“You’re lying!” Cammie shouted. “You couldn’t get anyone but some old man you married for his money.”
“Franco was a good man. But in Europe, a young wife is afforded certain liberties, Cammie. I assure you, I’ve had a full and satisfying life in every way. And I intend to continue.”
“You showed that back in St. Thomas!”
“I did, because there are things more alluring than youth, darling. There are things I know about pleasing a man—”
“You never slept with Jim,” Tracy said, her voice trembling. She would have begun to cry, but she had no tears to shed.
“Well, I suppose you can ask him. It was during sophomore year, which would have been just before I left for Italy and just before I met Marco. I’m afraid that went a little too far, but you aren’t unhappy about that, are you, Tracy?”
“What’s wrong with you?” Tracy asked.
“We were talking about food theft,” Holly put in. “There’s no reason to take this further. It’s ugly enough.”
“Except I’m so tired of seeing you two acting like a woman who has an ounce of femininity is some kind of disease! I’m tired of you acting like big firefighters and heroes, heaving the ho and pumping the bilge and treating me as though I’m excess baggage. I’m tired of listening to Holly lecture me that I’m not doing my share when all she’s done is cook some crap and lie in her bed. I’m dirty and sunburned, and I want to go home, and I never wanted to come out on this bloody stupid—”
“You shouldn’t have come. You just hurt people! You’ve never done a kind thing for anyone in your life, have you? Except send me things because you probably were too busy screwing around to raise children of your own!” Cammie shouted.
“I chose not to have children. I saw that most of them turn out to be ungrateful and thoughtless. Nothing I’ve seen since has ever proved me wrong. But when I got pregnant with Marco, I was still a self-sacrificing little Catholic girl, and I decided to give my baby to a good Catholic couple. And I just happened to know one.”
There was a breathless, interminable silence in which Tracy willed time to reverse itself. It did not. She reached out and found Holly’s strong, spatulate fingers and was comforted, deep in her primate brain, when their hands entwined. But when she looked at Holly, Holly nodded as if to tell her, Steady now, steady; it’s all right. But Holly’s eyes darted, unblinking, from Cammie to Olivia and back. Tracy turned away, toward the extravagant, unbroken nullity of the sea. The tiny aquamarine tips of the waves winked slyly.
“You’re my mother?” Cammie finally asked, releasing her breath as if she had been holding it underwater. “You . . . you’re my real mother?”
“You never guessed? You are rough around the edges. But a great beauty. Brains and talent, too.”
Cammie stared at Tracy. “You should have told me a long time ago. I asked and asked, and you never told me.”
“She made me swear,” Tracy admitted, miserable. “She wouldn’t give you to me otherwise.”
“So you listened to her. And you kept me wondering. I suspected, Mom. You know that? I thought about it. I just couldn’t imagine it. Well, Olivia, does this mean I’m the little Countess Montefalco? Do I get a big inheritance and a car? I like Alfa Romeos. . . .”
“I’m afraid not, honey. When I gave you to Tracy, you became a gym teacher’s daughter, with a father who draws factories and additions to people’s houses. Legally a Kyle. Camille Kyle. Now, there’s a moniker.” She reached for the red wine and began to uncork it, but Holly’s hand snaked out and snatched it from her. Olivia shrugged. “Not that I didn’t regret my choice. You’d certainly have been . . . well, better off. But I didn’t know what lay ahead for me when I was only twenty. And we all thought Tracy could never have a child, because of her abortion.”
“What abortion? Mom?”
“It was an ectopic pregnancy, Cammie. Dad and I were going to get married then, but I lost that baby.”
“So you see,” Olivia went on, “I would have been utterly cruel to renege. But then, along came big old Teddy! And isn’t he just the picture of your mom? Do you think that’s maybe, just maybe, why you and Tracy don’t get along so well?”
Cammie looked from one of them to the other. “I never thought it made any difference.”
“That’s because it doesn’t, Cammie!” Tracy cried. “I put washcloths on your head when you had fevers. I was the one who taught you to walk, and to read. Daddy saw that you had a genius for math. Ted adores you; you know that. . . .”
“But I’m not who I thought I was. . . .”
“You knew that you were adopted,” Tracy begged. “You knew that made us love you even more.”
“I didn’t know I was the daughter of the town whore,” Cammie said. “You must have worried that genetics would all come true, Mom. That’s why you watched me so close.”
“Cammie, please . . . I watch you so close because you’re my child,” Tracy said, dissolving visibly, quaking. “You’re my heart.”
Camille walked up and over to her cabin and closed the door. Tracy shook the handle. It was locked.
“What’s the matter with you? Why would you hurt her and me this way?” Tracy shouted down at Olivia.
“I meant to give her hope, Tracy. I meant to point out that she wouldn’t have to grow up looking like a broomstick with a pillow tied around the middle.”
“You hate me,” Tracy marveled. “You hate me. I knew your childhood was lousy. But the rest of it . . . You must have had an absolutely horrible life, Olivia. I feel the way Cammie does. I feel sorry for you. You’re not going to be able to take my daughter away at this late date. You heard what she said. The best you can hope for is that, for a few weeks or a few months, she’ll feel some kind of self-loathing she doesn’t deserve. You delight in being evil. It was funny when we were kids. It was jokes and naughty tricks. But you liked excluding the other girls. You took pleasure in their sadness. You liked making them feel inferior. But they weren’t really inferior to us, Olivia. Cissy Hewlett was a nice girl. Mary Brownell was cute and smart, smarter than any of us. Even Peggy Ojewski was a nice girl. But you chose us. Why us? Why me? Why Holly?”
Olivia, bristling like a terrier, glared up at Tracy. “I’ll tell you why. Holly had a foul mouth. She made me laugh. She was the girl everybody wanted to goof around with, the cheerleader, one of the boys. I wanted her to be with me, not with her dumb jock friends. I wanted the boys. If I wanted Janis, who was stunning and also had boys following her in packs, I had to accept you, too. Your mothers wouldn’t have had it any other way. And after I got to know you, I did admire how bold you were. How you would always do the dirty work to get my approval. If anything had to be stolen or sliced or knocked over, you’d do it, so I wouldn’t take away your status as a Godmother. Everyone wants slaves, Tracy. I never thought I’d really have them, though I did, later on. But well, it was high school. . . .”
“You’d like me to hate you, wouldn’t you, Liv? But I don’t. Every time I look at you, I see a trace of the thing I love most on earth, except for Ted and Jim. Something you’re never going to see. Someday you’re going to be a lonely old woman, Olivia. Joey has his kids. Your mom has Joey and her grandchildren, and the memory of your old bastard father, Sal. Who will you have? Some young guy like poor Michel you pay for companionship? I’d rather have my size fourteen ass than your size six life anytime, Olivia,” Tracy said. “Take it to the bank.”
Olivia turned to stalk away. But Tracy stepped in front of her. A cloud passed. When the moon reemerged, Tracy’s face was as empty as an open hand. “Go steer the boat. If I have to hurt you to make you do it, I will.”
Day Sixteen
Will you call me the moment you get there?” Dave asked Janis for the fiftieth time.
“David! I’ll call you when I call you. I’ll call you when I have something to tell you!”
“That’s what Tracy said.”
“Honey. In the freezer there are casseroles that
anyone who can work an oven could heat up. I made five in case. I don’t care if they eat pizza five nights straight. Take it easy. Don’t work too hard. Don’t tire yourself out.”
“They said there was nothing you could do.”
“But I can’t do nothing, Dave! The way Tracy and I grew up, we weren’t like cousins, we were like—”
“Sisters, I know. And I’ll look out for Jim. He’s a basket case.”
“Well, we talked it over and agreed that having both parents and his sister gone would be way more than Ted could take. I have to go, David. There’s no other choice. What if something happened and I could have helped them?”
“Do you have everything?”
“The old lady said I didn’t need anything but jeans and shorts and a jacket. And a swimsuit. As if I’d be taking a dip!”
“She’s going out there to find them when they have perfectly good Coast Guard cutters and helicopters?”
“Lenny is this older lady’s friend. Lenny owns the boat. They’re apparently a very loyal little community. She’s put off heading her boat to the Hamptons to help find Lenny.”
“But you promise to let her and her partner go? You’re not setting foot on any boat. Do I have your word?”
“Dave, you just reminded me. I finished Tracy’s purse. I’m going to run up and get it, and then I have to get to the airport. When I see her, I want to give her the birthday present I fixed up for her. It makes me think that I’ll really see her. Emma will be here any minute to drive me to the airport. Please wish me well.” Dave held her close and kissed her upturned mouth.
Janis ran upstairs and lovingly placed the little evening bag she’d finished just the previous night into her carry-on. Emma honked the horn. She and David kissed again, and Janis shouldered her bag.
Twelve hours later, she stepped on board Big Spender. With Sharon Gleeman and Reginald Black, she promised Meherio Amato and little Anthony that they would find Daddy, and they set out from the marina in St. Thomas.
Tracy set her experimental sail. When it filled, her first impulse was to call out in triumph to Cammie. But Cammie had come out of the cabin only to drink her water and eat a few bites of cereal. She unlocked the door that night to admit her mother. When Tracy looked in on her, she was asleep, or was pretending to be asleep. The cabin virtually stank of tense, speechless hostility. It fell to Tracy to make sure that Holly swallowed something, even if it was only a mouthful of water with a teabag dipped in it and some sugar or honey mixed in. Tracy was stretched thin as an elastic band, yet trying to balance a medicine ball on that narrow band alone. For the first time in her life, she thought she might snap. Yet the work and exhaustion staved off the anxiety. She could sometimes forget for hours at a time that her family might now have cracks that would no longer withstand any sort of pressure. The cracks would deepen into ravines. Cammie would spin off onto a lonely trajectory of avoidance. Jim’s heart would break.
And all this, only if they lived to tell.
She had not said a word to Olivia, and she would not. But Olivia had been skillful. She had placed the barbs carefully and well.
After her last watch, she’d locked the door to her cabin. She would not come out, either.
That left Tracy alone, Holly barely able to speak, Cammie and Olivia sequestered. And so, her mind her only companion, she could not rein in her thoughts: Did Tracy feel closer to Ted because he was of her blood and Jim’s? She did not. If anything, Cammie had been the brass ring, the prize, the most beloved, the sprite always just beyond Tracy’s reach. If anything, Tracy had taken Ted’s good humor for granted. Had she wished she had given birth to Cammie? Of course she had. But to Cammie, not some other child. Had she ever meant to tell Cammie? Yes, she had planned to tell Cammie this summer, this very summer, when she turned nineteen. Then Franco had died; and Olivia had announced her decision to come back to America; and Tracy had weakened, frightened—yes, frightened of the resemblance between them that would be so obvious now that Cammie was a woman. What had she feared? Olivia was glamorous and exotic. Tracy was . . . plain and, as every mother is to her own child, ordinary. Was she fearful that Cammie would want more than an “auntie’s” relationship with Olivia? Or had she put off the discussion she had planned—a low-key intimate talk—for fear of the bonfire it would ignite, given Cammie’s volatile age and state of mind? She had never been able to bear a confrontation. Damn it. Jim knew it. She went along with everything Jim wanted, always had.
What was done was done. Tracy shook out her shoes, mentally, and gave all her perseverance to the sails. And once they were moving, her spirits lifted.
Any progress was better than the endless slow drift. Alarmed as she was that the compass showed they had drifted back substantially in the direction from which they had come, now they were making time. Occasionally, Tracy saw a sprig of some kind of land plant on the water. She felt like Noah. Perhaps they would see land soon, or a vessel, anything. Perhaps they could find some nameless island, tie up, and fish, because Tracy had read in the reef book that fish sometimes played around the bottoms of boats if they were stationary. Perhaps they would build a fire and eat their catch.
Her forehead was so chapped that no amount of lotion could soothe it, and she feared she would have to have some kind of skin grafts on her nose. It was beyond recognition—like an artificial nose, raw and clownish. She kept it slathered with petroleum jelly, and still it ached, even to sneeze. Her hands, never kempt, now bled even when she coated them with shortening scooped from the tin vat. Her hair was impossibly tangled with wind and salt water. She had not even tried to run a comb through it. The hats were all sodden or blown to bits, except for the tied straw affair Olivia wore each time she came out of her cabin. Even her eyes stung behind her sunglasses, and her vision blurred periodically. One of her eyes had something that had blown into it and danced like a period in her line of sight. She was dizzy when she stood up, and her tongue was a bit swollen, the skin on her hands loosening, signs of dehydration she recognized from sports.
In ordinary life, Tracy often drank half a gallon of water a day. The four-ounce ration had had less of an effect on Olivia and Cammie, Cammie perhaps because of her youth. But Tracy knew she had to conserve her own strength. Without forcing anyone, but with stern determination, she simply walked away from the cockpit every four or five hours, and either Olivia or Cammie took her place. Although Tracy longed to reach out for her daughter, she did not. Cammie would need to come to terms as best she could with the facts of her biological parenthood. This ugly way of revealing something once cherished was in keeping with the nightmare voyage. Tracy hoped, perhaps too optimistically, that all of it might one day be an ordeal to be analyzed when it was safe to do so.
Cammie was more mature emotionally than she had ever been challenged to reveal. Tracy could pray and she could hope. But she could not alter Cammie’s stubbornness or her quite natural burden of disenfranchisement. Her world had been reconfigured. It would take time to see that the recast world had not blasted the essential underpinnings of the person Cammie was. Tracy tried to imagine how she herself would react given the same news, and if she were honest, she knew that while she would not have lashed out, she would have made a psychic cave for herself and burrowed in, just as Cammie had.
Tracy did not blame her child, only Olivia.
She dared not think past the next hour, the next gust of wind. She had never felt more alone, more like a pinpoint of breath in a strangled world. One of her friends was . . . well, if she was honest, perhaps dying. One of her friendships, forged with a unique bond, was dead. Her relationship with her child was on life support, and there was no guarantee they would be found before . . . before it was too late. And the energy bars she held in her hand. She had crumbled off three pieces that morning and fed them to Holly with her morning water ration. She’d eaten the rest of the bar herself.
The remaining two would be for Cammie.
Cammie would survive.
Day
Seventeen
What was that?” Cammie cried out.
Tracy stirred, too spent to answer.
“I felt something, Mom, like maybe a big wave.”
“Go up and look, then. Up in the cockpit.”
“Is Olivia up there?”
“No.”
“No one is up there?”
“No.”
“Then . . . what are you doing?”
“I’m dying. I haven’t slept. I don’t know how long it’s been. So shut up and let me sleep.”
“The boat is under sail. It could fuck up everything.”
“Because I’m too fucking tired. Leave me alone,” Tracy said.
“Get up, Mom. I felt something.”
Tracy rolled out of the bottom berth and, with Cammie following, stumbled out onto the deck.
Together, in disbelief, they felt the wake of the freighter as it swept past them, a mountain moving like a river.
“Get the flares! Cammie, get the flares!” Tracy ordered. “It’s not going to hit us. It has to be two hundred yards away. But maybe there’s a watch on the back end. Get the radio!”
Cammie lit and threw flare after flare high into the air, until only a pack of six remained. Tracy shook the radio, which seemed perversely unwilling to revive, and screamed, “This is the sailing vessel Opus! Mayday! Mayday! . . . The batteries are dead, Cammie!”
Cammie fumbled to fetch and force open a new package. By the light of the battery-powered lantern, they flipped the old batteries onto the deck and reloaded. “This is the sailing vessel Opus! Mayday! Mayday! Do you hear us?”
After interminable moments, a voice answered in blunt Slavic syllables.
“English!” Tracy sputtered, trying to remember every foreign language phrase she knew. “Anglais! Nous etes l’Opus! Vir sind der Opus! Cammie! Is that German? Is that German he’s speaking?” The voice, more faint, seemed to be reciting numbers, coordinates.
Still Summer Page 24