The Bookstore Sisters(3)
“You think I should stay on this island because of a promise I made when I was ten years old?” Isabel asked her sister. “Should I only have peanut butter sandwiches for lunch because that’s what I ate then?”
“Are you my sister or aren’t you?” Sophie’s face was pale; her black hair was knotted. She looked wild-eyed, and ready to snap.
“Of course I am.” Was she being asked to forget her apartment, her job, her own life? “I can stay with you until you get over Matt.” It was the absolute worst thing to say. Isabel knew that it was as soon as she blurted it out, but words that have been said cannot be unspoken, and Sophie was hurt beyond measure.
“Is that what you think happens when you lose someone you love? You get over them? You forget them and go on as if they never existed? Go on then, leave. You’ve always done as you pleased, just like you did last night. You should be more careful about who you sleep with, Izzy. Everyone on the island is talking about it.”
Isabel had been drunk the night before and only now remembered that she’d spent most of her time with a man she couldn’t quite remember. She only recalled that he was tall and dark and familiar. It was true, they had almost wound up in bed—she remembered that now—but after kissing madly outside the door to her room above the bar, the fellow had said something like, “I don’t think you’re in a state to make this decision. Why don’t I come back in the morning?”
But in the morning, she was gone. Sophie had left the tavern through the front door, and Isabel left out the back, and if the man in the hallway ever had returned, he certainly didn’t find her there waiting. Instead, she’d gone down to the docks, where she’d pleaded with one of the fishermen to give her a ride across the harbor, not wanting to wait for the ferry. She’d turned and looked at the island as they sped across the bay, and if she wasn’t mistaken, her sister was there on the shore. That had been the last time they’d seen each other, for in the years that had passed, they’d forgotten how much they had loved each other. They had tried hard to forget, and they had nearly succeeded, and so it had remained, until this Tuesday.
Now, on this day in the park, Isabel discovered there was a white card inside the envelope. One word had been hastily written in black marker. Help. Isabel wondered how a single word could have such a great effect, but she burst into tears, there in Madison Square Park, upsetting Hank the Labrador, who had a sensitive nature and now did his best to sit on her lap even though he weighed close to eighty pounds. At the bottom of the card, there was a line of typed print. Take the two o’clock ferry on Wednesday. If it was Sophie, something must have gone terribly wrong for her to contact Isabel after more than a decade. Despite all that had happened, Isabel had to go.
When you stop forgetting, the effects can be overwhelming. You think of the time when you imagined you would always live in a world of books, when in truth Isabel hadn’t read a book in years. She’d given them up. She didn’t even believe in them anymore. When she read, she remembered dancing on the beach on the first snowy night of the year when they could hear whales calling in the distance. She remembered the night they were told that their mother had passed away. She remembered Sophie crying in her room and her father standing out in the yard sobbing and her own decision not to feel things anymore.
Isabel brought Hank back to his owner’s apartment on Greenwich Avenue, but the dog stopped on the corner and refused to go forward. “Sometimes you have no choice,” Isabel always told him about the hours he spent in an empty apartment waiting for his owner to arrive, but today he simply would not budge, and Isabel didn’t have the patience or the heart to leave him.
She took Hank home, packed a bag, phoned everyone on her dog-walking list to regretfully inform them she would be out of town, briefly, she hoped. She left a message for Hank’s owner, who happened to be her divorce lawyer, not to expect him back. She was bringing Hank with her, that much was certain. He was already sitting on top of her suitcase.
Isabel rented a car in the morning and drove straight through, only briefly stopping in Portland to pick up a sandwich to go and some coffee and run into a pet store where they only sold extra-large bags of dog food weighing forty pounds. She headed north and east, turning off the highway and taking the twisting road along the shore. Things kept looking familiar so that forgetting was becoming more difficult with every mile. The dog kept his head out the window, even though the day was misty and cold. June was like that in Maine, the damp constant, until brilliant sunlight broke the sky open and the gray world turned blue and green in equal measure. When she got to the small town of Hensley, where the ferry to the island docked, she remembered all the times in high school when she’d tried to escape from the island.
“Can’t you just wait to grow up before you leave?” her father told Isabel the last time the ferry captain caught her stowing away and brought her back. “Time goes faster than you think.”
“Not fast enough,” Isabel answered, but as it turned out, her father was right. Suddenly, here she was in her thirties, with no family and no one to love, and she’d begun, only rarely and at odd hours, to think she’d made a terrible mistake.
A girl was pacing the dock as the ferry pulled in. She wore a black dress and black boots even though the mist had burned off and the day was now sunny, warm enough so that jeans and a T-shirt would have been more fitting. The girl had a pretty, intelligent face, though she was pale, with dark circles under her eyes. She was holding up a sign so that everyone who was walking off the ferry could see it clearly. Help. Isabel stood on the ferry, in shock. It wasn’t Sophie who had written to her but this girl with a sour expression, who looked annoyed every time someone disembarked from the ferry and passed her by.