Sailing Lessons

by Hannah McKinnon

  It was Sunday afternoon, which meant the family was soon to amass in his kitchen. All of them, including Mrs. Pruitt from next door. He should probably pour himself a beer before that happened.

  Lindy and the girls had long ago dubbed the weekly gathering as the “Something-Rather Dinner Party.” Which meant that whoever was available showed up with whatever was on hand. No fuss, more festivity. Hank had never been particularly fond of the term, but he had to admit it sometimes held. While Lindy had meant it in reference to the food, he would argue it could also be applied to some of their discussions over the years. The women in attendance could be long on opinion, and short on temper.

  “Right. I’ll be out in a minute,” he said.

  Lindy stepped inside his office and peeked over his shoulder. “Memory lane?”

  “Just cleaning out the old desk,” he said, tucking the letter back in its envelope.

  She placed a kiss on the top of his head and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “Any regrets?”

  Hank shook his head softly. “Just one.” He reached for a red pen and drew a line through the date on the calendar on his ledger.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Another Something-Rather Dinner Party.”

  • • •

  As usual, Shannon and Reid showed up first, with their kids. They filed in, the girls giving quick hugs to them both, and George inquiring immediately as to the whereabouts of Bowser.

  “Oh, he’s in the backyard, sweetie. Why don’t you go say hello to him?”

  George took off through the back of the house, and his sisters followed.

  “Hank,” Reid said, shook his hand, and held up a six-pack of beer.

  “My good man.” Hank had always liked Reid. He knew he worked long hours at his family office, but he’d been very successful. He and Shannon had always seemed of the same mind-set, and they were the two that Hank and Lindy worried very little over.

  Shannon kissed Hank’s cheek and deposited something that smelled delicious on the kitchen island.

  “This is gorgeous honey, but I don’t know where you find the time,” Lindy said. “That’s the point—bring something simple.”

  Hank followed to see what the fuss was about. There was a casserole dish of bright summer squash sliced into small half-moons with some kind of crusty cheese topping that looked like it came straight out of Martha Stewart Living magazine. “Oh, and I brought dessert, too. Strawberry parfait. The berries are fresh from Cape Cod Organic in Barnstable.”

  “Shannon!” Lindy scolded.

  Wren pulled up in her Jeep next. Hank noticed someone was with her in the front seat, and whoever it was was too big to be Lucy. Perhaps Wren had finally succumbed to her mother’s hints to bring someone special to dinner. As women went, Lindy was many things, but not subtle. It had been a long time since James was out of the picture, and Hank didn’t like to think of Wren working so hard and being alone. It would be good to have another man in the family.

  But when the passenger door opened, he saw it was not a date Wren had brought along. “Lindy!” Hank called.

  She was out the door and down the stairs before Piper even made it to the bottom step. “Oh, honey! What a surprise!” Then, looking around at all of them, “Why didn’t anyone tell me you were coming?”

  Wren hugged her mother. “Blame me; I invited her down last night.”

  Lindy held Piper at arm’s length. “You’ve been down since last night and didn’t come over ’til now?”

  “Mom,” Piper said.

  “Oh, all right, all right.” Lindy grabbed Lucy’s hand. “Everyone come in. There’s a ton of food to be had!”

  Within thirty minutes the table was filled. Hank grilled rib eye steaks, Wren tossed a salad she’d picked from her garden, and Shannon’s casserole had been heated up. Lindy pulled two trays of garlic bread from the oven. Piper stood at the kitchen island idly picking tomatoes out of Shannon’s dish and popping them into her mouth.

  Reid handed her a beer. “My wife will kill you if she sees you messing with her dish.”

  Piper grinned. “Oh, come on. She’ll kill one of us before the night’s over anyway.”

  Halfway through the meal, Mrs. Pruitt arrived, late as usual. Widowed and in her seventies, she’d long acted as a sort of aunt to the Bailey girls. As was custom, she let herself in the back door, and they now listened patiently from the dining room as she rummaged through the kitchen drawers and shuffled about the kitchen. The children giggled. Finally she appeared in the doorway holding two lit candles in silver candlesticks. “I found the prettiest beeswax candles in town at Tale of the Cod—they smell so nice! But seeing as you already have these in the sticks, I left them on the kitchen counter for another time.”

  She set the candlesticks carefully in the center of the table, and it was then she noticed Piper.

  “The redhead is back!” she cried, clasping her hands. Mrs. Pruitt had ridden the rises and falls of the family over their many years sharing a backyard fence, and she wasted no time pulling her chair in and filling up her plate to get caught up. “So, what force of nature drove you home, child?”

  Piper shrugged casually from her end of the table, but Hank, too, had been waiting for this very answer. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess I wanted some family time,” she said, her tone a little too honeyed.

  “Bullshit,” Lindy said brightly.

  “Mom!” Shannon pointed a fork in the direction of the kids.

  “Sorry, babies. Grandma said a bad thing. Don’t you repeat it.” She reached for George, who was seated next to her, and clamped both hands over his ears. “I call bullshit!”

  Reid smirked and the older grandkids tried to hide their giggles behind their napkins.

  Shannon threw up her hands. “Okay, you kids are excused. Nice work, Mom.”

  Hank shook his head and sipped his wine. It was no use saying anything to Lindy. She was an elegant woman with a foul mouth. He would dare to say he found it maddeningly attractive.

  Mrs. Pruitt, who was still mulling over Piper’s answer, chewed her food thoughtfully. “Did someone break your heart, dear?”

  “No.” Piper set her fork down. “Let me beat you all to the punch. I’m seeing someone new.”

  Lindy brightened. “Wonderful. When do we meet him?”

  “If you actually like this guy, I suggest you might wish to delay that,” Reid joked, rising from the table. He began clearing plates as the women settled back into their chairs. This was the usual course of Sunday dinner parties. Everyone pitched in with cooking. The men did the dishes.

  “Thank you,” Piper said to her brother-in-law. “I had the same thought. Really Mom, everything is fine.”

  Lindy narrowed her eyes over her wine glass but said no more. She was clearly enjoying having all of her girls around the table, and she would not push the matter.

  “Wren, you’ve barely eaten. Are you feeling all right?”

  Wren glanced at her sisters then back at Lindy. “I’m fine, Mama. But there is something I want to share. That we all want to share.”

  Lindy allowed her eyes to travel around the table, and Hank sensed her apprehension.

  Mrs. Pruitt pulled her chair up closer. “Will we be needing more wine?”

  Hank stood and refilled glasses, as they all watched Wren pull an envelope from her purse. She set it down by her mother. “This came in the mail. It was addressed to my shop.”

  Lindy pulled her reading glasses, which dangled around her neck, up onto her nose. Her eyes widened with recognition. She yanked her reading glasses off and looked around the table at all of them.

  “How long?” she asked.

  Hank felt something protective rise in his chest. “What is it?”

  But Lindy’s eyes were trained on the faces of her three daughters. Very softly, holding the envelope up between them, she asked again. “How long have the three of you had this?”

  Lindy seemed to know, without even openin
g it, what was in the envelope. Hank didn’t like the sense of being suddenly thrust into the dark.

  Wren turned to him, her green eyes flickering with apology. “It’s a letter. From our father.”

  Hank and Lindy locked eyes from each end of the table. He searched her face, the very face he had woken up beside for the last twenty years, whose complex arrangement of features dictated the kind of day he was going to have. For the first time in all those years, as if a compass had been reset, he could not read it. It occurred to him then that it did not matter what the letter said: this was between them, and once again, Hank was an outsider looking in.

  Lindy cleared her throat. “He’s coming back, isn’t he?”

  It was a statement, not a question.

  Mrs. Pruitt excused herself from the table. “I’m fetching the good candles. This is going to be a long night.”

  At the other end of the table, Hank could see the change in his wife already. The space between them opened and stretched, like a lifeline uncoiling. “I think I’ll leave you ladies to yourselves,” he said, rising from his chair.

  “No, wait.” Wren said. “We want you to stay.”

  Hank hesitated. Wren had always been the one hardest to reach. Once, when she was eleven years old, after a stormy day, they had taken a walk at the beach. All five of them. Hank had known the girls for several months then. Or at least had been trying to. Piper, desperate to connect, had clambered into his lap—too full of trust, her need visceral as a heartbeat. Shannon had tolerated his company, aloof, but polite. It was Wren who held back longest, her eyes always on him when he turned around. He could feel her watching him when he spoke to her mother in the kitchen, he could feel her eyes on his back as he walked out the door after dinner on a Friday night. He would look up at the house as he backed his car out of the dark driveway and see her silhouette in her bedroom window, her wavy hair spilling around the pale oval of her small face. Always, she kept a safe distance between them. Until that gray afternoon walk on the beach. They’d been walking along the high-tide mark, stopping every now and then to poke around in the detritus washed ashore from the storm, when Wren appeared at his side and suddenly slipped her hand in his. He’d looked down at her in surprise, and then quickly away, for fear she’d withdraw it. The whole way down the beach and back, she kept her narrow fingers entwined with his own. Until a dried horseshoe crab caught her eye and she bent to examine it. He’d kneeled with her in the sand, trying to listen as she spoke, but already missing the warm press of her small hand in his. She described a large crab her father had found years ago and how they’d set it free, dragging it gently back into the waves. It was a good story, but he felt a ripple of sadness when she dashed ahead to catch up with her sisters. Eventually they turned back for home and were halfway down the beach when the thud of footsteps in wet sand came up behind him. It was Wren. She handed him a razor clam shell before slipping her hand back in his. She held it all the way home. When Hank’s eyes filled with tears, he’d blamed the wind. Wren glanced briefly at him knowingly. Just as she did now, when he rose from the table.

  “I appreciate that,” he said, pushing his chair in gently. “But I’ll be in the den if anyone needs me.”

  Hank closed the door behind him and leaned against it, exhaling. It was the day they had all known might happen. From the beginning, Lindy had warned that Caleb Bailey was a wild card. Ever since, Hank had tried to conduct himself carefully, walking that narrow line between being a father figure but never daring to lay claim to the title.

  When they first met Lindy, she was newly divorced, having proved to the court that her husband was in absentia as both parent and spouse. Lindy had never held her husband accountable for child support, a fact that perplexed Hank. After all, she certainly could’ve used the money. And the kids deserved to know where he was. “What’s the point?” she’d asked when Hank questioned her decision. “I know him. I know him better than anyone. There is no money, and if there ever is he’ll be drinking it. He’s not fit to be in the girls’ lives. I didn’t want to remain tied to him any longer. Can you understand that?”

  He’d come to. Lindy could not afford to fight the past; she had three girls who needed her in the present. And it took everything she had. Her greatest gift to him had been to let him into their lives, to share those beautiful complicated headstrong girls with him. Father or not, he’d fallen in love with them all.

  But, now, he realized how careless he’d gotten, how cavalier. With each passing year that Caleb stayed away, the likelihood of his returning floated further away from the safe shore they had created. Hank couldn’t help it: over the course of all that time, he’d let himself love these girls like his own. Taking Piper’s picture when she dressed up as a lobster for her first-grade school play. Holding newborn Lucy in those early morning hours after Wren delivered her at Cape Cod Hospital. Walking Shannon down the aisle in her white gown at the Wequassett Resort. With each year, each milestone, each breath taken, he’d believed it to be true.

  Outside, in the dining room, came the rise and fall of female voices. A melody of the backdrop of his life.

  Hank winced. What a goddamned fool he’d been.

  Eight

  Wren

  She’s standing at the top of the steps at Lighthouse Beach. It is a summer day of splendor, the dune grass shifting gently in the salty breeze, the sun high over the channel. Chatham Harbor is a liquid sky, so blue is the water. The Rosa rugosa blooms on either side of the trailhead. Wren looks down to the sandy beach below. She shields her eyes from the sun. Somewhere down there is her family.

  But as she begins the steep descent to the sand, a fog rolls in. A charcoal swirl that coils its way along the shore spreads like a cloud of smoke up the beach. She turns to Chatham Lighthouse behind her, but even its golden beam cannot fracture the dense fog.

  From down below, Wren hears a cry. A child’s wail reaches her up on the dunes. Something is terribly wrong. She has to get down to the beach to her family. But Wren cannot move. She tries to bend a knee, lift a foot. But her feet are cemented in the sand. Her ears roar with the crash of waves, the voices growing fainter. She opens her mouth and screams, again and again. But no sound comes out. She cannot stop. Her throat is going to shatter.

  • • •

  A white flash illuminated the bedroom followed by a crack of thunder, and she jerked upright. Outside, rain pelleted her window and she fought to catch her breath, understanding now that it was just a storm. Lucy was sound asleep when she padded into her room barefoot. Wren pressed her lips to her daughter’s warm forehead, taking in the visceral scent of faint child sweat and sleep that enveloped Lucy’s room at night. She adjusted her blankets and tiptoed out.

  The house felt damp but cozy, the echo of driving rain against the walls and windows like a shell. Wren switched on the overhead light of the kitchen stove and put on the teapot. She couldn’t go back to sleep on nights like these.

  It had been a long time since she’d had the dream, so many that she couldn’t count. In the earlier years she’d awake twisted in her bedding, gasping for breath as if the cotton sheets were pulling her under. Shannon was having them, too, though she never wanted to talk about hers. When Lindy realized that she’d taken them all to a child psychologist, a woman the girls called Miss Anne.

  Every Saturday they went, first as a family in their newfound number of four, and later individually because Miss Anne believed one-on-one sessions might allow the girls to open up more. Wren recalled the defensive look on her mother’s face. “That’s ridiculous. My girls know they can speak freely in front of me. We have no secrets.”

  Wren felt embarrassed, by both her mother’s strong words against Miss Anne, who was younger and softer spoken than their mother, and by the realization that, in fact, her mother was wrong. There were things Wren could not say in front of her mother. And here was an outsider telling Lindy what Wren wished her mother knew instinctively. Yes, the Baileys were close. But they were
also close in their pain, bound in that net so snugly that it precluded full disclosure, lest it fray the thin ropes that held them together.

  Shannon refused to talk to Miss Anne. Wren recalled the four of them sitting on the hall bench in the waiting area just outside the therapist’s door, like a lineup at a police station. When her turn was called, Shannon would not budge. After some cajoling, and eventual mild threatening, she would begrudgingly stomp into the office and park herself roughly in the wingback chair that faced Miss Anne’s desk. There she remained, arms crossed staring straight ahead, as the grandfather clock ticked through the twenty wordless minutes of their session.

  Wren, however, found freedom in hers. Initially there had been some wariness about the intimacy of the situation. Miss Anne did not know them, and yet they were expected to discuss their most private, most awful experience with this woman. It went against all of her instincts. But when she found herself seated across from the friendly young woman, whose lipstick was the prettiest shade of red, something her own mother would never wear, Wren felt a flood of relief. Unlike in her own crowded and loquacious home, Wren could speak without interruption and Miss Anne listened. In her braver moments Wren shared her sixth-grade crush on John Waltham, at which Miss Anne smiled. In a darker moment she wondered aloud if it were her mother’s fault that their father had left them. As soon as that awful thing was said, Wren had reeled from an instantaneous fit of guilt, bending over at the waist and bursting into tears. How could she say such a thing about their dutiful mother? The same mother who was shrinking before their eyes under the weight of it all. Surely her mother missed Caleb Bailey as much as they did. After all, she had been left, too.

  Wren wished in that moment that Miss Anne would say something, chastise her, correct her mean spirit. The silence that stretched out between them was agony enough. In the end, Wren realized that Miss Anne’s role was not to placate or judge. This was on Wren’s shoulders, and with it came a burden the kind of which she had never borne. She was not alone, not exactly, but this was up to her.