“What? So now it’s your island all of a sudden?”
Maya bursts out laughing. Her best friend is the craziest, smartest person she knows, and in her own screwed-up way Ana is struggling to get everything back to normal again: boys, sex, life, the world. She starts where she always does when it comes to survival: with humor.
They stay on the island almost all summer. Ana makes sporadic trips home to fetch supplies but mainly to clear away the empty bottles from her dad’s kitchen. She always comes back before it gets dark, and she always makes sure that Maya has enough to eat. One morning Maya wakes up to find her friend standing naked at the edge of the water, swearing as she tries to catch fish with her bare hands, because she’s seen some idiot in a survival program on TV do it; from then on Maya refuses to call her anything but “Gollum.” In return, Ana watches Maya the first time she takes her clothes off and, noting the tan line made by her T-shirt and shorts, says, “You’re going to make a great dad someday. You’ve already got every dad’s beach holiday T-shirt tan.” They spend one last summer singing loudly and dancing badly, sleeping without nightmares beneath the starry sky. Maya plays her guitar, calm and free. She doesn’t know it yet, but in ten years’ time one of the songs she writes here will be the first thing she plays at every concert when she goes on tour. She will have tattoos on both arms then, a guitar and a rifle, and will dedicate the song to her best friend. Its title is “The Island.”
* * *
Benji is running alone in another part of the forest. He finds new hiding places; he’s had a lot of practice over the years. He’s become a man who doesn’t take anything for granted; only children think certain things are self-evident: always having a best friend, for instance. Being allowed to be who we are. Being able to love who we want. Nothing is self-evident to Benji anymore; he just runs deeper into the forest until his brain is gasping for oxygen and he can no longer feel anything. Then he climbs up into a tree. And waits for the wind.
* * *
You have to keep your promises. That’s one of the first things children learn when they start to talk. When Maya was little, she made her dad promise that she could be an astronaut, and Peter promised, because that’s what parents do. He promised everything else as well: that no one would ever hurt her. That everything would be all right. Even though it isn’t true.
After everything that happened in the spring Peter asked his daughter if she wanted to move away from Beartown. She said, “No. Because this is my town, too.” He asked what he could do for her, and she said, “Build a better club, for everyone.” So he promised.
He’s never been good with words. Never been the kind of dad who could tell his kids and his wife how much he loves them. He’s always hoped that just showing them he did would be enough. But how can he show them anything now? Beyond the fact that he’s a loser?
He pulls up at a pedestrian crossing. A young father is crossing the road with his daughter, eight or nine years old. The father is holding her hand, and the girl is making it very plain that she thinks she’s way too old for that. Peter has to stop himself getting out of the car and shouting at the father to never let go. Never let go! Never!
When Peter and Kira had their first child, Isak, Kira said to him, “This is what we are now. Everything else comes after this. First and foremost, we’re parents!” Peter already knew, of course. All parents know. It’s not a voluntary process, it’s an emotional assault; you become someone else’s property the first time you hear your child cry. You belong to that little person now. Before everything else. So when something happens to your child, it never stops being your fault.
Peter feels like leaping out of the car and shouting at that father, “Never let her out of your sight, never trust anyone, and don’t let her go to that party!”
When Isak died, people asked, “How does anyone get over that?” Peter’s only response is that you don’t. You just carry on living. Some of your emotional register switches to autopilot. But now? He doesn’t know. He just knows that when something happens to your child, it doesn’t make any difference whose fault it is, because it never stops being your fault regardless. Why weren’t you there? Why didn’t you kill him? Why weren’t you enough?
Peter wants to shout at the dad crossing the road, “NEVER LET GO BECAUSE THOSE BASTARDS WILL TAKE YOUR WHOLE LIVES AWAY FROM YOU!”
* * *
Instead he just cries quietly, his fingernails embedded in the steering wheel.
The Island
It was summer
And the island was ours
We had had winter
For a thousand years
You were broken
I was cracked
You hung the rope
I tied the knot
How many times did we have time to die
Before we turned sixteen
How many songs about saying good-bye
That only you know what they mean
But this was summer
And the island was ours
And you were mine
For a thousand years
* * *
Kira used to fall asleep on the sofa when Peter got home late. An unopened bottle of wine and two glasses on the table, a silent little dart of guilty conscience to remind him that she’d been waiting for him. That his not coming home actually hurt someone. He used to pick her up gently and carry her to bed, then fall asleep, breathing hard against her back.
A long marriage consists of such small things that when they get lost we don’t even know where to start looking for them. The way she usually touches him, as if she didn’t mean to, when he’s washing up and she’s making coffee and her little finger overlaps his when they put their hands down on the kitchen counter together. His lips brush her hair fleetingly as he passes her at the kitchen table, the two of them looking different ways. Two people who have loved each for long enough eventually seem to stop touching each other consciously, it becomes something instinctive; when they meet between the hall and kitchen, their bodies somehow find each other. When they walk through a door, her hand ends up in his as if by accident. Tiny collisions, every day, all the time. Impossible to construct. So when they disappear, no one knows why, but suddenly two people are living parallel lives instead of together. One morning they don’t make eye contact, their fingers land a few inches farther apart along the counter. They pass each other in a hallway. They no longer bump into each other.
It’s past midnight by the time Peter opens the front door. Kira knows he’s hoping she’s asleep, so she pretends to be. The wine bottle on the table is empty; there’s only one glass beside it. He doesn’t carry her to bed, just covers her clumsily with a blanket where she lies on the sofa. He stands there for a few moments; perhaps he’s waiting for her to stop pretending. But when she opens her eyes, he’s in the bathroom. He locks the door, stares down at the floor; she lies on the sofa, stares at the ceiling. They don’t know if they have anything to say to each other anymore. Everything has a breaking point, and even though people always say that “a joy shared is a joy doubled,” we seem to insist on believing that the opposite is true of sorrow. Perhaps that isn’t actually the case. Two drowning people with lead weights around their ankles may not be each other’s salvation; if they hold hands, they’ll just sink twice as fast. In the end the weight of carrying each other’s broken hearts becomes unbearable.
* * *
They sleep out of reach of each other’s fingertips. With no lips against hair, no breath against back. And night after night a single question slowly takes root inside both of their heads: Is this how it starts? When a relationship breaks down?
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