Fire on the Island
On a night two weeks after Harry told Tess about infinite universes, the voices in her head would not shut up.
She had learned Morse code the previous summer, but no matter how many times she tapped shut up on the top of the little desk in the room she shared with Vivian, the voices kept up their incessant nattering—louder and louder.
Worse than they had ever been before. If you don’t line up the Legos, something bad will happen.
So, she lined up the Legos. If you don’t write the alphabet backward twenty times, something bad will happen.
So, she wrote the alphabet backward twenty times. But still they kept on.
She and Harry hadn’t gone to the dock that night because a front had swept through and dark clouds filled the sky, threatening rain and lightning and obscuring the stars.
Nights when she couldn’t see Harry’s star made her nervous.
The wind whistled through the pine trees and blew hard enough that twigs and small branches occasionally thwapped against the roof, making Tess jump in her chair.
The air felt electric, as it often did before a summer storm, but this time Tess tingled not with excitement but with unease.
The whole universe seemed on edge and the voices knew it.
She had a set of twenty-five colored pencils in a metal box in her desk and the voices insisted that they each be sharpened to a fine point and that they all be the exact same length.
The only sharpener she had was one of those cheap little plastic ones that came in your school pencil box, and it made precision all but impossible.
Every time she had ten pencils perfectly lined up, the point would break on the eleventh one.
Or when she had fifteen lined up, she’d notice that the royal blue was a hair shorter than the others.
The pencils got shorter and the pile of multicolored shavings on the desk got bigger and the voices did not stop.
Marie had gone to bed early—with a headache, she had said.
“Don’t stay up too late,” she had told Tess when she kissed her good night in front of the fireplace where Tess had been reading The Return of the King.
Even then the voices had been warming up, but Tess kept reading for another hour or so until they became too much of a distraction.
Then she said good night to Harry and Vivian—each in a chair with a book—and went to her room to arrange Legos, write alphabets, and sharpen pencils.
Never had the voices been so demanding, yet they still didn’t totally drown out Tess’s memory of Marie’s voice—gentle and loving—telling her not to stay up too late.
She wished more than anything that she could comply.
When the aquamarine pencil was nothing more than a nub, Tess crept out of her room and to the edge of the living room, lurking in the shadows as she watched Harry and Vivian.
They sat together on the sofa, close enough that their legs pressed into one another.
Too close, thought Tess. They leaned slightly forward, their cheeks almost touching, and whispered words that Tess could not have heard if she had been sitting in the chair directly across from them.
But Tess understood the intonations of secrecy.
And of intimacy. Whatever Harry and Vivian were discussing, they didn’t want Tess to know. Or Marie.
Tess loved Vivian like a second mother, but she loved Marie, too.
She didn’t like Harry and Vivian having secrets from her mother.
Especially when those secrets involved sitting so close to each other in the dying light of a fire.
Tess tiptoed back to her room and slid under the covers, praying for sleep.
Thunder began to rumble outside, and she considered closing her window against the coming rain, but the fresh air soothed her.
Besides, if the rain blew in the window maybe it would wash away all the pencil shavings and in the morning the voices, and all evidence of their existence, would be gone.
Tess drifted in and out of sleep, often awakened by a boom of thunder.
Lightning flashed, but the rain still did not come, heightening her nervous anticipation.
It felt as if the world was holding back, letting the pressure build until the release would be catastrophic.
The third time she awoke, she got out of bed and looked out the window.
Harry and Vivian, laden with blankets and what the lightning revealed to be Harry’s antique radio, were walking toward the woods, Harry unspooling a long orange extension cord behind him.
Why in the world would they take the radio outside when it could start pouring rain at any moment?
Harry loved that radio. He dusted it with care almost every day and never let anyone else touch it. It could be ruined in a rainstorm.
As Harry and Vivian entered the woods to the north of the house, Tess watched the bouncing beam of Vivian’s flashlight. When that beam stilled, she realized where Harry had taken Vivian and became more convinced than ever that they were about to do something that would tear her family apart.
Since the time she was four or five, Tess had been allowed full access to the island.
But that liberty did not come without rules.
Before she learned to swim, she had to stay a few feet away from the lake itself.
Before she was a strong climber, the tree branches were off-limits.
But essentially, the island was hers to explore, and explore it she did, learning its every rise and fall, befriending each tree and shrub, building miniature cairns out of smooth stones or crude shelters out of dead branches.
By the time she was ten, she knew the island more intimately than most children knew their own homes.
The freedom to gain that intimacy had also built Tess’s sense of independence—the true purpose, she suspected now, of her parents’ giving her the run of the place.
But one spot on the island had always been forbidden: A circle of trees a short distance to the north of the house surrounded a clearing about twenty feet wide.
The trees were tall, slender pines whose branches did not spread far enough to prevent sunlight from falling in the clearing at midday in the summer.
A small patch of grass grew there, and a few laurel bushes almost enclosed the space, leaving a gap on the side facing the house just wide enough for an adult to pass through.
This clearing was Harry’s sanctum sanctorum—the one place on the island where not only Tess but also Marie and Vivian were forbidden to set foot.
“I used to read there as a child,” explained Harry when Tess had asked him why she couldn’t enter the circle.
“And my parents agreed that whenever I was there, no one would disturb me. So, it became special to me, my little retreat. And I’ve kept it that way over the years.
” Harry himself only ventured into what he called his “private circle” occasionally.
Sometimes a whole summer would pass without him slipping through the laurel bushes and disappearing for an hour or so.
But now, Tess watched as Harry led Vivian into his most private space and felt betrayed.
There was no other word for it. Tess was Harry’s family, his flesh and blood, the rightful heir to the private circle.
Marie was his wife, the person with whom he should share the most secret and intimate parts of himself.
Yet here he was leading Vivian into the very place from which both Tess and her mother had been barred.
She watched as the flashlight moved around within the laurels and then heard, in between the claps of thunder, the sound of music coming from Harry’s radio. Romantic music, thought Tess. Some love song from the days when young men took their girlfriends to secret spots in the woods.
Tess had a good grasp on the basics of sex by this time.
Neither Harry nor Marie had given her “the talk” that she had heard some of the girls at school blushingly refer to.
But she had talked to Vivian, and Tess read and listened and had even peeped through the keyhole one Sunday afternoon when Harry and Marie were “taking a nap” and glimpsed something that, while not wholly comprehensible, was certainly not nap-taking.
Most importantly she understood that sex was a type of intimacy that a loving husband enjoyed only with his wife, that sex with someone else—with Vivian for instance—was the sort of thing that presaged anger and fights, accusations of betrayal and broken promises, separation and divorce.
Tess felt a great pull inside herself, as if a game of tug-of-war as wide as the universe passed its rope directly through her gut.
“Under no circumstances should you ever set foot in my circle,” Harry had said, reiterating, “No circumstances.” But what if those circumstances were the possible implosion of the family that she loved: the destruction of her tender, kindhearted mother; the expulsion of one of her parents from the family home; a dagger in the heart of the friendship between Marie and Vivian; and the condemning of Tess to an adolescence of misery and a broken home?
Weren’t those circumstances dire enough to lift the ban on setting foot on some meaningless piece of ground?
Wasn’t saving her family a cause noble enough to justify defying her father?