The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners

by Luanne Rice

  “No,” I said.

  She grabbed my hand. “What I did to you … putting you in such danger. I am so sorry. Please, Pell—don’t be mad at your dad. It was all my fault.”

  Fault. What a useless word. It hit me—we were together, my mother and I. She was praying for Rafe, a boy she’d previously—even hours earlier—seemed completely unable to stand. And she’d just said “people I love.” My mother.

  All these years without her, I’d pictured her on the glamorous island of Capri, surrounded by rich, famous, shallow, beautiful people. I hadn’t expected to find her in a warm, cozy house, perched on a rocky overlook full of gardens, surrounded by some of the most wonderful people I’d ever met. I hadn’t anticipated Max, and the way he felt about her, and the way my mother obviously felt about him, and how depths and heights of love could heal every heart.

  “Mom,” I said, hugging her.

  We stood there a long time. Max came back, and my mother took his hand. They went to sit quietly in a corner of the waiting room. I watched her try to soothe him. The nurse came out to say they could see Rafe. I watched through the door, saw my mother lay her hand on Rafe’s forehead.

  It’s strange. Seeing her that way, so warm and caring toward Max in his moment of crisis, toward Rafe as he lay injured in bed, I felt my father with us. As if he’d come back to be with me, stand by my side, bear witness to my mother’s transformation. I felt him forgiving all she had done, all she’d been unable to do. I felt his spirit, but I wished I could see his face. I closed my eyes, brought him close in my mind.

  “She’s good,” I said to him. And I meant it two ways. She’s doing well—she’s healed herself from the pain that drove her away from us, and she’s a good person, someone I can feel proud of, someone who cares.

  My father had only wanted the best for me and Lucy. I knew that. He would never have driven my mother away, and he couldn’t really explain to us the truth of why he’d needed to protect us from her. It would have planted a dreadful, immutable fact in my mind: my mother had considered killing me.

  Instead, my father let us keep our love for her. He’d never told us she might have hurt me, might have intended the worst there was. Because of him, we’d been able to hold her close, Lucy and I, in a golden glow of what once had been and what we’d never stopped hoping could be again.

  And here we were. All three of us together.

  While my mother took Lucy home, to let her settle in and get over her jet lag, and while Max stayed at the hospital with Rafe, I walked with Travis. We sent his bag in my mother’s car. He and I climbed the Phoenician Steps—all eight-hundred-something of them. My legs ached, but the physical exertion was nothing compared to the difficulty of facing what I’d done.

  “I should bring the team over here,” he said. “A few times running up and down, we’d be in shape and ready for the season.”

  “Travis …,” I said.

  But he just kept walking up, as if he didn’t want to slow down, stop, listen to me, hear me confess. He sensed it, I could tell. I must have looked like a wreck—I’d been up all night, and even though I’d showered after the boat ride and making out with Rafe, I felt disgrace and betrayal clinging to me.

  When we finally got to the top, I grabbed Travis’s hand.

  “I have to talk to you,” I said.

  “This is amazing,” he said, not hearing me.

  He chose that moment to look around, and for the first time seemed to see the spectacular view. Rain had washed the air so clean, there wasn’t a trace of humidity to dull the sparkling blue. The cerulean bay gleamed, hardly a line between water and sky. We saw the white wakes of brightly colored fishing boats; my gaze was pulled southeast, in the direction of Il Faraglioni.

  “You have to listen to me,” I said, shaking him.

  He tried to keep ignoring me, just staring out to sea at Ischia, then right toward the mainland, over the water to the dark shape of Mount Vesuvius.

  “I did something,” I said.

  Finally he looked at me. “I know,” he said.

  “How?” I asked.

  “Because I know you, Pell,” he said.

  We sat down on a grassy slope, shaded by olive trees. Sunlight dappled through the silver leaves, and tiny lizards skittered across flat rocks. There was space between us; we didn’t touch, just stared out to sea. I wanted to explain everything, but suddenly I couldn’t speak. He knows me, he said. I thought he did. But I also thought I knew myself.

  “I want to tell you what happened,” I said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Yes, I do.” And I started talking. My mother, my father, the revelation about what had happened on the bridge, my father telling my mother he didn’t want her to live with us if she couldn’t keep us safe. My running out, deciding to leave. Rafe, the boat ride, the seahorses.

  “He showed you seahorses?” Travis asked. For some reason, that detail seemed to hurt him more than any so far. He’d heard, all along, about my father’s nicknames for me and Lucy.

  “Yes.”

  “Go on,” he said, steeling himself.

  I told him how Rafe had refused to take me to Sorrento, wanted me to have it out with my mother. How I’d been crazed, thinking of my father, of what he’d kept from us, of how everything I’d believed about him, and about our little family, was suddenly flipped. My wonderful father, so flawed he’d actually driven my mother away.

  “I wasn’t ready to go up to my mother’s house,” I told Travis. “I couldn’t bring myself to face her. So I went to the boathouse.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s where Rafe sleeps.”

  Travis looked away again, staring at the bay, at the boats, as if he wished he were on one of them, fishing far away from me. My heart was beating in my throat. I took Travis’s hand. He had to look at me for this part; I tugged, so he’d turn his head, and he did, and I was staring into his eyes.

  “I kissed him,” I said.

  He looked momentarily stung, then blank. And then he walked away. He stopped looking at me, and he started back down the steps, as if toward the marina, to find Nicolas, to get him to take him as far from me as he could get.

  Travis felt stung, as if wasps had gotten him. But instead of his skin burning, it was his insides. Little venomous insects had flown down his throat, jabbing him with poison. Could he die from this? The picture of Pell kissing another guy.

  He felt sick, burning up. The image was there in his mind, it wouldn’t go away. Had Rafe put one hand on her head, the other on her waist? Had he touched her face? Had the kiss been slow? Had it been intense? How long had it lasted?

  Pell had told Travis she loved him. He remembered the first time. It was even before Toronto, before things got so physically serious. Going back to last winter, the start of Christmas vacation, right after the wreath-throwing. His family had just gotten back together. Carrie had returned, bringing Gracie.

  The baby in the house had distracted everyone from the fact Carrie had disappeared for a year, all the reasons for her taking off. Gracie was so cute and sweet, funny and curious. The whole family congregated around her, staring at every move she made. Travis started feeling as if they were watching a magic show so they wouldn’t have to talk.

  He and Pell walked the school grounds, just as they had a few weeks earlier, looking for Beck at the height of the drama. Winter, and snow was a foot deep. The paths were shoveled but icy, and a bitter ocean wind blew between the buildings.

  “How are you?” Pell asked, after they’d walked in silence awhile.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s all weird.”

  “Which part?”

  “Things are messed up,” he said. “Carrie’s home, and that’s great. But she had a kid. No one even knew.”

  “Your family had a lot going on,” Pell said.

  Travis nodded, his chin buried in a muffler. She was right. Trauma had hit the Shaws. Family secrets; sounded like the title of a chic
k flick, but they were real. His mom had been with another guy before marrying his dad. Carrie had come from that relationship, and when the truth came out eighteen years later, it nearly destroyed everyone.

  Travis’s dad had died in a terrible accident, Carrie had run away, and it had taken a year for her to return home, for them all to start to come back together. Travis had been going out with Ally, a girl from back home in Ohio, when he’d first moved to Newport. Pell had seen him through everything, even the breakup.

  “Why did it have to happen?” Travis asked Pell, walking through the snow. “Why’d my dad have to die? Everyone’s sitting home, smiling at Gracie, and he’s gone—he’ll never know his grand daughter.”

  “I don’t know why such terrible things happen,” Pell said, taking his hand.

  “If my mom had told the truth back when they were young,” Travis began, and Pell stopped him.

  “I’m sure she did the best she could,” Pell said. “She must have decided it would hurt him less to not tell him the truth.”

  “It hurt him more,” Travis said.

  “I know,” Pell said. They walked a few more minutes, then stopped. She looked at Travis in that deep way, her blue eyes knowing so much, as if she’d lived her whole life already. Her eyes were filled with sadness, and that’s when she said it. “I love you, Travis.”

  “I love you too, Pell,” he said.

  They held each other, their bodies pressing together as the cold wind blew around them. Then she tilted her head back and looked up at him. He’d seen a sharpness in her blue eyes—a promise. He’d had the feeling she wanted to say more. But they hadn’t been going out long—they were so new. Maybe she’d felt it was too soon to say that much.

  Now, walking down the crooked, rugged stone steps on Capri, Travis burned with the news about Pell kissing Rafe. He hated what she’d done, more than almost anything he could think of. It had hurt him worse than anything since his dad’s death. But suddenly he stopped, one foot in the air, before it hit the next step. And he knew: exactly what Pell had been thinking that snowy day.

  He turned around and started running up the steep flight, two stairs at a time, hoping she would still be there. She had to be. He had to look her straight in the eyes and see if he was right.

  Travis came back.

  I hadn’t moved.

  In fact, I’d used my mother as a model. That day at Tiberius’s Leap, when she’d told me the first part of the story about taking me to the bridge, I’d been unable to hear the whole thing, and gone running off. Once I’d processed her words, I returned, and she was right where I’d left her.

  As Travis came flying up the craggy Phoenician Steps, I saw the relief in his face when he spotted me standing there. I know I felt immense comfort, realizing that he hadn’t commandeered Nicolas to take him back to the mainland.

  “Pell,” he said.

  “Oh, Travis,” I said, reaching out. But he stopped short, didn’t take my hand.

  “I have to ask you something,” he said.

  I nodded, steeling myself. He wanted to know about the kiss—the details of how it had happened, why I’d let myself get into that situation. “Travis, I’m just so sorry,” I began. But he shook his head hard, stopping me.

  “Back at school,” he said.

  “Newport?” I asked. What was he saying?

  “Last winter. On that walk.”

  That walk. There could be only one. “When we said we loved each other?” I asked.

  “Yes. You looked at me.”

  I nodded. I’d been unable to look away from him, and I felt that way again, and my eyes were riveted to his.

  “You wanted to say something else,” he said.

  Had I? I thought back, couldn’t remember. “I don’t know,” I said now.

  “I think you wanted to say you’d never lie to me,” he said. “Like my mother did to my dad. Even if it hurts, the truth is better.”

  My eyes filled with tears. Travis was right. I had been thinking that exact thing, on that cold walk through Newport Academy. His family had been ripped apart when his dad found out the truth, that Carrie wasn’t his daughter. Mrs. Shaw is one of the best people I know—kind, smart, caring. But she’d tried too hard to protect her husband, instead of trusting his strength, and his goodness, and his capacity to forgive.

  “Is that why you told me today?” he asked. “About you and Rafe?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Because I can’t keep a secret from you.”

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  “Travis, I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I am too.”

  I froze. Was he breaking up with me?

  “Can you ever …,” I started to say, but it took a minute to get the words out, “forgive me?”

  “Pell,” he said, sounding weary.

  I was terrible; he couldn’t get past it. I started to blather. “Back in Newport, when you were still with Ally … once you started having feelings for me, you broke up with her. You could never be with two people at the same time. And I …”

  “You were ‘with him’?” Travis asked.

  “No—I mean, we didn’t do anything. More than kissing … but isn’t that enough? I let something happen, and you never would have. You don’t deserve it. But if I can just explain, tell you …”

  “Pell,” he said. “You can tell me it was all because of the news about your father, and the seahorses, and all that. But I’ve been worried about Rafe Gardiner since you first told me about him.”

  “Why?” I asked, shocked.

  “You really want to know?” he asked.

  I nodded, and now it was my turn to gaze out over the sea. Birds sang in the trees, raucous song, and I felt my heart pounding. Travis took my hand, held it hard.

  “Your mother didn’t like him,” Travis said. “He had, has, some kind of dark secret. You said he was ‘troubled.’ Pell, since I’ve known you, you’ve been the best person on this earth. Nothing has ever shaken you. Your dad’s death, your grandmother’s whatever, your mother living so far away, having to look after Lucy as if you’re her mom, helping me through my family craziness.”

  “But I love you,” I whispered. “If you think I’m attracted to someone just because he has a dark secret …”

  “Pell,” he said. “You’re the one with the dark secret.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Now he was tender. He stroked my face. I felt his lips on my skin. He held my hand even tighter.

  “You’ve tried to carry it all for so long,” he said. “Put it down.”

  “What?” I asked. “Put what down?”

  “The heavy rock, the dark secret. Your mother left you and Lucy. Whyever she did it, whyever it happened, for whatever good or terrible reason, whether your father was the most wonderful dad in the world and made everything as good as he could, you’ve been without your mother since you were six years old.”

  He was right, and tears welled up again. I stared at him, the boy I’d loved since the day I first saw him.

  “Rafe is like you,” he said. “I don’t know how or why—I don’t even know him. But he’s suffered a lot. And you saw, and it made you feel at home. Because that’s you, Pell. You’ve been through so much.”

  “Travis,” I said, falling into his arms.

  “You told me the truth,” he said, kissing my lips. “As long as you’re not in love with him, what happened doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “That’s good,” he said.

  I gazed into his blue eyes. I believe that when you meet the one for you, you just know. That happened for me and Travis a year ago, when he first moved to Newport. I remember the first second I saw him, across the campus. Our eyes met; we became friends after that, and then better friends.

  He had to figure out things with Ally. Then he did, and they broke up, and we got together. We were still together. Life was hard; it had been so painful for both of us. But we had each other.


  I thought of last winter, back at school. Snow everywhere, all over campus. His family had recently reunited after their own period of working their way back together. Our school has a ceremony once each year, where we commemorate the history of Newport Academy, honoring its founder and one of the students who died long ago.

  A week before I told him I loved him, we were all gathered on the school’s snow-covered lawn. Travis watched as his sisters and niece, Lucy, and I threw a wreath into the sea. Then we all went to stand with his mother. The sea wind blew, and we were all chilled. We huddled in a circle, to keep warm. Travis’s father had died, his older sister had had a baby, his mother was sorting out the damage her secret had done.

  I was struck by how, out of great sadness and turmoil, the Shaw family could arrive at this amazing moment. Getting to know Travis had inspired me to think more clearly about my own history—about my parents, and the fact of my mother living so far away—and had strengthened a growing desire of mine to find her and bring her home. That day freezing cold, seeing three generations of Shaws, I realized how everything in a family affects everyone in a family….

  Ghosts in the nursery. That’s the phrase used by the psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg to explain the way parents bring their own issues of childhood—their own pains, fears, wishes—with them as they start to raise their own children. That idea resonated with me, and was one of the reasons I wanted to become a psychologist. For me, it was more the ghosts in second grade.

  That’s how old I’d been when my mother left.

  Sitting with Travis now, gazing into his blue eyes, I felt my second-grade ghosts flying away. I could almost see them, white as mist, rising into the clear air, through the branches of the olive trees, disappearing somewhere above.

  “I love you, Pell,” Travis said.

  “I love you, Travis,” I said. “You came all this way.”

  He smiled. His eyes looked relaxed now, getting tired, jet lag catching up with him. The blue sky and water surrounded Capri, and it felt like it belonged to us, all of that beauty and wildness, all of the mystery.