Safe Harbor

by Luanne Rice

  “What’s wrong with ‘way back’? That makes getting to know each other so much easier.”

  Dana became silent. She agreed with Marnie. Really knowing someone was more important than she had ever, in her solitary life, imagined. But that took years. Young men didn’t even know themselves. If that was true, how could they ever know someone else?

  Sam seemed so deep, different than other people his age, as if he had already lived through a lot, understood the ways she and the girls felt. But that was probably just a trick of her mind. She couldn’t afford to think like this. He’d get tired of their lives, their dramas and trauma. Who would want to hang around a single aunt and her two orphan nieces for very long? Not Jonathan, that was for sure… .

  “Well, anyway,” Marnie continued, “I like imagining you with Sam. He looked nice, and you were laughing, as if you were having fun. Fun is good, Dana.”

  “I know,” Dana said, staring at a small dark spot across the cove.

  “What good is being a world-traveling artist if you don’t have a little fun in your life? I hope it’s not Sam’s age. Age is about the least significant thing going. Older, younger, who cares, if someone makes you smile? It doesn’t matter.”

  “Age matters,” Dana said, glancing down at the letter on her lap.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My last boyfriend was younger. It didn’t work out.”

  “I’m sorry, Dana,” Marnie said. She had picked up on the hurt; Dana couldn’t hide it, even after six months.

  “My boyfriend—my ex-boyfriend,” she said, “was ten years younger. I told myself it didn’t matter. We had so much in common that had nothing to do with age. He was a painter, and we shared a studio in Honfleur. We took trips, painted en plein air, set up our easels by the Bosporus, the Aegean… .”

  “It sounds idyllic.”

  “It was for a while.” Dana blinked, her gaze drawn to the mantel. She stared at the plain brass box, and her throat ached. “When Lily died, everything changed. I couldn’t paint; some days I couldn’t even get out of bed.”

  “We all felt that way,” Marnie agreed.

  “Jonathan couldn’t understand,” Dana said. “He tried at first—he has a sister he loves, and I think he imagined how he’d feel if anything happened to her. But he got tired of me.”

  “Tired of you?”

  “Impatient, I guess. I couldn’t paint; I didn’t want to travel anymore. I couldn’t see the point of it … I had a model, and I fired her.”

  “A model?”

  “I used her for my mermaids—never mind, it doesn’t matter. The thing was, I couldn’t work at all anymore.”

  “That’s what grief does,” said Marnie, taking Dana’s hand. Dana knew she knew: Marnie’s father had died when she was only fourteen.

  “Yes, it is,” Dana said quietly. “I told myself Jonathan’s never lost anyone close to him. He’s lucky—how would he know? He’s too young; he’s never been that hurt or disappointed by life… .”

  “Yet,” Marnie said.

  Dana nodded. She had made excuses to herself for the way Jonathan had acted. He had held her for the first twelve hours after she’d gotten the news, held her while she’d cried and keened and tried to absorb the news of Lily’s death. He had driven her to the airport to go to the funeral, and he had picked her up when she came back.

  “We weren’t really serious,” she said. “I thought we were, but we weren’t. I was wrong, falling in love with someone so young.”

  “Do you think that’s because of his age? Or because of his character?”

  Dana was quiet, and she surprised herself by thinking of Sam. Something made her think he would have been more patient with her, not try to rush her through her feelings. She had realized soon after her return from Lily’s funeral that Jon expected her to be back to normal right away.

  He’d pack picnics and load the car with their paints and easels, then stand silently in the doorway of their bedroom, watching Dana lie in their bed. He’d accept invitations to dinner, get upset when Dana said she wasn’t going.

  “You’ve got to get past this, over this,” he’d say. “Let me help you… .”

  “How do I get ‘past’—‘over’—losing Lily?” she had cried to him one day when he’d wanted to take her to Paris to paint in the Bagatelle.

  “This is your life, Dana,” he had yelled back. “Not Lily’s, not anyone else’s. She died two months ago, and you’re still in bed. Hiding under the covers isn’t going to bring her back.”

  Dana hadn’t even had a response for that.

  “Your niece called,” he had said, sounding frustrated, knowing that the only thing to jump-start Dana was a call from one of the girls. He knew that she’d drag herself out of bed, go to the phone, and call home. Quinn and Allie could get her moving when all else, even he, had failed.

  Dana had found herself living in a life that didn’t work. What was she doing, yelling back and forth about her sister’s death? She was learning all about walls and armor, all the defenses a person put up when fear and loss crowded in. The bedsheets were her castle walls; nothing could get in and hurt her while she lay there, warm and hidden, away from the world.

  She learned other things too. She couldn’t make someone—Jonathan—understand what she was going through if he wasn’t ready to understand. They’d been calling what they felt for each other love. Such a beautiful word, but too big for what they had.

  She pictured him now. He was so strong, so intense and talented, her beautiful lover. Tall and broad, with wide dark eyes in his tan, olive-colored skin, long black hair knotted behind his head, he took after his Greek mother. Dana had met him her first week in Honfleur. Both American artists drawn to Normandy’s clear light, they had set up their easels by the port, wanting to paint the quai.

  They had circled each other’s work. He was good, very good. He told her that he had been watching her all along, that he was in awe of her canvas: Staring at the narrow houses squeezed together along the port, she had somehow seen the sea instead. Her canvas was a wash of blue and green, the tall port houses seen through water, shimmering beneath the waves.

  “It’s magical,” he said, staring at her painting. “Brand new. You actually see it that way or make it up as you go along?”

  “I see it that way.”

  “Nothing’s brand new anymore. Art school’s full of people trying to make their own style, find their own vision, but it’s all just one big rehash. You know? It’s after Wyeth or Welliver or Picasso or Renoir or Pollock or Metcalf, you do your best to make it your own, but it’s always after someone. Not you, though. I’ve never seen anything like this before. What’s your name, so I can say I knew you when we were both painting in Honfleur?”

  “Dana Underhill,” she said, smiling.

  “I’m Jon Hull,” he said, shaking her hand without bothering to wipe the paint off his first. Grinning down at their clasped fists, he’d held on tighter. “Maybe originality’s catching. I’ll get some of yours through the oils if I shake hard enough.”

  “You’re very good,” she said, admiring his canvas. Their ages were very much in play; she was the older, more experienced artist. She had lived all over the world, taught at RISD and Parsons, exhibited often. But she admired his technical skill, his palette, his dreamy use of light. While she examined his painting, she realized that he had not let go of her hand.

  Looking into his deep-set eyes, she felt shocked by the lust she saw in his gaze, the slow smile lifting his lips. He had to be ten years younger. This was dangerous, unknown territory. Gorgeous movie stars dated younger men. Women who spent time on their appearance, who took pride in the way they looked. Dana hardly noticed. So busy painting, some days she forgot to brush her hair.

  “Come have a drink with me,” he said.

  “No, I have to—”

  “Listen,” he said. “We’re two American painters standing on the quai in Honfleur. See that café over there? That’s where Cla
ude Monet and Eugène Boudin set the standard for color and light. Let’s do our part for Impressionism, okay?”

  “Well, if you put it that way,” she replied, so entranced by the idea of two Americans in France discussing art that she forgot to be uncomfortable.

  They had gone to Au Vieux Honfleur, taken a table on the terrace. Jon ordered a plateau des fruits de mer, piled high with langoustines, spider crabs, the fat and meaty crabs called torteaux, clams, periwinkles, and four kinds of oysters. After one bottle of gewürztraminer they ordered another. Dana sketched the bowl of halved lemons. Jon drew the oysters on ice. She started to sketch him sketching the oysters, and suddenly he came around the table and kissed her.

  They went back to her studio. She showed him her paintings and he helped her out of her clothes. They lay on the little daybed in the corner, where she often took naps during long days of work—calling up the mermaids, those muses deep in her subconscious, to help her find the inspiration needed to finish her work—and they made love.

  Her studio became his studio. He told her he wanted to study under her—in bed as well as in art. He moved in the next week, lugging his belongings from the hostel he’d been staying at. They were madly in love. Jon unlocked passions Dana hadn’t known she had. The mermaids became obsolete. With Jonathan Hull in her life, who needed muses? Love with a younger man was totally underrated. What man her own age had the energy, creativity, and romance to fill Dana with this lust for life?

  “What are you thinking about?” Marnie asked now.

  “How being with a young man isn’t worth it. It’s the biggest mistake I’ve ever made,” Dana replied.

  She remembered that morning when Jon told her Quinn had called. Dana had phoned back, dressed in her nightgown, helplessly holding the receiver and listening to Quinn cry and cry.

  Jon had watched her from the doorway. He had held her, trying to comfort her. But when she couldn’t let go, he backed off and told her he thought he needed a break. It would be good for them both, he said—he knew he was driving her crazy, telling her to smile, to get over it. Packing his easel into the car, he drove off to Étretat to paint.

  Dana had known it was going to be over soon. The truth of their differences was too great to ignore. The end came with a true identity crisis. Dana had spent most of her life being independent, avoiding relationships for her art. Now she needed someone to help her deal with Lily’s death and love her through the worst, but that person was never going to be Jon.

  He must have begun seeing Monique soon after that day. She caught them on the daybed three weeks later, both naked and young and beautiful, and although she thought her heart would break again, it was nothing compared to the loss of Lily.

  “So what you’re saying is, you’re going to hold him against Sam?”

  “It’s not like that,” Dana said, “between Sam and me.”

  “For an artist, you’re pretty blind. Even I could see—”

  “Marnie, I see what I need to see,” she said in a rush, disturbed by the idea. “Don’t worry about me, okay?”

  “Looks like you’re watching the beach right now,” Marnie said, noticing Dana’s position by the window as she sat on the adjacent sofa, deciding to drop the subject of Sam.

  “Quinn’s sitting on that rock,” Dana said, pointing at the tiny dark spot atop the biggest granite boulder across the cove at Little Beach.

  “Keeping vigil.”

  Dana didn’t reply.

  “For her parents,” Marnie said. “Martha told my mother she did it all year—even through the winter. Watched the spot where they went down as if she hoped they’d somehow appear.”

  Quinn, Dana thought, silently staring at that black dot on the big rock. And she thought: How couldn’t he understand what happened, how death could make one person take to bed and another person sit on a rock for an entire year?

  Sitting on a rock in the rain, praying for a vision of Lily, made much more sense to her than the idea of picking up a paintbrush, going back to work, pretending to get back to someone else’s idea of normal. To Dana, watching the small, dark, unyielding shape that was her niece, Quinn’s actions seemed the most natural things in the world.

  SAM HADN’T THOUGHT about loneliness in a long time.

  As a child, he had known it well. His brother was gone, his parents were distracted, and Sam had been pretty much left on his own. Now, sitting in the cabin of his Cape Dory while rain lashed the deck above, he tried to concentrate on his papers and wondered why he suddenly felt so lonely again—with a vengeance.

  Life was going his way. Who could think otherwise? He was a college professor—at Yale, no less. All those years of study and research had added up to a decent teaching post. To make matters even better, when Joe finished his latest treasure hunts off the coasts of Greece and Sicily, he was accepting a yearlong fellowship at Yale. The brothers would be colleagues, but more important, they would be in the same spot for more than just a few weeks.

  What else? Sitting at his desk, feeling the sea rock him back and forth, Sam made a list of reasons he should be happy.

  Women liked him. Strange but true. After years in the shadow of his bigger, handsomer brother, Sam had suddenly come into his own. Maybe it was the weights. Perhaps it was the miles he ran. Probably it was the fact that he had quit trying so hard. He’d just given in to being himself, forgotten about how he wasn’t now and wouldn’t ever be Joe.

  He liked—no, loved—his work. Being a professor was only half of it. The rest was collecting and analyzing data, being ahead of the curve on knowledge regarding marine mammals. He was writing a book on the emotional lives of dolphins, the ways they connected and communicated with each other and—bizarrely enough—the humans who studied them.

  While Joe used his oceanographic background on annual trips to distant seas in search of sunken ships and buried treasure, Sam had recently—the last two winters—begun visiting the sea off Bimini. There, in clear Bahamian waters, he had made the acquaintance of a family of spotted dolphins. Della, Minnie, and Sugar, they had welcomed him directly into their midst, leading him over the sand flats into the reef. He tracked them via transmitter and the observation of local scientists and fishermen, and the tapes of their songs and calls kept him company on long northern nights.

  So why was this summer storm making him feel so lonely?

  He felt like that little kid, abandoned by his brother and worried about his mother, who had wandered down to the Ida Lewis docks in search of new friends. Rain pelted the portholes, drowning out Della on the tape player. Lightning flashed, making him jump. Storms had scared him as a kid. His mother, working long hours, had never been there to comfort him. But from that first morning on the dock, the day she had asked him to join the sailing school, there had been Dana.

  She had made a difference. She had plucked him off the dock, made him believe he mattered. Some days Sam had felt like a throwaway kid. His parents had gotten married without any apparent real love. His mother, a widow, had needed a father for Joe. His father, a truck driver for the lobster co-op, had thought maybe he was ready to settle down. As things turned out, he was wrong.

  Sam had been the kid in the middle. By the time Dana came along, his father had died and his mother was a widow again. Dana made him feel wanted. She had acted as if he were special, as if her class wouldn’t be the same without him.

  He had never forgotten, after all this time. Though he couldn’t, at eight, have called what he felt for her love, he knew that some kind of seed had been planted. Now, moving from his desk to his bunk, he lay still and listened to the rain. The boat rocked beneath him.

  His boat—his home as well as his companion—had never felt so lonely. Reaching up to the shelf above his head, he pulled out an old notebook. This tome dated back—way back. Among other things, it held the drafts of four letters, never sent, written when he was seventeen and eighteen. More important, it contained two pictures—taken when he was nineteen, at the edge of the sea on
an island—that told the story of why he’d never gotten around to mailing the letters that had seemed so important to write.

  The wind and rain outside were nothing.

  Seeing Dana again had started the real storm brewing. Sam read and reread the letters. He stared at the photos, wondering how it was possible that she had physically changed so little over the years. In other ways, deep-down ways, she had changed a great deal. Dana was living a life of sorrow now. Sam could feel it in his own bones, as if this gale carried that truth on the wind.

  Closing his eyes, he thought back beyond the letters and pictures to the day she and Lily had pulled him from Newport Harbor. In his childish gratitude, he had promised she would never have to worry, that he’d protect her forever. She had laughed and called him her hero.

  People were expected to forget things like that. Dana was young, and Sam was just a kid. But he had never forgotten. No matter what she might think, no matter whether she had never taken his promise to heart, Sam had been deadly serious.

  And he knew the time had come to make good.

  Dana Underhill needed him now.

  He knew by the emptiness in her eyes, by the way she could no longer paint, by the desperation of her niece. Helping Quinn would be a start, but Sam knew he was really doing it for Dana.

  He had a tank in his chest, mowing down everything in its path: sense, manners, the old Sam. He had connected with her long ago. Perhaps he hadn’t realized until that moment on his bunk, in the cabin of his sailboat, just how much he needed to do this for her. Every girl, every relationship he had had, had been judged with her as the standard. She had been his older woman, as far out of his league as a goddess.

  Those days were over. Goddesses didn’t cry. Their worlds didn’t fall apart when their sisters drowned. They could paint with sea and sky, and their palettes never dried up. Dana might not know it, but she was in his sights. She needed him as much as he had ever needed her, and as soon as this storm ended, he was going to save her.

  CHAPTER 11