Safe Harbor

by Luanne Rice

  “Tell me one.”

  Dana kept working, but her mind spun back. There were so many. Some blended together, but others were as clear and distinct as a full moon in the sky. “Let’s see. The day Lily and I bought this boat. Our father drove us over to Old Mystic; we paid for it with money we’d earned ourselves, and when we got it home, we went sailing right away. It was incredible—a beautiful breezy July day.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “A long, long time ago,” she said through her mask. “When Lily and I were younger than Quinn and Allie are now.”

  They worked for a while in silence, and then they met at the back of the boat. There, on the transom, was the mermaid with two tails. “Your symbol,” Sam said. “You were painting mermaids even then.”

  “I guess I was. We both were—Lily painted half of her.”

  “We’ll leave her alone,” Sam said protectively. “Work around her.”

  Dana’s gaze slid toward him. She thought of the way things came together and dissolved. Lily’s life was right here, in this garage. Her heart hurt so much, working on this old boat, and she knew that Sam knew. She put down her scraper, feeling the tenderness he had for her and Lily’s history.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, staring at the paint scraper. How could she answer that? The clear-cut answer was no, she wasn’t. Lily was everywhere—or, to be more accurate, memories of Lily. She had loved her sister so much. This little boat was where their two passions—sailing and painting—had come together.

  “Does it make you want to paint again?”

  “I hadn’t been thinking that,” she said.

  “Maybe it would help,” he said.

  “Help how?”

  “Ground you. Give you something to focus on besides missing her.”

  The earth shifted. Dana could swear it really did; that a small earthquake occurred right there in the old garage. Holding herself steady, she knelt beside the Blue Jay and concentrated on the transom. It had been Sam’s words: missing Lily. Those were huge words, and they took in more than he, or even Dana, could imagine.

  This was the hardest part for Dana—seeing the section she and Lily had painted together. Was it possible these old brushstrokes were all that was left? Dana thought of all the painting she had done over the years, all the mermaids she had hidden there. As Lily had said in her letter to Monique, they were supposed to be their guardian angels, saviors from the deep… .

  Watching Dana from the corner of his eye, Sam had started to work again. Scraping harder, he had paint chips flying everywhere. Blue flecks covered his hands and forearms. His shoulders strained his gray T-shirt—black with sweat—and his muscles glistened.

  “You’d think it would be simpler,” she said, making herself smile. “Here you are, doing a good deed, and I’m a basket case.”

  “Really? I don’t think that.”

  “You’re just being polite, saying that.”

  “No, Dana. Really—if you’re not ready to launch the boat, we don’t have to. We can stop right now.”

  “I’m tempted. But thinking about me and Lily buying her, sailing her, makes me think about the girls—Quinn and Allie. What they’re missing with her in the garage.”

  “So we’ll keep at it?” Sam asked.

  “Yes,” she said, attacking the job with new vigor. They were across the boat from each other, and she glanced over now and then. His eyes were bright, curious, as if even scraping paint made him happy. Dana knew she had been that way once. It was the part of her Jonathan had been drawn to: awake, alive, open to the world.

  Now she had armor on. It couldn’t be seen, and it wasn’t material, but she couldn’t for the life of her begin to take it off. Being with Sam, feeling his concern, made her want to soften her heart. She wanted to go back to how she had been when this boat was new—in love with the sea and sky, hardly able to wait a minute to go sailing across the waves. Now she felt so guarded, so hurt by what life had given her, she hardly wanted to step outside. Her sister had died, and her boyfriend—the man she had loved because he had seemed to want her for who she really was, love her because she could paint as if she lived under the sea—had been too impatient to wait and see what might come next.

  The sanding complete, they started to paint. Down the road, Winnie Hubbard rehearsed, singing scales. People strolling down Cresthill Road slowed to check things out. Some called hello, others just passed by. Rumer Larkin drove past in the barn truck, hay bales piled in the bed. Marnie, getting into the car with her daughters and armloads of library books, backed out of her driveway and called hi through the open window as she pulled away.

  “Friendly place,” he said.

  “Everyone knows everyone,” she said, brushing with thick, even strokes.

  “Newport used to be like that. Do you remember?”

  “I was there for only two summers, but yes—I do. It was a really fun place, and if you had a boat, you fit right in.”

  “I didn’t have a boat,” Sam said.

  “Neither did I,” Dana said. “I was just the sailing teacher. But we used to hang around Bannister’s Wharf after work, meeting people from all over.”

  “I saw you there once,” Sam said, glancing across the boat. “My mother worked on the next dock over. She had to stay late one night, and I was wandering around, waiting for her to finish. I saw you and Lily at the Black Pearl.”

  “Were we behaving ourselves?” she asked, picturing the lively outdoor nightspot.

  He laughed. “You were the center of attention. Guys were swarming all over you. I remember hoping you wouldn’t ask them to go sailing instead of me.”

  “Did you think I would?”

  “I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t believe you’d asked me at all.” Leaning over, he painted with fierce concentration. His glasses had slid down his nose, and he bumped them up with his shoulder. “I was a runt from the wrong side of town, and the other kids were all preppies waiting to happen. I never got over you letting me sail.”

  “You were a student just like the rest of them. I didn’t care about pedigrees, and neither did Lily.”

  “I know. You were both great. But when I saw you with those guys at the Black Pearl, I thought, forget it. She’s going to kick you off the boat so fast …”

  “Never. They never stood a chance,” Dana said. She had dated her share of Newport sailors, but they weren’t really her type. Even back then, as young as she was, she had been serious about her art, not just looking for fun on a hot summer night.

  “Well, I’m glad. I would have fought to stay—I loved those lessons so much.”

  “There wasn’t anything to fight. I couldn’t resist you, Sam.” She laughed, relaxing as she remembered how much fun they had had. It felt good to flirt a little. Since breaking up with Jonathan six months earlier, she had kept her guard up, but what was the harm in this kind of banter? When she glanced up from painting, she saw that Sam had stopped working.

  His eyes were very intense over the edge of his mask, as if he were waiting for her to go on.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I was just a wharf rat,” he said.

  “But a cute one,” she said, her eyes drawn to his shoulders again, not understanding why he suddenly seemed so serious.

  “You know,” he began, tugging the mask off his face, “there was a time I would have killed to hear you say that.”

  “When you were eight?” Taking off her mask too, she smiled. “Somehow I don’t think you would have even noticed. All you cared about was learning how to sail—as fast as possible.”

  “Not when I was eight,” Sam began. “When I was older, and you were living on the Vineyard …”

  Dana’s mouth dropped open. How would he have known that? She thought of Jonathan, telling her that he had seen her on the quai, watched her at the market. Sam’s words brought back that memory of being seduced by Jon, and she suddenly felt off balance.

&nb
sp; The girls came wheeling up to the garage on their bikes, air whistling behind them. Quinn’s basket overflowed with hot dog rolls and yellow mustard. Allie’s contained the paper plates and napkins.

  “Aunt Dana, Mr. Porter at the store gave us a free bottle of ketchup for good luck because we bought so much stuff!” Allie announced.

  “I think he did the same for me and your mother when we had our hot dog stand.”

  “You guys are having a hot dog stand?” Sam asked.

  “Yes, tomorrow,” Allie said. “We put up signs all over the beach. We’re raising money for a good cause.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” Allie said. “It’s Quinn’s, and she won’t tell me what it is. But she says it’s good, so I’m helping.”

  Dana waited for Sam to ask Quinn and be told it was none of his business, but he didn’t. Once again she admired his sense around the girls, and she wondered whether she’d overreacted before.

  “I didn’t know you were coming today,” Quinn said, leaning on her handlebars and staring hard at Sam.

  “Well, I thought it was about time your aunt got the boat in the water. So here I am.”

  “Hmmm,” Quinn said, giving that statement due thought. Deciding she approved, she climbed off her bike.

  “Think you’ll want to go sailing again?”

  Waiting for Quinn to reply, Dana’s heart sped up. But Quinn just shook her head. “I don’t think so. Don’t hold your breath waiting, okay?”

  “Deal,” Sam said.

  “Are you coming back?”

  “When?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow. For the hot dog stand.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll try.”

  Nodding, Quinn unloaded the basket. She handed the mail to Dana, including a red-and-blue-bordered airmail envelope from Jonathan. Wordlessly, she carried her purchases up the hill. Allie stayed to watch the painting; waiting till it was done, she politely asked Dana to take her swimming.

  Sam wiped his hands with turpentine. “I’d better be going,” he said, handing her the can and rag.

  “Thank you, Sam,” she said.

  “For leaving?” He grinned.

  “No. For this—” She pointed at the boat. “It was a lot of work.”

  “Well, I didn’t have plans today.”

  “Seriously,” she said, their eyes locked. She wanted to know what he was thinking, what he was getting out of spending a beautiful summer morning painting an old boat with her. “Why did you come?”

  He placed his hands on her shoulders and stared straight into her eyes. Slowly, a smile came to his face like the sun rising out of the eastern bay. “Because a sailor should have a boat to sail.”

  “A sailor?”

  “You, Dana.”

  Dana swallowed, acknowledging what he’d said. Her heart began to beat faster, as if she’d just felt a fresh salt breeze in her hair, but she couldn’t quite smile.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said, taking a step forward. When she nodded, he went on. “What do you think I want? Why do you seem so suspicious of me?”

  “Because I’ve learned the hard way,” she said, holding Jonathan’s letter, “that people aren’t always what they seem to be at first.”

  “But sometimes they are,” Sam said.

  Dana couldn’t dispute that. It was only after he drove away, when she stood by the garage admiring the freshly painted Mermaid, that she thought of how he had mentioned seeing her when she had lived on the Vineyard and wondered how that had come about.

  She thought about how she and Lily had lived in Gay Head, how Lily had met Mark, her island man. A carpenter, he had come to their house to fix a broken porch rail. Lily had fallen in love with him, and six months later, he had proposed to her on Honeysuckle Hill, a small rise covered with flowers and vines, with long views from Gay Head to Menemsha, across the trees and ponds. “That’s our sacred ground,” Lily had proclaimed, and every year on the anniversary of his June sixth proposal, she and Mark returned there to camp out.

  Quinn had been conceived and born on the island. All of Mark’s old friends had showered her with love. They had baby-sat. Lily had taken her for long hikes and bike rides all over the island. A lifelong Vineyarder, Mark had kept them on the island as long as he could. But the year-round economy off island was better, so Lily had tempted him home to Hubbard’s Point. From there, he had started his real estate development company and become quite well off.

  Sometimes old friends contacted him for jobs. Some were willing to leave the island, but most weren’t. That was the thing: Mark wasn’t allowed to build there. Because Lily had adored the place so much, revered the incredible natural beauty of the moors and beaches, Mark had agreed to never develop Vineyard land.

  When winters got tough and men were out of work, some agreed to fly to New York or Hartford or Louisville or Dayton—wherever Mark Grayson was building his new tract. He liked to hire islanders but never at the expense of excellence. Proud of his buildings, he wanted only the best.

  Thinking of those things, wondering about his last projects, Dana sat on the wall to read the letter from Jonathan. The sun shined down, causing her to squint. He wanted to know whether she wanted the things from her studio. Her paints and canvases were just sitting there, and he couldn’t believe she didn’t want them. All she had to do was ask, and he would ship them to the States.

  She crumpled the letter and held it in her hand.

  THE NEXT MORNING it started to rain, and the bad weather lasted for four days. Quinn panicked the first day, but by the second she was near despair. Wind had torn down the few signs that hadn’t already been ruined by raindrops. The hot dogs, mustard, and ketchup would keep, but all that money for fresh rolls!

  “They’ll be stale,” she said. “They’ll have little green mold dots.”

  “No, they won’t,” Aunt Dana said, putting the plastic bags into the freezer.

  “The buns are ruined,” Quinn said. “Ruined!”

  “I’m telling you, all will be well. When I was your age, the exact same thing happened. We had put up signs, everyone had promised to come, and then the rains came instead. Quinn, it was like a tropical deluge. My mother did the same thing I’m doing now: put things in the freezer to wait it out.”

  “What happened?” Quinn asked. “Did you get to have the stand?”

  “We did.”

  Quinn cringed inwardly. She didn’t want to show Aunt Dana how much it hurt to hear her say “we.” She noticed it always, but on dark rainy days like this, thinking of the other half of Aunt Dana’s “we” made Quinn’s bones ache.

  “You will too,” Aunt Dana said. “You’ll make plenty of money to buy whatever it is you’re saving up for.”

  Quinn was silent, imagining the things Aunt Dana thought she wanted to buy. Normal twelve-year-old-girl stuff: CDs, short skirts, baggy pants, makeup, pierced earrings. The idea of such things seemed as far away to Quinn as the distant shores of Long Island, across the Sound.

  Closing her eyes, Quinn felt in her heart the one thing she wanted to buy with the money. One answer, one little answer.

  She thought of her aunt’s pictures, the ones she had seen at the Black Hall Gallery: big squares of water, each painting like a photograph of one small section of the sea. She imagined bringing into focus that spot under the Sound where her parents had been lost, framed in her mind like one of Aunt Dana’s pictures.

  “There,” Aunt Dana said, looking into the open freezer door, letting the frosty air billow into her face. “All packed away. Those hot dog rolls are safe from mold now, Quinn.”

  “What if Sam doesn’t come back? What if it rains so long, he forgets about the hot dog stand?”

  “Then we’ll call and remind him.”

  “I want him to come.”

  “I know you do.”

  “Do you too?”

  Aunt Dana looked surprised to be asked, instantly on guard. “Sure,” she said carefully. “I like Sam.�
��

  Quinn nodded. She wasn’t sure why, but she wasn’t reassured. Aunt Dana didn’t sound as if she meant it. Quinn had felt good, coming home to find Sam helping paint the boat. He balanced things out a little, a man in this house of women. Grandma certainly hadn’t had any men around when she’d stayed with them, and Aunt Dana’s boyfriend Jonathan—whoever he was—was far away in France. Besides, Sam was the only one who could help Quinn.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” Aunt Dana asked, putting her arm around Quinn’s shoulders. “We can sit by the window and wait for the rain to pass.”

  “No, thank you.” Quinn tried to smile. Longer to wait, she thought. One more day until she could earn the money to pay Sam. One more day she had to wait for her answer. The minute Aunt Dana left the room, she ran out into the rain to go to Little Beach and sit on her rock.

  CHAPTER 10

  HEARING A KNOCK ON THE DOOR, DANA CALLED out, “Come in!” She was sitting in the living room, midway through writing a letter, when Marnie walked in wearing a streaming yellow slicker. She stood off to the side, trying not to drip on the floor.

  “It’s okay,” Dana said. “With all the wet bathing suits that have come through this house, I think we can handle a few raindrops.”

  Marnie laughed, shaking off like a wet dog, hanging her slicker on a hook by the stone hearth. “You’re right. All those times we trekked in with sandy feet, leaving little wet patches on the cushions when we sat down …”

  “I did the same at your house. Beach life …”

  “We’re so lucky to have these places,” Marnie said, looking around the room at the salt-darkened wainscoting and old wicker furniture.

  “And the grandparents who built them.”

  “And gorgeous young sailors scraping paint in sweaty Tshirts. Hello, Adonis!”

  “Adonis?”

  “That handsome and, incidentally, rather intriguing fellow I saw you painting with.”

  “Oh,” Dana said, feeling herself blush. “That was just Sam.”

  “‘Just’ Sam? He looked like more than enough to me.”

  “I’ve known him a long time. He’s an old sailing student of mine and Lily’s—dating way back.”