The Fog (17 page)

She kicked her way through a pile of leaves, turning her socks gray with leaf dust, even though the leaves were gold. There was a chill in the air distinct from previous nights. It was winter-cold, not autumn-cold.

“Supposed to be a hurricane coming,” said Michael joyfully. Michael loved fierce weather. Benj told him not to talk about it, not even to think about it.

Benj thinks the weather can hear us talk, thought Christina.

It was island thinking. Island superstition. A year ago Anya had thought no differently; now she had moved beyond superstition; she thought the house and the sea could hear her, too.

“Hurricane’s down by Maryland and Delaware now,” said Michael, “but it might swing north.”

“No,” said Benj. “It’s going inland. Stop your noise, Michael.”

If I were home on the island, my mother would go on a winter hunt, thought Christina.

A winter hunt turns up matches for mittens, boots that fit, and the grocery bag that the long winter underwear was put in the year before.

Christina ached for her mother. She yearned for her father. But when they had come in on their own boat for an emergency meeting with the Shevvingtons — and with Miss Frisch — about Christina’s thievery, when they had seen the Polaroid shot of Christina with her hand literally in the drawer where the petty cash was kept … they collapsed weeping. This time Mr. Shevvington did not have to recommend anything at all; they begged him. They said, “Please control her for us, please teach her better than we were able to, please take her!”

Christina marveled that it was so easy for the Shevvingtons.

Michael and Benj were going back to the island for the weekend, and they were going to try to talk Anya into accompanying them. They walked toward the laundromat.

“Bet we’ll be stranded,” said Michael hopefully. “High winds, gale force, can’t come back to school for weeks.”

Benj laughed. “Bad weather is always over by Monday morning, Michael. Don’t worry, you won’t even miss first period.”

Michael was saddened. He said, “But maybe the Shevvingtons’ house will come down in the hurricane. I don’t know how it’s lasted so long on that cliff anyway. It’s in a very vulnerable position.”

“Don’t say that,” ordered Benj. “Christina has to stay there during the storm.” Benj made a face. “Not that there will be a storm,” he corrected himself.

She thought about Burning Fog Isle. She had experienced many severe storms, but none with a wind so strong that houses were thrown about like too small lobsters tossed overboard. Would her mother and father be all right?

She was finding it difficult to remember her parents’ faces, or Dolly’s laugh. She had made the mistake of saying that at breakfast and of course Mr. Shevvington heard and said, “Christina, this is serious personality disintegration. You have not cooperated with me on seeing a mental health counselor.”

Michael and Benj went on eating cornflakes.

Mr. Shevvington put an arm around Christina as if they liked each other.

But he does like me, thought Christina suddenly. He likes what he can do to me.

They were at very close range. She could see now that he wore contact lenses. He
could
change the color of his eyes! So that was how his eyes darkened and grew bluer. How could she have been afraid of his eyes? They weren’t even real.

“Boys,” said Mr. Shevvington, “take this letter to Anya’s poor parents. It isn’t much in the way of comfort but at least they’ll know we did our best by their poor daughter. We always thought she would become a wharf rat and now she has.”

“You did not think that!” cried Christina. “You thought she would have an honor roll year, and be the star of the senior class, and — ”

“Christina,” said Mr. Shevvington, “stop yarning. Michael, Benj, have a good visit on the island. Say hello to your parents for us.”

Miss Schuyler is on my side, Christina consoled herself. You can do anything if you have somebody on your side. She looked at her tormentors, who were both smiling, unpunctured by Christina’s or Miss Schuyler’s scorn.

Mrs. Shevvington’s yellow teeth lay in her mouth like seeds waiting for winter birds to eat them. The teeth smiled, as if they too were thinking of eating.

Christina shuddered.

She stuck to the boys. The boys thought nothing of it.

The laundromat was stupifyingly hot and humid.

It was another whole world in there: linty and gasping and wet. Anya was even thinner, which hardly seemed possible, and even more beautiful, which was surely not possible.

She was wearing, because of the heat, a thin white cotton gauze dress with white lace around the throat. She had caught her black hair in a thin white ribbon and the bow lay against her cheek like a white rose. Her hair in the humidity of the laundromat had puffed like cumulus clouds.

“Jeepers, Anya,” said Michael, “you look like a bride.”

“I am,” said Anya.

The boys stared at her.

At least this time they noticed something wrong, thought Christina grimly.

“Whose bride?” said Benj warily. “Blake’s not around any more, they got rid of him.”

“The sea,” said Anya. “Nuns marry God. I will wed the sea.” She folded a hot pink T-shirt, neatly turning the short sleeves in to the center and tucking the bottom up. She turned the shirt over, admired the flawless folding, and added it to a pile of somebody else’s clean clothes.

Anya, who had been first in her class, future doctor, Blake’s girl.

“Listen, Anya,” said Benj, “come home for the weekend with us. It’ll do you good to see your mom and dad. Frankie’s boat leaves in half an hour. Everybody on the island is worried, Anya. Come on. Please?”

Anya shook her head. “I have work to do.” She brought out a pen-and-ink drawing she was working on. At first it looked like waves from Japan or China, arching sea foam with hooks. But when you looked closely it was a hundred hands, a thousand fingers, all reaching for the same thing: Anya.

“I’ll do the laundry for you,” Christina offered. “I can’t go home. My parents don’t want me.”

“They would if you’d behave,” Benj told her. “Michael and I have about had it, Christina. I suppose you didn’t really do anything wrong, but it looks wrong, and it makes the island look wrong, and it’s time you stop and think before you do stupid, dumb things that hurt everybody else.”

“What kind of friends are you?” she cried, stomping her foot. The sound was oddly drowned in the sogginess of the room. Anya added several more fingers to her curling waves. “Why don’t you believe me? Why would you believe the Shevvingtons?”

“Mr. Shevvington is the principal,” protested Benj. “He’s not going to lie. Anyway, they caught you. They have the photograph.”

“I wasn’t taking money. I was looking for the files with those papers we had to fill out.”

Benj shrugged.

Anya whistled mindlessly. Two notes, back and forth, back and forth. “Don’t,” said Benj. “You’re whistling up a wind, and a wind right now means weather and we don’t want weather. Hear?”

Anya gave no sign of hearing anything. She held up her own hands and studied them like a manicurist. “I can’t figure out whose hands they are,” she said.

Is there another town full of vacant, stunned girls, whose souls were sucked away? thought Christina. A town the Shevvingtons finished with and got tired of?

“Come with us, Anya. Okay?” Benj and Michael Jaye were uncomfortable. They didn’t want to be in this ugly, damp place, with its mildewed walls and the madness that wafted off Anya like a breeze.

Christina wondered if the Shevvingtons were tired of Anya. If they had finished with her yet. If they don’t have Anya to toy with, she thought, they’ll need another girl. And the only one around … is me.

“We had boiled dinner last night,” Anya said. She frowned. “Corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, and turnips. I hate boiled dinner. It makes me feel old and crippled and penniless.”

The alternative to getting old is dying young, thought Christina. What have the Shevvingtons been saying to her?

“Mom’s having a fish fry,” said Michael. “We haven’t had decent fish since we left the island. Come on, Anya. Chrissie’ll fold your shirts.”

But Anya just kept folding, smiling at the T-shirts as if she were tucking tissues in her trousseau.

Christina, Michael, and Benj sat on the dock, feet dangling toward the water. A stiff, biting wind blew in from the Atlantic but in the sun the boards were warmish. They felt splintery and familiar. Bird-lovers who visited Burning Fog Isle every autumn to witness migrations, binoculars and cameras hanging around their necks, waited with the children for Frankie’s boat. Out on the rocks, seals sunned themselves and cormorants spread their wings to dry. They looked like dirty shirts hanging on the clothesline.

Christina thought of the island as heaven, a place of autumn colors and Thanksgiving coming. But she was not there, and she could not go there, and sometimes she wondered if it even existed.

Autumn was Christina’s favorite season. She loved fall: the carving of pumpkins, the early dark of afternoons, the cutting out of construction paper turkeys for Thanksgiving.

All these seemed a distant memory, something that grandmothers told their grandchildren about and nobody quite believed.

She made herself think of the letter Frankie would bring from her parents. The tape from Dolly.

If she knew Dolly, it would be a good tape, full of gossip and laughs.

“I just like to sit around aggravatin’ people,” Dolly liked to say. (That was what her grandmother liked to say, actually, and Dolly had just copied. But she was right. The trait had skipped a generation. They were both excellent at “aggravatin’ ” people.)

Dolly, as far as Christina knew, was ignorant of what had happened at Schooner Inne and school. Mr. and Mrs. Romney were silenced by shame and Michael and Benj by confused loyalties. As for the tape she had recorded when she was talking to Blake, it had vanished. Anya had been holding it, but by the time the ambulance came and Blake was taken away and the police had questioned Christina about the wet suit, Anya no longer had the cassette recorder in her hands and could not remember ever having it.

Frankie’s boat nosed into the harbor. Rindge barked a greeting. Frankie tossed Christina a line, which she whipped around the cleat on the dock. Frankie unloaded the boat, saying good-bye to passengers who thought he was an exotic, exciting sea captain, posing for tourist photographs and helping nervous day trippers who were afraid they would fall between the boat and the dock.

Then he handed her something better than a letter: her mother’s own baked beans.

Christina’s mother put sliced onions, salt pork, brown sugar, and molasses into the beans, adding a little salt and dry mustard and a pinch of ginger. Her beans were wonderfully moist. Even people who didn’t like beans loved Christina’s mother’s beans. Baked bean suppers had raised money for repairing the island fire engine and adding to the tiny school playground. Christina had loved that, but Anya used to yearn for a city, where they would raise money with art auctions and opening-night theater tickets.

And now Anya just wanted to fold other people’s shirts.

Christina held the casserole in her two hands and warmed herself on her mother’s love. She’s not so mad at me after all, thought Christina. She baked me a dinner.

Benj was roughhousing with Rindge. Frankie was saying to a birder, “Course, it’s exactly a century now since the last big one. So you can kinda feel it coming.”

“Feel what coming?” said Christina.

Frankie shook his head. “Ocean gets tired of lying there, I reckon. Every fifty, every hundred years, she’s got to kick up. Been fifty years since the hurricane that ripped down half the North Woods, tore the summer people’s houses off the island. Figure we’re due.”

Christina shivered.

“Yep,” said Frankie, looking out to sea at perfectly ordinary waves, “I think I see a swell. Beginnings of our own hurricane.” Frankie sounded happy about this, as if, like Michael, he had been yearning for his very own hurricane. “Got to get back to the island and batten down,” he said. “Got to close up shutters, tie down everything that moves, lay in a supply of bottled water and canned hash.”

“That sounds like fun,” said Michael. “Bottled water and canned hash. Gosh, Frankie, can I come live with you during the hurricane?”

“Yeah,” said Benj, “at least lay in a supply of chocolate chip cookies, Frankie.”

Frankie kicked the boys on board. He chewed on his pipe stem, looking Christina over from top to bottom. He knows, thought Christina, hot with shame. They know on the island; somebody talked; somebody said that Anya went crazy and Christina turned to crime. Do they all believe it? Do they all think I’m bad?

“You want to come, honey?” said Frankie. His eyes were full of affection. She wanted to kiss his weathered face a hundred times; somebody out there still loved her.

More than anything on earth she wanted to come with him. But she was not wanted. She shook her head, the barest movement, trying not to cry. “Say hi to my parents,” she whispered.

Frankie grinned at her. “You’re a tough kid, Chrissie. Now you lissena me. Don’t let them get you down. I went to school on the mainland once, too. Hurricanes are easier.” He rumpled her hair.

He was right; hurricanes had to be easier. But it was not school she was fighting. Why were all grown-ups so sure that if she only “adjusted to school,” everything would be perfect? She could adjust for a hundred years and the Shevvingtons would still be evil. “I don’t know if I’m that tough,” said Christina.

He chewed on his pipe. “What you need is sumpin’ to hang onto when the wind is bad. Take my baseball cap.” He put his old red-and-white cap on her head with the bill backwards and yanked it down over her eyes. “Bye, kid.”

She watched Frankie’s boat until there was nothing left to watch, only a silver gleam on a satin sea.

The sea whispered to her, soft as a caress, lapping her ankles like a kitten.
I am your friend. Come to me. You’ll be safe with me.

“Never!” cried Christina Romney, straight into the wind. “And you can’t make me, either! I am a horse in the granite! I am of the island and you will never win!”