You come here for the first time, and you think all your hopes and dreams have come true. Your life will end happily ever after.
The point is, for a kid who’s only ever lived in a house with wheels under it, this looks like the special safe place where she’ll live, loved and cared for, forever.
For a kid who used to sit on shag carpet with a box of colored pencils or crayons and draw pictures of these houses, houses she’d never seen. Just pictures of the way she imagined them with their porches and stained-glass windows. For this little girl to one day see these houses for real. These exact houses. Houses she thought she’d only ever imagined . . .
Since the first time she could draw, little Misty Marie knew the wet secrets of the septic tanks behind each house. She knew the wiring inside their walls was old, cloth-wrapped for insulation and strung through china tubes and along china posts. She could draw the inside of every front door, where every island family marked the names and height of each child.
Even from the mainland, from the ferry dock in Long Beach, across three miles of salt water, the island looks like paradise. The pines so dark green they look black, the waves breaking against the brown rocks, it’s like everything she could ever want. Protected. Quiet and alone.
Nowadays, this is how the island looks to a lot of people. A lot of rich strangers.
For this kid who’d never swam in anything bigger than the trailer park pool, blinded by too much chlorine, for her to ride the ferry into Waytansea Harbor with the birds singing and the sun bouncing bright off the rows and rows of the hotel windows. For her to hear the ocean rolling into the side of the breakwater, and feel the sun so warm and the clean wind in her hair, smelling the roses in full bloom . . . the thyme and rosemary . . .
This pathetic teenager who’d never seen the ocean, she’d already painted the headlands and the cliffs that hung high above the rocks. And she’d got them perfect.
Poor little Misty Marie Kleinman.
This girl came here as a bride, and the whole island came out to greet her. Forty, fifty families, all of them smiling and waiting their turn to shake her hand. A choir of grade school kids sang. They threw rice. There was a big dinner in her honor at the hotel, and everyone toasted her with champagne.
From its hillside up above Merchant Street, the windows of the Waytansea Hotel, all six stories of them, the rows of windows and glassed-in porches, the zigzag lines of dormers in the steep roof, they were all watching her arrive. Everyone was watching her come to live in one of the big houses in the shady, tree-lined belly of the fish.
Just one look at Waytansea Island, and Misty Kleinman figured it was worth kissing off her blue-collar mom. The dog piles and shag carpet. She swore never to set foot in the old trailer park. She put her plans for being a painter on hold.
The point is, when you’re a kid, even when you’re a little older, maybe twenty and enrolled in art school, you don’t know anything about the real world. You want to believe somebody when he says he loves you. He only wants to marry you and take you home to live in some perfect island paradise. A big stone house on East Birch Street. He says he only wants to make you happy.
And no, honestly, he won’t ever torture you to death.
And poor Misty Kleinman, she told herself, it wasn’t a career as an artist that she wanted. What she really wanted, all along, was the house, the family, the peace.
Then she came to Waytansea Island, where everything was so right.
Then it turned out
A MAN CALLS FROM the mainland, from Ocean Park, to complain that his kitchen is gone.
It’s natural not to notice at first. After you live anywhere long enough—a house, an apartment, a nation—it just seems too small.
Ocean Park, Oysterville, Long Beach, Ocean Shores, these are all mainland towns. The woman with the missing closet. The man with his bathroom gone. These people, they’re all messages on the answering machine, people who had some remodeling done on their vacation places. Mainland places, summer people. You have a nine-bedroom house you only see two weeks each year, it might take you a few seasons to notice you’re missing part. Most of these people have at least a half dozen houses. These aren’t really homes. These are investments. They have condos and co-ops. They have apartments in London and Hong Kong. A different toothbrush waits in every time zone. A pile of dirty clothes on every continent.
This voice complaining on Peter’s answering machine, he says there was a kitchen with a gas range. A double oven in one wall. A big two-door refrigerator.
Listening to him gripe, your wife, Misty Marie, she nods yes, a lot of things used to be different around here.
It used to be you could catch the ferry just by showing up. It runs every half hour, to the mainland and back. Every half hour. Now you get in line. You wait your turn. Sit in the parking lot with a mob of strangers in their shiny sports cars that don’t smell like urine. The ferry comes and goes three or four times before there’s room for you on board. You, sitting all that time in the hot sun, in that smell.
It takes you all morning just to get off the island.
You used to walk into the Waytansea Hotel and get a window table, no problem. It used to be you never saw litter on Waytansea Island. Or traffic. Or tattoos. Pierced noses. Syringes washed up on the beach. Sticky used condoms in the sand. Billboards. Corporate tagging.
The man in Ocean Park, he said how his dining room wall is nothing but perfect oak wainscoting and blue- striped wallpaper. The baseboard and picture molding and cove molding run seamless and unbroken from corner to corner. He knocked, and the wall is solid, plaster drywall on wood-frame construction. In the middle of this perfect wall is where he swears the kitchen door used to be.
Over the phone, the Ocean Park man says, “Maybe this is my mistake, but a house
The lady in Seaview only missed her linen closet when she couldn’t find a clean towel.
The man in Ocean Park, he said how he took a corkscrew from the dining room sideboard. He screwed a little hole where he remembered the kitchen door. He got a steak knife from the sideboard and stabbed the hole a little bigger. He has a little flashlight on his key chain, and he pressed his cheek to the wall and peeked through the hole he’d made. He squinted, and in the darkness was a room with words written across the walls. He squinted and let his eyes adjust, and there in the dark, all he could read were snatches:
“. . . set foot on the island and you will die . . .” the words said. “. . . run as fast as you can from this place. They will kill all of God’s children if it means saving their own . . .”
In where his kitchen should be, it says: “. . . all of you butchered . . .”
The man in Ocean Park says, “You’d better come see what I found.” His voice on the answering machine says, “The handwriting alone is worth the trip.”
THE DINING ROOM at the Waytansea Hotel, it’s named the Wood and Gold Dining Room because of its walnut paneling and gold brocade upholstery. The fireplace mantel is carved walnut with polished brass andirons. You have to keep the fire burning even when the wind blows from the mainland; then smoke backs up and coughs out the front. Soot and smoke slip out until you have to pull the batteries from every smoke detector. By then the whole hotel smells a little on fire.
Every time someone asks for table nine or ten by the fireplace and then bitches about the smoke and how it’s too hot, and asks for a new table, you need to take a drink. Just a sip of whatever you’ve got. Cooking sherry works for your poor fat wife.
This is a day in the life of Misty Marie, queen of the slaves.
Another longest day of the year.
It’s a game anybody can play. This is just Misty’s own personal coma.
