The Island (7 page)

From the time Chess was young, she had been marked as a shining star. She was pretty and she smiled, she was graceful and she twirled and curtsied. Her ballet teacher placed her up front, in the center. She had the best posture, the most compelling presence. She excelled at school, she outscored all the boys, hers was always the first hand in the air; teachers who taught two and three grades above hers knew her name. She was well liked, a queen bee; she was a kind and benevolent leader. She edited the yearbook, she was on the pep squad, she was president of the student council. She played tennis, the country club variety, social rather than competitive, and she played golf with her father. She was a good swimmer, a great skier. She had been accepted at Brown but went to Colchester because it was cuter. She was the social secretary of her sorority; she wrote for the college newspaper for the first two years, then became the editor. She aced all her classes and graduated Phi Beta Kappa, despite the fact that she could be found on any given Saturday night drinking keg beer and dancing on the bar at the SigEp house.

After college, Chess moved to New York City. She got a job in the advertising department at
Glamorous Home;
then she was promoted to editorial, where they could make better use of her talents. She indulged her lifelong love of cooking by attending the French Culinary Institute on the weekends and learning the proper way to dice an onion and how to measure in metric. She discovered Zabar’s and Fairway and the greenmarket in Union Square. She threw dinner parties in her apartment, inviting people she barely knew and making difficult dishes that impressed them. She went to work early and stayed late. She smiled at everyone, she knew all her doormen by name, she joined the Episcopal church on East Seventy-first Street and worked in the soup kitchen. She got promoted again. She was, at age twenty-nine, the youngest editor in the Diamond Publishing Group. Chess’s life had been silk ribbon unspooling exactly the way it was supposed to—and then it was as if she’d looked down and the ribbon was a rat’s nest, tangled and knotted. And so Chess threw the ribbon—spool and all—away.

Chess’s therapist suggested that she keep a journal. She needed an outlet for her feelings while she was away. Chess bought a regular spiral-bound notebook at Duane Reade, seventy pages, with a pink cardboard cover—the kind of thing she had written her chemistry labs in during high school. She could write about “all that had happened,” Robin said, but she didn’t have to. She could write about the scenery on Tuckernuck; she could write about the sound of the birds, the shape of the clouds.

Silk-lined drawer, the shape of the clouds. Robin Burns was a
medical
doctor? A diploma from Hopkins hung on her wall, but Chess was skeptical. Chess wasn’t sure she would be able to write at all. It was a yoga position she couldn’t achieve.

Try,
Robin and her medical degree said.
You’ll be surprised.

Okay, fine. There, in the car, Chess pulled the notebook out of her bag. She found a pen. The effort of this was enough to leave her short of breath. To express a thought or feeling in writing… she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t swim out of the seaweed. It was thick, bright green, and twisted like crepe paper, strangling her, binding her wrists and ankles. She was a prisoner. Michael. Nick. One dead, the other gone. Her fault. She couldn’t write about it.

She glanced at her sister. For the first ten years of their lives, they had been constant companions; for the second ten years, they had not. In that seminal decade—say, when Chess was ten to twenty, Tate eight to eighteen—they did the best they could to disentangle the burrs of their identities. This was easier for Chess because she was older and more at home in the wide world. Chess was smart and popular and accomplished, and so the predictable way for Tate to distinguish herself was to underachieve and hang out with complete losers. Tate was good at math and a genius on the computer; at the age of fourteen, she acquired a bordering-on-freakish taste for the music of Bruce Springsteen. While Chess was participating in Junior Miss and spearheading the senior class trip to Paris, Tate was hanging out in the computer lab, wearing ripped jeans, communing with the school’s population of nerds and geeks, all of them boys, all suffering from poor eyesight, acne, and cowlicks.

To look at Tate now, you would never guess the severe degree of her loserdom. Now, she was thin and toned, she had great hair—blond and thick, cut well—and she had a career that knew no limits. She was single and hadn’t had a boyfriend that Chess could remember since her senior year of high school. Did Tate care about this? Was Tate lonely? Chess had never asked; since they had grown up and moved out of their parents’ house, they talked only when circumstances required it—about their mother’s birthday present, holiday plans, and, more recently, their parents’ divorce. Tate had been leveled by their parents’ divorce. She just didn’t get it: They had made it so far, thirty years, they had made it through the years when the kids were small and Grant was building his practice. Now they were rich and the kids were out of the house. Why did they have to split? There had been some tough conversations, with Tate crying and Chess comforting, and these conversations had knit the two girls together closely enough so that when Michael Morgan proposed, Chess asked Tate to be her maid of honor.

Tate said, “I’ll do it as long as you promise never to get divorced.”

“I promise,” Chess had said.

“Okay, then,” Tate said.

Since “all that had happened,” Tate had been unstinting with her support and love, despite the fact that Chess hadn’t told her anything. Tate wasn’t known for her emotional depth. If Chess told her about the seaweed jungle or the stones in her pockets, Tate wouldn’t get it. Chess was going to have to come up with a reasonable explanation about her hair. A friend with cancer. Temporary insanity.

Chess’s heart slammed in her chest.
This
was depression: the constant urge to escape herself. To say,
I’m done here,
and step out of her life. Outside the car window, the landscape—endless trees punctuated by obnoxious rest stops (McDonald’s, Nathan’s, Starbucks)—streamed by. Robin had promised that getting away would feel good, but Chess experienced a sick panic rising in her throat like vomit.

“Bird?” Chess said. Her voice was barely a whisper, but Birdie was so attuned to any sound or movement from Chess that she immediately turned down the radio and said, “Yes, darling?”

Chess meant to ask Birdie to slow down; they were driving like they were on the lam. But Chess couldn’t form the sentence; she couldn’t find the tone that would do the trick. If Chess asked Birdie to slow down, Birdie would stop the car altogether. She would pull over to the shoulder to make sure Chess was okay. Did she need air, or ice water? She would offer Chess India’s seat up front.

Chess said, “Nothing. Never mind.”

Birdie eyed her in the rearview mirror, her voice already an octave higher with concern. “Are you sure, darling?”

Chess nodded.
Your mother is very worried about you,
Robin had said. Worried, yes; Birdie was treating Chess like she had a terminal disease. But things between Chess and her mother had always been unbalanced. How to explain? When Chess graduated from college, her mother handed her a thick binder, painstakingly prepared, replete with all of Chess’s accomplishments. The binder contained every single report card from twelve years of school, the program from every dance recital and every awards ceremony; it contained the short story she’d published in the high school literary magazine, her valedictory speech, her first byline in the college newspaper. It contained letters of recommendation from her high school teachers and her letters of acceptance from Brown, Colchester, Hamilton, and Connecticut College. Her mother had
saved
all this stuff? She had included snapshots of Chess throughout: in her sleek black dress before prom, on the diving board at the country club pool, as a toddler in a diaper, holding a dripping Popsicle. Chess paged through the binder, amazed and embarrassed. Her mother had believed that her life was worth careful documentation, whereas Chess hadn’t given her mother’s life a single thought. Her mother, Chess realized, had never
interested
her.

Chess had started calling her mother “Birdie” at the age of twelve, which was the age Chess felt like her mother’s equal—and neither her mother nor her father had commented. Birdie might have thought Chess would grow bored with it, or that it meant she and Chess were becoming friends, when in fact it was Chess asserting her adolescent power. Now, she continued the practice out of habit.

Things between Chess and Birdie changed with the divorce. Chess gained a new admiration for her mother: Birdie had thrown Grant Cousins out. At the age of fifty-five, she had changed her life. She had said no to unhappiness; she had opened herself up for other possibilities. Chess had encouraged her mother to get a job, and her mother seemed receptive to the idea, if understandably hesitant.

What would I do? Who would hire me at my age? If I go to work, who will take care of you?

Chess had said,
Birdie, I’m a grown woman. I can take care of myself.

And yet now that Chess had run her life through the meat grinder, she was a full-time job for her mother.

Could Chess tell her mother about “all that had happened”? Could she tell her mother she had fallen in love with Nick Morgan? If she told her mother this, her mother would love her anyway. After all, Birdie was her
mother.
But Birdie would be mortified, and the vision that Birdie held of Chess—the glowing, golden girl celebrated in that binder—would be tarnished.

Put that in the silk-lined drawer and revisit it when it is less painful.

The person that Chess felt the closest to now was her aunt India. India had been to hell and back on her own express train. Chess remembered the October morning when India had called to say Uncle Bill killed himself. It had been Chess’s senior year, the weekend of the homecoming dance. Birdie had received the call at four in the morning; she had climbed into the family minivan in her nightgown. She was going to drive all the way to Pennsylvania even though the sun was not yet up. It was Tate, at age fifteen, who had run out to the driveway with an overnight bag haphazardly stuffed with their mother’s clothes. Chess had wanted their mother to wait until the following day, Sunday, because of the home-coming dance. Chess was a senior and both her parents were expected to be at the dance to present her when her name was announced. If her mother wasn’t there, it would look weird.

Chess implored her mother to stay. She remembered the stricken look on Birdie’s face through the open car window in the breaking dawn. Her mother had said, “I am going because India is my
sister. There is no one else.
”

It was only later that Chess understood what it meant for Uncle Bill to commit suicide and leave behind a wife and three sons and a hulking artistic legacy. And it was only now that Chess realized what it must have felt like for her aunt. Yet look at India: She was laughing at something Birdie was saying. She could laugh! She was a whole person. She had been as badly broken then as Chess was now, or worse, and yet you couldn’t even see the cracks.

Chess slid her notebook and pen back into her bag, and the vision came to her unbidden: Michael, slipping, letting go, falling.
Falling! Letting go!
His arms flailing, his eyes popping.
Wait! Wait!
He was dead at the age of thirty-two. Death sometimes made sense—when a person was old, when a person had been sick for a very long time. Michael dead—his new business dissolved, his careful plans rendered meaningless.
This did not make sense!

Chess thought of Nick with a spray of cards in his hand, his eyelids hooded, his fingers worrying his chips. When she pictured him, he was always gambling. Why? Chess needed air. She could hear the tinny sound of Bruce Springsteen playing on Tate’s iPod. She couldn’t do this! She couldn’t pretend she was okay. She needed her mother to pull over. She would get out of the car and walk all the way back to Nick. But Nick wouldn’t have her. Put that in the silk-lined drawer.

She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. This was the breathing pregnant women used for pain management. She rested her head against the window, where it vibrated with the tires speeding over the highway.

A chicken salad sandwich,
she thought.
Blue,
she thought.

TATE

T
ate had never been in love before, and this, she felt, was for the best. What did love get you? Misery. Exhibit A in the seat beside her was her sister: Mary Francesca Cousins. Chess fell in love, Chess fell out of love, and then—wham! Instead of her being able to pick herself up, dust herself off, and move on, her jilted boyfriend
died.
When Tate had heard Chess was getting married, Tate had felt sorry for her (and sorry for herself for having to wear a four-hundred-dollar Nicole Miller bridesmaid dress in ruched bronze satin). When Chess had announced that she had thrown Michael Morgan off her back like she was a feisty bronco in a rodeo, Tate had felt a sense of kinship. Maybe she and her sister were related after all and, much to their mother’s dismay, would, by choice, spend the rest of their lives as single women. When Michael Morgan died, in an accident that Chess believed to be her fault even though she was twenty-two hundred miles away, Tate thought,
Oh, shit.
Drama followed Chess around like a smell. Some people, Tate had learned, were like that, and it was for people like her to sit and watch the show.

Tate was going to Tuckernuck out of love and concern for her sister. Because look at Chess now: she had shaved her head down to the scalp like an NBA star or a white supremacist. Birdie had been stricken by this. She had called Grant, who told her to call Chess’s therapist, and Robin had told Birdie not to overreact. Shaving her head was just Chess’s way of letting the world know she was hurting. Chess had always been vain about her hair, for good reason (long, thick, naturally wavy, the color of spun gold), and so to shave herself bald, she must have been in some exquisite pain indeed. And yet, Tate thought, it was damage she did to herself. It wasn’t as though she had cancer and had lost her hair to chemo. This was an ungenerous thought, and since Tate was here out of love and concern for her sister, she tucked that one away.