Chapter One

Some Pilgrims named these islands after animals -- hogs and rats and dogs. The smallest islands are the size of small houses and have names like Breadbox and Wagon. People live on Diamond Island and Mule Island, and a boat goes between them in the morning to pick up children and take them to the bus stop on the mainland near the town launch. Monk Island has a lighthouse on its point. The light comes in my window, because our house sits on the granite cliff of Pigeon Cove. We face east toward the outstretched ocean and a chain of islands called the Seven Sisters. Joan went on a field trip for school when she was in fifth grade to one of the Sisters. Her class was supposed to collect plants in plastic bags and draw pictures of flowers and leaves on the lined pages of their notebooks. Soon after they arrived, Joan was hit in the face by a bird. A huge white seabird flew up from its nest as she was walking in the marsh. "It was being protective," their Nature Reserve guide told her.

The Nature Reserve shares Pardon Island with the Coast Guard station. The buildings stand among the ruins of an old fort, whose turrets and thick stone facades still bravely face the sea. It was a lookout station for enemy ships. I don't know when this was, or if it's true. But a stone tower does remain intact on a high hill, and a few winnowed stone walls snake along the ground toward the bluff. Pardon Island sits on the other side of the harbor; I can't see it from my window. I see the Seven Sisters, Dog Island, Monk Island, and Rattlesnake Island. I see the rocky edge of Quahog Island through the trees. To the northeast there is Misery Island and Little Misery Island, barely in view beyond the clutter of chimneys puncturing the roof of The Chimneys, a mansion whose lawns I used to cut and whose garden topiary I used to trim, sharpening the shapes of deer and birds and bears.

Once, a classmate of mine had a birthday party on Misery Island. His father drove all of us out in his boat for an afternoon picnic. When we arrived, a group of teenagers were on the beach pouring boat fuel on a pile of trash in a sandpit. The whole place smelled like sewage. There were a few teenagers standing around a couple who lay on an army blanket. As they thrashed on top of each other, kissing and groping, the others looked on in a disinterested way. My classmate started to whimper because he was afraid of them. We all were. A few of the teenagers came toward us; they didn't care that my friend's father was our chaperon. They swore at him and laughed and threw on more driftwood, until the fire was gigantic. My classmate cried because his birthday was ruined. Back in the boat, his father yelled at him and said he was acting spoiled. All the guests -- we were five seventh-graders -- ate birthday cake off red plastic plates as the boat slapped against the high waves, speeding back through the channel toward the marina. We sat on flotation pillows with our backs against the sides of the boat as the bilge soaked our shorts and shoes.

Joan picked me up at the park gazebo near the marina, and when I told her what had happened she said, "It figures," because everyone knew Misery Island was where people did drugs and had sex or got raped.

I can hear Joan downstairs in the kitchen. A brown paper bag is being loudly crumpled, and I know she is tearing the top of a muffin off to heat in the toaster oven. We always fight about this because no one will eat the leftover half, the part that's still in the paper cup, and most times we're left with an oil-stained brown paper bag filled with crumbs and all these stale bottom halves. Our mother used to throw them out the window for the birds, who'd pick each muffin's paper cup clean and leave it somewhere in the yard, where it would turn up in a wad, clogging the teeth of the rake. Once, I saw one flattened, stuck like a patch to the rear tire of my father's truck. Joan brings everything home that doesn't sell at the bakery, even the things that are days beyond the half- priced or free day-old stuff. I know Joan is downstairs ripping apart a muffin -- it's Sunday morning, and I hear her making coffee and unwrapping the newspaper from its plastic bag.

We're going to lunch with Aunt Yvonne this afternoon. We call her Auntie E and have since we were kids, even though it sounds strange to us now and requires some dexterity to say. She called us yesterday and told us she'd pick us up at one o'clock. Joan and I stood over the answering machine and exchanged expressions that meant No way and I'm not going.

Once, when I was twelve and Joan was fourteen, Auntie E took us out to lunch at Peking Garden on Route 1. We sat in a booth near the darkened lounge where a television was blaring a violent movie and the wait staff sat at banquet tables snapping the ends off string beans and throwing them into an industrial-sized metal bowl on the floor. Auntie E had four Mai Tais by the time we'd returned from our second trip to the buffet. She picked at the food we brought her and ashed her cigarette into her teacup. Our waiter disappeared into the lounge and ignored us for forty minutes. Auntie E became annoyed at this and banged on our glasses with her chopsticks. She really got into it -- drumming on all the glasses and plates and bottles ...

Excerpted from On This Day © Copyright 2004 by Nathaniel Bellows. Reprinted with permission by Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.