Now, on this day in the park, Isabel discovered there was a white card inside the envelope. One word had been hastily written in black marker. Help. Isabel wondered how a single word could have such a great effect, but she burst into tears, there in Madison Square Park, upsetting Hank the Labrador, who had a sensitive nature and now did his best to sit on her lap even though he weighed close to eighty pounds. At the bottom of the card, there was a line of typed print. Take the two o’clock ferry on Wednesday. If it was Sophie, something must have gone terribly wrong for her to contact Isabel after more than a decade. Despite all that had happened, Isabel had to go.
When you stop forgetting, the effects can be overwhelming. You think of the time when you imagined you would always live in a world of books, when in truth Isabel hadn’t read a book in years. She’d given them up. She didn’t even believe in them anymore. When she read, she remembered dancing on the beach on the first snowy night of the year when they could hear whales calling in the distance. She remembered the night they were told that their mother had passed away. She remembered Sophie crying in her room and her father standing out in the yard sobbing and her own decision not to feel things anymore.
Isabel brought Hank back to his owner’s apartment on Greenwich Avenue, but the dog stopped on the corner and refused to go forward. “Sometimes you have no choice,” Isabel always told him about the hours he spent in an empty apartment waiting for his owner to arrive, but today he simply would not budge, and Isabel didn’t have the patience or the heart to leave him.
She took Hank home, packed a bag, phoned everyone on her dog-walking list to regretfully inform them she would be out of town, briefly, she hoped. She left a message for Hank’s owner, who happened to be her divorce lawyer, not to expect him back. She was bringing Hank with her, that much was certain. He was already sitting on top of her suitcase.
Isabel rented a car in the morning and drove straight through, only briefly stopping in Portland to pick up a sandwich to go and some coffee and run into a pet store where they only sold extra-large bags of dog food weighing forty pounds. She headed north and east, turning off the highway and taking the twisting road along the shore. Things kept looking familiar so that forgetting was becoming more difficult with every mile. The dog kept his head out the window, even though the day was misty and cold. June was like that in Maine, the damp constant, until brilliant sunlight broke the sky open and the gray world turned blue and green in equal measure. When she got to the small town of Hensley, where the ferry to the island docked, she remembered all the times in high school when she’d tried to escape from the island.
“Can’t you just wait to grow up before you leave?” her father told Isabel the last time the ferry captain caught her stowing away and brought her back. “Time goes faster than you think.”
“Not fast enough,” Isabel answered, but as it turned out, her father was right. Suddenly, here she was in her thirties, with no family and no one to love, and she’d begun, only rarely and at odd hours, to think she’d made a terrible mistake.
A girl was pacing the dock as the ferry pulled in. She wore a black dress and black boots even though the mist had burned off and the day was now sunny, warm enough so that jeans and a T-shirt would have been more fitting. The girl had a pretty, intelligent face, though she was pale, with dark circles under her eyes. She was holding up a sign so that everyone who was walking off the ferry could see it clearly. Help. Isabel stood on the ferry, in shock. It wasn’t Sophie who had written to her but this girl with a sour expression, who looked annoyed every time someone disembarked from the ferry and passed her by.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” the ferryman said to her.
Perhaps she had. The girl looked exactly like Sophie had at her age, except while Sophie had been light and cheerful, the girl on the dock looked bitter and suspicious.
“You don’t remember me.” The ferryman sounded disappointed. He’d noticed her staring at the girl on the dock. “Maybe we’re all ghosts to you.”
The light was bright, forcing Isabel to shield her eyes in order to see him more clearly. Her newfound companion was tall with black hair, unshaven and in need of a haircut, with eyes so dark they burned through her. He was also quite familiar, although everyone on the island would likely be someone she once knew. Isabel was so practiced at forgetting, she couldn’t recall his name.