A Charmed Place

by Antoinette Stockenberg

"Oh, but—so soon?" The words fell from Maddie's lips before she had a chance to snatch them back. "We've hardly had a chance to talk."

  "Darling, that's what lunch was for. Two of the dealers are by appointment only, and we're late." Norah blew Maddie a kiss and turned to her sidekick. "Got your Visa?"

  Short, dark-haired Joan patted the place where a six-shooter would hang and said, "Yup. Let's go." She loved shopping, loved it to the point that she'd maxed out her credit cards and had to resort to an equity loan to keep up with Norah.

  Joan joked that shopping was cheaper than gambling as a hobby, and maybe she was right. But what she really wanted—what she'd made no secret of wanting—was a husband, two kids, and a cat. So far, all she had was the cat.

  Maddie stood at the potting table, watching and smiling as the two women prepared to go off on their frivolous mission. She lasted until Norah turned the key to the ignition, and then she yielded to wretched temptation.

  "Wait! You never said what happened at Annie's with Dan Hawke!"

  Did it sound like an afterthought? She hoped so.

  Norah said gaily, "Oh, that? It was a disaster. We went up to him, all polite and properly starry-eyed. I was on my best behavior, swear to God. After exchanging two sentences with us, he said, 'I'm sorry, but I'm having a private and rather important conversation. Would you mind? Thank you so much.' "

  Joan covered her face at the memory, moaned, and said, "I've never been so embarrassed in my life."

  Norah threw her head back and laughed, displaying a graceful curve of throat. "Joannie!" she hooted. "Who cares? The man puts his pants on one leg at a time, the same as everybody else. He's not worth blushing over. Oh, and Maddie? That was his sister, I'm sure of it. She was delivering some kind of good-natured harangue when we walked up to them. I doubt that a lover would dare."

  With that, Norah threw her Mercedes into fast reverse, sending white quahog shells spinning beneath its tires. Maddie stared at the ruts created in the rain-soaked drive and shook her head. Her father would've felt vindicated: he'd wanted to go with asphalt.

  But Maddie had overruled him, because she was a romantic. A cottage called Rosedale deserved a drive paved with seashells, she'd said. She remembered the wry look on her father's face as the dump truck rumbled up the sandy, pot-holed road past the ten other laid-back cottages that made up Cranberry Lane, and then emptied its load of horrendously stinky clamshells onto their driveway.

  "The smell will go away," she'd insisted. And it had. But her father had never lived to know that.

  Maddie sighed and tried not to look at the lighthouse as she carried the flower clippings out to the compost bin. She felt a sudden surge of indignation over Norah's driving. Really, the woman was impossible. From now on, Maddie would make her park in the lane.

  ****

  All day, he'd had glimpses of her. In the garden; at the mailbox; coming and going past her kitchen window. But he hadn't yet got a good look at her, and it was killing him.

  From where he was positioned—at a bedroom window that looked over a small bight of water toward her cottage—he could tell that she looked much the same. The granny-print dresses that were all the rage back then had made a comeback; she was wearing one now. And her hair—it was still the same reassuring warm brown, thank God, and not fashionably streaked with blonde. It was shorter now than waist-length, of course; less obviously erotic. When he saw her for the first time yesterday, he felt a pang that she'd cut most of it off. But by today he could see that she'd done the right thing. She wasn't a kid anymore.

  And neither was he. That was the hell of it. Neither was he.

  Were her eyebrows still thick and straight? Her eyes still denim blue? Did she still have that oddly lilting laugh? Had she had that chipped tooth capped? These were questions that consumed him as he worked ineffectually at the well-worn oak desk that came with the lightkeeper's house.

  Her breasts, he remembered, were slightly uneven; she had been comically tragic about that. He prayed with all his heart that she hadn't gone and done something stupid to make them match.

  He remembered all the rest of her body as well, but it was hard to tell now if her hips were the same, if her waist was as slender, if she'd gained or lost weight. The dress she wore was anything but revealing. It was a hell of a lot easier to see, for example, that the tall, flashy redhead had a dynamite body and that her short, dark-haired friend didn't.

  He'd been able to see them clearly enough as they got into the Mercedes, though he scarcely remembered them from Annie's. But Maddie? Blocked by the damned house. For two cents he'd bulldoze it. Make her homeless. Make her seek comfort and refuge in the keeper's house. Make her seek him.

  At least then he could see her up close. He had the profound sense that if he could just see her, up close, he would know. He'd know if she had the answer to a question he couldn't begin either to ask or to answer: Are you sorry?

  He saw movement in the kitchen again, but again, he couldn't see a face. It may have been the girl, home now from an outing with her friends. How old was she? Fourteen? Fifteen? Where was he that many years ago? He thought about it and came up with a place: Africa, covering yet another civil war ... yet another famine. People dead and dying ... bodies everywhere ... children too starved to cry.

  God, how he hated it. Hated himself. Hated life.

  He began instinctively to reach for a cigarette, and then, less instinctively, he resisted. He'd made a promise.

  It was dusk. He couldn't keep up the pretense of reading if he wasn't going to turn on a light. Reluctantly, he lowered the ratty wood blind, turned on the green-glassed banker's lamp, and opened a political biography he had no desire to read. He stared at the same page for a full eternity, until it felt as if his eyes were beginning to cross.

  "Damn," he muttered. He threw his head back, closed his eyes, and gulped a long, deep draft of air, then let it out in a brief explosion.

  He turned off the lamp, pulled up the blind, and lit the cigarette after all. At least now he had some of what he craved: comfort and darkness. He pushed his chair deeper into shadow; it made a loud, scraping sound against the battered plank floors, jarring the stillness in the sparsely furnished room.

  He smoked another cigarette, then a third, watching the windows of the cottage, thinking thoughts he had no right to think. It hadn't been so bad when Jess was there. She'd dragged him through an endless round of shopping, hitting every domestics department between Sandy Point and Boston. She seemed to believe his life wouldn't be complete without a sink rack, bathroom curtains, and a soup ladle, not to mention a thousand other gadgets and doo-hickeys without which the modern homemaker could not, apparently, survive.

  But he was no homemaker. He couldn't see how he'd ever be a homemaker. Too much water had flowed under that bridge, carrying with it all those basic instincts to couple, to breed, to nurture. Maybe once ...?

  But he doubted it.

  He reached for the cigarette pack, then remembered—not that he'd actually forgotten—that it was empty. Jessie had made him promise that this pack would be his last, and he had honored all her hard work of the last three days by agreeing, again, to quit. In a way, he really did mean to. He had come back to this place, to this hallowed shore, armed with a fierce desire to get things right, whatever the hell that meant.

  He smiled wryly to himself. Twenty years earlier, another nonsmoker had challenged his habit.

  How can you smoke these things? she'd asked as she hunted down half a dozen butts from around the rock on the shell-strewn beach.

  They clear my head, he'd replied. From his perch on the rock, he'd watched her groom the beach in front of the lighthouse before the tide had a chance to. She had rolled her pants up above her knees, but one of the cuffs had come undone and was sodden; he remembered it well. Her hair was so long that it grazed the water when she bent over to pluck a stray butt from an outgoing wave. He had a vivid picture of the way the chestnut strands floated like a silken starburst on
the seawater. Venus Returns to the Sea. If it wasn't the name of a poem, it ought to've been.

  She loved poetry. And he loved to hear her recite it. The stuff was harmless enough, if irrelevant, so he used to seek out quiet corners with her on the campus green where he could listen to the rich, low caress of her voice without the chatter and clatter of students around them.

  She liked the pre-Raphaelites. And he, who had no room in his curriculum for bullshit like poetry, went out and bought a leatherbound, slender volume of their verse for her. He'd intended to give it to her for her birthday, but they never made it that far. He had the volume still, and he knew every single poem in it by heart. The book was ragged now, and falling apart. The leather had turned out not to be leather at all and he took the fraud to be symbolic. He just wasn't sure of what.

  He sighed again, frustrated beyond measure with the general state of his ignorance, and reached for the pack of cigarettes.

  Empty. Right.

  He had an unopened pack in his overnight bag. He got up from his desk to retrieve it.

  ****

  "Hey, gorgeous! How's my favorite woman in the world?"

  "Dad! Hi! Where are you?"

  "Right in town. At Annie's."

  "Cool. Are you coming over?"

  "That depends entirely on your mother. Is she around?"

  Tracey's voice fell to a conspiratorial whisper—the tone she used whenever the subject was her mother. "Mom's out doing a stock-up. I have to stay home for when Mr. Chaves comes; we don't have any hot water."

  "Bummer. That old house is a real bag of bones, isn't it?"

  "Yeah, it sucks. Those bats are back in the attic—didn't I tell you they would be? And the roof's leaking over the bathroom ceiling again, so there's flakes of paint on the floor all the time, and when you walk in there barefoot, the flakes stick to your feet and you almost need tweezers to get them off. It's like, so totally gross. And it's boring here." Her voice trailed off in a tragic wail. "I can't believe we're back for another whole summer."

  Michael Regan laughed and said, "You used to like it well enough when you were a kid, Trace."

  "Yeah, when I was a baby. But, like, I'm fourteen, Dad. There's just nothing, nothing, nothing to do here. It's not like Boston. I wish I was back in Boston."

  "I wish you were, too, puddin'. I miss our routine when you go down there for the summer. This should've been our weekend."

  Tracey's sigh was loud and heartrending. "I don't see why you can't stay here some of the time. I mean, you're family, no matter what. And all the rest of the family gets to come and go. Why should Uncle George be able to stay here and not you? I mean, who cares about Uncle George? He drinks and he's mean and he makes fun of me. It isn't fair"

  "Honey, we've been through all that. You know that if I could, I would."

  "No, I don't know," she said petulantly. "Juliette's parents are divorced, and her father gets to stay over sometimes."

  "Well, your mother and I are not that kind of divorced."

  "How many kinds of divorce are there? It's not like Mom's seeing anyone."

  "You mean, at all? What happened to Eric?"

  Her voice was a shrug. "He doesn't come around any more."

  "And that other one you talked about, the new guy in her English department—Gerald?''

  "Oh, Gerald. I'm pretty sure he's gay."

  "You are, are you. Well. Since you're the expert—"

  Tracey giggled and said, "I'm not an expert, Dad, but really. I'm pretty sure."

  "Well, I'm just glad I have you there to watch over your mother for me, Trace. I mean it. You're a sharp observer.

  "I get that from you, Dad, don't I? That's what Mom says."

  "She says that?"

  "Well, yeah. And that we're both moody."

  "So she still talks about me?"

  "Of course! You're my father."

  "Well, I'm glad she hasn't put all thoughts of me out in the recycle bin with my photographs."

  "No way! She even has some wedding pictures, you know. A bunch! I found them in her room."

  "Really. Now that's interesting. Huh."

  "Dad?"

  "Hmm?"

  Tracey's voice dropped even lower. "I really need you to be here lately. I mean, Mom is just coming down on me so hard. The older I get, the more she comes down. Like, I wanted to go to Great Woods to see Jimmy Buffet with a bunch of other kids? They were mostly older, but Juliette's my age. And like, it was Jimmy Buffet, not Nine Inch Nails. Like, it would've been so... so..."

  "Innocuous?"

  "So innocent. She just won't trust me!"

  "Never mind, honey. The next time he has a concert there, I'll take you myself. Promise."

  "Yeah, but it won't be the—well, anyway, if it was up to you, I could've gone. Right?"

  "Probably."

  "Y'know, I bet I still wouldn't have a pierced navel if it wasn't for you."

  "Hey, no one sees a navel. I say that's your own private business. Your mother overreacted on that one."

  "She overreacts on everything, Dad! That's just it!"

  "I know. I know."

  "It really isn't fair. She's so uptight."

  There was a grudge in his voice as he said, "Tell me something I don't know, honey."

  "I mean, every time she uses the word 'teenage,' it always has something bad after it. Teenage drinking, teenage drugs, teenage sex. She's always lecturing. I was taking off nail polish the other day? She starts nagging about not sniffing the remover. Sometimes I think she watches too much television. It's warping her brain."

  Michael laughed and said to his daughter, "An interesting point of view."

  "And she's been so weird since we got here. First she's in a sucky mood, then a good, then a sucky. I mean, she calls me temperamental. Da-ad! Do something!"

  "All right. When I see your mother I'll—"

  "Oh! Doorbell! It must be Mr. Chaves. I gotta go. Come over now, Dad, please please please!"

  She hung up without waiting for his answer, confident, no doubt, that her dad was as good as on his way to Rosedale Cottage.

  Michael let his hand linger on the receiver of the wall-mounted phone; he was tempted to call his daughter back and caution her that he had to go through channels.

  Channels! It was idiotic to have to ask Maddie for permission to see his own daughter. Four years of that crap had left him doubting his own competence as a father. All that bowing and scraping, just because some goddamned judge had decreed where and when he'd have access to his own child!

  He frowned, then stepped around a huge hanging pot of ivy and scanned the cafe's checker-clothed tables. His back had been to the tables while he was talking with Tracey. Now he noticed that Trixie Roiters, Town Busybody, had stopped in for coffee. The woman had ears like an elephant; no way was he going to humiliate himself in front of her by calling Tracey back.

  Piss on it, he thought bitterly. I can see my own daughter if I want to. He made up his mind to go straight to the cottage.

  Chapter 4

  By the time he arrived at Rosedale, Maddie was there, unloading groceries from her Taurus.

  He pulled in behind her on the crunchy drive and emerged from his car with a smile. "So you went with the quahog shells after all."

  Her return smile wasn't hostile, but it wasn't warm and fuzzy, either. Somehow he'd convinced himself that Maddie would be pleasantly surprised, rather than merely surprised, to see him.

  "Hello, Michael," she said. "Are you in town on business, or on pleasure?"

  "A little of both, actually. My tenant vacated the condo early. I had to come down to check it out and decide what to do about his deposit."

  She nodded in sympathy. "Will you be able to rent it for July and August?"

  "Without a doubt. And they tell me summer rents are out of sight this year," he added with a grin. He looped his fingers through six of the heaviest plastic bags of groceries that lay sprawled in the back of the wagon and lifted them out with a grun
t.

  Hoisting several others, Maddie said, "In that case, I guess you'll be giving your tenant back his deposit."

  Michael declined to tell her that he had no such plans. He followed her inside and stood in the kitchen while she unpacked, watching the play of sunlight on her hair, catching a scent of her perfume as she passed under his nose for another bag of groceries to put away.

  As always, their talk turned to Tracey. As always, he had to watch what he said. "I thought, since I was in town, that I'd take Trace out for a burger and a movie, if that's all right with you." Beg, grovel, damn the judge to hell.

  Maddie was arranging cans of tomato products in a pyramid of big to small: whole, stewed, sauce, and paste. "Sure," she said. "What's playing? I haven't paid attention."

  "Some Mel Gibson thing. She still likes Mel Gibson, doesn't she?" he asked, handing his ex-wife a couple of overlooked cans of plum tomatoes.

  Maddie stepped down from the wood footstool and turned to him with an on-second-thought look on her face.

  "It's a thriller, isn't it?" she said quietly. "They're always so violent."

  "It's a shoot-'em-up cartoon, is all it amounts to," he answered, defending his choice.

  "Bullets are bullets."

  She was thinking of one bullet in particular, he could see.

  "For God's sake—they use blanks in the movie, Maddie!"

  The look in her eyes—stricken, combative, aloof—made him say quickly, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snap."

  "You never do."

  "I'm sorry, honest."

  Where the hell was Tracey ? He cocked his head, listening to the rush of water through the plumbing in the kitchen wall. "Still showering," he said with a look of wonder. "I can't believe your well doesn't run dry."

  Maddie laughed and said, "The furnace was out. We had no hot water all morning. It turns out that a fuse shook loose above the boiler, but we needed a plumber to figure that out for us. It took him two seconds. Dad would've—anyway, Tracey was forced to go four extra hours without a shower. Naturally she needs to compensate."

  They exchanged a wry look of commiseration. On this, at least, they were agreed: their little girl had a daunting standard of hygiene.