“You should get some sleep.” We’ve both been awake all night, and the delirium of exhaustion is starting to feel like a freight train clamoring back and forth between my ears.
He nods, removes his hands from his coat pockets, and heads up the path to Anchor Cottage. He doesn’t even say good-bye.
I won’t be surprised if he starts packing as soon as he gets back to the cottage.
Mom is already awake and listening to the radio in the kitchen when I walk through the back door. It’s a local station that announces storm warnings and tide reports, and today the host, Buddy Kogens, is talking about the body that authorities pulled from the water early this morning.
“This town is black with death,” she says morosely, facing the kitchen sink, her hands gripping the white tile edge. “It’s saturated with it.” I don’t answer her. I’m too tired. So I slip out into the hall and upstairs to my bedroom. From the window, I see Bo moving up the path, almost to Anchor Cottage near the center of the island. His gait is slow and deliberate. He looks back once, as if he feels me watching him, and I duck back from the window.
Something nags at me. I just can’t put my finger on it.
* * *
The afternoon sky shatters apart, revealing a swath of milky blue.
Last night we found Gregory Dunn’s body in the harbor.
This morning we watched the sunrise from the pier as his body was brought ashore.
Day one of the Swan season: one boy dead.
I slip from bed, rubbing my eyes, still groggy even though the sun has been up for hours, and dress in an old pair of faded jeans and a navy-blue sweater. I take my time. I stand at the dresser, not meeting my own gaze in the mirror on the wall, running my fingers over a meager collection of things. A bottle of old perfume—Mom’s—which I bring to my nose. The vanilla scent has turned sharp and musty, taken on the tinge of alcohol. There’s a silver dish filled with pebbles gathered from the shore: aqua and coral and emerald green. Two candles sit at one corner of the dresser, the wicks hardly burned down. And hanging by a length of yellow ribbon from the top of the mirror is a triangle piece of glass with flowers pressed between it. I can’t dredge up the memory of where it came from. A birthday gift, maybe? Something Rose gave me? I stare at it, the small pink flowers flattened and dried, preserved for eternity.
I turn and lean against the dresser, taking stock of the room. Sparse and tidy. White walls. White everything. Clean. No bright colors anywhere. My room says little about me. Or maybe it says it all. A room easily abandoned. Left behind with hardly a hint that a girl ever lived here at all.
Mom is not in the house. The floorboards groan as I walk down the stairs into the kitchen. A plate of freshly baked orange muffins sits on the table. That’s two mornings in a row she’s made breakfast. The two mornings that Bo’s been on the island. She can’t help herself, she won’t let a stranger starve, even though she’d easily let herself or me go hungry. Old habits. The social decorum of a small town—feed anyone who comes to visit.
I grab two muffins then head out onto the front porch.
The air is warm. Calm and placated. Seagulls spin in dizzying circles overhead, swooping down to the steep shoreline and snatching up fish caught in the tide pools. I catch the silhouette of Mom inside the greenhouse, walking among the decomposing plants.
I peer across the island to Anchor Cottage. Is Bo still inside? Or did he pack his bag and find a way off the island while I slept? A knot tightens in my stomach. If I find the cottage empty, cold, and dark, how will I feel? Despair? Like my gut has been ripped out?
But at least I’ll know he’s safe, escaped this town before he wound up like Gregory Dunn.
A noise draws my focus away from the cottage. A low sawing sound—the cutting of wood. It echoes over the island. And it’s coming from the orchard.
I follow the wood-slat path deeper into the island, but before I’ve even stepped into the rows of perfectly spaced trees, I can tell that things are different. The wood ladder that normally rests at the farthest row against a half-dead Anjou tree, protected from the wind, has been moved closer to the center of the grove and has been positioned beside one of the Braeburn trees. And standing on the highest rung, leaning into the thicket of branches, is Bo.
He didn’t leave after all. He didn’t do the smart thing and flee when he had the opportunity. Relief swells inside my chest.
“Hey,” he says down to me, holding on to one of the low branches. The sun makes long shadows through the trees. “Is everything okay?”
He takes several steps down the ladder, his hat turned backward on his head.
“Fine,” I answer. “I just thought maybe you’d . . .” My voice dissipates.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m just glad you’re still here.”
He squints and wipes at his forehead. “You thought I would leave?”
“Maybe.”
The sunlight catches his eyes, making the dark green seem like pieces of emerald glass, an entire world contained within them. His gray T-shirt sticks to his chest and arms. His cheeks are flushed. I watch him a moment too long.
“Have you slept?” I ask.
“Not yet.” He smiles from one side of his mouth—his mood seems to have lifted slightly since this morning. While I was curled up in bed, sheets pulled over my head to block out the sun, he’s been out here working. Sleep probably seemed like an impossibility after last night, after what he saw. “I wanted to get started on the orchard.” He hooks a wide-toothed handsaw over a low, crooked limb then climbs down the ladder, brushing his hands across his jeans.
I hand him one of the freshly baked orange muffins. “What are you doing exactly?”
He cranes his head up to the tangled limbs above us, squinting. The scar beneath his left eye pinches together. “Cutting out any new growth. We only want the oldest limbs to stay because those are the ones that produce fruit. And see how some of the branches grow straight up or down? Those also need to go.” He blinks away from the sun then looks at me.
“Can I help?”
He sets the muffin on a rung of the ladder then lifts the hat from his head and scrubs a hand through his short hair. “If you want to.”
“I do.”
He drags out a second ladder from the old woodshed and finds another, smaller handsaw. He places the ladder against the tree next to the one he had been pruning and I climb carefully to the top, a little unsteady at first as it wobbles beneath me. Once I feel settled, I realize I’m shrouded by a veil of limbs, hidden in a world of branches, and then Bo climbs up behind me, standing one rung down. He extends the handsaw up to me and then wraps his arms around my waist, gripping the ladder to keep me from falling.
“What do you see?” he asks, his voice at my neck, my ear, and I shiver slightly at the feeling of his breath against my skin.
“I’m not sure,” I say truthfully.
“The trees haven’t bloomed yet,” he explains. “But they will soon, so we have to take out all the branches that are crowding the older limbs—the old wood, it’s called.”
“This small one,” I say, tapping it with my finger. “It’s growing straight up from a thicker branch, and it still looks a little green.”
“Exactly,” he praises. And I lift the saw, holding it to the limb. On my first stroke across the branch, the saw slips out, and I lurch forward to keep from dropping it. Bo tightens his arms around me, and the ladder teeters beneath us. My heartbeat spikes upward. “The saw takes some getting used to,” Bo adds.
I nod, gripping the top of the ladder. And then I feel the sharp stinging in my left index finger. I turn my palm up so I can examine it, and blood beads to the surface along the outer edge of my finger. When the blade slipped, it must have cut into my skin where my hand was holding the branch. Bo notices it at the same time, and he leans closer into me, reaching around to grab my finger.