Safe Harbor (10 page)

She had to talk to him.

She dressed quickly, then left her bedroom for
her parents room across the hall. “I need to make a call,” she
said, ignoring the open suitcases on her mother’s bed, the piles of
clothing, linens and toiletries scattered about.

“Don’t be silly. It’s too early to call
anyone.”

“I’ve got to talk to Kip.”

“Absolutely not,” her mother said, grabbing her
wrist for emphasis. “His whole family is sleeping right now,
Shelley. You can’t call people at this hour.”

“Someone called you.”

“Dad called me. He’s my husband. It’s
different.”

“I want to talk to Kip!”

“Not now,” her mother said gruffly, forcing her
back toward the door. “Go pack. Maybe there’ll be time to call him
later.” Her mother didn’t release her arm until she was in the
hall.

Shelley took a deep breath. Her wrist hurt. Her
toe hurt where she’d cut it yesterday. Her head hurt, her heart,
her soul.

She packed chaotically, tossing articles into
the suitcase in no particular order. Her shorts. Her box of
earrings. Her beach towel. Her suntan lotion. Her dresses. Her
pillowcase. Her mascara. Her sandals—and then she pulled them out
and slipped them onto her feet. Her string bikini. Her barrettes.
The letter from her father.

She pulled that out, too, and stuffed it into
her purse.

There was still plenty of room in the suitcase.
She threw in blouses, slacks, her rain coat, her paperbacks. She
set aside the Kafka book from the library. “Mom?” she called into
the other room. “What about my library book?’

“Forget it.”

“I can’t forget it. They’ll fine me if I don’t
return it on time.”

“Shelley.” Her mother sounded so tense, so
frantic, Shelley felt guilty for bothering her about something as
trivial as a library book. “We’ll stick it in the book drop on our
way to the ferry,” her mother said.

Shelley folded her sheets, tossed them into the
suitcase and shuddered. Seeing the naked mattress forced her to
acknowledge that she was truly leaving the island, that this wasn’t
just a jaunt to “America,” that she might not be coming
back.

She concentrated on the mechanics of packing to
prevent herself from thinking about the implications of it. Her
hand mirror. Her seashell collection. Her wrap-around Indian-print
skirt. The nail enamel she’d never used because her nails never
grew long enough to polish. Her address book. Her sweat shirts. The
hinged velvet box containing her gold choker...

She lifted the box back out of the suitcase,
opened it, and fastened the necklace around her throat.

Glimpsing her reflection in the mirror, she
smothered another sob. She didn’t want to leave. She wanted
everything to stay the same—even if her father didn’t come to the
island every weekend. She wanted her life the way it had been
before this morning. She wanted to go back to yesterday, to the day
she’d spent on the beach with Kip, when he’d pressed the towel
against her injured toe, when he’d curled a lock of her hair behind
her ear.

It was nearly six o’clock. She could call him
now.

Her mother had left the master bedroom, and
Shelley noticed that the upstairs telephone had already been
unplugged and packed. She raced down the stairs and found her
mother in the kitchen, yanking canned foods and utensils out of the
cabinets and throwing them willy-nilly into cartons.

“I’m calling Kip,” Shelley said, moving to the
wall phone.

“You can call him later. There’s too much to do
right now. See those cartons? They’re full. Fold down the flaps and
carry them out to the car, okay?”

“You packed the coffee maker,” Shelley noticed
with a dismay that seemed wildly out of proportion. “I wanted a
cup.”

“I’ll buy you some coffee in Old Harbor if
we’ve got time before the first ferry. Please start loading the
cartons.”

Shelley hoisted one of the cartons off the
table and staggered outside with it. The air in the front yard was
dense with mist, the grass slick with dew. Pale pink blades of
light cut through the trees from the east, heralding the dawn of a
perfect beach day.

No. No day would ever be perfect again. Not
after this.

Setting the heavy carton down in the back of
her mother’s Volvo wagon, Shelley pressed her fisted hands to her
eyes. She didn’t want to see a gorgeous sunrise. She didn’t want to
think about the islanders asleep in their beds as the morning fog
burned away. Everyone else in the world would be awakening into a
day filled with promise. Everyone else but Shelley and her
parents.

For the next twenty minutes she lugged cartons
back and forth from the kitchen to the car. She demanded that her
mother leave room for her bicycle, and they spent ten more minutes
shifting the cartons around to open a narrow space for the bike.
Then they went back upstairs for their suitcases. Her mother tossed
some extra linens into Shelley’s suitcase, and they stormed through
the bathroom like looters on a spree, grabbing everything that
wasn’t nailed down.

By seven-fifteen, the car was packed. Shelley
wondered whether her mother was going to close the house
completely, the way she usually did on Labor Day, draping cloths
over the furniture and latching the shutters against the island’s
winter storms. She didn’t do more than lock the front and back
doors, and Shelley wished she could interpret that to mean they
would be coming back before the end of the summer.

But she couldn’t convince herself.

They drove down the quiet, winding lane toward
Old Harbor. At Shelley’s insistence her mother veered in at the
library driveway so Shelley could drop her book into the overnight
slot, and then they traveled the final blocks to the ferry
dock.

Her mother purchased tickets, paid the
transport fee for the car and handed the ignition key to one of the
ferry workers. She and Shelley stood aside as he turned the car
around and backed it onto the ferry. Viewing the mass of cartons
and bags and her bike through the rear window caused Shelley’s eyes
to fill.

She wanted to scream, curse, hit things, demand
that someone prove to her that this was just a creepy nightmare,
her punishment for having enjoyed so many sinfully passionate
dreams during the last several nights.

But she was already awake. This was real. And
when she turned, teary-eyed, to her mother, she saw that her mother
had cupped her hands to her face and was crying.

“It’s going to be all right,” Shelley said, her
voice sounding distant and totally unpersuasive to
herself.

“Of course it is,” her mother responded,
sounding just as false.

Shelley glanced at the pay phone near the ferry
office. Maybe she could call Kip now.

But she couldn’t leave her mother. The woman
was falling apart, weeping shamelessly, right there in front of the
ferry workers and the other passengers standing in line to board
the boat.

You’re growing
up
, her father had written to Shelley. And
suddenly she felt terribly old.

She put her arm around her mother’s quaking
shoulders. Pulling the ferry tickets from her mother’s clenched
hand, Shelley handed them to the ticket taker and led her mother
across the paved dock to the boat. She guided her mother upstairs
to the passenger deck and they took seats on a bench. Her mother
hid her face against Shelley’s shoulder and sobbed.

Shelley remained
composed. Someone had to be an adult, and clearly it wasn’t going
to be her mother.
You’re growing
up
, she told herself.
You’re coming of age
.

Sunlight spread across the surface of the water
in the harbor, splintering on the tips of the waves. Below her the
ferry’s engine rumbled and churned. The boat slid slowly,
inexorably out of its slip and the island receded, retreated,
vanished from sight.

Her mother fell still, her head heavy on
Shelley’s shoulder. Shelley continued to stare at the water,
ignoring the mews of the seagulls circling overhead, the chatter of
passengers sharing the bench with them, the lulling motions of the
ferry as it moved through the calm waters of the sound, the shouted
greetings of the crew of a trawler passing them in its journey
south.

She simply stared, seeing nothing, refusing to
think about the fate that awaited her on the mainland. Except for
one thing: she would call Kip. The minute they got home, the very
instant they entered the house, she would call him.

That was the only part of her future she cared
about, the only part she could look forward to, the only part still
within her control. She promised herself that she would call him.
She clung to that promise, embraced it, depended on it to keep her
sane and steady through the long trip home.

It was a promise she would not keep.

PART TWO

KIP

Chapter Five

Kip leaned against the railing, watching the
slate-gray water churn and foam below him as the ferry cut across
the wind-whipped sound to the island. The sky was the same
malevolent gray color as the sea, the clouds low and oppressive.
Although it was only the second week in September, the wind was
wintry, slicing through his sweater and shirt and sending a chill
deep into him.

He wondered when he had last closed his
eyes.

He supposed he must have blinked once in a
while during the past thirteen months. If he hadn’t he would have
gone blind. Probably he closed his eyes when he slept, too,
although sleep had been his nemesis for a long time. He fought it,
resisted it, wrestled with it; only after a furious nightly battle
did he surrender to it, at which point his eyelids slid shut and he
saw Amanda.

She was permanently imprinted on the insides of
his lids, permanently branded into the blackest part of his soul.
If he focused only on what existed outside himself, on the cold
metal railing around which his hands were curled, on the persistent
rocking of the ferry, on the thrumming of the engine, the uniform
gray of water and sky, the gulls hovering and swooping for fish
just a few feet from the boat, he could fend her off. For a while,
at least.

When he closed his eyes and saw her, she
invariably appeared in one of three incarnations. In the first she
was alive and beautiful, her skin creamy, her light brown eyes
shining with laughter, her Cupid’s-bow lips curving naturally into
a smile. Her cheekbones were delicate, angling up and outward, and
her hair was a luscious cascade of black curls. She was waving at
him, stepping into the crosswalk to join him in Union Square, where
he had been waiting for her that warm evening.

It agonized him to see her so dynamic and
spirited and happy.

The second vision was worse, however. In it she
was lying on Geary Street, her head resting against the curb and
her body extended out into the road. Above her left eyebrow her
forehead was concave, her complexion lurid, gray and yellow and
purplish-blue. Blood trickled out of her nostrils.

The worst vision was the third one, in which
she stood in the middle of the crosswalk, frozen in place as she
gaped at the SUV racing heedlessly down Geary Street, not slowing
for the red light. Not stopping for the twenty-six-year-old woman
in the tailored white suit and green shell blouse, the nylons and
black pumps, the earrings Kip had given her for Christmas and the
ring he had given her when he’d given her his heart. Not stopping
for the woman with the wild black curls.

If only she had been heedless as well, perhaps
Kip might have been able to endure it. If only she hadn’t known, in
that split-second before the bumper of the SUV lifted her off her
feet, flung her into the air like a rag doll and sent her flying
halfway down the block, where she landed against the curb, suddenly
motionless, suddenly silent... If only she hadn’t known that what
she was witnessing when she saw the SUV was her own death bearing
down on her...

The cold wind stung his face, but he resolutely
kept his eyes open. If he didn’t, he might see her the third way,
the way she’d looked an instant before the impact, when she’d
realized what was about to happen to her.

Coming to the island was a stupid idea. He
should have thought it through, but he’d been so numb for so long
he’d forgotten how to think rationally. Now here he was, an hour
out of Pt. Judith, without a clue as to why he’d agreed to come or
what the hell he would do when he arrived or how in God’s name
spending some time on the island was going to change anything in
his crazy, meaningless life.

When his mother had flown out to San Francisco
four months ago and realized what a zombie he’d become, she’d
packed him up and brought him back to Boston. He hadn’t had the
will to argue with her, so he’d let her take charge of his life. He
could be a zombie as easily in his parents’ house in Chestnut Hill
as he could in his own San Francisco co-op.