Tales From Sea Glass Inn (27 page)

Tam started gathering the blue and white
spinnaker, stuffing the lightweight sail under the boom and down the hatch. She
pointed at the beach. “Hey, Pam. The inn is over this way now.”

Pam was leaning over the railing, staring at
the open sea as if it might calm her stomach. She and Mel had driven down to
Newport this morning to join Tam on a sail up the coast because Pam wanted to
see the Sea Glass Inn from a new angle and make a whale’s view painting of it.
The two of them had seemed excited at first, but they’d grown quieter during
the short sail to Cannon Beach.

“All she’ll remember from this trip is
dangling over the railing and being sick,” Mel said. She was sitting on a
red-cushioned bench with her knees hugged to her chest. “We’ll be giving you
paintings of the side of your boat for your next five birthdays.”

“Maybe I’ll make a portrait of you, Mel,” Pam
said in a weak voice. “That green tinge on your cheeks is a very flattering
color.”

“I’m not sick,” Mel said in an indignant
tone. Tam might have been more convinced if she hadn’t noticed the same color
Pam had. “It’s a new makeup. All the rage now. The beautiful blush of
seasickness.”

Tam laughed. She had met Mel almost a year
ago, when the oil spill hit Cannon Beach and Tam was called here from her
Newport office of the Department of Fish and Wildlife. She and Pam had been
acquaintances for ages since they had both spent part of their childhood here
on the shore. Mel and Pam had been the first people to welcome Tam back to what
she loosely considered
home
,
and although her homecoming had been anything but pleasant, she had been
grateful for their readily offered friendship. She liked hearing the playful
banter between them, companionable and intimate even though they weren’t
feeling well. Tam, on the other hand, felt great. The rough seas and salt air
nourished her more than food could ever do, and she relished the tactical
thrill of sailing out here where skill and confidence could mean the difference
between living and drowning.

She sat with a relaxed hand on the tiller
while Pam eased herself away from the railing and onto the bench next to Mel.
Her life vest rose up when she plopped down, bumping her in the chin, and she
pulled it back into place.

“I should probably tell you now how happy we
are that you’ve moved back here, Tam,” she said, picking up her pad and
squinting toward the shore. “Because I doubt I’ll be speaking to you after the
return trip.”

“I’m starting the not-speaking-to-her thing
right now,” Mel said. “I don’t know why I bothered to pack a nice lunch for us
when I won’t be able to hold any food down. Oh, Pam, look at the way the
sunlight’s hitting the studio. How lovely.”

“I see it,” Pam said, her charcoal pencil
rapidly capturing the scene in front of her. Her voice grew steadier the more
she worked. Even Mel seemed captivated enough by the view of her inn from the
ocean to perk up somewhat.

Tam watched with interest as the beach and
the large house unfolded on Pam’s paper before her eyes. Pam shook her hand and
continued working with short, brisk flicks of her pencil.

“Can you hold the boat still for a minute,
Tam?”

“Yeah, sure. One of my special sailing skills
is calming the seas.” Tam shook her head with amusement. She brought people
sailing with her on occasion, usually preferring to be on her own in the middle
of water and waves, and most of them got the same queasy look she was seeing in
Mel and Pam. She didn’t think she had a particularly strong stomach or any
immunity to being sick, but she always took more care to keep stunts to a
minimum when she had guests on board. Most of her passengers were undone by
what she’d consider an easy sail.

“This is the Pacific Ocean, not the lake at
summer camp,” she said. She gently adjusted their course to give Pam a change
of angle. “Besides, I thought the two of you said you’d sailed before.”

“We have,” Mel said in an indignant voice,
ending with a sheepish laugh. “On the lake at summer camp.”

“Never again,” Pam said, never taking her
gaze off the scene before her. “I’m not even getting on one of those fake boats
in Seaside’s kiddie park, just in case they slip off the track and fall into
the water.”

Mel laughed, and then groaned and leaned back
in her seat. Tam handed her a ginger ale from the cooler and Mel took it with a
moan of thanks.

“I blame you for this, too, Pam,” Mel said.
“You’ve known her for years and you should have warned me about how she sails.
Remind me not to let her drive us home.”

“I’m a great driver,” Tam said with pretend
indignation. “I never get speeding tickets.”

“Because no cop can catch her,” Pam said,
chewing on the end of her pencil and tilting her head as she examined the back
of Haystack Rock. “Can you take us a little closer? And over thataway.”

She waved toward the south side of the large
basalt formation, and Tam shook her head with caution. She’d been much closer
than this before, maneuvering delicately around the rock with one hand and
snapping pictures of birds and seals with the other, but she wasn’t sure these
two were up for the added roughness. “We’ll get tossed around a bit more than
we are now. Are you sure?”

Pam swallowed visibly and pointed. “See those
nesting murres? I want to paint them.”

Tam looked at Mel for her opinion. She sighed
and nodded with the look of a martyr heading to the gallows. “Anything for the
artist,” she said.

Her voice was punctuated with an exaggerated,
long-suffering sigh, but Tam had a feeling Mel meant those words without
hesitation. The connection and love between the two women was at once awesome
and sad for Tam to witness. She had never experienced anything like it herself,
although admittedly she’d never hung around long enough for a real bond to
form. Unattached and free. That was her motto.

She went as close to the rock as she was
willing to go with Pam and Mel along for the ride. She’d have pushed the limits
further on her own, but she was careful with her passengers.

“Whew,” Mel said when a particularly strong
wave rolled under the small sailboat. “You need to distract me, Tam. Get my mind
off losing my breakfast and tell me what Pam was like as a little girl.”

Tam usually hated to talk about her
childhood. She, like Pam, had grown up around here with her grandparents. Pam
had spent summers here, while Tam had been dropped off for unpredictable and
increasingly frequent amounts of time by her freewheeling mother. Mel looked
like she really needed to get her attention off the movement of the boat,
however, and Tam didn’t mind talking about Pam. Anyone but herself. She pointed
at Pam, who was drawing with a rapt and distant expression.

“What you see is what you get, even back
then,” she said. “Pam was always the introspective sort, wandering the beaches
with her sketch pad and a dreamy look in her eyes. We all thought she was a
little loony.”

Pam laughed. She continued to draw rapidly,
her eyes seeming to see past the birds on the rock and onto the canvas on which
she’d eventually paint them. Tam appreciated her talent but didn’t share
anything like it. She was connected to earth and sea, as down-to-earth as Pam
was visionary and imaginative.

“I had plenty of inspiration for drawings
with Tam around,” Pam said. “I remember a watercolor of her clinging halfway up
the side of that bluff over there while she waited for the fire department to
rescue her. And I did an interesting charcoal study of her draped over the hull
of a capsized rowboat before the Coast Guard arrived and hauled her ass out of
the ocean. I got my first start with portrait painting by capturing the look of
terror on her face.”

“Exhilaration,” Tam corrected with a laugh.
The day on the bluff had been exciting, and she’d had her first crush on the
woman firefighter who got her off the cliff. The time in the rowboat really had
been frightening, but she wasn’t about to admit it. She’d learned her lesson,
though, and it had been pounded into her by the cold waves that had threatened
to unmoor her from the hull of the boat. To this day, she might be daring, but
she’d never lost her healthy respect for the ocean’s power.

“Whatever,” Pam said. She finally looked away
from her sketchbook and at Mel. “You know what? I blame me, too. I should have
remembered those incidents before agreeing to come on a boat ride with her.”

“
You
asked
me
for a
ride, not the other way around,” Tam said with a laugh. She kept her boat
moored at Newport even though she’d be in charge of the new Cannon Beach
office. She knew why she had eventually applied for the position after turning
it down repeatedly, but she still wasn’t convinced it was a good idea to be back
here. She was staying at the inn until she either ran out of money and got a
place of her own, or until she quit and went back to her old job. There were
too many memories here. One memory in particular—her father—had abandoned her
here and now was trying to call her back. She’d needed him then, and he needed
her now. He wasn’t going to get what he wanted any more than she had as a
child. She pushed aside the guilt she felt whenever he came to mind these days.
She wasn’t after revenge. She just had nothing to give.

Pam continued their joking, likely unaware of
any underlying tension in Tam, who was reconsidering her return to Cannon Beach
yet again. “I asked for a ride because I’ve been watching you sail back and
forth for the past two years, in this damned cute boat with the blasted blue
and white sail. It looked like fun. From the shore. My mistake.”

“You’ll have to give her one of the
watercolors you’ve painted, Pam,” Mel said. Now that Tam had aimed the sloop
back toward the south and they were moving faster, the chop didn’t have as much
effect on stomachs. Mel eased herself into a more upright sitting position, let
go of the death grip she’d had around her knees, and dropped her feet to the
deck. “She’s made a few with your boat in them, Tam. The bright colors contrast
beautifully with the clouds and dark rocks.”

Tam smiled and murmured something about
wanting to see them, but she was startled by the idea of Pam seeing her often
enough to paint her. Tam had been avoiding this place, but she realized now that
her sailing trips often brought her to this area. She must have been drawn here
more than she thought. The subconscious homecoming trips disconcerted her.
She’d felt in control, coming here for this job as a choice and as a way to
find closure and say good-bye to the past. Had she been controlled, instead, by
a stubborn need to really come home? Stubborn and foolish. The past was past,
and all she had to do was let it go. She turned her attention away from her
troubling memories and focused instead on getting them safely back to her
boat’s harbor.

*

Tam walked down the bright, shiny hallway of
Seaside Hospital’s new oncology ward. The unit had been in existence for
decades, staffed by only two doctors and several nurses, but it had recently
grown because of a sizable bequest from a wealthy local woman. She’d been
forced to travel away from her beloved ocean to receive treatment in Portland,
and she’d willed her entire estate to make sure others didn’t have to do the
same thing.

Tam had read stories about the woman’s legacy
in the Newport newspaper, little realizing at the time that she’d be one of the
first wave of relatives coming to visit patients in the new wing. At the
moment, she wasn’t even sure she’d make it to his room, let alone go inside and
actually visit him. She’d turned back a couple of times, almost making it to
her car again. On her third attempt, she’d gotten as far as the nurses’
station, but instead of getting her father’s room number, she’d asked where the
gift shop was located, and ended up standing in the tiny store, staring at get-well
gifts she wasn’t going to buy. She bought a pack of gum just to be purchasing
something and to excuse her lack of willpower, and then she finally made it to
her father’s door.

She took a deep breath and pushed through the
half-open doorway. He was lying on the bed with his eyes closed, but his gaunt
hands were picking restlessly at the spotless white sheet. His color wasn’t
good, even though in his letter he’d told her they’d managed to ease the
symptoms of jaundice by unblocking his bile duct through surgery. Minor
surgery, compared to the liver transplant he’d need if he was going to survive
this cancer.

Tam stepped back too quickly, ready to flee
the room, and she bumped into a cart near the empty second bed. He opened his
eyes at the sound and stared at her for several long moments. She saw the
moment when recognition flared in his dark green eyes, mirror images of her
own.

“Tamsyn. You came. I knew you would.”

The first words she’d heard him speak since
he’d left her and her mother over thirty years ago. Tam had been four the last
time she saw him. She wondered at first how he could possibly recognize her,
but she would have picked him out of a crowd with no problem.

“How did you know? I wasn’t even sure until
today.” Not true. She had changed jobs because of this, to be close to where he
was. Why? She wasn’t about to sit vigil at his bedside, holding his hand and
speaking soothing words of comfort and hope. She didn’t want to be here.

“I can’t stay,” she said. He just watched her
while she struggled against the unseen force that had brought her to this
hospital. Finally, she won a small battle and turned around, ready to leave,
when a doctor came through the door and smiled at her.

What a smile. Tam stood transfixed, confused
by the beauty and light this woman brought into a room full of sickness and
pain and memories too ingrained to erase or forgive. She was average height and
average weight, but there wasn’t anything remotely average about her. Her red
hair was chin length and some scattered freckles highlighted her cheekbones.
Gray flecks made her blue eyes seem like crystals.