A Charmed Place

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "Fight it!"

  "And what? Alienate her forever? All I'm saying is, I have to do this slowly ... gingerly; I can't make a single false step now. Can't you see that?" she pleaded.

  Dan walked away from her. With his hands flat in his back pockets, he stared through the windows at the destruction outside. In the silence that followed, Maddie heard a lone hammer. People had already started to put their lives back together again.

  In a dull tone, Dan said, "Well, okay, you know best, I guess. I'm not a parent. I can't say what's right or wrong in your approach. Personally, I think you're wrong—but I'm not a parent."

  Eager to smooth things between them, she said, "You're right that he just wants to hurt me. I've hardly even had a date since the divorce ... so this has hit him hard. I think with time I can make him see reason. I wish there was a better way ... it will be horrible, not being with you—"

  Dan turned around slowly. "Not what?"

  "Not ... not ..." And then it hit her that she'd omitted one small detail of Michael's plan: that to get Tracey back at all, she had to give Dan up. "Not being with you," she repeated faintly. "If I ... if I see you, he'll begin the proceedings. That's what he said."

  The look on Dan's face became part of her permanent memory: the dark brows, pulled down in disbelief; the un-shaved chin, locked in grim repose; the total stillness of his being as he forced himself to comprehend the terms she was laying before him like cards in a game of blackjack.

  At last he said, "You're going to spit on his threat, right?"

  "Oh, Dan—how can I?" she asked him in agony. "For all the reasons I've just said. I'm her mother, Dan! And Michael is, and always will be, her twisted, twisted father."

  The silence was as long, as brutal, as any that had ever occurred between them.

  "I can't argue with that," Dan said at last, looking away again. After another long pause, he said, "So. The wedding's off."

  "If I marry you," she explained gently, "I may lose my child. I wouldn't have believed it a month ago. Now I do."

  "And you want me to—what?"

  "Wait?"

  He swung back around. "How long? Weeks? Months? Years? Until he walks Tracey down the aisle? Until your first grandchild is born? How long, Maddie? How long this time?''

  "You've loved me this long, Dan," she whispered.

  His jaw was clamped down tight; she could see the muscles working in his temples as he considered her entreaty.

  Finally he said, "You're asking too much, Maddie. Too much of any man. Even me."

  He turned to leave. His hand was on the screen door when he suddenly pulled off the cotton sweater she'd lent him and flung it at her. "Here—your father's sweater," he said in disgust. "The curse goes on."

  ****

  Cranberry Lane looked like a war zone. Hawke was in no mood to take in more than that general impression. He'd walked out of her cottage in such a seething rage that he hadn't even noticed if Rosedale still had a roof or not; presumably it had. Very quickly, though, the extent of the widespread damage became clear, even to him.

  A house was flattened, another one, half gone. Where it had gone was anyone's guess, but at least some of it had wedged in the lane. Dan picked his way barefoot around the debris and cut between two houses down to the beach, where he saw home after home split open and laid bare for all the world to see. A kitchen, a living room, a master bedroom—once those rooms had had a view of the ocean. Now the ocean had a view of them.

  It was bad. Whatever the ocean hadn't pushed forward, it seemed to have dragged back. The beach was littered with furniture and deck planking and the broken bones of boats that had washed ashore. People wandered everywhere, most of them in awe. Some wept. One elderly couple, holding one another, simply stared in silence at the remains of what was once a tiny cottage covered over with climbing roses. He wondered if it had been theirs.

  It was impossible not to feel their collective misery, but it only made his private one worse.

  We should be together now. We should be sharing this together.

  He couldn't believe that she'd done it again: sent him packing. After all the vows, all the tears, after all the phenomenal satisfaction of making love—off y'go, mate; that's a good boy.

  Unreal! This couldn't be happening. He felt dazed by her response, and the disaster on the beach only made it feel that much more unreal.

  The sound of sobbing pierced his reverie. He turned to see a middle-aged woman sitting on the deck of her home, sobbing over a framed photograph that hung limply in her hands. And yet her house looked pretty much intact. Had she lost a pet? Her grief seemed deeper than that. A relation? It occurred to Hawke, really for the first time, that people undoubtedly had died in this storm: a surfer, a resident, a motorist, a fisherman. Dot had to have fled with blood on her hands.

  Maddie could've died in this thing. She had forced her way through hell to find him and bring him home safe—and then had booted him out again. Unreal!

  "She really kicked ass, didn't she?"

  Dan looked up, inclined to agree.

  A deeply tanned beach-bum type grinned at him from the deck of a sailboat lying on its side, high and dry. "I hear Hyannisport's a disaster, man."

  He seemed too happy by half. "That your boat?" asked Dan, convinced he was looting it.

  "Nah. It's my buddy's. We're taking what we can off it. It's a total."

  "It looks fine to me," Dan said, still not convinced about the guy. "The sails didn't even unfurl."

  The beach bum cocked his head at Dan. "You blind, man? You could drive a truck through the hull."

  Only then did Dan see that the side that lay on the sand had a hole in it big enough—well, to drive a truck through.

  "Huh. You're right," he said, and he moved on, relating to the boat in an intensely personal way. Totaled. That's exactly how he felt.

  He walked over hard wet sand the rest of the way, jumping nimbly when debris sloshed back and forth in the flattening seas that still broke on the beach. As far as he was able to tell, the keeper's house and the lighthouse were still standing. It was only when he got directly between them and the water that he saw the change: the tower's foundation had sunk into the sand and it was now leaning, just like the one at Pisa. Not good.

  The keeper's house, on the other hand, was still intact. Some—many—shingles were missing and some windows blown out, but all in all, the keeper's house was in better shape than the lighthouse itself. Dan was proud to see that the roof had held. He counted it as the single accomplishment of his stay in Sandy Point.

  So. Back to square one. No phone, no electricity, no running water. It was a lot like being in Afghanistan again, except without hope. The realization sliced through his gut like a rusty saber, infecting him as it went. He closed his eyes, willing away all thoughts of Maddie. She'd made her choice. Twice. You couldn't get more certain than that. He'd given it his best shot, but destiny and biology had other ideas.

  In any case, the thought of waiting any longer was completely repellent to him. Weeks, months, years—any wait at all was unacceptable. He was going to have to get on with his life, hopefully without bitterness. He had to forgive, and somehow to forget.

  It'd be a lot easier to do that with a drink and a cigarette, he thought, plucking a strand of seaweed from his Jeep. He was going to have to figure out where to get both.

  Chapter 30

  As hurricanes go, Dot was no Hugo. But half a dozen towns on the mid-Cape's south shore had taken it on the chin—Sandy Point hardest of all. The village was laid flat on its back for almost two weeks while Com Electric replaced rows of poles and reels of cable, and bulldozers shoved bits and pieces of houses from the roads. The only vehicles allowed to traverse the town's torn-up streets were emergency ones—chief among them the water truck. Chainsaws and generators whined nonstop during the daylight hours, wearing on people's nerves.

  But at night, when the equipment was shut down, a quaint serenity prevailed. Sandy Point became a
sleepy Victorian watering hole once more. No TV's blared, no stereos throbbed; neither fan nor air conditioner hummed. Oil lamps and candlelight glowed through wide open windows and doors, and neighbors gathered on porches and decks, rehashing the scary parts of the storm and wondering when they'd have their electricity back.

  The ocean, too, stayed oddly meek—embarrassed, no doubt, by the fit it had thrown in front of everyone. It ebbed and flowed quietly now, over much less beach than before. Two feet less beach, to be exact; that's how much was missing from the front of the lighthouse. Coastal engineers said that the sand had shifted to the east, to someone else's shore.

  "Not that it matters where it went," Norah told the ad hoc committee that she'd assembled at the lighthouse. "We've got to move the lighthouse now. The contractor needs at least thirty feet of beach to maneuver his equipment around it. We have about thirty-four at high tide."

  The ad hoc committee was Norah's idea—a sop to flatter the six top contributors into coughing up the balance of the three hundred thousand needed to move the tower across the road. If time and money permitted, the keeper's house would be moved as well. But it was the lighthouse that was now the more urgent concern.

  Hawke watched with grudging admiration as Norah explained the moving procedure in expert detail to the five men and one woman clustered on the sand. Step by step, she laid out the arduous process of moving the historic structure—the cutting of the concrete floor, the hand excavation inside and out, the installation of the cribbing and steel beams through holes cut in the foundation, and the jacking up of the lighthouse to transfer it to the dolly system on which it would be driven across the road to its newly acquired site.

  The hurricane had flattened morales all over town, including Hawke's, but Norah seemed to have been energized by it. She'd arrived at the lighthouse less than an hour after he returned to it on the morning after Dot's rampage, and she'd spent every daylight hour there since. A great deal of her time was spent with town and state officials, contractors, and engineers.

  And the rest of it was spent with Hawke. Thrown together in the lighthouse crisis, they'd become friends in the last twelve days. Despite his foul mood and his desire to get out of Sandy Point, Hawke had ended up letting Norah talk him into pitching in to make the latest repairs to the keeper's house. One job led to another, and his mood began to improve. Soon he found himself going through his shoebox of business cards, looking for contacts that might be useful in the effort to speed up the relocation.

  And now, after the last committee member piled into the car that Norah had waiting for them, she and Hawke settled back in plastic chaises for sundowners on the beach. It was their fourth or fifth evening in a row, a nice little ritual by now.

  "They'll definitely come up with the cash," Norah told him with typical confidence. "We'll be able to sign the contract for the move this month."

  Hawke lifted an icy Coors from the cooler she'd brought and popped the lid. "How long before the actual move, do you think?"

  She shrugged her bare shoulders and said, "The contract will run for four months. The move itself will only take about a week. It's the preparation that's time-consuming. And everything will depend on the weather. Didn't I hear someone forecast half a dozen major hurricanes this summer?''

  "Ah, what do they know?" Hawke asked, squinting into the evening sun. There were shadier places to set the chaises, but here they were out of sight of Rosedale. He didn't want to be reminded of it. Ever.

  Norah stretched languidly, like a cat, then lay back and closed her eyes with a smile. "I love this time of day," she said. "The way everything winds down and people go home, but I don't have to. I always feel both self-indulged and sad, as if such a beautiful dream can't possibly go on."

  He laughed and slugged his Coors. "I don't have a clue whether that makes you selfish or humble."

  She rolled her head in his direction and batted her eyes once, slowly, at him. "Right now, I feel both."

  He didn't back down from the look he saw there. Definitely, there was a scent in the air. Did she know about the breakup? He hadn't once alluded to it, but it didn't take a rocket scientist to know there'd been a change in his status.

  She raked her red mane of hair over to one side; the setting sun danced and played over it, revealing a whole spectrum of russet tones. Spectacular, Hawke thought. He was startled to realize that he'd noticed.

  Because he was genuinely curious, he said, "How is it that a gorgeous thing like you is sitting on plastic chairs with an unemployed bum like me?"

  "Because you refuse to come lounge on the fancy chaises around my pool," she said with a smile.

  It was true. He'd stuck to washing himself from a barrel of rainwater rather than take advantage of her generator-equipped villa. Right about now, he was asking himself why.

  He had hung around Sandy Point for eleven days longer than he'd planned to do after he walked out of Rosedale. Not once had Maddie made an effort to contact him. No visits, no smoke signals. She meant what she said. Hell, he should've known that from the first time.

  A wave came up a little higher than the rest, lapping around the legs of their chaises. Hawke felt a corner suck into the sand, setting him ever so slightly off balance. "Ask me again," he told her softly.

  ****

  Michael Regan was in a well-earned rage. Two weeks had passed since he'd single-handedly secured new government funding for the remote viewing project—and he still hadn't been paid. Woodbine was screwing him good, putting him off with all kinds of excuses about procurement procedures and black contracts and some kind of security inspection before the funding would be released. Enough was enough. Tonight he was going to physically shake the damned money out of Woodbine if he had to.

  It didn't help Michael's mood that his daughter had come back more mopey than ever from a five-day visit to her grandmother. Despite all the attention, despite all the freedom—despite all the money!—he'd given Tracey, she missed her mother. She claimed not to, but he could see it coming; soon she'd want to go home.

  It infuriated him to know that there were now two people who preferred someone else's company to his: his wife—and his own daughter. He felt like a pariah. Him! The most sought-after guest at a party, the most popular teacher on campus.

  He didn't let the aggravation show as he knocked on Tracey's bedroom door and said cheerfully, "All packed? The train's leavin' the station. Whooo-whoo!"

  His daughter came out of her bedroom with a backpack over her shoulder and a glum look on her face.

  ''What's this all about?" he said, tucking a playful fist under her jaw.

  She lifted her chin away as he did it and said, "Dad, don't."

  "Hey! I thought you were looking forward to this sleepover thing."

  "It's not a sleepover; it's just a bunch of girls getting together."

  "And yakking all night. Yeah. A sleepover."

  "Have it your way," she said, walking ahead with her shoulders drooping.

  Oh, yeah. She wanted her mommy, all right. Damn. Maddie must have made inroads during the couple of phone calls she'd managed to put through. What would happen when power was restored and Rosedale was habitable again?

  He dropped Tracey off at her friend's house, telling her he'd pick her up at noon the next day, and then he backtracked to Brookline, where Woodbine would be working late. The very distinguished, very hard-working director invariably worked late at the Institute on Friday. It was quiet then, Woodbine liked to tell people. A man could hear himself think on a Friday night.

  A man could also alter data on a Friday night. Michael had no illusions about what went on at the Brookline Institute, and he didn't care. If the project results were tweaked, what did it matter? It was all a gray area, anyway. He knew his powers were real. If the government wanted them to be more real, fine. That's where a Woodbine came in handy.

  He arrived ten minutes early and sat in his car in the parking lot, waiting for the director to unlock the door for him. Exactly on
time, Woodbine appeared in the lobby, glanced at the BMW, and walked up to the imposing double doors. By the time he had one of them unlocked, Michael was on the other side, glaring at him through the glass.

  Woodbine said curtly, "Let's get this over with," and led the way to his office.

  Michael fell in beside him. "You took your sweet time returning my calls. I'd be surprised if your secretary isn't on to us."

  "There's no 'us' to be on to, Michael," Woodbine said with icy reserve.

  "Yeah, right. Just give me my money. I've waited long enough."

  "Obviously you have absolutely no idea how long it takes for government funding to make its way through channels."

  "So hire a channeler; you must have a few on your staff," Michael quipped.

  Woodbine declined to respond.

  They went into his office. Woodbine didn't offer him a seat and Michael didn't avail himself of one. As always when he was there, he felt edgy and angry. As if on cue, the first sharp stab of a headache appeared, reminding him that he hated the Institute, hated the Director, and wanted no more part of their program.

  Woodbine opened the top drawer of his elegant mahogany desk, took out a clasp envelope, and tossed it on the desktop. Pleased to see that it had a satisfying bulge to it, Michael reached for it and said, "For a job well done. You never did tell me how well I scored, Geoffrey."

  "In a word? You sucked."

  Michael's hand froze on the envelope where it lay. "The hell I did," he said, flushing with anger.

  The director shrugged and said, "A mailman could've done better. A nurse. A janitor. Anyone who could tell the time and follow a few simple directions. A buzzer sounds, and all you had to do was look at the clock on the wall, determine which ten-second sector the buzzer sounded in, and correlate that sector to a room of a house. We agreed beforehand. One to ten seconds: the kitchen. Ten to twenty seconds: the bath. Twenty to thirty: the garden. And so on. Your chances of guessing the object—or a thematically related one, which is nearly as good—would skyrocket. Was that so hard, Michael? Apparently it was."