From: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Re: Your Cake Walk story
I think I found the story you’re referring to, but I can’t get anyone to talk. Would you be willing to meet?
Anders checked his email more often than usual that week, hoping to get a response before his Saturday morning ferry ride back over to the island.
But a reply never came.
Chapter 15
As soon as Piper stepped onto the front porch of Tom’s mother’s house, relief welled up in her like water filling a pot. Arlene was challenging to visit on her best days—and this day was certainly not that. She’d been in one of her talking moods and regaled Piper on everything from the argument she was currently in with Tom’s grandfather Herbert (who’d been dead for twenty years) to the proper way to set a formal dining room table (“The edge of the butter knives must turn in toward the plates—you young people have no decorum”) to the origins of the metal cell tower being built just outside of town (“It’s the Russians! And everybody’s just letting it happen!”). Piper loved her mother-in-law—she tried to visit at least every other day, and she and Tom took dinner over twice a week—but she was exhausting, at best. Arlene, who’d once been an energetic, with-it woman, had been on a downward slide ever since Tom’s father had died six years earlier. But at least she hadn’t been slurring today, which Piper hoped meant that Dr. Khari and Lady Judy had both taken her last conversations with them to heart.
Piper turned a corner, startled as a body collided with her knees. “Watch it, Bobby,” she said, reaching down to set him upright.
“Sorry, Pipes!” he said, readying to take off again, with barely a glance at her.
“Hey, where are you headed in such a hurry?”
“Home. Ma says I have to finish my chores before I can play with this.” He held out his pudgy hand, which clutched a plastic grocery bag, hard angles straining against its seams.
“What is it?”
“A camera!”
Piper cocked her head. Bobby’s family was one of the poorest, if not the poorest, on the island. He went barefoot not because he hated wearing shoes, but because he likely didn’t own a pair. “Where’d you get it?”
“Anders. I’ve taken more than a hundrit pictures! But they’re stuck on here. He said he’ll help me get ’em off.”
“He did?”
“Yep. See ya!”
Feet rooted to the ground, she gaped after Bobby’s fleeing form. Not many people surprised Piper. But in the weeks since first stepping foot on this island, Anders was proving to be nothing if not unexpected. She thought after that first adventure—the way he looked trudging back up the dock, sunburned, covered in muck, and missing a shoe (one shoe!—she had tried to paint the picture for Tom and Mrs. Olecki that evening but dissolved into giggles every time she attempted it)—that he’d leave this island for good and never look back. But she had to give him credit. He kept coming back for more. And there was something oddly charming, or at least admirable, about someone being so willing to make such a fool of himself at any cost.
And then there was the way he had begun pitching in— hauling old crab pots down to the incinerator for BobDan, mowing Lady Judy’s lawn, and now this gift for Bobby—it was nothing short of . . . kind. But what she couldn’t possibly understand was why he was doing all of this. For a silly old podcast? Yes, climate change was important, but Anders himself had said—and Mrs. Olecki confirmed—that he had a nearly nonexistent audience. What did he think he was going to accomplish that the New York Times itself couldn’t? Nobody on the mainland cared about what was going to happen to their island, that much Piper knew for sure. The question was: Why did Anders seem to care so much?
Movement in her peripheral vision caught her eye, and Piper looked up, surprised to see she’d already made it to Lady Judy’s house while her mind was wandering—and further surprised to see Anders standing a few rungs from the top of a ladder at the side of her house, muttering under his breath as he clearly struggled to scrape the paint off the hundred-year-old window frames.
She stood staring up at him, as if his physical body might somehow offer clues to who he was and what he was doing here. A few wiry muscles she’d never noticed before flexed in his upper arms as he wielded the scrape, beneath skin that wasn’t quite as pale as when he’d arrived, the contrast with his freckles less apparent. It seemed work on the island was agreeing with him, too. It wouldn’t be long before he was as bronzed and sinewy as Tom.
As Piper appraised him, Anders paused in midscrape and leaned forward on the ladder, peering in the upper window of Lady Judy’s house, eyes widening with each passing second. Piper froze—what was he, some kind of creeper? And then she realized exactly which room he was looking in, and a grin replaced her frown as she understood why he was so captivated.
“Whatcha doing?” she said loudly, and Anders startled, dropping the putty knife in his hand.
“Jesus. You scared me.” He glanced back at her.
“Sorry.” She bent over to pick up the knife and he carefully climbed down the ladder rung by rung until he was close enough to retrieve it from her grasp.
“Thanks,” he said, and made to retrace his steps.
“Wait.”
Anders paused.
“I ran into Bobby. That was real nice, giving him that camera.”
Anders shrugged. “I didn’t use it much.”
She couldn’t put her finger on it, but he seemed different today. There was a hard edge about him.
“You OK?”
He hesitated, as if weighing how to answer, and then jerked his head once. “No. I had a bad week.”
Piper waited, wondering if a beloved pet had died, or he had a fight with a friend, or maybe even a breakup—
“My podcast isn’t . . . going well.”
“Your podcast,” she repeated, blinking.
“I’m doing all of these things you’re telling me to do, but I still feel like an outsider. Like everyone’s keeping me at arm’s length. No one will talk to me. Not about anything important, anyway.”
“You are an outsider.”
“I know I am, but . . .” He sighed again. “Never mind.”
He climbed back up the steps as Piper chewed her lip. She had about a hundred questions but settled on one. “Hey. This podcast means that much to you?”