The House on Fripp Island Read online

  Kimmy danced and spun in circles and slapped at the water’s surface. John was floating on his back, only his face and belly visible except when a swell rose beneath him and he paddled mildly with windmill strokes to ride it. Alex was at his side, dog-paddling haplessly. It occurred to Poppy that they should probably put Alex in swimming lessons. They rarely vacationed at the beach; too far away, too expensive, but it would be good if she at least knew some basics.

  Lisa said, “I think I’ll get into the water for a bit.”

  “Good,” Rae scoffed. “You could definitely stand to cool off.”

  Poppy said, “Let’s all go in the water. It’s sweltering out here.” She realized she hadn’t yet seen Rae swim at all.

  Rae said, “I don’t want to get my hair wet.”

  Poppy groaned and made a playful move like she was going to splash a bunch of water on Rae’s head. “We’ll just wade, then,” she said to Rae. “Come on, skinny-mini.”

  Lisa removed her cover-up and draped it over Rae’s beach chair, then entered the water.

  Behind her, Poppy and Rae slowly walked into the water side by side, Rae wincing dramatically at every small wave that reached new heights on her goose-bumped body.

  Poppy said, “It’s not that cold, you weenie.”

  Rae laughed.

  Poppy said, “Have you and Kimmy had swimming lessons?”

  Rae nodded. “But only for a short time and when I was really little, like four or five years old. I don’t remember anything I learned.”

  “Kimmy looks pretty comfortable out there.”

  “She’s not,” Rae said. “Well,” she amended, “she may be comfortable, but she’s not a good swimmer.”

  “No?”

  Rae shook her head. “She practically drowned last summer when we were in Florida. All of a sudden she got super-scared and frantic. The water wasn’t that deep and the waves weren’t that big, she just panicked.”

  “Goodness,” Poppy said.

  “Did Alex and Ryan have swimming lessons when they were little?” Rae asked.

  Poppy shook her head. “I was just feeling bad for never putting them in lessons, but it sounds like maybe lessons don’t do a whole lot of good anyway.”

  Rae watched her mother dip herself up to her neck in the water, then she said, “What’s going on with my mom?” It seemed her irritation with her mother was finally giving way to concern.

  Poppy said, “She’s got a lot on her mind.”

  “Like what?” Rae adjusted the clasp on one of her hoop earrings.

  “Well . . . She just wants this to be the perfect vacation for everyone.”

  “It probably would be if she wasn’t so stressed.”

  Poppy said, “Well.”

  Shivering, Rae turned back to face the beach, the water now at her waist. She saw Ryan, who was returning from the house with a bag of chips and a Gatorade. Rae’s eyes narrowed to focus on him intently for a few seconds with a severe sort of expression on her face. Ohhhh, Poppy thought, turning away to conceal her own grin. This was a new thing, but it made perfect sense. A crush on Ryan would explain why Rae was wearing this ridiculous bikini and hoop earrings, why she didn’t want to mess up her hair, associate with the “little” girls, or engage in their play. Poor thing, Poppy thought. Ryan was far more interested in a dead crab in a glass than in some fawning fourteen-year-old.

  Poppy recalled asking Lisa yesterday if Rae was into boys yet, and Lisa’s confident, dismissive “Nah.” Sheezus, Poppy thought. How out of touch must Lisa be? Her poor daughter was practically foaming at the mouth.

  Rae interrupted Poppy’s thoughts. “It’s too cold,” she said. “I’m not going in any further.” Eyes still on Ryan, Rae struck a runway-model pose, arms behind her head, arched back. It looked like she aimed to keep it up for a while.

  “Suit yourself,” Poppy said, diving in to dunk her head, then paddling out to the sandbar.

  Lisa made her way over to Poppy. “Thanks for stepping in, with Rae. Sorry. I really just lost it for a minute—”

  Poppy waved a hand in the air to end the apology. “It’s nothing.”

  Lisa was still wearing her hat, but she removed it now, handing it to Poppy to hold while she dunked. Her long hair stretched and corrugated like seaweed in the current. She emerged from the water like a goddess, face soft and mild, red hair sleek, neck long and graceful, breasts full and textured with goosebumps. She looped her hair into a rope and squeezed water from it.

  Poppy handed back her hat.

  Lisa was quiet for a bit, then said, “You still don’t think we should tell anyone? About Keats?”

  “You think we should? You don’t think chasing him and his dog off the beach will keep him away for the next few days?”

  Lisa squeaked air in through one corner of her mouth. “I guess you’re right. When he looked at me there,” she said, “he definitely recognized me from yesterday at the house.”

  “So then he knows that you know about the registry,” Poppy said. “At least I’d think that’s what he would assume every time a person gives him looks or, you know, chases him down the beach.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Lisa. “That should be enough to keep him away.”

  Poppy thought for a moment, then said, “And anyway, the way Rae told it, she whistled the dog over. It sounds like she approached him rather than the other way around.”

  Lisa scooped water in her palms, a faraway look in her eyes.

  Poppy said, “Lisa . . . Lisa?” She felt like she was calling to her friend through a tunnel. “Are you gonna make it?”

  Lisa turned to her and said coolly, “I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

  10

  POPPY HAD THE IDEA to make sandwiches for everyone and bring them down to the beach around one o’clock that afternoon, along with chips and beers and cookies and Capri Suns, sunscreen, ChapStick, magazines, Frisbees, dry towels . . . Everything imaginable, thereby eliminating the need for anyone else to go in the kitchen, so that Scott and Lisa would have privacy to hash things out when he returned. Lisa helped Poppy make the sandwiches and fill a cooler and a basket with all of these supplies, then Poppy returned to the beach and Lisa stayed in the house to await Scott’s return.

  An hour passed with no sign of Scott. Restless, Lisa retrieved a cluster of green grapes from the refrigerator, ate a few, then picked up the phone and dialed her mother’s number. Might as well get this out of the way before she had to deal with Scott. As the phone rang, she danced her toe across the hardwood floor and picked at a shred of grape flesh stuck between her teeth, fighting the onset of nerves that always accompanied these calls.

  Lisa loved the feeling of after a phone call with her mother—of being done. Having it accomplished. The before made her skittery with dread. It was worse now that Carol was sick, because there was the added fear of bad news from the doctor, but Lisa had felt this way about calling her mother ever since leaving home over twenty years ago. Every time she dialed that same home number, unchanged since before she was born, Lisa felt she was on the edge of something bad, something that would hurt. Carol had never once spoken words of judgment against Lisa for her life choices, but some dark and cold space persisted between them and they couldn’t quite seem to bridge it, no matter the frequency of their phone calls nor the warmth of the sentiments expressed.

  Lisa was petrified that her mother would someday say a thing that would gut her, like, “Do you miss me?” But she knew her mother would never say this.

  Carol sounded winded when she answered. She’d had to move too far and too fast to get to the phone.

  Lisa said, “Hi, Mom.”

  Carol heaved, a small grunt. “Let me just . . .”

  Lisa pictured her mother easing herself back into the blue recliner where she spent her days, gingerly accommodating all the aches as she sank into the chair.

  “Take your time,” Lisa said. “You should really keep the phone next to your chair.”

&n
bsp; “I do.” Carol sighed. “But I forget. How’s the beach?”

  “It’s nice,” Lisa said. “Sunny. The house is great. The girls are loving it.”

  “And how’s Poppy?” Carol asked this with such fondness and familiarity that Lisa felt a jolt of painful longing. Her mother always spoke of Poppy with affection and gratitude when describing the appointment Poppy had taken her to or the meal Poppy had delivered, and this had never bothered Lisa. But somehow it felt different today, since she and Poppy were here vacationing together; they were on equal ground. It seemed unfair that Carol should ask about Poppy this way, with this lift to her voice, like thoughts of Poppy were a greater pleasure than a phone call from her own daughter.

  “We’re having a ball,” Lisa said. “How are you feeling?”

  “I wish they’d fix my TV. They keep saying they’ll send a guy.”

  “Are you sleeping alright?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Taking your pills?”

  “Sure.”

  Lisa was out of questions. She wanted to ask her mother, Do you miss me? and Where did we go off track? and Will we be able to fix this before you’re gone? But all of these questions died long before they reached her throat; they were knotted somewhere low inside her. She wanted to ask, Do you wish I was a different person? Instead, she said, “OK, then, I guess. Love you.”

  Carol said, “Love you.”

  Lisa hung up the phone and ate another grape. She gazed out the window and down to the beach, where everyone was in the water except for Rae, who was lying in the shade of an umbrella, small and curled like a snake. Lisa thought of herself at age fourteen and the little life she had shared with her mother. The wallpaper in the kitchen featuring rows of cherries that had faded to pink. Carol bent over the bathtub doing laundry by hand after the machine broke and they didn’t have the money to replace it. The smell of Wonder Bread toasted for ten seconds too long. Tears warmed Lisa’s eyes and the world became bright and blurred. Nostalgia, she’d once been told, was one of the most powerful and least useful sensations. God, did it hurt.

  She winced as she recalled how stubborn and cold and cruel she had been to her mother when she was Rae’s age. Nothing was right, nothing was enough, and she was so consumed by the injustice of this that she was brimming with spite and disgust. Lisa tried to remember if Poppy had been this way as a teenager, and thought not. Poppy had always been ferocious yet sure-footed. Lisa wondered what a mother can do to give her daughter a sure footing when the daughter is so convinced that the world, the very ground she walks on, is ill suited to her existence and conspiring against her every step.

  Down at the beach, Ryan had decided to go for a walk after overhearing several other beachgoers who were seated nearby discussing a swarm of jellyfish that had washed up on the shore the night before. The sand, they said, was littered with the small, transparent, circular bodies. Ryan approached the group and asked how far away the jellyfish were.

  A man in a wetsuit said, “About fifteen minutes thataway,” thumbing north. “Whole beach covered with ’em. Happens every July.” He held up a fist to indicate the size. “Moon jellies. Ten thousand of ’em.”

  The woman next to him sported two brick-red French braids that reached all the way to her hips, and she was so thickly freckled that her skin had an odd grayish hue. She said, “They’re worth seeing, if you’ve never seen ’em.”

  Ryan announced to the others in his group that he was going to check out the jellyfish. John and Alex both appeared to be sleeping, with shirts over their heads.

  Kimmy leapt to her feet. “That sounds cool. I’ll come with you.”

  Rae, who was fanning her face with her book, was horrified by her sister’s audacity—Kimmy’s unbridled enthusiasm at the opportunity to spend one-on-one time with Ryan was downright mortifying.

  Rae set her book at her side and removed her sunglasses to glare harshly at Kimmy. She hissed, “You can’t just invite yourself along on his walk, you nitwit. Obviously he wants to go by himself.”

  Rae’s eyes darted toward Ryan, expecting a private look of appreciation. To Rae’s dismay, Ryan didn’t even glance in her direction. His eyes were on Kimmy, who had visibly shrunk at her sister’s reprimand. Kimmy twisted her arms uncomfortably around each other. She said, “I guess that’s true,” and made a move to sit back down on her towel.

  Instead, Ryan said, “It’s fine, I don’t mind the company.”

  Kimmy looked to Rae for approval, or permission, or maybe to punctuate this small victory.

  Rae said softly, “I just thought . . .” Then she shoved her sunglasses back onto her face and stared hard at the water. She felt like a balloon that had just been popped, wormy and shapeless now, trash.

  Ryan said, “You should come too, Rae, I think it’s gonna be cool.” He cracked his knuckles and the muscles of his brown forearms shifted and bulged.

  Instantly, Rae was full and soaring. Of course! Now she understood—this was what Ryan wanted all along; he was just too shy to ask Rae, and only Rae, to accompany him.

  She feigned a few seconds of indecision before agreeing, then she stood and brushed sand from her elbows. Her binoculars were strung over the back of her chair, and she picked them up and put them around her neck. She was hopeful that Ryan might ask to borrow the binoculars when they got close to their destination, that he would lift them to his face and his warm, tanned eye sockets would press against the black eyepieces. It would be something she could offer him, something they could share.

  “Let’s go,” Ryan said.

  “Which way?” Kimmy asked, and once Ryan had pointed, she darted down the beach to pop into the water for a cool-down before the walk.

  This left Ryan and Rae to walk side by side at a leisurely pace. Their hands were so close that with the slightest extension of the fingertips or shift of a wrist, they could have been touching. Watching Kimmy peripherally and smiling knowingly to each other, they seemed like a couple and Kimmy a sidekick, the third wheel, their annoying but necessary companion.

  Rae’s heart belted out a symphony as they walked together this way, dizzy with lust and possibility. A little engine of desire inside her revved and screamed, Yes! She imagined that a little engine inside of Ryan was feeling and screaming the same thing.

  Kimmy was the first to spot the glut of beached moon jellyfish, since she was in front of Ryan and Rae.

  She waved her hands over her head and called, “They’re like see-through donuts! Can I touch them?”

  Ryan did not ask to borrow the binoculars, but broke pace with Rae to jog out ahead and reach the enormous expanse of jellyfish, which were suddenly everywhere, such thick coverage in places that they overlapped one another. The sight was impressive and also mildly unsettling—a reminder that the world was actually quite strange if you bothered to notice, like glancing up to see a full moon in broad daylight.

  “Yeah, you can touch them,” Ryan called to Kimmy. “These ones don’t sting.”

  Rae jogged the short distance to catch up to Ryan and Kimmy, though she was disgusted by the sudden carpet of jellyfish at her feet, a massive, squishy slew of them.

  Kimmy held a jellyfish near her face, sniffing it.

  Ryan observed that a couple dozen yards up the beach, the abundance of jellyfish ended as abruptly as it had appeared. Must have been a huge bloom of them traveling together, he thought.

  Rae poked at one with a toe, hoping she did not appear uninterested in Ryan’s great passion. She could learn to tolerate this stuff, she supposed.

  Ryan said, “There are thirteen different species of moon jellies. Some scientists say they’re the oldest multiorgan species on the entire earth. Meaning, like, seven hundred million years.”

  Rae was so fixated on Ryan as he spoke—not the information he was spouting off but the shape of his lips around each word, the glistening of sweat on his brow, and the brilliance of his black curls under the sun—that she wasn’t watching Kimmy, even from the corner of an
eye. So Rae was horrified when she finally looked Kimmy’s way after Ryan had finished his spiel, and discovered that Kimmy was stuffing two jellyfish down the front of her swimsuit, placing them right over her nonexistent breasts.

  Kimmy massaged them theatrically through her swimsuit and did a little dance.

  “They’re like those things you put on in front of the mirror the other day,” Kimmy gleefully pointed out to Rae.

  Rae was stunned into silence.

  Kimmy continued, “You know, those chicken cutlet things Mom keeps in her underwear drawer. You put them in your bra the other day. I saw you.”

  Kimmy was clearly so delighted at having made the association between the size and shape of the jellyfish and that of Lisa’s silicone bra inserts that she was completely oblivious to Rae’s reaction and to Ryan’s discomfort at bearing witness to this. He was staring intently at the ground before him, shuffling some jellyfish around with his toes. Kimmy wouldn’t stop. She would never stop. Now she struck a pop-star pose: chest out, booty out, lips out, and she said to Rae through her shoved-out lips, “I saw you put those things in your trainer bra and you stood like this in front of the mirror.”

  Kimmy exaggerated the pose even further and then broke it, collapsing into giggles.

  Rae’s face was so full of angry blood she thought her whole brain might shoot out through her nostrils.

  It was true, of course.

  The girls had first discovered the cutlets years ago while putting away folded laundry, and Kimmy had carried one down to the kitchen, where Lisa stood over a steaming pot. Kimmy held the cutlet up like a dirty Kleenex and demanded, “What the heck is this? It was in your drawer with your undies.”

  Rae had followed closely behind her sister, sharing Kimmy’s curiosity about the cool, fleshy blob, but, as usual, lacking Kimmy’s will for confrontation.

  Lisa was stirring something in the pot with a wooden spoon. She looked over her shoulder and laughed when she saw what Kimmy was holding. She balanced the spoon across the top of the pot so she could face her daughters while she explained. “Sometimes ladies buy dresses or shirts that don’t fit right around the chest. Around their breasts,” she clarified. “So then sometimes ladies use these things to make a garment lay better over their breasts.”