I rub the scruff on my jaw. It feels good. I’m looking forward to shaving—to the ritual of it—but not this morning. That’s enough mirror time for now. I need to keep moving or Oscar will bulldoze this place with me in it.
It takes a few minutes to pack all my belongings in my car. I shut the passenger door and glance down the road, more at the sound than the sight of Oscar’s Demolition and Excavation truck and trailer rounding the corner and coming into view. It downshifts to climb the hill. I pull Doc’s pocket watch and flip it open. Eighteen minutes before ten—the same as I read the last time I looked—the moment it stopped twenty-four hours ago. I glance at it again—of all things, the second hand lunges forward. Tick after ironic tock.
The truck comes into view. I step out of the way as he pulls up to the dooryard, trailing a large piece of yellow equipment.
Oscar pokes his head out the window. “You sure you want to bulldoze the place?”
I laugh. “I’d have set it on fire if it weren’t illegal.”
“Okay, well, it’ll take a few minutes to unload,” he said and ducked into the cab momentarily, emerging with a covered Styrofoam cup. “Here, I thought you might like some coffee.”
“Thanks.” I reach for it. After the night I’ve had, I need it. “I think I’ll take it down to the water.”
He gives me a two-finger wave and puts the truck in gear. I may as well look over my $50 investment while I’m down there. I snatch the drawing pad on my way.
As I walk down the path to the stairway, my memory of yesterday comes back to me. It has been less than twenty-four hours, but it feels like a whole summer—no, a lifetime—ago. I can’t help smiling. Not only did I survive, but I’ve accomplished what I came for—short of caving the cabin in on itself.
Even as I gingerly make my way down the rickety old steps, my exhaustion is transforming into euphoria. A second wind. Doc would be proud of me. In fact, I now know that Doc was never anything less than proud of me. And I’m proud of myself.
I clutch the coffee cup in one hand and the sketchpad in the other as I arch my back, breathing in full lungs of brisk morning air. I take my time, walking through dew-laden weeds that haven’t yet seen sunlight. I can’t stop smiling as I step from one boulder to the next, until I reach the launch pad.
The kink has left my neck, and I’m all at once aware that I’m not blinking or twitching. When I breathe, I’m conscious of how full and unconstricted my lungs feel. I exhale—long and slow—waiting for a twitch. Nothing.
Balancing myself, I sit, my legs outstretched, wiggling my toes like a kid. The cove looks fresh and new. All the frightening echoes, the screams and shrieks, fade to a distant memory, like a whisper traveling out through the Narrows, leaving me at peace—finally.
With the pad in my lap, a mist of gratitude and resolution blurs my vision. I pop the cover from the coffee cup and sip. It’s still warm enough to be drinkable.
Now, for the pad in my lap. I sip again and flip to the first drawing. Perfect—a waterscape. Sunlight beaming through pine trees and a nice reflection. A pretty good rendition. Lots of attention to detail. The spilled coffee has discolored the edges, but not enough to spoil the image. Same with the next, only this one is of a small rowboat on the water. Funny. It looks so much like mine—the one buried under a ton of pine needles. It tugs at my heart. Already, this pad is beginning to feel like a bargain. I flip the page. A little more discoloration around the edges, but now the image—that is, the view—evokes an even stronger reaction. Setting the coffee aside, I hold it up, trying to catch better light to examine it.
In quick succession, I fold back page after page, each one stealing more of my breath, until I can only gasp. I hold up the last page, turn to my right, and compare the view. The cove. This cove. Nearly a dozen sketches, all from a familiar vantage point—from Whispering Narrows.
My heart is racing so fast I can’t make out a singular beat. Surely, the artist has signed her name somewhere in here. I leaf past page after page, pausing at the coffee cup drawing—Spilled Coffee—and all the way to the back, and I start at the beginning again, where coffee has stuck a page to the cover. I peel them apart, reading the factory print:
This Pad Belongs To:
Amelia Burns
As quick as I glance up from the pad, a reflection across the cove catches my eye. The kitchen door at Whispering Narrows flashes with sunlight as it shuts. A slender figure, with bobbed, black hair, stands outside and stretches in a loose-fitting white top over leggings. Carrying a mug, she ambles down the lawn and strolls to the end of the dock. She sits, bringing her knees to her chest. Hugging her legs, she sips. Her gaze travels from the sky, around the cove, and finally lands on me. Her head cocks and her hand covers her mouth. Her whole posture changes as the coffee mug tumbles to the dock. Coffee seeps between the planks, trickling into the water as the faintest whisper travels across the cove.
“Oh my God, Benjamin?”
The End
Other novels
by
J. B. Chicoine
Portraits Trilogy
Book I
Portrait of a Girl Running
Finalist in the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards
General Fiction
All Leila wants is to get through her senior year at her new high school without drawing undue attention. Not that she has any big secret to protect, but her unconventional upbringing has made her very private. At seventeen, she realizes just how odd it was that two men raised her—one black, one white—and no mother. Not to mention they were blues musicians, always on the move. When her father died, he left her with a fear of foster care and a plan that would help her fall between the cracks of the system. Three teachers make that impossible—the handsome track coach, her math teacher from hell, and a jealous gym instructor. Compromising situations, accusations of misconduct, and judicial hearings put Leila’s autonomy and even her dignity at risk, unless she learns to trust an unlikely ally.
Book II
Portrait of a Protégé
Four years after the close of Portrait of a Girl Running, Leila is twenty-two and living on a pretty little lake in New Hampshire. A new set of circumstances throws her into a repeating cycle of grief that twists and morphs into unexpected and powerful emotions. Leila must finally confront her fears and learn to let go while navigating the field of cutting-edge psychology, protecting herself from the capricious winds of Southern hospitality, playing in the backyard of big-money art, and taming her unruly heart. Even her ‘guardian’ has a thing or two he must learn about love and letting go.
Book III
Portrait of a Girl Adrift
Just when Leila thinks she has everything under control, her deepest insecurities resurface when she must confront her unresolved issues surrounding the mother who abandoned her as a baby, and the men who raised her. Not even Clarence Myles can show her the way, and so Leila embarks on a journey of self-discovery that sends her drifting from place to place in search of answers.
In the process of zigzagging her way between North and South, Leila encounters a series of intense psychological twists and turns that send her reeling, grappling with more questions about her identity. Embarking on a final quest for what it means to be ‘whole,’ Leila risks everything she knows about maintaining control; on a calculated whim, she boards a boat with a young woman who is everything Leila is not. While navigating her own heart, nothing could prepare Leila for the biggest truth she’s about to learn.
Also available in trade paperback through your favorite online or independent bookstore.
Uncharted
Story for a Shipwright
When a peculiar young woman shows up at the Wesley House Bed and Breakfast with a battered suitcase and stories to tell, shipwright Sam Wesley isn’t sure if she’s incredibly imaginative or just plain delusional. He soon realizes that Marlena is like no other woman he has ever met. Her strange behavior and far-fetched tales of shipwrecks and survival are a
fresh breeze in Sam’s stagnant life.
Sam isn’t the only one enchanted by Marlena. With his best friend putting the moves on her and a man from her past coming back into her life, the competition for Marlena’s heart is fierce. In the midst of it all, a misunderstanding sends Marlena running, and by the time Sam learns what his heart really wants, it may be too late to win her back.
“Uncharted tells a story within a story. Readers will be forced to skate along the edge of suspended belief, eagerly turning the pages, hoping it all turns out to be true. A great read that will appeal to armchair sailors, romantics, and real adventurers.”
~Carol Newman Cronin, author of Cape Cod Surprise
Available as a trade paperback, audio-book, and e-book from your favorite online bookstore
Blind Stitches
Talented young seamstress Juliet Glitch has been putting the finishing touches on a client’s wedding dress when the father of the bride dies unexpectedly two weeks before the wedding. Mother of the bride—former prima ballerina and Russian expatriate—asks Juliet to hem her blind son Nikolai’s trousers for the funeral.
Juliet and Nikolai embark on a psychological and emotional journey into family dysfunction and repressed memories surrounding his mother’s defection from the Soviet Union twenty years earlier.
Available as a trade paperback, audio-book, and e-book from your favorite online bookstore
Author Biography
J. B. Chicoine was born on Long Island, New York, and grew up in Amityville during the 1960s and ’70s. Since then, she has lived in New Hampshire, Kansas City, and Michigan. New England is her favorite setting for her stories.
When she’s not writing or painting, she enjoys volunteer work, traveling and working on various projects with her husband.
Her novel Portrait of a Girl Running placed as a finalist in the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. She blogs about her writing, and can be contacted via her website, www.JBChicoine.com and her J.B. Chicoine author page on Facebook.
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