Off Season (7 page)
There was another silence.
“They’re the last ones I have of my mother and father,” Peaches said softly, the sheen of tears glistening in her eyes again. “They were killed soon after we got home last summer.”
She dropped her lids again. Her grandmother and grandfather made small sounds of distress. All the boys at once exclaimed, “Great, let’s do that!”
I simply stared at them. No one would meet my eyes. My mother smiled fixedly. Glancing at my father, I saw that his eyebrows were drawn together in sort of a perplexed half frown.
“Well,” I said, my voice sounding loud and strident, “Cecie and I are going to go. Maybe we can see the slides another time.”
My mother opened her mouth to protest just at the moment when Wilma burst out of the thicket and bounded up the beach to the lawn, barking his joy at the sheer splendor of the morning, and at all his people gathered on his lawn. He cleared the seawall in one mighty jump and plunged into the crowd, tail wagging madly.
Peaches began to scream. She shut her eyes and screwed up her face and clapped her hands over it and screamed and screamed and screamed. She was drawn up in the chair into a knot, and her heels drummed the wood, and her head jerked back and forth. The screams were high and pierced the blue morning like a knife. I had never heard anything like them. I could only stand and stare. Wilma looked at the writhing shape in the chair and bounded in to join the game. He jumped up and licked Peaches’ covered face, barking in exultation.
“Gethimoffgethimoffgethimoffget him off!” Peaches screamed.
Several of the crowd started toward them, but Jeebs stepped in and grabbed Wilma by his collar and jerked him back furiously across the lawn and into the house. Wilma yelped in surprise and pain. None of us had ever hurt him before. I felt red fury surge behind my eyes.
“You let go of him, Jeebs Constable! He’s my dog, and you’re hurting him. You know he wouldn’t hurt her, he was just playing . . .”
I began to cry, embarrassing myself profoundly, and started after Jeebs and Wilma, whose howls of grief at being shut into the house away from his people rang down the reach.
“I didn’t realize you had a large dog,” Canon Davenport said icily. “I trust he can be confined while Peaches is here? She is terrified of dogs.”
“How could you not know we had Wilma?” I sobbed furiously. “He’s been coming up here as long as I have. He wouldn’t hurt a fly!”
“Lilly,” my father said quietly, putting a hand on my shoulder. “It won’t hurt Wilma to be inside for a little while. I’m sure we can work something out.”
“Well, you just work it out, then,” I bawled, and turned and ran, over the seawall and down the beach to the base of the cliff. As I started up it, stumbling and sniveling, I heard my mother cry, “Lilly Elizabeth Constable, you come right back here and apologize,” and my father saying, “Let her go, Elizabeth. That was hard on her, too.”
I turned and looked back. The crowd had tightened around Peaches as she was led, sobbing, back into the safety of the Davenports’ grand old Rolls-Royce. Wilma howled and howled. I turned and plunged into the undergrowth that fringed the cliff bottom and began to climb.
The sun was higher now, toward noon. Soon it would be the highest it would ever be this year; the summer solstice was approaching. I had always loved the notion of the solstice. It swam with magic as old as time, with forest things not of our world dancing in moonlit glades, of something wild and enormous and ancient walking the world.
The sun was directly overhead this noon, and an erratic little wind had sprung off the water, puffing and stopping, then blowing again, each time a little longer and stronger. It blew before it a strange mist, a radiant light-struck mist that was only the sun through ordinary June sea fog, but looked otherworldly, portentous. I was a little frightened by it; it obscured everything below me, and the summit of the cliff appeared and disappeared into it. But I climbed on. I wanted the solitude of the cliff top. If there was magic there, I wanted that too.
About a third of the way to the top I stopped. A figure was moving above me on the cliff, a figure that seemed impossibly tall and slender, made of the same luminous mist that crowned the cliff. A figure that was coming down. I froze.
Out of the fog came a boy. When he saw me, he stopped. He was no older than Jeebs, I thought, but you could hardly tell in the blowing mist. The sun breaking through picked up a shock of white-blond hair over his forehead; long, tanned legs in faded plaid shorts; gold-tanned arms with sliding muscles, covered, as the legs were, with tiny gold hairs. Big, bony feet bare in disreputable Top-Siders, a worn blue Shetland sweater tied around his waist over a white T-shirt, and a face—a carved, planed, tanned face of such beauty that you wanted to avert your eyes, or weep. Around him the swirling air tossed the mist; it was as though invisible wings were beating it. My breath stopped, and then started again. All fear left me. It was almost as though I had always known I would find him here.
After a moment, he spoke. His voice was harsh New England, but it had music in it.
“Hello,” he said. “Is this your cliff?”
“Yes,” I said stupidly. Then, “No. I mean I come here a lot but it doesn’t belong to me. But everybody climbs it.”
“Good,” he said, and smiled. His teeth were very white and the smile was a little crooked, and one front tooth was chipped. I felt giddy with relief. He was human; he needed orthodontia as much as any of us.
“I’m Jon Lowell,” he said. “I just got here.”
“I’m Lilly Constable. Did you fly?”
He looked at me keenly for a moment, and then the grin widened. “Not the way I think you mean. But this would be a great place for it, wouldn’t it? I flew in on Delta from Boston last night. I wish it had been the other way.”
“I think people used to,” I said, wondering if there was any way I could stop my tongue. “Sometimes I think they still can.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Jon Lowell said. “So do you live here, or visit, or what?”
“My folks have a house just down there on the cove. Edgewater. I’ve been coming here all my life.”
“Lucky you. We’ve rented a place down near that big bridge. My folks are looking for a summer place up here. I’ve been to the shore around Boston—Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket—but I’ve never been to Maine. I was afraid it was really going to be the sticks.”
“Sometimes it is,” I said, unable to look away from him. “There’s a bigger colony, Retreat, up the road a little, but Carter’s Cove doesn’t usually have many people. I’ve never met anybody who rented a house.”
“And I’ve never met anybody who could fly.”
Without speaking, we turned and walked together down the path toward the beach. We did not touch, of course, but, looking down at the path, I saw that our shadows did.
W
hen Jon Lowell and I came out onto our beach, I saw that my mother and father were sitting in the two Adirondack chairs that were always set alone under the huge pine that guarded the cliff down to the shore. Mostly people sat in the cluster of little chairs and tables under the shade of the big firs down where the seawall leveled out, with lunches or lemonade or evening drinks. But when they were alone, my parents always went to the Adirondacks. I liked them, too. Sitting in one gave you the feeling that you were surveying your own domain, both monarch and chatelaine of it.
They were sipping drinks and talking, their heads turned toward one another. When we started up the path to our cliff, my mother saw us and stopped talking. She lifted her hand to shade her eyes against the brilliant dazzle of the reach. The wind had blown the strange, radiant fog out to sea and the water was the tender, faultless blue of an early June flat “ca’am,” as Clara would have put it. Here and there little patches of dimpled water broke the surface as the wind eddied and dropped. The sun had moved just far enough west so that anyone or anything to the east was lost in diamonds. Mother shook her head slightly, as if to clear it, and said, “Well, hello. Where have you been?”
She was looking at Jon Lowell.
“Up there,” Jon said hesitantly, gesturing up at the high cliff top we had just left.
My mother ran her hand over her eyes and squinted back at us.
“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling. “For a minute you looked like somebody we know, or have seen Lilly with. I’m Elizabeth Constable, Lilly’s mother, and you must think I’m a stark raving lunatic.”
Jon looked at her, taking in the sunglasses that held the copper-streaked hair off her face, the stormy eyes, the perfect, carved medieval features. She wore one of the striped French jerseys she liked, and fresh white pants, and her feet were bare. She looked spectacular, stunning. I thought what it must be like to be seeing her for the first time, as Jon was, and a lick of the same hatred I had felt for Peaches Davenport seared my stomach and then calmed. You might as well hate a rainbow, or a new moon.
“No ma’am,” Jon said, smiling his chipped smile. “I sure don’t think that.”
“Mama and Daddy, this is Jonathan Lowell. Jon,” I said. “He was up on Mr. Forshee’s cliff when I went up there. He and his folks have just gotten here from—where did you say?” I asked, looking at him. He grinned and my stomach prickled.
“It has to be Boston,” my father said, smiling and offering his hand to Jon. “Lowell, I mean. I’m George Constable, the father of this”—he looked at me and lifted his hands and smiled again—“I was going to say young lady.”
Jon shook his hand gravely and said, “No, sir, actually we’re from western New York, a little town called Rockville. My father has some quarries there, and I guess the Lowells have pretty much always lived around there. My grandfather and great-grandfather had the quarries before we did.”
I dropped down on the cool grass beside my father’s chair and he gestured for Jon to sit, too. Jon did, a coil of bony grace. His tanned, scarred knees and big, muscular hands looked almost dangerous in the deep shade of the pine.
“So how did you find your way down east?” my mother inquired. “And particularly to Carter’s Cove? Almost nobody ever comes looking for us.”
“Well, we’ve spent summers all around New England, but never in Maine, and my mother was tired of the crowds on Nantucket and the Vineyard. Dad met Canon Davenport at some Episcopal conference in New York several years ago, and they kept in touch, and the canon called this winter and said he knew of a house for rent in the same little summer place where they went. So we ended up renting it, and we just got in last night.”
“Oh, you must mean the old Poston place,” my mother said. “I’m so glad there are finally people in it. Old Mrs. Poston never came back after her husband died, and her children are all on the West Coast and never get here. I’ve always thought it was a wonderful old house.”
“With the emphasis on old,” my father said. “I don’t think anything’s been done to it since right after the Korean War. Are you falling through floors and swatting mosquitoes all night?”
“No, sir, just a few sort of big spiders. One got into the bathtub with my mother last night. My dad said she walked on water getting out.”
“Bet it was a wolf spider,” I said. “There’s lots of them around here. They won’t hurt you.”
“They won’t have to,” Jon said. “You’d die of a heart attack before they ever touched you.”
We all laughed, and Jon said, “Speaking of my folks, I ought to go home. I told my mother I’d just be gone an hour or so and it’s been—lots longer than that.” He looked at me with a small smile. I felt myself flushing, and knew that the unbecoming fuchsia red was staining my face and chest.
“I sort of thought we might take the Beetle Cat over to Sunderson’s and see the ospreys,” I said, not looking at him. “Nobody else wanted to go, and you can see the babies by now.”
“Oh, gosh, I’d like that,” Jon Lowell said. “I’ve seen ospreys from way off, but they don’t hang around the beaches we go to. They’re beautiful.”
“Yes, they are,” my father said softly. I knew that of all the birds in this water world of ours, he loved the ospreys best. There had been a young eagle around for a couple of summers, a heart-stopping sight, but the ospreys were at the core of my father’s heart.
“Real family birds,” he would say. “They’ll die defending their young, but they don’t go after anything but fish. And they’ll keep coming back to the same nest year after year, until something destroys it. The ospreys on Sunderson’s were there for years until a bunch of the local boys shot up their nest. They’ve never come back until this summer. That’s why everybody is so anxious to see them and the babies.”
“Who would do that?” Jon said, real shock in his blue eyes.
“We don’t know. The police never found out, if they even tried, and none of the Mainers ever said, at least not to us summer folks.”
“And nobody ever was . . . punished for that?”
“I didn’t say that,” my father said. “Seth and Clara Anderson, the couple who’ve helped our family out since forever, just said ‘We look after our own,’ so I gather they’ve been called to account one way or another.”
“Are you a sailor, Jon?” my mother asked.
“No ma’am,” he said. “I’d really like to be, but I’ve been sort of involved in tennis every summer since I can remember.”
“Well,” my mother said, “why don’t you kids grab a sandwich and take poor Wilma and go over to Sunderson’s, and I’ll call the Davenports and Jon’s parents and ask them for drinks tonight. And I’ll tell them where you are, Jon. I’d love to meet our new neighbors. And they don’t have to worry about your going out with Lilly. She’s been sailing since she could toddle.”
“Will Peaches be coming?” I said, too casually.
“Of course she’s coming,” Mother said. “They’d hardly leave her alone, would they?”
“That would be too much to ask,” I said, under my voice.
“Lilly . . .” my mother began, but before she could finish I jumped up and yelled “Come on” to Jon Lowell, and we dashed into the house, grabbed a couple of wilting ham and cucumber sandwiches, liberated the frantic and joyful Wilma, and pounded down our long, weathered dock where our two boats, Jeebs’s and my stubby Beetle Cat, and the graceful old Friendship sloop that was the pride of my father’s heart, bobbed on a little freshening wind.