A Week at the Shore

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Good,” Margo states as we head for the house, but the declaration does nothing to relieve me. Like the gun that is gone but remains larger than ever, so is Anne. Here, though, there isn’t a tiny bullet hole but a big gaping wound.

  Hurting, I pass through the mudroom and, ignoring the half-cleaned kitchen, release Joy’s hand and head for the stairs.

  Joy runs to catch up. “Are you okay, Mom?”

  “Just need a shower.”

  We all do. I go first, then Joy, then Margo. None of us linger. Soap and hot water can’t wash away the damage. Then we’re all three in my room, sitting cross-legged on the plaid quilt wearing dry shorts and shirts and in various stages of towel-drying our hair.

  Margo is the first to set her towel aside. “Speak,” she orders.

  And I do try. But words won’t come. This trip has become a nightmare, making clear thought impossible. I don’t know what she wants to hear, don’t know what Joy should hear. I’ve been the decision-maker all these years, but I can’t pick words now. I want to call Anne a liar but can’t. I want to tear into myself for giving her secret away but can’t. I want to vomit or in lieu of that, lie down in this bed, turn off the lights, pull the covers up to my ears, and blot out the world. But I can’t do that either, with my sister and daughter waiting.

  “Mom?” Joy whispers in concern. She’s never seen me like this.

  I’ve never seen me like this, either. Helplessness is a luxury I could never afford. I’m so unpracticed at it that the onrush of emotion is paralyzing.

  The best I can do is to wave a hand. Not ready, it says, and they accept that.

  “Papa,” Joy murmurs to Margo, who nods.

  Climbing off the bed, she goes downstairs to check. I’m rocking gently, doing everything in my power to put my mind in a different place. Except, the gray fringe of my nightmares is closing in, made sharp by fragments of Anne, Mom and Dad, Margo and Joy. Jack is in the muddle, but he is no fragment. He is my safe place. He always knows what I’m feeling, always understands, always fills the void.

  I need to reconnect with that safe place. But I can’t leave Joy now. Or Margo. Margo has to be hurting, too.

  “Anne will be back,” she whispers.

  I don’t want her back. That’s the thing. I’m not up for another confrontation, any more than I can talk about the one we just had. Even after Joy reports that Dad is asleep in his chair, I continue to rock.

  Margo slips out only when Joy is beside me again, as if by silent agreement they won’t leave me alone. Likewise, they ask nothing. Margo returns with three mugs of hot chocolate topped with globs of whipped cream, and though the gesture is the sweetest, I can’t drink. Hot chocolate, here, in this house, is so thick with memory that it would clog my throat.

  My phone chimes. Grabbing it from the desk, Joy sets it in front of me on the quilt. It settles into a fold that obscures the screen, and for a minute, I don’t right it. If Anne is telling me to go back to New York, I’ll have a problem. If she is calling me a bastard in print, I’ll have a problem. If she is saying that she won’t be back for two weeks, I’ll have a problem.

  Margo angles the phone, reads the screen, and turns it to me.

  Just got home. Will you come?

  “Jack?” she asks.

  I nod.

  “Go.”

  “I can’t. What if Anne comes back?”

  “She won’t,” Margo says softly. “If she’s with Billy, he’ll calm her, though how anyone covered with tattoos can be calming,” she mutters, “is a mystery. Go, Mal. If she comes back tonight, I’m here. I’m in charge. Joy will sleep with me.”

  Again, I think of all they haven’t asked. “But what she said—”

  “—can wait,” Margo cuts in, both commanding and gentle.

  Leaning forward, I hug her, then put a hand to Joy’s face. She’s always such a talker that her silence unsettles me. When I draw back with the question in my eyes, she simply says, “Go, Mom.”

  I’m not sure she’s okay. But Margo is already reaching for her, and right now, there’s no one I’d trust more.

  Leaving the bed, I step into flip-flops, pull on my sweatshirt, and lifting its hood, run down the stairs.

  * * *

  With each step on the bluff stairs, each loping stride across the sand, everything else falls away. All I can think of is running through the rain to get to where I need to be.

  He is tall and solid as he holds open the back screen. His hair is a mess, though whether from shower or rain I neither know nor care. The rest of him is gray—gray eyes, gray sweats, gray tank—and the irony of that? Despite those bits of gray in my life that I hate, he is everything I want.

  Those gray eyes hunger. He is pleased that I’m here. One look at my face, though, and he sobers. Drawing me inside, he lowers my hood and pushes his fingers into my hair until they cradle my scalp. “What happened.” It isn’t so much a question as a statement of dread.

  Being here with him after an eternity without is such a relief that I find strength. I don’t speak, simply rise on tiptoe, wrap my arms around his neck, and hold tight. He smells of warmth and soap, distantly of beer, mostly of Jack.

  I hear a whimper and feel a wet nose on my thigh. Guy.

  Ignoring the dog, Jack holds our heads inches apart. “Tell me.”

  My mind dredges up single words from the debacle on the dock—ugly, gun, broken, gone—but only one thought is a phrase. “Make me forget?” I beg. He said sex did that for him, and I want it now.

  Guy whines.

  Ignoring him, Jack lowers his head to mine. I feel his face in my hair, his breath against it. “Talk first,” he insists.

  But I can’t. The restraint I’ve perfected in years of raising Joy is gone. Angling back, I frame his face and stare into those eyes. “Make. Me. Forget.” Pulling his head down, I kiss him the way he kissed me yesterday in nearly this very same place.

  * * *

  Reality is slow to return. I fight it for everything I’m worth, wanting to stay forever first on the kitchen counter, then against the stairwell wall, then in Jack’s boyhood bed which, true to his word, is just as it was when we were last here. What we do now, though, is very different from then. Back then, Jack was in charge. More sexually adept than me, he taught me what to do. And it’s not that I’ve become the expert since I left, just that my need for him is an adult need and greater than ever before.

  I demand, initiate, take.

  That is the first time, the one in the kitchen, all the fiercer after the seconds it takes for Jack to race up, shut Guy in the master bedroom, and race down. The time on the stairs is Jack’s answer to me, typically precarious with his feet, an elbow, and my bottom all on different treads. And the third? In his bed? Slow and sleepy and sexy. It is what we have never, ever done.

  The hair on his chest is damp under my cheek, his heartbeat still a rapid ka-thump ka-thump when he turns us so that we’re face-to-face. I can see him in the dim light of the bedside lamp—his mussed hair, flushed cheeks, the way he sucks in a breath when I spread my fingers over his belly. He wants me again, quite clearly. But there’s something else in him now, another change with age. We used to communicate about everything except sex. We were too young for that. Sex was sex and, frenzied as it was, untouchable with words. No more.

  “Where did you learn all that?” he asks in a thick voice.

  “You.”

  “You never—”

  I stop the thought with my fingertips. “Just you.”

  He lets that stand for a minute, our heads sharing the pillow, his eyes holding mine. Then he circles my back to cinch me in. His voice vibrating against my cheek. “Tell me what happened tonight.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “Not now. Don’t ruin now.”

  I feel a ripple of frustration in him, but he accepts. Because he understands, as I knew he would. So, I hold reality off a little while longer. But reality is like the gun throw
n into the ocean. Just because it disappears from sight doesn’t mean it’s gone. It is there, under however many fathoms, like the princess and the pea, which I used to read to Joy just as my mother read it to me.

  “Three hours,” I murmur as sleep hovers. “Set your phone.”

  He snorts. “I’m not setting any phone.”

  “I’m serious, Jack. I can’t sleep here the whole night.”

  “Why not?” In the next breath, he answers. “Huh. Joy. But Margo is with her.”

  “I can’t, not the whole night.” I could talk of the responsibility Anne claims I lack, but I don’t want to go there. I could say that I have never spent a night away from Joy since she was born, but I don’t want to think of why I am now and where it goes from here.

  I don’t look up. My decision is final.

  “Five hours,” he bargains.

  “Three.”

  “Four.”

  “Three point five.”

  “Done,” he says and, wrenching away, is thundering down the stairs and back up with his phone, dropping it on the nightstand, turning off the light, and sliding his long, naked body against mine.

  I fall asleep breathing him in. And for those few minutes—few hours—I feel whole.

  * * *

  After releasing Guy from the master bedroom, Jack walks me home. Hauling me up against him on the back steps, he gives me a last thorough kiss. It’s his mark, bestowed with what used to be smugness but is only worry now. I’ve told him about the gun, the argument, our mothers, but I didn’t allow for discussion. So, his worry could be from one of those things. Or from us. But I refuse to let him ask how I can really return to New York after what we just did. When he starts, I cover his mouth with my hand and shake my head in warning. Now, he simply, devastatingly, places a sweet kiss on my forehead and lets me go.

  There is no sound when I creep in through the beach door. I already know that Anne’s car hasn’t returned, but the fact that night lights are the only ones lit says that Margo has been down to check.

  Anne is with Bill. She has to be. The hope that the Billy Houseman we knew as kids should turn out to be our savior is bizarre. But it’s the best we have.

  Chapter 21

  Joy is sitting on the bed when I wake up, and the fight with Anne, the gun, my time with Jack all return. Needing a bridge into mother mode, I focus on the ocean sounds through a show of sleepiness, peering at her first through one eye, then both, before stretching.

  “Are you okay?” she asks softly.

  I nod.

  “Jack helped?”

  “Good to talk with,” I say.

  She grunts. “Mom.” She knows exactly how I spent the night.

  “Good to talk with,” I repeat, because I’m not getting into that. What Jack and I did was pure escapism—friends with benefits—the ultimate for-old-times’-sake. I don’t want to explain that to Joy any more than I want to dwell on it myself.

  But my worry is needless. She is more concerned about her aunt.

  “Anne never came back. Margo says she spent the night at Bill’s, but do we know for sure? What if she had a car crash, like the one that killed Gram or the one we saw driving here Friday?” she asks with a frightened grimace. “But she has to be at the shop by now. Wouldn’t she be there? I mean the baker gets there at four in the morning to make muffins, but Anne is the shop? She opens at six thirty. She has to be there.”

  “She will be.”

  “And what about us, Mom?” Her eyes are clear green and worried. “What do we do now? I was the one who wanted to come here way more than you, and now it’s a big fat mess. All because I wanted to play Truth or Dare? Like, I keep going back to that. If I hadn’t—”

  I squeeze her hand. “No, babe. It would have happened anyway. It needed to happen. And it was good to find the gun.”

  “Good? There’s nothing good about a gun. And now it’s gone, but Anne hates us.”

  I jiggle her hand. “She doesn’t hate us.”

  “The things she said—”

  “She was angry.”

  “Bastard daughter?”

  Lifting my head, I squint toward my cell. “What time is it?” The sun is well up. I hear gulls.

  “Seven.”

  “I can’t do this at seven,” I breathe, sinking back as the details of last night’s fight pinch at my mind.

  “But what do we do now?” Joy repeats with even greater urgency. “Do we stay or leave? Do we take Papa down to the shop? I don’t know if I want to be with Anne if she’s going to be that ugly. How can sisters treat sisters like that?”

  “Sisters are people first,” I say. No, not the discussion I want to get into now, but I am my daughter’s mother, and the buck stops here. More to the point, knowing her as I do, this daughter won’t let it go. “Sisters are related, not identical. They have different personalities and different life experiences.”

  “But you grew up together. You lived in this house together as many years as you lived away. You ate the same food and celebrated the same holidays. You rode in the backseat of Papa’s old wooden Jeep, and you ganged up on him. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  It did. Absolutely. But shit happens. It’s part of life. How to prepare her for that? How to explain family angst in a way that doesn’t put her off family altogether? My greatest dread in conceiving Joy as I did and raising her alone isn’t in not having back-up when we both have the flu. It’s in passing on the belief that living alone is best.

  “Family can be a challenge,” I say, “but the alternative is worse. That’s why we’re here, Joy. My sisters and I experienced life together but differently, and we’ve been apart for twenty years. What you’re seeing now is a … rapprochement.”

  She knows the word. She singled it out of a book not a month ago. We discussed its meaning, as well as the beauty of the sound. Ra-proche-ment. Soft proche, French ment.

  I had hoped the memory would lift her spirits, but she pouts. “A rapprochement is happy. This isn’t.”

  “It will be. ‘The best way out is always through,’ Robert Frost says.”

  “I know, Mom. You’ve told me a gazillion times, but you didn’t say through meant war.”

  “It isn’t war. It’s negotiation.”

  “Like give and take? Like bargaining? I didn’t hear that last night, and anyway, where does that leave us now?” Her voice quivers. “Anne let me work at the shop, but I don’t know if she will anymore. If Anne doesn’t want me around and Jack doesn’t want me around—”

  Sitting up fast, I take her shoulders. “Anne wants you. She loves having you here. Anyone watching can see how proud she is to have you at the shop. You’re her family.”

  “Jack isn’t, but I thought he liked me. He promised I could be his intern, and now it’s Monday, and I’m still here.”

  I smile, grateful to have definitive word on this, at least. “He’s coming for you at eight.”

  Joy’s pretty heart-shaped face, framed with wispy curls, lights up with elation at this news, but only for an instant. In the next, the worry is back. “Then what about Anne? What if she’s expecting me to go down to the square when I wake up?”

  “I’ll text her.”

  “But what about Papa?”

  * * *

  Papa is in his own world. I had begun to think of morning as his good time, but not this day. He doesn’t look up when Joy and I enter, doesn’t respond when she says a bright, “Hi, Papa.” Still in his pajamas, which is itself unheard of, he sits at the kitchen table with his hair uncombed and his salty brows knit. He looks to be brooding. Actually, he looks defeated, to judge from the way his arms hang at his sides.

  The smell of fresh coffee is strong. Margo has likely been the one to put it in front of him, but he seems oblivious to her as she leans against the counter holding a mug of her own. There is warning in her arched brow when our eyes meet. Last night is on hold. Tom Aldiss is front and center.

  “Good morning, Dad,” I say. He glances
only halfway up. “Joy wants breakfast before she leaves,” I add, careful not to identify who she’ll be leaving with, since Lord knows how he’d react to that. “I’m making her eggs. Do you want some?”

  “I’ll make them,” Joy offers in a magnanimous tone. The pleading look she shoots me says she doesn’t know how to deal with Dad and wants an out. “Fried?” she offers him. “Scrambled?”

  His mouth tightens. “I have no toothpaste.”

  “Sure, you do, Dad,” Margo says and goes in search. She’s heading for his room, apparently braver than me when it comes to entering. Either that, or, like Joy, she’s just wanting something else to do.

  “Scrambled,” I tell Joy, and am about to point to where the skillet is when she finds it on her own. “Make a bunch. We’ll all have some.”

  She takes what she needs from the fridge and heats the pan.

  “She’s a good cook,” I tell my father. “Well, for eggs. She takes after me when it comes to the rest, which is meh.” I wait for him to scold me for that. He believes women should cook. Actually, scolding would be better than no reaction at all, but no reaction at all is what I get. He is … I have no clue where.

  Margo returns. “The toothpaste was on your dresser, Dad,” she says off-handedly, as if someone else had put it there, which we know isn’t the case. “I put it back in the bathroom.” Retrieving her coffee, she takes a seat.

  Nope, not another word from his mouth, I tell her with a disheartened look.

  “At least the rain stopped,” she tells Dad, then me, “it’s gorgeous out, a good day for planting. What time is Mike coming?”

  “Nine,” I say.

  No reaction from Dad, though it’s certainly another opportunity for him to scold. If he has forgotten giving me permission and only remembers not wanting to pay someone else to do what he thinks my mother should, that would be something. But he remains unconnected. Maybe he’s picturing Sunny Side Up and expecting us to take him to the square? I remember Anne telling me of the time he went down in his pajamas. I hope he doesn’t plan on doing that now. Then I wonder if he plans things at all, or if they just happen with the random shift of thought.