Miracle Beach (30 page)

She shut the faucet and tested the temperature with a finger. It was hot enough to still be comfortable when it cooled, yet not scalding. In a word, perfect.

Magda undressed and climbed in, easing into the water. She checked the clock. She still had eight minutes, and thought that maybe Ginny would want to meet her out for a nice dinner afterward, to celebrate. She also thought that might be a good opportunity to tell Ginny what it was she was celebrating. Maybe she could even talk Ginny into going to Greece with her after all.

She dialed Ginny’s number and barely waited for Ginny to greet her after answering before Magda launched into her proposal.

“I was thinking we haven’t had dinner in a while, and I was also thinking I’d really like to try Hinterland,” Magda said. “Are you up for it?”

“I might be,” Ginny said. “Do you mind if I drag Frank along?”

She did mind. “I was hoping we could just make it the two of us.”

“Okay,” Ginny said, her voice trailing. Magda could tell she was thinking. “Well, I suppose I could order Frank a pizza, but do you mind if we go somewhere else? Titletown, maybe? Hinterland’s awfully expensive, and Frank’s been wanting to try it, too. I really should go the first time with him.”

Magda felt her blood begin to boil. She had wanted to go to Hinterland. She had wanted to dine out for a ridiculous price. She had wanted to celebrate. With Ginny. Why was that so much to ask? Couldn’t Ginny cut the cord from philandering Frank for one measly meal? She hadn’t counted on having to bargain so hard with Ginny over a stupid dinner out.

Magda checked the time. “I need to call you back, Ginny,” she said. She wasn’t completely sure she would.

She tilted her head back so that only her nose, mouth, and eyes remained above the surface, and wondered if this wasn’t all a giant mistake. Magda was a woman who believed in signs, and she thought that recently God seemed to have rented out billboards just for her—the cruise debacle, for one, and now Ginny’s asinine reluctance to eat a simple fancy dinner without Frank. And then there was Peter King: Was he the best she could hope for in eligible men? Even if they didn’t have Peter’s slimy tendencies wrapped up in look-at-me suits, surely they’d have some other hang-up, some other broken part. Maybe Magda simply needed to take the steps she had to discover the value in a partner who so intimately knew her history. It used to be her and Jack and Nash, and now it was just her and Jack. But maybe that was better than her alone. Instead of answers, silence rang loud in her ears. Then, as if from far away, a phone did, too.

She sat up and dried her hands on a towel, then reached for the phone and answered.

Magda and Jack exchanged pleasantries. Each asked what was new with the other. Responded, “Not a whole lot.” This was followed by a span of silence a second too long for Magda’s taste, so she started right in on explaining, which she had sworn she wouldn’t do.

“I hope you don’t think it was awful of me, Jack, to surprise you with the papers the way I did. I would have liked to have done things differently, and maybe I should have. I just didn’t trust myself to talk to you about it. I thought you might try to talk me out of it, and I took a long time deciding that this was really, truly the right thing for me to do, but—”

“It’s all right, Magda.”

“I’ve been thinking about things since then—”

“Well, I was mad at first, but I’ve come around.”

“I didn’t want to ambush you with a phone call, Jack, but—”

“And I think you’re a hundred percent right,” Jack said.

This wasn’t what Magda had expected to hear. She had expected to have to stand firm. She had prepared herself for the possibility of a small amount of begging. She had not anticipated, of all things, such a quick consensus.

“I—I’m
right
?”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “You and me, we’re two good people. And we’re awfully good at getting in each other’s way when it comes to what will make each other happy.”

“Sometimes,” Magda whispered.

“Of course. Of course! Not all the time. I’m not saying that. But on the big things. I love you, Magda. You know that. Somewhere along the line I stopped trying to be who I always wanted to be. And you did the same. We had to, in a way. But we don’t have to anymore. Before I got those papers I would have caught a plane back to Green Bay, maybe as soon as last week. I would have settled back into my old routine, our old routine. And it would have been fine. It really would have. But I would have woken up every day for the rest of my life thinking about how good I felt here on the island, how much I wanted to still be here. Does that make any sense?”

Magda had to admit that it did. Still, though, how could he agree with her? How could a part of him not want her back? How could he be so chipper about it all?

“It doesn’t have to be like this, Magda. Go live. Take some cooking classes, learn Italian, go travel like you’ve always talked about wanting to do. Things with us aren’t going to change all that much. This doesn’t mean we can’t still be a part of each other’s lives. It’s just in a different way. None of it is going to erase the fact that we raised a pretty damn good kid together. We’re always going to have Nash.”

“Nash is gone.”

“Naw,” Jack said. “Not by a long shot.” He paused. “Are you sitting down?” He waited for an answer.

Magda surveyed her watery roost. “Close enough,” she said.

She couldn’t imagine what Jack was playing at. How was he so calm? So rational? Rational even for Jack. And then one thought entered her mind and stuck fast there: There was someone else. Already.

“Magda, there’s something you should know,” Jack said.

Magda’s breath caught in her throat. She pictured Jack with some young thing out on that island—a woman with long, sandy blond hair who wore Birkenstocks and no makeup and looked windblown, sun-kissed, and radiantly beautiful. A woman younger than her. A woman skinnier than her. A woman more interesting than her, with the whole balance of her life to spend with Jack. With
her
Jack.

Lord, give me strength
, Magda prayed.

“Magda?”

Magda cupped her free hand and scooped a palmful of water to her face, washing away the hot tears threatening to fall from her eyes.

“Magda?”

“I’m here, Jack,” she said, her voice quiet, her former resolve nowhere to be found.

“You’re not going to believe this, but—”

Magda found herself clutching the edge of the tub so hard that her knuckles screamed in protest.

“—you
are
a grandmother.”

Magda drew her mouth into a scowl. Her husband—exhusband? Soon-to-be ex-husband?—had lost his fool mind. “That’s not funny, Jack.” Her fingers relaxed. What in tarnation was he playing at?

“Didn’t say it was,” Jack said. “But she’s beautiful. She looks so much like him, Magda.”

Magda could barely make sense of the words she was hearing. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“It’s a long story,” Jack said, and then proceeded to tell her all of it: about how the girl showed up on Macy’s front steps after getting herself on a bus to Canada and convincing a tourist at the Black Creek General Store to drive her to Macy’s farm, about the girl’s mother and her troubles, and about how intoxicatingly adorable—Jack’s exact words—their granddaughter was.

“Can I come meet her?”

“Absolutely!” Jack said. “Whenever you’d like.”

Magda wished she could transport herself right then. Were it not a solid two-day drive to Vancouver Island, she very well might have hung up with Jack, thrown clothes in a bag, and taken off for wherever this granddaughter was straightaway.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“A little past five your time. Why?”

Magda stood up and reached for a towel with her free hand. “I have to try to book a flight. I’ll call tomorrow and let you know when I’m coming.”

She had nearly hung up when she heard Jack say something. “What?” she asked.

“Your granddaughter,” Jack said, and that one word that had weighed so heavily on her before now tinkled light and airy, like the music of a harp, in her ears. “Her name is Glory.”

“Glory.”
Glory, Glory, Glory
, Magda repeated to herself. The refrain formed a song, a silent prayer, in her head.

JACK HAD NEARLY MADE IT OUT OF THE MARINA CLUBHOUSE when he heard someone calling after him.

This was not an unusual occurrence in the month that had passed since his sailboat had been delivered to Campbell River and he had moved onto it. He had learned early on to assemble all of his things before exiting the showers and walking quickly toward his boat’s berth. One dropped shoe, one misstep, and he’d be stuck talking for up to an hour with Old Sammy Hogan—the clubhouse manager who moved at a turtle’s pace and talked even more slowly, albeit continuously. It seemed to Jack that Old Sammy’s deliberate speech allowed him the time to always think of something else to say, stringing unrelated subjects together like beads and leaving the listener unable to find a break during which to extricate himself.

Today, though, as Jack turned around, it looked like Old Sammy had a little more zip to his step. He was moving, if not fast, then at least at the pace of a normal person, toward Jack, waving a piece of paper in the air.

“Mr. Allen! Mr. Allen! I got a note here for you!”

To expedite the process, Jack started walking toward Old Sammy, meeting him roughly in the middle.

Jack took the piece of paper from him and opened it. Scrawled in thick blue marker was the name Jamie Rodriguez above a barely legible phone number.

“She said for you to call as soon as you could, and that you’d know who she was,” Old Sammy said, his eyes open wide, as if expecting—or hoping—Jack would confide in him what was behind this cryptic message.

“Thanks—I’ve gotta run and take care of this,” he said, holding up the note. “Thanks, though, Sammy. I appreciate your getting me this,” he called over his shoulder as he strode in the opposite direction toward the pay phones.

He couldn’t figure out why Jamie Rodriguez had called here—the marina clubhouse—to try to get hold of him. He had given her Macy’s phone number for that purpose.

Jack had to flick the hook switch on the phone a few times to get a dial tone. He fished a prepaid phone card from his back pocket, entered the code, and then unfolded the paper with Jamie Rodriguez’s name on it and dialed that number. What was this all about?

“Sergeant Rodriguez, LAPD.”

“Hi, Sergeant. This is Jack Allen calling. I just got a message to call you.”

“Jack, good to hear from you. I’m glad you got a hold of me. I just need to clear a few things with you.”

Jack’s feet danced. He couldn’t keep still. “Did you find her?”

“Didn’t your wife tell you?”

“My wife? No.” What in the world did Magda have to do with this? How had Sergeant Rodriguez reached
Magda
?

“Well, we found Kat Gibson last night.” Jamie Rodriguez paused. “Or, rather, she found us. She ran over a cop doing a traffic stop. He’s still alive, but just by a thread. She was high out of her mind, and if he dies, she’s looking at ten to twelve.”

Jack’s feet stopped shuffling. “Years?” he asked.

“In prison,” the sergeant said. “She had enough heroin on her to charge her federally with intent to distribute, too. So that’s another five.”

“Oh, my God,” Jack said. “So she’s going to jail?”

“Prison,” Sergeant Rodriguez said. “Even if those drug charges don’t stick we’ve still probably got a dead cop on our hands. Oh, and she tried to flee the scene, too.”

“So what happens now? What happens to Glory?”

“Well, that depends. The mother doesn’t know where the father is and doesn’t have a legal guardian on record.”

“But the father is dead,” Jack said, then corrected himself: “My son, he’s dead.”

“Right,” Sergeant Rodriguez said. Jack thought he heard a note of sympathy in her voice, but couldn’t be certain. “So that leaves a couple of options. The mother can either appoint a legal guardian, or we’ll turn the daughter over to the state and put her into Child Protective Services.”

Foster care. Jack’s stomach lurched. “You mean there’s no way for us”—he let himself think, and then say, the very words he’d been trying to bury since the first night he laid eyes on Glory Jane Gibson—“for us to keep her?”

“Well, of course. You could petition to be her legal guardian, or challenge any guardianship the mother decides on, and as her closest known living relative, you’d have a good shot at custody. But I think that’s something you and your wife should get on the same page about.”

“My wife?”

“Yes. That’s why I left the message to call. Your wife indicated that she was happy we located Katherine, but that it would not be possible for you to take Glory in. I know you are attached to this girl, but no social worker in their right mind is going to place a kid who’s been through all of this into a home where one person wants them and another doesn’t.”