Safe Harbor (11 page)

His father arranged a job for him with an
associate in Boston, and that was fine, too. One thing Kip could do
was work. In the months preceding his move back east he had been
putting in ten- and twelve-hour days at his office in the Financial
District, functioning with astonishing efficiency and earning his
company loads of money. He had been meeting with clients and
advising them on investment strategies, running their figures
through his computer, devising new financial plans for them and
taking them out for expensive lunches at elegant restaurants,
although he couldn’t recall tasting anything he’d eaten during
those gourmet luncheons. He had been expert at matching his shirts
to his suits, knotting his ties and pairing his socks. None of this
took any real thought, and he’d been conducting his days and his
career with an eerie normality.

Then, when he
ran out of excuses to stay at the office, he had been returning to
the co-op in Pacific Heights—
their
co-op, the co-op he and Amanda had bought
together once they were both out of graduate school and could
afford their first real home—and turning back into a
zombie.

He discovered he could perform his act of
superficial sanity as well in Boston as in San Francisco: the
professional look, the professional attitude, the productivity.
After a few weeks in Chestnut Hill, he was able to make reasonably
civilized talk with his parents over dinner, although he still
couldn’t taste the food. When Diana flew up from Baltimore with the
baby, he indulged in the simple pleasures of bouncing Victoria on
his knee and tickling her round little belly. After a while, he
could almost pass for a human being.

“He’s getting better,” the family whispered
among themselves. “He’s beginning to snap out of it.”

Aunt Martha hosted a barbecue on Labor Day. Kip
actually thought he could cope with a family gathering. He looked
forward to seeing his cousin Becky—who was now a sophomore at
Williams College, his alma mater—and his other cousins, and Diana’s
husband Glenn, who had pulled strings and traded vacation days in
order to accompany his wife and daughter to the party. Kip went to
his aunt and uncle’s house determined to have fun, something he
hadn’t done in too long a time.

“Kip!” Aunt Martha charged into the driveway
and smothered him an effusive bear hug the minute he climbed out of
his car. “Kip! It’s so good to see you! You’re looking
wonderful!”

That was a lie; he looked like hell. He hugged
her anyway.

“Uncle Ned’ll get you something to drink,” she
said, arching an arm around his waist and ushering him around the
house to the back yard. “You come with me. I’ve got someone I want
you to meet.”

On the patio beside the pool, she presented him
to the daughter of one of her neighbors. The woman was a bright,
attractive architect in her late twenties, currently living near
Harvard Square. She was single. Kip understood at once why this
charming young woman had been invited.

No. He couldn’t cope. He closed his eyes and
the visions flashed through his brain, all three of them, Amanda
alive, Amanda dead, Amanda staring down her own death.

He couldn’t deal with this.

His aunt had barely finished making the
introductions when he mumbled, “Excuse me,” and stalked away. He
hurried around the house to the driveway, climbed into his car,
drove back to Chestnut Hill and shut himself up inside his
room.

“It isn’t healthy, Kip,” his mother shouted
through the door a while later, when she and his father arrived
home from the party.

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“It’s been over a year.”

“Thanks for keeping track.”

“Diana thinks you should see a
therapist—”

“I saw a therapist in San Francisco. He said
everyone heals at his own pace. Well, my pace happens to be real
slow, Mom. I don’t think I need to have some therapist in Boston
tell me that.”

“I don’t think you need that, either,” his
mother said, opening the door a crack and peeking in. “I also think
maybe you don’t need your well-meaning relatives meddling in your
life.”

He gazed at her, surprised and
grateful.

“There’s always the house on Block Island,” she
said.

He studied her as she stood in the doorway. In
her mid-fifties, she was still a hearty, youthful woman, her hair
more gray than brown but her face relatively unlined and her eyes
astute. “I thought you hadn’t been there for years,” he
said.

“We haven’t, except for a weekend now and then.
We’ve rented it out summers. But this summer’s lease ran from
Memorial Day to Labor Day. The tenants will be out by tomorrow. I
can call the agent on the island just to make sure, but certainly
by the end of the week the house should be empty. Why don’t you go
there for a while?”

He considered it.

“You’d have the place to yourself, Kip. Some
time alone, but within shouting distance if you needed us. Take a
leave of absence from work. Harrison will survive without you. I’m
worried that if you stick around here you may not survive at
all.”

The island. The house. Why not? He couldn’t
possibly feel worse there than he did here.

“You were always so happy on Block Island,” his
mother reminded him. “Maybe if you went you’d be able to clear your
head and unwind a little.”

“Okay.” He rose, crossed the room and gave his
mother a hug. “Thanks.”

“We love you, Kip,” his mother whispered.
“Maybe this is what you need.”

What I need I
can’t have
, he thought as the ferry
carried him closer and closer to a destination he wasn’t sure he
wanted to reach.
What I need is gone. What
I need is Amanda.

The fog streaked his eyeglasses with water, and
he removed them. Pulling a handkerchief from the hip pocket of his
khaki trousers, he wiped the round lenses clean, then dried the
gold frame and slid the glasses back on.

The island loomed ahead. The ferry droned its
horn as it passed the first of the stone breakwaters into Old
Harbor. Kip gazed at the shop fronts and Victorian hotels lining
Water Street, their outlines gradually clarifying through the
swirling fog. As the boat drew closer to shore he was able to make
out the people strolling along the street and swarming around the
pier. They moved so slowly, he thought. Much more slowly than the
hustling business people he encountered in Boston every
day.

This was a good idea, after all. Coming here
was the right thing to do.

If he told himself that enough times, he might
start to believe it.

The ferry sounded one final, mournful blast of
its horn as it inched up to the dock. Kip pushed away from the
railing and merged with the other passengers as they filed down the
narrow stairway to the bottom deck. His Saab was positioned to be
the first car off the boat. He climbed in, started the engine, and
shifted into gear as soon as one of the ferry workers signaled him
that it was safe to disembark.

A decade had passed since he’d last been on the
island, yet little had changed. A few stores had new names, a few
building façades wore a fresh coat of paint, but the ambiance was
the same: shops, boutiques, ice-cream parlors, everything tidy and
unpretentious. The book store, the art gallery, the brick-inlaid
sidewalks. The flower boxes. The Surf Hotel, the National, the
alley leading to Aldo’s. The Seaside Market.

Kip maneuvered into a parking space near the
market, shut off the engine and got out of the car. He had been
breathing in the briny sea air ever since he’d boarded the ferry at
Pt. Judith over an hour ago, but now, for the first time, it struck
him that he was truly on Block Island, separated from his family
not only by sixty miles of highway but by twelve miles of sea. He
felt more removed from them now than he had when he’d been three
thousand miles away in San Francisco.

He entered the Seaside Market. He wasn’t
consciously expecting to recognize any of its customers or clerks,
but he still found it jarring that every face in the store was
unknown to him.

Not that it mattered. He hadn’t come here to
socialize, to renew old acquaintances. He lifted a basket from the
stack near the cashier and wandered up and down the aisles, pulling
items at random from the crowded shelves: corn flakes, a bag of
apples, a bottle of orange juice, coffee, a loaf of bread, milk,
peanut-butter. It didn’t really matter what he tossed into the
basket; he wouldn’t taste any of it when he ate it.

At the rear of the store were shelves of
liquor, and there Kip paused. He could slap together a sandwich for
dinner and munch on corn flakes for breakfast, but a whole lot of
hours stretched between dinner and breakfast, hours he would spend
alternately trying to ward off sleep and yielding to its torments.
He needed something to get through those hours, ammunition to fight
off the demons.

He chose a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. A big one,
the largest one the store had in stock.

He paid for his purchases and carried the bags
back out to the Saab. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would go to
the bigger grocery store over on Ocean Avenue and buy some real
food. For tonight, peanut-butter, apples and bourbon would do just
fine.

He started the car, pulled out of the space,
and cruised toward High Street. The last couple of summers he’d
spent on the island he’d had his driver’s license, but driving on
the narrow island roads still felt peculiar to him, almost
sacrilegious.

He wondered if he would find his ten-speed
bicycle down in the basement of his parents’ house. If he did, it
would undoubtedly need an overhaul—a complete cleaning, a lube job,
air in the tires, the works.

Great
therapy
, he thought sardonically. And
after he was done overhauling his bike, he could weave some
baskets.

Spotting an unfamiliar store up the road, he
slowed the car. He’d left the shopping area when he’d turned off
Water Street. But here, amid bungalows and cottages, a pharmacy had
sprung up.

Block Island had never had a pharmacy before.
At long last, someone had finally realized that people on the
island sometimes needed medicine.

Especially if they spent the night guzzling
bourbon.

He steered into the small lot beside the
shingled building and yanked on the parking brake. As enthusiastic
as he was about drinking himself into a stupor tonight, he had
enough foresight to want to have a hangover remedy on hand when he
woke up tomorrow.

He climbed onto the porch of the shingled
building. Inside he was confronted by the usual drug-store
merchandise: racks of paperback novels, heavily discounted beach
toys, over-the-counter medications, shampoos, toothpaste, a vast
array of videos for rent. He roamed up and down the aisles until he
located the aspirin.

Selecting a large bottle, he returned to the
front of the store and discovered there was no cashier posted near
the door. He wandered back to the rear of the store, where an
elevated counter marked the pharmacy section. Behind it was a
glassed-in area of metal shelves lined with mysterious
medical-looking boxes and vials. One end of the counter held a
computerized cash register.

“Hello?” he called out.

“Be right out,” a woman’s voice responded.
After a moment he spotted a white-coated figure emerging from
behind one of the metal shelves, carrying a clipboard and a pen.
She stopped and jotted something onto a sheet of paper attached to
the clipboard, then scanned the shelf in front of her and jotted
another note.

Kip glanced over his shoulder at the rack
behind him, checking to see if there was anything else he ought to
buy while he was there. He had packed toothpaste and a toothbrush,
shampoo, soap and shaving gear. If he wanted books he would go to
the library or see what the summer tenants might have left lying
around at the house.

He heard the woman’s footsteps as she strode
around the glass barrier to the counter. Reaching for his wallet,
he turned back to make his purchase.

Shelley.

No, of course not. He must be mistaken. The
woman nearing the counter couldn’t possibly be...

Yet the hair that gently brushed past her
shoulders was the same dark blond shade as Shelley Ballard’s had
been. Her eyes were the same expressive gray. Her lips were as full
and soft, her height as statuesque. Her forehead was as high as
Shelley’s had been, her fingers as long and graceful. He could
almost see those fingers tossing a Frisbee with brutal
accuracy.

She couldn’t be Shelley. Shelley had vanished
without a trace—was it twelve years ago? This pharmacist might be
tall and athletically built, her body trim in a skirt and blouse
beneath her open white lab coat, her eyes clear and direct as she
scrutinized him—but she couldn’t possibly be Shelley.

She frowned slightly. “Kip?” she
murmured.

In Shelley’s voice.

“Oh, my God.”

“It’s you?”

“Oh, God. Shelley.”