Beach Plum Island (11 page)

They left their shoes on the patio. As they walked toward the refuge beach, Ava told him about the island’s history, explaining that the first settlers in the area were English, arriving by ship in 1635. The settlers had learned from Native Americans how to make preserves out of the small, sour beach plums that grew on the short gnarled trees populating the dunes. The sand was purple because of the crushed garnet stones, Ava added, and no bridge had connected Beach Plum Island to mainland Massachusetts until the 1880s.

“Before that, Beach Plum Island was a refuge for the ill, the brave, and the unlucky,” she said. “Smallpox and polio victims were sent here. Revolutionary War soldiers and shipwreck survivors landed here, too.”

“And you? Why are you here?”

She shrugged. “It was a cheap place to buy a house back when I got divorced.”

“And now you’re a saltwater woman, living on the beach.”

Ava smiled, embarrassed but pleased by the phrase “saltwater woman” and what it conjured for her: a woman who lived her life in rhythm with the sea, the shifting dunes, the whispering sea grasses.

Simon stopped to pick up a sand dollar. To her surprise, he tucked it into his pocket. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.” Ava looked up into Simon’s blue eyes, then had to lower her gaze. She was so attracted to him that it was easy to imagine that he could hear her heart pound above the surf.
This is Katy’s brother,
she reminded herself.
Off-limits.
“What is it?”

“I need to know why you’re being so nice to my family.”

“What?” She was startled enough to look up at him again.

Simon’s expression was guarded now, his eyes narrowed and wary. “Why are you being so nice?” he repeated. “Katy obviously broke up your parents’ marriage. That must have been hell on you. We weren’t happy about it in our family, either. My mother was certain your father was after Katy’s money, and we all hated to see her marry a man she’d probably end up nursing on his deathbed, which is exactly what happened. But we love Katy, so we accepted her choice, unlike you and Elaine.”

His words felt like sand thrown at her skin, unexpected and stinging. Ava dug her fists into the pockets of her shorts. “Don’t you dare lump me in with Elaine! Sure, I was upset by the divorce and its effect on our family, but I got over it. I’ve always treated Katy with respect, and if she says anything different, she’s lying.”

“She hasn’t said an unkind word to me about you. Or about Elaine. Ever.” Simon lifted his hands, palms up, shrugging his powerful shoulders. “But how could you be over it? If I were you, I’d be livid!” His voice was getting louder. “Your parents were struggling through your mother’s depression, as I understand things, and then Katy, this blond riding instructor—still a girl, really, barely out of college—busts your family apart like a grenade! How can you
not
hate Katy? Or at least resent her? And Gigi, too?”

Ava was so taken aback by his outburst that tears pricked her eyes. “Because I’m not like that! And this all happened years ago! Why do you sound like you’re accusing me of something? What have I done?”

“I’m sorry.” Simon ran a hand through his hair. “I didn’t mean to get excited. It isn’t what you’ve done, Ava. It’s what you
might
do. I can’t stand to see my sister in any more pain than she’s already in. Frankly, I doubt she’d survive it. If you turned on her, or hurt Gigi in any way, that would be the end of Katy, and I love Katy and Gigi more than I love myself. I need to protect my family from whatever it is that you and Elaine might want from us.”

“I don’t want anything!” Ava shouted. “Everything I could have wanted is already gone! Can’t you see that? My parents got divorced and we lost our house. Now my mom and dad are both
dead
!” Tears were streaming down Ava’s face. She turned around and started running home, not caring if Simon followed or not.

He did, of course, and grabbed her arm. She struggled to break free, but his grip was too strong. “Look at me!” he commanded.

She wanted to slap him, to wrestle Simon into the sand and kick him in the head. But Ava didn’t have any choice. Simon wouldn’t let go.

She glared up at him, not caring that her face was stinging with tears. “Are you happy now? Was this your goal, to make me miserable, too? Just like Elaine, Katy, and Gigi? Is that what you wanted?”

“Oh, shit,” Simon said. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

She snorted. “Well, thank God. I’d hate to see what you’d do if you
meant
to make me cry.”

Simon made a noise low in his throat and pulled her close. Ava rested her head against his chest, smelling his scent mixed with the sea and realizing that, once again, she was going to dampen Simon’s shirt. “Oh, shit, is right,” she said. “What a mess.”

He stroked her hair. “I just had to find out if you’re for real,” he murmured. Then he tipped her chin up and looked into her eyes, frowning a little, as if he was desperately memorizing her face.

Ava tried to pull away again, but Simon still wouldn’t let go. Instead, he leaned down and brushed his lips across hers. She tasted mint and the sea and something else, too, something so foreign on his lips that it took her breath away: desire.

Or maybe that was the taste on her own lips as she kissed him back, hard, holding on to Simon as if, at any moment, a rogue wave might carry them both out to sea.

E
laine groaned and rolled over. Or tried to, anyway, but something heavy was holding her in place.

For a minute she panicked, remembering how Ava had pinned her against the car last night and the terror of not being able to breathe. She started choking and opened her eyes.

She wasn’t with Ava. She was in her own bed, her favorite pink sheets and beige comforter tucked high up under her chin. How had she gotten here? She didn’t even remember driving home.

Elaine blinked and tried to sit up, discovered she could not. Somebody was pounding spikes into her temples. Gingerly, she lifted the covers and let out a gasp, blinking hard to clear her clouded vision. She had on the same clothes she’d been wearing last night, and the thing strapping her down was a man’s hairy arm.

Jesus Christ! What was a man doing in
her
bed? She never, ever brought men home! That was her cardinal rule!

Well, she’d just have to get rid of him fast. Then she’d start her Saturday the way she always did, with her favorite seven a.m. Zumba class and a smoothie from the yogurt place on the corner. She needed to sweat.

There was just one problem: by craning her neck and squinting at her bedside clock, she could see that it was already well past ten o’clock.

Elaine shook her head hard, as if she could somehow shake off her headache like a hat, but no. That just made her vision go blurry again.

She dropped her head back onto the pillow and closed her eyes, too afraid to turn around and see who belonged to that hairy arm.

•   •   •

Gigi wasn’t supposed to go to Ava’s on Saturday. Ava only expected her to work five days a week, four hours a day, for which she paid her the minimum hourly wage. Gigi would have gladly worked a million hours a week for free. That’s how much she loved pottery.

Today, though, she was going to Ava’s not to work or practice with the band—something else she couldn’t believe was happening, it was so freaking cool—but because Evan had finally invited her to see his drawings.

“Sam won’t be here and Mom always makes French toast for lunch on Saturdays,” Evan had added, as if Gigi needed any other reason to ride her bike to Beach Plum Island on a day as supremely fabulous as this one, with streamers of white cloud waving across a sky the color of pansies.

Evan liked to draw as much as she did. One day he wanted to create graphics for computer games. Gigi had shown Evan her sketchbook, but so far he’d refused to share anything of his.

“You’ll think they’re stupid,” he said. “Sam does.”

“Sam isn’t me,” Gigi had pointed out. “And Sam doesn’t do art.”

This was true. Sam did a lot of things well. He could run fast and hit balls with sticks, make cool videos, and figure out how to play songs on his guitar after listening to them on the radio. But Sam didn’t do art. And, in Gigi’s opinion, that made Sam nice, but less interesting than Evan.

“You think Sam is less interesting than me?” Evan clearly didn’t believe her.

“Would your own auntie lie to you?” she’d teased, elbowing him in the side.

They planned to look at Evan’s drawings together, before his dad picked him up for the rest of the weekend. Sam would still be at Les’s house, where he’d spent Friday night after practice because he and Les were coming up with a set list for their first show. Gigi had already picked out the perfect performing outfit—a striped blue and white tunic over black leggings, with her rainbow belt—and planned to dye her hair black.

Sam and Evan had talked her into taking out her lip ring, saying they could understand her better when she sang without it. That meant she might be able to wear lipstick for the gig, too, if she could borrow some of Mom’s. Mom had like three hundred tubes of the stuff, so she probably wouldn’t mind.

It was already hot by the time Gigi left her house to ride to Ava’s, but at least there wasn’t much beach traffic in the middle of the day; it was so hot everyone was probably already there. She didn’t mind biking the five miles from Newburyport to Beach Plum Island. She especially loved passing the little airport, where the small planes taking off and landing there looked like toys. She liked cruising through the marshes, too, where the tips of the whispering tall grasses were as puffy as lions’ tails and great blue herons stood at the edge of the marsh, feathers glinting silver in the bright light.

The only part Gigi hated was riding over the bridge. If there were cars, it was hard to stay far enough over and not get mowed down. But she was good about wearing her helmet, not a goofball like some idiot kids. She’d like to keep her brains intact, thank you, especially now that life was way less boring.

Ava was in the kitchen when she arrived, loading the dishwasher. She glanced over her shoulder and smiled. “Go out to the patio where it’s cool,” she said. “I’ve already eaten, but Evan’s out there. Want some French toast?”

“Sure.”

It was weird that Ava’s house didn’t have air-conditioning. Gigi had never been in a building without it. Ava had these giant ceiling fans and every one of them made a different noise. The living room fan looked like palm leaves and creaked. The white kitchen fan fluttered like bird wings. You could tell where you were in Ava’s house even with your eyes closed. Gigi liked the fans and breezes in Ava’s house better than the air-conditioning in her own. She ended up wearing a hoodie inside her own house, it was so cold, but she couldn’t open a window or her mom yelled at her for wasting electricity.

Evan was sitting cross-legged in one of the Adirondack chairs and drawing. Ava’s chairs were wooden and painted a soft green, with stars and moons cut out of the backs of them. Gigi loved them; sometimes she sat out here drawing whenever she was finished with her work in the studio and waiting for Sam and Evan.

Sam wore his hair buzzed short like a jock’s, but Evan’s was longer and straighter than Gigi’s. His bangs slipped over one eye as he looked up and smiled. “I brought it downstairs,” he said, tapping the cover of a black sketchbook.

Gigi held out her hand. “I’m ready.”

They spent an hour examining his drawings. At some point Ava brought her a plate of food and a glass of orange juice; Gigi handled the book carefully, wiping her hands every time she took a bite of Ava’s amazing French toast before touching a new page.

Evan’s book was good enough to be in a museum. He drew cartoons, but not like the ones you saw in comic books. These were detailed pen-and-ink sketches of fantastic creatures and scenery from whole worlds Evan imagined in his head, done in different inks and with such careful details that the signs on the storefronts had letters on them. You could even see things reflected in the eyes of the giant sandworms and ogres.

Evan’s dad showed up after a while. This was the first time Gigi had met him. Mark was pretty cool, a skinny guy with a long face and bony fingers like Evan, but thick eyebrows and a bouncy walk like Sam. He was bald and smiled a lot.

Gigi couldn’t imagine Ava being married. She was so self-sufficient. Not at all like her mom, curled in a ball of grief after Dad died and only now starting to get out of bed on any regular basis. Still, she had been prepared to hate Mark for divorcing Ava, but she didn’t. She found herself smiling back when Mark grinned at her and said, “So you’re Ava’s sister. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

She was relieved when Mark shook her hand and went right on talking to Ava in the kitchen, leaving her alone to nerd out with Evan and finish looking at the drawings. But her relief turned to something dark and shiny and sharp when Mark told Evan it was time to leave.

Evan shut his book of drawings, shrugged, and said, “My dad’s taking us to the Cape to meet his new girlfriend or something. Ugh. Guess that means I won’t see you until Monday.”

Gigi lifted a hand and gave a lame little wave. “Yeah, see you.”

Ava startled her a minute later, coming out to the patio and wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Want to take a swim? It’s already broiling out,” she said. “I’m going to dunk my head before it’s too hot to walk on the sand.”

“I don’t have a suit,” Gigi said.

“I can give you a T-shirt and shorts. Come on. Just a quick dip. Then I’ll drive you home so you don’t die of heatstroke on your bike.”

“Okay.”

They walked past the last house before the refuge, then waded into the water. Gigi had never been swimming on Beach Plum Island despite living nearby all her life. There was a steep drop-off, so they weren’t more than a few feet out before Gigi was in over her head. The waves were big and green and humped like a serpent’s back roiling along the shore; the water was so cold, Gigi had to work hard to breathe and her legs and arms went immediately numb.

There was a powerful undertow, too, which was why Mom never let her swim here, only at Crane Beach in Ipswich, where you had to wade out like a mile before you were in water over your head. At Crane’s, the waves were more like ripples in cloth than real surf like here.

Gigi got sucked under at one point and came up coughing and choking, panicked because she couldn’t stand up and certain she was being swept out to sea. Then Ava was touching her shoulder and paddling next to her.

“Just float,” Ava said. “Don’t fight the undertow. Stay on top of the waves.”

Ava held Gigi with her eyes, her eyes as green as the water around them, as if Ava had become part of the ocean, like those selkies who were half-woman, half-seal. She held Gigi up with her eyes and voice until they were both floating on top of the water, rocking like they were lying in a giant cradle, and Gigi wasn’t scared anymore.

“Did Dad ever come swimming here with you and Evan and Sam?” Gigi asked as they floated together just beyond where the waves broke, the sea swelling beneath them like one of Evan’s dragons rippling its back.

“A few times.”

“He must have loved it. Dad hated the pool at the club. He always talked about some lake in Maine where he used to swim as a kid.”

“Moosehead Lake,” Ava said.

“Right. Did he ever take you there?” It wasn’t the real question Gigi longed to ask, but she was determined to lead up to it; out here, with the two of them alone in the ocean, it finally seemed safe to ask.

“No,” Ava was saying. “Dad always talked about taking a vacation on Moosehead, but Mom never wanted to go there. Too close to the town where they grew up, I guess. Though that’s where she ended up living at the end.”

Gigi noticed Ava’s mouth tightening and felt terrible. She’d forgotten Ava’s mom had died in Maine. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s fine. It was a long time ago,” Ava said

Gigi knew she didn’t mean it. She could tell by Ava’s expression, by the way her green eyes looked like someone had drained the light out of them, that her grief for her mother was with her every day. Gigi understood; she felt that way about Dad. She supposed you never stopped missing the only people who’d known you all your life.

Her face was so numb with cold that her skin burned hot and she imagined her lips had turned purple. It was hard to speak because her teeth had started to chatter, but she made herself keep talking. It might be a long time before she and Ava were alone again. “So did Dad ever tell you about our brother?”

Ava lifted her head out of the water to stare at her. “What did you say?”

Gigi bit her lip. “It’s kind of crazy.”

“Try me.”

Now Gigi felt nervous. Maybe telling Ava this would ruin everything. What if Peter was dead or something shitty like that? The last thing she wanted to do was hurt Ava.

On the other hand, Dad had wanted Gigi to find Peter, and Ava was the only one who might help.

Gigi rolled onto her back, took a deep breath, and said, “Just before he died, Dad told me I had a brother. A brother older than you. His name was Peter.” She pressed two fingers to her salt-burned lips, then added, “Dad wanted me to find him and give Peter a message.”

“Peter,” Ava said softly, as if the name were a prayer. “What kind of message?” Her green eyes were so wide that Gigi could see herself reflected in them, like the eyes of the mythical creatures in Evan’s drawings.

Gigi frowned, trying to remember the exact words. “Dad wanted Peter to know he loved him and it wasn’t his choice to do whatever he and your mom did, even though something was wrong with him.”

“Something was wrong with who? Dad or Peter?”

“Peter. From the beginning, Dad said.”

By this time they had floated close to shore. “Come on,” Ava said. “I can’t concentrate out here. I’m too cold. And I need to hear this again.”

Back at Ava’s, they used the outdoor shower to rinse off before changing into their clothes, Ava upstairs and Gigi in the downstairs bathroom. The bathroom was so small that Gigi had to practically keep her arms pinned to her sides when she turned around, but she loved the tiny hand-painted sink Ava had made for the corner. She ran her fingers through her hair, her skin still stinging with salt.

After Ava had joined her outside, carrying her wet towel to hang on the line, Gigi said, “You know, even if I don’t really have a brother, I’m glad you’re my sister.”

Ava’s smile was quick and very white against her sunbrowned skin. “I’m so glad you’re my sister, too.” She sank into the other Adirondack chair, her long wet hair spread like seaweed across her tanned shoulders. “Now tell me again,” she said. “Everything Dad said.”

Gigi did. “You don’t think he was imagining things?” she asked afterward. “Did Dad tell you about Peter, too?”

Her sister’s face was a mask of concentration, her mouth a thin line, her eyes narrowed and serious. “Yes, but he never gave me any details. I thought he must have been out of his mind on drugs to say something that weird. Now I don’t know.”

“Me, either,” Gigi said, mainly because she wanted to agree with Ava, even though she didn’t really think her dad was lying or confused.

Ava shook her head so hard that droplets of water from her hair stung Gigi’s face. “I can’t believe my mother wouldn’t have said something to me about having another baby. Maybe Dad had a baby with another woman. Or maybe he was confused and talking about
his
brother, who died ages ago. People’s memories aren’t too reliable when they’re on certain drugs.”