“Soon. Then comes ice. In another month, there’ll be a skim coat. A month after that, it’ll be more’n a foot thick. We’re a small body of water. When it happens, it happens fast.”
The canoe rose and fell with the wind on the lake. They were thirty feet out from the island in whose shallows John’s loons lived. Lily searched the darkness for the birds.
“I can’t see them.”
Gently he cupped her head, wool hat and all, and turned it left. “There. Those moving things.”
She was a minute separating reflection from wind waves from loons. Then she saw, but only two. They floated close together, finding solace in each other, she fancied. In the next instant she understood.
“Mom and Dad have left,” John confirmed. “Headed south.”
“Will these two ever see them again?”
“Not for three years, at least. That’s when they return here to mate. Whether they return to our lake or to another one in the area remains to be seen. Whether they’ll recognize their parents, and vice versa, is anyone’s guess.”
“Sad,” Lily said. She was thinking about Maida, and about how… rich she felt now that they had bridged a gap.
“Let’s be honest here,” John chided. “These guys may be whizzes at survival. They have to be, to have made it for so many million years. But sensitive? Sentimental? I don’t think so.”
“No? Aren’t you the one who said they came out to see you all the time?”
He mocked himself with a chuckle. “Yeah, well, I liked to think that, but the truth is if you wait here long enough and invisibly enough, they just float into range.”
She tipped her head back. Even in the dark, with just the outline of windblown hair on his brow, a straight nose, and a square jaw gentled by just beard enough to cover it, his face was handsome. Taking care not to tip the canoe, she shifted sideways so that she was cradled in the crook of his arm and could more comfortably look up. “I like the other explanation. I think you do, too. You’re sensitive. You’re sentimental.” Then, because she had been wondering for hours, she asked, “Did you mean what you said about not writing a book?”
John didn’t have to give it much thought. As no-brainers went, it was right up there. He was perfectly comfortable, entirely confident, saying, “I meant it.”
“No book at all?”
“Not on this topic. Enough of the Blake story’s been told as I want to tell.”
“What about Terry’s story?”
“Lake News covered it.”
“Someone else will do it in depth.”
“That’s okay by me.”
“What about money and fame?”
Looking at her as she lay so trustingly in his arms, John couldn’t even spell the words, much less crave either one. “Funny thing about money and fame. They can’t go canoeing with you in the freezing cold or warm up in bed with you afterward. They can’t talk. They can’t sing. They can’t have kids.”
Her eyes went a little wider. The darkness couldn’t hide that. He hadn’t meant to throw it out yet, but there it was. Must have been tucked away more shallowly than he thought.
“I can have kids,” she said.
“I know you can, but you gotta want them.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You wouldn’t if you were still hoping to go back to Boston; at least, you wouldn’t want to have them with me, because I really don’t think I want to leave here. So. Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Still want to go back to Boston?”
Lily hadn’t made a conscious decision, but that didn’t mean the decision wasn’t made. It was made. It was easy. “What in the world is back there for me?” she asked, unable to think of a single thing that mattered more than what she had right here.
“Your car. Your piano. Your clothes.”
“Funny thing about that,” she said. “A car can’t go canoeing with you in the freezing cold. A piano can’t warm up in bed with you afterward. Clothes can’t talk or sing or have kids.”
“But they’re your things. They stand for something.”
She wasn’t letting his eyes go, not for a minute. “So do moving companies. Besides, how can I be with you in Boston, if you won’t leave here?”
“But I shouldn’t be the reason you decide to stay here.”
“Why not?”
She had him there. He opened and closed his mouth several times, then finally left it shut and just grinned. The grin warmed its way through her.
“Lest your ego get too big,” she cautioned, “there are other things keeping me here. There’s Maida.” She broke eye contact with him to look out toward the part of the lake where the orchards would be. “She hadn’t worked a day in her life until Daddy died. Now look.”
“She doesn’t like me.”
Lily looked back at him. “She doesn’t know you. But she has an open mind. She proved that today. So there’s Maida, and Poppy. And Hannah. Maida is on her side now, but if Rose doesn’t come around, I want to be there, too.”
“If you stay, what’ll you do?”
“I could teach.” Maida had said that the academy needed someone. “I could work for Lake News so that the editor-in-chief has more free time.” She liked the idea of working with John. “I could see if there’s a chamber music group in Concord in need of a pianist.” There were choices.
“You won’t miss Boston?”
“What I have here is better. Did I tell you how good you were today?”
John didn’t mind hearing it again. He was human, and male. “Was I?”
She grinned. “Masterful.”
“I think I got my point across.”
“Totally.” She touched a mittened hand to his cheek. “Thank you for doing that for me.”
“I did it for me, too. It felt good saying those things. They’ve been eating at me for years.”
“Gus would have been proud.”
John wanted to think it, though he didn’t know for sure. “Hard to tell with him. But we were on the right side today, Lily. We may not have changed a damn thing. Chances are good those reporters will do what they’ve always done.”
“Not all of them.”
“No matter. I feel better about myself right now.”
Lily was looking at the sky. “Here come the stars. He’s up there. He knows. He agrees.”
“God?”
“Gus.”
John wanted to laugh away the possibility, only the laugh didn’t come. Looking at Lily, feeling her goodness and her love, he suspected she might well be right.
Barbara Delinsky recently took time from working on her next book to talk to us. Here are the highlights of that conversation.
Q: How did the writing of Flirting with Pete differ from the creation of your earlier novels?
A: It differed in several ways. First, the plot actually came to me nearly ten years ago. Prior to then, I had always written about functional characters, but I wanted to do something different—I wanted to explore the games the human mind plays when pushed to emotional extremes. Jenny Clyde evolved, neither smart nor successful nor physically adept, and her mind did indeed play games when pushed to extremes. The writing was an unbelievable experience for me. By the end of the book, I felt I had created my strongest work.
But it was a novella, and therein lay the second difference between Flirting with Pete and my earlier work. I knew that I would have to expand upon it to satisfy the expectations of my publisher and my readers—particularly given its ending, which was very, very different from anything I had written. I knew I would have to alter that too, but I wasn’t ready. So I put Flirting with Pete aside and wrote a handful of other books. But Jenny remained with me, patiently awaiting her turn. When the time was right, she gave me a nudge. It was one of those visceral things.
Q: If Flirting with Pete is about Jenny Clyde, where did Casey Ellis come from?
A: Casey came from my need to keep Jenny’s story intact. Casey gave me a context in whic
h to view Jenny. She provided an environment more typical of my books, and while her story doesn’t exactly parallel Jenny’s, there are strong analogies. Both women are haunted by their fathers and irrevocably affected by the relationship between their parents.
Q: Are you a gardener?
A: Aha. You’re wondering about Casey’s town house and that gorgeous garden hidden behind brick walls. Truth be told, I have a brown thumb. But I do love looking at flowers, and I know how to do research. I have to confess that there were times when I was overwhelmed trying to remember which flowers and shrubs grow in sun and which in shade, which bloom in spring and which in summer or fall. I made elaborate charts. I think I got it right.
Q: Casey is a social worker, and you are schooled in psychology. Was this a case of writing about what you know? A: No. I never did therapy, as Casey does. But I do love people. I’ve always been attuned to feelings and motivations. Plus, I have a daughter-in-law who is a therapist. She tutored me in the art. I learned a lot.
Q: You must like that—learning. You have written too many books to always write about what you know, which raises a whole other issue. What’s this we hear about lobster trivia?
A: (Smile.) Well, it isn’t exactly trivia, since much of it is serious stuff to do with the daily life of a lobsterman. It all has to do with my next book, The Summer I Dared.
Q: Which is about lobstering?
A: That’s the backdrop—lobstering off the coast of Maine. The story is about three people who survive a horrific boating accident that claims the life of nine others. Julia Bechtel is a wife and mother from New York, Noah Prine is a lobsterman, and Kim Collela is a young woman with a secret. The lives of the three are deeply entwined in the aftermath of the accident.
Q: Which did you pick first—lobstering or the plot?
A: The plot. It’s the issue of random tragedy, such as the deaths of September 11, 2001. How to explain those? How to deal with being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Conversely, how to deal with walking away unscathed from something like that? The tragedy that opens The Summer I Dared has nothing to do with terrorism, but the questions are the same. I warrant a guess that most of us looked at our lives differently after September 11. Likewise, Julia, Noah, and Kim are irrevocably changed by the accident they survive. Each faces the dilemma of how to reconcile these changes with the lives they’ve known.
Q: Is the accident the focal point of the story?
A: No. It’s simply the catalyst. Honestly, I don’t think I could dwell on a tragedy like that through nine months of writing a book. What happens to the characters after the accident—how they deal and adjust and grow—is far more interesting to me.
Q: Can you give an example of this growth?
A: Not without giving away too much of the story. I will say that my main female voice is that of Julia, who has been the obedient daughter, wife, and mother. Following the accident, she wonders if obedience is enough, and whether she owes it to those who died to learn to be proactive.
Q: Why Maine?
A: I like to rotate my settings among the six New England states, and I hadn’t done Maine since writing For My Daughters in 1994. Not only was it time for Maine in that sense, but I’d been pining for Maine. I spent all my summers there as a child. My mother’s family came from Portland; I visited my grandfather there many times. He owned a barrel business on the waterfront. It was housed in a cavernous stone building, and produced wooden barrels with metal stays and rims. In recent years, the waterfront of Portland has been transformed into a charming area called the Old Port. I imagine that embedded somewhere among the restaurants and businesses there is an old cornerstone with the name Finn & Sons on it.
Q: Getting back to lobster trivia, though, it goes beyond the book, doesn’t it?
A: Yes. I had done tons of research on lobstering in preparation for writing The Summer I Dared, far more than I ever used in the book, and it seemed a shame to simply file all that way—particularly since I hadn’t found such a collection of little bits of information in one place anywhere else! So I gathered it all, put it into a cohesive form, and had it printed. It’s not for sale. At this point I’m simply sending it to the people who’ve been involved in the publication of The Summer I Dared. This version will never be for sale, unless it’s in exchange for donations to breast cancer research. That can be done through my website.
Q: And if some of your readers hate lobster? What then?
A: I invite them to vent. My web address is www.barbaradelinsky.com, and in addition to all sorts of news and offers and book summaries and reviews, there’s the Post Office, through which notes to me can be sent. I can also be reached the conventional way, through P.O. Box 812894, Wellesley, MA 02482-0026. I receive all notes, and answer as many as possible.
Scribner
Proudly Presents
THE SUMMER I DARED
Barbara Delinsky
Turn the page for a preview of The Summer I Dared . . . .
Prologue
The Amelia Celeste was born a lobsterboat. An elegant lady, she ran a proud thirty-eight feet of mahogany and oak, from the graceful upward sweep of her bow, down her foredeck to the wheelhouse and, on a straight and simple plane, back to her stern. True to the axiom that Maine lobstermen treat their boats with the same care as their wives, the Amelia Celeste had been doted on by Matthew Crane in much the same way he had pampered the flesh-and-blood Amelia Celeste, to whom he had been married for forty years and on whose grave every Friday he continued to lay a dozen long-stem roses, even twelve long years after her death.
Matthew had the means. His grandfather had made a fortune logging, not only the vast forests of northern Maine but the islands in its Gulf that bore trees rather than granite. He had built the family home on one of those evergreen islands, aptly named Big Sawyer. Two generations later, Crane descendants were equally represented among the fishermen and the artists who comprised the core of the island’s year-round residents.
Matthew was a fisherman, and for all his family money, remained a simple man at heart. His true delight, from the age of sixteen on, had been heading out at dawn to haul lobster traps from the fertile waters of Penobscot Bay. A purist, he continued to use wooden traps even when the rest of the local fleet had switched to ones made of wire mesh. Likewise, he would have died before trading in his wood-hulled boat for a newer fiberglass one that would be lighter and faster. Matthew didn’t need speed. He lived by the belief that life was about the “doing,” not the “done.” As for gaining a few miles to the gallon with a lighter boat, he felt that in a business where no two days were alike, where the seas could change in a matter of minutes and abruptly unbalance two men hauling loaded traps up over the starboard rail, the stability of the Amelia Celeste was worth gold. And then there was the noise. Wood was a natural insulater. Cruising in the Amelia Celeste was quiet as no fiberglass craft could be, and quiet meant you could hear the gulls, the cormorants, the wind and the waves. Those things brought him calm.
Reliability, stability, and calm—good reasons why, when Matthew turned sixty-five and his arthritis worsened enough to make his hands useless in the trade, he fitted the vessel with a new engine and tanks, rebuilt the pilothouse with permanent sides to keep out the wind, polished the mahogany to an even higher sheen, installed a defogger on the center window and seating for passengers in the stern, and relaunched the Amelia Celeste as a ferry.
During the first few years of this incarnation, Matthew skippered her himself. He made three daily runs to the mainland—once early each morning, once around noon, and once at the end of the day. He didn’t carry cars; the ferry run by the State of Maine did that. Nor did he publish a schedule, because if an islander had a special need, Matthew would adjust his schedule to meet it. He charged a nominal fee, and was lax about collecting it. This wasn’t a job; it was a hobby. He simply wanted to be on the boat he loved, in the bay he loved, and if he made life easier for the local folk, particularly when the winter months imp
osed a craze-inducing isolation, so much the better.
On that Tuesday evening in early June, however, when the idyll went tragically awry, Matthew—to his deep regret—was not at the helm of the Amelia Celeste. She was being piloted by Greg Hornsby, a far younger cousin of his who had spent all of his own forty years on the water and was as skilled a fisherman as Matthew. No, there was no shortage of experience or skill. Nor was there a shortage of electronics. As a lobsterboat, the Amelia Celeste had been equipped with multiband radios, fish finders, and radar. As a passenger-toting vessel, she had the latest in GPS navigational systems along with the rest, but none of it would help that day.
Riding low in the water as lobsterboats did, the Amelia Celeste left Big Sawyer at six in the evening carrying the photographer, art director, models, and gear from a photo shoot done earlier on the town docks. The sun had come out for the shoot, along with a crowd of locals wanting to watch, but the water remained cold, as Atlantic waters did in June, and, by late afternoon, the approach of a warm front brought in fog.
This was no problem. Fog was a frequent visitor to the region. The lobsterman who let fog keep him ashore was the lobsterman who couldn’t pay his bills.
Between the instruments at hand and Greg Hornsby’s familiarity with the route, the Amelia Celeste deftly skirted lobster buoys clustered in the shallows leading to inlets at nearby Little Sawyer, West Rock, and Hull Islands. After taking on a single passenger at each pier, she settled into the channel at an easy twenty-two knots, aimed at the mainland some six miles away.
Fifteen minutes later, the Amelia Celeste docked at Rockland and her passengers disembarked with their gear. Eight others were waiting to board, dressed not in the black of that city crew, but in the flannel shirts and hooded sweatshirts, jeans, and work boots that any sane islander knew to wear until summer truly arrived. These eight all lived on Big Sawyer, which meant that Greg would have a nonstop trip home, and that pleased him immensely. Tuesday was ribs night at the Grill, and Greg loved ribs. On ribs night, the wife and kids were on their own. His buddies were saving a booth; he’d be joining them there as soon as he put the Amelia Celeste to bed.
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