On Folly Beach (9 page)

Paige stepped back and shut the door with a solid thud, more final than any parting words could have been.

Emmy swallowed twice before she could find her voice. “I left your jar of sand on the desk in the office. Guess I won’t be needing it where I’m heading.” She tried to smile but it faltered when her lips began to tremble. “Mama—” she began but Paige cut her off by placing both of her hands on the open window.

“Don’t forget to call or your daddy won’t be able to sleep. Be careful.”

Before Paige could pull her hands away, Emmy grabbed them and squeezed. “Good-bye, Mama.”

Paige squeezed back, then let go, and Emmy’s hands fell useless to her lap. “Good-bye, Emmy.”

Emmy started the engine and raised the window before following the long gravel-and-dirt drive that led away from her parents’ house, watching her father wave to her in the rearview window until the cloud of dust obscured them. Focusing on the road ahead, she flipped the radio on and turned up the air conditioner, listening to the tires roll over the road and trying not to think about how long her journey was going to be.

THE SUNSET SKY BLUSHED IN reds and purples by the time Emmy drove through Charleston nearly thirteen hours later. She was hungry and tired, and her jaw hurt from clenching her teeth so tightly, but she wasn’t ready to stop yet. She was so close and she couldn’t help but feel that if she stopped she might not find the courage to continue.

Crossing over the Ashley River Bridge, with the pastel Charleston skyline punctuated by church steeples behind her, she turned the radio off and rolled her window down. She breathed in the scented air that smelled green and wet to her; a smell as foreign to her as a stranger’s kiss. The road hummed beneath her tires and she found herself tightening her jaws to the rhythm of the road.

Feeling anxious now, she flipped the radio back on, then fiddled with the dial on the old car radio before stopping on the first clear station. It was an oldies station playing music from the big-band era, and Emmy found herself relaxing. Although her parents were from the hippie generation, they loved to dance to the old music and had a cabinet full of records they’d take out from time to time and slow dance to in the living room. They’d been doing that ever since Emmy could remember, usually after she’d been sent to bed. But as soon as she’d hear the trumpets sing and the softer wail of the saxophone, she’d crawl to the top of the stairs and watch as her parents held each other tight, kissed, and spoke softly, reminding Emmy that there had once been a them before there’d been an us.

She’d watch for a short while, and when she returned to her bed, she’d lie on her pillow with a lump in her throat, wondering if it was from resentment that she wasn’t the center of their world or from a distant hope that one day she would find someone who liked to dance in the living room and who would look at her as if she was loved best.

Emmy flipped the radio off again as the silent fist of her grief squeezed her heart. She marveled that the entire time she’d been in the car, she hadn’t thought of Ben. She was angry with herself yet relieved, too, thinking this might be part of the recovery everybody had been promising her yet had remained as elusive as catching sand in the wind.

She glanced down at her lap to the map her father had drawn for her and took a left on Folly Road, the long, straight road that would take her over two small bridges before spilling her out on the little knife shape of land her father had labeled Folly Beach. Her car passed churches, strip malls filled with nail salons and realty offices, and a large Piggly Wiggly. Emmy hesitated only a moment before bypassing the entrance to the parking lot of the grocery store. If she didn’t have food and supplies, it would be that much easier to turn around and head back to Indiana if what she found on Folly wasn’t what she was looking for. Whatever that was.

She was nearly lulled to sleep by the heat of the sun through the window until her attention was caught by a brightly painted wooden boat off to the right of the road with The Luv Guv and Don’t cry for me, Argentina spray-painted in white against a spatter of bright colors splayed over every flat surface.

Emmy nearly ran off the road as she craned her neck to get a better look at the locals’ attempt at a billboard commentary about the South Carolina governor’s extramarital exploits recently making the national news. She wasn’t sure if she liked it or not, but it sounded just like what she’d heard about the people of Folly Beach, whose physical exertions and attitudes were directly related to the intensity of the heat from the Southern sun.

After crossing over the first bridge, Emmy sat up straighter to take in a better measure of where she was headed. Off in the distance to the left was a large blue water tower with FB in large black letters inside a white oval announcing that she was at least going in the right direction. Traffic slowed as the road narrowed approaching the Folly River Bridge, the docked shrimp boats announcing the proximity to the Atlantic Ocean. A salty breeze filled the car—a new smell that was strange yet oddly familiar, too. Maybe her mother’s childhood memories had been transferred to Emmy during infancy, as if the memory of warm sand between your toes were as tangible a thing as nourishment and security.

Red-flowered bushes Emmy had never seen before waved from each side of the road like spectators at a welcome parade, easing the tightness in her chest just a little. The Edge of America, she thought, recalling the Folly Beach nickname her mother had told her, an appropriate name for a destination for someone with nowhere else to go.

Glancing at her map again, she headed straight where Folly Road became Center Street, the only street on the island with a stoplight. In the old days, her mother had explained, if you stayed on Center Street, you’d run right into the ocean. Now, though, a monolithic cement Holiday Inn blocked access and the view, forcing all vehicles to either turn right or left on Ashley Avenue.

The light turned red and Emmy stopped. Perspiration trickled down her back and forehead, but she still resisted rolling up the window and turning on the air. The voices of the tourists and locals filling the sidewalks, shops, and restaurants, and the sound of blaring music from passing cars was the sound track to her new adventure, and she was afraid she’d miss something—miss a clue telling her that she was doing the right thing.

She turned left on East Ashley, the holiday weekend traffic heavy on the two-lane street, each side of the road packed with cars parked bumper to bumper. Everyone wore bathing suits, even the babies in strollers, and coolers and surfboards were the ubiquitous accessories as beachgoers unloaded them from cars, trucks, and minivans and lumbered toward the beach accesses.

Emmy passed old, paint-peeling houses that were nestled side by side with larger and newer beach mansions. Most of the houses, big and small alike, had names like Banana Cabana and Height of Folly posted on painted wooden signs by the driveways. All the houses sat on pilings, their one commonality apparently being a fear of the sea. Entire streets had been taken away by hurricanes in past years, according to Paige. While Emmy was no stranger to tornadoes, she felt a certain dread when she thought about the force of a tornado coupled with the strength of the ocean and wondered if mere pilings would be enough.

She looked down at the map one last time for the address she’d written at the bottom for the house she’d rented, sight unseen. Not that doing such a thing surprised her anymore; she’d agreed to purchase a business without ever having seen it either, much less even visited the state of South Carolina. Her chest filled with a silent sigh. Mama, what have we done?

The traffic thinned as she drove toward the east end of the island, and she slowed, checking the house numbers on mailboxes and posts, and even a painted surfboard stuck in the yard, as she passed each one before finally pausing in front of the correct address. Slowly, she turned into the shell-and-sand driveway with two cement tire runners and stopped, staring at the house in front of her through the windshield.

The house belonged to the son of the bookstore’s owner, Abigail Reynolds. The son was a developer in Atlanta who’d had the house built for his fiancée a couple of years before. Abigail hadn’t elaborated and Emmy was left to speculate that both the son and the fiancée lived in Atlanta and used the house only sporadically, renting it when they weren’t living in it.

Not that Emmy had been expecting to live in a mansion, but she was relieved that the house in front of her couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be called a shack, either. It was painted in a bright yellow with two stories sitting atop the pilings, the hip roof sporting a windowed turret on one side. A wide wooden staircase led up to the raised first floor, where the double doors lay nestled under a rounded portico protruding onto a wraparound porch. Bright white rockers sat on the porch, the strong ocean breeze making them wave like a greeting. Several piles of two-by-fours lay in the sparse grass of the front yard; a circular saw and sawhorse sat near them with tufts of sawdust lying in the grass and flitting in the air on the breeze. Emmy frowned at the scene for a moment, trying to remember what, if anything, Abigail had mentioned about any new construction on the house; then she moved her gaze back to the front doors, and her eyes widened.

Slowly opening her car door, she exited without taking her eyes off the doors, not really sure if she was seeing clearly. She removed her sunglasses and squinted in the bright light, feeling the brunt of the South Carolina sun for the first time like a heavy slap on her bare shoulders.

Ignoring the heat, she trudged across the lawn and up the front steps to what had caught her attention. The doors had been stained a dark cherry, but inset in the wood were two large windows nearly as long as each door, each bearing one half of the etched depiction of a bottle tree. Emmy studied the willowy stems and random bottle shapes for a long moment, making sure she was actually seeing what she thought she was, feeling the familiar pinpricks against the back of her neck.

The heat seemed to hit her again, and spots danced in front of her eyes. Leaning forward she pressed her forehead against the cool glass to see inside, and saw instead a reflection in the glass that wasn’t hers. It was an old woman, with two long braids but the image was gone as soon as Emmy realized she was seeing it. With a stifled gasp, she pulled back and blinked before pressing her forehead against the glass again. All she saw this time through the glass was a large, sparsely furnished room but one that was blessedly empty.

Emmy stumbled to one of the rockers and sat down, allowing the breeze to wash over her. It must have been a shadowed reflection of a passing cloud she’d seen. Either that or the heat was playing tricks on her mind. She closed her eyes as a strong breeze lifted her hair, cooling her neck and cheeks as relief coursed through her at the logical explanation of the reflection in the window. She felt foolish. She was used to heat in the summer, and even humidity. But it was more than that, and she knew it just as she’d known Ben was gone all those months ago. It was a feeling that this place was expecting her and that she was supposed to be here.

Feeling better she stood and looked over the railing, noticing for the first time that she had a view of the ocean through the empty space between the two houses across the street. She was too far to hear it, but she could see the ripples of waves outlined by sun and shadow, see the line at the edge of the world where the ocean met the sky.

She felt a tug somewhere near her heart, as if this strange new place meant something to her, as if the pull of the ocean was one more thing she’d been born with and she’d always known this place. It didn’t matter that she’d never seen an ocean before; she already knew what it meant to be able to see the ocean from your front door.

Slowly, she walked down the steps and began looking for a path that would lead her to the back of the house. Abigail had told Emmy that her son had picked a spot between the Folly River and the ocean as the perfect spot for his house but that she’d let Emmy figure out the reasons why by herself. Abigail had left a key in the lockbox on the back door, and Emmy had memorized the combination from saying it aloud many times on the long trip from Indiana.

She passed under the house, where there was space for two cars to park in tandem, and emerged into a grassy clearing, where wooden steps led up to a screened porch and, presumably, the back door. Slapping her leg as something bit her, she began to hurry up the steps, pausing on the landing to unlatch the screen door. Another strong breeze ripped the door from her hand, causing her to look up to see a darkening sky. Her gaze dropped to the view from the back of the house, the expanse of lawn giving way to tall, spider-leg-like grass and what looked like a wide wooden dock leading into the middle of it. Shades of browns, greens, and yellows lay like a spotted cat, leading to deeper water and a clear view of a lighthouse in the distance. The lighthouse appeared stranded in the middle of the sea, its rust and white stripes leading up to a darkened light.