The Drummond Girls Page 4

  They didn’t know me at all. Because I hadn’t let them.

  “I’m good,” I told her, and she turned back toward the windshield and the witchlike arms of trees reaching for us out of the headlights.

  Jill didn’t seem scared, though, and neither did Andrea or Linda. More like curious, excited, and alert. I wanted to prove to these women they were definitely my people and I, theirs.

  “Let’s just think about this for a second,” Linda said, her voice steady. “Let’s just stop right here and get our bearings before we run out of gas.”

  She stepped on the brakes right there—no need to pull over and let the traffic go by, because there wasn’t going to be any traffic, ever—took her hands from the steering wheel, and turned off the ignition. Without branches passing by the windows or the constant sound of grass and weeds whipping by underneath us, we could have been anywhere. Visibility was so absent we could have been crouched in a cave or floating in the vastness of outer space.

  “We could sleep in the Jeep,” Andrea said, her voice chipper. “Find our way back in the morning.”

  “No way,” Linda said. “We paid for that trailer and we’re sleeping in it.”

  Drummond’s unknowable darkness closed in, but the emptiness of it wasn’t frightening to me, it was intoxicating. A month before I’d read in the newspaper that NASA had lost contact with its Mars Observer. The space probe had been on a one-year interplanetary cruise and only three days from reentry when it disappeared. I pictured it without power, locked out of orbit and catapulting through space.

  Next, I remembered visiting Mammoth Cave with my family as a kid, and how when we were as far down into the earth as the tour went, our guide had switched off the overhead lights. Inside that darkness my little girl’s body felt like both nothing and everything at the same time. The only sounds were the dripping of cave water and my mother’s soft breathing.

  Being in the blackness of Drummond Island felt just like that. It was damp and chilly, and the only sounds were the tick, tick, tick of the engine cooling down and the soft exhales of my companions.

  I wasn’t only someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, or even someone’s mother anymore. I was a person in my own right, a woman who had real friends now, a woman who was part of a silent, woodsy sisterhood. The even breaths I heard going in and out sounded like they were coming from something bigger, something older, than four sets of young female lungs. That night, for those few moments, they could have been coming from the earth itself. Like my mother’s had, from inside that dark cave.

  Just then there was a rustling in the leaves. Perhaps it was a trick of the dark, but the sound seemed big and only inches from the outside of the Jeep. Bear? I reached in my jacket pocket for my camera. If Linda turned her headlights back on, even without a flash there might have been enough light for a picture. But my pocket was empty, and I had the sudden image of the camera I’d just had to have, sitting right where I’d forgotten it. On the gold-speckled table back inside our trailer.

  The rustling might have been a bear or maybe even a wolf, but I’d spent enough time outside in the woods at night to know everything sounded bigger in the dark.

  The mystery of something wild and alive in those woods was still thrilling. I’d found a sense of what I’d been craving—real wildness—and whether I could get a photograph of it or not, I felt a surge of ferocity I wanted to capture and take with me when we went back home. It was a primal vibration resonating beyond expensive bar tabs, past men-only fishing camps, and deep into the island that was just the four of us.

  I thought about my husband and how he hadn’t wanted me to go and how he was back home, sleeping alone. I thought about my sons. At that moment they’d be sleeping in their beds, too. I thought about the cozy log cabin and the clean lakeside hotel room I’d once imagined, before ever setting foot on the island. Then I pictured Frank’s old travel trailer parked on a square of gravel with the plastic lawn chairs we’d arranged in a half circle nearby. And I longed for them. I longed for the chairs and the bare lightbulb in the trailer’s galley kitchen, and the teeny bathroom with the chipped plastic accordion door, and the bedsheets that smelled like cigar smoke and mothballs.

  “I say we just keep going,” I said, offering up my first real suggestion of the weekend.

  “Works for me,” Jill said.

  It wasn’t a particularly brilliant idea; it was just the obvious choice and the only way we’d ever get back to Frank’s before daylight. But it would still become our motto. Continued motion—sometimes even paced and steady, other times hell-bent—would be the operating mode on all our future trips to Drummond Island. But it would guide our mainland lives, too. Our sisterhood would grow; four more women, including Bev, would join us on our annual sojourn north, and no matter what fate put in our way, we’d travel in one direction: forward.

  Linda said she thought we might be somewhere near the center of the island, and she started the Jeep, put her foot on the gas, and a few minutes later we spied a diamond-shaped light blinking in the distance. It was slim and bright, its shape reminding me of wolf’s eyes, but it couldn’t be that. It was too high up, too big, and was going off and on in a reassuring rhythm.

  Linda was the one who figured out what it actually was. The beacon of the DeTour Reef Light, the old lighthouse anchored in the St. Marys River, not far from the ferry dock. Which meant we weren’t in the center of the island after all; we were out on its southern claw and no more than four or five miles from Frank’s.

  It must have been after 4:00 a.m. when we pulled down his driveway. The light in the front window of his house was still on, and a face appeared in the glow. We knew it was his by the pinecone of a nose practically pressed against the frosty glass. The light clicked off as we drove by.

  Linda parked next to our trailer, her headlights passing over the lawn chairs, the awning, a square planter of fall flowers, a log picnic table I hadn’t even noticed before, then illuminated the steps leading up to the door. I had to duck my head down a little when we entered. The thrill of braving the night woods faded into exhaustion and once we walked inside I felt a collective sigh exit our bodies as one breath.

  The next morning, Jill made an absorption-platter breakfast using groceries we’d packed in the cooler with the beer and brought along with us. Eggs, green peppers, shredded potatoes, cheddar cheese, and ham all cooked together in a cast-iron pan. We ate outside on the picnic table, all of us wearing souvenir sweatshirts over our pajamas. We’d shopped for them the day before—I couldn’t afford the expensive one with the zipper and the hood and had bought a simple gray pullover instead, but on my chest it still read, “Drummond Island, Gem of the Huron.”

  “Clear your head!” Andrea had hollered before we’d even left town.

  It wasn’t possible she’d offered that advice to me only forty-eight hours before, was it?

  So much had happened since then. And yet, when we drove back over the bridge, when I completed my reentry to earth and my husband asked me what we’d done on the island, I already knew that no matter what I told him, it would seem insufficient.

  Found a fossil? Downed shots of Pucker at a bar? Drove around in the woods? Ate breakfast outside? None of those activities sounded life changing yet my head felt clearer than it had in years.

  The sun was out and shined its thin and vernal light upon us, reflecting off our waxy paper plates. We ate fast so our eggs wouldn’t get cold. When we were finished, Jill’s voice turned serious and she said she wanted to ask us something.

  I thought of those dirty pickup trucks, of everything that remained unspoken the second time she’d said, “I’m married,” and I braced myself. I was certain she was going to ask for some advice on her marriage. Dark woods didn’t frighten me, but that did. She was my friend now, I was the only other one of the girls who was married, and yet I had no advice to give her.

  “Can we come back here?” she asked. “I mean, I don’t just want to come back next year. I ne
ed to come back.”

  Jill hadn’t wanted advice, she’d wanted a promise.

  None of us could predict what was going to happen in our lives between now and next October, she explained. Maybe she’d decide she wanted a baby. Maybe Linda would move in with her boyfriend, Kenny. Maybe Andrea would get married to her boyfriend, Steve. Maybe I’d get one of the stories I was always working on published. The island didn’t care about anything that happened on the other side of the bridge, Jill said. The island cared about us, when we were on it together.

  “Can we all promise, right now, that we’re coming back next year?” Jill asked, looking around the table at each of us.

  Can I promise? I thought. Does a wolf shit in the woods?

  I thought of my husband, and his irritation at both my presence on the island and my tendency to overthink everything, and worked out next fall’s scenario. I’d start saving my money as soon as we got home. I’d get a black permanent marker and X out “Drummond Island, 1994” on the calendar. Starting in September, I’d make a bunch of dinners ahead of time and freeze them so my family would have healthy meals to eat while I was gone. And I’d make sure I had enough money to buy the more expensive disposable camera. The one with the flash.

  I’d had the impulse to shriek, “Yes! Yes, I can promise you!” To get up and hug Jill, slap Linda on the back, high-five Andrea, and run around the table in my bunny slippers.

  “I don’t know about the rest of you,” I said, faking a yawn, “but I’d probably go.”

  In or not, I didn’t want them to know how desperate I’d been for friends. If there was anything that marked you as a sissy la-la, it was desperation.

  All three of them looked at me, tried to keep a straight face, but then started giggling. They’d seen right through my act—that’s what happened when you had friends. They knew the real you, let you be yourself, but called you out on it sometimes, too.

  “We’re not just coming back next year,” Linda said. “We’re coming back every year.”

  “Unless we’re pregnant,” Jill added.

  “Or dead,” Andrea said.

  We’d all laughed out loud at that. On the outside, we were adults; but on the inside, we really were just girls back then. And girls were immortal. Death wasn’t real for people like us; it was a punch line.

  “We’re the Drummond Girls now,” Andrea said, extending a clenched fist. It was the first of several such gestures, rituals even, that she would originate. We all touched her fist with our own, and that’s how our pact was made. On a Sunday morning in October 1993, sitting outside on Frank’s wobbly picnic table, under an endlessly clear sky and within sight of the million-dollar view we’d paid fifty-five dollars for, it was decided. The four of us would come back to Drummond Island together every year on the first weekend in October unless we were either pregnant or dead.

  Of all the possibilities fate might decide to heave in our direction, those were the only two we could imagine keeping us away.

  CHAPTER TWO 1995

  Bev and me, exploring Drummond Island’s eastern shore sometime in the 1990s.

  Who can predict the circumstances required for a new friendship to begin? The next two years passed for the Drummond Girls uneventfully—no babies, no weddings, no publication, nothing out of the ordinary at all.

  Then I met Bev.

  It was just another night shift at Peegeo’s when Bev’s trajectory crossed with mine. The pact between Linda, Andrea, Jill, and me had stuck and in less than a month I’d be making my third trip to Drummond Island. I needed to make some extra money so I’d offered to be first in, which meant covering the bar (and keeping the tips) until a bartender arrived. I’d just punched in and there she was: blond, skinny, wearing a dress with big abstract splotches, and perched on a barstool like a tropical bird. Beverly Cynthia Mary Marsha Wojciechowski (pronounced, I’d learn soon enough, like where’s your house key).

  “Bud Light draft is a dollar nine, right?” she’d said, pushing a procession of coins my way with a bony index finger.

  An exchange of money and conversation over a blue Formica bar now seems as likely a place as any other to meet your best friend. Like me, Bev lived only a few miles from Peegeo’s. She was a frequent customer, and while I’d seen her often, I had never really talked to her before that night.

  She may have forgotten much of this now, I don’t know, but I remember how, over that border of blue, we shared the details of our lives.

  I was married with young children; she was divorced with grown children. I worked nights as a bartender and waitress; she worked days as a legal secretary. I’d gone to college after high school; she’d gone to Texas after her divorce. I was thirty-three; she was fifty-one.

  “You’re a Sagittarius, aren’t you?” she’d asked me.

  I didn’t put much stock in astrology, yet was impressed she’d guessed me right on her first try.

  “Me, too!” she’d said, slapping the bar in triumph. “We’re exactly alike.”

  It would be months before I would reveal this to Bev, but before I met her I’d felt a bit friend incompetent. Linda, Andrea, and Jill were solidly in my life, yet it was still my way to keep everyone, even the three of them, at a distance. There were reasons for that, blips I thought of as unavoidable grooves worn into the friend-making receptors in my brain.

  My family had moved around a lot when I was growing up—every year, in fact, for one long stretch—so all of my early friendships had been temporary. Colleen, Doreen, Joleen; Carrie, Mary, Sherry—my childhood friends had blended into a hazy summer carousel of braids, cutoff jeans, and banana-seat bicycles. In junior high I was so inseparable from Mike (neighbor girl who shunned the glam of “Michele”) that instead of knocking on her front door, I’d stand inside her open garage and call out her name. I was a year older than she was, which matters when you are twelve and thirteen, and high school eased us apart.

  As a freshman, I was skinny and shy, but by senior year I was a tall, curvy, wide-eyed floater with fashionably feathered hair and a love of books. I studied in the library with the brains; made varsity in two sports with the jocks; talked boys, music, and clothes with a few of the popular girls; snuck beers with the partiers and joints with the burnouts. I let anyone who wanted to copy off my test papers and was certain I fit in everywhere.

  Then one Saturday night the most popular of the popular girls arranged a sleepover to confront an unacceptable person in their midst. I was thrilled to be invited. I remember feeling mystified by the gathering, yet mindlessly in favor of it, too. I can still smell the Aqua Net Super Hold in that cavernous bedroom. Casey Kasem was counting down to the number one song of 1980. He announced what it was with great fanfare—“Call Me” by Blondie—just as my own life bottomed out. Because—psych!—I actually fit in nowhere. It was me; I was the unacceptable one. Too selfish, they said, too self-involved, and I lived too much in my head.

  As Debbie Harry’s voice raged from a boom box, those girls told me I didn’t know how to be a friend. The tiny table the radio sat on had looked so perfect, even if it was just two milk crates draped with a musty lace tablecloth. The girls I’d thought were my best friends would not be calling me anymore. I called my mom instead to come and pick me up. I’d changed my mind, I’d told her over the phone, and wouldn’t be spending the night after all. My kind and lovely mother had been a popular girl, too, and so even in the disguising dark of our family’s Oldsmobile, I’d felt too ashamed to tell her what had happened.

  Those girls would befriend me again, I’d act as if nothing had happened, yet all through college, then after I’d rented my first apartment, even after marriage, babies, and jobs, because of that sleepover I still believed the part of me that made friends was defective.

  That’s what being included on the Drummond trips had meant to me. Acceptance. Not in spite of who I was, but because of it. Linda, Andrea, and Jill had given that gift to me. By the time I met Bev, I was ready to let someone else in. I had my Dru
mmond Girls, and I had Bev; the two were separate, but that didn’t matter. I had friends.

  Weeks before we were to leave for Drummond that year, Andrea’s boyfriend proposed and she’d said yes. She planned her own all-girl celebration, and I can still hear the surprise in her voice the night she asked me, “You brought your kid to my bachelorette?”

  I was then, and still am, an obsessively devoted mother. Besides the Drummond trips and my shifts at Peegeo’s, when my sons were young I was always, always with them. I had a journalism degree and probably could have worked during the day at a magazine or a newspaper, but I’d taken on some contract editing assignments and continued to waitress at night instead. My boys may have handled hours in day care just fine, but I would not have survived it.

  That does not mean I was nutty enough to bring a three- or a five-year-old to a Drummond Girl’s bachelorette party. To Andrea’s credit, I did have my arm around someone. He was thin, much smaller than me, and I held him protectively against my hip.

  Had Bev been the one who’d first thought of Earl? She hardly knew Andrea then and so wouldn’t have been invited to the party. And yet, probably she had thought of him. It was just the kind of thing she loved. Funny, goofy, attention-getting, and a little bit lewd.

  It was a Saturday in August, late, and already dark outside as my guest and I rounded the corner of the porch at T.C. Traders. Andrea had left Peegeo’s for a job at the nautically themed restaurant, hoping to make more money, and inside a dozen people were already celebrating. T.C. Traders had closed for her bachelorette party, and the front door was locked when I’d arrived. Pounding on the porthole hadn’t worked, and my date and I were just heading for a side door when Andrea appeared.