Beach Plum Island

by Holly Robinson

Ava bit her lip to keep her temper in check. To Mark, a busy civil engineer whose paychecks had been doled out by the same big corporation for nearly twenty years, her decision to go back to school after the kids were born to earn her teaching degree had been a rational one. Yet he still couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea that, besides being a teacher, she was a potter with her own studio and gallery shows. Mark was apt to start a conversation by saying, “So, are you still playing with clay?” as if pottery were a passing phase in her life instead of a lifelong passion.

  On the other hand, one reason their divorce had been amicable was that both of them managed to sidestep small irritations and focus on the boys. She took a minute to remind herself that Mark was a good person and a loving father. She didn’t have to try, anymore, to convince him that artwork is work.

  “Nope, no masterpieces,” she said. “Not unless you call my grocery list a novel, which it nearly is these days. The boys are eating anything not nailed down.”

  Mark chuckled, but his laughter sounded forced. “Listen, I won’t keep you. I was just calling to arrange to talk to you in person about something.”

  Ava’s mouth went dry. Mark never asked to see her. “What about?”

  “I’d rather discuss it face-to-face.”

  “All right.” Ava’s mind raced, sorting through possibilities, none of them good: Mark had cancer; he’d lost his job; his mother was dying; one of the boys was in trouble but hadn’t told her yet. “Can you give me a hint, at least? How worried should I be?”

  There was a brief silence; then Mark sighed. “God. I’m sorry. I should have known better than to do this by phone. No, it’s nothing terrible, Ava. I’ll just come out with it, and then if you want, we can discuss it later. Or not.”

  By now, Ava was shivering with nerves in the hot car. “Okay. Tell me.”

  “I’m thinking of asking Sasha to move in with me.”

  Ava nearly laughed; she was so relieved that Mark’s news didn’t include any of the catastrophes she’d imagined. Almost immediately, though, she felt the wind go out of her, as if someone had suddenly tightened the seat belt. She unbuckled it with fumbling fingers.

  If Mark was telling her this now, he had probably already asked Sasha to marry him; he was never the sort of man to take relationships lightly. “Have you asked her yet?” Ava purposefully left the question vague.

  “Not exactly.”

  She could tell by the strain in his voice that Mark was lying. He had asked and Sasha had said yes. He just hadn’t wanted to spring it on her. Fair enough. Ava didn’t like the idea that he might be lying; at the same time, she reminded herself that Mark didn’t owe it to her to share his personal life and he was a good man who deserved to be with a woman who loved him more than she had.

  So why did she feel this knot in her stomach?

  “Ava?” Mark’s voice was gentle. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “It’s a surprise, but I’m glad for you. I really am. Sasha is a wonderful person. I hope you’ll be happy together.”

  She could hear his sigh—relief? Then Mark said, “Listen, I haven’t told the boys. Do you think we should tell them together?”

  This request, too, was being made out of respect to her, Ava knew, and perhaps with Sasha—ever the lawyer—coaxing him to tread lightly. Sasha had seen the worst of the worst among broken families in divorce court.

  “No,” Ava said. “The boys will be fine. Tell them whenever you’re ready. I’ll let you know if there’s any fallout at home.”

  “Okay. Thanks. I’ll probably tell them next weekend. We’ll talk before then.”

  They hung up. Ava wanted to turn on the engine and drive—drive anywhere from here, maybe straight to Simon’s office or his sailboat. She longed to do something unexpected, unlike her usual practical self, in response to Mark’s call. Having him live with Sasha would inevitably alter how easy things had always been between them. This was definitely shaky new territory.

  In the grocery store, she squinted beneath the unforgiving buzz of fluorescent lights at the plastic-wrapped vegetables and artfully bewildering array of cans and boxes. She was in such a daze that she nearly collided with another shopper, a woman with two runny-nosed kids trapped and wailing in the metal cage of a shopping cart.

  It was like running into a mirror of herself as a single mother long ago: Resentment clung to that young woman like a favorite threadbare sweater. Ava imagined her flipping the pages of her calendar at home in despair, thinking, Maybe I’ll try that other recipe for chicken breasts, already knowing she wouldn’t have the energy to be creative once she actually got the kids dressed, went to the store, came home to unload the groceries, fed the children, put them down for naps, and muscled the next load of laundry into the wash before starting dinner. In the end, they would all have cereal, maybe a banana.

  So exhausting, the whole business of motherhood. It was a business, too, complete with compromises and disappointing returns for your investments, with budgets and schedules and task lists and surly underlings. As a single mother, Ava had resorted to locking the boys in their bedroom at night, fearing for their lives as much as for her own sanity. Otherwise Sam—the ringleader—would get up and start his little experiments, pulling out the kitchen drawers to use as steps to reach the high cupboards and pretending to cook, encouraging Evan to help.

  Once, Sam had even turned on the stove, lighting the pilot with a match before climbing onto the stove to reach the flour in the cupboard above it. He’d burned his hand and was in a cast for weeks, often bloodying his own nose with the cast in sleep, which meant washing the sheets over and over again until Ava finally gave up and made him go to bed in an old sleeping bag. Afterward she’d just thrown the sleeping bag away. Sometimes Ava marveled that she’d managed to keep her kids from killing themselves.

  “Alive at twenty-five.” That was Olivia’s motto with kids. “All you gotta do is keep ’em alive ’til then. At twenty-five, they finally get their brains handed to them on their birthdays and you can relax a little.”

  Ava had been horrified when Olivia said this to her the first time, but now she repeated this mantra often.

  Mark’s phone call had made her realize again that now it was nearly over, everything she had once considered her life: her marriage, motherhood, the rhythm she’d established in her life between work and pottery and family. Her life as a daughter had ended, too, with her father’s death, and Elaine was slipping farther and farther away.

  Soon the boys would be adults, out of the house and living their own adventures. Would they even come home on holidays, once they were entrenched in college, off to jobs, families of their own? Was a home with a single mother in a shabby beach cottage enough of a home to make the trip worth it? Maybe Evan and Sam would prefer being with Mark and Sasha, in a nice house with two parents ready to greet them.

  That’s it. Stop the pity party. Blow out the candles and leave yourself alone! Ava wanted to rap her own knuckles the way her piano teacher, an ancient barrel of a woman smelling of eucalyptus cough drops, used to do.

  By the time she finished food shopping—she hardly bought anything but the usual staples, the things like bread and milk they seemed to need every hour with boys this size, yet spent over a hundred dollars—the pavement of the grocery store parking lot had already softened in the heat, even though it was only eight o’clock in the morning. Ava had left her phone in the car where she’d tossed it onto the passenger seat after that distressing call from Mark. She glanced at the screen and saw a new text message from Olivia, asking if she wanted to play tennis. Ava decided she did, even though it meant driving back across the bridge to the island to drop off her groceries, then collecting Olivia and returning to Newburyport to see if they could snag one of the shady courts at Atkinson Common.

  Olivia had turned fifty last year. Today she wore spandex shorts and a T-shirt, but he
r usual outfit, even in summer, consisted of jeans, cowboy boots in various colors, and formfitting T-shirts. With her sleek curtain of waist-length dark hair streaked shamelessly gray, she looked like a woman who’d reached the right age at last and was enjoying every minute of it. She was tall and angular, graceful whether she was running after tennis balls or commanding a gallery show in her cowboy boots.

  She was the one who had inspired Ava to pursue her career as an artist rather than just dabble outside of her teaching hours. Once an artist’s model, Olivia had left art school to marry a Spanish painter who “drank and fucked around like Hemingway,” she’d told Ava, “but never had the guts to shoot himself.” She had three children with him, all grown and out of the house. She had left Spain, and the husband, when he took on a younger woman as a model and installed her in his studio nights as well as days.

  Now Olivia did that rarest of things: managed to support herself as an artist. She had begun her career as an oil painter while she was an impoverished single mother, doing meticulously detailed miniature landscapes requiring only postcard-sized bits of canvas because that was all she could afford.

  The miniatures were a hit with tourists. Olivia still did them to keep her income stream steady, but she’d graduated to larger paintings. Now her work was shown in dozens of New England galleries.

  The tennis courts were empty. Olivia won the first set because of her aggressive net work and initial bursts of speed. Half an hour into the match, Ava had to wrap a bandanna around her forehead to keep her eyes free of the perspiration raining down her forehead.

  Happily, playing tennis forced Ava’s mind to be still. Dad had taught her to keep her eye on the ball by trying to read the letters on it. Soon there was nothing but the ball and her own breathing, her staccato pulse, because she knew if she lost her concentration, Olivia would come in for a kill, slamming an overhead.

  Once she focused, Ava was able to take the next two sets by consistently lobbing over Olivia’s head when her friend rushed the net and by aiming her returns at Olivia’s weaker backhand. Afterward, they picked up bagels and coffee in Newburyport and drove back to the island.

  Ava wasn’t ready to face the mess at home. She drove instead to the lighthouse at the northern tip of the island. They parked and took the sandy path by the playground to the beach. Fishing boats and pleasure craft traveled through this channel from upriver, from the marinas in Newburyport and from as far away as Lowell, into the open sea.

  On the opposite side of the river, they could see the crowded campground at Salisbury Beach. Cormorants ducked their gleaming black snake necks into the water or stood on buoys with wings outspread to dry. Ava spotted a lone seal drifting in the current.

  Along the beach there were a few sunbathers and shell pickers, but hardly anyone swam here. The currents were too unpredictable. Every year, a few kayakers or fishermen were swept away by riptides or rogue waves and drowned.

  They had left their sneakers in the car; Ava and Olivia ran gasping across the scorching soft yellow sand to the cooler plum-colored river’s edge. They followed the river toward the breakwater. It had been a brutal year for erosion. Two spring hurricanes had damaged several houses at this end of the island severely enough that the buildings capsized like badly stacked children’s blocks, toppling off their foundations and onto their sides. The police had cordoned off the area for weeks to keep looters and curious onlookers out of the abandoned properties. Now only rubble remained.

  Residents of the island were searching for a sustainable solution to the erosion. Recent plans discussed at town hall meetings had included beach mining—scooping up sand at low tide and dumping it near the high-tide mark to rebuild the dunes—or using a system that relied on planting rows of thin cedar shims that might mimic the native beach vegetation by collecting and stabilizing windblown sand. Ava and Olivia talked about these ideas as they walked, dismissing both as improbable solutions. There would always be another, more powerful storm, they agreed.

  “Seems crazy that anybody would build a house this close to the water after that last hurricane,” Ava said.

  “I know. I feel lucky to be on the basin side of the island,” Olivia said. “And you’re lucky your cottage is so high up on the beach and protected by dunes.”

  “Maybe it’ll just wash away with me in it when I’m an old woman,” Ava suggested. “Sometimes during those bad storms that’s what I imagine, me in that ancient cottage, bobbing on the waves like it’s a little gray boat.”

  “Worse ways to go, I suppose.”

  Ava followed her up the rocks to the flat part of the breakers, thinking about Beach Plum Island as a barrier island. The original settlers along this part of the Massachusetts North Shore had counted on the island to protect them from storms.

  Now, four hundred years later, it seemed that Beach Plum Island was doomed to wash away. Oddly, this made Ava feel more connected to this small bit of land than ever. “I’ve never felt more like I belong on this island than right now,” she told Olivia, wincing as they climbed the breakwater and the sharp edges of the rocks bit into her bare feet. “I’m old and eroded. Beaten up. All of my edges are changing shape.”

  She’d meant to joke, but Olivia knew her better than that. “What are you complaining about?” Olivia said. “You’re hardly old and you’re in great shape. You’ve got work you love, two sons who adore you, and an ex-husband who’s less of a prick than most. Count yourself lucky.”

  “I do, mostly. But lately my life feels out of control,” Ava said. “Everything is changing so fast, it’s like I’m losing the ability to protect everybody I love from seismic shifts in our lives.”

  They settled with their bagels and coffees on a flat, sun-warmed rock midway down the breakwater. “What changes?” Olivia asked. “You mean the boys getting older and leaving home?”

  “Partly. Evan and Sam drive me crazy, but I hate the idea of them leaving.”

  “They’ll be back,” Olivia said. “With laundry and empty bellies and cars that need fixing, I might add. Then you’ll resent them for intruding on your new freedom.”

  “Maybe. But I still feel dismal about it all. It seems like the end of an era. The end of me feeling useful.”

  “And really, really tired,” Olivia reminded her. “Don’t forget that.”

  Ava laughed. “How could I? I hardly have the energy to match my own shoes in the morning.”

  She chewed her bagel for a minute, thinking about Simon and the conversation with Mark. Even with Olivia, she didn’t dare talk about Simon. She couldn’t risk Elaine finding out. Or Gigi.

  “Mark called me this morning,” she said. “He’s going to move in with Sasha. Which, knowing him, means they’re probably already engaged.”

  “Well, he lasted on his own longer than most men,” Olivia said. “And he’s always been a good father, unlike some I won’t name. Enrique.” She jabbed her finger in the general direction of Spain across the Atlantic.

  “I know. Mark is a genuinely nice guy, right? Maybe that’s why the news hit me hard.” Ava shook her head. “So weird. I’ve never had regrets about the divorce, so why do I mind this change so much?”

  “Because it’s a permanent separation,” Olivia said. “You and Mark stayed so close after the divorce, it’s like you were still married, just living in separate houses. I always admired that about you, but I did wonder how you kept yourself emotionally separate when your lives were so entangled.”

  “I don’t know,” Ava said. “It was such a relief when we started living apart that I wonder if I ever really loved Mark at all. Maybe Elaine was right, and I only married him to escape my parents.”

  “Well, so what? At least you were happy for a while. And now you’re mourning him being with another woman. That must tell you something about your feelings for him.”

  “I know. It’s just that, with everything that’s happened since Dad
died, I haven’t quite trusted my emotions. They’re all over the map. Like, I’ve been realizing how alone Elaine must have felt when I married Mark. And now, by hanging out with Gigi and looking for Peter, I don’t know. It feels like I’m abandoning Elaine all over again.”

  “What makes you think she feels abandoned?”

  “Elaine’s on this self-destructive path lately, drinking and hooking up with guys. Her behavior reminds me of Mom’s, with her bouts of drinking and depression.”

  “That’s out of your control. Elaine’s a big girl. How she behaves doesn’t mean you should stop seeing Gigi or give up on looking for your brother. Elaine is probably just scared about having someone else in her life to care for, since things didn’t go so well with your mom. But Elaine’s not you.”

  “I’m scared, too,” Ava said.

  “You’d be stupid not to be scared. But you’ve always been stronger than Elaine. I know you’ll be fine, no matter what.”

  Ava crumpled up her napkin and stuffed it into the empty coffee cup, then lay back on the rock, shielding her face from the sun with one arm. “I’m tired of being strong,” she muttered. “All my life, I’ve been the good sister, the responsible one with a house and kids, the one who gives the holiday dinners and tells Elaine what to get the boys for their birthdays so they’ll think she’s cool. What the hell. I feel like I’m always tiptoeing around her delicate little feelings.”

  “So stop.”

  “I’m not sure I can,” Ava said glumly. “Even though I’m lying here and telling you how much I resent my sister, I’m also constantly worrying about her. I wish I knew how to feel close to her again, but all of my actions lately are pushing her away.” Not to mention what Elaine would do if she found out about my feelings for Simon, Ava thought. “I feel guilty because if I’m going to really lay myself bare, I have to admit that Elaine was the one who stuck it out and took care of Mom while I ran off and did my own thing. She must resent me for that even though she hasn’t ever said so. Who was the irresponsible one then?”