The only place that felt even remotely like home was far from where she’d grown up, in the Pacific Northwest in a cluster of remote islands north of Seattle, on San Juan Island. Every August she returned to the big yellow farmhouse perched on a bluff overlooking the sea, staying for a month with her two best friends from college, Lena and Marco, and their brood of three dark-haired children.
She wondered what they were all doing this very moment. It was early June, and they should be on the island, already enjoying the brief but golden Northwest summer before their return to New York City in the fall. She closed her eyes for a moment, picturing them—Marco with his sharp black eyes, that half smile when something amused him, his square, competent hands sketching out plans for a new library, a performing arts center. Marco Firelli was an award-winning architect who hid the rough-and-tumble edges of his blue-collar upbringing in the south of Italy beneath a smooth, cultivated urbanity. He and Maggie were so alike, sharing both a remarkable artistic ability and a fierce drive to succeed. From their early college days, they had distinguished themselves, outstripping their fellow students. They had been the golden ones in those years, she and Marco. Professors’ favorites, standouts.
And then there was Lena, Maggie’s college roommate and now Marco’s wife, who had driven up to the dormitory their freshman year in a Crown Victoria stuffed with matching powder-pink suitcases, sporting little white gloves and a dazzling smile. She’d looked like a Scandinavian Jackie Kennedy, suddenly transported to the wrong decade, all poise and guileless sophistication. Lena had ditched the white gloves long ago in favor of a gardening trowel and a cherry-print apron and the chaos of a household with three small children, but her smile was just as bright. She was a pillar of calm and order in a world that often seemed fractured beyond repair. When she hugged Maggie, the smell of butter and lemon always clinging to her hair, a sense of rightness fell once more into the world, a confirmation that at least a small part of it was still as it should be.
Maggie sighed, took a few more swallows of water, emptied the bottle and crinkled its thin plastic, then tossed it into her backpack. A couple of months and she would be back with them again. She willed August to come more quickly. The pull of the island was an ache that felt almost visceral. August meant late nights around a bonfire, warm afternoons picking blackberries, and lazy picnics at the shore, watching for orca whales. It meant laying her head down in the red-checkered guest room, knowing she would wake up to the smell of banana pancakes. It was a little bit of heaven on earth.
“Maggie,” Sanne called from the Land Cruiser. “Phone call for you.” She trotted toward Maggie, holding out the satellite phone. Probably Alistair, the head of her photography agency, eager to know how the shoot was going. He liked to stay informed.
“It’s a woman. She says it’s urgent.” Sanne offered the phone to Maggie, her brow furrowing in concern.
Maggie frowned. Not the office, then. Could it be Lena? No one else had this number. She handed her backpack to Sanne, taking the satellite phone in exchange.
“Hello?”
“Maggie?” It was Lena. The connection was terrible. It sounded like a hive full of bees buzzing angrily in the line, but even with the interference, Maggie could hear that something was wrong. It was the tone of Lena’s voice, tight as a violin string with controlled panic.
“Lena?” Maggie clenched the phone, her stomach flipping over. “Lena? What’s happened? Is everything okay?”
“Maggie! It’s . . . Marco,” she heard Lena say before her voice faded into static.
“Lena! Lena!” Maggie jiggled the phone, smacking it into the palm of her hand. It didn’t help. She heard only fragments of sentences.
“. . . the Strait . . . went in . . .” And then Lena’s voice dissolving into sobs.
“Lena, can you hear me?” Maggie cried, desperate to know what was happening. “Is Marco okay? What’s wrong?”
She hurried toward higher ground, trying to get a better signal. Nothing. A few yards away, Sanne, Ernesto, and several of the coffee pickers stood watching her, faces drawn with worry, obviously sensing something amiss. No one made a sound. She took a few more steps. The static seemed to lessen. Her heart was beating a staccato drum line, filling her with adrenaline and an icy dread.
“Lena,” Maggie repeated loudly, insistently. “What happened? Is Marco okay?”
And then Lena’s voice, coming through crystal clear for a brief second, just before the line went completely dead. “He drowned, Maggie. He’s gone.”
Maggie was vaguely aware of the phone slipping from her fingers, of kneeling in the dust as Sanne tried to help her up. Her hands were shaking uncontrollably, the shaking spreading through her whole body. Ernesto was on a walkie-talkie in the background, trying to summon help from the main house. The buzzing wasn’t in the phone anymore. It was in her head. She couldn’t catch her breath. She looked up at Sanne, bewildered, her mouth moving of its own accord.
“I have to go home,” she said, then pressed her head against her knees as the world went dark.
In the quiet, whitewashed guest room of the casa, left alone to rest, Maggie dialed Lena’s cell phone and the landline for the island house over and over. She got no answer. She left a message each time, pleading for Lena to call her back, but there was no reply.
At the insistence of the plantation overseer, Luis, they did not depart for Managua immediately as Maggie wanted to. He was adamant that traveling the mountainous roads at night was too dangerous. Maggie numbly capitulated, and Sanne booked Maggie on the first flight she could get from Managua the following day. They stayed the night at the casa, ready to leave at first light. Even after several generous shots of aged Flor de Caña pressed upon her by Luis, Maggie didn’t sleep, instead lying on the single hard bed dry-eyed and disbelieving.
At dawn, as Ernesto packed their scant luggage into the Land Cruiser, Maggie lingered in the guest room, trying Lena’s cell phone again, knowing it was too early to call the island but desperate to get through. Four rings, five. It rang for so long she was surprised when someone picked up.
“Hello?”
“Lena?” She clutched the phone, overcome with a wave of relief at the familiar voice.
Perhaps she had heard wrong. The connection had been so bad. Maybe everything was just fine.
The line was quiet for a moment, and then, “Maggie?” Lena’s voice, hollowed out, dulled, in an instant confirming everything Maggie had been trying to deny. It was not a mistake, then. It was true.
“Where are you?” Lena asked.
“Still in Nicaragua.” Maggie gulped back the despair she felt rising in her throat. “I’m coming as soon as I can. I tried to call last night but I couldn’t get through. Lena, what happened?” She hunched over the phone, staring distractedly out the window, over the dusty cement walls of the casa to a cloudless sky just blushing from gray to a vivid peach.
Lena gave a little sob. “Oh, Maggie, I don’t know. A kayaker in the Strait was in trouble. His kayak flipped. Jonah saw him and yelled, and Marco paddled out to try to help him. But then he capsized too. It was so windy, and you know how strong the currents are. I saw Marco go under, and he—” She halted for a moment. “He just didn’t come back up.” She sounded bewildered. “The police divers found him a few hours later. It’s . . . it’s all a blur.”
Maggie blinked, struggling to erase the mental image Lena’s words conjured up. Marco in the cold, black swirl of salt water above kelp beds hundreds of feet deep. Marco, taking one breath and going under . . .
She tried to focus on Lena instead, picturing her curled up like a little bird on the bed in their bedroom, golden hair fanned out on the quilt she’d designed for Marco, a geometric pattern to celebrate his first architectural award years before. She would be wearing her pale blue satin bathrobe, facing away from the wall of windows that overlooked Haro Strait, the spot where Marco drowned. Maggie shook her head. How could it be true? How could Marco simply be gone?
“I know, Lena, I know,” Maggie said, trying to soothe her. “It’s going to be okay. Don’t worry.” The desperation in Lena’s voice shook her. Without thought, Maggie assumed the role she always played. Maggie, the fierce and independent one, the one who took action, always on the move, always making things happen. The one who knew no fear. “I’m on the first flight out. Just hang on. I’m coming.”
Late that afternoon Maggie boarded her flight, leaving Sanne to fly back to Chicago alone the next day. She kept her camera and lenses with her. The weight of them in her hand was comforting, something familiar in a world turned suddenly wrong side out.
The plane wasn’t full, and Maggie found herself with the rare luxury of two seats to herself. She stowed her camera bag in the overhead compartment and placed her leather backpack on the seat beside her as she settled in for the flight. She pulled her iPod from the front pocket. She always carried it with her. It was a little square of security in an ever-shifting world.
Whether in Paris or Kathmandu, with the push of a button, Maggie would find Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, and Joan Baez unchanged. Their music was a little piece of her childhood as well, reminding her of evenings spent sitting at the kitchen table doing homework while her mother prepared dinner. Her mother, Ana, still on her feet at the end of a long shift at the hotel, would chop onions and garlic for arroz con pollo or stand at the stove stirring asopao de gandules, a thick gumbo with pigeon peas they often ate at the end of the month when the food stamps were running low.
The kitchen was always warm, redolent with the smell of cilantro and oregano, and in the background, playing on the crackly cassette player on top of the fridge, was the music of her mother’s youth—folk singers like Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary, songs of peace and protest from the sixties. Ana had especially favored Joan Baez and Linda Ronstadt because of their Hispanic heritage. She would let Maggie rifle through the shoe box of cassettes and choose one tape after another. In those moments, in the tiny kitchen with a pot bubbling on the stove and the calls for peace and love ringing out with the strains of guitar and tambourine, it felt as though nothing could touch them, as though if they could stay there in the kitchen forever, nothing bad would ever happen.
Maggie hovered for a moment over the list of folk singers in her iPod, turning instinctively to that remembered comfort, the warmth and smell of roasted garlic, the reassurance that her mother was there beside her, that everything would turn out okay. But everything was not okay. Ana had been gone for more than seven years now. And Marco . . . Maggie felt numbed from the inside when she thought of him. Over and over Lena’s words ran through her head. “He drowned, Maggie. He’s gone.”
She pressed her tongue against the sharp edge of an incisor, wanting to feel something, anything. She simply could not comprehend the loss of him, not yet. Later it would come, she knew. But for now there was a dull ache in the center of her chest, an empty space between her ribs, a proof of sorts that something fundamental had shifted in her world, that something good had vanished.
Maggie passed over the folk singers and chose a piece from her smaller collection of classical music, all compiled at Lena’s recommendation. Slipping her earbuds into her ears, she chose Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 in E minor, the Adagio. Fitting, since she was with Lena and Marco when she first heard it. She reclined her seat and closed her eyes, trying to sleep, trying not to remember, heading back to the woman who embraced her like a sister, back to the only man she’d ever truly loved.
Chapter Two
THE FIRST TIME MAGGIE SAW MARCO, SHE CALLED his bluff.
It was orientation week at the Rhys Institute of Art and Design located in central Vermont, one of the premier art and design schools in the nation. Maggie was a bright-eyed freshman with coltish, long limbs and a nimbus of dark curls, canny and street-smart in a way none of her fellow classmates were. She first saw Marco when she passed him on the green. He was standing casually, one long leg clad in perfectly pressed gray trousers perched on a bench as he charmed a trio of freshman girls. He was so striking it was almost unnerving, with wavy hair as black as her own, a closely clipped black beard that gave him a rakish air, like a gentleman pirate, and a lean figure with such sharp angles he looked as though he’d been cut from a clothing ad. His eyes were so dark they were inky.
But what caught her attention were his hands. They weren’t long or graceful, not the hands of a painter or artist. They were square with strong fingers, powerful hands that looked as though they could throw a mean punch. However, as he gestured, something about them was fluid too—they pulled meaning from the air as he talked, sculpting art with boxer hands.
“Hai dei bellissimi occhi blu,” he told a pretty blonde, who giggled and pinked nicely.
“Do you know any Italian?” he asked her, brushing her fingers with his own.
She shook her head, and her friends tittered with her. Maggie rolled her eyes. Italian was close enough to Spanish that she caught the gist of his words. He was complimenting the girl on her pretty blue eyes.
“Hai la testa vuota,” Marco crooned. Your head is empty.
Just about to move on, Maggie did a double take. He was still smiling in an enchanting way, but she caught the mischievous gleam in his eye. The girl sighed, gazing at him with a dreamy expression.
“I have to go to my orientation,” the blonde said at last. “But maybe I’ll see you around?” She sounded so hopeful.
He grinned, shrugged. “Perhaps. We shall see.” He watched the girls as they walked away, heads bent together, the spell of his words still on them. Maggie narrowed her eyes, taking his measure.
“You,” Maggie announced, “are so busted.”
He turned, surprised, and surveyed her for a moment. Then a smile split his face. His teeth were vivid white against the olive of his skin, pointed incisors giving him a slightly wolfish expression. He looked as though he enjoyed being caught in the act.
“Indeed,” he acknowledged, inclining his head. “And who are you?”
“Magdalena Henry. Who are you?”
“Marco Firelli, second-year architecture student.” He held out his hand. It was strong and warm, and she tightened her grip, meeting his strength with her own. He raised his eyebrows. “I’m on the welcoming committee. I’m just making sure these new students feel welcome.”
“Is that what you call it?” She dropped his hand and took a step back. “Someone should report you to the campus staff for preying on vulnerable freshman girls.”
He spread his hands in a gesture of goodwill. “Preying? Such a harsh word. It is all fun and games.” He shrugged. “No one gets hurt.” He looked at her curiously. “What are you here to study?”
Maggie hesitated, but only for a moment. “Photography. I’m on a Gilbert Scholarship.”
“Ah.” He cocked his head, considering her with a newfound respect. “Beautiful and talented.”
She crossed her arms and gave him a level stare. Catching her glacial expression, he hurried on. “So, Magdalena Henry, photography student, instead of reporting me, why not have lunch with me?”
She took another look at those intriguing hands and caved.
It was the beginning of an unlikely friendship. Maggie was wary at first, expecting Marco either to mock her or try to seduce her or both. She was drawn to him in a way that frankly unnerved her. If he tried to seduce her, she wasn’t entirely sure what her response would be. So she kept up her guard, trusting neither his charisma nor her own gut reaction to him.
But he surprised her. Underneath his smooth exterior, Marco Firelli was remarkably similar to Maggie. They were outsiders, neither belonging to the privileged and posh world of Rhys, where most students wore their pedigreed old money as casually as a cashmere sweater, jaunting off to Majorca for holidays and trading anecdotes about sailing clubs and polo parties
.
He was from Sicily, he told her. His manner was so refined and confident, his dress so casually chic, she had assumed he hailed from a wealthy Italian family. She imagined a villa in the south of Italy, a red sports car, perhaps a vineyard with a long history of excellent wines. He laughed when she told him that one evening at dinner in the cafeteria.
“My father is a butcher. My older brother is an auto mechanic. My younger brother is still in school. Mama takes care of the men. It’s how it works there. We are . . . How do you put it? Blue collar.” He leaned back in his chair at the cafeteria table, away from the remains of a tasteless chicken casserole, and grinned at her, waiting for a response.
“Well, if you’re blue collar, I don’t know what white collar would look like,” she said dryly. “You could pass for minor royalty around here.”
He shrugged, looking pleased. “You mean they don’t see the dirt under my fingernails?”
“They’re too busy swooning over your accent and your eyes,” she observed, rolling her own eyes and spearing a piece of buttered broccoli. Half the freshman girls at Rhys had fallen in love with Marco before orientation week was over. They stared daggers at her when she was with him, wondering how she could be so lucky, what she had to offer that they did not. She knew the answer. She understood something in Marco Firelli the others couldn’t. She had caught him in the act of his own charade and then found him to be a kindred spirit, and that put her in a position reserved for only a few.
Ascension of Larks Page 2