Isa bit her bottom lip. “Peter wasn’t in radio contact. It was either engine failure or he might have gotten confused about orientation.” She sat back. “I wish Miley hadn’t run off. How will he get home?”
“I’m sure he’ll grab a ride with friends. Nothing here seems to be too far from anything else.”
“I guess I’m glad,” said Isa after a minute. “I like it being just us, sometimes.”
On the drive home, though, I sort of yearned for Milo’s snarky presence to break up Isa’s going on about who’d win in a fight, a skunk or a hedgehog. A space monster or a sea monster. A brownie or an elf. I figured she relied on babyish games to calm herself. And I sure knew how that worked. I needed some calming myself. The morning had rattled me; I thought longingly of my Ziploc and all of its treats.
“Did Peter come around the house much?” I asked as Skylark lurched into sight.
“All the time. Jessie used to say her folks are snobs,” Isa answered. “Mr. and Mrs. Feathering thought Peter wasn’t good enough for Jess. Peter and Jessie were like Romeo and Juliet. Have you ever seen that old movie? Starring Leonardo DiCaprio? I’ve seen it twelve times. It’s my favorite.”
“Romeo and Juliet was a play by William Shakespeare. Written four hundred years before Leonardo DiCaprio was born.” When I cut the ignition, I saw that Isa’s face was downcast. “But I bet it’s a good movie, too.”
“Sometimes I could see them from the lighthouse,” she confessed softly. “I’d go up to spy on them kissing and stuff.”
“It’s creepy to spy on people,” I said. “Especially when they want privacy.”
“Oh, they knew. Well, Jessie knew. It was a game for her.” Isa shrugged. “She thought it was funny. Jess thought everything was funny.”
“And Peter?”
“He went along with her. Once Peter said they had eternal love. Too strong to die.” She turned to me, her face suddenly beseeching me, her hands twisting in her lap. “Do you believe that?”
“If it was a happy love, I do,” I said. “Happy love turns into good energy.” Crossing my fingers that Isa wouldn’t challenge my soft science on that.
Isa thought. “But Peter wasn’t happy. He always said he’d make his mark one day. He wanted everyone to know he was just as smart—even smarter—than any of the summer people. Jess called him Chippy, sometimes, for the chip on his shoulder. She had names for everyone. She called me Flora, because she said I acted olden timey, like a girl from a hundred years ago.”
Ha, I could see that. “Isa, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” But something was. Isa’s face was tight with memory. She studied the house.
“You can tell me.”
“I guess it’s hard to believe every single part of Peter is dead. Especially that most extra-alive part of him that wanted to make his mark.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Did I? Sometimes my visions of Hank and Jim remade death into a vibrant, if muted, awakening. “But I also think maybe you need to switch off your head for a while.”
Inside, I made peanut-butter graham crackers.
Then, down in the family room, I found a dated, reliable romantic comedy. Life set to cute meetings and cuter music. I’d watched enough of them on my own couch at home, and it seemed like the right, mindless antidote to an overactive imagination. Isa’s and mine both.
SEVEN
I’d been at Skylark for about a week when I got my first taste of a Little Bly rain.
I’d been irresponsible the night before. After staying up to watch the Fourth of July fireworks from the porch, Isa and Milo had overruled me on a horror movie that I had no stomach for, and afterward I’d put down an arsenal of meds to take me out: a sedative and then the other half of a sleeping tablet and then a new half of something else. At the rate I was going, I might be finished with the pills in less than a month, but I couldn’t deal with thinking about that. I’d run across that bridge when there was no more bridge behind me. Meantime, I’d limit my intake of gory movies.
Sleep smothered me, and I woke up with a rocks-in-the-brain side effect that seemed somewhat worse than usual. The rain’s fault, for sure. It had put a chill in the house, and a predictable damper on Connie’s mood.
In the kitchen, I made a pot of coffee, and my decline of Connie’s mandatory smoothie made her extra grumbly, as she slammed drawers and muttered about the health benefits of her rejected magical berry tincture.
“The thing is, I’ve got issues with blueberries,” I said, which wasn’t true, and half of me knew I was showing off for Milo, asserting my authority while sidelining hers.
After her breakfast, Isa got out her sketchbook and paint box to create a masterpiece from the kitchen-table fruit, while Milo escaped downstairs to play Grand Theft Auto. Connie shifted her complaint to lisping about her bursitis until she’d convinced herself that she’d have to spend the rest of the morning lying down. I pictured her on her back like a sea lion, wheezing and snorting. Since Connie’s living quarters were two small rooms squeezed off the kitchen, at least she’d be out of my way as I tackled the house.
“I bet Skylark is over a hundred years old,” I told Isa, who was blobbing a green pear into shape. “Think there’s any buried treasure in here? Old letters, secret passages? Maybe we should go exploring.” I hadn’t had a chance to do any of that since I’d been here; Isa and Milo both enjoyed the daily predictability of Green Hill Beach, and I liked being away from Connie, and so our days had taken on a slouchy pattern. Beautiful as Skylark was, it was also like living in a museum, without so much as a slobbery dog to cozy it up. We stayed away until “theven” and then, after dinner, we watched movies down in the family room. Nights had been thankfully uneventful, too, since my first—knock wood.
But this morning, the house looked different. The rain cooled and cast shadows through every room, subtly challenging me to become a shadow myself, to flit and dart around Skylark’s corners in search of its secrets.
“The house was built in 1903 by the architect Winslow Hastings Horne.” Isa answered my question with the politeness of an heiress long used to being quizzed on the family estate. “Even though it’s big, there’s nothing very special about it. I never go exploring on the third floor. It’s mostly guest rooms, and it’s kind of scary—the ceilings are too high, and on a day like today, the rain pounds so hard you can’t concentrate on anything else. The most interesting thing up there, supposedly, is the recamier. Dad says that one day we can sell it to pay for college since it belonged to Marie Antoinette.”