25. Sébastien
W hen Tin-tin and I get back with the suppressants and scent blockers, the cabin is looking neat and tidy— our belongings packed and ready to go; a lunch of potato soup and mysterious spicy jerky, laid out on the large wooden farm table.
We take a few moments to inject Louise and Tin-tin with their loading doses of scent blockers and make sure both wash down their suppressant tablets with a last icy cold cup of water pumped from the little lodge sink—we do our dishes and put them away on the wire rack, and pack out of our temporary home and heat haven for the last several days, a long drive to the coast awaiting us after our snowy trek to the car.
It’s about five hours into the drive when Louise suddenly sits bolt upright in the back seat—pressed between Tin-tin and I, her head lifting from my shoulder with a start as she asks breathlessly.
“Wait, all of you can swim? Right?”
Caz looks nervously into the rear view mirror, his icy blue eyes sparkling with nascent fear.
“Uh, I mean, I can doggy paddle and I can float on my back if I try real hard—but I have a low-key, high-key thalassophobia so…” he trails off.
“I’m an excellent swimmer. Why?” Quentin answers suspiciously.
Though neither Frank nor I have had a chance to answer the question, I am a very strong swimmer and I know Frank not only to be superb over long distances even in extreme conditions but also a skilled diver. Much like Quentin, I too wish to know why this has become a sudden concern.
“Well, the good news is that it doesn’t quite qualify as ‘open; ocean—it’s more of a sound between the mainland and the island just at the end of Windy Neck, not far from the beach. Probably a little less than a mile by zodiac or small motorboat,” Louise explains as Caz turns pale green.
“If we weren’t trying to be all stealthy about it—we could have driven down Windy Neck itself at low tide and walked out to the island on the sandbar, but—if we want to get to the cottage unseen, at night during calm waters with a paddled zodiac would be the best method of approach.
Obviously the landscape changes a bit if we have Saints who sink like stones. ”
“Caz will be fine. We’ll stop at a bait and tackle or outdoor store and pick up a little floaty vest as insurance.”
“Yeah, better pick up a boat, too. There will be stuff at the dock between the mainland and Windy Neck, but the locals will absolutely notice—and local harbor patrol has nothing better to do than to follow up on whatever the local Karen or Robert has to report,” Louise adds, everyone making noises of ascent.
The ‘STOR-WITH-US’ is our first stop, even before the sports store or bait and tackle. Frank runs distraction at the main desk while Quentin slips easily into the maze of corrugated metal roll-up doors, using his set of delicate lock picks to break into the unit in record time.
Though Caz sits, waiting behind the wheel of our getaway car, I back Tin-tin and Loulu up—following them into the unit to be another set of hands to move items quickly; to help carry out our bounty if needed.
Surprisingly, there’s almost nothing in the unit, a few dusty banker’s boxes and an unusually ornate silk potted tree caked in dust and cobwebs.
Louise pops the top off two of the banker's boxes and goes very still as she lifts an ancient, thick silver plastic laptop from its confines.
Quentin and I pull the tops off the other boxes, but they only yield a couple of corporate trophy glass sculptures and an old Lillian Vernon catalog stained by rainwater and age.
We find the rodent-chewed charging cable and stuff it into a canvas tote bag Loulu found in one of the other banker’s boxes along with the laptop—scurrying from the scene as quickly as possible.
A few towns over, we make a stop at an outdoor strip mall that will serve our needs.
We divide and conquer; myself and Louise sent on a mission to the dollar store for affordable non-perishable food along with some basic toiletries and supplies for a brief stay at the Penny’s lost cottage.
Frank stays with the car, chain-smoking cigarettes in the front passenger seat while Caz runs into the ServoCity to pick up a working charger for the laptop along with a few new burner phones and prepaid sim cards while Quentin hits the outdoors store.
Louise and I return with a bounty of seventy-nine cent boxes of mac and cheese, unpopular flavors of recent seasonal pop tarts, three five gallon plastic containers of spring water with little plastic spigots on the side, and a few canisters of powdered sports drink mix as Caz hustles back to the car with his charger and phones.
Tin-tin, back to his right mind after the heat and once again in full command of his superhuman charisma, sweet talks the girl at the Western Cliff Athletics into a free hydro flask covered in store branding and a twenty percent discount for his purchase; a rigid inflatable boat that can seat the five of us, a portable air pump, five plastic paddles, five black vest-style personal flotation devices, three bottles of white gas, an ultra light camping stove made for backpacking, two LED head lamps and a stack of “just add water” meal packets.
We stop for dinner just west of the Sagamore bridge and get dinner at a small Greek diner that makes a more than passable moussaka before making our way down toward Windy Neck.
It’s been nearly pitch-dark since three thirty in the afternoon, so we don’t have to worry about the cover of darkness, the new moon and a windless night conspiring to give us optimal crossing conditions.
“Your parents must have been pretty loaded to afford some private island shit,” Caz blurts out nervously as we inflate the boat at the grassy edge of a sand dune—Frank and Q’s headlamps diffused by gas station napkins and a bit of cello tape casting around dimly in the darkness and salt air.
Louise doesn’t say anything to this at first, but as she helps to steady the bow of the boat—slowly inflating under Frank and Quentin’s shared efforts with the pump, the words eventually seem to find her.
“I didn’t really think about my parents as being rich when I was a kid,” she admits, a hint of embarrassment tinging her usually proud voice.
“I never really knew anything else. Went to good schools, met other kids with similar families.” She shrugs timidly.
“It wasn’t until I went away to college that I started to see just how small of a slice of the world I was seeing,” Louise confesses earnestly.
“I guess that’s what privilege is though, right?
Not even knowing that you just don’t know.
” Her voice goes quiet and I think about my own childhood in and out of bloc apartment buildings like concrete jungles in the south of France, my Jiddu’s home in the Mellah.
I was too young to know enough to point out on a map—the dirty drug dens my Baabaa dragged me to and from across the eastern seaboard of the US. I can’t imagine it looked anything like the life of the pampered Penny princess.
I do my best to ignore the flare of resentment that rises in me. Being poor never made my mother bitter, even if it drove my father to the most toxic depths of depravity—chasing paper until it put him in the grave, a penniless criminal.
Obviously, Louise’s life hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows. I feel a stab of guilt as I accept my own role in her most recent trauma and turn my focus back to our imminent crossing.
The paddling is harder than I expect, despite how relatively calm the dark waters appear as we push off from the beach.
This section of the rocky shore is virtually uninhabited this time of year—all the seasonal houses in the area shuttered for winter, the locals tucked away inside their warm homes—far from the edge of the sea.
We make landfall on a small strip of sand amidst the rocks and patches of seagrass. The tiny spit of land can’t be called an island—not really. It’s barely one hundred yards across at its widest point—the small stone cottage with its slate roof appearing to sprout from the ground.
The door to the cottage, ironwood with green oxidized bands of metal across the front, boasts two different embedded combination spinner locks.
With an ease that only a lifetime of practice can produce, Loulu spins the tiny clicking wheels this way and that until both locks pop free, and the door opens—a slight musty and close smell emanating from the sea shack.
Before we light the lanterns or un-shroud our headlamps, Louise and Quentin hurry around the small space—affixing a stack of old newspapers we picked up at the diner to the windows with duct tape.
I stand outside the small cabin to confirm that the folded paper blots out the light from within as the others increase the brightness inside—before confirming our stealth and slipping back into the cottage.
In the newly lit space, everything comes into focus.
For a rich family, the vacation home is shockingly humble in its size and furnishings, though its very existence still speaks to a wealth of which I have only ever dreamed.
A beam runs across the center of the ceiling, dripping with ropes, fine plastic nets, buoys and a few moth-eaten life preservers that were once a bright orange, but have been bleached by sun and time; they appear to be for function rather than mere decoration.
The low, exposed ceiling vaulting is stained a dark brown.
The same stained wood is built into a maze of shelving on the far wall, with one small window embedded in the center of the shelves; loaded with books, old coffee cans full of colored pencils and markers, a full corningware set, and an oversized brass kettle patinated with age.
On the opposite wall is the old wood stove with its modest hob and small dusty stack of driftwood, and an iron box of matches on the brick safety pad beneath it.
In the space between the wall of shelves and the wood stove is a round wooden table encircled by a set of four wood and canvas folding chairs, and two metal framed daybeds that look out through the large picture window in the ocean-facing wall currently papered over by the Morning Metro Star.
I give the room another once over before the words slip out of my mouth, breaking the silence.
“Where are you supposed to take a piss?”
“Pfft!” Caz can’t contain the laugh that blows a raspberry through his closed lips.
“There’s a composting toilet in a little wooden booth outside,” Louise answers without so much as the hint of a smile, tears already running in silent, salty streams down her face.
A hush falls over the cabin as we set about settling in; Tin-tin helping Loulu to push the day beds together; gathering all the pillows and blankets they can to furnish us with a place to sleep, even if only for the night.
Frank paces back and forth behind Caz, who is doing his best to try to revive the ailing laptop from the storage unit with a large portable battery and a litany of different cables and electronic accessories while I begin to scrape together a dinner for us.
Tin-tin and Loulu finish their task; Q bundling himself in a large quilt at the edge of the bed-nest—Louise poised at the very edge of the metal frame—crouched on her heels, ready to spring forward at any moment.
Frank is about to light up a cigarette when Louise screams at him.
“Not inside! Go outside with that shit!”
She’s so sudden and intense that even Frank freezes, lighter in hand—before seeing himself out.
I turn my back on the hurry-up-and-wait drama of the laptop and do my best to focus on fashioning something edible out of our non-perishable delicacies.
So far I have opted to prepare a combination of freeze-dried packets of camping pasta with the little bits dried mushrooms and a few ‘holiday eggnog’ pop-tarts lightly grilled over the open gas flame—accompanied by some freshly mixed lemon-lime sports drink passed around in the new metal water bottle Tin Tin scored earlier.
It’s not going to earn me my Michelin star, but it isn’t bad for a shack out amongst the waves in New England midwinter.
Frank has just slipped back inside the cottage, and I am about to announce that dinner is served when Caz yells. “Oh-oh-oh! We’ve got power! The aging laptop wheezes to life, its screen flickering slightly.