Safe Harbor (17 page)

“I do,” she swore. “I think it’s when you
combine trust with love that you get into trouble. Love robs you of
perspective. It makes you ignore the things you don’t want to see.
My mother loved my father—and so did I. There were so many signs,
Kip, so many things I should have noticed. But I didn’t, because I
loved him and trusted him.” She gazed out the window for a moment,
her mouth curved in a poignant smile as the sinking sun painted the
sky with streaks of fire. Not until the sun had slipped completely
below the horizon did she turn back to Kip. “I’m not in love with
you, Kip. So I suppose it’s safe to trust you.”

The smile she gave him was curiously diffident.
She let her eyes reach to his again, brave, beautiful silver-gray
eyes, and took another sip of wine. He gazed at her defiantly
raised chin, her smooth cheeks, the fullness of her lips, and
thought for an insane moment how sad it was that they would never
be in love with each other.

Sad, but safe. He was as safe with Shelley as
she was with him. And right now, they both seemed to need that more
than anything else.

Chapter Eight

“HOW DO YOU KNOW all this stuff?” Shelley
asked.

He bent the brush bristles against his palm to
test their softness, then swirled the brush around in the jar of
solvent, rinsed it beneath the spout of the kitchen sink and tested
the bristles one last time. “How do I know all what stuff?” he shot
back.

“How to refinish the bannisters.”

Glancing over his shoulder at her, he laughed.
“There really isn’t much to know.”

“You knew what grades of sandpaper to use, and
which brushes, and...I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “I’m
impressed. You don’t seem like a Mr. Fix-It kind of
guy.”

“Casting aspersions on my manhood, are you? I’m
insulted,” he said, feigning indignation. He shook the excess water
from the brush, laid it on the counter with the other brush he’d
already cleaned, and dried his hands on a towel. “You seem to
forget, Shelley, that I spent many a summer weekend helping my
father fix things around this house.”

“That’s right,” she recalled. “You worked your
fingers to the bone while Diana lounged around mooning over her
latest boyfriend.”

“Exactly.”

Afternoon sunshine streamed through the bay
windows, filling the kitchen with golden light. Kip had argued with
Shelley over her decision to spend her day off helping him refinish
the staircase railings, but she had claimed that there was nothing
else she’d rather do. “Besides,” she’d informed him, “it isn’t
really my day off. As long as the pharmacy is open, I’m on call.”
The cell phone hooked onto her belt proved that.

The cell phone hadn’t rung since Shelley had
arrived at the house at ten o’clock that morning. Except for a
half-hour break for lunch and another break at around two-thirty to
split a bottle of beer on the front veranda, they’d been working
straight through.

It was nearly four o’clock now, still bright
and balmy outside. “Let’s take a ride,” Kip said.

She grinned. “Okay.”

He tossed the towel onto the counter, adjusted
his eyeglasses more comfortably on his nose, and studied the woman
perched on the kitchen table in her faded blue jeans and oversized
T-shirt. For a crazed moment he imagined Shelley and himself
slipping through a crack in time, tumbling backwards until they
were fifteen again. Shelley’s hair would be longer, her fingernails
shorter, her feet shod in sandals rather than white leather
sneakers. But basically she would have looked just as she looked
today, her cheeks arching as she smiled, her eyes glowing, her long
legs swinging freely, her attitude easy and amiable and amazingly
open.

In the nine days since he’d landed at Old
Harbor he’d done a lot of work on the house. He’d insulated the
windows, put new washers in the bathroom faucets, mopped all the
hardwood floors with a water-vinegar solution, swept the cellar,
given the lawn its autumn dose of fertilizer, repaired some roof
shingles on the garage, sanded down the stairway railings and
slapped on a fresh coat of varnish.

And he’d seen Shelley. Occasionally he dropped
in at the pharmacy to say hello, and every evening was reserved for
her. Sometimes they ate dinner at a restaurant, sometimes at his
house. One evening she’d insisted that he come to her apartment for
supper. The two of them had barely fit into the kitchen, and Kip
had suggested that they coordinate their respiration so they
wouldn’t both try to inhale at the same time and cause the walls to
implode. By the time dessert was served he had developed new
insights into the meaning of claustrophobia.

It didn’t matter, though. He’d enjoyed eating
in her cramped little flat as much as he enjoyed eating in his
roomy kitchen or at any of the restaurants around the island. A
miracle cure: he was actually starting to enjoy eating
again.

It wasn’t simply that Shelley’s presence
conquered his loneliness. In truth, the loneliness he suffered
couldn’t be conquered. It was with him and always would be. Like a
chronic illness, it might subside for a while, lying dormant deep
within him, and then without any warning or apparent provocation it
would flare up again. He was coming to understand the nature of it,
to adapt to it, to treasure those moments when the symptoms weren’t
pronounced and to withstand those moments when the pain rose up
against him.

Unlike his parents, Shelley didn’t expect him
ever to be completely free of his affliction. She recognized the
way he experienced it—sometimes it was obvious and sometimes it was
buried, but it was always present, something he would live with for
the rest of his life. She didn’t view it as a weakness, a flaw he
could overcome if only he put his mind to it.

He could be himself with her. He didn’t have to
try hard, to force anything, to worry about earning her approval or
fending off her pity. He could relax with the confidence that she
accepted him as he was.

Just like when they were kids.

She sprang off the table and headed outside
with him. Her bicycle, a spiffy black ten-speed which, she’d
boasted, she had bought brand-new shortly after she’d moved to the
island, was parked beside the front veranda. She waited patiently
while Kip wheeled his rejuvenated bike out of the garage and met up
with her in front of the house. Then they mounted, coasted down the
driveway, and turned onto the street.

In the olden days Kip would have challenged her
to a race, but he’d outgrown that childish competitiveness long
ago. It was much nicer to ride side by side with her, to glance to
the left and see her strong profile, her hair glittering in the
sunshine as the wind lifted it back from her face.

“So,” she called to him over the wind, “what’s
Diana doing these days, anyway?”

“Well, she’s settled on one boyfriend,” Kip
told her. “She married a guy named Glenn Hobart. He’s an
endocrinologist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and she’s a special
education teacher.”

Shelley seemed delighted. “That’s
wonderful.”

“Actually, she’s on a leave of absence right
now. She had a baby back in January. A daughter, Victoria. The most
beautiful girl in the world—says her unbiased uncle,” he added with
a self-mocking grin. “Diana was going to go back to work this
September, but she decided to take another year off. She’s really
into motherhood.”

“And you’re really into uncle-hood,” Shelley
guessed, shooting him a quick look and then concentrating on
steering around a sharp curve in the road. “I wish I had a sister.
You always used to fight with Diana, but still...it’s nice having a
sibling.”

“Yes,” he conceded. For all the squabbling, for
all the taunting and raging and threats of retribution, he loved
Diana and she loved him. Within days of his returning to Boston
with his mother last spring, Diana had rearranged her life and
carted her baby up to Chestnut Hill just to be with him, to offer
him whatever support she could.

He thought about how much Shelley would have
benefited from having a sibling with whom she could share the
burden of her family’s debacle. Obviously she couldn’t lean on her
mother. When her world came crashing down on her she’d had no one
to confide in, no one to unload on, no one to see it through with
her.

Kip wished he could have helped her in some
way. He wished he could have been the brother she didn’t
have.

Without thinking consciously about where they
were going, they found themselves veering off West Side Road toward
Dorie’s Cove. They bypassed the main beach and bounced along a
rutted dirt path to the edge of a grass-covered cliff. At the end
of the path they braked. Shelley looked at Kip, her eyes
bright.

In no time, Kip had his bicycle chain wrapped
around both their bikes, and he stashed them behind the familiar
old boulder where they’d always hidden them in the past. Then he
and Shelley picked their way carefully over the tumbled rocks and
stones, down the cliff to their special beach.

The sand was a shimmering salmon color,
reflecting the blushing light of the late-afternoon sun. Shelley
yanked off her sneakers and socks, rolled up the hems of her pants
and jogged across the beach to the water’s edge. Kip lagged behind,
gazing about him at the smooth rocks of the cliff, at the even
smoother sand, at the wind spiraling against the walls of their
hidden cove, leaving the unkempt dune grass whispering in its
wake.

How many afternoons had he spent here? How many
dreams had he dreamed in this hideaway? Why couldn’t life be as
painless now as it was then?

After removing his sneakers, he crossed the
sand to stand near Shelley. She gazed out at the blue-gray water of
the sound, at the stripe of light the sun painted across the still
water, narrow in the distance and spreading as it neared them. He
filled his lungs with the clean, salty air, then let it out in a
long, wistful sigh.

“Amanda would have loved this place,” he
murmured.

Shelley didn’t turn. She didn’t say anything.
Her hands on her hips, she stared resolutely out toward the
horizon. If he hadn’t noticed the barely perceptible stiffening in
her shoulders, he would have thought she hadn’t heard
him.

She
had
heard him,
though—and abruptly it occurred to him that he shouldn’t have said
what he’d said. This place belonged to him and Shelley and their
childhood. Amanda had never been a part of it.

“I’m sorry.”

Shelley raked her wind-tossed locks of hair out
of her eyes, but she didn’t turn. “No need to be.”

“If she’d stumbled onto this beach when we were
kids, we would have harassed her until she left.”

At last Shelley turned, smiling wryly. “Yeah.
We were pretty obnoxious.”

“I don’t know why I even thought of her just
now,” he said, still feeling a compulsion to explain, to
apologize.

Shelley’s smile grew tender. “You thought of
her because you loved her and you loved this place. If she’d
intruded on us today, we wouldn’t have chased her away. We would
have invited her to join us. We would have shared it with
her.”

Yes. They would have. Not just Kip but Shelley.
She cared so much about him, she could welcome his wife into their
memories. “You would have liked Amanda,” he said.

“Probably better than I like you,” Shelley
teased.

He reached out and took her hand. She moved to
him, her wet feet caked with sand, her hair tangled and streaked
with platinum highlights. When she stood toe to toe with him he
released her hand and wrapped his arms tightly around her waist.
“She would have liked you, too,” he said. “You’re an incredible
woman, Shelley.”

She opened her mouth to speak, then
reconsidered and said nothing. Closing her arms around him, she let
her head come to rest against his shoulder. He ran his fingertips
up her spine and into her hair, unraveling the snarled blond waves.
He longed to tell her how much these days had meant to him, how
much this one day meant, this one moment alone with her in their
secret cove, standing in the warmth of the setting sun while the
wind curled gently around them. He hoped his embrace conveyed what
he couldn’t express in words.

Holding her filled him with the harmony of
those days gone by, the peace and confidence and optimism that had
once defined his existence. With Shelley he could remember what it
was like to know that quiet joy.

With Shelley he could believe that someday he
might experience it again.

***

THURSDAY MORNING, he got a call from Harrison
Shaw, the friend of his father’s who had hired him when he’d moved
from San Francisco back to Chestnut Hill. “I just thought I’d check
in and see how you were making out,” Harrison said.

Kip owed Harrison a great deal. The man had
hired Kip for no other reason than that he was Brock Stroud’s son,
and as a result Kip had done everything within his power to make
sure Harrison never regretted granting that favor. Kip had thrown
himself into his first project, a loser that all the other
consultants at Harrison’s firm had declined. To everyone’s
surprise, Kip had come up with a good strategy for the hemorrhaging
high-tech firm, divesting it of its least productive subsidiary and
using the money from the sale to facilitate more extensive research
on its fiber-optic products.