Poor little Misty Marie Kleinman.

This girl came here as a bride, and the whole island came out to greet her. Forty, fifty families, all of them smiling and waiting their turn to shake her hand. A choir of grade school kids sang. They threw rice. There was a big dinner in her honor at the hotel, and everyone toasted her with champagne.

From its hillside up above Merchant Street, the windows of the Waytansea Hotel, all six stories of them, the rows of windows and glassed-in porches, the zigzag lines of dormers in the steep roof, they were all watching her arrive. Everyone was watching her come to live in one of the big houses in the shady, tree-lined belly of the fish.

Just one look at Waytansea Island, and Misty Kleinman figured it was worth kissing off her blue-collar mom. The dog piles and shag carpet. She swore never to set foot in the old trailer park. She put her plans for being a painter on hold.

The point is, when you’re a kid, even when you’re a little older, maybe twenty and enrolled in art school, you don’t know anything about the real world. You want to believe somebody when he says he loves you. He only wants to marry you and take you home to live in some perfect island paradise. A big stone house on East Birch Street. He says he only wants to make you happy.

And no, honestly, he won’t ever torture you to death.

And poor Misty Kleinman, she told herself, it wasn’t a career as an artist that she wanted. What she really wanted, all along, was the house, the family, the peace.

Then she came to Waytansea Island, where everything was so right.

Then it turned out she was wrong.

A MAN CALLS FROM the mainland, from Ocean Park, to complain that his kitchen is gone.

It’s natural not to notice at first. After you live anywhere long enough—a house, an apartment, a nation—it just seems too small.

Ocean Park, Oysterville, Long Beach, Ocean Shores, these are all mainland towns. The woman with the missing closet. The man with his bathroom gone. These people, they’re all messages on the answering machine, people who had some remodeling done on their vacation places. Mainland places, summer people. You have a nine-bedroom house you only see two weeks each year, it might take you a few seasons to notice you’re missing part. Most of these people have at least a half dozen houses. These aren’t really homes. These are investments. They have condos and co-ops. They have apartments in London and Hong Kong. A different toothbrush waits in every time zone. A pile of dirty clothes on every continent.

This voice complaining on Peter’s answering machine, he says there was a kitchen with a gas range. A double oven in one wall. A big two-door refrigerator.

Listening to him gripe, your wife, Misty Marie, she nods yes, a lot of things used to be different around here.

It used to be you could catch the ferry just by showing up. It runs every half hour, to the mainland and back. Every half hour. Now you get in line. You wait your turn. Sit in the parking lot with a mob of strangers in their shiny sports cars that don’t smell like urine. The ferry comes and goes three or four times before there’s room for you on board. You, sitting all that time in the hot sun, in that smell.

It takes you all morning just to get off the island.

You used to walk into the Waytansea Hotel and get a window table, no problem. It used to be you never saw litter on Waytansea Island. Or traffic. Or tattoos. Pierced noses. Syringes washed up on the beach. Sticky used condoms in the sand. Billboards. Corporate tagging.

The man in Ocean Park, he said how his dining room wall is nothing but perfect oak wainscoting and blue-striped wallpaper. The baseboard and picture molding and cove molding run seamless and unbroken from corner to corner. He knocked, and the wall is solid, plaster drywall on wood-frame construction. In the middle of this perfect wall is where he swears the kitchen door used to be.

Over the phone, the Ocean Park man says, “Maybe this is my mistake, but a house has to have a kitchen? Doesn’t it? Isn’t that in the building code or something?”

The lady in Seaview only missed her linen closet when she couldn’t find a clean towel.

The man in Ocean Park, he said how he took a corkscrew from the dining room sideboard. He screwed a little hole where he remembered the kitchen door. He got a steak knife from the sideboard and stabbed the hole a little bigger. He has a little flashlight on his key chain, and he pressed his cheek to the wall and peeked through the hole he’d made. He squinted, and in the darkness was a room with words written across the walls. He squinted and let his eyes adjust, and there in the dark, all he could read were snatches:

“. . . set foot on the island and you will die . . .” the words said. “. . . run as fast as you can from this place. They will kill all of God’s children if it means saving their own . . .”

In where his kitchen should be, it says: “. . . all of you butchered . . .”

The man in Ocean Park says, “You’d better come see what I found.” His voice on the answering machine says, “The handwriting alone is worth the trip.”

THE DINING ROOM at the Waytansea Hotel, it’s named the Wood and Gold Dining Room because of its walnut paneling and gold brocade upholstery. The fireplace mantel is carved walnut with polished brass andirons. You have to keep the fire burning even when the wind blows from the mainland; then smoke backs up and coughs out the front. Soot and smoke slip out until you have to pull the batteries from every smoke detector. By then the whole hotel smells a little on fire.

Every time someone asks for table nine or ten by the fireplace and then bitches about the smoke and how it’s too hot, and asks for a new table, you need to take a drink. Just a sip of whatever you’ve got. Cooking sherry works for your poor fat wife.

This is a day in the life of Misty Marie, queen of the slaves.

Another longest day of the year.

It’s a game anybody can play. This is just Misty’s own personal coma.

A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

In the Wood and Gold Dining Room, across from the fireplace, are windows that look down the coastline. Half the glazing putty has dried hard and crumbled until the cold wind whistles inside. The windows sweat. Moisture inside the room collects on the glass and trickles down into a puddle until the floor is soaked through and the carpet smells bad as a whale washed up on the beach for the last two weeks of July. The view outside, the horizon is cluttered with billboards, the same brand names, for fast food, sunglasses, tennis shoes, that you see printed on the litter that marks the tide line.

Floating in every wave, you see cigarette butts.

Every time someone asks for table fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen by the windows and then complains about the cold draft and the stink of the squishy wet carpet, when they whine for a new table, you need to take a drink.

These summer people, their holy grail is the perfect table. The power seat. Placement. The place they’re sitting is never as good as where they aren’t. It’s so crowded, just getting across the dining room, you’re punched in the stomach by elbows and hipbones. Slapped with purses.

Before we go any further, you might want to put on some extra clothes. You might want to stock up on some extra B vitamins. Maybe some extra brain cells. If you’re reading this in public, stop until you’re wearing your best good underwear.

Even before this, you might want to get on the list somewhere for a donor liver.

You can see where this is going.

This is where Misty Marie Kleinman’s whole life has gone.