Swans Landing #1 - Surfacing (3 page)

“Sorry to inconvenience you with my mom’s death,” I snapped.

Lake blinked. “That’s...that’s not what I meant.”

I shrugged, then turned away from him and unzipped my bag, digging around inside it while I pretended to search for something.

“I meant—” He exhaled heavily. “I’m sorry, I’m not good at this dad thing.”

No kidding.

“I’ll be back in a few hours. You can explore the village if you want. It’s not big. The other half of the island is part of the National Seashore, protected public land, so there’s not really anything there to see except trees and sand and the beach. I’d advise staying away from it until you’re more familiar with this area. If you get lost, find your way back to the Variety Store and ask for Miss Gale. She’ll point you in the right direction.” I heard the jingle of keys and then he said, “Here’s a house key for you.”

When I didn’t take it, Lake placed it on the dresser. I kept my back to him as he climbed down the ladder. His footsteps echoed across the floor downstairs and then the front door shut behind him.

I dropped down to the mattress and reached into my bag to pull out the envelope Mom had given me. She made me promise not to open it until I had gotten here. I had considered breaking that promise many times in the days since her death just to have one last piece of her still with me, but I’d held out. Now here I was in Swans Landing like she wanted, with this man I didn’t know and her one last gift in my hands.

The rip of the paper echoed through the quiet house. I tore carefully so that I wouldn’t mess up the side where she had scrawled my name in her small, shaky handwriting. Her writing used to be curly and bubbly, but the scrawl on the envelope was so different I could almost believe someone else had written it.

I unfolded a letter written on a sheet of plain notebook paper. The top of the letter was dated six months earlier. The words blurred together and it took a moment for me to realized that the paper in my hand trembled as my entire body shook.

I
knew
this day. The date was forever burned into my memory. This was the day Mom told me her cancer wasn’t going away, the treatments weren’t working.

This was the first day that I knew for sure my mom would soon die.

I wasn’t prepared for the wracking sobs that seeing this date caused me. I bent over, gasping and choking for air as I fought to keep the tears down. Everything hurt, from the sting of the tears in my eyes to the tightness that had curled my toes inside my shoes. Once again, I was at the hospital, bent over my mom’s bed after she’d taken her last breath, hugging her tight and feeling as if my entire world had stopped turning. In the days since my mom’s death, I’d been lost and drifting through the hours without any real consciousness. Before today, I hadn’t felt anything but numb.

My throat was raw when I finally sat up again. Through blurred vision, I began reading Mom’s last letter.

My little Mara-bug,

The first thing I want to tell you is this: I love you. Please understand that everything I’ve ever done
I
did simply because I loved you.

The second thing is: It’s okay if you’re angry. I’m angry too. I wanted to always be there for you and I’m angry that I can’t do that.
But now you’re where you belong, though you don’t know it yet. Your dad is a good man. Try not to be mad at him. He loves you and he’s only wanted what’s best for you—

My hands crumpled the paper into a tight ball and then slung it across the room. It skittered into a darkened corner of the A-frame roof.

This
was what she wanted to give me? A letter about how good and loving Lake was? She could have told me
anything
, given me something I could have actually used, and instead, when faced with death, she chose to give me
that
?

I had to get out of Lake’s house, so I slung my camera around my neck and climbed back down the ladder. An old rusted bike lay mixed in with all the other junk on the side of the house. I didn’t know if Lake would get mad at me for going through his things and I didn’t really care. The bike groaned at first, but eventually most of the rust worked out of it and it pedaled without much complaint.

An eerie quiet settled over the island as I pedaled down the narrow streets. Back home, cars and trucks always rumbled by, among the normal sounds of life. Here there was only the soft roar of the ocean in the background, a few cries of seagulls, wind rustling through the grass and trees. Every now and then I heard voices or a car went by at a snail’s pace, but it was never loud enough to drown out the silence.

Shops of every color imaginable, from deep red to brilliant turquoise, lined Heron Avenue, the main street of the island. Most had signs on the doors that read, “Closed until summer.” Some looked as if they had been boarded up for years, the dry grass and bushes in front of them overgrown and the paint faded and peeling. The island looked like a ghost town where a person could be forgotten forever.

I didn’t have any particular destination in mind when I’d set out, but I found myself traveling southeast until eventually the shops along the street gave way to open beach. I hopped off the bike and wheeled it past sand dunes that looked like little bald heads with wisps of grassy hair. As I emerged from between the dunes, I got a full view of the Atlantic. The sky had become even more overcast and the choppy water foamed into waves all the way out into the horizon. Far off in the distance, a ship slid across the water while closer to the shore, a few birds skimmed over the surface to catch fish.

I breathed in the salt air, savoring the taste on my tongue. I’d always had a weird obsession with salt. I liked my water with a little salt added to it. I poured enough of it on my food to give most people high blood pressure. My tastebuds reveled in the hint of it in every breath I took and I felt more alive than I had in a long time.

The beach wasn’t deserted, despite the weather. An older couple walked hand in hand near the water and a few teenagers gathered next to a sand dune, a couple of them on ATVs. Their voices and laughter floated toward me, but they didn’t glance in my direction.

“Oh, gross!” one of the girls shrieked as a boy lunged at her with a handful of dripping seaweed. Her friends laughed as she ran in a circle around them to avoid the boy.

My breath caught in my throat as I remembered the times I used to hang out with my own friends, way back before Mom got so sick. I felt a thousand miles away from the people my own age and I didn’t know if I had the energy to ever make it back toward something resembling normalcy.

If this was such a deserted island during the off season, then there should be a little private corner where I could sit in peace. Tucking my head down, I steered my bike across the sand and followed parallel to the water, keeping a safe distance from the rough and likely frigid sea.

The voices behind me faded and blended into the sound of the ocean until I couldn’t hear them anymore as the beach curved away from them. A long way down the beach, after it felt like I’d walked for miles, I passed over a row of sand dunes and found a thick grove of trees. The evergreen trees were smaller than they would have been if they had grown in Tennessee and the branches twisted in low-hanging crooked limbs, giving the forest a creepy appearance. Creepy was good. Creepy would keep giggling girls who were afraid of seaweed out of my hideout. I edged my way into the cove, skirting the wet sand where the water crashed onshore and found a quiet, isolated stretch of beach.

My bike fell soundlessly into the sand at my side. I closed my eyes and breathed in the salt air. It felt good, being here on the edge of the world with no one else in sight. Even though I hadn’t grown up on the island, something about the water seemed almost welcoming, almost as if it wanted me to be here.

I focused on the water through the viewfinder of my camera and scanned the horizon with the zoom. I snapped a few photos of the swirling clouds and the birds soaring overhead. The wind whipped my hair around my head and sand stung my skin. I tried to imagine my mom being here, standing in this same spot and looking out at the same ocean.

She came to Swans Landing the summer after she graduated college with a couple of friends. She originally planned to only spend the summer here, then go back home and look for a teaching job.

But then she met Lake. And when her friends left at the end of summer, Mom stayed behind. She moved in with Lake, they got married on the beach, and a year later I was born. Six weeks after that, the marriage had ended abruptly and Mom finally left Swans Landing, with me.

What was it about this place that made her want to stay? And what had finally driven her away?

Maybe she’d already told me the answer to both questions in her letter: Lake Westray. An answer I wasn’t sure that I wanted to understand. She had kept so many secrets over the years. Why did she now want me to know about Lake?

As my camera swung around, following a bird soaring over the water, a large, dark shape suddenly filled the viewfinder and blocked my view of the ocean.

“You’re not supposed to stand on the sand dunes,” said an angry voice.

Chapter Three

Behind the camera stood a guy around my age with a pair of broad shoulders beneath a thick black hoodie, nice full lips, tanned skin, and closely cropped dark hair, which looked wet. His deep, dark brown eyes glared at me.

“Huh?” I said. Very cool under pressure, that was me.

He pointed to a weathered sign that read, “Please stay off the sand dunes!”

“I thought this was just a small hill.” The sand beneath my feet stood a little higher than the rest of the beach, but not as high as the things that were clearly sand dunes behind me.

“A sand dune is a small hill,” he told me. “Meant to protect the beach from erosion. And you happen to be destroying this one by climbing all over it.”

“You’re standing on it too,” I pointed out.

“Only to get you off, since you couldn’t see the sign through your camera.” He sneered at me, as if taking pictures of the ocean was cliché and pathetic.

I held the camera up, inches from his face, and pressed the shutter release, letting the camera flash in his eyes simply to annoy him. “Fine, I’ll stay off the sand dunes,” I said, carefully moving to lower ground. “Since you’re apparently the beach police.”

He jumped down after me. “Sand dunes do serve a purpose. I’d prefer my house not wash away in the high tide, thank you.”

“Then here’s a thought: move off the island,” I snapped back.

Our eyes locked in a fight of wills, both silently daring the other to back down. My hands gripped my camera so hard that my fingernails ground against the casing.

Finally, he blinked first and laughed. “You look like a tourist, you know.” He pointed at the camera around my neck. “Camera and all.”

“You look like a decent human being,” I said, shrugging. “Apparently, you can’t judge people by appearances.”

He made a grunting noise and said, “I’m Josh.”

“Mara,” I told him.

“Woodser,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s what we call people who aren’t from the island,” he said. “Staying in town?”

I snorted. “I may be fresh off the boat, but I’m not stupid. I’m not telling some guy I don’t know where I live.”

He cracked a smile, causing my heartbeat to pulse in my ears. “Scared I might sneak into your room in the middle of the night?”

I might not throw him out if he did, but I certainly wasn’t going to say that out loud. “Maybe I don’t want you littering my door with your ‘Save the Sand Dunes’ brochures.”

Josh tilted his head back and regarded me with an amused expression, as if this entire conversation entertained him.

“What?” I snapped.

“You’re going to be a fun addition to the island. There aren’t many girls around here with an attitude as big as the lighthouse.”

“Look who’s talking,” I said. “No one warned me there was a one-person beach patrol taking on newcomers around here.”

“Only when they happen to stumble onto
my
part of the beach.”

I made a big show of turning around, looking at the trees and sand around us. “Your beach? Funny, I don’t see a sign with your name on it.”

“Everyone knows Pirate’s Cove is my beach. No one else ever comes here.” He crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow at me. “Until today, anyway.”

The sneer on his face sent fury bubbling through my veins. I planted my feet firmly in the sand and crossed my own arms. “Well, then, it’s time someone changed that. I’m thinking I’ll take this section of the beach right here.”

“Are you going to put up a sign?” Josh asked.

“A really big one.” I waved my fingers at him. “Do you mind? You’re intruding on my beach. This is private property.”

Josh didn’t move. “I should have guessed Lake Westray’s daughter would know how to make an entrance here.”

My eyes narrowed as I said, “How do you know Lake is my father?”