By The Sea, Book Three: Laura (21 page)

It also occurred to her that Sam might not
have changed at all, but that she had simply grown used to spending
her days and nights with a younger man. She pushed the thought of
that man violently from her mind.

A shipboard romance, that's all it
was
, she had told an incredulous Colin on the day that he left
the islands. But she hadn't believed it then, and now less than
ever.

How to greet Sam, that was the question. At
last she caught his eye. With a half-smile and a hesitant wave, she
began to edge down the gangplank, waiting for his expression to
change. It did not, until the adult passengers ahead of Neil moved
out of the boy's line of sight and he saw his father.

"Dad!" he cried, and began weaving his way
through the other passengers.

Sam heard his son's voice, and his weathered
face became more creased in a sudden grin. If she needed proof that
she'd made the right decision, Laura saw it in her husband's look
of relief.

But his welcome of her was far more
tempered, and for one awful moment she thought that he might try to
grab Neil from her and run.

Instead, he took her duffle without
embracing and said gruffly, "Rough trip? We had a wicked nor'easter
come through; you must have caught some of it."

"Yes, I guess so, but it was nothing
comp—"

No, stay away from there
, she
thought. There would be time enough and more to hash over the
details. Most of them, anyway.

She watched her son slip his hand shyly into
his father's ham-sized one and begin to prattle on about the
vagrant albatross that had landed ever so briefly on their deck.
"In the north Atlantic, Dad! Can you believe it? I never saw one,
ever! It was
huge
!"

"You're a lucky lad, son. They're all but
extinct," Sam said, but his attention was sliding over to Laura
now.

"Did you know that they stay with their mate
for life, Dad? The bosun told me that. I wonder where his mate
was," Neil went on. "We only saw the one."

The sight of her son babbling on sent a rush
of apprehension over Laura. Neil could be a chatterbox, and his
talk was bound, sooner or later, to turn to Colin, still and
forever his hero. Of course, Neil might not care to divulge that he
had been disobeying orders and skylarking in the rigging when he
became tangled in it and had to be saved by Colin. And he probably
did not understand and might not even remember the scene he came
upon in his parents' cabin on the night of the wreck.

But sooner or later, Neil might babble
innocently about something that Sam would deem anything but
innocent. Like the way Colin liked to tug Laura's braid playfully,
or the way they both seemed to finish one another's sentences, or
even how skilful they both were at crosswords. Any of it and all of
it could set Sam to thinking.

And the one thing Laura did not want her
husband to do was to think about Colin. Despite her hunger to
confess and make a clean breast of her affair, Laura understood
that the harder thing was not to say anything. Colin would be the
thorn she would bear in her heart for the rest of her life, an
ongoing pain that would ebb and surge.

Like the tide that so nearly carried us
away.

She was wondering whether that would not
have been the best thing when Sam said a little sharply,
"
Laura
. Are you listenin' to me? I been askin' about my
brother."

Apologizing, she said, "I'm still a little
disoriented from the boat's motion, I think."

"
You
? Since when?"

"Well, anyway. Billy is … you know—Billy!
He's fallen in love with island ways and has decided to stay in the
Bahamas for a while. They still move a lot of freight by sail
between islands; he's found a job as deck hand on a schooner."

"A schooner. Yeah. Like my
Ginny
, you
mean."

"Well, yes, but not nearly as well-kept
…."

What a dumb thing to say, she thought. It
would hardly bring comfort to Sam. Little land-mines everywhere!
She would have to learn to navigate them more carefully. She
shifted the duffel bag she was carrying from one hand to the other;
her shoulder still tended to ache without warning.

Sam took that bag from her as well and slung
it over his shoulder. "What's this?" he asked, feeling through the
canvas with his hand. "Lumber?"

"Oh, that!" Laura said, suddenly sorry she'd
brought it back with them.

Neil, always eager to contribute to the
conversation, said, "It's one of the name boards for the
Virginia
, Dad. Most of one, anyway."

Sam stopped mid-stride and dropped the
duffel bag on the pier. Unzipping the carrier, he saw the scarred
and broken remains of the name board he once had painted with
loving care. The
Virgin
. All that was left of the one true
love of his life.

He pulled the board out of the bag by its
broken end and hurled it into the harbor.

"Dad!" cried Neil, aghast. His eyes were
round with wonder.

"I don't need no remindin'," his father
said. He slung the bag back over his shoulder and strode out ahead
of them.

****

Sam was renting a sparsely furnished
four-room cottage on a dirt lane near the harbor in Newport. After
they were settled in and Neil was tucked in his very own, very dry
bed, Laura repeated what she had already written Sam about the
shipwreck, leaving out the same parts involving Colin as she had
left out in the letter.

The first order of business was of course
the little marble ball of gems. Sam's mouth fell slack when Laura
unscrewed the small globe and spilled its contents carefully onto a
dish towel on the small kitchen table.

"Godamighty" was his response. He fingered
the diamonds and rubies, all of them cut and polished and ready to
be surrounded by gold and platinum. "Do you reckon they could be
fakes?"

"I doubt it. I think we should assume
they're genuine. And I definitely think we should hire someone to
track down Mr. Angelina before they find us first. If we're honest,
who knows? Colin—Durant—thinks that there's a chance they'll give
us a reward for returning the stones."

"Where
is
Durant, anyway? You've said
naught about him."

Standing up and turning to the stove to hide
the rush of her emotions, Laura shrugged and said, "I have no idea.
He … he hopped aboard a yacht that had just had a crewmember jump
ship and was looking for a replacement to continue on in a
circumnavigation. He could be, I don't know, anywhere by now."

She brought the chipped enamel kettle over
to the sink, filled it, and took it over to the stove, all without
looking at her husband. Turning on the gas, she was rewarded with a
hissing sound.

"You have to light the damned pilot, woman!"
Sam snarled. "Move off! I'll do it m'self before you blow us all
up!"

And that's when Laura knew: the road back to
normalcy was going to involve many painful twists and turns and
frustrating detours.

****

Within a month, Mr. Angelina had got in
touch. He was not a happy man. The look on his face as he examined
and counted the gems was intense, almost fearful. Laura had to
wonder whether he was worried about his own role in the sorry
play.

"Well, that's it, then," he said, standing
up. "Our business here is done."

Meanwhile, Sam had been led by Laura to
expect a reward for them not being thieves. Sam wasn't a happy man,
either. "Hold on a bit," he said, keeping his tone mild. "Is that
all you've got to say?"

"I believe so, yes."

"There's no reward for our safe return of
them stones?"

"Your reward, sir, is that you are being
allowed to keep the deposit, for one, and are not being made to
reimburse the owner for the loss of his building supplies, for
another. That's your reward." The last came out in a smirk.

"Hey, now," Sam said. His voice had that
low, hard edge that Laura knew well. "I call that some unkind. We
took a chance. A big chance. It did cost us."

Faltering a little, Mr. Angelina pushed his
glasses back up his nose and said, "You weren't insured?"

"Funny thing, there," Sam said as he moved
between him and the kitchen door. "Lloyd's of London had the gall
to turn me down."

"Well, I don't see—"

"Look harder, then!"

Mr. Angelina compressed his lips and rubbed
a forefinger nervously across his chin. At last he sighed and
nodded as if to himself before reaching in his inside suit pocket
for a slender billfold. "Since you were not insured, and your own
loss was heavy, I believe the owner would approve of my leaving you
with something to help you along in this time of distress."

He pulled out four one-hundred-dollar bills
and placed them on the kitchen table, all without taking his eyes
off Sam, who had folded his arms across his chest in what he
presumably felt was an encouraging way.

Sam looked at the bills, then at the little
man, and said at last, "All right. I reckon we can forget about the
whole thing. You be sure to let your boss know that."

The haggling was over. With a brusque nod,
Mr. Angelina beat a retreat.

The money was a bribe to buy their silence;
Sam and Laura understood that perfectly well and were fine with it.
The jewels were back in the states, and Laura was no longer a
criminal. "No harm, no foul," as Sam put it. He'd even made a joke
about it: a double-smuggle; the crime had cancelled itself out.

The money wasn't nearly enough to buy
another boat, any boat, from which Sam could continue to ply his
trade. But Laura quickly found work teaching at the Lenthal School,
where Neil had begun to take classes, and her salary, together with
the modest amount of cash they now had, was enough for them to buy
the flood-prone house that they were renting. (The landlord, fed up
with his disastrous investment, let it go to them for a song.)

For several months Sam worked at the Hotel
Viking, but being in service was not for him. He left and secured a
better job, though with fewer hours, at the Torpedo Station,
assembling munitions of war. That job, too, displeased him, so he
left and found work mere blocks away on Long Wharf in one of the
repair shops that serviced the Fall River Line of steamboats.

As the months dragged into a year and then
two, and Sam became more and more unhappy, Laura encouraged him to
go back to sea, on a local fishing vessel if nothing else.

"Are you daft? Why would I want to work
aboard someone else's boat?"

"You'd be at sea again, Sam. You do miss
it," she said, clearing his dinner plate.

"I see the water every day. In Newport you
can't
not
see the water, no matter where it is you're
slaving. I told you: I'm done with the sea. Don't bother me about
it. You of all people," he couldn't help muttering.

Weary of his resentment and hostility, Laura
let her upbeat pose drop for once. "Then what are we doing
by
the sea? Why don't we move to a farm in Minnesota, where
you can work the land? I can certainly find a job teaching there.
And you could be your own boss again."

His laugh was little more than a sneer. "And
what the hell do I know about corn and cows?"

He was right. It wouldn't work. Not unless
he could see the possibility of joy in a new adventure.

She sighed and gave him an entreating look.
"Oh, Sam. Can't you try to be happy? Just for once … try? How long
do you mean to punish me?"

He hated to be told to try to be happy.
Slamming his fist on the supper table, he said, "I don't need to
listen to this!" and grabbed his jacket and cap, slamming the
kitchen door behind him.

Neil, who had been quietly scooping up the
last of the gravy in his bowl with the last of the bread on his
plate, winced and said to his mother, "Why is Dad always like that,
Mom? Are we out of money again?"

"What a thing to think! Of course not. If we
were out of money, do you suppose you'd have a brand-new bicycle
out back? And an allowance every week? Really! The things you come
up with, Neil."

"I was just wondering," he said. "Because
something's not right lately." He pushed his chair from the table a
little more dramatically than he needed to and went off to play
with his dog, a friendly, lively mutt that they'd adopted from the
shelter on nearby Harrington Street.

Her son was too perceptive by half, Laura
realized. Sam did seem to have reached a tipping point. He wanted
to be on the water, but on his own terms, and that could not be
arranged just yet. After they had saved some more … but by then he
might well be too old, too bitter, too tied to the bottle to pick
up his dream.

He was drinking more than ever. Laura had
never felt comfortable with his habit, but at least when he was
younger he was able to manage both work and play without it
affecting him. Nowadays it wasn't uncommon for him to stop after
work at one of the many rough taverns that dotted the downtown
streets between Long Wharf and their little house off Wellington
and arrive home late and bleary-eyed, and hardly able to hold a
conversation.

His drinking made their few encounters in
the bedroom even more fraught with tension. It came down to this:
lately Sam could not, and Laura would not, make the effort
necessary to have truly satisfying sex. Laura did try, for a while,
but it was hard for her to feign enthusiasm for someone who reeked
of alcohol, had forgotten how to be tender, and blamed her for his
inadequacy. "Yer not doin' it right!" was a favorite scold of his.
So eventually she gave up trying to do it at all.

Laura had no doubt, as she cleaned up the
dishes from their supper stew, that Sam would come home "drunk as a
skunk" as he liked to brag, and try to bait her in some way. He
knew she had papers to correct and lesson plans to lay out, and
that would provide him with one of his favorite targets: her job as
a teacher. She had learned very quickly not to talk about her love
for the children she taught, and especially the love those children
had for learning; it was like waving a flag in front of a bull.