The Glittering World

Welcome to the Cove

     Blue was restless from the moment they took off. When the plane wasn’t bouncing it lurched, a bucking hard-core mosh against the unsteady rumble of the fifty-seater’s black fly buzz. Through the worst of it he white-knuckled the armrests. The shape of the plane unnerved him: the vessel tunneled like a mine shaft, like the endless tapering caverns he traveled in his dreams. He ran a pale hand through his tar-black hair and leaned his head against the window, though he’d given up on any chance of sleep, Ambien and a plastic cup of red wine sadly missing from the agenda on the brief morning flight. 

     All the while Gabe, unfazed, chattered away beside him. Going on about various cloud formations he’d spotted beyond the wing, whether the restaurant would still be standing when they returned to New York, his hope that a nomadic family of Sasquatches might have wandered as far east as Nova Scotia. It was strangely comforting, and Blue nodded when he thought he should. Still, he couldn’t help but peer across the aisle toward Elisa, her head buried in her husband Jason’s shoulder. Elisa had always hated flying, almost as much as Blue. He wished he were sitting next to her instead, misery and company and all that. Now it was Jason who was at her side, as fate and marital vows would have it.

     He figured he’d catch some shut-eye in the rental car, but once his giddy traveling companions loaded their luggage and piled laughing into their late-model gray Cadillac, Blue knew there would be no sleep until they reached Cape Breton. He shifted in the backseat as the car pulled away from the curb. The glass and steel of the terminal juddered past, and the airport, along with the rest of Halifax, soon receded from sight. The brilliant bold sweep of the swollen Maritimes sky made his vision blur and his legs tremble, as if he had been at sea his whole life and was only now coming ashore.

     Elisa settled on her sit bones in the passenger seat. She whipped out her vintage Konica—her constant companion of late—and shot a picture of her husband behind the wheel. Jason bopped his head and tapped his square, well-manicured nails against the steering column, emoting like the heir to Nat King Cole as he sang along to a big band tune on the radio. Gabe’s unfamiliarity with the song didn’t prevent him from humming his own form of accompaniment. Folded like a crab claw with his spearmint-green Pumas on the back of Elisa’s seat, he looked happy just to be along for the ride, busy doodling in his sketch pad with a black Sharpie, his writing hand scarred by a childhood burn. Gabe was a scrubby weed of a kid, not yet old enough to tend bar, someone Elisa and Blue would have gravitated toward back in their nightlife days; indeed, with his sleepy smile and tangled mop of dirty blond hair, Gabe was pretty. But young. In the bright light of day, the twenty-year-old looked strangely even younger than when he’d walked into Blue’s restaurant last winter to inquire about the Help Wanted sign in the window.

     The four-hour drive stretched well into the afternoon, their destination a vacation house in the vicinity of the defunct Starling Cove Friendship Colony, the former commune where Blue was born. What recollection he had of the artists’ community was questionable at best, scratchy images of trees and mountains and possibly the façade of a crumbling brick building, spectral memories that might have been cribbed from photographs. Along the way they stopped at a Tim Hortons for coffee and lunch, then a Needs Convenience for gas and snacks; at a musty used-clothing chain store called Frenchy’s they spent nearly an hour. Blue, Elisa, and Gabe darted up and down the aisles to dig through the haphazardly compiled bins, Elisa with the enthusiastic determination of the fashion conscious, Blue and Gabe with the wariness of those who had spent grim youths forced into secondhand clothes. Jason hung back to make small talk with the matronly shopkeeper.

     Blue came across a T-shirt of an eagle superimposed over an American flag superimposed over an image of the burning Twin Towers, the words Never Forget emblazoned across the front. “Hey, Jason,” he called out, and held the shirt up for inspection. “What do you think?”