did hear the last part, which was, He’ll be fine.
The Bad part of the day came at the end while his
mom was outside barbecuing Sword steaks and he was sitting on the deck with Grandma Sylvie who liked to
watch the paddlers on the pond. At first it was very quiet.
Then a loud buzzing started. He thought it was a bug.
Then Grandma Sylvie started looking in her bag—the one
where she kept the round wooden frame with a cloth on
it and words in script that he couldn’t read. She carried
the bag everywhere but so far she hadn’t taken anything
out of it. Now, she took out a phone. At first he didn’t
know it was a phone because it was the flippy-up kind.
The phone was buzzing.
After Grandma Sylvie pushed a button and said,
“What?” her mouth turned into the straightest line Henry
ever saw. Henry heard a voice coming through the phone
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and recognized it. Aunt Shelley. He watched Grandma
Sylvie’s face go from Worried to Mad. She said, Tell him I said he’s being ridiculous. And, If you have to come you have to come. And, No. I do not want to see him. And, No, I’m not telling her. You tell her. And, Oh well. She pressed the Off button and snapped the phone shut and put it in her bag and looked at Henry and said, “Of course they want
me to break the news.”
She didn’t say what the news was but he figured it
out. Aunt Shelley and Grandpa Marshall were coming.
He didn’t know what day they were coming, but he knew
that was going to be a Bad Day for sure.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Routines. To Sylvie, they were like a religion. When Lane
and Shelley were young, their mother made sure each of
them stuck to one extracurricular routine, one activity
they could do no matter where they moved. For Shelley,
it was theater. In every town they lived, their mother
found first a children’s theater group, later one for teens.
Her sister didn’t especially enjoy performing in front of
an audience, but she loved the rest of it. Being part of a troupe, after-rehearsal hangouts, postplay celebrations.
For Lane, it was swimming. In every town they lived in,
their mother would find a pool and sign her up, first for
lessons, later on a team. Lane never liked being on a team, but she loved the feel of being in the water. Submerged,
she felt free.
As for her own routines, Sylvie had a few, but the
main one was walking. Unlike Lane’s relationship with
swimming, though—the main goal of which was to lose
herself—Sylvie always walked as if she were on a mission,
her face set not in dreamy reflection, but in a hard and
focused stare.
But so far, on the island, Sylvie hadn’t walked any-
where. She seemed reluctant to leave the house at all. To
Lane it seemed as if her mother was acting like a person in recovery. As to what she was recovering from, she didn’t
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yet have enough information to speculate. All she could
do was observe her mother sinking, every day, further
into herself.
On their very first day, Nathan had asked Lane to join
him on a walk around the pond and after Lane agreed,
she invited her mother and Henry to join them. They
both declined. When Lane she got back, she excitedly
reported what she’d seen: frogs croaking on lily pads in
the pond, dive-bombing hummingbirds. “You’ll love
walking here,” she told her mother. “The air smells like
pine. So many birds trilling in so many trees.”
Her mother was unmoved, so Lane began to take a daily
walk herself. In part this was to get some exercise; ever since their arrival, Spectacle Pond had been closed to swimming
because of high levels of bacteria. Not uncommon, Nathan
told her, after a rainy spell. This was why they always had a pond volunteer checking on water quality and why the
results of those tests were posted on the whiteboard outside the entrance to the Rec. The sign, which also included
announcements of camper birthdays, holiday greetings
and the day’s weather, listed the swimming conditions as
either, hooray, we can swim with a smiley face, or boo, no swimming today, with a frown. So far, the sign had been,
frowny face, no swimming today, every day.
The other reason Lane walked was the hope that if
she kept doing it, her mother would join her. So far, no
luck. Since their arrival, Lane had walked the pond every
day, alone.
She didn’t mind. The pond was so quiet in the morn-
ing, her only company was hummingbirds and dragonflies.
She used the walk the same way she used her swimming
time, to work through the things that were weighing on
her. There were a lot of candidates.
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Work was one. Summer’s texts, for starters. The last few
had been filled with emojis that Lane didn’t understand.
Each time she got a new one, she googled it to parse out
the meaning. But even googling didn’t help. There was
no unanimity on the internet about the meaning of the
emoji that looked like a whistling face, or was it a face
blowing a kiss? Googling did nothing to explain what the
woman dancing in the red dress had to do with her. So
she texted Summer and asked her to please use words, that
emojis were not effective for communicating. Summer
replied with an upside-down smile.
Sam was another worry. To her surprise and joy, an
email from him had arrived the night before, but the joy
didn’t last. His email said his return was up in the air,
—but hang in there. I still have your back. That was not
at all reassuring. It was also not from his Guild address.
Why, she wondered, had he stopped using Guild email?
She picked up her pace and her thoughts switched
to Shelley, whose phone calls, once again, had stopped
without explanation. They hadn’t spoken since Lane’s
arrival on the island. Their last conversation was the one where Lane mentioned the news that Uncle Albie had
died. Those two facts—her sharing the news about Albie
and Shelley not calling again—were definitely connected.
But how? She had no idea. Now she was engaged in the
useless exercise of calling Shelley every day and leaving
a message, which, no surprise, her sister was ignoring.
Was Shelley— She stopped herself. Dwelling on her sis-
ter’s phone habits was a waste of time. The path looped
to the left and she followed it, the sun tracking her like a spotlight.
The light in her day was Henry. Things were going
well for Henry. He’d even made friends. Camp friends
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who, like him, loved nothing better than drawing.
Amanda, his counselor, had told her this at the end of
the first week when she picked him up. While most of
the campers complained about the pond being closed for
swimming, Henry and his gang sat with smiles on their
faces as they silently sketched their made-up constella-
tions using charco
al or pastels or watercolor. Lane stopped herself and took a moment to revel in what she had just
thought: Henry was part of a gang.
The other bright light in her day was Nathan. He
stopped by the house almost every day, and just as he
had in New Jersey, he frequently came bearing gifts. She
suspected the gifts continued because his guilt continued.
First it was because he’d rented her a falling-apart house in New Jersey. Now it was because the guest cottage had
not turned out to be what he’d promised. Yesterday, her
second Sunday on the island, when he showed up with
arms full of freshly cut true-blue hydrangeas, heavy with
bloom, she told him he didn’t have anything to apologize
for; she’d gotten the good end of the deal. She should be
bringing flowers to him.
There was no one she would admit it to—she could
barely admit it to herself—but it was becoming hard work,
trying to see Nathan as just a friend.
Round and round her thoughts went, from work to
Shelley to Henry to Nathan and—oh!—how the dappled
light danced through the branches of the beetlebung trees.
And—oh!—that brown-and-green leaf opened as if with
wings because—oh!—it wasn’t a leaf; it was a perfectly
camouflaged butterfly. And—oh!—how strange to see a
caterpillar hanging on an invisible silken thread so that it looked as if the tiny thing was actually dancing in the air.
And—oh!—just as strange as the caterpillar dancing was
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Lane noticing that she, who usually rushed through life
as if being chased, was standing still, watching the dance.
“You have to go for a walk,” she told her mother when
she got back to the house that morning. “I saw a dozen
dragonflies and a dancing caterpillar. The wildflowers
are huge. Or maybe they’re weeds. It’s impossible to tell
what’s a weed and what’s a wildflower.”
To her surprise, her mother agreed. Right then, in
that very moment, she stood up, said she would go, and
left the house. Left for her first walk around the pond
from which she did not return. Not after one hour or
two or three.
When her mother didn’t return after three hours, Lane
called the police. The man who answered the phone was
kind. He came by ten minutes later. He carefully wrote
down the description and then asked her mother’s age
before gently raising the question of dementia.
“She’s of sound mind,” Lane said. “More or less.”
He nodded and told her he’d notify the other towns’
police departments and discuss with his supervisor whether or not it was too early to put out a Silver Alert. “It’s a judgment call with our elders,” he explained. “We don’t
like to wait for a situation to become critical. But we
don’t want to embarrass people.”
They were right to wait. Her main thought when Sylvie
was finally home was how lucky they’d been that Henry
had been at camp when it all happened. She wouldn’t
have wanted him to be there when the police came to
take the description, or to watch the spectacle of her an-
noying conversation she had with Shelley, whom she’d
called after the policeman left the house.
Shelley had picked up on the third call and sounded
irritated that, once again, no one had died. “Mom taking
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a long walk is not an emergency,” she said. “What’s wrong
with you people? The two of you. You and Dad both.”
She paused and then added, “I know you don’t mean to,
but the messages you leave are making Dad even more
anxious.”
That was how Lane learned the difficult-to-digest
news that her stay-at-home father had somehow gotten
himself to Shelley’s house in England for a visit.
In the end the resolution was a happy one. Sylvie, it
turned out, had been picked up by mistake by a Memory
Care Center van. It was a social worker from the center—
Connie—who brought her home and explained what
happened.
“She got lost on her walk and we picked her up by
accident. It’s nobody’s fault.”
Lane waited for her mother to comment but she
said nothing. She just sat, cheeks flushed, staring in
her lap while the social worker told the rest of what
happened.
Connie didn’t live on Spectacle Pond but she’d hiked
in to kayak enough times to know the spot that tripped
Sylvie up. “It’s the split where Lower and Upper Spectacle divide. The trees all look same. It’s easy to get lost. Our van driver could tell she was lost. His mistake was thinking she was one of ours.” Connie looked at Sylvie and
beamed. “And now she is.”
“Pardon?” Lane said.
“I convinced your mom to volunteer. We have lots of
volunteers at the center who come in to do crafts or play
guitar or sing. Your mom just sat with our clients. They
love her. She’s a very calming presence.”
It wasn’t how she thought of her mother—calming—
but she had noticed her mother had the same effect on
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Henry. He was very relaxed with her. Maybe there was
more to her mother than the sliver she saw.
After Connie left, Sylvie told her side of what hap-
pened. “When I got to the center they realized I was
picked up by accident and they offered to bring me here.
But I couldn’t tell them where to go. I don’t know the
address here. All I could say was it’s a house on the pond.
this island?”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“I didn’t take my phone. They offered me theirs but
that didn’t help. I didn’t know your number. Normally
I press your name.”
Normally, Lane thought, you don’t call. By this point they were sitting on the couch, her mother tucked into
the opposite corner, close enough for Lane to see her
agitation. “But it all worked out fine, right? Better than fine. Sounds like you’re the star of the memory center.”
Her mother’s hands, she saw, were clasped tight. Her
knuckles were white.
After a long silence her mother spoke. “I never
understood.”
“Understood what?” She watched as her mother strug-
gled. She seemed to be weighing whether or not to say
more. “Understood what?” she asked again.
Her mother drew a deep breath. When she let it out
it was shaky. “Your uncle used to get lost. Terribly lost.
Totally lost. And I would get so angry. So very angry. I
couldn’t understand how a person, a grown man, could
get lost going for a walk. And now.” She shook her head.
“I did exactly that. And you’re not mad at all.” Her mouth was a flat line that broke only when she whispered, “I
was awful.”
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Lane didn’t know what to say so she said nothing. She
drew the quietest possible breath and stayed completely still, save for
her startled blinks. This was, as far as she could remember, the first time her mother had ever brought up
the subject of her uncle. When it was clear her mother
wasn’t going to say anything more, Lane said, “I didn’t
know Uncle Albie got lost.”
Sylvie met her eyes. “Well that’s good. You were a
child. Your father and I weren’t sure what you knew. It
was hard to know in all the commotion. There wasn’t
always commotion. Just when he got himself into trouble.
He never meant to make trouble. It was the opposite. He
was trying to stop trouble. Who could blame him? Well
some people did. They didn’t understand.”
Again Lane waited and when nothing more came,
she prodded, “What kind of trouble?”
“Oh,” her mother said. She shook her head, remem-
bering. “Sometimes he’d end up way on the other side of
town at a park. Parks were the worst. Children on monkey
bars would make him physically ill, he was so sure they
would fall. Little things set him off too. He’d see a child outside alone and lose his mind. A small child, outside
their own house, drawing with chalk on the sidewalk,
would make rave like a lunatic, yelling at them to get in
the house. Of course they’d run inside, terrified because
a lunatic had started yelling at them.” Her eyes filled up.
She shook her head again, sat up straighter and lifted
up her chin. “We tried. No one can say we didn’t.” She
slumped. “Nothing worked. Nothing.”
“What did you try?”
“Therapists. A new one in every town. Medicine. He
tried so many pills. I could barely keep track of which
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ones he’d already tried. Amoxa-something. Trimipra-
something. Fluoxa-something.”
“Wait.” Lane closed her eyes. She felt something nig-
gling at the far recesses of her memory. She heard the
tune first and then found the words. “Amoxapine and
Trimipramine, you take them every day. Fluoxetine and Sertraline will send you on your way.”
“I don’t know why you girls made up that horrid song
about your uncle’s medication.”
“That song was about the drugs Dad sold.”
Her mother laughed. “No, it was not. That song is
a list of your uncle’s medicine. His useless medicine.”
She shrugged. “I suppose there is no medicine for what
he had.”
“What did he have?”
Her mother slumped and waved the question away.