Chapter 25
JOEL
Wakefield did not have a sheriff. They’d had a sergeant, but he’d passed away three years ago from a heart attack, and no one since had wanted the job. “What do you do when there’s a crime?” Joel asked the girl at the front desk, her eyelids fluorescent with blue shadow.
“You call the mayor,” she said, explaining that this was a man in his seventies with a glass eye.
Shay was at the church for the rehearsal, but Joel left her a note at the desk, saying he needed to speak with her; he didn’t know what else to do.
When he turned on the stair landing, he could see the girl had opened the folded paper, smirking to herself as she read his tight scrawl.
Before he could decide whether or not to say anything, Carmen was walking down to meet him.
“Time for the crab boil?” she asked.
Carmen had, of course, befriended some of the locals.
The waiter she’d met the evening before—Eric—had said that if Carmen wanted, she was welcome to come for lunch with his aunt, who would be cleaning and boiling blue crabs.
A Friday tradition. As they walked to the house, Joel looked for the girl from that morning, his fingers clenching and unclenching.
Carmen was telling him about her play, and he was doing his best to respond as he normally would, but it was difficult, like sprinting after a sprain.
“—and now that we’re close to the opening, Allen is in a full manic state, always doing lines in the bathroom.
He’ll be obsessive one second about the exact positioning of a stage light, and then he’ll sleep through half the rehearsal.
And if you ask me, which no one fucking is, Mike’s performance still needs a lot of direction. ”
“What’s wrong with his performance now?” Joel asked.
“It’s like he’s doing a De Niro impression, which as an impression is actually pretty good, but it doesn’t really make sense for a play set in Prohibition-era Georgia.”
Joel laughed. He had seen Carmen perform once, in a production of A Doll’s House reimagined for Brooklyn in the ’70s, and she was remarkable.
She was able to deliver each line so honestly while somehow still remaining Carmen, in the way Marlon Brando was always Marlon Brando, even when he was Terry Malloy or Vito Corleone.
Joel knew she’d become famous. It was only a matter of how long she’d have to wait.
This was something they’d deeply respected in each other during their six months together, that each had found their purpose.
So many of their peers were aimless, dipping their toes in an endless progression of pools.
When Joel left for Cornell, his parents made it clear that after four years, he would be expected to move to Boston to work for his father’s company.
But after a term, he realized they had no way of knowing what classes he enrolled in, so he filled his hours with courses on Shakespeare and Steinbeck, with writing workshops that he took just to unknot his classmates’ stories.
Soon his friends were giving him their papers to proof.
At its least satisfying, editing felt like straightening his bedroom.
At its most, like solving a mystery. It gave him something his family never had: a sense of belonging.
Sometimes he felt foolish, that he’d earned a degree from an elite school and now made barely enough to pay his rent, that he suffered long hours and dealt with temperamental writers and a boss who’d slept with half of the young women in the art department, but it felt like what he was meant to do.
You can see the potential in everything, Shay once said.
And that gift felt worth losing everything else—though at the time, he hadn’t realized it would mean losing Shay too.
“How about those?” Carmen asked, gesturing at a cluster of seagulls on a nearby lawn.
“A colony,” he said, smiling and reflexively pushing up his glasses. “A colony of seagulls.”
“Of course,” she said, and laughed. She had seemed at ease since waking and hadn’t said another word about the night before.
When he’d returned from his run, she was singing a Joni Mitchell song about California as she shaved her legs in the bathtub.
He’d decided to let things rest, his guilt a stagnant pool.
“There it is,” she said. “He said it was the one with the green door.”
They heard voices in the backyard, so they circled the house to find two old women in wrought iron chairs.
Toys littered the tall grass: a red tricycle with dirt-licked wheels, a stripped baby doll with a lightning bolt of marker streaking its chest. One woman’s hair was pure white, the other’s a salt-and-pepper gray.
Each wore an apron over a plain cotton dress.
At the sight of Joel and Carmen, they smiled, and Joel—for the first time on the island—felt welcome.
“Thank you for having us,” he said.
“We’re glad Eric invited you, but I’m not sure why you’re here and not at the beach,” the white-haired woman said, gesturing to the water. The house was yards from the docks.
“We can go to the beach in New York,” Carmen said.
The crabs were in a cooler of water, ice, and salt—the cold and salinity slowly numbed and then killed them, or at least that’s what the women had been told.
“I’ve never been able to ask them how they’re feeling,” the white-haired one said, and laughed.
Their carapaces were mud green, only their limbs painted an impossibly lovely blue, the color of morning glories.
“I think it’s better to boil them,” the gray-haired woman said. “Kills ’em in two seconds.”
“That’s probably the way I’d want to go,” Carmen said, kneeling close to the cooler and lifting one of the crab’s lifeless arms. “I’d want to die before I realized I’m dying.”
“I’d like to avoid you being boiled alive,” Joel joked, even though the words alone made him uneasy.
The women had Joel and Carmen take their chairs, standing to give instruction.
Growing up in Massachusetts, Joel had cracked open countless crabs and lobsters, but he’d never cleaned one, and he realized he had no idea what was hidden beneath the shell the length of his palm.
If he’d find a stomach or a spleen, a heart the size of an apple seed. The crab’s body was cold in his hands.
“Put your thumb there and pop its shell loose,” the white-haired woman said, positioning Joel’s fingers.
“Yes, like that, press down.” He flexed, and the carapace broke off with a satisfying cleanness.
Underneath was gray matter, what looked like a wet folded ribbon.
Carmen laughed at the mess. How long had it taken for people to know what to eat and what to throw back into the water? If bitterness always meant poison?
“Now you want to clean out the gills and tear off its mandibles,” the woman said, though she did this for him, expertly discarding shards of shell. Her fingers were rough with calluses. “Now you flip it over, and pull all this out, we don’t want that. Here, here, hold it here for me.”
The woman let go of Joel’s hand and picked up a green hose, spraying the crab’s body clean.
The gray-haired woman was more patient with Carmen, who was absorbed in the crab’s disassembling, picking at the edges of its pincer.
Joel’s crab was tossed into a metal bowl on the table, landing belly-up with a clink.
“Do you get a lot of tourists here?” Joel asked as the woman handed him another.
“Ferries come twice a day, but sometimes it’s just locals riding them. It’s rare to have so many mainlanders, like this weekend. We’re overrun.”
The wedding had more than three hundred guests, an unwieldy number. Still, the islanders must track any outsider, especially someone who steered away from the crowds. Joel lowered his voice so that Carmen would not hear. “Have you noticed anyone odd hanging around?”
“Odd?” The woman wiped her hands on her apron. “You all seem a bit odd to us, but since you’re here for Shay, everyone’s trying to be on their best behavior.”
“You know Shay?”
“Of course. She’s the only one from that family anyone can stand.”
Carmen told him to look, holding up her scraped-clean crab like a trophy.
The gray-haired woman said Carmen had to move faster, admonishing her like a mother, though Carmen only laughed.
Joel was amazed, as always, at how easily she became close with people.
Her shell was thin enough to tear with your teeth, whereas his was thicker than bone.
It took nearly half an hour to prepare the whole lot, the white-haired woman occasionally letting him clean the entire crab, but more often than not inserting her fingers into its crevices, her short nails catching strings of innards he’d missed.
She told him about her children and grandchildren.
She asked him how tall his apartment building was and how bad the city smelled.
When they were finished, she picked up the metal bowl and said it was time to boil water on the stove.
“Wash your hands with the hose and then come on in,” she said, and both of the older women disappeared into the kitchen to finish preparing lunch.
Carmen sprayed Joel’s hands first, and as he wiped them clean on his jeans, he heard voices on the docks, distant enough to be indistinct.
The shore was so close, and from the yard he could make out Ken, Andrew, and three other young men climbing onto a sailboat.
When one turned—the tallest, thin as a sapling—Joel recognized him as Shay’s brother, William.
Joel’s first thought was that they were going to drown him, which was absurd.
Maybe he hadn’t drunk enough water after his run, or the person he’d seen that morning had made him feel that everyone was in danger, that any pocketknife was meant to slit someone’s stomach, any boat trip an excuse to bind someone’s wrists and drop them into the bay.
By the water, Andrew offered William his hand, but he refused it even as he stumbled onto the deck, finding a seat. He wore a T-shirt and jeans, while the others were still in their polos and pale linen shorts. One of the men untied the rope from the cleat, and the motor roared.
“Is that her brother?” Carmen asked. Joel hadn’t realized she was standing beside him.
“Yeah. William.”
“They could be twins.”
“She’s older, but they seem like it sometimes. They’re really close.”
They watched as the boat cut through the low waves. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky after that morning’s rain, and the bow was so bright that it was almost painful to look at, nothing like the island’s crabbing boats, which were dull as sea glass, their paint blistered and peeling.
Shay’s relationship with her brother was similar, in some ways, to the one Joel had with his own, and in others, completely foreign.
Maybe this was because they were different sexes and had none of the competition Joel and his brothers felt, which emerged in their spats and shoves, their back-to-back measurements of height.
Maybe it was because he had two siblings, and together his younger brothers sometimes felt like pups he had to discipline and tend.
They were all separate entities, whereas William and Shay had a private language.
When she would tell Joel that William was struggling in some way, it was as if she herself were in pain.
Like Joel, Shay looked after her sibling, taking care of William in ways her parents would not, but this went beyond familial duty.
Joel liked his brothers. Shay loved hers.
But since their senior year, she had spoken of him less. Perhaps because of Andrew, or perhaps because of what had happened with their father. Joel did not know.
“I saw him running last night, down the lawn,” Carmen said.
“William?”
“Him and a few others. One dropped a bottle of something. They seemed pretty drunk, I kind of wanted to join them.”
It was easy to imagine Carmen doing this, taking off her sandals and joining a herd of strangers like a stray colt.
And if she had, if he and Shay had found themselves alone, what would he have said?
It would have been the first time they’d been alone since Riverside.
Joel shook off the thought, twitching as if a fly had landed on his cheek.
“I think you’d like him,” he said. “He’s a dishwasher. Or he was.”
“So Shay’s family isn’t well-off? They don’t own their own island?”
“No.” Joel laughed. “Her mom’s a receptionist.”
“What’s her dad do?”
“He was a reporter, actually, for the Tribune, but he died about four years ago, when we were in college. He was hit by a train.”
“Jesus.” Carmen murmured a note of sympathy. One of the women inside was calling her name. “Maybe we can all have dinner together, when we’re back in the city.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure she’d like that.”
Carmen lifted Joel’s hand and kissed his knuckle before turning back to the house, her fingers still wet, and he saw himself on the boat’s stern, bound and limp, being heaved into the waves.