Firefly Beach

by Luanne Rice

  With guidance from Michele, Clea and Skye went straight to the task of cleaning up the ball. Every year it was the same thing. All the planning, the arranging, the anticipation, the decoration, had lasted for months. All year, everyone at the Renwick Inn looked forward to the Firefly Ball. And when it was over, Caroline and her sisters pulled the whole thing apart. But this year Caroline wasn’t around to help.

  Taking down the paper lanterns reminded Skye of taking the lights off a Christmas tree. She stood on the ladder, looping the electrical cord over her arm. Swallows swooped in and out of the barn, brushing by her hair. She felt dizzy with a hangover and shame for what she had said to Caroline. Her mad twin had been in command.

  When the telephone rang in the inn, she heard it jingle through the trees and almost fell off the ladder. She had left word with her mother that she was there, and she hoped it was Simon, looking for her. He hadn’t surfaced since last night. But it was just someone calling for a dinner reservation.

  “Hey, Michele,” Skye asked when the manager walked by, taking another loop of wire. “Are the Meteor guys on the books?”

  “No,” Michele called.

  Skye watched her walk across the wide porch, through the big door with its fanlight window. She knew better than to be surprised. But she felt an ache anyway, deep inside. She had worried all along that Joe’s reentry into Caroline’s life had been temporary.

  “Hear that?” Skye asked Clea.

  “Yes,” Clea said.

  “Shit,” Skye said sadly.

  “He’ll be back,” Clea replied with quiet confidence.

  When they finally brushed the dirt off their hands and went inside the inn, Skye’s back ached and her legs felt tired. She went into the bar for a beer but took a glass of ice water instead. There, pausing for a minute, her gaze fell upon one of her father’s pictures. Very tiny, just four inches square, it showed a marsh.

  Skye gazed at the watercolor, its greens and golds flowing into each other, just as they did in the salt flats themselves. She recognized the scene: It was the Black Hall marshes, with the Wickland Light shimmering in the background. When Skye looked at his pictures, she knew she was seeing one very specific moment in time. The cloud would pass, or the sun would move, and everything would change.

  “He was a wonderful painter,” Clea said.

  “Amazing,” Skye agreed.

  “You inherited his talent.”

  “Thank you,” Skye said.

  “You heard what we were saying yesterday, didn’t you?” Clea asked, gesturing at Skye’s glass of water.

  “Maybe a little,” Skye said, sipping the water.

  “You can’t make beautiful sculptures if you’re…”

  Skye smiled, grateful that Clea had spared her the end of the sentence. Caroline would have said “dead” or “drunk.”

  “I know,” Skye said.

  On the other wall were the three portraits of Skye and her sisters Hugh had done after the hunts. Skye stared at the image of Caroline holding the dead fox. The winter light was cold and blue. The snow was deep, the stream black ice. The fox hanging limp with a line of blood drizzling from its mouth.

  “Clea, look.”

  Staring at Caroline’s portrait, Skye saw something she had never noticed before: Her father had painted a tear. It might have been a shadow, but from a certain perspective it was definitely a tear.

  “Was that always there?” Skye asked.

  “Yes,” Clea said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m positive. I used to wonder why Caroline had one and we didn’t.”

  Looking at the picture, Skye had always felt sad, but she had never seen the tear before. Had Caroline actually cried the day she killed the fox? Had their father guessed that the hunts were laced with tragedy, that they would doom his family, not save it? Or had Caroline?

  “Dad didn’t usually make statements like that in his work. He’d leave everything to the imagination of the viewer. He must have felt pretty strongly about showing Caroline crying.”

  “She carries the weight of the world, Skye,” Clea said gently, making Skye feel twice as guilty as she did already. “Dad just painted what he saw.”

  Joe Connor climbed out of the sea and let the dark water stream off his body. It ran down the deck into the scupper. He felt cold and clean. Night had fallen while he was down in the wreck. The fog had closed in; it wrapped the Meteor, heavy and gray, and sonorous tones of bell buoys and the foghorn at Moonstone Point carried across the water. He looked for Sam, but he wasn’t on deck.

  Operations were shutting down for the night. The compressor was off. Divers were slipping out of wetsuits, heading below for dinner. Joe was glad. Let them celebrate; today they had reached the mother lode.

  The chests were buried under tons of mud and wreckage. Based on measurements taken of the keel, Joe estimated the vessel to be about two hundred and twenty tons, most of it corrugated aft, when the ship rammed the reef. The site was a nightmare of broken spars, splintered planks, mountains of ballast stones. But through careful tunneling, scientific estimation, and blind luck, that morning Dan had located the first chest.

  Joe was the second man on the scene. They had swum down with lights, passing the bones of Elisabeth Randall. Joe’s thoughts went straight to Clarissa, to the cameo he had found, to Caroline. Reminding himself that controlled emotions were key to breathing steadily underwater, he forced the thoughts from his mind.

  Dan signaled from up ahead. Joe followed. Zigzagging through an obstacle course of jagged rocks and smashed wood, they shined their lamps into what looked like a devil’s cave. Pitch-black, it was guarded by notched and pointed shards of wreckage. But just inside, nestled in the sandy sea bottom, was the chest.

  Black wood encircled by bronze bands, it lay on its side. Two hasps had snapped free. Some of the gold had spilled out, creating a barnacle-encrusted trail of treasure. The divers followed it to the source, then hovered outside the possibly precarious “cave,” trying to determine how many other chests were inside and how safe it would be to proceed.

  “What do you think, captain?” asked Dan, coming up behind him on deck.

  “It was an exciting day. You did good.”

  “Thanks,” Dan said, grinning. He took a long drink of beer from a bottle. From down below came the sounds of the crew celebrating, retelling the triumphant moments.

  “Seen Sam?” Joe asked.

  “He’s eating,” Dan said.

  Joe nodded. Sam had packed his bags. Walking past his cabin, Joe had noticed the knapsack and duffel bag full and stowed in the corner, ready to go. But since the other night, when they’d had their conversation about Yale, Sam hadn’t said anything about leaving.

  “We’ll shore up those timbers tomorrow, just to be safe,” Joe said.

  “I say we go in with the hoist tonight, secure the chest right away. We can dive tonight, Joe. Let’s—”

  “We go tomorrow, Danny,” Joe said. He spoke curtly, but with respect. He didn’t like being second-guessed by his men. He was the captain, and he proceeded with a scientist’s caution. Dan was a salvage man out of Miami, one of the professional pirates. He knew his stuff, but he was at odds with the oceanographers. Pirates were greedy by trade and by nature.

  “Come on, Joe. The whole thing could shift—” Dan exploded.

  “Tomorrow,” Joe said, walking away.

  He stood at the rail, trying to control his anger. He’d been on plenty of treasure operations where impatience had killed the whole enterprise. Wrecks had collapsed, the gold had been lost. Crewmates had died. So you had to move with care, one step at a time. On the other hand, he knew Dan was right: Just because you had found the gold today didn’t mean it would be there tomorrow. The sea never stood still.

  Joe was as impatient as the next man. He wanted to get out of there, finish his mission, get away from Black Hall as fast as he could; if the wreck weren’t so unstable, he’d go down right then, yank the treasure ch
est up with the hydraulic winch, have his money counted by sunup, and be ready to go. The temptation was strong.

  “Hey, aren’t you gonna eat?” Sam asked, coming up with a plate of peach pie.

  “Yeah, I was checking the charts.”

  Sam’s brow was furrowed. He tried to straighten his cockeyed glasses, and the fork balanced on his plate clattered to the deck. “Here, this is for you,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Joe said. He took the plate, watched Sam wipe the fork on his shirttail. The brothers’ eyes met, and they grinned. On holidays, when Joe was home from school, they had always fought over washing dishes. They both hated the chore and they had both perfected ways of getting out of it.

  “It’s good pie,” Sam said, handing him the fork.

  “Hmmm,” Joe said, taking a bite. “So. Were you gonna tell me you’re planning to leave? Or were you just going to go?”

  “I was going to tell you,” Sam said, trying to use his thumbnail to tighten the tiny screw holding the earpiece on his glasses.

  Joe waited. Watching the awkward kid trying to get hold of that minuscule screw was putting his stomach in a knot. He had to hold himself back to keep from grabbing the glasses out of Sam’s hand.

  “I was planning to leave tomorrow,” Sam said, fiddling with the screw.

  “Hmmm,” Joe said.

  “Thinking about it anyway.”

  “Yeah?”

  Sam looked up. He was waiting for Joe to talk him into staying. Joe could feel it in the pit of his stomach. He dug into the pie again, just for a diversion. He could barely eat the stuff. His appetite was gone, and he hadn’t slept right in days, since the night of the ball. He was a mess of contradictions, and he knew it.

  Joe wanted Sam to stay, but he couldn’t wait for him to leave either. His few moments of sleep last night, he had dreamed of Caroline, of putting his arms around her and kissing her soft mouth, but when he was awake he thought of their parents, of all the history, of the scene her mother had caused.

  “So,” Joe said finally, putting down the pie plate. “You can’t make up your mind.”

  “Not really.”

  “Well,” Joe said slowly. “Tell me your reasons for both sides.”

  “Okay,” Sam said, perching on the rail. He was so clumsy, so accident-prone, Joe had to fight the urge to grab him by the collar and haul him off to keep him from going overboard. It was an exercise in tolerance to let him stay there. “I should get back to work. The whales aren’t in the passage, but I could be taking water samples, measuring salinity…”

  “Stuff like that,” Joe said, agreeing.

  “Or I could stay here…”

  “Yeah?”

  “A little longer. The gold’s pretty cool, and we found the mother lode today. I’d like to be here when we bring it up.”

  “Hmm,” Joe said, smiling inwardly at the “we.”

  “So…you can see my dilemma,” Sam said. “I don’t want you to think I’m after anything. I mean, any of the gold.”

  “I don’t,” Joe said quickly.

  “Because, frankly, I think gold sucks compared to other things. You know? Other things matter more.”

  “Yeah? Like what?” Joe asked, thinking of his own list.

  “Well, family,” Sam said. “Nature. The ocean. Love, I guess.”

  Joe nodded. He looked across the water, at the lighthouses blinking on the mainland. The night air sent a chill down his back. Love. Joe whistled.

  “Oh, yeah,” Sam said. “One more thing for the list. Good peach pie.”

  “That pie was great,” Joe said, nodding. “Thanks for bringing it to me.”

  “No sweat. Great enough to matter more than gold?”

  “Tough call,” Joe said.

  Sam was about to give up on his glasses. Sliding them back on, he glanced over and saw Joe holding out his hand.

  “Give me your specs,” Joe said, gesturing “come on,” and Sam handed them over. Joe reached into his pocket, pulled out his knife. He had been away at school, absent from Sam’s childhood and all the toys an older brother might have put together, bicycles he might have repaired, but standing on the deck of the Meteor, Joe tightened the screws on Sam’s glasses.

  “There,” he said, handing them back.

  “Hey,” Sam said, putting them on. Although straighter, the frames were still crooked, and Sam was grinning.

  “They look good,” Joe said inanely.

  “I think I need a new prescription,” Sam said.

  The Meteor rode higher on the rising waves, and the breeze was picking up. Here they were, standing on the deck of a treasure ship, talking about eyeglasses, when the feeling of good-bye was hanging in the air. Good peach pie. Great.

  “So, how much longer you guys staying up here?” Sam asked.

  The question took Joe by surprise. He hadn’t thought in terms of the calendar. He had been thinking about the wreck, the gold, and some unfinished business on land. He wanted to visit Firefly Hill, see the spot where his father had died. He was his father’s only son, and he wanted to pay his respects. But he knew none of it would take much more than a week.

  “Ten days?” Joe asked. “At the most.”

  “Because,” Sam said, “I was thinking I’d stick around for a few more days. Maybe help out, bringing up the gold or something. Recording sediment samples. Unless I’ll be in the way.”

  Joe shifted his gaze from the horizon to his brother. He shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “You won’t be in the way.”

  Sam nodded.

  Joe wanted him there. But he wasn’t good at saying what he wanted, getting the things Sam had mentioned earlier. If it was an object, if it lay on the sea bottom buried in silt, if centuries had left their mark in its metal, Joe Connor was your man. But if it lived and breathed, if it had a name and knew the meaning of love, forget it. Joe was out of his element.

  And yet, here was his brother, sticking around for a little while longer. Joe hadn’t even had to ask. Imagine what might happen if he tried opening his mouth. If he tried leaving his ship, heading for solid land, driving to someone’s door.

  Tried to say what was on his mind, in his dreams.

  Just imagine.

  Skye sat on the window seat in the bedroom she still shared with Simon. She loved foggy nights. They made her feel safe and protected. She believed the fog hid sins, provided a place for people to hide. Skye had felt scared and sinful for so long, and the fog had always been a refuge.

  She had clay under her fingernails. Today she had sculpted for hours in her studio. Somehow the tide had turned. She didn’t understand how, but speaking up to Caroline had loosened something inside. Or maybe Caroline had finally hit home. Back at work she had tried again to do Three Sisters, a piece that would capture the way she felt about herself, Clea, and Caroline.

  It had to show their closeness, but it had to show their separateness too. Skye had tried to sculpt it all different ways: abstract, very abstract, representational, surreal. She had formed one solid mass, meant to express her feelings about sometimes not knowing where she ended and her sisters began. One angry day, she had plunked down three separate balls of clay, unformed and unconnected, to show how immature she and her sisters really were and how little they really knew one another.

  But ever since the other morning, on Firefly Beach with Caroline, something new was emerging. Skye was doing a piece of three women standing in a circle. They were holding hands, with one woman looking into the center of the circle, one looking out, the other looking in.

  She found the combination intriguing. Because there were three, at all times two sisters holding hands would be facing the same direction. And one would be facing a different way. No matter how you looked at it, two would always be united. And one would be separate. But which two? And which one?

  Doing the work, Skye felt a little safer than she had been feeling. She knew she was struggling. She needed that intense connection with her sisters, but at the s
ame time she shrank from it.

  For such a long time she had thought her main problem was the resentment she felt about Joe’s father killing himself in the kitchen downstairs, her mother offering to trade her own life—and Skye’s—for Caroline’s. The beauty of a wild life, she thought. With so many traumatic events to choose from, how did you isolate the one that was making you would be relieved to die?

  For all these years she had thought she was the only one to suffer. The others had found a way to beat the sorrow, to escape its spell. Out of three girls, why her? They had all survived the hunts, all carried guns. Why had she been the one to make an irrevocable mistake? To kill a man.

  She never talked about it, had hardly ever told a soul. Her sisters knew some, and her father, but her husband didn’t and neither did her mother. The details of that day were too private and terrible. If she told anyone, if she ever started talking about it, the facts might eat her alive.

  Kill, she thought now. It sounded like what it was: sharp and hard and short and ugly like a bullet. She reached behind a book on the little window seat bookcase and took out her vodka bottle. She refilled her small crystal glass and took a sip.

  Drunk or just drinking, Skye had passed many hours trying not to think about the hunt, about the gun and Andrew Lockwood, about any of it. She had drunk to get loaded, to get wasted, to get happy, to get sad, because she loved the taste, because she was against killing animals, because her husband liked rough sex, because she had nightmares about snakes under her tent, because her father had stopped loving her, because she hated Swan Lake, because she had gone to Redhawk, because she was mad at her mother for offering to trade her life for Caroline’s, because Skye herself had killed a man dead.

  Working on her small sculpture that day, her impression of Three Sisters, Skye felt something shifting. A change in her breathing, a lessening of the pain deep inside. Prey turning on the hunter. Thinking of the worst and knowing she wasn’t alone. Nothing extreme, really. Unless you considered the desire to live extreme. Skye teetered on a suicidal seesaw: some days she wanted to live, many she would be relieved to die.

  Just thinking that, huddled on her window seat clutching her secret bottle of vodka, Skye thought about living. She took a sip, tears rolling down her cheeks. The vodka dulled her feelings, made her fear more manageable, but it killed so many other things too. When was the last time she had enjoyed a morning? Eaten and not felt like throwing up? Left the house and not wanted to hide from the first person she saw? Sculpted something she was halfway proud of?