Safe Harbor

by Luanne Rice

  When Martha Underhill slid her hand away to walk back into the gallery and rejoin the party, Dana closed her eyes. She thought of her cottage on the English Channel, of its whitewashed stone walls. What did it mean to her, after all? It was just real estate with a beautiful view to paint out the window. She and Jonathan had tried—fumbling all the way—to love each other there. Her assistant, Monique, had kept it spotlessly clean. Remembering that, she shivered.

  She thought of sailboats rocking in the harbor at Deauville; to supplement the income from her not-frequent-enough sales, she sometimes gave sailing lessons there. Then she thought of Lily.

  She wanted her sister.

  Of all the people in all the world, Dana wanted her sister to walk through the door. They’d bag this party in a second. She wanted to grab her sister’s hand, run down to the water, and find a boat. Lily’s girls could come with them, and together they could all sail away. Her heart was absolutely ready to be poured out. She craved a gripe session with the girls: a chance to bash Jon and trash Monique. A gentle breeze, a broad reach, and her sister were exactly what Dana needed.

  Instead, she just walked down the gallery steps, past the boxwood hedge. As she breathed in the clear summer air, her attention was drawn to a blue van. The driver climbed out, and Dana slowed down, then stopped in her tracks. He was tall and strong-looking, rearranging the bouquet of flowers he had brought. She was mesmerized by the sight of such a big man fiddling with daisies. Her heart kicked over, but when he lifted his eyes and looked straight at her, it flipped back. He was quite young, certainly no older than thirty. Suddenly Augusta Renwick exclaimed with delight, and the young man turned to her, and it didn’t matter anymore.

  Dana headed down the blue stone walk, away from the crowd, in search of her nieces.

  “SHE SAID YOU haven’t said two words to her,” Allie pleaded.

  “I have two words for her,” Quinn said. “‘Fuck you.’ ”

  “That is so rude and crummy.”

  “Pick one,” Quinn said. “Rude or crummy. You’re so dramatic.”

  “I’m not the one with Brillo head.”

  “No, you’re the one with empty head, you stupid baby.”

  Allie’s eyes welled with tears. Two big ones plopped off the lids, down her pink cheeks. Quinn tried not to look, but it was hard. They had walked out the gallery’s front door and sneaked in the back, and now they were sitting under the food table, hidden from sight by a long tablecloth. Face-to-face, she couldn’t exactly pretend she didn’t see her sister crying.

  “Stop that,” she said.

  “Stop what?” Allie asked, sniffling hard. She knew Quinn hated it when she cried, so she was trying to make herself stop.

  Just to change the subject, Quinn brought the cigarette butt out from behind her ear. She had found it on the gallery steps, not even half smoked. Filching matches from the owner’s desk had been a snap. Now she struck one, lit the butt, and took a drag.

  “Don’t do that,” Allie begged.

  “Why not?” Quinn asked, blowing out a puff. Smoke filled the small space, leaking out under the cloth’s hem.

  “You could die. Smoking kills—don’t you listen in school?”

  “Everyone dies,” Quinn said. “So who cares?”

  “I do,” Allie said, and now she really couldn’t control herself. The tears got bigger and started falling faster. To Quinn they looked clear and solid, tiny jellyfish rolling down her sister’s face.

  “Allie,” Quinn said, holding the cigarette in her cupped hand the way she had seen it done in movies. “You know why she’s here, don’t you?”

  “The art show.”

  “Bull. That’s not why.”

  “She says it’s all the same sea, the same salt water …” Allie cried.

  “But the houses are different, the people are different. We’d have to learn French, Al. Besides all that, I hate her.”

  “How can you hate her? She’s Mommy’s sister,” Allie wept.

  “That’s why,” Quinn whispered, staring at the lit part of the cigarette as if it were the beacon of a lighthouse. “That’s the exact reason why.”

  Suddenly feeling unbearably claustrophobic, Quinn pinched the cigarette out and stuck it behind her ear. Then she threw back the tablecloth and scrambled through a forest of legs, Allie right behind her. People laughed and gasped, but Quinn didn’t care. She just wanted to get away.

  BLACK HALL was exactly as Dana Underhill had remembered it: peaceful, elegant, suffused with clear yellow light that seemed to bounce off salt marshes and tidal creeks, to paint the shipbuilders’ mansions and church steeples, to trickle down the Connecticut River into Long Island Sound. Just as Honfleur was the birthplace of French Impressionism, Black Hall was where the movement had first started in America, and as an artist, Dana could understand why.

  “Hey,” the voice called.

  When she turned around, she saw the young man coming after her, still holding his flowers. She saw that she’d been right, that he was just about twenty-eight or twenty-nine.

  “Where are you going?” he asked when he’d caught up.

  “I’m looking for someone,” she said.

  He laughed. “They must be back there, at your opening. Everyone came to see you.”

  She didn’t stop walking. The June air was fresh and cool. It blew through the trees, made Dana pull her shawl a little tighter. She wore a white silk sheath and black cashmere wrap. Her earrings and necklace were silver lilies, to remind her of her sister. She wore them whenever she felt a little nervous or thought she might be afraid. Lately she had worn them to soothe her broken heart.

  “Is it kids?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Are you looking for two girls—your nieces, Lily’s kids?”

  “How do you know?” she asked, stopping short as her heart began to pound.

  “I saw them go by. They look just like you and Lily,” he said.

  “You know Lily?”

  “Knew her,” the young man corrected Dana, and again she felt the kick in her heart. “You don’t know who I am, do you? I thought you recognized me back there, when I first got here, but you don’t, do you?”

  She flushed, not wanting him to know she’d been thinking he was cute. “Tell me …” Dana began, her mouth dry, “how you know Lily.”

  “You both taught me how to sail,” he said, handing her the flowers. “A long time ago. Back in Newport.”

  She blinked, staring from the bouquet into his eyes. They were smiling, anticipatory.

  Dana spun back. The summer before her senior year at the Rhode Island School of Design, she and Lily had worked at the Ida Lewis Yacht Club. Dana had hoped to follow in the footsteps of Hugh Renwick and paint on the Newport wharves; even back then, to support her art, she had taught sailing to kids. Was this one of them, all grown up?

  “Don’t you remember me?” he asked, his voice deep yet soft.

  Dana peered more intently into the young man’s eyes and felt something move inside her chest. She saw herself and Lily treading water, holding an unconscious boy between them in their arms. The harbor was summer-warm; she could almost feel her sister’s feet brushing her legs underwater.

  “Sam …” The name came out of nowhere, out of the past.

  “You remember me,” he said, grinning widely.

  “We never forgot you. Lily told me she’d seen you somewhere—at the theater, wasn’t it?”

  “A little over a year ago,” he said, nodding. “Those are her girls?”

  “Yes.” Then, trying to smile, “How did you know?”

  “Well, they have the Underhill eyes. And she told me you don’t have any children of your own.”

  “No, just nieces. That’s enough,” Dana said. But her eyes failed to smile. “What brings you here? Are you an artist?”

  “Far from it.” He laughed. “I’m a scientist. An oceanographer to be exact. Remember the crabs?”

  “I do,” she said, beginning to s
mile as she pictured him on the dock. “I do.”

  Grinning, Sam gazed down at her. He was quite tall; Dana had to tilt her head back to look into his face. He was full of good humor—every part of him seemed to be smiling. The sun was setting behind the Congregational Church’s white spire, and the scratched lenses in his glasses reflected the declining golden light.

  “I’m a marine biologist,” he said. “My brother gives me grief—he’s an oceanographer too, but the geologist-geophysicist variety. Joe says studying whales is for nerds, that sediment’s where it’s at.”

  “I remember you talking about your brother,” Dana said. She could see him now, that little boy playing on the docks, catching crabs and throwing them back, missing the older brother who had gone to sea. Her heart caught, missing her sister, and her eyes filled with tears.

  “He married a girl from Black Hall,” Sam said, his gaze growing serious as he noticed the change in her expression.

  “Oh,” she said, carefully wiping her eyes.

  “I teach in New Haven now. Yale,” he said with a shrug, as if he’d just gotten caught bragging. “Joe and Caroline got married two years ago and they travel a lot, but whenever they come back to Firefly Beach, I’ll get to see them. It’s great.” Laughing, he focused on her eyes. “What am I telling you for? You know, right?”

  “I know?” she asked, figuring he was referring to his brother: “Caroline” had to be Caroline Renwick, daughter of the art legend, Hugh Renwick of Firefly Beach.

  “How great it is to come home and see your sister.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “You guys were really close. It was like a package deal—show up and get taught by not one but two Underhill sisters. Is she here tonight?”

  Dana didn’t reply. Thoughts of Hugh Renwick evaporated. Now she was remembering the package deal: Dana and Lily in the crash boat, coaching the fleet, feeling the summer breeze on their skin, picking out harbor scenes they wanted to paint.

  “You came home to see her and her kids?” Sam persisted.

  “I came home to see her kids.”

  His face was made for looking quizzical. Tilting his head, he pushed his glasses up. His eyes crinkled slightly. Dana smelled the wildflowers he had brought her and thought of beach grass filled with rosa rugosa, cornflowers, Queen Anne’s lace, and daylilies. She could see Sam didn’t know what to say next, so she said it for him.

  “Her daughters. They’re my charges,” Dana said, and the word sounded so formal, it made her laugh. My sweethearts, my darling nieces, my sister’s beautiful girls, would have sounded more natural. “My charges,” she said again.

  “But I don’t get it …” he began.

  “She left instructions in her will,” Dana said. “That if anything ever happened to her and Mark, I should take care of them.”

  “In her will,” Sam said slowly.

  “I should come home from wherever I was, it said, to look after them. Well, I was in France. Trying to paint and living my life. I did come home for the funerals, of course. But then, my mother seemed to have everything under control, taking care of the girls …”

  “What happened, Dana?”

  “They drowned. Lily and Mark,” Dana said. Her chest caved in when she said the words: It always did. But she breathed deeply and gazed at the beautiful sky, and somehow she kept herself from crying. That part was getting easier. What she felt inside was one thing, but what she showed to the world was becoming simpler to control.

  “Oh, Lily,” Sam said.

  Turning from the sky to Sam Trevor, Dana was surprised to see tears in his eyes. It was as if the feelings in her own heart had somehow shown up on this near-stranger’s face.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Dana said, gazing back at the sky, at the sharp white steeple piercing the golden-blue twilight. Down the street, people had come out of the gallery to see where she had gone. She heard their voices far off, a million miles away. She felt as if she were in a trance. “She died ten months ago.”

  “And you’ve come home to raise her daughters?”

  Dana shook her head. “No, to take them back to France with me.”

  “Oh,” Sam said.

  The crowd had spotted her. Dana heard her name being called. The voices were louder, calling her back. A cake was about to be cut. A toast had to be made. This was her homecoming, however temporary. She was a Black Hall artist, and her sister had made sure the world was going to know it.

  The evening star had come out. It glowed in the west, a tiny hole in the sky’s amber fabric. Dana looked for Lily everywhere: in a field of flowers, in a cup of tea, in the sky. Blinking, Dana stared at that bright star and made a wish. Closing her eyes, she thought of her sister. She could see Lily’s eyes, her yellow hair, her bright smile. Reaching out, she could almost touch her… .

  Sam didn’t move. He didn’t speak, and he didn’t try to steady her, even though she felt herself sway. She was under her sister’s spell, standing in the center of town, trying to touch the evening star. Lily seemed so close. She was right there, right there. With her eyes closed, Dana could feel Lily as if she had never left.

  But when she opened her eyes, she was alone with Sam. The gallery owner and her mother were calling her name. Still holding the bouquet of wildflowers, Dana turned around, and together she and the young boy of long ago walked slowly past the white church toward the art gallery and its waiting crowd.

  CHAPTER 2

  HUBBARD’S POINT HAD BARELY CHANGED IN DANA Underhill’s forty-one years of life. Located in the southern section of Black Hall, the land jutted into Long Island Sound and formed a rocky point. This was a summer place for working people: It lacked the panache and grandeur of certain beach areas to the east. The yards were tiny, the cottages nearly on top of one another. The original builders—grandparents and great-grandparents of the current owners—had been policemen, firemen, grocers, salesmen, telephone linemen, and teachers.

  What it lacked in tone, the Point more than made up in natural beauty and human warmth. Everyone knew everyone else. They called hello as they walked or drove by; they kept an eye on each other’s kids. Children Dana had grown up with had kids of their own. Gardens bloomed in bright profusion, and window boxes exploded with color. Honeysuckle scented the air, and dark pines blanketed yards with soft needles. Rabbits lived on the hillsides, and squirrels nested in the trees.

  The houses on the Point’s east side were built on rocks, great slabs of granite and quartz tufted with grass, sloping down into rock coves and tidal pools. The houses facing west overlooked the beach and swale—a white crescent strand curving along the Sound, backed by a gold-green marsh.

  The Underhills’ house, perched on the highest part of the Point, overlooked both beach and rocks. A shingled cottage built by Martha’s parents in 1938, it had survived that year’s famous hurricane and many storms to follow. Weathered gray, it blended austerely into the ledge, nestled among red cedars and wind-stunted oaks, brightened only by Lily’s overgrown rose and perennial gardens.

  “Pretty weedy, huh?” Allie asked, monitoring Dana’s expression.

  “Oh, it’s not too bad,” Dana said, sipping her coffee. Sunday morning after the art show, they sat on stone steps, shaded by a sassafras tree. The people next door were cooking breakfast, and the smell of bacon filled the air. Across the street, the McCrays’ house—home of Old Annabelle and her daughters, the Underhill sisters’ best friends the McCray sisters—was just coming alive, voices drifting out the open windows.

  “I think it is.” Allie looked worried. “Those rambler roses are choking everything. You can’t even see Mom’s herb garden. She planted lavender, rosemary, sage, and thyme that were supposed to come back every year. But I don’t see a bit of it.”

  Putting down her cup, Dana began to clear out some of the dead leaves and trailing briars. She uncovered a shrub of sage, soft and green; digging deeper, she found a thatch of silver thyme sprigged with tiny triang
ular leaves. Pricking her finger on a thorn, she licked a drop of blood. Through the house’s open windows, she heard the TV blaring, tuned to a morning show. Instead of coming out with Dana and Allie, Quinn had stayed inside to watch.

  “Does Quinn watch a lot of TV with Grandma?” Dana asked.

  “Not always,” Allie said, crouching beside Dana and pulling out weeds. “But sometimes.”

  “She doesn’t want to talk to me, does she?”

  Allie shook her head.

  Dana chewed her lip. Quinn had always been strong-willed, stubborn about things that mattered to her, but she had never stayed mad at Dana for this long before. Weeding the garden, Dana felt the dirt with her fingers. It was stony, filled with bits of granite, pure Hubbard’s Point. The soil here was different than it was anywhere else in the world, and touching it gave Dana a lump in her throat.

  Dana’s relationship with Hubbard’s Point, especially now, was far from simple. For one thing, the place had nothing to do with plots of land. She loved it as much as a person, and her feelings about it were just as complicated. She came back to herself here. It was the only place on earth where she couldn’t hide from her deepest truths. And every inch of it reminded her of Lily. She felt her sister’s loss more here than anywhere else, and everything else paled in comparison.

  “Your mother would not want Quinn to be avoiding me.”

  “Quinn knows that.”

  “Is this because I stayed away all year? I came for the funeral, then left again?” If she had to, Dana was prepared to explain herself.

  “Well, she didn’t like it, but that’s not why.”

  “Then why won’t she speak to me?”

  “Well,” Allie said, her face serene. “That’s because you want to take us back to France. And she doesn’t want to go.”

  EVERYONE THOUGHT QUINN was watching Meet the Press with Grandma, even Grandma. Lying on the sofa, covered with an afghan, Quinn had simply rolled off and stuffed pillows under the covers while Grandma stared at the screen. Then she had sidled upstairs, out her bedroom window, and down the oak tree growing right by the house.