Claude finished the necklace and put it gently around her neck and she laughed, stood and spun around in the grass. “I’m so digging this, we’re having our own little Be-In. Flower power and all!” And he told her Peace, and they sat cross-legged in the sun like they were in San Francisco, circa 1969. Later she bought a pair of vintage hip-hugger bell bottoms with satin cutouts stitched into the bell from a secondhand boutique and life was hippie sweet, as it can only be in Europe at twenty years old, no matter the decade.
This is what she remembers when a piece of summer slips between her and her daughters. Kat and Jenny went with her to buy silk flowers for the candlestand. Afterward they stop at the cove with ice cream cones. A stone wall dating back to colonial times holds back the surrounding woods, weathered picnic tables are tucked in the shade of ancient maple trees, and lazy colorful sailboats bob in the river inlet.
They sit in the shade, lulled by the motion of colorful vessels on water, the sails snow white. “Pretty, isn’t it?” Sara Beth asks.
Kat agrees, but Jenny acts too intent on licking her mocha fudge double scoop to answer. Sara Beth notices other times, when she glances up, that Jenny looks quickly away, caught observing her silently. It’s how Sara Beth feels, too, observing this other woman she wants to be, trying to figure herself out with furtive glances. She gets it, gets Jenny, but they stay silent in their sentry, easy to do near water and boats of summer, both unsure of the woman Sara Beth.
What fills their quiet are the birds singing, a boat engine idling. It would be nice to catch it, she thinks, to reach to the sky and snatch some of that summer sound and put it in a flowered box and when you need it, you open the lid and a robin’s call rises. Sometimes you’ll hear the boat far off idling, waiting for you to board on a crystal lake framed by tall green pines. And she thinks the sound of a horse nickering would be in that box as well.
Sitting with her daughters on the slivery table, she is acutely aware that so much of what we have in life slips away. She catches Kat’s eye. “Good?” she asks, and Kat tells her it’s the best. Her daughters sit with her on a summer day. They’re here with her, the same way Claude was. But who’s to vouch for the permanence of their presence, their love? So many of her loves have faded away, layers of her self diminishing. The piano, art, old lovers.
She can’t stop thinking about Claude now. About the year they spent studying abroad, walking through elaborate museums together, backpacking, trekking through Europe. So there’s this scale in her head: Tom, Claude. Tom. Claude.
The birds continue singing, a dog runs past, its license tags jangling, and when the sounds of summer peace at the cove become indistinguishable from the sounds in Valojoulx, she pulls out her leather journal.
“What’s that?” Jenny asks.
“This? Oh, well. It’s a journal I found at an antique shop, and its very old. I like to write my thoughts in it sometimes.”
“Like I do!” Kat pipes in. “I’m going to write about this day when we get home.”
“Yes. A journal like yours.” And when her girls are satisfied it’s nothing more than a passing fancy, an old journal to write new thoughts in, she adds one more line to her page.
I’m going to find Claude. It might help, Mom.
“Do you know what today is?” he asks. Long Island Sound’s gentle waves roll along the length of the beach. The sand feels warm on his bare feet, the sun warm on his skin. They never changed into their swimsuits, content sitting together at the water’s edge.
“Besides being the eleventh commandment day?” Rachel asks without moving. Her eyes are closed behind her sunglasses.
“Yes. Seriously.”
“Well…” Their heads rest back on the sand chairs as they drink in the sun’s late afternoon rays. The beach umbrella is closed, looking like a colorful pod.
“It’s the first day of summer,” Michael says, then watches her for a reaction.
Rachel smiles in her sand chair. Its blue and white stripes are sun bleached, its wooden armrests worn smooth by summers near the sea. She opens her eyes and looks out at the water. The afternoon sun reflects a surface of diamonds.
Finally, she looks over at him. “You’re very spontaneous.”
His life flashes before him as he searches for indications of spontaneity. He’s lived in the same town, on the same street, in the same house for that matter, all his life. He’s held the same job for the past fourteen years, the past five on horseback. You can count on finding him at random Yankee games, usually with his daughter. He hasn’t landed a serious relationship since his divorce and really doesn’t get out too much. He likes his home. Actually, he likes his life exactly the way it is.
Except for that relationship part. But there hasn’t been a woman since the divorce who held his interest, who hasn’t considered his life, his job and his home as a springboard. Just like his ex, they are never content with what is at hand. He is.
“No one’s ever accused me of spontaneity,” he answers.
“You don’t think you’re spontaneous?”
“Not at all.”
Rachel pulls her knees up and wraps her arms around them. “You showed up at my door today for this.” She motions to the Sound. “You took me to the top of the Empire State Building, explained your version of heaven, took me to see God’s view of the constellations then took me to Manhattan’s lighthouse.” She stops and takes off her sunglasses and he sees that she isn’t joking. “You kissed me goodnight, our first kiss, and then couldn’t leave me, walking into The Plaza lobby to check on Sara with me. Do you know how I felt when you did that?”
“I know how I felt.”
“Well, I felt really good, in case I forgot to tell you. And then,” she reaches over and brushes her hand over his arm, “you rode the train back to Connecticut with me so I wouldn’t have to ride alone. That’s not spontaneous?”
“No.” He glances at his arm where she touched him.
“Then what is it?”
“It’s you. And it’s me. It’s what I do for someone I care about.”
“But how could you have cared about me last month when you’d only just met me?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. There was something about the way you grabbed Maggie’s bridle in the middle of Fifth Avenue. Remember?”
Her gaze shifts to Long Island Sound, toward New York somewhere across the water, to where it all began. She sets her head back, puts on her sunglasses and closes her eyes. “I remember. What a day.”
Michael stands and picks up a smooth stone from the water and skims it across the surface. He steps deeper into the water smiling as he scoops a handful of the sea in her direction, its spray reaching her in a thousand shining droplets.
The sky turns inky under the setting sun. The tide is low and they walk along the water’s edge. One last sea gull, a straggler like them, perches on the end of the jetty. It’s the perfect day to straggle. If she were writing a definition of it, she would say straggle: lingering with the first day of summer, on the beach, well into dusk. But the thing is, when you looked it up you’d get the feeling along with the words: the sweet June warmth and the tang of salt air and the lapping, lapping rhythm of gentle sea water.
Michael picks up a handful of small stones and places a few flat ones in her hands.
“Do you think we can pull this off?” he asks.
She knows what he is asking: Can they sustain a relationship crossing the state line? “I’d like to think so.” She skims a three-skipper, not wanting to imagine him leaving.
“Do you have any suggestions?” He hands her a few more stones. “Because I’d like to see you again.”
“Couldn’t we try more of this back and forth? A little bit of meeting half way?”
Michael’s stone skims off into the darkness. He loses count of the skips. “Sounds good. It’ll make for a nice summer.” When they start walking back along the beach, he slips his arm around her.
“Look,” he says, pointing over the water.
“The first star.” She told him on the Empire State Building the value she placed on stars, especially the first ones. It isn’t so much the stars, but the power they hold in their light. She hopes for some of that magic, a bit of stardust, to fall on her own life.
“This star’s different, you know,” he says. “Its phenomenon only occurs once a year.”
“What do you mean?” They stop walking and linger near the water. The beach is getting dark and they watch the star, a sparkle in the violet evening sky.
The several seconds between them say two months. That’s all they’ve got ahead of them right now. He finally bends and kisses the top of her head. “It’s the first star of summer.”
Earlier, at the wishing fountain back in Addison, he said he wanted to save his wish for later.
This is later.
She can’t believe that this is the same tense guy she met on the streets of Manhattan, the tough New York cop on horseback who barely gave her the time of day. Now he is giving her the summer.
Before she can make her wish, Michael takes her face in his hands. And really, if there is such a thing as a wish, wouldn’t this be it, this delicate slice of the end of a June day? This touch of his hand, the sensation at the nape of her neck as his fingers move through her hair, thick with salt and sea breezes? That intimate effect on the skin, it’s all a part of it. A wish is something your heart craves like the moment he steps closer still and she knows that he wants more than to breathe the salt air and feel the wind at the sea. And she waits in that moment, keeping herself in it while the waves break and the sea breeze kisses her first, touching her cheek, lifting a wisp of hair. And the wish is sealed then when he kisses her as softly, moving his hands around her neck, touching her hair and she can’t tell the difference, sea breeze or delicate kiss.
This could be so perfect, beneath the stars at the edge of the sea. His fingers slip through her hair to her shoulders, lighting on her skin like he’s tracing his way right to her heart. But her past is there, too, and he doesn’t know that he scares her when he kisses her longer, sweeter. Because she can love him so much so that she won’t be able to stand it when he leaves. Like Carl did. Sometimes it feels like she’s still saying goodbye to Carl, the way the sadness bubbles up. And to Ashley. And Sara Beth. But she can’t stop. It’s too inside them, this moment on the beach, so she kisses him back, little kisses over and over, covering the fear his kiss pried loose.
Michael pulls back and caresses her cheek with his thumb. And it stops right there on the damp streak. “Rachel? You’re crying.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“It’s nothing. Really.” She tries to pull away but he won’t let her, moving right with her in some new dance.
“What’s wrong?”
She can guess his worry, that maybe she’s not ready for this. Or maybe there is someone else, here in Connecticut. That of course she had a life here before he came into it. She waits, and there are only the waves breaking on the beach. It’s a pivot when a few minutes ago are still with her and so is the anticipation of what is to come, the piece of time when the high tide begins to shift, motionless on top but swirling currents beneath the calm surface of the sea, switching to go out. She steps back, he steps closer.
“I’m fine. It’s really nothing.”
“Tell me about nothing.”
“Nothing.” And so, the tide changes. “It’s just, sometimes it feels like people are always leaving.”
“Me?”
She shrugs.
“Ashley?”
“It’ll be a long summer without her here.”
“And Sara Beth.”
“I want to tell her about you.”
“So that’s what this is about?” He touches her damp cheek. “You’re feeling lonely.”
And it’s the way he says it, the inflection that finds her in her loneliness because the place is familiar to him, and it makes her feel better, not worse, or sad, or embarrassed.
He puts his arm around her shoulder and they start walking again.
“Maybe I can help you with that.”
“Maybe.”
“Sara Beth’s really on your mind, isn’t she?”
“She is. Last week, after I finished planting at The Green, I took a leftover geranium to Carl’s grave. The funny thing is that I felt like I’d planted flowers at Sara Beth’s grave all afternoon. Like she’s really gone. How can I bring her back?”
“Maybe she’s not ready to come back yet.”
“I had that thought too.”
“Listen. Why don’t you come to New York next week? Maybe Monday?”
Little does he know that Monday, Tuesday, or any day will be fine. She has no plans with Sara Beth. No plans with Ashley. Her summer lays open. “Monday’s good.”
“I’ve got tickets to a ballgame. If you don’t mind going.”
“The Yankees?”
“I split a pair of season tickets with some guys at work. So we could hang out, you know. Go to the game, get something to eat maybe?”
She thinks of their evening bowling last month. The game took her away from her worries about Sara Beth. He knows what matters. Bowling, baseball, it all keeps life tamed and ordered, restrained from growing wild and out of control with crazy emotions and relationships, when you’re focused on the game.
“I’d love to go.” And planning their next date, the Yankees supplant her troubles. In the car all the way back to Addison, they talk about the team, the new stadium, the opposing team, dinner beforehand, drinks afterward. Her life comes back, the small stuff, giving her exactly what she needs.
And after Michael is in his truck on his way back to Queens, she studies a photograph of Manhattan on her easel. Her fingers float over the tray of pencils, dipping and touching until she senses the perfect one to begin her newest sketch.
Sara Beth sits up in bed, her laptop propped against her knees. One ear is tuned to the noises in the house, waiting to hear Tom lock the front door, climb the stairs, come to bed. Her bedside lamp throws light on the computer screen, the coverlet is folded down at the foot of the bed. She pulls up one site as a cover: Sotheby’s.
With that page in place, she Googles Claude and cannot believe the first few entries. A curator? In a French museum north of Paris? He never stopped living the dream! Art is my oxygen he used to tell her. It kept him going, apparently. Sustained his life, breathing it every day. And she thought of Monet’s words, “Colour is my daylong obsession, joy and torment.” It had been hers, today. And Tom actually liked the red painted wall. So she has that now. That, and their effort to keep the marriage together under one roof again.
But can she do the rest? If she’d stayed in France all those years ago, would she be happy? Would she own a small antique shop there? Would she have mastered the language? What if, what if? Would her mother still be alive? What was she looking for?
When she hears Tom coming up the stairs, she backs out of the museum site and her desktop background fills the screen. The candid photograph is of her and her mother laughing, her mom turning to her. She sighs, reaching forward and touching her face.
“What are you doing?” Tom asks.
“Oh.” Sara brings up the other site. “Just cruising Sotheby’s.”
“As long as you’re only cruising.”
And she leaves that screen, too, seeing her mother again, noticing the scarf casually wrapped around her neck, feeling the chill of that autumn day when they went pumpkin picking. Autumn was her favorite time of year. The rich scents, apple cider, woodstoves, turkey cooking in the oven. When she was little, she told her mother she wanted to do this forever, linger in the pumpkin patches in the golden light of fall. And they’d never missed a year together. She looks up at Tom at his dresser. He always welcomed her mother into their home, their lives. He had taken the picture, after all.
Chapter Sixteen
How many times has she told those kids not to slam the d
oor? A few days passed under the auspice of calm, broken by the slam and Sara Beth spilling her coffee in a long stain on the front of her top. Jenny storms through the kitchen, her hands clenched in tight fists, her body rigid.
“Jenny!” Sara Beth calls after her, blotting coffee off her tank top with a paper towel.
Her daughter flies up the stairs in a staccato beat before slamming her bedroom door shut. Then comes a cushion of silence before the stereo cranks. Owen looks up at the ceiling from his booster seat. The music puts him on alert, his eyes wide, his spoon frozen midair. Sara Beth goes to the kitchen window. She’s surprised Kat wasn’t right behind Jenny, holding on and rising upstairs with her, the tail on her sister’s kite. Outside in the sun, Kat’s sitting on the picnic table wearing last year’s bathing suit. Her bicycle lies on the ground all cockeyed.
“Come on, fella. Let’s go see KittyKat outside.” Owen hooks his sippy cup with his fingers as she lifts him and a few drops leak out, enough to sticky the floor. Okay, so there’s that, too. Cleaning the kitchen floor. And the thought brings on another headache.
“Katherine?” Sara Beth sets Owen down on the grass near the wayward bike. Her eyes squint in the sunlight. Brain aneurysms sometimes run in families. Please don’t let it be a migraine. “What’s the matter with your sister?”
Kat doesn’t turn back. “Swimming lessons started today.”
“Swimming lessons.” She closes her eyes for a long second and says it. “Oh shit.”
Now Kat turns to face her and Sara catches every bit of recent neglect she tossed their way like an old bone. Her daughter’s gaze moves from her bandana to her earrings to her old jeans. Kat pulls at her pinching bathing suit strap.
Whole Latte Life Page 14