Returning to Shore (9 page)

“Do you have twenty bucks you can lend me?” The voice came from a boy, a few years older than Jaylin, who had stuck his head in the doorway. His hair was bushy, like Jaylin's, and he had a rectangle of dark hair on his chin which looked like an attempt at a beard.

“Sorry, I'm totally broke,” said Jaylin. “Why don't you ask Mom?”

“I don't know where she is.”

“That's Mark, whom I have the misfortune to be related to,” Jaylin said to Clare, and to him, she added, “Guess you'll have to hit up Dad, then.”

“The dragon's in his lair,” said Mark and he disappeared from the doorway.

Jaylin sucked the last bit of ice cream off her spoon and smiled at Clare. “My Dad's not really a dragon,” she said. “He's just a temperamental writer who snaps at his poor offspring when he's having trouble coming up with ideas.”

“My stepfather is a writer, too,” said Clare.

“What does he write?”

“He's working on a novel. But he's published a lot of short stories.” Clare pictured the two literary magazines Peter had been so proud of, and the online
magazine. “A lot” wasn't actually exactly accurate, but it sounded much better than “a few.”

“Dad writes crime thrillers,” said Jaylin. “He writes the novel. And then the book becomes a best seller, so he writes the screenplay; then it gets made into a movie. Have you heard of
The Breaking Point
?”

Clare shook her head.

“
First and Ever After
?”

“I think so,” said Clare, though she wasn't sure she had. Vera had as much contempt for “airport books” as she did for YA novels.

“This island is crawling with writers,” said Jaylin.

Clare was about to explain that it was her real father who was here on the island, and her stepfather was somewhere else, but it immediately got too complicated. She'd have to explain that she didn't live with Peter anymore; she lived with her mother's third husband, Tertio, but that Peter was still her stepfather—because he was, wasn't he?

She wondered if she started off her relationship with Jaylin by not really telling her how things were, with a whole chunk of what was central to her life kept secret, would they ever have the possibility of a real
friendship? If Jaylin thought her father was a writer, she wouldn't think he was that “crazy old guy.” But that meant Jaylin couldn't ever come over to Richard's house, because then she would not only figure out the truth, but she'd discover that Clare hadn't been quite honest with her.

There was a man standing in the living room looking out at the view when Clare was leaving the house. He looked as old as Richard, but his greying hair was in a long ponytail. He was wearing loose-fitting clothes that might have been pajamas.

“Hi, Dad,” said Jaylin. “This is Clare.”

“Ahoy!” said Jaylin's dad, and he held up his wineglass in greeting.

“If Mark gets to take the boat to Provincetown I get to go, too, don't I?” Jaylin asked.

“That sounds reasonable to me,” said her father.

“Will you tell him that, please?”

“When I have the opportunity.”

“Can Clare come, too?”

“I don't see why not,” said Jaylin's father.

Outside on the deck Jaylin turned to Clare. “That's great,” she said. “It looks like we'll be going on Friday,
as long as the weather's nice. You'll be able to come, won't you?”

Clare noted that Jaylin hadn't asked her if she wanted to come. Perhaps the answer was too obvious: of course she'd want to.

“I'll have to ask my dad first,” she said. It seemed odd to be referring to him as her “dad,” but surely it would seem odder to Jaylin if she called him “Richard.”

Before Clare left, Jaylin wrote Clare's phone number down on a pad of paper shaped like a shell, and because Clare hadn't brought anything to write on, she wrote Jaylin's number on the back of her hand with a ballpoint pen.

“That's my house number,” said Jaylin. “There's no cell reception here.”

“I know.”

“It's like the dark ages,” said Jaylin. She stood at the top of the staircase and waved to Clare when Clare turned to look back up at the landing. But when Clare got to the bottom of the staircase and looked up again, Jaylin had left.

***

When Clare got back to the house Richard was still at his desk. He looked as if he hadn't moved from his chair the whole time she was away.

“We had a nice piece of good luck while you were gone,” he said. “Someone renting out here spotted a turtle laying her eggs in the middle of a dirt road in front of their house and called the terrapin hotline—we'd given out notices to everyone on the island—and Steffi and her team were able to get out there and relocate the nest.”

“That's great,” said Clare.

“What happened to your hand?” asked Richard.

“Oh, that's just ink. I met a girl on the beach and we might do something together and that's her phone number.”

“Good. You made a friend,” said Richard.

“Made a friend” was what you'd say about a kid at the playground. And besides, Jaylin could hardly be counted as friend, certainly not yet. But Clare didn't say so to Richard.

“I guess I'll go change out of my bathing suit,” she said. She went upstairs to her room and added Jaylin's number to the contacts on her cell phone.
Her phone might be useless for calls, but at least she could store numbers there. She scrolled through her contacts, looking at all the names. She had a lot of friends, but most of them were friends that she never talked with about anything that mattered a whole lot; most of them thought things were better in her life than they really were. It was only her friend Susannah who knew how much she missed Peter and how she felt when Vera decided to marry Tertio. It was only Susannah—Susannah, who was stuck in Colorado for the summer, practically the other side of the whole country—who knew how she'd felt about being shipped off to this island to spend three weeks with a man who was, it was true, her father, but who was really a stranger.

She went to the bathroom to wash the ink off her hand. She ran the cake of soap across her hand and rubbed the spot with her thumb. Even after two soapings and two rinses she couldn't get all the ink off. You couldn't read the number anymore, but you could tell that something had been written there.

Once Clare had come home from school with someone's phone number written on her arm and
Vera had been upset. She'd said it looked like the number the Nazis had tattooed on the Jews in the concentration camps, and it would be distressing to Ian, who was Jewish. She also said that the ink could cause a problem for Clare's skin. Vera never had just one reason for anything.

It rained the next day and there was rain promised for the day after. Jaylin called to tell Clare they were going into Boston and staying in a hotel for a few days and asked if she wanted to come. Clare might have considered asking Richard if she could go if she still felt as she did when she first got to Blackfish Island, but now she declined right away. The point of coming to Blackfish Island was to spend time with Richard, not to be escaping to somewhere else.

“How come you're going to Boston?” she asked.

“My mom is hungry for some urban time and my dad needs some undisturbed time,” Jaylin explained.
“And Mark has some friend who's flying in to Logan so we'll meet up with him and then he'll come back and spend a week here.”

“That's nice,” said Clare.

“Nice!” cried Jaylin. “My brother gets to have a friend from home come and visit, but not me. ‘Next summer,' is what my mom said. She'd better believe I'll hold her to that next year.”

“Where's home?” asked Clare, changing the subject.

“Philadelphia,” said Jaylin. “An unfortunate distance from the Cape—just close enough so my insane parents think it driving distance. So I have to spend a hundred hideous hours in the car. Where are you from?”

“New York,” said Clare. “Not exactly New York, just the suburbs outside of it.”

“Lucky you. No wonder you don't want to go into Boston,” said Jaylin. “I'll see you when I'm back. And don't forget about the trip to P-Town.”

Clare hadn't mentioned the trip to Richard because she didn't know how serious Jaylin's invitation was, but now she thought she better ask him if she could go. He was working at his desk and when she came into his
room he pushed his reading glasses halfway down his nose and looked at her over the top of them. Vera would have had a hundred questions and probably would have wanted to speak to Jaylin's mother before she gave her consent. But Richard just nodded and said, “If that's what you'd like to do.”

It was a relief not to have to explain anything. Still it might have been nice if he'd asked Clare at least one question, just to show he was interested in what she was doing.

***

The rain weighed down the branches of the oak trees close by the house, and the lichens on the trunks of the pitch pine had a silvery hue against the rain-dark trunks. Mist muted the view of the marsh. It felt as if they were in a forest, not near a beach by the sea. But at low tide the island asserted itself. The woodsy smell of pine needles and humus was eclipsed by the smell of the marsh. And even if you couldn't see the bay, you knew it was close by.

Clare walked the beach with Richard twice a day, but they didn't spot any more turtle tracks. In the
evening Richard dug out some old board games which he said had been in the house for as long as he could remember.

“When we were out here in the summer, we had no TV, no video games—my mother liked it that way,” he said. He smiled. “I got used to it.”

The Parcheesi set had black cardboard cylindrical shakers that were missing their bottoms, so you had to cup your hand over it when it was your turn to roll the dice. Because there were only two players, they each played two colors. Clare's red and yellow came in second and third. Richard's blue was first.

The Chinese checkers board was beautifully carved wood, but Richard wasn't able to find the box of marbles that went with it. The only marbles he did find was an odd assortment in an oatmeal container. Richard spilled them out on a tray.

“My old collection,” he said, and he nudged them affectionately with his forefinger. They were different sizes and colors, some clear as glass, some opaque as stone. Clare held an apricot-sized green one up to the light. When you looked through it, it was like being under the sea.

Because there weren't enough matching marbles to make a set, Richard proposed using peas. “Peas against marbles,” he said, and he brought out a paper bag of peas from the refrigerator and a bowl to shell them in. They ate the ones too small for playing with. The peas lined up in the dimples of wood made Clare giggle, but Richard played very seriously, concentrating on the board as if he were in a professional chess tournament, not a man studying a battlefield army of mismatched marbles and unevenly sized green peas. Richard proved to be an amazing jumper. His peas followed ingenious zigzag routes to reach their destination.

“I don't know how you can see those moves,” said Clare. Richard ran through his eight-jump move in slow motion for her.

“The trick is you have to be willing to go backwards to find a path forwards. Most players are so fixed on advancing their pieces that they don't explore those longer, backwards routes.”

“You mean me?”

Richard smiled. “You. And everyone else. I was a crack Chinese checkers player when I was a kid. It was a winning strategy I learned from my father. It's a
strategy of the old, the patient. Kids never get it.”

“You didn't have any brothers or sisters, right?”

“No,” said Richard. “I was an only child, just like you.”

“How come?”

“What do you mean how come?”

“I'm an only child because, well, because Mom and you weren't married that long. And then I guess Peter wasn't ready to have kids—or … I don't know.” Clare wasn't really sure. Maybe it was because Vera didn't want to have kids with Peter.

“My mother had two miscarriages before she had me. And when she finally got her perfect baby—she called me that, but of course I wasn't really
perfect
,” Richard smiled broadly at this—“she decided that was enough.” Richard paused for a moment. “Do you like being an only child?” he asked.

“It's OK,” said Clare. “How about you?”

“When I was kid, yes, it seemed OK. As an adult, when my life got hard, I would have liked to have had a sibling to share that with. And when my parents died—within half a year of each other—I had no one to grieve with me.”

There was quiet all around them. Clare wanted to know what he meant by his life getting hard. It seemed like it was an opening to something, to some of the questions she wanted to ask, but she wasn't sure how to begin. She ran her finger along the row of marbles on the board in front of her. Then she looked up at him.

“What was hard?” she asked.

Richard looked as if he had expected this question, perhaps he had even drawn it out from her, yet he also seemed as if he didn't know how he was going to answer.

“I made some changes in my life—or rather, my life took me in directions I hadn't anticipated.”

Clare kept her eyes on the Chinese checkers. She felt suddenly afraid now, as if she was about to hear something she might not want to hear, and she was sorry she had begun this. And yet, maybe she wasn't.

“Was that when you moved to the West Coast?” she asked.

“Actually, it was after that. I relocated to California when you were three,” said Richard. “I was working in computers then and got involved with an Internet start-up company out there. Vera and I were having a
trial separation. I thought I'd be out there for only a while, see how things went.”