Mitch walked Big Sister’s beach every morning, no matter the weather. There was a desolate, windswept beauty to the beach in the winter. And he felt it was a precious gift to be here. After he’d lost his beloved wife, Maisie, to ovarian cancer, Mitch had promised himself he would never again take a moment of happiness for granted. And he’d kept that promise.
The water was choppy this morning and the tide was going out, leaving a crust of ice behind on the sand. Blocks of ice as big as manhole covers had floated down the Connecticut River and washed ashore like so many pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. Mitch had to navigate his way through them as he made his way along the water’s edge. A dozen or so giant tree trunks had washed up, too, encased in ice, looking very much like dinosaur bones. A few hardy gulls and mergansers were poking along for their breakfast. Supposedly there were eagles around, although Mitch still hadn’t seen one. As he passed the old lighthouse, he came upon the broken remains of a Hobie Cat that someone with too much money and too few brains had left behind on the town beach at summer’s end. Each morning now, it turned up in a different place out on Big Sister’s beach, its mast long gone.
Mitch shared Big Sister with the surviving members of the blue-blooded Peck clan, who had held title to it since the sixteen hundreds. There were five houses in all, not counting the decommissioned lighthouse, which was the second tallest in New England. When he reached Bitsy Peck’s mammoth shingled cottage, he dutifully climbed the snow-packed wooden steps to her door and poked his head inside to make sure her furnace was running. Then he retraced his footsteps and continued on to Evan Peck’s stone cottage. The Pecks didn’t believe in shutting their island houses down over the winter-sometimes they felt like using them. The furnaces had to be kept running or their pipes would freeze, so someone had to keep an eye on the places. A caretaker, in other words. Mitch had happily volunteered.
His daily rounds completed, Mitch arrived at the island’s highly compromised wooden causeway, which had so many planks and railings missing it reminded him of a suspension bridge in an Indiana Jones movie. As he stepped gingerly across it, mindful of the frigid, choppy surf directly below, he hoped that his cottage’s 275-gallon fuel tank didn’t run dry before he was able to get the causeway repaired. Because no oil truck could make it out there right now. If he was careful, he had enough oil to last him for another month. But if he ran short in March, he’d have to tote emergency supplies out in five-gallon cans.
His bulbous, kidney-colored 1956 Studebaker pickup was parked by the gate under a blanket of snow and ice. Paul Fiore, Dorset’s plowman, hadn’t been by yet, so the dirt road that curved its way back through the Peck’s Point Nature Preserve to Old Shore Road was invisible save for the slender guide poles that Paul used. The Preserve was a windswept peninsula that jutted right out into the Sound at the mouth of the Connecticut River. The Pecks had donated it to the Nature Conservancy for tax reasons. During warm months, it was very popular with local bird-watchers, dog walkers and joggers. There were footpaths along the bluffs. A meadow tumbled down to the tidal marshes, where osprey, least tern and the highly endangered piping plover nested.
Mitch kept a scraper, an ice pick, a can of W-D 40 and a shovel in the back of the truck under a tarp. He scraped the snow and ice from the windows, grabbed hold of the driver’s side-door handle and tried to yank it open. No chance-it was frozen solid shut. He carefully chipped away at the ice with the pick, sprayed W-D 40 in the crack and tried again, putting every ounce of his considerable weight to the task. The top third of the door pulled open, the bottom two-thirds remained stubbornly shut. More W-D 40, more big boy pulling… and success. Mitch jumped in and tried the ignition. The engine kicked right over on the first try. The battery was brand new, plus his Studey was steadfast and true, aside from the fact that it had no heat. He stamped his feet on the floorboards to warm them up, found first gear and went roaring off, skidding on the sparkling blanket of virgin white snow as he slalomed his way between the guide poles. He did have snow tires, and two sixty-pound bags of sand over each rear wheel. But when there was ice under the snow, traction was not easy to come by.
Old Shore Road had been plowed and sanded already. But the Dorset Street historic district, with its majestic 250-year-old colonial mansions and towering sugar maples, still had not. Mitch chugged his way slowly through it, windshield wipers swatting the snowflakes to one side as he gazed out in wide-eyed wonder at the steepled, white Congregational Church, at John’s barbershop with its antique Wildroot sign, the old library, town hall, the Dorset Academy of Fine Arts. He could not believe how beautiful, how calm it all was. And how much he felt as if he’d been magically transported to a place far, far away from the real world. A kindly place where no crazed suburban commuters were scrambling their way to and from their snap-together modular homes built around a cul-de-sac one-half mile down the road from the newest on-ramp to nowhere. A contented place, a place where people led happy, meaningful lives.
Paradise, in other words.
Not that Dorset was. Mitch had been here long enough to know that a lot of good, generous people lived inside the village’s picture-postcard colonial mansions. But they were real people leading real lives, lives that routinely spun out of control. In short, Dorset was just like everywhere else, only prettier.
Because there was no such place as paradise. Not if people were living in it.
School had been canceled. As Mitch rounded the bend by Johnny Cake Hill Road, he saw that dozens of pink-cheeked neighborhood kids were already using their freedom to sled down the hill by way of the Dorset Country Club’s third fairway. Mitch could hear their joyous laughter as he drove past. Part of him, a big part, wanted to pull over and join them. But he was all grown up now, or at least his body was, so he kept on going toward the Big Brook Road shopping district, watching them wistfully in his rearview mirror.
He stopped first at the post office to pick up his mail and that of his three elderly charges-Sheila Enman, a retired school teacher well into her nineties; Sheila’s girlhood friend, Tootie Breen; and seventy-eight-year-old Rutherford Peck, a distant cousin of the Big Sister Island Pecks who had recently dozed off behind the wheel and lost his driver’s license. Mitch honestly didn’t mind running errands for them. It was no trouble. Besides, Mrs. Enman made him chocolate chip cookies, Mr. Peck supplied him with bottles of his excellent home-brewed stout and Tootie paid him each and every day with a shiny new quarter. Already, he’d earned almost six dollars this winter.
During the summer, when Dorset’s population doubled to nearly fourteen thousand, the A amp; P would be packed with hyper, sunburned fun-seekers shouting into their cell phones and scratching at their mosquito bites. The aisles were utterly deserted now as Mitch clumped his way along, earflaps up, shopping lists in hand. His grocery cart, which hadn’t been serviced since the Ford administration, kept driving hard to the left and slamming into the shelves. Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets” was playing over the store’s tinny sound system, a bit slooowwer than usual, it seemed. It sounded way more like a lullaby than it did a rock anthem. Actually, the scattered handful of aimless store workers seemed to be living in slo-mo as well.
Yesterday’s leftover rotisserie chickens were on sale-he got one for each of his elders. A box of Pilot crackers and three cans of chicken noodle soup for Mr. Peck. Clamato juice and Cream of Wheat for Mrs. Enman. A one-week supply of butter-pecan-flavored Ensure for Tootie. For himself Mitch collected the closely guarded secret ingredients to his American chop suey: one large jar of Ragu, one pound of ground beef, one pound of spaghetti, an onion, a green pepper and a package of frozen mixed vegetables. Garlic salt to taste.