By The Sea, Book Three: Laura

by Stockenberg, Antoinette

  "Neil—"

  "Yes. I know," Colin said, reviving more quickly than she. He staggered to his feet, spied the Virginia still high and dry on the reef, and, shading his eyes, squinted in the harsh sun. "I see someone … two … no, three. They're all right, Laura. They're all right."

  He began waving his arms in a wide arc over his head, trying to draw their attention.

  Laura bowed her head and pressed her hands together in fervent prayer. "Oh, thank you, God. Oh, thank you, thank you." She tried again to stand, then fell in a crumpled heap on the sand.

  Colin stopped mid-wave and dropped to his knees beside her. "You've lost blood, Laura," he said, eyeing the deep gash in her shoulder. Don't move. Please. Stay where you are."

  "No … he'll need to see me … to know I'm here."

  "I understand that, but—okay, let me help you." He lifted her to her feet and held her up with one arm while he signaled the Virginia with his other.

  Very quickly they were acknowledged with wildly enthusiastic waves from the three on the boat. Laura tried to wave back but let out a cry instead; her shoulder had other ideas.

  "We have to go to them. But I don't think I can swim. How will we get there?" she said, unable to think clearly. Her head felt as heavy as a bowl of potatoes.

  Colin surveyed the bits and pieces of lumber strewn around them. "Not by yawl-boat, that's for sure. Hopefully Neil's rowing dory is intact. They'll figure it out. We'll wait for them here while there's still a scrap of shade. Stay right there."

  She did as he said, and he lowered himself with a grimace of pain beside her. "Well," he said with a sigh. "We tried."

  "And failed. Now we don't even have the yawl-boat. Oh, God, the water barrels! What if they didn't make it?"

  "I'm sure they did. We'll be fine," Colin said.

  The wonder of it was, Laura could see that he meant it. It was both reassuring and exasperating. "How can you say that, Colin? We're shipwrecked on what looks like a spit of sand, with no one in sight."

  "You forget, there are three thousand islands and cays in the Bahamas—"

  "—of which only ten per cent are inhabited!"

  "Still pretty good odds. And besides," he said with a tentative, rueful look, "the Virginia is bound to be jumped on for salvage. Someone will see her soon. And therefore … us."

  She hadn't even considered the prospect: salvage. It was such a dread word. And yet here they were, facing its imminence. The boat would be stripped down to bare bones, and anything with any value would be carried off, from the sails to the coffee pot.

  It was an utterly crushing thought. "I wonder," she said, too ashamed to look at Colin, "if an arsonist ever feels sorry that he's burned someone's house down."

  "Laura! The comparison is absurd. You didn't act with malice."

  "I acted with arrogance. And now Sam has nothing." She added in a murmur, "I cannot leave him with nothing."

  "Not nothing," Colin said quickly, seeing the direction she was heading. "There are the gems."

  "Those?" She shook her head. "They don't belong to us."

  "Well, they damn well don't belong to whoever is going to walk away with them!"

  He checked himself, then said in a calmer voice, "We can get the jewels back to their owner. If we can find him. He may be grateful enough to toss a stone or two our way. Those will go to Sam. As for us, you and I are young enough and smart enough to make a future for ourselves and—"

  "Future?" She turned back to him at that. "How can we have a future after this?"

  "How can we not, after this?" Colin shot back. There it was, in his voice, in his look: that burning urgency that melted all resolve.

  Steeling herself against it, she said, "I can't give Sam back his boat. So I have to give him back his son. You know I do, Colin. And you also know

  I'll never leave Neil. You know that, too."

  She looked away again, took a deep breath of ocean air, and let it out slowly, surprised at how much it hurt to do it. If only she could blame the pain on a broken rib.

  They sat in numbed silence for a long moment. In a toneless voice Colin said at last, "You can't do that—go back to him. You can't."

  "I have to."

  "You're being a martyr."

  "I'm not."

  "You are! Can't you see that? You're like someone out of the Middle Ages: 'I've sinned, so I must be punished.' Because, make no mistake, this is about us and not about the boat."

  She sat without interrupting as he spoke, allowing herself to memorize his face for all time. Despite the trauma they'd just endured, and despite the scrapes and cuts on his face, he looked more energized, more handsome, more darkly captivating than ever.

  "I won't argue with you," she said when he paused for her response.

  He shrugged off her non-answer. "Do you love me, Laura?" he said with a burning look.

  "How can you ask?"

  "Do you love him?"

  "In a different way."

  She did not have the strength, emotional or physical, to continue the dialogue. "Can we leave the analysis to clergy and psychiatrists?" she said, not without some of her old spirit. "I've made up my mind, Colin. I think I made it up when I saw Neil at the door of our cabin—my cabin. It's no good, it won't work. Us. And I'm just so … tired."

  She struggled again to her feet, and this time she was able to remain standing. Waving away his help, she said, "We have to get moving. We have to retrieve the gems—and the passage money—before someone else does, and … and … just … move on. It's the right, the fair thing to do."

  In the most difficult pivot she'd ever had to make, Laura turned and began walking away from him, toward the end of the reef where the Virginia lay spent and motionless.

  Behind her, she heard Colin call out. "Laura! Life is not fair. If you haven't learned that yet in your nearly three decades, then God help you. You haven't really been living. Laura!"

  She shook her head and kept on walking.

  Chapter 15

  Laura Powers went back to Newport with her son, what was left of the thousand-dollar down payment, and the little marble ball of gems.

  But without the Virginia. By the time she and Neil left the Bahamas on a freighter bound for New York, the vessel that had carried Laura through ecstasy and misery had been picked clean, right down to her bones. Laura had managed to fill a couple of duffle bags with a few personal possessions, including her blurred and nearly illegible journal, Sam's second-favorite pipe, and one of the Virginia's name boards, missing its last two letters.

  She met up with Sam in New York, at a pier not far from where she had first laid eyes on him nearly a decade earlier. Sam, who had been fully briefed by Laura in a letter that went on for pages, knew what to expect: a remorseful wife who would never be able to make up for the loss of his beloved schooner, but who would try.

  Laura, on the other hand, had no idea how she would be received. Sam hadn't written her—she had not expected that he would—but he had managed somehow to get through on the telephone to the proper Bahamian authorities and have them relay the news to her that he had received her letter and would meet her in New York.

  As Laura and Neil were disembarking, she saw Sam before he saw them. She was shocked to see how much he had aged in her absence. His hair looked thinner, whiter, and he was stooping, like someone with a sore back. He wore an air of grim defeat, as if life were no longer worth the candle. It occurred to her that he was in a state of bereavement from the loss of his boat.

  It also occurred to her that Sam might not have changed at all, but that she had simply grown used to spending her days and nights with a younger man. She pushed the thought of that man violently from her mind.

  A shipboard romance, that's all it was, she had told an incredulous Colin on the day that he left the islands. But she hadn't believed it then, and now less than ever.

  How to greet Sam, that was the question. At last she caught his eye. With a half-smile and a hesitant wave, she began to ed
ge down the gangplank, waiting for his expression to change. It did not, until the adult passengers ahead of Neil moved out of the boy's line of sight and he saw his father.

  "Dad!" he cried, and began weaving his way through the other passengers.

  Sam heard his son's voice, and his weathered face became more creased in a sudden grin. If she needed proof that she'd made the right decision, Laura saw it in her husband's look of relief.

  But his welcome of her was far more tempered, and for one awful moment she thought that he might try to grab Neil from her and run.

  Instead, he took her duffle without embracing and said gruffly, "Rough trip? We had a wicked nor'easter come through; you must have caught some of it."

  "Yes, I guess so, but it was nothing comp—"

  No, stay away from there, she thought. There would be time enough and more to hash over the details. Most of them, anyway.

  She watched her son slip his hand shyly into his father's ham-sized one and begin to prattle on about the vagrant albatross that had landed ever so briefly on their deck. "In the north Atlantic, Dad! Can you believe it? I never saw one, ever! It was huge!"

  "You're a lucky lad, son. They're all but extinct," Sam said, but his attention was sliding over to Laura now.

  "Did you know that they stay with their mate for life, Dad? The bosun told me that. I wonder where his mate was," Neil went on. "We only saw the one."

  The sight of her son babbling on sent a rush of apprehension over Laura. Neil could be a chatterbox, and his talk was bound, sooner or later, to turn to Colin, still and forever his hero. Of course, Neil might not care to divulge that he had been disobeying orders and skylarking in the rigging when he became tangled in it and had to be saved by Colin. And he probably did not understand and might not even remember the scene he came upon in his parents' cabin on the night of the wreck.

  But sooner or later, Neil might babble innocently about something that Sam would deem anything but innocent. Like the way Colin liked to tug Laura's braid playfully, or the way they both seemed to finish one another's sentences, or even how skilful they both were at crosswords. Any of it and all of it could set Sam to thinking.

  And the one thing Laura did not want her husband to do was to think about Colin. Despite her hunger to confess and make a clean breast of her affair, Laura understood that the harder thing was not to say anything. Colin would be the thorn she would bear in her heart for the rest of her life, an ongoing pain that would ebb and surge.

  Like the tide that so nearly carried us away.

  She was wondering whether that would not have been the best thing when Sam said a little sharply, "Laura. Are you listenin' to me? I been askin' about my brother."

  Apologizing, she said, "I'm still a little disoriented from the boat's motion, I think."

  "You? Since when?"

  "Well, anyway. Billy is … you know—Billy! He's fallen in love with island ways and has decided to stay in the Bahamas for a while. They still move a lot of freight by sail between islands; he's found a job as deck hand on a schooner."

  "A schooner. Yeah. Like my Ginny, you mean."

  "Well, yes, but not nearly as well-kept …."

  What a dumb thing to say, she thought. It would hardly bring comfort to Sam. Little land-mines everywhere! She would have to learn to navigate them more carefully. She shifted the duffel bag she was carrying from one hand to the other; her shoulder still tended to ache without warning.

  Sam took that bag from her as well and slung it over his shoulder. "What's this?" he asked, feeling through the canvas with his hand. "Lumber?"

  "Oh, that!" Laura said, suddenly sorry she'd brought it back with them.

  Neil, always eager to contribute to the conversation, said, "It's one of the name boards for the Virginia, Dad. Most of one, anyway."

  Sam stopped mid-stride and dropped the duffel bag on the pier. Unzipping the carrier, he saw the scarred and broken remains of the name board he once had painted with loving care. The Virgin. All that was left of the one true love of his life.

  He pulled the board out of the bag by its broken end and hurled it into the harbor.

  "Dad!" cried Neil, aghast. His eyes were round with wonder.

  "I don't need no remindin'," his father said. He slung the bag back over his shoulder and strode out ahead of them.

  ****

  Sam was renting a sparsely furnished four-room cottage on a dirt lane near the harbor in Newport. After they were settled in and Neil was tucked in his very own, very dry bed, Laura repeated what she had already written Sam about the shipwreck, leaving out the same parts involving Colin as she had left out in the letter.

  The first order of business was of course the little marble ball of gems. Sam's mouth fell slack when Laura unscrewed the small globe and spilled its contents carefully onto a dish towel on the small kitchen table.

  "Godamighty" was his response. He fingered the diamonds and rubies, all of them cut and polished and ready to be surrounded by gold and platinum. "Do you reckon they could be fakes?"

  "I doubt it. I think we should assume they're genuine. And I definitely think we should hire someone to track down Mr. Angelina before they find us first. If we're honest, who knows? Colin—Durant—thinks that there's a chance they'll give us a reward for returning the stones."

  "Where is Durant, anyway? You've said naught about him."

  Standing up and turning to the stove to hide the rush of her emotions, Laura shrugged and said, "I have no idea. He … he hopped aboard a yacht that had just had a crewmember jump ship and was looking for a replacement to continue on in a circumnavigation. He could be, I don't know, anywhere by now."

  She brought the chipped enamel kettle over to the sink, filled it, and took it over to the stove, all without looking at her husband. Turning on the gas, she was rewarded with a hissing sound.

  "You have to light the damned pilot, woman!" Sam snarled. "Move off! I'll do it m'self before you blow us all up!"

  And that's when Laura knew: the road back to normalcy was going to involve many painful twists and turns and frustrating detours.

  ****

  Within a month, Mr. Angelina had got in touch. He was not a happy man. The look on his face as he examined and counted the gems was intense, almost fearful. Laura had to wonder whether he was worried about his own role in the sorry play.

  "Well, that's it, then," he said, standing up. "Our business here is done."

  Meanwhile, Sam had been led by Laura to expect a reward for them not being thieves. Sam wasn't a happy man, either. "Hold on a bit," he said, keeping his tone mild. "Is that all you've got to say?"

  "I believe so, yes."

  "There's no reward for our safe return of them stones?"

  "Your reward, sir, is that you are being allowed to keep the deposit, for one, and are not being made to reimburse the owner for the loss of his building supplies, for another. That's your reward." The last came out in a smirk.

  "Hey, now," Sam said. His voice had that low, hard edge that Laura knew well. "I call that some unkind. We took a chance. A big chance. It did cost us."

  Faltering a little, Mr. Angelina pushed his glasses back up his nose and said, "You weren't insured?"

  "Funny thing, there," Sam said as he moved between him and the kitchen door. "Lloyd's of London had the gall to turn me down."

  "Well, I don't see—"

  "Look harder, then!"

  Mr. Angelina compressed his lips and rubbed a forefinger nervously across his chin. At last he sighed and nodded as if to himself before reaching in his inside suit pocket for a slender billfold. "Since you were not insured, and your own loss was heavy, I believe the owner would approve of my leaving you with something to help you along in this time of distress."

  He pulled out four one-hundred-dollar bills and placed them on the kitchen table, all without taking his eyes off Sam, who had folded his arms across his chest in what he presumably felt was an encouraging way.

  Sam looked at the bills, then
at the little man, and said at last, "All right. I reckon we can forget about the whole thing. You be sure to let your boss know that."

  The haggling was over. With a brusque nod, Mr. Angelina beat a retreat.

  The money was a bribe to buy their silence; Sam and Laura understood that perfectly well and were fine with it. The jewels were back in the states, and Laura was no longer a criminal. "No harm, no foul," as Sam put it. He'd even made a joke about it: a double-smuggle; the crime had cancelled itself out.

  The money wasn't nearly enough to buy another boat, any boat, from which Sam could continue to ply his trade. But Laura quickly found work teaching at the Lenthal School, where Neil had begun to take classes, and her salary, together with the modest amount of cash they now had, was enough for them to buy the flood-prone house that they were renting. (The landlord, fed up with his disastrous investment, let it go to them for a song.)

  For several months Sam worked at the Hotel Viking, but being in service was not for him. He left and secured a better job, though with fewer hours, at the Torpedo Station, assembling munitions of war. That job, too, displeased him, so he left and found work mere blocks away on Long Wharf in one of the repair shops that serviced the Fall River Line of steamboats.

  As the months dragged into a year and then two, and Sam became more and more unhappy, Laura encouraged him to go back to sea, on a local fishing vessel if nothing else.

  "Are you daft? Why would I want to work aboard someone else's boat?"

  "You'd be at sea again, Sam. You do miss it," she said, clearing his dinner plate.

  "I see the water every day. In Newport you can't not see the water, no matter where it is you're slaving. I told you: I'm done with the sea. Don't bother me about it. You of all people," he couldn't help muttering.

  Weary of his resentment and hostility, Laura let her upbeat pose drop for once. "Then what are we doing by the sea? Why don't we move to a farm in Minnesota, where you can work the land? I can certainly find a job teaching there. And you could be your own boss again."