Sweet Salt Air

by Barbara Delinsky

  Letting herself in the front door, she went through to the kitchen. Charlotte’s purse was on the kitchen counter, meaning that she was back but apparently asleep. Nicole would have given anything to sleep. Her eyes were heavy and her thoughts spent, but her body was keyed up. Caffeine with dessert? Not a good idea.

  Blog, she told herself. But she wasn’t in the mood. Check for messages from Sparrow, she suggested. But it could wait. Shop online for organic tea, she proposed, but why do that when she already had the best in the cupboard?

  After steeping a mug of Cecily’s passionflower tea, she carried it through the Great Room door and, pulling out one of the patio chairs, sat in the dark at the table outside. The ocean soughed gently over midnight sand. She took one deep breath to calm herself, then another, and, puzzled, turned toward the garden. Something smelled good, but it wasn’t lavender. Rising, she followed her nose to the three pots that hadn’t been there earlier. She touched the green fronds and, bending to the white clusters on top, inhaled.

  She wasn’t sure what they were, but she was pretty sure where they’d come from, and while a part of her wanted to hurl them into the sea, her better instinct held back. Sitting down on the garden path, white pants and all, she inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, exhaled. In time, she felt calmer—possibly from the simple act of breathing deeply, more likely from the plants. She couldn’t be prideful when it came to these. They were definitely medicinal. They were also pretty. And she was tired of being angry.

  Reasoning that since she had already benefitted from the tea, she wouldn’t be damned for accepting a second Cole gift, she looked at them and breathed of them until she was calm enough for bed.

  * * *

  Friday had the dubious distinction of starting a weekend that had effectively begun two days before—meaning that the ferry schedule was off, which Nicole didn’t discover until she reached the pier and waited twenty minutes for a boat that didn’t come.

  “Not due ’til eleven,” advised the harbormaster, Roy Pepin, as he sauntered toward the dock from the Chowder House kitchen with a take-out mug in one bony hand and a half-eaten cruller in the other. “Ten minutes mow-a. G’won up and see Dorey.”

  Nicole smiled, nodded, and was grateful when Roy went on his way. Since there wasn’t much for a harbormaster to do in a harbor as small as this, he tended to talk even more than other Quinnies. Holidays always brought him out, and if he was rarely seen on the pier itself, it was because he was chatting it up at one slip or another.

  But Nicole wasn’t in the mood to socialize with Dorey, either. She was trying to gear up for her mother’s arrival, feeling the old pull and push, wondering how much to say when. Before leaving the house, after filling a ceramic ewer with fresh-cut peonies from the garden, she had snipped off a few valerian sprigs. Yes, valerian, Charlotte had said. Taking them from her pocket now, she held them to her nose. That they remained fragrant was a tribute to Cecily. That the scent alone, rather than tea brewed from the roots, brought relief, was also a tribute to Cecily. Nicole refused to credit Leo with this, much less Charlotte—though that anger was less raw this morning. The hurt remained, along with a certain disgust. But breakfast hadn’t been as awkward today. Granted, Nicole had finished her own before Charlotte came down, so it wasn’t a question of having to cook for or eat with her.

  Nicole no longer felt she owed Charlotte for coming to Quinnipeague. A few profiles for the cookbook were a drop in the bucket, given what Charlotte owed her. Nicole feel guilty? No more! Still, she was able to ask about the flowers in what she thought was a reasonable tone, and, when Charlotte said they were from Leo, she actually told her to thank him.

  She also didn’t ask the impossible—which, in hindsight, was what she had done, expecting Charlotte to approach Rose Mayes on the holiday. She did suggest talking with the minister and his wife, who, being parentless and childless, had no weekend guests and would be eager to talk. Given the number of island events held at the church, they were major players in Quinnipeague’s social scene—not to mention the mean banana-raspberry smoothie the wife kept in reserve as an alternative to popcorn on movie nights.

  The wind blew her hair about, and still Nicole held those petals to her nose. When the ferry finally appeared on the horizon, she felt a yearning. She needed her mother here—needed to talk about MS and babies and the future, all of which Julian had forbidden her to discuss. And yes, she needed to talk about Charlotte and Julian. Angie was the mother, and, right now, Nicole the child.

  But it wasn’t Angie who stepped off the ferry when it turned and backed up to the pier. It was her stepdaughter, Kaylin. Long dark hair caught up in a ponytail that had lost stray wisps to the wind, she wore jeans, layered tops, and tall UGGs. A large duffel hung from one shoulder, a backpack from the other.

  Confused, Nicole ran to her and gave her a hug, but in the next instant she was searching the boat. Other weekenders had debarked. There was no one left.

  “Mom was supposed to be here,” she said worriedly, knowing that Kaylin, who had spent so many summers with Angie, loved her, too.

  “She’s coming Sunday,” the girl said.

  “No. She said tomorrow, which is today.”

  “She was planning to,” Kaylin explained, words coming in her typical rush, “but when she saw me at the dock in Rockland, she said you and I needed time alone.”

  Nicole didn’t understand. Angie was the one she needed. “So where is she supposed to go?”

  “She’s driving up the coast.”

  “Alone?”

  “She was grateful to see me. She said she needed more time to gather the courage to come. There’s no cause for worry, Nicki—”

  But Nicole was already on the phone and, moments later, heard the same thing from Angie. The call was brief. Angie sounded fine.

  Nicole was disappointed but relieved—though she couldn’t dwell on either, because Kaylin said in a frightened rush, “Dad told me he has MS, Nicki. I. Am. Staggered. I mean, thank God I wasn’t at work when he called, because I was a total mess. I don’t know anyone with MS but I’ve heard plenty, and now my own father has it. I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it.”

  Nicole took her backpack. “How was he when he called?”

  “Tired. I mean, like, I’ve seen his hand shake, but I thought it was too much caffeine. And his balance is sometimes off. I’ve seen him kick at the carpet like it’s the carpet’s fault, which I always thought was just how he was getting older. But he sounded really, really down. He’s been sick for four years, and I didn’t know? What was he thinking?”

  “He was trying to protect you.”

  “Like I’m ten or something?” Kaylin asked, sounding indignant. She had her father’s dark looks and regal carriage, but her mother’s attitude. “I’m twenty-one. I’ll be graduating from college next year.”

  Attitude had served Monica well, propelling her up the corporate ladder, but Kaylin wasn’t quite there yet. “Speaking of which, why aren’t you in New York?” Nicole asked. “You said summer interns don’t get time off.” The girl had landed a plum spot at a major television network, hence no time planned on Quinnipeague.

  “I left after Dad called. And I’m not going back. You’re right. We don’t get time off. It’s sweltering in the city, and they have us running all over the place for stupid little things like mauve-and-white polka-dot place mats for this set or a red linen scarf for that personality—which is what my supervisor calls his anchors, though the only personality those people have is on air. They treat us like furniture.”

  That fast, Nicole was on overload. She had spent the night preparing to be a daughter and wasn’t up for being a mother. Struggling with the transition, she heard her father’s voice, and, in the void, repeated his words. “It’s called paying your dues.”

  “Dad said that, but I’ve been there a month, Nicki. That’s long enough to know what I don’t want. Besides, his being sick puts it all in a new light.”

  “He’ll be o
kay,” Nicole said.

  “Not to hear him tell,” Kaylin remarked and, during the drive back to the house, gave a rapid-fire blow-by-blow of the discussion. “He says he’s taking part in a trial,” she ended. “He says it’s his best hope, but it’s dangerous.”

  “He told you the risks?”

  “He had to. I made him.” Kaylin could be dogged when she wanted something, very Monica at times. More than once over the years, Nicole had been a buffer between father and daughter.

  But she felt little sympathy for Julian now. He had made his own bed, which was another of Bob’s pithy points.

  Suddenly Kaylin was more frightened than confrontational. “Maybe he was exaggerating the danger. Do you think he was?”

  “He was probably talking worst-case scenario.”

  “I told him I’d be a donor, but he says umbilical cord cells offer more hope. Is it true?”

  In lieu of taking a stand, Nicole shared what she knew. Without quite dissing stem cell treatments, she tried to put the emphasis on more conventional ones. Kaylin, bless her, kept coming back to the other.

  When they reached the house, Nicole made fresh lemonade and led the girl to the garden. “Talk with me here,” she said. “I want to plant these flowers.” She needed a little soothing herself, but if the valerian helped Kaylin at the same time, so much the better.

  Besides, garden work was therapeutic. Having no garden back home, Nicole only did it here, and then only when George Mayes wasn’t around to put in his tipsy two bits. In passing, she pulled spent blooms from her mother’s red snapdragons and drying leaves from the purple lisianthus, but her goal was those white valerian plants. They were doing just fine in their pots, but Nicole knew they would do better in the ground and, though she doubted the soil was right, Charlotte had insisted that Cecily’s spirit would make them grow.

  Okay. So maybe Cecily was trying to butter her up into thinking more highly of Leo and Charlotte. But Nicole could play the game, too. She could pretend she felt better about them as a couple. She was good at hiding things. And she did like these plants.

  “Here or there?” she asked Kaylin, indicating the site options.

  Never without an opinion, Kaylin pointed. “There. Dad shouldn’t be alone, y’know.”

  “He isn’t alone,” Nicole said as she took a gardening fork to the soil to loosen it up. “He’s in Durham surrounded by doctors.”

  “That’s his job, and it isn’t the same. Shouldn’t you be with him?”

  Nicole kept working. “It’s been four years, Kay. He and I know what to expect.” She looked up. “Did he call your brother?”

  “Johnny?” She make a sputtering sound. “He’s no help. He’s been working on my mom’s cousin’s farm, which is two hours from Des Moines, and they were in the middle of some soybean emergency.”

  Nicole twisted the fork in the soil. “How did he take it?”

  “Oh, he’s Mister Cool. He says Dad’s a doctor and knows what he’s doing, and I always thought so, too, only he was wrong for not telling us. I mean, like, we have a personal stake here, too, don’t we?”

  Nicole pointed at the trowel and, when Kaylin passed it to her, lengthened the hole to allow for three sets of roots. “They don’t know that it’s hereditary.”

  “They don’t know that it isn’t,” the girl argued. “Okay, so if MS has to do with the autoimmune system, maybe that’s the hereditary part, which means that I may have the same disorder but it’ll develop into some whole other disease.”

  She sounded frightened again, clearly needed a mother’s reassurance. But Nicole wasn’t her mother, damn it, and right now, she was emotionally handicapped. Julian really needed to be here answering her questions. Hell, Julian really needed to be here answering Nicole’s.

  But he wasn’t. And Kaylin was.

  Grasping at straws, she eyed the valerian. Handing the girl a bag of fertilizer, she nudged her nearer the blooms. “Mix a little into the soil while I get water.”

  “Will I?” Kaylin called as Nicole put a watering can under the nearby spigot.

  “I don’t know,” she said when she returned. “None of us knows when it comes to health. Look at my dad. He dropped dead out of the blue.”

  “That’s my point,” Kaylin said with feeling. “I could kill myself working as hard as Dad always did, then get sick, and, zappo, it’s gone.”

  “Excuse me,” Nicole said, darting her intermittent glances as she poured water into the hole, “your father isn’t done working by a long shot, and even if he were, he’s already contributed more to his field than many doctors do in a lifetime.” Nicole might fault Julian’s judgment on personal matters, but she couldn’t fault his work. “He’s made breakthroughs that totally justify the effort it took to get there. Even if he doesn’t discover another single thing, he’ll always have that.”

  “Well, he was lucky. He didn’t get sick until he was forty-two, but most people get MS in their twenties or thirties, and I’m twenty-two, which puts me right in the line of fire. If I have limited time—”

  “You don’t have limited time!” Nicole cried, unable to bear that thought. Taking one of the pots, she held the flowers to her nose and breathed deeply.

  “But if I do,” Kaylin said in a more measured way, “shouldn’t I be doing something I like? I won’t ever be a news anchor or host a talk show, and I know more about set design than my bosses do, because I’ve taken courses that they haven’t. This internship sucks.”

  After another inhalation, Nicole gently pulled the plant from its pot, positioned the roots in the hole, and scooped dirt around them. When the stalks stood on their own, she reached for a second pot. “There must be something you can get out of it.”

  “Oh, yeah. A line on my CV and maybe a reference, but if it leads to another job like this, what’s the point? I’m not having fun.”

  Nicole thrust the pot at her to hold and reached for the third. “There’s more to life than having fun.”

  “But look at you. You’re here having fun, while he’s back there alone.”

  Having fun? Nicole might have laughed at the irony of that if she hadn’t known the laugh would speak of hysteria, which would open up a can of worms she couldn’t possibly, possibly discuss with Kaylin.

  So she simply emptied the second pot, secured the roots in the ground, and sat back on her heels. Only then, when she was feeling a little calmer, did she answer the criticism. “I offered to be there, Kaylin. He thought it would be better if he made those phone calls himself.”

  “I don’t mean right now. I mean all summer. You knew he was sick. How could you come to Quinnipeague?”

  The question was so like one Charlotte had asked, that it seemed only right for Charlotte herself to return from town just then. When Nicole looked up, Kaylin swiveled. “Omigod,” the girl cried. “Charlotte?”

  They had spent only that wedding summer together—Kaylin and John here for the first time, getting to know the island, Angie and Bob, and even Nicole—but ten weeks of living in the same house with a person involved more shared time than could be forgotten.

  Charlotte smiled. Rather than launch into social niceties, though, she was typically blunt. “Your dad had a full schedule in Durham and wanted Nicki here. It wasn’t her choice.” She glanced at Nicole. “Sorry. I overheard. Do you guys want to be alone?”

  “No,” Nicole said. Charlotte, Cecily’s valerian—she would take whatever help she could get.

  Kaylin picked up where she’d left off, challenging Charlotte now. “He may say that, but I don’t believe him.”

  “He wanted Nicole to work on her book.”

  “He was totally lonely. Why else would he have suddenly decided to tell John and me?”

  Nicole broke in, puzzled. “Didn’t he tell you why?”

  “Tell me what?”

  She wasn’t protecting Julian in this when there was a perfectly good explanation. Taking the last of the three pots from Kaylin, she said, “He was outed down there
, and word spreads. He wanted to tell you himself before you heard it from someone else.” That someone else would have been Monica, who had been married to Julian long enough to know his colleagues in Philadelphia, any one of whom might be learning momentarily that Julian had MS.

  “And anyway,” Charlotte said, playing bad cop to Nicole’s good, “if you’re so worried about his being alone, why aren’t you down there?”

  “I offered, but he said no. So I’m doing the next best thing, coming here to get Nicole to go.”

  Setting down the pot, Nicole caught the girl’s hand. “He doesn’t want that.”

  Kaylin’s face crumbled. “You guys are breaking up?”

  She gave the hand a little shake. “No. I talk with your father all the time.”

  “Did you agree with him not telling Johnny and me until now?”

  As angry as Nicole was at Julian, she didn’t want to bad-mouth him to his daughter. But if she was dealing with character issues in him, this related to one in her.

  Releasing Kaylin’s hand, she removed the last plant from its pot and said a quiet, “No.”

  Charlotte was less restrained. “Different people handle problems different ways. Nicki wanted to be in Durham; he wanted her here. She wanted you to know way back; your dad didn’t.”

  “But he’s right about the internship,” Nicole put in, because he had shared Kaylin’s earlier complaints. “He told you to stick with it, didn’t he?”

  Kaylin nodded and, finally calmer, said, “He said I was being impulsive, but he doesn’t understand what I’m feeling. I tried to tell him, but he didn’t get it. Bob would have understood.”