Tales From Sea Glass Inn (4 page)

Helen felt the beginning of a panic attack
coming on. She wasn’t prone to them, but they’d been fairly regular since she’d
taken on the stress of starting a business of her own. They’d become even more
persistent over the past few days, ever since the tide of oil had slicked
across Cannon Beach. She found some comfort in the rhythm of pulling sheets of
paper off the stack and forming them into balls. Slide and scrunch. Slide and
scrunch. Breathe.

“We’ve only been open for a little less than
two years, so I’ll be looking for creative ways to attract customers, just like
you will. It only took me two hours to drive to Cannon Beach from my old home
in Salem, but the real journey to get to this place was a long and hard one.
I’ll do whatever it takes to stay here. I’m sure you feel the same.”

Helen nodded without looking up from the
strange little sculptures she was forming with her hands. Mel didn’t know her
past, but Helen figured most people in this isolated town had complex reasons
for being here. The anonymity of tourist season, when the streets would be
crowded with strangers. The hibernation of the off-season. The very reasons
Helen had chosen to come here. To find some peace at last.

“Besides, you’ve made a loyal following
already with those croissants of yours.” Mel tossed a wad of paper onto the
growing mound of them. “I figure a few more days of this work, and you’ll be
exhausted and numb enough to give me your secret recipe.”

Helen grinned, feeling a small release in the
tension she had been carrying in her chest. “Not a chance. I’d have to be—” She
paused abruptly and pointed across the room where four coveralled people were
carrying dog crates through a side entrance. “What’s going on over there?”

“They found more birds,” Mel said quietly.
“We should go help them.”

Helen saw Jenny moving quickly toward the
newcomers. Almost before Mel had finished speaking, Helen had hopped over the
side plank and was jogging over to her. Something about the way Jenny was
carrying herself gave Helen a sense of urgency, but she slowed to a walk as she
got closer. The men set the dog crates down and went back outside, presumably
for more. Without a need for words, Helen stepped to one side of a crate and
gently helped Jenny lift it.

Jenny smiled a weary but clear thank-you and
gestured with her head toward one of the pens already filled with newspaper balls.
Helen felt the weight of the crate shift as the birds inside jostled each
other. She tried to make the short walk as smooth as possible, and her fingers
hurt from gripping the cage tightly so she wouldn’t drop it.

“Let’s cover this end of the pen before we
turn them loose,” Jenny said once they had deposited the crate in the
four-by-eight enclosure. Helen helped her place a large piece of plywood over
one half of the pen, making a small cave. Jenny opened the crate and tipped it
slightly, sending four oil-covered birds scurrying into the darkened side.

Helen followed Jenny’s lead and quickly
placed a second plank over the other end of the pen, completely enclosing the
birds. She was as bewildered and surprised by the tears running down her cheeks
as the birds seemed to be by their new prison.

“What kind are they?” she asked with a
tremble in her voice.

Jenny looked up from where she was kneeling
by the crate and pulling out dirty newspapers. She stood and came over to
Helen, putting an arm across her shoulders. “They’re murres. Are you going to
be okay?”

Helen leaned into Jenny’s embrace, surprised
yet again by her own willingness to be touched. Usually she was the one doing
the holding—holding herself at a distance from everyone else.

“Yes,” she said, drawing strength from
Jenny’s combination of detachment and caring. Obviously this work meant a great
deal to Jenny, or she wouldn’t be doing it. But at the same time, she seemed to
have a shield in place. Do the job without the tears. They wouldn’t offer help
anyway, neither for the birds nor for Helen’s future here in oil-soaked Cannon
Beach. “They just seem so frightened. I hate that this happened to them.”

“I agree. They’ll be scared for a while, and
then they’ll adapt. We’ll do our best to make captivity easy for them until
their release. But remember, these are the lucky ones, the ones who get to come
here and be scared. They’re safe now and will be clean soon.”

Helen nodded and picked up her end of the
empty crate. They’d take it back to the people who would soon fill it with more
birds for her to help heal.

As she worked side by side with Jenny into
the night, Helen’s eyes remained dry. She had been thinking about herself
earlier tonight. What it meant for her to be at risk of losing her bakery so
soon after opening it. The loss in income, the guilt-driven need to volunteer.
She’d learned as a child to put herself first, because she’d never had anyone
else to take care of her. The sight of those four birds, burdened with oil and
helpless in their cage, had finally driven her focus off her own problems and
onto the small creatures huddled in corners.

*

Jenny sat on a wooden bench at the top of a
staircase and stared at the beach below. She had witnessed scenes like this on
countless occasions, but the discrepancy between normalcy and disaster always
unsettled her. The timeless sound of waves thundering to shore from deep ocean
origins was unchanged, unhindered by the spill. Rugged Haystack Rock looming in
the foreground looked the same as it did on the numerous postcards sold at
every store in town.

Contrasted with these were the lingering
stench of oil and the volunteers spreading across the beach as the sun rose.
They made slow but steady progress as they scooped blackened sand into trash
bags. The sight of them made Jenny feel guilty for not being at the center
doing her part to help, but Mel had practically carried her back to the inn for
a few hours of rest.

Jenny stretched and yawned. The short nap had
been good for her. She had been getting punchy with lack of sleep, and she
needed to be clearheaded enough to make good decisions for the animals and
birds temporarily in her care. Plus, she had organized the rescue effort well
enough for it to run without her for two or three hours. Shifts of volunteers
had been working around the clock for five days, but starting tonight, Jenny
would shut down the operation during the night except for a small staff of
people to keep watch over the full pens. Both the workers and the frightened
sea creatures would benefit from the dark, quiet hours. Time to heal and rest.

Although she usually moved on as soon as life
was returning to normal at a disaster site, she thought she might stay here at
Cannon Beach for a little longer. She could imagine the area in full glory,
with white-and-gray gulls dotting the shore and sky. The waves would be blue
green and splashed with foam, not rainbow slick with oil. Tide pools would be
full of life and not merely dead, greasy puddles. Like the mosaic hanging over
her bed in the inn, with Pam’s signature scrawled across the bottom corner. The
painting showed a slab of basalt, lit by the sun and darkened by shadows,
standing watch over a pool of clear, glistening water. Starfish shimmered with
embedded pink sea glass. Anemones and mussels adhered to the rock’s surface,
giving a sense of permanence and solidity.

Jenny rarely stayed in one place long enough
to see the stable, real world reappear. She only saw the veneer of disaster
covering the familiar, and the steady progress of those laboring to remove it.
Surprisingly, she wanted to be here long enough to see Mel welcoming guests to
the inn, and to stare through the studio window as Pam painted. To see Tia
opening her gallery once again and gabbing the ears off every tourist who
strolled in.

Most of all, though, Jenny wanted to see
Helen in her bakery, covered with a film of flour and chatting with customers,
the worry lines around her eyes and creasing her forehead gone for good. Jenny
sighed deeply and coughed at the smell of oil, feeling as if it was coating the
inside of her mouth and lungs. She had spent long hours in the same room as
Helen over the past couple of days. They had talked a little, but only about
the work they were doing. They had never been alone like they had been when
they first met, but instead had always been surrounded by crowds of volunteers.
Still, Jenny had felt a connection and she couldn’t shake the desire to know
Helen better. To know who she was when she wasn’t functioning in disaster mode.

A cool, wet nose gently nuzzled her hand
where it was resting on the edge of the bench. Jenny smiled, relieved to have a
distraction from thoughts of Helen, and reached down to pet the inn’s resident
spaniel.

A young man’s voice called, “Piper! Piper,
where are…oh, there you are.” Danny, Mel’s son, came around the corner of the
garden path and halted when he saw Jenny. “I should have known she’d find you,
Jenny.”

He sat on the bench next to her, over six
feet of gangly college sophomore. He and some friends had driven from Corvallis
to help with the rescue efforts, and the sight of the six rested and
ready-to-work young people had nearly made Jenny cry. She and the other
volunteers had been dragging with exhaustion after the first heavy wave of
birds came into the center, and the reinforcements had been more than welcome.
Jenny saw Mel in her son’s face and eyes and in his friendly, easygoing manner.
But even though Jenny knew they weren’t related by blood, she saw Pam in him,
too. He was sensitive and artistic, with a deep connection to nature and
animals. He took to the job of washing the fragile, oil-covered birds as if he’d
been born to do it.

“I’ve been trying to clean her ears, but she
hates it,” Danny said, holding up a tube of ointment and a gauze pad. “She’s
been tilting her head and fussing at her right ear, and we think she got some
oil on her paws and then got it inside her ear when she scratched it. She’ll
let us do anything with her, except this.”

“She’s probably hurting,” Jenny said. Piper
was sitting at her feet, gazing at the beach with a forlorn expression. She
didn’t move beyond the yellow tape marking the shore as off-limits, though,
treating it like a solid barrier. Jenny slid off the bench and gathered the
small brown-and-white dog against her. She wrapped one arm around Piper’s chest
and used the other hand to gently raise the outer flap of her ear.

“She has some inflammation, but it looks like
you caught the problem early enough.” She reached for the ointment and gauze,
and then read the label before awkwardly smearing some of the tube’s contents
on a clean pad with one hand. “This stuff should clear up the problem in a week
or so. See how I’m holding her against me? She’s confined, but she’s also
comforted by the pressure and closeness.”

Jenny swabbed Piper’s ear while she quietly
explained everything she was doing to Danny, who had come to kneel beside her.
“You should clean both ears, even if she’s just showing symptoms in this one,”
she said, releasing Piper and getting a new gauze pad out of its wrapper. “Why
don’t you try doing her left ear?”

After a short struggle, Danny got the hang of
holding Piper still while he treated her ear.

“Good job,” Jenny said when he let the dog go
with a pat.

“Thank you. You make it look so easy, but by
the end of the week, I’m sure I’ll be better. I’ve thought about trying to get
into the vet school at OSU, so any practice or advice I can get will help.”

Jenny had met quite a lot of aspiring
veterinarians doing the work she did. Some were discouraged by the manual labor
and heartbreak involved, but others seemed to thrive on the work at her
temporary rescue centers. Had any of them gone on to finish school? Would she
ever know if Danny made the choice to follow that dream or not? Most likely she
wouldn’t. By the time he made any serious plans for his future, she’d be in a
different state, or even country.

“I’ll make sure you get a chance to work with
some of the injured animals and birds while I’m here,” she said. She could
trust him to be gentle and to listen to her. “You’ll be helping them, and it
will be an interesting experience to add to your application, if you decide to
pursue your degree.”

“That’d be fantastic. Thank you,” Danny said.
He stood and called Piper to his side. “Thank you for everything you’re doing
here, not just this chance to help you.”

He looked back at the inn for a few moments
before meeting her eyes again. “And for my mom. This place means so much to
her. If she lost too much business, or ever had to close…” He shook his head.
“And for Pam, too. She cares about the sea life, and I know it’s killing her to
see any creature suffering. You’re doing something really good for all of us.”

Jenny blinked away the unexpected and
unpleasant heat of tears. She felt proud of what Danny was saying to her, and
she’d enjoyed the small interaction with a pet and its owner. She hadn’t had a
chance to do simple vet work since her earliest internships and clinic work.
She had been raised by parents who gave up everything to practice medicine
abroad, and—except for following her heart to vet school instead of medical
school—she had tried to follow in their footsteps. Danny’s appreciation touched
her on a personal level. She’d heard similar words before, but she’d never felt
them so keenly.

She shrugged, creating some emotional
distance with the casual gesture. “It’s just what I do. But you’re welcome.”

Danny nodded and turned away. Jenny figured
he was as uncomfortable with the emotions this rescue project was bringing to
the surface, in him and in his mom and Pam. Jenny knew it was better to focus
on the details and not the feelings involved. Build pens, assign volunteers to
tasks. Deal with the facts on the clipboard, not the emotions in her heart.

Unfortunately, the cause of too many
disconcerting emotions was standing on the path watching them. Danny nearly
bumped into Helen in his haste to get back to the house.