The Invisible Husband of Frick Island by Colleen Oakley (autobiographies to read .TXT) 📗

“I don’t know,” she said, hesitating. And Anders tried not to betray what he was feeling. If she said no, of course he’d be disappointed, but he’d respect her wishes. He could still get plenty of material for the podcast, but obviously Piper’s story was what his listeners were most interested in.

“I guess no one out here would ever hear it,” she said, though it wasn’t directed at Anders as much as herself.

“I mean, they could,” Anders said. “It’s on the Internet. Anyone can find it if they want.” It was something that occurred to him this week—that anyone on the island could listen to his podcast, and most people out here, given their propensity for privacy, probably wouldn’t be thrilled with the content. But it was a risk Anders was willing to take. If people confronted him and wanted him to stop, well, he would cross that bridge when he got to it. For now, he was operating under the mantra that it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission. That seemed to be how podcasts worked—Serial, S-Town. The ethics of it were debated ad nauseam online, but they didn’t follow the same tenets of newspaper journalism. In podcasts, story was king. And this was one hell of a story. Still, he wanted to be as honest with Piper as he could be, without scaring her off.

“Well, there’s really only one computer that actually gets Internet service on the island,” Piper said. “It’s at the market. And it’s painfully slow.”

“Really?” Anders said, although it made sense, Jess’s words reverberating in his mind: You’re about to go back in time. Well, that was one less thing for him to worry about.

Piper nodded. And then she shrugged. “Yeah. I guess it’s fine to record.”

While Anders nonchalantly dug his mini recorder out of his bag, trying to hide his excitement, and clicked it on, Piper bent down behind the desk, the entire upper half of her body disappearing from view.

Confused, Anders took a few steps forward, startling when she popped back up like a jack-in-the-box. “Here.” She thrust a stack of papers toward him.

“What’s this?”

“Research,” she said. “About climate change.”

Oh, right. He had nearly forgotten that was how this whole thing started—climate change. That was why she had told him to come to the wildlife center in the first place. She shook the stack, impatient. “Take it.”

He did as he was told, scanning the paper on top. It was a photocopy of a scientific study published in the Journal of Ecology titled “Winter Mortality of the Blue Crab in Chesapeake Bay.” “Where’d you get all this?”

“We have stacks of it in the office.” She nodded to a door in the wall beside the desk, and Anders realized that must be where she’d come from and Bill disappeared to. “A lot of it’s my mom’s, actually.”

“Your mom?”

Piper nodded. “She’s an ecologist.”

“Here? On the island?”

“She used to be. That’s what brought us over here.”

Anders’s eyes went big. “You’re a Come Here?”

She tilted her head, as if surprised Anders knew the phrase, and then nodded. “Yep. Since the sixth grade.”

Anders took this in. She seemed so the embodiment of the island, he couldn’t picture her living anywhere else. “What’s your mom do now?” he asked, wondering if he had met her on the island and not realized it.

“Same thing. Just on the Gold Coast of Australia.”

Anders stared, but Piper did not offer any further explanation.

“So you believe in climate change?”

“Of course.”

“I was getting the impression that no one on this island did.”

“From whom?”

“What?”

“From whom were you getting that impression?”

“Well, everyone,” Anders said, then remembered his conversation at the One-Eyed Crab. “That guy at the restaurant said as much, what’s his name—Jeffrey.”

Piper’s jaw went tight, and anger flashed in her eyes for the briefest second, so brief Anders wondered if he was imagining it. “Jeffrey’s an idiot.”

“Oh. Well, that Mr. Gimby at the antiques store. He definitely didn’t believe in it.”

Piper sighed. “Look, it’s complicated. Most people here accept it’s happening, just like they accept the sun comes up every morning. It’s the why that’s the trouble. They think it’s cyclical—the climate changes, sure, but it’s going to change back.”

“Won’t they be surprised when it doesn’t,” Anders said dryly.

“What did you say?” And there was no mistaking the anger that burned bright in Piper’s eyes this time. “Is this some kind of joke to you?”

“What? No, no, I—”

“I should have known,” she said, half to herself. And then fully to him: “You don’t know anything about this island or the people here. You all just come here all smug and full of yourselves, wanting to gawk and laugh at how weird we are. Or ignorant. Or whatever it is you think about us. I thought—what you said at Mrs. Olecki’s—I thought maybe you were different. That you actually realized there were people living on this island—people whose entire lives and livelihood are being affected, and that maybe you cared about that. I can see I was wrong.”

Anders stood, openmouthed and flame cheeked, unsure of how the conversation went so bad so quickly, and searched for something to say to salvage it.

“Look,” she said, in that way that let him know the conversation was over. “Did you want the tour? It starts in about five minutes.”

“Oh, yes! That would be great.” Maybe all was not lost. He’d get to spend more time with Piper and try to compensate for his cavalier observation. Maybe get back on better footing with her.

“Bill,” Piper called, so loud it reverberated in Anders’s ear. “He wants the tour!” She turned back to Anders and smiled sweetly. “He’ll be just a minute.”

“Oh. Bill does the tour? I thought maybe that you—”

“Nope! I have things to do. Best of luck with your article.” She disappeared through the side door, and as Anders stood clutching the thick stack of research papers Piper had given him and waiting for Bill to reappear, he decided that that