Summer Harbor (2 page)

In bed, Kiley watched the darkness with open eyes, unable to sleep. Eventually, finally, a trace of gray appeared beneath the edge of her shade. In that first notion of dawn, her bedroom door opened and Will stepped in.

“Are you awake, Mom?”

She heard his snuffling and sat up. At once, her big, bright, and independent boy was in her arms, crying out his shame and regret and pleading for her forgiveness. She rocked him, resting his head on her shoulder, and wondering how he could feel so much like the little boy who once cried with the same heartsick intensity when he’d broken her favorite antique vase.

The last few months had been a tug of war between them, as never before. His natural demand for independence and her equally natural desire to remain part of his life had warred mightily. Was she powerless to keep him from repeating his mistake? Despite his tears and apologies, how could she really trust him not to do the same thing if peer pressure and opportunity offered?

Kiley was shocked at how damaged her trust in him was. In her predawn imagination she’d seen him selling his blood to support his habit, then closed her eyes against the image. It was only pot, and only once. Or so he said. The fact she doubted him pained her, and Kiley knew that this loss of trust between them might only be healed by separating Will from the source of his temptation, in particular, those friends of his. They weren’t kids she’d known since Will had been in grade school. These were kids from one of the other towns that made up the regional school district. She barely knew their names, much less who their parents were or how much supervision they got.

What Will needed was a safe place. They both needed an interim resting place where they could mend this rent in the fabric of their relationship, before he was launched on his final lap to adulthood.

Hawke’s Cove had always been her place of refuge. When schoolwork or arguments with her parents or spats with girlfriends made Southton oppressive, she would think of Hawke’s Cove, of the predictable routine of beach and reading on the porch, or the scent of damp air and hot sand. The peace that comes with being in the place you are the most happy. The fellowship of Mack and Grainger.

An early sparrow began to cheep outside the bedroom window, a distant reply.

More than any other place in the world, Hawke’s Cove represented sanctuary. Her middle-of-the-night thoughts about Will tormented her; could time in Hawke’s Cove serve to repair the damage done to her trust? Just letting herself think about being there comforted Kiley. Not for any other reason could she imagine returning, not because her parents wanted her to, or even for herself, but for Will’s sake.

“Will, I think maybe that we should go to Hawke’s Cove.”

Will sat up and pulled away from her, his eyes glittering with spent tears in the strengthening light of day. “I thought you wouldn’t go.”

“I don’t want to, but I think that we need the distraction.”

Will pulled away from her arms, a rapid, flat-palmed rub of his eyes wiping away the small boy who’d just been there. His jaw flexed. “You know I won’t do it again; I promise. Swear to God.”

Kiley took the corner of the sheet and wiped her own tears. “So you’re promising to keep away from D.C. and Mike? All summer?”

There was exactly enough hesitation in Will’s answer. “It wasn’t their fault. I mean, it was my choice, I did it. No one put a gun to my head.”

“You bought it?”

“No. I just smoked it.”

“If I take the car away from you, you can’t work. You’re too old to ground, and I don’t want to spend the last summer we’re together worrying every night that, deliberately or not, you’re in the wrong company.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

Kiley looked away from him to the yellowing light bordering the drawn shade as if she could read her answer written there. Over the years, parenting had taught her to temper her words. She knew that harsh words, even justifiably provoked, could be soul-breaking to young ears. Reprimands were always based on anger at behavior, not at him. Never
ad hominem
, always a little retractable. Until this minute, when there were no words for how betrayed she felt. He had done the one thing they had discussed and agreed on time and again. If he could fail her so easily in this, would mere words repair the damage? Talk, as her mother often said, is cheap.

“No, Will. Frankly, I don’t.”

Will stood up and gathered his dignity around him. “I really am sorry, Mom. I know that I screwed up. It was a mistake in judgment, but, whether you believe me or not, it won’t happen again. It was stupid.”

“So why did you do it?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Echoes of her own words nineteen years before.
I can’t tell
you.
She understood that there were times when it was enough to admit error, if not the reason.

“I understand why you might not believe me when I say I won’t ever do it again, but taking me away won’t give me the chance to show you that you can trust me.” Will’s voice had taken on his most reasonable tone, the voice he used to convince her to give him permission to do something against her better judgment. Like letting him attend that unchaperoned party at Lori’s.

“Going away will give us both a little distance from this incident, Will. We need that.” Kiley hoped he didn’t see that she was convincing herself with her words.

“So, if we go, how long do we stay?” Will’s tone verged on curious as he capitulated.

“I’m not sure. A couple of weeks, three maybe.” Kiley threw back the bedclothes and sat on the edge of the bed. Sleep was out of the question. “I have a month coming to me, and July is a good time to go. The doctor is taking his vacation then, so things will be slow at the office.” Kiley found her slippers and pulled on her housecoat. “Let’s have breakfast.”

Will shook his head. “Not for me. I’m going back to bed.”

“We aren’t done talking about this, you know.”

Will stood in the doorway and shrugged a silent “Whatever” of youthful
sangfroid
. Instantly, Kiley knew that she’d made the right decision. He thought that his tears and apologies were enough. In that still childlike, solipsistic world Will inhabited, he believed that he had smoothed things over. That she was his mother, therefore, she must forgive him. Kiley remembered how that felt. If only tears and remorse could smooth away the mistakes of youth. This indiscretion would not affect the rest of his life in quite the way hers had, but neither would it go away.

“Tell me something.” Will remained in the doorway, his hands pressed against the doorjamb.

Kiley pulled the belt of her housecoat around her waist. “What?”

“What is it about Hawke’s Cove that scares you so much?”

“Stuff.”

“Like my father?” A last arrow fired.

Kiley knotted the belt, not looking up at Will. “Your father was the love of my life.”

That was all she would ever say. Will’s father was someone who was kind, and handsome, and clever, whom she loved, and was now gone.

The truth was, she didn’t know who his father was. Long ago she had loved two boys equally, only to find that that wasn’t possible. In love, there can never be three. The uncanny part was that every now and then Will betrayed some characteristic of one, and then of the other, as if the two had joined together to create this child; as if her love had somehow caused the impossible to happen, and Will was part of all three of them.

The old summerhouse was so like she remembered it that for an instant, upon opening the double front door, Kiley half expected Mortie the cocker spaniel to greet her. Mortie had been her dog as a child, his fur a golden tan color that faded as he aged. He’d peacefully died in his sleep right there in the corner beside the hearth in the summer of her seventeenth year. Kiley glanced at the corner, half surprised that there was no dog bed still there. Stifling the temptation to tour the house as a memory museum, Kiley called to Will to start unloading the suitcases from the car.

Kiley’s parents hadn’t been back to the place since her mother’s first fall. A shattered hip and the diagnosis of advanced osteoporosis had ended their summer pilgrimages to Hawke’s Cove, despite the encouragement of Lydia’s physical therapist to keep doing what she had always done. Any thought of going was further compromised as Merriwell’s lungs began to lose their battle against his lifetime of smoking. So, the Harris house had stood empty last summer, for the first time in nearly seventy summers. No Harris had lounged on the front porch, morning coffee in hand, surveying the magnificent seascape that, no matter how often it was viewed, never failed to amaze. A three-generation continuum had been broken, in part by Kiley’s refusal to come back.

Now there was Will, the fourth generation at Hawke’s Cove, standing on the broad verandah…staring across the short front yard and narrow road to the intense blue of the summer ocean below the bluff. His ball cap was twisted around backward, his baggy jeans exposed his boxers, and his face was glowing with that first view of the cove that lent its name to the town. Will hitched up his jeans and turned to face her. “No one ever said it was this beautiful.”

“It’s even more beautiful during storms. The sea becomes this gray green color, and the whitecaps are like cream. You can’t see across to Great Harbor because the sky and the sea become the same color. When I was a girl, we’d sit out here to watch the storms come and go, like our own private show.” She let Will imagine she meant herself and her parents. But it was Mack and Grainger with whom she’d sit, enraptured by the dramatic sky, jumping and grasping hands at each bolt of lightning spearing from the black clouds into the roiling sea, like Neptune’s tridents.

“Do you think we’ll get any thunderstorms while we’re here?”

“This is New England seacoast, so anything’s possible.”

Kiley grasped the handle of her suitcase and climbed up the steep, narrow stairs to the second floor. She breathed in the slightly musty, salt-and-wood smell of a long-closed summerhouse. The scent acted like a door to the memories of other summer arrivals, made tangible by the same awkward weight of the overpacked suitcases, and the familiar sound of her sandals on wood floors. She half tasted the homemade chowder always left for them by the woman who used to open the house when she was a girl.

The wash of homesickness weakened her legs with its potency, and sharp tears came to her eyes.

“Mom, are you all right?” Will’s voice betrayed his surprise at his mother’s quiet weeping.

“I never realized how much I missed it.” Kiley laughed at herself and brushed away the tears. “Oh, I feel so foolish.” But was it the foolishness of sentimentality, or the foolishness of having stayed away for so long?

Will came upon the photographs when he pulled open the top drawer of the pine bureau in the tiny upstairs room that once had been his mother’s. The pictures were loose, the pinpricks where thumbtacks had held them on the wall were tinged with rust. Will ran his fingers over the white beadboard wall above the bureau, and picked out the tiny holes. As he held up the photographs, Will could see that they matched the pinholes perfectly. Someone had come in and pulled these pictures down and stuffed them into this drawer in a random and thoughtless way. Some of the five snapshots were torn at the corners, where the culprit had yanked against the tacks.

Hearing his mother coming down the hall, Will instinctively slammed shut the drawer.

“Finding everything?” His mother stood in the doorway, her out-of-character crying jag no longer in evidence, her eyes dry, if bright, her smile fixed, if not genuine.

“Yeah. Fine. Just putting my stuff away.”

Kiley seemed satisfied and went back downstairs to start dinner.

Will gently slid the drawer open again and removed the snapshots. Sitting on the soft mattress of the single bed, he studied the faces captured there. Two boys, and a girl who could only be his mother. He was taken by surprise at how much she looked like him when he was a kid; the shape of her face, the color of her hair, and the expression in her eyes reminded him of an old snapshot of himself that she kept on her desk at work.

Will flipped the first picture over, the one where they all looked about grade school age. “Grainger, Mack, and me, summer of 1976.” The three were on the beach, a huge sand castle behind them. The colors had faded, but Will could still make out the red, white, and blue of his mother’s one-piece bathing suit and the pale green of the warm summer sea. In the second photo, the same three sat on the flat wide porch rail of this house, legs dangling over the side, arms entwined. Kiley sat between the two boys, the three faces smiling into the camera. “Summer 1980.” The handwriting and the color of the pen, a girlish lilac, made Will think that his mother had pinned these pictures up, not one at a time, but at the same time, as if she’d chosen these five as a sampling of her summers with these two boys. Could they be cousins? He rejected the theory that these two boys were relations; looking at how physically they touched in this picture, he understood that these three were friends, best friends. Teen girls were especially touchy-feely with each other; boys, more apt to loop an arm around a neck in a mock choke hold to demonstrate their affection. This gangly trio were tangled together with arms across each other’s shoulders in every conceivable combination. Only best friends did that.

The next two snapshots were much the same. “Us at the beach, 1982.” “Summer 1983.” Each picture chronicled their physical changes. Grainger, darker haired and always photographed to Kiley’s right; Mack, almost as blond as Kiley, positioned always to her left. In 1982, Mack was the tallest; in 1983, Grainger was a head above Mack and more than that over Kiley. Both boys were shirtless in this snapshot, and both had broadened, muscled up from thin puberty to robust young adulthood.

In the last photograph, marked simply in the same lilac-colored ink “
1984,”
the three friends leaned against the side of a small sailboat propped up on what looked like stilts. The boat’s hull was freshly scraped and patched along the bottom with dabs of white. Hanging over the stern, the name of the boat was crudely hand-lettered on a piece of cardboard:
Blithe Spirit
.

Will spread the five pictures out on the bed and knelt down. By placing them in chronological order, he could see his mother grow up before his eyes like the images in one of those flip books. In 1976, she was a scrawny little girl with a Band-Aid on her knee. Her smile was glittery with braces, and her hair, nearly bleached white by the July sun, was cropped short. By 1980, the braces were gone, her knees were unmarred, and her body had begun to change toward womanhood. Yet there was a charming self-conscious gawkiness about her, as if she was caught in mid-transformation.

In the summer of 1983, Kiley had returned to Hawke’s Cove a young woman. Her blond hair was long, a little brittle with the fashion of the time. Although they were again photographed on the porch, she wore a very minimal bikini. Her posture between the two young men was flirtatious, as if she had arrived that summer understanding her powers. Will studied the faces of the two young men with growing curiosity. Manhood had darkened Grainger’s jawline with the shadow of a beard. Mack still looked boyish, yet his eyes, looking, not at the camera, but at Kiley, were mature.

Picking up the last picture, the one of the boat, Will thought he could see a change in the eyes of all three. A tension, a difference in their smiles. No longer open and laughing, these were smiles beckoned by the photographer. They were people with things on their minds. Their arms, at their sides, not touching. Will gathered up the photographs and put them back in the drawer. No one but his mother went through life not mentioning friends as close as these two obviously had been.

Maybe it was because she’d been so young when he was born, or maybe it was her natural liveliness, but Will had always enjoyed his mother’s company, had enjoyed being the most important person in her life. She was still playful, still full of mischief and practical jokes. When he was ten, he’d worried that he’d be seen as a mama’s boy and had tried hard to find fault with her. But his friends preferred playing ball in his yard, in large part due to his mother’s easiness with them and her willingness to pitch; it helped that she didn’t throw like a girl. Having to work full-time, she’d chosen to work in a medical office rather than a more exciting hospital job, so that she’d never work weekends or holidays. Every night after supper, before she started the dishes and he his homework, they’d talk and play a game. Effortlessly, she would pull from him his worries and triumphs, sharing with him stories of her own day.

The only complaint he had about his mother was that she was so very closemouthed about the answers to the really important questions he had, like who his father was, and why she’d cut Hawke’s Cove out of her life as if it didn’t exist. The handsome photographs of scenery and boats hanging on Nana and Pop’s walls belied what little she had told him about Hawke’s Cove, always speaking of it as if it were a way station on the road to life, of no importance to her. She’d never wanted him to come here, always coming up with other vacation ideas. Even when he got old enough to want to go with his grandparents to their summerhouse, she’d never let him.

As he’d entered adolescence, she’d known when to ask questions and when to let him muddle on by himself. Until now, when he’d muddled himself into banishment, and he knew she was half-blaming herself. He’d screwed up royally and here he was. Maybe that was the hand of fate. Maybe his mistake that night would open the door on the great mystery of his life.

Will took the last picture out of the drawer and slipped it into his back pocket. He’d been born in May, 1985. It didn’t take calculus to figure out that his mother had left here pregnant the August before. She might even have been carrying him as that picture was snapped. A bundle of cells about to throw her entire life into disarray. If neither one of these two boys was his father, maybe they’d know who was.

Will suddenly threw himself onto the bed with enough force to make the old-fashioned springs protest, flinging one arm across his eyes to block out the summer light streaming through the narrow window, and the visions which surfaced in his mind. He was no innocent; he’d had a steady girlfriend till she broke up with him. He knew what couples did. But this was his
mother
. She must have been in love with one of those two boys, or someone else. Maybe the someone who kept taking the pictures. Surely there had been a deep, Romeo-and-Juliet kind of love. Ill-starred. Star-crossed, whatever. There had to be a good reason that she had kept his father’s identity a secret.

Unless she didn’t know? No, that wasn’t possible. His mother could never have been the type of girl to sleep around. Maybe she had been a victim. But how could she love him as completely as she did, if he was the product of rape? This scenario had crossed his mind before because of her avoidance of this place, as if it held memories so painful there was no purifying it. But she was a pro-choice advocate, a physician’s assistant who campaigned for a woman’s right to choose. But maybe he was the reason why. When
was Roe v. Wade?
Maybe she couldn’t legally…

These horrific thoughts made Will press his arm harder across his eyes. Feeling a little nauseous, he rolled over and, with the implausible power of youth, promptly fell asleep, never hearing Kiley call him to eat.