The Sound of Glass (16 page)

I looked at the dock, wondering whether I could jump out of the boat safely. But I thought of Cal, and when I met Gibbes’s eyes I straightened my shoulders.

“Everybody ready?” Gibbes asked, waiting for all of us to nod
before starting the motor, the sound abrupt and jarring. After the initial jolt, the motor settled into a steady, low thrum that I grew accustomed to, and didn’t completely override the marsh music.

The first thing I noticed was the smell, the same one I remembered from standing in the front yard with Mr. Williams.
Pluff mud
. That was what he’d called it. It was a peculiar odor that was green and earthy, part salt and part sea. It was alien and exotic, almost unpleasant, but completely intoxicating and unlike anything that I’d experienced at home.

We’d meandered into a widening creek, the tall grasses that had at first brushed the boat now farther away as we skirted through the marsh on a watery path. Gibbes was true to his word and kept out of open water, always within easy reach of the sandy hammocks that protruded from the marsh like underwater serpents, their salty-soil backs exposed to the relentless sun as the tides ebbed and flowed around them every six hours and six minutes.

I’d never seen a place of such contradictions, barren yet lush, monochromatic yet teeming with unexpected shades of color. It was a constantly changing landscape where nothing was the same, yet nothing was truly altered except for the rise and fall of the tides.

“This is my favorite place in the world,” said Maris. “I don’t think I’ll ever want to leave it.” She kept her voice quiet, an unspoken agreement between all of us that this was a place as sacred as a church, where hushed voices were required.

“Do you have beaches or is it all this grassy stuff?” Owen asked.

Gibbes glanced at me and then over to Owen. “We have beaches, but we’ll save that for another day. Remind me to take you to Hunting Island someday. I spent a lot of summer days and nights there with my friends as a teenager. They have a lighthouse, and you’re allowed to climb to the top.”

A secret smile lit Gibbes’s face, and I wondered at his memories. I imagined they involved beer and music and girls. I could see him doing all those things I imagined teenage boys did: saw him tossing
a football with a friend or diving into the ocean headfirst. It was easy to picture Gibbes as the carefree kid raised by the water who took for granted suntanned skin and bleached hair and shirtless nights. But I couldn’t see Cal doing any of those things, no matter how hard I tried.

“I like this,” Owen said slowly. “It’s just . . . different from Lake Lanier at home. Like all the plants out here haven’t had a chance to grow very tall.”

Gibbes slowed the boat, the engine just a low murmur. “In a way that’s true. To survive out here as a plant you have to be tough. They’ve adapted to take all they need from nature while at the same time fight it back. It’s not easy to be covered with water for half the day, and then baked in the broiling sun for the other half. They couldn’t survive if they behaved like ordinary plants.”

Owen frowned for a moment, his mouth twisted as he thought. “Actually, they’re really just ordinary plants. But they’ve learned to survive unordinary events, which makes them like the strongest plants in the world. That’s pretty cool.”

“Pretty cool,” Gibbes agreed, speeding up the boat again. “You see examples of that all over the plant and animal kingdoms.”

He kept his focus in front of him, but I felt that his words had been meant for me. I thought of Cal again, and how two brothers raised in the same place could be so different. How one could survive and thrive and the other not.

I soon forgot the sounds of the marsh creatures and the thrum of the motor as we entered the river. I was transfixed by how easily the land gave way to the water, the marsh a wide transition separating closely related cousins. It was hard to reconcile this place with the Maine shoreline of my memory, the large granite boulders that defied each frothy wave that crashed against them. The Atlantic coast of Maine had been chiseled by the relentless forces of wind, ice, and water, its craggy face the result of sheets of ice for thousands of years gouging the reluctant granite. But this place of marsh grasses
and long-legged birds seemed to have been placed on the Earth by gentle hands, a remedy for the rest of the world.

A shift in the light drew my eyes upward and an involuntary sigh seeped from my mouth. The blue sky sparkled, the sun hanging perfectly above us, its yellow heat making me more languid than hot. I tried to put my thoughts into words, to order them into sentences that would make sense. Several times I opened my mouth, only to have my tongue trip me.

“The sky is different here,” I said, but that was all wrong. It wasn’t what I’d meant to say at all. I tried again. “I wanted to say that the sky is so big, but that isn’t quite it.” I contemplated the view from the boat as our wake trickled back toward the marsh and the grass, moving it gently, as if an unseen hand were brushing the tops. The horizon grew in front of us as we slowly made our way forward, the sky and water melting together.

“It’s that the water is wide,” Gibbes said softly.

“Yes,” I said before I could think. Before I realized it was Gibbes who spoke the words that were still dancing in my brain and I hadn’t wanted him to know.

Owen slapped his arm, lifting his hand to reveal a squashed mosquito. He dangled his hand in the water to rinse it off. I’d seen Loralee douse him and Maris with bug repellent, but apparently, like me, he was too much of a mosquito magnet for it to make any difference. I slapped one on my ankle, where a telltale pink bump had already made its mark.

“Do you have mosquitoes in Maine?” Owen asked.

“Oh, yes. The mosquito is the unofficial state bird of Maine, I think.”

He grinned. “Daddy used to say that about Georgia.”

“Well, South Carolina’s is the palmetto bug, just in case you were wondering.” Gibbes moved the tiller on the boat, turning us sharply to the left. A bubbly spray shot up over the side while my hands searched for something to grasp as my heart wedged itself somewhere between my chest and my throat.

“Sorry,” Gibbes said, actually sounding contrite. “I thought it was time to head back to the dock and eat.”

I nodded, embarrassed to find my hand pressed against my heart. I turned my head, my gaze captured by the alabaster poise of a white bird with black legs standing in the water. Her head didn’t move, and she didn’t appear to be looking at us, but I sensed she was aware of us the way a person sees in the dark. Long, dainty white feathers extended from her tail, and I held my breath, not wanting her to fly away.

She was such a thing of beauty and grace and strength, and I was glad that I’d been forced to come out on the boat Gibbes called a “stump-knocker” to see her, to see even a fragment of the natural wonders of this place. Each golden-tipped strand of marsh grass, every slim-throated bird and wide-watered vista, were like gossamer threads tugging at my wounded heart. I watched as the bird’s orange beak drilled with perfect precision into the water, extracting a small fish. The boat glided past her as she ate her meal, and I wanted to applaud her cleverness.

“That’s a great egret,” Gibbes explained. “Their eggs usually hatch in June, so there’s most likely a nest nearby. We’ll come back in a month so you can hear the babies ask for food. It sounds like they’re saying, ‘Me first.’”

“No way!” said Owen, tilting his head back as the giant bird stretched her wings and flew over us, her feathers rippling like ribbons of smoke, more elegant and regal than any man-made flying machine could ever hope to be.

“It’s true,” Maris said. “I’ve heard it. I’ll come back with you and we can listen for it together.”

“Sure,” Owen mumbled. His ears pinkened but I didn’t think it was from the sun. My eyes met Loralee’s and we shared an insider’s smile before I remembered who she was and looked away.

Gibbes docked the boat and we all managed to disembark without incident. Gibbes took my hand, and I held on tightly as I tried
not to look down at the small space between the dock and the edge of the boat. I stretched my legs wide, holding back a shout of victory when my foot found purchase on the wood of the dock.

“Mrs. Heyward? Look—I have one, too.”

I turned to Maris, who was pulling up the edge of her cover-up and displaying an impressive scar on her knee. I looked down at my own leg, where my shorts had ridden up on my thigh, displaying a six-inch line of puckered skin. Every year it faded just a little, the skin becoming smoother, the pink tint of it lightening. But it would never go away completely, and I was glad. There were some offenses where a brief punishment wasn’t enough.

“I was jumping with my horse and I fell off. How did you get yours?”

Her question was so innocent, the inflicted hurt so unintentional, that I knew I shouldn’t be angry. But I was—suddenly angry at the reminder of why I hated the water and hadn’t wanted to come out in the first place. Angry that the memory outshone anything I’d just seen.

She continued to stare up at me, her eyes hidden behind her blue sunglasses, and I struggled to find a calm voice. “It was an accident. When I was twelve. But that was a long time ago.”

I felt Gibbes’s eyes on me but I didn’t look up, instead pretending to focus on unbuckling my life jacket, and then helping the children with theirs as Gibbes and Loralee left to retrieve the picnic basket from the kitchen.

When Loralee first spread the red and white checked tablecloth on top of the deck so near the water, I almost asked for my life jacket back, but when nobody else seemed concerned I remained silent. I wondered to myself whether alligators could jump, but kept that thought to myself, too.

We all helped Loralee remove the plastic-wrapped and Tupperware-covered items from the basket, setting them on the cloth. I was busy taking off lids and wrappings when Loralee bumped
into me. We were on our knees, so I wasn’t taken off balance, but I instinctively reached out to steady her. Her face was pale under her makeup and her skin clammy.

“Are you all right?” I asked, realizing that I was the only thing preventing Loralee from toppling into the water.

Gibbes moved quickly to her side, his fingers finding her pulse. We were silent for a moment as he counted. “I think she needs to get out of the sun. I’m going to bring her inside where it’s cooler and get her some water before I make her lie down on the sofa for a bit.” He turned to Owen. “She’ll be fine,” he said, and I felt absurdly grateful that he’d thought to reassure Loralee’s son.

She could barely walk, and by the time they’d reached the end of the dock, Gibbes was carrying her, lifting her as if she weighed no more than a pillow. Her long, manicured fingers rested on his shoulder, and I quickly looked back at the picnic spread, although it took a while for the image to go away.

We were busy loading our plates with food when Gibbes returned.

“How is she?” I asked, glad to hear my voice sounded neutral.

“She’ll be fine. Her meds cause her to be dehydrated, which makes her overheat easily. She drank a tall glass of water and she’s already feeling much better. I set the clock on the stove to wake her up in an hour.”

“Good,” I said, watching him closely, wondering why he was avoiding eye contact.

He sat down next to me on the blanket and rubbed his hands together. “So, who wants some watermelon?”

“I do, I do!” the kids shouted in unison, their hands and faces smeared with mayonnaise from their sandwiches, half-moons of yellow on their upper lips from the lemonade.

I reached into the basket, surprised to find it empty.

“What are you looking for?” Gibbes asked.

“Knives and forks. How else are we supposed to eat the watermelon?”

The children began laughing and I saw that Gibbes was trying very hard not to. “Have you never eaten watermelon before, or had a contest for who could spit a seed the farthest?”

I thought for a moment, then shook my head. “I know we had watermelons in the grocery store, but I can’t say I’ve ever actually eaten it. And the watermelon I remember wasn’t anywhere near as red as that. But I can say with certainty that I’ve never spit any seed out of my mouth, intentionally or not.”

I was being silly, almost flirtatious, yet I didn’t stop to think about why. I felt the sun on my skin; I was in the middle of a salt marsh where nobody seemed to care that I was wearing an old lady’s floppy hat and three coats of sunscreen, or that I was wearing a pair of shorts for the first time in a very long while.

Gibbes seemed to pick up on my mood. As if he were a surgeon exhibiting a precise technique to medical students, he carefully unwrapped a wedge of watermelon. Holding it up like a prize, he then leaned forward and bit right into the middle of it. Watermelon juice seeped from the fruit, past the rind, and onto his hand and wrist.

“Pardon me, Merritt, but this is a necessity when eating watermelon.” He bunched his lips together and without further warning ejected a seed from his mouth. I watched with guarded fascination as it carried out over the water, landing at a good distance.

“Nice one, Dr. Heyward,” Owen said, high-fiving the doctor. Holding his hand up, Gibbes then lightly patted Maris’s palm with splayed fingers.

“What a talent,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t also be asked to perform.

“Why, thank you, ma’am. I was the watermelon-seed-spitting champion at the Water Festival three years in a row when I was a boy.”

“That being on your résumé is probably what got you into med school. What happened the fourth year? Got too old and lost some teeth?”

The laughter in his eyes died. He looked down at the watermelon in his hands, but didn’t seem to notice the juice still dripping down onto his crossed legs. “No. Cal left, and I didn’t feel like going to the Water Festival anymore.”

“I love the Water Festival!” Maris said, oblivious to the sudden tension in the air. “It’s every July and it’s
so
much fun. There’s games and music and lots of really great food.” She turned to Owen. “You can come with me and my family—we go every year, because my dad has to enter the sailing regatta even though he’s never won. He says somebody has to come in last, so it might as well be him.”