The Fog (2 page)

Benj and Michael took the steps two at a time, passing the girls. The entire stair swayed drunkenly under their feet.

“I don’t know where the souvenir woman spends the night,” Christina told Anya.

“She doesn’t sleep,” said Anya.

The door of the souvenir shop was flung open, and banged hard against the wall. The souvenir woman stood in the doorway like a photograph of herself.

“Look at the hoods on those eyes,” Anya whispered to Christina. “They aren’t hinged for closing. Those eyes are following me, Christina. Lobster eyes on stalks. Don’t they remind you of Peg? That woman took Peg’s dead eyes out of the ocean and stuck them in her own head.”

Christina felt sick, almost dizzy. “That’s the most disgusting thing I ever heard, Anya,” she said. “Don’t talk like that.” But the thought stayed with her: Peg, brown paws failing, slipping beneath the waves, only to have this creature seize her eyes. So that Peg swam on forever, without air, without sight.

The souvenir woman smiled, black holes where her teeth were missing, as if she had been shot. Slowly she pulled a poster out of the barrel. The woman moved toward the girls. Her layered skirts were long and thick, as leathery as her skin.

“If she touches me,” said Anya, “I will turn to leather.”

Christina swallowed. Already it seemed her throat had hardened, gotten thicker, turned leathery.

Anya stepped behind Christina, using her for a shield.

The souvenir woman rolled toward them, like a wave or a tire. The lobster eyes chose Anya. “I have a poster just for you.” The poster in her claw-like hand was rolled picture side in, so it was only a plain white tube. “Come. Take it.”

Christina shook her head. Anya laughed out of tune. “Don’t let her touch me, Chrissie,” whispered Anya.

Christina could think of nothing to say, either to the souvenir woman or to Anya. Would she be like this at school? Speechless and stupid in front of the sophisticated mainland kids?

“Yours,” said the woman, with her dreadful smile.

“No, thank you,” said Christina.

The woman laughed. Each eye focused separately; one eye for Anya, one eye for Christina. “No charge,” said the woman to Anya. “I want you to have it.”

Christina shook her head for both of them.

The woman jabbed Christina in the stomach with the poster, as if it were a lance or a sword. Behind her, Anya whimpered.

It’s paper, Christina told herself, it’s nothing but a piece of paper. I can just stuff it in the garbage as soon as I’m home.

She took the poster. In her hand it felt strangely damp, as if it were not made of paper at all, but of sea water.

“Come on, come on,” Michael was saying, “don’t take all day, Chrissie. Have you got the one you want?” He and Benj were each holding posters; they had somehow finished paying for them.

Christina stared down at the poster in her hand.

The souvenir woman smiled, blue eyes lying in her face like jellyfish dying on the rocks.

The children abandoned the village and went to Christina’s house.

Burning Fog Isle had three kinds of houses: real ones, like Anya’s or the boys’; summer houses, built by vacationers; and summer cottages, built by millionaires generations ago.

To Christina the word “cottage” meant “castle.” The cottage in which Christina and her family lived had thirty-two rooms. It had been built in 1905 by a family from Boston and was owned now by a family from Dallas who came up three weeks a summer, if they came at all.

Christina’s family lived there year-round in the wing over the kitchens and pantries.

Christina’s father could do anything: electricity, plumbing, carpentry, roof repair, gardening. It never bothered him that the Romneys didn’t have a house of their own. He just slowly circled the cottage, year by year, painting and caulking his way around.

“What’s your poster of?” Michael said to Christina.

“It’s not my poster. I don’t know what it’s of,” said Christina.

“You don’t
know
?” said Michael. “What do you mean? You didn’t look at it before you bought it? Christina, you are so strange.”

Christina could not bear for Michael, whom she worshiped, to think her strange. “We didn’t pick it out,” said Christina. “She forced it on us.”

“Who?” Michael asked.

“The woman who owns the shack,” said Anya. “She made us take it.”

“She was stabbing me with that poster,” agreed Christina.

Michael was disgusted. “Christina, when you get to the mainland, you better not be yarning all the time. People don’t make friends with people who yarn.”

“I’m not yarning,” protested Christina. “Weren’t you watching? Didn’t you see her, all wrinkled and evil, forcing me to take this?”

“Don’t use that word,
yarn
,” said Michael. “It’s island. It’s local. You have to behave right once you’re in school, Christina, or you’ll get picked on. You say dumb things like ‘wrinkled and evil’ about some pitiful old woman who can’t even afford to go to the dentist and you won’t make any friends. You want to have friends, don’t you?”

Christina could think of nothing more hideous than not having friends. The boys made it sound as if they would not be her friends either, should she go yarning around. Michael and Benj rolled their eyes. “And we have to live with her for a whole year,” said Michael.

Christina flushed.

“Let’s see this famous poster,” said Benj.

Christina pulled the rubber band off the tube. Anya took one corner of the poster and Christina the other, and together they held it open.

It was a poster of the sea.

The sea at its cruelest, the sea bringing destruction.

Green, blue, and black blended into a cauldron. Waves stretched up as if to rip a child off the rocks. White froth like beckoning fingers strangled little fish. Beneath the water blurry figures tried to swim up to the surface.

“Look,” whispered Anya. Her long, thin fingers tightened convulsively on the paper. “You can see the drowned. Their bodies are floating at the bottom of the poster.”

Christina found herself tipping forward, wanting to rescue everybody. It’s paper, she reminded herself.

Anya stared into the poster. She swayed slightly, and her white skin grew even paler. “Look at the fingers of the dead,” she whispered. “See them scrabbling at the surface?”

Michael inspected the poster. “Christina, you’re so funny,” he teased. “We live by the sea. It’s eating the paint off our houses. It drowned our ancestors. Why do you want more of it? I can’t believe you went and bought a poster of the sea.”

Christina let go her corner. The poster folded up diagonally, so that a corner of sea stared from the long white tube.

“It drowned our ancestors,” Anya repeated. “Perhaps it’s been too long for the sea since it had a Romney. Or a Rothrock. Or a Jaye.”

Christina rolled the poster sea side in and threw it in the grass. But then she picked it up again.

T
HERE WAS SHUT-IN FOG
the day they left: thick fog, like the inside of an envelope.

This was the fog for which the island was famous. A trick of atmosphere sometimes occurred, so that when the sun shone behind the fog, it looked like fire. Many times in the last three hundred years mainlanders had thought there was something burning at sea: a ship perhaps, in desperate need. But it had always been just the fog that hovered over the island.

Christina loved the fog. It hugged her and kept her secrets. It belonged to the sea and went back to the sea, and you could neither hold it nor summon it.

Anya hated fog. She insisted that her hair never looked good: She could work an hour setting her hair, walk out the door, and the fog would finger through her hair and ruin it.

The parents carried the children’s trunks and boxes and suitcases on board Frankie’s boat.

Dolly stood to one side and wept.

Dolly was Benj and Michael’s little sister. She was also Christina’s best friend. Only eight months younger than Christina, Dolly was in sixth grade, and, because they were the only girls anywhere near the same age, Christina and Dolly had always done everything together.

Dolly was small and wiry, with red hair in braids. “Christina gets to go to the mainland. Christina gets to go to real school. Christina gets to board at Schooner Inne. Have Anya for a roommate.” Dolly ripped the top of her old white sneaker against the splinters of the dock. “Next year,” said Dolly in grief, “when I get to board, Anya will have graduated. Benj will have quit school. It won’t be the same! It’s not fair. I want to go this year, too!” cried Dolly.

“Don’t be silly,” said her parents.

“Get lost,” said her brothers.

Dolly had been born on Thanksgiving Day, and Mrs. Jaye let them use her for Baby Jesus in that year’s Christmas pageant. She was only four weeks old and a ten-year-old Mary dropped Dolly headfirst into the manger, but there wasn’t any brain damage, the doctor who was flown in told them. (Michael and Benj always said there was plenty, the worst kind.) Dolly wanted to be Baby Jesus every year. Dolly said it was pretty boring to have Jesus always either in diapers or dying on a cross, and why didn’t we have a nice six-year-old Jesus (Dolly) or a really decent ten-year-old Jesus (Dolly), and now she said, “I’m almost as old as Christina, let me come to school, too!” But her parents hung onto her.

Christina was swept by panic. What if she didn’t make friends? What if Dolly remained, forever, the only friend Christina ever had? What if Anya hated sharing a room with her and Michael and Benj hated sharing rooms with each other and everything was awful?

She hugged Dolly fiercely. Summer people laughed gently. Christina knew they thought of her as a pitiful little country girl who had never been off-island and was afraid of the Big Bad Mainland. Christina felt like spitting on them.

“Have a good time,” whispered Dolly. “Send me tapes.” She pressed into Christina’s hand a beautifully wrapped present, which Christina knew, since they had mail-ordered it together, contained a half dozen new, blank cassette tapes on which Christina was to dictate all the news, tell Dolly every single detail, and on which, by return boat, Dolly would describe the island.

Frankie said, “Okay, now, we said our goodbyes? We sure? We absolutely done here? Huh, Lady Christina?” Frankie was very tall and thin; just skin tightened over lanky bones. He wore a Red Sox baseball cap and chewed a pipe. He never bought tobacco and never smoked; he just liked the pipe in his mouth.

“Done,” said Christina, and she felt horribly, terrifyingly, “done” — as if she would never return to Burning Fog Isle. She said nothing, letting Dolly do all the weeping good-bye. She waved calmly to her parents and spoke in a relaxed fashion to Anya. The wind fingered their hair, making Anya’s a dark storm and Christina’s a mass of glowing ribbons. The tourists said how beautiful they were.

Frankie took the boat out into the solid gray of the ocean. They headed into the fog, and the island vanished; the fog soaked it up.

“The island has drowned,” said Anya. She trailed her fingers in the fog. “Or have we drowned?”

One tourist murmured to his wife, “Don’t those two girls look like ancient island princesses? Marked out for sacrifice?”

The wife did not laugh. “Sent away for the sake of the islanders,” she whispered, “to be given to the sea.”

Anya accidentally jogged Christina’s arm.

The silvery-paper package with its pink and lavender ribbons was knocked out of Christina’s hand. She tried to catch it, but it fell overboard. Frankie’s boat surged on. The present floated in the waves, only the ribbons above water.

“It’s an omen,” said the summer people, laughing.

The children did not laugh.

“It’s only tapes,” said Christina, although she felt sick and desperate, because now how would she exchange with Dolly? She had not even read Dolly’s good-bye card yet. Christina let herself cry a moment, knowing that her face was so damp from the fog nobody would be able to tell.

The boys had seen. They came out of the cabin to commiserate. Benj said not to worry; he would buy Christina another tape. I’m such a hick I forgot I could buy more, she thought. I forgot about stores.

Christina thought of her allowance. Her mother had given her five dollars a week. It sounded like a fortune, but Anya said it was nothing; Anya said Christina would be island poor and laughed at.

It was low tide when they docked. The pilings that held up the dock were long and naked, like telephone poles. They weren’t pretty. They weren’t symmetrically placed. They were just there.

Out in the harbor were friendship sloops, lobster smacks, visiting yachts, and cabin cruisers, trawlers, and Boston Whalers. The rich, sick, sea smell of bait was everywhere, coming from the herring in the barrels in the bait house.

Before them the town rose in layers.

There were the docks, boathouses, and fishmarkets. Then came the tourist lanes — boutiques; antique shops; boat, moped, and bike rentals; real estate agents, and ocean view inns. Next came the real town — gas station, bank, laundromat, shoe store, discount appliance store. Up on the hills were the houses, jammed next to each other. Layers of green tree and hill poked between roofs. Scarlet geraniums bloomed in dooryards.

The summer people clambered off Frankie’s boat first, the way summer people always do. Michael and Benj began shouldering the trunks and boxes.

A wave of excitement as wild and strong as the ocean gales swept over Christina.

She was crossing a frontier.

Childhood jumped rope on the isle, but now she would put away childhood, and be a teenager. She would fend for herself and answer to none.

“Anya, I’m grown up now,” she whispered, but Anya neither agreed nor disagreed. Anya’s eyes were searching for the Shevvingtons.

The children were all old Maine stock, with old names. Benj, Michael, and Dolly were Jayes; Anya was a Rothrock; and Christina, a Romney. The sea captain’s wife, who stepped off the roof all those generations ago, had been born a Rothrock like Anya. She had married Captain Shevvington.

The principal’s name was Shevvington. Christina’s father said that was why the school board hired him — to have a Shevvington back in town, to match Shevvington Street, Shevvington House Restaurant, and the Shevvington Collection in the Maritime Museum.