Safe Harbor

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "You weren't a stranger by then," he said, and immediately he wished he hadn't, because he could see where she was leading him.

  "And Miss Manners wouldn't have any problem with your making wild, passionate love all night to a stranger, either, would she?"

  When he refused to answer, she goaded him. "She wouldn't, would she?"

  He wanted her mercy; he said softly, "Obviously by then you weren't—"

  "A stranger?" Her eyes blazed, her voice rose. "Then why the hell didn't you tell me you were married? To Eden Walker! My God—to Eden Walker! I can't even begin to take this in."

  She began to pace, but there was no room for that luxury, so she stopped and laid her hands on the corners of a low dresser, probably trying to decide whether she could lift it and hurl it at him.

  He took a kind of wild comfort from the fact that she hadn't turned and walked straight out of the barn and out of his life. "It was a long time ago, Holly," he pleaded. "I was young; I was a fool."

  "And now you're not?" she cried, whirling around. "Who but a fool would make love to me when he was married to someone else?"

  "We aren't married—not in anything but name. She didn't even take my name. I had no idea if she was dead or alive. We couldn't have been more separated!"

  "Oh, where have I heard that one before?"

  "It's the truth. I know you don't want to believe a thing I say, but it's the truth."

  His mind wasn't thinking straight; he was succumbing to panic at the thought of losing her. He had expected it, dreaded it, deserved it—and yet now that it was happening, he was shutting down completely in denial.

  He went scrambling after his wits like a kid with a runaway skateboard. Trying to be scrupulously honest, he said, "Eden and I were whatever it's called when the woman takes off, never to be heard from again."

  "Oh, what, you had a tiff a few months ago and I'm supposed to believe it's over between you?"

  "Seven years, Holly! She disappeared seven years ago!"

  It slowed her down, but only just. "Seven years, seven decades, seven centuries! What difference does it make? You never divorced her!"

  "True," he agreed. "And here's my politically incorrect response: Up until I met you, I didn't know whether I loved her or not. So shoot me. I didn't know."

  "You still don't know. You haven't seen her. You still don't know! She's going to walk back into your life with an armful of cash for your parents, and you're going to fall in love all over again! I know it!"

  "You're wrong! You couldn't be more wrong!"

  He wanted to take her in his arms and reassure her, but when he took a step closer she threw her hands up in front of her as if he were a vampire bat. "No! One woman at a time, please! I've never been keen on the concept of harems."

  "Holly, for pity's sake, you're being melodramatic. Eden doesn't mean anything to me."

  "Oh? Are you willing to look me in the eye and tell me that during the whole time you were coming on to me, you had no feelings—no feelings at all—for Eden?"

  "I—" He took a deep breath and blew it out in massive frustration. "No. I can't do that."

  "Oh—damn you," she cried, equally frustrated. "You lie at all the wrong times, you know that?"

  Confused now, he said, "You wanted the truth, Holly. Do you know how hard this is for me?"

  "As a matter of fact, I do," she shot back. "You've been tight-lipped about everything from the start. It's the kind of man you are. I should have known. I did know, and yet ...."

  She closed her eyes against the tears, and when she opened them, her look was unmistakable: complete disdain. Even worse was the unconscious gesture that accompanied it. She wiped her fingertips across the cuffs of her paint-smeared shorts as if she were wiping herself clean of paint stains. Of Sam stains. Wiping herself clean of him.

  "You're right," he said, unmanned by the innocence of that gesture. "I should have told you. I have no excuse."

  He had plenty of them, but none that mattered. Bottom line, she wasn't inclined to grant him mercy, and he had no right to beg for it.

  But, for the first time in his life, beg for it he did. "I'm sorry, Holly," he whispered abjectly. "Will you forgive me?"

  She stared at him for a long, long time—trying, he thought, to see into his soul. He studied her face as he had never studied a face before, memorizing it. She was so beautiful. Her dark brows, her deep-sea-green eyes, the smudge of blue paint on her cheekbone, pink on her chin... all of it was heartbreakingly endearing. Her eyes as she gazed at him seemed fathomless. And then, just when he felt sure that she recognized the love that he had for her, she sighed, and pressed her lips tightly together, and shook her head.

  "No, Sam. I won't forgive you."

  She turned away from him and walked out.

  Chapter 24

  Holly stumbled in blind anguish down the footpath that cut through the trees between her cottage and the barn.

  It must be me. I fought with Ivy, and now I've fought with Sam. It must be me. I'm making mountains out of molehills. Sam didn't do anything. What did he do? Nothing. He didn't lie; he just didn't say. Ivy and Sam in one night, that's impossible. Something is wrong with me. It's my fault.

  What had he said exactly?

  Eden Walker is still my wife.

  Holly tried to brush away a stream of tears. How could it possibly be her fault that Eden Walker was still Sam's wife? It was his fault, that bastard, that bastard, it was his fault. She let out a moan: she so much wanted it all to be hers.

  Blindly, she staggered on. She caught a fallen branch with the toe of her sandal and went sprawling onto the mulched path. Surprised, she lay there picking off pieces of pine bark that were sticking to her right leg and arm; she was numb with shock, completely out of it. Behind her she heard a twig snap. It got her scrambling to her feet again: she had no desire to repeat the agony with him in the barn. Her barn. Her wonderful red barn. Her studio, her refuge, her art. Ruined. Ruined by a stupid, stupid man. Two stupid men.

  They tell you what they think you want to hear. They don't want to hurt you but they don't want to make hard choices, either. They want it all. Pigs, pigs, all of them. They're all alike, not to be trusted. Ever.

  She ran inside her house and locked both doors, spooked not by the fear of a bogeyman or a Koloman, but by the thought of a Steadman.

  I have to talk about this with someone. But Sam was her someone of choice. Who instead?

  Not her father, that was for sure. He knew—surely that's what the fight on the beach had been about—and he didn't care. The only choice, the obvious choice, was for Holly to confide in her mother.

  She knew that it looked bad for a thirty-one-year-old to be running straight to her mom. But her sixty-year-old mom had come running to Holly not so long ago, and over the same woman at that.

  How ironic, thought Holly. How totally twisted.

  She drove on automatic to the turreted house on Main. It was late when she arrived; the house was dark.

  Unless. She skirted around to the side. As she expected, the lights in the master bedroom were on. She crept over to the gnarled old cherry tree that grew alongside the house and began climbing, monkeylike, from lower limbs to upper until she reached the small balcony outside her mother's bedroom.

  The French doors were open to the night air, but the screen doors were locked. Her mother was in the bathroom: Holly waited until she emerged and then called softly through the opening. Her mother jumped half a foot.

  "Holly, for Pete's sake," she said, tying her robe around her as she approached the screen doors. "You're too old for that. I'm too old for that; you're going to give me a heart attack."

  Holly put a finger to her lips. "Mom, we have to talk."

  "At this hour? About what? I'm exhausted. I want to go to sleep."

  "I know, I know." She went directly to the stereo system and put on a New Age CD to drown out their voices.

  Her heart was still thumping from the climb; the extra oxygen help
ed keep her from breaking down. When she turned around, she had a ridiculously amused smile plastered to her face. "You won't believe what I just found out," she said.

  That part she got out with no problem. She forced her smile to broaden.

  "Eden's back, and ... it's the funniest thing. She's actually married to—this is so funny—Sam."

  The thing that undid her was the look of deep and instant sympathy on her mother's face as she rushed to embrace her. Holly knew that mothers understood their daughters' pain. But this mother understood this pain in an extraordinary way. It was as if a single bullet had gone through both their hearts, leaving both women clutching one another to keep from falling down.

  Holly broke down, despite her best efforts. In the next few minutes she related, in bits and tear-stained pieces, the scene that had just taken place in the red barn between Sam and her.

  It was harder for Holly to tell her mother that her father had been informed and that her father didn't care; and that he was eager to help straighten out Eden's financial—and presumably her legal—entanglements. But Holly made herself do it, because she believed that not to say anything was to lie.

  Her mother accepted the news with eerie resignation: undoubtedly she was too shell-shocked to do much else.

  "So now there are two men who want her?" she asked when Holly was done.

  Holly said, "Sam says no, that she doesn't mean anything to him. How can I believe him? He's lied about everything, including his own name, to me."

  Her mother was awash in her own sea of misery. "She's on the boat? She's actually on the boat right now?"

  "Yeah, if Sam is right," Holly answered. Too tired to move, she was lying like a rag doll stomach-down over a huge tufted hassock. "What will you do now, Mom?" she asked in a mopey voice. "You won't stay on the island, will you? If you go, I go," she decided.

  Her mother had her bare feet perched on the edge of the hassock, pulled up to the wing chair in which she sat. Her head was thrown back, her eyes were closed; her wrists were draped limply over the rolled arms of the chair. She seemed even more weary than Holly; it had been another hell of a long day.

  "You're jumping the gun, dear; you always do. No one knows where they'll stay. Maybe they'll sail off into the sunset. That's your father's dream, isn't it?" She sounded bitter and sad and lonely as she said it.

  "Eden would never do that," Holly said, flopping over on her back and easing the stretch in her limbs. "She needs more than an adoring audience of one. Just ask Sam."

  She threw in the last three words to show how brave she was; but the effort hurt more than she thought possible. How on earth was her mother getting through this?

  "Don't go rushing for the ferry yet, Holly," Charlotte said grimly. "It's not over until it's over. Something could happen. She's reckless. Accidents do happen."

  Something in her voice made Holly uneasy. "Mom," she said softly, "I don't like you like that."

  "Yes. You're right. Sorry."

  Holly went back to thoughts of Sam. "We should form an organization. We'll call ourselves the Man-Haters' Club—East Vineyard Chapter."

  "And that would accomplish what?"

  Holly spread her arms wide in a martyr's pose. "We could have weekly meetings and eat chocolate and write dreary poems about how pathetic men are."

  "I thought I heard voices up here," said Ivy, poking her head in the room. "What's this club? I like the sound of it. Who're we hating and why?"

  They were women, they were family, they were currently short on pride. It wasn't hard for Holly to relate her tale of woe for the second time that night, this time with fewer sobs and tears.

  "So here we are," she said, pulling her knees to her chin. "All in the same boat, all at the same time. I think we would've been better off staggering our traumas," she added glumly. "It would be nice if one of us were emotionally intact."

  "Nah," said Ivy. "We'd end up hating her for being that way."

  "Ivy, for goodness sake!" her mother admonished. "You're both too young to be so disillusioned."

  "Right now I feel old enough for the old folks' home," Holly admitted, yawning. She stretched full-length on her mother's needlepoint rug and closed her eyes. "I think I'll just sleep here tonight."

  She was prodded alert by her sister's next remark: "Now that I think about it, Holly, I'm not sure you're as qualified as we are to be in a man-haters' club."

  It struck a nerve. Holly had been feeling slightly uneasy herself; her situation was not the same as the other two women's.

  "Okay, obviously there was nothing wrong with his marrying Eden," she allowed, opening her eyes. "But there was plenty wrong with not telling me about it."

  "Well, you can see why he'd be reluctant to do that with you, honey," her mother chimed in. "I've told you before: you want everyone to be too happy. That's another way of saying you hate bad news."

  "Mother! Now it's my fault?"

  "Not at all. But it's been my experience in life that in most situations, everyone is at least partly to blame."

  Holly sat up. "No! I'm not taking any blame in this. I didn't do anything wrong, damn it! And neither did you. It's not your fault if you can't sail around the world."

  "No, but even if my stomach were able, I wouldn't want to do it. For a marriage to work, big dreams have to be shared; it's only the smaller ones that are optional."

  "If it is a dream. If you ask me, I think Dad is just bored, bored, bored with work. It's not that he really wants to see the world; it's just that he wants to run away from his job. There's a huge difference."

  "Okay, Dear Abby—what was Jack's problem?" asked Ivy. "He loves his work."

  "Oh, Jack. He was just incredibly stupid."

  "And Sam? Why do you think Sam jumped into bed with you? To get back at Dad?"

  "Not at all. If that were the case, he would've slept with Mom."

  "Hollyl"

  Holly shrugged at her mother and said, "Sorry. We're just theorizing." To her sister, she said, "Frankly, in retrospect I have no idea what Sam saw in me. You haven't met Eden, but I'm the polar opposite of her. I hate to play games; she lives to play games—"

  "Sam may not like to play games."

  "There are other things. I'm not coy; she's a flirt. I'm not confident—"

  "Earlier this evening, you were brimming," her mother reminded her with a gentle smile.

  Holly sighed and said, "That was before I got dumped."

  "You didn't get dumped, Holly. I got dumped. You found out that Sam once got taken in by Eden's allure, that's all. He was twenty-three; what did you expect? Twenty-three is just a few months older than thirteen."

  Holly wasn't comforted by the fact. "If Eden has the power to make Dad throw away a thirty-plus-year marriage, she certainly has the power to reclaim a man who's been carrying the torch for seven years. The only option I have is to wait and see what happens," she said, more to herself than to them.

  It was time to go. She stood up. "To be perfectly honest," she added, "I don't think Eden will want Sam. She's ignored him for seven years; that must mean something. Besides, she's going to go where the money is, and Sam doesn't have that much. Not compared to Dad. So. Where does that leave me?"

  Resting her forearms on her head, she swung left and right, working out the day's kinks. "It leaves me with someone who will—possibly—continue to carry the torch, even if he buries it deep down inside. How would I ever know for sure?"

  It was hard to argue with that, and neither Holly's mother nor her sister bothered to try. The three became silent; Holly had just waved her evil wand over the slumber party and turned it into a wake.

  Ivy tried to brighten the mood. "Stay over tonight. Stay. Mom will make us breakfast in the morning—won't you, Mom?" she said.

  Their mother was unhappy with Ivy's plan and was blunt about it.

  "I don't think that's a good idea," she told Holly. "With Ivy and the girls here, there's really no room. I don't want to make up the sofa bed—for pity's s
ake, you only live a mile away."

  Surprised by her mother's resolve, Holly shrugged and said, "Okay by me; I know when I'm not wanted."

  "I feel a headache coming on," Charlotte added. She was virtually showing Holly the door.

  "With or without a premonition?" Holly murmured, studying her mother curiously.

  "Don't be flip, Holly; it's your biggest flaw. Good night. Both of you. Please."

  And that was that.

  Chapter 25

  A little before six the next morning, Eden Walker snuggled her naked body against her exhausted lover and licked the lobe of his ear. "Mornin', big guy," she said in a sleepy, sultry voice. "Ready for more?"

  The response she got was a pleased, delighted groan—but a groan, nevertheless.

  Eden laughed and sat up in the berth. "Then what do you say to a warm doughnut instead?"

  Eric Anderson rolled onto his back and opened one eye. "I say yes." He closed his eyes. A sleepy, sated smile softened the deep lines of his face. "It's good to have you back aboard."

  Eden pulled a denim jumper over her bare body and slid into a pair of espadrilles. "Don't go sailing off without me, now," she teased.

  "Oh, my darling," said Eric, doting on every syllable. "Never."

  "Good," she said, grabbing her straw carryall. "Be right back!"

  Emerging on deck, Eden bent over double and combed her fingers through her auburn hair, then shook it back as she straightened and took a deep, long breath of salt air. She glanced around at the other boats, but the marina was quiet at that hour. Her step was light and sure as she hopped down to the dock, then walked out toward the road through the shell-strewn parking lot.

  She was halfway across the lot when a car shot out from its place among a row of parked automobiles and headed in her direction.

  She turned in time to see the wagon swerve toward her, running her down before racing out of the lot.

  ****

  Sam lucked out: there was a seat available on the Cape Air Cessna for the first flight out to Boston that morning. Arriving early on standby had something to do with nabbing the spot, he knew; but he had chosen to believe that God had simply got tired of the way he was screwing up his quest for justice and had decided to step in and lend a hand.