Free The Shelter of Neighbours by Eílís Ní Dhuibhne Page B

– when Trish and Chip found me. I pushed the magazine under a cushion and pretended to be reading the novel, but she saw, all right.
    They were neighbours, from the next cabin. Morgan knew them – their father was a big shot from somewhere near Morristown. They’d brought Berry for a walk once or twice.
    â€˜Oops! Beg pardon!’ he said. He was already on the porch.
    â€˜We dropped by to say hello to Berry,’ she said, in a raspy, dry voice, much more confident than his.
    â€˜Oh,’ I said. ‘She’s not here. They’re all out. They’re down at the lake swimming. They usually go swimming at this time, before their lunch.’
    I had a tendency to tell people much more than they needed to know. I was pretty sure this pair were up to no good, that they’d come to snoop around, maybe even to steal something, but all the same, I was deferring to them. It wasn’t that they looked super-rich or anything. They dressed like most of the teenagers at Lake Elizabeth, in shorts and T-shirts. Flip-flops. She was stocky, almost fat, not one of the svelte, smooth-skinned model types. She looked rather Irish, actually, although she wasn’t. He was averagely tall, with curly, reddish hair, and fair skin. Intense blue eyes, the same as Berry’s. Navy blue. Even so, I didn’t think he was especially handsome. Most of the young men around here were like gods, and he looked more ordinary, like a nice-enough-looking Irish boy, not like a basketball player from somewhere off the Garden State Turnpike or Route Nine Oh One. (I loved the names they had on their roads: they made them sound so important.)
    â€˜Who are you?’ she asked peremptorily. She’d no manners. And she should have known who I was because she’d been introduced to me once, down in the restaurant.
    â€˜Rosemary.’ I felt the heat of the day pressing in on me suddenly.
    â€˜Hm,’ she said, with an enigmatic pursing of her lips that was almost a sneer.
    â€˜Uh, I’m Chip,’ Chip said hurriedly. ‘Chip Johnson. And this is my sister, Trish.’
    I pretended not to know. It struck me that they looked more like boyfriend and girlfriend than brother and sister. Although who’d have wanted Trish as a girlfriend?
    â€˜What’re ya reading?’ Chip pointed at the book.
    I told him.
    Trish’s eyebrows shot up. ‘I’ve heard of that.’
    Most of the women I’d met over here spoke in hilly lines, their voices rising and falling, then rising like a ski slope at the end of the line, open and hopeful. Trish’s sentences were downhill all the way, and when she finished one, it was shut and locked up for good.
    She picked up the book without asking if she could and riffled through the pages.
    Probably to cover his embarrassment, Chip asked me if I’d like to go canoeing with them sometime.
    Trish stopped snooping in my book the minute he said this and looked as cross as a bobcat. I said I’d love to go out in a canoe, which was the truth.
    In the books I’d had at home, on the sofa in our kitchen in Dublin I’d read of children who messed about in boats, who rode horses, who ice-skated, and who did a myriad other things which were off limits so completely for me that I never dreamt of asking my mother if I could do them, even though I longed to. Actually, we didn’t know anybody who went out in a boat, or rode a horse.
    Here at the lake they did all that stuff. Canoeing was just one of the dozens of desirable activities on offer, free to guests at the resort. Free to me. There was a harbour where all the silver canoes were lined up: they were long, with those nice turned-up pointy ends, like the shoes the prince wears in pantomimes. Smooth as silver herrings, they glided along the lakewater and it had not even crossed my mind that I could actually go out in one. But now that Chip had planted the notion in my head, I thought of it all the