8
Now
“Do you think there’s any chance your parents have wine in their fridge?” I call to Bridget as she heads upstairs. She always showers after our inaugural walk. She’s the most laidback, chill-mongering version of herself on the island, but her loafing still follows a schedule.
“Not at all,” she says. Ken drinks beer or whiskey, and Christine mostly
abstains.
“Rye and peanuts, then?”
She nods. “Rye and peanuts.”
I know when she’s washing her hair, because I can hear her rendition of “Un-Break My Heart” from the kitchen. I’d like to read into the song choice, but it’s one of her lather-rinse-repeat standards.
I should probably make us something resembling a meal. While my greatest culinary achievement is predicting the winners of The Great British Baking Show, Bridget hates cooking. Miles is the chef in their relationship, a very good one. It’s how he won me over—I’m a sucker for a homecooked meal. I survey the meager contents of the Clarks’ fridge. We’ll have to go grocery shopping tomorrow. I hunt out the rye and a bag of peanuts in the shell—two things you can always count on Ken having in stock—and pour myself a finger of whiskey.
I rarely drink brown liquor back home, but I could use the fortification.
My mind has been stretching, bending, performing acrobatic feats on a balance beam, twisting to process Felix’s evident discomfort with me and
Bridget’s runaway bride act. I take a sip, and the caramel burn in my throat grounds me. I’m on the island. Back at Summer Wind. And something weird is happening with my best friend. I’ve never seen her crumble like she did at the beach.
I find bread in the freezer and Cheez Whiz in the back of the Clarks’ fancy new refrigerator. I’ve just settled the grilled cheese sandwiches into the pan when I notice photos tacked to the side of the fridge. That’s new. I checked for family pictures that first summer. I wanted to see just how oblivious I’d been to who Felix really was, but there were none. At the very least, I wasn’t that clueless.
The only photo of the Clarks that Bridget had on display when we lived together was a framed picture on her dresser, taken when she and Felix were children. But during that earliest visit, I forced her to give me a guided tour through the family albums Christine keeps in the TV room, so I’ve seen some of the ones on the fridge before. Class pictures and snapshots of family reunions and sandcastle competition winners. The Clark siblings at various ages. Bridget has looked like Bridget since she was a newborn, but Felix grew into himself. He was a wrinkly red baby with a thatch of dark hair. I know he cried nonstop—that’s how he got his nickname. The howling wolf.
He was a bright-eyed boy, a bit on the small side, and a cocksure teen, one of those guys who skipped the awkward phase and went straight to heartthrob.
There’s one of him and Bridget in their bathing suits, arms around each other.
It’s not from that long ago—Felix has a beard.
You need to study Felix and Bridget closely to see the resemblance—the neatly sloped nose they got from their mom, the square jaw from their dad— but it’s there. They share more than excellent faces with their parents, though.
The Clarks feel like they belong to each other in a way that I admire and envy. Each is unique. Christine is the bluntest. Bridget, the most orderly. Ken is the peacemaker. Felix the rock. But they’re all very Clark-like. Self- actualized. Resilient. Physically affectionate. Steadfast.
It’s a different family from the one I grew up in. My mom, the dentist— precise, skeptical. My dad, the mortgage broker—practical, stern. They have none of the Clarks’ sense of fun. Our life was routine. Cereal for breakfast,
chicken for dinner. Evening news and prime-time sitcoms. Shuffling to and from arenas for my brother’s hockey games. Lyle is six years older than me, and while my brother and I look alike—deep blue eyes, straight noses, thick heads of reddish-brown hair, good cheekbones—we had nothing in common as kids. A whole evening could pass with hearing my dad say little more than a few sentences. It wasn’t a terrible childhood, but it was quiet, and I was often lonely.
Aunt Stacy felt like family, like pieces of me came from her. She was the antithesis of my mother—exuberant and fashionable and full of stories from her acting days. She was steadfastly single, but her heart was open. Bridget was a homesick twenty-two-year-old when I introduced her to Stacy, and my aunt scooped her up, fed her take-out Italian, and turned our duo into a trio.
I flip the sandwiches, and then go back to the photos, gawking at Felix’s bare chest. Maybe that’s why it takes me another minute to see that I’m on the fridge, too. I haven’t seen this one before. Bridget and I are in the living room, and the Trivial Pursuit board is on the coffee table. We’re on the couch laughing, both of us in sweaters. It was taken the year I came for Thanksgiving. Felix is in the photo, sitting in the armchair, his eyes clamped on me. My legs bristle with goose bumps, and then I hear the floorboards
shift.
“What’s that smell?” Bridget says.
I sniff.
That smell is burnt cheese.
• • •
AFTER OUR SIX O’CLOCK DINNER OF BLACKENED GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICHES AND gherkins, Bridget and I sit on the deck, watching the birds flit through the trees. Bridget is wearing her dad’s HISTORY IS NOT BORING T-shirt and a pair of leggings she describes as lovingly worn but are actually more hole than pant.
She has no time for fashion, and her design sense is atrocious. She once tried her hand at flower arranging, and when I asked whether she was color blind,
she thought I was joking. Every so often, she sends me photos of bouquets she thinks I’ll like. They’re terrible, and I love them.
Wind tinkles through the chimes. I don’t know when they arrived, but they bother me. All I want to hear when I’m at Summer Wind are the breeze and the birds.
A strong gust sends the chimes into a tinny tizzy, and Bridget jumps up to
remove them from the hook.
“I hate these things,” she says.
“The worst.”
“I’ll be back in a sec,” Bridget says, stepping inside.
The ceramic toad watches me with bulging eyes while I wait. “Don’t look at me like that,” I grumble.
My mind, the wretch, sneaks upstairs to Felix’s bedroom and back to our first night together. It feels like a lifetime ago, as if we were two other people.
Sometimes I wonder if I was willfully ignorant. I didn’t see the toad, but there were other clues. The fact that his parents were out of town. The impeccable flower beds—I knew Christine was an avid gardener. The piano that featured heavily in Bridget’s family legends. There was a bottle of my favorite vinho verde lying on the bottom shelf of the fridge that her parents had bought for us, but I didn’t spot it. Maybe if I had, I would have clued in.
Or maybe not.
It’s cooling off quickly, and Bridget returns with a blanket from the steamer trunk, the bag of peanuts, and the bottle of rye, which she sets on the coffee table between flickering citronella candles after pouring us each a glass. Bridget’s alcohol tolerance is almost zero, and I doubt she slept better than I did last night. She’ll put herself to bed before the sun sets.
“What’s with the photos on the fridge?” I ask as she takes a seat at the other end of the sofa.
Christine had a thing against hanging family pictures. “I know how beautiful my children are. I don’t need to announce it to the world,” she told me the first summer I stayed here.
Bridget shrugs a shoulder. “My mom’s gone soft in her retirement. I used to think she loved horses more than people. But she really misses us, even
though Wolf visits all the time.” She observes me over her glass. “Did you see the photo of you and me?”
“I did.” I take a sip. “I can’t believe that was only two years ago. We look so much younger.”
She hums. “Did you notice Wolf ogling you?”
“What? No,” I say too quickly.
“What’s up with you two?” She’s yawning when she asks, so it sounds casual, but every inch of me stiffens.
“What do you mean?” I’ve come close to telling Bridget a sanitized version of my history with Felix more than once. A few years ago, I’d resolved to come clean immediately after a visit to the island, but then a week passed, and another, and it didn’t seem urgent to tell her. The excuses for keeping my hookups with Felix a secret stacked up. But when I got back from PEI last summer, I was determined to do it once and for all. I made a dinner reservation at a nice restaurant so she wouldn’t lose it in public. I drank several glasses of wine, but by the time the bill came, I still hadn’t mustered the courage. This won’t be the first time I’ve chickened out.
“I can tell something’s going on,” Bridget says. “He barely looked at you today and—” She waves her arm around the deck.
“And what?”
“He’s not here. He’s usually within five feet when you’re around.”
“He’s busy at the cottages.”
In my weakest moments, I read the online reviews, scanning for mentions of Felix. There’s one, written by a woman named Nova Scarlet from last fall, saying the “hot caretaker and his tight white tees” were the highlight of her trip. She put a winky face emoji at the end of the sentence. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what it implied.
Bridget gives me a dubious look, then throws back the rest of her whiskey, coughs, and refills her glass. For her, this is excessive.
“So I have an idea,” she says.
“Uh-oh.”
“A fucking brilliant idea,” she clarifies.
“I’m terrified and intrigued. Continue.”
“I think we should go full PEI.”
“And what does that involve? Fiddle lessons from your granddad?
Jumping off Covehead Bridge? Eating all the seafood?”
“Definitely. That’s always been rule number one.”
“Eat our weight in oysters is rule number one.”
“Oh, we’ll be doing that. Wolf’s shucking in Tyne Valley in two days.
We’re going, and you’ll love it.”
Felix competes at the national oyster-shucking championship every year.
I’ve never been here to witness it, but I know he’s good. He came first place in the junior division when he was seventeen. It’s not hard to believe. I know what he can do with his hands.
“And if I can’t pressure Wolf into staying here, he’ll spend the night Sunday,” Bridget goes on. “It’s too far to drive back to his place after the contest.”
My brain goes straight to Felix first thing in the morning. Sleepy eyelids.
Pillow creases. Pajama pants. Honey in his tea and on his lips.
“Wait,” I say, batting the images away. “Did you just say Sunday? I was thinking we’d fly back Sunday night.”
“Wolf will be offended if you don’t go.”
I doubt that.
“I’ll be offended, too,” Bridget adds.
I sigh. If I get back first thing Monday, it’ll be fine. I’ll be harried, but I’m used to harried.
“Okay,” I say. “You win. We’ll go to the shucking thing, which means we’ve got oysters covered.”
“Then there’s rule two, obviously,” Bridget says. “We leave the city behind. For the rest of the week, we do all the greatest hits. Sandcastles.
Seafood. Lighthouses. Coastal drives. No wedding talk. No work talk. We pretend like we’re twenty-four again.”
On that first trip, Bridget and I bopped around Prince Edward Island in a rental sedan, singing at the top of our lungs. It was our first time driving together—neither of us had a car in the city—and she took me to all the big tourist spots. Green Gables, the black-and-white-striped West Point
Lighthouse, a hike in PEI National Park, a feast at New Glasgow Lobster Suppers. I kept a strict seafood-only diet when we dined out, gorging myself on lobster rolls, oysters, mussels, chowder, and fish and chips. I tried (and failed) to find a piece of sea glass by the shore.
It’s not like Bridget to be so nostalgic, and the no wedding talk provision doesn’t escape me, but she hates feeling backed into a corner, so for now, I let it slide. I should be able to figure out how to crack her in the next forty- eight hours.
“We’ve never really committed to the full Lucy Maud Montgomery experience,” I say. “Maybe we should get Anne and Diana wigs. Straw hats.
Raspberry cordial. Take a carriage ride in pinafores.”
“No fucking way. But I’ll allow a trip to Green Gables.”
“Really?” We went there during my first visit, but I would have gone back multiple times if Bridget hadn’t vetoed me. I keep my map of PEI in a glass-sided box on my desk at home. I’ve circled the places Bridget and I visited, keeping track of what I wanted to see next time. Anticipating the island was almost as sweet as being here.
Sometimes I unfold the map and run my finger along the eastern edge of the island, over the shore where Salt Cottages stand, over the area slightly inland where Felix lives. A cabin nestled among pines and apple trees, a pond under their branches.
“Really.” She unfolds the wool blanket so it covers both our laps. The Clarks have the best blankets. “One last girls’ trip. We’ll make it count.”
I huff out a laugh. “You’re getting married, not dying. We have our whole lives for girls’ trips.”
Her smile falters, and my stomach drops.
“Bridget. You’re not sick, are you?” It happened so fast with my aunt.
One day, she and I were having brunch in her garden. The following Tuesday, she was in the hospital. Four weeks after that, she died.
“No.” Her hair is piled in a messy bun, and it wobbles when she shakes her head. “Of course not.” She scootches across the couch and wraps an arm around me, leaning her head on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Bee,” she says, knowing where my fear comes from.
After the funeral last summer, Bridget put me on a plane to PEI. I blame what happened—the way my feelings for Felix seemed to explode out of nowhere—on my emotional state. Grief-stricken. Recently dumped. I’d been so tender.
But I don’t need to worry about Bridget’s health. She’s not sick. Her family is well. I know she loves her job, and her coworkers love her back.
The bridal shower her boss held was outrageously elaborate. That leaves only one explanation.
“Things with you and Miles: You’re sure everything’s okay there?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Hmm.” It’s not exactly convincing.
“I just missed my parents and the island,” she says. “And I’ve been stressed about the wedding. I need a break. Some fun.”
Interviewing wedding vendors, collecting RSVPs, preparing a run-of- show for the day itself—that is Bridget’s idea of fun. And I know, because her nuptials have monopolized most of our conversations since Miles proposed ten months ago.
She came to the store after closing to show me the ring. Miles works in real estate development, and he picked a diamond that proved it. I oohed and aahed, because that rock is stunning, and then dug out the emergency bottle of vinho verde I keep in the flower cooler.
“It’s not a lot of time to plan,” Bridget had said, grinning broadly. “I can’t fucking wait.”
No one shivers with pleasure at the words tight work-back schedule the way Bridget does. So I don’t buy for a second that she’s stressed, or that she needs “some fun.” It’s like we’ve been cast in a play, where Bridget and I have been made to switch roles. She’s supposed to be the adult in our relationship. I’m the one who runs away from my problems. I can’t decide whether to be concerned about her or annoyed. Scratch that, I can be both.
“You know I rescheduled a really important meeting to be here,” I say.
“I’m pretty sure my contact at Cena knows she’s handing me a golden egg and thinks I’m flighty for rescheduling. Not to mention I’m doing the flowers for your wedding in eight days.”
“I’m sorry to inconvenience you,” she says, suddenly snippy.
I hate fighting with Bridget. I’m not good at it, and she’s exceptional. My thoughts turn mushy, and I end up forgetting why we’re arguing in the first place. So even though this trip is a major inconvenience, I back down.
Bridget needs me, even if I don’t know why. And she’d be there for me.
Without question.
“You’re not,” I say. “I love you more than anyone. You know that. I just
have a lot going on.”
“I know you do.”
We’re quiet for a full minute before she says, “We can’t forget about the
third rule.”
“I would never.”
“I might have been a little oversensitive when I came up with that one,”
Bridget says with a dry laugh.
What an understatement.
“Nevertheless,” I say. “I think it’s best if we keep that one in place.”
Rule number three: Don’t fall in love with her brother.
