Safe Harbor

by Judith Arnold

  The confession seemed to exhaust her. She returned her hand to her lap and leaned back in her chair, fixing her eyes on something behind Kip, something just above his right shoulder.

  He waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t. “I hated you for a while,” he said, then cringed at how reproachful he sounded.

  She accepted his rudeness without blinking. “Because I never called you?” she asked.

  “Never called, never wrote... I wrote to you, but my letter was returned, stamped ‘Addressee Unknown.’ In all the time we were friends, Shelley, we’d never had secrets—and then you left without any explanation, without a single word.”

  She seemed to be struggling to resurrect her smile, but her eyes brimmed with sadness as they narrowed on his face. “I had planned to call you,” she confessed. “I should have. But...things didn’t work out the way I had hoped.”

  “How did they work out?” he asked gently.

  She toyed with the label on her beer bottle, tracing its edge with her fingernail. “It was my father,” she said, her voice taking on a harsh quality. “You remember my father, don’t you?”

  Kip nodded. “You were angry with him that summer because he wouldn’t visit every weekend.”

  “That’s right. He kept spending his weekends back in Connecticut.” All the humor was gone from her voice now, all the warmth. She sounded taut, almost brittle, on the verge of cracking.

  “You thought he might be having an affair or something.” How had Kip remembered that? After so many years, why had Shelley’s adolescent fears remained with him?

  A grim laugh escaped her. “Well, that wasn’t quite the problem. He had been having an affair, but by that summer it was winding down. He’d established certain precedents with his sweetheart, though...”

  It hurt Kip to hear the hostility in her voice. Shelley had never been a bitter person. She’d been sweet and ingenuous, principled yet sentimental.

  He considered changing the subject. But he wanted to know the truth. He wanted to know what had happened to her.

  “My father was embezzling from the bank where he was an officer,” she finally said. Her fingernail caught on the corner of the label and tore off a shred. With obvious effort, she forced her hand to lie motionless on the table. “He was arrested. He had been skimming for years—first to buy his sweetie nice things without my mother finding out about it, and then to keep his sweetie satisfied so she wouldn’t break up his marriage. As if she was the one who broke up the marriage. It was my father. He was the one who was married. He was the one who should have known better.”

  Her rage was apparently aimed at her father’s infidelity. But embezzlement seemed a much greater transgression to Kip. “Was he convicted?” he asked.

  Shelley’s eyes were so icy they sent a shiver up his spine. “Yes. He was convicted on a federal charge of tax evasion. Apparently, you’re supposed to declare your embezzlement income on your 1040, and he failed to do that. He got hit with a heavy fine and served time at the federal prison in Danbury.”

  “He went to jail?”

  She nodded. “Only on the federal charge. The bank dropped its prosecution in favor of a negotiated settlement. We had to sell everything to pay them back. Everything,” she stressed, spitting out the syllables. “Our house in Westport—and the house here on the island, of course. The cars. The furniture. My mother’s jewelry. Even my gold necklace—the one my father gave me for my birthday. The bank and the feds took it all. Every last penny.”

  Kip realized he was gaping at her and deliberately looked away. He could scarcely comprehend what she was telling him. Then again, he supposed the situation would have been just as incomprehensible to Shelley if she hadn’t lived through it.

  “The ultimate irony,” she went on in a tone low and tense with fury, “was that my father’s girlfriend didn’t have to give back anything. She kept her condo and her jewelry and everything else my father gave her. My mother and I lost everything because we were legally connected to him. We were his family, so we had to pay the price.”

  For a while Kip could think of nothing to say. He listened to the purr of the refrigerator’s motor, the slap of a curtain cord against the wall as a breeze fluttered through the open bay windows, the slow, steady whisper of Shelley breathing in and out, her eyes now blank as she moved beyond anger to that numbness Kip was all too familiar with. Finally, he asked, “How is your mother?”

  Shelley made a face and drank some beer. “She’s remarried. She lives in Houston. She’s not very happy, but she has three meals a day and a roof over her head, so she doesn’t complain.”

  Kip remembered Mary Ballard. She’d been an attractive woman, blond and stylish and somewhat aloof—but he’d always suspected that was a result of bashfulness, not arrogance. The time she’d come with Shelley to a barbecue at his house, she’d seemed overwhelmed by the bustle and noise and the effusiveness of his family. She’d been a nice woman, though.

  Evidently she’d gotten as raw a deal as Shelley. He wondered why Shelley sounded so cynical when she talked about her.

  Shelley apparently read his mind. “My mother,” she explained, “doesn’t know how to function without a man. She’s never had a paying job in her life. There we were, absolutely broke, with my father up on criminal charges. My mother divorced him—you can’t blame her for that. But there was no alimony. There was no anything—except debts. She and I moved in with her sister in Houston. I got an after-school job flipping burgers and my mother worked on commission as a sales clerk in a clothing boutique—where she earned zilch. The woman doesn’t know how to sell. All she knows is how to be a wife. So she grabbed the first man who came along and hung on for dear life.” She grimaced and shook her head.

  “You don’t like him?”

  “No, I don’t like him. He’s cold and uncommunicative. He has no sense of humor. He’s an emotional miser. But he and my mother have...an understanding.”

  Shelley reached for her beer bottle, then changed her mind and nudged it away. “I go to Houston to visit them every year at Christmas. While I’m there I count the days until I can leave and come back here. I can’t stand my mother’s husband. I can’t stand my father, either. My father took everything I valued in life—family and trust and love and security—and he trashed it. He ruined it. At least my mother’s new husband isn’t deceitful. He supports her financially and she’s there for him in bed every night. He gives her money and she gives him sex. The whole business stinks. I will never let myself become dependent on a man. Never.”

  The words emerged flat and chilly, in a slow, practiced tempo. Kip sensed that Shelley had thought more about this resolution than about her decision to become a pharmacist. He tried to link the hurt, frightened woman across the table from him to the bubbly, carefree girl he’d known twelve years ago. Tried but failed.

  He considered pointing out to her that not all marriages were like those of her mother, that not all men were either philandering embezzlers or emotional abusers. He considered reminding her of the trust and affection his parents shared, proof that some men and women were honest and loving with each other. But what good would it do to remind Shelley of everything she didn’t have?

  He couldn’t blame her for the conclusions she’d reached or the scars she’d been left with. He couldn’t cure her. He knew all too well that some wounds never healed.

  He reached across the table and covered her hand with his. He felt her tension in the cold stiffness of her fingers. “I forgive you for not calling me,” he murmured.

  She glanced at him. Able to read the sympathy in his expression, she offered a shy smile. “Thank you,” she said. He knew she was thanking him not for his forgiveness but for listening and not judging, for being someone she could trust even though she hadn’t seen him in years, even though he was a man and she no longer trusted men.

  They sat at the table for a long while, neither of them speaking. The sky outside the windows gradually darkened, making the kitc
hen seem brighter and cozier in contrast. Shelley gazed at the uneaten pizza, the scratched pine surface of the table, the intricate pattern of stitches across the front of Kip’s sweater. She gazed at his hand covering hers.

  She gazed at his ring.

  ***

  “DO YOU MIND coming up here?” he asked.

  “No, not at all.” Two short steps took her to the window sill where she knelt, exactly as she and Kip used to kneel, with her arms resting on the sill and the vista of the front yard spread below. Tonight that vista was blurred by the fog, but Kip didn’t care.

  He wanted to answer the questions she was too polite to ask. He supposed she would have been more comfortable on the veranda—he could have dragged a couple of Adirondack chairs out of the garage—or in the living room, or in the den, with the television turned on, offering a distraction if it turned out they needed one. But he couldn’t imagine baring his soul to her anywhere else but in the cupola.

  They’d brought two fresh beers with them. Because he’d left the windows open earlier the air was noticeably fresher in the tiny room. Moonlight filtered through thick layers of mist to illuminate the cupola with a smudgy silver glow.

  “She died a year ago in August,” he said.

  Shelley turned from the window and sat—in the corner where she’d always sat. Kip took the corner diagonally opposite her—his corner. They stretched their legs out, as they’d done so many times before.

  This felt right. He was glad she’d agreed to come upstairs with him. Here in their special place, he could tell Shelley why he wore a wedding band.

  Shelley’s face reflected compassion. “Had she been ill?”

  He shook his head. “No. She was hit by a car.”

  Shelley winced.

  “I—” He stared down into the narrow-bore opening of the beer bottle balanced on his thighs. “I saw the accident. I watched it. I watched her die, Shelley.” He had never actually spoken those words before. His parents had learned, in bits and pieces, from reading the accident report and talking to the police officer who had been the first on the scene, that Kip had been standing on the corner and had witnessed the accident. But he himself had never told them. He’d never told them what horrible visions assailed him whenever he closed his eyes.

  “What was her name?”

  “Amanda.”

  “Tell me everything about her, Kip.”

  Everything? He lifted his eyes and frowned. Shelley nodded, informing him that she honestly wanted him to tell her.

  So he did. He told her about how he’d met Amanda at Mt. Holyoke College, when he’d driven down to the school with a friend of his who was dating a friend of hers. He told Shelley about how they’d spent every weekend together from then on, even in the summers, about how they’d coordinated their professional school applications, deciding to move to California when she got into the law school at U.C.-Berkeley and he got into Stanford. He told her about the first time he’d brought her to Chestnut Hill to meet his parents, about how everyone had adored her, about how she’d taught his mother how to braid bread dough and debated politics with his father.

  He told Shelley about the curly black hair that had so annoyed Amanda--until curly hair had suddenly become the height of fashion. He told Shelley about her crystal-clear soprano voice, the solos she performed in her college choir.

  He told Shelley about their wedding, the flowers Amanda had worn in her hair and the rose she’d pinned to his lapel. He’d told her about their “honeymoon—an exhausting drive across country to California—and the ugly, poorly lit apartment they’d found in Hayward, halfway between their two campuses. He told her about how hard they’d both worked, studying and holding down part-time jobs, somehow finding something romantic in eating spaghetti five nights a week.

  Kip had finished business school and gotten a job in San Francisco. They’d moved up to Berkeley for Amanda’s final year of law school, and then she’d been hired as an associate at a prestigious firm. They’d purchased their co-op, given up spaghetti for shellfish and sun-dried tomatoes, learned about wines, bought the Saab. They’d met every evening after work, sometimes only to ride the bus home together, sometimes to walk to Chinatown for dinner, sometimes to shop.

  Kip hadn’t really liked shopping that much, he told Shelley. But Amanda had. One evening, a little more than a year after they’d moved to San Francisco, she’d asked if he would mind her stopping at Macy’s in Union Square. The store had advertised a sale on belts, and she’d wanted to find a new leather belt for her jungle-print dress.

  Kip had told her he’d wait for her in the park across the street. It had been a beautiful, balmy evening, and he’d thought people-watching in the park would be more fun than debating the merits of various belts in a crowded department store.

  He’d ambled about the park for twenty minutes, and then he’d spotted Amanda emerging from the store. He’d strolled to the corner to meet her, and she’d waved at him, checked the traffic light, stepped out into the street and died.

  “I haven’t handled it very well,” he said.

  Shelley’s legs rested against his. She had listened, saying nothing, only nodding and sipping her beer and nodding again as his story poured out of him. “Is there a good way to handle something like that?” she asked.

  He smiled. “I’ve missed you,” he whispered. When he’d said it at the pharmacy earlier that day he’d meant it, but not until this minute, when she had made the kindest, most sensible remark anyone had said to him since the accident, had he realized how very much he missed having her in his life.

  She was in his life now. And he knew that, although he would never get over losing Amanda, never feel whole again and never stop grieving, things would get better. Life would start to become bearable once more.

  He had Shelley—his pal, his buddy, his soul-mate. His friend. Things would get better.

  Chapter Seven

  HE ROSE EARLY, feeling unusually well rested, without any aftereffects—no hangover, no recollection of nightmares tormenting him throughout the night. With a vigor he hadn’t experienced in ages, he showered and shaved, slugged down a cup of coffee, and gave the house a close, objective inspection.

  By the end of an hour he’d compiled an impressive list of projects. The bannisters needed refinishing. The faucet in the family bathroom sink dripped. The upstairs veranda had some loose planks. Most of the windows required caulking. His bicycle, stored in the cellar along with the barbecue grill, the lawn furniture, the picnic table and a couple of beach umbrellas, cried out for an overhaul, just as he’d predicted.

  Maybe such projects were nothing more than busy-work, therapy, petty exercises in the art of staying sane. He didn’t care. He was here and he was going to do things.

  The first thing he was going to do was drive to the supermarket on Ocean Avenue and buy some food. The pizza he’d eaten last night hadn’t been on a par with what one could buy in Boston’s North End, but at least he’d perceived a degree of flavor in his dinner. He would hardly call that proof that he was cured, but it was a positive sign.

  At the supermarket he stocked up on staples, meat and fish, vegetables and junk food. From there he went to the hardware store for sandpaper, polyurethane, paint brushes, washers and lubricating oil. The proprietor looked vaguely familiar, but Kip didn’t bother to introduce himself. He drove home, put the groceries away, and carried the hardware supplies down to the cellar. The rest of the morning he devoted to the resuscitation of his bicycle.

  By lunchtime he was ready for another shower. Most of the cobwebs he’d cleaned off the tire spokes had stuck to him; his forearms were covered with grime and his chin was smeared with grease. He welcomed the dirt, though. Not once in the hours he’d spent laboring on the bike had he envisioned Amanda. Not once had he seen her immobilized in the crosswalk on Geary, waiting for death to steal her away.

  What he’d thought about while he worked was Block Island, the sunny morning that had greeted him, the distinctive
blend of aromas filling the air—late-blooming marigolds, apples, salt and sand—and the tranquility of the empty house. In San Francisco he had awakened to the cacophony of automobile traffic along Pacific Avenue. In Chestnut Hill he’d arisen to the sounds of his mother bustling about the house, yammering on the telephone, soliciting volunteers for the Special Olympics or organizing a fundraiser for Children’s Hospital, planning a League of Women Voters meeting and blasting Vivaldi through the stereo speakers.

  Here...nothing. Nothing but the low, sweet moan of the wind arching over the stone walls and spinning through the leaves of the red maple near his bedroom windows. Nothing but the friendly creaking of the house’s timbers and the high-pitched caws of seagulls wheeling overhead.

  Once he’d filled the tires with the air pump he found on a shelf in a corner of the cellar, he lugged the bicycle up the stairs and out onto the front porch, then went back indoors to wash up and change his clothes. After downing a peanut butter sandwich, he took off on a bike ride.

  Instinct navigated him along the twisting lanes he remembered so well, around the corner, over a hill to the tiny Cape Cod-style cottage that used to belong to the Ballards. It was pale yellow—when Shelley had lived there it had been brown—and a shingle hung from the porch railing, with “The Hansens” engraved into it. It hurt him to see that proud label announcing to the world that the Ballards had been dispossessed of their summer house.

  Probably it hurt Shelley even more.

  He steered away from the cottage, following the sinuous curves of the island roads until he reached the pharmacy on High Street. He swung off his bike, chained it to the bike rack, and entered.

  Shelley’s voice reached him from the rear of the store. Striding down an aisle to the counter, he slowed when he saw that she was conferring with an elderly man. “I can refill this prescription only one more time, Ed,” she said as she slid a brown plastic bottle of pills into a paper bag and presented it to him.