Summer Harbor (21 page)

Toby’s Lexus was gone, the empty driveway confirming her solitary occupation of the house. Grainger pulled his truck in, and Kiley opened the door and jumped out. Grainger met her at the side of the truck, pulling the three bags of groceries out of the truck’s deep bed. Kiley took them from him, trying not to touch his hands as he transferred the awkward plastic handles to her.

“Thanks for the ride.” It was on the tip of her tongue to offer a glass of lemonade, but Grainger moved away from her like a man afraid that an invitation to stay might be extended if he didn’t get back into his truck immediately.

The crunch of clamshells broke the awkward moment. Will drew up behind Grainger’s truck, holding it captive in the driveway. “Hi, what’s up?”

Kiley hadn’t seen Grainger and Will side by side before, and the sight of them—both tall and rangy, baseball caps pulled to the same angle shading their brows, a similar
maleness
as they greeted each other with a handshake—punched her with its significance. If she hadn’t been so overly proud—yes, that was the word,
proud
—this might have been reenacted time and time again: while Will was tiny, as he grew, as he developed into this handsome young man. Kiley searched for similarities beyond their height and manhood. As they talked about
Random
, she indulged herself in looking for living evidence of Will’s paternity. Did they have the same jawline, angular and deep? Or did their hands match in long fingeredness and the light furring on knuckles? Grainger’s hair had gone dark with age; would Will’s fair hair darken, as well? Would Mack’s have darkened with age? Conor’s hadn’t, though it had receded.

Eye color, every high school biology student’s first exercise in Mendel’s theories, was useless here. All three of them had blue eyes. Grainger’s were grayer than hers, and Mack’s had been more pale blue, like a summer sky. Hers were a deep, unequivocal ocean blue, just like Will’s.

Kiley knew she was staring and drew her eyes up to catch Will’s. “Can you please move the car so Grainger can leave?”

“Mom, why doesn’t Grainger stay for the barbecue?”

“No, I couldn’t, really, thanks…” Grainger opened his truck door. “Another time, perhaps. I’ll see you tomorrow, Will.”

Kiley held out her grocery bags to Will. “Take these inside, please, Will.”

“Mom, Grainger, why not? I’m sure we have plenty, and you’d both get to meet Catherine.”

“Bring her by the boathouse sometime. I’d love to meet her.” Grainger was back in his truck, but Will’s hand stayed on the door handle, preventing Grainger from shutting the door unless he jerked it away.

“Mom would love for you to stay. Wouldn’t you, Mom?” Will looked hard at her, challenging her to deny it.

“Will.” Kiley’s voice was a warning. “It’s rude to insist when someone has declined.”

Will kept his hand on the door of the truck. “Grainger, come on.” He was a half step away from whiny.

Kiley watched Grainger’s tension-hardened jawline relax, a slow sad smile come to his lips. “I can’t.”

“Forget it.” Will gave them his shrug of I-couldn’t-care-less.

Grainger realized that the blue car was behind his truck. “Will, why don’t you take those bags from your mother and let her move that car.”

Will pulled his hand off the door handle. Disappointment had leveled his mouth into a thin, hard line, but he did as Grainger said, handing her the car keys.

Kiley slipped in behind the wheel, backing the car carefully out onto the bluff road. She waited, but Grainger’s truck didn’t immediately follow. Concerned that Will was trying one more time to change Grainger’s mind, Kiley got out and walked around the hedge to see Grainger still sitting in his truck. In the side mirror, she could see he was staring straight ahead, his hands on the steering wheel, making no move to start the engine. Unaware of her observation, he’d let his guard down and Kiley saw something like disappointment on his face. As if he’d been hoping she would endorse Will’s impulsive invitation.

“Grainger?”

Startled out of his reverie, Grainger twisted the key in the ignition.

“Grainger, wait.”

He kept his profile to her as she walked up to the truck, his gaze still on the middle distance. Did he regret yesterday’s small, sweet moment of touch? Or had it been meant as a cruel physical reminder of what they had lost? When speech couldn’t begin to describe what was forever sullied between them, the feel of his breath on her neck did.

“Grainger, would you consider staying?”

Without looking at her, he nodded. “Only if you’re sure, Kiley.”

“I’m not sure, but I am certain that it would make Will happy.” Even as she said those words, she substituted others in her mind:
I want you to be happy.

“I should go change. No civilized person would want to eat with me this way.” He looked down at himself.

“You’re fine.” When she’d sat with him in the truck, Kiley had noticed his warm, masculine scent, not unpleasant, and disturbingly familiar. It was true, then; the nose never forgets. “If you go, you won’t come back.”

Grainger threw her a sharp look of mistrust. Did he think she was referring even obliquely to his running away that day? Kiley quickly tried to recover her meaning. “I mean, we aren’t dressing for dinner. It’s a barbecue for heaven’s sake.”

“I should go. This is a stupid idea. Clearly we aren’t in a place where we can successfully pretend every other sentence isn’t a reference to the past. I’m overly sensitive, and so are you. Let’s just stop here, before it gets out of hand.”

“Grainger, no. I really didn’t mean anything about…about that. I would have said the same…” Her voice trailed off. No, he was right. She did feel as though once off her property, he was a flight risk. “You’re right. This is a stupid idea. I’m just indulging Will in a little hopeless fantasy. Like he said, forget about it.”

“Fantasy? What fantasy? That I’m his father, when we both know that’s not true?” Grainger threw the truck into reverse. “Why don’t you tell him the truth? Why keep him, and me, in the dark?”

“What truth?” Kiley shouted over the engine as Grainger gunned it. The hedges were overgrown and the view up the road obscured. Kiley held her breath as he backed too fast out of the driveway and into the road. She only let it out as he slammed the vehicle into drive and sped away.

If Catherine hadn’t pulled into the driveway at just that moment, Kiley would have given in to the shriek of frustration rising in her throat. Instead, with a second deep breath, she put on a cheerful face to greet Will’s new friend.

How long does it take to self-destruct? What are the odds of spontaneous combustion brought on by a bursting heart, Grainger wondered as he drove straight home, forgetting that his original errand, before he foolishly stopped to offer Kiley a ride, was to get gas. He probably wouldn’t have enough to drive to the gas station tomorrow, but there was no way he could conduct even ordinary business right now. Anyone who saw his face would read grotesque mistakes written there. Even Pilot, attuned to his every mood, rode with his muzzle leaning through the sliding rear window’s opening, as if looking back at his master’s stupid behavior. A day ago he had hoped that Kiley and he would have an opportunity to get past their hurts, move ahead, to forgive. And today, like some sort of self-destructive asshole, he had thrust the opportunity away like shoving a life preserver out of reach. Evidently he preferred to drown in his own emotions.

If Grainger had been a drinking man, he’d have stopped at the liquor store and stocked up, putting out the burn of lost opportunity with the burn of scotch. But he wasn’t. He derided himself: If he was a smart man, he’d turn the truck around and go back. But, he wasn’t. He was a stubborn man, so he went home, and picked up a sander.

Before going windsurfing with Catherine, Will had spent the morning working on
Blithe Spirit.
Grainger hadn’t told him who she was, only that he’d had her since he’d had the boatyard. Along with the boathouse, the beachfront, six moorings, and all of the equipment,
Blithe Spirit
had come with the sale. The MacKenzies had hired the former owner to salvage the boat off Bailey’s Beach, and never taken her back home.

It was years before he could make himself uncover her from the blue tarp. Then the first thing he did was to look at the fiberglass patch they’d made. He’d always believed that it had to have been the weak spot, the cause of the accident. But he was wrong; the patch had held.

The second thing he did was sand the name off her transom. So unless Grainger told him, Will would never know this was the same boat in which his father died.

Grainger had come back to Hawke’s Cove because he had gotten a call from the sheriff’s department in Great Harbor. An economically worded message left on his answering machine at his one-bedroom apartment in Galveston, where he lived during those rare weeks not afloat, stated that he should call back ASAP; it was urgent. He knew that Rollie Egan must be dead; there could be no other reason for them to call. He was a little surprised they’d been able to track him down.

When Grainger called the sheriff’s office, the female voice on the line was businesslike, not unkind, or particularly sympathetic. Exactly right for the impassive way he received the news. She detailed the accident as he asked questions, giving him only as much detail as he wanted.

“The official report states that he was somehow caught in the nets and pulled overboard. Cause of death was drowning.”

“Was he drunk?”

“Yes. Alcohol was a factor.”

“I figured.”

“The coroner needs to know what arrangements you wish to make. He needs you to claim the body.”

Rollie had barely claimed him as a son, and now Grainger was responsible for seeing that he got a decent burial. He wanted to say, “Toss him back,” but instead he said “I’ll be there tomorrow,” booked the first flight he could to Boston, and began to jot a list of things he’d need to do to give Rollie Egan a funeral. In twenty-four hours Grainger was right back where he’d started, staring at his father’s bloated ugly face, wondering why he cared enough to bother with a service. By some carelessness, Rollie’s eyes were half open, hooded, and the tips of his cigarette-yellowed front teeth were exposed in a kind of grimace.

If he felt no sorrow at his passing, drunk and dragged into the cold ocean, neither did Grainger feel relief or happiness. A calm neutrality settled on him. Once he was in Great Harbor to claim Rollie’s body and arrange for his cremation, it took very little to drive across the bridge to Hawke’s Cove. Grainger drove around, noting how little things had changed, wondering if he had changed as little.

Eventually he passed the boatyard with a For Sale sign dangling, its worn appearance indicating that the ravaged old place had been on the market for years. And he knew that without Rollie and the painful associations with him, Hawke’s Cove might be where he could make his land-based living.

The other pain from this place he carried with him, so it mattered very little where he was. He accepted that. Maybe even, deep in his heart, he hoped that being there might vitiate his contract with grief.

That last night, angry, hurt, and confused, and thinking that his father was still out squidding, Grainger had gone back to the motel room. He didn’t know what he was going to do; he wanted only to hole up, lick his wounds, and regroup. But when Grainger opened the heavy motel door, there was Rollie, quietly drunk. The small space smelled of his sour body and cigarettes, with an overlay of fish. Grainger knew he should go back out, but he didn’t, he walked in and shut the door.

Oblivious to Grainger’s anguished face, Rollie had begun a tirade against him. “So, you come crawlin’ back to your old man when the do-gooders don’t want you? Eh? Better to stick with your own kind, boy. Course, with your mother tramping around, who knows what kind that is?” It was a favorite theme with him in recent months, an inexplicable obsession. He’d been put off the squidder for drunkenness, and he was happy to take out his frustration on Grainger, as he so often had on his wife. He was sitting down in a chair, his head lolling as if it were still on the boat while his body was on land. Rollie’s eyes were half closed, studying Grainger standing there in front of him. Grainger knew that look, the look that preceded a beating.

No more. Never again. Grainger plucked some money out of his wallet to drop on the nightstand, keeping his eyes on Rollie as if on a cobra, and slung his backpack over his shoulder. Rollie looked at the money, forty dollars, his lips drawing into a thin, tight line. Grainger knew he had either impressed or infuriated him. He wasn’t going to wait and find out. Grainger slammed the door behind him.

It had started to rain hard by the time Grainger found a working phone booth. It was almost dawn, but he didn’t care. He dialed Mack’s number, hoping that Mack would answer, and that he’d want to try and patch things up. They mustn’t let Kiley come between them.

Mrs. MacKenzie’s voice answered. “Grainger, thank God, we thought you were with him.”

“No, Mack went to go cool off by himself.”

“Grainger.” Mrs. MacKenzie sounded hard, cold. As if knowing that he wasn’t with Mack, that they hadn’t shared the same fate, had now penetrated her with ice and she had no will to be gentle. “He took the boat.”

“Mrs. MacKenzie, what happened?” But he knew. He heard the raging tears in her voice and he knew. Mack was lost and he hadn’t prevented it. Grainger had always been the one to guide, to lead; the responsible one. He should never have let Mack go out alone to
Blithe Spirit.

“Why didn’t you stop him, Grainger?”

“I had no idea what he was going to do.”

“What made him do this?”

“We had a big fight. I thought he’d just sit out there.” The first thin light of dawn illuminated the rough gray water of the harbor.

“But he didn’t.”

Mrs. MacKenzie didn’t ask where he was, or how he was. She hung up the phone. He was no longer her care.

The postmark on his mother’s one letter to him, the letter Kiley had brought, was from Boston. By holding it up to a bright light, Grainger could make out McLean Hospital underneath the blacked-out return address. In it had been a ten dollar bill and a short note: “I thought you maybe have graduated high school by now. Congradulashions. From your mother.” Nothing more, no explanation or apology, nor love. He reread the note, not seeing its limitations this time, but interpreting a shy kindness.

At the entrance to the highway, he stuck out his thumb. He had three weeks before reporting for duty. In that time maybe he could finally find his mother. She was all he had left in the world.

Losing Will would be as painful as any other loss he had endured. But as long as Will agreed, there was nothing preventing Grainger from keeping in touch, from having Will return to visit, even going to see him at school. Grainger wouldn’t allow him to disappear into the ether like his mother; or, like Mack, into the sea.