Moondance Beach (6 page)

Her name! What was her name? Who was this woman? As hard as he tried, his brain remained mired in mud, spinning its wheels. And that’s when she slipped through his embrace and disappeared, carried away like an osprey feather on a wave, like smoke on the wind.

Duncan jolted awake with a gasp and flipped on the light. He touched his fingers to his face and found tears rolling down his cheeks. Tears.
Un-fucking-believable
. The last time he had cried was seventh grade.

He dropped his head into his hands. How was it that this particular nightmare had cracked him more than the ones filled with bombs and blood and death? Why did he feel this particular loss so deeply? Why was there so much grief?

He did not understand the symbolism of the dream, but he had enough sense to know that he had just allowed something precious to slip through his fingers. The sadness he felt was loss. Regret.

Duncan stretched, then carefully walked toward the fireplace, knowing what had to be done. He reached high and lifted the gilded frame over his head, carried it out into the hallway, then flipped the painting around before he leaned it against the wall.

Tomorrow morning, after he’d gotten some rest and pulled himself together, he would find a place for it in the attic. Way off in a corner somewhere. Away from him.

He went back to bed, and in the morning when he woke he found that another trinket had been left for him
while he slept. It was a garden-variety rock the size of a book of matches and the color of dirt. He held it in his palm, seeing that it was unremarkable in every way except for one.

Its edges had been worn away by water, sand, and the passing of time, carving it into the shape of a heart.

*   *   *

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Rusty waved the group inside the tavern, his face lit up with surprise. “It’s our very own Navy Lieutenant Duncan Flynn! We wondered when you’d make an appearance.”

“Good to see you, Rusty.”

While Rusty wiped down a table for five by the marina-side windows, Duncan shook hands and got slapped on the back more times than he cared to count. He handled the questions about his injuries and the raid with as much grace as he could muster, but Clancy wasn’t pleased with his performance.

“Come on, now,” he whispered as they approached the table. “These are our locals, and you’re a hero to them.”

Duncan did his best to tamp down the rage he suddenly felt. “Clancy,” he said, pulling out a chair and sitting next to his brother, “I am no one’s hero.”

Once Nat, Ash, and Frasier were seated, Rusty came by with Frasier’s usual Guinness on tap, a martini for Nat, and a Sam Adams for Ash, who scowled when it got placed in front of him. Maybe Ash needed a couple more weeks before he was ready for another night on the town.

Rusty slid an ice water over to Clancy, who was on duty, and then looked at Duncan with anticipation.

“What can I get the man of the hour? It’s on the house, whatever it is.”

“That’s awful kind of you, Rusty, but I’m not drinking much these days. I think an ice tea would do the trick.”

“You got it, son.” Rusty placed his hand on Duncan’s shoulder before he hustled off.

The men didn’t say anything for a moment, and Frasier looked out the window like a grumpy kid who’d just been dragged into the principal’s office. As previously discussed, Clancy would be taking the lead in dressing down his father tonight. They decided it was the only option since Nat was too buddy-buddy with Frasier; Ash was too polite and respectful; and Duncan was too straightforward to be effective.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Frasier said, still looking out the window.

“Here you go!” Rusty arrived, setting the ice tea glass on a coaster. “You boys let me know what else you need, all right?”

“Da.” Clancy waited until Rusty was out of earshot. “We need to talk this out. What you did last night to Ma was, well . . .”

“Totally whacked,” Nat said.

“It made everyone extremely uncomfortable,” Ash said.

“That dinner was a fuckin’ soup sandwich,” Duncan said.

“What the hell is a soup sandwich?”

Duncan forgot that his everyday expressions were a foreign language to anyone who hadn’t served in the military, so he cleared it up for Clancy. “Think about it—what would it be like to try to eat a sandwich made of soup?”

“It would be fucked-up,” Nat answered.

“Exactly. Cheers.” Duncan clicked his ice tea to Nat’s martini.

“All right. Let’s sort this out.” Clancy had summoned his official talk-the-guy-off-the-ledge tone of voice. “Da, what were you thinking?”

Frasier turned to look at his two sons. “I don’t expect you to choose my side. None of you have ever chosen my side.”

“There are no sides to this,” Clancy said.

“Sure there are.” Frasier spread his hands as far apart as they would go on the tabletop, nearly knocking over Nat’s martini in the process. “This is your mother’s side.” He slammed his left hand down hard. “And this is mine.” He did the same with his right hand. “It’s been like that since I drove the fishery into the ground twenty-odd years ago.”

Clancy shot a quick glance to Duncan before he spoke to his father. “It wasn’t your fault the entire North Atlantic cod supply collapsed, Da. That was eighty percent of Flynn Fisheries’ sales. You kept it going longer than other large fisheries up and down the Eastern Seaboard—that I know for sure.”

“It wasn’t just the overfishing, son.” Frasier shook his head. “The company started going downhill as soon as your grandfather handed it over to me. I make a far better politician than businessman, and your mother always found a way to remind me of that. She was mad as a box of frogs when we had no choice but to turn the Safe Haven into a bed-and-breakfast.”

“Shit happens,” Clancy said with a shrug. “But here we are—we’re all alive. The Safe Haven has been restored, thanks to Ash.” Everyone raised their glasses. “And he and Rowan are operating it as an inn only in high season and only because they
want to
. Nobody’s suffering.”

Frasier nodded silently. “You boys don’t understand. When a man loses his job or fails to keep a family business afloat, it affects the way his woman looks at him. Your mother and I were never the same after that. We had to rely on your mother’s salary as principal of the school and barely had enough money to keep the Safe Haven from falling down. And then . . .” Frasier looked up at the group with red-rimmed eyes. “Jesus, do we really have to rehash the whole development catastrophe?”

Though Duncan hadn’t been around for most of it, he knew his parents had separated after they’d disagreed about what to do with the family land. Da wanted to sell the Flynns’ three hundred prime oceanfront acres for a resort and casino, which would have made them multimillionaires, but Mona had refused.

Clancy shook his head. “You can’t avoid the facts, Da. The longer the land battle went on, the more you and Ma couldn’t stand the sight of each other. And then, to add insult to injury, you started seeing the woman who was the most vocal proponent of selling out—Sally! Sally the fairy! It was pretty clear to all of us that you and Ma used the development issue to duke it out.”

Frasier shook his head and took a sip from his pint glass. “Yeah. That was a real . . .” He raised his chin Duncan’s way. “It was a real soup sandwich.”

All of them laughed, which took a little bit of the edge off. Duncan knew it was time for him to step in.

“Da, look. We wanted to meet with you because we want you and Ma to begin negotiations. Both of you are miserable at the moment.”

“I know
I
am.” Frasier shook his head.

Clancy chimed in. “The question is—what do you really want? Do you want to stay married to Ma? Do you
still love her? Because if you do love her and still want to be married to her, you’ve got to hustle it up. She’s going to file for divorce unless you do something.”

Frasier frowned, keeping his gaze focused on his Guinness.

Duncan spoke next. “Bringing Sally to a family dinner sent a clear message, and the message was that Ma was invisible to you, that she wasn’t even on your radar as a person, that you had no respect for her whatsoever. Is that accurate?”

Frasier raised his head. His face was stricken with sadness. “No, son. I did it to shock her into paying attention to me.”

Nat nodded. “Well, you shocked the shit out of me—that’s for sure.”

Clancy kept the ball in play. “If you love her, then you’ve got to suck it up, Da. You’ve got to put everything on the line and make sure she knows how you feel. Ma is so angry and hurt that she will never make the first move.”

“It was that way with Rowan and me.” Ash said the words so softly they could hardly hear them. He looked around the table, sheepish. “I misled her and she hated me—for good reason, as we all know—and I had no choice but to step it up.”

A low chuckle went around the table, as everyone remembered how Ash had filleted his soul for Rowan in the most dramatic and public way possible—dressed up as a ship captain and taking center stage at the Mermaid Festival closing ceremonies, professing his love for her and begging for her forgiveness.

“That was epic,” Nat said. “It’s probably the best part of the documentary, to tell you the truth.”

“I had to do the same with Evelyn.” Clancy wrapped his hands around his ice water. “She didn’t trust me, and the only way I could earn her trust was to put her and Christina first, ahead of my career in law enforcement, ahead of everything.” He looked up and smiled. “Some things—some
people
—are worth doing that for.”

“I wouldn’t even know how to begin,” Frasier said. “One bouquet of roses won’t make up for all these years of arguing.”

“No,” Clancy said. “But a bouquet every week might help—but only if they are her favorite flowers, in her favorite color, and in her favorite kind of vase.”

Duncan leaned toward his father. “In military terms, it would be like chipping away at an enemy combatant’s weaknesses until you’re close enough to execute. So with Ma, you just keep wearing down her defenses.”

“He’s right,” Clancy said. “You knock on her door. You buy her a copy of her favorite book or a Blu-ray of her favorite movie.”

Duncan laughed. “Hell, Da. You could even write her poems about sea spray and mermaids if you have to—just get in there and chip away at her resistance.”

Frasier’s eyes went big. “Poems?”

“Duncan has a point,” Clancy said. “But don’t do any of it unless it’s really what you want. Above all, you have to be honest with her now. No more playing games and hiding behind your hurt.”

“Exactly,” Duncan said. “Because if you don’t want Ma anymore, the only honorable move is to let her go, and do it now.”

Frasier shook his head and sighed. “I do want her. I do still love her. I will always love her. But
dammit
, that woman is stubborn.”

Clancy and Duncan gave each other a sideways glance, and then Duncan said, “Ma is not the only stubborn person in the Flynn family. Two bullheaded people have worked themselves into this impasse, and it’s going to take guts to break out of it.”

“It’s in your hands, Da.” Everyone raised their glasses to Clancy’s pronouncement.

“Hooya!” Duncan
said.

Twenty-four years ago . . .

L
ena sat cross-legged on the end of the bed while Duncan played something called
Nemesis
on his Game Boy. It was a good thing she’d brought a book, because Duncan liked the game so much that he’d hardly noticed she was there. This was the third time now that she’d brought his lunch and sat with him for a while. She wasn’t sure if he liked her to visit, but he never told her to leave.

“What’s the game about?”

He didn’t look up. “War.” His thumbs moved so fast she could hardly see them. “There’s a spaceship battle, and my orders are to kill the bad guys.”

Lena gathered her knees to her chest. “What did they do?”

“Huh? Who?”

“The bad guys. What did they do that makes them so bad?”

Duncan paused the Game Boy and looked at her like she was crazy. “I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. They’re just enemy spaceships and they have to be destroyed.
Watch.” Duncan turned sideways so she could see the action on the tiny screen, one ship sending out death rays and bombs and other ships blowing up. All of it happened with really bad beeping music that seemed to just go on and on and never change.

“Okay.” Lena didn’t see what was so great about it. She picked up the book Duncan’s mother had given her to read. She told Lena that she used to read it to her kids when they were younger and that they still enjoyed it. The book was called
The Mermaid of Bayberry Island
. Lena could tell it was a kids’ book because it had a lot of pretty color pictures of pirates and mermaids and sea captains. But some of the words were hard to read, even for Lena, and she’d been the best reader in all of second grade at her school in Rhode Island. She had a certificate that said so!

With the spaceship battle going on in the background, she flipped through the pages until she found a place she wanted to start reading.

Once the mermaid fountain was finished and shown to the people of Bayberry Island, rumors began that she had magical powers. People claimed the mermaid could find true love for anyone who wanted it.

Lena studied the colorful full-page drawing of the mermaid of Fountain Square. She decided the statue was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She had long hair, nice eyes, and a friendly face. Her skin looked so soft. Lena decided that if the mermaid were real, she would be one of those ladies who always smelled good and wore lipstick. But the one thing she couldn’t stop
staring at was the mermaid’s tail. Lena had so many questions. Where was her belly button? How could that happen? The statue’s arms were like everyone else’s, with hands and fingers and an elbow and everything else that was supposed to be there. So what happened to her legs? Everything from the hips down was covered in sparkly scales. Where her feet should be she had a wide fantail. Its shape reminded Lena of a real-life dolphin or whale tail, only a lot fancier.

Sure, she had seen drawings of mermaids before. Her mother used to tell her mermaid stories she’d learned as a little girl growing up in the Azores. But never had Lena seen anything as interesting and perfect as this drawing.

“Where’s the fountain?”

“Huh?” Duncan frowned in concentration at his tiny black-and-white screen. His spaceship was still killing everything that got in its way.

“The mermaid. Where is this mermaid statue? How long does it take to walk to Fountain Square?”

Duncan paused his game and glared at Lena, who was holding up the book. “Are you kidding me? You want to talk about the mermaid?”

She held her chin high. “Yes, I do.”

Duncan grabbed the book from her hands and began laughing. “Ma gave this to you, I bet.”

“She did.” Lena snatched it back.

Duncan smiled. It wasn’t a sweet smile. He looked like he was up to no good. But it was the first smile Lena had seen from him at all, so she thought it was wonderful.

“You know, I can save you a lot of time. You don’t have to read the book. I’ll tell you the real story.”

Lena sat up straighter. “Really? You will?”

“Sure.” Duncan dropped his electronic game to the comforter and leaned back against the headboard. He crossed his arms over his belly.

“So there was this dude back in the eighteen hundreds, Rutherford Flynn. He was my great-great-grandfather. He came here from Ireland and started a fishing business. It’s called Flynn Fisheries, and my dad is the president now. This house was built by Rutherford.”

She felt her eyes bug out. “Really?”

“Yeah. So Rutherford gets super-rich and owns a lot of boats, and one day he’s at sea when the weather turns. You know, back then they didn’t have satellites or the Weather Channel, so they never really knew how bad storms would get or exactly when they’d show up.”

Suddenly, Lena felt scared. “Did he
die
?”

Duncan tipped his head back and laughed. It was strange that such a big, loud noise could come from a puny and sick boy. The laugh soon turned into a cough, and the cough sounded so bad and lasted so long that Lena was about run down to get Duncan’s mother. But like it was nothing, he held up his hand for her to wait. He finished coughing, then kept talking. “Remember I said he was my great-great-grandfather?”

She nodded.

“Then he couldn’t have died, right? He went on to have a boy, who had a boy, who had my dad.”

“Oh.” Lena suddenly felt like a stupid little girl.

“It’s okay. So you want to hear what happened?”

She nodded, excited again.

“All right. So this really bad nor’easter hits the fleet, and Rutherford tries his best, but pretty soon he realizes they’re all going to die. Water is everywhere. The boats are being blown sideways. Almost every man on the
island was out that day, so if they died, then every family on the island would have been destroyed.”

Lena slapped a hand over her mouth.

“So my great-great-grandfather is about to give up and let the sea swallow them whole, when he looks down into the stormy water and sees . . .”

Lena waited while Duncan coughed a few times. She jumped up and sat on her haunches, ready to hear what happened next. He was teasing her. “What?” She smacked her hands onto the comforter. “What does he see?”

“A mermaid!”

She gasped.

“And she stares up at him from down in the water and guides all the boats safely to shore. Everybody is cheering and stuff, and as soon as my great-great-grandfather touches land, he tells his men he has to find her and jumps right back into the stormy sea, like a crazy person. They drag him out again and get him to a tavern, where the owner’s daughter nurses him. You know, she gives him soup and dries him off and stuff.”

Lena nodded. “Go on!”

“Well, he wakes up a couple days later, sees this really pretty girl taking care of him, and freaks out. He thinks she’s the mermaid. He
swears
she is! And he goes down on his knees and begs her to marry him.”

Lena tipped her head to the side, blinking in disbelief. “He married a mermaid?”

Duncan laughed, coughed, then laughed again. When he looked at her, his eyes had softened. He seemed a little nicer. “How old did you say you are?”

“Seven.”

“I’m ten. That’s a
lot
older. I am way more mature than you.”

“So?” Lena crossed her legs once more and settled onto the comforter. “I had a friend who was only four and one who was nine. Can you finish the story now, please?”

“You got it.” Duncan cleared his throat, and that’s when Lena noticed how his shoulders poked up under his T-shirt. She tried hard to be quiet, but he was so skinny it scared her. For the first time, she wondered—how sick was he?

“Are you going to die?”

“What?” His face froze.

“I just . . . I wondered if you are so sick that you’re going to die.”

Duncan looked away. She saw that he was working hard to breathe, and she watched as he grabbed his inhaler and took his medicine. When he finally faced her again, his face looked blank.

“So. You wanna know what happened to the mermaid girl?”

“Yes!”

He chuckled. “Right. So Rutherford marries the tavern keeper’s daughter, and later, after they have kids and get even richer and build this house and everything, he becomes mayor and decides to have a fountain made in honor of his wife. He gets some famous artist to do it, and they have this big party to reveal it. The cover gets pulled away and there she is—a mermaid! And nobody knows what to say.”

“Why? Didn’t they like it?”

A smile slowly spread on Duncan’s face. “Now I’m going to tell you the
real
story, Adelena Silva, something you won’t find in any book. Pay attention and never forget what I’m about to tell you.” He paused.

“Go on!”

“If you say so. Here’s the truth: my great-great-grandfather was a nutcase. You know, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”

Lena felt her mouth fall open.

“Of course his wife wasn’t a mermaid! But he
thought
she was. And my ma thinks so, too, and she’s in charge of a whole group of women who dress up like mermaids and have meetings in our dining room. So the real story is that everyone on this island is a little crazy, and so are you if you think that stupid story is real!”

Lena let her hands fall to her sides, overwhelmed with disappointment and numb with sadness. But Duncan kept smiling, like he was happy he’d just destroyed something. She didn’t understand it.

Slowly, Lena got off the bed and lifted the book into her arms. She stood over Duncan, trying to figure out what she saw. Those eyes stared at her—burning blue and alive—like he was ready to fight her. Suddenly, she understood. He was mad because he was sick. He couldn’t have any fun, so he didn’t want anyone else to have fun either. He didn’t think good things happened, so he didn’t want anyone else to think so either. It made sense, she decided. If she were sick like that, she would be mad, too.

“Well? You got something to say?”

Lena shrugged. It was going to be hard to be friends with a boy like Duncan. He was mean on the outside and scared and lonely on the inside. How could you be a friend to someone who pretended he didn’t want or need a friend?

“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.

Lena wandered down the back staircase to the
apartment she shared with her mother. It was right off the kitchen, very small, but her mother said they had everything they needed. Lena had her own bedroom. They had their own TV, bathroom, and something her mother called a kitchenette. Lena shut her bedroom door, plopped down on her bed, and rolled onto her stomach. She opened the book and began reading again. This time she would start at the very beginning, so she didn’t miss anything.

Duncan was wrong about Rutherford and the mermaid, of course. He said those things only because he was angry and had never been to the Azores. Lena knew that someday, when he felt better, Duncan Flynn would be able to believe.

Maybe she would help him.