Kit’s bedroom was one of ten in the Chapel House. The rooms were all off the meandering upstairs hallway, half of them facing the ocean, the other half the bay. Jay and Janni’s room was the only exception. It stretched the entire north side of the house with a view of both ocean and bay. One of the two upstairs fireplaces was also in their room. The other, with its Victorian mantel, was in the den.
All the rooms were large, and Kit had plenty of space for the walnut bedroom furniture she’d brought with her from Seattle. It looked beautiful against the soft buttery walls, and the carved molding around the ceiling looked as though it had been stained to match. She loved this room. It was warm and peaceful and usually settled her the moment she stepped inside.
But tonight she was finding it hard to sleep. Her windows were open and she lay on her back, naked under the sheet, listening to the rhythmic roar and whisper of the ocean. The moon left a lacy pattern on her ceiling, and she watched it change shape as she mulled over the warning Jay had given her before she came up to bed. He’d told her about the beach on summer nights, how the city crowds would converge on the neighboring towns and she could never know who might be lurking over the next sand dune. Although, he added with a smile, he was certain she could outrun just about anyone.
It still surprised her to be thought of as an athlete. She’d told them the truth, but they shook their heads in disbelief, only able to picture her slender and healthy. For most of her life she’d been anything but.
Bill had badgered her daily to run with him, and she had balked every time. It had become a joke between them. “Join me for a run?” he’d ask, standing at the front door in his shorts and T-shirt, a white sweatband in stark contrast to his dark curls.
“Oh gee, honey, I don’t know,” she’d answer as though she were actually considering it. “I think I’ll pass today.” He’d leave, both of them smiling at the ritual.
When her two closest friends, teachers at the high school, began jogging after work, she felt left out. It was no different from all those times when she was a kid, watching her classmates play softball while she sat on the bench on doctor’s orders, morosely swinging the only legs on the playground that never wore Band-Aids. Her teachers had united together to demand that note from her pediatrician. None of them wanted the responsibility for her asthma. After all, this kid could have attacks sitting calmly in class. Who knew what would happen if she joined the others on the playground?
She couldn’t trust her own body. The day she took her tennis shoes to the track to run with her friends she was terrified. She felt her heart pounding against her ribs just lacing up the shoes.
Her friends slowed their pace for her, and she walked and jogged, walked and jogged six times around the track, a mile and a half. Afterward, when she looked in the mirror of the teachers’ lounge, her cheeks were a lively pink. High quality color, not like the powder blush she angled across them each morning in a painstaking attempt to emphasize nonexistent hollows. The next day her legs ached with the sweetest pain in the world.
She couldn’t stop. Bill was amused. “Did you take your little jog today?” he’d ask. When she finally accepted his invitation to join him, his face fell. “Oh, well, honey, I mean, I really do this for the exercise, and if I have to slow down for you it’d blow my routine.”
Within a few months he didn’t need to slow down for her, and that’s when the marriage started to crumble. Or perhaps, as she admitted to herself later, it had been falling apart bit by bit for many years.
2.
From the air, the buildings of Newark looked like a charcoal drawing, and the sky between the city and the circling jet was dense with chemicals and ash. Yet there was no place Cole would rather be than suspended above that smoky city, spiraling toward the airport where his parents would be waiting for him and where the past nine months would be no more than a memory.
Those last few weeks in Paris, Estelle had acted as though his departure was a betrayal. Her eyes walled him in with suspicion. He’d been relieved when Elliot wired him to return to Blair ahead of schedule. He didn’t want to spend another month with Estelle while she finished her translating and his feeling of suffocation grew in the French summer heat.
The dark-haired flight attendant broke into his thoughts to hand him a warm, powder-scented hand towel.
“You’re almost home,” she said, lingering by his seat.
For what he hoped was the last time he gave her a restrained smile and returned his gaze to the city below. Once during this trip he had thought she was going to proposition him. She sat in the empty seat next to him and told him that she didn’t usually say things like this to a passenger, but “I can’t seem to stop myself from telling you that I really find you attractive.”
He felt her body next to him, all hopeful energy.
“Thanks,” he said. “But I’m already in a permanent relationship.”
“I . . . um . . . I wasn’t looking for permanence.”
He smiled patiently. “Sorry, but I am. And now I really need to get some reading done.” He rustled the papers in his lap, and with the color rising in her cheeks, the attendant excused herself. She gave up easily, he thought. More easily than most.
He wasn’t sure what the attraction was. He didn’t see himself as exceptionally good-looking. He liked the straight line of his nose well enough but his eyes were an alarming turquoise color that he himself described as unearthly, and his smile was more than a little lopsided.
He watched the flight attendant make her stop-and-smile way down the aisle. She was pretty all right but he hadn’t touched a woman other than Estelle in six years, and he wasn’t about to start now.
The jet, so graceful in the air, lumbered awkwardly to the terminal. Cole squinted through the window to make out his parents standing behind the tinted glass of the waiting area. He was surprised to see Corinne standing next to them, looking like a scared rabbit. At first he thought he was mistaken, and he stared hard until his eyes burned and he began to feel that gnawing blend of love and hate his sister always evoked in him. Wendy and Becky were with her, and he waved to them from the little window even though he was quite certain they couldn’t see him. They looked taller, stringier.
His father kissed his cheek when he reached the waiting area inside the terminal. The same gesture Cole had pulled away from as a teenager gave him a lump in his throat these days. Lately, when he looked in the mirror, it was his father’s face he saw reflected there. There was no gray in his dark brown hair yet, but the lines were deepening in the same places. He had the same subtle cleft in his chin, the same deep hollows in his cheeks that his mother generously referred to as dimples. He hoped he would never take on his father’s gaunt defeated look.
His mother looked, as always, as if she’d been taking very good care of herself. Her hair, which had once been Cole’s color, was now silver. Her skin was smooth and unlined despite the perpetual tan. She embraced him and nodded toward Corinne.
“Look who’s here,” she said proudly. “In an airport.”
“The twins wanted to welcome you home so I forced myself to come too, but I’m absolutely dying to get out of this place.” Corinne laughed nervously as Cole knelt down to hug the girls. They were as towheaded as he had been as a child.
He took his sister’s hand. Her palm was damp and her fingers trembled in his own. He kissed her pale cheek.
“Would you like to wait outside while I get my luggage?” he asked her, surprised at his own gentleness.
Relief softened her features as she nodded and turned to find the exit.
The ride from Newark to Watchung was cramped and noisy with everyone competing for his attention. The girls sang preschool songs for him, trying to outdo each other in volume. They clung to him in the backseat of the sedan, smelling sweetly of baby shampoo. Wendy sat on his lap, toying with the buttons on his shirt.
Cole furrowed his brow at his nieces. Their father had walked out on them a year ago, saying he’d had it
with Corinne and her phobias. Since then the girls attached themselves too easily to other men.
“You don’t need to worry about those two,” Estelle told him. “They’re survivors.” But Cole saw only two little girls made of glass that could shatter in the slightest breeze.
He took Wendy’s hand away from his shirt and squeezed it, wishing he could turn back time and shield them from everything worldly.
Corinne left with the girls shortly before dinner, as the fireflies were beginning to light the yard with their maize-colored glow. He and Estelle would have to come over when Estelle got back, Corinne said as she hugged him good-bye. He nodded, knowing Estelle would ask him to invent a reason to turn down the invitation.
His parents exchanged looks of surprise across the dinner table when he told them he’d be moving out of the Chapel House.
“What does that mean, Cole?” Phillip asked, setting his fork down. “Will you and Estelle be getting married?” The beautiful smoothness of his father’s French-Canadian accent struck him as if he were hearing it for the first time. Phillip Perelle had grown up in Montreal. He’d met Virginia Cole there when she was on spring break from Smith, and they were married six months later. They saw to it that their children spoke French as easily as they did English. Still Cole’s French had never met Estelle’s standards. She’d lived the first ten years of her life in Paris, as well as a few years during high school and college. His French couldn’t compare.
Cole returned his father’s quizzical look. “I’m not sure what it means.” He pushed his plate away, annoyed at the knot in his stomach. He wanted to marry Estelle. He had for several years, but the conflict over where to live always got in the way. That was a small obstacle, though, compared to Estelle’s fear of marriage itself. It wasn’t the commitment that frightened her—he knew there was no one else in her life. It was putting her faith in an institution she saw as doomed. Her mother had been divorced three times, her father twice. She was afraid that the moment they married Cole would begin to grow tired of her. But he was patient. He figured that in time he could convince her otherwise.
Virginia was eyeing him closely from across the table. “I’ve always thought Janni’s grandfather had something of the sorcerer in him to build a house with such a pull on the people inside,” she said. “It must be difficult to get out from under that spell, not to mention leaving Jay and Janni after all these years.”
What is very difficult, he thought, is having a psychologist for a mother.
“It won’t be easy.” He tried to avoid his mother’s perceptive gaze. He’d always suspected her of eavesdropping on his thoughts—how else could she know what he was thinking and feeling with such accuracy? His childhood friends could get away with lying about why their homework wasn’t done or where they’d been the night before. When he tried it, his mother invariably knew the truth, as if she’d left a little part of herself attached to him at his birth to serve as an informer.
Now she leaned across the table toward him, trying to grip his blue-green eyes with her own. “This is Estelle’s idea, isn’t it?” she asked.
Phillip looked at his wife. “What if it is?” he said. “She’s a smart girl. It’s about time, if you ask me.”
“It’s a mutual decision, Mom,” he said, keeping his voice even. He wished he could say that the last nine months had drawn them closer together, but his mother would know in an instant he was lying.
They had made few friends in Paris. Had it been the long work hours or had Estelle reeled him in each time he stepped away from her? He didn’t know. They worked together in the daytime and slept together at night. They spoke only French with each other. They tried to master the current patois, making and incorporating the same mistakes in usage until the language they spoke was very much their own and their symbiosis was complete.
She clung to him with a bewildering fierceness. Her possessiveness grew as if she could be certain her heart would beat only in his presence. She began asking him to account for the few hours he spent apart from her, then she’d tearfully apologize for doubting him.
He blamed Paris, not Estelle, and he was certain she would be her old self again when they were back in New Jersey. She convinced him that her Point Pleasant condominium was big enough for both of them and that the time was right to move in together, away from the Chapel House. She was hard to refuse. At times he felt weakened by some Circean quality in her that made him give in to her with no thought to the consequences.
He couldn’t very well describe that power to his mother when he didn’t understand it himself.
He arrived in Point Pleasant on Sunday night and opened up the condominium. He expected a musty, stale smell to greet him, but it was Estelle’s scent—that unique blend of soap and roses and earth—that enveloped him, as if she’d just walked past him into the hallway. Amazing that the sterile white and chrome condominium would hold her scent for all these months. Right now, as he stood in her living room, she was sleeping three thousand miles away from him. He could picture her, the splash of mahogany-colored hair across the pillow, one arm reaching out for him in her sleep. A sudden longing ran through him to the tips of his fingers.
He set his luggage down by the front door, balancing a bag of hamburgers on top of his suitcase, and walked across the living room to the balcony that overlooked the inlet. He wanted to see the water before he did anything else. The inlet was never calm, and this evening was no exception. Its waves inflated and died over and over again with no true rhythm. A few fishermen were scattered on the flat rocks of the jetty, colored pink by the setting sun.
He opened the refrigerator. It gaped discouragingly at him with its white and silver emptiness, like the room behind him. He filled a glass with tap water and carried it to the kitchen table. He ate two of the hamburgers, chewing and swallowing without tasting. The third he threw in the garbage.
He wouldn’t call the Chapel House until at least nine, when it would be too late for him to drive there. He couldn’t take the chance of being asked to stay the night or feeling the walls of the house close around him like a lullaby. His dreams in Paris had been full of the house. Even when the dream itself made no sense, the setting held it together. He dreamt often of his bedroom or of the kitchen with one of Janni’s fires burning in the fireplace. How would he survive in this condo?
The waves of the inlet disappeared in the dusk, and the lights clicked on one by one in the handful of boats foolish enough to attempt the inlet at night. The fishermen packed up their gear, calling to each other in muffled words he couldn’t decipher, but which he imagined signified resignation and defeat.
Nine o’clock came and went without a call to the house. Still too early. Mantoloking’s only ten minutes away, he thought. He pictured driving down the barrier island, the ocean on his left, the bay on his right, the thick salty air filling his car. He could drive to the house, visit for an hour, and drive back. He had a sudden mental image of an alcoholic at a party claiming he could take just one drink, and he laughed out loud at the comparison.
At nine-thirty he made the call. The voice that answered was unfamiliar.
“Maris?” he asked, wondering if he’d tangled the digits of the number in his memory.
“No, this is Kit Sheridan.”
He felt a sharp twinge of loss; the Chapel House was not the same house he had left. There was a stranger living there, answering the phone as if she belonged.
“Is Jay there?” he said. “This is Cole.”
“Oh, Cole,” said Kit. “I’ll get Janni.” The stranger was gone so quickly she left ice on the line.
“Cole! Are you in Point Pleasant? Can you come over tonight?” Janni’s voice was quick and eager and brought a smile to his lips.
“It’s too late, Jance,” he said, as if the hour of his call had been dictated by some force outside himself.
“God, we’ve missed you. You should have come here for the night. Aren’t you going to be lonely there all by yourself?”
“No, it’s fine,” he lied.
She told him that Jay was out of town until Tuesday, but she’d meet him for lunch the next day. It felt strange, having to make arrangements to see her. He was used to simply knocking on her bedroom door when he wanted to talk.
Estelle’s big bed looked inviting, but the bedroom was too full of her. He remembered so many mornings lying beneath the sheets of that bed, watching her brush her thick, wavy hair at the dressing table. She’d wear slips of lace and satin, and she’d use the names of fruit to describe their colors.
“This one’s apricot,” she would say, or “this one’s raspberry with a hint of watermelon.” She used mango when she could think of no fruit the color of her slip, because she said mangoes turned a different color nearly every day as they ripened.
He loved watching her. Sometimes when she would catch his smile or his look of contentment, she’d say, “Isn’t this better than spending the night in the Chapel House?” And he would have to agree because he liked to see her so relaxed, so comfortable in her own home. The lure of the house was, it seemed, selective.
She’d certainly been relaxed this past weekend, his last in Paris. They’d driven through the Loire Valley in the leased Renault. He hadn’t wanted to go, but it would be his last look at the chateaux country for a while. He’d expected Estelle to spend the time questioning him again about his plans for the next three weeks, when he’d be in New Jersey without her. But the interrogation never came, and as the enchantment of the valley surrounded him, he began to unwind.
They’d spent the morning exploring Chenonceau, his favorite of the chateaux. It wasn’t the architecture or the manicured gardens that captivated him. It was the water. The Cher River flowed under and around the castle—he could see water from every window.
Secrets at the Beach House Page 2