Safe Harbor (6 page)

His voice drifted through the open door, friendly and low. What a fine man Sam was, so very kind. Augusta thought of how much he had grown up these last two years—taking the teaching post at Yale, coming into his own from the obviously daunting shadow of his older brother.

When Augusta heard the click of Sam hanging up the phone, she bit her lip. Her fingers went to her black pearls, working each one as if it held a nugget of wisdom. “Mind your own business,” one pearl said. “Let him find his own way,” said another. “Don't meddle,” said the third. In her old age, Augusta was learning a lot about being a mother.

But rationalizing that Sam wasn't biologically one of her children, she had just the opening necessary. Watching the waves break along the sands of Firefly Beach, she cleared her throat and straightened her spine.

“What did she say?” Augusta demanded as he came out the door.

“Well, she can't have dinner tonight.”

“Tell me why. She has to have dinner tonight—as an artist, she needs her strength, and as a woman taking care of children, she needs it even more.”

“I guess she has other plans,” Sam laughed, wind blowing his hair across his face. Augusta wished he would take those glasses off. They made him look too smart, and she knew Dana Underhill would be a sitting duck if only she could see the heart and soul in Sam's golden-green eyes.

“You are far too good-natured,” Augusta said, shaking her head. “Don't be too understanding, young man.”

“What was I supposed to do, Augusta? Tell her I'm coming no matter what she said?”

“That's what Hugh would have done,” she said, thinking of her husband. “And your brother, Joe.”

At that, Sam fell silent. He sat in the chair beside Augusta, and together they rocked companionably. She could see the tightness in his face, and her heart broke a little in her chest. Sam wasn't like Hugh or Joe. He was just as strong, but he had a much more gentle way. Augusta didn't want to see him lose it; neither did she want to see him miss his chance.

“You like her, don't you?” Augusta asked.

“I do,” he said. When he glanced over, the boyishness was gone from his eyes. His face was weatherbeaten—sun- and windburned, with lines of sadness around his mouth. “You see through me. I came to visit you, but I want to see her too. I've never gotten her out of my mind.”

“Just like Joe,” Augusta said, marveling as she reached across the space between their chairs and held Sam's hand. “The way he never forgot Caroline. Long love must run in your family.”

“I'm thinking it does.”

Augusta watched him, the way he was looking east, toward Hubbard's Point. Although she didn't know the Underhills well, she had seen them around town over the years. Their daughters had gone to school together, and Augusta thought she remembered seeing Dana and Lily at some of the Firefly Beach bonfires. Now her gaze drifted east as well, and she thought of how many of her children—biological or not—had found love on this strand of shore.

“Sam?” she asked, still holding his hand.

“Yes?”

“Go for a walk,” she said softly. She thought of how many times she and Hugh had walked along that beach, how many times they had kissed with the waves licking their feet.

“Where?” he asked, slowly turning his head so she could see the fire in his green eyes.

“You know, dear,” Augusta said, rocking again, looking over the Sound as she thought about Hugh. “You know where.”

“She said she doesn't want to have dinner tonight.”

“I know.” Augusta knew all about Lily Grayson's death last summer, and she could only imagine what her sister—and mother—must be suffering. But Augusta had encountered sudden death herself, and she knew that isolation must sooner or later be broken. “If she needs time and space, you should let her have it. But listen to me, Sam: not too much time, and not too much space.”

“What are you saying?”

“Take that walk. See where it brings you, and see whom you see.”

“You mean walk to Hubbard's Point?”

Augusta nodded. “Whether you actually talk to her tonight is beside the point. Gestures matter, Sam. Leave your footsteps in the sand, and you just might set something into motion.”

“That sounds far too wise to ignore.”

“I'm thrilled you see it that way,” Augusta said, smiling. “Would you make sure you repeat your impression to my daughters? I'd like them to know a Yale professor considers me wise.”

Laughing, Sam kissed her forehead and took the long flight of stone steps down to the beach.

 

T
HE GIRLS WERE QUIET
. They were lying on separate sofas on opposite sides of the living room while a sea breeze blew through the open windows and twilight left silver and rust-red tracks on the Sound's surface. Dana sat in a chair, sketch pad on her lap, looking at the beach.

A few people were having a late swim. The ice cream man was parked in the sandy lot, waiting for the after-dinner strollers. A lobster boat plied the buoy-dotted bay, pulling pots. Dana breathed slowly, remembering her and Lily's lobster business. They had borrowed their father's dory, taken out a fifteen-pot recreational license, and become lobsterwomen for the summer.

The memory made her smile, and then, because it was so happy, made her skin tingle. Everything brought back thoughts of Lily. When she looked at the ice cream truck, she remembered Lily's favorite flavor: toasted almond. When she saw the lobster boat, she could see her sister grinning, holding a lobster in either hand, heard her laughingly call them messengers from the mermaids.

There, at the end of the beach, she saw a figure coming down the path from Little Beach. Dark and shadowy from the distance, she imagined it might be Lily herself. Coming home to see her, to get her, to take her back to the sea. But the person wasn't Lily at all; it was Sam.

Without taking her eyes off him, Dana reached for the binoculars. The eyepieces pressed to her face, she swept the beach. There he was; the glasses wavered as she got him in sight. He came down the steep trail between the scrub oaks and salt pines. His footing sure, he ambled from the path onto the sand.

She saw that he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, looking more casual than he had at the gallery. His arms were tan and strong, and she wondered what an oceanographer could possibly have to lift to give him such muscles. Observing him at this distance, knowing he couldn't see her, her heart sped up.

Sam Trevor was a very handsome man. His hair glinted in the late-day light, as gold as the grass that grew in the marsh. He walked slowly, looking over the water. What was he thinking? she wondered. Had he walked all the way from Firefly Beach?

The idea seemed dangerous and passionate. Although the walk wasn't very long—no more than two or three miles—it was fairly arduous. Dana could picture the rocky promontories he had crossed, the tidal bight—rushing from the swale into the Sound—that he must have jumped.

What was he doing now? Standing still, he turned away from the water to look up the hill. He was staring straight at her house. Ducking slightly in the chair, Dana pushed herself back from the window.

His arms were out, as if he wanted to give her something. Her heart pounding, she tried to imagine what it was. She felt so upset by being there, so broken by Lily's death, she knew she should accept any gift sent her way. Still watching Sam with the glasses, she saw him bend down, pick up a stick.

“What's out there?” Quinn called from across the room.

“Nothing,” Dana said, staring at Sam.

“Mom was always keeping track of things with the binos. Birds, fish . . . what is it, an osprey hunting?”

“Probably,” Dana said, her throat raw. Lily had sat in this chair, pressed these same field glasses to her eyes. Thinking of the birds Lily had watched, the ospreys she had seen diving for their catches, Dana's eyes filled with tears.

With no ospreys around at the moment, she decided to keep watching Sam. He walked back and forth, making footprints on her beach. Then, using the stick, he seemed to be drawing in the sand. The tide was coming in, and the waves washed over the silvery, hard-packed flats. Straining her eyes, Dana saw that Sam wasn't drawing at all. He had written one letter:

D

Dana's chest ached. It hurt from the inside out, as if her heart had bruised itself beating against her ribs. That old, familiar letter glistened in the sunset light, one straight line with another veering out—curving away, as if in departure, then veering back, as if it had decided to come back home.

D.

So many words began with the letter D. Distance. Death. Deauville. Decision. Determined. Destination: France. And then, of course, there was Dana.

“That osprey catch anything yet?” Quinn asked after another minute.

“Not yet,” Dana answered, her voice barely a whisper. Sam had started walking back the way he had come, toward the path to Little Beach and the other beaches beyond. She stared at his broad back, wondered whether, if she ran fast, she could catch up to him. And if she did, what she would say.

Instead, because it was not only easier but the only thing she could think to do, she turned her binoculars on that single letter in the wet and shiny sand, flecks of mica glistening like black stars, and watched it until the waves took it away.

CHAPTER
3

M
ARTHA
U
NDERHILL HAD LOVED HER LIFE FOR A
long time. Born and raised a Connecticut Yankee, she had relatively simple tastes. She drove a Ford. Her favorite meal was clam chowder, baked haddock, and French fries. Although her heart was still in Hubbard's Point, she now lived in Marshlands Condos, eight miles away: This house was too big for her now. She had been married to one man—Jim Underhill, her daughters' father, the love of her life—for thirty-two years, until his death from a stroke.

Jim had been her childhood sweetheart. They had gone all through New Hampton schools together. When he threw her coat up into a tree one snowy January morning in third grade, her grandmother had told her that meant he liked her. He gave her his arrowhead collection and his father's World War I medals. Her mother made her give them back, but already her fate—and their love—were sealed.

Married at twenty-two, they wanted kids right away. They tried and tried, but she couldn't conceive. Her heart hurt once a month when she'd see that rusty red stain, when she'd hear about Jim's sisters getting pregnant, when she'd see her old school friends pushing baby carriages.

Jim went to war. He was a navigator-bombardier in the 8th Air Force, and he was a great hero. Everyone, especially Martha, was so proud of him. He flew missions over Normandy, Cologne, and Dresden. The losses were terrible, and she spent the whole war with her stomach in a knot. Once he was shot down over occupied France, and he'd parachuted into a tree. Hanging there, dangling from the branches, he had held his breath while a battalion of German soldiers stopped beneath him for a rest.

Martha didn't hear the story for months, during which time she had assumed he was dead. Those were the darkest days of her life. Lying in bed, the curtains closed, she would press her chest, trying to keep her heart from breaking out. She had thought she was a widow, and the word itself was terrible, but the worst part was imagining a whole life without Jim, without the babies she had not stopped hoping they would have.

Then, one miraculous day, the phone rang, and the sorrow ended: Jim's voice came over the wire, direct from a hospital in London. “I'm safe, darling. I'm alive, I love you, and I'm coming home.”

Come home he did. They got started right away, back on their plan to have children, and when six months had passed without success, something shifted in Martha. What difference did it make anyway? They had each other. No one had ever loved a man the way she loved Jim, and she felt absolutely cherished as his wife. His roofing business was booming, and without children, Martha spent time beachcombing, collecting shells and driftwood.

Sometimes she made things. It seemed like more than a hobby, but she felt pretentious calling it art. Jim encouraged her, and after a while she began to show her work in local craft fairs. When they inherited Martha's family place at Hubbard's Point, she began selling her beach sculptures through the women's club, at their annual clambake and Fourth of July celebrations. Her friends paid good money for her pieces: driftwood draped with old net decorated with sea glass, periwinkles, razor clams, and dried seaweed. Although her sculptures had a certain sameness, they sold as quickly as she could make them. To her amazement, she became known around the beach as “the artist.”

“My work is my baby,” she used to say when asked if she minded not having children. It never ceased to amaze her how forward some people could be, but that response seemed to do the trick. She had even started believing it herself—most of the time, anyway. Certain sights—a happy family on the boardwalk, for example, or a mother teaching her children to swim—could stop her in her tracks. She'd get a headache, or a feeling of exhaustion would overtake her, and she'd have to go up to the cottage and lie down until the pain passed.

And then it happened: After fifteen years of marriage, when they were thirty-seven years old, Martha and Jim Underhill conceived a child. One early spring day, she experienced morning sickness for the first time. The nausea was overwhelming. She subsisted on saltines and ginger ale, delivered like clockwork by Jim. If anything, he was more traumatized than she. Since the rubber cement she used to glue her work made her even sicker, she stopped making sculptures.

Nine months later, her true purpose in life was revealed: to be Dana's mother. How happy Martha felt, how content and awed and fulfilled. She put sculpting on the back burner. Once in a while she'd start something, but she found she'd rather be with Dana. All she wanted to do was be a mother, love her baby, have another.

She had Lily exactly two years and two months after Dana was born.

Now, rocking on the porch, Martha stared out at Long Island Sound and thought back to that time. Those first few years, she hardly sculpted at all. Sometimes it bothered her, the way she poured all her love and creativity into her family, and she'd begin a new piece.

It was always so hard to finish. The girls would want to play, or Martha would have errands to do, or she and Jim would finally get a little time to themselves. When the girls proved to have artistic talent, Martha nurtured it with all she had. She was a mother of daughters, and when some clod at the post office asked whether she wished one of them was a boy, she'd look him straight in the eye, smile, and say, “Oh, no.”

If only she had had them younger, she thought now, rocking and gazing across the half-moon bay at Little Beach. Perhaps if she weren't so ancient, she wouldn't find everything so impossible to bear. Now the most consistent joy in her life was her shar-pei, Maggie.

Martha Underhill was seventy-eight years old. When she looked in the mirror, she hardly recognized her own face. She had lines and wrinkles, her chin line was no longer sharp, her eyes had lost their sparkle. Those eyes frightened her: They looked shell-shocked, as if she had been through the worst life has to offer.

Which, of course, she had.

Looking back over her life, she could think of five terrible, horrible times. Those weeks when she'd known Jim was missing in action, presumed dead; her mother's death; her father's; the shocking loss of Jim; and oh . . . she could hardly stand to think of it even now.

Losing Lily.

Lily Rose Underhill Grayson. Martha's second baby, her simpler daughter, the light of everyone's life. Lily had made her family smile just to see her. Dana had loved her from the first minute; Martha and Jim had been prepared for sibling rivalry, but it had never materialized. Dana and Lily were water girls, always on the beach together, inspiring each other to swim farther, sail faster. Martha believed it was because of Lily that Dana had turned to painting water—cross-sections of the ocean, because she and her sister were of the sea. They had loved it, and it had taken Lily away.

Rocking softly with Maggie at her side, Martha closed her eyes tight. Clouds scudded across the June sky. Down on the beach Dana and Allie walked the tide line; Quinn was nowhere to be seen. Knuckles to her mouth, Martha tried to keep from crying out. The pain wasn't in her hand, wasn't even in her hip: so deep inside, she couldn't begin to say where it was.

Lily, her easy child, was gone. Her ashes, along with Mark's, rested in an urn on the mantel. Turning her head, Martha looked at it now. The container was brass and square. It was solid, utilitarian, with nothing decorative about it, meant to hold the ashes just long enough to dispose of them. Quinn, however, refused to entertain such a possibility.

The little girls, Martha's granddaughters, seemed so precarious, as if they had parachuted into an enemy tree of their own. If Martha's arthritis weren't so severe, she could continue to live with them. She could hold them together, let them stay in their home.

Dana was determined to take them away. What would she do with two small girls to think about? Martha knew she thought she was acting in their best interest, that moving them away would be less painful in the end. Dana would show them France, she would take them on weekends to Paris and Rome and Dublin. It would be a life beyond their wildest dreams.

At that, staring down the gentle hillside at the small white beach, Martha dropped her hands into her lap. Maggie jumped up to lick her fingers. Didn't Dana know that the best dreams weren't always wildest? That Connecticut could be just as beautiful as Europe, that a shingled cottage could be twice as magical as any stone house? That love didn't have to be wild or dangerous or with a man who didn't love her enough back?

And that children needed their grandmother at least as much as she needed them?

 

“W
HAT
'
S
F
RANCE LIKE?
” Allie asked, collecting shells.

“Like a painting,” Dana said. “Beauty everywhere you look.”

“But it's beautiful here,” Allie said.

“Yes, it is. But don't you want to see somewhere different?”

“I guess so. Not Quinn though.”

“She'll love it once we get there,” Dana said. “You can have the same rooms as when you visited—you liked those, didn't you? You liked being able to see the English Channel, and Quinn couldn't believe the house was almost four hundred years old. I'll fix up a section in the barn so you can have your own studios.”

“Studios?”

“For art,” Dana said. “You're both wonderful painters.”

“Quinn doesn't paint anymore. She says she hates it. She hates everything.”

“Don't worry about her,” Dana said softly. Hearing the strain in Allie's voice, she put her arm around her shoulders. She remembered times she'd been worried about Lily: when she had the measles, for example, and after she got a D in algebra two quarters in a row. “We'll take care of her.”

“I want her to be okay,” Allie said. “But sometimes I don't think she is.”

“Where is she now?”

“Little Beach, probably. That's where she goes.”

Dana nodded. She had gone there, too, when she'd wanted to hide from her family and friends. The beach was quiet just then, hardly any people to be seen. It was only June, and some school systems, unlike Black Hall, were still in session. Some families came down for weekends, others wouldn't return to Hubbard's Point until full summer. The Underhills had winterized their cottage and lived there year-round.

Dana had a pack of childhood friends, most of them with kids of their own. Marnie McCray—now Marnie Campbell—especially. One of the girls across the street, she had two daughters, and she would know what to do. But Marnie and her girls hadn't yet arrived for summer at the Point, so Dana decided to follow her own instinct; telling Allie to go up to the house, Dana went off in search of Quinn.

 

Q
UINN HEARD HER
coming through the path. Huddled behind the big rock, writing in her diary, Quinn heard twigs breaking and leaves rustling, and she knew: It was Aunt Dana.

They had always had a magical bond. Long-lasting, as long as Quinn had been alive, they had been connected in ways they couldn't explain. Quinn loved her mother and father: no mistake about that. But the first face she remembered, the first eyes she'd ever seen peering into hers, were Aunt Dana's.

There was an explanation, of course. The minute her mother went into labor, she'd put out a search party for her sister, painting at Squibnocket Point; Aunt Dana had hopped into the first car and driven down-island to the hospital in time to be Quinn's first official visitor.

As the years went by, Aunt Dana had spoiled her like crazy. She had bought her all sorts of wild presents—French clothes and white boots and toys no other kid had and a pink bike and a tiger kitten. The minute she'd walk into the house, Quinn would vault off the closest surface into her arms, and not be put down for the rest of her aunt's stay.

There had been times—sleepy, content times—looking into her aunt's face, when Quinn had called her Mommy. The mistake would last for just a second; Quinn would know it was from the warm bottle and the soft blanket and the smell of her aunt's paint and the old, familiar look in her clear blue eyes.

Dana had taught her how to sail. Her mother too, of course, but especially Aunt Dana. Quinn had admired her aunt's instinctive ability to find the wind, and she'd wanted it for herself. She had latched on to her mental toughness, her sense of direction, her spirit of competition.

“Quinn!” her aunt called now. “I know you're here.”

Flattening herself against the big rock, Quinn tried to blend into the shadows and sand. Waves splashed her feet. Holding her plastic-wrapped diary under one arm, she furiously dug a deep hole just above the tide line.

“Quinn . . .”

Stepping out from behind the rock, Quinn came face-to-face with Aunt Dana. Just seeing her made Quinn's chest tighten and stomach clench. Quinn looked down at her own feet, counting ten toes over and over. She had a tidal wave in her heart, and if she wasn't careful, it was going to drag her into the sea, all the way past everywhere else to Japan.

“I thought you might be here,” Aunt Dana said steadily.

“Why?”

“Because it's where I used to come.”

“It's where everyone comes,” Quinn said, making her voice cold.

Aunt Dana looked around. She raised her eyebrows, making her eyes wide. One thing about her, she had a deadpan sense of humor and liked to make her nieces laugh, and Quinn knew what she was going to say an instant before she spoke. “I don't see anyone else here,” she said.

“That's because it's only June, and not everyone's at the Point for the summer yet.”

“So we have it all to ourselves.”

“For three more days.”

“We're not leaving forever, Quinn. We'll come back a lot—as often as you want.”

“How about every day? That's how often I want.”