True Blue (Hubbard's Point)

by Luanne Rice

  “Sea to shining sea,” he said out loud.

  What if it was too late? What was “too late” anyway? He thought of his own childhood and the happy summers they'd spent at Hubbard's Point. His mother had always been there—-just like Mrs. Larkin next door. Taking the kids on picnics, nature hikes, rows out to Gull Island: Zeb had wished that for Michael, but Elizabeth had never wanted to be that kind of mother.

  “The simple things in life are for simple people,” she had said, laughing, a martini in her hand. “Like my sister.” And thinking of her sister, Zeb felt a long, slow shiver all through his bones.

  Elizabeth had never made any secret about the fact that her career came first.

  Especially during the years before the divorce, before Elizabeth had gone to Betty Ford, Zeb had always been there. Ironically, since she'd gotten sober, he had seen his son much less. Elizabeth had become more available, often taking Michael with her on location.

  Zeb hadn't seen him anywhere near enough after that. Although he had a house on the beach in Dana Point, it didn't compare to movie sets in Fiji or Paris. To make up for earlier missed opportunities at NASA, Zeb had logged a lot of extra time in the simulator, gotten assigned to some relatively routine but time-consuming payload deployments. The work had helped him get over missing Michael after the divorce, but it had also made it harder for them to schedule time together.

  Glancing over at Michael, he caught his breath. He had grown and changed so much; it seemed that Zeb had turned away for a minute and missed it all. At first he and Elizabeth had split the holidays with Michael. But when Michael became a teenager, Zeb had had to sacrifice his times: Michael's friends were children of Elizabeth's friends in L.A., and that was where he'd wanted to stay.

  Zeb had tried to respect Michael's wishes even when he'd been hurt by them. He refused to replicate the kind of man his father had been. As gentle as his mother had been, his father was just that hard. He had established one way of doing things: his way.

  Zeb tried to make the marriage work. That was important to him. He made a mistake, but he'd done his best to fix it—especially after the baby was born. He tried to pick up the slack. As demanding as his career had been, he passed up many flights to stay home with Michael.

  With Elizabeth on location and him alone with their boy, he had had plenty of time to think. He'd been racked by torment, like a Monday-morning quarterback running the plays of his life. If only I had, if only I hadn't… He thought back to the day he'd admitted to Rumer that he'd fallen in love with her sister; he could still see her face, first blank, hearing the unbelievable, then twisted with anguish. He could still feel the places on his chest where she'd hit him with her fists.

  Alone with Michael then, alone with him now. Glancing over, Zeb thought of how hard it must have been for him, the only child in a loveless marriage. Zeb had had the same kind of childhood; he knew. At least Zeb wasn't like his own father.

  When he was seventeen, Michael's age, his father was hardly ever around. Whenever he was, all they seemed to do was fight: “What are you doing, hanging around with women all the time? Your mother, the girls next door? You can do one of two things with your stargazing, you can become a fucking poet, or you can become a man. It makes me sick, seeing you turn into one of them. Up on the roof with Rumer, for chrissakes. What's wrong with the boys around here?”

  “Rumer's my friend, Dad,” Zeb had said, stunned.

  “People will think you're queer. Always hanging around with the girls—even your hair looks like a girl. Why don't you cut it and be a man?”

  Now, driving along, Zeb glanced over at Michael's ponytail. It was longer than Zeb's had ever been. He thought of the night he'd gone to bed, woken up to find his father had cut his hair while he'd slept. His father had been a pilot, stationed in Rangoon during World War II; coming home, he had flown for Pan Am. Serving his country, flying airplanes, had been his father's way of being a man's man. The fact that he was never home, never around to talk to, wasn't supposed to matter.

  Zeb had relied on his mother. She had been great— from the start, she had recognized his love of the stars. She had given him a telescope and a guide to the sky when he was five. She had also seen his love of the Larkin girls, and never tried to make him feel ashamed of it.

  “Never judge your friends by what makes them different,” she had said. “Gender, color, none of that matters. It's who they—and you—are inside that counts.”

  Her only distress, Zeb thought, had come when he'd married Elizabeth instead of Rumer. While his father was pleased with Zee's beauty and glamour, sure his son's choice had made all the sense in the world, his mother had held back from ever really giving him her blessing. Rumer hadn't even come to the wedding; Zeb had had the feeling his mother hadn't wanted to either.

  His father had been as taken by Elizabeth's fiery beauty as Zeb himself. What man wouldn't be? Side by side, the sisters were like silver and pewter: one shining so brightly, she could keep people from noticing the quiet and eternal beauty of the other. Zeb had been too young and dumb to understand that marriage partners had to be best friends too. His father hadn't taught him that.

  Zeb's parents were dead now. His father had died in a plane crash—a small single-engine Cessna on a charter to Martha's Vineyard. That had been Zeb's first year away from Caltech, just months before he flew his first space shuttle flight. His mother's heart attack had taken her the week they found out Elizabeth was pregnant. So, separately, his parents had missed two of the most significant milestones of his life—and Zeb had never stopped regretting it.

  Zeb shivered, thinking of his father crashing into the sea. He had been at the controls, flying two friends out for a golf tournament. One of them had survived, and he'd said to Zeb, “Your father died like he lived: doing what he loved, flying a plane, the king of the sky. He died like a man.”

  Like a man… Zeb held the wheel and wondered what that said about the reason he had stopped flying. His father would have laughed at him if he knew, considered the new lab small potatoes compared to a life of flight. All these years later, and he could still see his father shaking his head, disapproving of Zeb's life.

  “Hey,” he said to his son. “How about waking up?”

  Michael shifted, burying his head deeper.

  “Talk to me, Michael. Tell me your hopes and dreams. Ask me about the meaning of life. This is what fathers and sons do when they're driving crosscountry—they exchange views on deep topics. Go ahead—humor your father.”

  “Tired, Dad,” Michael growled.

  “You can't be that tired. You've gotten about forty-eight hours of straight sleep. And you've got to be pretty well rested after stopping school in—what was it—early April?”

  No response to that. Zeb's father would have killed him for dropping out. He would have ridiculed him, probably kicked him out of the house. Zeb could almost hear the derision in his voice: “If you don't want to go to school, fine: Get a job. Pay your own way. Stand on your own two feet.”

  Maybe Zeb should say that to Michael. Perhaps his father's way, the hard way, was the best. Shake his son awake and give him a strict talking-to. Tell him he was taking him to Connecticut, where his grandfather was a retired high school teacher of the first order, that his ass was in a sling—he just didn't know it yet.

  “Horses,” Zeb said instead, looking out the window at two chestnuts grazing in a field. If there was one thing Michael loved, and always had, it was horses. But right now, still, the boy didn't stir.

  “Go ahead,” Zeb said now. “Miss everything. Sleep your way across the country—sleep through life, buddy.”

  When Zeb was little, his dad had called him his copilot. He had taught him to look both ways at an intersection and say “clear”—-just like on a runway. Somehow he thought he and Michael would have the road atlas open between them, plotting their route, taking side trips to the Grand Canyon, the stockyards, Graceland. All the way from Los Angeles, and nothing. A big void: a fath
er-and-son black hole. Zeb thought back nearly eighteen years to a difficult premature birth in California, holding his wife's hand, praying that the baby be born alive, be safe, be happy….

  Traffic was light; a shadow crossed the hood of their car, and Zeb looked out the window to watch a red-tailed hawk soaring overhead, a rabbit squirming in its talons, until it disappeared into the forest. He thought of Rumer again, felt a shiver, as if the hawk were her messenger.

  He felt a flash of anxiety—his hundredth of the day. The blast up in space had knocked him around, shifted everything from his mind to his heart. The violence of it had terrified him, made him think he was about to die. Life hadn't been the same after that: The explosion had torn a hole in him that only talking to Rumer could fix.

  He knew it would never be the same; he knew he'd never get her back. But he had to try to make everything right… or at least okay. That was why he had to get home to Connecticut. He hit the gas, the needle edging past eighty, just to keep himself from turning off the highway, turning back.

  Hubbard's Point, the land of the sisters. Zeb held the wheel and wondered what it would be like to see Rumer again, whether it would do any good for him to tell the truth once he got there, whether she'd be willing—or even able—to hear. Michael groaned in his sleep. High above, the blue sky curved to the horizon, dotted with invisible silver stars, paving their way home.

  QUINN GRAYSON sat in the back row of veterinary science—an elective intended to complement freshman biology—staring at her test paper and listening to all her classmates’ pencils scribble madly They were all on fire with inspiration. Every single kid seemed positively inflamed with answers—writing so crazily as if they'd burst if they couldn't pour forth their knowledge about animal first aid.

  Quinn tried to read the questions. Her eyes scanned the words. Her brain took in the meaning, but the questions stopped short at her heart. She didn't like thinking about puppies with heartworm, cats who had swallowed fish bones.

  “Oh, no,” Quinn gasped, seeing the diagram of a canary with a broken wing. Catching lobsters for food was one thing, but tending to injured pets was another. Rumer—Dr. Larkin—looked up from her papers.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “The poor canary,” Quinn said, her eyes filling with tears. She had overdeveloped sensitivity. She thought of it as a condition, as real as asthma or a heart murmur. It had started the year her parents had drowned, and at times the feeling overtook her like a huge wave rising out of the sea.

  The class snickered as Dr. Larkin rose slowly from her chair and started down the aisle. She was small and thin, dressed in a long, pale brown dress. Sometimes, when she came straight from her office as the town's vet, she wore a white lab coat. Quinn wondered whether she knew the kids commented on how plainly she dressed, as if she wanted to become one of the animals she loved so much.

  “What is it, Quinn?” Dr. Larkin asked, standing beside her desk.

  “It looks like someone's pet,” Quinn said, pointing at the picture of a yellow bird, its left wing splayed in a very painful way. She closed her eyes. “Something… loved. I don't know how you can do it, work on hurt things…”

  Ryan Howland, the boy sitting in front of her, laughed. “It's a test, Quinn. You're supposed to answer the questions, not ask them…and besides, people eat the lobsters you catch. They kill them.”

  “I'm talking to Rumer—Dr. Larkin—not you,” she said, and slid his chair slightly forward with her booted foot.

  “Hey, stop that!” he said, turning to stare straight at Quinn, an angry yet injured expression on his face.

  Rumer crouched down and looked into Quinn's eyes. Quinn knew she taught this class out of the goodness of her heart. Many families in Black Hall had pets, and Rumer wanted to teach the kids responsibility and care. She gazed at Quinn with “what am I going to do with you?” written all over her face.

  “I should never have taken this class for my elective,” Quinn whispered. “It's only because you're teaching it. I should have signed up for automotive arts instead. Cars don't hurt or feel pain—they just rust.”

  “The point of the class,” Rumer said, smiling, “is to help the pets so they don't hurt either. Now, finish up, okay?”

  Closing her eyes, trying to ignore what Ryan had said about killing lobsters, Quinn heard wind blowing through the trees outside. She imagined the breeze sweeping across the sea, from the Wickland Shoal, across Firefly Beach, up the bluff, over the marsh, across the three white steeples in town, into her very soul; she tried to think about the nobility of providing food for families.

  She forced herself to focus on the next test question: What are the benefits of having more than one pet at the same time? Wasn't that sort of like her and her sister? Life without Allie would be unimaginable. Or maybe the question had to do with love: the importance of animals, like people, being together. Companionship, love…

  Her mind jumped to her parents, sinking with their ship, together under the sea forevermore…Day dreaming, unable to focus on pets, she stared at her paper. Sunlight poured over her shoulder from the large bank of windows; silvery dust motes danced in the air.

  “Don't hear you writing, Quinn,” Ryan whispered. “That because you don't know anything about warm animals? All you can handle are lobsters, because they're cold like you. You like dropping them in boiling water?”

  “You don't understand…”

  “Tell that to the lobsters. You're just as cold-blooded as they are.”

  Quinn felt ice in her belly. She knew she couldn't argue with him, because he was right: I am cold. I've been a changeling, a sea creature, since my parents drowned, she thought but didn't say. On the other hand, she felt like attacking him—pulling his hair until he begged her for mercy. She loved the lobsters she caught and felt very proud to be playing her part in the food chain.

  “I'm finished here today,” she said calmly, with great dignity, as she pushed back her chair and walked to the front of the room, placing her unfinished test on Rumer's desk. Although she had other exams scheduled that day, she wasn't going to take them.

  “What do you mean?” Rumer asked.

  “I'm going lobstering,” Quinn replied.

  “Don't leave,” Rumer said, holding her gaze. “Remember what Winnie said last night—be excellent.”

  But the rage and sorrow gushing from Quinn's heart were too huge for the classroom to hold, and she backed away. Their eyes met, but Quinn didn't speak. No one in the world—not even her fellow Dame de la Roche—knew what it was like to be Quinn Grayson on a daily basis, and for that, Quinn knew that Rumer should feel grateful.

  “So, she got kicked out?” asked Sixtus Larkin, hunched over as he lovingly sanded the rail of his pride and joy, a Herreshoff-designed New York Yacht Club 30. His hands were as gnarled as tree roots, but he worked with gentle precision.

  “Suspended, Dad,” Rumer replied, sitting on the rock ledge, looking up at him. The sloop was in its cradle, ten feet off the ground, recently uncovered after its long winter's sleep. Arthritis had taken hold of Sixtus recently, giving him a stooped back and creaky joints. Rumer worried, watching him balance on the rail, but took a deep breath and continued: “The principal heard that she left school property, and she won't get to finish the year.”

  With his leg propped up on the cabin top, leaning into each strong stroke of the sandpaper, her father chuckled. His skin, leathery from the sun and wind, was flecked with tiny bits of varnish. He wore ancient Top-Siders, white shirt, and khakis—all filled with holes, as if he'd just stumbled off the street. People might imagine that these were just his boat-painting clothes, Rumer thought, regarding him, but they weren't: He hadn't bought anything new in fifteen years, and he dressed like this all the time.

  “Boy, Quinn's a tough one, isn't she?” he asked, sanding harder.

  “I never think of her that way,” Rumer said, rubbing her eyes.

  Last night she had had a bad dream. It had left her writhing, ly
ing in sweaty sheets, trying to remember what had happened. A green house, a rooftop, the sweetest feeling of love, then everything falling away, changing into something else: lies, betrayal, catching two people in bed together… she shuddered now, getting the picture. Zeb was coming: Old wounds were being opened.

  “Well,” her father continued, “in the lingo of teachers, she's what's known as ‘a discipline problem.’ Can't have kids walking out of class just because they feel like lobstering.” He chuckled. “Personally, I admire her gumption.”

  “Me too, but I'm afraid to encourage her. She's on the edge enough as it is.”

  “She shouldn't have walked out of school, that's for sure. If I were still teaching, I'd have called her back, given her a talking-to.”

  “It's so much easier to be a vet,” Rumer sighed. “I'm really out of my element at school. If it weren't for wanting to follow in your footsteps just a little, I never would have started the program. Give me a litter of feral kittens, and I'm fine. A roomful of teenagers, and… I don't know how you did it all those years.”

  “Sometimes I don't either,” he said, smiling.

  “I just finished talking to Dana—she and Sam have enough to do with the wedding Saturday, and now she has to worry about Quinn… and decide whether they should even leave on their honeymoon.”

  “Let Quinn stay with us. Between the two of us, we should be able to drill some sense into her. She's a bit of a feral kitten herself.”

  Rumer smiled. “She and Allie are staying with the McCrays. But we'll all pitch in.”

  “That kid is something special,” he said, pausing to wipe the sweat from his brow. “Ever since she and her sister tried to sail to the Vineyard that time, I've had my eye on her.”