Envious Moon(18)

It begins:

She was incandescent. Is that the word I am looking for? She glowed. From the moment she came into the world. She glowed. At birth her eyes were blue and she had a little cherub of a face. Big wide eyes. Button nose. Rosebud mouth. Flushed, pink baby skin. Her hair was black then, and it had not fallen out yet and grown back reddish. Just a little patch of black hair. She had a small angel’s kiss above her nose. She was very calm, very alert. A really good baby. You just wanted to hold her all the time. Even her cries were pretty. Not piercing like some babies. You just wanted to smell her all the time. She smelled like flowers.

There was a painting in our house, on the living room wall. It was nothing special, something done by one of the island artists. It showed the lighthouse in a storm. The sky was dark and the waves crashed against the cliff. When she was a baby, she liked to stare at this picture. Somehow it soothed her. She could be crying her head off and you would carry her in your arms to the painting. We used to call it the “magic painting.” Because no matter how fussy she was, when she saw it, she stopped and stared. Her eyes grew wide. She looked at it like she was seeing God.

She had a favorite blanket. It was chocolate brown and the softest thing you ever felt. We wrapped her in it when she was a baby and years later when she went away to school, it was the one thing she made sure to take with her. She didn’t need it anymore for warmth, but it reminded her of her childhood. Carefree and without worries. We loved that about her, that she hung on to things. Not material things, like lots of people, but things that had meaning for her. That reminded her of family.





After Hannah found me on the beach, I debated for a long time what to do next. In the end, I decided the only thing to do was to bring her a fish.

I spent that afternoon below the lighthouse where the waters came together. I stood on an ocean-smoothed rock and the barnacles were enough to anchor myself. The waves washed over my boots. The beach was behind me and in front of me hundreds and hundreds of birds swooped in great arcs toward the water.

I threw line after line into the churning surf. For hours I had no luck. I preferred live bait but all I had was lures. But the test was heavy and the day was beautiful and the ocean breeze felt good against my bare skin. Behind me now and again tourists stopped to watch me cast and I was aware of their presence but I ignored them. I worked different sides of any obstacles I saw. Fish like to gather against objects, rocks and debris. I teased the line through the busy current and I jigged it a little bit. Finally, there it was. Quick as a whisper and it was gone. I brought the line in as fast as I could and I tossed out to the same spot and this time I was ready for it. When it hit I pulled sharply back on the rod. It was a fighter, I could tell that. It wanted to dive and I gave it some line and let it. Run a little, I thought. Run and get tired. I couldn’t tell if it was a blue or a striper. I hoped for a striper. Stripers were less oily and were better eaters. I gave it more line and when it had run for a while, I started to slowly bring it in. At one point it jumped and behind me someone clapped. I had an audience. It rose and I got a good look at it. It was a striper, the blue-green scales bright and silvery in the sunlight.

I felt it tiring. I brought it closer and closer. I wished I had a gaff or a net but it did not matter so much. I brought the bass right to the rock where I stood. I could see it under the water now, laboring, and I reached down and picked it up by the mouth. I held it up in the air for the tourists to see. It was a good fish. Thirty inches or so and fat. I waited until the tourists moved on. Then I swung it hard against the rock until I felt it go slack beneath my fingers.

Back at the camp I gutted the fish and then cleaned it in the salt water. I wrapped it in newspaper and then I took a swim and washed the fish off my hands. When I made my way to the house, I went through the cove this time, following her footsteps in the sand from the morning.

It was strange to walk up the same path in the daylight. I looked at the beach, where my skiff had been that night. And on the trail I suddenly remembered the sound of our feet pounding down it in the dark.

When I reached the house, I marched right up to the door. I held the newspaper-wrapped fish under my arm and I knocked like I was anyone else who had come to visit. I knocked several times and there was no answer.

I sat on the edge of the porch and I waited. I smoked a cigarette and for a moment I worried that perhaps she had left the island. She was probably always leaving the island. Like the time I had seen her on the ferry. The fish was next to me and the day was warm. I could not keep it there forever. I looked down the curvy driveway. This was the way she would come and I hoped that when she did that she’d be alone. I hadn’t thought of that. What if she was with someone else? After all, I knew nothing about her. Other than how she looked through a window in the dark.

The afternoon got on. I was about to hide around back, just to make sure that when she showed she’d be alone, when she appeared around the bend on a bicycle. The bicycle was old-fashioned-looking and red and on the front it had a basket. She came to a halt in front of me, putting her feet down on either side of it. Her hair was up in a ponytail. Normally I liked it when girls wore their hair down but this afforded me a better look at her face. And for the first time, I noticed her freckles, the lot of them, like tiny brown stars on her cheeks.

She looked at me, and she said, “What are you doing here?”

I held up the newspaper package. “I brought you a fish.”