Hale's Point (4 page)

Beyond it, the rocky shore and Long Island Sound. From a gap
in the stone wall, a hodgepodge of boulders set into the sandy precipice served
as a kind of stairway to the beach. It was the Hales’ beach, which included a
crescent-shaped jetty that sliced into the Sound—the point for which Hale’s
Point was named. Some twenty acres of woodland, also Hale property, abutted the
beach—prime North Shore real estate, entirely undeveloped except for the half
acre or so immediately surrounding the house and stable, the latter of which
R.H.
had long ago converted into an eight-car garage for
his collection of vintage sports cars. The Hales had fended off lucrative
offers for the land for two centuries.

He had loved the beach as a boy, but with his leg all but
useless, he couldn’t even think about climbing down there.

The sound he had taken for waves came from the pool, where
Harley glided smoothly and swiftly through the pale blue water. Her arms curved
in perfect arcs: her movements were graceful, but eerily mechanical. Every
third stroke, like clockwork, she took a breath. Her pace never varied or
slowed as she swam lap after lap.

He lay back down and threw an arm over his eyes. How long had
it been since he had swum? Ten years? Fifteen?

He rolled over and tried to get to back to sleep, but the
splashing kept him awake. Her pace was maniacally, irritatingly perfect.

Finally, the splashing stopped. Tucker sat up and parted the
blinds again. Still in the pool, she reached onto the smooth concrete deck for
something—a black stopwatch—clicked it, and checked her time. Pushing against
the deck, she propelled herself up and stepped nimbly out of the pool.

She was compact and sleek, a healthy animal. For a woman her
size, she had long legs, and they looked like they meant business. She wore a
black swimsuit, one of those unlined Lycra racing suits, as revealing as skin.
He could see the contours of her breasts as clearly as if she were nude; they
were small, high, and firm, their nipples hard in the cool morning air.

Tucker turned away from the window, feeling like a Peeping
Tom. He took another shower to get the kinks out, combed his wet hair back to
get it off his face, and put on a pair of baggy shorts and a T-shirt. He forgot
what their original colors had been. Most of his clothes were army
surplus—khaki, olive drab, and navy—so they had probably started out militarily
neutral before fading, like everything else he owned, into a kind of used-up
noncolor
.

He grabbed his cane and followed the aroma of freshly brewed
coffee to the kitchen. She stood at the stove, cocooned in her white
terry-cloth robe, holding a saucepan full of gray paste, which she was spooning
into a bowl.

The paste had pieces of something in it. When she saw him,
she tilted the pot so he could get a better look. “Oatmeal with raisins,
apples, and sunflower seeds. I made enough for you.”

“Thanks, but I’m trying to cut down.” She looked a little
confused, then rolled her eyes. “You don’t have any glazed doughnuts, do you?”
he asked.

“That’s what you eat for breakfast?”

He nodded, taking a seat at the big pine table and leaning
his cane against it. “I’ve been known to have them for lunch and dinner, too.”

She joined him at the table. “You are what you eat.”

“I beg to differ. I saw you get out of the pool just now, and
I know for a fact you’re not gray and lumpy.” She glanced at him and then
spooned some oatmeal into her gorgeous mouth. “Do you swim every morning?”

“A hundred laps. But usually I swim at six. I set the alarm
two hours later today ‘cause I was up half the night.” Her skin shone, her eyes
glittered. She looked invigorated and happy. He figured she was probably just
jazzed on endorphins, but she looked sensational. She looked like she’d just
had great sex. The thought made him want to get up and untie the double-knotted
sash on that terry-cloth robe.

Instead, he said, “A hundred laps? You count them?” She
nodded. “Doesn’t that kind of take the pleasure out of it?”

“My morning swim is for exercise. And my afternoon run. My
evening swim is for pleasure.”

She was too much. “What happens if you suddenly find yourself
enjoying your morning swim? Do you have to stop and take a break and think
about something really annoying so you can get back in there and finish off
your hundred laps in the right frame of mind?”

She chewed slowly, watching him from across the table. “Are
you mad because of the baseball bat?”

“What?”

“First the oatmeal, now my swimming. Are you mad because I—”

“You really think I’m mad at you? You weren’t kidding when
you said you couldn’t take a joke. Honey, you’ve got some serious chilling-out
to do.”

They sat in silence for a minute, and then she said, “I’ve
been wondering about something. It’s none of my business, I know, and you don’t
have to tell me—”

“Shoot.”

“What are you doing here? I mean, after twenty years—”

“Twenty-one,” he corrected.

“Twenty-one. I think I’ve got a pretty good idea why you
left. My guess is it had something to do with rules and expectations, and what
is and isn’t done. A father who thought he knew everything and a son who knew
he knew everything.”

Her insight amused him. “It’s a little more complicated, but
that’s it in a nutshell.”

She looked at him over the top of her coffee cup. “You’ve had
no contact at all with your father for twenty-one years?” He shook his head. “So
what’s this all about? Why are you back?”

He rubbed his long fingers over the scarred pine, composing
an answer. After a few seconds of watching him, she rose and went to the stove
to refill her bowl. The oatmeal had congealed into a solid mass, and she had to
use her fingers to push wads of it off the wooden spoon. “Forget it, Tucker. I
didn’t mean to pry. I ask too many questions, I always have.”

“No, it’s okay. Mostly I’m just here for R and R. I’ve got
some healing up to do, and I thought this might be the place to do it.” He
shrugged. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.” There was more to it than that, of
course. He could have rested up in his own home instead of the one he had fled
twenty-one years ago. If she was thinking these same thoughts, she didn’t voice
them.

Her gaze took in the scar on his face and dropped toward his
injured leg, but the table hid it from her view. “What happened to you?” she
asked, taking her seat.

Tucker wanted a cigarette. Badly. He reached into the pocket
of his T-shirt before remembering:
R.H.
did not
permit smoking in the house, and his personally appointed majordomo prided
herself on making sure those orders were followed.

Rising, he brought his cup over to the counter to refill it,
not needing the cane, since it was just a couple of yards. Her stopwatch was
lying next to the coffeemaker, and he picked it up, shaking his head. You
needed one to time a swim meet, but not for your morning exercise. Unless, of
course, you were the kind of person—like
R.H.
and,
apparently, Harley—who didn’t believe something was real unless you could count
it.

“I got hurt,” he finally said.

“Fair enough. I’m out of line.”

“No, you’re not.” He spoke softly, turning the stopwatch over
in his hands, his back to her. “You’re just being polite. You’re trying to make
conversation. You’re asking me about myself. But the truth is, you don’t really
know me, and you don’t really care.”

He set the watch down and turned to face her and found her
jaw set and her eyes glittering. “It’s okay.” He tried to make his tone gentle
and nonthreatening, but realized even as he spoke the words, how condescending
he sounded. “I have no problem with that. But I’d rather you didn’t go through
the motions of pretending you did.”

She gripped the table with both hands. “Don’t tell me what I
feel. You don’t know me any better than I know you, and you
don’t
know what I care about.”

He held up both palms. “Look, honey, I just—”

“And don’t call me honey. I don’t like it.”

“All right…” A second ticked by as they stared at each
other. “Sweetheart.”

She stood and stalked out of the room. “It’s a
joke,
” he said to her back. Groaning, he
slumped against the counter and rubbed hard at the back of his aching neck. “You
know. Jokes? Those things you laugh at? Well…” he mumbled, “not you, but… normal
people?”

***

Harley looked down on Tucker from the window of his old room,
the cleaning basket in one hand and the pull cord of the wooden blinds in the
other. He lay out there on the patio,
faceup
on a
lounge chair, asleep in the early-afternoon sun. Or probably asleep. She couldn’t
see his eyes under the aviator sunglasses he wore. He still hadn’t shaved. He
hadn’t done anything all morning except read the paper, smoke some cigarettes,
eat the peanut-butter sandwich she’d made him, and sleep. Well, that was his
right. He said he’d come here for R and R—rest and relaxation—and considering
his torn-up body, he could probably use it.

He obviously wasn’t after a suntan. He hadn’t removed his
T-shirt, and although he was wearing shorts, he had the open newspaper spread
over his legs like a blanket. One hand rested on his flat stomach, the other on
the ground. For a guy who didn’t seem to do much, he looked to be in great
shape. Even through the T-shirt, she could make out the well-defined muscles of
his chest and shoulders.

Last night, when she had seen him in that towel, her heart
had raced, and she had actually blushed! Those incredibly wide shoulders, those
narrow hips. His arms and legs went on forever, powerful and sinewy. It was the
kind of body you’d see at the Olympics, crouching at the edge of a pool,
waiting for the crack of a starter’s pistol.

His beauty made his scars that much more shocking. Whatever
had happened to him looked like something you wouldn’t expect to live through.
He had said he was damn good at surviving, and she suspected he knew what he
was talking about.

In order to make room for the cleaning basket on his desk, she
had to push aside a stack of magazines two decades old, topped with an unusual
paperweight: a big cat, leaping, cast in chrome—the hood ornament from a
Jaguar. What an appropriate bauble, she thought, for a boy with everything, a
child of immense wealth, brought up in one of the most exclusive communities in
the world—a community named after his own family.

He sprang from privilege, she from deprivation. Looking at
them now, anyone would think it had been the other way around. In fact,
although she hated to admit it, in some ways he reminded her of her parents;
like them, he was a square peg in a round hole, although not so extreme. He
did, after all, own his own business. Her aimless, self-destructive parents
could never have managed that.

Her efforts to lead an orderly, right-thinking life amused
him. A bohemian blue blood like Tucker Hale might laugh at her
straight-and-narrow path, but only by keeping to it could she ensure that she
would be spared in adulthood the poverty and tragedy that she could not escape
as a child.

She withdrew a feather duster from the cleaning basket and
flicked it over the hood ornament and the magazine on top— a
Rolling Stone
. Curious, she thumbed
through the rest: one or two each of
Car
and Driver, Sail, Sailing World,
and
Sports
Illustrated,
and about a dozen
Playboys
.

A framed black-and-white studio portrait sat on the desk, and
she touched the duster to it: a beautiful young woman with black hair and large
dark eyes holding a baby in her arms. The infant Tucker and his mother, she
guessed. Tucker had her eyes. In the photograph, she wore her hair pulled back.
Ornate earrings with dark stones in them dangled from her ears. An equally
striking ring graced her left land—a large cabochon stone with what looked like
two little hands, one on either side, holding it in place. Nestled next to it
she wore a simple gold band, presumably her wedding ring.

Harley scanned the room. Until now, she had avoided coming in
here. She had thought it a kind of shrine to a dead son, and it had given her
the creeps. Now that she knew it was, instead, a shrine to a wayward son, it
intrigued her.

In addition to the dartboard, the walls were festooned with
sports pennants and posters. There were political posters, too. One showed a
drawing of a hand holding flowers, and the words
War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.
And above
the bed—an antique four-poster with an incongruous-looking batik bedspread—hung
a huge black-and-white photograph of Sophia Loren standing in water, her clothes
soaked and clinging.
Hmm.

She turned to the shelves. The trophies that served as
bookends were all topped with sleek male figures in swim trunks, crouched and
ready to spring. Precisely the pose in which she had, moments ago, envisioned
Tucker’s built-for-speed body. So he
had
been
a swimmer. As she dusted the trophies, she glanced at their inscriptions:
1500-Meter Freestyle, First Place…
200-Meter Butterfly, First Place
…