Safe Harbor

by Luanne Rice

  When the sun had risen high over the bay and the two Brothers north and south—rock islands inhabited only by seagulls—Quinn came home. Moving furtively through the yard, as if she didn’t want Dana to notice her, she slipped into the house.

  Following Quinn inside, Dana found her looking through the kitchen cupboards. Bright morning sun splashed across the highly polished fir floor. Dana couldn’t help remembering the linoleum that had been there when she was young, admiring Lily and Mark for pulling up the old tiles to discover the natural wood beneath.

  Growing up on Martha’s Vineyard, Mark had been a carpenter. He had apprenticed with a builder, become one himself. Lily had loved his work—no one had ever been so turned on, watching a man swing a hammer, wield a level. But when he had become a developer, she started getting nervous. Lily loved nature. She adored woods and fields. Why build new houses over beautiful land, she wondered, when there were already so many wonderful old ones?

  “Would you like me to make you breakfast?” Dana asked, remembering how she had encouraged Lily to be diplomatic there, to ask herself whether—as the wife of a builder—she was being supportive by suggesting that everyone live in old houses.

  “That’s okay,” Quinn said.

  “I used to like it when my mother made me pancakes or waffles.”

  “We have hot breakfasts on weekends.”

  “I don’t see the pancake police,” Dana joked. “What do you say we break the rules and have some on Monday?”

  “Usually I eat granola during the week,” Quinn said. “Grandma buys it for me, but I guess she didn’t last week. She thought we—”

  “Were going to France,” Dana finished, having a flash craving for a brioche and café crème.

  Quinn blushed, reaching for the Cheerios. “That’s okay,” she said quickly. “I’ll eat Allie’s cereal. She won’t mind.”

  Dana nodded, taking the half gallon of one percent milk out of the refrigerator. Quinn looked at it stoically, then poured it into her bowl. Allie had already told Dana they liked two percent, that anything less reminded them of blue water. Dana had started a grocery list and stuck it to the refrigerator, telling the girls to write down whatever they wanted her to buy.

  So far, the only items were in Dana’s handwriting. She missed her friends Isabel and Colette in France. She missed the way things used to be with Jonathan—the meals they would eat at cafés in Honfleur, at long farmhouse tables in their kitchens, on weekend trips to Paris. She missed Reblochon, chèvre, and Camembert. She hankered for poulet fermier. This list illustrated the bizarre change in her life: Popsicles, spaghetti, yogurt, fruit juice. She looked from the list to Quinn, quietly eating at the kitchen table. Pouring a cup of coffee, Dana sat beside her.

  “Why don’t you put granola on the list?”

  Quinn shrugged. “I don’t really need it.”

  “But if you want it, I’ll get it.”

  “Cheerios are fine.”

  Dana sipped her coffee. Before leaving for the airport, Quinn had been acting like a holy terror. Since coming home, she was sweet and docile, as if afraid of making any waves, as if she thought one wrong move would make her aunt change her mind and load them onto the next plane.

  “Why do you go out every morning?” Dana asked.

  Quinn’s left hand went to her head and surreptitiously began to pull her braids. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You leave so early. Before Allie or I are up.”

  “Do I wake you up? I’m sorry if I do.”

  “No, you don’t. I’m just trying to find out more about you.”

  At that, the old familiar scowl came back to Quinn’s face. “What’s there to find out?” she asked. “It’s not very interesting. I just like the sunrise.”

  “I like it too. It’s one of my favorite times to paint,” Dana said, then regretted it. She hadn’t painted at sunrise in nearly a year.

  “It’s one of my favorite times to …”

  “What?” Dana asked, leaning forward as if she could pull the words out of Quinn’s mouth. She wanted to understand her niece. Quinn had a world of secrets locked inside; Dana could read it in the tightness of her jaw, the lines around her eyes.

  “You’re just like Mom,” Quinn said, suddenly sounding sad.

  “Is that bad?”

  “You’re an artist. Everyone says you’re such a free spirit, so I thought you must be happier, happy enough that maybe you wouldn’t have to oversee what I’m doing every second.”

  Pulling back, Dana didn’t know what to say.

  “I didn’t mean that,” Quinn said quickly. “Mom just, well, she was strict, that’s all.”

  “What did you mean, that I’m happier? She wasn’t happy?”

  “No, she was. I don’t know what I mean. Forget it—paint or something. Why don’t you?”

  “Why don’t I paint?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will,” Dana said.

  “You should,” Quinn said, dropping her bowl into the sink, walking out of the kitchen. Dana watched her go. A thought flashed past, like the just-glimpsed tail of a comet. What had her mother meant the other day when she’d made that comment about Mark’s business trips?

  Had he cheated on Lily? Dana didn’t want to believe that, and she didn’t think so. But she knew from experience that it could happen. She knew that one minute a man could be telling the woman he loved his fantasies, and the next—when she was so overcome with grief over her sister to paint or love or even listen much—he could break her heart by making those fantasies come true.

  But then it was time to enroll Allie in swimming lessons, so Dana went looking for towels and forgot all about Quinn and her mother’s words, and the fact that she didn’t even want to paint.

  QUINN FELT BAD about clamming up on Aunt Dana. The thing was, she could spot a bonding moment a mile away. Getting close again was not in anyone’s best interest. Ever since their last-minute reprieve at the airport, Quinn had been so wrapped up in feeling lucky and thankful, she’d done her best to stay out of trouble. She made her bed every morning. She refrained from teasing Allie. Her lungs were now a no-smoking zone. When the granola ran out, she switched to Cheerios without complaint.

  But this morning, she’d nearly blown it. There they were, sitting in the kitchen the way Quinn and her mom used to, on the verge of a heart-to-heart talk. Aunt Dana had said sunrise was a favorite time to paint, and Quinn had nearly said, it’s my favorite time to write.

  Red flags, buzzers, and air horns!

  How stupid could she be? Wouldn’t it just be easier to hand Aunt Dana her diary, walk her to the easy chair, and invite her to sit down to read it? Quinn had to give herself credit. She had found a great hiding place. It was far from the house—a good fifteen-minute walk—and that was her safety factor.

  Aunt Dana was more like Quinn’s mother than she could have imagined. She loved seeing the girls be creative. Her eyes would grow soft at the mention of painting or writing. If Quinn had said she liked to write at sunrise, Aunt Dana would be begging to be allowed to read her stories.

  Nice little tales, Aunt Dana would think. Full of children and bunnies and seashells and friendly porpoises. Or maybe, considering that Quinn was twelve now, Aunt Dana would expect boy-girl stories, how the pretty girl and the gentle boy went rowing out to South Brother for a picnic.

  Guess again.

  Quinn wandered through the house. Aunt Dana had taken Allie down to the beach to sign her up for swimming lessons, and Quinn looked through the binoculars to find them. There, all the way at the end of the beach, they were milling around with the few mothers and kids who had arrived for the summer so far. Never mind that Allie could swim to the raft by herself, that Quinn had taught her to do the sidestroke and dead-man’s float. The family tradition—dating back to when their mom and Aunt Dana were young—was to take swimming lessons until you were ten, to make sure you could handle any emergency.

  That’s how Quinn knew the accident was
a lie.

  Her stomach dropped out, just thinking about it. Peering through the binoculars at her sister and aunt, she felt as if she were standing on a diving platform, that the platform had simply disappeared under her feet. Raising the glasses higher, she scanned the Sound, the water where her parents had died.

  Today the sea was flat calm. Motorboats droned like bees in the distance. There was Long Island across the way. Her heart throbbing, she remembered her mother telling how she and Aunt Dana used to sail to Shelter Island. She remembered stories of how they and a pack of their friends had once swum all the way to Orient Point. Seven miles across the Sound!

  So how had Quinn’s mother—who had taken swimming lessons till she was ten, who had boldly swum all the way across Long Island Sound, who was the best sailor around—drowned within sight of their house? It was right out there, just past the bell buoy on the Wickland Shoals, Quinn thought. She stared at the spot, binoculars trembling in her hand.

  Quinn knew how. Lowering the glasses, she stepped away from the window. The sight of all that water was making her sick. Now, alone and safe in her own house, she closed her eyes and let the feelings press in on her.

  This was her house. These four walls held secrets that only her family knew. Aunt Dana had lived here once, Grandma’s mother had built it with her husband, but the house belonged to Quinn, Allie, and their parents. Her father had replaced the roof, improved the kitchen. Every board, every nail, every rug, every bookshelf, had absorbed their secrets.

  The secrets were in Quinn’s heart and in her diary. She loved her family so much, she would guard them forever. Whispers and cries; she could almost hear them now, coming through the walls. Her diary had saved her from hearing them alone, and she had written down everything she heard, everything she knew.

  Walking through all the rooms, she visited familiar things. The dictionary stand in the upstairs hall, her mother’s watercolors of the four seasons, her father’s tennis racket. Touching the handle, the place his fingers had gripped, filled Quinn with so much electricity, she had to sit down.

  If only she had started writing her diary later. Her mother had read it. Quinn could almost hear her mother’s voice now. That soft voice, trying to explain the things Quinn had written about. Quinn had listened, her face red-hot with embarrassment, with fury, feeling so mad and upset that she couldn’t even hear the words. Quinn hadn’t forgiven, and she bet her mother hadn’t either.

  Two days later, her parents were dead.

  Her mother, who could swim across the Sound, who could swim underwater through the rock pools across the street with just one breath, who had taught Quinn to sail the way a butterfly flies, and her father, whose shoulders were so broad and his swimming stroke so sure, who could swim to the raft with both Allie and Quinn on his back, had drowned.

  Quinn didn’t know the exact details; she couldn’t quite let herself picture or imagine, not even when writing in her diary, exactly how they had done it. But she believed that her parents had died on purpose.

  Died underneath the sea.

  Sunlight shimmered on the surface of the bay, and light bounced up the hill into the house. Water was everywhere. Quinn turned her back on the windows, but the sea’s reflection danced in mirrors and picture frames, surrounding her. Who could find the answers? Who could know the truth?

  Mermaids swim out there, her mother used to tell her when she was little. They have hair like seaweed and tails like fishes, and they live in the deepest part of the Sound. They play with lobsters and juggle clams, and they open oysters for pearls to bring home to their mothers.

  On full-moon nights they spread their nets across the sea, catching silver bait-fish to wear in their hair, and on moonless nights they dry their nets on the dark rocks where young girls, if they aren’t careful going home, could trip and be pulled into the waves.

  Quinn shivered to think of being pulled into the sea. She thought of mermaids, and she thought of lobsters, and she knew the answers wouldn’t come from them. And then she thought of oceanographers. They were scientists who studied the sea, studied the deep, could learn things no one else knew.

  “Sam, Sam, Oceanographer Man,” Quinn whispered into the empty house as she wondered when her aunt would see him again.

  Her circuit of her home had brought her back to the upstairs hall, to her father’s tennis racket leaning against the dark wood wall—exactly where he had left it the day he had died. Quinn had never let her grandmother move it or even touch it, but she moved it now. Grabbing her father’s racket in both hands, she ran into her bedroom. Smashing her mattress, Quinn swung. Her pillow, her blanket, the lamp beside her bed: Quinn swung blindly, beating her room for the answers she did not have.

  CHAPTER 6

  SAM LAY ON THE MAKESHIFT BENCH, LIFTING weights in the sun. Sweat ran down his body from heat and exertion as he decided to do another set. The boat rocked beneath him, and he thought about going sailing. Instead, he added twenty pounds on either side of the one seventy he already had on and kept lifting.

  His muscles burned, and he knew that was good. As a scientist he knew that a person’s memories were stored in the cells, deeper than the conscious mind could reach, and right now every inch of Sam’s body was remembering something he wanted to forget. Working out was the best way he knew to do that.

  Sam’s boat was moored in Stony Creek, a section of Branford, Connecticut, close to New Haven and the Thimble Islands. That morning he had rowed half a mile in to the town dock, run eight miles, had coffee and a bagel, and rowed back out. Although he had abstracts to read and an article to write, he had brought his weights up on deck instead.

  This was a routine of long standing. Sam had been a skinny kid with a strong older brother. Not only small for his age, he also came from a poor family—the worst sin possible in Newport. For his sixteenth birthday, Joe had given him a set of barbells and said: “You can’t live in a mansion or join the yacht club, and you can’t wake up tall, but you can kick their rich asses. Get busy.”

  The sun baked down, so Sam closed his eyes. His gray T-shirt was drenched as he pushed the limits. “Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen,” he counted, feeling the fire in his pectorals and biceps. The set finished, he lowered the weights and let himself breathe. Joe, right about most things, had been wrong about one: When he was seventeen, Sam woke up tall. That year he went from five seven to six feet. The next year, by the time he started Dartmouth, he was six three. The barbells had started coming in handy, because Sam had a plan.

  Waking up tall had gotten him thinking he had power. The kind of power that made all things possible, that made dreams come true. Sam knew a few things about himself. He was loyal, and he had the longest memory of anyone he knew. He was the elephant of Newport: When someone showed him an act of kindness, he never forgot.

  He never forgot Dana Underhill.

  She might never realize what she’d done for him that long-ago summer. She had invited him into her sailing class, taught him the skill he loved more than any other. When he found the water and sailing, he found his heart. Without knowing, she had pulled him from an abyss deeper than any ocean trench.

  Some adults would never understand what childhood could be. The ones who had grown up happy and loved, who had never seen their parents hurt, who had most of what they needed: Those adults couldn’t know.

  For Sam, growing up as worried about food and rent as his mother was, angry that everyone else had more than him, childhood hadn’t been easy. His school pictures were hard to look at—he could see the worry and pain in his face, the tension in his posture.

  It took a hard-luck kid to know one, and Sam recognized his female counterpart in Quinn Grayson. The girl was in the right place though. She had no idea what she was dealing with, having an aunt like Dana.

  Dana, he thought now, picking up the weights again.

  He’d never forget what she’d done for him, but he wanted to forget what he’d done about her. He thought of his secret visit. The sha
me was still strong, surging along his nerves.

  How could a person divide memory? Keep some, throw out the rest? Gritting his teeth, Sam lay on his back in the hot sun and began to lift. His biceps and triceps, his deltoids, felt the pain. He had grown tall, he had made himself strong, but certain things he couldn’t change.

  One thing he knew for sure: He wasn’t going to abandon her now.

  He had read the signs in Quinn’s eyes, and he knew what Dana was in for. He knew, because he had been there himself. To pay Dana back for what she’d done for him, Sam was going to help her through this. He had the ongoing dolphin observations from Bimini to analyze, the meetings in Nova Scotia to cancel. He wasn’t going anywhere. He just hoped he could keep himself divided.

  Then his phone rang down in the cabin, and he swore he knew before the answering machine picked up. He heard the voice, hesitation mixed with bravado. Spellbound, Sam listened to the invitation. It was as if he’d willed it himself. He held the weights, suspended over his chest, listening. He’d have to shuffle things around to make the timing work, but he would.

  This was the call he’d been waiting for.

  QUINN HAD BROKEN the lamp beside her bed.

  Dana found it when she went upstairs with the basket to collect everyone’s dirty clothes to take to the Laundromat—sitting on granite, their house lacked a decent septic tank and the capacity to run a washing machine.

  She was overwhelmed with trying to mother her orphaned nieces, trying to learn everything there was about running a house—something she’d never had any desire to do—and feeling generally burdened by the time she reached Quinn’s room. There, shoved into a corner of her closet, was the lamp. Kneeling down, Dana gathered the pieces together.

  The lamp’s base had been a ceramic shell: a channeled whelk. Lily had made it in eighth grade—sculpted it from clay, traced the whorls, formed the opening. She had fired it in the junior-high kiln, painted and glazed it pale pink. Their father had wired it, turned it into a lamp. For years it had sat on an old oak dry sink downstairs, but Quinn must have appropriated it for her bedroom.