Firefly Beach

by Luanne Rice

  “What about him?” Caroline asked.

  “Tell me something. How did Homer like your father?”

  “He loved him,” Caroline said. “It was so sad, ironic, really, that after my father died, Homer cried for him the way he’d once cried for Andrew. For days and days. He’d disappear from the house, go off on these long walks. He’d come home and howl on the porch.”

  “For your father.”

  “Yes,” Caroline said, recognition dawning in her eyes.

  “Even though your father had stopped playing with him. He might have turned away, but that didn’t stop Homer from loving him.”

  Caroline nodded, her eyes briming. She bowed her head for a minute. Joe waited, wanting to touch her but knowing she needed to decide for herself.

  “I’m not afraid,” she said suddenly, raising her eyes. They were full of tears, the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen.

  “You’re not?”

  “The opposite,” she said.

  Joe grinned, knowing she meant love, that they were picking up where their letters had left off so long ago.

  “When do we leave for Greece?” she asked.

  “As soon as Sam’s out of the hospital,” he said, taking her in his arms.

  AUGUSTA WAS RELEASED FROM THE HOSPITAL RIGHT after Labor Day. She went straight to Clea’s house, because Clea was the daughter best equipped to give their mother the care she needed. The bad blow Augusta had suffered had affected her motor skills and she needed physical therapy three times a week. This meant driving her to a rehabilitation facility and encouraging her to do her exercises at home.

  Caroline gave her a fabulous black hawthorn walking stick with a sterling silver handle, which Augusta thought was marvelous. Antique and Irish, like something Oscar Wilde would have used had he ever needed a cane. Since they had shaved her head at the hospital, she was growing to enjoy being bald—or at least she was making the most of it. Her hair would grow back, but for now she wore the beautiful and dramatic silk scarves her daughters kept bringing her. She twisted them into turbans and thought she looked quite regal. Divine, considering.

  But Clea felt overwhelmed. Her whole family considered her the rock. She kept house and cooked gourmet meals. She ran her children from day camp to flute and trumpet lessons to the movies all day long. She was the minister’s wife, she stood by Peter’s side at weddings and funerals, sickbeds and prayer services.

  Having her mother under her roof was making her crazy. It wasn’t Augusta’s fault. For once, her mother was being meek. She seemed grateful for every saltine, every glass of seltzer water. Her doctors had told her she couldn’t drink alcohol while she was taking anti-seizure medication, and Augusta hardly complained. Every day at five she would say, “Time for a martini!” But Clea wouldn’t bring one, and Augusta wouldn’t push it.

  Mainly, Augusta stayed in her room and listened to music. It confused Clea to see her mother so quiet and contemplative. One day she called Clea to her bedside. Clea had thought she was going to ask for an extra blanket, or a glass of ice water, but instead, Augusta patted the quilt and asked Clea to sit by her side. Reaching for an English bone hairbrush, Augusta began to brush Clea’s hair.

  “Tell me something,” Augusta said, slowly stroking Clea’s hair.

  “Like what?” Clea said, feeling goose bumps on the back of her neck from the unfamiliar pleasure of her mother’s touch.

  “Anything, honey. Just tell me a story. Anything at all.”

  “Well, Maripat and Mark both want to sign up for a new soccer league.”

  “About you, Clea,” Augusta said. “I love the children, but I want to hear something about you.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Clea said, her throat constricting, hardly knowing where to start.

  “Something about Clea,” Augusta said. “Tell me.”

  “But why?”

  “I’m so sorry there has to be a ‘why,’ ” Augusta said. “That you don’t think it completely natural for me to wonder about you.”

  “You had Dad to worry about,” Clea said.

  “Yes, I did worry,” Augusta said, brushing Clea’s hair, “that he’d find me boring, feel closed in, go off with someone else. You girls suffered for it.”

  “I’m fine, Mom,” Clea said. “And Caroline is great.” Caroline had announced her plans to go to Greece. While no one was totally surprised, the reality of her departure—for an entire year—felt daunting.

  “But Skye’s not.”

  “No,” Clea said. Skye had moved out of Caroline’s, back to Firefly Hill, where she could be alone. Clea had stopped by once with an extra pot of beef stew, and found her in bed at four in the afternoon, staring hopelessly out the window. Feeling her mother brush her hair, Clea closed her eyes. She tried to imagine how she would feel if she knew Maripat was suffering the way Skye was, and she knew her mother had a broken heart.

  “What can I do, darling?” Augusta asked. “I know it’s a case of too little too late, but I can’t bear it. I can’t bear to see her this way.”

  “I don’t know, Mom,” Clea said, reaching back for her mother’s hand. It felt thin and frail, and when she turned around, she saw how old her mother looked. Augusta stopped brushing Clea’s hair, letting her hands fall to her lap.

  “With Caroline off to Greece, I don’t know….”

  “She’ll be back.”

  “I’ve let her handle so much for so long. She’s taken care of Skye all her life, while I…wasted so much time.”

  They looked into each other’s eyes, the two mothers of the family. They each understood how it felt to raise daughters, the special worries of letting their beloved girls out into this world full of dangers, and Clea tried to send her mother some of her own strength. Clea had gotten it from somewhere, and she liked to think some of it had come from Augusta herself.

  “What happened?” Augusta said in the absent way of someone who has woken up from a bad dream. “That’s what I asked Caroline. With all our gifts, all the love we have for one another, what went wrong? That’s what I want to know. That one missing piece.”

  “Life, Mom,” Clea said, holding her mother’s hand. She thought “what if” all the time: What if Peter died, what if someone hurt one of the children, what if she fell through the ice in the pond? Terrible things happened when you least expected them. But so did wonderful things, so did joy. “That missing piece is life,” she said.

  “Life,” Augusta said, tilting her head.

  Skye was alone at Firefly Hill. She had agreed to have dinner with Caroline and Joe. What she wanted to do was pull the curtains, turn off the phone, and get the job done. She wanted to kill herself. She was so sick of living. Nothing touched the agony inside.

  The house was a tomb. Memories everywhere. Homer’s fur all over the furniture, but no Homer. He was at Caroline’s, her mother was at Clea’s walking with a cane and undergoing physical therapy because of the man Skye had brought into their home. Simon was in Boston. He had gone back to Biba, but he would have to face charges for assault and attempted rape in the coming months. Skye didn’t care. She didn’t love him anymore. She didn’t need him—didn’t need anyone. She loved only her father. She had recently imagined herself drinking with his ghost. Talking out loud to him, telling him how she felt, begging him to forgive her.

  Someone knocked on the door. Expecting Caroline and Joe to just walk in, she felt surprised. She checked herself in the mirror: bloated face, circles under her eyes, her hair a rat’s nest. She noticed a dark stain on the front of her sweater, but she didn’t care. Slowly, every joint in her body aching, Skye went to the door.

  It was Joe. He stood on the porch, all alone. Skye looked around.

  “Hi,” Joe said.

  “Hi. Where’s Caroline?”

  “At home. Can I come in?”

  Skye swung the door open. Without speaking, Joe walked past her. He waited until Skye remembered to ask if he’d like to come into the kitchen.

  “What’s wrong? Is
she okay?” Skye asked.

  “She’s fine,” Joe said, eyeing the bottle. Skye blushed. She hadn’t drunk from it, but she had been staring at it for the last half hour.

  “Would you like a drink?” Skye asked.

  “Skye?”

  His voice was so quiet, so calm and kind, it stopped Skye in her tracks.

  “Would you like to go to an AA meeting instead?” he asked.

  “AA?”

  “Alcoholics Anonymous.”

  “You’re one?”

  “I’m one,” he said, smiling.

  “How did you know?” she asked, trembling. “What made you go?”

  “It was over for me,” he said. “I didn’t want to do it anymore.”

  “I’m so tired,” Skye said. She thought of the bottle, how she could drink it all night and not feel drunk, how nothing was chasing the pain away. She thought of her .22 out in a shed behind the house. She hadn’t checked on it in a while, but for the last day and a half she had been imagining how it would feel to pick it up, do to herself what she had done to a man on a mountain trail.

  “I was too,” Joe said. “I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

  “That’s it,” Skye said, tears streaming down her face. “That’s how I feel.”

  “You never have to feel this way again. Will you come with me?” Joe asked.

  Skye took a look around the kitchen. There were the clay handprints she had made for her father in first grade. The bust of her mother she had done in high school. There were pictures of her and her sisters, dressed in their red-checked coats, ready to go hunting on Redhawk one Thanksgiving weekend. A picture of her father the year before she shot Andrew Lockwood; it was the last picture of him that showed him smiling. He had spent the rest of his life drunk.

  “Dad,” Skye said out loud.

  “He’d want this for you,” Joe said.

  “I feel like I’m leaving him,” Skye said. Then, giving Joe a defiant look, “I love him.”

  “Why shouldn’t you? He’s your father.”

  “Everyone blames him” she said.

  “He’s still your father.”

  Skye nodded. That’s how she saw it: Before the hunts, before the shooting, there was a big man who taught her how to draw, carried her on his shoulders, took her swimming at the beach.

  “You’re not leaving him, Skye,” Joe said, reaching out his hand.

  The tears ran down Skye’s face. She picked up her father’s picture and held it to her breast. She felt so afraid of leaving the house. She and her father were so alike, artists who had made mistakes with the ones they loved, who drank because they couldn’t bear the hurt in others’ faces.

  “Come, Skye,” Joe said. “Please?”

  She took a deep breath, put down her father’s picture. If she looked too deeply into Joe’s eyes, she would see more than she was prepared for right now. He was helping her out of love for Caroline, she was sure. Skye was sure Caroline knew what he was doing, that she was sitting home right now with Homer, wishing her heart out that Skye would go to the AA meeting with Joe. It would make leaving for Greece so much easier.

  “You’re taking her away,” Skye said.

  “Only to Greece,” Joe said. “Not away. She could never go away from you.”

  “It’s too far,” Skye said.

  “She hasn’t left yet,” he said. “She’s five miles up the road right now.”

  Caroline leaving for Greece: another blow, another reason to take the dark path, hide out, turn away. It was so much easier to sleep than be awake, to drink than to stop.

  “There’s a saying in AA,” Joe said. “Don’t quit before the miracle.”

  “What’s the miracle?”

  “You’ll know it when you see it,” Joe said.

  “What if I never see it?”

  “If you quit, you’ll never know what you might have missed.”

  Closing her eyes, Skye thought of the .22. She thought of her father and Joe’s father; she thought of Andrew Lockwood. Their faces had been so clear, but now they were fading. She couldn’t bring them into focus. Right now the face she was seeing was Caroline’s.

  Skye’s eyes slowly opened, and she nodded.

  “Okay,” she heard herself saying. “I’ll go with you.”

  Every morning Caroline found herself giving Michele a little more of the inn’s business to handle. She took her to Coastal Bank & Trust, introduced her to the bankers, explained the workings of various accounts.

  Michele was a quick study. She seemed eager. She learned fast, asked the right questions. Of course, she had been at the front desk for ten years, so she had a head start. Caroline noticed Tim hanging around some afternoons, taking a regular seat in the bar. Classes had started at the college, and he would sometimes drop by with colleagues or students to have a beer and talk about the artists of Black Hall. Seeing him there made Caroline happy. She knew he was at the inn to support Michele, that he would keep it up when Caroline was away.

  Other days, Caroline wasn’t sure she wanted to leave. How could she sail away with Joe and leave the inn behind? How could she leave her family? They needed her too much. Maybe she hadn’t been the perfect sister to Clea and Skye, the perfect daughter to Augusta, but she had done her best, and so far hadn’t they all survived? They wobbled along, the Renwick women, a troupe of off-balance acrobats trying to pedal bicycles across a high wire.

  Sam was scheduled to be discharged from the hospital the following day, and she and Joe were supposed to leave a few days after that. Skye was now going to meetings. Caroline knew her sister’s new sobriety came with no guarantees, but she had hope. She knew that she had no other option.

  Caroline dropped in regularly at Clea’s to visit her mother. Augusta was trying to be a good sport. She didn’t like the idea of Caroline leaving, especially for Greece—especially with Joe Connor. But she held her tongue. As if she had decided enough harm had been done in their lives, she seemed unwilling to do more. She didn’t dislike Joe; she resented his father for the violence he had introduced to their family.

  Three days before she was going to leave, Caroline drove Augusta to the hospital for a checkup. They were in the neurologist’s office, waiting to see the doctor, when Joe and Sam walked in. Augusta froze. This was her first moment face-to-face with Joe Connor since the Firefly Ball.

  “Hello, Mrs. Renwick,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “Hello, Joe,” she said cautiously. She shook his hand, then his brother’s. The boys kissed Caroline, and everyone seemed very chummy.

  “Looks like we have the same doctor, Mrs. Renwick,” Sam said.

  “Call me Augusta,” she said. “You too, Joe.”

  “Thanks, Augusta,” Joe said.

  Caroline and Joe had a million things to do before they left. They stood off to the side, by the receptionist’s desk, going over a checklist. Augusta and Sam sat alone, not knowing quite what to say to each other. Augusta reached up to make sure her turban was in place.

  “Hey, nice hat,” Sam said, grinning. His skin was pale, the circles under his eyes dark and deep. Skinnier than ever, he must have lost ten pounds. He had a big white bandage on his head, exactly like the one Augusta had worn the previous week.

  “Thank you,” she said demurely. “Yours is quite nice too.”

  “Feeling better?” he asked.

  “A little shaky these days. And you?”

  “Wobbly as all hell. If you’ll excuse my language.”

  “Think nothing of it,” Augusta said, peering at him. She was looking for a resemblance to his brother, but saw practically none. Joe was strapping and sexy, while Sam was thin and gawky, handsome in an English-schoolboy way. Glasses, tufty hair sticking out of the bandage, a narrow face.

  “Actually, my head hurts all the time,” he said, leaning closer to her. “They’re giving me anti-seizure medication, and it makes me feel like sleeping.”

  “Me too,” Augusta said. “It’s awful. I feel like
I’m living in fog, and I’m not allowed to drink martinis. Do you have seizures?”

  “I had one,” Sam said, staring at his knees.

  Augusta touched the back of his hand. The poor child. He was so young. “Did you hate it?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t want to have another. My doctor said they’re not uncommon with head injuries. Have you had any?”

  “Two. Nightmare roller-coaster rides. Once they started, nothing on earth could stop them.”

  “Wow, it rots, huh? My brother would go crazy if he knew. He thinks the accident was his fault.”

  “Your brother,” Augusta said, folding her arms and biting her lip as she watched Joe and Caroline laughing quietly.

  “You don’t like him?” Sam asked.

  “Nothing to do with you, dear,” she said. “But certain things from the past. And now he wants to take Caroline off to Greece.”

  “He’s a good guy,” Sam said.

  “If you only knew the whole story. It started with his father, you see, coming into our home one Christmas Eve and threatening to kill us all. I hope I’m not shocking you—”

  “I know the story,” Sam said easily. “But you’re missing the best part.”

  “Which is?” Augusta asked. She was changing in ways she couldn’t comprehend, including allowing the possibility that this skinny child, his head addled, might have something to tell her about her family’s tragedy.

  “Your daughter’s in love with him.”

  Augusta turned her head to stare.

  Sam shrugged. “I don’t want him going to Greece either. But do you honestly think you’re going to stop them? You might as well decide to play ball.”

  “I’ve never played ball,” Augusta said thoughtfully.

  “You’d better start now, Augusta,” Sam said. “ ’Cause that’s what life’s about.”

  “I think I got Augusta to give you her blessing, dragging Caroline off to Greece with you,” Sam said. This was his first walk outside, his first day out of the hospital. Warm in the September sunshine, he and Joe were heading down a road by the sea.

  “You’re a powerful man,” Joe said.

  “She’s stubborn,” Sam said. “But who can blame her? Not wanting to send her daughter off with a scoundrel like you?”