Page 4 of Dead of Summer

ORLA

The Hadley Island ferry backs away from the mainland, shuddering loudly.

Orla O’Connor has stationed herself on the top deck, her suitcase wedged between her knees and the row of plastic seats in front of her.

Their tops are cracked and bleached to the color of orange sherbet from the sun.

She looks around at the other passengers, relieved to find that she recognizes none of them.

They all seem to be tourists who, despite the relatively cool and windy conditions on the boat, are optimistically wearing shorts and T-shirts.

They take pictures with their phones, calling loudly across the deck to one another.

Orla feels like she is living on a completely different plane of existence than all of them.

Two women in their sixties settle into the row of chairs in front of Orla.

They wear matching straw hats and lean back relaxed as they chatter on about where to get the best calamari on the island.

Orla sinks deeper into her seat trying to bury her annoyance.

What exactly is it that bothers her about these people?

Happiness? The sound of their voices? Or is it that their lives seem so carefree, so different from her own?

The boat picks up speed as it cuts though the sound, and she looks nervously toward the bow where the swells undulate higher and higher, breaking into frothy whitecaps.

Is it too soon for more Xanax? The last one she took was before she got on the bus in New York this morning, her throat sour with what she was about to do.

She holds off for now. She’ll certainly need another later.

After nearly twelve years Orla has almost managed to forget what it is like here, the briny vegetal smell of the water, the way the salt immediately tangles in your hair and makes it sticky.

The rush of memory makes her stomach turn even before the front of the boat pitches up.

It comes down hard, smashing into a wave.

Her palms are damp as she braces herself, holding on to the bottom of her seat.

It wobbles slightly as the boat collides with another wave, sending a giant spray up across the bow.

A few of the people around her scream with delight.

Orla wants to turn and glare at them, but she is too busy holding on as tightly as possible.

She tries to focus on her breathing, to not let her nerves overtake her. Breathe in, one, two, three, four.

Orla hates the ocean. It is part of the reason she’s avoided coming back to Hadley Island for so long.

She cannot even bear to look at it, the way it is constantly moving, how staring down into the churning darkness you can hardly see a thing.

The water can trap the light and play tricks on you.

When you are out in it you have no idea how deep it is.

You don’t have any way to see the untold number of creatures waiting in the dark.

The boat cracks against a large swell, sending another blast of water up over the bow. Orla sinks farther into her seat, gripping the armrests as the tourists shriek with laughter. There are more of them than she expected so early in the season. It’s only the first weekend in June.

The ferry rolls sideways against the waves as they move across the sound.

Orla watches the horizon, holding her breath as the island comes into view.

It starts as a thin strip of gray and green shimmering above the water.

Without moving a muscle, she watches as it grows closer and crisper.

The horizon tilts as anxiety grips at her chest.

Soon she can see Hadley Island clearly. Each rocky cove and outcropping comes into focus, familiar as kin, followed by the ellipse of the town’s main beach.

A surprisingly large crowd of people are already out there, folding chairs and umbrellas claiming spots on the soft white-gray sand even though the water will still be too cold for swimming.

She’s been trying to avoid it, craning her neck to look literally anywhere else, but now the ferry is moving directly past the inlet that holds the Clarke mansion.

It’s impossible to tear your eyes from the cliff-like marble exterior, blinding white in the sun.

It’s set on the back of a vast emerald lawn that slopes down to the private dock and crescent of meticulously combed beach.

The only surviving Gilded Age summer home on the island stands in stark contrast to the cedar-shingled bungalows around it.

Orla’s stomach sloshes as she sees a speck of a person step out onto the veranda, but before she can try to identify who, the ferry has pulled forward past a rocky outcropping obscuring her view.

They are almost to shore now, passing through a small city of yachts moored in the harbor.

They tower above the little ferry, their multistoried facades stamped with tacky gold names.

If engaging with the art world has revealed anything to Orla, it is that you can buy nearly anything in this world but taste.

The woman in front of her turns to her left, pointing at something away from shore.

“Look at that house over there on its very own island,” Orla hears her say to her friend.

Orla’s heart dips precariously as she follows her gaze to the tiny island.

A lone single-story house is perched on stilts atop a gray pile of rock in the middle of the water.

“Like a fairy tale,” the friend replies.

Or a nightmare , Orla thinks.

“Do you think someone lives there? Would it even be possible?”

If only she knew. She listens to them deliberate on the details.

If Orla were in a different sort of mood, or maybe if she’d had a few drinks, she would have interjected to say that someone does live there.

She may even have told the women what she knows about the strange, sad home of Marjorie and Henry Wright and the watery grave Henry made for her best friend Alice.

She turns her face away and pulls her hands farther into the sleeves of her sweatshirt as they chug through the harbor and approach a row of buildings painted in cheerful, if a bit weatherworn, colors hugging the water.

The entire village of Port Mary. The ferry turns clumsily with a loud groan and the engine cuts.

The awkward cries of seagulls pierce the sudden quiet; they swoop overhead, landing on the pilings as the ferry scrapes along the dock.

A teenage boy leaps from the deck, deftly twisting the lines and pulling the boat in.

Back in high school Orla and Alice always knew the kids working the ferry.

They were their peers; now she wonders how many of them have stayed on the island.

Not many, she’s sure. Very few people born on Hadley stay here for good.

If you have the means, Hadley is the kind of place you return to in summers, not a place to live year-round.

Not if you can afford not to. Winter on the island is desolate. Orla remembers it well.

Around her people gather their things. They have moved on from the novelty of the boat ride and are already chattering excitedly about trips to the beach and dinner reservations and where to buy the freshest lobsters.

Orla feels conspicuously alone among them.

She grabs her bag and adjusts her sunglasses and propels herself to the narrow staircase.

The window of Mint Ship ice cream shop slides open to welcome the tourists clomping down the dock behind her, their faces pink from the wind.

Orla dodges past them, yanking her suitcase behind her.

At the end of the dock, Orla turns to the left and walks quickly through the village.

Harbor Street hugs the water in an arc of quaint shops and restaurants.

She notes that not one has changed since she was last here.

She rolls her suitcase past the Salty Crab, the seafood restaurant and dive bar where she spent many nights drinking with Alice before they were even legal.

The sidewalk out front gives off a tang of spilled beer drying in the sun.

But from the doorway, propped open slightly, wafts the smell of some deep-fried sea creature.

Orla’s stomach gurgles. An empty booth by the window catches the sunlight invitingly.

She stops and presses her face to the glass.

A woman sits at the end of the bar below a collection of decorative ropes and anchors.

She’s wearing a half apron and has a pencil tucked over her ear.

Jean O’Malley has been a fixture at the Salty Crab as long as Orla has been alive.

Her curly hair is grayer now, her sturdy body just a bit wider than Orla remembers her.

She had always seemed so capable, so resilient, that Orla never considered her life outside of the Crab.

She’d never left the island and never married.

She had only her sister, Marjorie, and her brother-in-law, Henry Wright.

Back when Orla was little, she had seen the three of them occasionally wandering around town or sharing dinner in the Crab.

But after what happened with Alice, Marjorie and Henry stopped coming to the island altogether.

Apart from her shifts at the Crab, Jean was always on her own.

Orla watches her wearily begin to roll silverware into napkins, her wrists flicking with over thirty years of muscle memory.

Orla’s sunglasses accidentally tap against the glass. Jean looks up, startled.

Damn it.

Orla jerks back from the window and rushes the rest of the way up Harbor Street.

She passes the other restaurants, their awnings advertising lobster claws and scallop risottos, then walks past the liquor store and the post office.

She practically runs past the Clarke property, its white marble facade looming down a drive accessible behind a sealed metal gate.

Orla doesn’t so much as pause to catch her breath until the road finally curves, and she can see the cedarwood shingles on the very top of her childhood home poking up between the trees.

She approaches the house with an unexpected fluttering in her chest. It’s been kept up with the help of a caretaker and looks unchanged from when she left.

The lush green lawn is freshly mowed. Stands of indigo hydrangeas in full bloom flank the lawn.

The swing on the front porch wavers invitingly in the breeze.

She almost expects her dad to step outside holding a tray inviting her to try something he’d just finished cooking.

She stops midway up the walk, turning her head to the right.

She had been trying not to look but she has to.

For nearly Orla’s entire childhood Alice had lived right next door.

They were the same age, as luck would have it.

A built-in best friend. Alice, bold and smart with an adventurous streak that would have gotten them into trouble more often were it not for Orla’s more balanced and careful nature.

The two of them were as close as any sisters could have been, spending every waking moment they could together, rushing back and forth between their houses from the time the sun came up until after dark when their parents called them back to their respective homes for bed.

Even their houses matched. Alice’s house, once the slightly nicer of the two, is now so overgrown it is hardly visible even up close. Through the dense vegetation, Orla can find only a vague hint of the outline of what was once a beautiful and immaculately kept seaside home.

The wraparound porch where Orla and Alice once acted out a thousand made-up fairy tales with their dolls and stuffed animals is now almost completely obscured behind a dark mass of vines and hanging branches.

The roof of the porch has caved in, the jagged edges of rotted boards peeking through the opening.

The cedar siding, where it is visible through the overgrown brush, is curled back, with gaps in the shingles like a partly scaled fish.

The glass in the picture windows is obscured by a thick layer of dirt.

A shutter on one has come loose and hangs at an angle.

Orla hadn’t known how bad it had gotten.

She’d never dared to ask. But the extent of the neglect makes her realize how much time has passed.

She turns away feeling sick and pulls her things up the steps to her house.

As she crouches to dig for the house key in the pocket of her suitcase, a gust of wind blows over her bare legs.

In the shadow of the front porch there is a chill in the air.

It’s the kind of cold that seemed impossible to imagine when she packed yesterday in her sweaty New York apartment. Her hands tremble a little.

The feeling is coming back. The pain of it twists in her chest, building and building like the pressure at the start of a scream.

She rushes to unlock the door.