Tides of the Heart (22 page)

Sometimes, though, in the evening, she saw him walking.

She’d be sitting on the porch of their weathered Cape Cod house just past the center of Vineyard Haven, playing with Mellie, her baby sister. It was just the two of them—she and Mellie—while Mom cleaned the kitchen after supper, and Dad was napping from another long day keeping the grounds at Mayfield House, and Richard was off working as he did every day and every night at the ferry docks earning money to go to college.

“Evening, Yank,” Brit would say as he strolled along the sidewalk that cut through their small front yard. He’d often
stop and say a few words of idle chitchat, playing a moment with the baby, never staying long enough for lemonade or iced tea, or to meet Mom or Dad or Richard. As quickly as he’d come, he’d be off again, bidding Mellie and her good night and continuing his walk, leaving her to fantasize that when summer ended, he would take her with him.

But when summer ended, he, of course, did not.

The following year he came back. Again, he was alone. She decided he must be a writer—one of those independent, solitary types who could not stand interruption while he was hard at work. He wrote in the summer; perhaps in the winter he went to cocktail parties in the city where important people talked about his books and he told them that all his inspiration came while he was away on Martha’s Vineyard.

“I brought you something, Yank,” he said one day while she sat in an Adirondack chair on the porch, snapping green beans to go with his dinner.

She brushed the long hair from her eyes and looked up from her work.

He handed her a small white box.

Setting down the old tin colander, she crossed her bare feet and wiped her hands on the apron that covered her blue-flowered sarong. She looked into his eyes—for another brief moment, they locked on hers. Then she took the box and slowly lifted the lid. Inside was the beautiful cobalt piece of sea glass, rimmed with a pure silver border and strung from a fine silver chain. “Oh,” she said, because she did not know what else to say, because she did not know if this was meant for her or if he was showing it to her to see if she thought it was good enough for someone else.

“It’s yours,” Brit said. “I had it made for you.”

“Oh,” she repeated.

The next day he asked if she played tennis. Well, of course, she hadn’t since they’d moved here to the island;
there was no time for tennis in the summer and no place to play in winter. But here in West Chop private tennis courts were set among the pine trees, exclusively tended for the summer people, for people who had nothing else to do unless you counted playing golf.

“Can you have dinner with me tonight?” he asked while she was folding linens. “After dinner we can play a game or two. I’ve come across some old racquets in the closet in the hall.”

For the next few weeks, they played tennis nearly every evening before the sun went down. She darted around the court, her dark hair flying, the sea glass pendant bouncing lightly between her breasts. When they finished they said good night and she rode off on her bicycle, back to Mom and Dad and Richard and Mellie and the life she really led, not the one in West Chop in the big house on the beach.

Then one night there was a thunderstorm that crept up unexpectedly, the way island storms so often did. He urged her to stay until the rain and lightning stopped, and before she knew what or how or why, the thing that she’d been craving finally happened.

He said he didn’t know she was a virgin. And yet he took her clothes off with all the tenderness she needed; he caressed her breasts and kissed her throat and grazed his hands there and there and there with all the patience she had ever imagined a lover would—should—have.

And in the fall Harold left again, hinting that, perhaps next year when she was twenty-one, she might go with him.

He gave her his address, a post office box in New York City, where she could write and send him pictures, and say how much she missed him, which was exactly what she did. She had not expected that in one of those letters, she’d be telling him that her mother had a sudden aneurysm and died on New Year’s Eve.

•  •  •

When he returned that summer it was clear that she would not go with him.

“I can’t leave Mellie with my father,” she tried to explain. “He would not know how to raise a little girl.”

But then he took her in his arms and told her that he loved her. He said he would be hers for every summer, if that was how it had to be, that they would have their summers until Mellie was a little older, until she could be on her own.

And that was how it was. For twelve summers they played tennis and had picnics with Mellie. They combed the beach for sea glass, but none they found was as beautiful as the one set in the pendant that hung from her neck. And with each autumn he was gone again, leaving her with memories and hopes and dreams and fantasies of the life they would have someday.

The day, however, never happened.

In the year that she turned thirty-one, and Mellie just thirteen, he did not come back to Martha’s Vineyard. He did not call, he did not come. And her letters to Harold Dixon at his post office box were returned to her unopened. She’d wanted to track him down, but she didn’t know how to find someone with only a post office box number. She supposed she could trace him through the people he rented the West Chop house from, but in the end she did not, for she was too embarrassed: the island girl used by the tourist man—a tired, old story that had been told too many times.

She’d cried a million tears since then; she’d walked a million miles back and forth to West Chop, hoping he’d come back to her.

He never did.

And yet she smiled now. She’d come down to the beach this morning to walk and smile and congratulate herself on
a job well done. Because after what they’d done to her, the others now would suffer, too.

At first, she hadn’t thought her plan would work. But now it had. She’d been afraid that Jessica Bates Randall would not receive her message. Or care about it if she did.

But Jess had.

And Jess did.

And now Jess was coming. Here to the Vineyard.

She watched the sand filter through her toes and wondered how life as she knew it—as she had been
tricked
into knowing it—would change. And if they’d all be sorry that they’d destroyed hers … her one chance at happiness sucked out with the tide.

A sparkling glimmer caught her eye. She bent down and scraped a few grains of damp, low-tide sand. Beneath the grains—just waiting for her to find it—was a perfect amber specimen of precious, smooth sea glass. She picked it up, slipped it into her pocket, and smiled again.

Boston Harbor murked below, a bowl of gun-metal water rimmed on one side by the blue Atlantic, on the other by the gray landscape of tall city buildings that stood too close together.

Ginny looked out the small window of the plane, down to the place she had not seen in thirty years, the town she had once called home. As the plane descended, an invisible cord tied itself around her neck. With each breath, it tightened. Her heart began to softly pound; her chest began to sweat. Inside her head, a low buzz droned; her ears closed up; the seat in front of her grew fuzzy, out of focus. Her knees grew weak and watery, as if the blood and bones within had somehow turned to liquid—cold, numbing liquid.

She gripped the tray table and closed her eyes.
Jesus Christ
, she thought.
Jesus H. Christ.
She did not know how long it had been since she’d had one of these attacks. Not since she’d been living in L.A., not since she’d put the past behind her.

“Please close all tray tables and return your seat to the upright position.”

The words came from overhead, from somewhere in the
ceiling that spun above her now, that swayed and swirled with each slow-motion of the air around her, the air she fought to breathe.

“Miss?” Another fuzzy voice. This one closer, louder, with a hollow, gurgled echo as if spoken through a microphone submerged in a tub of water. “Miss? You have to put up your tray table.”

Ginny’s eyes followed the sound and landed on a young woman dressed in navy blue with a neat white collar and small golden wings pinned to her lapel. She was standing in the aisle smiling down at Ginny. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“How much longer until we land?” Ginny somehow found the strength to ask.

“Only a few minutes now.” She smiled again.

Ginny did not return the smile, but stared out the window once again and wondered what she’d have to do to get the pilot to turn back.

Then she remembered he was dead. Not the pilot. Shit, she hoped the pilot wasn’t dead. No. It was her stepfather who was dead. That filthy piece of crap who had forced himself upon her so many, many times—that rat bastard Ginny dared not push away, for if she had, he would have beat her mother. Again and again, he would have beat her. Not that he hadn’t anyway. But only when Ginny was not around, only when she could not give him what he wanted.

He is dead, he is dead
, she repeated over and over to herself in a twisted, manic mantra.
Dead, dead, dead.

And then she remembered the night it happened.

She’d been asleep, awakened by a sense of something pressing on her mouth. Her eyes flew open.

“One sound and you’re dead,” he’d whispered in the darkness.

Her head began to ache; her heart began to bleed. She’d thought she was safe at Larchwood Hall. She’d thought he’d never find her there, that he would never learn about the baby.

He stretched a wide piece of tape across her mouth; he tightly wound more around her wrists.

“Is it my kid in there?” he laughed, his penis waving in her face—his hard, straight penis, poking at her mouth, then pushing at her swollen abdomen.

And then he ripped her nightgown off and shoved his dick between her legs.

“It’s mine, isn’t it?” he growled with acrid, foul breath.

Suddenly, all Ginny could think of was the baby inside her. The living little person who had not asked to be conceived, who had not asked to be a product of Ginny’s stepfather and his drunken, abusive trysts.

With more might than she knew she possessed, Ginny heaved her legs together, crushing his tight and throbbing balls.

He screamed.

He rolled from the bed to the floor, dragging her along.

She kicked.

He screamed again.

And then Ginny saw a figure standing in the shadows, hands raised above its head. Swiftly the hands came down, aimed directly at his back.

The light in the room was snapped on.

And there stood pregnant, fifteen-year-old Jess, one hand on the light switch, looking at the blood that spurted from his back, from the deep thrust that she’d made with the pair of sewing shears.

Her stepfather was dead.

Jess had killed him.

And thanks to the dickhead sheriff, Bud Wilson—who’d been downstairs screwing Miss Taylor while Ginny was fighting for her measly life—no charges were ever filed.

And Ginny—and her mother—at last had been set free.

Her breathing slowed now; her heart eased. She opened her eyes as the feeling returned to her knees; her eyesight came back into focus. She looked out the window again; the big plane floated lower toward the city: the Prudential
Center, Fenway Park, the lazy Charles River. Places she had never wanted to see again as long as she lived. Now she was back. Because Jess needed her. And because, thanks to Jess, that filthy piece of crap was dead, had been dead for nearly thirty years. For that, Ginny owed her.

As the runway rose to meet them, Ginny also knew she owed Jess for bringing Lisa back into her life: the once-unwanted baby who had become the only family Ginny had left, the only remaining part of her that walked the earth, would ever walk the earth. Whether or not she chose to walk it next to that creep of all time, Brad, was Lisa’s choice. In the meantime, maybe there was a way to salvage what might be left of the birth mother-daughter relationship. Jake would have wanted it that way.

The wheels screeched on the asphalt; Ginny had made it home. And as they taxied to the gate, she wondered if the real reason she’d come back east was not for Jess at all, but because Lisa was in New Jersey—a do-able drive from the island, should the opportunity arise.

Jake used to say “Opportunity has no way of knocking if it doesn’t know you’re home.”

Ginny had never been certain exactly what the hell that meant, but Jake had built a great production company, so it must have worked for him.

With that in mind, and a convenient hour to kill before the shuttle left for the Vineyard, she found herself standing at a phone booth in the far end of the concourse, dialing New Jersey information.

“Mrs. Andrews,” Ginny said moments later, “this is Ginny Edwards. Did Lisa make it there yet?”

“Oh, my. Can you imagine? They drove clear across the country for the twins’ graduation.…”

“Yes, I know. Is she there now?”

“No. She went for a drive. With Brad.”

The mention of his name made Ginny’s heart began to
pound again.
No
, she commanded herself.
He cannot hurt you.
After all, it was only Brad. He was not her dead stepfather, and he had no power over her no matter how hard he tried. “Well,” she said, carefully forming each word, “please tell Lisa I’ll be on Martha’s Vineyard for a few days.” She gave Mrs. Andrews the name of Mayfield House in Vineyard Haven “in case she needs to find me.”