by Karen White
I looked at the wide and hopeful eyes of the children, trying desperately to think of an excuse to say no. I wanted to tell them that I’d already paid my dues by riding across the bridge and getting in a boat, but that sounded inadequate even to me. Turning to Owen, I asked, “Is it okay with your mother?”
“She’s resting and I didn’t want to bother her.”
My usual annoyance that I felt when Loralee retreated to her room for a nap was nudged aside by worry. I remembered how tired she’d looked the previous night, and how she’d blamed her insomnia on her stuffy nose and itchy eyes due to allergies. Her explanations made sense, but when I thought of her streaming eyes, I couldn’t completely shake off a sliver of doubt.
“Yes, let’s let her sleep.” I thought desperately for another excuse. “Did you clean up your LEGOs?”
“Sort of,” Owen said. “Maris made a castle that looks like a horse stable with, like, one hundred horses that all have names and are owned by a princess. And I made a special cannon that can blow down the doors of the castle but not hurt any of the horses or people. It just blows doors off things.”
“So we left them out so we could play with them again later,” Maris completed, as if they were already an old married couple.
“There’s water at the marina there, right?”
Owen and Maris both tried to hide their giggles behind their hands. “Yes,” Owen explained. “The marina is where they keep the boats. In the water.”
“I know that,” I said. “What I meant is that I can’t swim, and I don’t think it’s a good idea if I’m the only adult with the two of you—”
Gibbes interrupted. “If you wait until I get all those boxes of newspapers loaded into my truck, I’ll go with you. I’m an excellent swimmer.” He grinned like he knew exactly what I was thinking.
“Yes, yes!” The children hopped up and down like jumping beans.
I looked at Gibbes, who just shrugged. “Looks like we’re going to the marina, then.”
We weren’t going in the water or on it—just near it. Surely I could do that. “All right. Let me go grab a hat and some sunscreen for me and the children. I’ll be right back.”
When I reached my room, I caught my reflection in the mirror over the dressing table and for the first time in a while I actually looked at myself long enough to admit that I didn’t like what I saw. The ill-fitting blouse and skirt were more than unflattering. They were the kinds of things invisible women wore. I’d worn these clothes and others just like them for years, throwing them on in the morning without thought. Even my own mother, who was as no-frills as mothers got, loved wearing the color blue and the way it made her eyes shine.
I leaned into the mirror, staring harder, remembering a favorite blue blouse I’d worn when I’d first met Cal, and again several times while we’d been dating. And how I didn’t remember when I’d stopped wearing it and had moved into the uniform of a woman who didn’t want to be noticed.
The flesh rose on the back of my neck as the air conditioner whirred on, making me shiver as I imagined Cal watching me stare at myself in the mirror. Never turn your back on a fire. It was almost as if the words had been whispered in my ear. But instead of Cal’s voice, it had been my own.
Quickly I unbuttoned my blouse and slipped out of the skirt, then pulled out the shorts and top I’d borrowed from Loralee that she’d apparently mistakenly returned to my room with my clean and folded laundry. I put them on, my only regret being that I had only my loafers for my feet.
I slathered on sunscreen, then grabbed my hat and the bottle of sunblock before heading downstairs. The recycling boxes had already been taken from the upstairs hallway, and I stopped to pick up a newspaper on the bottom step that must have fallen out.
I placed it on the hall table, planning on giving it to Gibbes, then followed the sound of Owen’s voice to the kitchen. Gibbes and the two children sat at the table, the Battleship game box open, and Gibbes was reading the directions.
He stopped reading, then watched as I put sunscreen on Maris’s face and arms and then Owen’s. “All right,” I said. “You guys ready?”
“You guys?” Maris’s freckled nose scrunched up.
Gibbes returned the directions to the box and stood. “That’s how our neighbors to the north say ‘y’all.’ Not as easy on the ears, but it gets the job done.”
“Really?” I said. “I’ll make many concessions to fit in, but I promise you that saying ‘y’all’ won’t be one of them.”
Gibbes pretended to look offended. “If I weren’t a gentleman, I’d place a wager on that.”
“And if I weren’t a lady, I’d tell you how little I care about what you think.”
“Spoken like a Southern lady already,” Gibbes said as he ushered us out of the kitchen. “Before the end of the year you’ll probably be claiming that crabbing is a sport and that the season between summer and winter is football.”
I almost said that he wouldn’t know, since I doubted we’d still be seeing each other by then, but I didn’t. Not because I didn’t think it was true, but because he was looking at me in a different way than he’d done when we’d first met. Seeing me not as Cal’s unlikely wife, but somebody else. Anybody else.
We headed down Bay Street, crossing toward the water at the first light. The blue sky offered no respite from the relentless sun, and I wondered how long it would take me to get used to the heat. The long Maine winters seemed very far away, like a fading dream upon waking. Lying in bed at night, I sometimes imagined the icy taste of snow on my tongue. But then I’d hear the wind chimes and it would be gone, replaced with the tang of salt air.
“Did you know that if humans had the same metabolism as a hummingbird, we’d have to eat a hundred and fifty thousand calories a day?” Owen directed this at nobody in particular, but I thought it was probably meant for Maris.
She wore her blue sparkly sunglasses again, and with her pixie face she looked like an adorable bug when she turned to look at Owen. “We have hummingbird feeders off of our back porch and the little birds swarm all over them. You should come see it.”
He looked at me as if Maris had suddenly gone off script.
“Sounds like fun,” I interceded.
It was a weekday, so only a few boats were out on the water, the rest docked, bobbing up and down like babies rocked by the waves. I felt none of my fear there, the sun and heat making it easy to forget an icy storm and the freezing water beneath a bridge far away.
It was only when I felt my scar, or saw it when looking in a mirror, or when I found myself missing my mother, that I remembered. But each time the pain lessened, the scar tissue thickening. I’d overheard Loralee telling Owen that every time we remembered something, we weren’t remembering the event itself but the last time we’d remembered it. It was our way of creating filters between our past and present, creating what we chose to recall and what we’d rather forget. I hoped she was right. After knowing her for even such a short time, I’d begun to suspect that she was probably right about a lot of things.
It was ebb tide, the pluff mud exposed beyond the small seawall at the side of the marina’s parking lot. We walked along the edge, examining the mud and grass for signs of life.
At first glance it seemed still, the grass wilting in the direct onslaught of the sun, the puckered mud thirsting for water. Maris got down on her haunches, her tanned arms around her knees, and the rest of us followed. A flash of movement caught our attention as a tiny crab scrambled sideways from his hiding place by a rock to the thick forest of grass. One of his claws was more than twice the size of the other one, giving him a comic appearance. His lopsided appendages didn’t seem to hinder his movement, and he’d disappeared into the marsh within seconds.
“That’s a fiddler crab,” Maris announced. “Because his big claw makes him look like he’s playing a fiddle.”
Not to be outdone, Owen said, “Only the male fiddler crabs have the big claw, and if they lose the big one in a fight wit
h another male, the smaller one swells up, and a little one grows where the big one used to be. They wave them around during mating season to attract females to their burrows so they can make baby fiddler crabs. That makes no sense to me, but that’s what it says in the science book I found in my room.” Owen pushed his glasses up on his nose.
Gibbes nudged me, but I didn’t dare look at him, because I was pretty sure I’d laugh hard enough to fall over into the mud. Instead we stayed where we were, looking for signs of life. “It’s amazing,” I said, watching the tiny crabs scuttle across the mud, their oddly shaped eyes watching us warily.
“What is?” asked Gibbes. “The fact that female fiddler crabs find oversize claws attractive?”
I pierced him with my “museum curator” look, which I’d once used on busloads of schoolchildren. Looking back at the mud, I said, “No. That something that seems so lifeless is actually teeming with life. If Owen hadn’t been telling me all that he’s learned about the marsh mud, I would have walked by without really looking.”
Gibbes stood, his eyes traveling across the water to the sound. “I didn’t figure that out until I got to med school.”
“What? That fiddler crabs have odd mating rituals?” I said it before I could think twice.
I was rewarded with a smile that made me look away. “No. That we miss a lot when we’re not paying attention. That things aren’t always as they appear to be.”
I stood to face him, the salt air breathing to life something I hadn’t felt in years. Something that felt a lot like courage, but couldn’t be. I wasn’t brave. Or strong. I just seemed to have a knack for landing on my feet.
“Like what?” I asked, meeting his eyes although I wanted to turn away.
“Gibbes Heyward? Is that you?”
We both turned at the sound of a woman’s voice. A boat filled with people and loud music was approaching the dock closest to the parking lot. The man behind the steering wheel lifted a beer can in our direction as a curvy redhead wearing what could only be described as Daisy Dukes and a bikini top easily hopped out of the boat, landing barefoot on the dock, then jogged her way toward us. I turned to watch the kids, reminding them to stay on the wall and out of the mud, unwilling to be a witness to a wardrobe malfunction that seemed a foregone conclusion.
“It is you,” she said, whipping her long hair from her shoulders in case we’d missed a view of her cleavage as she’d run. “You haven’t changed a bit, Gibbes.” She blinked heavily mascaraed lashes at him. Close up, I could tell that she was much older than I’d originally thought, more likely in her early forties than the twenty-something I’d thought her to be from her clothing. “Don’t you remember me?” She smelled like a mixture of cigarettes, coconut oil, and sweat, and I stepped back out of range.
A flash of recognition swept across Gibbes’s face, or maybe it was something else. Either way, he definitely knew who she was. “Sandy? Sandy Beach?”
“That’s your name for real?” Maris asked, looking up at the stranger through her sunglasses.
“The one and only!” She threw her arms around Gibbes’s neck, pressing her considerable chest against his while his hands did a frantic search to figure out a safe place to land.
Gently he put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back. “It’s been a while.”
“It has. I just moved back to South Carolina—been living in Vero Beach the last ten years or so.” She waggled her left hand. “Got divorced and decided it was time I come home. Florida was too small a place for me and my ex, if you know what I mean.”
I tousled Owen’s hair to distract him so he’d close his mouth and stop staring at the woman’s tattoo, which looked like a dragon perched on her shoulder, its pointed tail reaching toward her cleavage like a directional arrow.
She looked at me with interest, her gaze dropping to the two children, who were busy staring back like spectators at a zoo. “Is this your wife and kids?”
“No,” we both said simultaneously.
“I’m Merritt Heyward, Gibbes’s sister-in-law. And this is my half brother, Owen, and his friend Maris.”
She smiled at the children, her teeth yellowed with nicotine, before moving her gaze back to me. “Unless there’s another brother I don’t know about, I’m guessing you’re married to Cal?”
As if sensing my unease, Gibbes stepped in. “Cal passed recently, and Merritt has inherited our grandmother’s house.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She looked at me again with renewed interest, or what I thought was interest. But there was something else in her eyes that I couldn’t identify. She took in my loafers and the modest shorts, lingering briefly on the knit top before settling on my straw hat. “You don’t seem his type.” Deep creases formed between her brows. “How long were you married?”
I wanted to tell her that it was none of her business. Instead I lifted my chin. “Seven years.”
“Seven years?”
I couldn’t imagine her sounding more surprised if I’d said we’d had seven children or that I was ninety years old.
She leaned forward, studying me. “You must be a lot stronger than you look, then. I dated him for almost a year and it almost killed me.” She stepped back, throwing a glance at Gibbes. “I should have gone for this one instead, but he was just a kid and I didn’t want to be one of those women, if you know what I mean.” She nodded her head in the direction of the children just in case we weren’t sure why she was censoring herself. “Not that it mattered, really. Us girls like the bad boys, don’t we?”
“No, not all of us.”
She tightened her mouth, accentuating the brackets formed by wrinkles on each side of her face. “Yeah, well, I just figured you did, because you married Cal.” She coughed a smoker’s cough, taking a moment to catch her breath. “It took everything I had to break up with him—even moved to Florida just to make sure there was enough distance between us. But I figured I was lucky to get away with just a broken heart instead of something else.”
It felt like somebody was squeezing me around the middle, stopping my heart and my breath at the same time.
“Sandy? Are you coming? Joe’s got a keg at his house—we’re moving the party there.” The group from the boat was clustered in front of two pickup trucks in the parking lot, carrying coolers and brightly colored beach towels, looking very hot and impatient.
She nodded, then turned back to us. “Gotta go—but it was great running into you, Gibbes. And meeting you,” she said to me. Her eyes were a dull green, as if the light had stopped penetrating them years ago.
“You, too,” I said, managing a small smile.
We watched her walk toward the group, tiptoeing her way across the hot asphalt.
“I wouldn’t pay her too much attention,” Gibbes said. “There’s a reason they used to call her ‘Sandy the Public Beach.’” Even though his words had been meant to comfort me, the storm brewing in his eyes matched my own uneasiness.
“Owen, I’m so sorry, but I’m not feeling well—it must be the heat. I need to go back right now. We’ll return another time, okay?”
Owen masked his disappointment quickly. “All right. Maybe tomorrow?”
“Maybe.” I walked quickly, unaware of the sun beating down on us or the sweat trickling down my face and back. As soon as I got inside the house, I tore off my hat, then stood in the front parlor between the two air-conditioning units, lifting my hair off of my neck, wishing the whir of the appliances could erase the woman’s voice from my head. I was lucky to get away with just a broken heart instead of something else.
The children rushed in behind me, followed by Gibbes, who shut the door. I kept my eyes closed, hoping they’d keep going.
“Did you save this for me?” Owen said behind me.
Reluctantly I opened my eyes and saw him holding up the newspaper I’d found on the stairs and left on the hall table.
“I think it fell out of the recycling box. Why don’t you give it to Dr. Heyward?”
“But it has a picture of that plane on it, and I’ve been keeping those.”
Gibbes took the newspaper and flipped it over to read. After a moment he lifted his eyes to meet mine. “It’s about the crash. In 1955.” He turned to Owen. “Did you say you have more of these?”
Owen nodded. “Yeah. Mama said it was okay with you if I kept a few because they had stuff about planes.”
“Have you read them all yet?”
Owen shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Can I borrow them? I promise I’ll bring them back to you when I’m done.”
“Sure. I’ll go get them.” He took off up the stairs, his tread light as he crossed the hall upstairs to his bedroom.
“This is odd,” Gibbes said.
I turned toward him. “What is?”
“The plane was on its way from LaGuardia to Miami when it exploded over Beaufort.”
“I know—that’s what Deborah told us. Which makes sense, seeing as how, without even looking at a map, I can see that Beaufort would be on its flight path.”
He lowered the newspaper, then folded it in half. “But that’s not where it originated. It was only on a stopover at LaGuardia, where it was delayed for two hours. It started farther north.”
For a moment I imagined I could smell the scent of smoldering fire, of hot ashes falling like rain. Never let the fire get behind you. “Where?” I asked.
“Bangor. Bangor, Maine.”
I blinked several times, trying to get my thoughts in order, hoping to find something to say about coincidences and the world being a very small place. But my thoughts ran all the way up to the attic room, to the plane model with forty-nine dead passengers and crew representing a plane from my hometown that had crashed in Beaufort, South Carolina. As incongruous as it seemed, I couldn’t help but think of Cal’s favorite phrase when talking about the causes of various fires. There’s no such thing as accidents.
I looked up and met Gibbes’s eyes, and knew without a doubt that he’d heard Cal say that, too, and that neither one of us believed in coincidence.