Chapter 19
The four girls played together all day every day after the diving contest, and each day that summer had the same pattern. Pam, the early riser, sat on her family’s dock each morning playing with her shell collection and watched the sun rise. She would sit there until Amy arrived, usually an hour after sunrise. Then she and Amy would go back to Amy’s house, which was their headquarters due to the fact that Amy’s parents loved having the girls around and encouraged them to stick around by offering up a variety of diversions.
Amy’s father would take them crabbing most mornings, patiently teaching each girl how to scap crabs: scooping them up quickly with the long-handled net from a boat or the dock and dropping them in a bucket. He also taught them how to sail, how to tie a knot that would never unravel, and how to read clouds and forecast the weather more accurately than any meteorologist. Amy’s mother pulled out puzzles and games for them on rainy days and popped Jiffy Pop popcorn on the gas range for a snack. Even when Amy’s parents weren’t directly entertaining the girls, they were endlessly indulgent and deaf to the racket the four girls made running in and out of the house, shrieking with delight when one of their sons decided to tease the girls or chase after them.
Keeley would be the next to show up, either smiling or glum, and then the last to arrive was Zooey, whose mother insisted on her eating a big hot breakfast and getting fully slathered in sunscreen before leaving the house. Once together, they would either go crabbing with Amy’s father or swim and dive from the family’s dock. Afterward, they’d file upstairs to Amy’s room where they would play with her dolls. Amy’s parents always insisted on providing their lunch, and then the afternoon would be spent sailing with Amy’s father or playing a swimming game they called “mermaids” where they all pretended to be mermaids and made up stories to act out together in the water. Late in the afternoon they would walk up and down the boardwalk and visit other families as well as stop by the Lion’s Den to see who was there and if there was anything fun going on. Then it would be dinnertime and they would each go home, saying goodbye and waving endlessly as they walked in separate directions as if it would be a long time until they saw each other again instead of only the next day.
By August, it was accepted that, in addition to being moody, Keeley was clumsy. She always had cuts and bruises and corresponding stories of her misadventures at home. Amy thought that Keeley’s night vision was bad, as she never saw her friend knock into things during the day.
One morning in mid-August, Keeley showed up later than usual. Even Zooey had already arrived and they were sitting on Amy’s dock waiting for Keeley so they could go crabbing. Amy’s oldest brother, Will, had just arrived on the island after working most of the summer as a counselor at Camp Winaukee in New Hampshire. After briefly asking them about their summer in a polite yet artificial way that fully communicated that he was done with little kids for the summer, he went to work on the outboard engine that had been giving his dad trouble.
Keeley arrived wearing a floppy blue cotton sunhat that was about three sizes too big for her head. It was actually an adult’s sunhat, and Keeley had to keep pushing it back off her face as she walked down the boardwalk toward them so she could see where she was going. Her hair, usually neatly brushed, was sticking out like a rats nest, visibly messy even from a distance. She reached where they were sitting on the dock and sat down next to them, saying hello in the subdued voice she always spoke in when she was in one of her bad moods.
When the girls were first playing together, they would try to jolly Keeley out of her grumpiness on these days, but they had learned that it didn’t work. Keeley would just go mute and hunker down more into her funk. Now, they simply ignored it and went on with their day. If they were lucky, by the afternoon Keeley would have forgotten whatever was bothering her and they would all be having a great time as usual. Of course, they all wondered about their friend, but no amount of asking ever yielded anything.
Amy’s father took them crabbing in his rowboat, but they didn’t catch anything. It was too late, the sun too high. The best time was when the sun was just starting its ascent in the early morning and the crabs scurried about on the sandy bottom like it was rush hour. When they got back, Will was waiting to show off his work on the outboard which now started with a roar on the first try. Mr. Dougherty beamed and slapped Will on the back repeatedly. The girls, bored with their talk of valves and oil, went inside and upstairs to play with Amy’s dolls.
As they climbed the stairs, Amy spotted a five dollar bill sitting on the floor at the top of the steps.
“Five dollars! Finders keepers!” she called, and grabbed at it thinking of all the candy they could buy across the channel at Clark’s.
The five dollar bill moved to the left, apparently blown by a draft. Amy grabbed at it again, and, once again, it leapt out of her fingers.
Then she heard a hissing sound. She knew that sound. She stopped grabbing at the bill and looked at it. There was something shiny attached to it. A clear fishing line had been taped to it.
Hissing again.
Rich! Amy climbed the last step of the stairs and there he was, bent over and laughing his hissing laugh. He looked up, saw her face, and burst into outright laughter.
“Got you! Ha! Ha!” Rich said, and then threw his hands up in an effeminate pose. “Oh, five dollars! Oooooh, five dollars!” He bent over in a convulsion of laughter. What made this much worse was that he had fooled her only yesterday. How had she forgotten? Yesterday it had been a quarter, super-glued to their dock. It was still there.
“Oh, shut up!” Amy said. “Shut up!”
Something moved quickly to her right in the doorway of the bedroom that the three boys shared. A flash of light blasted in her face. “Gotcha!” Jim yelled, dropping the camera away from his eyes and grinning.
“Give me that!” Amy shrieked and started toward him. She hated that stupid camera! Why had her parents given it to Jim, of all people? Mr. Nosy Busybody himself!
Jim slammed the door shut. The lock clicked on the other side, a simple bolt that the two younger boys had installed on their own and used only when their sister wanted to enter the room, usually after they’d gotten her good and angry. Amy had thought about telling her parents about the lock, but there was no way to do it without looking like a snitch. She wouldn’t give her brothers another label to work with.
Amy turned back to see that Rich was laughing even harder. “Oooo, he got you! That picture’s going to be a beaut!”
Amy, looking at Rich, who was too big for her to fight, and then at the door protecting her youngest brother, realized she was beat again. Resigned, she gestured at her friends to follow her. They were still standing on the stairs open-mouthed and curiously watching the scene unfold. None of them had to go through this torture. They were all either only children or the oldest.
“Come on, let’s go,” Amy said. The four girls filed into Amy’s bedroom and shut the door, leaving Rich’s hissing laughter behind them.
Once inside Amy’s room, which looked like a typical Captain’s Island bedroom with its simple wooden furniture and rag rug as well as a few little-girl touches including pink ruffled cotton curtains on the windows and a matching pink bedspread and dust ruffle on the bed, the girls assumed their usual positions. Like their mermaids game, they played a special game with dolls, too. Each girl picked up her favorite doll and they played a game where all the dolls were in a family and experienced new and exciting dramas daily.
Amy’s favorite doll was a brown monkey doll with a large red mouth. He was her favorite because she loved monkeys more than any other animal, he had wire in his body that allowed you to pose him in all types of fun and fantastic positions, and he had big brown eyes that looked both happy and amused. She loved telling him jokes because he always got them. She called him “Mo-mo” and had loved him best since she got him for her birthday when she was four. Mo-mo was the father of the family and usually the one to find solutions to any problem the other dolls had.
The first day they played dolls Pam had gravitated towards the large purple puppy doll that sat in the central place of honor in the white wicker chair where all the dolls lived. Part of the reason the doll was there was simply its size – it made more sense to pile the other smaller dolls on top of it. The other reason was that it was a doll to show off – it was the only present she’d ever gotten from her revered oldest brother, won that spring at a local carnival’s water-gun game.
It didn’t matter that Will was essentially babysitting her and the other youngest child in the family, Jim, that day. It mattered that he had won it and told her he won it for her, presenting it to her with a flourish. When Pam first approached the doll, Amy had the urge to tell Pam to leave it alone, but then she saw Pam’s bright expression and decided not to. She still couldn’t get over her luck that Keeley and Pam were her friends now. She liked Zooey, too, but Key and Pam were the popular cool kids. Amy had idolized them and been ignored by them for the last two summers. Pam called the dog-doll, which Amy hadn’t gotten around to naming yet, “Mr. Pups”. Mr. Pups role in the doll-family was to stir up trouble.
When Zooey picked out her favorite that first day – the way they all did, not saying anything, just picking up the dolls that attracted them most – Amy was glad. She felt bad about that doll. It was a princess doll dressed in a golden dress and wearing a gold and rhinestone tiara. It wasn’t Amy’s style at all, but her Aunt Judy had given it to her, her father’s sister, and now she had to cart it with her to Captain’s because her aunt would be visiting them on Labor Day weekend. She had to pretend she liked it and not hurt her aunt’s feelings. That’s what Amy’s mother had said. Now, the doll had some good wear-and-tear going, giving it that loved-look. Thank God for Zooey’s weird taste in dolls. Zooey called the doll Princess SunSparkle and it played a kind of mother character to their family, usually admonishing Mr. Pups for being bad and making “teas” for them to eat all the time. Amy didn’t know what a “tea” was, only knew of the beverage that was like coffee, but she played along.
Keeley had giggled and cooed when she saw Baby Elly, a plastic baby-doll that used to be able to drink from a little bottle and wet diapers, but now had a clog or something. Baby Elly was named after the Dougherty’s neighbors’ baby who Amy had fallen in love with when she was five. Baby Elly was one of those dolls that was like a fad, you loved her when you got her, couldn’t get enough of her, and then you were just – done. Luckily for Baby Elly, Keeley didn’t know this, and loved that baby doll like it was her own. Keeley even found some of her own baby clothes at her family’s house and brought them over to dress the doll up. The baby’s job, it seemed, was to be changed constantly from one outfit to the next and then cuddled.
They played dolls in Amy’s room only, never taking them down to the boardwalk or the beach, as both Rich and Jim had taught Amy early on that dolls were easy targets for them. Mo-mo was missing an ear from one skirmish and several of her dolls’ heads were loose in their sockets from the time the boys stole them from the playroom and put the heads on stakes surrounding their fort to warn off marauders. Amy strongly suspected Rich when it came to Baby Elly’s inability to drink or wet her diaper anymore, and she had even gotten a shrug out of him when she confronted him. Yet, no justice was served. With fights like these between the siblings, her parents rarely interfered, believing children had to learn the harsh ways of the world early in life and that protecting them did them no favors.
Today Zooey was the one to introduce the storyline based on her new favorite book, The Little Princess, where a privileged little girl in a London boarding school becomes suddenly orphaned and is treated terribly: starved, worked to the bone, and forced to live in a freezing rat-infested attic. Zooey hadn’t gotten to the end of the book yet, but she had been telling Pam and Amy all about it that morning while they were waiting for Keeley to show up and it sounded wonderfully horrible.
Zooey picked up Princess SunSparkle and said in a loud voice, “You, Princess, are no longer a princess! You are a poor wretch now and will go hungry and work in the kitchen! Remove that fancy gown at once and wear the rags suitable to your station!” Zooey immediately undressed Princess SunSparkle, leaving her only in her white frilly slip and stockings. “Now get to work! You must serve all the other dolls here!”
Pam spoke up in Mr. Pups’ growly voice, “Yes, serve us! We want tea and crumpets! Now! Hurry up!”
“Yes sir! Right away, Sir Pups!” Zooey said, and made the princess run in circles.
Amy lifted up Mo-mo, “No! We must save Princess SunSparkle!”
Pam said, “No, I am Sir Pups and I say she must suffer. She may not even have a bed to sleep in. She must sleep on the floor!” Pam pointed at the floor and Zooey laid the princess doll on the wooden floor.
“Help!” Amy said, shaking Mo-mo above her head, “We must save the princess from a terrible fate! If she sleeps on the floor, she is so delicate she will die!”
Keeley, who had been sitting quietly cuddling Baby Elly, her face hidden by the huge sunhat, suddenly looked up and pushed the hat’s brim back, her face hopeful. She said, “She can stay with Baby Elly! Baby Elly has a bed and she wants to share it with the princess!” She put Baby Elly in the tiny bassinet that came with the doll and gestured to Zooey, smiling.
“Oh! Thank you, Baby Elly! I am so tired and cold!” Zooey said in Princess SunSparkle’s high falsetto, shuffling over to the bassinet on her knees and holding the doll. She placed Princess SunSparkle in the bassinet next to the baby doll. “Oh, how warm and cozy your bed is! I can almost forget how hungry I am!”
Zooey looked at Keeley and smiled at her. Keeley smiled back, tipping her head back to look at Zooey from under the hat, the lines that came onto her face when she was in a bad mood disappearing.
Pam jumped up with Mr. Pups and went over to the bassinet. “No!” she growled for Mr. Pups. “You are a servant and must suffer!” She reached out and grabbed for the Princess doll.
Keeley moved fast to grab Princess SunSparkle first. “Stop it, Mr. Pups! I have given her permission!”
Amy stood up with Mo-mo. “Yes, Mr. Pups! Permission has been granted!”
“No!” Pam growled, grabbing at the only area she could reach: the princess doll’s head, “You are a servant and you are not worthy!”
Keeley shrieked, yanking back at the doll. “Stop!”
Pam dropped Mr. Pups, freeing her left hand, and grabbed at Keeley’s hat in an effort to distract her. The hat fell off onto the floor.
Seeing Keeley’s exposed head, Pam gasped, letting go of the princess doll.
Keeley fell back and landed on her butt, still holding the doll by her legs. Her usually beautiful hair was tangled, and its lightness was marred by dark tarry looking chunks of something near the scalp. Worse, her whole head looked misshapen. Glancing around at the other girls who were staring at her, she dropped the princess doll on the floor and quickly covered her exposed head with her hands.
They were all silent suddenly, looking at Keeley sitting on the floor, trying to cover up her head.
Then they were all talking at once. “What happened? Keeley! Your head!” Was that blood?
Keeley, keeping one hand on her hair, reached out and snatched back the hat off of the floor and pulled it back over her head. Then she slowly picked up Princess SunSparkle and put her in the bassinet, tucking her in next to Baby Elly. “Now, now,” she said quietly. Then she let out a little sob, and got to her feet, looking down so her face was covered by the hat. “I have to go home,” she said, her voice wavering.
Pam took two steps and put her hand on Keeley’s shoulder. Keeley flinched a little. “No, don’t go home, Key. We want you here,” Pam said softly. Pam’s tone had changed to the gentle one Amy had heard her use with her younger brother.
“What happened?” Amy asked, stepping closer. “You fall down?” She had never seen anything like Keeley’s poor head, all swollen and lumpy, hair chunky with dried blood. Maybe she fell down the stairs in the dark? It could get so dark on Captain’s at night, pitch black. Maybe Keeley had thought she could feel her way to the bathroom last night and fell.
Keeley stood quietly looking at the floor, her face still covered by the hat. She didn’t answer.
Pam said, patting Keeley’s shoulder, “Did you fall down, Key?”
Zooey, still kneeling by the bassinet, looked up at Keeley, trying to see her face. “No,” she said, sadly. “It was something else, wasn’t it?”
Keeley jerked a little and looked at Zooey. “What?” Keeley said.
Zooey looked up at Keeley. “Am I wrong?”
They looked at each other for a minute, as if having a silent conversation. Then Keeley started shaking her head. “I, I,..” Keeley whimpered, and then started outright crying.
Amy couldn’t stand it anymore. She walked right over to Keeley and wrapped her arms around her as far as she could reach. A full head shorter, her face rested against Keeley’s chest. “It’s okay, Keeley. It’s okay! We know you’re a clumsy goof, but we love you anyway. We love you so much. Your head’s going to heal just fine. My mom can look at it and fix you right up.”
Keeley just cried louder and said, “No! No one! Leave me alone!” But she didn’t shake Amy off.
Pam wrapped her arms around Keeley, too, one arm going around Amy’s back. Then Zooey stood up and hugged Keeley from behind. Zooey said, “It’s going to be all right. Really it is.”
Then they were all crying a little, mostly from shock at seeing their friend hurt so badly.
When the tears subsided, they parted, patting Keeley on her arms and back. Keeley still stood, looking at her feet, little sniffles emanating from under the floppy hat.
Then Zooey said something weird. “You don’t have to tell us, Keeley. It’s okay.”
Amy looked at Zooey like she was nuts. Not tell them? Why not? Keeley probably fell down the stairs and needed a grownup to help her! What if she was seriously hurt? She forgot all about Keeley’s own mother, who was living in the same house with her daughter and should have looked at her daughter’s injured head herself. All Amy could think about was her own mother and how her mother would clean Keeley’s wounds and wash her hair and bandage her. She would probably make her something nice and comforting to eat, too, like a grilled cheese sandwich and they would all get one. Amy’s mouth started watering thinking about that warm gooey sandwich.
But Zooey looked very serious. She kept a hand on Keeley’s shoulder.
Keeley said, her voice watery from tears, “I can’t tell. If I tell, then maybe it’s true. Maybe she really…”
Amy stared at Keeley. What was she talking about? Who?
Pam spoke up, her voice louder than before. “What? What are you talking about?”
Zooey shushed Pam. “Don’t shout, Pam. Let her talk.” She put her arm around Keeley protectively.
“I am!” Pam yelled and then lowered her voice, and looked around at each of them, “I am. I don’t understand.”
Join the club, Amy thought.
“You were telling us about your mom,” Zooey prompted softly. She rubbed Keeley’s arm, and peeked under her hat at her face.
Her mom! What? Amy felt an electric zinging feeling pass through her.
Keeley mewled and nodded.
“It’s okay,” Zooey said again.
Keeley told them then, her voice halting and then surging in pulses like a wonky outboard motor. She stood among them, her head hung low, her face obscured by the hat and told them everything about her mother’s hidden hatred for her, about the hitting that started and then had just gotten worse. They heard the basics that day and more details of the story would be filled in over the years.
It all began two years before, when Keeley was five. Before then she was coddled and spoiled by both parents, a favored pet in their family, the darling little girl that was a perfect counterpart to her older golden-boy brother, Sean. Four years older than Keeley, at nine Sean was their family’s shining light. Like his father, Sean was both scholastically gifted, a straight-A student, and an athletic star – he was both the captain of his ice hockey team as well as one of the best players on his school’s tennis team.
Riding home on his bike late one night after tennis practice, he’d taken a shortcut through a little wooded area, probably hungry and tired and in a rush to get home. Keeley’s mother, Maggie, held dinner as long as she could, going to the front door again and again to look for Sean. When she and Keeley finally sat down to eat - her father was working late as usual and not home for dinner - the food was dry and hard from being kept in the oven for over an hour.
After they finished eating, Maggie called her husband’s office, and not reaching him, called the police. Sean was found two hours later by the police lying just off the path in the woods, his head split open by a rock from when he fell off of his bike. There was nothing in the path to explain why he had fallen and the assumption was that an animal had been in the path and Sean had swerved to avoid hitting it.
Keeley’s parents changed forever that night. Their marriage had never been strong. Joseph O’Brien was a workaholic and rarely home, usually seeking the bottle and the solace of other men’s company at a local bar when he wanted to relax. Maggie’s social ambitions exceeded her working-class reach and her failure to be truly accepted by the genteel women of the local garden club was a grave disappointment to her, making her bitter and often depressed. What had held them together, what had been their favorite topic of conversation on the rare nights and weekends when Joe was around, were their ambitions for their son.
Sean’s aptitude for numbers, something Joe had never had, meant he could work on Wall Street one day, where the real money was. Joe’s career in advertising, despite long hours and hard work, had never really taken off and he was still only an assistant account executive. Things would be different for Sean. Doors would open. Maggie could see him living the kind of life she had always dreamed of: one of yachts and sprawling estates and regular trips to Paris and Rome.
After Sean’s death, Joe all but disappeared from their lives, only showing up when sufficiently harangued by Maggie, and Maggie’s bitterness blossomed into anger at the world, at the unfairness of her life, and specifically, anger at Keeley for being the one to live. That was when the beatings started. First it was slaps and smacks and ordering Keeley to go to her room. Then Maggie started using a big wooden hairbrush. Then, it was an aluminum frying pan.
This summer, Joe had come out to Captain’s on the weekends, but yesterday was Monday and he was back home and at work. Keeley said she hadn’t seen it coming last night. She had been sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her mother to serve dinner. Her mother had been grumbling to herself, but that was typical.
Then, all of the sudden, smack! Her mother hit her in the back of the head with the aluminum frying pan that she had stopped cooking with and now only used on Keeley. Keeley fell on the floor in surprise.
The girls still clustered around her, Keeley said, “She just kept hitting me on the head while I was lying there and yelling about my head being the one that should be cracked open and not Sean’s. Every time I tried to cover up my head to protect it, she’d grab my arms away and hit me again. I really thought I was going to die. That she was going to smash my head open. It hurt so bad. Then she just stopped. Dropped the pan on the floor and went to her bedroom. Left the food burning on the stove with me lying on the floor. She wanted me to die last night.”
Amy was frozen in shock, her feet glued to the floor. She had never heard anything like it. Sure, kids got spankings sometimes. Sometimes they deserved them. But this? It was terrifying.
Pam, who had also been silent and still while listening to Keeley’s story, suddenly spoke. “No, she didn’t mean it, not really! My mom gets the blues sometimes, that’s what she calls it when she won’t leave the house, and she’s really mean to me. But after, she always tells me she loves me, that she didn’t mean it, what she said. Your mom’s just the same way. She doesn’t mean it!”
Amy looked over at Pam. Her mother, too? What was wrong here? Her mom and all her friends’ moms back home had always been a source of love and comfort and care. How was it possible for them to be anything else? They were mothers! They’re supposed to be that way. She couldn’t get her mind around this whole thing. It was like there was a stop sign in her head.
Keeley lifted the brim of the hat and looked at Pam and then at each of them. “No. She means it. She really does.” Then her face crumpled. “Oh, I don’t know what I’m going to do!”
They all hugged Keeley again, all looking at each other over her head, their faces filled with fear and confusion. Amy wanted her mother to see Keeley’s head, but Keeley adamantly refused. Pam took over then and they all went to the bathroom downstairs together, hooked the lock on the door, and camped out while Pam gently washed Keeley’s hair. They used up a whole box of Band-aids on Keeley’s head as well as some Bacitracin, which made Keeley whimper and squeal in pain when it was applied to her still-oozing wounds.
Even though it was a beautiful sunny day, the girls didn’t want to swim or sail, they just wanted to take care of Keeley. They stayed in the house all day, playing board games on the screened-in porch and ignoring Rich and Jim, who were crouched under the porch yelling out jokes and quotes from Saturday Night Live. Keeley kept her hat on over her newly bandaged head to hide it from Amy’s parents. After much pleading from the girls, Amy’s mother agreed to a sleepover, and the girls breathed a sigh of relief knowing Keeley would be safe that night. Pam and Zooey had to get permission for the sleepover from their parents, but Keeley didn’t go home at all.
“She doesn’t care if I ever come back,” she said, and shrugged. Then she changed the subject, talking about a dollhouse she’d seen in a magazine that had real working lamps. Amy told her mother that Keeley’s mother had given permission, feeling slightly guilty but justified in her lie.
Keeley went back to her house the following night and didn’t say another word about her mother. She wouldn’t even talk about the subject if one of the other girls brought it up. Her head healed and came out of hiding from behind the floppy sunhat after two weeks. Their days returned to the old pattern they’d had before, but now, when they saw the bruises, they knew Keeley wasn’t clumsy, had never been. Tears would start in Amy’s eyes at those moments and she would wipe them away quickly, understanding that’s what Keeley wanted, for things to be happy and normal. That was all she understood.