The ensuing battle often ended in tears. Someone might go flying off the bed, someone might get tickled to within an inch of peeing, someone’s head might knock someone’s elbow, some other might let out a blood-curdling scream that was instantly muffled by hands or pillow—because the very worst outcome would be to arouse the attentions of an adult.
So when Celine and Mimi cracked Bobby’s door—she had tried to barricade it with a chair but the two succeeded in sliding it back—and found the bed empty and the window screen propped against the wall, they were shocked, as sisters, but excited, as hunters. They stuck their heads out the window to find the espaliered pear tree forming a perfect leafy ladder, and found it also to be irresistible and they descended it without accident—Mimi could climb trees like a monkey. They ran like escaped convicts down the lawns to the beach where the fog still moved in a living cloud. They thought they would find Bobby collecting sea glass, but she was nowhere in sight. They trotted up the beach and back. They were still in huntress mode and so did not call out, but they didn’t have to: They heard, between the moans of two foghorns on the sound, a softer groaning.
Grayson’s dock was at the south end of the beach and formed a boundary. At slack tide it was eight to ten feet off the water. Their father had always loved to dive from the deck, and though they had never all been to the island together, he promised in his letters to put each on his back and jump off. He told them it would be like parachuting without a parachute, which for some reason drove them crazy with anticipation. Mimi and Celine followed the sobs to the dock and found Bobby washed onto the beach like a shipwreck, her face covered in blood.
She had dived right off the end, as she imagined her father dove. She had thrown herself off, unaware that Harry only dove at high tide and knew the bottom well enough to avoid the bigger rocks.
Anyway, she didn’t really care if she died. Her father had made the big trip back from France and rather than making a beeline to Fishers to celebrate their reunion as she would have expected, he seemed to be looping right around them. Seemed to be sidestepping his own family. Why on earth would he maneuver to avoid them? It surpassed all understanding. Maybe he was angry with her, or hurt that she hadn’t written back promptly or often enough. Could that be it? Maybe in Paris, in something so serious as a world war, he had lost his taste for fatherhood. Maybe little girls were too trivial a thing anymore.
The harder she tried to reconcile this behavior with the father she adored and had been missing, the more she felt uncertain that anything would continue to act as it should—her mother, for instance, or the sea, or stars, or the sun. And that made her angry. So. If he was not going to come back as promised and put her on his back and jump off Grayson’s dock, she would do it herself.
That morning she had woken earlier than usual. It was barely light and the whip-poor-will was still lashing at the fog with her incessant call. Bobby had been crying. She knew she had because her pillow was wet. She put on her bathing suit instead of her shorts and climbed down so as not to chance meeting the housekeeper, Anna, who also got up very early. She ran down to the beach and across to the high dock and executed an impressive swan dive off the end. She skinned her arm on a boulder four feet beneath the surface and struck the side of her head. Very lucky that the rock was mostly covered in a thick mat of slippery seaweed. Still the crack sent lightning through her brain and she remembered a flash of a thought: “Ne pas s’évanouir! Do not pass out! You will drown!”
Still, she was a very practical little girl and calm under all circumstances that had nothing to do with her father, and though she was out of her mind with grief and anger she really had not meant to kill herself. She struck the rock and lightning forked and all went black and then she found herself clawing for the surface where the fog was more luminous than the dark of the seabed, and she gulped water and air and choked and coughed and kept swimming until her feet scraped bottom and got cut on the barnacles and she somehow crawled onto the sand of their beach. She was choking and sobbing. She tried to get to her knees and threw up on the sand and lay back down. She curled up. She cried. Her father didn’t love her anymore. She had tried to prove that it didn’t really matter, that she could survive on her own, and evidently she couldn’t. She was a total failure. She sobbed. She couldn’t even cry because she kept choking. Where was she anyway? She hated America.
Celine ran out of the fog and found her sister curled and bloody. With the flash of intuition she would come to rely on all her life, she understood the whole scene. She was precocious, too, in caring for fallen nestlings and stray cats, and she knew to put pressure on a bleeding wound. She did not panic. As soon as she saw her sister’s head she peeled off her shirt and pressed it against the cut that welled above Bobby’s left temple. “Même chose!” she said briskly to Mimi, who wanted only to be just like her big sister and who tugged off her own top, and Celine took the striped shirt and still holding pressure rolled it three times and wrapped it around Bobby’s head and tied it as tightly as she could.
“Okay,” she said to Mimi in English. “Now run! Vite! Fetch Mummy!” Mimi ran back up the beach and vanished in the fog.
Celine got off her knees and sat beside her crying sister and very gently lifted her head into her lap and stroked her bare shoulder. The fog moved in and out of itself slowly, and tiny waves lapped the sand. Peepers throbbed peacefully in the marsh, the foghorn moaned. Her sister cried quietly and trembled under her hand. Celine bent her head down as far as she could so that her hair hung in Bobby’s wet face and she murmured into her ear, “He still loves us. He does.”
The next one to go to the hospital was Alfonse the gardener. Nobody liked him. The girls couldn’t understand why Gaga kept him on. He wore khaki coveralls that were stained with dirt and oil, and he coughed and spat, and he was mean. They said “Hello” and “Good Morning,” and he only scowled back. They spied on him sometimes from the dark shade under a stand of pines. They crept through the tall grass at the edge of the lawn like leopards. The light through the needled limbs broomed across their backs and they pretended they wore spots. They watched Alfonse pulling weeds. He yanked them out like he was mad at each one. There was a rumor that once he had had a wife and child, but that they had left, or died. The girls could see why they might have fled. Sometimes while they spied, he lifted his head and looked straight at them, his eyes narrow. Whoops. He also smoked a pipe when he was sitting alone in the shade of his toolshed in the afternoon. It stank. Sort of. He smoked and coughed and spat.
A few days after Bobby’s accident, the sisters decided to go fishing. Another enticement their father had mentioned. They had hooks and sinkers and they needed worms. The three of them went into Alfonse’s shed looking for trowels to dig them up. They wrinkled their noses. The shed smelled of dirt and moss and maybe vanilla pipe tobacco. They had just found one rusty trowel when the doorway darkened with Alfonse’s bulky shadow. “What the hell,” he said. “You should ask me first.” They did not ask, they squeezed past him and bounded like startled deer and added his curse to their list of indictments. The next day Bobby said, “Let’s pull a prank—une farce—on the stupid man.” They were in the telephone closet off the pantry, under the stairs. There was a corkboard on the wall of the tiny room on which their grandparents had tacked important phone numbers. A half card of shiny thumbtacks lay on the shelf. Bobby picked it up and ordered, “Venez! Vite!” She still commanded allegiance despite the shaved patch on the side of her head and the twenty-three stitches.