hundreds of days when her boys, Mickey and Bucky, and Beth caught crabs down by the rocks with Uncle Grant. They used chicken necks for bait, tied up in knots on weighted ends of cord. They caught blue crabs by the score, shrieking as they moved them ever so carefully from the line to the net to the basket, trying not to get pinched—the Revenge of the Ill-Fated Crab. They shrieked again with excitement when one escaped the basket in the kitchen or on the porch, clicking its claws as it hurried sideways, looking for salvation. There was no salvation for those guys, no ma’am. They wound up steamed and dumped right from the colander on newspapers that were spread over the porch table, cracked apart and dipped in cocktail sauce. It made her laugh to remember. She realized then that she had not been crabbing in years. And she remembered how she had completely embraced her closely knit family when she was young and how important they had been to her.
“Maybe I should take up crabbing again, Lola. Do you want to come and help?”
“What’s that?” Mr. Brown said.
“Nothing. I was just talking to my dog.”
“No reason why not.”
They passed the hill fort then and Beth sighed with relief as it had not changed one lick, except for the children’s park built in front of it that had sprung up some years ago. In her mind’s eye, she could see herself, her cousins, and a gang of island kids sliding down it on flattened cardboard boxes and catching the devil from the town fathers for trespassing and sledding on the patchy grass. They had been very young, not quite ten, when Mickey had his first brush with the law.
“What do you think you’re doing, son?”
Mickey looked up into the face of the chief of police and everyone thought he was going to wet his pants right there in front of the whole world.
“Um, nothing?”
“You children get on out of here now, before I have to lock you all up! You hear me?”
Beth giggled to remember how they had abandoned their cardboard and run in every direction to escape incarceration.
She remembered flying kites on the beach in the winter and all those stories they told and retold…you see, as long as things looked about the same and they told and retold the same stories, the past was still alive. They could all stay young and live forever. In that moment, that was what she wanted—for her life to be as it had been before her father died and to live forever in that corner of her childhood world.
“Turn left here?” Mr. Brown said, snapping her out of her daydream.
“Yes, left here and then right to that driveway on the left. Yes. Left here.”
“Welcome home,” Mr. Brown said, and put the car in park, leaving the engine to continue its rumbling. “Always good to be home, ain’t it?”
She simply said, “Yeah, it is.” What she wanted to say was something else entirely. She wanted to say, You don’t know how complicated this is. I might be swallowed alive in the next year. Get me out of here. But she didn’t.
She only said, “Yeah, it is.”
Beth leaned forward in her seat to size up the Island Gamble. She thought she had known exactly what to expect. The house would loom large, spooky, and scare the daylights out of her with its enormity. But it didn’t. She was ship-shape. Her shutters were straight, her white clapboards glistened from a recent paint job, and her silver tin roof mirrored the enormous clouds overhead like the compact mirror of a dowager. The Island Gamble seemed sweet, grandmotherly, and nostalgic, as safe a haven as one could ever want. At the sight of it she became emotional and suddenly she wanted to cry. There was her mother’s old Volvo wagon and her Aunt Maggie’s car too. They were there, waiting for her.
She got out and liberated Lola from her crate, hooking her leash to her collar. She paid Mr. Brown and he deposited her luggage at the foot of the steps, meaning she would have the pleasure of hauling it all up the steps and into