Blue Jeans and Coffee Beans (28 page)

“Damn it,” she finally says as she sits at the kitchen table. Between the wallpapering and painting and thinking she was pregnant and searching adoption registries, the telephone number is just gone.

So she grabs her phone and quickly dials Maris’ cell, impatiently waiting for her to answer. “Come on, come on,” she says, pacing the kitchen, disconnecting and dialing again. “Answer the damn phone.” She leaves a quick message on her voicemail, then disconnects and tries again. “Maris, call me.” She takes a long breath, wanting to say everything, and unable to say anything. “We really need to talk, it’s important. Call,” she says before slamming down her phone.

When she hangs up, she looks at her gold star necklace. She, too, has an aunt, far across the Atlantic. Someone who must think of her, from time to time. And the thought leaves her feeling so purely connected to Maris and Elsa, the three women linked together through the years with a simple braided chain, that she puts on her sandals and heads off, half-running, to Maris’ cottage. She has to see her, to tell her, to hug her.

After waiting endlessly on Maris’ doorstep, she returns home. Matt finds her later sitting in their kitchen on the window seat, her knees pulled up in front of her as she watches out the window, hoping to see Jason’s SUV drive by further down the street. Maris has to be with him.

“I knew you were upset about the baby,” Matt says when he sits beside her and sets a bouquet on the table. He wears his uniform, his polished boots, his firearm still, in his rush to get home. “You’re shaking,” he says, wiping away her tears. “You’ll feel better in a few days.”

“It’s not the baby.” She takes off the pendant and holds it out to his hand, watching his gaze move from it up to her face. “It’s true,” she says. “And no one ever told me.” The flowers lay on the table in front of them, the summer day grows warm outside the window, the scent of the sea reaches in.

Jason had forgotten that he could feel happiness in the wind brushing his face, in the damp sea mist settling on the night, in the darkness itself. At the water’s edge, Madison bounds ahead of them, occasionally barking into the sea breeze.

“Sometimes it feels like I’ve never left here,” Maris says as she brushes back strands of hair.

“What do you mean?” Jason asks.

“It feels like I’ve always been here and Chicago and the past twelve years were only a dream somehow.”

“There’s a reason for dreams, Maris. We work things out in them.” A cool ocean breeze skims across the water. “Cold?” he asks. His suit jacket hangs draped over her shoulders and he lifts it higher, closing it around her arms while pulling her near.

“A little. Do you want to go back?”

“In a minute. There’s something I have to do first.”

“What’s that?” Maris asks, looking up at him.

His fingers touch her hair, brushing wisps from her cheek. Standing at the edge of the sea, night and water are as black as one, broken only by a swath of pale moonlight falling from the sky, by the rhythm of the waves breaking close by. In that darkness, he kisses her and his world becomes just and only that, for one long moment as the waves continue to reach up on the beach. When he stops, his hand traces every curve of her face. “I couldn’t love you and not tell you about that day.”

Her fingers touch his lips. “I love you, too,” she whispers.

“Come on,” he says, and they turn back toward the road with his arm around her, holding her close. Madison lopes past them holding a stick of driftwood in her mouth, her tail swinging with happiness. They walk slowly behind the dog, lingering with the night. Time is finally, finally sweet.

Beneath his bedroom window, with the rhythm of the breaking waves carrying to them, Jason’s hand stops hers from reaching for the bedside lamp. Moonlight allays the darkness instead, looking almost liquid, Maris thinks. The edges of the room are softly blurred by it, much like her sketches blur beneath fresh watercolor paints, the water dissipating clarity. And that blend of pale light from above, along with the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, makes the night itself watercolored. Sea colored, she thinks, with the evening’s breeze bringing the sense of the sea close. Sometimes life is all about that, about how the waves continue to reach the shore no matter where we are. Bent over a sketch pad in a city studio, with denim samples strewn about. Or lying twisted on a hot summer pavement, it doesn’t matter. The waves come. Once you’ve heard them, and walked beside them, they are always there.

Maris touches upon his scars, her fingers softly slipping along them. His breath catches at her first trace of his face and she stays there, close, her eyes searching his as she moves her hand along his neck to the gnarled skin of his back where his body met the road. Her touch comes in those waves, gentle but endless, down his side to his leg, tracing the scarred web along his thigh ever so slowly before reaching back to find the ridge above his jawline. Time is fluid, the night is fluid, life is fluid, and at the sea, one heals.

Maris knows this day has been like a silver cap on one of those sea waves, changing the direction and force of his life, bringing him gently to shore. She heals him then, completely, moving on top of him and leaving tender kisses along his jaw. His hands move over her back and up through her hair, touching her neck until he turns and cradles her beneath him. She whispers words that he stops with his kisses, so she brings the affection to her hands that stroke his arms, cling to his back, not letting him slip back into that sea of darkness.

What she is most glad for, more than anything else, is this. Summer, for him, will have this moment in it, too. She wants that for Jason, wants him to remember it drifting in through the open window, the starry sky above, the sea breeze moving the white curtains, bringing a hint of the sea itself. His hands frame her face. “Maris,” he says quietly, searching her eyes. She senses, somehow, that this is how he has to love her, his eyes have to see the moment, hear the night. Sight and sound, sight and sound, keep him present.

When she answers softly, “I love you,” it is the way his mouth tastes the soft of her throat before moving to her face and kissing her cheek, her eyes. It is the way his hands frame her shoulders close that tells her he hears the sound of her words. She presses her lips against his ear, letting him feel even her breath as she says his name, hoping he feels the possibility of life again, shimmering like a summer sea.

Later, Jason lies awake in the night feeling Maris beside him, her arm draped over his chest, her head on his shoulder. It is very late, all the world still. He hears Long Island Sound in the distance. It blurs motion and time and is a sound that can summon a lifetime of memories.

But there is something more. He holds Maris close and feels the rise and fall of her breathing. The waves reach up on the beach while he stays absolutely motionless, the sea breeze floating in, the moon’s glow illuminating them, and he considers, unsure, just what he senses. After a minute, or ten, or waking from dozing, Maris turns her face up toward him and he feels her gaze. Out of the darkness, her hand reaches to his face and touches the moist streak slipping along the side of his cheek.

He takes her hand, then, and cups it in his, to his chest, before slipping his arm around her shoulders, lying close, the waves outside continuing to break.

.

Chapter Twenty-Six

I
n the light of Monday morning, Maris sees Jason’s life more clearly. She sees the ordered furniture in his beach home, everything in its place, meticulous. She sees a second, spare prosthetic leg beside his dresser. Crutches lean in the corner of the bedroom, and she sees him put a second pair of those in his truck. His day will be long and there might come a time when he’ll have to remove his prosthesis. Sitting outside on his deck, she listens to him talk in the kitchen, hearing his inflections, his pauses, as his day lengthens with each phone call: an appointment with a building contractor, with a wholesale window supplier and with two clients at their cottages, followed by an evening meeting in Eastfield. Finally he needs to stop at his condominium to work on research papers still there for a new cottage restoration. They won’t see each other until late that night.

While waiting outside for him, she checks her cell phone and calls back Eva, leaving her a message when there is no answer.

“Who you talking to?” Jason asks, bringing his coffee onto the deck.

“Evangeline.”

“Eva?”

“She left me a couple tense messages.”

“What did she want?”

“I’m not sure, she didn’t really say. Something’s up, though.”

“Do you want to stop by and see her?”

“I just can’t, there’s so much going on today. It’ll keep till I get back later.”

“I’ll come with you to your attorney’s office,” Jason insists then, his coffee on the table before him, his barn rising behind him, mid-restoration. He’s already been moving in his pencils and shields and t-squares and design rolls, along with Neil’s volumes of cottage scrapbooks. Without Neil’s presence, she sees that he couldn’t do it.

“I’ll be okay, really. I already know most of what he’ll tell me. Besides, your schedule is booked.”

“I’ll cancel.” He says it without hesitation; she takes precedence.

“No, I’ll be fine.” She sips her coffee, thinking. “Do you know what you could do though? My appointment is at one o’clock and it’s an hour drive each way. Could you stop by and take Madison out for a while? I hate to leave her alone for long.”

Jason agrees and Maris gives him her extra house key while he writes his personal cell phone number on the back of his business card. “I have to take off now. But you call me if you need me.” She takes the card from him and lets him fold her into his arms, talking into her ear. “Anytime, okay?” They kiss then and she misses him already when she feels his hands leaving her shoulders.

It is one of those crystal clear summer mornings, so she walks around his yard, looking into the barn and lingering alone on his deck with her coffee. Forty-five minutes after he left, she turns over his business card and dials the number. “Don’t talk,” she says, knowing he is with a contractor. She doesn’t want her words to compel him to respond, possibly embarrassing him. “Just listen.”

“Okay,” he answers. There are noises in the background: workers’ voices calling out, a power saw whining and a construction vehicle backing up. She imagines he bends into the call, maybe blocking his other ear to hear her over the sounds of the job site.

“There’s just something I wanted to tell you.”

“Go on.”

She smiles, picturing him at work. “I love you,” she says.

“I love you too, sweetheart. I’ll call you later.”

Only then does she feel ready to take care of something else pressing on her mind. She straightens up the kitchen and goes back to her cottage to make the other phone call that is long overdue.

“I can’t compete with someone you’ve known your whole life,” Scott says. “Especially someone from Stony Point.”

“It’s not about competition, Scott.” She opens the ring box and looks at the diamond as he talks, slipping it on her finger, then taking it off again.

“For you, it’s not. You’ve made your choice. But it is for me. Or it was, until you told me his name.”

“I’m sorry, I never planned for this to happen.”

“I know you didn’t. And I know it’s over. And it’s not just Barlow. It’s where he’s from. It’s Stony Point, Maris. I can’t compete with whatever hold that little beach has on you.”

She sets the engagement ring on the dining room table along with everything else wanting her attention. Her office at Saybrooks is anxious for her new fall designs, Eva needs to talk, and there’s that pending job offer. Surrounded by denim sketches spread across the table, she opens her laptop and sends off a couple messages to her assistant, letting her know she’ll scan the sketches into the system in a few days. Then she opens the other email that has been idle in her inbox for several days now. The Manhattan design house needs an answer this week. Will she accept their offer for a position to expand their denim line, with free design rein and a substantial salary increase? The lace curtains behind her puff out like wind in the sails, then fall back limp. Her fingers tap at the keyboard declining the offer, pausing to place a stone paperweight on the sketches lifted by the breeze slipping in, before hitting the delete key as she erases her response and keeps the email as New for now.

Too much else is pressing in on her, including Eva, who she tries calling again, wondering what has her so upset. Still no answer. “I’ll stop by after my appointment today,” Maris says in a voicemail. “We’ll have coffee and talk.”

She shuts off her phone then and sets it aside on the table so there won’t be any interruptions as she prepares for her attorney’s appointment. The secret of her own family challenges her like no design assignment ever has, so she turns to the old box from her father’s house. Everything in it is some sort of hint. Slipping her hand into the folds of a soft baby blanket, she pulls out the black and white snapshots there. Their edges have begun to curl with age, but even though so much time has passed, Maris recognizes the rooms: the kitchen where something always simmered or baked, the formal living room for family visits, the paneled family room where chairs were meant for curling up on with good books.

Even though the prints are black and white, she knows the colors: the green appliances, the rich cherry wood of the mantle clock, the gold brocade sofa, the honey pine walls.

And even though she can’t remember her, Maris knows the woman in them. She searches her mother’s face, her eyes, her expression, and craves something she might see with her own eyes, some truth that explains a second child, a daughter who she had to love as much as she did Maris. But the photographs hold their secret well.

She turns back to the box. Everything in it is evidence of a second baby’s life: the knitted baby cap, the family christening gown, a swaddling blanket, the home movie film, the empty small box from an Italian jeweler. Someone didn’t want this child forgotten. She collects the photographs and reaches for the baby blanket to tuck back in the box. While fussing with the blanket over the table, a small manila envelope she missed before slides out from a fold.

And suddenly nothing is more important as she drops the blanket, carefully opens the envelope clasp and slips out the contents. Two items fall to the table … another photograph, this one an old five-by-seven black and white print, and a yellowed identification card.

Maris picks up the photograph and angles it beneath her table lamp. A ship deck is crowded with people off to one side looking out over the water at a distant view. Far in the background, behind a misty veil, rises the Statue of Liberty. The photographer, standing to the stern, frames the picture to capture a large portion of the bow of the boat.

And one person on deck catches Maris’ eye. A young girl of about fourteen turns her back on the crowd and faces the camera. Her clothing is plain and drab: a long gray dress over which a heavy black coat falls to below her knees. On her feet she wears a scuffed pair of black leather high-top boots. Her thick, dark hair is pulled back in a loose bun and a knitted wool scarf drapes over the back of her head with the ends wrapped loosely at her throat.

The resemblance is clear. She sees the wide-set eyes and prominent jawline of her mother, though it isn’t her squinting into the early light of day decades ago. In one hand, the girl grips the handle of a leather travel trunk, while the other hand clutches a large paper, some sort of travel authorization. Maris knows, before turning the picture over, that this is her mother’s and Aunt Elsa’s mother. This young girl, her dark eyes gazing steady at the camera, is her maternal grandmother. On the back of the photograph, her mother had written the notation
Mama waiting for the ferry at Ellis Island
.

Why would this be saved? What significance does it have in the baby’s life? She scans the crowds of immigrants dressed in dark clothes, the women’s heads wrapped in shawls and scarves against the damp harbor air. They lean on the rails of the ship looking to New York. The planks of the deck’s floor are wood and a staircase rises to a second level where the ship’s uniformed crew mans the operations.

The answer jumps out at her then. The ship’s name is painted directly below the rails of the upper deck, on the far side of the boat. She squints and angles the photograph to read it clearly.

This is the ship that brought her grandmother to America. Surprising tears burn her eyes as the one word says it all. It explains why the box of mementoes was kept, the photograph saved, the baby named.

Evangeline
.

She drops the photograph on the table and picks up the yellowed identification card. Her eyes race over it, searching out more details. The heading is in bold print …
Inspection Card
. Beneath that, in smaller letters, it reads …
Immigrants and Steerage Passengers
. It lists her grandmother’s name as well as the
Port of Departure
, Naples, Italy. But it is the next line that confirms everything.

Name of Ship
… Evangeline.

Outside, a robin sings and the cicadas buzz in the trees. She turns to look out the window, to know the truth of this one moment. She is here, at Stony Point. The sea breeze stirs. Summer lingers. But the card holds the other truth, the one that changes everything. That shifts her world. Information about medical and quarantine inspections have been stamped on it, dates and numbers.

But none of that matters to her now. Only one thing does.

The baby she’s been looking for hadn’t died.

Maris just found her. She’d been given up for adoption and is very much alive.

No one responded to Eva’s birth parent search, nor would they ever, because her parents are Maris’ parents. And they have both died. Theresa and Ned are somehow involved, too, bringing Maris into their home during all those years the two sisters were separated.

And no one ever told them. Not one word. Ever.

Eva is her sister. Evangeline.

Maris stands and backs away from the mess on the table, from the evidence, from the random sketches she’d finished up, from her cell phone off to the side. She’s seen enough and figured out enough. Attorney Riley will fill in the rest. It is time to leave.

Upstairs, she splashes cold water on her face, pats it dry and runs a brush through her hair. She lifts the blue velvet bag from her dresser top and slips out her gold pendant, the evening star rising above the sea. Her hands shake as she tries to clasp it behind her neck. Elsa, a world away, had at least tried to hold on to
two
little girls. For certainly the empty jewelry box from the attic once held a similar pendant for Eva. Where is it? What ever became of Elsa?

A large black denim duffel sits on her closet shelf and it doesn’t take long to open her dresser drawers and throw in enough necessities and a change of clothes to get her through a few days. She hurries back downstairs to the dining room with the tote over her shoulder, slips her laptop into it, grabs her purse and leaves the rest, the photographs and sketches and diamond ring and Identification Card and cell phone, leaves it all behind.