Free Islands by Anne Rivers Siddons

even known such friendship existed. Suddenly I wanted, more than anything in the world, to tell Lewis to turn the car around and take me home.
    “We’re here,” he said, turning the car off onto a rough, sandy track that led through a forest of scrub pines and palmettos and an occasional stunted live oak, flanked by dunes. It seemed to me that we drove for a long time. There was nothing on either side of us but sand and scrub.
    “This is definitely the inelegant end of the island,” Lewis said. “Most of the fancy cottages are up toward the east end. But I’ve always been glad of that because we have relatively few neighbors. The beach along here is sort of skimpy, and the dunes are high and shifty. It’s kept the property pretty wild.”
    And then we were through the undergrowth and out into a glaring, sandy space beyond which the dunes rose high, fringed with waving sea oats, and the sound of the hidden ocean boomed in my ears, and I saw the house for the first time.
    It was a hybrid of a house, to put it kindly. It stood unshaded in the middle of the blinding-white clearing, and its peeling gray shingles threw off heat like a hot pavement; you could see the shimmering waves of it. The central portion was square and two storied, with many small windows where I could see curtains blowing in the sea wind, and startlingly, a widow’s walk atop it, like a church hat on a dowager. Various shingled wings and ells had been added, obviously later, and a screened-in porch surrounded it. The house sat high on its pilings, and there was a pool of dense, dark shade underneath, where I could see a couple of cars and a lawn mower and what looked to be a volleyball net draped over a Ping-Pong table. Down in the yard, or whatever they called the scorching-white area surrounding it, the noonday heat must surely be close to unbearable. But I had seen the flutter of the curtains, and heard the snap of what must be a flag in the wind. All the living in this house would be done in the air.
    “I need to be here,” I said stupidly to Lewis, hardly aware that I spoke. The house sang to me as my mother never had.
    “I know,” he smiled. “And here you are.”
    A long flight of wooden steps led up from the sand to the porch in back. They were railed and stout looking, but needed paint badly. The rest of the house did, too. I loved every chip and gouge. This beautiful house was nevertheless a hoyden in torn clothes, and would demand nothing from you except allegiance. It had mine before we got out of the car.
    “It’s wonderful,” I said to Lewis, trudging across the sand to the steps. Sandspurs pricked at my legs, and small, vicious insects homed in on me.
    “Yes, it is,” he said. “There’s nothing about it aesthetically right; it started life as a New England saltbox because Camilla’s father had visited Nantucket and fell in love with the old seafarers’ houses there. Most of the other houses are low, behind the dunes, but he said that if he had a house on the beach, he, by God, wanted to see the beach. This house is on one of the highest points on the island, and it’s raised another story by the stilts. He bought up all the land down to the primary dune line, because he said he didn’t want to be looking into anybody else’s bathroom window. Once you’re in the house, it’s like being on a ship at sea. You look straight over the dunes to the beach and the ocean; the tops of the palms are about level with the porch. Whoever added the wings and the porch didn’t require anything but bedroom space and a place to sit outside. None of it’s ever going to make Architectural Digest . But somehow it works. Even if the bedrooms are the size of a Legare Street closet and the walls are so thin you can hear your neighbors…snore.”
    He leered at me.
    “Well, there’s always the dunes,” I said, and he laughed and took my hand and we ran up the steps and onto the porch and into the wind.
    It hit us squarely when we reached