Driftwood Summer

by Patti Callahan Henry

  It was Mama’s way to rewrite the past—to turn a dandelion into a fresh white daisy. Their childhood was this: Daddy gone so many nights for his work in the Air Force that Riley barely remembered him being home; Mama’s slurred words every evening; Maisy’s police escorts home on more than one summer evening. But Mama remembered, or attempted to make them remember, their life as a fairy tale on the beaches of coastal Georgia. If Mama were to write the book, to pass along the family stories, there would be a million daisies.

  The Sheffield children each seemed to be born with roles as defined as the seasons of the year. Riley had mutely accepted hers—she was to be an example for the other girls, a rock of steadfast strength. She was the oldest: responsible, a tomboy athlete with her bigger-boned body and strong muscles. Maisy was the middle sister: beautiful, fragile and lithe. Adalee was the youngest: pampered and naive, even now unaware what had happened that last summer before Maisy left, of the break in the family bonds.

  Riley turned from the family oil painting, from the memories, and lifted her cell phone from her back pocket to call Lodge, as Mama had requested.

  “Hey,” he said after the first ring. “Riley, what’s up?”

  “I hate caller ID,” she said. “Now I can’t prank call you like I used to.”

  “Okay, pretend I don’t know who you are.”

  “Too late,” she said. “You already know.”

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “I do know who you are.”

  The way he said it made her smile. “I’m just calling to thank you for the article. It’s wonderful. Have I told you what a terrific writer you are?”

  “No, and you can tell me whenever you like.”

  “You’re a terrific writer.”

  “Thank you, Riley Sheffield.” Shuffling noises came across the line, and then his voice. “Sorry—dropped the phone. Hey, listen, wanna go grab some dinner?”

  Riley stared up at the portrait of the girl Lodge had once known. “Oh, I can’t. My sisters are here. Mama is laid up. I have Brayden. . . .”

  “I know, I know. You’re busy. I just thought . . . we could do a follow-up article to come out when the festivities start.”

  “Oh. Yes. That would be great. I was actually going to beg for just that. Why don’t you stop by the store tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  Riley hung up and put her arm around Brayden’s shoulders. “Who was that?” he asked.

  Riley grabbed the pile of opened mail off the front table, leafed through the letters paper clipped to their envelopes as she answered, “The newspaper guy—you know, Mr. Barton, who you fish with sometimes.”

  Brayden opened his mouth to speak, but the home phone rang in the hallway. He made a grunting noise. “I hate the phone. Every time I think we’re leaving or doing something—the stupid phone rings.”

  “This is a terribly busy time, Brayden. I promise it will get better.”

  A voice, both familiar and distant, spoke. “May I please speak with Ms. Sheffield?”

  “Speaking,” Riley said, made a motion for Brayden to hold on a minute. He sat slumped on the bottom step of the curving staircase and propped his elbows onto his knees.

  “Kitsy Sheffield?”

  “No, this is Riley.” She made a face at Brayden.

  “Well, hello, Riley. This is Sheppard Logan. I know I’m a bit late with this question, but Mack and I are coming to town tomorrow and we can’t seem to find a place to stay. I don’t know why we didn’t expect it—but in the old days we wouldn’t have had any difficulty finding a room there. Times have changed, eh?”

  Riley attempted a laugh, which came out more like a cough. “Yes, the summers are crazy here now. But there is a new place. Have you called the Seaside Inn?”

  “No. Do you have their number?”

  Riley rattled it off. “I am so glad you’re coming. There will be events every day leading up to the party, so please take full advantage of the festivities.” Riley repeated the words she’d said to at least a hundred customers over the phone, yet this time her voice shook.

  “Hold on. I need some paper.”

  Silence filled the line; then Riley heard it: Mack Logan’s voice calling out to his father, “Here, Dad.” She closed her eyes, tried to imagine a Mack Logan who was thirty-two years old, in his parents’ house. She couldn’t do it. Nothing came to mind except the tanned, tall boy of summer.

  Mr. Logan came back on the line. “Go ahead. I’m ready.”

  Riley gave him the number again, and then paused before speaking in her most controlled voice. “Please tell Mrs. Logan and the boys that I said hello.”

  “I will, dear. And I so look forward to seeing your family again.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Logan.”

  Riley held the receiver in her hand, the buzz of disconnection humming across the foyer.

  “Mommm . . . hello. They hung up.” Brayden’s irritation was obvious.

  Riley glanced over at her precious son, sitting on the bottom step of her childhood staircase looking at her holding a dead receiver in her hand. In a way, in a distorted and fantastic way, even though he wasn’t Brayden’s father, Mack Logan was one of the reasons this child sat in front of her. She hung up the phone and hugged Brayden too tight.

  “Stop, Mom. You can be so embarrassing.”

  “Yes, for the throngs of people watching you right now, I am humiliating.”

  “I’m going to see Gamma.” He ran off down the hall.

  She allowed the sweet thrill of hearing Mack Logan’s voice, even in the background, run through her before she dismissed it as another childhood fantasy. When they’d been best friends as children, she’d had an unbounded belief in mermaids and fairies, in fairy tales and nature’s mysteries. She’d believed she could fly with Peter Pan, breathe underwater, walk without touching the ground. And she’d believed that Mack Logan loved her.

  Reality had a way of ruining a girl’s dreams. Her life with Brayden above a coastal bookshop was all she dreamed of now. Riley climbed the curved staircase, took a left at the top of the stairs. Photos of the Sheffield sisters lined the entire hallway: Halloween night dressed in princess costumes; first days of school; Christmas morning with the stockings—all snapshots that could never capture the internal workings of who they were then and whom they would become. Riley stopped at a photo of Maisy with her homecoming queen banner hung across her pale yellow dress. Riley reached up, wiped dust off the bottom of the frame and then opened the door to her own childhood bedroom.

  The room was empty save for a queen-sized bed and dresser used for guests. Riley sat on the bed, closed her eyes; she allowed the last memory of Mack Logan to take shape in her mind’s eye.

  Mack had been Riley’s best friend since the day they were seven years old and had met on Pearson’s fishing pier. Riley showed him what type of bait to use for the redfish, and he showed her how to throw a cast net. A friendship formed that would remain, or so she’d thought. All those years ago, she’d been able to forget about Mack during the school year until his family’s Volvo station wagon pulled into Palmetto Beach on Memorial Day weekend, bikes clipped to the back of the car, a large plastic carrier that looked like a purple turtle with its head hidden strapped to the top. Mack, his brother, Joe, and their parents would get out of the car at Driftwood Cottage and summer would begin.

  For eleven years they came.

  That last summer arrived with record-breaking high temperatures. Heat rose from the pavement in waves, and the summer people ran across the sand screeching and jumping, using towels as stepping-stones. Large multicolored umbrellas dotted the beach, parents underneath fanning themselves while children ran at the water’s edge, oblivious of the ninety-eight percent humidity and over-hundred-degree temperatures. The ceiling fans in the Beach Club porch whirred incessantly and ineffectively.

  Mack and Riley came together on the pier as they always had. After the awkward greetings, which followed a school year apart, they dropped their fishing lines int
o the gray-blue water. Riley pulled her baseball cap lower on her forehead, yanked her T-shirt off to fish in her bathing suit. Mack was quiet; he hadn’t said much since he’d arrived. They were eighteen years old now, high school graduates—a new world.

  Riley couldn’t take his silence much longer. It was usually less than ten minutes before the natural rhythms of their summer friendship resumed. “Okay,” she said, placing her fishing pole in a metal loop. “You’re mad at me. What did I do?”

  He backed away from her. “No . . . no. Why do you say that?”

  “You’re acting totally weird.”

  “Just because I’m quiet doesn’t mean I’m weird.”

  She leaned against the pier’s cracked wooden railing. “Okay, not weird.” She tilted her head at him. “You sure got a lot taller this year.”

  He laughed. “Pizza. That was pretty much my diet. I don’t think I’m any taller, just bigger maybe.”

  Riley felt the natural camaraderie of their decadelong friendship begin to return.

  His eyes traveled down her body, the leaner body she hadn’t possessed the summer before. Then he turned away. “Yeah, you changed, too.”

  “Whatever.” She picked up her fishing pole, cast the line into the water.

  “You’re . . . smaller.”

  “No, I’m two inches taller.” She poked at his side with the pole.

  “Yeah, I guess.” He blushed.

  She laughed, a small, nervous sound. Maybe, just maybe this would be the summer he loved her as much as she loved him. She’d been willing to remain his best friend these last years with the remote hope that one day he’d turn to her and see her: Riley Sheffield, the girl almost a woman. Maybe it was happening now.

  The next days were the best. They flirted around the edges of attraction, touching fingertips while fishing or baiting hooks, looping legs and arms in a wrestling match in the pool—seeking out any reason to touch without appearing to want to do more than roughhouse.

  Riley floated through those days with an expectation of love finally fulfilled. Her mother was right; some things were worth waiting for. Mack Logan was one of them. She wasn’t the most beautiful sister—that was Maisy. Yet thankfully, Maisy seemed to irritate Mack: her high voice, her clumsy way at sports.

  Well into the third week of summer, Riley waited for Mack on the front porch; they were going to the movie on the lawn, a weekly event in the park where the teenagers congregated without supervision while their parents drank scotch and vodka at the Beach Club. This was the site of first kisses, first tastes of cheap wine and first puffs on cigarettes. Riley had spent more than her usual five minutes getting ready that night, suffering a sudden indecisiveness. Hair in a ponytail, and then down over her shoulders; a tank top, and then a T-shirt; a jeans miniskirt, then shorts. It was simpler when Mack hadn’t noticed her as anything more than a buddy, but still she wouldn’t change the anticipation she’d felt the last few weeks.

  Her heart sped; her skin flushed. Everything seemed more possible, as though the world had shifted into the orbit it was always meant to have.

  Maisy came out onto the porch, where Riley was leaning against a post watching the sidewalk for Mack. She dropped her tall body into a chair and somehow made the simple gesture look seductive. “Whatcha doing?”

  “Waiting for someone.” Riley turned away from her sister’s beauty, not wanting anything to ruin how she felt about herself at that moment.

  “Who?” Maisy was sixteen now, and her adolescence had increased her radiance.

  “None of your business.” Riley saw Mack turn the corner to Sixth Avenue. “Gotta go.” She ran down the front steps and met Mack on the sidewalk.

  He smiled at Riley. “I brought a blanket and a cooler.”

  She wanted to bask in this moment, to enjoy his smile for her, his preparation for an evening under a night sky watching a movie, skin touching skin in innocence and promise.

  Maisy’s voice shattered the night. “Hey, Mack,” she hollered.

  He stopped, looked over his shoulder at Maisy running toward them, then at Riley.

  Riley sensed the shift before it actually happened: Mack turning his smile, his focus on Maisy. She felt the desperate desire to rewind time, to undo the act of Maisy running toward them. Even before the change occurred, Riley knew that it would happen eventually, so why not now? Riley was bland gray compared to Maisy’s radiant light.

  Riley took a deep breath, sensing the end of something that had barely begun. She looked at Mack. “She’s here to irritate the hell out of me. That’s essentially her life goal.”

  “It always has been,” he said, yet his gaze followed the sixteen-year-old girl coming toward them. He laughed, looked at Riley. “You wanna ditch her?”

  He’d said these words a hundred times over the years when Maisy had found them at the pier or asked to go out on the sailboat or to join them at the pool—Let’s ditch her. It had been easy then. It would be impossible now.

  Maisy arrived breathless at their side. “Hey, y’all on your way to the movie on the lawn?”

  “Yes,” Riley said. “Why don’t you go find that boyfriend of yours and head that way?” Her words were a dull sword compared to the sharp impact Maisy’s beauty was having on Mack.

  The slow turning of his affection wasn’t completed that night, or the next morning, but the beginning of Mack and Maisy’s summer romance began at the exact moment that Mack and Riley’s ended. Of course Riley pretended that it had never begun, that his preoccupation with Maisy was of no concern to her. They’d been friends and always would be. Yet inside, her heart broke in places that remained permanently jagged, places where the most casual graze of memory catches in pain.

  Hate for Maisy began to grow inside Riley’s heart, tangling the emotions of love and sisterhood. An ally became an enemy. A friend turned foe. Riley hid these feelings for Maisy as she hid most feelings behind her happy-go-lucky, Riley-loves-everyone persona.

  Once Mack noticed Maisy, what was simple became complex and confusing. He’d arrive at the house, and Riley would think it was to fish or boat, and instead he’d take Maisy to the movies or the ice-cream stand. Maisy stepped out of her role as tag-along sister into a new one: competition.

  The months passed until the bonfire on that last night in celebration of the end of summer. All the teens in Palmetto Beach were frenetic with the need to take in and consume this last night before they all returned home. The music was loud, the voices high-pitched, the laughter almost hysterical.

  Riley would leave for college in a week. The blazing bonfire, and the burning hole in her gut from the lemonade-vodka surprise she’d drunk with Lodge Barton behind the lifeguard station allowed the bitterness toward her sister to grow, as the fire did with each log added.

  This last night—this night of the fire—Maisy had gone home. She was sixteen years old and her curfew was an hour ago. Daddy was strict about this in a way he wasn’t about other things. Freedom reigned in almost all other aspects of their lives, as though someone had told him you get to pick one rule to enforce in your daughters’ lives, and he’d said, “Fine, curfew it is.”

  Mack stood on the other side of the bonfire, laughing with his brother, Joe, his head back and the fire lighting his chin. He caught Riley’s gaze across the flames and smiled, motioned for her to join them.

  Maybe, she’d thought, just maybe this would be the night he’d really see her. She’d once believed in this kind of equilibrium: in a single moment in which the world turned right, in which things worked out for the best, in perfect destiny. In the balanced world in which she’d lived—where the tide breathed in and then exhaled back out twice a day every day, where wild-winged ospreys returned to the same nests every year, where the rising moon mirrored the setting sun over the marsh—it was utterly impossible for someone to love another person as much as she loved Mack Logan and not feel that love returned.

  Logs had been arranged to form a perimeter separating fire from sand, and sh
e walked around it to Mack, to happy endings and new beginnings. Lodge stopped her, offered her another swig of his alcoholic concoction. She shook her head no.

  Then the world became off-kilter somehow, tilted and backward. Mack’s arm was draped around a girl. Riley stumbled in the sand, moved forward.

  Maisy.

  Mack was holding her and they were moving toward the lifeguard station, laughing. Riley caught Joe staring at her; he shrugged and Riley ran. Her rushed steps took her home without her own full understanding of what she was doing or why. The Sheffield house was only one block down and one block back from the beach. “Second row,” the summer people called these homes.

  Riley burst through the front door. Mama and Daddy were sitting in their usual chairs, Mama cross-stitching a dining room chair cover for the Historical Foundation, Daddy reading a novel.

  “Maisy is at the bonfire,” Riley said, her calm tone belying her inner panic and anger, her bitterness.

  Daddy’s face turned the purple shade that Riley often imagined he used when yelling at the cadets at the flight academy. A military man, he was not one for discussion or debate, only action. His novel fell to the ground as he bolted from the room without asking any questions.

  Mama shook her head. “Now was that necessary, Riley?”

  “Yes, it was.” Riley ran to her room, imagining the scene at the bonfire until she could no longer stay herself. She bolted down the back stairs, returned to the beach. Her toes sank into the sand and she felt something shift, something now unalterable in the Sheffield family.

  She reached the beach again, easing her way back to the party. She slid into the group around the bonfire. “Ooh,” Betsy Miller, from Connecticut, said, “you missed it big-time. Your daddy came in here and dragged your sister home. She was totally freaking out.”

  “Oh?” Riley raised her eyebrows, scanned the crowd for Mack. Where was he?

  She spun in a circle.

  There.

  He stood alone, his face blank and full of flame’s shadows. For the first time in memory, she could not feel his emotions. She tucked her hair behind her ear and walked toward him, slow, steady. He looked up at her across the night, across their years as best friends. He held her gaze for only a moment as she begged, in her mind, for him not to turn away.