“About a dozen seconds ago.” That laughing sob came out again. She tried to refill the flute and her hands were so unsteady she ended up pouring the champagne into the vase instead. She set the bottle down hard enough that for a moment she was afraid she’d broken the glass table.
Jo handed her own flute over and Cassidy knocked it back. The bubbles burning the back of her throat.
“Why now?”
“What’s today?” She waved her hand at them, at the restaurant.
“The fourteenth.” Jo blinked hard to focus on her watch. “Still.”
“Valentine’s Day,” Perrin offered.
“Right. And where is the man with two first names? Where is Jack James?”
“Where?” Perrin asked caught up in the question.
“I don’t know. But he certainly isn’t here. Probably doesn’t know what day it is. Handsome, pleasant, and totally lost in his own world.”
“Bor-ring!” Perrin declared around a hiccup. She tucked the long side of her hair behind one ear. She took one of Cassidy’s hands and held it tightly. In that instant, the flashy designer was gone and one of her best friends sat beside her.
“Cass. He was never even a flatu-, ‘scuse me, flatulent fifth. You are so much better than hi-im.” That hiccup launched her hair from behind her ear and over half her face again.
Cassidy nodded. She knew she was better. She just didn’t feel that way whenever she was with him. She always felt… grateful. Whether it was his doing or hers, it didn’t matter. It was plain and simple too sad for words.
Tears started to flow and she couldn’t stop them. It wasn’t sadness. Not for casting off the man with two first names. A bit of it was for thinking so little of herself in the first place. A big chunk of it was plain and simple relief.
“I am so done with sec-onds.” Now she had the hiccups.
Perrin answered with a another hic-nod-hair swirl.
Jo burst out laughing. A rare event in itself.
And totally infectious.
They leaned together as the tears, laughter, and hiccups flowed between them.
# # #
“See.” Melanie waved a negligent flick of her fingers toward the lounge as they left the restaurant.
Russell glanced over the heads of the dozens of little groups in the lounge. One of the top yuppie “meat markets” in town. The best place to meet the other fast-rising singles of Seattle’s finest, Cutter’s bar, if he’d cared for such things. Once he had, which was weird.
Then he spotted them and his mind froze the image. The perfect image. The image that passed by when the camera had missed the moment. The image that could never be recreated no matter what was done in the studio.
Angelo’s wine reviewer, still perfectly put together, not a hair astray, dressed all in black as before, laughing or maybe crying on her friend’s bare shoulder. Blue and black, matching and contrasting. The third, serious, reserved, her clothes as light as her hair dark. A single arm extended forward and hand resting palm-down between the shoulder blades of her grieving friend.
Three women. They were so close. Clearly they knew each other the way new friends couldn’t and the way lovers rarely did.
“Traveled Road… partway.” That’s what he’d call the shot if he had it. Or perhaps that carefully reserved and rarely bequeathed name, “Untitled.”
It was easy to picture them together in a couple of decades, hair gray, surface beauty faded, and all three still close. Still radiant.
Lime Kiln Lighthouse
San Juan Island
First lit: 1914
Automated: 1962
48.5159 -123.1524
The last major lighthouse established in Washington State, it faces Canada and still watches over the entrance to Haro Strait. It was also the last to receive electricity, not until after WWII.
It is one of the best known lighthouses in the state, known far and wide as a whale observatory. Pods of Orcas and Grey whales frequently pass close in front of the lighthouse’s craggy doorstep.
MARCH 1
“It sounds like someone is screaming and laughing at the same time.”
The technician, who wore his own set of headphones nodded. “J-pod. That’s their dialect, Ms. Knowles.”
“Cassidy. What’s J-pod and they have dialects?” The two of them sat shoulder-to-shoulder in the first floor of the Lime Kiln lighthouse. Through the narrow window she could see the Georgia Straits. No whales anywhere in sight.
“The J-pod is one of our local groups of orcas. They wander up and down Puget Sound nattering away like a bunch of old-timers. And then,” he paused as a particularly quick set of chirps rattled through her headphones.
“There, hear that? That’s a group of youngsters. Sound like they’re maybe a mile offshore. The main pod is a mile or so farther out.”
“This is incredible.” She was listening to passing whales swimming somewhere out of sight below the surface.
Jeff was typing madly on his laptop.
“What are you doing there?”
“Just recording the time of passage and how many voices I hear, fourteen so far.”
She inspected him more carefully. Mid-twenties, nice face, at least what she could see above the heavy beard. Brown hair back in a ponytail. Sitting in front of a console with switches and plug-ins, though clearly most of it occurred in the laptop. Wiggling lines mimicked the sound in a series of waves too fast to follow.
“We can only hear about a third of what they say. Most of the rest is ultrasonic to our hearing.”
“Ultrasonic, like the planes?” Whale-sized sonic booms?
“That’s supersonic. ‘Ultra’ means too high for us to hear. We had to develop special microphones to hear their full vocal range. See, our hearing stops here,” he pointed at a line near the lower part of the wiggles on the screen. Even as he did so, one of the lines shot well above his finger and she didn’t hear a thing on the headphones except a creepy sensation of fingernails running up her spine.
“What are they saying?”
He turned to face her, his neutral brown eyes wrinkled with a bit of a smile.
“Not a clue, yet. We think a lot of the high stuff is echo-location so they can find food and one another. Same things bats do. But what they chat about all day is a complete mystery. Their vocabulary is huge whatever it is. Not just squeaks and squawks. There are patterns, thousands of them as far as we can tell. Perhaps a fully evolved and complex language.”
Jeff’s specialty was as narrow as hers, and as highly trained; nuance, common themes, major notes, and minor notes. Hers were color and smell and taste, his sound, but they had far more in common that she’d have guessed.
They sat in companionable silence as the whales sang to each other. She tried to pick them apart. Did one always have a deep, dropping pattern? Heee-whaaa. What would it be like to learn more about another species? To study something with such passion?
Well, she had actually; since birth it seemed.
Of course her passion didn’t require sitting in a concrete lighthouse with peeling white paint, listening forever to something she didn’t understand.
Maybe Jeff’s passion wasn’t so charming once she thought about it. The concrete room certainly wasn’t very warm despite the heater under the desk. She couldn’t smell the ocean just a dozen feet away. Instead it smelled of mold and decaying paint. It smelled of heated metal and sounded of the squeaky fan that was barely keeping her legs above freezing.
Out the slender window, an impossible vision appeared; not a whale breeching nor a row of tall fins skimming the water.
It was a blue sailboat with maroon sails. The same number of sails as the two pictures on her wall. One big one in front of the mast and reaching all the way to the deck. The other one, from the mast back until it reached past the where the captain stood in the back. It hung so low that it looked as if it might hit him when it swung.
“Thanks, Jeff.” She dropped the headphones and rushed ou
t as he stammered a call after her. She ran over the rocks, digging for her camera in her leather backpack. She managed the picture barely in time before he sailed out of the frame with the lighthouse.
Another photo just of the boat.
He must have the same calendar, because this was past coincidence. They’d met three months in a row. Too bad there was no way to signal him. It would be a good laugh to meet in a bar somewhere, maybe see if he had a set of letters too.
No, that would be too weird. Two lost people having their lives shaped by a calendar. She raised a hand in salute, but he was facing away, looking forward. He’d have no possible way of knowing why she was waving. It wasn’t as if she wore a huge red sail.
This is what her father had told her. In his letter he’d confirmed that she wasn’t unique. She tucked a hand into the pocket of her red coat and held the letter as she moved back to the cliff edge beside the lighthouse and looked out at the shining water. In the distance, Vancouver Island lay across the horizon, where she could see some tiny shapes at the limit of visibility, buildings of the city of Victoria.
Farther south, the Olympic Mountains were still white with snow. She could smell the snow and the sea salt. She could imagine the light, cold breeze starting as a whisper on the distant polar seas, a wave splash pushing the air ahead. The small swirl building along the Aleutians and sweeping down the coast. Threading among the Canadian Gulf islands on its way to here, the wind’s first contact with the continental U.S. and she was the first to breathe it, to take in the salt spray thrown into the air three thousand miles away.
I had no direction. Out of the Vietnam War. Out of the army. Still alive.
Cassidy could hear her dad’s voice from the letter, soft and warm on the cold breeze. Not rough with throat cancer. She heard his voice from when she was a teenager, a sound she could wrap safely around herself when she grew scared. She didn’t turn to him, didn’t want to break the illusion.
Your mama never made it to grad school, I always felt bad about that. After a month we were living together. After six months she’d turned our vineyard into a business, not a big one, but a business. It was the real birth of the Napa Valley and there we were on the ground floor.
“Napa Valley? I certainly didn’t grow up in Napa Valley.”
The big surprise came along, you. So we had a wedding in the fields right before the harvest.
September wedding in the vineyards, it must have been beautiful. He’d never told her they’d gotten married because mama was pregnant. She’d always assumed it was the other way round. Not that it bothered her much.
Not much of a reception. I spent our wedding night out in the fields watching for an early frost. A real freak cold snap slid down from Canada and we weren’t big enough to survive the loss of even a single crop. We dodged that one, but then we were into the harvest. Never did have a honeymoon. Too much work to do.
But it didn’t matter. Your mama and I were just plain right for each other. From that very first moment when she’d tumbled out of that VW van with a peace symbol on the side. Her hair the same dark red as grape leaves in autumn.
You’ll find the right man, Ice Sweet.
That was a laugh. She was thirty now and the “right man” was a myth. She did require at least “compatible” though and Jack James hadn’t even been that.
I know you don’t believe me, but you will. Until then, don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense. My life never did.
Love you, Ice Sweet.
“Love you, Daddy.”
# # #
“Damn you, Angelo.”
His friend didn’t answer. Probably because he wasn’t there, but that was a lousy excuse.
“Too busy redesigning your damn restaurant to take four days off to go sailing.” Russell grabbed for the jib sheet as he came about, but missed it. And he hadn’t tied a knot in the bitter end. The line shot out of the cockpit, nearly snagged Nutcase as it whipped past the cat, making her jump straight up like a furry fireworks, ran out the pulley block, and was over the side trailing in the water.
He brought the boat up into the wind, forcing the sail back over the boat. Then he sprinted forward, snagged the line dripping with freezing water, and ran back for the cockpit letting the rope slip through his fingers. He added a cold rope burn to his list of complaints against Angelo.
The boat fell off the wind again before he could run the line through the block. He whipped a couple turns around the winch and let it draw all wrong while he got control of the tiller again.
The line burned in his sore hand as he got the boat moving again. Once he had some speed up, he brought her into the wind again to take the pressure off the line. This time he got it through the block and around the winch before she fell off again. With the tiller between his knees, he tied a quick figure-eight knot in the end of the line so it couldn’t go overboard again. He wouldn’t make that mistake again soon.
He was almost back to the lighthouse by the time he had it under control.
He’d gone out twice now with Angelo along just for the ride while he practiced single-handing the big boat. Angelo had kept up a running commentary that amused himself no end as Russell scrambled about the boat. But he’d done it.
Then he’d set off alone for the Lime Kiln lighthouse on San Juan Island. On the first morning out, he’d thought it was fun plunging through the steep wake of a big tanker. The Lady had driven her bow deep into the third wave and water had come running down the deck and sluiced out the scuppers he’d only cut in a week before. So sweet.
It wasn’t until he’d anchored and tried to bunk down last night that he’d discovered his mistake. He hadn’t latched the forehatch. The hinged wood must have floated up when the wave came aboard and a two-foot square chunk of wave had poured into the center of the stateroom bed. Everything was sopping. He spent a very uncomfortable night trying to sleep on the main cabin floor underneath a spare sail. One foot kept slipping through the missing floorboard and thudding down onto the concrete bilge.
Nutcase had curled up on his chest and been perfectly content to snore her way through the night with occasional flails of her tail across his nose during the particularly good dreams.
She also hadn’t minded Russell’s mistake of anchoring that first night right next to a bell buoy. Each tiny swell that ran under the boat made every line slap against the mast with a sharp clack. And then it would reach the buoy and a piercing ring would echo through the boat. Nutcase had snored on.
It was a good thing Melanie wasn’t along, roughing it on the floor would have really not made her happy.
As a matter of fact, he wasn’t sure what would. She’d liked the penthouse well enough, and the sex had been pretty spectacular. She’d appeared to enjoy the sail with Dave and Betsy, even the scenic plane flight. The pilot had let him take the controls for a few minutes, he definitely had to learn to fly someday. Such a feeling of freedom. It didn’t have the peace of sailing before the world’s winds, but it was a close second.
He’d thought everything was great, right until he’d found her crying in the shower on their last morning together. He’d almost closed the door quietly and let her be, but there was too much between them for that.
Instead, he climbed in beside her and squatted down with his back on the opposite wall. She tried to push him out, but he wasn’t going to leave that easily. She kept her arms wrapped tightly over her breasts. He reached out to stroke her wet hair, but she slapped his hand aside.
“You don’t get it, do you?” Her voice was sharp with accusation.
Despite the steam and pounding hot water, he could see the running tears and snot. He tried to think of what he’d missed. They’d had fine meals, tickets to the ballet, and a bit of fun.
“You really don’t.” She was shaking her head. She looked up into the pounding spray for a moment as if seeking God. One of those perfect hands reached out and she stroked her thumb down his cheek. He turned his head to place a kiss in her palm, but sh
e pulled back before he could.
She sat up straighter.
“You really don’t. Oh, Russell.” Her soft accent gone, replaced by the flat slap of New York. She wiped at her eyes, her gray eyes filled with infinite sadness.
“I’m sorry for me, but I’m more sorry for you.” She rose from the floor, rinsed her face for a moment under the hot spray and stepped from the shower. He’d watched her through the glass door. Sat under the spray while she dried off that gorgeous body. Applied moisturizers. Baby powder. Added makeup. Dried her hair in a roar of blow dryer that didn’t penetrate the shower’s patter but sent forth long billows of blonde.
Even now, two weeks later, he could feel the power of her parting kiss at the airport. Her body pressed to his so that every curve fit. Her hold so tight it almost knocked the breath from his body.
Then she was gone, a head of blonde sunlight sailing through the crowds at security. Never once turning to see if he was still watching.
He blinked and turned the boat sharply. If he didn’t pay more attention, he’d play moth to the lighthouse and ram himself right up on her rocks. Once he had his heading settled, he grabbed his camera and snapped a few quick shots off the stern.
A loud splash sounded beside the boat, and he spun about looking for Nutcase. The cat stood with its nose pressed against the safety netting he’d added to the lifelines, staring down into the water off the starboard side. As he leaned over to follow her gaze, a massive wall of black and white whale shot out of the water and crashed down beside him. He shouted in surprise as the orca crashed back into the water less than twenty feet away.
A wave of spray showered onto the boat. Nutcase howled and scrambled below, her coat dripping with seawater.
Russell caught half a dozen photos of the orca before it sounded and disappeared.
Damn!
Angelo was going to be so jealous.
Excellent!
# # #
Russell shook any errant sawdust off the paper towel and wrapped it around his sandwich. He grabbed a beer from the cooler and a box of crackers. He set the meal on the table he’d finished this morning. He lifted the top once more to admire the chart drawer built right into the tabletop. Room for four around the settee or drop the table down level with the benches and it could sleep two. Especially if they were feeling cuddly.
Where Dreams Are Born (Angelo's Hearth) Page 8
