Luanne Rice

by Summer's Child

  “Rose has a bad heart—like Grandma,” Jessica said. Her voice sounded thin, as if she’d been holding it in, and suddenly she started to cry.

  “No, honey,” Lily said. “What Rose has is different—she was born with heart defects. She’s got the best doctors, and in July, right after her birthday, they’ll be replacing an old VSD patch.” Marisa nodded, as if she knew what Lily was talking about. Lily just kept talking: “We expect it to be her last surgery. Just wait—she’ll be running races… .”

  “Winning them,” Rose said.

  Jessica shuddered and cried harder. Marisa hugged her, and Lily looked on, feeling helpless. She could feel Rose’s friendship dissolving right then and there.

  “What happened to your grandma?” Rose asked.

  “She … she …” Jessica said.

  “She had a heart attack,” Marisa said.

  “Well, I won’t have one,” Rose said.

  Once again Lily and Marisa’s eyes met. The air was full of mothers and grandmothers and sisters who weren’t there, yet somehow were. Lily felt the spirit of her own mother, coming to give her strength—she felt it all the time. Overhead, the tall pines rustled in the warm summer wind.

  “You know we’re counting on you,” Lily said, glancing back at her daughter. “To help us celebrate Rose’s birthday and give her a good send-off for her surgery. I hope you’re both planning to come.”

  “It’s a whale-watch cruise!” Rose said. “It’s going to be my friends and the Nanouk Girls.”

  “The what?” Marisa asked.

  “The Nanouk Girls of the Frozen North,” Lily said. “After one winter here, you’ll understand. We meet to needlepoint, eat, and gripe.”

  “Sounds divine,” Marisa said.

  “So you’ll come on the cruise?”

  “We’re in,” Marisa said. “Right, Jess?”

  Jessica was still crying a little. She was an almost-nine-year-old who had seen a little too much hard truth about what can happen—to her father, to her new best friend. Lily felt a pang in her own heart. She’d been wanting to protect Rose from the hard truths as long as she’d been alive.

  “It won’t be the same without you,” Rose said. “Please say you’ll come, Jessica? Please? I swear, I’m almost normal!”

  Almost normal. The words sliced Lily in half, and Marisa saw.

  “We’ll be there,” Marisa said.

  Jessica nodded, giving a real smile. She asked her mother if Rose and Lily could come in for a snack, but Marisa acted as if she hadn’t heard. Instead she waved, walking Jessica toward the house. Rose pivoted in her seat as they pulled away, watching her friend and Marisa as long as possible, until Lily turned the corner beneath the granite cliffs, driving down the long, steep coast road toward home.

  Marisa closed the door behind her, the palm of her hand slick, slipping on the brass knob. She wiped her hands on her jeans, walked into the kitchen to get Jessica her snack. “Can we invite them in?” Jess had asked. Lily had heard, had seen Marisa ignore the question. Staring at the sky, at the hawk flying overhead—an osprey, silver fish in its talons. Looking anywhere but into Lily’s eyes. Mother to mother—the unspoken language of life. Lily had seen, and now she would wonder.

  “Mom, we’re really going to the party?” Jessica asked.

  “Yes, you can go.” Marisa heard her own voice speaking to Lily: the quick, enthusiastic We’re in. So when she backed out, her regret would seem sincere.

  “So I can pretend it’s mine?”

  “Honey—”

  “I can’t even tell my best friend that we have the same birthday!”

  “Jess, you know why. People use last names and birthdays and social security numbers to search for other people.”

  “You mean Ted. Why don’t you just say that, instead of pretending that everything is nice and normal? We’re hiding from him, not ‘people’!”

  Marisa took a deep breath. Jessica had been handling the move, and everything associated with it, so well. At first she had been so relieved to get away, she would have gone along with anything. She had taken to their new identities almost as if it were a game. With the help of Susan Cuccio at the Center, they had made up new names, birthdays, and family histories. Jessica had been so helpful with the history part, helping to weave in the real and beloved—her aunt, her first cat, their love of music—with the fictional.

  But now, especially as her real birthday drew near, everything changed. Marisa had been fighting depression—finding it hard to stay the course, get up in the morning, do everything she had to do. She had been wavering, wondering whether they had done the right thing, coming up here. No wonder Jessica was upset and confused.

  “You’re letting me go to Rose’s party, but I couldn’t go to Paula’s back home.”

  “That was different.”

  “Because he’s not here?”

  “Sweetheart …”

  “Will he ever find us?”

  “Let’s not worry about Ted,” Marisa said. “We’ve got plenty to do, just taking care of ourselves. Now—peanut butter and jelly, or oatmeal cookies?”

  “Cookies and milk. I don’t like it here that much, Mom. Except for Rose. She makes being in this cold, rocky place almost okay. Rose is the best, best friend I’ve ever had. Mom, is she really going to be okay?”

  Marisa walked over to the refrigerator and opened the door, so Jessica couldn’t see her face, or see her hands shaking. Mystification, it was called … not being straight with your own child, keeping them in the fog.

  “Mom, is she?”

  Marisa thought of what Lily had said—that Rose had been born with heart defects. That meant multiple. VSD, so that meant ventricular. Aortal as well? She still had her textbooks from nursing school—where were they? If she could put her hands on them, maybe she could learn more about what was happening with Rose. Pediatric cardiac care wasn’t her specialty, but at least she could help Jessica understand.

  “I want her to be okay,” Jessica said, looking up as Marisa set down the milk and cookies.

  “I know you do.”

  “Maybe we could use our secret savings, to pay for an operation and save her life. We have the money, right? Or one of our friends could do it for free?”

  Marisa picked up the remote, turned on the TV. They had a satellite—up here, so far from civilization, it was the only game in town. Hundreds of channels, with endless choices. A person could grow old just clicking the remote. She found an Adam Sandler movie she thought Jessica would like and stopped there.

  “Mom?”

  “Jess, why are you saying that? Rose’s mother is taking care of her.”

  “Okay. Fine. But you didn’t see her down by the dock. She practically turned blue, and she couldn’t breathe, and I didn’t know what to do, and that horrible scary man with the fake hand had to help her!”

  “But you did know what to do—you went to get her mother. You stayed calm.”

  “I did,” Jessica agreed, munching her cookie in thoughtful agreement. Then she stopped and looked up. “Like I did when Ted hurt my puppy.”

  On the screen, Adam Sandler was being hilarious. All over the world, people were watching this movie and laughing. But not this mother and daughter. Marisa was too busy staring at Jessica, noticing the way she said “hurt”—when Ted had killed Tally, not just hurt her.

  “I really don’t mind that we’re hiding. As long as he never finds us, and you never take him back. You know that, right?” Jessica asked.

  “I know that,” Marisa said.

  Jessica nodded, accepting, good daughter that she was. She stared at the TV screen; Marisa felt a slide of guilt for parking her daughter in front of Adam Sandler, wanting to distract her from all the questions. She went to the window and looked out, and as she did she remembered where her textbooks were: boxed up and stashed in the storage unit, along with almost everything else.

  Through the trees, down the hill, she saw the wide blue sparkling bay embraced by cragg
y cliffs and granite headlands. The big white hotel with its long red roof lorded it over the small town—Lily’s shop, the whale-watch boats. Marisa knew that although she’d let Jessica go on the birthday cruise, she herself would have to cancel. A woman’s club might be a little too dangerous. She blinked into the bright early summer sun, and her eyes stung. In Boston, she knew this would be considered a house with a “million-dollar view.” To Marisa, it just felt like somewhere far, far from home.

  Because she didn’t like feeling that way, and because she knew a way to feel closer to home, she went online. E-mails, her favorite message boards, and a secret chat room—better than cocktails in the afternoon for making everything nice and numb. Intimacy and friendship without the dangers of being found out. Instead though, bypassing her favorites, she went straight to the website for Johns Hopkins, the nursing school she had attended. She typed in her username and password, went straight to cardiac care, and started to read.

  Chapter 4

  Sharks, overfishing, and biodiversity,” Gerard Lafarge said from the deck of the Mar IV as she came toward the pilings.

  “Yeah, what about it?” Liam Neill replied, walking along the dock.

  “We got a freaking genius in our midst.”

  “Something tells me you don’t mean that in a good way,” Liam said with a grin, using his right hand—his good hand—to catch the bow line Gerard threw, looping it around the cleat on the dock, then walking aft to do the same with the stern line.

  “Seriously,” Gerard said, jumping off his fishing boat to set the spring lines. He was grimy and unshaven from days at sea. The boat rocked in the gentle harbor swells. The smell of fish was strong, and flocks of seagulls swooped down, screaming. “You think articles like that are good for us? We make our living doing the stuff you write about. Mako brings big money at the market. Tastes like swordfish, only sweeter, and without the mercury. You’re giving us a bad name.”

  “First of all, I’m impressed you saw the paper. I didn’t know you read oceanographic journals.” He might just as well have stopped with “I didn’t know you read.”

  “Believe me, this one’s making its way around the guys. Let’s just say, you caught our attention.”

  “Second of all, mako sharks aren’t endangered, so you’re within your legal rights. But it’s more a matter of thinking about the future. You overfish now, the species dwindles, and what’ll your kids do?”

  “You think I want my kids fishing? Shit, I don’t want them working this hard, maybe buying it in a winter storm—I’m making all I can now, getting rich off the sea, to send the brats to McGill or Harvard, so they can stay on dry land and support me and Marguerite in our old age.”

  “Is that why you’re going after dolphins now?”

  The banter stopped, the look on Gerard’s grizzled face turning ice cold. His glance slid to the deck, where his crew was icing the catch. Liam stared at the hacked-off dorsal fin lying in a pile of debris.

  “What do you know, Neill?” Gerard barked. “The rest of your family does an honest day’s work on the water—while you sit in judgment of us all. I heard what you said to your uncle. You want to stop him from whale-watching, just like you want to stop me from fishing.”

  “I don’t want to stop anyone,” Liam said. He continued out the dock, where he met his cousin Jude Neill. Jude had been hosing down the flat-bottom Zodiac, one of the smaller boats in the family’s whale-watching fleet. He’d stopped, obviously to listen to Liam and Gerard.

  “But you do,” Jude said, smiling.

  “I do—what?” Liam asked.

  “Want to stop us from whale-watching.”

  “You going to start in on me too?” Liam asked.

  “Someone’s got to keep you in line,” Jude said.

  The cousins glared at each other, then broke into grins. Jude stood aside so Liam could climb aboard. Water from the hose splashed his boots. The day was sunny, but in the distance a dark wall of fog was approaching fast.

  “See anything today?”

  “Five fin whales, a few minkes, a whole lot of dolphins. The crowd was happy.”

  “That idiot Lafarge had a dolphin dorsal fin right there in the bottom of his boat. He didn’t even try to hide it when I walked by.”

  “Look, I’m sure he didn’t catch it on purpose. He long-lines, and there’s no helping what you catch that way. What should he do, let the meat go to waste?”

  “He shouldn’t long-line.”

  “Truce, okay, cuz? I’m on your side with this one. All the tourists love dolphins—they’re good for family business. So you’re preaching to the converted. Just don’t lecture me on the Marine Mammal Act, and on getting too close to the sweet, cuddly air-breathers. I got you and the patrol boats giving me grief on one side, and on the other I got my customers wanting to get the whales up close and personal on camera, pointing at my less conscientious competitors who practically let them pet the freaking things.”

  “Yeah, well …”

  “Remember when you, me, and Connor used to go out, see how close we could get? Connor used to like to put his hand right over the blowhole… .”

  “He’d say he could feel the warm air.”

  “No one could get close like Connor,” Jude said.

  “Nope. No one could,” Liam said. The blue bay sparkled; as he squinted into the sun he thought he saw the back of a white whale, a beluga, surface about fifty yards out. Suddenly he remembered being twelve, when Jude was eleven and Connor was nine. Three boys with the whole summer ahead of them …

  “The kid spoke their language. He spoke whale, that’s just a fact. And when I—”

  Liam interrupted him. “No human speaks whale. Look, the reason I came down here was to ask you about a charter.”

  “You want to charter a whale watch? That’s a first,” Jude said, trying to hide his hurt feelings with sarcasm. Liam just let it pass; he wanted to get off the dock, back to his dark office, away from any sightings of the white whale.

  “Not me. A birthday charter—for Rose Malone’s birthday party.”

  “Ah, yeah. This Saturday. Lily booked the big boat for the morning. Nine to eleven. Why? What about it?”

  “Who’s going to be captain?”

  “Captain? I don’t know. Let’s see—sixteen giggling, screaming girls and their mothers? Whoever picks the short straw, I guess. Why?”

  “I want you to do me a favor. I want you to captain.”

  Jude stared at him. One eyebrow dramatically raised, then lowered. He seemed to be waiting for the punch line. When none came, he said, “I never work Saturdays. It’s the only single perk I get, owning the fleet, top of the food chain. You know?”

  “I’m asking you a favor, Jude,” Liam said. “It’s important.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re the best, and because you never flinch, and because you know what to do in a crisis. Rose is going in for surgery soon. I don’t think there’s going to be a problem—”

  “Her mother already told me there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Good. But still.”

  Jude squinted. “What are you trying to tell me? Is Rose Malone your secret love child? You did it with Lily? You and Miss Unapproachable 2005 got it on ten years ago and you’re suddenly feeling protective?”

  Liam shook his head, smiling. If it made Jude feel more like captaining the cruise, he’d let him think what he wanted. People had always speculated about Lily Malone, and because of his history with her, people always wondered.

  “Will you do it?”

  “Am I looking at liability here? The girl has a problem on board …”

  “She won’t, I’m sure. The surgery has been planned—it’s routine, for her condition. Besides, if you’re using the big boat, there’s no faster way to get her to the heliport if it’s necessary.”

  “Great. You’re making me nervous. Maybe I should cancel.”

  “You won’t. You’re not going to ruin Rose’s birthday.”<
br />
  “You’re an arm-twister, you know that? Some cousin …”

  Liam knew then that Jude would captain Rose’s birthday party. He waved, walking back down the long dock, toward the town square and its statue of the fisherman—right where he had stood with Rose earlier. He felt a long shiver go down his spine.

  The air was getting warmer, making you almost believe you could go swimming. These northern waters were still cold from the winter snows melting up north, filling the rivers, entering the Gulf. But on an early summer day like this, he traveled back in time. He was twelve, and Jude was eleven, and Connor was nine. He could almost believe they were all together. Liam could feel the way they all used to be, back when he still had both arms, back before Connor.

  But he had trained himself not to think such thoughts—summer day or not—and he walked past the stone fisherman without even a sideways glance, up the stairs of his office, where he slammed the door shut behind him.

  At home, Lily Malone sat on the porch, needlepointing while Rose knelt in the garden. She wore the half-glasses she’d recently started needing—bright pink rims to make the whole idea seem somehow festive instead of quite depressing. Peering over them, she kept one eye on her daughter while trying to be surreptitious about her project. Every year for her daughter’s birthday, she had done a needlework square. Of course Rose knew she’d be getting one again this year, but it was part of the fun for Lily to hide it and for Rose to pretend to be surprised.

  “Mom, look,” Rose said. “The morning glories are coming up. And here—some zinnias. At least, I think that’s what they are. The leaves are so tiny.”

  “Check your map,” Lily suggested.

  Rose pushed herself up and walked over to the garden shed. Lily watched how slowly she moved. She watched Rose’s chest rise and fall, counting her breaths. She checked her color, which was pale, but not too pale—her lips weren’t at all blue. Her balance seemed steady—she wasn’t dizzy. Over the years, Lily had developed the ability to assess Rose’s minute-to-minute health. She wasn’t foolproof, but by tuning in to the small things, she felt she had a good sense of what was happening.