CHAPTER FOUR.

The drive to Maine was longer than either of them had imagined. Lottie and Rose had decided on renting a Subaru in a burst of enthusiasm about New England, but now, as Rose pounded along the endless grayness of I-95 North, she felt driving up together had been a very bad idea.

They had crossed the Maine border hours ago. She had done her reading about what to expect during August in Maine-good weather and fewer bugs, apparently-but how big could this state be? Lottie had been mercifully quiet for the past fifty miles-she had put Ethan's bedtime music on the car stereo and honestly it was pretty soothing-so Rose had some time to think.

She thought about the twins, of course. Where had she gone so wrong? She was a lactating cow for the first year, pumping and expressing when she didn't have the two of them latched on. She loved her two babies fiercely, of course she did, but they sucked her dry in every way. And those names-their private nicknames for the two swimming fishes in her womb-had somehow stuck. Now she was a stay-at-home mom with an unfinished, unpublished dissertation in poetry. A husband who was sleeping on the couch. And a problem child nobody knew what to do with, least of all her.

"Don't cry, Rose," said Lottie. "This music makes everyone sad."

By the time they picked up Route 1 it was already starting to get dark. Rose couldn't tell whether it was because there was rain coming or because it was getting so late. They had badly misjudged the time. As they passed the careworn businesses that lined the roadway, Maine didn't look so hot. The sky was threatening and bruised. There was a smell of ozone in the air, even through the air-conditioning. Rose was a rusty enough driver as it was (Lottie had driven the first three hundred miles), and now, if it rained and roads were slick and it got dark . . . She did not want to think about that.

Lightning flashed in the sky in front of her. "How much farther can it possibly be?" Lottie checked her directions, which were hard to read in the struggling light. Robert SanSouci had not done them any favors by writing the whole thing by hand on onionskin and sending it by snail mail. Why couldn't they just follow GPS once they got off Route 1? Was the place that remote? Was the whole thing an elaborate ruse?

"Robert says the exit for 286 is coming up," said Lottie, as if Robert were a close personal friend. "A while more on Route One, then a few miles on twisty roads, through West Dorset and then Dorset and then Dorset Harbor-a lot of Dorsets-and over a bridge to Big Lost. Then a short boat trip from Big Lost to Little Lost, and we're there."

"If we don't end up in Stephen King country," said Rose.

"At least it will be an experience," said Lottie. "I'm glad we told the others they couldn't come till tomorrow. We'll get to claim the place for ourselves. I want to sleep in the round part."

"The turret," Rose said. "Me too." Her back was killing her and she had a literal pain in the ass from sitting so long. Twenty minutes passed in silence. She thought she might scream just for something to do when Lottie piped up, "West Dorset two miles! You've done it, Rose!"

Rose turned off 286 and headed confusingly east to West Dover, and the heavens opened. At least for now they were on a fairly decent road, but the rain was bucketing down and the headlights of the oncoming cars were strafing Rose's eyes. Lottie was a competent navigator but Robert's directions were discursive rather than practical. The windshield wipers' frantic back-and-forth was making them both crazy.

"I can't even see the road, much less a 'yellow farmhouse on a verge with a large oak tree opposite,'" said Rose after one of Lottie's instructions. "Can't we ask directions?"

"There's no one to ask," said Lottie. "Turn here!"

"Don't yell at me!"

"I'm not yelling!" Lottie yelled.

Rose missed the turn and made a hairpin U-turn but she kept her voice even. "Since we missed the ferry, Robert says there'll be a boat for us at the landing." Lottie had insisted on stopping at L.L.Bean. She was almost an hour late to meet Rose in the parking lot. She thought they'd parked in the Muskrat lot, not the Moose.

"A couple of miles on this road and then we go over a causeway . . . that'll be Big Lost Island."

"Where I bet they have a motel," said Rose.

"Then we look for a dirt road next to a really tall lone spruce on the right."

"Every tree in this whole state is a tall spruce," said Rose.

"Now!" said Lottie.

Rose made a sharp right turn and sprayed up gravel on the car. "This car will be wrecked by the time we're done."

"This car is the state car of Maine," said Lottie. "It's supposed to get wrecked. Follow this road for eight miles and we'll be at the landing."

They headed over a causeway and Rose thought of Bea and Ben and Fred all safe together at home. She pictured them eating their Annie's mac and cheese and laughing at Road Runner cartoons online.

"I can't believe we have to take a boat over," said Lottie. "And I still think you said we were in the Muskrat lot."

"There was no Muskrat lot," said Rose.

"Honestly, I think it's supposed to be right here. Bear right again."

At last the Subaru's headlights illuminated a very small, very fragile-looking wooden dock. A hand-painted white sign with black letters read LITTLE LOST ISLAND.

Rose heaved a huge sigh. "We made it" was all she could say.

They pulled into a small field, with a couple dozen hulking cars parked in two haphazard rows. Rose stopped the car. Silence, except for the sound of the pounding rain on the rooftop. For a moment, neither of them said a word. They had not seen another living being for the past twenty miles. They did not see any on the dock. They had missed the last ferry some three hours ago. They had bags and suitcases enough for a monthlong holiday and now they'd have to face going across the water in what Robert called "a serviceable skiff." Rose had imagined she could handle a skiff but now, in the dark, in the rain, in her despair, she could only think of the possibilities for failure. This was supposed to be my time to regroup, she thought. She let her head drop to the steering wheel.

"I think we wait here a little for the rain to let up. It's already clearing," said Lottie, her optimism grating on Rose, not for the first time. "And take it from there."

"I think we just go and get it over with," said Rose. "Let's take what we need for the night. If we don't go there now I am going to turn around and never come back."

She blasted the door open and got pelted with rain in the fifteen seconds it took to get her slicker on. "I'll head down to the dock and check out the boat," she called. She looked back and could see that Lottie was carrying the bottle of Laphroaig they'd picked up in a moment of giddiness at the New Hampshire liquor superstore. We both need a drink, she thought, the second we get there. Maybe even now. I need one now.

There was only one boat that could possibly be called a skiff tied up to the dock, a twelve-foot Whaler, as Robert had promised.

Rose spotted a Clorox half bottle floating in the boat and grabbed it. "I'll start bailing!" she called. "Here, take my bag. Don't get in yet!"

"Do you know what you're doing?" Lottie asked.

"Yes!" Rose had occasionally taken a boat out on Lake Michigan, back when she and Fred were so poor and so happy in graduate school. But Fred did the bailing then.

"Do you know how to get it started too?"

"You pump the gas bulb, make sure it's in neutral, pull out the choke-" She yanked the starting handle twice, hard. Nothing happened. "Come on," said Rose. She looked up to see that both duffle bags in Lottie's care were already sopping wet.

"Don't worry, Rose!" she called. "It'll catch! I can see the Little Lost dock lights from here, I think."

Rose pulled again. Nothing. She pulled again. Still nothing.

"Let me try," said Lottie.

Lottie got into the boat without falling in, which was the best that could be said of her seamanship. They cautiously changed places. "I think I can do this," she said.

"Just don't flood it," said Rose. "I've already-"

Before Rose could finish her warning, Lottie had pulled the cord a half-dozen times. The air was pungent with the smell of gasoline and Rose knew the engine had flooded. Then Lottie pulled the handle a half-dozen times more, just to make really sure they'd go nowhere.

"You flooded it, Lottie. Do not pull it again for at least ten minutes. If it doesn't start, we can sleep in the car if we have to. Or we can go home. We can just go home."

"You need a hand?"

A figure appeared on the landing. The halogen light made him seem ghostly in the rain. He walked down the ramp toward them and Rose saw he wasn't ghostly at all. He was solid and competent-looking, and very male.

"Oh my God, yes," said Rose.

"Sounds like you flooded the engine. I'll take you over in the ferry if you don't want to wait it out."

The male voice belonged to a kid. He couldn't have been more than twenty, twenty-two.

"But the ferry isn't running now."

"It is when I'm drivin' it."

He walked around to the far end of the dock and they heard an engine burble to life with one turn of a key. Lottie gathered her bags and Rose's and clambered out of the Whaler, and they followed him onto the Eleventh Hour, a large, generous, stable, covered double-decker boat. They stood clutching the railings, mercifully sheltered as the rain poured down. The water was choppy and the ferry bounced, but it cut through the water as if it knew by instinct how to get to the other side.

The journey seemed endless, although Robert had said Little Lost was no more than two nautical miles from the dock. Nautical miles were longer than regular miles-Rose knew that much, but even if someone had given her the formula for calculation, her brain was too numb to figure it out. The boat slowed appreciably. "We're here, Rose," Lottie said, and the ferry driver drew them up alongside a dock, dimly illuminated by a couple of floodlights, and cut the engine.

"Can we leave our bags? I don't think I can manage."

"Can't leave 'em in the ferry."

If anything, it was raining harder now, yet their nameless helper swept up their bags with a sure hand and carried them up a ramp and along the dock to the island itself. "I'll get you a cart." The way he said it sounded like "caht."

"A Maine accent!" Lottie whispered.

"This is yours," he told them, proffering a large, wet, plasticky wheelbarrow that did not seem quite in keeping with the idea of a precious Maine cottage. "See, it says Hopewell. You stay on this boardwalk, up the hill, all the way to the top. I'll lend you a flashlight." He took a small, battered, rubber-covered flashlight out of his jacket pocket. "When you get to the top of the hill, shine the light and you'll see a sign that says Hopewell and Grundys. Keep on the path for Hopewell. The door's open."

Before they could thank him or even ask his name, he turned and was gone.

It was a long, hard, wet slog up the hill with their heavy bags and they slogged it in silence, sometimes pushing the cart, sometimes pulling it. When they tentatively rounded the last bend on the path to the cottage, Lottie commented that she'd left the Laphroaig in the Whaler. But by then they didn't need a drink; they needed sleep. Lottie steadied the cart at the base of the wooden steps as Rose walked up to the small screened back door. The rain had let up for a moment, and the clouds parted enough for a slender moon to shine through. Rose remembered reading there would be a blue moon this month, which she'd planned to watch rise on the east side of the island. Ha! If I stay that long, she thought. Now, in the darkness, their struggling flashlight barely illuminated a sign that read HOPEWELL COTTAGE, the letters picked out with bleached shells. They regarded the looming house for a few moments from the wooden porch. Then they climbed up the slick steps and pushed open the sticky wooden door.

"We're here," said Lottie. "Our own cottage in Maine." Rose flipped on a couple of light switches but the electricity was evidently not working. The flashlight's weak beam showed them the house was all wood: wood floors, wood walls, wood ceilings. It smelled of old pine, salt air, mildew, dust, wood smoke. They pushed open two of the most likely doors and found a couple of bedrooms.

"Thank God the beds are made up," said Rose. "I'll take this one for now." She dropped her waterlogged baggage on the floor of her room. "Good night," she said.

Before she could close the door, Lottie stopped her. She leaned in close and gave Rose a kiss on the cheek. "I promised myself, the first thing to happen in this house," Lottie said solemnly, quietly, "would be a kiss."

Rose stumbled into her small bedroom. She oriented herself, had a badly needed pee in a tiny adjoining bathroom. Then she peeled off her clothes, felt her cheek for Lottie's kiss, and softly cried herself to sleep.

CHAPTER FIVE.

Lottie was almost afraid to get out of bed when she finally opened her eyes the next morning. What would she see out the window? A shining paradise or a muddy hillside? But it would be amazing. Whatever it was would be amazing. She could barely bring herself to look.

There were Swiss dot curtains on the windows and a dim light was coming through shutters behind them-was the sun even up yet? She looked around for a clock and didn't find one. She had no idea what time it was. Her cell phone had stopped getting service somewhere north of Ellsworth, and there didn't seem to be a working outlet in her small room.

Lottie felt as if she had slept a very long time-she hadn't woken up so rested in ages. She thought of Ethan. She had been able to connect to Jon and him for a minute on Rose's phone from Bangor. Would they know she was fine? Would they believe she was thinking about them? But what a joy to sleep so soundly, and by herself!

Other than her eyelids, Lottie hadn't moved a muscle since she woke up. She wanted to take it all in. The air was different here. It was thinner and clearer. It smelled sweet-from the promised roses outside her window? Or maybe from the old pine of the house itself? She hesitated to go to the window and look out. Could the view be as sweet as this little room? She had a double bed, but it was a double bed for very small people, a couple from a different age. You'd have to be very close to sleep with another person in this bed. But that suited her fine.

Her sheets were crisp and white, as if someone had ironed them by hand. Lottie put them up to her face and inhaled. "They smell like sunshine," she said to the room. She pulled off the bedclothes and placed her bare feet on the warm, worn, unfinished floorboards, flinging her arms out and throwing off her T-shirt with a single gesture. She was naked in the warm half-light of this tiny bedroom and she could feel everything waking up again-her skin, the soles of her feet, the tips of her ears. She pushed up her generous breasts dramatically. "Va-va-voom!" she said, actually laughing.

And then she opened the shutters.

The first things her eyes lit on were flowers, a riot of flowers-orange gold with black centers; delicate white blossoms; full-blown lilies; and everywhere, wild roses. Even though she was on the ground floor of the cottage she was perched high enough to see that the garden of flowers soon fell off, and next came a view of the dazzling water, and out on the horizon, the curving edge of the sea. She breathed in the cool, clean fresh air, which smelled like the ocean. The sun hit her skin and she felt as if she could hardly stay inside herself. It was as if she were too small to hold so much beauty, as if she were washed through with light.

Rose, who had risen not much earlier, was seated on a huge flat rock in the cottage garden. The sun poured onto her skin. The sea before her lay asleep, hardly stirring and yet somehow breathing, alive. You could see for miles, all the way out to the Atlantic. Across the narrow bay the mountains-each one a different color-were materializing from the mist, and at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the cottage arose she saw a great horse chestnut tree, cutting through the deep blues and the heather of the mountains with its canopy of brilliant green.

Her gaze turned to the garden. She had no idea what most of these flowers were called. I'll learn the names of the flowers here! she thought. Black-eyed Susans she knew. And hydrangeas and roses, of course. She recognized spruce trees, or maybe pine trees, but there were so many kinds just in this one spot, this huge old box of a cottage she would call home for one whole month. When Rose had awakened, she had been elated with the view from her room-tall grass, geraniums, a winding path down to what she hoped would be a rocky beach-but she and Lottie were down on the ground floor, and Rose wanted to see more. Usually her first impulse would be to explore the house, but the outdoors called to her.

Just stepping out onto the warm wet grass with her bare feet changed her outlook on everything that had happened last night. Of course it was hard to get here, she thought. It should be hard to get here. And thank God it rained all last night-it made every leaf greener, every branch darker, every fragrant flower more brilliant.

"Rose!" Lottie called to her. Rose turned and saw her haloed by the rising light. Even she could see that Lottie-whom she had only seen burdened by bags, jackets, stroller-was now something different. She was aglow. Rose smiled at her as she ran down the path in her bare feet. "Oh, Rose, can you believe it? Can you stand it?" She was wearing just an oversize T-shirt and her hair was twice its usual volume. She looked like she belonged here. Rose wondered if the place could already have had the same effect on her.

"It's like a dream," said Lottie. "Like a dream, but so . . . solid."

"I know!" Rose said. "These flowers. They just grow!" She bent down and covered her face in something shocking pink, a flower she would have thought was fake in Brooklyn. Here it looked almost humble compared to all the brightness surrounding it.

"It's so odd to say it," said Lottie, "but I can't wait till Caroline Dester gets here. She is going to be blown away. And Beverly Fisher too. It's heaven here, Rose, isn't it? And nobody doesn't like heaven."

"It's heaven," said Rose. "It's heaven outside. And it's so sweet inside."

"Sweet and sort of huge. I can't believe they call this a cottage."

"We need to explore," said Rose. "The big bedrooms are upstairs. I bet you can see all the way across the Atlantic from the top floor."

Lottie had turned her face up to catch the sun's morning light. "I don't even think I packed sunscreen," she said. "I thought there'd be so much fog!"

"I did," said Rose. "Come on. We'll check out the rest of the house. We should decide which tower we want before the others come." She paused. The sun, the warmth, the color, the light were working on her. "Maybe we should even give the best rooms to Caroline and poor color-blind Beverly. They might need them more than we do."

"Maybe we should!"

Rose's tender feet smarted as they walked along the stone path back to the cottage. They'll toughen up, she thought.

"Can you believe that somebody who plays the lute for a living owns this place?" said Lottie. "I'm not even sure what a lute is."

"It's like a guitar, only an older version," said Rose. "They're always cropping up in sonnets." Maybe while I'm here I'll write about a lute, Rose thought. Didn't Campion write about lutes? I'll Google it. But then, a rush of anxiety and pleasure: no Google.

"I see you writing here. You should write a sonnet about a lute," said Lottie. "I looked you up online." She stopped to smell a giant yellow-flowering tree. "Gorgeous."

"Whatever you read is years old," said Rose. "And let's give the writing a little time."

"Oh, I think you will write," said Lottie. "I see it."