The Half Life

Chapter 1

YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT La Maddalena, and I’ll get to that.

But to understand everything that happened on the island, you’ve got to understand a little bit about me and why, when Paul Archer proposed not just marrying him but moving with him to a tiny island smack dab in the middle of the Mediterranean, I said yes.

I had spent the whole of my life—all twenty-three years of it—in Charleston, South Carolina, and at that time the Holy City was still very much a navy town.

The Battery was there, same as always, but the Peninsula wasn’t like it is today—Louis Vuitton and Gucci fighting for space on King Street and restaurants like FIG and Husk getting written up in The New York Times.

Back then folks were still shopping at Woolworth’s and Silver’s, and the nicest place to eat was a restaurant called the Blue Hawaii, where, if you were willing to drive all the way to Mount Pleasant, you could get yourself a pupu platter and a rum cocktail called a Flaming Volcano.

Lenny was not a student. Looking back now, I’m sure he had ADHD and maybe even some sort of processing disorder, but no one talked about such things then.

Instead, teachers just decided he was thick or not trying hard enough or both.

I was only two years younger than Lenny, so on the first day of school each year, I always had some teacher who read the name Eileen O’Malley on her roll and asked, without even trying to hide her disregard, if we were any relation.

When Lenny graduated from high school, he went to work for my dad, and for a few years things looked pretty good.

He had always been smart with boats, could take apart the motor of our Bonefisher and put it back together with his eyes closed, so the work made him happy.

And it made Dad happy, knowing he was giving Lenny some training and that one day—if Lenny took over the business—he’d be able to earn a decent living.

I graduated from high school in 1969 and enrolled at the College of Charleston, where I had decided to major in English if for no other reason than that I liked to read and didn’t know what else to study.

The College of Charleston was still private at that point, but they gave a big break to kids from Charleston County.

If I remember correctly, my tuition was nine hundred and twenty-five dollars a year.

Adjusted for inflation, that’s under eight thousand dollars.

Can you even imagine a private school charging so little today?

I lived at home that first year, to save money, but in the fall of 1970, my parents let me go in on an apartment at Rutledge Rivers with a couple of girls I knew from the neighborhood.

To pay the rent, I got a part-time job at Condon’s, which was a department store on King Street, up near Marion Square.

It wasn’t as high-class as Berlin’s, where all the rich kids shopped, but they put me in the cosmetics department, which seemed fancy, and the pay was good.

With what I made, I could cobble together my rent and have enough left over for a couple of whiskey sours at Big John’s.

I was starting to think I had my life all figured out, but then Lenny got drafted and a letter from the Selective Service arrived at the house, ordering him to report for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States.

By October of my sophomore year, he was headed to basic training at Fort Polk; by February, he was in Da Nang; and by May, two guys in uniform were sitting on my parents’ sofa, telling them how their only son had taken his last breath at a field hospital in Nha Trang.

The day we got the news, it was my dad who tracked me down at Condon’s.

My manager told me I had a call on line two, and I fell all over myself apologizing because we weren’t supposed to take personal calls at the store.

He waved me off, like he’d heard it all before, and when I got on the phone and realized it was my dad on the line, I was relieved.

At least I wasn’t going to get in trouble over some Citadel cadet who couldn’t get a clue.

Then it occurred to me that my dad had never once called me at the store, and if he was doing so now, something was wrong.

He didn’t tell me about Lenny, probably didn’t want me driving across the Ashley River out of my mind, so he just told me to come home.

My shift didn’t end for another three hours. “Right now?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, and there was something about the way that one little word cracked on the way out that told me not to argue.

I cashed out my drawer and handed the bank bag to my manager, who seemed to sense that this was not the time to give me any grief about cutting out early.

“You going to be in tomorrow?” he asked, and I said I didn’t know, then went to get my purse out of the break room and walked to my car, which I’d forgotten I’d parked on Calhoun Street.

By the time I finally found it, my hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t get the key in the lock.

“You don’t know what this is about,” I said aloud to myself, and eventually, I managed to unlock the door.

It was one of those perfect spring days in Charleston—hot enough to roll the windows down but not so hot that my skin felt sticky.

Ordinarily, I’d have sung along to the radio, maybe stuck my hand out the window just to feel the air drag against my open palm.

But that day I gripped the steering wheel like a life preserver, stopped at every yellow light, counted to three at every stop sign.

I drove five miles under the speed limit the whole way home because a big part of me believed that if I could just delay my arrival, I could keep my brother alive a little longer.