Safe Harbor

by Luanne Rice

  “Because of our ages?”

  “No, not just that,” she said. “It’s everything. Lily, the girls … it’s all a jumble for me.” She thought, trying to sort it out enough to explain. “Because I’m not ready. I was hurt by someone in France. I know you’re different, you’re not him, but he was younger than I am too. He wanted to rush me into painting before I could even think about it.”

  “Do you think I’m doing that?”

  Dana shook her head, taking his hand. “No, it’s very different. But I’m confused. I don’t know what to think.”

  “I do,” he said, smiling.

  Dana wanted to say more, but just then she noticed that Quinn’s flashlight had begun to bob through the woods, across the rocks on the way home. Sam had seen it too, and he turned back to Dana.

  “She’s coming,” Dana said.

  Sam took her hands. He held them very lightly in his, looking into her eyes the whole time. “Find what you need,” he said.

  “What I need,” she said, thoughts flooding in, “are the answers, I guess. Why my sister died. And her locket—she always wore it, you know. I wish her daughters could have it.” She looked at Sam. “You’re talking about when we dive on the Sundance… .”

  “No. I mean in your life,” Sam said. “I don’t want to see you hurting like this, Dana. Just like that old seaman, I want you to find your enchantment with life again.”

  Dana’s eyes filled with tears because she wanted that so much too. She thought of the paints in the garage, and for one moment her fingers tingled with the desire to pick up a brush.

  “There’s something else I have to ask you before she gets back.”

  “What?”

  “About New York. You’re going next Thursday, right?”

  “Yes. To meet someone for lunch,” Dana said, remembering that he had been to dinner the day she’d made the date.

  “Will you save that night for me?”

  “Oh, Sam,” Dana said. “I don’t know… .”

  “Look. Monday we’re diving on the Sundance. Depending on what we find, if everything works out the way I think it will, I want you to meet me at the fountain at Lincoln Center,” Sam said.

  “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you,” he said. “Will you?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “That’s the best I can do.”

  “That’s the best I can ask for,” Sam said. And, kissing her one more time, he left her standing in the middle of the living room, wondering why she suddenly had such a burning desire to paint, when Quinn walked through the front door.

  SHE DIDN’T WASTE TIME asking herself or anyone else. After midnight, when both girls were in bed and asleep, Dana slipped outside. She walked down the hill to the garage, and she stood in front of her canvas. Inspiration washed over and through her, and wherever it came from, it made her feel grateful to Sam. She mixed her oils, and for the first time in many months, Dana began to paint.

  QUINN GOT THE message: Monday was the day. Sam was coming over with a big-ass oceanography boat, and they were going to get all the answers they needed. But this time, when she went down to the garage to tell Aunt Dana the news, she got the shock of her life.

  Aunt Dana had been painting. She must have been at it all night.

  The painting was only partly finished, and the garage was as dark as ever, but even so, Quinn could see how beautiful it was. The blues and purples blended together, and flashes of gold hit the wave tops. Down below the surface, the water was still and calm. Blackfish and cunners swam amid the kelp. Quinn must have gasped, because her aunt smiled and asked, “What?”

  “You’re really painting,” Quinn whispered.

  “I am.”

  “I didn’t think you ever would. Not here.”

  “I didn’t either.”

  “What made you start?”

  Her aunt was silent. She wiped her hands on the sides of her jeans, where she had already left many streaks of paint. “It was just time, Quinn,” Aunt Dana said. “Someone helped me see that. No matter what mysteries we’re facing, we still have to live our lives.”

  “Who was the someone? Me?” Quinn asked.

  “You were one someone.” Her aunt laughed.

  “Sam’s the other, right?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “I think I do,” her aunt said. Quinn wanted her to say more, but instead, she blushed, as if the heat had just shot up. Staring at her aunt, Quinn noticed how happy she looked. The happiness was in her eyes and skin, not in anything as obvious as a smile. She was glowing, as if starting to paint had made her feel right again, like the old Aunt Dana, the Aunt Dana Quinn hadn’t seen since before her mother had died.

  “Aunt Dana?” Quinn asked.

  “What, honey?” Aunt Dana asked, touching her brush to the blue paint, lightly stroking it onto the canvas.

  “Why is every day so different?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why can you paint today and not yesterday? Why was Mom here two August fourths ago but not today?”

  “Those are the mysteries I was just talking about, Aquinnah Jane.”

  “What do you think we’ll find on Monday?”

  Aunt Dana laid down her brush, came around the easel to hold Quinn and stop her heart from beating out of her body. Sometimes all Quinn could do was run as fast as she could, but right now she let her aunt put her arms around her and stroke her head.

  “Whatever we find, I’ll be right there with you,” Aunt Dana whispered.

  “Promise?”

  “I do.”

  “What if it’s bad, Aunt Dana?”

  “We’ll be together. We’ll deal with it then.”

  Quinn closed her eyes. She felt glad her aunt wasn’t telling her to look on the bright side, that they’d find only good things. Her mother had done that sometimes, told white lies to cover up her own worries and fears. She had done that about the business trips, and when Quinn had written angry things in her diary, her mother had read it.

  “I wish we had never left Martha’s Vineyard,” Quinn said. “Stayed there from the time I was a baby.”

  “Why?”

  “It was our special island, the place I was born. We were so happy there. I wish we could all go back, turn back time to those days… .”

  CHAPTER 17

  THEY RODE ACROSS THE WAVES ABOARD THE Westerly, the research vessel Sam had brought. Looking east, holding Allie on her lap, Dana glanced at Sam. He smiled at her, and she smiled back, shivering in the breeze that blew through her hair. From the deck, they could practically see the Vineyard beyond the horizon.

  Dana thought of the carefree happy days she and Lily had had on that island, before men and children and responsibilities had come to take them away from each other. The ship rode across the Sound, the engine thrumming.

  Because the ship belonged to Yale, Sam had brought two graduate students as crew—one of them a lovely twenty-two-year-old woman. The vessel was a sixty-five-foot trawler, bequested to the marine studies department by a wealthy alumnus, and it was furnished with more equipment than anyone could imagine.

  Sam was captain. He steered with Dana, Allie, and Quinn beside him in the wheelhouse. Quinn made sure he had her hand-drawn map spread out before him, but Dana noticed he relied more on the chart and GPS coordinates—the Global Positioning System, bouncing air waves up to a satellite as a way of determining position—glancing from the instruments to the chart table and back. When he looked at Dana, she felt a shiver run down her spine.

  She felt so torn. She wanted to trust him completely. He was sacrificing so much time to help her and the girls. Buying her the paints had been such a loving gesture, one she’d never forget. But as the boat pounded across the waves, she remembered how hurt she had been before. She found herself comparing everything he did to Jonathan: Would Jon have helped her this way? Would he have been this kind to the girls? Wasn’t it possible to have good intentions and
still give in to passion for someone younger, prettier, wilder?

  She found herself watching the female grad student. Her name was Terry Blackstone. Tall and tan, blond hair streaming behind her in the wind, she looked ready to play volleyball. Her white shorts rode low on her hips, her tight blue T-shirt revealed a bikini top underneath.

  “We’re far from shore,” Allie said nervously. “Farther than when we sail.”

  “Not a lot,” Dana said, dragging her eyes away from Terry, pointing out their regular sailing route along the shore.

  “You didn’t have to come,” Quinn reminded her. “You could have stayed with Mrs. Campbell.”

  “I wanted to come for Mommy and Daddy, but I don’t want anything bad to happen, like the thing that took them… .”

  “Don’t be scared, Al,” Quinn said, reaching into Dana’s beach bag for Kimba, pressing him into her sister’s hands.

  “You either.” Allie smiled.

  Dana was silent, letting the sisters take care of each other, just as she and Lily had once done. Sun sparkled on the Sound. Pleasure boats crisscrossed their path, sailboats heeling over, motorboats pulling water-skiers, Jet Skis jumping the wakes. Terry and Matt—the other grad student—talked quietly at the rail.

  They passed the green can buoy that served to mark one end of the Wickland Shoals and the red bell buoy that marked the other. Beyond that was open water. Turning to look over her shoulder, Dana saw the Connecticut shoreline behind them, shimmering in a sea of haze. Looking forward, she saw the North Shore of Long Island a bit farther away.

  “Are we at the midpoint?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” Sam said. “But almost.”

  “How can you tell?” Quinn asked. “Just by looking?”

  “No, your aunt’s the artist, the one with the excellent eye,” Sam said. “Me, I have to rely on electronics.”

  “Sam is an excellent navigator,” Terry called. “Get him to tell you how we all made it back from Montauk in a gale!”

  “You all went to Montauk?” Dana asked, unable to block the jealousy.

  “To chase a pod of dolphins,” Sam said, oblivious. Dana nodded. She couldn’t stop looking at Terry’s long legs. Monique had been twenty-five, just three years older. The day before she’d found her with Jon, Dana would have said she wasn’t the jealous type. She had never considered other women to be rivals before. Now she gazed at Terry and wished her heart would stop hurting.

  Sam showed Quinn and Allie how to work the GPS. Dana watched as Sam pushed the buttons and Quinn marked the chart. “But there’s another way to tell where we are,” he said after a minute.

  “What?”

  “See that?” Sam asked, pointing forward.

  Dana and her nieces looked through the windshield down the bow. Terry and Matt were watching too. There, straight ahead, the water seemed to rise and fall in ocean waves. It was wake left, not by the pleasure craft of a few minutes ago, but by a passing oil tanker.

  “The shipping lane,” Sam said as Dana picked up the binoculars to look. The ship was longer than a football field. It was black and red with stripes of rust running down its hull. Because it rode low in the water, traveling from east to west, Dana figured it was full of oil, heading to New York from the port of Providence.

  “We’re going in there?” Allie asked, shrinking into Dana’s lap.

  “Not quite,” Sam said. “Just close enough.”

  “The Hunting Ground,” Quinn breathed, and Dana shivered.

  Now a barge came along, piled high with containers. The tow rope was long and hard to see, but the tug pulling it carried markers on a mast. Sam pointed them out, telling Quinn each marker represented twenty feet of tow line. Dana watched as Quinn, trying to listen, seemed mesmerized by the huge wake and wash generated by such enormous vessels.

  Sam switched on the depth sounder. His crew—Terry and Matt—stood beside him, watching the chart for marked elevations and comparing it with the sonar. Dana forgot to be jealous. She sat still, one arm around Allie. Quinn took a step backward, melting into her side as she had years before, when she was a very little girl. The feeling they were close to where Lily and Mark had died came upon them like fog, and they knew to get through it they were going to have to stay together.

  QUINN SWORE SHE heard the bing that marked the spot.

  Every damn bing sounded the same as the sonar swept down from the Westerly’s hull, sending sound waves straight to the bottom of the Sound. But suddenly, there was one sound like a bell—a short, sweet hello from the sea bottom that told Quinn they had found her parents’ boat.

  “It’s here,” she said to Aunt Dana and then to Sam. “We’ve found it.”

  Sam looked at her as if she were crazy, or perhaps the youthful savant that she was.

  “I think you might be right,” he said.

  “I have powers,” she said, trying to sound calm. Her heart was making that damn near impossible though. It was as if she had a puppy in her chest, trying to get out. Squirming, thrashing, bumping all over the place.

  “You’re the captain today,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “This is your charter,” he said. “We’re here because of you.”

  “I know,” she said. This was her cue. Digging into her pocket, she came up with the cash. “I gave you that big payment before, and here’s six more dollars. You know the hot dog stand came up a little short. I’ll get you the other two bucks as soon as I can.”

  “You look like a person who’s good for your debts,” Sam said.

  “I am,” she said. Then, turning for confirmation, “Right, Aunt Dana?”

  “Absolutely,” Dana said, looking pretty in white shorts and a white shirt and a paint-stained blue cap. Her brown hair was messy in the wind, and she looked like a little kid trying to be a grown-up.

  Quinn, her sister, and her aunt watched Sam getting into his wet suit. He looked cute and thin. His ribs were defined, his stomach tan, and Quinn found it very interesting the way Aunt Dana stared while pretending to watch a freighter going down the shipping lane.

  Clearing her throat, Quinn said she had to go to the head. Aunt Dana said, no problem. Climbing down below, from the wheelhouse to the cabin, Quinn reached into the waistband of her shorts. An exception had been made.

  Usually she never dared bring her diary home. After the reading incident, she had vowed to leave it buried at Little Beach. But today she needed it with her. She absolutely wanted to record, for posterity and sanity, this day’s events as they happened.

  Curled up on a settee down below, she began to write.

  We are onboard the RV Westerly. Sam is about to dive down to the bottom and find out the truth. It’s a sunny day. For some reason, I thought the sky would be gray and the water black. I know the answers won’t be good ones. Sam thinks they will—I can tell. He wouldn’t dive if he thought they wouldn’t.

  I remember the day Mommy read my diary. She was so mad. Her face looked like one of those cartoon monsters with her eyes big and her lipstick too dark, making her mouth look mean. She was holding the diary, shaking it in my face.

  “You spy on your father, you listen to his phone calls,” she said. “That is not what a good daughter does. It isn’t trusting, and it isn’t right. Doesn’t he put food on our table? Doesn’t he travel all over the country to find the right projects? There are grown-up things you can’t understand.”

  Well, Mommy, tell me, then. Tell me the grown-up things I can’t understand. She never did. She never did tell me. All I had were the phone calls and the fights. If she didn’t want me to eavesdrop, why did she yell so loud? Did she think I couldn’t hear? How Allie managed to sleep through all that, I’ll never know.

  “Parents fight,” she’d say, trying to stop me from crying. “I love your father so much. Sometimes I react too strongly to what he does—he builds houses in beautiful places. People need places to live, not just birds and animals!” Cuddling me, promising me they still loved each oth
er, saying that fathers did what they had to do to support their families. That Daddy built homes for families, made old people good places to live in. The ghosts of their fights still keep me awake.

  Now Sam is getting ready to dive down. What will he find? There’s a whole story in that boat down there, if only the right person tries to read it. Just like there’s a whole story in our house, in the yard, in the garage, in the other diary. Aunt Dana could find it, I suppose—I wish she would.

  She’s my good aunt. I love her so much, almost as much as I love them. She’s looking after me and Allie, helping us find the way to live without them. It’s not easy. Most kids my age still think their parents are perfect. I know mine weren’t, but I just wish they hadn’t decided to leave.

  While Sam pulled on his wet suit, his mind raced with many memories. He thought of a day two summers ago, diving on the Cambria with his brother, Joe. The old barquentine had wrecked on the Wickland Shoals over a hundred years ago, and Joe and his crew had salvaged the ship and treasure. Sam’s gaze drifted across the Sound to the spot. He still had the scar from where he’d been cut with a cable, and he still remembered the shark that had swum into his blood.

  It had been a mako. A man-eater—as dangerous a shark as was found in these waters. Joe had claimed it was a harmless blacktip, but what did he know? He was just a geologist. Unable to help himself now, Sam looked for fins.

  Another memory surfaced. He saw himself as a boy, waiting at the foot of the Jamestown Bridge. It was Christmas morning, and his father was dead. He could see the ice and snow, feel the cold in his bones. Thinking of Quinn down below, he knew this was her bleak Christmas morning. It didn’t matter that the August sun was beating down, that the thermometer registered eighty-five. The girl was ice cold inside, and she would be until Sam came up with the truth.

  Dana was watching him. He felt her gaze on his bare chest, and he sensed her coming as he pulled on the black neoprene jacket. She placed her hand on his back.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “I haven’t done anything yet,” he said.

  “You’ve done so much. Getting the boat, letting Quinn feel like it’s because of her. She’s down below, writing in her diary.”