The Island

As a teenager, the novelist Lily King fell for a boy she met on the beach. In the decades that followed, he would shape her life far beyond their initial encounter.

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FADE INTO ME "IN MID-SEPTEMBER, THE TEMPERATURE BEGAN TO DROP," WRITES LILY KING, CHRONICLING THE TAIL END OF A LONG-SIMMERING LOVE. PHOTO BY ALEX BALANSAY.

When I was 14, my mother fell in love with a man named George. He was short and stout, bald except for a trim ridge of gray around the back. He wore thick glasses with clear plastic frames and had a pursed mouth that could burst into a delighted O that altered his whole face when you made him laugh. My mother and I moved out of our apartment across town and into his house the weekend of their wedding. On the little pad of paper in the kitchen, George left my mother cryptic messages before he went to work at a bank in Boston, which I could make no sense of but made her chuckle when she found them. In his station wagon, at the table, on our walks with the dog around the block after dinner, they delighted each other. The marriage had its complications, but she loved him and he loved her, and it was the first example of married love I got to see up close.

That first summer after the wedding, George brought us up to his house on an island off the coast of Rockland, Maine, for the last two weeks of August. I fell hard for Maine, for islands, and, the next year, on a rocky beach called Tar Tank, for a tall boy in a corduroy jacket named Matt. I loved this funny, awkward, adorable boy in secret, in silence, for the next seven summers.

Every year on the ferry going to the island I made sure to be on the side with the clearest view of his house. I strained for a glimpse of him on the porch, in the field of wildflowers, on the dock, in a dinghy. Was he here? Had he come? Sometimes we would only overlap a few days. One August we passed each other at the top of the ferry ramp: He was getting off and I was getting on. But even that hello and goodbye, his scratched voice, his quick humor, and a few new inches in height were enough to feed the flame for another year.