Safe Harbor

by Luanne Rice

  Secrecy was paramount. Tucked into the waistband of her shorts she had a pen. Once she hit the ground, she held the pen between her teeth, exactly the way a pirate would hold a dagger. Then she ran down the narrow stone path to the beach stairs.

  Onto the footbridge, across the creek, along the soft sand, Quinn ran for her life. She bit the pen, dashing like a wild Pequot. Eastern woodland Indians had roamed this land hundreds of years ago. They had hunted and fished, roasting their catches in the natural fireplace beneath the stone boulder in Mrs. Fitzgerald’s yard.

  Quinn knew plenty about Indians. For one thing, her real name was Aquinnah, which was Wampanoag for “high ground.” Her parents had named her that because they had met and fallen in love at a place of high ground. Quinn intended to become an anthropologist when she grew up. She was going to go to Connecticut College, just a few miles away, to study Pequots, Mohegans, Nehantics, and Wampanoags.

  One place she wasn’t going to go was France. Running swiftly down the beach, she passed several families setting up camp by the high-tide line. Beach chairs, blankets, buckets, crabbing nets, umbrellas: memories of another life. Nearly banging into some happy father standing ankle-deep with his little kid, Quinn swore out loud.

  “Hey, watch your language!” the father scolded.

  “Sorry,” she called, more from habit than because she meant it. People like him didn’t understand. They didn’t know that togetherness didn’t always last forever, that even the happiest families could be destroyed in a second.

  Picking up the pace, she ran past the beached sailboats by the seawall, past the crabbing rocks, and up the crooked hillside path, into the forest trail that led to Little Beach. This was a nature preserve, the perfect place for imagining woodland Indians. Trees encroached on the narrow path, which bent around boulders and fallen logs.

  Looking both ways, Quinn stopped. The coast clear, she shouldered through thick underbrush until she reached a downed oak. Squirming beneath its broken branches, she lay on her back. Fingertips extended—farther, farther—she wriggled her hand into a hollow and withdrew a plastic-wrapped package.

  Now that she had her treasure, she tucked it into her waistband and bit harder on her pen. Running through the woods, she cast furtive glances from side to side. Breaking out of the woods, the path streamed onto a white sand beach. Quinn blinked hard, getting used to the brightness.

  Little Beach was deserted. She used to come here with her mother to search for sea glass and skip flat stones. Just around the bend was Tomahawk Point, where rich people lived, and then Firefly Beach, where that great artist’s family still lived. Ol’ Hugh Renwick might be more famous, but Aunt Dana was better. Holding her precious package, Quinn darted behind a big pink-gray boulder speckled with mica, glittering like black stars in the morning sun.

  Her heart pounding, she held the Ziploc bag to her chest. It felt damp, from spring nights in the fallen log, and she hoped no moisture had gotten inside. The log would be a great place to hide cigarettes or beer, but this was contraband of a different sort. Unwrapping the plastic, she pulled out a blue notebook and began to read from an entry written nine months earlier, in October.

  Grandma’s no different from Mom. After all that “you can trust me” crap, she did the exact same thing Mom did: read my diary. What does it do, run in the family? She read the parts about missing Mom and Dad, about wishing I’d been in the boat with them. I figured something was up when she started talking about the shrink again. I am counting the days till Aunt Dana gets here. Then Grandma can go back to her old-folks condo, and we can live with someone who doesn’t feel the need to monitor our every move. Aunt Dana is cool. She is very cool. In fact, she is snow-ice, North-Pole, and deep-sea cool. I wish she’d come here soon. I don’t get why she has to live over there, so far away, when I want her here.

  Then she turned to a page written in January, several months later, reading every word carefully.

  This is bad. This is very bad. First of all, I’m pissed out of my gourd that I have to walk a freaking (say “fucking,” Quinn, not “freaking,”) okay, fucking, mile through the woods to write in my freaking diary. Just so Grandma won’t go rooting through my undies to find it and freak out when she reads what I’m about to write. Here goes. Aunt Dana is losing it. I mean, really losing it. She’d better not wait till summer to come live with us. She’d better get over here right now. For one thing, I’m so sick of Grandma complaining about how cold the house is, how tired she gets walking down to the street to get the paper, how much easier it is at the old-age condo, where people bring everything to her door and keep the heat cranked up to ninety-five degrees. Aunt Dana keeps saying she’s going to come, and then she doesn’t. She says she’s getting ready for her art show, that she has one or two or fucking three more paintings to finish, that she wouldn’t want to disappoint Mom. I don’t get it. I thought she loved me. Allie has Grandma, but I’m supposed to have Aunt Dana!

  Our parents wanted her to have us. We’re supposed to be living with her, not Grandma. I know Mom went to the Black Hall Gallery to arrange the art show, but Mom’s not here now. I am! And I helped with the art show too. I went with Mom when she brought the slides.

  Maybe when Aunt Dana comes here for the show and moves into our house, everything will be fine. We’ll go back to how it used to be. Mom won’t be here, but having Aunt Dana will help. I keep remembering how she looked at the funeral. Just like a Kabuki warrior: scowl, hiss, grunt. Very, very horrible. She walked straight …

  Not wanting to relive the scene of horror, Quinn licked the tip of her felt pen and turned to a clean page. She began to write, and the words flowed from the point. Small waves hit the shore, splashing spray into her face. Ignoring it, Quinn got lost in the world of emotion, pouring it all onto the page in the beauty of that early summer morning.

  I hate the world. I hate the world, I hate the world, I loathe and execrate the world. She’s the biggest jerk ever to live. That’s right, I said “she.” Which “she” you might ask? Well, take your pick. Grandma, Allie, Aunt Dana, and Mom. They pester, whine, connive, and die, in that order. Grandma pesters me to act normal, Allie whines and cries about what’s going to happen next, Aunt Dana thinks she’s going to get me and Allie to move to France with her, and Mom read my diary and got shocked by the kind of person I am and then died. How did I ever get born into a family like this? I’m not going to France. I mean it, I don’t care what they do to me, I am not moving to France. I can’t believe I’ll never see Mom again. She read shit she wasn’t meant to read, and went ballistic. She hated me, and the big joke is, I don’t even blame her.

  Today I swore in front of some perfect father and kid, and he yelled at me. Better me than his kid though. Yell at your kid and the next wave just might tear you apart. Here today, gone tomorrow. I used to love to sail. Mom said I could be in the Olympics. Now I hate it.

  I AM NOT MOVING TO FRANCE.

  When she finished writing, she felt a little better. The sun felt hot on her face, and the receding tide made the rocks and sand smell like seaweed. Everything was salty: the sea, the kelp, the sargassum weed, her wet cheeks. Licking her lips, she carefully wrapped her diary in plastic. On the horizon, small sailboats danced on the waves. White sails, blue sky. Quinn reached into her pocket. She took out the gift and, as always, left it on the rock nearest the tide line.

  It was time to hide her diary and return home.

  THE GIRLS WERE nowhere to be found. Dana felt restless from jet lag and seeing her family again, so she wandered down to the garage at the foot of the hill, by the road. Lifting the heavy door, she stepped inside. It smelled damp and musty, and English ivy had broken through some slats and concrete to climb the inside walls.

  The old sailboat rested on a rusty trailer, off to the side. It was a Blue Jay, paint peeling from its wooden hull. Taking up space, it had been filled to overflowing with rakes, shovels, bags of lime, empty cartons, the Christmas tree stand, a clam basket, fishing rods, an
d a bag of empty bottles. The varnished mast had blackened in spots, and the sail bag was speckled with mildew.

  Dana and Lily had learned to sail in this boat. Running her hand along the sides, Dana remembered how they had pestered their father, begging him to let them have it. He had given his permission, told them they would have to earn the money to buy it themselves. When she got to the stern, Dana had to take a deep breath before looking at the transom. There it was, the name:

  MERMAID

  Even knowing it was there, her heart beat faster. Her fingers traced the letters. She and Lily had painstakingly made the stencil, and Lily had brushed on the white paint. They had painted one mermaid with round breasts and two tails because that was how they sometimes felt: as if they shared a body, as if they had two tails to propel them through life.

  “Here you are,” Dana’s mother said, leaning on her cane and peering into the dark garage. “Oh, it’s so damp and cold in here.”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “I thought we should talk before the girls came back. When do you plan to leave?”

  “I told you, Mom. On Thursday. Did you find their passports?”

  “They’re in Lily and Mark’s safety deposit box.”

  Dana nodded. She should have remembered. Lily had gotten each girl a passport upon birth—Quinn on the Vineyard, Allie here in Connecticut—knowing that with Dana’s hunger to live abroad, there would be many trips to see their aunt. As executor of Lily’s will, Dana had received the list of the box’s contents.

  “You know my opinion,” her mother said as if she had no feeling whatsoever, as if she were numb from the neck up.

  “Yes. You want me to move in here so you can move back to your condo. But I can’t do that, Mom. My studio’s in Honfleur. I have two commissions right now, and they’re both in progress. The girls will love France. They’re so smart, they’ll pick up the language right away.”

  “Why are you making this so hard?”

  “Hard?” Dana asked.

  Her mother stared straight through her. “Pretending that this has anything to do with logistics. You moving here, them moving there … sweetheart, this is your home.”

  “I know,” Dana said. Out of the corner of her eye the boat loomed large. Lily’s half of the mermaid seemed to be smiling wider. The sight of it caused Dana’s heart to squeeze tighter. Every sight, every smell, reminded her of Lily. Why couldn’t all love be like what they had had: open, honest, true, real, forever? She thought of Jonathan’s deceptions, and her stomach hurt. Being at Hubbard’s Point without Lily, even for four days, was nearly unbearable.

  “Mom, why is the boat in here?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The girls should have been using it.” Dana examined the flaking paint, the barnacled bottom.

  Martha shook her head. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I don’t believe they want to either.”

  “But why not?”

  “They don’t like to go out on the water anymore,” her mother said, conjuring that other boat, the one Mark had built, going down in the Sound that moonlit July night.

  “It’s sad to see it just sitting here,” Dana said, running her hand along the rail to block the image out. “Did Lily use it a lot?”

  “Well, she used to. Quite a bit. Taught the girls on it, was absolutely proud of how Quinn took to sailing …”

  “A chip off the old block,” Dana said, picturing Lily sailing at Quinn’s age.

  “But she didn’t that last year,” her mother said. “Mark had bought the big sailboat, and Lily spent a lot of time out with him. Aside from that, the house needed quite a bit of upkeep, and she took care of that.”

  “Upkeep …”

  “After I broke my hip,” Martha Underhill said, leaning against the wall and carefully watching Dana’s face, “taking care of the house and yard got to be too much. Even going up and down stairs took effort. That’s when I decided to give this house to Lily, Mark, and the girls.”

  “And they loved living here.”

  “Yes, they did. I always worried that you’d feel resentful, that you might think I was playing favorites.”

  “I didn’t think that,” Dana said, but with a tug of her heart, she realized that in fact, in some deep-down way, maybe she had.

  “You’ve made a life for yourself. Painting, traveling … You were our free spirit. Lily and I kept wishing you’d move back home, but we got used to your way. Once a year, sometimes twice, you’d come to stay. Even less often once you fell in love with Jonathan. I got it through my head that you wouldn’t want the house as much as Lily would.”

  Dana nodded. The garage was chilly and dark, and she hugged herself thinking of where falling in love with Jonathan had gotten her.

  “Was I right?”

  “Yes, Mom.” Dana smiled.

  “I know you love the girls,” Martha said, her voice dropping an octave. “That’s why Lily made you their guardian.”

  Dana nodded, wanting to reach for her mother.

  “They’ve been through so much. My God, Dana. To uproot them from their home at a time like this? How can you think of doing it? You learned how to paint right here—at Hubbard’s Point. I don’t see why you can’t do it here now.”

  “You think it’s about painting?” Dana asked, feeling the blood drain from her face.

  “Painting or Jonathan.”

  “It’s not Jonathan,” Dana said, her body stiff. “That’s all over.”

  “Well, painting, then,” Martha said, looking around, without even a comment about the breakup—that’s what she expected from Dana. Her relationships had never lasted long, and her family had stopped expecting them to. They knew painting came before any human being—even them. “Your canvases are huge. They’d barely fit through our door. But we could make it work. Build a studio, or even this garage—we could call Paul Nichols to put in a skylight!”

  Dana couldn’t breathe. Hadn’t her mother noticed the way she’d walked around the Black Hall Gallery, unable to even look at her own paintings? They mocked her, that’s what it was. Everyone thought they were recent work, done during the last year, but they weren’t. Dana had dragged them out of storage because they were all she had. She wouldn’t say it out loud to anyone, but she couldn’t paint. She hadn’t been able to since Lily had died.

  “It’s not the space,” Dana said instead.

  “Well, your model, then. How you use her, I don’t know. I haven’t seen a human figure in your paintings since you used to paint Lily. But Lily told me you’d hired an Asian girl… .”

  “My assistant, Monique,” Dana said in a daze. “She’s Vietnamese. Her family had moved to France after the war … Paris first, and then they opened a restaurant in Lyons.”

  The girl was so beautiful, had been through a great deal, and lost family members in the fighting and its aftermath. Dana’s figure work was her least strong suit. When she decided to paint mermaids, she asked her assistant to be her model. Monique, with her small frame and lithe figure, her firm muscles and graceful legs, had seemed perfect. Besides, Dana had a soft spot for people away from their families, and she had wanted to help by giving her more work.

  “Yes, Monique. Lily was glad you had company in your studio. She said that was supposed to be her role, but since you and she lived so far apart, Monique would have to do.”

  “Lily wrote to her,” Dana remembered. Monique had opened the letter and read it quietly. Unsentimental, she hadn’t understood Lily’s motivation. When she threw the blue stationery into the studio wastebasket, Dana had retrieved and read it:

  You are with my sister every day, and I envy you. Dana says you’re beautiful, that you will make a great mermaid. Do you have any idea what that means? Mermaids are so special to us—they’re like guardian angels. For Dana to choose you to be her mermaid is very significant. She says you are far from home, far from your family. I’m sure that makes her feel closer to you. She’s far from us, and we miss her so much.

/>   By then Dana had already figured out that Monique’s relationship with her family was very different from hers. Monique’s distance from them was emotional as well as geographical. She wasn’t particularly interested in getting close to Dana either, and Lily’s letter had meant nothing to her.

  “Having a model was just an experiment. It didn’t work out,” Dana said.

  Her mother’s face fell. Talking about the size of canvases and the height of doors and models and new skylights must have made her feel hopeful, as if they were making a plan. Dana understood. She almost felt that way herself.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” her mother said, sounding tired, and for a second their eyes locked.

  “Aunt Dana,” Allie called from up the hill. “Someone’s on the phone for you—Sam Trevor.”

  “Who’s that?” Martha asked.

  “Someone I used to know,” Dana said. Touching the Blue Jay, her fingertips tingled. She took another look at the sailboat’s stern, at the mermaid with two tails. Sometimes she thought she needed a second tail just to keep her on a straight course, that without Lily she was lost. Not looking at her mother, aware of the sorrow and vigilance in her eyes, Dana walked out of the garage and began to run up the hill.

  IT TOOK DANA so long to get to the phone, Sam didn’t think she was coming. He stood in the kitchen of Firefly Hill, aware of Augusta Renwick rocking on the porch, just out of earshot. Since Joe had married Caroline, the Renwicks had let Sam know that this was his home too, that he could come here anytime he wanted. He had felt sort of guilty, being too busy at Yale to drive the twenty-five miles to Black Hall very often, but he had taken this opportunity—with Dana in town—to drop in on his brother’s mother-in-law.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” Augusta had asked, holding his hand as she’d led him onto the porch. At her age—late seventies, eighty? Sam couldn’t tell—she was by any measure still a true beauty. With long white hair falling over her black velvet opera cape, she looked stunning and dramatic. Sam could imagine the great artist Hugh Renwick falling in love with her, buying her the famous black pearls she wore now and always.