Safe Harbor

SAFE
HARBOR

Judith Arnold

Smashwords Edition

***

Copyright 1991 by Barbara Keiler

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to
other people. If you would like to share this book with another
person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you
share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it,
or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return
to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for
respecting the author’s work.

***

PART ONE

SHELLEY

Chapter One

“SHELLEY?” HER MOTHER HOLLERED up the stairs.
“Kip’s here.”

Shelley gave the reflection in the mirror above
the dresser a final, anxious inspection. She fussed with the skimpy
crocheted triangles, rearranging them along the woven string that
circled her rib cage just below her breasts. On the one hand, she
was afraid the triangles didn’t cover enough of her; on the other,
she acknowledged dolefully, she really didn’t have much worth
covering.

Some girls expanded out by the time they
reached fifteen. Shelley seemed only to expand up. This past winter
was the first during which she hadn’t grown any taller—although at
five foot nine, she was quite tall enough. Not only was she tall
but she was built like a basketball player, with broad shoulders,
long limbs, large hands and lean hips. Her limp hair was a bland
shade halfway between brown and blond. Her eyes, an equally bland
shade of gray, were set too close together. Her nose was too big,
her lips too fat; her fingernails refused to grow and her feet were
calloused from too many summers spent running around
barefoot.

And she was flat-chested.

Whatever had possessed her to buy a string
bikini? She should have just pulled her bicycle out of the trunk of
her father’s car when they’d reached the Old Harbor ferry dock,
kissed her father good-bye and biked straight home. She should
never have stopped in at the boutique on Water Street and blown
thirty dollars on a scrap of crocheted turquoise yarn. She should
have stuck to her old familiar one-piece suits so the entire
universe—to say nothing of Kip Stroud—wouldn’t have to contend with
the pathetic sight of her straight-as-a-board figure.

She’d wandered into the boutique because she’d
been melancholy yesterday afternoon, desperate for the kind of
pick-me-up she got from buying something she didn’t need. Seeing
her father off on the ferry back to New London always put her in a
funk. She understood that while she and her mother were free to
spend all summer in their cozy vacation house on Block Island, at
the end of each weekend, her father had to “go to America,” as the
islanders called returning to the mainland, so he could put in time
at his office. “Even bank executives have to work, princess,” he’d
tell Shelley whenever she complained about his absence from the
island during the week. “I’ll be back Friday night. I
promise.”

The Ballards had been summering on Block Island
for eight years. But this year, for the first time, Shelley’s
father didn’t always keep that promise. Sometimes he didn’t join
Shelley and her mother until Saturday. One weekend he didn’t come
at all. “Things have been difficult at work,” he would say,
although Shelley couldn’t fathom how he could make things any less
difficult by hanging around in Connecticut on the weekends when the
bank’s corporate offices were closed.

She missed him, but it wasn’t for herself that
she wished he would come to the island every weekend. It was for
him. If anyone needed a strong, curative dose of Block Island, it
was her stressed-out father.

The island was the best remedy Shelley knew of
for all the hassles and tensions of winter in “America.” Maybe it
was the sea breezes, maybe the slower pace of life, maybe the
morning fog and the midday heat and the heavy scent of honeysuckle
that permeated the air. Maybe it was magic. Whatever it was,
Shelley was always happier on Block Island than she was back home
in Westport. So was her mother, and so was her father when he was
here.

“Shelley?” her mother hollered
again.

“Coming!” Turning her back on the mirror, she
grabbed her oversized Yale T-shirt, threw it on and pulled the hem
halfway down her thighs. Then she smoothed the frayed edges of her
denim cut-offs, grabbed her backpack and bounded down the narrow
stairs to the first floor of the tiny cottage.

Kip was waiting for her outside at the bottom
of the porch steps, his ten-speed bike balanced between his legs
and a battered red backpack riding his shoulders. Like her, he wore
a baggy T-shirt—his featured the Harvard crest, in deference to his
Boston-area roots—and cut-off jeans. A month and a half of summer
had imbued his skin with a golden glow, and his thick brown hair
was long and rich with sun-bleached highlights. He’d grown at least
four inches and gained at least thirty pounds over the winter. He
looked a lot more like a man than a boy.

Shelley
shouldn’t have noticed. She had known Kip too long and too well to
think of him as a
guy
. He was her buddy, her best friend on the island. Ever since
her first summer here, when she’d been at Scotch Beach with her
parents and a scrappy eight-year-old kid with goggly eyeglasses had
marched over and said, “Hey, you wanna see a dead snake?” they’d
been pals. She had eagerly tramped through the dune grass with him
to check out the reptile carcass, and they’d argued heatedly about
whether a person could get poisoned from touching a dead snake, and
by the end of the argument he had called her a dumb girl and she’d
called him a poop-head, and they’d made a plan to meet at the beach
again the next day.

For the next seven summers, they’d been
spending their days together at various beaches, or in town, or
biking along the cliffs. They’d been whiling away their afternoons
licking ice-cream cones in Old Harbor and making pests of
themselves on the porch of the National Hotel, listening to the
folk singers hired to entertain the beer-drinking clientele. They’d
been winding down in the evenings sipping lemonade and playing
backgammon on one of the breezy verandas of his parents’ house.
They’d been having picnics, trading secrets, exploring hidden
coves.

During the winter Shelley rarely thought about
Kip. They never wrote or called each other. She had her home
friends and he had his. But every year, as June rolled around and
her mother embarked on preparations for the family’s annual
migration to the island, Shelley experienced a quiet thrill at the
comprehension that soon she and Kip would be tearing around the
island again, bickering, swapping secrets, spying on his older
sister and acting as if they’d never been away from each
other.

“Come on, slowpoke,” he called to her as soon
as she tossed her mother a perfunctory kiss and raced out of the
house. “You’re getting as bad as Diana, taking forever to get
ready.”

“I didn’t take forever,” she said, refusing to
take his needling seriously. She swung one leg over the seat of her
bike, shouted through the screen door that she’d be home in time
for supper, and then lifted her sandaled feet onto the pedals and
coasted down the rutted dirt driveway to the street. A year ago she
wouldn’t have bothered to wear sandals, but now that she was
fifteen she thought she ought to do something about the unsightly
callus rimming her heels.

“Wanna go up by Dorie’s Cove?” Kip asked, then
turned right without giving her a chance to answer. Not that she
minded—she and he had discovered a well-hidden inlet near Dorie’s
Cove on the west shore, and that was their favorite
beach.

Kip’s bike boasted five more gears than
Shelley’s, but he took the hill slowly so she could catch up.
“Those are your new sunglasses,” she observed once she’d pulled
alongside him.

“Yeah. My dad picked them up at the optician’s
and brought them down this past weekend.”

“I like them,” she said. They were similar to
his regular glasses—tortoise-shell, aviator-style—and a vast
improvement over the hinged clip-on shades he used to attach to his
glasses before he had a prescription pair of sunglasses.

“I look real cool now, don’t I,” he said with a
self-mocking smile.

“Oh, yeah, real cool.”

“Beat you down the hill,” he challenged her,
then shot ahead as the road veered left and descended down a steep,
twisting slope.

Shelley cursed, but her voice was lost in the
wind. She sped past weathered cottages with tiled roofs and
wind-blanched shingles, past rolling green acreage, gnarled maples
and dwarf pines, past pot-holes and picket fences and quaint signs
hanging from porch railings, reading: “Sea View” and “Windlass” and
“Queen of the Mist.” For all their fancy names, none of those
houses was anywhere near as nice as Kip’s. His family owned a
rambling Victorian year-rounder, over one hundred years old, with
upstairs and downstairs porches, a full dry basement and a cupola.
They’d never bothered to name the house. It was simply the Stroud
place, a glorious gray structure trimmed with white gingerbread,
perched on two verdant acres surrounded by dense hedges and stone
walls bordering a narrow road as hilly and serpentine as the road
on which the Ballards’ much smaller cottage stood.

Shelley loved the Stroud place. She loved the
painstakingly restored woodwork inside, the fresh paint outside,
the breezy verandas with their flower boxes and Adirondack chairs,
and most of all the cupola with its breathtaking views of both Old
Harbor and New Harbor. The house her parents owned was an
unwinterized four-room Cape Cod furnished in a style her mother
called “Goodwill Modern.” Shelley was grateful that her family
could afford the house, no matter how modest it was. But
still...the Strouds’ house was wonderful.

At the bottom of the hill she caught up to Kip
again. The wind flattened his hair back from his face in a way
that, combined with his dark-lensed glasses, gave him a mysterious,
dashing appearance. The sun played over his cheeks, revealing the
faint outlines of his shaven beard. His jaw seemed thicker than it
had been last summer, his brow higher, the bones of his face more
solid. Once again Shelley was forced to acknowledge how much he’d
matured over the past year.

Maybe she was the one who had matured so much.
Last summer she hadn’t been at all conscious of how good-looking he
was. Then again, last summer he’d had those doofus clip-on
sunglasses, and he’d been skinny. Instead of a real, razor-worthy
beard his jaw had been covered with peach fuzz, and his voice had
squeaked like a clarinet in an amateur’s hands.

Last year she’d adored Kip because he was her
friend. This year, though... This year she kept getting hung up
about stupid things like whether he was going to laugh at her when
he saw her in her new bikini.

Nearing their private cove, they steered off
the road and dismounted. After locking their bikes together and
stashing them behind a massive granite boulder, they picked their
way down the rugged slope to the sheltered beach below. As always,
it was unoccupied. Shelley sometimes wondered whether anyone else
on the whole island knew of its existence.

Kip swung his pack off his shoulders, dropped
it onto the sand and kicked off his leather mocs. “Man, it’s hot,”
he complained, even though a brisk westerly breeze swept the
humidity from the air. “I need some R&R. My old man made me
help him paint the deck chairs this past weekend.”

“Life’s tough,” Shelley said unsympathetically.
She wished her house had a deck to put chairs on.

Kip tugged a blanket out of his pack, unrolled
it and spread it out on the sand. Then he pulled off his T-shirt
and sprawled out across the blanket. “Life is tough,” he declared,
although his broad smile gave him away. “My father’s a
slave-driver, Shelley. You know how he can be.”

“Oh, yes. He carries a whip with him wherever
he goes.” Actually, Shelley considered Kip’s father an absolute
teddy-bear.

“What I want to know is, how come I had to help
him paint the deck chairs and Diana didn’t? Doesn’t that seem
sexist to you?”