About that time, the village council started work to reopen the closed hotel. It was crazy, using the last bit of everyone’s trust money, all the island families chipping in to rebuild the burned-out, crumbling old ruin that rose on the hillside above the harbor. Wasting the last of their resources to attract reams of tourists. Dooming their next generation to waiting tables, cleaning rooms, painting souvenir crap on seashells.
It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness.
We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.
Curled on the quilt, a part of every person for generations, Misty could put her arms around her daughter. Misty could hold her baby, her body cupped around Tabbi, as if she were still inside. Still part of Misty. Immortal.
The sour milk smell of Tabbi, of her breath. The sweet smell of baby powder, almost powdered sugar. Misty’s nose tucked against the warm skin of her baby’s neck.
Inside those years, they had no reason to hurry. They were young. Their world was clean. It was church on Sunday. It was reading books, soaking in the bathtub. Picking wild berries and making jelly at night, when the white kitchen was cool with a breeze, the windows up. They always knew the phase of the moon, but seldom the day of the week.
Just for that little window of years, Misty could see how her life wasn’t an end. She was a means to the future.
They’d stand Tabbi against the front doorframe. Against all the forgotten names still there. Those children, now dead. They’d mark her height with a felt-tipped pen.
Tabbi, age four.
Tabbi, age eight.
Just for the record, the weather today is slightly maudlin.
Here, sitting at the dormer window of her attic room in the Waytansea Hotel, the island is spread out under her, filthy with strangers and messages. Billboards and neon. Logos. Trademarks.
The bed where Misty curled around Tabbi, trying to keep her inside. Angel Delaporte sleeps there now. Some crazy man. A stalker. In her room, in her bed, under the window with the hiss and burst of ocean waves breaking outside. Peter’s house.
Our house. Our bed.
Until Tabbi turned ten years old, the Waytansea Hotel was sealed, empty. The windows shuttered, with plywood bolted into each window frame. The doors boarded over.
The summer Tabbi turned ten, the hotel opened. The village became an army of bellhops and waiters, maids and desk clerks. That was the year Peter started working off the island, doing drywall. Little remodeling jobs for summer people with too many houses to look after. With the hotel open, the ferry started to run all day, every day, cramming the island with tourists and traffic.
After that, the paper cups and fast food wrappers arrived. The car alarms and long lines hunting for a place to park. The used diapers people left in the sand. The island went downhill until this year, until Tabbi turned thirteen, until Misty walked out to the garage to find Peter asleep in the car and the gas tank empty. Until people started calling to say their laundry room was gone, their guest bedroom missing. Until Angel Delaporte is exactly where he’s always wanted to be. In her husband’s bed.
In your bed.
Angel lying in her bed. Angel sleeping with her painting of the antique chair.
Misty, with nothing. Tabbi, gone. Her inspiration, gone.
Just for the record, Misty never told anyone, but Peter had packed a suitcase and hidden it in the car’s trunk. A suitcase to take along, a change of clothes for hell. It never made sense. Nothing Peter did in the past three years has made much sense.
Outside her little attic window, down on the beach, kids are splashing in the waves. One boy wears a frilly white shirt and black pants. He’s talking to another boy, wearing just soccer shorts. They pass a cigarette back and forth, taking turns smoking it. The one boy in the frilly white shirt has black hair, just long enough to tuck behind his ears.
On the windowsill is Tabbi’s shoe box of junk jewelry. The bracelets, the orphaned earrings and chipped old brooches. Peter’s jewelry. Rattling around in the box with the loose plastic pearls and glass diamonds.
From her window, Misty looks down on the beach where she saw Tabbi for the last time. Where it happened. The boy with short dark hair is wearing an earring, something glittering gold and red. And with nobody to hear it, Misty says, “Tabbi.”
Misty’s fingers gripping the windowsill, she pushes her head and shoulders out and shouts, “Tabbi?” Misty must be half out the window, ready to fall five stories to the hotel porch, and she yells, “Tabbi!”
And it is. It’s Tabbi. With her hair cut. Flirting with some kid. Smoking.
The boy just puffs on the cigarette and hands it back. He flips his hair and laughs with one hand over his mouth. His hair in the ocean wind, a flickering black flag.
The waves hiss and burst.
Her hair. Your hair.
Misty twists through the little window, and the shoe box spills out. The box slides down the shingled roof. It hits the gutter and flips, and the jewelry flies. It falls, flashing red and yellow and green, flashing bright as fireworks and falling the way Misty’s about to, down to shatter on the concrete floor of the hotel porch.
Only the hundred pounds of her cast, her leg embedded in fiberglass, keeps her from pitching out the window. Then two arms come around her, and a voice says, “Misty, don’t.” Someone pulls her back, and it’s Paulette. A room service menu is dropped on the floor. Paulette’s arms come around her from behind. Paulette’s hands lock together, and she swings Misty, spinning her around the solid weight of the full-leg cast, planting her facedown on the paint-stained carpet.
Panting, panting and dragging her huge fiberglass leg, her ball and chain, back toward the window, Misty says, “It was Tabbi.” Misty says, “Outside.”
Her catheter is pulled out again, pee squirted everywhere.
Paulette gets to her feet. She’s making a nasty face, her risorius muscles cinching her face tight around her nose while she dries her hands on her dark skirt. She tucks her blouse back tight into her waistband and says, “No, Misty. No it wasn’t.” And she picks up the room service menu.
Misty has to get downstairs. To get outside. She’s got to find Tabbi. Paulette has to help lift the cast. They’ve got to get Dr. Touchet to cut it off.
And Paulette shakes her head and says, “If they take off that cast, you’ll be crippled for life.” She goes to the window and shuts it. She locks it and pulls the curtains.
And from the floor, Misty says, “Please. Paulette, help me up.”
But Paulette taps her foot. She fishes an order pad out of the side pocket in her skirt and says, “The kitchen is out of the whitefish.”
And just for the record, Misty’s still trapped.
Misty’s trapped, but her kid could be alive.
Your kid.
“A steak,” Misty says.
Misty wants the thickest piece of beef they can find. Cooked well done.
August 24
WHAT MISTY REALLY WANTS is a steak knife. She wants a serrated knife to cut through the side of this leg cast, and she wants Paulette not to notice when the knife’s missing from her tray after dinner. Paulette doesn’t notice, and she doesn’t lock the door from the outside, either. Why bother when Misty’s hobbled by a ton of fucking fiberglass.
All night, Misty’s in bed, picking and hacking. Misty’s sawing at the cast. Digging with the knife blade and scooping the fiberglass shavings into her hand, throwing them under the bed.
Misty’s a convict digging herself out of a very small prison, a prison felt-tip-penned with Tabbi’s flowers and birds.
It takes until midnight to cut from her waist, halfway down her thigh. The knife keeps slipping, stabbing and lancing into her side. By the time she gets to her knee, Misty’s falling asleep. Scabbed and crusted in dried blood. Glued to the sheets. By three in the morning, she’s only partway down her calf. She’s almost free, but she falls asleep.