Mia

BEAU’S LIPS ON mine that Monday in the Chawterley Painter’s Studio, with the sun through the windowpane warm on my shoulders, and the lingering smell of oil-based paint. I had seen that kiss coming and I had wanted it to come, I had invited it from the moment we sat in the skiff together, from even before that, in the Captain’s Library. I’d like to say there was more to it than that. I’d like to think my attraction to him arose out of the soft, thoughtful way he explained the difficulties of establishing economic stability in third world countries and the near-impossibility of instilling hope in people who’ve never seen anything but downsides to having dreams. I’d like to say I was charmed by his tales of adventure with Ginger: climbing around the moss-covered foundation of the original Chawterley kitchen; sailing all the way around the island for the first time without a parent aboard, and then from the island to the mainland just because they could; setting out with Max McKee in search of pirate treasures buried, legend had it, deep in Mad Man Barley’s Grove—a few acres of hackberries and persimmon and locust trees on the other side of the no-name road, where they would in later years meet the island kids to smoke dope. But the truth is, the attraction I felt for Beau was immediate and physical. The fact is that if he’d kissed me in the Captain’s Library even before we’d been introduced, I’d have done what I did the next afternoon in the Painter’s Studio: slid the diamond of my engagement ring palmward, closed my fist around it, and kissed him back.

One shortish kiss, followed by another, longer one, his beard tickling my cheek, my chin, the vulnerable spot at the join of my jaw and ear and neck. He ran a finger from my cowlick down my nose and over my lips, to the tip of my chin, ever so gently, as if to make sure I was real. Then down my neck, to the indent at my collarbone where the clasp of Ginger’s black pearls I’d worn to the Crease Ball my first date with Andy had sat.

“Want to hunt for pirate treasure with me?” he asked, his eyes as bright as they must have been on those childhood adventures with Ginger.

I glanced out the door—no one else awake yet.

He kissed me again, and I kissed him back again.

“We go halfsies on anything we find?” I said.

He set the charcoal pencil back on the easel and I stood, stretching tall. “Agreed,” he said, “even though I’m the one who knows the island.”

“Such amazing expertise, and yet you’ve failed to find any treasure to date.”

He smiled, Ginger’s wide grin surrounded by his soft beard. “You haven’t seen my collection of arrowheads.”

We slipped out the side door from the studio and down a narrow path into the woods. He didn’t take my hand until we were out of sight of the house, and when he did, he took my right hand in his left, maybe because he was a southpaw like his sister, or because he was a gentleman, or because he was as aware as I was of the ring on my left hand, the promise I’d made that everything about this moment broke.

Andy deserves better than this, I thought as I linked my fingers in Beau’s. Andy deserves better than me.

WE’D ALL GOTTEN pretty comfortable with each other by the Wednesday evening when the eight of us went to dinner at the Pointway Inn. We piled into the jeep the Conrads kept at Chawterley, and we headed down the island, across the no-name road, and into the little crabbing town. Frank drove and the rest of us squeezed in wherever we fit, sitting on laps and in the back where grocery bags might ride. My head bumped up against the ceiling, but my back nestled against Beau’s chest, my legs on his legs, so I wasn’t about to move.

We drank cocktails on a charming glassed-in porch overlooking the bay, watching the sun sink and redden over the water. I tried to remain engaged in the conversation despite the distraction of Beau’s thigh warm against mine, his fingers surreptitiously brushing along my jeans.

“How long does it take from the moment the sun’s blazing bottom touches the horizon until its last cut of light disappears?” Laney asked.

“It depends,” Trey said.

“It depends?” Betts raspberried her lips, very sophisticated. “Doesn’t the earth always turn at the same rate? Isn’t that what determines how fast the sun disappears?”

“The time it takes the sun to set depends on the latitude you’re watching from, the season, and even the atmosphere,” Trey said, meeting Betts’s incredulity with facts: “The fastest sunsets occur around the times of the equinoxes, on March twenty-first and September twenty-third, and the slowest near the solstices, June twenty-first and December twenty-first. There’s a mathematical formula for the approximate time it takes the sun to set on those dates, the variable being latitude. It rises faster at the equator, and more slowly as you approach the poles.”

I thought of the long days that summer Mom dragged us to Alaska. Mom’s friend that year was Miss Georgia, and she was pretty enough to be the Miss America contestant her name suggested rather than the schoolteacher she was. We stayed in a cabin on the coast, where even in August I was never quite warm enough. Bobby was in his Harriet the Spy phase; he had a spy costume he put together from an old hunting vest of Dad’s, with binoculars and sunglasses to hide behind, a notebook, and a toy camera, a Holga. I was uncomfortable enough with the idea of him turning his spying eye on Mom that I walked into the little town with him every morning to spy on absolute strangers instead, although I couldn’t have told you why. But I did the spying on Mom myself the last night we were there. I stayed up with the midnight sun, watching the straight set of Mom’s lips as she and her friend sat on the front porch steps, arguing. I couldn’t quite hear their voices from the bushes I hid behind, and I was afraid to move closer, afraid I’d be seen, so I just watched Miss Georgia’s angry face, Mom’s more impassive one, hoping the sun would set and Miss Georgia would leave and Mom would go inside to sleep.

Sometimes the sun never does set.

“The world land speed record for sunset is two minutes and eight seconds,” Trey said as the cocktail waitress brought a fresh round of drinks. “Here—we’re at about thirty-eight degrees latitude—the range will be from about two minutes and forty-five seconds to about three and a quarter minutes.”

“That’s all?” Betts asked.

“Don’t blink.”

Laney asked—in what Betts would call her best I’m-working-with-this-guy-next-fall-so-why-not-flatter-him voice—why the atmosphere made a difference.

“It doesn’t much,” Trey conceded. “Refraction by the atmosphere lifts things a little near the horizon, so they look higher in the sky than they are, but that works at both the top and bottom.”

“Both instants are delayed by the same amount so their difference remains the same,” I said.

The sole of Beau’s foot pressed gently over the laces of mine.

“Exactly,” Trey said.

“Unless conditions in the atmosphere change as the sun is setting.”

“Exactly,” Trey said again.

“Here it goes,” Doug said, and we all looked to see the sun kiss the horizon. We watched quietly as the bottom arc flattened, and then Doug began to sing softly: “Is this the little girl I carried?”

Beau’s hand settled quietly on my upper thigh as he joined Frank and Trey and Doug for the chorus of “Sunrise, Sunset,” the four of them singing in such melancholy tones that the song seemed to bubble up through me as I listened, as I sat mutely watching the sun sink under the darkening bruise of sky.

We ate early-season crabs in the inn’s cozy dining room, and drank a delicious French chardonnay, and we talked, and we laughed, and we flirted. It felt right, as though we Ms. Bradwells were completed by this guy gang, as though they were just what we should have been looking for had we known we needed to look. Laney was a little quiet, and she didn’t eat much, but maybe she wasn’t much for crab, or maybe it was weird for her to be the only black person in the room, although I didn’t think that was it. Laney’s family had been the only black family in her neighborhood in Denver when she was a kid.

“Dessert is a required course tonight,” Trey insisted. “Mrs. Kitching’s Smith Island Cake.” Eight thin layers of yellow cake interspersed with chocolate icing, brought over by boat from Ewell on Smith Island, which we ate with a slender bottle of dessert wine. And then it was dark, dark, dark. “Time to see this syzygy,” Trey said, and no one objected, no one pointed out that Venus and Mercury wouldn’t rise until almost dawn, that if we started now we would be there all night. We wanted to be there all night.

BACK AT THE lighthouse, Doug ducked into the Lightkeeper’s Cottage to grab a bottle of scotch while the rest of us headed up the winding stairs. I don’t know what I’d expected Trey’s telescope to look like—something small and precise, scientific, I suppose—but the one in the middle of the watch room was a fat red tube that even today’s supersized me would easily have fit inside. It looked like it should be too heavy to move, but Trey took the bottom end and Frank the top, and they carried it easily up the winding stairs to the lantern deck.

“It’s just an empty light bucket,” Trey said to Laney. “It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, but you’re going to love the view, Miss Weils.”

Ms. Weils. But Ginger didn’t correct him.

“First up: the Roman war god’s very own Mars,” Trey said.

He used binoculars to scan the sky, then pointed the telescope and looked through an eyepiece near the top of the scope. After a moment, he said, “There she is.”

Ginger moved toward the telescope, but Trey said, “How about you first, Mia?”

I hesitated, but Ginger didn’t move, so I put my eye to the viewfinder. A reddish bowling ball of a planet loomed big enough that you could see a deep tear in the swirly-patterned fabric of its surface.

“Valles Marineris,” Trey said.

“Mariner’s Valleys,” Laney said.

Trey looked her up and down carefully, like she was a racehorse he might like to bet on. “You know Mars?”

“Just Latin,” Ginger answered for Laney, a little dismissively, I thought.

“Greek, too?” Trey asked.

When Laney allowed that she didn’t know Greek, he told us the canyon we were looking at was also called Agathadaemon, “the sanctuary of the good spirit.” It was ten times as long and three and a half times as deep as the Grand Canyon, he said, on a planet with a radius half that of Earth.

“An eighth the size,” I said.

The looks I got …

“The volume of a sphere?” I said. “Four-thirds pi times the radius cubed?”

“Mia, the fucking Savant,” Ginger said.

We spent the whole night taking turns looking through the telescope and talking about what we saw. Jupiter and Saturn were in fairly straight alignment with Mars so that when Trey showed us where to look—“near that really bright star, which is Spica”—we could identify three starlike dots in a line of not-stars without the telescope. Laney, the first to step up to the telescope to see Saturn, said in an astonished voice, “Saturn looks just exactly like you expect it to—which is so unexpected!” Its rings looked like the ones on the plastic solar system model Bobby had when we were kids, oddly unreal.

In no time at all, it was nearly dawn and we’d seen Uranus and Neptune and Pluto—still a planet in those days—leaving only Venus and Mercury.

“Prepare yourself for the end of the world!” Betts warned, and as always, she was the first to laugh.

It was so easy to laugh back then at doomsday predictions: the earth pulling off its axis, out of its orbit, away from the only warmth we knew. We couldn’t imagine our lives could be changed so dramatically in a single moment. When Laney asked Trey, seriously, if scientists expected anything unusual, Ginger offered to make her doomsday placards, help her grow a beard, and feature her in a New Yorker cartoon.

“But seriously,” Laney repeated.

“Seriously,” Trey said, “they expect all the planets to be aligned on the same side of the sun, an event that won’t repeat for almost two hundred years. Isn’t that unusual enough?”

We all took turns stepping up to the telescope as Venus rose. Then Mercury rose, too, and the world didn’t end as near as we could tell. The eight of us—oddly energized despite the glow of light at the horizon—peered eastward as if we might see this final planet without need of the telescope. Trey scanned the horizon with the binoculars, and fiddled with the telescope again, and peered for a long moment before saying quietly, reverently, “There she is.”

“Laney,” he said as he stepped away from the eyepiece, and she didn’t have to be asked twice to take his place.

“Just at the horizon?” she said uncertainly.

Trey motioned Beau to step forward next, but he said no, we ought to let the girls go first, and I felt the warmth of his hand on my back, moving me forward.

I pressed my eye to the glass, but I could see nothing but horizon and lightening sky. Maybe the light still had been dim enough for Trey to see the planet, but it had changed now. Maybe the atmosphere was changing so fast that by the time even Laney put her eye to the viewfinder it had disappeared into the wash of dawn. I don’t know. I remember feeling oddly embarrassed, though, as if I’d lost Mercury in something I’d done wrong and my failure would deprive the others of the last chance in our lifetime to glimpse a syzygy.

Trey looked through the eyepiece himself again and adjusted the scope, then peered and adjusted again. “Too much sunlight,” he said. “It’s gone.”

Leaving me remembering again that last night at that cabin in Alaska, with Miss Georgia: I’d stumbled forward, probably nodding off to sleep as I’d spied on Mom and her friend, and the noise had attracted their attention. “Oh hell, Ellen,” Miss Georgia had said, and she stood and walked to her car. “Georgia,” my mom called softly, but she only stood watching from the porch as Miss Georgia closed the car door and drove away. I remember thinking if I’d known it would be that easy I’d have let Bobby loose with his hunting vest and binoculars and camera the day we’d arrived. But then I’d looked to my mother, seen her expression as she watched the car disappear down the road. I understood even then, I think, that she was in love with Miss Georgia, and that she’d never see her again.