The Bookstore Sisters by Alice Hoffman

The letter to Isabel Gibson arrived on a Tuesday, which had always been the unluckiest day of the week. Tuesdays were meant for accidents, disappointments, and bad news. Long ago, the day was considered to belong to Mars, the god of war and blood. Now it just meant trouble—it meant that your past could come back to haunt you. Isabel stuffed the letter, which was postmarked from Brinkley’s Island, into her pocket without looking at it, since no news was good news as far as she was concerned, then she promptly forgot about it. She was good at forgetting; she had practiced for years, and it was now a skill at which she excelled. When she tried, she was able to forget not only Brinkley’s Island, which held her worst childhood memories, but the entire state of Maine, where she had spent her first eighteen years. She could forget she was divorced, after five unhappy years; she could forget she was thirty-two and ate most of her meals alone in her apartment on Eighteenth Street, where the stove was temperamental and often refused to light. She could even forget that she had once been considered the girl most likely to become somebody, when she’d turned out to be nobody in particular. When Isabel really tried, she could block out everything around her. She could even forget it was June, which had once been her favorite time of year, before everything went wrong.

Isabel was now a full-time dog walker in Manhattan, where she had lived ever since finishing art school twelve years earlier. She’d had promise back then—all her teachers had told her so—but promise can disappear if you leave it to flounder, and now she had five dogs to walk on a daily basis, a troupe that included a well-behaved Labrador retriever who was left alone in his apartment for ten hours each day, a Jack Russell terrier who didn’t listen to a word she said, two standard poodles who barely looked at her and only related to each other, and a sheepdog who liked to nip whenever he had the chance. Isabel didn’t think about the letter that had arrived until she was sitting in the Madison Square dog park. She had already delivered four of her dogs to their homes and was alone with the Labrador retriever, named Hank. She usually had Hank for most of the day even though she was only paid for three of those hours; she couldn’t bear to bring him home to an empty apartment. Every time she did, she could hear him howling as she walked down the hallway, and it nearly broke her heart, something she didn’t even think she had anymore. Forgetting you had one could nearly make it so.

Isabel took the envelope from the pocket of her spring coat, bought on sale at Saks when she was still married and using Roger’s credit cards as often as possible. Roger had said that even though she had married him, she had never made a real commitment and had always neglected him. He blamed her for all that had gone wrong between them, and she might have believed him if she hadn’t discovered a scrap of paper in his jacket with script that was girlish and unfamiliar. This morning was heaven. As it turned out, when Roger went out running early in the day, he was also having an affair, so that was the end of that. Any possibility of a commitment was over.

Before the divorce was official, Isabel charged purchases she didn’t need or want at Burberry and Coach and Saks at a mad pace, all on Roger’s cards. For a while, she bought two of everything, and sent the doubles to her sister, Sophie, but she never received a thank-you note. For all she knew, her sister had thrown the expensive purses and sweaters in the trash or had given them to the jumble sale that was held at the community center each summer. It seemed it was impossible for them to be sisters again, and if the letter that had arrived was from Sophie, as Isabel suspected it was, it was likely to be full of anger and blame over the huge falling-out they’d had the last time they’d been together.

No matter what, the craggy landscape of Brinkley’s Island had managed to surface in all Isabel’s paintings. She could be at the Hudson River sketching out an urban river scene only to wind up with a painting of the rocky beach at the harbor or the meadow behind the house where she’d grown up, so filled with lupines that the whole world turned blue and pink and white. Isabel had sold off the last of her paintings for twenty-five dollars apiece at the flea market in Chelsea, so that she could continue to forget. Mostly she tried to forget her own bad behavior the last time she’d seen her sister. Born two years apart, she and Sophie had been best friends, but that was long ago. They had grown up in the cottage attached to the Once upon a Time Bookshop, a place locals treated as if it were their personal library. People brought the books home, then returned them once they’d been read, without bothering to pay, with the margins filled with cheerful remarks and blasting critiques. Isabel’s father, Shaun Gibson, was beloved on the island and always encouraged people to read as much as they wished to, but that didn’t mean he was financially adept, and money was always a struggle; in the end there was no money at all.

When Shaun died, during Isabel’s last year of school in New York, she wanted to sell the bookstore, but Sophie said they’d be dismantling their heritage and destroying their past, which was exactly the point as far as Isabel could see. Their past was miserable, wasn’t it? Their mother had passed away when Isabel was ten and Sophie twelve, after two terrible years of an illness that had caused their beautiful mother to remain in bed with the curtains drawn. Isabel had spent most of those two years escaping into books. When their mother stopped baking, her favorite thing to do, and they knew how bad it was, Isabel stopped reading. There was no longer any way to escape what was happening to them. Afterward, their father was out most nights at the tavern, drowning his pain, until Sophie ran to get him and bring him home. That was what Isabel wished to forget most of all. The sorrow she felt when she’d been alone in her room and had heard her sister crying late at night when she thought no one could hear. That was when she began to plan her escape from the island.

As for the bookstore, she’d been convinced it would only land them in bankruptcy once their father had passed on, the year after Isabel had moved to New York. He’d had an emotional attachment to a place that was failing, and Sophie had inherited that trait. When the sisters had argued, Sophie had hired a lawyer and won, although Isabel didn’t know what exactly her sister had won, other than outstanding debt and a store filled with dusty editions that were piled to the ceiling. The back room, which had once been Isabel’s favorite place to read, had stacks of myths, fairy tales, novels, and histories, along with books of maps, their father’s favorites, for he had always planned to travel the world someday. That day had never come, and he’d gone exactly nowhere. The idea of going nowhere haunted Isabel; she had taken a few trips, to Mexico and California, but each time she had she’d thought, What am I doing here all alone?

The case between the sisters was heard at the small white courthouse on Main Street, where fifty of Shaun Gibson’s closest friends came to testify that the bookstore must remain and was, in fact, a historical site, for the building had been put up in 1670. The attached house was known as Red Rose Cottage, and the roses that grew there could not be found anywhere else in Maine and were thought to have been brought over from England when the first settlers arrived. A botanical expert was asked to testify and called the roses a national treasure.

The day at the courthouse had been a huge show of support for the bookstore, since there were only sixty people living on the island year round, and it seemed all of them had shown up. The island was a well-known summer place where the population swelled in June, July, and August. The summer people came and went and were considered outsiders even if they were second-generation visitors. The year-rounders all knew each other, and they knew they wanted a bookstore, and that was that, case closed. Afterward, Isabel and Sophie had never spoken again. They vowed they would never see one another, but then Sophie suffered a tragedy that Isabel couldn’t ignore.

Sophie’s new husband, a fisherman named Matt Hawley who the sisters had grown up with, had drowned during a storm. Although Isabel hadn’t been invited to the wedding, as soon as she heard the news of his passing, she’d left for home. She’d sped along the highway in a panic throughout the seven-hour drive, fearing she would be late, managing to get the last ferry of the day across. Matt had been a quiet lovely boy who’d grown up to be a quiet lovely man, and there had never been any question that Sophie would marry him one day. He’d had her name tattooed on his arm when he was all of seventeen, off on a tear with the other island boys to Boston. And that was as good as an engagement ring, better, Sophie always said, because you could lose a ring, but a tattoo was part of you, yours forever, yours for life.

Isabel had arrived late, just as she’d feared, entering the church in the middle of the service, the old oak door squeaking and giving her away. She hadn’t thought about clothes, and while everyone else wore solemn black, she had on a spring dress patterned with flowers. She hadn’t even bothered to comb her hair, and she looked a mess, as if she were a tourist who had mistakenly stumbled onto a local tragedy. Everyone spied the latecomer, and no one was surprised to see it was Isabel, who was thought of as selfish, a real New Yorker. Sophie had turned to see her sister, and after one look, she’d turned away. At the close of the service, Isabel went up to her sister, waiting in line with the other mourners. “Are you serious?” Sophie said when at last they were face to face. “You can’t even be on time to Matt’s funeral?”

“I tried,” Isabel found herself saying. She sounded pathetic even to herself.

“You shouldn’t have to try,” Sophie said. “That’s what you’ve never understood.”

After that, Isabel was far too embarrassed to gather with the other mourners in the parlor of her parents’ house, where Sophie now lived. Instead, she’d wound up at the Black Horse Tavern, where she drank far too much and forgot just about everything. It was the sort of evening when she knew she was making a mistake while it was happening. She danced with men she barely knew and those she knew too well, and she couldn’t remember how she’d made it up to her rented room above the bar. In the morning, Isabel woke with a headache and a huge desire never to return to Maine. She quickly packed her bag and went downstairs, hoping to escape before anyone took notice of her, but there was Sophie, having a coffee at the bar. Sophie had always been the calm, logical sister, but now she looked distraught. And there was something Isabel hadn’t noticed at the church. Sophie was pregnant.

“You’re deserting me,” Sophie said. “Once again. Dad went to the bar, you locked yourself away with your books, and I had to take care of everything.”

“I’m not deserting anyone. Mom and Dad are gone, and the bookstore is as good as ruined. Why would I stay?”

“Because we promised we would take over the bookstore,” Sophie reminded her. “We told Dad we would.”

They had said so, true enough, but they’d been children, two sad girls, who had lost their mother. Books had been Isabel’s salvation and her escape. She’d spent evenings in the fairy-tale section reading her way through the stacks of books, always preferring Andrew Lang’s color-coded fairy books. Sophie had favored biographies and history, the stories of women who had survived despite all odds. The island had seemed enchanted then, and when the moon was full, they sneaked outside to read by its light. Sometimes their father would find them asleep in the grass in the morning, their books still open. Sometimes Matt would come by to read books about sailing, as if he were predicting his future with stories of drowned men and the women who waited for them on the shore. Matt and Sophie were fated to be together even back then, but fate can turn dark when you least expect it to, and there you are alone and in mourning with no one to help you raise the child you’re about to bring into the world.

“You think I should stay on this island because of a promise I made when I was ten years old?” Isabel asked her sister. “Should I only have peanut butter sandwiches for lunch because that’s what I ate then?”

“Are you my sister or aren’t you?” Sophie’s face was pale; her black hair was knotted. She looked wild-eyed, and ready to snap.

“Of course I am.” Was she being asked to forget her apartment, her job, her own life? “I can stay with you until you get over Matt.” It was the absolute worst thing to say. Isabel knew that it was as soon as she blurted it out, but words that have been said cannot be unspoken, and Sophie was hurt beyond measure.

“Is that what you think happens when you lose someone you love? You get over them? You forget them and go on as if they never existed? Go on then, leave. You’ve always done as you pleased, just like you did last night. You should be more careful about who you sleep with, Izzy. Everyone on the island is talking about it.”

Isabel had been drunk the night before and only now remembered that she’d spent most of her time with a man she couldn’t quite remember. She only recalled that he was tall and dark and familiar. It was true, they had almost wound up in bed—she remembered that now—but after kissing madly outside the door to her room above the bar, the fellow had said something like, “I don’t think you’re in a state to make this decision. Why don’t I come back in the morning?”

But in the morning, she was gone. Sophie had left the tavern through the front door, and Isabel left out the back, and if the man in the hallway ever had returned, he certainly didn’t find her there waiting. Instead, she’d gone down to the docks, where she’d pleaded with one of the fishermen to give her a ride across the harbor, not wanting to wait for the ferry. She’d turned and looked at the island as they sped across the bay, and if she wasn’t mistaken, her sister was there on the shore. That had been the last time they’d seen each other, for in the years that had passed, they’d forgotten how much they had loved each other. They had tried hard to forget, and they had nearly succeeded, and so it had remained, until this Tuesday.

Now, on this day in the park, Isabel discovered there was a white card inside the envelope. One word had been hastily written in black marker. Help. Isabel wondered how a single word could have such a great effect, but she burst into tears, there in Madison Square Park, upsetting Hank the Labrador, who had a sensitive nature and now did his best to sit on her lap even though he weighed close to eighty pounds. At the bottom of the card, there was a line of typed print. Take the two o’clock ferry on Wednesday. If it was Sophie, something must have gone terribly wrong for her to contact Isabel after more than a decade. Despite all that had happened, Isabel had to go.

When you stop forgetting, the effects can be overwhelming. You think of the time when you imagined you would always live in a world of books, when in truth Isabel hadn’t read a book in years. She’d given them up. She didn’t even believe in them anymore. When she read, she remembered dancing on the beach on the first snowy night of the year when they could hear whales calling in the distance. She remembered the night they were told that their mother had passed away. She remembered Sophie crying in her room and her father standing out in the yard sobbing and her own decision not to feel things anymore.

Isabel brought Hank back to his owner’s apartment on Greenwich Avenue, but the dog stopped on the corner and refused to go forward. “Sometimes you have no choice,” Isabel always told him about the hours he spent in an empty apartment waiting for his owner to arrive, but today he simply would not budge, and Isabel didn’t have the patience or the heart to leave him.

She took Hank home, packed a bag, phoned everyone on her dog-walking list to regretfully inform them she would be out of town, briefly, she hoped. She left a message for Hank’s owner, who happened to be her divorce lawyer, not to expect him back. She was bringing Hank with her, that much was certain. He was already sitting on top of her suitcase.

Isabel rented a car in the morning and drove straight through, only briefly stopping in Portland to pick up a sandwich to go and some coffee and run into a pet store where they only sold extra-large bags of dog food weighing forty pounds. She headed north and east, turning off the highway and taking the twisting road along the shore. Things kept looking familiar so that forgetting was becoming more difficult with every mile. The dog kept his head out the window, even though the day was misty and cold. June was like that in Maine, the damp constant, until brilliant sunlight broke the sky open and the gray world turned blue and green in equal measure. When she got to the small town of Hensley, where the ferry to the island docked, she remembered all the times in high school when she’d tried to escape from the island.

“Can’t you just wait to grow up before you leave?” her father told Isabel the last time the ferry captain caught her stowing away and brought her back. “Time goes faster than you think.”

“Not fast enough,” Isabel answered, but as it turned out, her father was right. Suddenly, here she was in her thirties, with no family and no one to love, and she’d begun, only rarely and at odd hours, to think she’d made a terrible mistake.

A girl was pacing the dock as the ferry pulled in. She wore a black dress and black boots even though the mist had burned off and the day was now sunny, warm enough so that jeans and a T-shirt would have been more fitting. The girl had a pretty, intelligent face, though she was pale, with dark circles under her eyes. She was holding up a sign so that everyone who was walking off the ferry could see it clearly. Help. Isabel stood on the ferry, in shock. It wasn’t Sophie who had written to her but this girl with a sour expression, who looked annoyed every time someone disembarked from the ferry and passed her by.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” the ferryman said to her.

Perhaps she had. The girl looked exactly like Sophie had at her age, except while Sophie had been light and cheerful, the girl on the dock looked bitter and suspicious.

“You don’t remember me.” The ferryman sounded disappointed. He’d noticed her staring at the girl on the dock. “Maybe we’re all ghosts to you.”

The light was bright, forcing Isabel to shield her eyes in order to see him more clearly. Her newfound companion was tall with black hair, unshaven and in need of a haircut, with eyes so dark they burned through her. He was also quite familiar, although everyone on the island would likely be someone she once knew. Isabel was so practiced at forgetting, she couldn’t recall his name.

“We used to run away together,” he told her.

And there it was. Isabel remembered going off to hide in the marshes with him. No one will ever find us, she used to tell him. Good, he always answered. We don’t need anyone else.

“Johnny Lenox,” Isabel said.

They’d been at school together, and he’d been handsome and daring, always getting into trouble once he was a teenager. All the girls were mad for him, but he never seemed to settle down. He just followed Isabel around until she left. “I can’t remember the last time I saw you,” Isabel said.

“I can. I brought you up to your room on the night of Matt’s funeral.” When Isabel flushed with embarrassment, Johnny added, “Don’t worry, I was a gentleman. I could tell you didn’t know who the hell I was. Anyway, it was years ago.” He nodded to the girl with the sign on the dock. “It was before Violet was born.”

An older man was peering at them. “John, I need you. And not in five minutes when the lady’s gone.”

“My father,” Johnny said of the older man. “You don’t want to cross him even though I’m the one who’s supposedly in charge now.”

The old captain had been her enemy once upon a time, always catching her when she stowed away and reporting back to Isabel’s father. “Hey, Mr. Lenox,” Isabel called. “Remember me?”

The older Mr. Lenox didn’t seem to remember her, or maybe he did; either way he looked displeased. Isabel had always believed that people on the island resented anyone who wanted more.

“Get going, Miss,” Mr. Lenox called to her. “We’ve docked.”

“You always wanted to get out of here,” Johnny said. “You kept running away until you succeeded. I haven’t forgotten you one bit, Isabel.” He gave her a sidelong look. “But it appears you’ve forgotten me even after what transpired after Matt died.”

“What transpired?” Isabel asked, uncertain and feeling a fool.

“You fell in love with me,” Johnny said.

Isabel laughed out loud, then covered her mouth. “Sorry.”

“I’m not making it up. That’s what you told me.”

“If I did, you should know I’m well known to be a liar.”

“I knew you pretty well, and you were never a liar.” He nodded to the girl on the dock, who’d caught sight of Isabel and was now waving. As it turned out, Isabel was the last person to disembark. “Your niece seems to be waiting for you, but it looks like you don’t notice that sort of thing.”

The older Mr. Lenox called out to ask what the hell Johnny thought he was doing when they were due back across the bay in half an hour.

“He still thinks he’s the captain,” Johnny said as he turned from Isabel. “Just like you still think you’ll be happier if you run away.”

Passengers leaving the island had already begun to board when Isabel made her way off the ferry.

“Violet?” Isabel said when she reached the dock. Staring at the girl was like seeing her sister in black-and-white, unlike Sophie who had always been so bright. Sunlight, their father used to call her. Then what am I? Isabel had once said, wounded by how he seemed to favor Sophie. Oh, you’re moonlight, he’d said. Harder to see, but there for those who look.