“And the male turtles?”
“They never come up on shore at all. Their part is done once they’ve fertilized the eggs.”
If she knew him better, Clare might have asked if that’s the way it had been with him. But as soon as she thought of it for a minute, she knew, she would not have been able to say anything. It was too weird. God—just thinking about it now made her so embarrassed she could not even look at him. But if he had made any connection in his mind to the subject, he didn’t let on. He had started walking again. There were big houses along the dunes. They were set up high for the view, and had long, wooden stairways down to the beach.
Richard noticed her looking at them. “People build those monstrosities too close to the edge of the dune, and then—then,” he repeated, his voice rising, “they want to build a revetment.”
“What’s a revetment?”
“A wall to keep the dune from eroding. The problem is, it destroys the natural geologic progression; dunes were meant to erode. If you put up a wall, the sea steals the sand from somewhere else.” Richard shook his head. “Those people. They want to put in lawns. Terrapins can’t nest in lawns. They drive their SUVs at top speed along the dirt roads. They don’t see a terrapin, let alone a hatchling.” He took in his breath and let it out slowly, as if he had practiced this breathing technique. “You see what I’m up against, Clare?” he asked. He sounded resigned now, tired out.
“I guess,” said Clare, but he wasn’t really looking at her. He was already walking fast down the beach. He was looking intently at the sand in front of him. Once again, he seemed to have forgotten she was there.
They had gone three-quarters of the way around the island, past the houses on the dunes, when they came across the tracks. They didn’t look like much of anything to Clare—she would have walked right over them if she was on her own, but Richard spotted them from a distance and sprinted towards them.
“Here we are,” he said. He was excited now. He bent close to the ground, like a dog sniffing a trail, and scrambled up towards the dunes. Then he sank to his knees, dug around a bit, and sat back.
“Too late,” he said evenly.
Clare came up beside him.
“This is what a predated nest looks like,” he said. There wasn’t much to see. A few scraps of leathery-looking shell.
“That’s what happens when you go away,” said Richard. He stood up slowly, brushing the sand from his hands. “With a species so fragile like this, every nest counts, every egg counts.”
Clare could feel her eyes filling up, and she turned her face away from him. He’d probably think it was the turtles she was crying about.
But he didn’t. “I’m sorry, Clare,” he said. “I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming myself.”
She turned to him quickly. She didn’t care if he saw her crying now. “Maybe you shouldn’t have left them, then,” she said.
He stared at her.
She’d blurted that out quickly and there was no going back now. “Just so you know,” she said, “I didn’t want to come here this summer. It was you who asked for me to come.”
She started running back to the house. Either she was faster than he was, or he didn’t try to catch up with her. She ran into the kitchen and up to the room which was her room and closed the door behind her.
7
It was half an hour later when she heard him coming upstairs. He knocked on the door.
“You can come in,” she said. She was sitting on the bed, leaning against the wall. Her knees were bent and she had her arms wrapped around her legs, holding them close against her body.
He stood in the doorway. “I’m not very good about talking about things, Clare,” he said. “Never have been. But I guess as much as I don’t like talking, I’ve got to say something now.”
He leaned sideways against the doorframe, ran his finger up along the grain of the wood. “Looks to me that we’ve got two choices here. Either we can throw in the towel and call up your Aunt Eva and you spend the rest of the time with her. Or we hang on and see if we can get anything going for us.”
Clare didn’t say anything right away. She looked down at the quilt, studied the pattern.
“I’d say either way was OK with me,” said Richard, “but that wouldn’t be the truth, Clare. The truth is that I’d rather you said you wanted to hang on, because that’s what I’d like to do. Give us some more time. See what we can do? Or maybe I should put that differently.” He paused for a moment, cleared his throat. “What I should say is, give me more time, see what I can do. What you’re doing is—well—OK.”
“All right, then,” said Clare.
“All right, what?”
“Number two,” she said, and she looked up at him now.
Richard stood straight up. “That’s good,” he said. “Thank you, Clare.” And he went back downstairs.
8
In the afternoon Richard said they would go kayaking, so Clare went upstairs to put on her bathing suit. She’d brought three, and none of them seemed right. She had to stand on the bed to see all of her in the mirror over the bureau. Finally she chose the one that covered her the most, and pulled a big T-shirt over it.
Down at the beach there was a pile of small boats along the side of low dunes.
“Have you kayaked before?” Richard asked.
Clare shook her head. “Then I suppose we should take a little time to get you used to it before we head out netting.”
Richard hoisted a small boat up and carried it down to the water. It was the smallest and ugliest boat in the group. It was a dull orange, and looked as if it been battered by rocks. “This is my baby,” said Richard, and he gave it a tap with his foot.
The words jolted Clare. “This is my baby,” Vera had said, the first time she introduced Tertio to Clare.
The other boat Richard carried down, to Clare’s relief, was a larger, newer one. It was bright red. When he set it on the sand next to his boat, his boat looked even smaller and rougher.
“I got this one for you to use,” said Richard. He said this casually, but looked back at her in a way that made Clare guess he was hoping she would be pleased. She wasn’t sure if he had borrowed the boat for her to use, or if he had actually bought it. Either way, he had thought about her, planned something for her visit.
“Thank you. I love red,” was all she could manage to say.
He had outfitted her with a life jacket. Fortunately it wasn’t one of those awful orange kinds that you wore like a sausage around your neck, but a vest with a zipper up the front. She stood by the kayak now, holding the paddle he had given her.
“Tell me what kind of experience you’ve had with boats,” said Richard.
“I use the rowboat on Tertio’s pond,” said Clare. Richard’s eyebrows rose before she could catch her slip.
“Mom’s new husband’s pond,” she corrected herself.
Richard was smiling now.
“His name is actually Ian,” said Clare.
“I know,” said Richard. “So he has a pond, does he?”
“Only a very small pond,” said Clare. She didn’t want him to have the wrong impression.
“A swimming hole?” asked Richard.
“Well, it’s kind of mucky, so you don’t swim in it. You swim in the pool.” She had made things, she realized, even worse.
But Richard just smiled. “Don’t worry, Clare, it’s fine with me that your mother married a millionaire. I’m happy for her. I want her to be comfortable.”
A millionaire? That sounded so … Well, perhaps he was. That wasn’t what was wrong with Tertio, though. It was his personality. It was the way he was. Sure, he had a pond, but did he ever do more than glance at it in the distance? All he ever did outside was swim a few laps in the pool on weekends, then lie on his lounge chair and make calls to his office, while Vera lay on her lounge chair beside him, reading the Sunday paper. If Clare said, “I’m going off to explore the pond,” Vera would look up from her page and say,
“That’s nice dear.” Once, just to test her, Clare had said, “I’m going off to drown in the pond.” Tertio had just grunted, but Vera never missed anything.
“What did you say?” she asked.
“I was just kidding, Mom.”
And Vera had given her a look which conveyed exactly what she thought of Clare’s joke, then gone back to her reading.
***
Before they got into the kayaks, Richard gave her a paddling demonstration on land. She looked quickly in both directions, but even though there was no one else on the beach she felt embarrassed standing there paddling in the air. He stood behind her, put his arms around her and placed his hands beside hers, on the paddle. This was the closest he’d been to her. She looked at her hands right next to his, the hands she had inherited, distinct as a face. Their hands dipped right, left; right, left.
Once they got out on the water, the kayak felt tipsy. Richard had her lean far to each side to show how far it would go without flipping, but even though the water was only waist deep, she felt nervous.
“You’ll get the hang of it soon enough,” said Richard. “Compared to rowing, it’s a pleasure. For one thing, you’re looking in the direction you’re headed, for another thing, your center of gravity is nice and low.”
It was nice to be low in the water, almost as if she were sitting right in the bay itself. Richard had her paddle around in circles and showed her how to turn and how to back up. It wasn’t that hard. As she paddled with Richard across the inlet she grew more confident. The kayak did tip as she leaned to each side, but it easily righted itself. The water was calm and she was surprised by how quickly they made it to the beach on the opposite shore. Richard helped her out of the kayak and pulled it up on the sand beside his. She looked back where they had come from. The boathouse on the shore was farther in the distance than she had imagined; it could have been a toy.
“Tired?” Richard asked.
“Not really,” she said.
“Clare, you’re a natural,” said Richard, and she felt a flush of pride. No one had ever said this to her before. Certainly not the tennis instructor at Tertio’s club. “Clare, I’m afraid you’re not a natural,” he told her, “but with some practice there’s no reason why you can’t have a backhand, too.”
“Before we go out netting,” said Richard, “I’d like to do some work on emergency techniques. These boats don’t easily capsize, but just in case, I want you to know how to handle it.”
Clare’s heart started beating fiercely. All the sense of mastery she’d been feeling dropped entirely away. She got back into her kayak and followed Richard out to where the water was just over her head.
“You’re a decent swimmer, aren’t you?” asked Richard.
Clare nodded.
“And you have a life jacket on, so you’ll bob right up to the surface, right?”
Clare nodded again.
“If you’re a strong kayaker, and it flips upside down, you can right it yourself. Here, I’ll show you,” said Richard. He paddled out a distance from her, flipped the boat so it was upside down, then somehow—she couldn’t see how he managed—he got himself out of the kayak, swam up beside it, and then flipped it upright again. His hair and beard were soaking wet now and his face looked thinner.
“If you find yourself upside down in the water, you just swim out and under and come up on the side of the kayak. The kayak won’t sink; no need to worry about that. You hang onto the side until you catch your breath, then you right the kayak and climb back in again. That’s the tricky part.” He heaved himself up onto the kayak and he looked somewhat ridiculous as he worked to get his legs up and squeeze himself into the little boat. He was breathing hard, and he seemed vulnerable for a moment, a way Clare hadn’t seen him before. Once he was seated, he looked like himself again.
“Ready to give it a try?” he asked her.
“OK,” said Clare.
“Come out here.”
She paddled out into the deeper water. The sunlight illuminated the top several inches of water, but didn’t reach farther into the dark blue-green below. She tried tilting the boat far to one side, but each time, just before it got dangerously close to tipping over, she panicked and righted it quickly.
“You’ve got to try it just once,” said Richard.
“I can’t,” she said.
“You can,” said Richard.
She paddled around again and tried leaning, but once again, her instinct made her pull herself upright. Except this time the boat didn’t respond. In an instant she was upside down in the water, clambering to find the surface. She thought she was drowning. She banged against the side of the boat, clutched at something hard, and suddenly found she had broken through the surface of water to the sweet air. She grabbed onto the side of the boat and gasped for breath. Then she saw her father’s face.
“You did that, didn’t you?” she asked.
He nodded.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she cried.
“I did,” he said.
***
Clare worked for half an hour to get herself back into her kayak. When Richard had demonstrated the technique, it had looked hard, but when she tried it, with him coaching her from his kayak, it seemed impossible. She had barely enough strength to hoist her body up onto the hull of the boat and every time she did, she slipped back into the water or pulled the kayak upside down on top of herself. It didn’t make things easier that she’d started laughing. And once she started laughing, Richard had started laughing, too.
“I need to take a rest,” she said, and she leaned her head on the kayak and closed her eyes and felt the pleasant rhythm of the boat beneath her cheek moving up and down with the waves that she, herself, had made. When she opened her eyes she saw that Richard was leaning his head back in his kayak, eyes shut, with his feet up outside of the hull. He looked as if he was dozing. Quietly, she slid down into the water and swam up to his boat. Then she grabbed the side of it and pulled it over. The kayak tipped on its side and all in a second Richard was dumped out of the boat. He came up spluttering. He grabbed onto the overturned kayak and shook his head, like a wet dog.
For an instant the look of astonishment on his face frightened her—she didn’t know him well enough to tell if he might be angry or not. She wondered what had possessed her to do a thing like that. What had she been thinking? But then he smiled at her—it was a smile that was full of pleasure and surprise, a smile that was different than any he had given her before.
“I guess we’re even now,” he said.
9
They’d decided that the turtle netting would wait until the next day. Richard had suggested they spend some time at the house, then go out for pizza for dinner. It was, Clare realized, what he considered something special, something he thought she’d like. With Vera, pizza was a meal of last resort. It wasn’t something you ever planned on; it was what you had when meetings ran late and no one had the time to cook. The years when Vera was in law school, it was too often pizza for dinner. But Clare would not have wanted Richard to know this. He had obviously gone to the trouble to find out where to get pizza, since he said he never ate pizza himself.
Clare settled on the deck to read one of the paperbacks she had brought with her while Richard went to his study to work on his turtle website. It was not a book from Peter’s list—those were all books that she read to impress Peter—no, this was a novel that Susannah had passed along to her, a book that Vera would say had no intellectual value, but still it was fun. And she felt she deserved something fun after braving the water of Cape Cod Bay.
The deck was on the back of the house, facing the view. Once it must have been a place you could sit and enjoy a broad view; now, she positioned her chair so she could see a slice of the water. The chairs were old-fashioned, wood, slung with canvas so faded the orange and green stripes were barely visible. When she’d first unfolded her chair, pine needles had coughed up on the deck.
Clare hadn’t hear
d a car drive up—there was no driveway, just a sand road and a walk from the driveway to the house. But then she heard voices. A woman’s voice said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Rich, I wouldn’t have just dropped over if I knew you had a guest here.”
Rich?
And Richard said, “It’s my daughter.”
Clare turned around. His daughter. It was the first time he’d said that word.
The woman was blonde and slender. “Oh, your daughter!” she said, with evident surprise. “I didn’t know—”
“She’s here visiting for a few weeks,” said Richard.
“Let me say hello,” said the woman, and she pushed open the screen slider and came out on the deck. Richard followed her. Clare instinctively put the book facedown on the deck beside her chair. If she was going to be meeting someone, she didn’t want them to be thinking of her as the kind of girl who read junky YA novels—of course she was reading a junky YA novel, but still, it was just because it was summer. Clare pulled herself out of her chair. She felt small sitting in the low chair, like a kid.
It occurred to Clare that Richard might not have introduced them—either because he was the kind of man who didn’t think to do such things, or because, for some reason, he wasn’t eager for them to meet. But the woman had clearly wanted to meet Clare. She had a sheaf of papers in her hand, which she gave to Richard, and stepped up to Clare now, hand extended. She was older up close than she had looked at a distance, a woman who had once been quite pretty and was, Clare thought, used to thinking of herself that way, though her teeth were too big.
“I’m Steffi,” she said.
“I’m Clare.”
Richard stood a bit behind them. Steffi turned to him. “You never told me you had a daughter,” she said. He shrugged. She leaned towards Clare confidentially. “Your father is a man of many secrets,” she said in a teasing way, but there was also a note of criticism.
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