Summer Harbor

With gratitude

To my agent, Andrea Cirillo, and the wonderful team at JRA;

To Micki, I think this blind date is working out;

To Matthew Stackpole, who introduced me to Leeds Mitchell Jr.’s
Introduction to Sailing
and Jan Adkins’s
The Craft of Sail
and taught me port from starboard;

To the captain and crew of the
When and If
for the ride; and, as always, to my dear family for putting up with the crazed woman in the shed.

It was just past four o’clock, and the living room was winter dark as Will came through the front door. Before he even shrugged off his coat, Will plugged in the Christmas tree lights, then stood back to admire the big spruce cluttered with packages under its widely spread lower branches. On Christmas Eve there would be even more, when Nana and Pop got there and added their gifts to the pile. And, in a silly adherence to implausible belief, on Christmas morning there would be three or four for him signed by Santa.

In his left hand, Will carried the mail. Mixed in with the bills addressed to his mother and the Christmas cards addressed to them both was an envelope with just his name on it—one he’d been waiting for ever since finishing his last class of the semester. One that, in some sense, he’d been waiting for forever.

At the foot of the porch steps, the metal For Sale sign clattered in the breeze off the water. A discreet sign, with letters over-arching a stylized lighthouse, all done in blue and white, advertising the local agency that handled important real estate: “Seacoast Properties, Ltd.”

“Limited to what?” Will asked.

“Limited to the wealthy,” his mother, Kiley, replied.

“Like Pop and Nana?”

“Only in the old days of yacht club cotillions and madras shorts. Today’s wealthy, the ones who survived the downturn, put Pop’s money in the chump change category.”

“Chump enough to send me to Cornell.”

“This house is sending you to Cornell.” Kiley immediately regretted her involuntary sharpness. But the impact of seeing the house, so eerily unchanged from her memory of it, was like grit against polished wood.

She bent over to snag a piece of litter tangled in a
Rosa rugosa
bush. Nowadays, the owners of these shingle-style summerhouses had landscape architects swarming over the small yards to plant “native” plantings and develop cottage gardens. Her father had stuck in a hedge of old-fashioned privet, a couple of spiky yuccas, a scattering of lace-cap hydrangeas,
Rosa rugosa
bordering the cement path to the front door, and let the yellowish grass do as it pleased. “This is a summer place. If I wanted a fussy garden, I’d stay home in Southton.” It would probably be a selling point—not much to tear up, and the
Rosa rugosa
s were native.

It was frustrating, how every little action prompted a memory. Even the key in her hand prompted a vivid memory of it hanging on the hook by the back door, the seashell key chain exactly as memory served. In her eighteen-year moratorium from Hawke’s Cove, the house had remained inviolate in her thoughts, pristine and untouchable, and being here verified those chosen memories.

Kiley had never forbidden herself memory. Sometimes, in the early morning hours when the infant Will suckled on her breast, refusing to go back to sleep, or when an old Don Henley song on the radio so clearly brought back the feel of sand beneath her feet, Kiley relished the companionship of her two friends, even though only in selective memory.

It was out of a great need to keep this place and the good memories in the vault of sanctity that she had refused to come back. Nothing remains the same once reality has overridden the imaginary. How could she keep the cherished youth of summers in Hawke’s Cove separate from the tragic end to those days if she set foot again where it had all happened?

Her parents’ decision to sell the Hawke’s Cove house came as a mild shock. Her grandfather had purchased it for a song in 1933, and it had been the summer focal point of the Harris family ever since. Kiley had paid little heed to her parents’ frequent conversations about the place’s disposition, assuming that ultimately it would come to her. The idea of selling it out of the family hurt her in a place she had long kept apart from her adult self. Intellectually, she knew that maintaining the place was beyond her parents now, as her mother lost skirmish after skirmish with brittle bones and her father struggled against the emphysema slowly choking him. Childishly, she had hoped that her parents would neglect to really do anything about the house, despite all their talk, and that, at some magical and undefined point, she would find herself suddenly able to go back to it.

When her parents abruptly announced that they had decided to sell the house to fund Will’s education, Kiley felt the irony acutely.

By his very existence, Will had cost her Hawke’s Cove. Now Hawke’s Cove would pay for
his
absence.

Until her parents offered to pay for Cornell, Kiley had expected that Will would go to a state college closer to home, where she could afford his tuition. The sheer distance between Southton, Massachusetts, and upstate New York made Kiley weak, knowing she’d see her son only rarely once he left for school in the fall. Always at the junction of feeling unbearably proud that he had been accepted at Cornell, and unbearably sad about letting him go, Kiley buried her feelings in busyness. She regularly went over Will’s ever-growing list of items to take with him, focused on the minutiae of preparing for college, and mentally pushed away the distant day in September when he would leave her behind. Maybe it was easier for parents who had spouses and other children. But Will, he was her world.

Then her parents said they wanted her to go and inventory the place, to ready it for sale. She had no intention of breaking her moratorium against being in Hawke’s Cove with the task.

“Mother, why don’t you just have the agency hire someone to pack it up, or, better yet, sell it with the contents?”

“Kiley, I will not have strangers stealing from me.”

Lydia Bowman Harris, now in her seventies, was obsessive about theft. Their Southton home had all kinds of burglar deterrents, which, on average, were accidentally set off once a week by her father’s slow motion in getting to the right buttons to disarm a device. It was kind of a family joke.

“I can’t just up and take off for Hawke’s Cove. I don’t know when I can get free, and certainly not for long enough to get the job done.”

“You have vacation time.”

“Yes, and I was thinking about going to Cameo Lake with Will. It’s our last—”

Her father stood up, then took a moment to pull in sufficient breath to add weight to his words. “Kiley, we buried the past, got on with our lives. There’s nothing there which is going to change anything, or revive anything, or matter much anymore. We need you to do this for us. We don’t ask much of you, but this, we’re asking.” Merriwell Harris walked with slow dignity out of the parlor.

“Don’t mind him, Kiley.” Lydia Harris waved a still-elegant hand in the air in dismissal of her husband’s remarks. “He’s not happy about having to give up the place. It was in his family for seventy years.”

“Then don’t.”

“Why should we hang on to the place when there’s no one to use it? You won’t go.”

“Mother, you know the memories would choke me.”

“Kiley Anne Harris, for eighteen years you’ve done well, made a good life for you and the boy. I know we were uncompromising in the beginning, but what’s done is done. I don’t think that any of us would wish things had been different.” Meaning that Will had not been born.

“No. Of course not. But, I can only keep focused on the good things if I can keep the past out of sight.”

“It was your own doing. Until you face that, you’ll never grow up.”

Lydia’s sharpness only served to keep Kiley’s back up. No, she would not cross that little bridge over the wetlands that separated Hawke’s Cove from Great Harbor. In some ways, she was the opposite of that old guy who took tickets at the theater when she and the boys were kids. Joe Green, it was said, could not leave Hawke’s Cove, even to bring home his own boy’s body for burial. They said it had cost him his wife.

She, on the other hand, couldn’t return. As long as Kiley remained on this side of the bridge, she could choose idealized memories that were harmless.

At night sometimes, she would wake from dreams of water. Complicated dreams that left her sad. For a short while Kiley had gone to a counselor, a recommendation from a nursing school classmate. All the counselor could tell her was that she needed to get a hobby, that she was too concerned with serious matters. She hadn’t told him anything of the past, only of her present: school, working full-time, raising a toddler single-handedly. The rift with her parents over Will’s existence.

“You need a break, Kiley. Find some time for yourself. Go to the shore.”

Kiley stopped seeing him after that.

The dreams were cyclical, and her journal noted that they most often appeared when, not she, but Will faced a life change. When he was being toilet trained, or trying out for youth soccer; when she went out with someone for more than two consecutive dates. Even as he entered high school. Periods when she worried more about him. About how she was raising him.

In her dreams Kiley never saw Mack or Grainger, but the constant of water in these dreams always made her feel that she’d been with them there. In Hawke’s Cove, surrounded on three sides by the sea, providing years of summers together on the beach and in the water. The sailboat that they lovingly made seaworthy. And, of course, the insoluble association of water and the way things had ended between them.

Despite her parents’ pressure, Kiley believed nothing could induce her to abandon her eighteen-year prohibition against going back to Hawke’s Cove. It was her self-punishment. She would forever deny herself the thing she most wanted, in the belief that she deserved no less.

And that belief had held up, until Will and two of his pals got caught with marijuana.

The second-most-dreaded phone call in a parent’s life. “Come down to the station.” Kiley felt detached, as if she did this every day of her life. She brushed her teeth and combed her hair, then pulled on a clean sweatshirt over her pajama top and sweatpants over the bottoms, though normally she’d never go out in such an outfit this seemed all right under these circumstances. No one would know her. She found her car keys, and remembered to set the house alarm, then drove the few miles to the police station slowly, the radio off, as if music would be inappropriate. All the way there, she spoke aloud to herself, trying to anchor herself with the sound of her own voice.

“At least he’s not dead.” She couldn’t pinpoint her emotions. Part relief it wasn’t worse, part anger. Certainly shame would emerge, the hunt for a one-line acknowledgment of parental mortification to hand to those who would casually ask about the situation later, their curiosity masked as concern.
Déjà vu.
So clearly, Kiley remembered the raised eyebrows as she appeared in the market with her blooming belly. The “How are you feeling, dear?” code for “What a shame, the Harris girl knocked up, and no father.”

In their moderately well-to-do town, there was a certain parental expectation that this might happen. Perhaps this was an initiation rite. “Come join those of us whose children have destroyed our credibility. You bring the coffee, and we can share our disappointments.” A twelve-step program for failed parents.

Hadn’t she played with him, taken him sledding and to miniature golf? Hadn’t she made him sit at the table to do his homework even when he’d preferred to do it slouched across his bed? Hadn’t she learned to cook and made him dinner every single night of his life? But she had left him in the care of baby-sitters while she pursued her certification as a physician’s assistant. She had declined membership in the PTA because she didn’t have time in the evening to go to meetings that weren’t part of her education. Suddenly Kiley couldn’t remember laughing with him.

The parking lot was empty of civilian cars, the station house door wide open in the late June night. Kiley rested her forehead on the steering wheel, her thoughts swirling. She took a deep breath and drew deeply on her professional reserve, the armor of unflappability she wore at work to assure everyone she was in charge.

Will was exceedingly lucky not to have had the stuff on his person, and that the arresting officer had chosen to charge only one of the three boys, but that was almost no consolation. Will’s action—whether the first and only time, as he claimed, or one of many never discovered—meant that somewhere, somehow, she’d deluded herself into thinking she’d successfully raised this boy by herself. That all the long talks they’d had, all the rules she’d imposed, were laughable. In one night, he had proved that she was not the paragon of single motherhood she had occasionally thought herself, now that he was about to be launched into independent adulthood. His action had belied the thrill of watching him graduate sixth in his class, and served up a big portion of humility.

What had seemed, nineteen years ago, to be the hardest decision she would ever face had paled in comparison to the daily diet of hard decisions necessary to rear this child she had chosen to bear and keep. Even now, those interminable nights of wakeful debate while lying in her dorm room bed could startle her with a clarity of memory. As if those circling thoughts had been physical, as physical as Will’s first kick in utero or the labor pains of his birth. Those pains she had forgotten—not so, the pain of struggling to tell her parents that she was, at eighteen and almost through her first semester of Smith College, pregnant. She deliberately told them after the sixteen-week mark; deliberately and resolutely never told them who had fathered the child.

The drive home from the police station with Will, deep in the predawn darkness, theirs the only car on the winding country route, was in a silence so extraordinary Kiley felt as if she could touch it. Will stared out the passenger window, as if unable to even look in the same direction as his mother. His form filled the small space with coltish length, accentuated by his baggy jeans. There was so much Kiley wanted to say.
You could lose your place at Cornell, you are risking your life, what in God’s name were you thinking?
But she was afraid that she would be unable to stop once she got started, and the last thing she wanted was to become the shrieking banshee of his expectations. Often enough, he’d accused her of “screaming” at him when she had reprimanded him in a deliberately level voice. This time, the potential for her voice to rise into a penetrating howl was so strong she would not let herself even speak. Silence seemed the better alternative and, in the end, she simply told Will to go to bed. They’d talk in the morning.