Florida by Lauren Groff Read Free Book Online

sister.
    All night, she and the island were awake, the island because it never slept, the girl because she knew that only her ferocious attention would keep them safe.
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    —
    Before they were left alone in the fishing camp on the island in the middle of the ocean, there had been Smokey Joe and Melanie. They were strangers to the girls. He wore a red bandanna above his eyebrows. Her shirts couldn’t hold in all her flesh.
    The older girl knew that the two adults were nervous, because they didn’t stop smoking and arguing in hushed voices while the girls watched Snow White over and over. It was the only tape they’d brought. In the afternoon, Smokey Joe took the girls on a walk to the pond at the center of the island. It was a weird place. Beyond the sandy bay where the dock and the cabin were, the land grew rough with a kind of spongy stone and the trees seemed shrunken and bent by the wind.
    Watch out, he told them. A Hollywood movie had been made here a long time ago and some monkeys hadescaped. You come close, they’ll rip your hair out and steal your food from your bowl and throw poop at your head. He was joking, maybe. It was hard to tell.
    They didn’t see any monkeys, though they did see huge black palmetto bugs, a rat snake sunning itself on the sandy path, long-necked white birds that Smokey Joe called ibises.
    In the cabin, Melanie gave them hamburger patties without ketchup or buns and told them not to touch the dog because he was a mean little sucker. The younger sister didn’t listen, and suddenly her forearm was bleeding. Melanie shrugged and said, Told you. The older girl got one of their mother’s maxi pads from her dopp kit and wrapped it, sticker side out, around her sister’s arm.
    Smokey Joe sat outside all afternoon under the purple tree with its nubby green banana fingers. He was listening to his CB radio. Then he stood up and shouted for Melanie. Melanie ran out, her breasts and belly moving in all kinds of directions under her shirt. The older sister heard Smokey Joe say, Safer to leave ’em.
    Melanie poked her head into the cabin. She was pale under her orangey tan.
    She said, Stay here. If someone shows up, don’t you go with no man. Girls, listen to me. Stay here, be good. I’ll send a lady to get you in a few hours.
    The girls went outside and watched Smokey Joe and Melanie running down the dock. Melanie was screaming for the dog, but the dog stood still and didn’t follow her.And then Joe threw off the lines and Melanie jumped into the boat, almost missing it. One leg dangled in the water, then she lifted it over the side and they took off at full speed.
    Before that, exactly one day before Smokey Joe and Melanie left the girls alone on the island, their mother had come to them in their own cabin, and she was dressed all fancy and smelled like a garden. Her boyfriend Ernesto and she were going out in Ernesto’s boat, she said. We’ll only be gone for an hour or two, honey bears. She pressed them close to her, her face made up with blue eyeshadow, her eyelashes so thick and long that it was a wonder she could see. She left red kisses on their cheeks.
    But the hours clicked by and she didn’t come back at all. When night fell, the girls had to sleep on the floor in Melanie and Smokey Joe’s cabin, and Melanie and Smokey Joe whispered behind their bedroom door all night.
    And, two days before that, their mother had come into the girls’ room in Fort Lauderdale in the middle of the night and thrown a few of their things into a bag and said, We’re going on a boat ride, pretties! Ernesto’s going to make us rich, and she laughed. Their mother was so beautiful she just glinted off light. Before the sun was even up, they were on Ernesto’s boat, going fast through the dark. And then they’d come to this little island, and the adults had talked all day and all night in the other cabin, and their mother had seemed wild on the inside, flushed on the outside.
    And before Ernesto, many