Fog

  Green, blue, and black blended into a cauldron. Waves stretched up as if to rip a child off the rocks. White froth like beckoning fingers strangled little fish. Beneath the water blurry figures tried to swim up to the surface.

  “Look,” whispered Anya. Her long, thin fingers tightened convulsively on the paper. “You can see the drowned. Their bodies are floating at the bottom of the poster.”

  Christina found herself tipping forward, wanting to rescue everybody. It’s paper, she reminded herself.

  Anya stared into the poster. She swayed slightly, and her white skin grew even paler. “Look at the fingers of the dead,” she whispered. “See them scrabbling at the surface?”

  Michael inspected the poster. “Christina, you’re so funny,” he teased. “We live by the sea. It’s eating the paint off our houses. It drowned our ancestors. Why do you want more of it? I can’t believe you went and bought a poster of the sea.”

  Christina let go her corner. The poster folded up diagonally, so that a corner of sea stared from the long white tube.

  “It drowned our ancestors,” Anya repeated. “Perhaps it’s been too long for the sea since it had a Romney. Or a Rothrock. Or a Jaye.”

  Christina rolled the poster sea side in and threw it in the grass. But then she picked it up again.

  Chapter 2

  THERE WAS SHUT-IN FOG the day they left: thick fog, like the inside of an envelope.

  This was the fog for which the island was famous. A trick of atmosphere sometimes occurred, so that when the sun shone behind the fog, it looked like fire. Many times in the last three hundred years mainlanders had thought there was something burning at sea: a ship perhaps, in desperate need. But it had always been just the fog that hovered over the island.

  Christina loved the fog. It hugged her and kept her secrets. It belonged to the sea and went back to the sea, and you could neither hold it nor summon it.

  Anya hated fog. She insisted that her hair never looked good: She could work an hour setting her hair, walk out the door, and the fog would finger through her hair and ruin it.

  The parents carried the children’s trunks and boxes and suitcases on board Frankie’s boat.

  Dolly stood to one side and wept.

  Dolly was Benj and Michael’s little sister. She was also Christina’s best friend. Only eight months younger than Christina, Dolly was in sixth grade, and, because they were the only girls anywhere near the same age, Christina and Dolly had always done everything together.

  Dolly was small and wiry, with red hair in braids. “Christina gets to go to the mainland. Christina gets to go to real school. Christina gets to board at Schooner Inne. Have Anya for a roommate.” Dolly ripped the top of her old white sneaker against the splinters of the dock. “Next year,” said Dolly in grief, “when I get to board, Anya will have graduated. Benj will have quit school. It won’t be the same! It’s not fair. I want to go this year, too!” cried Dolly.

  “Don’t be silly,” said her parents.

  “Get lost,” said her brothers.

  Dolly had been born on Thanksgiving Day, and Mrs. Jaye let them use her for Baby Jesus in that year’s Christmas pageant. She was only four weeks old and a ten-year-old Mary dropped Dolly headfirst into the manger, but there wasn’t any brain damage, the doctor who was flown in told them. (Michael and Benj always said there was plenty, the worst kind.) Dolly wanted to be Baby Jesus every year. Dolly said it was pretty boring to have Jesus always either in diapers or dying on a cross, and why didn’t we have a nice six-year-old Jesus (Dolly) or a really decent ten-year-old Jesus (Dolly), and now she said, “I’m almost as old as Christina, let me come to school, too!” But her parents hung onto her.

  Christina was swept by panic. What if she didn’t make friends? What if Dolly remained, forever, the only friend Christina ever had? What if Anya hated sharing a room with her and Michael and Benj hated sharing rooms with each other and everything was awful?

  She hugged Dolly fiercely. Summer people laughed gently. Christina knew they thought of her as a pitiful little country girl who had never been off-island and was afraid of the Big Bad Mainland. Christina felt like spitting on them.

  “Have a good time,” whispered Dolly. “Send me tapes.” She pressed into Christina’s hand a beautifully wrapped present, which Christina knew, since they had mail-ordered it together, contained a half dozen new, blank cassette tapes on which Christina was to dictate all the news, tell Dolly every single detail, and on which, by return boat, Dolly would describe the island.

  Frankie said, “Okay, now, we said our goodbyes? We sure? We absolutely done here? Huh, Lady Christina?” Frankie was very tall and thin; just skin tightened over lanky bones. He wore a Red Sox baseball cap and chewed a pipe. He never bought tobacco and never smoked; he just liked the pipe in his mouth.

  “Done,” said Christina, and she felt horribly, terrifyingly, “done” — as if she would never return to Burning Fog Isle. She said nothing, letting Dolly do all the weeping good-bye. She waved calmly to her parents and spoke in a relaxed fashion to Anya. The wind fingered their hair, making Anya’s a dark storm and Christina’s a mass of glowing ribbons. The tourists said how beautiful they were.

  Frankie took the boat out into the solid gray of the ocean. They headed into the fog, and the island vanished; the fog soaked it up.

  “The island has drowned,” said Anya. She trailed her fingers in the fog. “Or have we drowned?”

  One tourist murmured to his wife, “Don’t those two girls look like ancient island princesses? Marked out for sacrifice?”

  The wife did not laugh. “Sent away for the sake of the islanders,” she whispered, “to be given to the sea.”

  Anya accidentally jogged Christina’s arm.

  The silvery-paper package with its pink and lavender ribbons was knocked out of Christina’s hand. She tried to catch it, but it fell overboard. Frankie’s boat surged on. The present floated in the waves, only the ribbons above water.

  “It’s an omen,” said the summer people, laughing.

  The children did not laugh.

  “It’s only tapes,” said Christina, although she felt sick and desperate, because now how would she exchange with Dolly? She had not even read Dolly’s good-bye card yet. Christina let herself cry a moment, knowing that her face was so damp from the fog nobody would be able to tell.

  The boys had seen. They came out of the cabin to commiserate. Benj said not to worry; he would buy Christina another tape. I’m such a hick I forgot I could buy more, she thought. I forgot about stores.

  Christina thought of her allowance. Her mother had given her five dollars a week. It sounded like a fortune, but Anya said it was nothing; Anya said Christina would be island poor and laughed at.

  It was low tide when they docked. The pilings that held up the dock were long and naked, like telephone poles. They weren’t pretty. They weren’t symmetrically placed. They were just there.

  Out in the harbor were friendship sloops, lobster smacks, visiting yachts, and cabin cruisers, trawlers, and Boston Whalers. The rich, sick, sea smell of bait was everywhere, coming from the herring in the barrels in the bait house.

  Before them the town rose in layers.

  There were the docks, boathouses, and fishmarkets. Then came the tourist lanes — boutiques; antique shops; boat, moped, and bike rentals; real estate agents, and ocean view inns. Next came the real town — gas station, bank, laundromat, shoe store, discount appliance store. Up on the hills were the houses, jammed next to each other. Layers of green tree and hill poked between roofs. Scarlet geraniums bloomed in dooryards.

  The summer people clambered off Frankie’s boat first, the way summer people always do. Michael and Benj began shouldering the trunks and boxes.

  A wave of excitement as wild and strong as the ocean gales swept over Christina.

  She was crossing a frontier.

  Childhood jumped rope on the isle, but now she would put away childhood, and be a teenager. She would fend for he
rself and answer to none.

  “Anya, I’m grown up now,” she whispered, but Anya neither agreed nor disagreed. Anya’s eyes were searching for the Shevvingtons.

  The children were all old Maine stock, with old names. Benj, Michael, and Dolly were Jayes; Anya was a Rothrock; and Christina, a Romney. The sea captain’s wife, who stepped off the roof all those generations ago, had been born a Rothrock like Anya. She had married Captain Shevvington.

  The principal’s name was Shevvington. Christina’s father said that was why the school board hired him — to have a Shevvington back in town, to match Shevvington Street, Shevvington House Restaurant, and the Shevvington Collection in the Maritime Museum.

  At orientation back in July, the island parents and children had met Mr. Shevvington. He had strange eyes. Unblinking and hypnotic, like a dog’s. Christina had wanted to stare right back, but the mad dog image frightened her, as if to stare wrongly would make Mr. Shevvington bite her, and she would be mortally wounded and die in agony.

  How impressed all the parents were with the principal! He’s such a caring man! they said to each other. He’s so understanding and yet so well disciplined. He’s gentle with the children, but strong and firm. He will be a perfect role model for the boys and a father figure for the girls.

  Christina had been amazed to hear her own parents talking like this, as if they had all just read the same pop psychology book.

  Christina, Anya, and the boys stood on the dock, surrounded by piles of possessions. Trunks, cardboard boxes, tennis rackets, suitcases, tote bags, backpacks. Christina felt like an immigrant who would probably have to get shots before she would be allowed to stay.

  High on the cliffs to their left, on the other side of the Singing Bridge, perched on top of Candle Cove, sat the Schooner Inne.

  Nobody in his right mind would build on Candle Cove. It was a fine place for warehouses or factories, but not for homes.

  Tide at Candle Cove was twenty-eight feet — as high as the roof of a house! The sides of the cove were rocks, huge outcroppings with ledges and shelves that appealed to children and romantics.

  A hundred years before, a couple on their honeymoon had picnicked on a granite outcropping that was twenty-five feet above the mud. How happy they must have been, sharing lemonade, perhaps nibbling at the same scarlet apple. How exciting the tide must have seemed, rumbling forward, the waves leaping and lashing. And suddenly the two lovers must have realized that twenty-five feet was not high enough to be safe from a twenty-eight foot tide. Christina imagined them trying to get off the ledge, the boy lifting the girl, her long skirts snagging, the water roaring around them, the boy thinking No, no, no, no, please don’t —

  Their bodies were never found. The sea took them to picnic forever and ever. The town had fenced off the cliff around Candle Cove, but still people went down there, climbing on the rocks, or worse, walking on the mud flats exposed at low tide.

  If nobody in his right mind would build on Candle Cove, thought Christina, then the sea captain was not in his right mind when he built his house. Why did his bride step off the roof?

  “If the Shevvingtons don’t hurry up and get here,” said Benj irritably, “we’ll use your father’s truck to haul this stuff to the Inne, Christina. You got keys?”

  “Of course she doesn’t have keys,” said his brother. “She’s only thirteen. She doesn’t know how to drive.”

  A solid trunk of a woman appeared between them. She had no female shape at all. She was without curves: a large thick post with hair on top. Even her head had no curves. Her features were very flat, so that she had no profile, only a face. “There will be no bickering in my household,” she said, laying a hand on the shoulders of the brothers. Her hands were fat, the flesh bulging over the many rings on her short fingers. The nails were long and hooked and had just been polished dark red, so that they seemed to bleed.

  Michael and Benj, who, with their sister Dolly, had never done anything except bicker, pulled away from her hands.

  “I am Mrs. Shevvington. Load your belongings into the van. Do not dillydally. There will be no dillydallying in my household.”

  Christina could not imagine this pie dough wed to Mr. Shevvington. Many years and many pounds separated them. Mr. Shevvington was so graceful, handsome, and silvery.

  The creature closed her thick, curved palm over Christina’s cheek. “Dillydallying?”

  “No, no,” said Christina, leaping away from the hand. It was sweaty. It had left a damp print on her cheek.

  The boys began loading the mountain of possessions into a dark green utility van with rust along the bottom. A driver sat motionless behind the steering wheel.

  Mrs. Shevvington commented that they had brought a considerable amount with them; she did not know where they thought they would store all these things. Certainly she, Mrs. Shevvington, did not propose to have her precious space given up to old tattered suitcases.

  “You have an inn,” protested Christina. “You must be able to store a million suitcases and trunks.”

  “When I state a fact, Christina, do not contradict me.”

  Christina flushed. The others looked embarrassed for her.

  Their posters had been rolled into one cardboard shipping tube, which had fallen on the dock. “Is this garbage?” Mrs. Shevvington asked.

  “No, I just didn’t see it,” said Benj.

  “Sloppy,” said Mrs. Shevvington. “There will be no sloppy thinking or acting in my household.”

  Benjamin’s smile faltered and vanished. Christina’s face would not even form a smile. She has flattened all our faces to match hers, thought Christina, and we have known her only for a minute.

  Mrs. Shevvington waved the van away. It drove off without them.

  “We will walk,” said Mrs. Shevvington. “It is a brisk walk, straight up Breakneck Hill. Good for you.”

  Michael nodded. “There will be no laziness in your household, huh, Mrs. Shevvington?” he said, with his most charming smile, the smile that won all the summer visitors over and made them come back the next year.

  Mrs. Shevvington smiled. Her teeth were as short as her fingernails: tiny yellowed stubs that hardly seemed like teeth at all. Michael’s sweet smile vanished slowly, as if being erased. When Michael’s smile was entirely gone, Mrs. Shevvington closed her own lips. Her face remained solid. “It is called Breakneck Hill,” she said, “because a hundred years ago, when bicycles first came into fashion, a young boy — about your age, Christina — rode his bicycle down that hill. Of course it was too steep for the rudimentary brake his cycle possessed.”

  “What happened to him?” Michael asked.

  Mrs. Shevvington raised thin wispy eyebrows. “He broke his neck, of course.”

  I don’t want to live with her for a year, Christina thought. I can’t bear to sit at breakfast with her, or sort laundry with her, or have her say good night.

  Christina wanted to run back down Breakneck Hill and leap back on the boat with Frankie, where Rindge would wag his tail and keep her safe, with his salty, doggy smell.

  How could the others walk so calmly up Breakneck Hill?

  Christina looked back. Frankie was already leaving. She clung to the safety fence, and it wobbled beneath her grip.

  Breakneck Hill was very steep, and no effort had been made to terrace it. It hurt their feet to walk at such a tilt. The wind tore at them, alternately pushing them away from the edge and yanking them toward it. In winter, spray from the waves would glaze the sidewalk with ice.

  It must have been a tragic time, a hundred years ago, she thought, what with the boy on the bike, the honeymooners, and the sea captain’s wife.

  Mrs. Shevvington handed Anya the poster tube to carry, and Anya went white and shivered, taking it.

  Michael pointed down into the mud flats that spread on either side of the channel. Out on the flats walked a man in a wet suit. The wet suit was brown rather than the usual black, and it was hard to distinguish the man from the mud. He see
med body-less. Skinless. Rubbery and slick.

  “Idiot,” said Mrs. Shevvington. She sounded rather pleased, as if she liked comparing herself favorably to idiots. She paused to watch the man.

  They were directly over Candle Cove, with breathtaking views out to sea and into Maine.

  The tide crept slowly in. Licking the barnacles, inching toward the docks and the town, it slithered along like a great flat fish.

  The man in the brown wet suit looked at the pancake of water and cocked his head, as if wondering whether to bother about it.

  A queer, sickening whisper had begun.

  Benj said, “It’s the tide. It’s coming.” He ran to the edge of the cliff and leaned over the flimsy wire. “Get out!” he yelled at the wet suit. “Get out of the cove! Now!”

  Christina, whose life was governed by tides, had never seen a tide like this. Although she had sat on the town docks a hundred times as this very tide came in, and from safety had laughed at its power, she had never seen the tide from above — the horror of the ocean coming home to Candle Cove.

  The pancake of flat water that had crawled over the mud flats rippled, as if monsters were writhing in it.

  The wet suit began running now, in a horrible slow pattern, like a man living out all Christina’s nightmares: his feet caught, the mud sucking on him.

  The wet suit reached one of the ladders that stuck down into the cove like trellises for roses.

  The water at his feet buckled like a milkshake in a blender.

  The wet suit ran up the ladder, and the water ran with him, eating his ankles.

  The rest of the ocean hurtled into the narrow granite opening of the Cove. It was loud as thunder, loud as a rock concert when you’re sitting next to the stage.

  Tons of green water crashed toward the docks.

  As the first wave passed beneath them, the children actually tasted it. The wind lifted salt up toward them, and the air was colder from the cold of the Atlantic, and it brushed their cheeks with ocean air.

  Anya cried out, but her cry was drowned by the crash of the tide.