Sweet Salt Air

by Barbara Delinsky

  They did have that, in spite of the ongoing heartache of Julian. Nicole missed him—no doubting it—and he shared that, to judge from his frequent texts. Tired, but okay, he would say in response to her query. Or, Just finished a great session with a bunch of top-notch MDs. Or, Taped a clip for the local news. Link to follow. Charlotte assumed that their phone calls were more personal, since Nicole’s anger had faded.

  Not so the fear, which shadowed her eyes at odd moments. But she didn’t talk about this as much now, either. Tiresome was the word she used when Charlotte asked. And true to that, she was upbeat and smiling when they were in town. Working on the cookbook gave her focus. She was right; the last thing they needed was a glitch.

  Charlotte saw an easy fix. “Can you correct the herbs yourself?”

  “If I alter the recipes, they won’t sign a release. Please, Charlotte, ask him to stop?”

  “I don’t think it was Leo,” she said, though she was unsettled. Hadn’t Leo threatened to prevent their getting recipes? I’ll put out the word that I don’t want you to, he had said.

  But that was before they were … whatever they were. Now it seemed impossible that he would do this. He had been too caring on the beach Monday night, too understanding on his front porch the next night. And his kiss this morning? Too honest.

  “Then how do you explain this?” Nicole cried, holding up the cards. “I didn’t sense guilt when I was collecting these. If leaving things out was deliberate, they were clearly comfortable with it. Did they not think I’d notice?” She grew beseechful. “Call Leo?”

  “I don’t have his number.”

  “Someone must. Maybe Dorey.”

  “Uh-huh, like she’d give it to me? She made it clear that I shouldn’t mess with Leo Cole.”

  “She was right,” Nicole said, deflating, “and she didn’t see the two of you this morning. Are you going to his house this weekend?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t have to babysit me, y’know.”

  “It isn’t babysitting. I choose to be with you.” That said, Charlotte’s thoughts jumped ahead. If she wanted to get to know Leo, they needed more time together than an hour here and there. But she didn’t want Nicole to be alone. “Has Julian committed to the Fourth?”

  Quietly, Nicole said, “He can’t come. He feels that since the doctors he’s working with won’t be leaving town, he shouldn’t, either, and besides that, it’s too far to travel. I think he means for him. And he’s right. Raleigh-Durham to Quinnipeague is a haul.” She regarded the recipe cards with renewed desperation. “What’re we going to do about these?”

  * * *

  The answer, of course, was to go door-to-door getting corrections, but that meant putting people on the spot when nothing about the underlying problem had changed. If island women were being pressured, the pressure would remain until its source was found.

  Leo was the logical first stop. Charlotte could have walked to his house Friday night, but something held her back. It might have been the fish hash that Nicole made with fresh halibut, the rest of Rebecca Wilde’s ingredients, and what she intuitively knew to be the right amount of thyme. They didn’t eat until late, and after finishing off a white Burgundy from Bob’s stash, they were too sluggish to do more than watch a restored version of Gone With the Wind.

  Then again, it might have been fear keeping her from Leo’s that night. If he had carried through on his threats, they had no future.

  Or, it might have been simple procrastination. Better she learn that tomorrow than tonight.

  * * *

  Saturday dawned foggy. Nicole played in the kitchen most of the morning, testing first a French toast casserole, then Anna Cabot’s famed layered eggs. Mercifully, these recipes were correct. They were actually perfect, she declared in an ebullient text to Julian following a tasting session with Charlotte.

  No answer on the other? he wrote back.

  Not yet. Maybe later. Charlotte has assured her Leo would be in touch, and Nicole figured that collecting more recipes would be ridiculous until he was stopped.

  On one level, she was stymied.

  On another, she was freed. When the fog burned off, she took that as an invitation to sit on the back patio and read.

  * * *

  Midway through the afternoon, Leo texted Charlotte. I’m doing shingles tonight. Want to help?

  * * *

  Since it was a clear, warm night, Charlotte walked. A navy dusk was just settling in when she rounded the Cole curve and saw him setting up the ladders. He wore his usual black, but his tool belt was still on the ground. Bundles of shingles were stacked on a pallet nearby.

  Halfway down the drive, she stopped to wait. She smelled herbs, plus those white flowers, which were near the woods on her left. Refusing to be charmed by any of it, she thought of the recipe cards and stayed where she was.

  Leo finished with the ladders and was about to open the first bundle when he saw her. He waited. When she didn’t move, he gestured her forward. When she didn’t come, he set down the box cutter and started toward her.

  “Something wrong?” he asked as he neared.

  She nodded. “We started collecting recipes cards. The herbs were misrepresented on a bunch of them.”

  “Misrepresented?”

  “Given as dried, rather than fresh. Or left out completely. Like people were afraid to mention them. Like someone told them not to.”

  He seemed amused. “That so?”

  “Was it you?”

  His amusement faded. “No.”

  “You threatened.”

  “Yeah, and Bear was dangerous.”

  All talk, then? She wanted to believe it. “Well, it wasn’t Cecily.”

  He snorted. “You sure about that?”

  “Come on, Leo. Dead people don’t go talking around town.”

  “Not in the traditional way.”

  “Which means?”

  “The legend lives on.”

  Charlotte was intrigued. “Which means?”

  “People believed things about Cecily. Most were wrong, but tell that to the faithful. If they think she can reach out from the grave, they might try to avoid upsetting her.”

  “By passing on recipes that used her herbs? Why would that upset her?”

  He shrugged. “Go ask. She wasn’t always the nicest person.”

  “Most Quinnies worship her.”

  “They weren’t her son,” he said with a head-on stare of those midnight eyes.

  Charlotte caught her breath. “What did she do?”

  He stared at her for another minute before looking away. “Not my place to criticize. I wasn’t easy to raise.”

  “What did she do?” Charlotte repeated, but this time to his back. He was wandering off into the herbs. Halfway down the row, he bent to snap sprigs of tiny red buds from a broad-leafed plant. Stuffing them in his pocket, he reached for more. “What’s that?” she asked, coming abreast of him.

  “Sorrel.” He shot her a quick look. “You know sorrel?”

  “No.”

  “Most people don’t. It isn’t glam’rous,” he said, sounding more Maine, “but it has a really nice lem’ny taste. The leaves cook up into a cream soup. Sorrel’s also good for poachin’ fish.”

  “What do you do with those buds?” Charlotte asked as he stuffed several more in his pocket.

  “Throw ’em out. Sorrel grows easy, as long as you keep it trimmed. It’s the young leaves that have the best taste. Buds like these”—he picked off another—“retard the new growth.” He straightened, eyes resigned, enunciation less Maine and more Leo. “I know all this because I worked these gardens for her. It wasn’t by choice. If I didn’t do it, I didn’t get fed.”

  Wondering why that sounded ominous, Charlotte was tentative. “That’s a good work ethic.”

  “For a kid who’s four? Five? Six? She home-schooled me to keep me around. I used to sneak off—jump on the back of a pickup headin’ in town—and when I got there
, I’d steal a little of this, little of that. Town was a whole new world. Candy? Potato chips? Comic books? They’d catch me and bring me back home, and she’d make me sleep outside with the plants. Great in summer, not in winter.”

  Charlotte tried to imagine it. “She imprisoned you here?”

  “Not entirely. I used to stow away on fishing boats that left the harbor at dawn. She must’ve thought the male company would help because she didn’t raise a stink. When I got a little older, she sent me around the island on my bike delivering her packets. They did help people. Gotta give her that.”

  “But you’re describing child abuse. Didn’t anyone know it?”

  “How would they? They didn’t come out here, and she wasn’t telling. Me, neither. She was my mother.”

  He wandered to the end of the row, absently touching the white flowers as he passed. Following him, Charlotte asked, “How’d you finally end up going to the island school?” He didn’t answer. She guessed there had been outside force. “Weren’t they afraid of crossing her?”

  “Islanders were. Not authorities on the mainland.”

  “Child welfare?”

  He hesitated, then said, “Close enough. She did love me. She was afraid of losing me.” Chewing on a corner of his mouth, he stood with his hands at his back, fingertips tucked in the waist of his shorts, and his eyes on the woods. With the sun gone and the moon not yet up, the trees blurred into a moss-green mass, making it a good place to get lost.

  Not that Leo was lost. Entirely focused, he took several steps into the murk and scooped the fallen end of a branch from the forest floor. Studying it, he turned it slowly and with purpose, before tossing it gently toward the garden.

  “What’s that for?” Charlotte asked.

  “Whittling. Pine’s soft, but the knots can be tough.” Retrieving the branch, he showed her. “There aren’t many knots here. This one’s good.”

  “What do you whittle?”

  “Nothing much. I’m bad at it. It’s about the process.”

  Like her knitting, but the thought was a distraction. “Go on,” she urged gently. “About growing up. I want to hear.” He looked at her then. Even with a minimum of light, she saw vulnerability—or felt it. “Friends tell friends things like this,” she coaxed.

  “Is that what we are?” he asked, sounding discouraged.

  “Yes.”

  “Then that’s a first for me. I don’t have friends. I never learned how.”

  She had trouble believing that. He was a nice enough guy.

  He must have seen her doubt, because his hand tightened on the branch. “I was ten when I started school in town. I’d never been with other kids. I didn’t know how in the hell to act. Obviously, I did it wrong. Cecily saw that as a validation of what she’d been saying—that the plants were the only friends I needed, and that if you loved them, they’d love you and would thrive. They did. They still do. But they shouldn’t.” He glanced over the rows. “The climate here is all wrong for most of these plants. So maybe she was right. About the love part, at least.” Hunkering down, he dropped the branch and brushed a hand over the grass. “How can something that grows in the shade be this green?”

  It did look green, Charlotte realized. Even at night. But something else struck her. It had to do with the way he’d touched those white flowers and, now, brushed the grass. “You love the plants.”

  He shifted to sit. “I do. I like taking care of them.” His knees were bent, boots planted in that surprising green grass.

  “For her?”

  “For me. I tried to kill them once,” he confessed, sounding more guilty than proud. “It was right after she died. I was angry she’d croaked in that hospital, like she’d done it to show me how bad my judgment was, so I came back here and hacked all this down. It was fall. Most of it was gone for the season anyway, but I dug everything up, roots and all. Next spring, it all came back. Bigger, stronger.”

  “Did her ashes do that?” Charlotte asked.

  He recoiled, staring up at her in distaste. “Hell no. I didn’t cremate her. She’s buried in town behind the church. I figured folks’d visit her there.” His mouth quirked. “Part of the legend, y’know? She helped those people. Me, I was just the drug runner.”

  “A bad lesson.”

  “Hey, she gave it away for free. I was the one who sold it. She didn’t know I was doing it ’til I got caught.”

  “Didn’t she see her marijuana disappearing?” Charlotte asked, frowning back at the garden. “I don’t smell it, by the way.”

  His expression turned wry. “It’s the only thing that didn’t grow back. Mother didn’t want me tempted.”

  “So, you do believe that the dead reach out?”

  “No. Hell, I don’t know. But there’s something poetic about the pot just dying off.”

  “Would you have been tempted?”

  “Nope. Not to use, not to sell.”

  Charlotte wasn’t surprised. Nothing about him spoke of either. All she could think about in the silence that followed, though, was the way Cecily had used him. Wasn’t the best mother, Dorey had said. Charlotte hadn’t followed then, but did now. Her own parents had never been that bad, their major crime being neglect. But she felt a new affinity for Leo. To have to struggle against a parent at home and then face the rest of the world … she didn’t imagine it had been any easier for him than it had been for her.

  Lowering herself so that she sat cross-legged between his boots, she leaned on her thighs. “Do you have a father?”

  He snickered. “Cecily was good but not that good. Immaculate conception was beyond her.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Do you see him much?”

  “No. He doesn’t come here, and I don’t go there.”

  “Where’s there?”

  “Rockland.”

  The mainland, and so close. “But you two talk.”

  “Not if I can help it. He didn’t treat my mother well. Just left her alone to raise me herself. I’m guessing she was bi-polar. The swings were dramatic. So it was hard. Money. Me. That.”

  Hard on Leo, Charlotte heard, though he tried to frame it otherwise. Needing to comfort—to let him know that he wasn’t alone just then—she wrapped a hand around his calf. “You’re good to take her side,” she said, but he was staring at her hand.

  “Is that pity?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “Just me wanting to touch you.”

  “If it’s pity, take it back.”

  She left her hand where it was—actually moved it in lightly. There was no padding here, just warm skin covered by a spatter of dark hair.

  Slowly he calmed. “About what you said before. I have my own side. I just try to see hers is all. She helped a lot of people. That was her calling.”

  “So you keep up her house and her herbs.”

  “What else do I have?”

  It was a throwaway line, but Charlotte took it to heart. He might have filled in a few blanks about the boy, but there were still major holes in the story of the man. He was an ex-con; that was fact. But other things didn’t fit—like his talking as if he had an advanced degree in psychology. Giving his leg a squeeze, she said, “You tell me. What do you have?”

  His eyes swept the night land. “This. My home.”

  “Did you never want to go elsewhere?”

  “I’ve been elsewhere. It was worse.”

  “Where?”

  Eyes glazing, he was suddenly years away and angry. “When I got out of jail, they set me up doing construction on the mainland. My boss was a woman who didn’t like that I wouldn’t fuck her. When she accused me of selling drugs on the site, they locked me back up faster’n you could say frame-up.”

  Charlotte gasped. “Did you?”

  “Sell? Hell no. The prosecutor figured that out. That’s when I came back here.” He calmed. “I lived in an old shack down by the pier and did odd jobs. When C
ecily got sick and wouldn’t get help, I called the prison doctor. He’d been a kind of mentor, bringing me books and stuff. He said if I took her to the mainland, he’d meet us at the hospital. He never showed.”

  “Betrayal,” Charlotte whispered.

  “You could say.”

  She sensed he had other words for it, any of which he would articulate if she pushed him. He was intelligent and intuitive—unexpectedly so, she thought not for the first time.

  But the silence was comfortable.

  Finally, he came forward, took her hand, and linked their fingers. “Anyway, it wasn’t me warning people against helping you out. I don’t like the idea of your cookbook, but I wouldn’t ruin it for you.”

  She could see it in his eyes, which in that moment were unguarded and direct. “Do you know who would?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do we fight it?”

  “We?”

  She had meant Nicole and her. But he had a point. “Would you spread the word that Cecily’s okay with the cookbook?”

  “I’m not sure it’d help. I don’t connect with her, Charlotte. I don’t even go to the cemetery. Islanders know that. Cecily and me, it’s definitely a love-hate thing.”

  “There,” Charlotte said and, sitting straight, took back her hand. “That’s what I don’t understand. How do you know to call it a love-hate thing?”

  He frowned. “Because it is.”

  “But how do you know that term? Have you been in therapy?”

  “No.”

  “Which is weird. You describe a childhood that should have left you scarred, but you seem totally balanced to me. You live alone out here, but you don’t sound like a hermit. You don’t even speak Maine much. You do sometimes, but then it’s like you forget to do it. Words, intonation, rhythm—you don’t sound like a high school dropout. You say you have no friends, but you talk like you’ve been talking with friends all your life. Your dialogue is just right.”

  “I read,” he said quietly.

  “We all do—”

  “I read,” he repeated, eyes unblinking.

  “I thought that started in prison.”

  He seemed to relax at that, giving her a curious smile. “Why?”