“You’re awake,” Jane had responded, because Jane was the insomniac in the family.
She’d balanced her hip on the edge of Aunt Magnolia’s stool so she could lean against her aunt’s side, close her eyes, and pretend she was still asleep. Aunt Magnolia had been tall, like Jane, and Jane had always fit well against her. Aunt Magnolia had put her cup of tea into Jane’s hands, closing both of Jane’s palms around its warmth.
“You remember your old writing tutor?” Aunt Magnolia had said. “Kiran Thrash?”
“Of course,” Jane had responded, taking a noisy slurp.
“Did she ever talk about her house?”
“The house with the French name? On the island her dad owns?”
“Tu Reviens,” Aunt Magnolia had said.
Jane had known enough French to translate this. “‘You return.’”
“Exactly, darling,” Aunt Magnolia had said. “I want you to make me a promise.”
“Okay.”
“If anyone ever invites you to Tu Reviens,” she’d said, “promise me that you’ll go.”
“Okay,” Jane had said. “Um, why?”
“I’ve heard it’s a place of opportunity.”
“Aunt Magnolia,” Jane had said with a snort, putting her cup down to look into her aunt’s eyes. Her aunt had had a funny blue blotch staining the otherwise brown iris in one of her eyes, like a nebula, or a muddy star, with little spikes, spokes.
“Aunt Magnolia,” Jane had repeated. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Her aunt had chuckled, deep in her throat, then had given Jane a one-armed hug. “You know I get wild ideas sometimes.”
Aunt Magnolia had been one for sudden trips, like camping in some remote part of the Finger Lakes where overnights weren’t exactly permitted and where cell phones didn’t work. They would read books together by lantern light, listen to the moths throw themselves against the canvas of the tiny, glowing tent, then finally fall asleep to the sound of loons. And then a week later Aunt Magnolia might go off to Japan to photograph sharks. The images she brought back amazed Jane. It might be a photo of a shark, but what Jane saw was Aunt Magnolia and her camera, pressed in by water, silence, and cold, breathing compressed air, waiting for a visit from a creature that might as well be an alien, so strange were the inhabitants of the underwater world.
“You’re wild, Aunt Magnolia,” Jane had said. “And wonderful.”
“But I don’t ask you for many promises, do I?”
“No.”
“So promise me this one thing. Won’t you?”
“All right,” Jane had said, “fine. For you, I promise I won’t ever turn down an invitation to Tu Reviens. Why are you awake anyway?”
“Strange dreams,” she’d said. Then, a few days later, she’d left on an expedition to Antarctica, gotten caught too far from camp during a polar blizzard, and frozen to death.
Kiran’s invitation brought Aunt Magnolia near in a way that nothing else had in the four months since.
*
Tu Reviens. You return.
It’s unsettling, to be so far from home—all her usual anxieties lifted, only to be replaced with new ones. Does Kiran’s father even know Jane is coming? What if she’s just a third wheel once Kiran meets up with her boyfriend? How does a person act around people who own yachts and private islands?
Standing in the lounge of The Kiran, the rain falling in sheets outside, Jane tells herself to breathe, slow, deep, and even, the way Aunt Magnolia taught her. “It’ll help you when you learn to scuba dive,” Aunt Magnolia had used to say when Jane was tiny—five, six, seven—though somehow, those scuba lessons had never materialized.
In, Jane thinks, focusing on her expanding belly. Out, feeling her torso flatten. Jane glances at the house, floating above them in the storm. Aunt Magnolia never worried. She just went.
Jane suddenly feels like a character in a novel by Edith Wharton or the Bront?s. I’m a young woman of reduced circumstances, with no family and no prospects, invited by a wealthy family to their glamorous estate. Could this be my heroic journey?
She’ll need to choose an umbrella appropriate for a heroic journey. Will Kiran think it’s weird? Can she find one that isn’t embarrassing? Teetering across the lounge floor, opening one of her crates, Jane lights upon the right choice instantly. The petite umbrella’s satin canopy alternates deep brown with a coppery rose. The brass fittings are made of antique parts, but strong. She could impale someone on the ferrule.
Jane opens it. The runners squeak and the curve of the ribs is warped, the fabric unevenly stretched.
It’s just a stupid, lopsided umbrella, Jane thinks to herself, suddenly blinking back tears. Aunt Magnolia? Why am I here?
Patrick sticks his head into the lounge. His bright eyes flash at Jane, then touch Kiran. “We’re docked, Kir,” he says, “and the car is here.”
Kiran sits up, not looking at him. Then, when he returns to the deck, she watches him through the window as he lifts wooden crates onto his shoulder and carries them onto the dock. His eyes catch hers and she looks away. “Leave your stuff,” she says to Jane dismissively. “Patrick will bring it up later.”
“Okay,” Jane says. Something is definitely up with Patrick and Kiran. “Who’s your boyfriend, anyway?”
“His name is Colin. He works with my brother. You’ll meet him. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“Did you make that umbrella?” asks Kiran.
“Yes.”
“I thought so. It makes me think of you.”
Of course it does. It’s homemade and funny-looking.
Kiran and Jane step into the rain. Patrick holds a steadying hand out to Jane and she grabs his forearm by accident. He is soaked to the skin. Patrick Yellan, Jane notices, has beautiful forearms.
“Watch your step,” he says in her ear.
*
Once on land, Kiran and Jane scurry toward an enormous black car on the dock. “Patrick’s the one who asked me to come home for the gala,” Kiran shouts through the rain.
“What?” says Jane, flustered. She’s trying to shield Kiran with her umbrella, which sends a rivulet of icy water down the canopy straight into the neck of her own shirt. “Really? Why?”
“Who the hell knows? He told me he has a confession to make. He’s always announcing shit like that, then he has nothing to say.”
“Are you . . . good friends?”
“Stop trying to keep me dry,” Kiran says, reaching for the car door. “It’s only making both of us more wet.”
There is, it turns out, a road that starts at the bay, continues clockwise around the base of the island, then enters a series of hairpin turns that climb the sheer cliffs gradually.
It’s not a soothing drive in a Rolls-Royce in the rain; the car seems too big to take the turns without plummeting off the edge. The driver has the facial expression of a bulldog and she’s driving like she’s got a train to catch. Steel-haired and steel-eyed, pale-skinned with high cheekbones, she’s wearing black yoga clothes and an apron with cooking stains. She stares at Jane in the rearview mirror. Jane shivers, tilting her head so her boisterous curls obscure her face.
“Are we short-staffed again, Mrs. Vanders?” Kiran asks. “You’re wearing an apron.”
“A handful of guests just arrived unannounced,” says Mrs. Vanders. “The spring gala is the day after tomorrow. Cook is having hysterics.”
Kiran throws her head against the back of the seat and closes her eyes. “What guests?”
“Phoebe and Philip Okada,” Mrs. Vanders says. “Lucy St. George—”
“My brother makes me want to die,” Kiran says, interrupting.
“Your brother himself has made no appearance,” says Mrs. Vanders significantly.
“Shocking,” says Kiran. “Any bank robbers expected?”
Mrs. Vanders grunts at this peculiar question and says, “I imagine not.”
“Bank robbers?” says Jane.
“Well,” Kiran says, ignoring Jane, “I announced my friend ahead of time. I hope you’ve set aside space; Janie needs space.”
“We’ve set aside the Red Suite in the east wing for Jane. It has its own morning room,” Mrs. Vanders says. “Though regrettably it has no view of the sea.”