The Silver Boat

by Luanne Rice

“Yeah,” she said. “Can I ask you, I don’t actually want to hear but I have to know, have my sisters told you when this whole thing will be final?”

  “I have no idea,” he said. “I’m too busy trying to make you eat.”

  She watched him cross the small space, walk into the sunny kitchen. He opened a brown paper bag, took out a loaf of bread. She saw him pop two pieces into the stainless steel toaster, find butter and jelly in the refrigerator. When the toast was ready, he carefully fixed it for her, cutting the bread into triangles and arranging it on a plate.

  “There,” he said, handing it to her. She propped herself up on one elbow and took a bite.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I feel bad, taking you away from work in the middle of the day.”

  “You know, don’t you?” Andy asked.

  “Know what?”

  “The place I’ve been working on, with Pete,” he said. “That cottage by the millpond.”

  “The new owners cracking the whip?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “There’s no new owner,” he said. “It’s me. And I built the house for you.”

  “Andy!”

  “For us,” he said.

  Dar took it in. She closed her eyes, remembering their first visit to the site, when the brown field and gray river stones were covered with frost. He’d held her hand, shown her the meadow and millstone. Right now, lying on her bed, she could almost feel the chilly April breeze as he’d stood beside her.

  “Will you move in with me?” he asked.

  She knocked the toast over as she hugged him, shocked by his love and generosity. What if she couldn’t live up to it? What if she had too much of her father’s blood in her, and took off one day to prove something unprovable to Andy or herself? But as they faced each other across the spilled toast, she felt her heart settle down.

  “Is that a ‘yes’?” he asked, smiling nervously.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He looked so relieved, they both started laughing. “You had me for a minute there, Darrah. But this is right. I know it is.”

  “So do I.” She paused. “You kept it such a secret,” she said.

  “Well,” he said. “I’m not the only one . . .”

  She waited for him to explain, but he didn’t. He hugged her hard.

  “I’d better get back,” he said. “If you’re okay alone.”

  She nodded, pushing the covers back, gathering up the plate and toast. “I’m getting up.”

  “Good. See you tonight?”

  “I’ll be here.”

  Andy kissed her softly on the mouth. She watched him leave, heard his truck start up. She walked over to her desk, and almost immediately Dulse’s story filled her mind.

  Sitting at her drafting table, she pushed her drawing tablet aside. She began to sketch in a simpler and more basic way, on a blank page of paper: Dulse on a train across the sea.

  Dulse was the only passenger aboard the train, and when she made her way through many empty cars to the engine, she realized no one was at the controls. Instead of being afraid, she stationed herself in the engineer’s seat and waited to see where the train would take her.

  Dar took her time inking in those first panels, using her smallestgauge Micron pens to capture the fragility of train tracks on the ocean’s surface, the delicacy of the train, thirty cars long, gannets and puffins perched on the roofs, octopi entwined with the metal links between cars, barnacles and starfish attached to the tracks, long tendrils of kelp trailing from the rails.

  Up above, a ring around the moon, layers of reddish space particles. Instead of predicting rain, the moon’s ring itself began to drizzle, sending space dust down to earth. Sitting in the engine, Dulse saw the air fill with rust-red snow, making it impossible to see where the train was taking her.

  Dar went back, erased the pencil lines, added color to the sea and red dust, Prismacolor pens for the train and sea creatures, a softer effect using watercolors and a fine sable brush for the moon’s ring, a wide, flat brush to color the deep green-blue sea.

  Scup interrupted her, scratching at the door. Dar leaned over, let him in. Someone had tied a blue ribbon around his neck, a small white paper attached; Dar untied it and read the note in Rory’s handwriting: Dar, we love you.

  Dar placed the card on her desk, slid it under the small pewter dory her father had carried with him from his grandfather’s boat shed in Cobh. She made herself a cup of tea.

  Opening to a new page, she made three quick sketches: the train pulling into the Atlantic port town of Arcachon, thousands of oysters attached to the pilings of the train pier; on a map, Arcachon’s harbor appearing as if a sea monster had taken a large bite out of France’s southern Atlantic coast; a dune as tall as a mountain, the largest sand dune in the world.

  La Pyla, the name of the dune, appeared in a bubble over its rounded peak, high above sea level. Trailing green seaweed and salt water, minnows falling from her pockets and being snatched up by seagulls, Dulse strode through Arcachon’s wind-twisted pines, looking up at the great dune. The moon’s ring-dust had fallen here, covering the white sand with a layer of garnet red.

  Dulse began to climb. She produced a leather sack, crouched down, used a hard, amber-colored piece of whale baleen to sift the topmost layer, the red moondust, into her pouch. A great wind picked up, swirling the red particles around, sending them into the air and harbor, mixing them deeply within the dune. But by then, Dulse had all she needed.

  Dar inked over the pencil sketch, then began to paint, delicate watercolors to suggest the fleeting nature of space dust. And what did red moondust mean to Dulse? Dar didn’t try to figure it out; she merely painted, then crosshatched fine circular shadows to indicate the wind’s power.

  When she was finished, she opened her door—the first time since she’d shut herself in two days earlier. She blinked into the blindingly blue sky. Scup ran out ahead of her, down the sandy path toward the beach. Dar put on a windbreaker and followed him, barefoot.

  They crossed the boardwalk, passed the little cat’s grave, stepped onto the sand. These dunes were low and long; the path between them was wide. Dar watched Scup run down to the water’s edge, sniffing along the tide line, spending quality time with a dead skate caught in clumps of seaweed.

  She sat high up on the beach, the dune just behind her, in the sun-hot sand. Letting it run through her fingers, she saw twinkling black mica stick to her skin. She wished she had a baleen comb like Dulse, to separate out the sparkles.

  Once, when they were young, Harrison had brought her and her sisters to Mink Meadows, his father’s favorite golf course over in Vineyard Haven; they’d taken magnets into a sand trap, dragged them across, come up with long trails of iron ore, nearly microscopic bits magnetized to each other.

  Was that the inspiration for Dulse’s latest adventure? Dar wasn’t sure. She only knew that her ideas came from deep down, experiences and emotions of her own.

  Sitting there, she barely heard them coming. But she sensed them even before she saw their shadows. Rory and Delia had walked down from the big house, sat on either side of her.

  “We saw you,” Rory said.

  “I’m here,” Dar said.

  “Do you still want to be alone?” Delia asked.

  Dar didn’t reply. She just kept remembering that day with the magnets, all the iron ore they’d collected. They had collected it in a leather golf club cover Harrison had filched from his father’s custom 5-wood.

  “Why was there iron in the sand trap?” she asked.

  “The sand trap?” Delia asked.

  “With Harrison!” Rory said. “That day with the magnets.”

  “There’s iron in all sand, even here at the beach.” Dar said. “But nothing like that day.”

  “I guess I thought it came from the golf clubs,” Delia said. “All that metal banging around at the ball. I figured little bits got chipped away over the years, mixing in with the sand.”

  Dar nodded. That made sense.


  “Dar,” Rory said. “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I,” Delia said.

  “I know,” Dar said. “It’s all right.”

  “That sounds so contained,” Rory said, sounding sad. “I’d almost rather have you yell at us.”

  “But why?” Dar asked. “What good would that do?”

  “You’re hurt, but we are, too,” Rory said. “We don’t want it to be this way. Dar, we can’t afford to keep the house the way we’ve known and loved it all these years. How long before we’ll need another new roof? What about the rattling windows? Even without taxes, what about repairs?”

  “We love it too much to let it go that way,” Delia said.

  A steady breeze carried the sound of the bell buoy tolling off Nomans Land to the beach. Dar heard it, and a memory flooded back. When she was very young and her family was waiting for the ferry, her father had walked her past all the Woods Hole Oceanographic buildings, showing her the buoy lab where four-story-high scientific research buoys—fresh from their positions throughout the Atlantic Ocean—lay on the wharf waiting for repair or for their data to be recovered.

  “What’s data?” Dar had asked.

  “Information,” her father had answered.

  “What kind?”

  “Well, these big buoys are set out in the middle of the sea, and they measure wind, tides, wave heights, and the space between one wave and the next. Wind creates waves, and these buoys record wave anomalies.”

  “Anom . . . ?”

  “Variations. Strange happenings, rogue waves. The ocean never stays still; the wind won’t let it,” he’d said. “A good sailor knows everything is always changing.”

  And it was. And so was life. Dar listened to the distant clanging, brought to her by the wind.

  “I signed the paper,” Dar said, staring at the mica on her hands. “Did the sale go through?”

  “Yes,” Rory said.

  “The inheritance tax has been paid, and there’s a lot left over. Bart wrote three checks, one for each of us,” Delia said.

  Scup came running back, a bone in his mouth. Dar pried it loose: the size of a tennis ball, it had to be a whale’s vertebra. The whole moment felt unreal, and all she wanted was to go back home and draw more Dulse before packing up.

  “Will you come with us?” Rory asked.

  “Not right now,” Dar said.

  “Please,” Delia said. “The sale isn’t straightforward. We need you to see something.”

  “Have you talked with Andy? Did he tell you about the house he’s building for us?” Dar asked.

  “Yes,” Delia said.

  “Come with us,” Rory said, standing, offering a hand to pull Dar up. Dar let her, and there was no way to express her reluctance to follow. If the house wasn’t theirs anymore, she wasn’t sure she could ever set foot inside it again.

  “Can’t you just tell me here?” Dar asked.

  But they wouldn’t, and so she walked along with them. Crossing the yard, she saw Harrison’s van parked behind her sisters’ cars. He was lying on a towel in the sun, but when he saw them coming, he grunted himself up and opened his arms for Dar.

  “Hi, sweetie,” he said. “Been a shitty couple of days, hasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “I’m here for you. You know that. Even if Andy wasn’t working double time on the house and your sisters hadn’t come up with their brilliant plan, I’d have made room in my place for you. I’d have given you the bed. Or maybe we’d have shared it. Either way.”

  “Thank you, Harrison,” she said.

  The house should have looked the same as ever, but it didn’t to Dar. Dar’s gaze swept the gracious exterior, every shingle, shutter, porch rail, windowpane untouched, and wondered what was missing. Now it was just a big waterfront house, no longer her family home.

  “That’s okay,” Delia said.

  “I’ll get it,” Rory said, running into the house.

  Dar watched the four old cats skulk in a pack along the bramble hedge; did they miss Dahlia? She had the feeling they did, that they were looking for her. She wanted to gather them up, take them with her, keep them safe. Andy wouldn’t mind; she was positive of that.

  A minute later she heard the screen door brush shut, saw Rory coming toward her with an envelope. The check, Dar thought. Her share of the sale.

  Rory and Delia smiled.

  “We told them they couldn’t have it,” Rory said.

  “At first they said no, because it’s such a charming part of Daggett’s Way,” Delia said. “But then they agreed to trade.”

  “Trade what?”

  “Open this,” Rory said, thrusting the envelope at her. Dar reached in with mica-covered hands, leaving black sparkles on the paper.

  “It’s a deed,” she said, reading. Before she could digest the words, Delia spoke up.

  “We traded them the strip of land grant property for the Hideaway.”

  “It’s almost exactly the same square footage,” Rory said.

  “The deed is yours,” Delia said.

  Dar stared at the paper.

  Her sisters’ smiles quavered, hesitant, wanting to make sure Dar was really okay, that she was happy, that they’d done right by her.

  “The Hideaway belongs to you,” Rory said. “It could never go to anyone else.”

  “Thank you,” Dar said, stunned.

  “One thing,” Harrison said. “You’d break Andy’s heart if you didn’t move into that house he’s building . . . Jonathan even came up to show him the best place to situate your studio. Big windows facing north over the meadow.”

  Dar reached out to hug her sisters. They stood in a tight knot, heads together, not wanting to let go.

  “What about the parchment?” she asked finally. “Did you have to hand it over with the actual land?”

  “No. Bart and the Fitzgeralds saw to that,” Rory said.

  “We should give it to a museum,” Dar said. “That’s been in the back of my mind. What if we sent it to Ireland, on loan, to Kanturk Castle? We could make it in memory of Dad.”

  “I like that,” Rory said.

  “I do, too,” Delia said.

  Dar thought about calling Tim, asking him to help make the offer. She could write an account of their father’s story, send it to the castle along with the deed.

  “Listen,” Rory said. “We’re going to have to get going soon. We couldn’t leave before we cleared all this with you. But . . .”

  “You have to get home. I understand.”

  “If we get going, we can catch a late ferry. Let’s just walk through one more time,” Rory said.

  “Come on, Dar,” Delia said. “Please?”

  Dar started to say no, but changed her mind. She and her sisters walked into the big house, and this time she knew it was really good-bye. Standing in the kitchen, she realized it still smelled like home and probably always would.

  Moving into the living room, they looked out the seaward windows. A snowy egret flew overhead, yellow legs trailing behind, making its slow, elegant way to the salt pond. Reeds along the beach walkway rustled, and there were the four great hunters, their little tiger faces with amber eyes staring from the camouflage of tawny marsh grass.

  Dar turned, took in the big room where her family had come for so long. She let her gaze take in the stone fireplace, granite mantel, window seats, burnished wide oak floorboards, brass sconces. She thought of all the music, conversations, celebrations, and sorrows this room had held. She touched the mantel, and then she was ready.

  “We’ll stop by as soon as we pack up the car,” Rory said.

  Dar nodded. She kissed her sisters and walked out the door. The sun was setting; Harrison had made himself a cocktail; she saw him watching the clouds fill with pink light. Scup lay on the porch beside him, so Dar didn’t disturb them and hurried past the old well, cellar hole, ancient apple trees, and lilac grove.

  Andy was home from work, his truck parked in the drive. She wa
lked inside, found him looking out the window.

  “I wondered where you were,” he said.

  “With my sisters. They held on to it. The Hideaway.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “That was the other secret?” she asked.

  He gazed at her with sharp green eyes. “I should have told you right away. But I was afraid you’d say no to moving in with me. You still might, now that you know.”

  “When will our house be ready?” she asked.

  “I’m aiming for us to be in by October. Before it gets too cold.”

  Dar stepped toward him, pulling him close. They held each other, not speaking for a long time. She could imagine her sisters coming here over the years. It would always be their connection to the beach, the sea, each other.

  She’d been afraid everything would feel wrong, surreal, with Daggett’s Way, the center of her childhood universe, sold. But instead she felt lighter. She felt deep certainty that her father had set off on his final voyage filled with love for his family. Dar’s chin rested on Andy’s shoulder, and she looked down at her desk. Sunlight hit the surface at an angle.

  It bathed her pens, brushes, pencils, and drawings, everything on the desk, in luminous light. Her eyes caught the edge of her sisters’ card, Dar, we love you, sticking out from beneath the tiny pewter dory.

  Dar heard Rory and Delia coming to say good-bye, their cars pulling into her driveway, their voices happy as they climbed out. She stayed in Andy’s arms, hearing laughter outside, transfixed by what she saw on her desk.

  Just a corner of the white card, a fragment her sister’s handwriting, jutting out from beneath the dory. The sunlight’s alchemy had transformed the dull pewter into shining sterling—the single object her father had carried with him to America from his grandfather’s workplace, a little silver boat keeping safe his daughters’ words of love, and holding the memories of the long journey they’d made to bring him home.

  ALSO BY LUANNE RICE

  Deep Blue Sea for Beginners

  The Geometry of Sisters

  Last Kiss

  What Matters Most

  The Edge of Winter

  Sandcastles

  Summer of Roses

  Summer’s Child