Summer Harbor (15 page)

Kiley walked down the hill into the village. Maybe she’d go as far as the harbor, admire the boats calling in from distant places. Or pop into the small library and pick out a mystery.

She was still agitated from her talk with Will last night, suffering from a galloping sense that she’d whitewashed the story. The facts were told, but purified by time and distance. Her bed had been too soft last night and sleep would not come. Maybe it was better this way: chewing on the past had certainly prevented her from dwelling on her immediate future. Over and over, Kiley replayed the mental tapes of her last three meetings with Grainger. The terrible words said, the horrific ending that last August night of their childhoods. Then, the stiff surprised greeting in the Osprey’s Nest. Finally, the fleeting easiness after the softball game, countered with his sudden walking away, as if he suddenly remembered he hated her. Just what did Grainger Egan want from her?

Almost to Main Street, Kiley decided to get some homemade ice cream at Linda’s Coffee Shop. But as soon as she turned the corner, she stopped. The Egan’s Boat Works truck was parked on Main Street, with Grainger’s dog sitting in the driver’s seat, its small brown eyes fixed on the door of the restaurant. The door opened and Grainger came out, greeted his dog with a pat, and handed it something from the take-out bag, then shoved it over with his hip and got in.

Kiley stood motionless on the sidewalk, invisible. He’d been so prominent in her relentless thoughts. Now, there he was, and for the first time, she noticed how much he had changed. The Grainger of her memory was a lanky youth, with ropy muscles and a narrow chest. This man was broad-shouldered, the tanned arms revealed by his paint-spattered T-shirt well-defined, his waist narrow, his torso big but lean. In the harsh July sunlight, she could see that his hair had darkened to true brown, touched at the temples with silvery gray. His face was etched with the lines of a man whose life was outdoors. He was a grown man.

A good-looking grown man with a life. All the imaginary conversations she’d had with him over the years had not prepared her for the reality of him. He’d existed only as the eighteen-year-old boy who’d made love to her and then rejected her. The one she had apologized to in her dreams over and over, the imaginary friend who had always accepted her apologies. It had been necessary to keep Grainger locked up in that magic box where he would always be that boy. But the reality of the man released that boy forever. This was the Grainger she needed to know.

Kiley turned on her heel and walked away. Her pulse was audible in her ears against the sound of traffic on the narrow street. Walking back the way she came, Kiley thought that she’d be walking away from him. But Grainger had turned in her direction, and was suddenly alongside of her. His eyes were on the double-parked car in front of him, then on the dog. Then, as if drawn by some instinct to look, he turned to see her. They were motionless, staring at each other. A car horn roused Grainger from his transfixion. He nodded a greeting, but did not smile. She raised a hand to wave, but he sped away.

She didn’t want to keep meeting Grainger like this, accidentally. After all, they did have Will between them. Regardless of paternity, Will existed, and Grainger could make what he wanted of it. The biggest secret from those days was now out in the open. What did he think about it?

Kiley remembered her father’s request to deal with the boat, and Grainger’s words: “Call me.” She would. No more pussy-footing around; she had a reason to see him. Maybe then they could begin to repair some of the damage.

Will was gone when Kiley got back home. The black phone sat quietly looming, waiting for her to pick it up and call Grainger. All the way back to the house, Kiley had rehearsed what she would say. She’d keep it all business.

He had a nice ad in the Yellow Pages, a silhouette of a schooner. Kiley stared at it as the phone on the other end rang and rang until an answering machine picked up. “Egan’s Boat Works. Please leave a message.” What can you tell about a man by his answering machine message?

“It’s Kiley. I’m calling about the boat. About
Random.
” She left her telephone number and hung up, painfully aware of the beating of her heart. The sudden shrill ring of the phone startled Kiley and she grabbed the receiver up, half expecting it to be Grainger.

“Kiley? Hey, it’s Conor.”

Kiley sat down on the little chair and ran a hand beneath her hair, lifting it up off her neck, where a trickle of perspiration bloomed. “Conor, hi.”

“Look, I know this is a little short notice, but would you like to have dinner tomorrow night?” When she hesitated, he pressed on. “I mean, if you don’t have anything going on. I’m thinking maybe Anthony’s in Great Harbor. Have you ever been there?”

“No. But…”

“Kiley, it’s all right. I know there’s baggage here, and we should talk about it.”

Why hadn’t Grainger said that? Why hadn’t she? Conor had always been on the periphery of her world, glimpsed as he led his glamorous, grown-up college life when they were still teens. He resided on Olympus, deigning only occasionally to notice them, and they all looked up to him. When she and Mack paired off, Conor had congratulated them, telling Mack he was very lucky. Telling her to confide in him should Mack behave badly. Conor had no idea the weight of the baggage she carried.

“Okay. But I’ll meet you there. I have some things to do in Great Harbor.” She wanted to tell Conor about Will before she brought them face-to-face; prep him, so to speak, before handing him a boy he might think was his nephew.

“I saw him today.” Kiley didn’t look up from her plate of spaghetti.

“Who?”

“Grainger.” Why had she even mentioned it?

“Where?” Will reached for the Parmesan cheese.

“He drove by when I was on Main Street.” It seemed a terribly difficult thing to spool the strands of spaghetti around her fork.

“Did he see you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you speak?”

“I think you could say that we were both struck dumb.”

“Are you guys grown-ups or not?” Will jabbed his fork into a piece of sausage. “Jesus. You could at least have waved.”

“Don’t swear. And I did wave.”

“Why don’t you invite him over for dinner or something?”

Kiley didn’t answer for a moment. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I guess I just don’t get it. You are dwelling on ancient history.” Will’s voice had risen; instantly, he lowered it. “Could you, for my sake, at least try to understand why I might want the two of you in the same room?”

“No,
I
really don’t get it. This isn’t some fucking
Parent Trap,
some happy-ending movie. We hurt each other. End of story.”

“Now who’s swearing?”

Kiley put her fork down and patted Will’s hand. “You’re too young to understand the difficulty—”

Will pulled away. “Don’t patronize me, Mom. It’s a pretty simple wish. I can’t get to know Grainger better if I think it’s making you unhappy.”

“Oh, Will. It won’t make me unhappy. I encourage you to get to know him. He was a wonderful guy; I’m sure he’s still wonderful. Just don’t expect us to want some orchestrated reunion neither one of us is looking for.” Grainger still hadn’t returned her call, and she took it to mean he didn’t want to; that his offer to help was simply the conditioned response of a man in the boat business. He was probably having second thoughts after seeing her at the picnic. “Don’t mistake wishful thinking for reality.”

Will shoved his plate away and opened one of his sailing books.

“Conor MacKenzie called me today. Mack’s brother.”

Will took his eyes off the page. “You didn’t tell me that Mack’s family is still here.”

“He’s the guy I was sitting with last night at the picnic.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“He doesn’t know about you. His parents don’t know about you.”

“You’ve managed to keep my existence secret from anyone who might have cared.”

“That’s a little harsh.”

“What are you so afraid of? That they’ll want custody?”

Kiley got up to scrape her plate into the compost container. “Sometimes it seems like a good idea to wait on something. Then, before you know it, it’s too late. It’s too late to tell the truth.”

“That’s not what you’ve told me before.”

“Well, he’ll know soon enough. I’m going out with him tomorrow night.”

“Good. I think that the MacKenzies will be happy to know that maybe they have a grandson.”

Kiley set her plate in the sink and squirted dishwashing detergent across it in a rough Z pattern. “You don’t think that it would be unfair to make them hope that you are their grandson?”

“It would be simple enough to prove it.” Will added his plate to the dishes in the sink. He leaned back against the counter and ran a hand through his hair exactly the way Grainger used to when he was debating something, gripping the ends of it in a tug before letting go. “I’d like to have a DNA test done.”

“You could only do that if one of the MacKenzies or Grainger goes along with it.” Kiley struggled to keep her voice even.

Will closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Mack had done that any time he was preparing a rebuttal to Grainger’s argument. “At least let’s ask them if they would.”

The water was scalding, and Kiley slammed the hot water faucet off, and pulled on the cold water faucet. “Can’t you just let it alone? What difference would it make in the end? I raised you. You’re my son. I didn’t need any of them before, and I certainly don’t need any of them now.”

Will pushed himself away from the counter and stalked toward the back door. “
You
might not, but I do.”

Kiley slammed the dish in her hand down into the soapy water, causing a geyser to slap the countertop and drip onto the floor. “This is exactly why I never wanted to come back here. This is exactly what I feared would happen. Things would be opened up, people would get hurt. I never should have come here.”

“You’re wrong, Mom. It was exactly what we both needed. You’re like a clam, holding on to that grain of sand. You’re starting to open up; now let go of the pearl.”

“Oyster. It’s oysters who make pearls, and there are no pearls here.”

“Let go, Mom. I deserve to have this one piece of the puzzle solved. I deserve to know who my father is.”

“I can’t talk about this anymore.” Kiley turned her back and addressed the dishes, scrubbing hard at the sauce pot, her dish sponge going round and round with a hollow splooshing sound. “Don’t I have enough to worry about, getting this house ready for sale, finding a new job, without having to—”

Will grabbed the car keys from the hook by the back door and walked out.

Having seen Kiley, Grainger was half expecting the knock on the door. He was in that twisted place of half hope, half dread. But it wasn’t her; it was Will. Grainger was sure the surprise of it was on his face; he could feel his expression change from clenched-jaw anticipation to pleasure. Surely Will saw it too, and Grainger was glad that the ultimate look on his face showed welcome.

“Come in.” Grainger held the door wide and left it open.

Will was trembling in a way that precluded simply being chilly. There was fear in his eyes, as if he was about to jump off the topmast yard of a schooner without being able to see the water below. Grainger had spent the summer between his two years at Maine Maritime crewing on a charter schooner. His mates were a rowdy bunch, always daring each other to greater and greater feats of bravado. As first mate, Grainger set the challenges. The very first day he climbed aloft, he felt a loosening up of the vise that had constricted his heart for five years. Most days he was almost unaware of it. Joy, happiness, laughter, were rare moments in his days. This one day, he climbed so high the crew and guests below him were pinpricks; and suddenly it was only him, his balance on the footropes, and the sky. Below him, the deck of the ship was inconsequential, the water surrounding it so great. Suddenly, literally, he was above it all. His view was southeasterly, and it was easy to imagine that he might see Hawke’s Cove jutting out into the Atlantic. He hadn’t been back since that night, and had no intention of ever going back. But that never stopped him from wishing it could have been different; from longing for another time.

He remained where he was until the sails below his feet began their descent, as the guests and crew folded the heavy canvas sails like a giant fan to rest on the boom. Without the view-blocking sails beneath him, Grainger felt even more above it all. He pulled his bare feet out from the footropes and grasped the very top of the mast, bringing himself slowly to a balanced upright position atop it, the soles of his feet against the pinnacle of the mast, his arms outstretched for balance. The crew and guests stopped what they were doing and looked up as Grainger launched himself, dropping with more speed than he had expected, into the deepwater cove. It hurt, but his hands had pierced the deceptively hard surface of the water first, and he came up uninjured. And feeling more alive than he had been in years.

Now Will Harris stood in front of him, a pale, choked expression on his face. Grainger shook off the memory of that long-ago plunge, aware that his heart was beating as hard as it had in that last second before he had dived.

“I should have called?” Will’s inflection was the one that teenagers affect, every statement potentially a question, leaving the door open to escape.

“No. It’s fine.” Grainger bent and ran his fingers through Pilot’s coat to check for ticks, acting as if Will’s dropping by unexpectedly was as normal as anyone else’s.

“This is probably random, and you can say no…” Will joined Grainger in the tick hunt, both of them avoiding a direct look. “But I wondered if you’d let me work here. You don’t have to pay me or anything. I just like the boats. I’d like you to teach me how to, like, do stuff with them.”

“Stuff?”

“Yeah. You know, what you do here, paint or scrape, learn to rig.”

“Is that the only reason?” The words were out of his mouth before Grainger could think them.

Will looked at Grainger with those black-encircled blue irises, his ram’s horn eyebrows over fair lashes that were long and almost girlish. He looked at him with a nonverbal challenge. The way Kiley had looked at him this afternoon, as if challenging him to speak first.

“No.”

Will didn’t offer his ulterior reason for wanting to hang out with him, but Grainger thought he knew what it was, and was suddenly overwhelmed with rising joy. Could it be that Will wanted to spend time with him in the hope that he might prove to be his father?

Grainger kept his embarrassingly moist eyes on the dog. “Great. Sure. Go get the tick jar from the workbench and then I’ll get you started.” Grainger was back in control by the time Will had located the mayonnaise jar with the kerosene in it, and he dropped a couple of wood ticks into the jar. “Okay. There’s still enough light out, so grab a mask and that sander under the bench. I’ll get you started outside.”

Grainger always claimed not to be a sentimentalist. He threw out everything no longer useful. He sold boats he’d labored on for months without a backward glance. He seldom got misty-eyed at movies. Without a tremble, he could say good-bye to people he knew he wouldn’t see again. That was life. People come, people go.

Only Grainger knew he was a fake, that he spent part of every day remembering the past. It was easier years ago, when he was kept on the move by his profession. He was distracted by card games at sea, long hours monitoring radar and Loran, reviewing navigational charts and taking orders. There was nothing with him or around him to remind him of the past. Then he came home. Back to Hawke’s Cove, where he’d sworn he’d never return, and every day since had been a war of maudlin sentimentality versus getting on with his life. What was past was unchangeable, and yet it infiltrated some moment of every day. The simple fact of being in this place, of seeing faces of people he’d gone to school with, walking the same streets, the overall unchangeability of his small town. The clock in the town hall tower that had never worked. The same surnames of the people who run the town. There had always been a Silva or a Fielding or a French as selectman or county commissioner or dog warden. Grainger choked back the memories and moved on.

Grainger knew that his mistake was in not creating new memories. He had nothing worth remembering with either joy or grief, besides those years of his youth. Even his two attempts at having a romantic relationship had faded away because he spent more time afloat than ashore. Natural, unremarkable, endings to tepid affairs. He had intended keeping this boy at arm’s length, keep him from awakening suppressed memories, but Grainger knew that from the moment he was aware of Will Harris, his defenses had been breached.

He got Will started sanding a hull.
Miss Emily
was still taking up all the space in the boathouse, needing one last coat of marine paint. Using a paint sprayer, it didn’t take Grainger long to finish while Will kept at his task outside. Stripping off his protective white jumpsuit, Grainger had a moment to look out the window. He might look out the window five hundred times a day, but now he looked with purpose. Will was squatting, the power sander held at shoulder height as he ran it along the hull beneath the waterline. His Cornell cap was twisted around so that the bill rested against his neck. Cornell. Nice choice. Grainger wondered what he was going to major in and almost went out to ask, then pulled himself back.
Leave him be.
They could talk about school when he came in; it would be too easy to lose the remaining light trying to get to know a boy who would very quickly be out of his life.

It hit Grainger, then, that it was incumbent on him to make sure Will
didn’t
slip out of his life. Whether or not he was his biological son, Will was a part of him. It didn’t really matter if Kiley wanted it or not; Grainger wanted it. And, if his suspicions were correct, it was something Will wanted too.

“Hey, Will. Do you drink coffee?”

Will stood up and pulled the mask from his face. Even at a distance, Grainger could see the dimples forming in his cheeks.

“Sure do.”

Mack had never liked coffee.

“Come inside in about ten minutes.”

Grainger turned away from the door. Mack and he had battled over Kiley, and now he would battle Mack’s memory for her son. Grainger knew he was doomed to read every mannerism, every blush or phrase, as a genetic marker. He knew that some days he would see Mack so clearly that there would be no denying Will was his legacy. And, maybe, on other occasions, he might hope that Will was his. Grainger slammed the glass carafe under the faucet, almost hard enough to break it.

Pilot barked in greeting as Will came in, his baggy green shorts and loose T-shirt dusty with sanded paint.

“Go wash your hands.” Grainger sounded paternal even to himself and turned away to hide a self-conscious smile.

When Will came back, he, too, was smiling. The smile of someone who’d uncovered something. “You have that picture too.”

“What picture?” Although Grainger knew. On his bathroom wall, hidden from public sight, was a photograph in a cheap black frame of Mack, Kiley, and him in front of
Blithe Spirit
as she sat on her cradle in Mack’s backyard. The only photograph Grainger had ever kept from those days.

“Of you guys. And the boat.”

Grainger said nothing, although he was pleased in some way that Will had seen that snapshot, seen a tangible connection between his mother and himself. They all had copies of that picture. The MacKenzies still had theirs in a gold-toned frame on a mantel in their house. Once or twice a year they invited him for dinner. Always overly cheery affairs; they never spoke of what went on before, they only spoke of today. Grainger called Mrs. MacKenzie “Doro,” and they all pretended nothing had ever happened. But Grainger didn’t think she loved him as she once did. He was now only a connection to her lost child, not the lost child she once saved. For a while, he was certain that she must have blamed him. He had run away that night, hitchhiked away from Great Harbor, heading toward the postmark on the letter his mother had sent, the letter Kiley had brought to him. Later, he couldn’t bring himself to return to them, to find out for sure what they felt.

Will added an enormous amount of half-and-half to his coffee. Sort of the way Grainger did.

“How does your mother feel about you being here? With me.”

“She’s okay with it. She told me it was all right for me to get to know you. She said you were a nice guy.”

Grainger sipped his coffee very carefully. “Ummm. I used to be.”

“Oh, come on.” Will laughed, amused for some reason at Grainger’s demurral.

Pilot, always good for distraction, sidled up to Will, looking for a rump scratch. Will obliged, and the dog got that ecstatic look of doggy pleasure as the boy’s long fingers dug into the perpetually itchy spot at the base of his tail.

Grainger watched Will’s face, noticing the way he didn’t make eye contact. “Why did you really come?”

“I told you…I’m interested in boats.”

“Will. If you and I are going to get along, we need to be honest.”

“Why? No one has been honest with me.”

The urge to ask, “And what has your mother told you, what has she said about me?” was physical, a burning on his tongue. “Ask me what you want to know.”

“I want to know what happened to Mack.”

Grainger scraped his fingers through his hair, now unable himself to make eye contact. “Have you asked your mother?”

“She told me that…” Will was flushed, his voice suddenly a low growl. “She told me what she did, that she slept with both of you, but she won’t tell me what happened in the end.”

“Life doesn’t have tidy endings. People hurt each other, and sometimes they don’t behave well.”

“But
I
was the result of her not behaving. And I don’t know if I’m the reason she’s cut herself off from this place, like she’s
ashamed
of me or something. Was it something else that made it impossible for her to come back? If she loved you both the way I think she did, then she could never have
not
told you about me.” Will rubbed the back of his hand against his eyes and moved toward the door. “I have to go.”

Grainger caught him by the elbow. “I can’t imagine that she was ever ashamed of you.”

Will stared at him, wavering, wanting to believe him.

“Come back tomorrow, like we planned.”

“No. It was a stupid idea.”

“Will, take the lesson.” Will’s eyes were still on him, looking at him with the same confused intensity as…no, no more. It was time to put the past to rest. “I’ll tell you what you want to know tomorrow.”

Will nodded.

Grainger waited until he was certain Will was gone before walking past Merriwell Harris’s
Random
to the covered Beetle Cat that had been sitting solitary in the boatyard for as long as he’d owned the place. She would be a good one for Will to learn on. Once again, she needed TLC and antifouling paint. Once again, she needed scraping and painting, brightwork renewed. It wasn’t a big job. Just one that had, like the story he would tell Will tomorrow, been waiting for him for a long time.