Jules balanced his four-year-old daughter, Eva, on his hip as he searched the crowd of fair-goers. He could just make out, through the mob of islanders, his wife, Leslie, and sixteen-year-old son, Brooks, strolling arm in arm. Like two kids on a date, he thought. Leslie’s golden head dipped toward the Afro his son was desperate to grow out, the ends catching the festival light so it looked like his boy wore a halo.
They had always been close, Leslie and Brooks, in a way Jules couldn’t understand, more like siblings than mother and son, and they’d grown even closer since Leslie’s mother died and the idea of moving from the city to Avalon Island had dominated their lives. Until it was the only thing Leslie and Brooks talked about. The island. The island. The two of them stuffing it into every conversation, no matter how trivial the topic. Until it was them and the island versus Jules, and he’d had no choice but to agree to the move, hoping the sweet dreams Leslie had spun for him, and even more for Brooks, came true. The Castle. The gardens. The good schools and hundreds of acres of untouched woods and beaches. A swing set and tree house for Eva. No more urban noise and stink, only ocean breeze.
And here Jules was, clutching Eva in his arms and trying not to panic—Don’t call too much attention to yourself when you’re the only black man, his father had lectured him so many years ago—because now Jules had lost his wife and son in a sea of white faces.
The Castle. He nearly laughed aloud each time he thought of it. How would he ever call that stunning monster a home, with its iron gate flanked by two marble eagles? Poised to swoop down, talons stretched. Leslie had forbade them from using the big house, a bona fide mansion—not until she did whatever she needed to rid the place of her dead parents’ bad vibes. Burned bunches of sage, recited what she called her positive affirmations, hung pear-shaped crystals in the tall windows to invite good energy. Jules suspected they’d be stuck in the two-bedroom groundskeeper’s cottage for a while, and was mostly relieved. Leslie had given him a quick tour of the Castle’s abandoned interior; it smelled damp and decaying—every room uninviting in its own unique way. Must watch Eva doesn’t fall, he’d thought, when he first saw the entryway’s cold stone walls and spiraling marble staircase, then realized the absurdity of trying to baby-proof such a place. The wall-length glass case of Admiral Marshall’s gun collection, from rusty-tipped Civil War bayonets to a variety of pistols, made Jules’s mouth go dry each time he tried to talk to Leslie about it, insisting they buy a new lock. How could they make a home having to pass those guns every morning and night?
He’d spotted trails of mouse pellets in the high-ceilinged kitchen (felt more like a church than a place where he’d make Eva heart-shaped flapjacks), and the droppings of some larger beast in the cobwebbed cavernous ballroom whose hand-painted ceiling—pink-edged clouds against a blue sky fit for cherubs—had made Eva gasp, then sigh, Pretty. He half-expected to find a family of raccoons nesting in one of the many rooms. The Castle was immense—never had he imagined such a home existing only an hour from the cramped city apartment of his childhood.
“Daddy?” Eva pawed at his cheek.
He felt the damp spot growing on the back of the white linen button-down Leslie had suggested he wear to the fair, insisting he leave the tails untucked. No, baby, it’s not messy, it’s beachy. Casual.
“Dah-dee?” Eva shouted this time and shook her head so the pom-pom bells at the ends of her pigtails jingled.
“What is it, baby girl?”
“Where’s Mama? Where’s Brooks?”
“Good question. I see them up there. If we hurry, we can beat them to the choo-choo ride.”
“Choo-choo!”
As they passed the grandstand, a bell went off. A muffled voice barked through a loudspeaker. Pigs squealed. Feet pounded metal bleachers.
Eva had her fists up at her ears. Her lower lip quivered. He knew what that meant. Ten seconds or less to tears.
He hurried deeper into the fair.
People stared.
Only a few hours ago, he’d been looking forward to the night, almost as excited as Leslie and Brooks, who’d spent an hour trying on and then discarding outfits, until the bed was a pile of cloth—all white and off-white. And the ancient words Jules had memorized years ago in his Botanical Latin class at Harvard returned to him: Candidus, pure white. Gypseeus, lacteus, and niveus—chalk-, milk-, and snow-white. And the one he and his mostly celibate classmates (not by choice—they were a real set of nerds) had snickered over. Virgineus—unblemished white.
Jules was an expert on the flowers these people worshipped, ordered their maids to arrange in heirloom vases on their parlor tables, their landscapers to plant in their well-tended gardens. He had studied a variety of white lilies—the Aurelian lily, with its trumpet-shaped bloom; the Easter lily (Lilium longiflorum) native to the Ryukyu Islands in Japan; and the most famous, the Calla. Which wasn’t a lily after all, but an aroid, and poisonous. And what did that matter now, he thought, as the thump of the Gravitron ride’s techno bass set his teeth rattling.
He wished he had stayed at the house. It was way after Eva’s bedtime. He imagined he and Eva floating in bubbles in the ancient claw-footed tub under the cathedral ceiling in the master bathroom.
On his very first trip out to the island, he and Leslie had left the kids in the city, watched over by their neighbor, Mrs. Umansky of the killer chocolate babka and free babysitting. It was their first night away, alone, since Eva’s birth four years earlier. Leslie had teased him all through the two-hour drive—her lips nibbling at his ear, her thin cotton skirt riding higher and higher, and when they exited the causeway and entered the island, she slipped her hand between his legs. He nearly swerved into the thick woods lining the roads. What you up to, Leslie Day? She knew all the right things to whisper in his ear—I’m wet—and knew to wear a tight tank top with no bra that day so her nipples strained against the cotton. He’d learned this about her when they first met in Cambridge years ago: She was a woman who understood that men needed sex. And since they’d arrived, she’d been more worked up than ever—and their honeymoon days back at Harvard had, he thought, been busy. It was as if the island, the Castle, turned her on in a way he couldn’t have on his own.
Eva was yelling, tugging on his arm something fierce. “That! That, Daddy!” She pointed to the cotton-candy machine with the domed case lit up so you could watch the tornado of fluff twist. She planted her palms against the glass.
A plump woman waddled by. She was wearing a dress that seemed too fancy for a fair, Jules thought, better suited for a wedding. An enormous orchid bloom drooped from her chest and he felt a jolt of recognition. He’d know that show-off anywhere, with its narrow calyx framing three broad fuchsia petals—two identical and the third frilled like an old-fashioned petticoat.
The woman stopped short. He saw how her makeup had smeared in the heat.
“Why, what a darling little creature you are,” she said to Eva.
Creature, Jules thought. Distinct from a human being.