Beatrice allowed the question to sink in. “I don’t know. He might be done with me and that would hurt. But I am still who I am. There’s something inside I want to show to the world, and I was afraid that getting married again would keep me from finding it,” Beatrice said. “Like your swan maiden, Victoria.”
“Did Tom keep you from it when you were married?”
“Yes.”
“Has Lachlan ever?”
“Not even once.” Beatrice held up her hands as if in surrender. “Not even close. You know, when I chose Pegasus, I thought it was because she could fly, but it’s because she’s unafraid, she lifts herself up even as the world tells her to stay on the ground. Now . . . I know.”
Daisy’s voice came choked with emotion. “And the starling, me, always needing to be in a crowd, always needing approval, always needing someone around. I thought that the best thing in the world was having more and more people around, but it’s kept me from flying, literally and figuratively. That murmur has kept me in a safe place. I don’t know what that means yet, but I don’t need to know. I fell for that idiot Bumble guy under the pretense that I need constant companionship.” She turned to Victoria. “And you, our beautiful Bird of Paradise . . . where were you last night and parts of today? Flying on those fancy feathers?”
“The opposite.” Victoria sat quietly, now wearing a simple shift of dark blue, her hair in a ponytail and her face free of makeup. “I’ve been talking to Red. I know you don’t believe me—and I wouldn’t either—but we’ve just been talking. It’s true. He’s been living out here and telling me about it, and I’ve been just listening. A simpler life . . .”
Rose laughed. “Right, Victoria.”
Victoria shrugged, sat back on the towel. “I’m telling you the straight up truth, with a splash of vodka.” She lifted her drink. “But still the truth.”
Daisy sighed. “Why did we ever think men were the answer?”
Rose was quiet before she said, “Because sometimes they are?” But this time Beatrice heard it in her voice—she wasn’t so sure anymore.
“No,” Beatrice said. “They are never actually the answer, but they can be part of something greater in our life.” Beatrice spoke slowly and quietly, wanting to find the truth that was slowly arriving in lessons from their bird icons. “Those movies—they were right in some ways: love is worth the chance. But after that—it’s up to us. We have to keep our eyes open. We have to pursue our own true self. Sometimes love isn’t what we thought. Sometimes it doesn’t work out. Sometimes it shatters our hearts. But it is always worth the chance with a good man.”
“Yes!” Rose stood up. “I have to tell you a story. All of you.” She stood to face them, backlit by a moon more subtle than the night before, hidden behind the clouds. Only a week ago it had been half waning, when Lachlan had walked away from her, and now it sat bloated and full over them. “Victoria, when you told me about the swan maiden myth, I knew the truth. I chose that bird because of one reason, and that same bird has come to show me another truth. I chose a swan because it meant lifelong union, but in truth, I have given all my feathers to a man who does not deserve them. To a man who has wanted to take those feathers to stuff his own pillows and bed and comfort.” She slammed her foot into the sand, then dug her toes below. She was quietly crying now. She coughed and spoke with firmness. “We have to get out of our own way, know what keeps us back, what our wishes are that we are putting onto them, or our fears that we place onto them. In college, we picked someone and then placed all our dreams on top of them, used our dreams to give these guys a Superman cape, never looking closely enough to see who they really were.”
Daisy tilted her head toward Rose. “Is Chip . . . not . . . ?”
Rose shook her head. “He moved out two months ago claiming he had fallen in love with some woman he met on an airplane. An airplane! But he’s come back, begging, telling me he was a fool and it was a huge mistake and he loves only me, forever. I believe him but . . . I don’t.”
“Oh, sweetie, and you didn’t tell us because—”
“Because I was the one who put that Superman cape on him, and I didn’t want any of you to know that my swan was an ugly duckling.”
The four women huddled around each other, their heads bent and touching foreheads in a circle. The night settled upon Rose’s words and they knew, each of them, that they had chosen the bird all those years ago that spoke to them even now in a way they’d never expected.
* * *
When they told the story later, the story about their last morning on the island, they couldn’t agree on whose idea it had been to take the kayaks out on the coastal river side of the island. Victoria? She swears it wasn’t. But Daisy and Rose swear it was. Beatrice believes it was Daisy, but either way, Daisy and Rose were in a double kayak, an orange one so battered it looked like it had been chewed up and spit out, while Beatrice and Victoria rowed in single blue kayaks that Red had dragged from under the house.
“Be careful,” he’d hollered out before they left.
The first half hour had been dreamy as they rowed across the river smooth as a lake, clouds reflected like a world existed below the water, the sun beating down and the breeze cooling them off. For a while they bobbed side by side holding on to each other’s kayaks so they could float.
“What will you do when you get home?” Victoria quietly asked Rose. “I mean . . . will you let Chip come home?”
“That’s the first time you haven’t said his name three in a row.” Rose smiled at Victoria. “That was nice.” She trailed her fingers in the water and then looked up. “I don’t know. There’s so much I haven’t done because he asked me not to do them—and I still, since the day I graduated, want to write a book. Write something other than a grocery list. I’ve been doing it quietly late at night for a few years, but nothing has come of it. It’s all garbled words that never turn into anything.”
“Well,” Victoria said taking off her sunhat and gazing directly at her friend. “Now you go on and don those swan feathers and . . .”
“If I can find them.”
They all paused simultaneously, as if something beneath them had been turned on full blast; their kayaks began to move rapidly on their own, heading for the sea.
“Whoa!” Beatrice grabbed her paddle.
“Shit.” Victoria pulled her sunhat on quickly. “The tide. It’s going out.”
And with that, they began to row like crazy, separating and pushing hard toward the shore. Hollering at each other in half sentences, zipping the life vests they’d thought unnecessary but took anyway at Red’s insistence.
Rowing so hard her shoulders burned, Beatrice called out. “You think he coulda’ warned us, or something!”
“Whose stupid idea was this?” Victoria hollered as a wave washed over the side of her kayak.
Then they went silent as they each rowed as hard and fast as they could without barely moving an inch. Slowly, and sometimes cursing, they reached the edge of the sandy beach one by one. Almost to shore, Victoria’s kayak flipped over and spilled her into the shallows. Sputtering and laughing, she rose from the water like a sea creature, her long hair hanging in threads and her bathing suit pulled sideways so that one breast, white and pendulous, was exposed. She didn’t even notice as she stumbled to the shore.
“Oh my God, that was thrilling!” She laughed as she fell to the sand. “What a ride.” She reached up and pulled at what was now obviously a hair extension and threw it into the water. Then another.
The other friends looked at each other, and Beatrice spoke for them all. “Who are you and what have you done with our friend who can’t stand to have her hair messed up and her manicure chipped?”
Victoria lay flat, gazing up at the sky. “I have no idea. A Bird of Paradise who is discovering an island life?”
They laughed and then Beatrice spoke slowly, as if finding her words with every step she took. “I’m going to propose to him,” she said, sliding the kayak up to the soft grassy ar
ea littered with pinecones and fallen palmetto leaves.
Daisy sat in the sand, catching her breath. “And how is that? It doesn’t seem to go with our romantic narrative, does it? I mean . . .” she grinned. “It wasn’t Eliza Doolittle who wooed Henry Higgins back with a song about growing accustomed to his face. It was the other way around.”
Beatrice thought about this for a long silent moment, about the end of all the romantic narratives strung through their lives, about women having their own agency and choosing what was right for them instead of taking the best of what is offered. She thought about the men she never called because it wasn’t proper or the suggestions she never gave because she just needed to wait her turn.
She dropped the kayak and turned to her friends, her face aflame with something more than heat and hard rowing. “Eliza Doolittle. You know she didn’t stay, right? In the real version; in the book Pygmalion, she left. She found her worth and she left.”
“Well,” Daisy said and then took a breath, “what kind of messed-up story is it that they fed us the other version—the one where she stays because he sings her a little song about being accustomed to her.”
“Exactly!” Beatrice felt the truth moving closer. “What kind of story did they feed us, showing us that being accustomed and safe was enough?”
As Daisy and Beatrice batted these thoughts back and forth between them, Victoria and Rose watched as if at a tennis match, sitting not in bleachers but on their kayak flipped upside down.
Victoria picked up the ball. “So what does that mean for you? Lachlan has never just said he’s accustomed to you.”
“But that’s the thing, isn’t it?” Beatrice said. “He’s never treated me poorly and then come back with some sob story about how he misses me and loves me and now knows how much he really loves me. That’s the old story. Lachlan is the new story, and I just kept looking for the old story, the one where there needs to be drama and breakup and diminishing worth so the guy can swoop in and save me.” She slams her hand onto the side of a tree, the bark breaking the skin where blood seeps.
Victoria stood up and walked to Beatrice, took her hand, and stared at the blood and then into Beatrice’s bluest eyes. “You know, you never really needed us. You had the answers all along.”
Beatrice shook her head. “Oh, that’s not even remotely true. Sometimes, or maybe all the time, we see the truth with those we love most.”
“What will you say?” Rose piped up, sitting quietly on the kayak. “How will you ask?”
“I don’t know,” Beatrice said. “I haven’t gotten that far in this whole scenario. Any ideas?”
They glanced one to the other until Rose said, “You’ll think of something. You always do.”
And with that, they pulled the kayaks up to the soft sandy yard as Red came outside to inform them he was ready to take them across the water and toward home.
Victoria stood, tucked her breast back into her bathing suit, and slipped on a T-shirt. “Can you take me last? I want just a bit more time.”
“Of course. I can only take three at the most anyway.” He glanced around at the kayaks spread about like tossed shells. “Did you enjoy your rides?”
The friends looked at each other and burst into simultaneous laughter. Damn, it was good to be together, Beatrice thought. Even if nothing had been fixed in their lives, or problems solved, even if the tide had almost taken them to sea, even if Lachlan never answered her call, it was good to know that love and stories and art remained with her birds.
Epilogue
What Happens Next
Six Months Later
After Beatrice’s weekend on the island, it had taken a few tortuous weeks for her to figure out how to answer Lachlan’s proposal: with her own. She’d taken those quiet weeks and written down their love story; from the day they met in the art museum to the day she showed up at his door carrying the pages like a diamond ring in a blue velvet box. She’d written the story by hand, every word in careful cursive, and bound it by hand at the Art School’s bindery. She’d hand-sewn every stitch and she’d painted the wooden cover with two doves—birds she hadn’t yet painted, this time a first—curled tightly in a nest.
When she’d taken the book to his house, he hadn’t answered the door. She knew he was home; she felt his presence shuffling behind the closed door of his house and his heart. She’d left the package on his brick stoop wrapped in thick brown paper, simple string tying it together with the tag: For Lachlan. The last line, on the last page didn’t state “The End,” instead she’d typed, “I wonder what happens next.”
She could give him no more than this—their story, her heart, and the truth. And she waited.
For three days she waited.
For eternity she waited.
She checked her email and her phone and her texts and her mailbox. She began to arrive at the truth that he hadn’t only changed his mind, but also his heart. And there was nothing she could do to change it. That was the very thing with hearts—you can love them but you can’t make them love back. You can adore them, but you can’t convince with logic; you can’t, absolutely can’t, talk a heart into any-damn-thing.
Logic was never the answer, not in love or art.
So she’d thought a story would have to suffice, and if it didn’t, it didn’t.
On the third day, near midnight, when despair had turned to resignation and sorrow, a knock came to her door. She’d opened the door, and before she flicked on the porch light, he said only one word.
“Beatrice.”
Her name. And who doesn’t want to hear their name, just the simplicity of it, said by the person they love the most while in the midst of the darkest night.
* * *
Beatrice’s Savannah backyard shimmered with the sudden outburst of rain that had swept through and wreaked havoc and destruction upon the wedding decorations. The silver balloons hung limply, and the white tent slumped sideways. The string quartet huddled on the covered back porch with the rest of the guests, who were trying to decide whether to laugh or cry at the destruction of the beautiful setup.
Beatrice stood with Lachlan, holding his hand, her pale blush-colored dress wet and clinging to her legs. The storm had come just as the last (and late) guest Victoria had arrived with Red on her arm, her hair down and a pale blue dress swirling about her like its own storm. They’d both drawn every eye to them as they sidled to the front and took two seats, cuddled together like nesting birds.
With one loud crack of thunder and a wind that blew sideways, a dark cloud had dumped rain as everyone ran for shelter. The pop-up storm left as quickly as it had arrived, and now they all stared at the mess from Beatrice’s covered back porch.
Beatrice glanced down to her brick-walled yard. The caterers in their white aprons were trying to right the small tent; a tall man with windswept hair from the rental company was fixing chairs right, and picking up tossed flowers: the roses and ranunculus that Beatrice had grown in her own garden, the peonies she’d had imported, and the palmetto leaves she’d gathered with Lachlan from his yard. All sent asunder.
A server in a black suit climbed up the back stairs balancing a tray of champagne. He stepped onto the porch and handed them out. While Lachlan and Beatrice decided what to do next, at least their thirty guests could have something to drink.
Rose, stunning in her simple green dress, and alone, was the first to make her way to Beatrice. “They say that rain is a blessing at a wedding.”
Beatrice smiled at her friend, now living only a few blocks away. “Will this go in your novel?”
Rose laughed and winked. “Everything goes in the novel.”
Daisy, standing next to Rose in a pink off-the-shoulder gown, smiled coyly. “I’ll sue you for defamation. Or slander. Or something, unless I’m the heroine who rights all wrongs and—”
“You’re always the heroine.” Rose linked her arm through Daisy’s just as Victoria and Red arrived, gently pushing aside guests to stand on the other sid
e of Lachlan.
“What novel? What are you talking about?” Victoria’s low voice had them all turning to her.
Red reached up to remove a leaf that had blown and lodged itself in her waves.
Daisy raised her eyebrows. “You don’t know about this?”
“No.” Victoria made a pouty face and took Red’s hand. “What are you talking about?”
“Well,” Beatrice reached out and touched Victoria’s arm. “If you weren’t always hidden away on some island . . .”
Red and Victoria looked to each other and smiled. “Tell me anyway.”
“Rose, our beloved swan, has slipped back into her feathers.”
Victoria looked to Rose. “This is true? Tell me.”
“I left Chip.” She grinned. “Chip. Chip. Chip.” She paused for their smiles. “Anyway, it’s not final or anything, but I told him I needed to go, after what he did, that this is what I needed. So I’ve rented a house here in Savannah, only a few blocks from our Pegasus and near the library. I started a novel. It’s called . . . The Roommates.”
“Oh wow!” Victoria disengaged from Red. “Do you tell all our stories?”
“It’s a cross between Sibley’s bird guides and Lord of the Flies.” She grinned with a mischievous glint in her eye. “A story about how one day, a long time ago, roommates chose a bird icon and then flew off to their own worlds, to then come together years later and change each other’s lives for good.”
Daisy threw back her head and laughed. “So total fiction.”
“Totally.” Rose smiled.
Victoria smiled. “That is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.”
Lachlan, so handsome in his tuxedo and trimmed silver beard, looking like he should be on top of a cake, looked back and forth between the women and then held up his hand. “Ladies. Ladies. This is about a wedding. Not your old college days.” His grin belied his admonishing words as he kissed Beatrice on the lips.
The preacher, their friend Harold Morris, his clerical collar whipped sideways from the wind, and his coat unbuttoned, edged up and interrupted in full fix-it mode. “Okay, I can clear the aisle by dragging out the palm leaves. The band can set up again and . . . I’ll check with the caterer how much of the food was destroyed.” He pointed down where two men in white chef coats were struggling to lift the left end of the tent.
Reunion Beach Page 6