The Bookstore Sisters
Alice Hoffman
The letter to Isabel Gibson arrived on a Tuesday, which had always been the unluckiest day of the week. Tuesdays were meant for accidents, disappointments, and bad news. Long ago, the day was considered to belong to Mars, the god of war and blood. Now it just meant trouble—it meant that your past could come back to haunt you. Isabel stuffed the letter, which was postmarked from Brinkley’s Island, into her pocket without looking at it, since no news was good news as far as she was concerned, then she promptly forgot about it. She was good at forgetting; she had practiced for years, and it was now a skill at which she excelled. When she tried, she was able to forget not only Brinkley’s Island, which held her worst childhood memories, but the entire state of Maine, where she had spent her first eighteen years. She could forget she was divorced, after five unhappy years; she could forget she was thirty-two and ate most of her meals alone in her apartment on Eighteenth Street, where the stove was temperamental and often refused to light. She could even forget that she had once been considered the girl most likely to become somebody, when she’d turned out to be nobody in particular. When Isabel really tried, she could block out everything around her. She could even forget it was June, which had once been her favorite time of year, before everything went wrong.
Isabel was now a full-time dog walker in Manhattan, where she had lived ever since finishing art school twelve years earlier. She’d had promise back then—all her teachers had told her so—but promise can disappear if you leave it to flounder, and now she had five dogs to walk on a daily basis, a troupe that included a well-behaved Labrador retriever who was left alone in his apartment for ten hours each day, a Jack Russell terrier who didn’t listen to a word she said, two standard poodles who barely looked at her and only related to each other, and a sheepdog who liked to nip whenever he had the chance. Isabel didn’t think about the letter that had arrived until she was sitting in the Madison Square dog park. She had already delivered four of her dogs to their homes and was alone with the Labrador retriever, named Hank. She usually had Hank for most of the day even though she was only paid for three of those hours; she couldn’t bear to bring him home to an empty apartment. Every time she did, she could hear him howling as she walked down the hallway, and it nearly broke her heart, something she didn’t even think she had anymore. Forgetting you had one could nearly make it so.
Isabel took the envelope from the pocket of her spring coat, bought on sale at Saks when she was still married and using Roger’s credit cards as often as possible. Roger had said that even though she had married him, she had never made a real commitment and had always neglected him. He blamed her for all that had gone wrong between them, and she might have believed him if she hadn’t discovered a scrap of paper in his jacket with script that was girlish and unfamiliar. This morning was heaven. As it turned out, when Roger went out running early in the day, he was also having an affair, so that was the end of that. Any possibility of a commitment was over.
Before the divorce was official, Isabel charged purchases she didn’t need or want at Burberry and Coach and Saks at a mad pace, all on Roger’s cards. For a while, she bought two of everything, and sent the doubles to her sister, Sophie, but she never received a thank-you note. For all she knew, her sister had thrown the expensive purses and sweaters in the trash or had given them to the jumble sale that was held at the community center each summer. It seemed it was impossible for them to be sisters again, and if the letter that had arrived was from Sophie, as Isabel suspected it was, it was likely to be full of anger and blame over the huge falling-out they’d had the last time they’d been together.
No matter what, the craggy landscape of Brinkley’s Island had managed to surface in all Isabel’s paintings. She could be at the Hudson River sketching out an urban river scene only to wind up with a painting of the rocky beach at the harbor or the meadow behind the house where she’d grown up, so filled with lupines that the whole world turned blue and pink and white. Isabel had sold off the last of her paintings for twenty-five dollars apiece at the flea market in Chelsea, so that she could continue to forget. Mostly she tried to forget her own bad behavior the last time she’d seen her sister. Born two years apart, she and Sophie had been best friends, but that was long ago. They had grown up in the cottage attached to the Once upon a Time Bookshop, a place locals treated as if it were their personal library. People brought the books home, then returned them once they’d been read, without bothering to pay, with the margins filled with cheerful remarks and blasting critiques. Isabel’s father, Shaun Gibson, was beloved on the island and always encouraged people to read as much as they wished to, but that didn’t mean he was financially adept, and money was always a struggle; in the end there was no money at all.
When Shaun died, during Isabel’s last year of school in New York, she wanted to sell the bookstore, but Sophie said they’d be dismantling their heritage and destroying their past, which was exactly the point as far as Isabel could see. Their past was miserable, wasn’t it? Their mother had passed away when Isabel was ten and Sophie twelve, after two terrible years of an illness that had caused their beautiful mother to remain in bed with the curtains drawn. Isabel had spent most of those two years escaping into books. When their mother stopped baking, her favorite thing to do, and they knew how bad it was, Isabel stopped reading. There was no longer any way to escape what was happening to them. Afterward, their father was out most nights at the tavern, drowning his pain, until Sophie ran to get him and bring him home. That was what Isabel wished to forget most of all. The sorrow she felt when she’d been alone in her room and had heard her sister crying late at night when she thought no one could hear. That was when she began to plan her escape from the island.