Luke looked at the next photo, his mother with work gloves on, shielding her eyes from the sun, a straw hat, and a basket of weeds with cutting shears by her side. But she was smiling at the camera, familiar, friendly, casual with the taker of the photograph, like a friend. The Porters were her clients . . . Luke knew that. They paid her to garden. But then something happened. Something Frank couldn’t tell him. Luke swallowed so hard his throat ached.
Another photo . . . now his mother Lynne in a pink sundress standing in the yard, smiling again. Not like a worker, but like a guest. And then, another photo of his mother in the porch swing of this very house. Next to her on the swing, Bucky’s father, George Sr., closer than a boss and an employee would sit, closer than friends.
Bucky’s father with a cleft chin. Like Luke’s. Bucky’s father with brown, unruly hair like Luke’s. In the next photo on the beach, George Sr.’s arm around his mother Lynne, both of them smiling, looking like, well, they’d just gotten out of bed. Her hand grabbing his hip flesh as lovers do.
Still another photo of his mother, looking beautiful at a bayside bar, boats, docks, seagulls in the distance, toasting the taker of the photograph.
His mother on a date with George Sr., in an illicit moment, a stolen cocktail by the bay.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Resolution Time
Katie’s knuckles tapped onto the playroom closet door, then she opened the wooden flaps to peer inside. “You in there?”
“Yeah. Yep, I sure am.”
“Poppy left. This is too weird. She’s going back to the party, Huck wants a sleepover with that Calhoun kid, she’s going to tell him okay. It’s just too hard a day on both of us to find Bucky, and handle everything. I told her I’d look around town for Bucky, then drive over.”
“You do that,” answered Luke in a trance. He was sitting on the floor, elbows on his knees, his head in his hands.
“Come out, it’s fine.” She knelt down and caressed his shins. “What’s with you? It wasn’t that close. She wasn’t coming back here into the playroom, you know. We stayed in the front hall.”
He looked at her, his face white like cake flour. “Frank is always right.”
“Why? What did he . . . does he know about Bucky? Did he tell you something?”
“Katie, Frank knows a lot about the Porter family. A lot more than you and I could have imagined. We have to go see him now. Together.”
“Now? Frank? We’re going to . . . how do you know?”
“Let me take it from here. It’s all starting to make sense. Everything.” Luke grabbed the old manila envelope with the photographs and tapped her on her forehead with it. “It’s all in here,” he said.
Then he grabbed Katie’s hand hard, and they almost tumbled down the front stairs of the cottage, he was dragging her so fast.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Breakfast Table Breakthrough
Luke spilled the photos onto the red linoleum dining table in the kitchen he’d grown up in. Katie was on his right, the man who’d raised him across the table.
“Talk to me, Dad.”
“With Katie here? I just met her, son.”
“You met her before. On the docks. She and I care about each other. I want her here.”
“Well, I’ve said hello to her once or twice, but this is the first time . . . and, son, I think this is very personal . . .”
“I want her here.”
Frank nodded. Luke’s mom was obstinate in the exact same way. Frank flashed on a scene about twenty years before at this very table when they’d been in a fight about how he’d brushed her aside at an engagement party because he’d been hanging with his buddies. Lynne refused to move until he agreed with her side of the story and promised to be more thoughtful in social situations. He knew the woman he loved was wrong—she had plenty of girlfriends there to talk to, she just didn’t want to. But that balmy summer night, nineteen years before, he had to give in if he wanted to go to sleep.
Lynne’s son, Luke, sitting before him now wasn’t budging either.
“Okay, fine,” answered Frank prudently. “Katie stays. Where did you get the photographs?”
“I found them in a crack in the back closet of a playroom, hidden behind a thirty-year-old game of Parcheesi.”
“Where, Luke? Where?” Frank shook his head and curled his lips inward, preparing for this moment that was doomed to arise at some point.
“At thirty-seven Willow Lane.”
“You were there?”
“Yep. Katie rented it for the summer.”
Frank breathed in deep, clasped his fingers together behind his head, and cracked his neck back while spreading his elbows out. “Just amazing. Who would have . . . you both are newly . . . ?”
“She’s part of the story, Dad. Like really in the middle of it. And I have to know and I want her to know and it’s, just, I want her by my side right now.”
Katie grabbed the top of Luke’s thigh and rubbed it hard under the table. “Frank, I know we don’t know each other, but since I met your son, or your stepson or . . .”
“He’s my son,” Frank said, sternly. “Always my son.”
“Well, we just had a strong connection and I think he feels . . .”
Frank offered a subtle smile. “I know my son. I can tell how he feels.”
“So?” Luke asked. “What happened?”
Frank flattened his hands on the red linoleum table he’d bought with his girlfriend Lynne at a garage sale down the street before they were ever married. A sale from a long time ago, way back when they were together, living together, and she wasn’t yet pregnant with the child of her employer, Mr. George Herbert Bradford Porter Sr. residing at 37 Willow Lane.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Forgive and Forget
“You obviously forgave Lynne,” Katie remarked.
“She was too beautiful not to forgive,” Frank answered, staring at his hands. “Her face was so sweet, the kindest face you ever saw. Her eyes tilted down on the sides like a puppy. You just couldn’t deny her anything. No one could ever say ‘no’ to that face, because she was so good inside. She had this thin body, this graceful way of moving around that was like a ballet dancer. I would often stop what I was doing just to have another chance to watch her walk across a room.
“So I had to forgive her,” Frank continued. “I couldn’t stay mad. It was only an affair with that George Porter Sr. He was a snake who seduced his pretty young gardener because she worked near his bedroom. She was prey and she didn’t even realize it. George Sr. took her out for drinks, bedded her . . .” Frank’s voice became stilted and forced. “She said it was about four times, then he moved on to some married woman, I heard.
“When I confronted her about another guy—I . . . I just had a feeling one night when she was late and flustered, your mother told me straight away and apologized.”
“What did you do?” asked Luke.
“Well, I left her immediately. I couldn’t take it. We were separated for about a year and a half. But I thought about her every day. I’d drive my truck by houses where she was working just to see her. Sometimes she didn’t know I was watching her at all. And, other times, I’d bring her a coffee while she was working so hard in people’s gardens all day. She always took it light with cream. She liked blueberry muffins for energy, too.
“Then, about ten weeks after the affair ended, she felt the stirrings inside her. We both knew it wasn’t mine. When she told George Sr., he said he’d give her three hundred dollars a month to keep quiet. She took the money because she needed it, for about nine months after you were born, Luke. ”
Across the linoleum, Luke stared at Frank and fidgeted with the loose metal casing around the table. He’d thought his blood father had moved away. He never knew that he’d died and fathered a certain Bucky Porter as well. Bucky, his half brother.
Frank went on patiently and slowly. “After you were born, your mother and I were in touch a bit, we went for drinks. I c
ould barely stand to stay away, but I did as much as I could. And then one day, the baby—that’s you, Luke—you did this crazy thing. We were sitting kind of near each other in one of those Wednesday concerts in the grass in town, about two groups away from each other. We waved hello. In fact, I think I brought her over a beer or something. It was one nice June day, thirty-one years ago I guess, son, some blue grass band playing up on a stage.
“We hadn’t come to the concert together or even planned on seeing each other there. She was with a girlfriend who’d been very supportive of a young, single mother, and I was with a buddy from work, Earl, who’s still by my side at work every day. But anyway, I swear, you, who were like ten months old or so, crawled fifty feet across the grass right straight at me and sat in my lap. And then, you looked up at me, and I looked at you, at your mom. And I thought, I’m going to take this kid on because I love that beautiful woman sitting there across the grass.
“So, to hell with George Porter Sr.’s three hundred bucks. To hell with that guy’s loose morals. We don’t need him. We can make our own family. Which we did . . .” Frank’s voice cracked as he rubbed his forehead. “Which we did.” Frank tapped Luke’s hand. “So. Yes. As hard as it is to believe, Bucky Porter is a son of the same man, George Porter Sr. You and Bucky are half brothers, his mom is that Poppy Porter woman in the big hats. I’ve seen her around town, kind-looking woman, I’m sure she doesn’t know a thing.”
“Do you think Bucky knows?” Luke asked. “Do you have any idea? Did my mom ever say anything about George Sr.’s family knowing about me?”
“Southampton is small and big all at once,” Frank said. “Of course your mother bumped into George Sr. over the years, maybe once every year or so. I remember a few times she and I both would see him and move to the other side of the street. But I think she only spoke to him twice in fifteen years. And she did ask once. George Sr. said the rest of the family never knew. But she pressed him, and he twitched a little, and, she told me she got the impression maybe someone knew.”
“Who did George Sr. tell?” Luke asked, barely able to breathe.
“She’s wasn’t sure. She thought maybe he did, only because he’d said something about a brother should know he’d had another, but she couldn’t tell. That Bucky Porter, you ever get a weird feeling from him? Like he knew something about you?”
“I don’t know. This is all so nuts, and so hard to get my head around. He yells at Kona, and well, yeah, he kind of puts his back to me. He’ll kind of confront Kona and Kenny, but never me.”
“Maybe he knew something of the connection,” said Frank. “He’s had to have had a feeling. Maybe that’s why he was running you off his beach. It was just too much.”
“He said we spoiled his view.”
“Well, maybe he meant he didn’t want to accept it, or wonder about it every day.” Frank held his son’s hand. “I’m telling you, I’m your family, I’m always your family. And your mother loved you more than any woman on this planet ever loved a son. And when she died, it all got passed to me to give to you. So I’ve got enough for both of us.”
Tears streamed down Katie’s cheeks as she thought of Huck, of Lynne’s devotion to Luke, of how a harrowing and lethal day in a boat meant she missed out on giving him decades of love.
“Your beautiful mother is now one with nature. That’s why I just tell you to leave her be, resting in the sea. And leave those wealthy city people be. We don’t need them. Never have. I always tell you that, son.”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Lifting Fog
The air at this late sunset hour often became wet and heavy when fog rolled over the edge of Long Island, sucking moisture from the ocean, inlets, and bays. The salty mist wafted through the homes, the scent of the sea swirling around people and their furniture. In Luke’s van, condensation collected in the corners of the windows, his seats damp as if they had been lightly rained on.
Neither Luke nor Katie looked at each other as they drove to the cottage. Katie decided she’d move out from Bucky’s cottage in a matter of days. Luke, meanwhile, touched his cleft chin nervously, now seeing the strong paternal resemblance in that tennis photo.
The photo of his mother, hands on her hips, in front of the Willow Lane garden haunted him most. She appeared steady and assured in that image. Did she know right then she was pregnant, that he was already growing inside her? Luke turned down Willow Lane, both of them silent with reckoning.
As Luke thought about the woman who’d made him, who’d perished in the sea that was creating all the mist around them, Katie remembered the woman who’d died in the spring. Her own mother never knew of her trajectory out East. Yet, perhaps she was guiding this whole adventure to Long Island, and, ultimately, into this soggy van.
Her mother wouldn’t want Katie landing here without confidence. She wouldn’t want her living with a nagging feeling about a man. Katie would finally burn through the fog in her own head, stagnant and stubborn until now. Perhaps Bucky served only as a vehicle to get here, a delivery system, a human catapult.
This fall, Katie would work at a solid school system without so many budget cuts, and give her son a new life in a town that suited him more as he grew into a teen. She could now swat away those pernicious furies buzzing about her. The same ones that had tricked her into thinking she should accept a relationship with Bucky—a relationship that had always felt amiss.
She’d move out of the ghost-filled cottage. Soon. She’d thank Bucky for inviting her. She was grateful for his providing a framework: from a pail of black bing cherries to sharing an old family Volvo to putt around in. She would not stoop to ask about the younger girls he supposedly chased after. He was, it now seemed, genetically wired to stray. It didn’t matter. She’d get that job; she’d keep her son challenged.
One more step to take.
The carved pinewood box waited in her closet, the small velvet pouch inside holding ashes. An eastern resting place for her mother now made sense. During the funeral, Katie had not spread all of her mother’s ashes in the clear, fresh water of Flathead Lake. She discreetly saved an equal amount inside the velvet pouch. At the time, she had no idea why.
Now she knew the Atlantic would be a second home for both of them. It supported Katie when she slipped from her board, the salt water more buoyant than the fresh lake water. This ocean provided a playground for her son, a salty elixir to dive into at the end of a long day, a surface for her to glide on. As she stood on her windsurf, manipulating her sail before taking off, she’d see horseshoe crabs scampering along the sandy bottom. The jellyfish, with big maroon centers and long tentacles, swayed with the water’s wake around her. After dusting the Atlantic with her mother’s remaining ashes, she’d dunk herself in nearby. She’d float alongside her anytime she wished. The ocean was amniotic, so many creatures thriving within.
Luke on her left, the sweet teacher of the sea, the guy in the frumpy shirts, would also play into her future on the Atlantic. Earlier, Luke’s body had fit so perfectly with hers, just like a missing puzzle piece she’d been seeking. She’d be more open to him in the coming weeks. But only time could tell the autumn story.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Police Palooza
When Luke turned the van into the cottage driveway several hours later to drop Katie off, a police car waited in front of the garage. Poppy sat on the porch, clasping her hands in her lap, pursing her worried lips. The bird feeder George Sr. had bought George Jr. forty years before swayed in the front yard tree.
Luke’s seventh grade friend, who had become the respected public servant, Officer James Monroe, took several large strides toward his van. At first Luke thought he’d high-five him out the window, but when he saw James’s expression, he banged his forehead against his steering wheel.
“Luke Forrester, I’m so sorry, but I’m going to have to take you in. We’ve got some questions about the disappearance of George Porter Jr.”
“Me? James? Me? You think I?”
<
br /> Poppy walked over to the car. “Katie,” she said, “please explain to your friend Luke Forrester that he should not talk at all.”
Luke got out of the car while Officer Monroe softly said, “I got to bring you in . . .”
“Why?” Luke said, confused. But then again, maybe he wasn’t—maybe, in fact, he understood clearly. Bucky had framed him. All of them.
“We’d like to ask you some questions about his disappearance. One of your Jet Skis was found upside down near the jetty wake this evening. It wasn’t banged up, it didn’t hit anything hard, which we found strange as well. We didn’t find the driver. We do know a Mr. ‘Bucky,’ or a Mr. George Herbert Bradford Porter Jr., as his license reveals, was seen on a Jet Ski in the early evening. Mrs. Poppy Porter called to say he was missing.
“Several witnesses saw you all take him out in the bay today. But a few people also saw him on the docks later; it’s unclear with whom. The witnesses were confused about who he’d gone with the second time. We assume you went twice? Once at about 11:00 a.m. and once at 6:00 p.m.?”
“I didn’t go twice, no one did. I know that . . . Kona and Kenny don’t do anything in the bay without me, that’s just how we work. They’re strong in the sea, and well, I’m just more organized with the ropes and vests and . . . but no, I didn’t take him twice. I can assure you, James.”
Poppy yelled, “Luke, stop talking. Now. He’s an officer of the law.”
In eighth grade, Luke and James had stolen their first beers out of his parents’ garage fridge. They’d chased girls all through high school without great success, both of them awkward and shy.
“Luke, they also saw you and your partners physically challenging Bucky around the dock late morning,” Officer Monroe continued. “One member of Bucky’s club told us it wasn’t the first time there’d been a scuffle, a physical one. Kenny, who we all know to be a big, strong guy, after all, roughed him up on the beach apparently a while back? Shoved him to the ground, pushed him around a few times this summer? Apparently this happened in the sand, in front of many members of the Seabrook. We already have seven or more confirming . . . you know about that? I’m sorry, I have to take you in.”
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