Beach Girls

by Luanne Rice

  “What was their mission?”

  “Working to bring literacy to poor areas—but not in Georgia. It couldn't be near Atlanta, because after he left the order, he would be denigrated in the community.”

  “He should be! For seducing a married woman, getting her to leave her family! I was raised Catholic—we all were. We all know there are good priests and bad priests. I'm sorry, but this guy is horrible.”

  Madeleine let Stevie rant. It felt good to have someone sharing her outrage. If only Emma were still alive, she thought. Stevie and I could gossip our heads off, full of moral indignation, have a great bitch session, then go kidnap her and deprogram her and convince her to return home.

  “Jack didn't know anything?” Stevie asked.

  “He knew that something was wrong. Emma told me that he actually encouraged her to see Father Richard. I guess he thought the priest would help their marriage.”

  “And instead he abused their trust.”

  “Yeah—that's how I see it. Emma defended him, though.”

  “Well, she would,” Stevie said. “So would I. Falling in love is like magic. It gets you under its spell, and you're a goner. I know—I've made more mistakes than you can imagine in that condition. But I didn't have a child. . . .”

  “That's the part that drove me crazy,” Madeleine said. “Thinking of Nell . . .” She wanted to tell Stevie about the last minutes, in the car, when she'd driven off the road. But instead, buying time, she spun back a little.

  “There we were, sitting on the beach at St. Simons Island, the way we'd done so many times before. And Emma was looking around, picking apart the resort for being too luxurious, and our bathing suits, for being too expensive. She began talking about poverty in rural Georgia—said that Father Richard had opened her eyes to things she had never seen or thought about before. Families who don't have enough money to make ends meet. Mothers who have to struggle to feed their children. Overcrowding in the prisons, the inhumanity with which the inmates were treated.”

  “Those are important issues,” Stevie said.

  “I know. And I was surprised and—at first—pleased to hear Emma talking that way. I mean, Jack would never call her spoiled, but that's what I thought—the way she always needed the biggest car on the block, or wanted to join the most exclusive clubs. She didn't even want us to read your books to Nell because they were too realistic, showed some ugly things about life!”

  “I know,” Stevie said.

  “She stared at her diamond ring glinting in the sun and said, ‘People die in diamond mines so rich women like us can wear these.' I told her, ‘They're symbols of love—Jack's and Chris's.' And she said, ‘If love is true, it doesn't need jewels to prove it.' When she said that, I knew something big was going on. Because for a long time before that, she'd measured how good a birthday or Christmas was by how fancy the jewelry Jack gave her was.”

  “It sounds as if she was having a transformation,” Stevie said.

  “I know. And at first I thought it was all positive.”

  “But it wasn't. . . .”

  “She told me she and Father Richard weren't having sex. They had kissed and held each other, but they didn't want to do more till they figured out what they were going to do. He told her that he needed to have a period of ‘discernment.' Where he would pray, ask what he should do. He went up into the hills where he'd grown up, all alone for . . . I don't know . . . she made it sound like forty days in the desert. At the end of his time there, he came back and told her he wanted to leave the priesthood to be with her.”

  “And all she had to do was leave her marriage.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Nell.”

  “It made me crazy, Stevie,” Madeleine said. “We were driving home from the beach.”

  “The day of the accident?”

  Madeleine nodded. She heard the waves hitting the beach. Telling this story was so hard, so terrible. But she needed to get it out, needed to have her friend understand. Stevie had known and loved Emma; she obviously adored Nell and Jack.

  “I want to tell you,” Madeleine said, her voice breaking. “Because I love and trust you. And I need an ally.”

  “An ally?”

  “To help me move forward, to figure out what I have to do to heal things with my brother. And to help him heal, too. He's hurting so badly.”

  “I know he is,” Stevie said, leaning forward to hold Madeleine's hand. She gazed into her eyes, warm and steady. Madeleine left her hand right there, feeling the pressure of Stevie's fingers.

  “We were driving back to Atlanta. Emma wanted to show me where Richard had grown up. It was a small country town, in the Georgia hills. Very poor . . . Emma told me that he had taken her there on a drive, to show her the roots of poverty. He'd told her that some of his neighbors had wound up in prison for terrible things. His own father had gone to jail just for forging a check, and he'd died there—stabbed by another inmate. Richard said that his own family had suffered, and that he'd known that he wanted to do something to help.”

  “So he became a priest?”

  Madeleine nodded. “He must have been the family's pride and joy. He got a scholarship to Loyola University. From there, he went into the priesthood. Went to graduate school at Georgetown, their Program for Justice and Peace. Emma said he was passionate about social justice.”

  Stevie stared at the candle flame and seemed to shiver.

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, I was just remembering something my father said to me. When I was little . . . and I'd hide in the reeds, to watch sandpipers build their nests. Or I'd stay out on freezing cold nights to catch sight of an owl flying out of the woods. . . . He told me that I was passionate about birds, and that meant I would be passionate about everything. He told me that I had a fire inside. . . .”

  “Which you do.”

  “He told me I had to learn how to use it—to temper it. I had no idea what he meant then. He told me that studying Irish literature had taught him that passion could destroy as much as it could enliven. He told me he envied what I had, but that it also made him worry about me. . . .” She paused, still staring at the flame as if seeing her own private demons. “Sounds as if Richard had the same fire inside.”

  “Yes,” Maddie said. “But I destroyed Emma.”

  “Don't say that,” Stevie said, looking up.

  “I did, though. I drove her into a tree.”

  “Tell me, Maddie,” Stevie said. “If you can.”

  Madeleine nodded. She took a deep breath, remembering all the sessions with Dr. Mallory, all the waves of shock and terror that had passed through her body, at last passed out of it.

  “She told me that she had important work to do,” Madeleine said. “That she and Richard had a mission too important to ignore. She said that Jack could take care of Nell. That when Nell was old enough, she would understand. Here we were, driving down this rutted dirt road way out in the middle of nowhere . . . past houses with tin roofs, tar-paper walls . . . with broken-down cars and old refrigerators out in the yards . . .”

  “Past the house where Richard had grown up poor,” Stevie murmured.

  Madeleine nodded. “And I was just driving along, feeling that it was all so surreal—and how could Emma not see? So I said to her, ‘You're in love with a man whose childhood pain haunts him still, every day.' I wanted her to see, to hear what she was about to do to Nell, to remember that raising her daughter was the most important work in the world.”

  “She couldn't see,” Stevie said. “She was too lost in love.”

  “Yes, she was. So I told her—that if she left Nell, it would be like killing a part of her. The part that trusted, and loved, and believed. . . . I told her that she and Richard wanted to do something wonderful to help the world, but that they would be destroying one beautiful, trusting little girl.”

  Stevie's eyes filled, and so did Madeleine's, and for a few seconds Madeleine thought of Nell's pain, and the rift in her family, and how
it had started with Emma falling in love, and she had to squeeze her eyes tight to keep from sobbing.

  “Emma was furious with me. She told me that she and Richard had prayed about it, were praying about it every day . . . and it wasn't that she was abandoning her daughter—she was going away temporarily . . . that Nell would understand. That she could visit—it would be shared custody, she was sure Jack wouldn't give her any trouble.”

  “Maybe she didn't know Jack all that well,” Stevie said.

  “I know. I just turned to her and said I thought he'd give her more trouble than she could ever imagine. And I told her I'd help him—I'd testify for him in divorce court. I told her that she was being selfish, throwing Nell away. And that if she did that, she'd deserve to lose her daughter.”

  “Throwing Nell away,” Stevie whispered hotly, staring at the dark water.

  “She went crazy. I guess she thought we'd spent this sisterly time together, bonding about it all—she'd mistaken my quietness, my attempts to be understanding, as acceptance. I think she thought I'd be her ally.”

  “You were just trying to listen,” Stevie said.

  “Yes. But that was over—she told me she planned to tell Jack and Nell that night. And that she was moving out the next day. I told her I'd help my brother get sole custody and see that she didn't get a penny in alimony. And the funny thing was, that's what made her go insane. She told me she deserved money after all those years of marriage, and that she needed it to help support what she and Richard were going to do.”

  “That's ridiculous.”

  “I know. I was so angry, I must have hit the gas. We were going fast. . . . She yelled at me, that I was just Nell's aunt, didn't have the right to get involved . . . she made it all about Nell, but I know the thing that really pulled the pin was the idea of losing alimony. She said, ‘You think you care about her more than I do? She's my daughter!' And then she slapped me so hard—”

  “Oh, Maddie,” Stevie said, taking her hand.

  “Across the face—I saw stars.” Madeleine closed her eyes, still feeling the shocking sting of Emma's hand across her cheek and eye. “The next thing I remember, we were upside down—we'd hit a tree and flipped over. My arm . . .”

  Stevie squeezed her hand. Madeleine felt the searing sensations in her shoulder, as if it had been sliced, severed with a hot knife. She trembled, but calmed herself by looking into Stevie's eyes.

  “My arm was hanging off. The blood was pumping out—my artery was cut through. Emma lay there, against my body. Her eyes were open . . . she was trying to talk, and blood was gurgling in her throat.” Madeleine began to cry as she remembered. “I wanted to help her, save her.”

  “It wasn't your fault, Maddie.”

  “She just stared up at me—she wanted to live so badly! I could see the panic in her eyes. She kept saying, ‘Tell him I'm sorry . . .'” Madeleine sobbed.

  “Who, tell who?”

  “That's what I don't know!” Madeleine cried. “Did she mean tell Jack she was sorry for what she was going to do? Or tell Richard she was sorry for getting hurt and ruining their plans?”

  “Oh, Maddie . . .”

  “And then I passed out. When I woke up, I was in the hospital. Jack was with me . . . Chris was on the way. I was medicated, I'd just been through three surgeries to save my arm—and all I could think of was Emma. I wanted to know if she was all right. And I had to tell Jack about the crisis she was in—so he could stop her, get her back. I wanted him to prevent Father Richard from visiting her. I just thought, if he knew what he was dealing with, he could stop it. He could work to save their marriage, keep Emma from leaving Nell.”

  “You had to tell him,” Stevie said.

  “Really? Do you really think so? Because what did it matter, in the end? Emma died! I could have kept her secret and saved my family!” Madeleine sobbed.

  “Maddie—it would have torn you up. You didn't know that Emma would die . . . you wanted to help.”

  “But if I had waited—waited till after the shock of the accident. He refused to believe me. He thought I was making it up. He was just so grief stricken about Emma, so afraid of losing her. He couldn't bear to see her in that terrible light—about to leave him and Nell.”

  “He was in shock,” Stevie said.

  “Total shock that's lasted more than a year. Taken him from Atlanta to Boston to Scotland—he had to leave the country to get away from me!”

  “Not from you,” Stevie said. “From his own pain.”

  “If only I had kept Emma's story a secret,” Madeleine said. “Then Jack wouldn't have had to face it, carry it.”

  “It was the truth,” Stevie said. “His truth, and Nell's—not just Emma's. Maddie, don't you know that you acted out of love? Love for your brother?”

  Madeleine bowed her head, wracked by sobs. The sound of her own blood rushing through her head merged with the crash of the waves on the beach. The tide was advancing, the waves slipping higher over the sands. The reggae band played easy, happy melodies. The sounds came together, surging in such a way that Madeleine barely heard his voice.

  “Her idiot brother,” he said.

  There, not a foot away from their table, stood Jack, tears welling in his eyes too.

  “You're here,” Stevie gasped.

  Madeleine jumped up and threw herself into her brother's arms. She couldn't believe that Jack was here, that he was really here. He held her, rocking her, saying, “I'm sorry, Maddie, I made a mistake, it wasn't your fault.” It was the voice she'd grown up with, the voice of her big brother; something in her heart let go, and she cried harder, with relief now.

  “Jack,” she sobbed.

  “Oh, Maddie,” he said. “I went to Scotland with Nell because you loved it. But you're not there, and I can't go on without you in our lives.”

  Madeleine kissed his cheek, but couldn't quite speak. She let go of him, sitting down in her chair and closing her eyes for just a second. In that moment, she heard his voice again.

  “You either, Stevie. We can't do this without you,” Jack said.

  When Madeleine looked up, she saw Stevie and Jack locked in a kiss, arms around each other and hair ruffled in the sea wind. The waves broke on the beach one after another, the steadiest sound in the world. Madeleine listened, feeling her heart beat harder than the waves, knowing that her brother had come home to stay.

  Chapter 28

  ALTHOUGH THE INN WAS FULL, AUNT Aida found a way to cram everyone in. Since there was no way Madeleine was driving home to Providence on the night when she and her brother were reuniting, she called Chris and told him she was staying—and for him to come down the next day dressed for Henry's wedding. She and Nell would be staying in Stevie's room—an upstairs parlor with two beds and a Victorian chaise. Henry gave his room to Jack.

  “I don't want to put you out,” Jack said.

  “I'm going to stay with Doreen,” Henry said. “I'd planned on sneaking over there anyway. No way am I spending one more night without her, starting now.”

  “That sounds like a very good idea,” Jack said.

  Stevie happened to look up as Jack said those words, and she saw that he was staring straight at her. The sight sent a quick shiver down her spine. She smiled at him, and when he smiled back, the tremor started right up at the top and shot down again. Madeleine's story was reverberating in her mind, but the shock and joy of seeing Jack and Nell momentarily pushed it aside.

  Nell had slept on the plane and was now wide awake and raring to go. She clung to her aunt's hand. Stevie saw the rapture in both their faces—and Jack's. Aida sat in the background, smiling with barely contained satisfaction, as if she knew love—all sorts of love—was in the air, and that she had done something to bring it about.

  “Were you surprised to see us?” Nell asked, looking up at Maddie.

  “More surprised than I've ever been in my life!”

  Stevie gazed at Madeleine. She had almost certainly aged since Nell had last seen her. She had
been through a sort of war—and it showed in the lines around her eyes, a streak of gray in her brown hair, some extra weight around her hips. But Stevie thought she had never seen her friend more beautiful. She was a veteran who had made it through, surviving on love and faith.

  “How about you, Stevie?”

  “Me, too,” Stevie said. “I still can't believe you're here.”

  “How did this come to be?” Aunt Aida asked.

  “I put a message in a bottle and sent it to Stevie,” Nell said, laughing. “But Dad found it.”

  “Is that true?” Stevie asked.

  “It is,” Jack said.

  Stevie wondered what the message had said. She wondered whether Nell had really thought it would make it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, through storms and currents, against the tide. Could Nell possibly have believed that could happen? But then Stevie thought of the birds she painted, the heart-stopping courage and tenacity of hummingbirds—birds no larger than a flower, migrating from one continent to another—and she thought, of course! Yes, Nell had expected the message to reach its destination.

  And it had. It was right here, in the presence of Jack and Nell herself.

  “That's my Nell,” Madeleine said.

  “She makes things happen, that's for sure,” Jack said.

  Everyone was tired, and tomorrow would be here before they knew it. So Henry kissed Stevie and Aida, told them he'd see them in the morning. Standing at the foot of the stairs, Jack kissed Nell and his sister goodnight. Stevie saw Madeleine and Nell bubbling over with happiness, and she told herself she wanted to give them a minute.

  “I'll be right up,” she said.

  “Okay,” Madeleine said, throwing her a look of total happiness.

  When everyone else had gone upstairs, Stevie turned to Jack. They were alone in the lobby—the night clerk had gone home at nine. The room was warmly lit—lamps with fringed peach-silk shades, brass wall sconces, and a shaft of moonlight.

  “Let's go outside,” Jack said, “and take a walk.”

  “That sounds good,” Stevie said. She was still reeling with Madeleine's story, and with the shock of seeing Jack and Nell. She needed to clear her mind and get her heart into some sort of normal rhythm.