“Where were you all those years? In a cave? He’s on the island, but I don’t know where he’s staying.”

“Listen, have you seen Lucas?”

He shook his head. “I’m glad you’re here, though. Let’s go in. I’m buying.”

“I have to find Lucas,” I said.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “Is everything okay?”

“Oh, it’s fine. I don’t know where he is, but I’m sure he’s fine.” I turned to walk down Clara Day Street and then pivoted back to Eddie. “Lucas has been really happy lately,” I told him.

Which was true enough. He was happy in his own way. Lucas had too many fears, too many anxieties to ever experience the kind of happy-go-lucky contentment other people did. The psychologist he went to when we were little called it pathological shyness. But calling it shyness was like calling a hurricane a frisky breeze. It felt more like a fear, a phobia, of people. I didn’t understand it. But when you love someone you don’t have to understand them, you just have to accept who they are, and that was who Lucas was.

What it meant was that all the small things one does to take care of business on a daily basis, Lucas was incapable of doing. The mere thought of talking to a teller in a bank left him shaking with dread. He couldn’t go to the grocery store. He never used the telephone.

In other ways he functioned like any other adult. He went to work every day, did half the house chores, made a reasonable baked chicken. But he didn’t have friends, and never girlfriends. And if it weren’t for me, I’m not sure how he’d get food into the house. If it weren’t for me, he might actually die of loneliness.

That was why I was twenty-eight years old and only just getting around to finishing those college applications. It wasn’t that Lucas was any more capable of taking care of himself now than last year, or the year before. But increasingly, I’d been feeling that my chances were running out—that it was now or never, that if I didn’t leave soon I would literally sink into the sand of this island forever.