Safe Harbor (5 page)

“Here you are,” Dana's mother said, leaning on her cane and peering into the dark garage. “Oh, it's so damp and cold in here.”

“Hi, Mom.”

“I thought we should talk before the girls came back. When do you plan to leave?”

“I told you, Mom. On Thursday. Did you find their passports?”

“They're in Lily and Mark's safety deposit box.”

Dana nodded. She should have remembered. Lily had gotten each girl a passport upon birth—Quinn on the Vineyard, Allie here in Connecticut—knowing that with Dana's hunger to live abroad, there would be many trips to see their aunt. As executor of Lily's will, Dana had received the list of the box's contents.

“You know my opinion,” her mother said as if she had no feeling whatsoever, as if she were numb from the neck up.

“Yes. You want me to move in here so you can move back to your condo. But I can't do that, Mom. My studio's in Honfleur. I have two commissions right now, and they're both in progress. The girls will love France. They're so smart, they'll pick up the language right away.”

“Why are you making this so hard?”

“Hard?” Dana asked.

Her mother stared straight through her. “Pretending that this has anything to do with logistics. You moving here, them moving there . . . sweetheart, this is your home.”

“I know,” Dana said. Out of the corner of her eye the boat loomed large. Lily's half of the mermaid seemed to be smiling wider. The sight of it caused Dana's heart to squeeze tighter. Every sight, every smell, reminded her of Lily. Why couldn't all love be like what they had had: open, honest, true, real, forever? She thought of Jonathan's deceptions, and her stomach hurt. Being at Hubbard's Point without Lily, even for four days, was nearly unbearable.

“Mom, why is the boat in here?”

“Excuse me?”

“The girls should have been using it.” Dana examined the flaking paint, the barnacled bottom.

Martha shook her head. “No, I don't think that's a good idea. I don't believe they want to either.”

“But why not?”

“They don't like to go out on the water anymore,” her mother said, conjuring that other boat, the one Mark had built, going down in the Sound that moonlit July night.

“It's sad to see it just sitting here,” Dana said, running her hand along the rail to block the image out. “Did Lily use it a lot?”

“Well, she used to. Quite a bit. Taught the girls on it, was absolutely proud of how Quinn took to sailing . . .”

“A chip off the old block,” Dana said, picturing Lily sailing at Quinn's age.

“But she didn't that last year,” her mother said. “Mark had bought the big sailboat, and Lily spent a lot of time out with him. Aside from that, the house needed quite a bit of upkeep, and she took care of that.”

“Upkeep . . .”

“After I broke my hip,” Martha Underhill said, leaning against the wall and carefully watching Dana's face, “taking care of the house and yard got to be too much. Even going up and down stairs took effort. That's when I decided to give this house to Lily, Mark, and the girls.”

“And they loved living here.”

“Yes, they did. I always worried that you'd feel resentful, that you might think I was playing favorites.”

“I didn't think that,” Dana said, but with a tug of her heart, she realized that in fact, in some deep-down way, maybe she had.

“You've made a life for yourself. Painting, traveling . . . You were our free spirit. Lily and I kept wishing you'd move back home, but we got used to your way. Once a year, sometimes twice, you'd come to stay. Even less often once you fell in love with Jonathan. I got it through my head that you wouldn't want the house as much as Lily would.”

Dana nodded. The garage was chilly and dark, and she hugged herself thinking of where falling in love with Jonathan had gotten her.

“Was I right?”

“Yes, Mom.” Dana smiled.

“I know you love the girls,” Martha said, her voice dropping an octave. “That's why Lily made you their guardian.”

Dana nodded, wanting to reach for her mother.

“They've been through so much. My God, Dana. To uproot them from their home at a time like this? How can you think of doing it? You learned how to paint right here—at Hubbard's Point. I don't see why you can't do it here now.”

“You think it's about painting?” Dana asked, feeling the blood drain from her face.

“Painting or Jonathan.”

“It's not Jonathan,” Dana said, her body stiff. “That's all over.”

“Well, painting, then,” Martha said, looking around, without even a comment about the breakup—that's what she expected from Dana. Her relationships had never lasted long, and her family had stopped expecting them to. They knew painting came before any human being—even them. “Your canvases are huge. They'd barely fit through our door. But we could make it work. Build a studio, or even this garage—we could call Paul Nichols to put in a skylight!”

Dana couldn't breathe. Hadn't her mother noticed the way she'd walked around the Black Hall Gallery, unable to even look at her own paintings? They mocked her, that's what it was. Everyone thought they were recent work, done during the last year, but they weren't. Dana had dragged them out of storage because they were all she had. She wouldn't say it out loud to anyone, but she couldn't paint. She hadn't been able to since Lily had died.

“It's not the space,” Dana said instead.

“Well, your model, then. How you use her, I don't know. I haven't seen a human figure in your paintings since you used to paint Lily. But Lily told me you'd hired an Asian girl. . . .”

“My assistant, Monique,” Dana said in a daze. “She's Vietnamese. Her family had moved to France after the war . . . Paris first, and then they opened a restaurant in Lyons.”

The girl was so beautiful, had been through a great deal, and lost family members in the fighting and its aftermath. Dana's figure work was her least strong suit. When she decided to paint mermaids, she asked her assistant to be her model. Monique, with her small frame and lithe figure, her firm muscles and graceful legs, had seemed perfect. Besides, Dana had a soft spot for people away from their families, and she had wanted to help by giving her more work.

“Yes, Monique. Lily was glad you had company in your studio. She said that was supposed to be her role, but since you and she lived so far apart, Monique would have to do.”

“Lily wrote to her,” Dana remembered. Monique had opened the letter and read it quietly. Unsentimental, she hadn't understood Lily's motivation. When she threw the blue stationery into the studio wastebasket, Dana had retrieved and read it:

You are with my sister every day, and I envy you. Dana says you're beautiful, that you will make a great mermaid. Do you have any idea what that means? Mermaids are so special to us—they're like guardian angels. For Dana to choose you to be her mermaid is very significant. She says you are far from home, far from your family. I'm sure that makes her feel closer to you. She's far from us, and we miss her so much.

By then Dana had already figured out that Monique's relationship with her family was very different from hers. Monique's distance from them was emotional as well as geographical. She wasn't particularly interested in getting close to Dana either, and Lily's letter had meant nothing to her.

“Having a model was just an experiment. It didn't work out,” Dana said.

Her mother's face fell. Talking about the size of canvases and the height of doors and models and new skylights must have made her feel hopeful, as if they were making a plan. Dana understood. She almost felt that way herself.

“Oh, sweetheart,” her mother said, sounding tired, and for a second their eyes locked.

“Aunt Dana,” Allie called from up the hill. “Someone's on the phone for you—Sam Trevor.”

“Who's that?” Martha asked.

“Someone I used to know,” Dana said. Touching the Blue Jay, her fingertips tingled. She took another look at the sailboat's stern, at the mermaid with two tails. Sometimes she thought she needed a second tail just to keep her on a straight course, that without Lily she was lost. Not looking at her mother, aware of the sorrow and vigilance in her eyes, Dana walked out of the garage and began to run up the hill.

 

I
T TOOK
D
ANA
so long to get to the phone, Sam didn't think she was coming. He stood in the kitchen of Firefly Hill, aware of Augusta Renwick rocking on the porch, just out of earshot. Since Joe had married Caroline, the Renwicks had let Sam know that this was his home too, that he could come here anytime he wanted. He had felt sort of guilty, being too busy at Yale to drive the twenty-five miles to Black Hall very often, but he had taken this opportunity—with Dana in town—to drop in on his brother's mother-in-law.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” Augusta had asked, holding his hand as she'd led him onto the porch. At her age—late seventies, eighty? Sam couldn't tell—she was by any measure still a true beauty. With long white hair falling over her black velvet opera cape, she looked stunning and dramatic. Sam could imagine the great artist Hugh Renwick falling in love with her, buying her the famous black pearls she wore now and always.

“To see you, of course, Augusta,” he'd said, kissing the back of her hand.

“Oh, dear child,” she'd said, laughing elegantly. “That's just delightful of you to say, but we both know it's total bullshit.”

“Excuse me?” Sam had asked, reddening.

“Listen, I was at the gallery, remember? I saw the flowers you brought, and both Clea and Skye said you looked positively enthralled to be talking to Dana Underhill.”

“Actually, Augusta, I definitely came to see you. I was in the neighborhood, and I wanted to visit my—” Sam had begun, but she'd cut him off.

“Don't even bother with that, Sam. I'm old, and I'm family. You don't need to pussyfoot around with me. Go call her—the phone's right in there.”

And so he had. The little girl—Dana's younger niece, he supposed—had taken the message, run out to call her aunt, then returned to breathe into the receiver. Her breathing sounded husky, as if she had a cold or an allergy, or as if she had been crying, and to amuse them both, Sam whistled “Anchors Aweigh” while they waited.

“You whistle good,” she said.

“Yeah?” Sam asked.

“Uh-huh. My dad whistled like that.”

“Did he whistle ‘Anchors Aweigh'?”

“I don't think so.”

“Hmm,” Sam said. “I don't blame him. It's not my favorite song or anything, but it's pretty easy to whistle. If you grew up in Newport, Rhode Island, like I did, you'd hear a bunch of Navy guys whistling ‘Anchors Aweigh' when they were walking down Thames Street, and you'd be whistling it too. Go ahead—give it a try.”

“I don't know the song.”

“It goes like this.” He whistled a few bars.

The kid did her best. Her whistle was terrible.

“My aunt's a great artist.”

“That she is.”

“Did you go to her show?”

“I did.”

“My mom planned it.”

“She did an incredible job,” Sam said, taking a deep breath.

“Well,” the little girl said. “Here she is.”

The cord clattered, and Sam heard the muffled sound of a palm being held against a mouthpiece. Certain words filtered through in a child's voice: “whistle,” “Navy,” and “great artist.” Then Dana cleared her throat and came on.

“Hello?”

Sam's heart was racing, and it took a second for his voice to work.

“Hey, Dana,” he said. “It's Sam.”

“Hi, Sam.”

“Well, I'm in the area, visiting Augusta Renwick, and I thought I'd give you a call.”

“Really? Thanks, Sam. How are you?”

“I'm fine,” Sam said, staring out the kitchen window at the cliff overlooking Long Island Sound. He knew Dana was just a few miles down the coast, and he wondered whether she was hearing the same waves. “I've been wondering how you are.”

“Well . . .” she began, stopping as if the answer was too hard or complicated to get out.

“The thing is,” he said, “I thought maybe you need to talk.”

She waited for him to go on. Her breathing sounded surprisingly like her niece's: soft, unguarded, strangely emotional.

“And I was wondering,” Sam continued, “whether you'd like to have dinner with me before you go back to France.”

“Dinner?” she asked, as if she'd never heard the word before.

“The thing is, I'm in Black Hall right now. At Firefly Hill, like I said. I'll probably spend the night, and I thought maybe I could pick you up and take you to dinner. The Renwick Inn, maybe . . .”

She paused then, the silence stretching out. He wouldn't rush her. She was going through a lot, maybe more than she knew. Sam knew how close those sisters were; he knew from his own feelings for Joe.

“Oh, Sam,” she said finally, something unrecognizable in her voice—tears? A grin? Grief? “I don't think so.”

“No?”

“I wish I could. It's sweet of you to ask. But there's so much to do, and we leave for Honfleur on Thursday.”

“I know,” he said. “I was hoping to see you before then. To say good-bye.”

She paused again, as if she was thinking that over.

“You meant a lot to me,” he said, his voice thick. “You and Lily. Don't think I don't know what this must be like for you.”

She said something too muffled for him to hear.

“What?” he asked.

“I don't think anyone knows that,” she said, quietly hanging up the phone.

 

A
UGUSTA
R
ENWICK ROCKED
in her chair, gazing across the Sound. There, just east, was the spot where Joe had excavated the old wreck. She could practically see the research vessel
Meteor,
and she wished it would sail back with Joe and her daughter Caroline aboard. But they were off in Turkey, treasure-hunting in the Bosporus, and she was extravagantly happy to have Sam there instead.