by Karen White
With excitement, Maggie turned to look for it, positive something must have arrived from Peter by now. He’d remembered to say good-bye this time, and at night when she closed her eyes, she could still taste his kiss. Jim’s kisses had been sweet, so sweet that she’d always kissed him with her eyes wide-open. But Peter’s kisses made her close her eyes so she could better see the things he made her want to do.
She spotted the stack of mail, mostly bills and a few letters, sitting on top of a small brown-paper-wrapped package. When she picked it up, a new book that still smelled of paper glue slid out of the opened end, and she caught it, holding it up to read the cover. She ran her hand across the title, The Great Gatsby, remembering Peter telling her how it was his favorite book, and how he’d borrowed her own dog-eared copy.
Focusing on the package, she frowned, realizing that someone had neatly cut the string and sliced open one end, allowing the book to slide out. “Do you know how this got opened?” Maggie turned around and held out the package to Cat, the cut string dangling from the bottom.
Without looking up, Cat said, “I opened it.”
Maggie took a step closer but didn’t say anything, waiting for Cat to look up. When she didn’t, Maggie asked, “Why? It’s addressed to me.”
Cat finally looked up, her green eyes bright from the slanting light coming in from the kitchen window. “Because Peter might have been sending something to me, too, and stuck it in the package. I just wanted to check.”
An icy chill swept down the back of Maggie’s neck. Her mother had once told her that when you felt like that, somebody was walking over your grave, and for the first time, Maggie finally understood what she’d meant. “Why would he be sending something to you?” She hadn’t wanted to ask that question, but it was too late to pull it back.
“Because he’s my friend, too, Mags. You can’t monopolize him just because you found him first, you know. He’s actually the one who thought I’d make a good spotter.”
“When did you talk to him?”
Cat shrugged, but it didn’t mask her look of self-satisfaction. “I suppose you were working in the store. He was actually on the way there when I spotted him and asked for his help in carrying Jim’s things to the car. I finally decided to get rid of Jim’s clothes, what with storage space being what it is, but I needed a strong arm to help me. So I asked Peter.”
A memory of Jim flashed in Maggie’s mind; it had been his wedding day and Maggie had faced him in the receiving line on the front steps of the church. She’d pressed forward to kiss his cheek, surprised to find it as cold as her own hands despite the heat of the day. When she pulled back, he’d grabbed her arms and the look on his face made her think of a man who’d just discovered that his new and expensive shoes were too tight.
Maggie fell back into her chair, her fingers gripping the package so tightly that the tips turned white. “No, Cat, please. Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” Cat’s gaze faltered, her eyes slipping back to the splayed catalog.
Maggie put the book down on the table and reached across to grab Cat’s hands in hers, not allowing Cat to pull away. “You’re my family, Cat. I love you. Jim loved you. Isn’t that enough?”
Cat didn’t respond right away, but Maggie held on, not willing to give up. Finally Cat sniffed, and Maggie watched as a tear slipped onto the catalog page, the small drop spreading with greedy fingers, mutilating the face of one of the fur-clad models. Cat shook her head as if to clear it, and when she faced Maggie again, her face was twisted with an odd mixture of remorse and defiance.
“No, it’s not. It will never be enough.”
Maggie dropped Cat’s hands as her cousin pushed back from the table, then ran from the room, and with a tightening in her chest, Maggie felt the truth of Cat’s words.
“Maggie?”
Maggie swung her head around to where Lulu stood inside the back door holding a dark amber narrow-necked bottle that might have once contained some sort of tonic. Lulu’s face was unreadable as always, leaving Maggie unsure of how long she’d been standing there. Forcing a smile, she said, “Yes, Lulu?”
She held out the bottle to her sister. “I think Amy left me a note but I can’t get it out of the bottle.”
Maggie took the bottle and held it up to the light, seeing the corner of a torn piece of paper that had been shoved into the neck. “How do you know it came from Amy?”
“I put a note in a bottle on Amy’s tree, so I think this must be her answer. I went over to their house again, and their neighbor told me they’d been back a couple of days ago for just a few hours to collect the rest of their things, and then they left again. I figure Amy couldn’t find me, so she stuck a note in this bottle—but she didn’t roll it up like I did, so I can’t get it out.”
Gently, Maggie placed the bottle on the table. “I’ve got tweezers in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Why don’t you run upstairs and get them and we’ll see what we can do?”
When Lulu returned, Maggie easily plucked the scrap of paper from the upturned bottle before handing it to her little sister and waiting while she read the note to herself. Slowly, she raised her eyes and handed the note to Maggie. Squinting to read the tiny writing scribbled across every available space, she read:
Maggie gently squeezed Lulu’s arm. “I’m sorry, Lulu. Amy was a good friend to you.”
Lulu stared back at her, her hazel eyes dry and somber. “Did you mean it when you said you loved Cat?”
Surprised, Maggie nodded, struggling very hard to separate obligation from true affection. “I suppose I do.” She stopped for a moment, trying to think of a way to explain to a nine-year-old the complicated feelings she had for Cat. Continuing, she said, “She and I were raised more like sisters than cousins by our mama, so we share that bond. And Mama taught me that I can still love a person while not always loving their actions.” Maggie sat back, satisfied with her answer, and decided not to tell Lulu that Cat looked like their mama or how Cat had been the one who’d let her scream and cry when Maggie’s mother had died because she understood what it was like. Or that Cat hadn’t started out so needy but had changed after her own mother died, and Cat had begun to act as if she’d been cast adrift on the ocean. Maggie had read about survival stories at sea, and how sailors turned to cannibalism to stay alive. She’d pictured Cat that way, clinging to whatever life had left her.
It was all of these things that had made Maggie say yes when her mother made her promise to look after Cat, to understand how Cat was different from most people and deserved love even when it appeared she was incapable of giving it. And Maggie had agreed because of all of those things, but mostly because she was the only one left who could.
Lulu continued to gaze at her for a long moment until she finally turned away and picked up her note from the table. “I guess I’ll go collect scrap metal all by myself then.” She began to walk away, but then stopped to turn around and face Maggie. “If you ever stop loving Cat, would you let me know?”
Maggie studied her younger sister as she would a stranger, noticing the short, squat body, the mousy brown hair and deep, mournful eyes, and wondered not for the first time what toll so many losses would take on Lulu as she grew into womanhood. It was times like this that Maggie missed her mother the most, wishing to have her back just for a moment to find out if she was doing things right. But like Amy’s mother had said about bailing johnboats with thimbles, wishing would get her nowhere.
Straightening her back against the chair, Maggie said, “We never get to choose whether we love someone or not, Lulu. It’s not like a gift you can give and take back. It just is.”
Lulu continued to study her sister with those eyes that seemed too old in her face before nodding and turning away. “I’ll be back by suppertime.”
Maggie turned back to the empty bottle on the table and the small scrap of paper that had been hidden inside, and thought about poor Amy and her mother, and Cat, and the desperate measures people sometimes took just
to survive.
CHAPTER 10
FOLLY BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA
July 2009
When Emmy pulled her Explorer into the driveway of the house, the sound of steady hammering was coming from the backyard. She leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see or talk to anybody—she’d already had a day full of people as she’d struggled to find her way around the store and learn how it ran, in addition to learning how to operate the antique brass cash register that Abigail told her had been there since the store opened in the nineteen twenties. Silently, Emmy promised to herself that one of the first things she’d do would be to replace the antiquated register with a computerized inventory system.
Wearily, she shut the car door behind her and headed toward the hammering. She paused by the bottle tree, admiring the artistry of it and imagining Lulu bending each metal twig and placing each colorful bottle into a pattern pleasing to her eye and her artist’s heart. Emmy still couldn’t quite reconcile the Lulu O’Shea she knew in person with the woman who created the kind of inspired beauty that managed to touch the soul.
She spotted the amber bottle and dipped her head to peer inside. The rolled note remained near the neck of the bottle where she’d left it. Come back to me. She shivered, not knowing why, then looked up when she realized the hammering had stopped.
Heath stood on the partially completed dock wearing sneakers, socks, shorts, and nothing else. He held a hammer, looking at her expectantly, as if the sweat wasn’t pouring from his face and down his tanned and, Emmy had to admit to herself, well-muscled torso. She forced her gaze up to his face and tried not to think about how his mother had named him after Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff. His eyes traveled from the bottle tree back to her, reminding her that she’d been snooping. Blushing, she stammered, “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’ll just go into the house. . . .”
He tossed the hammer down on the wooden boards. “You’re not disturbing me. This is your house right now, so I’ll stop making noise since you’re back.” He picked up a towel and wiped his face. “Let me go jump in the ocean to cool off. Then we can talk about some sort of schedule so I’m not always invading your space.”
“Like right now? Don’t you need a bathing suit?”
He smiled and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes reminded Emmy of his mother. “Don’t need one.” He walked past her, then stopped when he realized she wasn’t following him.
“I’ll wait here.”
“I’ll keep my shorts on, promise.”
She frowned at him to hide her blush. “It’s not that. It’s just, well, I don’t have a bathing suit.”
This time he almost laughed. “I wasn’t asking you to jump in with me—just have a chat. But now that you mention it, it might not be such a bad idea for you to hang out at the beach for a while. You have the skin of a librarian.”
Without waiting for her to respond, he began walking again down the driveway to the street, passing his bike leaning against the tree.
She caught up to him at the end of the driveway. “I told you already. I’m not a librarian.”
“Right. You told me that.”
A push of wind from the direction of the ocean lifted his hair, revealing a straight white scar that ran from his temple and disappeared into his hairline. His smile faded when he saw her looking at it, and he began to walk away again. “Are you coming?”
His dog, Frank, who’d been resting in the shade of the front porch, ran up to her and jogged by her side as they crossed the street and approached the sandy trail that was labeled as a beach access.
She could now hear the ocean and the cries of strange birds, and she stopped. “Wait.”
Heath stopped, but Frank kept going, running faster.
“I’ve never seen the ocean before.”
He looked at her expectantly as if waiting for her to make a case for stopping.
Feeling foolish again, she said, “Is there . . . I mean, should I be afraid of alligators or anything?”
He smiled as he walked toward her, but it wasn’t mocking. “Alligators don’t usually like salt water, so you’re pretty safe from them on the beach.” He glanced down at her kitten-heel pumps. “The sand’s pretty deep next to the dunes; you might want to take those off.”
He waited while she slipped off her shoes, then began to walk again. Looking behind him, he said, “Hey, if I were in a cornfield in Indiana, I’d probably be watching out for killer crows or something.”
She bit the inside of her cheek to keep herself from smiling. “Yeah, right.” She stopped again at the rise of the dune, where wooden steps had been placed to guide beachgoers down to the water.
“But we do have sharks,” Heath shouted as he and Frank started to run toward the water, sand flying behind their heels until they’d reached the water’s edge, man and dog quickly disappearing beneath the waves.
Emmy held her breath until both heads, shiny and wet, appeared above the surface like those of dark seals. Heath looked up at her and waved her forward, but still, she hesitated. She’d seen oceans in movies, and in her mother’s photographs, but now, standing in front of the great Atlantic, she felt the pulsing of the waves, felt the power and breadth of the water as it bled out into the horizon, endless and liquid like the earth’s lifeblood. It made her feel alive, unlike anything she’d felt under the broad, flat skies of home. As she stared out at the dark blue vastness, her veins seemed to pump with the ancient rhythm of the waves, giving her kinship to every person who’d ever lived by the water, yet at the same time making her feel very, very insignificant.
Emmy moved forward, the hot sand burning the soles of her feet as she looked out across the expanse of sand and saw the haphazard placement of large umbrellas scattered across the beach like brightly colored starfish. Children with buckets and shovels sat in clusters sculpting mounds of sand decorated with blobs of shells and other beach debris. Nearly naked sunbathers with bronzed and lobster red skin lay sprawled on chairs and towels like sacrificial victims to a sun god. She looked down at her own pale skin and remembered how Ben had loved touching it, marveling at its unblemished whiteness, which had never been exposed to the sun. What she’d once loathed, she’d begun to feel proud of, taking extra care of her skin with expensive lotions and sunscreen. She still did, out of habit, and quickly crossed her arms across her chest trying to hide the exposed skin from the sun.
Emmy stopped where the sand became smooth and wet, yet she was just out of reach of the encroaching waves. It was almost as if she believed that if she felt the ocean, she would understand what her mother loved and what she’d missed all of those years, and she wanted nothing to tie her to this place of strangers—this place that Ben had never been.
Heath and Frank emerged from the water, both shaking their heads in synchronicity and flicking water over each other and Emmy. She stepped back, wiping the water from her face. “Careful!”
“Sorry,” said Heath, although his smile told her he wasn’t really.
“The water feels good—you should give it a try.”
“I should actually get back inside or find a hat and sunscreen. My skin’s not used to the sun.”
Water clung to his lashes, making his eyes appear star-kissed. “The beach is really nice at sunset, especially since most of the tourists have packed up and gone home by then. You should come back then.” He paused, looking at her intently as if he wasn’t sure she’d come back on her own, as if it were important that she love this place. “I’ll bring you sometime,” he added.
She wasn’t sure how to respond, so she said, “Were you serious about sharks?”
He began walking down the beach and she kept abreast of him, being sure to keep him on the ocean side and her feet dry.
“Yep. I’ve even caught a few from the pier. Have to throw back the babies, but you can keep the ones that are over a certain size. There used to be hammerheads and bull sharks, but nobody’s seen those for almost twenty years. Now it�
��s mostly sharp-nosed and black tips, with the occasional tiger shark and a few others.”
She gave a wary glance over at the water. “Are they man-eaters?” Scenes from the movie Jaws flashed through her head, and from Heath’s amused expression, it seemed that he was reading her mind.
He kept his gaze focused straight ahead. “Some of them.” He let the tension build while they walked a little farther down the beach, and she found herself jogging to keep up with his long strides. “But mostly they leave people alone. You know, you have a much greater chance of being struck by lightning while standing in a cornfield than you do of getting eaten by a shark.”
Emmy raised her eyebrows, still keeping a close eye on the shoreline for any telltale fins. “That’s reassuring. Thanks.”
“No problem.”
They continued to walk, the salty breeze off the water a welcome respite from the sweltering heat. Frank continued to run in and out of the water, occasionally racing up to people on the shore, who greeted him by name and gave him a scratch behind the ear or a treat.
They’d passed several other people with dogs, all of them on leashes. “Isn’t there some kind of dog-nuisance law for the beach?”
“Sure. No dogs allowed on the beach after ten in the morning or before six in the evening, and only on a leash.”
She watched as Frank jogged up to a group spread out on blankets; apparently they were getting ready to have supper on the beach. They greeted Frank with pats and food offerings, and Heath waved to all of them, giving Emmy a running litany of names and occupations as if she would remember any of them. The jumble of names she’d learned from Abigail that morning was already forgotten.
“And Frank is excluded from the rules?”
He sent her a sidelong glance. “Until somebody complains, I guess. He’s actually pretty well behaved, and only goes up to people he knows. Otherwise, he pretends he’s on a leash and sticks next to me.”