Safe Harbor (14 page)

Kip nodded. “You were angry with him that
summer because he wouldn’t visit every weekend.”

“That’s right. He kept spending his weekends
back in Connecticut.” All the humor was gone from her voice now,
all the warmth. She sounded taut, almost brittle, on the verge of
cracking.

“You thought he might be having an affair or
something.” How had Kip remembered that? After so many years, why
had Shelley’s adolescent fears remained with him?

A grim laugh escaped her. “Well, that wasn’t
quite the problem. He had been having an affair, but by that summer
it was winding down. He’d established certain precedents with his
sweetheart, though...”

It hurt Kip to hear the hostility in her voice.
Shelley had never been a bitter person. She’d been sweet and
ingenuous, principled yet sentimental.

He considered changing the subject. But he
wanted to know the truth. He wanted to know what had happened to
her.

“My father was embezzling from the bank where
he was an officer,” she finally said. Her fingernail caught on the
corner of the label and tore off a shred. With obvious effort, she
forced her hand to lie motionless on the table. “He was arrested.
He had been skimming for years—first to buy his sweetie nice things
without my mother finding out about it, and then to keep his
sweetie satisfied so she wouldn’t break up his marriage. As if she
was the one who broke up the marriage. It was my father. He was the
one who was married. He was the one who should have known
better.”

Her rage was apparently aimed at her father’s
infidelity. But embezzlement seemed a much greater transgression to
Kip. “Was he convicted?” he asked.

Shelley’s eyes were so icy they sent a shiver
up his spine. “Yes. He was convicted on a federal charge of tax
evasion. Apparently, you’re supposed to declare your embezzlement
income on your 1040, and he failed to do that. He got hit with a
heavy fine and served time at the federal prison in
Danbury.”

“He went to jail?”

She nodded.
“Only on the federal charge. The bank dropped its prosecution in
favor of a negotiated settlement. We had to sell everything to pay
them back.
Everything
,” she stressed, spitting out the syllables. “Our house in
Westport—and the house here on the island, of course. The cars. The
furniture. My mother’s jewelry. Even my gold necklace—the one my
father gave me for my birthday. The bank and the feds took it all.
Every last penny.”

Kip realized he was gaping at her and
deliberately looked away. He could scarcely comprehend what she was
telling him. Then again, he supposed the situation would have been
just as incomprehensible to Shelley if she hadn’t lived through
it.

“The ultimate irony,” she went on in a tone low
and tense with fury, “was that my father’s girlfriend didn’t have
to give back anything. She kept her condo and her jewelry and
everything else my father gave her. My mother and I lost everything
because we were legally connected to him. We were his family, so we
had to pay the price.”

For a while Kip could think of nothing to say.
He listened to the purr of the refrigerator’s motor, the slap of a
curtain cord against the wall as a breeze fluttered through the
open bay windows, the slow, steady whisper of Shelley breathing in
and out, her eyes now blank as she moved beyond anger to that
numbness Kip was all too familiar with. Finally, he asked, “How is
your mother?”

Shelley made a face and drank some beer. “She’s
remarried. She lives in Houston. She’s not very happy, but she has
three meals a day and a roof over her head, so she doesn’t
complain.”

Kip remembered Mary Ballard. She’d been an
attractive woman, blond and stylish and somewhat aloof—but he’d
always suspected that was a result of bashfulness, not arrogance.
The time she’d come with Shelley to a barbecue at his house, she’d
seemed overwhelmed by the bustle and noise and the effusiveness of
his family. She’d been a nice woman, though.

Evidently she’d gotten as raw a deal as
Shelley. He wondered why Shelley sounded so cynical when she talked
about her.

Shelley apparently read his mind. “My mother,”
she explained, “doesn’t know how to function without a man. She’s
never had a paying job in her life. There we were, absolutely
broke, with my father up on criminal charges. My mother divorced
him—you can’t blame her for that. But there was no alimony. There
was no anything—except debts. She and I moved in with her sister in
Houston. I got an after-school job flipping burgers and my mother
worked on commission as a sales clerk in a clothing boutique—where
she earned zilch. The woman doesn’t know how to sell. All she knows
is how to be a wife. So she grabbed the first man who came along
and hung on for dear life.” She grimaced and shook her
head.

“You don’t like him?”

“No, I don’t like him. He’s cold and
uncommunicative. He has no sense of humor. He’s an emotional miser.
But he and my mother have...an understanding.”

Shelley reached for her beer bottle, then
changed her mind and nudged it away. “I go to Houston to visit them
every year at Christmas. While I’m there I count the days until I
can leave and come back here. I can’t stand my mother’s husband. I
can’t stand my father, either. My father took everything I valued
in life—family and trust and love and security—and he trashed it.
He ruined it. At least my mother’s new husband isn’t deceitful. He
supports her financially and she’s there for him in bed every
night. He gives her money and she gives him sex. The whole business
stinks. I will never let myself become dependent on a man.
Never.”

The words emerged flat and chilly, in a slow,
practiced tempo. Kip sensed that Shelley had thought more about
this resolution than about her decision to become a pharmacist. He
tried to link the hurt, frightened woman across the table from him
to the bubbly, carefree girl he’d known twelve years ago. Tried but
failed.

He considered pointing out to her that not all
marriages were like those of her mother, that not all men were
either philandering embezzlers or emotional abusers. He considered
reminding her of the trust and affection his parents shared, proof
that some men and women were honest and loving with each other. But
what good would it do to remind Shelley of everything she didn’t
have?

He couldn’t blame her for the conclusions she’d
reached or the scars she’d been left with. He couldn’t cure her. He
knew all too well that some wounds never healed.

He reached across the table and covered her
hand with his. He felt her tension in the cold stiffness of her
fingers. “I forgive you for not calling me,” he
murmured.

She glanced at him. Able to read the sympathy
in his expression, she offered a shy smile. “Thank you,” she said.
He knew she was thanking him not for his forgiveness but for
listening and not judging, for being someone she could trust even
though she hadn’t seen him in years, even though he was a man and
she no longer trusted men.

They sat at the table for a long while, neither
of them speaking. The sky outside the windows gradually darkened,
making the kitchen seem brighter and cozier in contrast. Shelley
gazed at the uneaten pizza, the scratched pine surface of the
table, the intricate pattern of stitches across the front of Kip’s
sweater. She gazed at his hand covering hers.

She gazed at his ring.

***

“DO YOU MIND coming up here?” he
asked.

“No, not at all.” Two short steps took her to
the window sill where she knelt, exactly as she and Kip used to
kneel, with her arms resting on the sill and the vista of the front
yard spread below. Tonight that vista was blurred by the fog, but
Kip didn’t care.

He wanted to answer the questions she was too
polite to ask. He supposed she would have been more comfortable on
the veranda—he could have dragged a couple of Adirondack chairs out
of the garage—or in the living room, or in the den, with the
television turned on, offering a distraction if it turned out they
needed one. But he couldn’t imagine baring his soul to her anywhere
else but in the cupola.

They’d brought two fresh beers with them.
Because he’d left the windows open earlier the air was noticeably
fresher in the tiny room. Moonlight filtered through thick layers
of mist to illuminate the cupola with a smudgy silver
glow.

“She died a year ago in August,” he
said.

Shelley turned
from the window and sat—in the corner where she’d always sat. Kip
took the corner diagonally opposite her—
his
corner. They stretched their
legs out, as they’d done so many times before.

This felt right. He was glad she’d agreed to
come upstairs with him. Here in their special place, he could tell
Shelley why he wore a wedding band.

Shelley’s face reflected compassion. “Had she
been ill?”

He shook his head. “No. She was hit by a
car.”

Shelley winced.

“I—” He stared down into the narrow-bore
opening of the beer bottle balanced on his thighs. “I saw the
accident. I watched it. I watched her die, Shelley.” He had never
actually spoken those words before. His parents had learned, in
bits and pieces, from reading the accident report and talking to
the police officer who had been the first on the scene, that Kip
had been standing on the corner and had witnessed the accident. But
he himself had never told them. He’d never told them what horrible
visions assailed him whenever he closed his eyes.

“What was her name?”

“Amanda.”

“Tell me everything about her, Kip.”

Everything? He lifted his eyes and frowned.
Shelley nodded, informing him that she honestly wanted him to tell
her.

So he did. He told her about how he’d met
Amanda at Mt. Holyoke College, when he’d driven down to the school
with a friend of his who was dating a friend of hers. He told
Shelley about how they’d spent every weekend together from then on,
even in the summers, about how they’d coordinated their
professional school applications, deciding to move to California
when she got into the law school at U.C.-Berkeley and he got into
Stanford. He told her about the first time he’d brought her to
Chestnut Hill to meet his parents, about how everyone had adored
her, about how she’d taught his mother how to braid bread dough and
debated politics with his father.

He told Shelley about the curly black hair that
had so annoyed Amanda--until curly hair had suddenly become the
height of fashion. He told Shelley about her crystal-clear soprano
voice, the solos she performed in her college choir.

He told Shelley about their wedding, the
flowers Amanda had worn in her hair and the rose she’d pinned to
his lapel. He’d told her about their “honeymoon—an exhausting drive
across country to California—and the ugly, poorly lit apartment
they’d found in Hayward, halfway between their two campuses. He
told her about how hard they’d both worked, studying and holding
down part-time jobs, somehow finding something romantic in eating
spaghetti five nights a week.

Kip had finished business school and gotten a
job in San Francisco. They’d moved up to Berkeley for Amanda’s
final year of law school, and then she’d been hired as an associate
at a prestigious firm. They’d purchased their co-op, given up
spaghetti for shellfish and sun-dried tomatoes, learned about
wines, bought the Saab. They’d met every evening after work,
sometimes only to ride the bus home together, sometimes to walk to
Chinatown for dinner, sometimes to shop.

Kip hadn’t really liked shopping that much, he
told Shelley. But Amanda had. One evening, a little more than a
year after they’d moved to San Francisco, she’d asked if he would
mind her stopping at Macy’s in Union Square. The store had
advertised a sale on belts, and she’d wanted to find a new leather
belt for her jungle-print dress.

Kip had told her he’d wait for her in the park
across the street. It had been a beautiful, balmy evening, and he’d
thought people-watching in the park would be more fun than debating
the merits of various belts in a crowded department
store.

He’d ambled about the park for twenty minutes,
and then he’d spotted Amanda emerging from the store. He’d strolled
to the corner to meet her, and she’d waved at him, checked the
traffic light, stepped out into the street and died.

“I haven’t handled it very well,” he
said.

Shelley’s legs rested against his. She had
listened, saying nothing, only nodding and sipping her beer and
nodding again as his story poured out of him. “Is there a good way
to handle something like that?” she asked.

He smiled. “I’ve missed you,” he whispered.
When he’d said it at the pharmacy earlier that day he’d meant it,
but not until this minute, when she had made the kindest, most
sensible remark anyone had said to him since the accident, had he
realized how very much he missed having her in his life.

She was in his life now. And he knew that,
although he would never get over losing Amanda, never feel whole
again and never stop grieving, things would get better. Life would
start to become bearable once more.