“Me too. Makes me feel safer, somehow, knowing he’s hanging there with his sword raised. Why don’t you have an Island nickname?”
“Me? I don’t know. Nobody ever gave me one.”
“Maybe nobody ever dared.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I turned on my side to face his profile. His nose was too big, his brow too ridged. His lips were full, though, which softened him a little. I wondered if the moonlight gilded my skin in the same way; whether his cheeks, if I were so unfathomably brave as to touch them, would feel as cool and smooth as they looked from here, a foot or two away. “That was something, this morning,” I said. “What you did. Diving into the water and saving Popeye. You might have been killed.”
He didn’t turn toward me or anything. Just shrugged his shoulders a little, against the sand. “Popeye?” he said.
“That’s what I called him, in my head. Watching you from the window. He had that shirt on, and he was chewing on a pipe—”
“Wait a second.” He turned his head and squinted at me. “You saw his pipe?”
“I—well—”
“You were watching us with binoculars, weren’t you?”
“Well—”
“Miranda! For how long?”
I rolled back to face the sky. “Just a minute or two. I was curious. Never saw anybody fishing for lobsters before.”
“Aw, you’re blushing.”
“No I’m not. Anyway, how could you tell if I was?”
“I just can. I can feel your cheeks getting warm.”
“No you can’t. Not from over there.”
“Yes I can.”
I made to rise, and he caught my hand, and for a second or two we didn’t move. The air grew heavy between us. His hand was calloused and hot, larger than I thought, so rough it seemed to scratch my skin. The hand of a lobsterman. I looked away, because I didn’t know what was happening, because I’d never held a boy’s hand before, certainly not a tough hand like that. The sea slapped against the rocks, the lighthouse beam swept above our heads. A fierce voice called out.
“Joseph! What’s going on out there?”
Joseph turned toward the sound, but he didn’t drop my hand. Instead his grip tightened, not uncomfortable, just snug. I looked, too, and saw a dark silhouette in the middle of a glowing rectangle, painted on the side of a squat, square building attached to the lighthouse.
Joseph called back to this apparition. “Nothing much, Mama. Izzy rowed over with a friend.”
She said something back, something I couldn’t understand, and Joseph replied in the same language, which I figured was Portuguese. Sounded a little like Spanish, but it went by too fast for me to pick out any words. The exchange ended with a noise of exasperation from the other side, the maternal kind of noise that means the same thing in any language, I guess, and the silhouette stepped forward from the doorway and became a woman, monochrome in the moonlight. She was small and sharp and graceful, and her dark hair was gathered in an old-fashioned bun at the nape of her neck. She made me think of a ballerina, only shorter. She was examining me, I knew. I felt the impact of her dislike like a blow. I shifted my feet and straightened my back, and when I realized Joseph still held my hand, I pulled it free and tucked my fingers deep into the folds of tulle that hung around my legs.
She turned her head to Joseph and said something in Portuguese.
He answered in English. “Don’t worry. I’ll row them back myself.”
“You don’t need to do that,” I said. “I can row.”
“Not on your life. That current’s a killer when the tide’s going out, and you’ll be rowing against it.” He bent over Isobel and shook her shoulder. “Izzy! Izzy, wake up!”
She moved her head, groaned, and went still.
“She’s drunk,” said Mrs. Vargas.
Joseph didn’t reply to that. He didn’t even sigh, as he might have done, annoyed as he must have been. Just lifted Isobel in his arms and said to me, “Can you make it across the rocks all right?”
“Sure I can.”
He went ahead of me, carrying Isobel, and I followed his white T-shirt, phosphorescent as the ocean in the moonlight. My feet were steadier now. I wrapped my toes around the sharp, wet edges of the rocks and didn’t slip once. When we reached the dock, I held the boat steady while Joseph bore Isobel aboard. “You better hold her while I row,” he said, so I stepped inside and made my way to the bow seat and took Isobel’s slack body against mine.
I don’t think we said a word, the two of us, the entire distance from Flood Rock to the Fisher dock. I sat on the bench and held Isobel between my legs while she slumped against my left side. Joseph just rowed, steady and efficient, like a fellow who’d been rowing boats since he could walk, which was probably the case. He wasn’t lying about the current. I watched as he fought the strength of the outgoing tide, hurtling through the narrow channel and out into the broad Atlantic; I watched the strain of his muscles, the movement of his shoulders, the pop of his biceps, and my bones filled with terror as I realized I couldn’t have done this by myself, Isobel unconscious at my feet, however hard I pulled. The boat would have borne out past the Island to the open sea.
At one point, near the dock and the shelter of the small Fisher cove, our eyes met. I’d been looking over his shoulder and so had he, judging the distance to shore, and when he turned back his gaze made right for my face and stayed there, so that I couldn’t help but succumb to its human gravitation. Instead of looking away, he smiled, as if we’d just shared a secret, the nature of which I couldn’t have guessed, so young as I was in the early days of that summer. I only thought that he had a warm, beautiful smile, the most beautiful smile I’d ever seen, and in the instant before I ducked my head, I knew I was in love with him. Just imagine. As innocent, as uncomplicated as that. I still remember that moment, that sweet, shy revelation, remember it fondly, because it only comes once in your life, and then it’s gone. You can’t have it back. And it’s only a second! Isn’t that capricious? One measly instant of clarity, tucked inside the reach of your livelong days. And then the boat touches the shore, and the moment flies, and your life—your real, murky, messy, incalculable life—your life resumes.
10.
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK the next morning, the morning after our parents’ wedding, Isobel came into my room, dressed and fragrant, and told me we were going to church.
I hadn’t exactly expected her, as you might imagine. I lay curled on the armchair in my dressing gown, comfortable as could be, staring through the window at the young, watery sunshine that drenched the Flood Rock lighthouse. A book spread open in my lap, unread. Last night, I’d fallen into bed, slept a sound, soundless six hours, and woken more refreshed than I ought, filled with an anticipation I couldn’t yet name, and unable to concentrate on any words written on any page. I blinked at the shadows under Isobel’s eyes and said, “Church?”
“Darling, it’s Sunday,” she said, as if the two ideas couldn’t possibly exist without each other.
My father came from an old, intellectual family, and Mama from a young bohemian one. Neither viewed organized religion with uncritical awe; it was one of the few common territories between them. After my birth, nobody thought of baptizing me. When I asked about God—aged eight, mind you—Daddy told me solemnly that I should believe whatever my conscience held to be true. I asked him, what was a conscience? He said it was my inner voice that told me right from wrong, and from then on, when I thought of