On Folly Beach

by Karen White

She hid her smile as they picked their way across lines of large rocks that stretched like arms from the shore into the ocean, which Heath explained were groins placed there long before Hugo to help with the constant erosion of the beach. “The jetties in Charleston Harbor and these groins probably did more damage to the ecosystem than protect the shore. We actually have a beach renourishment project, where every eight years we get sediment pumped onto the front beach, but that’s only temporary. And, unfortunately, it attracts more development.”

  “I would think that as a builder who owns some property here, you’d see it as a good thing.”

  “One would think. But Folly has been my family’s home for generations. It’s a little annoying to see the landscape changed so drastically by a few outsiders.” With a shrug, he said, “I guess in the last few years, I’ve begun to think a little differently than I used to—altered my focus, you might say. Which is one of the reasons why I’ve been spending more time on Folly than in Atlanta.”

  She wanted to ask him what had changed to alter his focus, but he’d moved forward, as if to deliberately avoid any questions. His words irked her, bringing back memories of Ben and his sense of duty and love of country, which had sent him to the other side of the world and away from her and all that he loved.

  She was still brooding when they turned around to go back the way they’d come and Heath asked, “So why are you here, Ms. Media Specialist with a master’s degree in library science?”

  She turned to look at him, seeing again the tanned skin, the longer hair, the careless posture in his shoulders—shoulders which had never carried a rifle or traveled in a convoy over mine-ridden roads and belonged to a man whose life’s ambition now seemed to center on playing in the surf. She didn’t want this man, who was made, it seemed, of sea and sun and sand, to question her motives or to attempt to know her loss. But his eyes were kind and not mocking, and her answer was a lot easier than she’d thought it would have been.

  “My mother loved the beach.” Emmy realized how stupid that sounded, and tried to clarify. “She grew up here and loved Folly, although I don’t think I realized how much until recently. And she loved Folly’s Finds from when she was a little girl. She patterned her own store in Indiana after it, actually.”

  He stopped and she stopped, too. “But what made you come here?”

  She looked past him toward the ocean, feeling the pull and tug of the tide as if it were trying to take her someplace she didn’t want to go. With a deep breath, she said, “I recently lost my husband, and my mother thought this place would be good for me.”

  They turned at the sound of a sharp cry behind them, and for a moment, they watched a gull circling something still and dark in the sand, flying down to peck at it before swooping up with a cry into the air again. It reminded Emmy of her grief, of the way she continued to live and breathe and eat, but every so often she would return to the dark speck inside, and renew her sorrow.

  “I’m sorry. Was it expected?”

  Emmy faced him again. “He was a soldier. I guess I would have been naive not to expect it, but I don’t think it really ever occurred to me that I would never see him again.”

  He picked up a shell from the sand, then reached back and threw it as hard as he could into the rushing waves before turning back to her. “I hope you find what you’re looking for here. I think you will.”

  There was something in his voice, as if he knew what she needed, and the memory of the note in the bottle tree flashed through her head. Come back to me. It was unlike her to hold back any questions when she wanted answers, but Heath Reynolds made her hesitate. And then it was too late because he bent down and pulled something out of the sand before holding it out to her in his palm. She stepped closer and saw what looked like a dark brown seed shell with two thin antenna-like protrusions from the top and bottom.

  “It’s called a devil’s pocketbook, although they’re actually skate egg sacks, and in May they’re all over the beach.” He handed it to her and she took it, feeling the slickness of the waterlogged casing against her fingers. “There’re always surprises to find here in the sand. When I was a boy, my mother told me that what you found on the beach was just reminders that we’re not alone in the world. That you’ll always find what you need if you look hard enough.”

  Emmy began walking again, unable to answer because of the old familiar feeling teasing the back of her neck. They passed a woman who was at least in her sixties wearing a bikini and a baseball cap with two long gray braids dangling from each side of her head. For a brief moment, Emmy thought it was Lulu before she realized that what she knew of Lulu did not include exposing any skin on the beach. Thinking of Lulu, she turned to Heath. “I meant to ask your mother this, but I figure you would know as well as she does—was Lulu ever married?”

  With a soft grin, he said, “Definitely not. There’s never been a man good enough for her, I think.”

  Emmy studied him for a moment, unsure of whether he was joking.

  Heath continued. “I think when she was younger, she fell in love, but I don’t know what happened to that relationship.”

  “Was his name Peter, do you know?”

  He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve heard that name mentioned before. You can ask her, though.”

  “I’d rather not.” She said the words without thinking, then quickly looked up to see if Heath had taken offense and was relieved to find him smiling.

  “Where did you come across the name?”

  “In the box of books your mother sent to Indiana. There was a 1942 edition of a Nancy Drew mystery book and inside someone named Peter had inscribed it to Lulu with the words, ‘Be good and stay sweet.’ I gave it to Lulu today, but she tore out the inscription page before giving it back to me. I thought it odd, but she doesn’t seem that open to questions.”

  “I can ask her myself if you like.”

  Emmy wanted to say no, reluctant for him to be more involved in her life. But the alternative was even less appealing so she nodded. “If you wouldn’t mind. And I have one more request, and I promise it will be my last. The books in your house—the ones that once belonged to your grandmother Maggie—can I sort through them and rearrange them in some sort of order? They look as if they were just thrown haphazardly on the shelves, and I thought you might like to know what you have.”

  He grinned. “That really bothers you, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she admitted without blinking. “It really does.”

  “Sure—have at it. And if you find something that you really want, it’s yours.”

  “But not if it’s valuable. I’ll be happy to give you fair market value for anything I find.”

  “No, really. I don’t care. You can take all of them if you like. Or sell them at the store—it doesn’t matter to me. I’ve learned to believe in not holding on to things anymore. They’re only things.”

  Emmy stopped abruptly, thinking about the tightly folded flag and Ben’s Medal of Honor, which she kept in her bedside drawer, and of Ben’s clothes still hanging in the closet in the bedroom at her parents’ house. If she had her purse with her, she could reach in and show Heath the nail clippers that had once been Ben’s, and the dog tags he’d been wearing when a roadside bomb exploded near his convoy. They were only things, true; but they were all she had left of what her life was supposed to have been.

  She forced the words out of her constricted throat, feeling dizzy enough to faint. “Don’t say that. Don’t.” She sucked in a wheezing breath. “You don’t know.” She swallowed, trying to force the hot, humid air into her lungs. “You don’t know what it’s like.” She stared at him, his image shimmering in the heat like a mirage. “Or you’d know how precious things can be.”

  The wind lifted his hair again, revealing the scar. She waited for him to protest, to tell her she was wrong, but he just stared at her with somber light brown eyes.

  “Maybe,” was all he said before turning his attention back
to the water, where the waves were creeping closer to shore, each bubbling finger grasping more sand than before.

  “I know my way back from here,” Emmy said abruptly, stumbling up into the thicker sand, and not caring that they hadn’t talked about scheduling his work time on the dock. “Good-bye.” She didn’t turn around as she headed toward the first beach-access walkway she could find. She passed the same gull they’d seen before, still in its macabre dance as it swooped and swirled over its find in the sand. She stopped and watched, remembering what Heath’s mother had said about the treasures buried in the sand. You’ll always find what you need if you look hard enough.

  Turning away, she headed toward the dunes, with their bald pates covered in sparse grassy hair, the sound of the gull like laughter behind her back.

  CHAPTER 11

  FOLLY BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA

  August 2009

  A heavy Sunday afternoon downpour darkened the sky and the watery world around the house, creating a cool oasis from which Emmy didn’t want to emerge. She’d spent most of the morning lugging books down from the turret, dangling from the circular staircase again and again to grab hidden and stacked books, refusing to let a single book go unrescued and uncataloged. She then hefted them into the living room in haphazard towers, creating a tiny city of leather and paper.

  Her goal had been to have this job done in a week, but she’d quickly found that she didn’t have as much free time as she’d originally thought. Although helping at Paige’s Pages had prepared her for a lot of the work at Folly’s Finds, it was a far cry from the responsibilities of actually owning a store. Handling and anticipating the needs and requirements of the employees, Janell, Abigail, tourists, and locals overwhelmed her at times, in part because everything was new, and also because by nature she was more reserved than what was required of a business owner on Folly Beach. She was relieved that the residents didn’t ask her about Ben, and wondered if that had been Abigail’s doing.

  She found herself calling her mother often, asking for advice on bookstore business matters. At least that was how the calls always started. But then the conversation would turn to other things, like the change in the color of the cornfields, or good books they’d read recently, or her father’s health. Strangely, these were topics that were never discussed when Emmy lived with her mother, as if the lines between mother and daughter were placed in a minefield, too easily ignited. And now Emmy had begun to tell her mother about Folly and the people here, and Paige listened and asked questions with the intensity of an exile too far from home.

  Thankfully Emmy hadn’t had to deal with Heath, who, according to Abigail, had gone back to Atlanta for several weeks for business. Emmy had forgotten that he was a developer and architect in Atlanta, and found it curious that he would choose to spend so much time on Folly, away from his company and the root of his business. She thought often of their argument the last time she’d seen him, wanting each time to feel the anger she’d felt then. Instead, she kept seeing the scar on the side of his head and the guarded look in his eyes, which made her think of a funhouse mirror you found at arcades where what you saw was a distortion of what you thought you would see.

  Best of all Lulu kept to herself, moving unnoticed to and from her bottle garden behind the store, miraculously appearing whenever a potential bottle-tree customer visited the store. Emmy was amazed at the sheer number of people who came to Folly’s Finds for the sole purpose of buying a tree, as well as the letters she received from all over the country inquiring about ordering one.

  Emmy stood and rubbed her back, sore from all the lifting and leaning, and wondered if she was too young to take a nap. She eyed the empty shelves, thinking of the next step that involved scrubbing the emptied shelves and lining them with the rolls of acid-free paper she’d ordered online.

  Instead, she backed out of the alcove of the turret and left the bedroom, closing the door behind her so she wouldn’t be reminded of what awaited her. Then she returned to the living room, feeling reassured that the stairs and shelves would still be there later after she’d gone through more of the books.

  Before she started, she turned on the stereo and stuck in a Glenn Miller CD. She’d been surprised to find it amongst the REM, Foo Fighters, and Rolling Stones, but somehow big-band music fit her mood. Maybe it was the photos on the walls taken in the nineteen forties that inspired her, but it was to the brass notes of “String of Pearls” that Emmy opened up her laptop, where she’d already transferred her inventory notes from the books in the box onto an Excel spreadsheet, and flipped it on before seating herself next to it on the floor in front of the first stack.

  As she’d done before, she began at the top, pulling each book from the stack and meticulously turning every page in search of any writing. She still had her pile of books in the bedroom with the margin writings she’d found previously, and she intended to add any more she found to that stack. It had begun to occur to her that the messages might make more sense to her if she figured out some sort of order for them, and had already started on her computer a document about the messages she’d found so far. She’d studied them for a long time, and the only thing she’d concluded was what she’d already known from the start—that they were love notes between a man and a woman. The clandestine aspect of the love affair was still mere speculation, but she hoped she’d find more in Heath’s books, if only because they came from the same source—his mother’s attic.

  She’d reached only the fourth book before she found the first note. It was in a later edition of Robinson Crusoe, and in the familiar woman’s handwriting in blue ink were written the words: I miss you. It’s cold outside and the pavilion is deserted.

  Feeling satisfied that this was more evidence to support her hypothesis of a clandestine affair, she placed the book on the floor next to her to start a new pile, and reached for another book. It was nearly an hour later that she found the next message, this one in a worn copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In the familiar broad strokes of the man’s handwriting were written the words: Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea change / Into something rich and strange.

  Emmy recognized the words from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but wondered at their meaning in the message. What sea change? And who was the “him” referring to? She turned the page, seeing the impression of the words on the next page as if the writer had again written with agitation.

  The CD ended, and she got up to replace it with a Tommy Dorsey’s greatest-hits album and poured herself a glass of wine as “In the Blue of Evening” began to play. Emmy’s mother always claimed that music was a subliminal advertisement for dancing, and Emmy began swaying across the room, avoiding the stacks of books, as she recalled the steps from watching her parents dance.

  She waltzed into the dining area, where she hadn’t yet ventured, preferring to eat her meals on the bar stools at the granite kitchen island. She turned away from the windows and saw for the first time the wall arrangement of four more old photographs, matted in matching bleached and distressed wooden frames, and stopped. Taking a step forward, she took a sip of wine and began to study the people in the pictures, trapped forever in time in their wooden boxes like butterflies.

  The photograph on the upper left was a wedding photo of a bride and groom standing outside on a boardwalk with the ocean behind them. The man wore the white uniform of a navy enlisted man, with dark shoes and a dark tie that crossed over his chest. He was tall and light haired, and while not what Emmy would call handsome, he had a charming smile and warm eyes that tilted up at the corners, which probably made him look like he was smiling even when he wasn’t.

  The bride looked familiar, and after Emmy had studied the photograph for a moment, she realized that it was the same woman in the bathing suit in the photograph from the living room, Heath’s great-aunt Catherine. She was beautiful in her bathing suit, and even more so on her wedding day in a dress of white lace and clutching a tumbling bouquet of white roses. But whereas her
groom’s face was open and smiling, her expression was a little unsure: an arched eyebrow that looked almost victorious matched with eyes that seemed more surprised than joyful. It was an odd combination for a wedding day, as odd as the two individuals that seemed to be mismatched as a couple.

  Her gaze strayed to the next photograph of the woman she recognized as Maggie standing outside a store that Emmy easily recognized as Folly’s Finds. It was hard to determine the color in black-and-white, but it was lighter than the current pink, and the door was completely different, with only two large windowpanes devoid of any stickers.

  Maggie wore peep-toe pumps and a prim checkered dress buttoned up to the neck. As Emmy had noticed before, she wasn’t beautiful, but her face demanded attention from the sheer intensity of her expression and the light in her eyes. Unlike Catherine, Maggie was a person Emmy wished she could meet, if only to understand how a person could remain alone in the face of a hurricane.

  The third picture was of the little boy, whom Heath had told her was his father, John. He stood in a striped shirt and overalls, holding a fishing line with a tiny fish dangling from the end. His face was split with a grin, the boy apparently oblivious to the size of his catch.

  The last photograph made Emmy pause as she sipped her wine. A male in a dark-colored suit and tie stared out at the photographer with a questioning look, as if he wasn’t sure why his picture was being taken. He was seated at a table and people were dancing behind him. He held a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of Pabst in the other, and his head was turned slightly as if he had been caught by surprise by the photographer. A gold signet ring winked from his finger, but the letter on the top of it was blurred, as if the photographer had caught the subject in movement. The man was young, about thirty, and undeniably handsome in an old-fashioned kind of way. But his eyes in the photograph were what made a person stop and pause; light and piercing, they conveyed much more than surprise. They were the eyes of a man unsure yet confident at the same time, a juxtaposition that Emmy presumed would break an ordinary man.