But Summer had made me hold that story inside so long. Now it sits in my throat, a dry cough. It won’t come out. There is nowhere to start.
The next day, they came with this notebook, a sun on its cover. ‘Write your happiest memory. A toy. A pet.’
And so.
Summer
Five years later, after Japan, after Egypt, after Turkey, Japan again, we returned to the island with Pops. What a time. If you’ve ever sunk a seaplane deliberately in the middle of the night, you’ll know what I’m saying here.
Pops’s work had dragged us all kinds of everywhere over the years, and it sounds disgustingly smug but by then we’d seen enough places in the world to realise that Bartleby was pretty dang beautiful, and not just as far as remote abandoned churches go. Sure, it wasn’t anything like ending up in India, say, where even the smog haze felt electric, and currents of spicy smells ran under everything, and the people made rainbow tides. But in India, trying to watch all the coloured saris was like trying to see all the specks of a cloud of confetti at once (FYI—impossible), and the cows were so bony that even as I was saying to Winter, ‘Look at those tough old horns, they’re as strong as marble coathangers,’ one died right in front of her and she had to go and lay her cheek against it until the owner lashed at her legs with a big jerky piece of bamboo. Above all, the island felt safe, safe, safe, and though the shack was gone, returning still felt like coming home.
The first thing we did that first day when the sun came up—even before we unpacked—was plant parsley, because did you know that parsley has the most calcium of any food ever? So I guess Pops always knew we’d stay a while if he was thinking about our growing bones, because it’s not like we had cows or goats or camels or any other kind of friendly, milk-giving mammal arriving anytime soon, and the last thing we needed was to grow up all soft-boned and bent over. It was going to be hard enough getting boyfriends in the future.
The second thing we did was realise that sea water had ruined our sourdough cultures, which are those weird, alive yeast things that you bake bread from, and maybe it was because we’d been awake for thirty-six hours straight, but Winter really cried. And if I’m totally honest, which I’m trying to be, I cried too, because hot bread—proper leavened bread—risen and baked over some kind of fire, well, is there anything better?
And Pops did what he always did when we cried: mutter something about needing to work, and put his hands in his pockets, and back out of the room quickly, though to his credit he came back a moment later with a box of books and slit it open before scuttling away. And what was the first one, just shining on out at us? It was To Kill a Mockingbird, and though everyone thinks it’s their favourite, we felt an especial connection, Winter and I, because we’d lost our mother, just like dear little Scout and handsome, moody Jem, and we were also often left alone. And I’m not saying our father was Atticus Finch or anything, but not everyone was that crash-hot on Pops, so when the townspeople turn against Atticus and want to bash his hat off, we could kind of relate.
We lay under an almond tree in the sun, and I read it aloud until we may as well have been in the mossy balm of southern Alabama and that hot, salty mash of good versus evil, and eventually we drifted to sleep. When we woke up, the sky was pretty and the breeze was chilly and we agreed that if we were Harper Lee, we wouldn’t ever have written another book either, because nothing can be more perfect than perfect, and that’s how we felt about Mockingbird. And wasn’t that a scandal, when it turned out that the long-lost prequel was actually written by her lawyer with help from dear Harper’s personal diaries that the lawyer had swooped from the back of a garage and gone through with a highlighter.
As the last of the sun hit the bricks of the bell tower, and gulls wheeled and the ocean murmured, we jumped up and did split leaps over the sand and yelled, ‘Pork!’ as we threw our ruined sourdough to the birds, and suddenly life didn’t seem so bad.
We spent the next few days tracing over our summer with Walter, dragging our toes through the sand to draw an outline where the white house used to be. We were so into it that we almost forgot our twelfth birthday. If I squinted, sometimes I thought I could see us cartwheeling along the shore in the sunshine, the sea behind us breaking out in a rash of diamonds.
Winter
Our Pet
His name was Pete.
He was my mother’s dog. A springer spaniel, white and brown. His smile belonged on a birthday card.
Summer taught him to stand like a man. On his back legs, he could foxtrot to music. He waited for us by the big school gates. Like a nursery rhyme.
Then my mother died. We were eleven.
Pete started snapping.
First just at flies. Pond fish in a park.
Then the hem of a little girl’s dress.
A baby’s sunhat.
My father’s calf.
We came to the island with chickens for eggs. Their blood crusted brown on his lips.
On windy nights, he howled. He threw himself at walls, at the stained-glass windows of our small church. He was sick with love that had nowhere to go.
‘Did you know glass is actually a slow-flowing liquid?’ Summer said once as his rope lead burned in my palms. She was pretending not to notice him. When Summer pretended, I almost believed.
Not long before the boy showed up, Pete started to circle Summer.
He walked around her in slow, smooth circles. He purred like a motor. His teeth glowed.
Eventually we ate that dog. Summer said it wasn’t dog meat, but I knew.
I pushed the plate away with my eyes. I shook as she gnawed, her thumbs slick with grease right up to the joint.
‘Eat,’ Summer said. And then, ‘Eat. There’s nothing else left.’
I wanted to try.
Even for Summer, I couldn’t.
The boy and I, we had watched her kill Pete. As she hacked off his leg, Summer frowned like she did when we pulled Christmas crackers.
The boy held my hand. At least, that’s how I remember it.
We were down in the moat. We often were. By then, we were one and the same. Or maybe just mingled together. Sand from two beaches on the point where they meet.
But all that came after. I will go back.
Summer
You might be wondering right about now how we managed, two tweenaged girls all alone, not connected to anyone anyhow, gadgets or otherwise, and in a church to boot, not, like, a laser-tag arena or a mall after closing time, or any other place you might imagine being locked in if you had to write an essay about it for school.
Well, we had the mountain, which was like a grandfather clock, or maybe even a grandfather, ancient and solid and friendly. Its party-hat peak nudging the clouds, making heaven feel closer and everything somehow less lonely. There was the sea, which, if you’ve been there—and who hasn’t?—you’d know is a big old twinkly sheet of kindness that makes everything else seem pretty irrelevant, especially you.
Then don’t forget about all the books, my mother’s books, all those juicy classics, and there were so many of those that by the time we got to the end of her collection, we were excited again about the ones from the beginning. Like the first day of school after the summer holidays when you can’t wait to get there and see if your friends have new haircuts. Winter loved to be read to, though often I had to skim the parts that I knew she couldn’t handle, like Beth from Little Women dying, and any scene in Pride and Prejudice that featured Mary, the loser brainiac sister who everyone in her family picked on.