Blue Jeans and Coffee Beans (11 page)

He looks at her beside him. “I’ll be all right.”

Maris finds it hard to believe, because he looks like every single ounce of his body, every muscle, every bone, is spent. It looks like he’d gotten sick on the beach afterward. Not from drinking, but from the night.

“Do you need anything?” she asks. She can’t remember ever being so worried about someone.

“No.”

“Can I help somehow?”

“No thanks, Maris.” He sits up straighter, taking a long breath. “Really. I’m fine.”

“Well.” A moment passes. “I’ll just sit with you here, then.” She reaches over and pulls the cigarette from his fingers, taking a drag herself like they did when they were teenagers short on smokes, then returns it. His hand trembles as he takes it back.

“What a night,” he says.

“No kidding. How about that swan?”

“Jesus.” He glances behind them at the boat marina. “Out of nowhere.”

.

Chapter Nine

J
ason places a sheet of tracing paper over the sketch on the drawing board. Two new clients need preliminary designs soon. Eight by ten photographs depicting the cottages in their current form are tacked in front of the table. It would be easy to scan them into his computer and engage his software to rework the designs, but instead he uses a roll of tracing paper to overlay sketch, adding detail and bringing the cottages further back in time with each new layer of paper. Neil had accumulated scrapbooks of old cottage photographs, and one lays open beside his drawing board as Jason replicates the white-painted columns supporting a porch overhang.

Time passes quickly when he works like this. He’d stayed up long into the night, cleaning and drying sand and salt water from every component and crevice of his limb. And still, he’d been up with the sun. Now, after three hours, he sets down his pencil and walks to the window, letting himself feel what sketching and planning have supplanted since early dawn. It will take more than ten miles of distance in an air conditioned condominium to rid the salt air from his lungs, to blind the panic from his eyes, to erase the regret he feels that Maris saw him out of control.

It’s bad enough so that an hour later, he walks along the flagstone path to the front porch of her cottage. Geraniums stand like bright red flags in clay pots alongside the flagstone. White and purple petunias cascade from window boxes. When he stands outside her front porch, the scent of brewing coffee floats through the screen door. Noises come to him as he stops there: dishes clattering in the kitchen, water flowing from the tap, a pan placed on a stove burner. On the porch, a novel waits open on a white wicker table. A copious spray of cattails reaches from a tall ceramic vase in the corner and hurricane lanterns and starfish lean on a high shelf.
Paradise is open to interpretation.
A life like this, as close as the other side of a screen door, is as far removed from him as a ship on the horizon. The chink of silverware being pulled from a drawer and Maris’ voice talking to her dog has him move closer. He reaches for the lighthouse knocker and gives three good raps.

Madison rushes to the porch, a growl rising from her throat until she sees him there. “Jason?” Maris asks, following behind the dog. When she unlatches the screen door, Madison noses herself outside and presses her muzzle into his hand while her tail never stops wagging.

“Hey there, girl,” he says, scratching her neck. When he looks up, Maris stands holding the door, barefoot, wearing denim cutoffs and a white tank top. A gold star pendant hangs around her neck and her hair is clipped in a low ponytail. “Maris,” he says. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“No, not at all.”

“I know it’s early, but I wondered if we could talk.”

“Sure. Have you had breakfast?”

“I’m good. How about a walk instead?”

She hesitates. “I just poured my coffee.” She holds the screen door open and he steps onto her porch with Madison close at his feet. “Come on in the kitchen,” she says as she walks through the cottage.

He follows Maris through the living room, looking for any familiarity in the décor. A sofa is slipcovered in navy and white stripes; fashion sketches cover an old cherry drop-leaf coffee table; a white painted cabinet sits at the stair balustrade and large square paned windows line the staircase wall.

“This is a great place you’re renting,” he says as he walks into the kitchen.

“I love it here.” She motions for him to take a seat at the breakfast island. Bunches of dried herbs hang from exposed ceiling beams. Soft strains from the local jazz station rise from a countertop stereo. “I’ve got crumb cake,” she says over her shoulder.

“No thanks. Just coffee.”

“Are you feeling better today?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.” He takes in the details of the kitchen. It all fits perfectly with the sounds he listened to outside its door. Vases of sea glass and heather, white shuttered windows, a lazy ceiling fan. “My brother and I had signed on to do the renovations here.”

“You’re kidding,” Maris says, turning to him with the coffee pot in one hand, a mug with a seashell design in the other.

He notices the architectural details in the kitchen windows and exposed beams. “But we got in the accident before I even drew up the plans.”

She fills the mug and sets it in front of him.

“Naturally they used someone else,” he says. “I haven’t been in here since.”

Maris sits across from him and sips her coffee.

“He’s kind of why I’m here now, Maris. Neil is. And last night and everything that happened on the boardwalk. It was crazy, and I want to talk to you about it.”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“No, I do.” Madison settles on the tile floor beside him and he takes a long swallow of coffee, thinking how to begin. “It’s been good seeing everyone this summer.”

Maris reaches over the breakfast bar and clasps his hand. “It has, and we’re all friends. We understand, Jason.”

He pulls his hand back and stands, ready to thank her for that, for letting him off the hook so easily. He can quickly finish his coffee and be on his way. But when he sees the coffee pot and the dishes in the sink and her digital sketch tablet with a recent design on the screen, when he looks back at her and sees the way she watches him, he pulls out his stool and sits again. “Friends, Maris, also explain.”

She slides her coffee cup to the side. “Why don’t we take that walk outside then? I’ve been cooped up in here all morning.”

“They call it hysterical amnesia,” Jason explains at the water’s edge. July’s sun bleaches the sand before them. “My doctor says it happens following a traumatic incident.”

“You don’t remember it happening then?”

“No, I actually do remember most of it. This type of amnesia blocks only parts of the trauma.” He stops and picks up a stone on the beach. “It’s a psychological defense, suppressing the emotion from, well, from a day like that.”

“And last night something came back?”

Jason throws the stone out into the water. “It did.”

“You mean you remembered something for the first time after all these years?”

He nods and begins walking again. “The scope of the amnesia depends on a lot of things. How severe the trauma was, how physically close I came to it, how psychologically close, post-trauma care.”

“I’d guess you rated pretty high in all those.”

“You’d be right. Most of that day is clear to me, but lately I’ve been remembering some of the missing pieces.”

Maris puts her hand on his arm. She thinks of his frenzy right after stopping Kyle the night before. Visions of the collision had flashed in his mind. He was back in the accident that killed his brother. “The emotions flash back too, don’t they?”

“That’s what you saw last night. It can get pretty intense.”

They reach the rocky ledge at the end of the beach and Jason bends to pick up a conch shell, its inside whorls of pink.

“I wish there was some way I could have helped,” Maris says.

“You did. It helped just to have you there.” He puts the seashell in her hand. “You kept me from completely losing it with Kyle.”

Maris looks up at him. Hidden somewhere behind that pain, can she still find some of the beach friend she once knew, and danced with, and said goodbye to on a deck twelve years ago? His whole life can’t stem from only one day now.

“What?” he asks.

“So that wasn’t your normal temperament then?”

He laughs and she is glad to see a little of the old Jason return. “No. I haven’t felt like that in years. I thought the memory loss was permanent. It’s really sudden the way it’s coming back.”

“Why now?” They turn and walk back down the beach. The sun rises further in the sky and families stake out their spots on the sand, setting up bright umbrellas and opening sand chairs. “After all these years.”

“I know exactly why. My doctor warned me this could happen under the right circumstances. The first circumstance is that I’m tired.”

“Rest is so important, Jason.”

“I know. But I’ve been looking for a place to move my studio and thought I might move it here. It’s a big job cleaning out the old barn. And I’m bogged down with work. So fatigue plays one part. The rest is that for the first time, I’m spending the summer here at my brother’s haunts.”

“Facing memories?”

He nods. “The doctors call them cues. They trigger my mind to remember. There’s really no way to control it, except to get through it.” He stops and throws a piece of driftwood far out into the water.

“Or leave it behind?”

“That’s always an option.”

Maris crouches down and lifts a piece of seaweed from the high tide line. Sea glass glistens amidst a few stones and sun-bleached shells. “When I was in high school, I went through a phase when I was really missing my mother. And I’d get so sad and couldn’t focus. There was a horse stable in town, and my father would take me horseback riding, to help.” She stands, squinting into the sun.

“They say animals are therapeutic.”

“It’s true,” she says as they continue walking. The boardwalk stretches before them. “Shadow took me places, not only physically, but in my thoughts. We rode miles and miles of trails through the woods, when I saw through his eyes.”

“Shadow?”

Maris smiles. “He was a huge black horse, and very old. Every single time I rode him, as soon as he caught sight of the barn at the end of our ride, he would break out in a gallop. Nothing could stop him from rushing to get home.”

They step onto the boardwalk. In the morning light, it looks different. What had pushed two men to the brink only hours ago is now a mirage beneath the sunshine. But still, it is there.

Jason kneels a leg on the seat and faces the boats behind the boardwalk. Maris stands beside him. She hears him take a long breath.

Today the beach will fill with families and conversation and suntan lotion and sandcastles. People will linger long into the afternoon, lying in the sun or swimming out to the raft. He needs some of this beach easiness.

“Hey,” she says. “Let me show you the designs I’m working on. I think you’ll like them.” He turns and looks at her. “Seriously. They’re inspired by Stony Point. Come on.”

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“Do you have any of that crumb cake left?”

And she knows that, for him, breakfast on the porch will be so good, just like that horse ride through the trails.

“Mom?”

“Not now, Taylor,” Eva calls over her shoulder, annoyed at the interruption that comes as soon as she sits at her desk. The whole day has been like that. By the time Kyle left and Matt went in to work, the breakfast dishes needed cleaning. Two clients called about Open Houses listed in the Sunday paper and her mother called over her morning coffee. “I’m busy.” She clicks on the adoption site, wondering how many days have passed since she last checked. Her eyes search the screen.

“Mom.”

This time the voice is right behind her. Eva minimizes the screen and turns in her chair. “What is it now?”

Taylor rolls her eyes. “What are you so crabby about?”

“I’m not crabby. I’m really busy with work. Now what is it?”