Tilly and I order endless takeout. Chinese and Thai and pepperoni pizza. We
eat with our fingers and blunted wooden sticks. Forks are too much effort
for girls like us. We queue up movies that make us cry, Steel Magnolias, Cold Mountain, My Girl. We
quote lines back and forth until the characters’ quips become our own. It’s
easier this way, to hide behind a black-clad Sally Field as she loses it in
a cemetery, or an aproned Nicole Kidman as she loses it in a snowy field,
or any Hollywood woman, really, as she loses it somewhere scenic, somewhere
needled with the five pointed leaves of green ivy, the sweeping white of a
snow-choked pasture silhouetting her perfect figure. If we stop watching,
it’s pretty clear Tilly or I will lose it, and it won’t be in some pastoral
scene, it will be in this bed, the week-old sheets perfumed with a thousand
soy sauce packets, pebbled with the dry husks of pork fried rice.

#

When I got the phone call from Tilly, I was sitting on the couch that I
lost, floral sheets tumbling in the dryer that I lost, sipping wine from a
glass that I lost, sheltered under the A-frame roof of the house that I
lost. From Tilly’s tone, I could tell this was going to be a
hold-onto-your-hats conversation, a this-one-is-gonna-leave-a-mark. Tilly’s
boyfriend of two moths had ditched her, returned her first editions and Bob
Dylan records. She sobbed while I sipped, and, before my glass was empty,
she guilted a visit out of me. I should’ve told her then that Nick and I
were through, that he was crashing with a friend on Middle Road until I
could find a place of my own. I didn’t, though, because saying it would
have made it real, and making it real would have made it mine. Instead, I
you-deserve-better-ed and fuck-that-guy-ed and let Tilly take center stage
as she always had. Then I bonneted on my savior hat, headed straight for
Florida.

#

Saint Augustine has rebranded as the oldest city in the States, but show me
what early settlers settled on a Gone With The Wind themed bar
called Scarlett O’Hara’s, a hot sauce store whimsically titled the Pepper
Palace. I would like to get my hands on that history book. Tilly cast off
from the island six months ago in search of a place without seasons, a
forever spring break. Winter on the island is wind that starts gusting in
October and doesn’t stop until May. Trees bend, phone lines snap, shingles
weather. We continue. Tilly ran from winter on Martha’s Vineyard, traded
her snow boots for flip-flops, parkas for sundresses. She asked me to come
with her, but I demurred. After all, winter on the island is all I’ve ever
known.

#

As Tilly cruises the television channels for our next tearjerker, I
investigate the brightly colored pamphlets I scooped from the airport
information desk and start to build an itinerary. One offers a voyage upon
the Mighty Black Raven, promising the most exciting interactive pirate show
this side of the moon, another shills a riveting trolley tour of the city’s
most scenic sights. I show Tilly the literature for The Trolley of the
Damned, a nighttime ghost tour, and she laughs, but we both know we don’t
need tickets to ride that train.

#

Tilly plays the TV bereaved, oversized black shades, a Ferragamo headscarf.
It is ninety degrees outside the contained cool of the air-conditioned
studio, but I know better than to argue. This is Tilly The Cool Girl, Tilly
The Thunder Stealer, Tilly The Brokenhearted. With cobblestoned streets
under my feet, I wince as the Saint Augustine sun sears black orbs into my
pupils. Sweat halos my hairline. Tilly locks her front door and we swarm
with the doughy day trippers wandering the narrow alley of Saint George
Street. With the tourist pamphlets wedged into my purse, we are setting out
to plant Tilly’s flag in this swampy ground, to make this historic hellhole
hers.

#

This is not my first rodeo with Tilly The Brokenhearted. We have rehearsed
these moves countless times, our first waltz box-stepped in middle school
when I comforted her after Mark Edwards shattered her still developing
heart. Together, we shredded his yearbook photo she had tacked in her
locker, exed out his heart-ringed name in a graffitied bathroom stall.
These days, broken hearts are harder to suture, but I’ve always been around
to pick up the pieces.

#

According to our tour guide, every step you take in this city means a foot
in someone else’s grave. Tilly and I pay eight dollars to be led on a
walking tour with a group of family reunioners sporting t-shirts that
advertise their lifelong membership to the Jones clan. Our guide serves up
story after story of hauntings: the little girl gone blue from the plague
who hangs around the city’s coquinaed gates waiting for her mother. The
forlorn lover who forever weeps over the flaking tombstone of his would-be
bride. The pirate who paces the sea wall eyeballing the horizon for the
sails of his lost ship. If you believe the stories, these ghosts are
looking for something in this city, but I can’t help but wonder if maybe
they’re just trying to set the record straight, to say, hey, you’ve got it
all wrong. It’s not my mother I’m looking for, but my brother; or I wasn’t
sad when she kicked the bucket—she had been stepping out on me, anyway; or
when that ship sank I was glad—turns out it wasn’t a pirate’s life for me,
after all.

#

Here’s the thing about gossip on the island: the mill is always churning
and everyone is fair game. Did you hear about Liz and Brian? They’re back
together. The drunk girl who gunned her Camry over the jetty and into the
Menemsha Basin? She was last seen downing tequila at the Ritz. I know my
name is making the rounds in the all-island game of telephone. I know that
my conveniently timed departure is good gossip. I know that my absence is
making tongues wag fervently. I don’t know how it will feel to return.

#

Once during our island wild youth, and because we had seen it in some
movie, Tilly and I halved the whorled flesh of our pointer fingers with a
blunt fishing knife until blood welled then pressed tips together, laughing
as we promised forever friendship. When Tilly tells this story, it ends
here, our fingers sealed. But I remember the after, the moment when I
tongued the tangy blood, imagined I would never feel closer to another
living thing.

#

At the Lady de la Leche Shrine, Spanish Moss beards every oak, and the
paths that meander past gravestones are shaded by the leaves of palmettos.
We wander, stop every so often to read a bronzed plaque detailing the lives
of the nuns who lived on these grounds. Back on the island, we have our own
stories to tell, but we don’t hand them over to every eager tourist who
comes knocking. Imagine the plaque telling the story of the two brothers
who no longer speak due to a land dispute, the town drunk who backed over
his kid in the driveway, the police officer who executed a wild turkey for
exhibiting menacing behavior. Tourists don’t want those stories, they want
the ghosts, the glamour, the glistening orbs. As Tilly reads about the last
abbess who reigned supreme over these grounds, I imagine the plaque that
would stand in front of Nick and my place: Love Don’t Live Here No More.

#

On the bricked patio of the Tini Martin Bar, Tilly and I sip extra dirties,
spear olives crammed with blue cheese. The yellow sun arrows off the
surface of the Saint John’s River, the smell of the water sweet and
cloying. Tilly is talking about the city, about how she really feels she
can make a home for herself here. I nod, dreg my martini. Stay forever, she
says. I’m so happy I could fry. The Florida sun obliges.

#

All things considered, I think I’m keeping it together pretty well. Our two
martini lunch doesn’t loosen my tongue enough to let the whole story come
cartwheeling out. When Tilly offhandedly asks me about island life, I give
her the basics: bare birches, frost-stitched ground, Mr. Taylor’s third DUI
in as many weeks. I don’t tell her that I fucked up, that I spent a night
in a bed that wasn’t my own and that there was no coming back from it. It
was only my first strike but I was out all the same.

#

On Saint Augustine Beach, the sand is white and finely grained, the shore
unmarred by the ochre boulders that pockmark the island’s coast. Tilly and
I walk in the wake of the cresting waves, the warm water spackling our
ankles and calves. The tide turns, left-behind water pooling and reshaping
the shore. On this beach, it is easy to forget about the island, to think
that maybe back there was nothing more than a story I told myself to keep
the Florida heat at bay, that my unforgiveable night never really happened.
The receding tide drags our footprints out to sea, the ocean easily mopping
up any clues of our existence.

#

Our last stop of the day is at the Fountain of Youth. I’m hoping for shade,
spring water running cool and sweet, a single swallow erasing my crows
feet, salving my winter-dried skin, but I’m old enough to know that
anything heralded on a billboard is probably too good to be true. The
attraction buses in tourists from South Florida, from Georgia, from South
Carolina. I want to roll my eyes at these silly Southern pilgrims but we
are here, too. Tilly and I queue with the other tourists, stand in line for
fifteen minutes until we finally gain entry to the small shack with a
stone-ringed well. A park worker in conquistador garb strokes his pointed
beard, doles out paper Dixie cups. Tilly and I here’s to us and tip back
our heads. The water is blood-warm and sulfur-infused, coating my tongue
with the taste of egg. If this is youth, I don’t want any part of it.
Outside in the blinding sun, Tilly vogues and smiles, asks me if she looks
any younger. Yes, I want to tell her, but it would be another lie. If we’re
being honest, I wasn’t really hoping for baby skin or a set of milk teeth.
I wanted a rewind, a return to island childhood summers whittled away with
Tilly, a time when our biggest concerns focused on whose house we would
sleepover at, on which boy would ask us to Friday’s all-island dance. I
wanted a clean slate, a wiping of mistakes and choices made in adulthood. I
wanted to return to that moment with Tilly, our bloodied fingers sealed
under the star-sick sky, the sound of the bell buoy in the harbor clanging
to the pace of our rabbit hearts.

#

Back in Tilly’s apartment, we shake out her sheets, toss them in the
stacked washer. We open a bottle of champagne, the cork popcorning off the
ceiling. We drink to youth, to each other, to summer on the island. I pack
my carry on, fold sundresses that will remain closeted until May. Buoyed by
the bubbles of champagne, Tilly is no longer the brokenhearted but the
triumphant. She is excited about this city, about the opportunity to tell
her own story, about the chance to embellish and omit. With her
fact-checkers floating in the middle of the frozen Atlantic, her history is
hers to craft and of that I am jealous. But I am not Tilly—I cannot trade
in the island for a different address. I cannot bill myself a new origin
story, a new girl to be reborn in a sharper version of the original mold. I
can only hope that this me is enough, that the letters of my name I’ve
fingertipped in the island’s sand since birth have not been erased in a
turning tide.

#

In 4E, I watch out the oval window of the plane as palm trees become
matchsticks, become blades of grass, become the blue of cruising altitude.
My flight to Boston is easy and I’ve splurged on a connector to the island.
In the nine person cabin of the Cape Air flight, the twin engines shudder
to life and then we are climbing, the buildings of Boston scraping the
metallic March sky. Bean Town becomes a snow globe city and then we are in
a white fog, the propellers pummeling the air. With my cell phone off and a
watchless wrist, it is impossible to tell how much time has passed. Those
minutes, so many hours. We descend suddenly, my stomach still floating at
cruising altitude and then the ocean appears, the greens and teals more
Caribbean than Atlantic. Beneath the clear water, I can see the wrecked
hull of a one-time ship, the wood of a would-be home, the invisible
remnants of forgotten lives repurposed for a minnow’s amusement park.
Wheels coast lightly over slicked tarmac. Seagulls catwalk the runway. An
air traffic controller opens the door, welcomes us to the island, the smell
of the wet grass and ocean-thickened air nearly driving me to kiss the
salty tarmac. In this moment, I know that no matter what is said about me
in living rooms or in neon lit bars, this will not become the island that I
lost.

Image Credit: Xander Robin