Safe Harbor (4 page)

“Of course not.”

“Well, he acted like it was. So did my mother.
My dad told me to grow up and my mom made jokes about how maybe my
father was having an affair.”

Kip cursed. “Do you think that’s what it’s
about?” he asked, taking her concern as seriously as she
did.

“No.” She toyed with the rubber band, twisting
it into figure-8 shapes and then letting it snap loose. “This is
going to sound really crazy, Kip, but sometimes I think it’s
something worse.”

“Like what?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s not
fair, Kip—this is supposed to be my happy time, the summer on Block
Island. But...I mean, for my mom to even joke about such a
thing...” The tears she’d been suppressing ever since her mother
had relayed the news about her father’s phone call finally broke
free. Shelley pressed her hands to her eyes and sobbed.

She was scarcely aware of Kip shifting,
reversing position, wedging himself next to her with his legs
forming a bridge over hers. He arched his arm around her and pulled
her against him, and she wept into the soft cotton of his shirt,
into the firm strength of his shoulder. A girl ought to be able to
cry on her mother’s shoulder, but Shelley couldn’t.

She had Kip, though. Maybe that was even
better.

After a long while, she sniffled to a halt. Her
shoulders rose and fell in a final shudder, and she pulled back
from him and swabbed her damp cheeks with her palms. “Sorry about
that,” she murmured hoarsely.

He smiled. As the sky darkened the
three-quarter moon grew brighter, reflecting off the lenses of his
eyeglasses. “Sorry about what?”

She recalled the first time they’d met, so long
ago, when he’d dragged her through the dune grass to inspect the
dead snake he’d discovered. His motivation had probably been to
shake her up, but she’d been tough and courageous. She’d squatted
down and stared the corpse straight in its lidless black eyes. No
doubt Kip had been testing her, trying to find out whether she was
a sissy. He’d found out she wasn’t.

But here she was, falling apart, blubbering,
her courage gone and her emotions overblown. Here she was, leaning
on him and acting like a dumb girl.

“I’m sorry I cried like that. I’m scared, Kip.
I know there’s no reason to be, but—”

“Maybe there is a reason to be,” he countered,
twirling his fingers through her hair. She understood that he
didn’t mean to alarm her, but rather wanted to reassure her that
her reaction wasn’t as dopey as she seemed to think it
was.

“If my parents get a divorce I’ll die,” she
declared.

“No you won’t.”

“But I love them both.”

“Well, maybe...maybe that’s not it at all.
Maybe your dad just has some problems to work out, and he wants to
work them out by himself.”

“Yeah—or with another woman.”

“Maybe he just wants some time alone. I
mean--every guy needs a little time to himself now and
then.”

“He has time to himself all week long,” she
reminded Kip. “We’re here. He’s all alone in Westport.”

“But he’s at work most of the time.”

“Whose side are you on, anyway?” she
snapped.

Kip groaned and socked her gently in the arm.
“Girls,” he grunted, an all-encompassing complaint. “Of course I’m
on your side, Shelley. I’m just trying to explain...”

“Explain what?”

“He’s a guy. There’s no way you can understand
everything that’s going on in his head.”

“You
are
taking his side,”
she accused, supremely annoyed.

“I’m trying to talk you down,
Shell.”

“You’re a creep. And I can too understand
everything that’s going on in his head. Same as your head. They’re
both empty. What’s going on inside them is zilch.”

Kip laughed. So did Shelley. Arguing with him
felt good; they both knew where they stood and what the situation
was. It wasn’t like arguing with her parents, where so much
remained unspoken, unacknowledged.

From four stories below came the wind-borne
drone of a moped engine. Shelley and Kip scrambled to their knees
in time to see a two-seater bounce up the driveway to the front
porch. The engine died and the two passengers—Diana and a strapping
young man with black hair and a thick mustache—climbed
off.

“That’s him?” Shelley whispered.

“The love of her life,” Kip whispered
back.

Her personal woes momentarily forgotten,
Shelley slipped into her spying mode. Spying on Diana was a summer
tradition for Shelley and Kip, although this summer Shelley found
herself spying on Diana less out of mischief than out of
admiration. Diana was so pretty, so sophisticated. In her tank top
and shorts, with her hair cut in an expertly styled shag and her
eyes enhanced with tinted contacts and a subtle touch of make-up,
with a narrow strap of braided leather circling one bare, slender
ankle, she looked awfully cool.

In less than two months she would be heading
off to Middlebury College. Maybe she was moody and sulky and she
took forever to get ready. But she knew things Shelley longed to
know, things that had to do with life and love and being a woman.
Spying on her with Kip was entertaining, but sometimes Shelley
wished she could spend a little time at Diana’s feet, learning
important things.

“I think he’s kind of cute,” she assessed
Diana’s boyfriend.

Kip made a face. “He’s a nerd.”

“He’s got a mustache. He must be
old.”

“I could grow a mustache if I wanted,” Kip
said.

Shelley glanced at him and wrinkled her nose.
“Nah. It wouldn’t suit you. You’re too clean-cut.”

He gave her
another playful sock in the arm. “
You’re
a nerd.”

“Shh.” She rose on her knees to watch as Diana
and her date paused before the porch steps. He wrapped his arms
around Diana’s shoulders, and she wrapped her arms around his
waist. Their lips met in a kiss.

After a prolonged minute, the porch light
flickered off and on. Diana and the guy sprang apart. “My mother,”
Kip murmured. “The guardian of virtue.”

“What’s she going to do when Diana goes off to
college?”

“Pray a lot.” He and Shelley watched as Diana
squeezed the guy’s hand in farewell and backed slowly up the stairs
to the veranda, gazing dreamily at him as he climbed onto the moped
and revved the motor. Not until he had vanished beyond the stone
wall did she turn and enter the house.

“Have you met him?” Shelley asked.

“Who, Romeo?” Kip turned from the window and
settled back onto the floor. Shelley sat as well, the tight
quarters forcing her into the curve of Kip’s arm. “Not really. My
mom invited him over for a barbecue Saturday evening, so she and my
dad can check him out. My dad’s going to be coming down with my
grandmother, my Uncle Ned and Aunt Martha and their kids, so the
guy will be just one face among many. Hey,” he said brightly,
pulling back to look at her. “Maybe you and your mother can come,
too.”

Shelley shook her head. “To a Stroud family
gathering? We wouldn’t fit in.”

“Of course you would. It’s going to be a mob
scene. And if your father isn’t coming to the island, what are you
and your mother going to do all weekend, sit around and mope?
Wouldn’t you rather come to our house and eat some charred meat and
soggy pickles? It’ll be a good time.”

“I don’t know,” Shelley hedged, although it did
sound like a lot of fun. Much more fun than watching TV with her
mother in their stuffy little cottage and wondering what Shelley’s
father was up to back in Connecticut.

“You’d get to meet Romeo,” Kip pointed
out.

Shelley was tempted. “Don’t you think you ought
to ask your mother first?”

“You know she’ll say it’s a great
idea.”

Of course she would. Kip’s mother wasn’t the
sort to get hung up on two guests more or less at a barbecue.
“Well...if it’s okay with my mother, then, sure, we’ll
come.”

“Good.” He gave her an affectionate hug, then
hauled himself to his feet. “How about let’s go get some lemonade
and bother Diana?”

“Okay,” Shelley agreed as Kip grabbed her hand
and hoisted her off the floor. Once again he had made her feel
better. As they descended the ladder into the house, she could
almost forget about the problems that had sent her crying into his
arms.

***

“DO I LOOK ALL RIGHT?” Shelley’s mother
asked.

Shelley turned from the mirror, where she’d
been trying futilely to do something interesting with her
exceptionally uninteresting hair. Her mother had on white jeans and
an oversized blue silk blouse that gathered in a knot at one hip.
From her ears dangled large gold hoops; her wrists were circled by
gold bangles.

“You look very classy,” Shelley said, meaning
it. She didn’t add that the Strouds had too much class to worry
about looking classy.

Shelley’s mother had met Kip’s parents on a few
occasions, and they’d exchanged small talk on the usual
subjects—the names of house painters, the outrageous cost of
electricity on the island, the most recent incident of vandalism at
the lighthouse up at Sandy Point. They’d never actually socialized
in a big way, though. When Shelley’s father was on the island the
Ballards did family-type things: going out to dinner at the
National Hotel, picnicking at Mohegan Bluffs or just hanging out at
the house, being together. And when Shelley’s father wasn’t on the
island, her mother felt peculiar about venturing out in public
without him. “I’m a married woman,” her mother would claim. “I’m
not used to traveling solo.”

After much
urging from Shelley, however, her mother had decided to attend a
party without a proper escort.
Three
cheers for independence
, Shelley had
muttered under her breath when her mother finally accepted Kip’s
invitation. Just because her mother had married her father at the
age of twenty-one, just because she’d never had an outside job—let
alone a career—or an identity apart from “Mary Ballard, wife and
mother,” just because she’d never done anything solo didn’t mean
she couldn’t go to the Strouds’.

She was nervous, though, and because she was
Shelley couldn’t be. Giving up on her hair, she tossed her brush
onto the dresser and stepped into her sandals. She wore a polo
shirt, khaki shorts and a thin gold chain about her neck—a birthday
present from her father. The best thing she could say about her
appearance was that, six weeks into the summer, she had acquired a
dynamite tan.

“Well, let’s go,” her mother said brightly. It
was obvious that she was trying hard to be cheerful despite the
absence of her husband.

Downstairs, Shelley’s mother stopped in the
kitchen to pick up her purse and a bottle of Zinfandel. When her
mother had purchased the wine Shelley had tactfully reminded her
that people at barbecues drank beer and soda, but her mother
wouldn’t listen. “When someone invites you to dinner,” she
explained, “it’s correct to bring a bottle of wine.”

Her mother handed her the bottle once they were
both seated in the car. Shelley recited the directions, and her
mother drove. Her grip on the wheel wasn’t too tight, but Shelley
could sense the anxiety in her mother’s slender arms, in her taut
jaw, in her rigid posture as she squinted in the early-evening
sunlight. As much as Shelley missed her father, she realized her
mother missed him in different ways—not only because she wanted to
see him and talk to him, but because she felt insecure and exposed
without him.

Shelley had always admired her parents’
marriage. Some of her classmates had divorced parents, and they
seemed sad and confused about it. But until this summer, when
strange, ominous undercurrents kept churning through her family,
Shelley had considered her parents an ideal couple. George Ballard
conquered the world and Mary Ballard organized the home front.
George earned the money and Mary spent it wisely, not on trinkets
and junk but on the sort of clothes, household furnishings and
jewelry that would earn the family a respectable place in the
world. Shelley’s parents strove hard; they looked good together;
they complemented each other.

It had always seemed to work so well—until this
summer. Something was amiss, a gear out of alignment, a clamp
broken, two pieces of metal rubbing together, creating friction,
setting off sparks. For the first time in her life, Shelley found
herself wondering whether being in such a tight, self-contained
marriage was a good thing, after all.

At least, she resolved, when she got married
she would have her own career. None of this
not-used-to-traveling-solo stuff for her. She would marry, of
course—a strong, ethical, handsome man like her father, a man
devoted to taking care of her, even if she would require less care
than her mother. She would marry a wonderful guy and live happily
ever after, but she would never let herself become dependent on
him.

“That’s the driveway over there,” Shelley said,
gesturing toward the opening in the stone wall. She’d pointed out
the Stroud place to her parents before, but she didn’t blame her
mother for not remembering. There were so many pretty stone walls
on the island, so many tangled hedges of rose and honeysuckle, so
many charming Victorian houses crowned with cupolas.