Beach Trip (63 page)

Six Months Later
Mayaguana, Bahamas

Dear Mel–

You once said I was the only one who had never done anything rotten enough to ask for forgiveness. After reading this, will you still feel that way?

I couldn’t think of any other way to do this. My mother and Briggs were just too determined. They would have hounded us relentlessly, and we would never have had any peace. And peace is what I need. I don’t know if this will work—there are never any guarantees in love—but I wanted a chance to try. I’ve lived half my life trying to please everyone else, and now I want a chance to please myself. I want a chance to be happy.

Mike says life is short and we must grab it with both hands while we can. He’s a good man and a good captain. I love him. We spend our days fishing and lying in the sun. I’ve never known such happiness as I’ve known these last few months on this small boat.

I spent so many years not really living, just surviving. The drugs were to keep me from feeling. It was Mike who convinced me that I had to stop taking them, I had to grieve, to feel, if I was ever to get better. I know you were worried and I’m sorry. I had to pretend. I couldn’t show that I’d changed. I couldn’t do anything that might make Briggs suspicious.

Seeing all of you again made me realize how short life is, how important it is that we spend it with people we love, doing things that have meaning to us. Sara and Annie are lucky. Love can sustain you through anything, and I don’t worry about them. And I don’t worry about you either, Mel. You had the courage to strike out on your own, to live your life without regret, and I always admired that in you. You have your work, and that’s all you ever needed. Well, not all, but most anyway.

Henry knows the truth, of course. And April. We couldn’t have done it without dear April playing her part. And you can tell Sara and Annie, too. But no one else. Maybe I’ll call you in a few months and we can all get together again. The islands here are beautiful—hundreds of little deserted cays and beaches with nothing but jasmine and flamingos and wild donkeys.

I am so happy. Forgive me.

Lola

Read on for an excerpt from
Cathy Holton’s newest novel,
Summer in the South

When Ava was small, Clotilde told her stories of ghosts and ruined castles and lonely moonlit roads. Most children might have been afraid of such tales but Ava welcomed the shivers of fear and miraculous possibility they sent up her narrow spine. She preferred the gnomes and changelings and lonely misshapen creatures to the beautiful princesses and handsome princes that wove themselves in and out of Clotilde’s rambling tales, because they seemed more familiar to her.

“Tell me a story,” Ava would say, climbing sleepily onto Clotilde’s lap, and Clotilde’s girlish face would go still and then brighten as the words came to her.

They owned few books in those days, not because they were poor but because Clotilde liked to travel light. She preferred rented rooms furnished with the cast-offs of other people’s dismal lives to possessions of her own.

“I’m a traveler!” she always said, and when Ava was older and asked her morosely, “But why?” Clotilde’s face, still girlish, softened for a moment. “Because each time you leave one place and move to another, you get to start over. You get to become whomever you want to be.”

To help in this metamorphosis Clotilde sometimes changed her name. Over the years she was Dharma and Abrielle and even (ironically) Magdalena. But it was the name Clotilde that she most often used.

“Clotilde was the Queen of Sardinia!” she exclaimed, grinning sheepishly at whatever man was currently in her life. “Besides, the name means ‘famous in battle.’ ”

Clotilde saw no more harm in changing her name than she did in moving every six months. “What’s in a name?” she liked to say.

Ava, who had been born Summer Rayne Dabrowski, inevitably responded, “Everything.”

Sometime around the time she was in third grade, not long after they moved to Cincinnati and just before they moved to Cleveland, Ava had jettisoned Summer Rayne in favor of Margaret, after the name penciled into her well-worn copy of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
, Margaret Anne Govan. And later, when she went off to college, she had abandoned Margaret in favor of Ava, still foolishly believing, like Clotilde, that she could leave her girlhood behind by just changing her name.

“Tell me a story,” she would say when she was still small enough to believe in Clotilde’s stories. “Tell me a story about my father.” And she would snuggle down in her narrow bed and wait for Clotilde to begin, wait for the words to form behind the smooth mask of Clotilde’s girlish face and come tumbling out of her sly rosebud mouth.

“Once upon a time there was a handsome Prince of the Underworld, and he fell in love with a beautiful princess. But she was betrothed to someone else, and when her father found out that she had been tarrying with the Prince of the Underworld he had the two of them locked up in a tower behind a pair of huge paneled doors.

“‘You cannot live apart,’ cried the angry king. ‘Let’s see how you shall live together, day after day, night after night, with only each other for company!’

“And although the two were given water, slid through a panel in the massive doors, they were denied food.

“‘Live on your love for each other!’ roared the cruel king.

“‘Give us bread!’ the two wailed, shut up in their tower tomb. ‘We are hungry!’

“Their pitiful cries went on for days and weeks, becoming ever weaker and more pitiful as the days went on. Finally they stopped. When the villagers crept close there were no sounds but the growls and slurps of voracious eating, the sharp clatters of teeth against bone, the sound of flesh being torn and devoured.”

It was one of Ava’s favorite stories. Years later she would remember it and, closing her eyes could see the youthful images of her parents entombed behind paneled doors, waiting like tragic ghosts for her to come and free them.

When Will Fraser called and suggested she spend the summer in Woodburn, Tennessee, Ava thought the idea preposterous. It wasn’t the first time he’d invited her. They had gone to college together at Bard and had kept in touch over the past seven or eight years through emails and phone calls and the occasional visit. He’d come to Chicago several times on business and had looked her up. Each time he’d asked her to spend some time in Tennessee, she’d laughed. She had made the mistake of telling him she wanted to be a novelist—he had a manner that invited confidences—and he insisted that his sleepy little hometown would be the perfect place for her to write her first novel. He didn’t seem to understand that, unlike him, she had to work for a living; she couldn’t just up and leave and go off chasing some wild and youthful dream. She had school loans to pay and a job in a prestigious Chicago ad agency it had taken her some time and effort to land.

But this time when he called, things were different. Her life was undergoing a series of cataclysmic upheavals. In less than six months her estranged mother had died of a brain aneurysm, her writing career had stalled, her affair with her boss, Jacob, had wound down to its inevitable conclusion, and most disturbing of all, she had received a condolence letter out of the blue from a man purporting to be her father. Coming one on top of the other, these events had left her shaken, confused, and understandably depressed.

Sunk in a dense depressive fog, she hadn’t had the strength to pretend when Will called.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

“I’ve been better,” she said.

On his last trip to Chicago a few months before, she hadn’t seen him. He had called and left a message saying he was in town, but she had planned a rendezvous with Jacob that night and so pretended she hadn’t gotten the message in time, calling Will later to apologize profusely. She felt guilty for weeks about standing him up, and yet the truth was they had only known each other for a short time in college. He was two years ahead of her in school and was friends with her first love, Michael. In those days Will was a tall, dark-haired boy, very well mannered but shy, with a slight Southern accent.

“Another trust fund baby,” Michael had called him dismissively and it was true. There had been plenty of those at Bard although Will didn’t seem like old money: He shopped at the thrift stores like the rest of them and drove an old, battered Volvo station wagon. The truth was, Ava hadn’t really paid much attention to him; she had been so caught up in her tumultuous love affair with Michael, and Will had simply been a quiet backdrop to all of that. A silent witness.

Once she and Michael had quarreled in a bar several miles from campus and Michael, in a fury, abruptly left, taking the car and leaving her stranded at two o’clock in the morning in an unfamiliar part of town. Will, who had been watching from the bar (he had grown accustomed to their violent arguments and no longer intervened), insisted on driving her home. She was dismayed to find herself crying, and raged against Michael on the long ride home while Will sat listening quietly. He was very courtly and insisted on seeing her up the rickety stairs of her Victorian apartment building to her front door.

“Would you like me to wait?” he asked.

“No. Thank you.” She knew Michael would return later, drunk, and there’d be another row and she didn’t want Will to see it. She was embarrassed suddenly that he’d already seen so much of their dysfunctional relationship.

“All right. Good night.” He touched her briefly on the arm and a faint creep of color appeared along his brow. Ava realized then that he had a crush on her.

“Good night,” she said.

She never told Michael how she’d gotten home and he had never asked, but a few weeks later he mentioned rather casually that Will Fraser was engaged to a girl he’d gone to boarding school with. After that there was a wariness between Will and Ava whenever they met, something that Ava noted at first with a mild tinge of regret and later didn’t notice at all. By the time Will and Michael graduated a year later, the two had drifted apart and Ava rarely saw Will.

She saw him briefly at graduation. He was standing on the lawn among a small knot of friends and family. He’d grown very thin and pale and when she remarked on this to Michael he smiled unpleasantly and said it had something to do with the girlfriend. A broken engagement or something like that.

“You women are all alike,” Michael said in a crass attempt at humor. “You’re all pains in the asses.”

“You’ve got spinach in your teeth,” Ava said, and while he hurried off to check, she strolled over to congratulate Will.

He smiled when he saw her and introduced her to his family. His parents had died in a car accident when he was a child, and he’d been raised by two great-aunts, Fanny and Josephine. They smiled politely at Ava. They were both elegantly dressed, with pale skin and clear gray eyes. Very attractive, both of them, although they must have been in their seventies. The smaller one, Fanny, giggled and took Ava’s arm.

“So you’re Ava,” she said, blushing and then giggling again. She wore a silk dress tightly belted around her narrow waist and a short little jacket.

Josephine, the taller one, let her eyes flicker coolly over Ava. “Goodness, Fanny, let her go.” She was dressed in a gray suit that matched her eyes and she seemed rather reserved, like Will, only in him this reserve came across as shyness and in her it seemed cold and distant. “You’ll have to excuse my sister,” she said to Ava.
Sistuh
. “As you can see, she’s never met a stranger.”

It was an odd thing to say and yet spoken in that beautiful accent it sounded like music.

“What lovely hair you have,” Fanny said.

Ava smiled. “Thank you.” It was her best feature and she was inordinately proud of it. She’d left it down that day and it fell in red gold waves around her shoulders.

“Aren’t you chilly?” Josephine asked, noting her sleeveless dress.

Ava laughed. “After Chicago, this is nothing,” she said.

“So you’re from Chicago?”

“Pretty much.”

“Ah,” Josephine said in a tone that could have indicated surprise or disapproval or resignation.

A faint bloom of color appeared on Will’s pale cheeks. He raised his head and looked around anxiously. “What’s happened to Uncle Maitland?” he said.

…

Somewhere south of Owensboro the landscape changed, became more rolling and green. Great clouds of yellow pollen hung in the air. The light in Chicago had a sharp, clear quality but here it came in at odd angles, filtered by tall trees and masses of greenery lining the roadway.

They had thrown her a going away party at work, a
Deliverance
theme party, complete with dueling banjos and white trash martinis. Colleen, drunk, had stood up and given a nice little speech, ending with the warning, “And whatever you do, don’t get off the expressway! For Christ’s sake, stay on the expressway.” Everyone at work thought of the south as a place of hillbillies and moonshine, and Ava had to admit (although only to herself) that she felt the same way. Perhaps this was why she had gotten off the expressway just north of Louisville, and, buying a map, proceeded to drive bravely along curving picturesque county roads past small-frame farmhouses and tall-steepled churches and mobile homes with elaborately attached decks and discarded appliances rusting in the yards.

Beside her, buckled safely into the passenger seat, Clotilde rested quietly in her enameled urn like a genie waiting for someone to come and rub her lamp.

They passed a wide field and a weathered barn with
see rock city
painted on its sagging roof. There was something insubstantial and aerie about the shimmering light and the varying shades of green, like a landscape from a dream or a long-forgotten fairy tale.

“It’s so green,” Ava said to Clotilde.

A hawk circled lazily above the tree line. Far off in the distance a rim of blue mountains rose into the hazy sky.

The last time Will had called her and invited her to come south, Ava had reverted to old habits: she broke down and told him everything—about her mother, about Jacob, about her job that she detested. She unburdened herself like she once had about Michael, droning on and on while he listened quietly. It was the alcohol, she told herself later, that had made her so garrulous. That and the fact she wasn’t sleeping well.

“You can quit your job and move down here and work on your novel,” he had said when she’d finished, and she’d laughed disparagingly. He had continued in a placid voice as if trying to soothe a worrisome child. “No really. Woodburn is a sleepy little town. Nothing much ever happens around here. There are no distractions and you can stay with Josephine and Fanny. They live in an old house near the town square and you’d have a suite of rooms to yourself, you wouldn’t be disturbed. It’s a large house; I tease them they should turn it into a bed and breakfast one of these days.”

“Do you live with them?”

“No, I live at Longford.”

“Where’s that?”

“The family farm. Out from town. I’d ask you to stay with me but I’m renovating the house and it’s pretty primitive right now.”

“Shouldn’t you ask the aunts before you offer to move me in?”

“Actually, they were the ones who suggested it.”

“Really? Why?”

He had cleared his throat. “Well,” he had said, “they remembered you from that day at Bard, the day I graduated. ‘Your little friend Ava,’ Fanny calls you. ‘The one with the lovely hair.’ I told them you were looking for a quiet place to write your first novel and they said, ‘Oh, tell her to come down here. She can stay with us.’ ”

“That’s very generous of them.”

“You sound surprised.”

“It’s just that I got the feeling the stern aunt, the tall one …”

“Josephine?”

“Yes, Josephine. I got the feeling she didn’t like me.”

“That’s just her way. The Woodburns are Scottish and they have a tendency to be rather reserved.”

“And you’re a Woodburn?”

“Yes. On my mother’s side. My grandmother Celia was Josephine and Fanny’s sister.”

“I can’t just quit my job,” Ava had said. “I don’t have enough money in my checking account to take off and write.”

“It’s free room and board. Think of it as a writing retreat. One of those communes where artists spend the summer.”