Chapter 3

3

Unlike a lot of people in my area, I am not a river rat.

In this part of upper New York State, where we live, is the St. Lawrence River—a massive, deep river that separates the United States and Canada. It's a major shipping channel, and more than that, it is a way of life. People love the St. Lawrence because it's enormous and deep and clean, with luminescent water. Everything is the river, and the river is everything. People wear shirts that say how much they love the river. Everyone has a boat up there and fishes and swims and Jet Skis around. If you are one of the people who live the St. Lawrence lifestyle, you are a river rat. I don't know why they chose rat as their term, aside from the alliteration. Beach bum. River rat. I'm not sure what this makes me. A land locust? Anyway, it's a thing.

Even though it's about two hours from our house, we'd only been there once, and that was when I was little. My mom's an English teacher and my dad researches socioeconomics, so we go to places where everyone reads a lot, or to my grandparents' house in Florida, where we still read a lot, but do so with someone playing Jimmy Buffett in the background or while being watched by an unblinking iguana.

In this river, in a section where the two countries are within touching distance, there is an area called the Thousand Islands, even though everyone there will tell you that there are over 1,800 islands. Only a few of these islands are very big. Most are hilariously small. All you need to be classified as an island there is to be above and surrounded by water and to have one tree. It counts if you used to have a tree. This was the only thing I remembered from our trip: little spots of land with houses like candy sitting on them, surrounded by water like green glass.

It was a straight shot up the highway to Clement Bay, the closest town to Morning House. Clement Bay is a tourist town, with one main street right along the water full of boutiques and places to eat. I was supposed to catch my boat at Uncle Jim's River Cruises, right at the far end. It was a big enough operation, with a few multistory sightseeing boats and a dinner cruise. My parents bought my sixteen-dollar ticket and helped me wheel my two suitcases into the line with all the tourists. They offered to take the ride with me, but I thought it was best for me to get on the boat and go. It looks weird to show up at your new summer job with your parents with you. I got surprisingly emotional when the line started to move, and I began dragging my suitcases away from them, across the asphalt of the parking lot and to the dock. An older couple in matching American flag T-shirts regarded my suitcases with confusion and gave each other a look, like I had offended them by bringing so much stuff, and this is just what kids are like now, with their phones and their two suitcases on a sightseeing boat.

Because Morning House was the last stop, where people could get off and explore the island and house for an hour or two, I had to ride the entire scenic cruise to get there. The Thousand Islands really are beautiful. In some places, the water takes on a tropical glow—a pure aqua that seems to emit light. The boat drifted around Pine Island, with its slanted trees that had been bent by the wind. There was Bluff Island, the one someone won in a poker game. There was a scrappy little island called Willie Nelson Island. I heard about the five thousand or so shipwrecks that littered the bottom of the river, and the gold treasure that might be buried on Maple Island. There were stories of how this part of the river was how so much illegal liquor came into the United States from Canada during Prohibition, how bootleggers outfitted their boats and dumped booze in the water in packages that would float up to the surface to be picked up and smuggled into the country, how there were trails of bottles and beer cans marking their paths to this day.

"That's Just Enough Room Island," the guide said as we passed an island with one house stubbornly built on every inch, so that if you took too long of a step out the front door you went directly into the water.

"More like Leave Me the Fuck Alone Island," I mumbled.

The older couple in the American flag shirts looked at me disapprovingly. I rested my chin on the rail and shut up.

I imagined Akilah and me spending the summer here together as we passed the elegant parts of Wellesley Island, covered in houses owned by people who use summer as a verb. These were the houses I remembered seeing—big, storybook-looking ones, wildly colored in pastels and gingerbread decoration. It's always weird when an old memory like that lines up pretty well with reality.

"Fire is the enemy on these islands," the guide said. "This was the site of the great Frontenac Hotel, which burned down in 1911 when a member of the band playing that night dropped a lit cigarette. It remains a serious concern. In fact, we have a fireboat here called Last Chance , because when it shows up..."

I put in earbuds for the rest of the tour.

We made our way along the river, me tuning everything out, until a mini-castle structure on a tiny island appeared in front of us, connected to the main one with a small stone bridge, maybe six feet long.

"Our last stop," the captain said. "Right in front of us here is the boathouse for Ralston Island and the famous Morning House. It's open to the public for the very first time this summer. Built between 1920 and 1922, the house was sealed up after two of the family's children died here on the same day in the summer of 1932. But it's been preserved and you can see it for the first time...."

I got off last, clanging my rolling suitcases along the metal floor of the boat.

"That's a lot of stuff you've got there," the guide said as I heaved my bags over the small platform between the boat and the dock, trying hard not to drop everything I had for the summer into the water.

"I'm very serious about sightseeing," I replied.

I'd been told to go to the ticket office when I got off the boat. It was right there at the dock, along with a tiny US border control office, which was just one bored guy staring at his phone. I went over to the window in the ticket hut.

"I don't need a ticket, I don't think?" I said. "Dr. Henson brought me here? I'm... going to be working?"

I spoke in questions and was answered with one from another direction.

"Are you Marlowe Wexler?"

I turned around to see a girl with pale, densely freckled skin and thick red hair that hung long and triumphant over her shoulders. She had a delicate build that was swamped in an oversized maroon Morning House polo shirt, open slightly at the neck to reveal a white-gold chain with a fragile letter A dangling from it. Before I replied, she removed a walkie-talkie from her hip and raised it to her mouth.

"She's here," she said into it.

"She won't make the final tour," the voice on the walkie went on, ominously, "so take her to the playhouse. Have her meet me at five in the hall."

"Okay!" She clipped the walkie back onto the pocket of her shorts and opened the wheelchair-accessible entrance. "I'm April. Welcome to Morning House! Here..."

She took the handle of the heavier of my bags and gallantly began dragging it up the weaving path. I wanted to stop her since she looked like someone who could be carried off by a bird, but she moved my bags with more ease than I could manage. She was tiny but had wiry strength.

"Marlowe is such a cool name," she said over her shoulder.

It was a compliment, but I hadn't done anything to deserve it, so I was my usual smooth self and tried to laugh it off. What came out was an uneasy snickering noise, which I got away with because it blended in with the sound of the suitcase wheels on the path. I shouldn't be allowed to talk to cute girls. Whenever I see one, I should put a box over my head.

As we passed a cluster of trees, the view suddenly opened and Morning House revealed itself. I had to tilt my head back to see all of it, because it was built up on the natural high point of the island and soared above. It was made of gray stone, with a red roof that was a jumble of peaks and turrets of differing heights. Windows large and small, round and square, glinted in the sun from copper-green frames. It looked like an Ivy League school, or possibly Dracula's castle—or some combination of the two from a movie where Dracula goes to Yale.

Over the front door, there was a massive stained-glass relief of a rising sun that seemed to glow from its very own power source.

"Wait until you get inside," April said. "The place is full of stained glass. It's like a cathedral in there. But the playhouse is good too."

"Playhouse?"

She didn't need to explain, because we had turned a corner and found ourselves in front of a smaller but still sizable building. If the big house was for a happy Dracula, this one had come from Hansel and Gretel. The stone blocks in the walls were of varying sizes, jumbled together solidly. There were tiny round windows and long ones, dotted around in a broken rhythm.

I had arrived at my summer home, and it appeared to be fictional.