Learning to Swim (14 page)

Bród agus Dochar

Pride and Prejudice

I didn’t mention anything I’d learned about Jen’s family in our subsequent meetings at Mrs. O’Leary’s, and Rory didn’t say anything about Owen. Not until a day in the middle of July when Mrs. O’Leary asked me to find her jacket. As I was getting up to acquiesce, Rory appeared in the doorway of the house.

“I’ll look for it before I leave,” he said. It was addressed to Mrs. O’Leary, so I awkwardly returned to my rocking chair.

“Such a darling boy,” Mrs. O’Leary said absently. “How I’ll suffer when he’s gone.”

“Mrs. O’Leary,” I started awkwardly, remembering the book filled with money. “Are you preparing your house to sell it?”

I expected her to dodge the question, but she didn’t. “No, dear, I wouldn’t sell this house. It’s not my house; it’s Seamus’s. I wouldn’t sell it without his permission.”

I bit my lip. I had heard her talk of him countless times as though he was a long-dead person. But I’d never actually referenced his death in her presence. I wanted to believe she wasn’t that unstable. I wanted to believe she wasn’t still combing the horizon for his little boat.

“But of course it’s yours,” I tried. “Through marriage.”

The old woman took a shaky breath, her crumpled hands twitching in her lap. “No, it will always be my Seamus’s. I just happen to still be stuck here. I’m not inclined to give it away before I must.”

“Of course,” I said quickly. I didn’t want to sound like some young busybody trying to force the old woman into a retirement home or some equally awful place. And in whatever way she seemed to have interpreted my words, they made her nervous. “It was just with all this cleaning up you have Rory … Ronan do. I was just wondering if you were going to be selling it or moving out or something. I know these houses have to be worth a lot, being so close to the ocean.”

Rory reappeared then, a navy blue sweater in hand. I had seen him produce this sweater for inspection before. He didn’t even seem to wait for her verdict. He slung it over the railing of the porch as she shook her head sadly.

“You seem tired today, Mrs. O’Leary,” he said, his eyebrows pushed together in concern. “It’s probably time to go inside. I’m finished with the upstairs now. I’ll start on the attic tomorrow.”

On another day Mrs. O’Leary might have lingered with me on the porch, but she was nervous today and let Rory lead her inside.

“Good night, dear,” she said to him at the door.

He closed the front door and let the screen door bang shut, spinning quickly around to face me. “You shouldn’t talk to her about the future, it upsets her,” he said.

I was taken aback but also extremely put out. She was my friend as much as his.
Well.
Maybe I hadn’t known her as long, but she was my friend. “I don’t think it concerns you what I talk about with my friend,” I sniffed.

“Right, go around upsetting whoever you like,” he said. It was on the tip of my tongue to say I hadn’t meant to upset her, but he wasn’t finished. “It would just be a lot easier for the rest us if you would go upset people on
your
end of the beach. It’s kind of crowded down here, and we don’t need idle
princesses
hanging around down here making things harder.”

Idle? Princess?
I was stung.

“Why don’t you go back up to the big houses,” he went on. “I know there are more than a few guys with eyes on your money.”

Eyes on my money?
I was pushed to sputtering: “Is-is it just-just jealousy? Is that what makes you
hate
us so much?”

He snorted. “Yes, I am just driven mad with jealousy for your boyfriend’s pink shirts.”

“You pretend it’s
us
who creates this wall. But it’s
you
! I’ve never heard them say a word against you!” That wasn’t entirely true. “Those families have lived here years and years, some probably longer than yours!” I said obstinately. “Those kids, they’ve been coming here all their lives, too.”

“But they don’t know what the ocean looks like in the winter,” he said simply.

I groaned. “Get off your high horse! You’re so stuck atop this pinnacle where you’ve placed your family and your parents’ resort—”

“Yeah, my mom is so unfortunate as to need a job!” he yelled. “I know that automatically puts me some ten to fifteen rungs below you and your nanny.”

“I don’t have a
nanny
—”

“Oh, that’s right. Your dog’s the one with the nanny.”

“You pretend to know an awful lot about my life,” I said, my voice shaking. He snorted again. “But you’ve been doing that since the day I met you,” I barreled on. “Assuming things about me and my life!”

“It’s easy to do when you traipse around here like you own the place. Acting like some kind of royalty. Just down south to watch the locals for entertainment.”

“I don’t
traipse
!” I yelled idiotically. “I come here to visit my
friend.
It’s
you
who
traipses about, acting like some sort of suffering hero, making stupid assumptions with no interest in correcting them, even when the realities are staring you in the face!”

“Staring me in the face? All that’s staring me in the face is a stuck-up, rich kid whose sole occupation for the summer is to walk around the poor side of town talking down to everyone she meets—even her supposed
friends
.” He nodded toward the front door, and I could feel the blood rush to my cheeks.

There it was again. But this time it hurt more. Because several things had occurred to me: I thought she was crazy. I thought her kitchen was gross. I hadn’t known her name for weeks. I hadn’t cared to know her name for weeks; it hadn’t mattered to me. Because she was a source of entertainment. Like summer help.

He was right
.

The truth brought a stinging to my eyes that I knew preceded tears. I ran down the stairs as fast I could and all the way to my pier without slowing down. It was hard to run in the sand, and I stumbled like a fool, but I didn’t dare slow down. There was only one place I felt comfortable crying.

An Finné Fir

The Best Man

I stopped going to Mrs. O’Leary’s altogether. I didn’t want to see Rory. But I also didn’t want to see Mrs. O’Leary. I felt as though I had betrayed her. There was nothing left I liked about Oyster Beach.

It was already late July, and it didn’t take much for me to convince my parents that it would benefit us all to go home a few weeks early, which was the earliest my mom could get the house together. Dad was rather tired of the social scene and thought it best that we “fix our situation” at home. This meant that when we were home it would be easier for him to contact all his friends to get me into a school he approved of. I knew this, but I didn’t resist it. Even that would be preferable to what Oyster Beach had become.

Rory’s words had stung me to the core. They were mean, degrading, and offensive. And above all, they were the truth. And that only made me despise Owen and the Carltons and my parents even more.

My mom was sorry to see her perfect world being taken away from her early, but she acquiesced since it would most likely see me to the future she wanted. So Dad set about making plans for the upkeep of the house for the rest of the year. They were going to hire a tenant for the off-season, and Mom happily set about buying the best antiques the area could provide to boost the rental price. We’d be gone by mid-August.

One day, when I returned to the house from a walk along the beach, a walk carefully mapped out to avoid the resort, I found a strange visitor.

Mr. Hall was sitting at our kitchen table, talking to my mother. A huge wave of confusion washed over me—uneasy feelings, thoughts of Jen Johnson, Rick Johnson, Rick Johnson’s fiancé, dead, bloated bodies, ashrays. All kinds of eerie things crept upon me with a shiver on my spine.

Mr. Hall nodded a hello, as my mom conducted her usual investigation into where I’d been, who I’d been with and what I planned to do next. I shrugged all her questions off, more interested in the quiet old man who inexplicably sat in our kitchen. “What are you guys doing?” I was finally able to ask.

“This is Mr. Hall; he owns an antiques shop in town,” she explained.

If he wondered why I didn’t correct her assumption about our not knowing each other, he didn’t say as much. He had been gone by the time Captain Harville had called my parents that night at the beginning of summer that seemed so far away now. And she, of course, didn’t know I’d contacted him about the strange instruments I kept in my pockets.

“I’ve hired him to look at some of the things in the house,” Mom went on. “To see if he can sell any of it. And later he’s going to bring over some things that might go nicely with the décor.”

“Pink stuff,” I mumbled.

Mom rolled her eyes and started talking about lace, so I sneaked around her into the house. But I was restless with a stranger in the house, and later, when I went downstairs, he was the only one in the kitchen. I could hardly turn around and leave the room again without seeming rude, so I made small talk.

“That stuff looks cool,” I said lamely.

There were boxes of junk in front of him, boxes with no lids, contents spilling onto the tabletop. He looked at things through a big eyeglass—vases, cups, tablecloths, metal objects with unknown functions—checking them for who-knew-what.

He nodded wordlessly, and I turned to leave the room again, my duty being done, but then he said,

“You talk to Mrs. O’Leary, don’t you?”

I stopped. I thought carefully about answering before I turned around and nodded. “How do you know her?” I asked.

“There was a time when everyone in Oyster Beach knew Lia O’Leary.”

Lia O’Leary.
I had never known her first name. Lia. I had never even considered that a person her age
had
a first name.

I was quiet, but stared at him, willing him to tell me more without my having to ask.

“Seamus O’Leary was my best friend,” he said simply.

I sat down at the table across from him.

“I knew Seamus from the day he got to this country.”

“Then you knew him when they met,” I said. “She’s told me before about how they met. And a lot about them when they were younger.”

“I knew him the day they met, and I told him from the day they met that she was not right for him.”

I was appalled. He read my dark expression and added, “They didn’t have a happy marriage, you know.”

That certainly didn’t fit anything Mrs. O’Leary had ever told me. “How so?”

“They were married very quickly after they met. I was the best man.” His expression was cheerful for a moment, then flickered back to a dark reminiscence. “Seamus expected people in this town to be happy for him. The town was smaller back then, everyone knew everyone. And he expected them to celebrate his finally settling down. They didn’t. He was a loved man, that’s for sure. Loved by everybody in this town. Every
woman
, more specifically. He expected them to be just as happy as he was on the occasion. But too many a young lady was conscious of the loss to her own expectations that his marriage produced. And Lia was so pretty. Pretty, but different. So, so different. ‘Odd,’ people said. ‘Strange.’ She wore that scarf over her hair, all the time; she looked like a gypsy, they said. Other girls didn’t like that. Some wouldn’t go near her, wouldn’t acknowledge her. But they all, oh, they
all
loved Seamus.”

“She loved him, too,” I said, instantly on the defense. “You should hear the way she talks about him.” I couldn’t imagine other women hating Mrs. O’Leary. Or, more accurately, I didn’t
want
to imagine it. Because it was only too easy, and too depressing, to see how they would take the eccentric woman and shun her as an outsider. “She still loves him,” I said firmly.

Mr. Hall looked at his hands. “That may be true, but it wasn’t long after they were married that she was longing to leave. Some loves are stronger than others.”

Longing to leave?
Mrs. O’Leary was
still
in that dumpy little house. If she wanted to leave, why would she
still
be there?

“You have to understand that Lia was a beautiful woman. Beautiful and … she … and not from around here. Different. She had a dark beauty—long, dark hair, always covered with some colorful scarf. Big, dark eyes. That wasn’t the style of women in Oyster Beach. Blonde and sun-bleached was the order of the day. So she stood out. There wasn’t a man in Oyster Beach that wasn’t taken with Lia O’Leary. Including Seamus. But he always loved her more than she could love him.”

“I don’t think you’re right,” I said stubbornly. “She loves him.”

“We can agree to disagree,” he said simply. He adjusted his glasses and returned his attention to his antiques.

I was not about to let this topic die. “What about the children?” I asked. “Ronan? And the one that died so quickly after being born?”

Mr. Hall looked me in the eye. I got the feeling that he was trying to take the measure of me before going on. I put on my best I-can-keep-a-secret face.

He took a deep breath. “We all thought that would hold her down for a while. After the first baby died—”

“He disappeared,” I said. I assumed, being so close to Seamus, that he knew this and was only keeping this from me from years of practiced silence. Or denial. If there was one thing I knew people were good at, it was not telling the whole truth. “I know the baby disappeared,” I repeated.

He looked at me with squinted eyes, clearly realizing he had underestimated me. “Okay, disappeared,” he finally said. “The doctor was in often to see her after the second pregnancy; she was very ill. Weak. Considered too frail to have children. She was devastated, depressed. Everyone thought it was her inability to have children that depressed her.”