Broken Bay Page 2

  “I don’t know how you do it,” Hannah said. “You’re made of tougher stuff than me.”

  Georgia made a face. “You know me, I’d go crazy cooped up in an office. I’ll take the frostbite.” Georgia and Hannah didn’t look like cousins at first glance. Their fathers were brothers: sons of Japanese immigrants with deep roots in Seattle. Hannah’s father had married Charlie, a blonde hippie chick from Modesto, while Georgia’s father had married Nadira, whom he’d met when she was a doctoral student at UW, newly arrived from Nairobi. Emma had a distinct vision of her from childhood: so tall and elegant, intimidating right up until she smiled and it set the room aglow. Despite the difference in the cousins’ appearance, Emma was always struck by their similarities when they were in the same room, the way they moved with economy, their lovely faces that never revealed much, their thick, dark hair, Hannah’s arrow straight and Georgia’s curly and seemingly miles long if measured root to tip.

  “Though I do like Hannah’s suits,” Georgia said, smiling at her cousin. “And your shoe game is on point. The most glamorous thing I ever have on my feet is my MicroTherm boots.”

  “You know I love my shoes. The office thing can be a drag. But at least I’ve got a good view.” Hannah worked on a high floor in one of the downtown buildings that looked out onto Puget Sound. The sunsets outside her window were spectacular and, like it or not, she was often there to see them, even during the summer when they happened around nine.

  “And you’re making that money,” Abby said. “Nothing wrong with that.” Another thing Emma was unsure of—what it was Abby did for a living. There was something with a local Portland co-op, something about hemp, and she’d mentioned coding.

  Hannah shrugged. “Yeah, as long as I get time off to travel. And the money is good. I know that’s gauche to say.”

  “Um, please!” Abby said, “We get to say whatever we want this weekend. Right? Especially you, Hannah.”

  This was greeted with shouts of assent and raised champagne glasses. A second bottle was produced as quickly as the first was emptied. Emma slipped into the kitchen to start making dinner—tacos and guacamole, plus homemade margaritas. Offers to help were lobbed in her direction but she waved them off—the kitchen was a large open space with a center island that connected to the main room so she could be part of the conversation even from where she stood.

  “Georgia, where do you spend most of your time in Alaska?” Abby asked.

  “My home base is Fairbanks, with the university, but we go all over.”

  “That’s so rad. I was on a halibut fishing boat one year. It was rough, but beautiful country. We saw humpback whales almost every day.”

  “How did you end up on a fishing boat?” Georgia asked.

  “How does any girl end up on a fishing boat?”

  No one seemed to know the answer to this question.

  “Love,” Abby finally filled in for them.

  “Ugh,” Stephanie said from over by the window, waving her cell phone in the air. “No bars. Does anyone get service?”

  Abby shrugged. “Not me, but I go tech-free on weekends anyway.”

  “That’s fine, but I need to check on my kids,” Stephanie said, reminding Emma that she ought to check in with her husband, Spencer, about her own brood. On the one hand, she missed them already, on the other hand to have a few days to be free of the persistent drumbeat of mommy, mommy, mommy was an immeasurable relief.

  “Mine works,” Georgia said, getting to her feet and handing her clunky, strange-looking phone to Stephanie, who smiled gratefully. “Satellite. We all have these up north. You could practically get service from the moon.”

  The day that followed, their first of three on the island, was exactly what Emma had hoped for. The unlikely quintet suddenly seemed like the oldest of old friends as they spent the day exploring the island under a sparkling blue sky. There was nothing like Northwest sunshine. It felt a thousand times more brilliant than the sun in California where Emma and Hannah had spent their college years. The trees were greener, the water bluer, the whole effect rarer and more precious.

  When they’d returned from their long morning walk through the woods, Stephanie hollered from the house’s giant garage.

  “Did you guys see the cruisers? Oh my god! These remind me of the one I had growing up.”

  Each of the cruiser bikes had large baskets affixed to the handlebars, which the girls filled with ice—nestling bottles of beer and a steel water bottle containing mimosas. Georgia—who had a portable version of everything one could imagine from her field travels—brought along her Bluetooth stereo. The five of them pedaled around the island for hours drinking and telling stories. Abby seemed to have no end of wild tales—that time she’d been a hostess on a European cruise line, or the summer she’d spent living with a painter in Mexico City. It was unclear how much was strictly true, nor did that seem to matter much.

  They stopped in at the Broken Bean in Walker’s Landing. The island’s coffee shop shared a space with the Treasure Trove, a gift store boasting puzzles, books, T-shirts, and all manner of kitschy memorabilia. As they waited for their coffee orders to be called up, the girls wandered the store aimless and buzzed. Emma picked up a book called Cabin Porn and as she leafed through the pictures of cabins—some beautiful, some odd—Hannah materialized by her side, sliding in at her elbow to look at the book.

  “See, this is what I want,” Hannah said.

  “This cabin?” Emma asked, looking down at the dark, mossy one-room shack, which sat nestled deep in the forest somewhere in Germany.

  “Just a cabin or even a yurt or something. To get away, you know?”

  Emma knew that this was not Steven’s idea of an ideal vacation home, and certainly it was as far as could be from their shared downtown condo, with its majestic view of Elliott Bay from a high and pristine vantage. Steven did not rough it. It had been a point of some contention for Steven and Hannah that he would only camp for a night, and even then, he insisted they be close to facilities. But Emma supposed all marriages—even the happiest of them—contained such compromises. For example, Emma thought soccer to be the most boring sport on earth, and yet did she not accompany Spencer to at least a handful of Sounders games each season? And did he not good-naturedly join her on hikes, which she knew he secretly thought of as “walking uphill, but for no reason,” as she’d overheard him say to his brother once?

  “You guys!” Abby said excitedly, appearing next to Hannah, “Look at this!”

  She handed Hannah a cheaply made paperback, its cover a funny little illustration of a tree-lined house with a ghost in one of the windows.

  “Haunted San Juans: Ghostly Tales from the Islands,” Hannah read out with a smile.

  “It’s by a local author. Or you know “author.” I’m buying it; it’s seven dollars. Maybe we can find something about Walker and go on a ghost hunt.”

  Just then, their coffee orders were called up and they congregated at the bar to pick them up and pay.

  That night, Saturday, was their night to hit the town—which meant they were headed to the one pub on the island—the Catch and Release—for a night of drinking and dancing with the locals.

  “What can I get you girls?” asked the bartender in a raspy voice that spoke to inhaling the smoke of her own and others’ cigarettes for too many years. One could tell she’d been pretty when she was young; now her face bore the windblown look of an outdoorswoman.

  “What do you have on tap?” Georgia asked.

  “Lagunitas, Corona, Freemont Ale, Horseheads,” she said.

  “Horsehead, please.”

  “I’m going to have a Cut Bait,” Hannah said, studying the brightly colored, laminated cocktail menu.

  “Oh, what’s in that?” Emma asked.

  “Uh,” Hannah said, looking back down at the menu, “Rum, tequila, vodka, triple sec, grenadine,
lime juice, champagne floater optional. So everything; everything is in it.”

  “Sounds awful,” Stephanie said under her breath.

  “Sounds awesome. I’ll take one of those, champagne floater included,” Abby chimed in.

  “I don’t suppose you have wine?” Stephanie asked rather apologetically, leaning over the bar.

  “Red and white.”

  Stephanie raised her eyebrows. “Any good?”

  “Well,” the bartender said with a smile, “the manager has us fill up decoy bottles from a box. Does that answer your question?”

  Stephanie cringed. “Which of the, um, cocktails is your favorite?”

  “Well, I personally like the Cut Bait, but the Hell in a Handbasket is the house specialty.”

  “The . . .”

  “It’s similar but it’s got a floater of one fifty-one. And we light it on fire.”

  “Well, someone needs to order that one,” Abby said.

  Stephanie looked nonplussed. “Okay, Abby,” she said with a smile. “I will if you will.”

  Abby hooted with laughter, throwing an arm around Stephanie.

  “Make it two, my good woman,” she said.

  The bartender smiled. “Madeline,” she said. “Miss Madeline to you bunch.”

  “Yes, Miss Madeline,” Abby said, “two Hells in two Handbaskets, please.”

  “Stand back,” she said when she had the drinks lined up and ready to set ablaze, “last time I did one of these for a bachelorette, the bride nearly singed her eyebrows off.”

  “How did you know we were a bachelorette party?” Emma asked. Hannah had expressly forbidden any paraphernalia: no sashes, no tiaras, no novelty penises. Actually, no penises of any variety.

  “Wild guess,” she said with a sideways smile. She lit up the drinks and the whoosh of fire brought cheers from the girls, and left them momentarily mesmerized by the waning blue flames licking the tops of the glasses.

  “You’re the bride?” Madeline asked a moment later, with a glance at Hannah, who nodded. “I thought so, you look like you’re about to go swimming with sharks.”

  “I do not look like that,” she said quietly.

  “You do, sweetheart,” Madeline was pouring a round of tequila shots, “and so you should, I ought to know, been married three times. Cheers, ladies,” she said picking up the sixth shot, “these are on me.”

  The night continued apace. A band, surprisingly good despite appearing to be made up of grandfatherly fishermen, played Beach Boys and Rod Stewart covers. The girls danced like fools. Later, when the band took five, they returned to the bar for another round; this time, they all ordered the Hell in a Handbasket.

  “Where are you girls staying on the island?” Madeline asked.

  “Right near Broken Bay,” Hannah said, taking a sip of her no-longer-flaming drink.

  “Pretty up there, but you girls be careful on that beach. You know about Broken Bay?”

  “There was a pamphlet in the house that said there used to be a lot of shipwrecks there,” Emma said, “in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds.”

  “Oh, used to be? Is that what it said? There was one two months ago, two local fishermen died. There’s a wicked undertow, in a storm it pulls ships right up onto the rocks. The locals don’t go anywhere near it.”

  The girls looked at each other warily.

  “It does seem really quiet for such a nice beach,” Stephanie said. They’d gone by it earlier on their morning walk and there hadn’t been a soul in sight.

  “No swimming down there, got it,” Emma said.

  “If you want to swim try Eagle Point on the south end of the island. Though I’m not sure we’ll get the weather for it this weekend,” Madeline said, with an apologetic smile. “Got a storm front coming in.”

  Emma tried to conceal her disappointment—she couldn’t be responsible for the weather though, could she?—and turned her face away from the group. The other bartender was waiting on the pack of grizzled men who’d been staring at the girls all night. Emma had been aware of them for some time now; it was impossible not to feel their heavy, hooded eyes following the five of them from the dance floor to the bar and back again. On the other side of the room there was a group of sporty-looking twentysomething guys who’d also been watching them with wolflike interest. Unlike the older men, they seemed poised to actually make their approach at some point. It was not Emma’s first bachelorette party by a long shot, and she knew they were a bull’s-eye: tacky paraphernalia or no. But as a mom of two young kids, it’d been quite a while since Emma had been to a bar, and the protective shell she’d developed in her twenties had thinned. She wondered when this part of being a woman would be over. She wondered if she would miss it, or if it would just be a relief when men stopped looking at her that way. Perhaps both.

  “Oh! This song!” Abby said as the band picked back up and began in on “You Shook Me All Night Long.”

  “Yeah! Let’s dance,” Stephanie said, grabbing Hannah’s hand.

  It wasn’t long until the group of boys—who by then seemed more a swirl of strong jaws and broad, polo-shirt-clad shoulders than distinct entities—had joined them. The girls stayed until the band broke once more and then piled into the island’s sole taxi van to return to the house.

  Emma felt herself sobering a bit by the time they made it back to the house. Did Hannah seem a little melancholy tonight? No, she was having fun, she thought, watching her in the kitchen laughing with Georgia. She hoped she wasn’t too bummed about the weather. Emma knew she needed to stop obsessing about making everything perfect for Hannah. Hannah only expected perfection from Hannah, no one else.

  “Wine, hot tub, who’s with me?!” Abby shouted, emerging from her room already bikini-clad.

  A cheer arose and off they went to the bedrooms to change. Emma went to the kitchen to put her water glass in the sink. Just as she turned to head to the bedroom, something in one of the windows caught her eye: a flash of red moving in, and then quickly out, of sight.

  “Hot tub, pop the bubbly, rubbin’ your spot love got your screaming ‘Punish me.’ ” Abby was dancing around the kitchen with a bottle of champagne, singing an ancient hip-hop song that had been popular when they’d all been in college. She appeared to be oblivious to what Emma had seen.

  Emma, suddenly wickedly alert, watched the windows. And then she saw: a dark-haired woman, a luminous pale face; the flash of red had been her dress, her jacket, something. She was there and then gone.

  “Guys!” Emma shrieked, “There’s someone outside!”

  The girls flushed to the front of the house like a flock of birds startled from the underbrush by a gunshot. They were all in various states of undress.

  “What?” Stephanie clutched her towel around her now nearly bare body. “Do we have a prowler?”

  For some reason, this comment made Stephanie sound about sixty-five, and Emma cracked a smile despite her racing heart.

  But they all felt it suddenly: how remote they were, that being nowhere in sight of another house was a luxury but also a liability. How, as a group of women, they were always a lure to those who might harm them.

  “I’ll just go check,” Emma shrugged on her coat and retrieved a small flashlight from the kitchen drawer.

  The girls didn’t want to let her go alone and so they tromped out, half-dressed and wearing flip-flops, Abby brandishing a kitchen knife just in case. Stephanie rolled her eyes at this, but Emma was secretly relieved. Goodness knows, with her colorful history, she might have been in knife fight or two. The darkness that surrounded the house felt vast: on one side, the ocean black and churning with a long carpet of light from the brilliant waxing moon, and behind the house, after a good twenty feet of lawn, the edge of the forest. When their search yielded nothing, they returned to the house.

  “I guess I didn’t see anything, or
whatever I saw, it’s gone now. Maybe it was a deer?”

  “A deer that looks like a person?” Georgia asked.

  Emma forced a laugh; she didn’t want to ruin the evening. “Too many cocktails at the Catch and Release. Hot tub! It’s freezing out there,” she declared, trying to shake it off.

  The girls finished changing into their bathing suits. Stephanie wore a bikini, and Emma felt a stab of envy looking at her flat stomach. How had three children emerged from there? And it wasn’t as though Stephanie was one of those Eastside housewives that was a full-time fitness queen, she ran a busy private dermatology practice. They slipped into the steaming water, packing the small tub and sending a small wave of chlorinated surf over the sides.

  “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,” Abby laughed.

  “Are you okay?” Hannah asked, sloshing over to squeeze in next to Emma. “You look a little freaked out.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, probably too brightly. Was she? She was still unsettled, and as the minutes passed, she felt increasingly certain she’d seen a face in that window; but she did not want this to be so. What if there was some creepy prowler lying in wait? What then? Should they call someone? But who, the police? That felt like an overreaction. And she so wanted this weekend to be peaceful.

  “More importantly, are you having a good time?” Emma asked instead.

  “The best time,” Hannah said, and Emma thought she was only imagining something wistful in her tone.

  “Oh! I have an idea,” Abby said, drinking down the rest of the champagne in her plastic cup and standing to go back in the house, goose pimples covering her fair skin as the night air hit her dripping body. “I’m going to get the ghost-story book, let’s see if there’s a good one about Walker Island.”