Summer Harbor (14 page)

Race day dawned pinkish gray, a streak of mackerel sky foretelling tomorrow’s storm. Kiley and Mack rowed out to
Blithe Spirit
in silence. When he’d tried to kiss her hello, she’d turned her mouth away from him, afraid suddenly that their new intimacy would be spelled out for all to see. No, not for all—for Grainger to see. Grainger was already aboard
Gemini,
crewing for the Doublemints. Kiley shipped the oars as Mack grasped the sailboat’s grab rail and hauled the dinghy close to the Beetle Cat. She took his hand as she stepped from one craft to the other, but let go as soon as both feet were in the boat.

This morning, they were shy with each other. Tentative. Kiley had lain awake most of the night, wrestling with guilt. Not from having had sex, but the guilty aftertaste of knowing she may have made a mistake. As hard as she tried to convince herself that Mack was the one, that what they’d done was the natural outcome of a prolonged, if odd, courtship, it was Grainger who kept haunting her sleeplessness. She had begged Mack to say nothing.

“What kind of guy do you think I am? Kiss and tell?” he’d protested.

“I think you’re his best friend, and best friends tend to tell each other everything. Yes. You have to promise me.”

“I promise.” Mack looked slightly disappointed.

Grainger was standing in the stern of
Gemini.
He waved and Kiley waved back, glad of the distance between them. Just as he knew they’d paired off, surely he would know that they had carried their relationship to this new plane.

Mack climbed into the cockpit, blocking her view of Grainger for moment. “Ready?”

“Yeah, sure.” Kiley hauled on the mainsheet. The sail rose easily, the breeze filled it and they were off, heading for the start of the race. As they moved away from the other boats, Kiley turned to look again at
Gemini.
Grainger was seated, one arm casually around one of the twins. From the distance, Kiley couldn’t see if Grainger was touching her, or simply resting his arm on the gunwale behind her.

Mack snickered. “Looks like he’s doing all right with the Doublemints. He could get a twofer.”

“That’s gross.” Kiley felt a knot of something begin to twist itself in her gut. Some foreign emotion she couldn’t quite define.

Mack chucked her under the chin as if she was a sulky child. “Come on, cheer up. We’ll beat ’em.”

“No, we won’t.” Kiley knew she sounded snappish, though Mack didn’t deserve it. “We just aren’t the sailors they are.”

Suddenly quiet, Mack guided the little boat along until they reached the area where other boats in their class were circling like wary opponents, waiting for the committee boat to signal the start.

“I think maybe you’re sorry about what happened last night.”

Kiley shook her head. “No, I’m not.” She reached out and took Mack’s hand. “I’m just a little tired.”

Mack squeezed her hand, then brought it to his lips. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” But she knew that she didn’t mean it in the same way he did. Mack was good and kind and fun…but he wasn’t Grainger. Kiley kept her face turned away so that Mack wouldn’t read the truth so plainly written there.

The next day Kiley drove to the Seasaw Motel, a two-story concrete building with little affectations of the seaside in the electric blue fake shutters that framed each window and the pots of geraniums outside each door, cigarette butts poking out of them like pegs. She could hear screaming children and splashing coming from the pool behind the building. Cars with out-of-state licenses filled the parking lot, and it was hard to find a free space. Kiley didn’t know which room was theirs and, even as she went into the small office reeking of cigarette smoke and damp rug, she worried that she might come face-to-face with Grainger’s father.

Mrs. MacKenzie had asked her to deliver a letter to Grainger. Postmarked “Boston,” it was hand-addressed. “I think he should have it right away. Will you take it to him? Mack won’t get home from work until four.”

It was as if the hand of God had come to guide her. After the race Saturday, Kiley had avoided Grainger except to congratulate him and the twins on their third place finish. But avoidance was no good, the wrong fix. She needed to see him, to speak to him, to explode this bubble of uncertainty lodged in her gut. She needed to know that she had made the right decision. There seemed no way to accomplish that until now,
deus ex machina,
she was being sent to Grainger. She was nervous. What if he got angry that she just showed up, when so clearly he, too, was distancing himself?

No. No matter what, he was still her friend. And she had been sent. Kiley shook off the nervousness.

She asked the desk clerk which room belonged to the Egans, steeling herself against meeting Mr. Egan, steeling herself to look Grainger in the eye.

The desk clerk was about Kiley’s age, a little hard around the eyes, and she took a long drag on her cigarette as she flipped through the guest register. “One oh one. First on the left.”

“Is Mr. Egan there, or is he out?”

She stamped her cigarette out, grinding it as if pondering the question. “Beats me.”

“Thanks.”

Kiley clutched the envelope in her hand. She had no idea what she’d say to Grainger, assuming he was there, assuming he would talk to her. She had never struggled for words with either of them, and maybe it was that they’d never said a serious thing to one another in all those years. Always teasing, jousting, gossiping. Never sitting down and explaining what they were really made of. Never telling each other that they loved one another. In those days, so distant to her now, it felt incomplete to be with only one of them. When waiting for one or the other of them to arrive, it was a temporary bifurcation, soon brought into balance. Now, nothing was in balance—as if her ballast had shifted and she was in danger of sinking. She should be dizzy with love, not weighted with guilt.

Kiley was standing on the cement walkway, the envelope in her hand, staring at the number on the motel door, when it opened. For a moment she thought that Grainger had been waiting for her, had known she was coming.

“What are you doing here?” Grainger’s voice was sharp, surprised.

Kiley could only hand him the letter.

He accepted it without taking his eyes off her until she blushed, wondering if he could see in her face what she and Mack had done. “Come in.”

“Your father…”

“Out. Fishing. I’m by myself.”

The room was tidy, the television on, and Grainger shut it off. Take-out wrappers were scattered on the small round table under the window. He’d been eating and must have seen Kiley through the half-closed curtains. Grainger stuffed the papers and napkins into the trash and gestured for her to sit down. She took the only chair. He sat in front of her on one of the double beds. “Why did you come?”

“Mrs. MacKenzie thought you’d want that letter right away, and Mack is at work. So I brought it.”

Grainger looked at the letter. An ordinary number ten envelope, plain white. He studied his name, handwritten on it, as if trying to decipher a code hidden in the neat letters. Kiley leaned a little closer, her curiosity aroused by his long contemplation of it. Where the return address should have been, there were only black lines, someone’s deliberate crossing out of the business address.

“Open it.”

“Later.”

“Why not?”

“I’d just rather open it alone, okay?” His voice wasn’t gruff or even annoyed, but his excluding words hurt.

“Okay. Read it in peace.” Kiley had the door open before he called her back inside. This was a bad idea. She shouldn’t have come.

“I’d ask you to stay, but that isn’t fair to Mack. Or to you.” He kept his gaze on the envelope still in his hand, but the longing in his voice called to her, the same longing she felt for their old friendship.

But no, it was different. There was something else in his voice. Her eyes were open now. “Grainger?”

“Everything is different now; you’ve chosen Mack. You’re right for each other. I’m happy for you.”

Kiley pressed the metal door closed, and the sound of the latch clicking shut felt like her heart clicking open. He loved her, and she had been too blind to see it. No, not too blind, too disbelieving. “Grainger, why didn’t you speak first? Why didn’t you say something?”

“What difference would it have made? I never stood a chance.”

Kiley moved away from the door. “It would have made all the difference.” She reached across the divide between them and touched his face. “All the difference.”

He moved away from her hand as if he’d been burned. “Mack is my best friend.”

“And you’re his.”

“You were ours.”

“I wish Mack had never said anything to me. He changed everything.”

“But he had to. You can’t go on feeling like this and not say something. You can’t suppress these feelings. If he’d only told me long ago, come clean to me first, then I would have…”

“What?”

“Let go of my own dream.”

“For Mack’s sake? What about your own?”

“You don’t understand. His family saved me, gave me a new start in life. How could I repay them by taking away his dream? What kind of friend would I be?”

“What kind of friend are you to
me?
Where do my feelings come into this? You two decide who gets me?”

“We didn’t decide; we never planned this.”

“I never wanted to choose between either of you.”

“Then why did you?”

“I didn’t know how you felt. If I had…”

Grainger paced across the small room, then came back and took her hand. “If Mack had said nothing and I said nothing, which one of us would you have chosen?”

Grainger stood in front of her, the shadows of the room somehow enlarging him into a prototype of the man he would become. Kiley could smell him, his sweat from honest labor mingling with the pungent smell of arousal. They were standing close now, too close. It was so easy to have his arms around her, a snug harbor. Tears rolled from her eyes, and she made no move to stanch them.

It was all clear. What she felt for Mack was childish, insubstantial. A mere shadow of the feelings flooding her at the touch of Grainger’s cheek against her hair, his breath against her forehead. Lifting her chin, she breathed in deeply to receive it, hoping to find his mouth coming to meet hers. “You, Grainger. You.”

At his kiss, the taste of his tongue and the salt of her own tears, she felt as if she were falling away, as if the ocean had opened up and dragged her down—not in a frightening way, more like the comfort of safe waters, knowing she could breathe underwater.
I am drowning in him
, she thought,
and I will not struggle.

Will watched his mother’s face as she talked. He had the oddest impression that, as she reached deep into her memory to pull out the story she needed him to hear, the girl she had once been began to surface. Her eyes, seeing what her words described, brightened; she smiled, and long forgotten dimples showed in the corners of her mouth. He began to see her as she once was, and from the shadow of the beautiful girl she’d been, Will saw that his mother was now a beautiful woman. He was proud that his mother looked good, and, at the same time, a little unnerved by recognizing it.

As her story went on his mother’s pace slowed, her words mined from a treacherous vein. The dimples receded, she tucked her hair behind her ears and her eyes clouded with pain. Her voice dropped lower and lower as if in amazement at the pictures in her mind she was giving to him. Will realized she’d forgotten to whom she was telling this story. And he’d forgotten that it was
his
story.

It was such a complicated tale. The way she was telling it, at least he was cushioned, hearing it as a legend, as a tale outside of himself, outside of her, his mother. These things that had happened involved those three kids beside the boat, those strangers.

Will tried to sort out that phrase:
In every love affair, there is a beloved and a lover. One who loves more.
He knew where he stood in that equation with Lori; it was very obvious. He couldn’t quite parse it in his mother’s story. It seemed as though they were all the lovers and, at the same time, each one beloved. Kiley was beloved of both Mack and Grainger. She believed that it was in equal measure. In turn, she loved them both, almost equally. What had she said? They had been two halves of her whole.

Then there was the third factor in this increasingly weird equation: the love Grainger and Mack had for each other. Brotherly, best friends, like no friendship he’d ever had. The kind of bond that can be badly damaged by betrayal, and remain unhealed for years. Decades.

Only the thump of the porch rockers kept the moment from complete stillness.

Will waited for his mother to go on until he understood that she’d come to the end of her story. He spoke gently, as if waking her. “Mom?”

She roused herself enough to remember he was there. “What, hon?”

“How did it end? I mean, after you and Grainger hooked up? What happened with Mack? How did he take it?”

She dropped her eyes, but not before Will saw the tears in them. Her lips trembled slightly and she bit at them. “Not well.”

“So what happened?”

She pushed herself out of the rocking chair, sending it into a wild canter. “I can’t tell you. I thought that I could, but I can’t.”

“I have to know. You can’t not tell me.” He was being cheated. He tried to control the petulance in his voice as he demanded again, “Come on, Mom. You’ve told me this much. How did it end?”

She put one hand out to stop the motion of the rocking chair. She looked down on her son, then looked to the sea beyond the bluff, the water a deeper dark than the sky above it, a visible line defining where one began and the other left off. “You see, Will, my mistake wasn’t in choosing Mack or Grainger, but in choosing at all. That was the answer I should have given Grainger. I wouldn’t have chosen.”

“So you really don’t know who my father is.”

His mother looked down on him with a smile, her dimples showing. “Your father was the love of my life.”

Like Alice’s rabbit hole, the entry to his mother’s past had disappeared.

After breakfast the next day, Will tried to concentrate on the books Grainger had loaned him. He lay on his narrow bed and thumbed through the illustrated manuals, rehearsing the lexicon under his breath.
Jib, jibe
or
gybe, mainsail, cleat, clew, shroud, running rigging, standing rigging, bitt, block,
blah blah blah.

Every word conjured the image of the three friends in their boat, the tension between them like a foul wind.

Every instruction teemed with minute details: move the tiller in that direction to go in the opposite. Even directions for moving a boat away from a dock seemed unnaturally complicated. Will chided himself. He was going to major in architecture; surely he could figure this out.

But it was no good. He couldn’t concentrate with the story his mother had told him whirling around in his head. For although he told himself that at least she’d loved the two boys, that he was not a product of rape, he couldn’t shake the fact that he was very angry.

Fickle.
That was the word; his mother had been cruelly fickle. No wonder the two boys, now men, wanted nothing to do with her. And, by default, him.

Will dropped the books on the floor of his bedroom and went downstairs. His mother was nowhere in sight, but the car was in the driveway and he helped himself to the keys. He would go to Great Harbor and try to shake this cloudiness away. After scrawling a note on the back of an envelope to say he didn’t know when he’d be back, Will left the house, letting the screen door slam in anger and frustration.

Will pulled away from the stop sign a little too fast. Sand spit out from under the tires, making him think of Grainger pulling away too quickly from him. Grainger would know how the story ended. Something had happened; Will was certain of it. If Mack had only gotten mad and said horrible things, she would have said so. The look in her eyes told him there was definitely more to the story.

Even only yesterday, he’d thought it would be enough to know how he came to be. But now, every answer was shadowed by another question.

Great Harbor had all the shops and game rooms and movie houses Hawke’s Cove lacked, as well as a strip mall with Staples on one end and T.J.Maxx at the other. A real town. Not like Hawke’s Cove with its old-fashioned, uncool dry-goods store, and plain old coffee shop instead of Starbucks. Will pulled into the strip mall parking lot and went into the coffee bar. Sitting in the window, drinking but not tasting his latte, Will noticed the electric blue shutters of the motel across the street. A shiver of recognition raised the hair on his arms. The motel where…the thought formulated itself before he could deflect it…where he might have been conceived. In the darkness, accompanied by the soft percussion of the rocking chairs, his mother’s story had seemed about fictional people—but seeing those blue shutters brought the truth of it home like a sledgehammer.

“Hey, look out.” A girl’s voice behind him spoke in warning.

Will glanced back and saw behind him one of the girls from last night, swiveling to avoid a large man who was completely unaware of her. He had nearly spilled his tray of coffees on her, and she banged into Will’s table to avoid being stepped on. Will reached out and grabbed her tall paper cup before it tipped off of her tray.

“Good catch. Thanks.”

Will set the cup back on her tray. She stood a moment longer, scouting for a place to sit down. “I’m almost done, sit here.” Will pointed to one of the cushiony chairs alongside his small table.

The girl gave the room one more look and then sat down, her tray taking up most of the table. “Thanks. It gets crazy in here.”

“So I see.” Will didn’t know whether to say more, or if, like him, she’d come in here to get away from something. To think about something.

She gave Will a look. “Don’t I know you?”

“I sat next to you last night at the fireworks.”

“Will, right?”

“Catherine?”

“Catherine Ames.” The girl opened up her bagel and began spreading cream cheese on it so that both flat surfaces were covered with exactly the same amount. “I work at the T.J.Maxx. Summer job, although I get a few weekends in during the holidays.”

“So you live here year-round?”

“Mmm.” The girl sipped her tall coffee. “Hawke’s Cove.”

“Me, too. I mean, I’m there for a couple of weeks.”

“Summer kid?”

“No. Well, sort of. It’s my first time, although my family’s been here since the thirties.”

“Where?”

“Overlook Bluff Road.”

“That’s where the rich folks live. You rich?”

“No, we’re not rich. My mother and I aren’t, that is.” Will took another sip of his cooling coffee and wondered if he should leave. He didn’t relish having to talk about his family right now. At the same time, he was glad for this break from the tyranny of his private thoughts.

“Ours is a new house, in Cove terms. About fifteen years old. We moved in when I was three. It’s on Bailey’s Farm Road.”

Will startled a little at the name of the road. “Near Bailey’s Beach?”

“Yeah. Not a lot of people know that beach. Do you go there?”

Will frowned a little behind his cup.
No, but I might have been conceived there.
“I’ve heard of it.” Dear God, his mother had slept with two guys. He felt a little sick and only caught up to this girl’s sentence halfway through.

“It’s the best. No crowds. I’ll take you there sometime.”

He’d thought last night that she was cute; now he took an unabashed look at her. Catherine’s short dark hair was highlighted with a little red, her nose, which fit her small face perfectly, sported a tiny pink stone in one nostril. He’d never much cared for nose piercing, but this one looked nice. Her thick dark brows accented the dark of her eyes, eyes he realized were looking at him in a similar critical exercise. He wondered what she saw. “When do you go back to work?”

“I have to go back”—Catherine checked her watch—“in one minute.”

“Are you seeing anyone?” Will felt an unaccustomed boldness rise in his chest.

“No. Why?” Catherine was standing, her tray in her hands.

“Maybe you’d like to go out?”

“When?”

“Tonight? Tomorrow?”

“I’m off tomorrow.”

“I’ve got something in the morning.” His sailing lesson.

“After lunch?”

“Let’s say two o’clock.”

“Maybe we could go to the beach, if it’s good.”

“Could we go to Bailey’s Beach?”

Catherine smiled at him, an odd smile, as if she’d made a bet with herself that’s what he’d say. As if she knew him already. “I live at number fifteen Bailey’s Farm Road.”

“Perfect.”