Beach Plum Island (26 page)

“It was! But you didn’t even give me the courtesy of accepting!” Elaine wobbled on her sandals but pulled away from Gabe and stepped out of reach. “You paid for dinner, so now you think you can tell me how to live my life. Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. I don’t owe you a thing.”

“I know you don’t.” Gabe’s voice dropped in pitch and become deliberately soothing, the way Ava’s voice used to dip when she had to calm her boys in the middle of tantrums. “Look, Elaine, I’m certainly not telling you how to live your life. I’ve just seen you get into trouble because you drink too much, so I worry.”

Elaine was infuriated by Gabe’s tone—how dare he condescend to her?—and about what amounted to a blanket judgment on her lifestyle. Sure, she was having a little trouble staying grounded now, maybe, but that was temporary.

“What is it you worry about?” she asked sweetly. “About me being an alcoholic and a sex addict besides?”

Gabe’s mouth twitched. “Come on. Did I say anything about sex? Has there been a single word uttered about sex this entire evening?”

“No, and that’s my point,” Elaine declared. “I thought you liked me. Clearly, I was wrong.”

“You don’t know anything about what I feel because you don’t
ask
,” Gabe said.

“You didn’t give me a chance! You were in trial attorney mode, grilling me all night!” Elaine said. “You think I’m on guard to protect my underbelly? Have you examined your own behavior lately, Judge Blaustein?” She was shouting now. People on the subway platform had turned to stare. Good. Maybe the judge’s photograph would be in tomorrow’s
Boston Globe
. That would teach him to patronize her.

Gabe was still trying to reason with her when the train rattled into the station, the cars too brightly lit, the passengers inside them looking as waxy as mannequins on the molded plastic seats. They stepped into the car together, but just as the doors started to slide shut, Elaine slipped back onto the platform.

She waved at Gabe’s startled face as the train left the station. If she needed a lecture, she’d rather get one from her sister. At least Ava loved her. Most of the time, anyway.

•   •   •

There were a couple of new kids at band practice. The boy looked slightly familiar and the girl was totally crushing on Sam.
Good luck with that,
Gigi thought. Sam didn’t seem to care about anything except his guitar and lacrosse.

She took a break after singing “Highway to Hell,” a song that felt amazing to belt but always made her throat hurt like she’d swallowed toothpicks. She went into the kitchen for a drink of water and a slice of pizza. Gigi had no clue how much boys ate until hanging with Evan and Sam. By now, she’d learned to grab a slice of pizza early, before the boys inhaled the entire box.

Tonight she was surprised to come into the kitchen and see Ava on the patio, talking to Les’s mother, who wore funky green eyeglasses and a sundress but otherwise looked exactly like Les, dumpy and short, with rabbity teeth.

Gigi took a slice of pizza and watched Ava wave good-bye to Les’s mom. Then Ava disappeared, shoving her hands into her pockets as she headed for the studio. Gigi resisted the urge to follow her. She had asked Ava earlier today whether she’d heard from the adoption registry. Ava said they hadn’t found a match; Gigi wasn’t exactly surprised, but she was definitely disappointed.

“So what are we going to do now?” she’d asked Ava as they loaded the kiln together this afternoon.

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing,” Ava had said.

A completely unacceptable answer, in Gigi’s opinion, but still, she’d kept the visit to Cousin Mildred to herself. Even her mother hadn’t figured out she’d gone to Portsmouth. What would be the point of telling them what she knew, that Dad had married Mom because she was pregnant? That she was the real reason Elaine had been stuck taking care of Suzanne, and Evan and Sam’s time with their grandfather had been shortchanged? The boys didn’t seem resentful of this—they always acted like it was no biggie that their grandfather had run off with Katy—but Gigi thought maybe that was because boys just didn’t obsess about relationships the way girls did. What if Evan and Sam knew the truth, though, that their grandparents might have stayed together if it hadn’t been for her? The idea of having them angry with her made Gigi dizzy with fear.

She went over the day in her mind again as she wiggled another pizza slice out of the box on Ava’s kitchen counter. She had done her jobs the way she usually did in the studio. The band had practiced as usual. Nothing was different.

Nothing, that is, except Ava, who kept looking distracted and shut herself in her bedroom at odd times to talk on the phone, something she had never done until a few weeks ago. Who was she talking to, that she had to keep their conversations so private?

Maybe Ava had a secret boyfriend. Gigi hoped he wasn’t secret because he was married or something weird like that.

Ava’s a grown-up,
she reminded herself. Adults did things for weird reasons that had nothing to do with their children. Kids orbited adult fields of gravity, being pulled along through the confusing adult universe without having any control over the direction or speed of the changes in their lives.

This led Gigi to wonder what her own mom did when she was alone, and whether she’d find a boyfriend, too, after a few years. She hoped so. Mom needed more people around, since Gigi definitely planned on moving to New York or Denver or Hollywood, somewhere with a cool music scene. She hated the idea of Mom being lonely and sad without her.

The patio was empty now, the breeze off the ocean sticky and fishy smelling. Must be low tide. Gigi was drawn outside by the soothing sound of the surf to sit on one of the Adirondack chairs, hoping the air would clear her muddled thoughts. Her ears were ringing from the music. Maybe she should wear earplugs when she sang, like everybody said. But then it was so hard to really
feel
the music.

The beach was empty, the light compressed to a silver arrow along the horizon, the last flinty bit of heat in the sky before night swallowed the ocean. Gigi thought she’d never loved anywhere as much as she loved Beach Plum Island. She wished Dad could be here right now, to see this sky.

Dad used to always wake her up in the middle of the night if there was a comet or a meteor shower, or sometimes just because it was a clear night. They’d lie on the ground even in winter to watch the sparks shooting across the sky. Her dad’s deep voice rumbled as he pointed out the constellations, Venus glowing like a diamond chip, Mars a foggy red, shooting stars, the Milky Way. The two of them would lie shoulder to shoulder under the big afghan from the living room couch, like they were trapped beneath a sparkling glass bowl.

“We’re swimming in the night soup,” Dad always said.

Gigi’s eyes welled.
Shit.
She couldn’t stop missing him, because she didn’t know how to fill all the holes in her life he had left behind.

Someone cleared his throat behind her. Gigi whipped her head around.

It was that boy who’d come in halfway through the first set with Sarah, the girl being so obvious about wanting to hook up with Sam. He and Sarah must be brother and sister; they had the same angular faces, beaky noses and sharp chins, like their faces had been chiseled out of rock.

Sarah wore her light brown hair wound in a complicated braid halfway down her back. This kid’s hair was darker, but almost as long as his sister’s and twisted into dreadlocks. He’d tamed it with a red bandanna and wore a blue earring shaped like a crescent moon in one ear.

“Wow. Sick spot.” The boy was holding a slice of pizza in one hand, a glass of lemonade in the other. “You surf out there?” He gestured with his chin.

“I can barely swim out there,” she admitted.

“Yeah, I hear you. The island’s got a gnarly undertow. I usually take my board to Salisbury.”

The boy perched on the back step of Ava’s house. Instead of looking at each other, they both stared out at the surf. They could hear the water but couldn’t see it, other than an occasional white flutter, as if someone were running and pulling a long white ribbon across the sand.

“I’m Neal, by the way,” the boy said. “Sarah’s brother. My mom made me drive her over here so she could hear your band.”

“That was nice of you.”

Neal turned his head toward Gigi. “I didn’t want to do it. I’m not that nice, usually, at least not to my sister, but I’m glad I did. You were really rockin’ up there. Smoking-hot voice. I’m seriously not kidding.”

She laughed. “Why would I think you were?”

“Hey. Guys say whatever they think other people want to hear sometimes, right? Especially girls. But I’m not into that.” Neal ate the pizza slice in three bites, never taking his eyes off her face. Then he said, “I know you. Just not your name.”

“You do? I’m Gigi. My sister is Sam’s mom, Ava.” Gigi wiped her hands on the napkin and balled it up, tossed it into Ava’s fire pit. Saying Ava was her sister sounded a lot less weird than saying Sam and Evan were her nephews. Let people work that out for themselves.

“Yeah, I know you from the barn. You’re that girl who’s really good with horses.”

“No, I’m not,” Gigi said, startled. “You’re probably mixing me up with somebody else. I’m the girl who quit summer camp and can hardly even ride after five years of torturing myself with lessons.” She steeled herself, waiting for Neal to say something about Lydia or Justin, but he didn’t.

“No, you’re definitely the one,” Neal said. “I’ve seen the horses talk to you.”

Gigi got up off the chair and joined him on the step to see Neal’s face better in the fading light. She had always thought the horses talked to her, too, but she never would have admitted it. “When?” she asked, narrowing her eyes so Neal would know he couldn’t prank her.

“Dude, I work at the barn. You and your friends just don’t notice me.”

Her
friends
? Ha! She didn’t have any friends at the barn. In fact, Gigi had only had one real friend before Evan and Sam: Kirsten, and she was camping with her family in New Hampshire practically all summer.

Suddenly, studying the boy’s face, she did remember Neal. He looked different with that bandanna over his head; usually he pulled his dreads into a ponytail at the stables and wore a weird brimmed hat with a feather. “You’re the guy who mucks out the stalls and tacks up horses for lessons, right?”

Neal smiled, his teeth as white and square as Chiclets. “One of them, yeah. Sometimes I exercise horses for people who are away, too. My parents don’t belong to the club, but Jessica gives me enough hours to pay for lessons.”

“You mean Jessica the Robot?” The words were out before Gigi could stop herself.

Neal tipped his head back and laughed. “Yeah, that’s her. She’s my cousin. That’s why she hired me. She’s pretty nice, actually. She only acts like such a be-atch because the girls at the club are so friggin’ full of themselves, you know?” He spread his hands. “The moms are even worse.”

Gigi supposed he was right. The women at the club were a tough crowd. Still, after being around Ava, Gigi wasn’t so sure you had to be nasty to put people in their places. She’d seen Ava turn Sam’s rowdiest lacrosse friends to stone with one sideways look.

“So do you compete?” she asked.

Neal rolled his eyes. “As if. I can barely stay in the saddle. I mainly like to ride the trails. Hey, we should go together sometime. I could borrow a horse. Lots of peeps are away this month and want some flunky to exercise their beasts.”

“Sure, I guess,” Gigi said, thinking how odd it was to have a boy look at her like this, like she was actually worth paying attention to.

“Cool.” Neal’s smile, nice enough before, widened now. “Ready to get back in there?” He stood up and offered his hand to her with his palm open, as if he were going to catch raindrops or snowflakes in it.

Gigi hesitated, then put her hand in his and let Neal pull her to her feet.

D
espite Gigi’s help, she’d still fallen behind on her gallery deadlines. Ava worked through the night and into the early morning, trimming, glazing, and finally loading the kiln.

It was often daunting to look at the bisqued pots on her shelves, knowing she still had to mix the glazes and dip the pots into them or pour on the glaze. Glazing was exhausting because it required her to be on her feet so much, and the studio floor was cement. For once, though, she was grateful for the hours of labor, for the way it cleansed her mind.

Each kiln load held nearly five thousand dollars’ worth of pots, she’d calculated once. Ava imagined it was even more now that her work had been reviewed in several magazines and commanded higher prices. In any case, it typically took her half a week to glaze a full kiln load, but this time she managed to finish it in a single long day. Afterward, she turned on the kiln and made up the futon in the studio.

It was hot with the kiln going. She slept in her underwear, wrapped only in a sheet, and set the alarm to wake her every two hours to check the pyrometer and temperature cones. She stayed in the studio until the firing was complete, then shut off the kiln and went outside.

She had lost all track of time. It was just after sunrise, but what day?

Ava wandered a little way down the beach, where the air was raw and damp and fishy. Fog lay over the shoreline. She imagined it as a gray shawl tossed over Beach Plum Island as she walked a little more, wondering where Elaine had spent the night, then returned to the house.

She had intended to clean today, but the house defeated her before she began. Dust bunnies had morphed into dust buffaloes roaming the floor. Dishes cluttered every horizontal surface, and the floors were gritty with sand. She had always hated this never-ending stream of chores, even knowing it helped define her as a mother, and had helped justify her existence through the years whenever she felt doubts about her art, her teaching, herself.

Furiously, Ava made coffee and poured cereal into a chipped blue bowl she should have thrown away, slamming cupboard doors. She wanted to wake Sam and Evan to yell at them to clean up after themselves. At the same time, she wanted the kitchen to herself.

The boys slept through the noise like coma victims. She never would have predicted this, given that both boys were cranky infants and toddlers who thought five a.m. was a fine time to wake up, but then teen hormones kicked in and drugged them. Left to their own devices, her sons would stay up until four a.m. and sleep until noon. It was like living with vampires.

Ava sighed. She really couldn’t keep letting them trash the house with their friends. Elaine was right: she had enabled her sons by being too kind, too forgiving, instead of instilling the sort of army barracks discipline that would make them grow up tough and independent.

What was the phrase Elaine used? The boys suffered from “learned helplessness.” That was it.

“Think of their poor wives,” Elaine always said. “You’ve got to train Evan and Sam right, Ava, or they’ll be divorced before they’re thirty because nobody will want to live with them.”

Hearing Elaine criticize her—even in her own mind—made Ava even angrier. As if Elaine knew one thing about motherhood!

And where was her sister, anyway? Ava wondered, searching for her car keys under the piles of newspapers and magazines drifting across the kitchen table. She hadn’t heard a thing from her in days. She hoped Elaine wasn’t drinking or off screwing some stranger who’d slit her throat in the middle of the night.

Self-absorbed and spoiled, that’s what her sister was, no better than Evan and Sam. Elaine had no idea how her behavior impacted other people, or what it was like to put somebody else first.

Except Mom,
a tiny voice trumpeted inside Ava’s left temple, giving her a sharp headache.
Elaine took care of Mom, not you.

Finally, car keys located, Ava headed for the grocery store, intent on leaving the mess in the kitchen behind along with her worries about her children and her sister. Once on the road, all she wanted to do was keep driving south—to Boston, to Simon, to a life other than the one she was living right now, where memories of her parents kept rising up with the power to literally knock her legs out from under her.

Yesterday she’d seen an older man, tall and broad and silver-haired like her father, wearing the same khaki shorts Dad wore on weekends, and she’d felt her knees turn to jelly. And everyone, it seemed, had adopted her mother’s lavender-scented hand cream. “You can always tell a woman’s age by her hands,” Mom used to say.

Why hadn’t she spent more time with either of them?

Ava stared at her own strong, callused hands on the steering wheel. Anyone who noticed her hands would think she was a hundred years old. She
felt
a hundred years old. She couldn’t cope with this grief, much less with the energy it was taking to locate her brother, this chronic anxiety about what might happen if they found him, or the deep sadness and irrational fury she felt toward Elaine for shutting her out.

Maybe it was time for her to just corner her sister in Boston, to insist that Elaine have dinner with her.

Ava had pulled into the parking lot of the grocery store when her cell phone rang. She unrolled the window—there was still a cool breeze, despite the heat promised for later today—and picked up the phone, answering only because she saw it was Mark.

There was a time, soon after the divorce, when she and Mark had talked on the phone almost daily, making arrangements for the boys and catching up on each other’s lives. But he called so rarely now, preferring instead to communicate directly with the boys by texting them, that Ava knew he must have something important to tell her.

“Hey,” he said. “Hope I’m not interrupting a masterpiece in progress.”

Ava bit her lip to keep her temper in check. To Mark, a busy civil engineer whose paychecks had been doled out by the same big corporation for nearly twenty years, her decision to go back to school after the kids were born to earn her teaching degree had been a rational one. Yet he still couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea that, besides being a teacher, she was a potter with her own studio and gallery shows. Mark was apt to start a conversation by saying, “So, are you still playing with clay?” as if pottery were a passing phase in her life instead of a lifelong passion.

On the other hand, one reason their divorce had been amicable was that both of them managed to sidestep small irritations and focus on the boys. She took a minute to remind herself that Mark was a good person and a loving father. She didn’t have to try, anymore, to convince him that artwork
is
work.

“Nope, no masterpieces,” she said. “Not unless you call my grocery list a novel, which it nearly is these days. The boys are eating anything not nailed down.”

Mark chuckled, but his laughter sounded forced. “Listen, I won’t keep you. I was just calling to arrange to talk to you in person about something.”

Ava’s mouth went dry. Mark never asked to see her. “What about?”

“I’d rather discuss it face-to-face.”

“All right.” Ava’s mind raced, sorting through possibilities, none of them good: Mark had cancer; he’d lost his job; his mother was dying; one of the boys was in trouble but hadn’t told her yet. “Can you give me a hint, at least? How worried should I be?”

There was a brief silence; then Mark sighed. “God. I’m sorry. I should have known better than to do this by phone. No, it’s nothing terrible, Ava. I’ll just come out with it, and then if you want, we can discuss it later. Or not.”

By now, Ava was shivering with nerves in the hot car. “Okay. Tell me.”

“I’m thinking of asking Sasha to move in with me.”

Ava nearly laughed; she was so relieved that Mark’s news didn’t include any of the catastrophes she’d imagined. Almost immediately, though, she felt the wind go out of her, as if someone had suddenly tightened the seat belt. She unbuckled it with fumbling fingers.

If Mark was telling her this now, he had probably already asked Sasha to marry him; he was never the sort of man to take relationships lightly. “Have you asked her yet?” Ava purposefully left the question vague.

“Not exactly.”

She could tell by the strain in his voice that Mark was lying. He had asked and Sasha had said yes. He just hadn’t wanted to spring it on her. Fair enough. Ava didn’t like the idea that he might be lying; at the same time, she reminded herself that Mark didn’t owe it to her to share his personal life and he was a good man who deserved to be with a woman who loved him more than she had.

So why did she feel this knot in her stomach?

“Ava?” Mark’s voice was gentle. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “It’s a surprise, but I’m glad for you. I really am. Sasha is a wonderful person. I hope you’ll be happy together.”

She could hear his sigh—relief? Then Mark said, “Listen, I haven’t told the boys. Do you think we should tell them together?”

This request, too, was being made out of respect to her, Ava knew, and perhaps with Sasha—ever the lawyer—coaxing him to tread lightly. Sasha had seen the worst of the worst among broken families in divorce court.

“No,” Ava said. “The boys will be fine. Tell them whenever you’re ready. I’ll let you know if there’s any fallout at home.”

“Okay. Thanks. I’ll probably tell them next weekend. We’ll talk before then.”

They hung up. Ava wanted to turn on the engine and drive—drive anywhere from here, maybe straight to Simon’s office or his sailboat. She longed to do something unexpected, unlike her usual practical self, in response to Mark’s call. Having him live with Sasha would inevitably alter how easy things had always been between them. This was definitely shaky new territory.

In the grocery store, she squinted beneath the unforgiving buzz of fluorescent lights at the plastic-wrapped vegetables and artfully bewildering array of cans and boxes. She was in such a daze that she nearly collided with another shopper, a woman with two runny-nosed kids trapped and wailing in the metal cage of a shopping cart.

It was like running into a mirror of herself as a single mother long ago: Resentment clung to that young woman like a favorite threadbare sweater. Ava imagined her flipping the pages of her calendar at home in despair, thinking,
Maybe I’ll try that other recipe for chicken breasts,
already knowing she wouldn’t have the energy to be creative once she actually got the kids dressed, went to the store, came home to unload the groceries, fed the children, put them down for naps, and muscled the next load of laundry into the wash before starting dinner. In the end, they would all have cereal, maybe a banana.

So exhausting, the whole business of motherhood. It
was
a business, too, complete with compromises and disappointing returns for your investments, with budgets and schedules and task lists and surly underlings. As a single mother, Ava had resorted to locking the boys in their bedroom at night, fearing for their lives as much as for her own sanity. Otherwise Sam—the ringleader—would get up and start his little experiments, pulling out the kitchen drawers to use as steps to reach the high cupboards and pretending to cook, encouraging Evan to help.

Once, Sam had even turned on the stove, lighting the pilot with a match before climbing onto the stove to reach the flour in the cupboard above it. He’d burned his hand and was in a cast for weeks, often bloodying his own nose with the cast in sleep, which meant washing the sheets over and over again until Ava finally gave up and made him go to bed in an old sleeping bag. Afterward she’d just thrown the sleeping bag away. Sometimes Ava marveled that she’d managed to keep her kids from killing themselves.

“Alive at twenty-five.” That was Olivia’s motto with kids. “All you gotta do is keep ’em alive ’til then. At twenty-five, they finally get their brains handed to them on their birthdays and you can relax a little.”

Ava had been horrified when Olivia said this to her the first time, but now she repeated this mantra often.

Mark’s phone call had made her realize again that now it was nearly over, everything she had once considered her life: her marriage, motherhood, the rhythm she’d established in her life between work and pottery and family. Her life as a daughter had ended, too, with her father’s death, and Elaine was slipping farther and farther away.

Soon the boys would be adults, out of the house and living their own adventures. Would they even come home on holidays, once they were entrenched in college, off to jobs, families of their own? Was a home with a single mother in a shabby beach cottage enough of a home to make the trip worth it? Maybe Evan and Sam would prefer being with Mark and Sasha, in a nice house with two parents ready to greet them.

That’s it. Stop the pity party. Blow out the candles and leave yourself alone!
Ava wanted to rap her own knuckles the way her piano teacher, an ancient barrel of a woman smelling of eucalyptus cough drops, used to do.

By the time she finished food shopping—she hardly bought anything but the usual staples, the things like bread and milk they seemed to need every hour with boys this size, yet spent over a hundred dollars—the pavement of the grocery store parking lot had already softened in the heat, even though it was only eight o’clock in the morning. Ava had left her phone in the car where she’d tossed it onto the passenger seat after that distressing call from Mark. She glanced at the screen and saw a new text message from Olivia, asking if she wanted to play tennis. Ava decided she did, even though it meant driving back across the bridge to the island to drop off her groceries, then collecting Olivia and returning to Newburyport to see if they could snag one of the shady courts at Atkinson Common.

Olivia had turned fifty last year. Today she wore spandex shorts and a T-shirt, but her usual outfit, even in summer, consisted of jeans, cowboy boots in various colors, and formfitting T-shirts. With her sleek curtain of waist-length dark hair streaked shamelessly gray, she looked like a woman who’d reached the right age at last and was enjoying every minute of it. She was tall and angular, graceful whether she was running after tennis balls or commanding a gallery show in her cowboy boots.