Moon Shell Beach

by Nancy Thayer

  Clare had broken off with Jesse every time. And sooner or later, the irresistible force that had drawn them together in high school brought them back together again.

  At the end of last summer, when Clare’s mother, whom Jesse had adored, was dying, Jesse had proposed marriage to Clare. He’d sworn off other women once and for all. He wanted to get married, he wanted to have children with Clare, he was ready to settle down. Oh, and I can believe you this time because? Clare had retorted. No, thanks. She knew he was just trying to make her mother happy—that was one of the lovable things about Jesse, he was in his heart a truly sweet guy. Two months later, in front of her father, Jesse had proposed again. This time, she’d accepted.

  She was sure Jesse hadn’t strayed since then. But the sight of one of Jesse’s former flings always stung, and Georgeann Kostner had been his last mistake. Jesse had been hired by the Kostners to renovate the space above their garage into a small rental apartment. Tony was always out fishing. Georgeann had brought mugs of hot coffee to Jesse, and stayed to talk, and one day she asked Jesse for help opening a stuck window in the bedroom, and then, as was often the case with Jesse, one thing led to another.

  After a few weeks, Clare heard the gossip from a friend who had heard it from a friend who had seen Jesse’s truck parked in front of the Kostners’ house for exceptionally long lunch hours. Clare had confronted Jesse. Jesse had confessed and pleaded for forgiveness. It wasn’t that he’d found Georgeann so irresistible, he swore, it wasn’t that he cared for her in even the smallest way; it was just that the woman had come on to him so strongly, and she had been so needy, and he had been so weak.

  After Jesse’s affair with Georgeann, Clare had told Jesse she was through with him, this time forever. She’d packed up his possessions and dumped them in the bed of his truck. She’d gotten Caller ID and refused to pick up the phone when his number came up. She refused to open the door when he knocked.

  And she had her own affair, with Jesse’s best friend, the painfully shy Amos. When he found out, Jesse had given Amos a black eye. Clare had been surprised at how guilty she’d felt when she heard about that. She thought she’d be pleased by Jesse’s jealousy. Instead she felt sad for both Jesse and Amos.

  Then her mother had gotten ill, and Jesse had come around to visit her, and she and Jesse had grown close again, and now here they were, engaged. Here they were, and she was convinced Jesse was through with wandering. She believed he would keep his promise to her, she trusted him when he said he loved her and wanted to live the rest of his life with her, but she still couldn’t find a good reason in her heart or mind to attend this memorial service.

  She followed Jesse into the bedroom and shut the door so her father wouldn’t hear them arguing. “I doubt Georgeann would even want me to come.”

  Jesse gawked. “Are you nuts? You think she’s going to come on to me at her husband’s memorial service?”

  “No. No, I didn’t mean that. I just meant that Georgeann and I were never close. And she’s got to know that I never cared for Tony.”

  Jesse grabbed his white shirt and yanked it on, buttoning up the front and the cuffs. Jesse looked really good in a white shirt. “His parents will be there, too, and his brother and sister. You like Rena.”

  Clare conceded the point. “I do like Rena. But it’s not like we’re close. She won’t notice if I’m there are not.”

  “Sure she will. Come on, Clare, this isn’t just about Tony, it’s about the community. We’ve lost one of ours. Whether we respected him or not, he is still one of ours. It’s like…like…like how we all take care of Lillian O’Malley. We don’t say, oh, the dumb broad took too many drugs and broke her brain and can’t walk across the street without getting lost. If anyone sees her wandering around, we take the time to cajole her into our car and we drive her home, we take the time to do that, even though on this island time is money. Tony was a dumb grunt in high school, I admit that, and he never did get much smarter, but he was a fisherman, he was an island son, and you’re an island daughter, and it’s just not right for you not to attend this service.”

  Clare looked at Jesse, who had slipped on the trousers to his best and only dark suit and was now working on a tie. His newly washed hair gleamed like the sun. He was beautiful. And he was right, too, about Tony and the island community, and this was one of the reasons she loved Jesse, because he was such a profound part of the island, and the island, land and people, were part of him.

  “You’re right, Jesse. I should go. I will go. Give me a moment, I’ll find my black dress.”

  The Congregational church was crowded to standing-room only. As Clare sat next to Jesse in the last row, a deep welling of pain told her the real reason she’d wanted to avoid this service. It reminded her of being seated in the first row, next to her father, at the memorial service for her mother.

  During the days just after her mother’s death, Clare had felt almost coddled by a blanket of exhaustion and relief. Her mother’s death had been short but hard, and Clare was grateful simply to have her mother lifted away from her pain. Clare’s father, dumbfounded by the sudden illness and death of the woman he adored, became confused and lethargic. Clare had had to do everything, make all the arrangements, patiently accept the sympathies and consolations of the town.

  Now she was able to settle into a reflective mood. It was almost Christmas. The year was drawing toward its final days. Night inked out the sky before five o’clock, and plunging temperatures and rising winds drove people into the refuge of their homes. Her shop did little business. Just before Christmas, there would be a sudden explosion of customers needing stocking stuffers and a few grand luxury boxes of truffles, but until then, Clare found herself often alone for hours in Sweet Hart’s. There was always something she could do, but recently she found herself just leaning on her counter, remembering.

  Ellen Hart had not been particularly maternal. She loved her husband and daughter, but the early years of nurturing a baby and raising a child had been difficult for her. Around the time Clare turned nine, Ellen had her studio built, and with each passing week she escaped more and more completely into her art. Somehow the three of them bumbled along together, and while Clare never starved, she seldom sat down to the dinner table with both her parents, and after a while, if the house needed cleaning, it was Clare who cleaned it. Clare didn’t resent her mother. No one could resent Ellen, who was lovely in a wistful way, with her long brown and white hair floating around her shoulders as she drifted out to the studio in her jeans, painter’s smock, and bedroom slippers. When she focused, she was charming. Jesse could usually get Ellen’s attention. He could make Ellen light up the way most women did around him, and when Ellen let her head fall back as she laughed, she was enchanting.

  In the quiet moments since her mother’s death, Clare was visited by memories of earlier years, when she was a little girl, when her mother’s attentions were more fully engaged on her family. On rainy days, her mother dressed Clare up in one of her romantic filmy negligees or satin robes, put ballet music on the stereo, and danced, swooping, around the house with Clare, and then the rain would disappear, and the walls of the house would melt, and Clare would be with a Fairy Queen, and she would be the Fairy Princess, and they would be waltzing among the clouds.

  One year, when Clare was seven or perhaps eight, a girl in their class gave a Halloween party. Clare wanted to be a mermaid, and her artistic mother had concocted a costume from turquoise satin with a tail that trailed behind her like a shining blue arrow. A small slit on the side made it possible for her to walk in tiny steps, like a mermaid would have to take. In her curly brown hair glittered a tiara her mother had made by gluing shells and sparkles on a headband. Clare wished she could wear the tiara every moment of her life.

  The day before the party, Clare had invited Lexi over to play, and unable to contain the thrill of having such a fabulous costume, she’d tried it on for Lexi. Lexi reacted with wonder, circling Clare slowly, gently touching h
er long blue tail, and then Lexi had sat right down on the floor and cried. Her parents were both busy in their store. They had no time to create an outfit for Lexi, and had ordered her a generic princess gown that was ugly, too large, and exactly like the one Spring Macmillan said she had.

  Clare’s mother had been in the hallway at that moment. She’d swept into the room to announce that she would make Lexi her very own singular mermaid costume. Clare was delighted to see her friend’s excitement, but worried, too. She didn’t want Lexi to have a costume like hers. It would diminish the originality of her own.

  But Ellen constructed Lexi’s costume from a one-piece emerald bathing suit, draped with scarves of sea green, foam white, and blue that fell to Lexi’s ankles, where they were gathered around into a frothy tail. Ellen sat the two girls down at the kitchen table with slender silk ribbons of green and blue and glued tiny silver and gold shells to the end of each ribbon. She phoned Lexi’s mother to ask if Lexi could spend the night, and Saturday, just before the party, she braided the ribbons into Lexi’s shoulder-length white-blond hair. She drove the girls to the party, and Clare would never forget the thrill of entering the room with Lexi at her side, both of them mermaids, extraordinary, glamorous, creatures from another world. At the very bottom of her heart, Clare was especially pleased that she was the one with the glittering, shell-studded tiara. Her costume was just a little bit better.

  The congregation rose now to sing a hymn. As Clare rose with the others, she wondered whether Lexi even knew that Ellen had died. Clare had received no letter of condolence, and that seemed a little odd. Wouldn’t Lexi’s parents have told Lexi about Clare’s mother’s death?

  Perhaps Lexi hadn’t written a note of condolence because Clare had never answered any of Lexi’s earlier letters. It had been ten years since she and Lexi had had their bitter, name-calling argument. For a few years after that, Lexi had written brief notes to Clare. And Clare hadn’t answered. Lexi’s letters had seemed like a kind of bragging. Here I am in Paris, here I am in Rome. During those years Clare had gotten a college degree in business, attended a culinary college for two years, worked three jobs every summer to save money, and started Sweet Hart’s. She’d had no time to spend on regrets and memories, and what free time she did have she’d spent with Jesse. Loving Jesse—and hating him, whenever she found out he was sleeping with someone else. Now she had agreed to marry Jesse. She’d managed to forgive Jesse for all his philandering. Couldn’t she forgive Lexi for an argument that had been every bit as much Clare’s fault?

  The truth was, she missed Lexi, and yet it was possible that the Lexi she missed didn’t even exist anymore. Lexi lived in New York with a wealthy, important man. Lexi’s brother, Adam, had left the island, too, to work with a veterinary practice outside Boston. Their parents were both retired now, so Clare never ran into them. She scanned the rows in front of her, but didn’t spot the Laneys, although she might not recognize them from the back.

  If they had come, and if they were at the reception after the service, she might ask them how Lexi was doing. In the past ten years, she’d never spoken to them about Lexi. Perhaps they might tell Lexi that Clare had asked after her. It might be seen as an overture for reconciliation, and Clare was stunned at how much the thought appealed to her.

  But no matter how hard she looked, she didn’t see the Laneys.

  SIX

  2006

  Lexi was in the climate-controlled walk-in closet in her husband’s Park Avenue home. Funny, how she still thought of this place as Ed’s home, not hers. Partly that was because she’d never been given permission to redecorate any of the rooms. Ed preferred a dark palette of colors, and heavy, massive furniture that loomed against the walls, seeming somehow judicial. Their judgment on Lexi was: you don’t belong here. In the early years, Lexi thought that, with time, she would feel at home in this place. She had tried to feel at home here. But now, ten years later, she was still an intruder or, at best, a guest in the gallery of her husband’s life.

  This one enclosed room in the large, formal house was hers. Her closet, hushed and orderly, was her refuge. Opening the glossy teak closet doors, she ran her fingertips over her silk shirts, skirts, and dresses, organized by color into a rainbow of luxury. With a touch of her finger, custom-built drawers glided open like silk, exposing layer after layer of perfectly folded sweaters, T-shirts, leotards. In other drawers, on velvet pads, lay her glittering treasure hoard of jewelry—the jewelry not valuable enough to be in the vault.

  So much beauty. So much perfection.

  And all of it cold and mute and still.

  She sank down on the floor, pulled her knees up to her chest, and buried her face in her arms. She’d started her period again today, perhaps that was why she was in such a dark mood. Ed would never have approved of her seeing a therapist, so recently she’d taken to reading self-help books. Now she called upon their advice. One exercise had been to look for the positive, to count her blessings. She could do that, couldn’t she?

  Okay, then. To start with, she lived in luxury, that was certain. And she had to admit that she traveled as much as she wanted. With Ed, she vacationed in Tuscany, sunned on private Caribbean islands, and skied in Switzerland or Vail. She heard operas and symphonies in London, Amsterdam, and New York, and attended private parties for the conductors and divas afterward. She gazed upon breathtaking paintings in Paris and St. Petersburg. She even spent a few summer weeks on the Vineyard, which was kind of funny, since Nantucketers considered it a rival island. The only vacation spot she never went to was Nantucket. Because her marriage to Ed had caused such a rift with her parents, Ed never wanted to spend time on Nantucket, and Lexi didn’t push it. In a way, she didn’t want to go there when she was with him, because if she was with him she wouldn’t be herself, the self people on Nantucket knew and loved.

  Or, rather, used to love.

  Oh, how she missed the island. She missed her parents, she missed the beaches, she missed Clare.

  Stop it, Lexi told herself. Stop obsessing about what you don’t have. Focus on what you have.

  She looked around the closet. The clothes. It was such fun, choosing and wearing the clothes she was supposed to wear, the more expensive, the better, because it all reflected on her husband. Ed valued her lanky, sleek body, and people around him gushed with compliments when Lexi attended a charity ball in a simple gown and big jewels. She knew the admiration was really only a kind of suck-up to her wealthy husband, but that didn’t dim the pleasure. At the best of times, she felt like her husband’s colleague. Ed would brief her on the people they would be dining with and prime her on whom to flatter, whom to ignore. Earlier in their marriage, he’d liked to have sex after an important business-related event and, in a weird way, that had made her feel useful. But after all these years of marriage, the sex was irregular and brief. She was afraid Ed was bored with her.

  And she was unhappy and deeply lonely. Ed traveled constantly and she missed his company, but more than that, she missed having women friends. Most of the women Lexi met were the wives of Ed’s colleagues, and those women were older, or first wives who disliked Lexi on principle. Or they were women with children.

  Children. Oh, how she wanted a child.

  For a few years, Lexi had been on the Pill. Ed didn’t like condoms, and she knew she was too inexperienced in this new life to be a good mother. When she stopped taking the Pill, after they’d been married for four years, she assumed she’d get pregnant within months. And she did. Two months later, she miscarried.

  Ed was kind to her, on his way out the door to another meeting. He didn’t want more children—he already had three. So Lexi never told him about the two other miscarriages. She could never tell him how, as the months passed, with the rise of hope and the plunge of disappointment, she came to hate her body, not for the way it looked but because of what it could not seem to do.

  It was impossible to share these deep and intimate emotions with him. She quickly learned, and c
onstantly was reminded, that Ed liked her when she was perfect and distant, but in her imperfect neediness, she was on her own. Lexi had tried to find friends. She gave dinner parties, and networked with other women by doing charity work. She invited women for lunch. Sometimes they invited her back. After a while, with committee meetings and luncheons, she had at least the illusion of friendships. But never did she have that flash of connection she had had with Clare, that sense of being immediately at home, in the same pack. She could never talk about what really mattered to her.

  Focus on the positive, she ordered herself.

  Okay, she did have one friend. She did have Gloria. Thank goodness for Gloria. Two years ago, bored with herself and tired of feeling insecure because she was less knowledgeable than Ed’s older, more experienced crowd, Lexi told him she wanted to go back to college. Nonsense, Ed said. In the first place, that would tie her down so she couldn’t travel with him, and in the second place, how embarrassing would it be for him to have a wife in college? He had children in college!

  But he agreed she could have a tutor.

  So brilliant, funny, warmhearted Gloria Ruben entered her life—and changed her life. Gloria was ten years older than Lexi, plump, maternal, and energetic. She taught literature and theater criticism at CCNY and supplemented her income with tutoring. Gloria had been divorced twice, she had two teenage children and a constellation of relatives and friends and old and new lovers who were always needing her, but as Lexi and Gloria got to know each other, Gloria made time to accompany Lexi to a new off-Broadway play or a concert at Carnegie Hall.

  And when Lexi had a miscarriage, Gloria mourned with her, and nursed her, tucking her in bed with pillows and bringing her chocolates and a pile of new novels. Gloria was the one who insisted Lexi see an ob-gyn about these miscarriages, and when the medical verdict came—Lexi was fine, there was no reason she couldn’t have a baby—it was Gloria who celebrated with Lexi, drinking Taittinger champagne.