Safe Harbor

by Luanne Rice

  Dana had seen that style in paintings, on birthday cards, on the walls of the Vineyard cottage. The shades of white ranged from nearly pale yellow to nearly pale blue, blending so subtly into the color of the walls, they almost couldn’t be seen at all. Her sister’s presence filled the room.

  “Lily spent a lot of time here,” Patricia said. “Obviously a very talented, artistic woman. I tried to hire her to paint walls for me and some of my clients, but she said no, she was too busy with the girls. She seemed to especially love the garden—we all appreciated the beauty she brought here. She and Mark seemed very close. I’m so sorry about what happened.”

  “Thank you.” Dana was a very private person. She used her work to express everything: joy, anger, curiosity, mystery, grief. Asking a complete stranger for answers about her family seemed as alien as dancing down Main Street. But she knew she had come here to help Quinn. Glancing at Sam, their eyes met. He was sending her strength; she knew by the way he drew himself up, held her gaze. She felt a surprising surge of force coming from him, and she took a deep breath.

  “Was anything wrong?” she asked.

  “Wrong?”

  “In his business,” she said. “Do you know if there were any problems …” She trailed off, feeling embarrassed and exposed even to be asking.

  Patricia frowned, shaking her head. “Not that I knew of. I know he developed a project in the Midwest that he had to travel to to check on now and then. Lily would stop by to pick up his mail and say how much she missed him.”

  “Did he go often?”

  “More and more, it seemed. I attributed it to his growing success.”

  “He was successful,” Dana said, not a question. Lily had told her how secure she and Mark had started to feel. Financially, they were in good shape. They had investments and savings, stocks and bonds.

  “Yes, he was. After the Sun Center project sold so well, I started teasing him about buying Lily a Mercedes and a mink coat. They weren’t like that though. The flashiest thing he bought was that boat,” Patricia said, shaking her head. “I wish he hadn’t.”

  “Sundance,” Dana said, making a connection. “That was the name of the boat.”

  “What was the Sun Center?” Sam asked, thinking along the same lines.

  “Oh, some sort of assisted living center near Cincinnati. I don’t know that much about it, but Lily was proud of his involvement. The place had a very positive aspect—New Age, or something. She said old age homes could look bright but feel gloomy—a place where old people went to die. And that the Sun Center was the opposite—a place where old people go to live.”

  “Lily was proud. She told me a little about it,” Dana said, trying to remember the details. When their mother had moved to Marshlands Condominiums, Lily had told Dana about Mark’s project. “I wish Mom could go to a place like that,” Lily had said. “They have yoga classes, an indoor pool and sauna, a meditation room, movement therapists on staff.”

  “Sounds almost like a spa,” Dana had said, laughing.

  “Yes, better than visiting Canyon Ranch,” Lily had replied.

  “Do they take dogs? She couldn’t leave Maggie… .”

  “Is there some problem?” Patricia asked, discreet but obviously curious about Dana and Sam’s visit.

  “No,” Dana said. “I’m just trying to piece things together… .”

  “He was away so much that last year,” Patricia said, shaking her head. “I’d like to think it was a blessing that he and Lily were together at the end, but those children …”

  “I know,” Dana said.

  “Lily used to bring them with her. Sometimes they’d come into my shop and Lily would tell them about the old lady who used to sell penny candy there.”

  “Miss Alice,” Dana said.

  “Yes, that’s the name. I don’t come from Black Hall, but Lily used to tell me she was legendary, that all the children in town thought her shop was a mecca. She showed me the locket she was wearing, a silver locket that came from there.”

  “I gave it to her,” Dana said, feeling a shiver go down her back.

  “She had your picture in one side,” Patricia said, “and her daughters’ in the other. I’d watch those beautiful girls helping her with the garden and think what a wonderful, lucky family they were. How are they?”

  Dana opened her mouth, but the question was too big for her to answer. Sam stepped forward, his arm brushing hers, and he spoke in a low, calm tone. “They’re doing well,” he said. “They’re with their aunt, and that’s making all the difference.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Patricia said. Then, as if sensing Dana and Sam wanted time alone, she backed toward the door. “Just pull the door shut when you’re finished,” she said. “Take as long as you want, okay?”

  “Okay, thanks,” Sam said.

  Dana had wandered over to the window to stare at Lily’s painting of white flowers. The blossoms rose toward the high ceiling, blooming on the pale green vine.

  “It’s so subtle,” Sam said, “you can hardly see it.”

  “It blends into the yellow walls,” Dana agreed.

  “Why did she do it that way?” Sam asked.

  Dana was silent, picturing Lily’s small watercolors in the upstairs hall at home, then thinking of her own huge, bold canvases. She thought of Lily’s life as a wife and mother and her own life as a vagabond artist. “That’s how she was,” Dana said quietly. “She blended in. She put others first, and she never felt the need to shine.”

  “But she did shine,” Sam said. “People loved her.”

  “That was her secret,” Dana said, picturing her sister’s smile. “She shined from within.”

  “She did,” Sam said, nodding. “From the first time I ever met her.”

  Dana turned to look at him. He was so tall and handsome, yet thoughtful and eager to please. The sight of him—his strong arms and sharp gaze—made her heart jump, but his sensitivity soothed and calmed it down again. “How could you tell?” she asked. “You were just a kid.”

  Sam took a step toward her. Their toes were almost touching, and she tilted her head back to look into his eyes. “I thought you’d know, Dana,” he said. “Kids can see inside a person better than anyone.”

  She blinked, feeling him brush the hair out of her eyes. With her shorts and scruffy sneakers, she felt almost like a little kid beside him. He looked like a man who taught at Yale: pressed chinos, blue oxford shirt, brown loafers. His hand was so tender; she leaned into his touch, closing her eyes.

  “You knew Lily,” she whispered. They were connected by that fact, and something more. Standing so close, she felt herself tingling. She hadn’t felt this way since Jon, and although warning bells were going off, she couldn’t stop.

  “And I know you. I’m here for you, Dana.”

  Dana’s hands tightened into loose fists. She wanted to believe Sam was steady and reliable, someone who wouldn’t throw a person away just because her sister had died. But what if he weren’t? What if he hurt her the way Jonathan had? Dana didn’t think she could go through that again. While she stood there, stunned by the loss and confusion she felt, she saw him lift his eyes and look more carefully at Lily’s painting.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Up there,” he said, pointing at the vines and flowers above the window frame. “It looks like she painted some words.”

  He moved the wallpaper books off the old bench and carried it over to the window, holding Dana’s hand as she climbed up. She had to stand on tiptoe to see what he had seen. Moving even closer, holding tightly to Sam’s hand as she balanced on her toes, Dana could see that Lily had woven words into the petals and leaves: “I love Mark Grayson,” she read. “Aquinnah and Alexandra are the best girls in the world.” “Sisters forever—Dana, come home!” “Penny candy and silver lockets: thank you, Miss Alice.” “The mermaids of Little Beach.” A tiny bunch of grapes and “Martha’s Vineyard.” Wreaths of honeysuckle and “Honeysuckle Hill.”

>   “What is it, Dana?” Sam asked, feeling the shiver go through her, from her body to his.

  “She was happy,” Dana said as her voice broke.

  “How do you know?”

  “She says so, right here.” Her eyes filling, Dana read the words over and over. It was as if Lily had written a little biography on the wall above the oak window frame. Her life was her family; her heart was full of love and spirit.

  “It seems she had everything,” Sam said, reading the wall.

  “She did!” Dana couldn’t see anymore. She reached for Sam, and he helped her down from the bench. They stood together. His arms came around her shoulders, but she pulled back hard. She knew she was standing at the edge of a pit, the one that had swallowed Lily, and suddenly she turned and pressed herself into Sam’s body as if he could save her life.

  “Oh, Dana,” he said.

  She shivered and shook, ice cold inside, feeling Sam’s arms around her back. He really knew Lily, she thought. He talked to her, sailed with her, saw her at Long Wharf with Mark. Holding Sam somehow let Dana know that Lily was real, that she existed somewhere besides in Dana’s mind, and she was suddenly so overwhelmingly glad that he was with her.

  “Oh, Sam,” she cried.

  “You loved her,” Sam said.

  “Quinn’s wrong,” Dana said.

  “What?”

  “They were happy. They didn’t sink their boat on purpose. She has to see what her mother wrote.”

  Sam didn’t reply. He didn’t let go either. Dana felt his arms tighten, as if he thought her words had made her more vulnerable than before. Her heart was beating fast. It told her she and Sam were on the same side, part of the same mission. The thought made her feel safe, and the warmth and strength of his body did something to her heart that she wasn’t ready to analyze.

  “Don’t you think she should see?” Dana asked, leaning back within the circle of his embrace. Glancing up, she read “Honeysuckle Hill”—the place where Mark had proposed to her. “She’ll know she’s wrong, and she’ll forget that crazy stuff about the boat… .”

  “She can’t forget what she heard,” Sam said.

  Dana stepped away. “She heard her parents fighting. That’s all.”

  “I know.”

  “All adults fight. Lily might have been gentle and wonderful, but she had a temper. I promise—I’ve been on the receiving end more than once. Quinn misunderstood, Sam. It was a fight, that’s all.”

  “I know,” he said, worry and something like regret in his eyes. “But she heard it right before she saw them for the last time. It’s taken on greater meaning. She’ll still want to find the boat.”

  “How do you know?”

  Sam hesitated. He took his glasses off and frowned at them. Then he cleaned them with his shirtsleeve. “I know, that’s all. I’ll tell you some—” Putting his glasses on again, his attention was drawn back to the wall above the window frame. Dana thought he was reading Lily’s writing, but instead he seemed focused on the wood frame above the panes.

  Seven feet off the ground, Dana saw the glint of metal. So intent had she been on reading Lily’s writing before, she hadn’t noticed it. Now Sam reached up, the tails of his shirt untucking and showing his bare stomach, touching the metal with his fingers, edging it forward till it fell into his hand.

  It was a key.

  A small gold key, the kind that might unlock a child’s diary. Sam held it for a moment, then handed it to Dana. She felt it, heavy in her palm, and she remembered similar keys from other times. Lily had been a great one for locking up her secrets.

  Dana had always found her keys, her hiding places. It was wrong, she knew, but she had felt it her older sister’s prerogative—no, duty!—to search out and discover Lily’s secret things. She would pride herself on never—well, almost never—reading the entries, examining the contents. Getting into her sister’s head, rooting out the hiding places, had been satisfaction enough.

  “What do you think it’s for?” Sam asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said slowly.

  Dana thought of Lily’s cloth-and leather-bound diaries, her lacquered jewelry box, the miniature cedar hope chest she’d received for her high school graduation. The gold key she held in her hand could have fit any of those containers, but Dana was thinking of something else: an old tackle box with rusty hinges and a relatively new brass padlock in the back of the garage. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t delicate, but when Dana thought of it, her pulse quickened just as it had when she’d found Lily’s hiding places of long ago.

  AUNT DANA was grocery shopping or doing errands or something, and Quinn and Allie were supposed to be crabbing with Cameron and June, but that was for suckers. Let Allie follow the rules: Quinn had things to do.

  First, a sweep of the house. It was rare these days to have the place all to herself. Either Aunt Dana was eagle-eyeing everything she did, or she got Grandma to do the job for her. Allie was practically Quinn’s shadow. If Quinn went into the kitchen, so did Allie. If she decided to watch TV, guess what Allie wanted to do? Quinn hardly ever had time to herself.

  Sunlight poured through the windows. On nice days, their house was the sunniest place in the world. Her mother hadn’t liked curtains. She had loved light and air and the view so much, she had kept nearly all the windows bare. As Quinn walked through the house, checking out paintings and photos, books and the box of ashes, rays of sunlight lit her way.

  Up the stairs, into her parents’ room. No one ever went in there. Quinn sat on the bed—first on her father’s side, then on her mother’s side. The coverlet was old and frayed, a quilt made by her mother’s grandmother. Placing her head on the pillow, Quinn closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Her mother’s smell—lemon shampoo, sunscreen, mint toothpaste—had worn off. Quinn partially rectified the situation by running to the bathroom, dabbing a dot of shampoo onto one finger, toothpaste on the other, and rubbing them onto the pillowcase. There—much better!

  She catalogued the bedside table: the stack of books her mother always read, a few magazines, lots of letters from Aunt Dana, an address book, a little crystal ball that happened to be one of Quinn’s favorite things in the world. Similar to a snow globe, it contained a mermaid with long red hair and a green tail, and when Quinn shook it, instead of snowflakes, tiny fish swirled around.

  Quinn laughed just as she had when she was a baby and her mother would shake the globe and say the magic words: “Mermaid come, tell me true, what’s a girl supposed to do?”

  Comforted, Quinn continued her prowl. She opened the closet, pawed through her parents’ clothes. Her father’s suits and blazers on one side, her mother’s skirts and pants on the other. Quinn didn’t like the closet much; Grandma had strewn the place with mothballs before Quinn had been able to stop her.

  Now her father’s bedside table—neater than her mother’s—with one half-read John le Carré book, a framed photo of “his girls,” and the best part—the glass of water he’d been drinking the night before he’d died. Quinn kept the level filled to the exact spot, about an inch above the bottom of the glass, to compensate for evaporation.

  The bureau—a gold mine of contact. All their clothes, a few papers here and there, a junk drawer filled with memories and treasures. Quinn bypassed the bureau for now. She had other things to do before Aunt Dana came home, so she had to move fast. She barely even had time to look at the photos, the painting Mom had done of Honeysuckle Hill. The jewelry box came last.

  Quinn stared at the lid. Lacquered black with a gold-leaf depiction of a plum tree on the banks of a gentle river, it had a lock that no longer worked. Why she even bothered to look inside, Quinn really didn’t know. Her heart sank just as she opened the top.

  Diamonds and pearls, big deal.

  The pearls her mother had received for her sixteenth birthday, the diamond earrings Quinn’s father had given her for their tenth wedding anniversary. A few pairs of earrings, a class ring, some pieces made by her mother’s fr
iends in the jewelry department at RISD, the mother’s pin—with Quinn’s and Allie’s birthstones—given by their father one Mother’s Day.

  Quinn stared into the jewelry box, at all the beautiful things. She felt her happiness draining away, and she wondered why she always thought about what wasn’t there instead of what was. Running her thumb over the smooth stones of her mother’s pin, she thought of how much she had loved to see her mother wear it.

  “Hell-shit!”

  The voice was hers, and so was the thumping sound of her feet flying down the stairs. Out the door, across the yard, around the granite ledge, down the stone steps, and over the footbridge. Now she was on the big beach, zooming past all the happy families enjoying the sunny day.

  “Hell-crap!” she yelled just to vary her vocabulary. Mothers, knee-deep in the surf, stared in horror. Little children building sand castles trembled in dread. “Fuck-nuts! Damn the beach balls!”

  Her head was pounding even harder than her feet on the sand. She disappeared like a witch up the path and into the woods, over the path to Little Beach. Her heart was pumping so fast, she half expected to bleed from the ears. She reached her rock and dove for the hiding place, digging like a dog.

  There: the plastic bag. She pulled out the diary and a half-smoked cigarette. Lighting up, she sneered at the sky. Her braids felt too tight today, and she imagined all her evil thoughts shooting at the clouds. Fingers burning to write, she grabbed the pen and let it rip.

  It’s still gone. Why do I think that by saying the mermaid poem and opening the jewelry box I’ll find it? We know where it is, don’t we, Quinn? Sherlock Holmes could have used you on his side. Your powers of deductive reasoning could blow the minds of even the greatest detectives. Dad’s John le Carré guy couldn’t even keep up with you.

  Let’s see. She loved it. She never took it off. Aunt Dana gave it to her. That must mean (drumroll) she was (suspenseful music) wearing it (aha!) when the boat sank.

  Sarcasm is very overrated. Even when I’m the one writing it and I’ll be the only one reading it, it makes me feel worse. I know Mom was wearing the silver locket. Being sarcastic about it won’t make it magically appear in her jewelry box. I wonder if it’s true, the old story Mommy and Aunt Dana used to tell us: that the mermaids gather all the jewelry people lose in the sea and on the beach, wear it the last full moon of the year for the Mermaid’s Ball.