He saw Jeffrey’s boots come back into view as they clomped their way down the stairs and out of sight. He listened as Piper’s door creaked closed and decided now was not the best timing to visit her and offer his confession.
And then he remembered the trash. He walked into the kitchen and hefted the plastic bag out of the bin. After tying the top into a knot, he walked it into the backyard, where the metal bins rested alongside the shed.
“Anders?”
He froze and then turned his head slowly to find Piper sitting on the top step of her porch, her eyes bloodshot and swollen. He hated to see women cry—his mom, his sister, Celeste once. It made him feel ungainly and awkward, as if he suddenly had three extra limbs and didn’t know how to wield them correctly. He hated to see men cry, too, for that matter. That was why he never watched Good Will Hunting a second time. Or Cast Away. But there was something about Piper crying that made him feel worse than awkward. It made him hurt down to his bones.
“Oh,” he said weakly. “I thought you were—”
“What are you doing here?”
He glanced at the bag in his hand. “Taking out the trash?” he ventured, and then, completing the final steps to the bins, he finished his chore and walked back toward the bottom steps. “Are you OK?” It was a stupid question, like pointing to the sun and asking if it was the moon, but it was the best he could come up with.
“Yeah,” she said, wiping under her eyes and inhaling a big lungful of air. He fought the urge to ask her what in the world Jeffrey’s drunk visit was all about. And then fought the greater urge to vault up the steps and hope that she’d throw herself in his willing arms again. It didn’t help that he knew what he needed to tell her was going to upset her all over again. He stood rooted to the bottom step, feeling helpless, and shoved his hands in his pockets, trying to think of a way to soothe her. Fortunately, something popped in his blank mind.
“You know what I do when I’m upset?”
“What?”
“I pedal a bike eight hundred miles to the other side of the island until I think my legs are going to fall off and then I sit on an extraordinarily uncomfortable rock and watch sad lonely birds hunt for their supper.”
A sound a bit like a hiccup escaped Piper’s mouth. “You do, huh?” she said, a touch of shine reentering her eyes. “Do you stick your feet in the sand?”
“God, no. I’m not a sadist.”
She offered a full-on smile and Anders felt his stomach untwist a bit. Suddenly, something moved in Piper’s lap and he noticed a ball of fur stick its head up and look at him. He stared back at it and cocked his head, recognizing it as the black-and-white-patched cat he had seen before at Mr. Gimby’s. But he’d never noticed it at Piper’s house before.
“Is that yours?”
Piper glanced down at the animal as if she was also surprised to see it. “Oh. Yeah. I mean, he’s not really mine. He kind of comes and goes as he pleases.”
“Oh. So do you want to go? To the beach? I’m not doing anything right now.”
She hesitated. “No. I’m not feeling well. I’m just gonna rest for a while.” She stood and the cat landed on all fours on the porch and started circling Piper’s legs.
“OK,” Anders said. And then both Piper and the cat disappeared into her house.
Pearl was waiting for him, hands on her hips, when he walked in the back door. “Don’t you know anything?” she hissed.
“What?” he asked, startled to see her.
“When a girl is crying, you give her a handkerchief.”
“I don’t have a handkerchief.”
Pearl rolled her eyes up to the ceiling, made a loud huffing noise, threw her hands up in the air, and turned to go.
“Wait!” Anders said.
Mrs. Olecki paused and cocked an eyebrow at him.
“What’s the deal with Jeffrey and Piper?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is he . . . I don’t know . . . in love with her?”
Mrs. Olecki stared at him then, long and hard, until the straight line of her lips slowly turned up and what started as a small chuckle eventually grew into short hoots and long howls of laughter. Her entire body shook with it. “In love with Piper,” she muttered. And then she fixed Anders with one last look. “You’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer, are you?” With that, she turned and left the kitchen for good, still chuckling as she went, leaving Anders alone, his forehead wrinkled in confusion, contemplating all his many failures as a man.
It wasn’t until the front door slammed closed behind her that he remembered the soup.
* * *
—
An hour later, Anders was sitting at the dining room table playing solitaire with Harold’s deck of cards, plotting what he was going to say to Piper when he got a chance to talk to her. Half of him tried to convince the other half that he didn’t need to say anything. Being out here, he felt it again—the isolation, the feeling that the real world, his real life, was miles away. Maybe no one on the island would ever find out—maybe they’d just get a nice bump in tourism and everyone would be so thrilled they wouldn’t dig any deeper into why. But he knew that was wishful thinking.
So, around the fifth game, he moved on to hoping Piper slept all day, and all evening, and then maybe by tomorrow he’d have figured out how to tell her.
As he lost his eighth game of solitaire, he heard the unmistakable long creak of Piper’s front door open. He got up and walked to the window, watching her canvas-shoe-clad feet come into view and tiptoe down the stairs. Was it his imagination, or was she trying to be quiet? He stepped to the side so she wouldn’t see him ogling her through the window. And he watched as she came into full view, furtively glancing from side to side while hurrying to her bike. Then, instead of walking it out down the alley to the main road, she threw her leg over the frame, hopped onto the seat, and took off to the right of the shed, through to the neighbor’s backyard, and then she was gone.
Anders stayed put at the window, considering her actions: Maybe she was feeling better and wanted fresh air. Perhaps she wanted to go out to Graver’s Beach, after all. But if that was the case, what was the point of being so sneaky about it? And then, like a light bulb clicking on, Anders remembered all the times the past few weeks when Piper was less than forthcoming regarding her whereabouts and how she’d apparently been sick a few weeks ago and today—but aside from her swollen sad eyes, she’d appeared perfectly healthy.
And though it probably didn’t take a journalist or someone with keen observation skills, Anders had a deep gut instinct that Piper was hiding something—and he was determined to find out what it was.