“But the rocks were so slippery. You couldn’t see it, this film of slippery stuff covering the rocks. Bill told me back at the house that day that the rocks are covered with diatoms, which are like algae. He told me after he’d stopped yelling at me because I fell on those rocks trying to catch up to him and I slid down a large one and into the surf. Even though it was low tide, once you go to the water’s edge, it got very deep very quickly, which is why you can fish there because the fish like to hide in the deep pockets between the places where the rocks stick out. I fell in and went under quickly. The current was so strong. I had no idea. You could not swim from any point off the island, so I had never been swimming and had never felt it before. When a wave came in, I got slammed against one of the rocks, and then when it went out, it pulled me with it and my head went under. And it was so cold because it was just early spring and the water never gets warm there anyway.
“Bill had to jump in to save me. I thought I was going to drown. The rock was too slippery for me to grab hold, so I just got slammed up and then pulled under like a rag doll. It was horrible. And then I felt his hand grab my arm. Bill had waded in from the other side, where he could stay standing, and he held on to this little tree that was trying to grow between the rocks, and then he grabbed me with the other hand. He held me while the water tried to pull me back under, and then when the wave came back in and pushed me, he used that force to bring me to his side and then up onto the rock. I lay there crying and gasping for air. Bill sat there staring at me, shaking his head with disapproval, but then he scooped me up and held me so I would stay warm.
“I don’t know why I told that whole story. The only important thing is to know that Bill would never have suspected I would make my escape there, by those rocks. And that made it the perfect place to meet Rick in his boat. We did it at high tide. He threw me a life jacket with a rope tied to it, and I put it on and got in that water, even though I could still remember almost dying there. I just closed my eyes and then let him pull me to the boat. He grabbed the top of the jacket and hauled me up until I was on the deck, shivering. He had dry clothes for me and a hat and a blanket. He drove the boat along the side you couldn’t see from the house and then he dropped me off up the coast, not inland where the harbor was, but definitely on the shore. His friend was waiting with the truck. I got in, and that was that. I think I told you the rest this morning.”
This story made my father cry because of the part about wanting Bill to be my father and it made my mother unnerved because she still could not understand how I did not know where this island was. She said we should wait until the examinations were complete before any more stories were told. She said this as if I were not in the room, but then she stroked my hair and kissed my forehead and told me, “Everything will be all right, sweetheart.”
My parents fought that day about where I should stay. My mother won. In spite of the excitement and stress that my homecoming had provoked, the irony of this did not escape me. I slept the first night in the guest room. My mother had turned our rooms into a study and a den. She said it had been too painful to see my things every day, so she put them all in the attic for a while and then finally gave them away to charities.
As I walked down the hallway, whose walls were now adorned with modern art, I remembered the second rude awakening I had in this house.
It happened the third weekend in April when Hunter was home from boarding school. He’d brought a friend whose name was Joe, and he was a junior like Hunter. Emma was a freshman. She had just turned fifteen.
On Fridays when it was Mrs. Martin’s weekend, Emma and I would try to make plans with our friends, even if we had to invite ourselves to the friend’s house. Sometimes Emma would let me sit on her bed and watch her pluck her eyebrows or put on makeup before she went out. And sometimes she would tell me things about her life because she had no one else to tell them to who wouldn’t gossip about her or judge her or try to steal her plan. On this Friday, we were staying home because Emma had a plan to make Joe her boyfriend.
I’m having Natasha Friar over because Hunter said she was hot and that will keep him busy. And while he’s busy with Nat, I’ll be busy with Joe.
Our mother and Mr. Martin had already left to go to the club for golf and dinner with their friends. They told us to be good and not to leave the house. Emma leaned into the mirror to finish putting on her mascara. I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, thinking about her plan, and how clever she was, and how beautiful she looked when she put on her tight clothes and red lip gloss. I must have been too quiet, or maybe I stared so long that she started to feel my eyes burning a hole in her skin.
She stopped what she was doing and turned to look at me, one hand gripping the mascara wand and the other waving a finger at me. Stay out of the way, Cass. I mean it! You can have one drink with us but that’s it. If you mess things up for me, or Hunter, one of us will kill you!
Hunter and his friends arrived in a car service at 9:12. Nat had been at our house since 7:14 and was already drunk on Mr. Martin’s apricot brandy. Emma was too nervous to be drunk, though she’d made us both a fuzzy navel. I went upstairs to my room.
I don’t know what time it was when I came out of my room, because I had fallen asleep but then woken up. I felt unnerved, like I couldn’t get back to sleep until I knew if our mother and Mr. Martin had come home, and whether anyone else was asleep, and where they were all sleeping, and also what had happened with Emma’s plan. It’s strange to fall asleep after drinking and then to wake up and not know what’s going on outside your own door, in your own house. And so I went out, not with the intention of ruining Emma’s plan with Joe or Hunter’s plan with Nat, but just to get my bearings so I could go back to sleep.
From outside my room, I could see down the hall to the master bedroom. The door was closed and there was no light coming from the crack at the bottom. Hunter’s door was open and his room was dark, which meant he was downstairs in the TV room, probably, maybe with Nat. But across the hall, in the guest room, the door was closed and a light was flickering at the bottom.
I could tell you that I thought maybe someone had left it on and I needed to check. I could tell you that I was worried about Nat and thought she was in there, passed out with the light still on. I could tell you I thought the same about Joe, or the other couple Hunter had brought home. But none of that would be true. The truth is that I knew Emma was in that room, and although I had no need to open that door, I had an unstoppable desire to do it.