On Folly Beach

by Karen White

  Emmy also noticed that Paige wasn’t carrying the expected bakery bag, but instead held a glass mason jar. The glass was fogged and blotched as if handled a great deal, and the metal lid had long since darkened. Curious now, Emmy stood and walked toward her mother.

  “What’s that?”

  Instead of answering Paige held it out, and after hesitating for a moment, Emmy took it. It shifted in her hands, a soft rolling like an ocean wave, and when she lifted the jar to eye level, she saw what it was.

  “It’s a jar of sand,” she said, knowing as she spoke that it was more than that—that somehow the sand was part of her mother, as much as her green eyes and curly hair. It was the part of her mother that she’d never shared with Emmy before.

  “From Folly Beach. My mother scooped it up and put it in this jar and gave it to me on my wedding day. She said that way I’d never forget where I came from.”

  But you did, Emmy wanted to say, but remained silent because the sand in the jar had become warm under her touch, as if it were remembering the South Carolina sun.

  Instead she asked, “Why are you giving it to me?”

  Paige leaned against the doorframe, her face reflecting her exhaustion. “Because. . . .” She was silent for a moment. “Because this”—she indicated the room and the Indiana world outside the walls—“isn’t all there is. It’s safe and familiar, but it’s not the rest of your life.”

  A bubble of anger erupted in the back of Emmy’s mind. “I’m happy here.”

  “No, you’re not. You think you are because you don’t know any different.”

  Emmy squinted her eyes, trying to recognize the woman who sounded so much like her mother—the mother who’d given Emmy a roof over her head, good food to eat, and clothes on her back, but nothing that could have been called guidance. Emmy had always thought it had grown from her mother’s heart being broken too many times with the deaths of her babies; there simply hadn’t been enough remaining to hold another child.

  Emmy thought of the attic stocked with folded-up easels, dried-up and clotted paints, and half-finished canvases. It was the attic that had been off-limits to Emmy during her childhood, making it an irresistible temptation that she’d succumbed to many times following arguments with her mother. The paintings were the part of her mother she didn’t know—the part of the girl Paige had been before she’d married Emmy’s father. Paige had caught her up there once, but instead of anger, Emmy had seen only resignation, like accepting a diagnosis long after the tumor had been excised.

  Her mother had told her that the paintings had been part of her application to art school in Rhode Island, but that had been before she’d met Emmy’s father, Bill. They had never spoken of it again, but every once in a while, when she saw her mother staring out a window or holding a forgotten cup of coffee until it got cold, she pictured the girl with dreams of being an artist carefully hidden inside the face of a woman who chose to paint the colors of her walls beige.

  Emmy stood to face her mother, feeling defiant, the jar in her hands still warm. “But you do know different, and you’re still here.”

  As if Emmy hadn’t spoken, Paige said, “Do you know why coyotes are found in almost every state now? Because they adapt. They find that what they really wanted isn’t what they need, that there’s something just as good someplace else. It’s how they survive.” She paused a moment. “It’s been six months, Emmy. I’ve held my tongue while I’ve watched you stumble through your days like a drunk woman, but it’s past time that you pull yourself together. You need to make a change or you will never get over this.”

  Emmy’s anger felt muffled, as if she sensed that her mother might be right. “Maybe I don’t want to get over Ben. He was the best thing that ever happened to me. And this is my home, Mama. Leaving would be like leaving Ben, and that would be like him dying all over again.”

  Paige pressed the back of her head against the doorframe and closed her eyes as if summoning strength. “Sometimes, just when we think we can see our lives on course and we can settle back and get comfortable, a new path opens. Some people just keep going, too scared to veer off the familiar path. But others, well, they step off into the unknown, and find that maybe that was where they were supposed to be all along.”

  Emmy tasted salt on her lips and realized that she was crying. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Mama. There is no other path. This is my home.”

  Paige stepped forward and cupped her hands over Emmy’s as she clutched the jar. “I do know. I’ve never veered off course. But you’ve been given a second chance. And you”—she pressed a finger gently against Emmy’s chest above where her heart beat—“you’re one of those other people. I think I’ve known that since you were little.” She sighed, her warm breath reminding Emmy of being rocked as a child. “Maybe that’s why there’s this distance between us. You were going to leave me eventually, and I didn’t want it to hurt too much.”

  “I’m not going to leave at all.” Emmy turned around and placed the jar of sand on the desk, but found to her surprise that some of the sand had managed to stick to her fingers, lingering like an unwanted thought. This was not the heart-to-heart conversation she’d always imagined other girls had with their mothers, or the one she’d always wanted to have with her own. This was a conversation that could culminate only with one of them saying good-bye, and after all the years of waiting, it was still too soon. “I can’t. You need me here, in the store. And Dad, too.” She thought of the morning coffee and newspaper she delivered to her father every morning, how she reminded him when it was time to cut his hair or put on a sweater. She didn’t say it because it had long since become obvious that he allowed her to do those things to make her feel needed.

  Paige smiled faintly, as if reading Emmy’s thoughts and agreeing with them. “Life should be a question, Emmy, and you’re way too young to think you’ve already found all the answers.”

  Emmy wanted to protest, to tell her mother that she was wrong, but she recognized the grain of truth in Paige’s words, heard them in her heart as if she’d always known them to be true but had denied them anyway. She tried a new tack. “I can’t go to South Carolina. I don’t know anybody, and how would I support myself ?” She tasted the loneliness already, like a bitter candy slow to melt.

  Paige moved into the room toward the stack of boxes brought in the previous day by the UPS man. Paige sorted through them, sliding off a smaller box to reveal a large square one on the bottom of the pile. “I was on eBay a couple of weeks ago, looking for used books for our new trade-in section of the store. I’ve found that boxes from estate sales give me the best deals because usually whoever packs them up has no idea what’s in them and is just too happy to get rid of them and prices them accordingly.”

  Bending over, she wrapped her arms around the big box and slid it closer to Emmy. “And that’s how I found this.”

  Emmy tilted her head to read the shipping label: FOLLY’S FINDS. “Is that a store?”

  Paige nodded. “It is. Or used to be. Apparently the owner is retiring and selling inventory. I used to love the store. It was run by two older ladies. The younger one had a sort of side business crafting bottle trees and selling them from the back of the store. It’s where I got mine from, actually. Their last name was Shaw or O’Shea or something like that. It was more of a general store at one time, but the book section kept growing, so that became their main focus after a while. They carried all of the great classics, and they had a pretty extensive travel section. But they had an entire back corner of the store devoted strictly to romances.” A look of whimsy passed over Paige’s face, surprising Emmy. “I’ve tried to reconstruct that atmosphere here, although I don’t know if I’ve got it quite right. It was a magical place to be, which is probably why I thought to open up my own store.”

  Emmy reached over to the desk and took a pair of scissors from the pencil holder and sliced through the line of tape that covered the top of the box but didn’t move to open the fl
aps. “I don’t understand. What does any of this have to do with me?”

  “When I realized where the books were from, I called the store. The current owner is an Abigail something-or-other, who is apparently the daughter-in-law of one of the two women I remembered from the store. She’s been unable to sell the business as is and thought that if she sold the inventory she’d have a better chance of selling the building for a different kind of business.” Her eyes narrowed as she closely considered her daughter. “She also told me that in recent years they’ve become well-known for their rare books and manuscripts—although that’s mostly online, with her acting as a broker of sorts.”

  Despite herself, Emmy felt a flutter of interest. But then she thought of Ben, and how this was the place she’d known him and loved him. As if somehow all of her memories of him were tied to this one spot in the universe and would disappear without her there to hold them down.

  She turned back to the computer and sat down. “I can’t afford it, even if I wanted it.” Emmy swallowed, waiting for the flutter to disappear, and for her mother to agree.

  “But you can, Emmy. You have the money from the house, and from Ben. His final gift to you.”

  Emmy felt overwhelmed suddenly, with grief and loss and the glimmer of possibility. It scared her, made her feel like a small child letting go of her mother’s hand in a crowded place.

  “I can’t,” she said again, sounding halfhearted even to herself.

  “Yes, you can. You will. Ben chose you because of your strength. Don’t disappoint him.”

  Emmy looked up at her mother with surprise. “He told you that?”

  Paige shook her head. “He didn’t have to. I’ve known it since the moment you were born. You didn’t try to focus on my face like most babies; you were already looking behind me to find what else was out there.”

  Emmy brought her eyebrows together. “You didn’t want me to marry Ben, did you?”

  Paige closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. Finally, she said, “This isn’t about him anymore. You can choose to unpack your bags at the detour sign and dig a trench for the long haul, or you can make your own detour.”

  She retrieved the jar of sand and placed it in Emmy’s hands again. “You can always come back, you know. You’ll always have a home here with us. But that would be a lot like planting a rose in the desert; you’d survive but you’d never really bloom.”

  When she started to move away, Emmy grabbed her hand. “Why are you doing this?”

  Paige pulled away and moved to the door, stepping over a small corrugated box. Without turning around, she paused and said, “Because you’re my daughter. Because you’re the me I never let myself be.” She shrugged. “I’ve never known how to love you, Emmy. You’ve always been so damned independent. Maybe I’ve finally figured out that to love you means letting you go.”

  Emmy let her head sag as she spoke, her voice thick with tears. “I loved him, Mama. I loved him more than I ever thought possible, and I can’t just make that go away. I don’t want it to. And I can’t help thinking that the best thing that’s ever happened to me has already happened.”

  Her mother sighed and turned her head to look at Emmy. “Just think about it, okay?”

  Paige left, leaving Emmy clutching the jar of beach sand from a place she’d never been. Emmy closed her eyes, feeling the warmth of it again, imagining she smelled salt air and some other nameless thing: a heavy, pungent odor of sun-warmed earth and stagnant water. And she imagined something else, too: a shimmering in the air that hinted of unsaid good-byes and unpaid guilt. Or maybe it was the scent of new beginnings. The thought sent a shock of fear and anticipation through her that lifted the skin from her neck. It reminded her again of the wind in the bottle tree the night she’d become a widow, and as she sat down in front of the box of books, she began to think in possibilities.

  EMMY AWOKE TO THE SOUND of diminishing footsteps—too heavy to be her mother’s and the sound of her father’s snoring from their bedroom down the hall told her that they weren’t his. She sat up, straining to hear them again, but heard only the night sleeping around her.

  A sliver of moon spilled through her window shade, illuminating the jar of sand she’d inexplicably placed on her bedside table. She stared at it, imagining it had become liquid swirling inside the glass in tiny waves.

  Emmy leaned over and switched on the lamp, relieved to see the jar of sand exactly as she’d left it. Her gaze traveled to the floor where the box of books from Folly’s Finds sat. She wasn’t entirely sure why she’d brought it from the store, only that she’d been looking for something to do when she invariably woke up in the middle of the night with no hope of further sleep.

  Sliding from the bed, she knelt in front of the box and pried the flaps back before lifting away crumpled newspapers. Peering inside, Emmy smelled the comforting scent of old books, the indefinable mixture of worn leather, ancient glue, and the passage of years. She reached inside and lifted out a thick hardbound book coated in bubble wrap and placed it on her lap.

  Buying boxes of old books was something her mother had begun to do on a regular basis as she’d expanded their store to carry used as well as new books, and it was Emmy’s job to sort through them. Every once in a while, Emmy would find something rare and valuable tucked in amongst the dog-eared doctor romances of a previous generation, or the coverless sagas from the eighties with food and coffee stains decorating the tattered pages. They invariably came from an estate sale, the unwanted books belonging to somebody’s grandmother or great-aunt inherited by a family member who wasn’t going to be the one to throw them away.

  Emmy wasn’t sure if she’d been given the sorting task because of her degree and expertise or because her mother knew that all she had to do was place her hands on a box to determine if anything of real value was inside. She wasn’t always accurate, but accurate enough to warrant being the official sorter.

  She flattened her hands on the book in her lap and felt the familiar heat against her palm, the slight tingling behind her ears, and she knew there was something in the box that warranted further inspection. She carefully removed the bubble wrap, then held the book at an angle to read the fading title better. Romeo and Juliet. Glancing inside to the front pages, she noted the copyright date of nineteen thirty-nine before placing the book on the floor beside her.

  Methodically, she began unwrapping each book, disrobing it of its bubble-wrapped cover, revealing each book. She noted with interest that the majority of the books was travelogues or atlases, with a few classic novels—nothing autographed and no first editions to make them valuable—thrown in. Emmy spotted Austen, Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, and even a German translation of Shakespeare—all familiar friends, and she found herself smiling. It seemed a deliberate collection of books, almost as if they’d been in somebody’s personal library rather than on the shelves of a bookstore.

  When she reached the bottom of the box, she peered inside to see if she’d missed anything. She’d been almost positive that something wonderful had been lurking within the corrugated walls of the box, but she must have missed it.

  Too awake now to even contemplate sleep, she sorted through the books again one by one to see what she might have missed. When she’d finished, she sat back on her heels and regarded the piles in front of her with narrowed eyes. Her gaze fell upon the first book she’d held, Romeo and Juliet, the one that had made her skin prick. Leaning over she plucked it from the top of one of the stacks and flipped it open again to examine it more closely.

  She’d already studied the copyright page, so this time she flipped immediately to the back of the book. Holding the book up to her nose, she wondered if it was her imagination that made her smell salty air. For the first time, she noticed the warped bottom edge of the book as if it had at some point in its life been in contact with water. Flipping the book over, Emmy realized the bottom of all of the pages showed water damage. She began to turn pages, looking for rot or mildew, and when she didn’
t spot any, she surmised that the book had most likely been in contact with water for only a short while and then been properly dried instead of being left closed on a shelf.

  Emmy was about to close the book again when it slipped from her hands, landing on a corner of the spine before toppling over splay-backed. Carefully, Emmy picked up the book, holding it fixed to the place where it had fallen open, and held it up to the light again. In the top right margin of the right-hand page was handwriting, the black of the ink now a bruised shade of purple.

  The broad, thick strokes of the letters were undoubtedly made by a male and as she brought the book closer to read it better in the dim light, she found herself blushing at the intimacy of his words.

  A great man once wrote, “Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and blows up the bonfire.”

  If only I were as eloquent as Mr. de la Rochefoucauld . . . I miss you, I miss you, I miss you. And I want you. And I need your kiss. And your touch on my skin like a man needs water. Always.

  Emmy’s mouth went dry, as if an unknown lover had whispered in her ear. Who was he? Who was he writing to? She flipped through the rest of the book twice until she was satisfied that there were no more notes in the margins. Curious and fully awake now, she pulled the next book off of a stack and began to thumb through it before hastily putting it aside when she didn’t find anything. It wasn’t until she’d reached the fifth book, a tattered copy of Wuthering Heights, that she found another note handwritten in the margin. The black ink was small and faded, eluding discovery until Emmy’s third perusal of the book. She might have missed it, too, if she hadn’t been so dogged about it, like a child searching for a lost favorite toy. The search had become almost like a lifeline thrown to her in the darkness, something to hang on to.

  The handwriting was different in this book, softer, more feminine, and all thoughts that it was another random note fled as Emmy read the neatly printed words. I saw you last night on the pier and I know you saw me, too, but your eyes wouldn’t meet mine as long as she was around. I understand it and am glad you are not so bold in her presence as to acknowledge me too openly. But then I saw you touch her hand, then place your arm around her shoulder, and I had to look away. And when I lay awake all night, I kept seeing your hand on hers and I died a little inside. How long can we do this? How will this end? I’m like a ðHow long can we do this? How will this end? I’m like a bird f ly ing into a glass window again and again, trying to reach the unattainable yet willing to die trying. I must be with you again. Where?