Summer Harbor (3 page)

Armed with her yellow pad and fluorescent-hued stickies, Kiley devoted herself to the inventory. She started before Will got up, marking down each item with its description, location, and whether it was to be saved or sold. Her mother had been told by the realtor that the house would sell for a lot more if it contained the cottage-style furniture that had been part of its decor since the beginning.

Part of the charm of their summer retreat was the simplicity of the furnishings. Painted pine tables, three-drawer chests, wicker and chintz, and lamps made from sea glass–filled jars. There had never been any question of replacing the chairs, or the marble-topped telephone table, or the four painted rockers on the porch. It would have been disloyal to unspoken tradition. Instead, her mother had tucked discarded pieces from their Southton home around the old cottage furniture, blending tastes and fashions with a skillful hand. Every year, they had traveled to Hawke’s Cove with some chair or bureau on top of the station wagon. A new set of dinnerware at home meant the old would come to join the other cast-off plates and cups in the old cupboard. Kiley used to think that coming to the summerhouse each year was like seeing old friends. Once inviolate in the formal living room at home, the couch became a nest in Hawke’s Cove, lounged on in sandy bathing suits, long bare legs draped over the arms as peanut butter sandwiches were consumed.

Every long-forgotten object now stood out so clearly in her mind; bursts of memory jolted her, distracting her from her task. There was the little jug in which her mother put her cereal milk so that she could get her own breakfast without waking her parents, the slight lines of crazing in the brown glaze intensely familiar. As a child, she had imagined that the erratic lines were tiny roads on which microscopic people traveled.

There was the white china dog that had belonged to her grandmother and which she was allowed only to look at, never to touch. Even picking it up now felt like the action of a disobedient child. Kiley laughed. No wonder they wouldn’t let her play with it; it was Staffordshire. That would go home. Kiley wrote “keep” on a fluorescent orange stickie and stuck it under the sitting dog’s behind.

The front sitting room was now festooned with yellow and orange tags. The framed navigational map was tagged yellow, for “stays with house,” and the watercolor of a lighthouse, painted by a good friend from the yacht club, was flagged orange: “bring it home.” Looking around the large sunny room, Kiley realized that more things were tagged orange than yellow, and she sighed. Maybe she’d have to come back to this room before they left and revisit her decisions.

Despite all the years of sending used things to Hawke’s Cove, her parents’ Southton house was chockablock full of stuff. Where would they put all of these formerly banished items? And what would happen in a few years, when they would inevitably have to give up the big house? Kiley saw herself going over all these same items again, and, ultimately, marking them for sale. Why not just do it now and be done with it? How much of this stuff did she want around, reminding her of how her life had moved so easily away from the life she’d expected? Could keeping that silly watercolor change what it stood for? Like people known in only one context, could its sentimental meaning withstand the change of venue? Or would it just fade from notice hanging in the hall in her house, powerless to remind her of playing endless games of hearts with Mack and Grainger on rainy afternoons?

They used to make up stories about the nonexistent lighthouse. Princesses trapped by evil knights, that’s what she always wanted to tell. The boys liked to imagine spies lurking around, planning mayhem in the town. They’d get so detailed about their fantasies that they all half expected to see the lighthouse standing guard on the bluff, instead of the Coast Guard’s beacon light at the end of the jetty at the harbor, its red light flashing every eight seconds to warn sailors of the entrance.

Sentiment was ineluctable. She was deluding herself in thinking she could hold it at bay with orange and yellow stickies; they only revealed how deep her attachment was.

Outside, the gulls complained. Kiley set down her pad and pencil and pushed open the double screen doors. It was July warm, just right for an afternoon at the beach; she should wake Will up before he slept this perfect day away. She looked at her watch: it wasn’t yet noon, let him sleep, the beach could wait.

Kiley sat down in the rocker nearest the door and propped her ankles on the porch railing. The complaining gulls swooped at each other and moved out over the water. A group of cyclists passed along the bluff, then a clot of walkers. It was so easy to imagine it was Mack and Grainger she was waiting for.

She hadn’t seen Grainger Egan yet. She knew he was in town, that he’d returned from a ten-year stint aboard ocean-going vessels. A couple of years ago, her father had mentioned conversationally that Grainger’d left the Merchant Marine before his twenty years would have guaranteed him a pension and now was devoting himself to boat repair. Merriwell had been oblivious to the pinking of her cheeks at the sound of Grainger’s name.

It seemed that Grainger had come back to the life he had left, and Kiley wondered why. Where Mack had always said he’d come back to Hawke’s Cove to settle down after he’d seen the world, Grainger had declared that nothing could persuade him to spend one minute longer in this place than he had to.

Of course, that was when his father was still alive.

Kiley set the rocker into slow motion, the thoughts of Grainger and Mack and of herself as a young girl a little disorienting. Here she was, where they had rocked so often, and so vigorously that her mother would yell at them; there was where Mack fell off the railing and skinned his arm. Over there, deep in the privet hedge, Grainger had found a bird’s nest with eggs in it. Those moments felt dreamed, not real. Had the three of them ever been so easy and free? The balance of their friendship so perfect? If only it were possible to edit out the summer of 1984, to know only those better memories of other summers, then maybe they could recover the equilibrium of their friendship.

The motion of her rocker increased as her thoughts wandered. Maybe she should see Grainger. Just call him, say, “Hi, how are you. Yeah, it’s been a long time, yeah, bygones are bygones.”

Bullshit. Kiley put out a foot and stopped the motion of her chair. It didn’t take a psychologist to figure out that she’d be the last person in the world he’d want to see. How could they make small talk when they’d never dealt with that awful night? They had never seen each other again, never talked, or even written. The image of Grainger’s face filled with an admixture of pain and anger, and the contempt with which he’d last looked at her, had kept her from ever trying.

She’d lost them both that night. Mack and Grainger.

But she did have Will.

The first time she’d seen his face, wrinkled and squalling and more precious than any other sight, Kiley knew that she’d done the right thing. Though her world was irrevocably changed, and she was no longer the girl she’d been, the mysterious hand of God had rewarded her ignorance with this gift.

Over the years, aided by this funny, charming little boy, Kiley had regained much of the youthful
joie de vivre
lost during those lonely and terrible months before Will’s birth. In reparation for her mistakes, she’d been charged with the responsibility of raising this boy to be a good man. And with one or two bumps in the road, she had. She’d made her peace with her fate.

Only now, sitting in this familiar and yet foreign place, only now did Kiley wonder if Grainger ever had found
his
peace.

Her thoughts were interrupted as Will flopped down on the other rocking chair.

“The living room looks like a confetti factory.”

“It’s going to be harder than I thought.”

“Lots of memories?”

Kiley nodded, her eyes on the horizon. A pair of motorboats passed each other, one heading into Hawke’s Cove, the other coursing for Great Harbor.

“I found this.” Will held out the photograph from 1976.

She couldn’t hide her smile at the sight of them. “Oh, my God, how cute we were! Just little kids, ten years old.” Kiley pointed at her red, white, and blue bathing suit. “It was the Bicentennial summer.”

“Who were they? The boys? Cousins?”

“We were pals. Playmates.” Kiley felt the understatement redden her cheeks. She remembered the photo being taken. Her father had snapped them with his new Instamatic camera. Merriwell had liked the boys; it was her mother who didn’t encourage the friendship. Kiley looked closely at the faces of the threesome caught on the beach. Could she see Will in either boy’s face? Grainger was laughing in this picture, but he would soon turn into a solemn little boy. “Poor Grainger.”

“What do you mean?”

“This was taken just before his mother disappeared.”

“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?”

“She left. Ran away.” Will was so hungry for details of her youth she knew he wouldn’t be satisfied with a skimmed version. “Her husband was abusive. He was awful. Although he never admitted it, I think Grainger was afraid of Rollie Egan.”

“And she left the kid with him?”

“Grainger pretty much lived with the MacKenzies. Mack’s parents.”

“Mack and Grainger then, they were good friends?”

“Best friends.”

“Of yours, I mean.”

Kiley handed Will back the photograph. One word, and it all would come out. All she had to say was yes. She fell back on her first description. “We were playmates. Pals.”

He handed back the photograph. “I’ve got some postcards to mail. Okay if I go now?”

Kiley held the picture in her lap but did not look at it. “Sure. We’ll go to the beach when you get back.”

“Mom?” Will was standing now, hitching up his cargo-style shorts.

“Yeah?”

“What did he do? Grainger, after his mother left?”

“At first he just sort of hid from everyone.”

“Did you go get him?”

“We tried.”

“And?”

Kiley hadn’t thought of that day in years, but now she remembered with astounding clarity that day when she and Mack hiked the four miles to the old Sunderland house the Egans rented. Grainger’s family moved from place to place, and he was living that year on remote French’s Cove.

The house lay below the slope of the weedy pasture they had reached by cutting through the woods, out of view except for the black-capped white chimney. It was so desperately poor. That their friend could live in this appalling squalor was something neither one could articulate. Looking down on the house from the top of the pasture, Mack and Kiley linked arms. In a coastal community, it wasn’t unusual to see houses with cluttered yards: Boston Whaler hulls upside-down, lobster pots stacked like children’s blocks, and their accompanying markers like bulbous lances beside them. That was to be expected of a working fisherman’s yard. But here were the random leavings of an unsuccessful life. Rusted boat trailers and piles of tangled fishnet, empty cable reels and junk cars with open hoods, among which the house squatted like a derelict in a doorway. Bare earth surrounded the place; no garden or even pretty weeds grew near it. A crippled-looking television antenna canted off to one side of the chimney. The front door gaped open, no screen door to protect the house from flies. The screenless windows were also wide open, like blind eyes peering out over the ruin of the yard. A tattered curtain fluttered out of one of them. The house looked abandoned, not just by Mrs. Egan, but by humanity.

They both agreed that Grainger would die if he knew they had seen where he lived.

Without another word, the pair ducked back into the woods, between them a pledge never to speak of this. It was the first secret Kiley remembered ever having between them, their first secret excluding Grainger.

“We tried to find him, but we couldn’t. He showed up on his own a day later.”

“His mother never came back?”

“No.”

Will hitched his shorts again and stared out at the seascape before them, at the utter peacefulness of the softly undulating water and the silent movement of sailboats on the horizon. “That sucks.”

After Will had gone to mail his postcards, Kiley remained on the porch, rocking slowly, thinking back to their promising with linked pinkies to never let Grainger know they’d seen the squalor he lived in. Grainger was so proud. Mack so compassionate. Even at ten, Mack understood that Grainger would disappear from their lives if he knew they pitied him. But they loved him too, and never once thought of him as less equal. In fact, as his adversity provided him with a maturity beyond their years, they turned to him as their nominal leader.

Winter after winter, from the summer she first met the boys, Kiley marked time from September to June. Waiting for that day when school ended and the station wagon was packed, and Hawke’s Cove was not six months away but only a couple of hundred miles, then just hours, finally, minutes.

The tempo of her rocking increased again as that old sense of anticipation arose. Kiley hadn’t let it surface the whole time she and Will prepared to come back. She’d forbidden it heart-space on the long drive. But now, sitting on the front porch, the latent surge of excitement and expectation built up, part nostalgia, part hope.