Safe Harbor (4 page)

“But I don't get it . . .” he began.

“She left instructions in her will,” Dana said. “That if anything ever happened to her and Mark, I should take care of them.”

“In her will,” Sam said slowly.

“I should come home from wherever I was, it said, to look after them. Well, I was in France. Trying to paint and living my life. I did come home for the funerals, of course. But then, my mother seemed to have everything under control, taking care of the girls . . .”

“What happened, Dana?”

“They drowned. Lily and Mark,” Dana said. Her chest caved in when she said the words: It always did. But she breathed deeply and gazed at the beautiful sky, and somehow she kept herself from crying. That part was getting easier. What she felt inside was one thing, but what she showed to the world was becoming simpler to control.

“Oh, Lily,” Sam said.

Turning from the sky to Sam Trevor, Dana was surprised to see tears in his eyes. It was as if the feelings in her own heart had somehow shown up on this near-stranger's face.

“I'm so sorry,” he said.

“Thank you,” Dana said, gazing back at the sky, at the sharp white steeple piercing the golden-blue twilight. Down the street, people had come out of the gallery to see where she had gone. She heard their voices far off, a million miles away. She felt as if she were in a trance. “She died ten months ago.”

“And you've come home to raise her daughters?”

Dana shook her head. “No, to take them back to France with me.”

“Oh,” Sam said.

The crowd had spotted her. Dana heard her name being called. The voices were louder, calling her back. A cake was about to be cut. A toast had to be made. This was her homecoming, however temporary. She was a Black Hall artist, and her sister had made sure the world was going to know it.

The evening star had come out. It glowed in the west, a tiny hole in the sky's amber fabric. Dana looked for Lily everywhere: in a field of flowers, in a cup of tea, in the sky. Blinking, Dana stared at that bright star and made a wish. Closing her eyes, she thought of her sister. She could see Lily's eyes, her yellow hair, her bright smile. Reaching out, she could almost touch her. . . .

Sam didn't move. He didn't speak, and he didn't try to steady her, even though she felt herself sway. She was under her sister's spell, standing in the center of town, trying to touch the evening star. Lily seemed so close. She was right there, right there. With her eyes closed, Dana could feel Lily as if she had never left.

But when she opened her eyes, she was alone with Sam. The gallery owner and her mother were calling her name. Still holding the bouquet of wildflowers, Dana turned around, and together she and the young boy of long ago walked slowly past the white church toward the art gallery and its waiting crowd.

CHAPTER
2

H
UBBARD
'
S
P
OINT HAD BARELY CHANGED IN
D
ANA
Underhill's forty-one years of life. Located in the southern section of Black Hall, the land jutted into Long Island Sound and formed a rocky point. This was a summer place for working people: It lacked the panache and grandeur of certain beach areas to the east. The yards were tiny, the cottages nearly on top of one another. The original builders—grandparents and great-grandparents of the current owners—had been policemen, firemen, grocers, salesmen, telephone linemen, and teachers.

What it lacked in tone, the Point more than made up in natural beauty and human warmth. Everyone knew everyone else. They called hello as they walked or drove by; they kept an eye on each other's kids. Children Dana had grown up with had kids of their own. Gardens bloomed in bright profusion, and window boxes exploded with color. Honeysuckle scented the air, and dark pines blanketed yards with soft needles. Rabbits lived on the hillsides, and squirrels nested in the trees.

The houses on the Point's east side were built on rocks, great slabs of granite and quartz tufted with grass, sloping down into rock coves and tidal pools. The houses facing west overlooked the beach and swale—a white crescent strand curving along the Sound, backed by a gold-green marsh.

The Underhills' house, perched on the highest part of the Point, overlooked both beach and rocks. A shingled cottage built by Martha's parents in 1938, it had survived that year's famous hurricane and many storms to follow. Weathered gray, it blended austerely into the ledge, nestled among red cedars and wind-stunted oaks, brightened only by Lily's overgrown rose and perennial gardens.

“Pretty weedy, huh?” Allie asked, monitoring Dana's expression.

“Oh, it's not too bad,” Dana said, sipping her coffee. Sunday morning after the art show, they sat on stone steps, shaded by a sassafras tree. The people next door were cooking breakfast, and the smell of bacon filled the air. Across the street, the McCrays' house—home of Old Annabelle and her daughters, the Underhill sisters' best friends the McCray sisters—was just coming alive, voices drifting out the open windows.

“I think it is.” Allie looked worried. “Those rambler roses are choking everything. You can't even see Mom's herb garden. She planted lavender, rosemary, sage, and thyme that were supposed to come back every year. But I don't see a bit of it.”

Putting down her cup, Dana began to clear out some of the dead leaves and trailing briars. She uncovered a shrub of sage, soft and green; digging deeper, she found a thatch of silver thyme sprigged with tiny triangular leaves. Pricking her finger on a thorn, she licked a drop of blood. Through the house's open windows, she heard the TV blaring, tuned to a morning show. Instead of coming out with Dana and Allie, Quinn had stayed inside to watch.

“Does Quinn watch a lot of TV with Grandma?” Dana asked.

“Not always,” Allie said, crouching beside Dana and pulling out weeds. “But sometimes.”

“She doesn't want to talk to me, does she?”

Allie shook her head.

Dana chewed her lip. Quinn had always been strong-willed, stubborn about things that mattered to her, but she had never stayed mad at Dana for this long before. Weeding the garden, Dana felt the dirt with her fingers. It was stony, filled with bits of granite, pure Hubbard's Point. The soil here was different than it was anywhere else in the world, and touching it gave Dana a lump in her throat.

Dana's relationship with Hubbard's Point, especially now, was far from simple. For one thing, the place had nothing to do with plots of land. She loved it as much as a person, and her feelings about it were just as complicated. She came back to herself here. It was the only place on earth where she couldn't hide from her deepest truths. And every inch of it reminded her of Lily. She felt her sister's loss more here than anywhere else, and everything else paled in comparison.

“Your mother would not want Quinn to be avoiding me.”

“Quinn knows that.”

“Is this because I stayed away all year? I came for the funeral, then left again?” If she had to, Dana was prepared to explain herself.

“Well, she didn't like it, but that's not why.”

“Then why won't she speak to me?”

“Well,” Allie said, her face serene. “That's because you want to take us back to France. And she doesn't want to go.”

 

E
VERYONE THOUGHT
Q
UINN
was watching
Meet the Press
with Grandma, even Grandma. Lying on the sofa, covered with an afghan, Quinn had simply rolled off and stuffed pillows under the covers while Grandma stared at the screen. Then she had sidled upstairs, out her bedroom window, and down the oak tree growing right by the house.

Secrecy was paramount. Tucked into the waistband of her shorts she had a pen. Once she hit the ground, she held the pen between her teeth, exactly the way a pirate would hold a dagger. Then she ran down the narrow stone path to the beach stairs.

Onto the footbridge, across the creek, along the soft sand, Quinn ran for her life. She bit the pen, dashing like a wild Pequot. Eastern woodland Indians had roamed this land hundreds of years ago. They had hunted and fished, roasting their catches in the natural fireplace beneath the stone boulder in Mrs. Fitzgerald's yard.

Quinn knew plenty about Indians. For one thing, her real name was Aquinnah, which was Wampanoag for “high ground.” Her parents had named her that because they had met and fallen in love at a place of high ground. Quinn intended to become an anthropologist when she grew up. She was going to go to Connecticut College, just a few miles away, to study Pequots, Mohegans, Nehantics, and Wampanoags.

One place she wasn't going to go was France. Running swiftly down the beach, she passed several families setting up camp by the high-tide line. Beach chairs, blankets, buckets, crabbing nets, umbrellas: memories of another life. Nearly banging into some happy father standing ankle-deep with his little kid, Quinn swore out loud.

“Hey, watch your language!” the father scolded.

“Sorry,” she called, more from habit than because she meant it. People like him didn't understand. They didn't know that togetherness didn't always last forever, that even the happiest families could be destroyed in a second.

Picking up the pace, she ran past the beached sailboats by the seawall, past the crabbing rocks, and up the crooked hillside path, into the forest trail that led to Little Beach. This was a nature preserve, the perfect place for imagining woodland Indians. Trees encroached on the narrow path, which bent around boulders and fallen logs.

Looking both ways, Quinn stopped. The coast clear, she shouldered through thick underbrush until she reached a downed oak. Squirming beneath its broken branches, she lay on her back. Fingertips extended—farther, farther—she wriggled her hand into a hollow and withdrew a plastic-wrapped package.

Now that she had her treasure, she tucked it into her waistband and bit harder on her pen. Running through the woods, she cast furtive glances from side to side. Breaking out of the woods, the path streamed onto a white sand beach. Quinn blinked hard, getting used to the brightness.

Little Beach was deserted. She used to come here with her mother to search for sea glass and skip flat stones. Just around the bend was Tomahawk Point, where rich people lived, and then Firefly Beach, where that great artist's family still lived. Ol' Hugh Renwick might be more famous, but Aunt Dana was better. Holding her precious package, Quinn darted behind a big pink-gray boulder speckled with mica, glittering like black stars in the morning sun.

Her heart pounding, she held the Ziploc bag to her chest. It felt damp, from spring nights in the fallen log, and she hoped no moisture had gotten inside. The log would be a great place to hide cigarettes or beer, but this was contraband of a different sort. Unwrapping the plastic, she pulled out a blue notebook and began to read from an entry written nine months earlier, in October.

Grandma's no different from Mom. After all that “you can trust me” crap, she did the exact same thing Mom did: read my diary. What does it do, run in the family? She read the parts about missing Mom and Dad, about wishing I'd been in the boat with them. I figured something was up when she started talking about the shrink again. I am counting the days till Aunt Dana gets here. Then Grandma can go back to her old-folks condo, and we can live with someone who doesn't feel the need to monitor our every move. Aunt Dana is cool. She is very cool. In fact, she is snow-ice, North-Pole, and deep-sea cool. I wish she'd come here soon. I don't get why she has to live over there, so far away, when I want her here.

Then she turned to a page written in January, several months later, reading every word carefully.

This is bad. This is very bad. First of all, I'm pissed out of my gourd that I have to walk a freaking (say “fucking,” Quinn, not “freaking,”) okay, fucking, mile through the woods to write in my freaking diary. Just so Grandma won't go rooting through my undies to find it and freak out when she reads what I'm about to write. Here goes. Aunt Dana is losing it. I mean, really losing it. She'd better not wait till summer to come live with us. She'd better get over here right now. For one thing, I'm so sick of Grandma complaining about how cold the house is, how tired she gets walking down to the street to get the paper, how much easier it is at the old-age condo, where people bring everything to her door and keep the heat cranked up to ninety-five degrees. Aunt Dana keeps saying she's going to come, and then she doesn't. She says she's getting ready for her art show, that she has one or two or fucking three more paintings to finish, that she wouldn't want to disappoint Mom. I don't get it. I thought she loved me. Allie has Grandma, but I'm supposed to have Aunt Dana!

Our parents wanted her to have us. We're supposed to be living with her, not Grandma. I know Mom went to the Black Hall Gallery to arrange the art show, but Mom's not here now. I am! And I helped with the art show too. I went with Mom when she brought the slides.

Maybe when Aunt Dana comes here for the show and moves into our house, everything will be fine. We'll go back to how it used to be. Mom won't be here, but having Aunt Dana will help. I keep remembering how she looked at the funeral. Just like a Kabuki warrior: scowl, hiss, grunt. Very, very horrible. She walked straight . . .

Not wanting to relive the scene of horror, Quinn licked the tip of her felt pen and turned to a clean page. She began to write, and the words flowed from the point. Small waves hit the shore, splashing spray into her face. Ignoring it, Quinn got lost in the world of emotion, pouring it all onto the page in the beauty of that early summer morning.

I hate the world. I hate the world, I hate the world, I loathe and execrate the world. She's the biggest jerk ever to live. That's right, I said “she.” Which “she” you might ask? Well, take your pick. Grandma, Allie, Aunt Dana, and Mom. They pester, whine, connive, and die, in that order. Grandma pesters me to act normal, Allie whines and cries about what's going to happen next, Aunt Dana thinks she's going to get me and Allie to move to France with her, and Mom read my diary and got shocked by the kind of person I am and then died. How did I ever get born into a family like this? I'm not going to France. I mean it, I don't care what they do to me, I am not moving to France. I can't believe I'll never see Mom again. She read shit she wasn't meant to read, and went ballistic. She hated me, and the big joke is, I don't even blame her.

Today I swore in front of some perfect father and kid, and he yelled at me. Better me than his kid though. Yell at your kid and the next wave just might tear you apart. Here today, gone tomorrow. I used to love to sail. Mom said I could be in the Olympics. Now I hate it.

I AM NOT MOVING TO FRANCE.

When she finished writing, she felt a little better. The sun felt hot on her face, and the receding tide made the rocks and sand smell like seaweed. Everything was salty: the sea, the kelp, the sargassum weed, her wet cheeks. Licking her lips, she carefully wrapped her diary in plastic. On the horizon, small sailboats danced on the waves. White sails, blue sky. Quinn reached into her pocket. She took out the gift and, as always, left it on the rock nearest the tide line.

It was time to hide her diary and return home.

 

T
HE GIRLS WERE
nowhere to be found. Dana felt restless from jet lag and seeing her family again, so she wandered down to the garage at the foot of the hill, by the road. Lifting the heavy door, she stepped inside. It smelled damp and musty, and English ivy had broken through some slats and concrete to climb the inside walls.

The old sailboat rested on a rusty trailer, off to the side. It was a Blue Jay, paint peeling from its wooden hull. Taking up space, it had been filled to overflowing with rakes, shovels, bags of lime, empty cartons, the Christmas tree stand, a clam basket, fishing rods, and a bag of empty bottles. The varnished mast had blackened in spots, and the sail bag was speckled with mildew.

Dana and Lily had learned to sail in this boat. Running her hand along the sides, Dana remembered how they had pestered their father, begging him to let them have it. He had given his permission, told them they would have to earn the money to buy it themselves. When she got to the stern, Dana had to take a deep breath before looking at the transom. There it was, the name:

MERMAID

Even knowing it was there, her heart beat faster. Her fingers traced the letters. She and Lily had painstakingly made the stencil, and Lily had brushed on the white paint. They had painted one mermaid with round breasts and two tails because that was how they sometimes felt: as if they shared a body, as if they had two tails to propel them through life.