Summer Harbor (4 page)

Abruptly, Kiley stood up. This place could not be allowed to open that place in her heart where she had buried the past.

Any thought of seeing Grainger Egan was out of the question. She could not bear to see the man the boy had become.

Grainger Egan stood in line at the post office window, a month’s worth of bills in his hand. He was standing behind a lanky boy digging in his capacious pockets for the right change for half a dozen postcard stamps. Dozens of youths cluttered the streets of Hawke’s Cove in the summer, mostly indistinguishable one from another, camouflaged into anonymity by their baggy pants and backward baseball caps. Maybe it was the boy’s intense study of one of the postcards in his hand, or the bend of his neck, but Grainger was certain that he knew this kid. As the boy turned away from the window, Grainger nodded to him, with a nominal I’m-sure-I-know-your-parents smile. Then Grainger’s smile froze, but the boy turned away before the look on Grainger’s face exposed how startled he was at the sight of those wide-spaced blue eyes. Grainger knew who he was, who he had to be. Without question.

He was the image of his mother. Masculine, to be sure, but the same honey blond hair, the same ocean blue eyes, so achingly familiar. The spontaneous dimpled smile as he responded to Grainger’s half-smile. The telltale arch of his eyebrows proved his heredity, perfect ram’s horns, just like Kiley’s. It might be believed that here was a creature of parthenogenesis, so deeply did he resemble his mother at this age.

Unable to avoid the thought before it was in his mind, Grainger wondered whether she still looked like that, like a gamine, a breath of fresh air, the blithe spirit he and Mack nicknamed Kiley, after being made to read Shelley’s “To a Skylark” in ninth grade. “Hail to thee, Blithe Spirit,” they mocked the writer. Kiley laughed it off, retorting, “Bird thou never wert.”
Wert
became their code word that summer. “Hey Blithe, Grainger and I wert going to the movies tonight, you want to go?”

“You wert, wert you?” Oh, they thought themselves very funny. Or Mack very funny, because he was the one to use the word to the greatest amusement. He could always do that, defuse any situation with a joke or a funny gesture, or a non sequitur.

Until Kiley came into their lives, Mack and Grainger had been content as a duo. They had played the same games for so long they didn’t have to discuss the details of the various missions planned as mock soldiers, or the complicated plots of their imaginary detective stories, or which superheroes they were, wearing towel capes and running along the beach. Mack was always clever Spider-Man; Grainger, the conflicted Superman. When Kiley came, they expanded their games to include her or happily played games of her devising, as long as Barbies weren’t involved. On the rare occasions he let himself think back, Grainger remembered every childhood summer day as sunny and warm. Every day a beach day. He still saw the three of them as eight-year-olds, or ten-year-olds. When they were fifteen and life was golden. Beyond that, Grainger could not allow himself to reminisce. Dual abandonments, the bookends of his youth, inevitably subverted even the most innocent recollection.

Some cynics might say that adolescence changes everything; what could he expect? But Grainger knew that they had come very close to defying the odds in preserving a platonic friendship, devoid of jealousy, devoid of competition. Until one summer when it all came tumbling down and their lives were changed. Even then, they might have carried into adulthood only the sweet memories, if only…

Grainger slapped the fistful of bills against his leg. He had spent a lot of time keeping the “if onlies” at bay. One look at this boy’s wide blue eyes, and his battlements were in danger of being breached.

“Grainger, you’re next,” Harvey Clark called to him from the service window.

The boy, poking his cards into the mail slot, turned and looked at Grainger, openly curious, as if trying to place the name, a little half-smile of his own on his face.

Grainger was certain of it then: this tall boy with Kiley’s features must be Mack’s son. Or his.

Grainger’d had some warning; he knew before they arrived that Kiley Harris and her son were coming to town to ready the old house for sale. Though Toby Reynolds had passed the word along only as casual gossip, to Grainger it was like storm warning pennants being hoisted. Toby’s business was to pass along stuff like that, stoking the furnace of commerce, so to speak, as a high-end real estate agent. Toby knew Grainger dealt with rich summer people in his boat business, and always let it drop when one of the premier properties in Hawke’s Cove was up for grabs. Toby, who moved comfortably among these people, had some skewed idea that Grainger’s connection to them was likely to provide such a conversational turn. But Grainger merely repaired their boats, and launched or hauled them with the seasons. He didn’t say much to them except what needed to be done, when it might be finished, and how much they should pay him. He didn’t want to be their friend or move within their tight social circles, although he was often the recipient of invitations and occasionally attended a cocktail party or fund-raiser if the hosts were longtime summer people or good sailors, or if the benefit was one he supported.

Toby, a
washashore,
was only vaguely aware of the divide between the old Covers and the newcomers who had brought suburbia with them. His perspective was one of the immediate; unlike those who called themselves natives, he had only a minimalist’s sense of history. And he employed it only when it suited his needs, as when an historic house came on the market. Then he would trot out his “local knowledge” to plump up its selling points against the condition of the roof or the limited view.

Toby’s sense of Hawke’s Cove history was building-centric. He had no concept of human history, the old grudges, griefs and secrets that lay behind the faces of those ordinary men he greeted every morning at Linda’s Coffee Shop. And he could never have imagined the effect his words might have on Grainger when he casually mentioned that the woman whose actions forever altered Grainger’s life was coming back.

“It’s rare for these places to go up for sale, the shingle-style houses on the bluff. Almost never.” Toby was on the verge of salivating. “But I guess they’re not in good health. And the wife said the daughter, Kitty or Cathy or something, doesn’t want it. So they want it sold. Pronto.”

“Kiley.”

“Beg pardon?”

“The daughter’s name is Kiley.”

“Right. Whatever. Anyway they’re in a hurry.”

As they walked out together, Grainger’s dog, Pilot, waited patiently in the truck, his chin resting on the steering wheel. Toby’s immaculate Lexus was parked next to the ’99 Ford half ton. He was still going on about the Harris house, and Grainger felt an uncharacteristic urge to give him a good shove against his car and smack him into silence.

“Mrs. Harris said her father-in-law bought the place for five hundred dollars. Now it’s valued at over a million. She said something about wanting to put her grandson through college. I told
her
even if they send the kid to Harvard, they’ll still have loads of money left over.”

The news of a grandson surprised Grainger. But it made sense then, this sudden desire to sell the place after all these years. Kiley had never come back to use it. If Grainger ever felt a twinge of something that might have been hurt, or anger, imagining that she’d successfully gotten on with her life, he’d stifled it pretty quickly. Just because he had been incapable of trusting anyone with his heart, certainly didn’t mean that Kiley was similarly afflicted.

“…and she says, no, he’s been accepted to Cornell. As if Harvard had been an option…”

Not
a little kid, but a college boy.

Grainger was very good at math. It was nineteen summers ago that they had last been together. He knew the last day they had ever seen each other: August 24, 1984.

As Toby nattered on, Grainger walked away from him without another word and climbed into his truck, pulling away from the curb a little too fast, ignoring the look on Toby’s face as the loose sand dinged against his white car.

He drove in the opposite direction from his boat shed and up Seaview Avenue to Overlook Bluff Road. Pilot wiggled on the seat beside him, loving any departure from routine that might result in a walk.

The Harris’s house, waiting for the arrival of its long absent daughter, sat behind its scraggly privet hedge. Still shuttered, as it had been for the last year, the house was unchanged from his boyhood memories of it. The porch looked in need of a new coat of deck paint, and the roof was a year or so away from needing replacement, but for all that, the place looked pretty good.

Although he had passed by a thousand times, he’d always kept his eyes on the view below the bluff. Now Grainger pulled off to the side of the road to stare at the house, trying to imagine that something besides the tragic implosion of their friendship might have taken place back then—but he could only think of the first time he’d set foot on that property.

By the time Kiley Harris entered their lives, the summer the boys turned eight, Mack MacKenzie and Grainger Egan had been buddies for what seemed like forever to two little boys, from about the time Mack and his family had moved year-round to Hawke’s Cove. Mack’s physician dad set up his general practice in the professional building, making the leap, as he called it, from big-city impersonal practice, to a small-town practice in the place he had summered all of his life. A move that meant that, although he certainly wasn’t paid in chickens and eggs, he knew his patients very well. Hawke’s Cove in the early seventies was still a small place, only just building into the summer resort it would become by the turn of the millennium.

Grainger was sitting in Dr. MacKenzie’s waiting room, his nose running and his mother handing him tissues. Mack was cheerfully healthy, playing with a set of plastic trains on the floor of the well-child side of the room. Grainger was remanded to the sick-child side and sat despondent and rheumy, sure that he’d never have a chance to play with those marvelous trains. In his family, well-care wasn’t an option. Without health insurance, only persistent coughs and fevers got medical attention. As long as Grainger’s mother remained with them, at least he did see a doctor when really sick. After she left, his friendship with Mack provided care on several levels.

Seeing Grainger’s obvious desire to touch those brightly colored cars, Mack began to push the train in his direction. One by one the cars passed across the invisible divide between them until Grainger was in full possession of the toy.

“I’m Mack.”

“I’m Grainger.”

“Is that your first name or your last name?”

“First. Egan is my last name.”

“Grainger Egan. I’m not sick. I just have to play here when my mom’s busy. My daddy is the doctor.”

“My daddy is a fisherman.”

“I wish my dad was.”

“My dad can teach your dad.”

“Okay. When you get better, do you want to play?”

Mack lived close by the Overlook Bluff Road neighborhood, in a neat, old, viewless Cape-style house that had two bathrooms and a den. Such a place was palatial to Grainger, who then lived above LaRiviere’s Market in three rooms. Very soon Grainger became a fixture in the MacKenzie household, even having his own hook by the door to hang his coat on when they came home from school. As it grew dark, Mrs. MacKenzie would say, “Grainger honey, can you stay?” She knew dinner for him might be hot dogs or cereal, not pork chops or roast chicken.

If his father was out at sea, fishing on one of the big boats out of Great Harbor, he’d shake his head and say no thank you. His mother was home alone and would expect him. If Rollie Egan was home, either between trips or unemployed owing to the vagaries of the fishing industry, Grainger would nod yes. Please. Later he would run home in the dark, timing his arrival to occur just as his father fell asleep in front of the television, the three or four beers he’d consumed guaranteeing he wouldn’t notice Grainger’s coming in after supper. Occasionally Grainger would mistime his return, and Rollie would berate him about ingratitude and getting above himself. Depending on the degree of success his last fishing trip had brought, he might keep his abuse verbal. If the fishing had been poor, Grainger might expect the belt. His wide open eyes would fixate on the movement of his father’s hairy hands to his belt buckle. Rollie knew that, and would tease the boy by touching it, just to see the fear Grainger tried so hard not to show.

Sometimes, though, he had already taken out his frustration on Grainger’s mother. Regret and guilt are strange bedfellows, and that often made Rollie more dangerous. The less he brought home, the more he bullied. If Grainger could hear his mother’s weeping through the thin walls of the building, he would sit in the hallway, waiting until his father’s loud snores proclaimed it safe to go in. Sometimes Mrs. Katz in the other apartment would open her door and pull him inside. She’d never say a word, but give Grainger a slice of pound cake and a glass of milk, and
tsk tsk
her tongue as he ate.

As spring daylight increased playtime, one of his and Mack’s favorite games after supper was “trespassing.” They’d visit unoccupied summerhouses and scamper over porches, climb trellises, and dare each other to peek in windows. Once school let out, Grainger stayed at Mack’s four nights out of five.

The long June sunset lingered until eight o’clock, giving the pair time to move through the neighborhood for new dares. The closer it got to true summer, and the arrival of summer people, the more exciting the game.

One evening they drifted into the Harris yard from the back, and moved around to the great wraparound porch with its tipped-over rocking chairs. In those days people didn’t lock up their outdoor furniture, simply tipped the chairs forward to prevent rain and leaf mold from building up. In the evening half-light, the rockers looked like people bent over in prayer, foreheads touching the porch rail. The chairs beckoned to two small boys looking for mischief. They crept along the hedges, speaking in a code of their own devising as they scouted the territory. Mack dared Grainger, and he ran up across the porch to tip upright each of the four big chairs, then stepped on the rockers to get them to moving in a chaotic dance. The sudden appearance of headlights coming along Overlook Bluff Road made the boys quickly duck behind the wide, shingled balustrades. When the headlights didn’t pass but instead pointed right at where they were hiding, Grainger could feel his pulse race with the same intensity as when he ran home those nights his father was there.