That Summer Place: Island Time / Old Things / Private Paradise

Catherine glanced back at the stack of report folders in a jagged pile on her desk, then up at the smiling images of her daughters. She picked up the phone, punched in a series of numbers and got Seattle information.

Fifteen minutes later she had rented the same quaint Victorian house in the same cove on the same secluded San Juan island where she’d spent so many summers.

This June, she vowed, would be different for her girls.

It was different. Her girls didn’t want to go.

Dana had to turn down a free ticket to a rock concert at Great America and Aly was going to miss a birthday party at the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. Aly had eventually accepted Catherine’s decision to go to the island, especially after Catherine had bribed her by letting her bring along her cat Harold. But fifteen year old Dana was still scowling at the world. Nothing worked with her. If there had been a high school course in sulking, Dana would have aced the class.

Over an hour ago they had left the ferry at Orcas, purchased their supplies and loaded everything into a boat run by Blakely Charters. Until January, when daily ferry service would start to Spruce Island, the charter company made two runs a week. Sundays and Thursdays. Other than by seaplane, hiring a boat was the only way to get to the more remote and secluded islands of the San Juans.

It was late and the sun was sliding down the horizon; it turned the cotton clouds in the western sky gold, purple and red. Catherine leaned over the bow of the boat and pointed west. “Girls! Quick! Look at that sky!”

She had forgotten how gorgeous the sunsets were here. The color. The sheer beauty of nature. No one could possibly visit this part of the world and not believe in the perfect hand of God.

She turned toward her silent daughters to share their first sight of a Northwest summer sunset, and her heart sank.

Dana sat with her back to her, staring out at the water like a prisoner heading for death row. In her lap was an open copy of Stephen King’s Green Mile series. Without looking at Catherine, she blinked once, then buried her nose back in the book.

Dana’s sulking hurt Catherine. She didn’t want to let on that Dana had gotten to her, so she looked away. Aly had on a set of headphones. She was head-bopping to some song that shrieked through the headphone earpieces.

Catherine reached over, picked up the empty CD case, and read the name.

Alanis Morrisette.

She felt as if she were a hundred years old. She hated that music. Then she remembered how much her dad had disliked her Bob Dylan albums. She asked herself the question she always asked when she was dealing with the girls.

Will it matter in five years?

Dana’s sulking wouldn’t matter and hopefully some other hot young singer would be Aly’s favorite—if she still had her hearing.

The generation gap between her and her daughters felt as if it were as wide as the Grand Canyon. But she did know one thing—her relationship with her daughters would matter in five years.

She wanted her girls back, not these two young people she didn’t know anymore. She desperately wanted what few memories they could make this month, something special for them to look back on the same way she looked back on the island and those summers from her childhood.

She thought of this trip as a fresh start; she needed to be a mother again.

Catherine reached across and snatched the book out of Dana’s hands. “You can read this later.” She tucked it inside her duffel bag, then she punched the off button on Aly’s CD player and gestured for her to take off the headphones.

Both girls gaped at her.

She pointed ahead of them. “That’s Spruce Island,” she told them in a classic mother’s tone that demanded their attention—now.

Against the horizon the island was a camel-shaped lump of rocks and trees and natural coastline that grew larger the closer they got.

“I loved that island when I was your age. My favorite memories are there and it’s important to me that we spend time together so you can see what a wonderful place it is.”

They continued to look at her, then turned in unison to look at the island ahead of them.

“There are no houses,” Dana said in a voice that implied it was the very ends of the earth.

“There are summer houses, a few cabins and a village on the other side of the island. You can’t see them on this side. It’s more isolated. The island has always been a place where people go to get away.” She paused, then added, “Like us.”

They turned back around. From the looks on their faces you’d think she had just spoken Greek.

“The first houses were summer homes built late in the nineteenth century. Those hills are parkland and there are hiking trails.”

Dana frowned at her. “You hate hiking. You said you’d rather chew on foil than traipse up some mountain.”

“Yeah,” Aly said, siding with her sister. “You said smart people leave mountain climbing to the goats.”

Catherine realized she would never have to worry about losing her memory. She had her daughters to remind her of every single thing she had ever said.

“Fine. Forget about hiking. As I was saying, the house is on a cove on the western side of the island. There’s a private dock and a mooring. The rental agent said the owners still keep a sailboat. We’re free to use it. There are supposed to be bikes, too. When we used to come here there was a handyman’s cabin on a nearby inlet and a small harbor where boats from the mainland could moor. Other than that the island is pretty isolated.”

Twenty minutes later they stood at the end of a gray weathered dock, their bags and supplies stacked like building blocks and Harold whining in his cat carrier. There was nothing before them but silvery water. Catherine watched the boat turn around in a wide swath and head back for the mainland.

For just one moment she looked around her and was a little scared. It was secluded, and they were three women alone.

She raised a hand to her forehead and scanned the island. The large house was partially hidden by cedar and maple trees, but Catherine could see the sharp roofline. The old shingles were green with algae and moss, the way everything grew green in the dampness of the islands.

She took a deep breath, bent down, picked up a duffel and two plastic bags of groceries, then she marched bravely down the dock toward the rocky beach. Over her shoulder she called out, “Grab something and let’s go, girls. It’s getting dark.”

Five

It wasn’t dark enough.

Not to hide what time and weather had done to the old house. It was painted the same color yellow with the same white trim. Catherine walked toward the house and the closer she got the more she realized that the house looked the same because it was probably the same coat of paint as in 1966. It certainly looked about thirty years old.

Behind her she heard Dana’s shoes crunching on the gravel. A second later she heard a gasp.

“Mo-ther!”

“What?” Catherine snapped and turned around. She wasn’t ready for a confrontation.

“What are those?” With her horrified expression, Dana stood pointing at the ground. Next to her Aly clutched the cat carrier to her chest the way one holds a child after a close call.

Catherine looked at the ground. “They’re slugs.”

“Ugh!” Both girls shivered and stepped back.

“Oh God! I stepped on one!” Dana dropped her backpack and jumped around, shrieking.

It was the most life she’d shown since Catherine told the girls about the trip and she’d given her best Mother-you are-going-to-ruin-my-life act.

“Get it off! Get it off!”

“Stop hopping all over the place. You’ll step on another one.”

Dana froze.

“Just wipe your shoe off on the grass.”

Dana moaned, then hobbled over to a patch of wet grass and made a big to-do about wiping off her shoe.

Aly had shifted her cat carrier and was scanning the ground. “Do they travel with a mate?”

“I have no idea. They’re just like the snails we have at home only without the shells.” Catherine quickly checked the ground for slugs, then set down her bags. She had for gotten about those huge slugs that slithered all over the place whenever it rained.

“This place is awful,” Dana muttered from behind her.

“It’s not awful. It’s rustic and quaint,” Catherine told her, trying to keep her voice light but not feeling light at all.

Dana snorted.

“Follow me.” She could hear the girls whispering behind her and Harold began to whine. She didn’t really blame them. She had a bad feeling about this. She opened the screen door and held it with her shoulder while she pulled the rental envelope with the key out of her pocket and unlocked the front door.

Please, she thought, please let the inside be better than the outside.

Better was a relative term.

The inside wasn’t the Four Seasons. Catherine looked around the room. It was clean and neat and furnished in an odd mishmash of styles. There was an eastlake style sofa upholstered in a brown and red western print with bronco-riding cowboys, red and black lariats, and a smattering of green horseshoes. There were throw pillows scattered across it—one was yellow gingham, one was needlepoint bulldogs, and the other was black and white and shaped like a soccer ball. A Blackwatch plaid stadium blanket with the Mariners emblem embroidered in the corner was thrown over the edge of a brown recliner. Next to it was a white French provincial chair that looked exactly like one her grandmother had in front of her bedroom dressing table.

The coffee table was a huge wooden piece with burned edges, something you see in a roadside stand next to the velvet paintings of Elvis. In the center of the table was a monkeypod bowl with a silver nut cracker and a chrome and black leather ashtray. The end tables weren’t end tables at all, but small dressers. One was painted aqua and the other canary yellow. The aqua dresser had a white milkglass lamp with a beige ruffled shade. The only other light in the room was a red and orange lava lamp.

“Who decorated this place?” Dana said with a disgusted voice.

“Dale Evans and Barbara Cartland,” Catherine said as she set down the bags.

“Who?”

“James Bond and the Monkees?”

“James Bond and the Monkees?” Aly repeated. “Was that a rock group in the olden days?”

“Hey, hey, we’re the mon-kees,” Catherine sang, bopping her head as she did the Pony across the linoleum in the kitchen.

Her daughters looked at each other and rolled their eyes. She sighed. Her children had their father’s sense of humor.

“Yes, the Monkees were a rock group and surely you know who James Bond is.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot. Pierce Brosnan, huh?”

“Sean Connery.”

“The old guy? Uh-uh,” Aly shook her head. “He was Indiana Jones’s dad.”

Catherine felt ancient.

Aly dropped the grocery bags on a rag rug and plopped down on the cowboy sofa. She switched on the lamp. “I love lava lamps.” She rested her chin in her hands and watched the lamp bubble.

Catherine watched her youngest daughter and was overcome with a sense of déjà vu. Aly was dressed in bell-bottomed jeans, a wide black belt, and a skinny turtleneck. She even had on a thick white headband and a flip hairdo like the Breck girl.

“Can we get one, Mom?”

“One what?”

“A lava lamp.”

Catherine hadn’t liked lava lamps back when they were new. To her they were in the same category as Chia pets and diet tablets that helped you lose ten pounds overnight.

Aly was staring at her through the liquid of the lamp.

“We’ll see.”

“Where’s the TV?” Dana looked at her and popped her gum.

Here it comes, Catherine thought. She opened the refrigerator and started putting things inside. When she had her head sufficiently hidden behind the door she said, “There is no TV.”

It took a few minutes before she could get a word in between their melodramatic protests. Aly was going to miss “Nick at Night” and Dana just plain hated the island and wanted to go home, where “it was normal.” And she wanted to go now.

“You need to give this place a chance. And even if I was willing to leave—which I’m not—there’s no boat until Thursday.”

Catherine crossed the room to the bookcase made of cinderblock and wood planks. “There’s a whole wall of books here.” She opened a huge cabinet. “Look in here. I see stacks of puzzles and games.”

Dana shifted her gaze to the cabinet. “Oh yea!” She clapped her hands like a baby. “Candyland and Chutes and Ladders.”

Catherine looked inside. “Don’t be smart. There are adult games in here, too. And puzzles are always fun. We used to do those at home.” She pulled out the top puzzle box. “Look at this one. It’s a thousand-piece puzzle of a pepperoni pizza. You both like pizza.”

Aly stood next to her and looked inside. She tilted her head sideways to read. “What’s this? Two thousand pieces.” She looked back at Catherine. “We’ve never done a puzzle with that many pieces. Have you?”

Catherine shook her head.

Aly read the puzzle label. “It says Classic Puzzle Series: Metal Rockers.”

Catherine pictured a photograph made up of sleek, chrome and black leather Brancusi rocking chairs cut up into thousands of tiny pieces all shaped like Mickey Mouse. She smiled. It would be the kind of puzzle that was almost impossible to do in less than three days. “Take it out, Aly, and let’s take a look.”

Aly held up the box and they stared down at the lid. A whole group of chalk-white faces framed with wild black hairdos stared back at them.

Catherine felt her smile fade.

“Cool!” Dana said, taking the box from her sister. “It’s Aerosmith and Kiss.” Both girls moved over to the sofa as if they were chasing concert tickets, sat down and dumped out a huge pile of tiny puzzle pieces on the coffee table.

Dana looked up impatiently. “Come on, Mom.”

“Let’s get comfortable first.” Catherine ran toward the downstairs bedroom. “Last one in their sweats has to make dinner!”

A few minutes later when she walked back into the room wearing old sweats, she found Dana already in her flannel pajamas and sprawled out on the sofa with Aly’s cat asleep on her stomach.

“No Aly?”

Dana shook her head. “She couldn’t find her boxers.”

Catherine grinned. “Good. I don’t have to cook.”

A minute later Aly came running down the stairs wearing a pair of white cotton boxers patterned with bright red lips and a cropped T-shirt that said Smile and Kiss Me. She looked at Dana, then at Catherine. “I’m last, huh?”

They nodded.

Aly was a trooper. She just shrugged, walked over to the sofa and scooped up her cat. “I know exactly what I’m fixing for dinner.”

“What?” Catherine asked.

She exchanged a sly look with Dana, then said, “It’s a surprise.”

Catherine didn’t care what she made as long as the girls were reasonably happy for now. She’d take this one moment at a time. She walked toward the coffee table, then started to sit opposite it on the floor.

“Sit here, Mom.” Aly tucked the cat onto her hip, shifted sides of the coffee table, then sank gracefully down to the rug. “You don’t want to sit on the floor. Remember that time you couldn’t get up?”

“I’d been skiing all day,” Catherine said defensively.

Her daughters exchanged a look that said, “Yeah. Sure.”

“I had.” Catherine sat down on the Dale Evans sofa.

Dana laughed, a refreshing sound, then in a falsetto voice she said, “Help! Help! I’ve fallen down and I can’t get up!”

Aly caught on and said, “We’ll order you one of those clapper things, Mom.”

“Funny. Real funny.” Catherine tried to look serious and failed. Both her girls were grinning at her. For the first time in the last few days she thought that perhaps her plan just might work. The three of them were talking together and joking with each other. The girls were laughing instead of ignoring her.

“I found a corner piece!” Aly said, hunched over the puzzle with Harold purring in her lap. She sat up, her pert little nose in the air. “I was first.”

A minute later, in the name of good old healthy female competition, they all lost themselves to the other one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.

Six

Michael was outside cutting wood when the air began to fill with the smell of rain. Daylight had faded away and the wind was picking up, so he went inside. He hung his jacket on the old iron coat-rack, next to where his grandfather’s tool belt still hung on the exact same hook as it had for almost forty years.

He’d kept that belt around long after his grandfather had died. The canvas was frayed, the edges were black with grease, and the leather was cracked. At first he’d told himself he kept it around because they didn’t make tool belts like they used to, with a slot for a flashlight and for tools.

Hell. Now they made tool belts out of space-age, NASA-developed weave that was stronger than canvas and leather could ever be.

The truth was, he’d kept it for sentimental reasons. And he still used it. Maybe he wore it because he was trying to recapture his past. Maybe he was just old and needed something from his youth to cling to.

He turned away, not really giving a damn why he wore the thing. He just did.

He crossed the room and started a fire, then went into the kitchen where he made some soup. He stood at the stove and ate right from the pan. He ate most of his meals that way, when he was home alone and too lazy to dirty a plate or to bother with sitting down at a table.

Unless there was a football game on TV, then he sat down in front of his big screen while he ate from the pan.

Single people had singular habits. He drank milk and orange juice from the carton while standing at the open refrigerator, his arm resting on the door. He dipped his toast in the jam jar. He didn’t pick up his socks or make his bed unless someone was going to join him in it. He usually left the cap off the toothpaste and squeezed the tube from the middle.

He knew himself pretty well, he thought as he crossed the room. He picked up the latest issue of Money magazine, then set down a glass of Jack Daniel’s on a small table and sat in an old comfortable chair in front of the older rock fireplace that blazed and crackled with a fire.

He propped his feet up on a tired leather ottoman and relaxed—something he couldn’t seem to do much of lately. At some point he had lost the ability to sleep on planes. Hell, sometimes he even lost the ability to sleep in a hotel room, and it didn’t seem to matter how exhausted he was.

At this moment, though, he wasn’t tired. But he knew he could easily fall asleep in the old chair if he just closed his eyes. There was a comfort in knowing he could do something easily, something that had until now eluded him.

He chose to sip his drink and look around him instead of escaping to sleep. He had a strong sense that he was where he belonged, in a place that seemed to fit him better than his sleek glass offices or his huge home.

He’d gotten so he only lived in three of the rooms in that enormous house on the water. Usually he came in through the garage, because when he walked in the front doors he felt as if he were walking into the Guggenheim.

Here he was surrounded by old things. He liked old things.

He took his glasses out of his flannel shirt pocket and slipped them on, then began to read the magazine. The Asian markets were on a downtrend and the Wall Street wizards expected the NASDAQ to drop. Some hotshot at Merrill Lynch predicted Letni stock to drop and profits to be down.

Michael had been reading about and hearing those rumors for over a year. But each quarter the company proved to be stronger than ever. This magazine issue was barely a week old, yet just yesterday, before he’d loaded the boat with supplies and motored to the island, Letni had released to the public the profit reports for the last quarter.

They were twice as high as he had expected.

He laughed and tossed the magazine into the fireplace, where it curled into dark flame that was as black as the magazine’s predictions. He watched it burn, then picked up his drink and mockingly raised his glass to the jackass who’d written the article.

Michael toasted him with two extremely crude words.

By eight o’clock Catherine and the girls had polished off six cans of cream soda, a can of cheese Pringles, a box of Wheat Thins and two containers of Allouette spread, five apples, a slab of Tillamook cheese and two pints of Ben & Jerry’s Wavy Gravy ice cream—Aly’s idea of dinner.

“One more piece and we’ll have the outside frame done.” Catherine stuck her spoon in the empty ice cream carton and scanned the table for a piece that had a flat edge.

Dana was chewing on a handful of smoked almonds—a gift from Catherine’s mother—and eyeing the small puzzle pieces with a determined look on her face. It seemed that Dana was driven to find that puzzle piece.

But not Aly. She had given up on the puzzle frame and was putting together Gene Simmons’s chalky face. Even upside-down Catherine could see that in the photograph his tongue was sticking out.

She suddenly wished they were putting together a picture of Bambi, Thumper and Flower. She sighed in that quiet, tired way, when you knew time had slipped past far too quickly, then went back to the puzzle.

A few minutes later she had an awful thought. “If this puzzle is missing any pieces I’m going to scream.”

Almost simultaneously she spotted the last outside end piece.

Aha!

She locked her eyes on it and casually set down the empty ice cream carton. Then she leaned forward and quickly reached across the table to snatch up the puzzle piece.

At that very same moment the lights went out.

It didn’t take Catherine long to remember that whenever a storm hit Spruce Island, the power went out. The sudden and complete island darkness could jar your memory quickly.

There were no streetlights here. Just the stars and the moon, and on some rainy nights, not even that.

What she saw in the darkness was the remembered image of her father cursing at the old generator behind the rental house. She could remember her mother holding an umbrella and scolding her dad for cursing, and how Catherine always got to hold the flashlight so her dad could see inside the generator while he cursed at it.

So she and the girls went outside, loaded with one big old metal flashlight and a huge Mary Poppins-sized umbrella. Dana whipped the flashlight back and forth across the ground. She was on slug patrol.

Aly carried the umbrella. Catherine stumbled on a rock and almost fell on her face; she couldn’t see because Dana, her slug-fearing daughter, had the flashlight shining near her own feet instead of the path that ran toward the north end of the yard.

Catherine stopped and turned around. “Dana.”

“Huh?”

“Keep the flashlight ahead of us so I don’t fall and kill myself.”

Dana never even looked up at her.

Huddled under the umbrella with Aly, Catherine tapped Dana on the arm. “I promise no slugs are going to suddenly leap up from the ground and latch on to your face like that monster did in Alien.”

“Oh, Mom.”

Catherine stopped in front of a small wooden garden shed with a trap door. “Ah, here it is. Voila!” She paused and waved her hand dramatically. “This, my girls, is a generator…I think. Hold the flashlight up, Dana.”

“Does it work?” Dana asked, glancing up for only one brief second before she turned her gaze back to the grass.

“I don’t know. It used to drive your grandpa nuts, though. I’d come out here with him and hold the flashlight. Like you are, Dana. Aim it here, sweetie. That’s right. I can still remember him banging on this metal thing when he couldn’t get it to work. He made so much noise you could have heard him hammering on it all the way across the island. He used to say a generator is like a mule. It needs a swift kick to get going.”