“I tried,” Isabel found herself saying. She sounded pathetic even to herself.
“You shouldn’t have to try,” Sophie said. “That’s what you’ve never understood.”
After that, Isabel was far too embarrassed to gather with the other mourners in the parlor of her parents’ house, where Sophie now lived. Instead, she’d wound up at the Black Horse Tavern, where she drank far too much and forgot just about everything. It was the sort of evening when she knew she was making a mistake while it was happening. She danced with men she barely knew and those she knew too well, and she couldn’t remember how she’d made it up to her rented room above the bar. In the morning, Isabel woke with a headache and a huge desire never to return to Maine. She quickly packed her bag and went downstairs, hoping to escape before anyone took notice of her, but there was Sophie, having a coffee at the bar. Sophie had always been the calm, logical sister, but now she looked distraught. And there was something Isabel hadn’t noticed at the church. Sophie was pregnant.
“You’re deserting me,” Sophie said. “Once again. Dad went to the bar, you locked yourself away with your books, and I had to take care of everything.”
“I’m not deserting anyone. Mom and Dad are gone, and the bookstore is as good as ruined. Why would I stay?”
“Because we promised we would take over the bookstore,” Sophie reminded her. “We told Dad we would.”
They had said so, true enough, but they’d been children, two sad girls, who had lost their mother. Books had been Isabel’s salvation and her escape. She’d spent evenings in the fairy-tale section reading her way through the stacks of books, always preferring Andrew Lang’s color-coded fairy books. Sophie had favored biographies and history, the stories of women who had survived despite all odds. The island had seemed enchanted then, and when the moon was full, they sneaked outside to read by its light. Sometimes their father would find them asleep in the grass in the morning, their books still open. Sometimes Matt would come by to read books about sailing, as if he were predicting his future with stories of drowned men and the women who waited for them on the shore. Matt and Sophie were fated to be together even back then, but fate can turn dark when you least expect it to, and there you are alone and in mourning with no one to help you raise the child you’re about to bring into the world.
“You think I should stay on this island because of a promise I made when I was ten years old?” Isabel asked her sister. “Should I only have peanut butter sandwiches for lunch because that’s what I ate then?”
“Are you my sister or aren’t you?” Sophie’s face was pale; her black hair was knotted. She looked wild-eyed, and ready to snap.
“Of course I am.” Was she being asked to forget her apartment, her job, her own life? “I can stay with you until you get over Matt.” It was the absolute worst thing to say. Isabel knew that it was as soon as she blurted it out, but words that have been said cannot be unspoken, and Sophie was hurt beyond measure.
“Is that what you think happens when you lose someone you love? You get over them? You forget them and go on as if they never existed? Go on then, leave. You’ve always done as you pleased, just like you did last night. You should be more careful about who you sleep with, Izzy. Everyone on the island is talking about it.”
Isabel had been drunk the night before and only now remembered that she’d spent most of her time with a man she couldn’t quite remember. She only recalled that he was tall and dark and familiar. It was true, they had almost wound up in bed—she remembered that now—but after kissing madly outside the door to her room above the bar, the fellow had said something like, “I don’t think you’re in a state to make this decision. Why don’t I come back in the morning?”
But in the morning, she was gone. Sophie had left the tavern through the front door, and Isabel left out the back, and if the man in the hallway ever had returned, he certainly didn’t find her there waiting. Instead, she’d gone down to the docks, where she’d pleaded with one of the fishermen to give her a ride across the harbor, not wanting to wait for the ferry. She’d turned and looked at the island as they sped across the bay, and if she wasn’t mistaken, her sister was there on the shore. That had been the last time they’d seen each other, for in the years that had passed, they’d forgotten how much they had loved each other. They had tried hard to forget, and they had nearly succeeded, and so it had remained, until this Tuesday.