Returning to Shore (5 page)

“It's fine,” she said. “It's exactly what I eat.”

He smiled a little. “I can't take any credit for that, I'm afraid. Your mother sent me a list of your food requirements. I just made a trip in to the supermarket and bought what she listed: orange juice without pulp, two percent milk, French vanilla frozen yogurt, veggie burgers, green seedless grapes.” He pointed at a large fruit bowl. There were about eight bunches of grapes; they spilled out of the bowl.

“That's a lot of grapes,” said Clare, feeling unpleasantly like a small child.

“She said you liked grapes.” He made himself a cup of coffee and came and sat across from her at
the counter. He stirred his coffee, took small sips. He looked like he had something to say to her, but he didn't know how to begin. When she finished her cereal she carried the bowl over to the sink.

“Want me to put this in the dishwasher?” she asked.

“I haven't used the dishwasher yet,” he said.

“You haven't?”

“Just one of me. Easy enough to wash what I use. But I suppose with you here now it might be worth trying.”

Clare opened the dishwasher door and was about to put her bowl in, when she realized it was full of paper products.

“I've been using it as storage,” Richard said. “Let's just pile stuff up here and I'll figure out another place for it later.” He started to hand things up to Clare, and she set them on the counter. They stood close beside each other, but only once did his arm brush against hers. They worked efficiently, as if the passing of paper towel rolls and boxes of paper napkins from his hands to hers had been choreographed in advance. Clare noticed how similar their hands were—the same shape, the same curve of their thumbs. Vera had long slender
hands, an octave and a note, but Clare's hands were squarer, her fingers shorter—she could barely reach an octave. Even though her father's hands were bigger and his nails were rough, her hands had been formed from the same mold. It had never occurred to Clare before that hands could reveal a connection between them, that hands could matter that way.

Soon the dishwasher was empty, and the counter was stacked with rolls of paper towels, paper napkins, paper plates. Richard reached for the cereal bowl and set it in on the top rack of the dishwasher.

“Why don't we give this thing a test run now,” he said. “It worked for the last tenants, but it's been a while.” He put in detergent and started up the dishwasher. There wasn't anything to watch, but they both stood there, looking at the dishwasher, listening to the water rushing in, invisible behind the white door. Clare wondered if they would continue standing there for the entire cycle.

“I guess it works,” said Richard, finally. “I'm going out now to finish my rounds of the island. Do you want to come with me?”

“I guess so,” said Clare.

“Your mother instructed me to remind you to put on sunscreen,” said Richard. “If you don't have any, there's some in the bathroom.”

“Oh, I have plenty,” said Clare. “She packed me enough to last the next three summers.”

“I'm not surprised,” said Richard. He smiled, but only slightly.

“Are we going to be going swimming?” asked Clare.

“It's low tide now,” said Richard. He sounded as if she should know this. “No swimming. But if you want to go this afternoon, I could show you where people swim.”

Clare wondered if that meant he expected her to go off swimming on her own. She couldn't imagine Vera would be very happy about that.

“OK,” she said.

There was a path that ran from the house down to the marsh. Clare followed behind Richard. It wasn't a path anyone had designed, it was just a sandy, worn path. At Tertio's house in the country—now Vera's house, too—all the paths were part of the landscaping design. They were carpeted with wood chips, freshly
applied on a regular basis by the landscaping service. Nobody ever made a path just by going someplace.

***

The tide was so low it was hard to imagine the sea had ever covered what now looked like part of the land. You could tell where it had been, though, because it had left behind a band of seaweed when it had receded. Richard walked quickly, and seemed to expect Clare to keep up. Far out in the marsh Clare saw the arched wooden bridge. It seemed to connect nothing with nothing. When they came around the bay side of the island Richard slowed his pace. There were boats at anchor, lying on their sides. They looked sad somehow, like beached whales dying on the flats. Richard was scanning the beach in both directions.

“Are you looking for something?” Clare asked.

Richard stopped and turned to her. For a moment she wondered if he had forgotten she was there.

“Terrapin tracks,” he said. “This is the season when the females come up on shore to deposit their eggs. I'm trying to locate the nests, and put a cage over each one to protect it from predators: foxes, skunks, coyotes.”

Clare kept her eyes on him while he spoke and tried to think of a question to show she was interested. “Do you catch the turtle in the cage?” she asked.

Richard smiled, as if he'd never thought of this possibility before. “No, the turtle just lays her eggs, buries them in the sand. Then she goes back to the sea. The eggs are on their own.”

“If the eggs are buried, how do the foxes know they're there?” asked Clare.

“They've got great noses,” said Richard, and he tapped his own, which was long and sunburned.

“What happens when the eggs hatch? How does the mother turtle get back to the babies if they're all in a cage?”

“Good question,” said Richard, and Clare brightened. It wasn't like she was really interested in the turtles—after all, they were just turtles—but she wanted Richard to feel she was interested. She wanted him to talk with her. “Once the female terrapin has laid the eggs, she's done,” said Richard. “She returns to the bay. When the eggs hatch in September, the hatchlings have to make their way on their own up over the dune, and to the marsh.”

“And the male turtles?”

“They never come up on shore at all. Their part is done once they've fertilized the eggs.”

If she knew him better, Clare might have asked if that's the way it had been with him. But as soon as she thought of it for a minute, she knew, she would not have been able to say anything. It was too weird. God—just thinking about it now made her so embarrassed she could not even look at him. But if he had made any connection in his mind to the subject, he didn't let on. He had started walking again. There were big houses along the dunes. They were set up high for the view, and had long, wooden stairways down to the beach.

Richard noticed her looking at them. “People build those monstrosities too close to the edge of the dune, and then—then,” he repeated, his voice rising, “they want to build a revetment.”

“What's a revetment?”

“A wall to keep the dune from eroding. The problem is, it destroys the natural geologic progression; dunes were meant to erode. If you put up a wall, the sea steals the sand from somewhere else.” Richard shook his head. “Those people. They want to put in lawns.
Terrapins can't nest in lawns. They drive their SUVs at top speed along the dirt roads. They don't see a terrapin, let alone a hatchling.” He took in his breath and let it out slowly, as if he had practiced this breathing technique. “You see what I'm up against, Clare?” he asked. He sounded resigned now, tired out.

“I guess,” said Clare, but he wasn't really looking at her. He was already walking fast down the beach. He was looking intently at the sand in front of him. Once again, he seemed to have forgotten she was there.

They had gone three-quarters of the way around the island, past the houses on the dunes, when they came across the tracks. They didn't look like much of anything to Clare—she would have walked right over them if she was on her own, but Richard spotted them from a distance and sprinted towards them.

“Here we are,” he said. He was excited now. He bent close to the ground, like a dog sniffing a trail, and scrambled up towards the dunes. Then he sank to his knees, dug around a bit, and sat back.

“Too late,” he said evenly.

Clare came up beside him.

“This is what a predated nest looks like,” he said.
There wasn't much to see. A few scraps of leathery-looking shell.

“That's what happens when you go away,” said Richard. He stood up slowly, brushing the sand from his hands. “With a species so fragile like this, every nest counts, every egg counts.”

Clare could feel her eyes filling up, and she turned her face away from him. He'd probably think it was the turtles she was crying about.

But he didn't. “I'm sorry, Clare,” he said. “I'm not blaming you. I'm blaming myself.”

She turned to him quickly. She didn't care if he saw her crying now. “Maybe you shouldn't have left them, then,” she said.

He stared at her.

She'd blurted that out quickly and there was no going back now. “Just so you know,” she said, “I didn't want to come here this summer. It was you who asked for me to come.”

She started running back to the house. Either she was faster than he was, or he didn't try to catch up with her. She ran into the kitchen and up to the room which was her room and closed the door behind her.

It was half an hour later when she heard him coming upstairs. He knocked on the door.

“You can come in,” she said. She was sitting on the bed, leaning against the wall. Her knees were bent and she had her arms wrapped around her legs, holding them close against her body.

He stood in the doorway. “I'm not very good about talking about things, Clare,” he said. “Never have been. But I guess as much as I don't like talking, I've got to say something now.”

He leaned sideways against the doorframe, ran his finger up along the grain of the wood. “Looks to me
that we've got two choices here. Either we can throw in the towel and call up your Aunt Eva and you spend the rest of the time with her. Or we hang on and see if we can get anything going for us.”

Clare didn't say anything right away. She looked down at the quilt, studied the pattern.

“I'd say either way was OK with me,” said Richard, “but that wouldn't be the truth, Clare. The truth is that I'd rather you said you wanted to hang on, because that's what I'd like to do. Give us some more time. See what we can do? Or maybe I should put that differently.” He paused for a moment, cleared his throat. “What I should say is, give me more time, see what I can do. What you're doing is—well—OK.”

“All right, then,” said Clare.

“All right, what?”

“Number two,” she said, and she looked up at him now.

Richard stood straight up. “That's good,” he said. “Thank you, Clare.” And he went back downstairs.

In the afternoon Richard said they would go kayaking, so Clare went upstairs to put on her bathing suit. She'd brought three, and none of them seemed right. She had to stand on the bed to see all of her in the mirror over the bureau. Finally she chose the one that covered her the most, and pulled a big T-shirt over it.

Down at the beach there was a pile of small boats along the side of low dunes.

“Have you kayaked before?” Richard asked.

Clare shook her head. “Then I suppose we should take a little time to get you used to it before we head out netting.”

Richard hoisted a small boat up and carried it down to the water. It was the smallest and ugliest boat in the group. It was a dull orange, and looked as if it been battered by rocks. “This is my baby,” said Richard, and he gave it a tap with his foot.

The words jolted Clare. “This is my baby,” Vera had said, the first time she introduced Tertio to Clare.

The other boat Richard carried down, to Clare's relief, was a larger, newer one. It was bright red. When he set it on the sand next to his boat, his boat looked even smaller and rougher.

“I got this one for you to use,” said Richard. He said this casually, but looked back at her in a way that made Clare guess he was hoping she would be pleased. She wasn't sure if he had borrowed the boat for her to use, or if he had actually bought it. Either way, he had thought about her, planned something for her visit.

“Thank you. I love red,” was all she could manage to say.

He had outfitted her with a life jacket. Fortunately it wasn't one of those awful orange kinds that you wore like a sausage around your neck, but a vest with a zipper
up the front. She stood by the kayak now, holding the paddle he had given her.

“Tell me what kind of experience you've had with boats,” said Richard.

“I use the rowboat on Tertio's pond,” said Clare. Richard's eyebrows rose before she could catch her slip.

“Mom's new husband's pond,” she corrected herself.

Richard was smiling now.

“His name is actually Ian,” said Clare.

“I know,” said Richard. “So he has a pond, does he?”

“Only a very small pond,” said Clare. She didn't want him to have the wrong impression.

“A swimming hole?” asked Richard.

“Well, it's kind of mucky, so you don't swim in it. You swim in the pool.” She had made things, she realized, even worse.

But Richard just smiled. “Don't worry, Clare, it's fine with me that your mother married a millionaire. I'm happy for her. I want her to be comfortable.”

A millionaire? That sounded so … Well, perhaps he was. That wasn't what was wrong with Tertio,
though. It was his personality. It was the way he was. Sure, he had a pond, but did he ever do more than glance at it in the distance? All he ever did outside was swim a few laps in the pool on weekends, then lie on his lounge chair and make calls to his office, while Vera lay on her lounge chair beside him, reading the Sunday paper. If Clare said, “I'm going off to explore the pond,” Vera would look up from her page and say, “That's nice dear.” Once, just to test her, Clare had said, “I'm going off to drown in the pond.” Tertio had just grunted, but Vera never missed anything.