person who loves to talk more than she gets to, and me stubbornly silent and frankly still grumpy about that linen-pants comment.

  Colors deepened as we ascended. At the landing, the stained-glass window of Noah gathering animals into his ark filtered hues of orange, cherry and lemon into a pattern of light over the carpet runner. Down wide corridors hung with family portraits, I noticed the ancestral repeat of teardrop nose and gingery hair. Not beautiful, but dramatic features that carried all the way around to the full-length painting at the end of the hall. Where two redheaded boys and their raven-haired but drop-nosed sister, swathed in dark velvet and white lace, were grouped around a chunky Saint Bernard.

  Here, we stopped.

  Gawking at the children’s sweet faces, I was acutely self-conscious of my blundering intrusion into this cloistered world of genteel innocence. I didn’t belong here. I should go while I could.

  I hardly noticed the door opposite, until Connie opened it.

  “You’re in the blue room. Which you’ll thee ith more than enough.” Connie’s tone suggested that this wasn’t her choice, that I didn’t deserve the honor. In her hesitation before she stepped through, I wondered if she hoped I’d do the right thing here and request more suitably humble quarters—preferably nearer to an attic or washing machine.

  But I knew from the moment I entered that I wouldn’t trade squat. The room was perfect, fit for the princess I would pretend to be. And wasn’t that what I needed, most of all? To jump-start myself into the more substantial, confident Jamie Atkinson than the girl who’d whimpered away from the stick in the eye that had apparently qualified as my junior year?

  At the very least, as Mom might say, I could play it for laughs. Dig up a tasseled shawl or strip of mink and send pics of myself at the dressing table with a caption like “And how’s your summer going, dahling?”

  “Duth everything thuit you?” Connie asked, all Sylvester the Cat sarcasm, as she opened another door to the en suite bathroom.

  I turned from the window in a slow circle, my eyes tracing a line of the room’s encompassing beauty, its fireplace and four-poster, its paintings and bookshelves, skirted dressing table and crowned armoire, back to the window with its view of green lawn, blue sky, oyster sea.

  “It’s the shite.” A Maggie-and-me word, a joke word, with a hint of Euro-cool.

  But Connie frowned. “Remember your language. A child livth here.”

  I moved to look out the bathroom window, which had a view of the pool, an imposing bluestone rectangle so meticulously landscaped that the idea of going for a swim in it seemed disruptive, like a prank. “Where is she, anyway?” I’d been listening for Isa since I’d walked in, but the house was silent. No thumping feet from the upper floor, not a giggle, not even a whisper.

  Connie was looking through my bedroom window. I left the bathroom to follow her gaze outward to the lighthouse that stood on a high outcropping of rock, facing Skylark and separated by an inlet. I’d seen it as we’d driven up, but from this angle, the window framed it neat as a painting. “Likely gone out.”

  I pointed. “As in all the way out there?”

  “She yoothed to go out there quite a bit, latht year.” The housekeeper turned on me. “The Mithter didn’t tell you about what happened here latht year, did he?”

  My mind sped through Miles’s email. The punch points. The time zone. The request not to bug him. “Is there something I should know?”

  Connie didn’t answer. She smoothed a pinch in the curtain, stooped to pick a bit of fluff off the carpet, pulled out the handkerchief she kept in her watchband and honked into it. Then retucked the snotty cloth into place. “Go find her, when you’re thettled. It wath Jethie who encouraged her to do anything and everything. Though the differenth between a free thpirit and completely thpoiled I mutht be too old to tell.” And with an old lady’s sigh to prove it, she heaved my suitcase onto a small luggage rack at the foot of the bed and unzipped it, preparing to unpack my things.

  I stepped in front of it. “I’ll take care of that.” Nasty snoop. I’d have to watch out. Find a good hiding place for my Ziploc, for starters. “Who’s Jessie, anyway?”

  “The girl from latht thummer,” said Connie, reluctantly backing off my bag. “The girl who had your job?” Her voice quizzed me.

  I shook my head. No, Miles McRae hadn’t mentioned Jessie.

  Her eyes squinted me in, as if she had special powers to detect me to my core, truthful self. “Jutht ath well. The patht hath no bearing on today.” Her lisp made this proclamation sound weirdly ominous. If Maggie had been with me, we’d have laughed.

  With no Mags, the moment was unsettling.

  I was glad when Connie moved to go. “Our water’th from a cold-thpring well, tho be careful with it; it’th not bottomleth. Try to limit yourthelf to three flutheth per day. With training, it thouldn’t be difficult. And it might get chilly early morning, tho cover your feet when you walk on the bare floor. Be back with Itha by theven, for dinner. It’th thpaghetti tonight.”

  I wanted to ask more about Jessie—like why hadn’t she wanted her old job back this summer?—but I’d save my questions for Isa. The less time spent with Connie, the better. So I stood there, unwilling to yield any pleasantries (“Thpaghetti, yum!”). Waiting for her to leave me so that I could unpack, and use up one of my precious toilet flushes.

  THREE

  After I’d traded my panth for jeans, hid my pills behind my books in the bottom bookshelf and texted my parents a quick hi im here all ok, I had over an hour to kill before dinner. Connie hadn’t pushed too hard for me to find Isa, as long as I got back before the all-important “theven” dinner hour, so I decided not to make it a priority just yet. Besides, I wanted to spend some time adjusting to Skylark.

  As I brushed my hair in the mottled mirror over the fireplace, I wished there were more of me to ground the space. I was tall, not thin by any stretch; “strong-boned” was what Dr. Gamba said—which always sounded like a euphemism for something crueler, though nobody could call me fat and be right. But in the rigid grandeur of this room, I felt formless and misplaced. Like I could float to the ceiling and bob around the amber-globe chandelier.

  Or maybe it was just the effects of the pill.

  Once, Mr. Ryan had said I was beautiful. That I reminded him of a cat. His imagination transformed my round eyes, flattish nose and mini-bite mouth into something playful and feline. He was just out of college, he’d confessed during one of our chicken-nachos afternoons in the way-back booth of Ruby Tuesday. Not only was he hardly earning any salary, but his student loans were killing him. He’d wanted to quit every single day, he said. He felt like he’d sold his soul to the “collective critique of suburban high school entitlement.” Except for me, he’d said.

  “Again and again, I looked to your gentle face as a beacon.”

  I had a feeling he’d practiced these poetic phrases beforehand, though Sean Ryan was a chemist at heart, the way he knew how to ignite my imagination and dissolve my willpower … no, I wasn’t going there.

  I was months and miles past all that.

  Halfway down the corridor, I doubled back for another pill. Whatever I’d taken on the train, it was waning.

  A late-afternoon mist had drifted over the sea, hiding the sun and weighting the air. I’d kicked off my flats, and my feet felt the sting of unfamiliar objects, shards of mussels’ shell and nips of rock, as I picked my path to the lighthouse. At first it had seemed like a no-brainer. Down the hill, bisect the inlet; find the uphill path and billy-goat up, up, up.

  But the water between the bluffs was rougher than I’d anticipated, waves smashing in and out of the gullies. Black eelgrass noosed tight around my ankles as my jeans soaked to a watermark just past my knee, then climbed darkly higher.

  At the roar overhead, I looked up to see a private jet wing past, so low and close that while there was plenty of space between us, I instinctively ducked, wetting my upper half to match my lower. The airport must be on this side of the island. It wasn’t hard to picture all the fabulous Little Blyers coasting in from the city on their propjets, right on time for lobster thermidor. Capital M Money lived here. I could see it in the peaked roofs along the coast, the lush gardens and hedgerows bordering properties spread out so far that not a decibel of someone else’s noise polluted the ears of his neighbor.

  I didn’t know much about the Very Rich. The most glamorous kid in my class was Dex Benten, whose parents once attended the Academy Awards because they’d composed the sound tracks for the Bourne Identity franchise. Dex’s house had an eternity pool and he drove a used BMW, but that wasn’t much to throw around. That wasn’t private planes and homes with names, and for a sea-soaked moment, I felt completely manipulated onto this island. Who was I, some Victorian waif suffering from a Mystery Lung Disease, where the only cure was exile and isolation? This wasn’t my scene at all. And I didn’t know a soul.

  When it had been an abstraction, Little Bly had sounded almost exhilarating. Here, in the tidal, crashing reality, I was struck by how desperately lonely I might be for the next six weeks.

  What. The hell. Was I doing here?

  Jerking myself from my thoughts, I began to move fast, wading out with long strides into the ocean, but I still couldn’t crack how to approach the hard profile of rock surrounded by its moat of sucking shoals. Eventually, I gave up, retracing my steps until I was back on land below Skylark again. The only other way in was to return to the house, then head down the hill on its opposite side and skirt around to the back of the lighthouse. Eating up another twenty minutes, minimum.

  I measured it. Even an unsuccessful attempt was better than returning to Connie, who’d no doubt find me some mind-numbing, pre-dinner kitchen tasks. She was just that type.

  Anywhere but back. I’d keep going.

  And as it turned out, once I’d scaled the hill, I found a wooden walk secured on its ocean side by a rail. I took it and became instantly engrossed with watching my feet; my pedicure was so chipped it showed more toenail than polish. So when I finally did look up, I stopped cold, my heart jumping in surprise.

  Either I was going deaf, or the kids hadn’t made a sound.

  There were two of them, standing a dozen yards ahead where the rail ended, at the edge of a jut of overhang. I shaded my eyes. One painkiller’s side effect was occasionally a fuzzy double image, but this was no trick of the eye.

  Two same-sized girls in shorts and T-shirts. Or maybe a girl and a skinny, shortish guy?

  The longer I looked, the more I was sure, yes, definitely a guy, but not so shrimpy as the girl was tall. And they were sharing a private moment. There was a leaning-in-ness and face-to-face-ness about them. They must not have seen me yet, either, and so I started self-consciously clearing my throat—though neither of them reacted. Maybe they were neighbors—part of the “kick-back bunch” of Little Blyers that Miles McRae talked about. If I could make a couple of friends right from day one, then I wouldn’t have to

  “Jamie!”

  At the sound of my name, I snapped around.

  She was a flit of white high above, her arms making broad arcs, as if she needed rescuing. Standing in front of the lighthouse, she seemed as matched to it as a Dutch girl guarding her windmill. I signaled back as I swerved off the walk and broke into a jog to meet her, glancing back over my shoulder at the couple.

  Only they weren’t there, and in my next breath, the late afternoon sun had burned through the haze to shine harsh in my eyes. I spun around, confused—whoa whoa wait wait, where had they gone? Had they climbed down, or dived off that rock? No way, it was so high. But I had to know, and I veered in the opposite direction, running to look over the edge of the cliff. I hadn’t been too aerobic since my injury, and by the time I reached the place where they’d been, I could feel the burn in my lungs and gently used muscles.

  Nothing. Nothing below but the phlegm of foam breaking over the peaks of rock. The tide was coming in. I caught my breath. Had they jumped? For real? The water didn’t seem deep enough; any kind of long-drop jump looked incredibly dangerous. Maybe they’d climbed down quick, a pair of romantic sand crabs, and then scuttled off to some secret grotto, but the timing of that was almost impossible.

  “Jamie! Over here!”

  I turned again to face Isa, who was now gliding down the hill. She was even prettier than the picture Miles had jpged. On our one phone call, he’d told me that Isa had been adopted as an infant from Vietnam (“though she reminds me of my late wife anyway. Something about her laugh, it breaks my heart, go figure”), and her sandalwood skin and gourmet-chocolate eyes looked as if they’d been warmed by sunshine. She radiated with such a näive, delicate sweetness that it was hard not to automatically want to reflect some of it as I smiled back at her.

  “Jamie, right? You’re such a honey, coming out here to find me,” she said. Calling me a honey seemed like a quirky, almost antiquated thing for an eleven-year-old girl to do. Except Isa wasn’t your typical almost–seventh grader. I could tell that at once; she wasn’t one of those girls trend-surfing on wash-out henna tattoos, retro T-shirts or the glitter body makeup that I’d forever associate with Maggie’s and my junior high experience—a two-year recipe of Trying Too Hard with a major pinch of Not Getting It.

  Isa’s nearly waist-length hair and eyelet cotton dress were more old-fashioned and whimsical than anything I’d have been caught dead in at that age. But when she briefly took my hand in greeting, the needy pressure of her grip reminded me of the way I’d once grasped Mr. Ryan’s fingers under the table at Ruby Tuesday. My squeezing hand, my urgent and devoted stare. I’d been just as much a child, in my own way. And yet it also seemed like a long time ago, too, when I’d felt such innocence.

  “What’s wrong?” Isa stepped back to scrutinize me. “You looked at me funny.”

  “I’m sorry.” I smiled. In the bright sun it felt like I was grimacing. “Nice to meet you.”

  She squinted at me, then grinned. “Me too. It’s been maximum boring here, especially since Milo’s away at camp this summer, which leaves just me and the Funsicle, who hates to drive me places or do anything cool. The Funsicle even hates music. Once I asked her what kind, and she said the musical kind.”

  “Who’s the Funsicle?”

  “Connie. It’s her nickname. Jessie made it up because she said Connie’s the Grim Reaper of Fun. As in, if she thinks people are having a good time, she slices it to the ground.”

  “I like that. Fun sickle. And who’s Milo?”

  “My older brother.”

  “I don’t think your dad mentioned him.”

  “Probably since you’ll never meet him. You’re just for me, after all. Milo’s away till August. Which is too bad. Miley’s the man. He’s major gorgie—all my friends say. And he’s sweet when he’s not intense. Sucks he’s fourteen or you’d have fallen madly in love with him.”

  “Maybe it’s better that he’s not around to distract me.”

  I’d been kidding, but Isa seemed to take my comment sincerely. “That’s true.”

  “Hey, Isa”—I said her name tentatively; she was the first Isa I’d ever known—“did you see those kids up there?”

  “What kids? I’ve been alone all day, losing my mind from boredom. When I saw you drive up, I was, like, Fine-Ally.” She spun out in a twirl of black hair and white dress. “My dad told me he went out with your mom way back.”

  “Over thirty years ago,” I said. “It’s weird to imagine those days—before the Internet, right?”

  “It’s weirder to imagine my dad young,” she said, giving me a look like perhaps she’d overestimated me. “C’mon. Let’s go down. I made mint lemonade.” As she yanked me toward the walk, her shackle on my wrist was too intense for me to run more than a quick check over my shoulder, to where the kids had stood.

  I had seen them, hadn’t I? I knew I had.

  “Connie hates anyone to be late,” Isa warned as we approached the house. “ ‘Theven meanth theven.’ Jess always used to say Connie’d chop off three of your fingers if you’d let her, to remind you what time to be home for dinner.”

  I snorted. I liked that. “So where is your Jessie this summer?”

  Isa regarded me. Her face was a golden, heart-shaped locket, with every feature scrolled into place like a careful calligraphy. Pretty as she was now, in a few years she’d be a knockout. I was also struck, even before she spoke again, by the sadness in her face now that her smile was gone.

  “Jessie’s dead,” she answered.

  FOUR

  We arrived at the house to find a van stenciled with the sign LITTLE BLY LIVERY 1-800-BLY-RIDE parked outside the wide-open front door, where Connie emerged clutching a fistful of bills.

  “Dad’s home?” I heard the catch of hope in Isa’s voice. “Yes way! To surprise us!” She looked at me gleefully, but my mind was still reeling with the new information.

  Jessie, this my-age girl who’d held my job, this fun-loving, Connie-defying girl with whom I’d felt an instant bond based on those few facts, was dead.

  How? Why? When? Had she lived at Skylark? What happened to her?

  Isa hadn’t wanted to go into details, so I’d played it casually. Letting her ramble about the lemonade she’d made for me—using mint she’d picked herself from the kitchen garden—and recount her past performance this spring when she and her friend Clementine had put on a play based on the Robert Frost poem “Mending Wall” for their entire sixth-grade class.

  At my school, you’d get your butt kicked for inflicting anything that tedious on your fellow students. But I could already see that Isa was a more fragile specimen than Mags and me at the height of our wedgie-yanking, middle school powers.