Summer Harbor

by Susan Wilson

  “Or Mack.”

  “And Mack.”

  “Mack died. You could have died!” she hollered.

  “Neither of which is Grainger’s fault.”

  They stood in appalled silence until Will walked out of the room.

  Suddenly Kiley felt done in. She had been thinking about how to punish Will; instead, he had stood in front of her, not as a child needing her reprimand, but as an adult in full comprehension of things she’d long kept hidden, reprimanding her.

  He was all grown up. For the first time Kiley faced having to accept his adulthood. Her little boy was gone and she no longer held sway over him. She pressed her forehead against the cool wood of the doorjamb. Her job was over. What would she do for the rest of her life?

  Kiley lay down on the old divan in the parlor. She was helpless suddenly against the need to sleep, as if sleep would protect her against the roiling emotion and confusion. She lay with her arms folded against her stomach, her legs drawn up, wondering if it was possible to die of memory. Everything was all mixed up: images of Mack’s angry departure blended with Will’s safe return, until, in half sleep, she imagined that Mack had been the one to come off that Coast Guard boat. The thought startled her awake; then she plunged into an exhausted sleep. Dreamless, for a while Kiley found a refuge.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep. Her mouth felt metallic and her eyes heavy. She half opened them to see Grainger sitting in the armchair opposite, simply looking at her. He looked haggard, unshaven, slightly gray with his own long night of pain. She half expected that he was a ghost, that the real Grainger was gone. Then he spoke and his husky voice was thick with the fear that it wasn’t he, but she, who was the ghost.

  “Do you remember the letter you brought me? The day we made love, the last day we were together? Do you remember that the postmark on that letter was Boston, and the return address was blacked out? That letter was from my mother, Kiley. I managed to decipher some of the return address when I held it up to a light. I could just make out ‘McLean Hospital.’ ”

  “The psychiatric hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was she a patient?”

  “That’s what I feared, but no. She was working there as an aide.”

  Kiley was upright, sitting with her hands clasped, attentive, but distant. “How was she, your mother?”

  “Surprised to see me. She didn’t know me at first, as if she’d put me so far out of her mind I didn’t exist. Then she cried and told me that she’d had to leave, she was afraid for her life. One time, Rollie found her packing us up, and he not only knocked her around, but he told her that unless she went alone, he’d hunt her down wherever she went. If she left me behind, she was free. I was the price of her freedom.”

  “I can’t believe she’d do that. I can’t believe she’d put herself first.”

  Kiley was ill with the thought of this woman leaving a small boy in the charge of a drunken, violent man. What kind of mother did that? Grainger’s sad young face came to her then, his pale and pensive expression, smiling only when the three of them were alone together.

  “She told me she honestly believed he’d treat me all right. She had no idea that he never imagined she’d actually do it. He was calling her bluff.”

  “Did you tell her how he treated you?”

  There was a long silence. Grainger’s breath seemed a little labored, his eyes turned from her, the imagery of his childhood nightmare before them. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “What good would it do to make her suffer any more than she had?”

  “You forgave her?”

  “Not in so many words, but I suppose so.”

  “I’m glad for you, Grainger.” Kiley heard Will’s footsteps above. “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “Because I want you to know that I wasn’t running away from you, and I didn’t think that Mack was in any danger. I wanted you to go to him, because I believed he was the one you really loved. That you two were right for each other and I never would be. If I stayed, it would just spoil any chance you two would have together.”

  “You never believed me when I said it was you I loved.”

  “No. You were so anguished over Mack’s hurt that I knew you were mistaken.”

  “Feeling sorry about hurting someone’s feelings is a different thing.”

  “Do you hold me responsible for Will’s actions?”

  Kiley stood up, amazed at how wobbly she felt. “If anything had happened to Will last night, I would have done more than hold you responsible.”

  “You wouldn’t have had to. I would, and do, hold myself responsible. For all of it.” Grainger was on his feet. “If I had known what was going to happen, Kiley, I would have stopped him. I loved him.”

  “Who, Will or Mack?”

  “Both of them.”

  Will was coming down the back stairs.

  “I came to ask you to come with me. I have something I want us to do together.”

  “What?”

  “I’d rather show you. It’s something I need you to help me do.”

  “No. We’re on our way in a few minutes.”

  “Please, Kiley. Come with me.”

  Kiley felt strength return. “No, Grainger. And I would prefer it if you left now, without seeing Will.”

  “I won’t do that.” His voice was low and even, uncompromising. “I won’t let you keep him from me. He could be mine. And even if he isn’t—”

  “Get out of here.” Her emotional bank account was overdrawn, the horror of thinking she might have lost Will was the last check. She couldn’t take any more drama or demands on her heart. “I won’t have it.”

  “Won’t have what?” Will was in the room with them, holding up his hands in a referee’s gesture.

  “Will, go put the suitcases in the car. Grainger was just leaving.”

  “I want your mother to come with me for a few minutes.”

  “Go with him. I’ll finish packing,” Will said.

  “No. Get out of here, Grainger. Don’t you get it yet? I want nothing to do with you.”

  “That wasn’t how it was last night.”

  Kiley stepped across the room, her outstretched hand ready to slap Grainger, but he caught it in mid-strike. “I’ve had enough of your hitting me. It isn’t physical pain you commit, it’s emotional—and I’m a past master at receiving emotional pain. You’re only hurting yourself. Maybe you still blame me for Mack’s death, but I think you blame yourself too.”

  “Stop it!” Will shouted. “Grow up, the pair of you, and deal with it! Neither of you killed Mack. You aren’t responsible for his death. He is. Mack chose to act stupidly, to make a dramatic point. Neither of you could have stopped him, any more than taking me away from D.C. and Mike would have stopped my smoking dope if that’s what I wanted to do. Any more than taking me away from Catherine will stop us from being together. It was my decision to go out last night. Mom, if you chose Mack and then changed your mind well, you were kids, for god’s sake. That’s what kids do. Lori changed hers. I changed mine.” Will’s ocean blue eyes were wide with emotion as he looked from one to the other. “It doesn’t mean anyone is responsible. You’ve built a whole life regretting someone else’s mistake. Isn’t it time to move on?”

  Kiley’s wrist was still gripped in Grainger’s hand as they stared at Will. Tall and blond and fiery in the sun streaming in through the big windows, his face a little shadowed, for an uncanny instant, he looked like Mack.

  Grainger let his grip relax and slid his hand to take hers in a gentle touch. And as she took his fingers in hers, Kiley felt the slow dissolving away of years of pain.

  The sultry morning had given way to a threatening afternoon. The eastern sky was nearly purple as they climbed into Grainger’s Zodiac. Kiley fastened her life jacket with a trembling hand. Without discussing what they were doing, they began to act in tandem, little conversation needed, allowing the solemn activity to progress in resp
ectful silence. There was nothing else to say.

  Behind them, Blithe Spirit willingly came along. Her fresh white paint was bright in the eerie sky, her varnish like sweet maple syrup. At the top of her mast, her blue pennant fluttered. Kiley and Grainger reached the middle of Maiden Cove, just above the point he knew to be the deepest.

  They climbed from the boat into Blithe Spirit, carrying two cans of gasoline. Grainger tossed her anchor over, careful that its line slid between the bitt and into the chock, then executed a figure-eight maneuver around a cleat to hold the anchor line tense enough, short enough, that there would be very little swing.

  With a graceful sweeping motion, Kiley and Grainger drained the two gasoline cans all over the deck, cockpit, and sole of the little vessel. The slow action reminded Grainger a little of the ritual blessing of the fleet, holy water cast at the bows of the fishing boats.

  He handed Kiley back into the Zodiac and followed. Then he motored away just far enough that he thought his old pitching arm would still reach. Grainger lit a flare and stood up, and Kiley put one hand on his belt to balance him. He pitched and the flare landed in Blithe Spirit’s cockpit. In an instant the boat was on fire, flames spreading like liquid up the sides and to the mast, where the varnish bubbled and the fire crawled upward as a sailor climbs.

  He remembered climbing the mainmast of the schooner he’d been first mate on, remembered the feel of the swaying beneath his feet in the footropes, his safety dependent on his sense of balance. Now Kiley held him, and he was balanced. He sat down beside her and they wept, clutched together, feeling the heat from the fire on their wet faces, and knowing that they both were free.

  The smoke began to rise in the still, purple-colored air. In a few minutes it would begin to rain; lightning was already streaking the eastern sky. Thunder, its voice unrestricted by the open ocean beyond Maiden Cove, rumbled on and on, like a baritone singing plainsong.

  Their pyre rose higher and higher, and in the smoke and flames they imagined that they saw Mack’s spirit rise. He, too, at last was free.

  Epilogue

  It was just past four o’clock, and the living room was winter dark as Will came through the front door. Before he even shrugged off his coat, Will plugged in the Christmas tree lights, then stood back to admire the big spruce cluttered with packages under its widely spread lower branches. On Christmas Eve there would be even more, when Nana and Pop got there and added their gifts to the pile. And, in a silly adherence to implausible belief, on Christmas morning there would be three or four for him signed by Santa.

  In his left hand, Will carried the mail. Mixed in with the bills addressed to his mother and the Christmas cards addressed to them both was an envelope with just his name on it—one he’d been waiting for ever since finishing his last class of the semester. One that, in some sense, he’d been waiting for forever.

  Mom would be home from her new job at the hospital in a few minutes, so if he wanted to read it in privacy, he should open it now. Yet with deliberate slowness, Will sorted the day’s mail into three piles. Holiday cards, bills, junk. He kept the envelope marked “GenSearch” in his hand.

  Twice his mom and Grainger had come up to Ithaca to see him at school. The first time, on Parent’s Weekend in October, they had told him they were moving the wedding date up. It seemed that they’d gotten a head start on a sibling for him.

  “Too much information,” he’d protested, but the truth was that he was very excited about having a little sister or brother, even if he was nearly grown and would pretty much be outside of the family unit. He pictured himself coming to visit, the look of adoring delight on a toddler’s face as he brought a present guaranteed to please, making sand castles on the beach.

  Will took the envelope into the living room, setting it unopened on the couch as he laid a fire in the fireplace. Next year, the Santa gifts would be innumerable. Never very far below the surface was the question: Would the child be fully his brother or sister, or genetically half? Despite the unwelcome persistence of the thought, Will knew that he’d never consider the baby anything less than his full sibling.

  He sat in front of the fire, teasing the flame into catching, then building, throwing its warmth on his cold face. The old Sunderland house was still a work in progress, but Grainger and his mother had made great inroads on rehabbing the place. This fireplace was one of the first completed projects, and the best feature of the eighteenth-century house.

  Will played with the edge of the envelope, running it between his thumb and forefinger, turning it over and staring at the address. In his grasp lay the answer to his lifelong question. He half hoped the envelope would open itself, a magical act that would absolve him of having asked the question. Grainger had lived up to his promise and allowed a swab of cheek cells to be sent to GenSearch. That was the second time he and Kiley had come together to visit, just before finals. Grainger had taken them out to dinner afterward, Catherine with them. While they told stories of life on campus to entertain the adults, Will could see Grainger looking at him, amusement or fondness in his eyes. It didn’t matter to Grainger if their blood was the same or not. He loved him as a son; whether his own or Mack’s, it didn’t matter. It was Will’s question, his search. And he knew that once his paternity was known, there would be no unknowing it.

  Will heard the back door open and his mother call to see if he was home. He still held the envelope in his hand—the one that would forever define his life and his relationship to his sibling, and to his father, whoever he turned out to be.

  “I’m in here, Mom.”

  Will stood up, and dropped the envelope into the flames.

  A dark wisp of smoke rose up as the thin paper caught, rising skyward toward the night.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Susan Wilson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Epilogue