Snapshots (7 page)

By the time we had to leave for college, my pain had made me even more determined to lay claim to my own future, separate and distinct from Rick's. Once I was at Furman, I wouldn't have to encounter Rick on any sort of regular basis. Or think about him. Or anything.

2004

T
he scent of the sea washed over Rick like a balm as soon as he crossed the new, high-tech Cooper River Bridge connecting the city of Charleston with Mount Pleasant before heading north on U.S. 17, the coastal highway. The previous night, he had closed the Kendall house and tossed everything he needed into the trunk of his sedan before heading out of town.

Along the way, the road was dotted with open-air stands where Gullah women sold the beautiful braided baskets that they wove from sweetgrass gathered in the marsh. Now, in early March, the tawny marsh grass rippling into the distance was greening again after the brief Low Country winter, and the air held the promise of summer, of soft breezes and warm sunshine and pure bliss.

Homecoming. That was what this was, and Rick felt an inexplicable catch in his throat. When he'd moved to Miami, he'd settled in and learned to converse passably well in Spanish. He'd drawn energy from the throbbing Latin beat of the city, flourished under the relentless sun beating down on blindingly white buildings. But the gentle Carolina Low Country was where he belonged, where he was born and bred. The enchantment of the place never failed to infuse him with hope.

By the time he crossed the antiquated bridge to Tappany Island, Rick was warbling the beer-bottle song at the top of his lungs. It was silly, but he and his brother had always started singing as soon as they left Columbia, starting at a thousand bottles and working their way down.

This had the effect of driving their mother crazy. “I'm getting pure-tee annoyed,” she'd say in her flat Alabama accent, flicking on her blinker to pass a truck on I-26. Or, “Can't you boys sing something else? Like Boy Scout songs?”

The year he and Martine and Trista had competed in the high-school talent show, they'd practiced their favorite song all the way from St. Matthews to the Tappany Island causeway. It was a hit by Concrete Blonde called “Joey,” and by the time they reached the island, Lilah Rose had declared that she never wanted to hear one word of that song again as long as she lived.

Today Rick stopped singing on the causeway and inhaled deeply of the fresh salt air. The bridge over the Intracoastal, one of the few remaining that swiveled sideways, closed after letting a tall-masted sailboat pass, and ahead he saw the ocean, reduced to a few glimmery shreds of blue interspersed with rows of beach cottages. For a moment he caught a glimpse of the neighboring island, a ragged spit of land that was home to a herd of sturdy marsh ponies, wild and untamable.

The ramshackle old white-painted building that housed Jeter's Market hadn't changed much over the years; a Nehi sign still swung from a bracket over the door, and a few drab guinea hens pecked in the dirt in the side yard.

“Don't I know you?” asked the man at the counter, shoving a frayed toothpick to the other side of his mouth. He wore a tattered baseball cap with a Panthers logo back to front and was reading the latest issue of the
Island Gazette.

Rick grabbed a six-pack out of the cooler and shoved a twenty across the scarred counter. “Rick McCulloch,” he said. “Been here a lot. Aren't you Jolly?”

“Yup, sure am. Jolly Jeter. I remember you coming in here all the time.”

“How's business?” Rick asked.

“Can't complain. PawPaw passed on, Dad's retired and me and my brother Goz took over the store.” It seemed like only a few summers ago that Jolly had been a little kid scrambling around after a pack of nondescript dogs in the dust outside.

Jolly jerked his head back over his shoulder toward a shed in the backyard. “Goz makes the barbecue.”

“Yeah, it's the best damn barbecue in the South,” Rick said. “If you've got some handy, I'll take a quart. A pack of boiled peanuts, too.” It reassured him that a jar of Gummi Bears stood on the counter exactly where old Mr. Jeter used to keep it.

As Rick popped the top on a beer can, Jolly disappeared into the back room and returned with a chilled container packed to the brim with pulled pork. The large pot steaming on a hot plate in back of the counter yielded a ladleful of peanuts that he sealed into a plastic bag.

“Thanks, catch you later,” Rick told Jolly, who gave him a casual salute.

In the car, Rick nestled the beer can between the barbecue and peanuts on the seat beside him. He took a sip now and then, feeling a modicum of guilt about drinking and driving as he headed toward Sweetwater Cottage. He slowed when he passed the oceanfront park where he'd learned to fly a kite, and in a few minutes the tower surmounting the gabled roof of Sweetwater Cottage hove into view above the trees.

Dubbed the Lighthouse by Rick and his brother, the tower had always been Rick's favorite spot as a kid, and he'd spent long hours hunkered down on the widow's walk, pretending he was a pirate on the lookout for ships. Later, he and Martine and Trista had sat out there and smoked their first forbidden cigarettes unbeknownst to Lilah Rose or the ever-vigilant Queen.

The rutted oyster-shell driveway leading to the cottage curved through a paltry stand of pine trees and a lush population of palmettos with rough, wind-bent trunks. When the car emerged from the woods and underbrush, he was, as always, heartened by the vista of white dunes fringed with sea oats and the blue, blue ocean beyond.

He parked beneath the massive and twisted live oak that had sheltered each of his cars in turn. The old place needed some work, he realized as he unfolded himself from the front seat and inhaled a long breath of the soft sea air. Several shutters hung loose, and the windowpanes were cloudy with salt spray, but Sweetwater Cottage was home. Comfortable. Easy. A place to renew his soul.

Which he started by hooking the frayed Pawleys Island rope hammock between two porch posts and sagging gratefully into it, after which he feasted greedily on barbecue and boiled peanuts and drank the beers one by one until he fell asleep.

The cold wind from the ocean nearly tipped Rick out of the hammock at approximately three in the morning. March was not a time that anyone would want to camp out in the Low Country unless well shrouded in blankets or a sleeping bag, and Rick had neither. Woozily, he flexed his stiff joints and stumbled inside, but he didn't bother to climb the stairs to the tower room. He crashed on the bed in the guest room Trista usually stayed in, off the hall beside the dining room and the kitchen. No sheets on the bed, so he upped the thermostat and wrapped himself in the bedspread, where he stayed cocooned until well into the morning.

He woke up to rain rattling against the windows and made his bleary-eyed way through the living room to the porch on the front of the house. Wind-driven waves surged on the shore, hesitated in swirls of silvery foam, then drew back to join the pewter sea. The palmetto trees near the path shivered with a water glaze, and whether it was rain or sea spray, Rick couldn't tell.

You took your chances here in the spring. One day could be mild, the sun shedding its golden benevolence on the shore, the cries of small seabirds punctuating the gentle rise and fall of the waves. Or it could be like this, cold and forbidding, damp and even hostile. As a veil of fog began to advance across the water, he felt a chill and went back inside. He should call his brother, tell him he was at the cottage and to plan for necessary repairs. Their parents had left Hal in charge when they left for China.

But right now, Rick didn't want to talk to Hal. His gaze fell across the bookcase in the living room, where, many years ago, his mother had put a framed snapshot of him with Trista and Martine.

Lilah Rose had taken their picture just before they'd climbed into their father's old aluminum johnboat to go fishing in the marsh. Trista and Martine sat on the dock, arms around each other and Trista holding a bamboo pole. He crouched behind them with a hand placed casually on each of their shoulders. Martine was blowing a huge pink bubble from gum they'd bought that morning at Jeter's. Trista was laughing up at him, and he was crossing his eyes. Their hair was still slightly green from dyeing it with food coloring for St. Patrick's Day a month or so earlier, much to the disgust of both sets of parents.

Rick couldn't have said why his mother had chosen that particular picture to frame. It certainly wasn't that good of any of them. It captured the immediacy of the moment, and that was about all. Maybe that was enough.

Suddenly, he wanted to talk to Trista. Not that he had anything in particular to say to her. He just wanted to hear her voice. He dialed her on his cell phone's speed dial, waiting impatiently for her to answer.

“Hello?” She sounded groggy with sleep.

“Tris—did I wake you?” It was ten o'clock in the morning, and Trista wasn't usually a late sleeper.

“I worked late last night at the station, anchoring news coverage of a big tanker-truck snafu on I-20. What's up? Is everything okay?”

“Uh—” He imagined her smiling as she rolled over in bed and propped herself up on a pillow.

“Dumb question,” she said, sounding more awake. “Let's start over. What's new with you? Or is that another dumb question?”

“I'm at Sweetwater Cottage. Seems strange that I'm the only one here.”

“Is Martine…?”

“Has she told you the divorce is final?” He wondered how much time would elapse before saying the words didn't hurt anymore.

“I haven't talked with her for a couple of weeks,” Trista said slowly, as if trying to gauge his reaction.

“She's still living with Steve,” he said.

“I'm sorry, Rick.”

“Yeah, well.” By sheer force of will, he adopted a matter-of-fact tone. “Shorty put me on leave from the department. He says he's giving me time to get my act together.”

A long silence ensued. “What can I do to help?” Trista asked somberly.

“Console a new bachelor by coming down here to play strip poker?” He didn't really mean it. It was just a quip to fill the silence when nothing else came to mind, and he hoped it would make her laugh. It brought an image to his mind of Trista on that one occasion so long ago when they'd made love. It had been his first time, and he was sure it had been hers, as well. For years he hadn't allowed himself to think about that.

“Very funny, Rick. With this cold front passing through, and wearing layers of clothes, it would take a while to get to the objective,” Trista said, and he heard the smile in her voice. She sounded fully awake now. “On the other hand, Easter's only a few weeks away. Maybe I could talk Lindsay and Peter into a short vacation from their kids that weekend, and we could pay you a visit.” Lindsay and Peter Tolson were college friends who had been the most frequent visitors during spring and summer vacations on the island.

Rick really didn't like the idea of Trista and the Tolsons overrunning the cottage, imposing their ideas on him. Laughing. Being cheerful. Trying to boost him out of his doldrums. “I'll give it some thought,” he said.

Trista pretended to be offended. “Well, I like that, Rick McCulloch. Besides, aren't Lindsay, Peter and I welcome anytime, strip poker or no?”

“Of course, but—”

Her tone, now that she was wide awake, became teasing. “Don't put me off. We'll be there even if I have to pay for a babysitter for Lindsay and Peter's kids myself. We'll walk on the beach and find sand dollars. We'll pig out on barbecue. We'll go crabbing.”

“How am I going to get my head together that way?” he asked in exasperation, belatedly realizing that Trista wasn't going to back off.

“We're good at jigsaw puzzles. We'll help you fit all the pieces in place,” she said soothingly.

He groaned inwardly and told himself that he never should have called her.

She was still talking. “I'm way behind on taking my vacation days. I've got some left over from last year that will expire if I don't use them soon, so I'll add them to the back end of the week.”

He groped for words that would dissuade her. He wondered if she planned to bring a guy this time. He hadn't much liked the last one, whose first name was Armistead, last name something he couldn't recall. Armistead had worn the same pair of green plaid Bermudas the whole weekend and nicknamed everybody, male and female, “Sport.”

“If you're planning to come,” and he emphasized the
if,
“let me know when.”

“We've got to find you something fun to do. It's not good to sit around getting overly introspective. Listen, how about if I supply details in a few days.”

“Sure thing,” Rick said, eyeing the liquor cabinet in the bar, which was kept fully stocked. It was a bit early to start drinking, but as one of the old sots retired from the department was fond of saying, the sun was over the yardarm somewhere.

They hung up, and Rick sauntered into the bathroom, where he eyed his beard stubble and decided not to bother shaving. He dressed before he poured the first shot of scotch, unpacked his clothes before he drank the second. By the time he downed the third shot, he didn't care about anything.

Thus ensued the next couple of weeks, during which Rick slept a lot, drank a lot and ate too little. He grew a beard. He didn't do laundry but let the clothes pile up until he wore shorts and underwear two, then three times. Often he didn't shower for days.