This Is the Story of You (3 page)

Here I should probably explain the rules, the lines in the sand, the ins and outs of Haven.
We were a people shaped by extremes. Too much and too little were in our genes.

To be specific:

Too little was the size of things—the dimension of our island, the we-fit-inside-it-bank-turned-school, the quality of restaurants, the quantity of bridges.

Too much was The Season—Memorial Day through Labor Day. Vacationeers by the boatload, bikinis by the square inch, coolers by the mile, a puke-able waft of SPFs. The longest lines at night were at Dippy's Icy Creams. The longest lines by day circled the lighthouse. During The Season the public trash bins were volcanic eruptions, the songbirds were scarce, the deer hid where you couldn't find them, the hamburgers were priced like mini filets mignons, and the rentable bikes streamed up, streamed down. At the Mini Amuse the Giant Wheel turned, the Alice in Wonderland teased, the dozen giraffes on the merry-go-round looked demoralized and beat. At Dusker's Five and Dime the hermit crabs in the painted shells sold for exorbitant fees.

Whoever was up there in the little planes that dragged the advertising banners around would have looked down and seen the flopped hats, crusted towels, tippy shovels, broken castles, and bands of Frisbee fliers—Vacationeers, each one. Whoever was up there looking down would not have seen the bona fides, the Year-Rounders, the us, because we weren't on the beach. We were too employed renting out the bikes, flipping the burgers, scooping the Dippy's, cranking up the carousel, veering the Vacationeers out of riptides—to get out and be
seen
. From the age of very young we had been taught to maximize The Season, which was code for keeping the minimum wage coming, which was another way of saying that we stepped out of the way, we subserved, for the three hot months of summer.

We Year-Rounders had been babies together, toddlers together, kindergartners together, Alabasterans. We had a pact: Let the infiltrators be and watch them leave and don't divide to conquer. We knew that what mattered most of all was us, and that we'd be there for us, and that we would not allow the outside world to actually dilute us. Like I said, we knew our water.

Six miles long.

One-half mile wide.
Haven.

Go forth and conquer
together
.

I woke to the sound of Old Carmen's transistor news.
A ripple wind was kicking the sound waves my way.
Wind speeds,
someone was saying.
Updrafts. Eye.
Something was continent-size and massing, whirling and frisking, but that's what storms do. They collect themselves. They spin. They kick and moan and spit their way toward the minuscule Caribbean, scratch the stratosphere, and blow. Most storms don't make it all that far. Their chimneys pop. Their speeds collapse. They blow out to sea, disorganize.

I lay in my bed with the window open, listening to the radio words and the ocean. I lay there wondering if it was just another dream or a touch of déjà vu—this radio voice in my room, in my head, in the breeze. I pulled the thin paisley sheet off my legs and stared around at the room—the planked floor cool and the ceiling so low that when I stood I had to crouch, except in the room's middle, where the roof rose to a peak.

It was September. I was seventeen. The only Mira Banul in the miniature family of Banuls. Banul was my name and my species. In every school photo ever taken, I have the same expression:
What? Me?
I have the same Mickey-cuts-my-hair hair, the same spangle of freckles across my left cheekbone, the same unerasable lopsided stare. “You could try to smile,” Mickey would say, but Jasper Lee, my perfect, brilliant brother, gave himself last-word status every time. “You do the Banuls proud,” he'd say. And I'd look at him and feel so full of love that my heart would want to scream.

Jasper Lee—he never had a school pic taken. Not a single, stupid one.

Along the one edge of that attic sprawled the velvet couch—emerald in the sun, purple in the shadows, secure as a castle. In a bucket by its side were the snake, the frog, the turtle, and the walrus that I'd won during a good-luck streak at the Mini Amuse. Over there was the old walnut cupboard, just four feet high, where Mickey left the dishes my aunt had left behind. We never used them. We never sold them. We never talked about what had happened.
Not a story worth telling.
That's what Mickey had said. I'd moved into the attic when my brother came around, when he needed the second downstairs room as his own. I took it over, took it on, found room for me. The attic, its adjacent bathroom, the photographs that my aunt had left, too, the portrait of her in the frame. The best picture of my aunt is her at twenty-six years old, her long bangs disguising her eyes.

It said
me, 26
,
along the edge of the picture in ink.

Which is the only way I knew.

I stepped from the attic through the sliding door onto the deck. The tide was out, the edge of the sea against the horizon. The sun was a minor ridge of pink. Ginger's black lab was out in the sand, playing a game of Territory with a spotted mixed-breed I had never seen before, and there was Old Carmen, wrapped up in her blankets, on her swatch of sand. I closed my eyes, and the radio voice droned. Sahara something. Wind speeds 68. Caribbean crawl, no, not a crawl, a stall.

Haven was ready for anything. They'd pumped new sand onto our beaches the summer before—big pipes tossing out wet stuff from the ocean floor. They'd piled the dunes in front of the beachfront homes. They'd pieced new rocks together in black vertical juts. They'd said,
Be prepared for anything,
and we were. Our closets and basements and storage coves were rife with plywood and nails and duct tape. Our pantries were full of flashlights, batteries, cans, crackers, water jugs, candles, and the otherwise stuff that was stocked front and center in the hardware store that never closed.

Our training was impeccable.

We were used to weather. We were
proud
of being used to weather. Onto posts, signs, stucco, brick, inside our basements, we marked the places where the waters had, through the years, risen, like other people mark the growing inches of kids. In restaurants we hung photos of historic storms. In the DVDs they sold at the gasoline stations, they told the stories of our previous survivals.

But
this
storm.

This storm had stalled.

I pulled my hair into a ponytail. I watched the dogs chasing each other's tails. I saw Old Carmen stand and wobble down toward the sea. In the downstairs distance, in the paisley-plaid kitchen with the mustard-gold oven and fridge, I heard Mickey—her TV snapped off, her scrapple in the pan, because it was Wednesday, an Elaprase cocktail day, by which I mean a rumble-across-the-bridge-and-drive-another-hour-and-park-in-Visitors'-at-Memorial-Hospital day. They had a Jasper Lee bed on the second floor. They had a needle they hooked into his arm, a line that dripped, and a bunch of old magazines, but Mickey didn't read them. Mickey sat with Jasper Lee, talked to Jasper Lee, pulled puzzles, Monopoly, Crazy Eights, checkers from the canvas Bag of Tricks that they hauled hospital-way each week, and my brother always won.

Every Wednesday, this is how it was—cocktail day. Look up Elaprase, and they'll tell you this: It's a purified form of human iduronate-2-sulfatase, shown to improve “walking capacity,” shown to reduce “spleen volume.” Ask me, and I'll explain: It's the best shot we have at Jasper Lee not getting worse. The Elaprase does my brother's enzyming for him. It costs hundreds of thousands. My mother drives. My brother sits. The government pays.

Which is the story of us, the Banuls, and if you loved a brother like I love my brother, you'd learn the hyphenated language, too. It'd be the only way you could ever think of to make that hard part of him part of you. To share it, somehow. To say, best as you could, “I am in this with you.”

Wednesday. Mickey was making breakfast, and Jasper Lee was in his bed, lying there beneath the model planes that Deni and Eva and I had found as kits and brought home and assembled and glued and painted and hung from transparent strings thumbtacked to the ceiling. By his door were his wooden canes, which I'd painted in candy-cane colors. On his sill was his tin soldier army, which I'd found tossed in a can at the White Elephant. His special-size Velcro shoes for his special-size feet were, as always, beneath his bed. His curtains were closed, the curtains that Mickey had sewn from remnants she'd found—fabric cars, fabric adventures.

And there, on the bureau, nothing but sand. No mirror (“Be gone,” Jasper Lee had said). No brush or comb (“You kidding me?”). No Haven paraphernalia (“I have some pride.”). But sand, yes, film canisters of sand—eBayed out of its native habitats, sent by way of first-class mail, labeled with a chunky marker on masking tape. Jasper Lee had Corsica sand; Smith Mountain Lake sand; Cecina, Italy, sand. He had sand from the South China Sea and sand from Masaya, Nicaragua, and sand from the islands of Hawaii. He had canisters of chip, flint, spark from all over the world, and he had expertise—decipherings and decodings about the magic life of sand. Sand as interlocking crystals and three-armed sponge spicules. Sand as star shapes, heart shapes, tiny baby shells. Sand as micro sea urchin spines, rocking dodecahedra, precious garnets, feldspar, magnetite, quartz. Sand as fish bones, sand dollars, mica, forams, shipwreck dust, shark teeth, and broken dinner plates.

“Think about it,” Jasper Lee said. “The more you knock around a grain of sand, the smoother and more polished it becomes. The heavier the wave, the more powerful the crystal. Trample it, pound it, toss it, scrape it, dig it, build it, crush it, but what have you done? You cannot defeat sand. Sand is victorious. Sand washes in, sand washes out, sand goes its own which-ing way.”

Sand was what Jasper Lee knew. Sand was what Jasper Lee
owned
; it would have been my brother's Project Flow—Jasper Lee, who, in the early part of the sunny days, caned his way through the house and out the back door into the Zone, toward the gangplank Mickey had built to ease the path up and over the dunes. The gangplank we arranged after every storm and at the start of every year.

Captive coming,
my little brother would say.
Captive on his way.
Stopping and standing at the top of the dune and looking out to the sea. Calling it high tide or low, even though Mickey and I already knew. The tides. The sand. The birds. The salt. He'd drag his body out there in the morning chill and find his place to be. He'd drop down beside his bucket, shovel in, watch the seagulls scatter and return, the little pipers. He'd say,
Don't run off,
and sometimes I wouldn't, and he'd pull his fingers through the sand, let that sand shimmer down to earth. His thick fingers. Those sandy grains. The lock and interlock of my brother, weather, time.

We'll build a castle,
he'd look up and say to me.
We'll
fortify.

My brother had plans. He had plans and sand vocabulary. The best castles ever built were the ones that he designed. The best sand ever caught was the sand that he curated. The best soul on the planet was him. I might have been medium at most everything, but I had arrogance all over me about my brother, Jasper Lee. He was the best brother ever, and today was cocktail day, which was also scrapple day, though I was a sunny-side-up girl myself.

“Hey,” I said, when I came downstairs, dressed for school and for the sun.

“Morning,” Mickey said.

She had her apron on, her faded jeans with the ripped hems, her painted T-shirt and tie-dyed flip-flops. Her hair had been thickened by the scrapple steam, and there was heat behind her freckles. She was tall and skinny, long dark hair with blunt-chopped ends and little ribbons of gray near her face. Mickey's shoulder blades were her most memorable part. No matter what she wore or how she stood, those two back wings angled out. They were where and how she stored her strength, which she needed plenty of; everywhere you looked there was proof of that. The basket of unpaid bills by the silver breadbox. The Post-it notes on the refrigerator. The calendar that she'd thumbtacked to the kitchen wall—Jasper Lee's doctor appointments, Jasper Lee's therapy sessions, all the Mickey gigs that Mickey did to try to keep our family's engines purring. Mondays and Fridays: Front Desk at the Gray Lady Nursing Home. Tuesdays and Thursdays: kiln duty at the pottery shop. Saturday afternoons: care for the O'Sullivan triplets. Sunday afternoons: some seamstress work, if she could get it. Mickey searched, snagged, took what she could. She marked it down on the calendar. She stuck the dates to the wall.

“Can I convince you?” she asked that day, meaning the scrapple beneath the steam. She was the kind of pretty the people who knew her saw best. Jeans shaggy, cuticles torn, hair just hanging, a few odd strands of gray—maybe that's how other people saw Mickey. But that's not how we saw her, Jasper Lee and me. We saw everything Mickey did for us, and all the ways she loved, which included Wednesday-morning scrapple, which is also called pon haus, which has been defined, by the Wiki, no less, as little more than mush. Food taxonomy.

“Not a snowball's chance,” I said, yanking out my own frying pan and plopping it down. I took two eggs from the carton. I turned on my fire. I swiped a pad of butter. I sunny-sided, taking my place beside my mother. We kept our backs to the turned-off TV.

“Finish the scrapple and I'll get him up?”

“Finish my eggs,” I said, “and I'll get him.”

I gave her my spatula, my flame, my perfect yolks. I left her like that—manning two pans, and two fires. There was no storm in our sky. Only blue. Only light. Only the smell of all the salt in the sea.