Free Moon Island by Rosie Thomas

Captain’s House from Elizabeth Newton’s garden. She moved quickly, because Elizabeth might be working with her pruning shears again amid the thick greenery. She didn’t want to talk to Elizabeth now, or even to be seen by her.
    There was no way to go but round to the road side of the house. There was a path and dogwood bushes, and the open patch of grass and stones where John left the car. The Pittsharbor lane petered out here at the Captain’s House, the last building on the bluff.
    May wandered slowly along the road. She hesitated at the sound of a car and saw a black Lexus coming round the bend. She thought it must be more members of the endless Beam family arriving, but the car slowed before their driveway and turned towards the house that stood between theirs and the Fennymores’.
    The name on the mailbox was Stiegel. The occupants of the car were a couple, quite young. May waited in the shelter of the hedge. The car drew up at the door and the man got out. He had dark curly hair and wore smart New York clothes; a pink Ralph Lauren button-down shirt and polished shoes. There was a thick gold band on his wedding finger; she saw the light catch it as he opened the rear door of the car and unbuckled a baby seat. He swung the seat into the air, using two hands, as if it were a prize he had just been awarded. There was a fat, impassive-looking baby strapped into it. ‘ Here we are,’ the man cooed into the baby’s face, ‘ here we are at last. Was it a long way for her? A long way in the nasty car?’
    The woman had got out too. She was big, May saw, and swathed in those no-colour linen clothes that some people try to hide their size inside. ‘Come on, open up the house, Marty,’ she said. ‘You know she needs her feed.’
    Marty handed the baby over to her and ran up the steps to the door, tugging a bunch of keys out of a slim leather bag. He fumbled, then unlocked the door. He pushed it open and held it for the woman, who walked by with the baby lifted aloft in its seat. They all disappeared inside, but a minute later the man reemerged and began taking heavy bags from the trunk of the Lexus. May slipped out of her hiding-place and walked on aimlessly.
    The Fennymores’ house was smaller than the other four. It was a plain box but the steep pitched roof and low windows made it look hunched, even forbidding. There was no suggestion of a garden, only a piece of open ground where their old tan station-wagon stood next to a dilapidated shed. Shading the car and the shed was a big tree. It had pale, almost silvery bark and branches like the fingers of an elegant woman’s hand. A sweep of leaves looked like the layers of a skirt.
    May hardly knew one tree from the next, but she thought this one might be a kind of birch or maybe beech. It wasn’t exactly the same as the one in the park she called Mom’s tree, but it was quite similar. On an impulse she left the road and went to it. She rested the flat of her hand against the smooth, sun-warmed bark, then tipped her head forward so that her forehead touched it.
    Alison had been tall and elegant like the tree. The rustling skirt of leaves was like one she had brought with her when she moved from England to New York in 1970. Alison had been a student of American history and part of her degree course had been a year at Columbia. She had met John Duhane sitting on a bench at the Frick and had stayed to marry him.
    The skirt was made of watery tie-dyed cheesecloth, sea-green and jade, with a handkerchief-point hem sewn with tiny emerald beads. The beads had rolled and scattered as the scissor blades sliced the cheesecloth into tatters. Once, long before that, May had implored Alison to let her dress up in the skirt. She had worn it to a fancy dress party as a sea nymph and Alison had plaited green ribbons for seaweed in her hair.
    May pressed her face against the bark of the new tree, but she couldn’t conjure up any words, for her mother or for anyone else. Instead,