Returning to Shore

by Corinne Demas

  “That’s my house number,” said Jaylin. “There’s no cell reception here.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s like the dark ages,” said Jaylin. She stood at the top of the staircase and waved to Clare when Clare turned to look back up at the landing. But when Clare got to the bottom of the staircase and looked up again, Jaylin had left.

  ***

  When Clare got back to the house Richard was still at his desk. He looked as if he hadn’t moved from his chair the whole time she was away.

  “We had a nice piece of good luck while you were gone,” he said. “Someone renting out here spotted a turtle laying her eggs in the middle of a dirt road in front of their house and called the terrapin hotline—we’d given out notices to everyone on the island—and Steffi and her team were able to get out there and relocate the nest.”

  “That’s great,” said Clare.

  “What happened to your hand?” asked Richard.

  “Oh, that’s just ink. I met a girl on the beach and we might do something together and that’s her phone number.”

  “Good. You made a friend,” said Richard.

  “Made a friend” was what you’d say about a kid at the playground. And besides, Jaylin could hardly be counted as friend, certainly not yet. But Clare didn’t say so to Richard.

  “I guess I’ll go change out of my bathing suit,” she said. She went upstairs to her room and added Jaylin’s number to the contacts on her cell phone. Her phone might be useless for calls, but at least she could store numbers there. She scrolled through her contacts, looking at all the names. She had a lot of friends, but most of them were friends that she never talked with about anything that mattered a whole lot; most of them thought things were better in her life than they really were. It was only her friend Susannah who knew how much she missed Peter and how she felt when Vera decided to marry Tertio. It was only Susannah—Susannah, who was stuck in Colorado for the summer, practically the other side of the whole country—who knew how she’d felt about being shipped off to this island to spend three weeks with a man who was, it was true, her father, but who was really a stranger.

  She went to the bathroom to wash the ink off her hand. She ran the cake of soap across her hand and rubbed the spot with her thumb. Even after two soapings and two rinses she couldn’t get all the ink off. You couldn’t read the number anymore, but you could tell that something had been written there.

  Once Clare had come home from school with someone’s phone number written on her arm and Vera had been upset. She’d said it looked like the number the Nazis had tattooed on the Jews in the concentration camps, and it would be distressing to Ian, who was Jewish. She also said that the ink could cause a problem for Clare’s skin. Vera never had just one reason for anything.

  13

  It rained the next day and there was rain promised for the day after. Jaylin called to tell Clare they were going into Boston and staying in a hotel for a few days and asked if she wanted to come. Clare might have considered asking Richard if she could go if she still felt as she did when she first got to Blackfish Island, but now she declined right away. The point of coming to Blackfish Island was to spend time with Richard, not to be escaping to somewhere else.

  “How come you’re going to Boston?” she asked.

  “My mom is hungry for some urban time and my dad needs some undisturbed time,” Jaylin explained. “And Mark has some friend who’s flying in to Logan so we’ll meet up with him and then he’ll come back and spend a week here.”

  “That’s nice,” said Clare.

  “Nice!” cried Jaylin. “My brother gets to have a friend from home come and visit, but not me. ‘Next summer,’ is what my mom said. She’d better believe I’ll hold her to that next year.”

  “Where’s home?” asked Clare, changing the subject.

  “Philadelphia,” said Jaylin. “An unfortunate distance from the Cape—just close enough so my insane parents think it driving distance. So I have to spend a hundred hideous hours in the car. Where are you from?”

  “New York,” said Clare. “Not exactly New York, just the suburbs outside of it.”

  “Lucky you. No wonder you don’t want to go into Boston,” said Jaylin. “I’ll see you when I’m back. And don’t forget about the trip to P-Town.”

  Clare hadn’t mentioned the trip to Richard because she didn’t know how serious Jaylin’s invitation was, but now she thought she better ask him if she could go. He was working at his desk and when she came into his room he pushed his reading glasses halfway down his nose and looked at her over the top of them. Vera would have had a hundred questions and probably would have wanted to speak to Jaylin’s mother before she gave her consent. But Richard just nodded and said, “If that’s what you’d like to do.”

  It was a relief not to have to explain anything. Still it might have been nice if he’d asked Clare at least one question, just to show he was interested in what she was doing.

  ***

  The rain weighed down the branches of the oak trees close by the house, and the lichens on the trunks of the pitch pine had a silvery hue against the rain-dark trunks. Mist muted the view of the marsh. It felt as if they were in a forest, not near a beach by the sea. But at low tide the island asserted itself. The woodsy smell of pine needles and humus was eclipsed by the smell of the marsh. And even if you couldn’t see the bay, you knew it was close by.

  Clare walked the beach with Richard twice a day, but they didn’t spot any more turtle tracks. In the evening Richard dug out some old board games which he said had been in the house for as long as he could remember.

  “When we were out here in the summer, we had no TV, no video games—my mother liked it that way,” he said. He smiled. “I got used to it.”

  The Parcheesi set had black cardboard cylindrical shakers that were missing their bottoms, so you had to cup your hand over it when it was your turn to roll the dice. Because there were only two players, they each played two colors. Clare’s red and yellow came in second and third. Richard’s blue was first.

  The Chinese checkers board was beautifully carved wood, but Richard wasn’t able to find the box of marbles that went with it. The only marbles he did find was an odd assortment in an oatmeal container. Richard spilled them out on a tray.

  “My old collection,” he said, and he nudged them affectionately with his forefinger. They were different sizes and colors, some clear as glass, some opaque as stone. Clare held an apricot-sized green one up to the light. When you looked through it, it was like being under the sea.

  Because there weren’t enough matching marbles to make a set, Richard proposed using peas. “Peas against marbles,” he said, and he brought out a paper bag of peas from the refrigerator and a bowl to shell them in. They ate the ones too small for playing with. The peas lined up in the dimples of wood made Clare giggle, but Richard played very seriously, concentrating on the board as if he were in a professional chess tournament, not a man studying a battlefield army of mismatched marbles and unevenly sized green peas. Richard proved to be an amazing jumper. His peas followed ingenious zigzag routes to reach their destination.

  “I don’t know how you can see those moves,” said Clare. Richard ran through his eight-jump move in slow motion for her.

  “The trick is you have to be willing to go backwards to find a path forwards. Most players are so fixed on advancing their pieces that they don’t explore those longer, backwards routes.”

  “You mean me?”

  Richard smiled. “You. And everyone else. I was a crack Chinese checkers player when I was a kid. It was a winning strategy I learned from my father. It’s a strategy of the old, the patient. Kids never get it.”

  “You didn’t have any brothers or sisters, right?”

  “No,” said Richard. “I was an only child, just like you.”

  “How come?”

  “What do you mean how come?”

  “I’m an only child because, well, because Mom and you weren’t marrie
d that long. And then I guess Peter wasn’t ready to have kids—or … I don’t know.” Clare wasn’t really sure. Maybe it was because Vera didn’t want to have kids with Peter.

  “My mother had two miscarriages before she had me. And when she finally got her perfect baby—she called me that, but of course I wasn’t really perfect,” Richard smiled broadly at this—“she decided that was enough.” Richard paused for a moment. “Do you like being an only child?” he asked.

  “It’s OK,” said Clare. “How about you?”

  “When I was kid, yes, it seemed OK. As an adult, when my life got hard, I would have liked to have had a sibling to share that with. And when my parents died—within half a year of each other—I had no one to grieve with me.”

  There was quiet all around them. Clare wanted to know what he meant by his life getting hard. It seemed like it was an opening to something, to some of the questions she wanted to ask, but she wasn’t sure how to begin. She ran her finger along the row of marbles on the board in front of her. Then she looked up at him.

  “What was hard?” she asked.

  Richard looked as if he had expected this question, perhaps he had even drawn it out from her, yet he also seemed as if he didn’t know how he was going to answer.

  “I made some changes in my life—or rather, my life took me in directions I hadn’t anticipated.”

  Clare kept her eyes on the Chinese checkers. She felt suddenly afraid now, as if she was about to hear something she might not want to hear, and she was sorry she had begun this. And yet, maybe she wasn’t.

  “Was that when you moved to the West Coast?” she asked.

  “Actually, it was after that. I relocated to California when you were three,” said Richard. “I was working in computers then and got involved with an Internet start-up company out there. Vera and I were having a trial separation. I thought I’d be out there for only a while, see how things went.”

  Clare looked up at Richard now.

  “The company took off. Vera decided she wanted to marry Peter. So I had to decide if I was going to return to the East Coast or make my life out there.”

  Clare waited.

  “It seemed simpler to stay out there,” said Richard.

  Clare felt as if she had been slapped. “What about me?” she asked.

  Richard stood up. At first she thought he was going to walk off, leave her question behind. But instead he stretched and rubbed his hands through his hair. Then he sat down again.

  “You’ve gotten to the core problem, haven’t you? What to do about you. I decided—and perhaps I was wrong about this—that it was better for you if I stayed out of your life completely. Vera and Peter seemed to be a stable parental unit, and I wanted you to have that. Have them.”

  So he had given her Peter. She would never have thought about it that way, would never have imagined that her relationship with Peter was at all dependent on Richard’s generosity. But even so, he had abandoned her. He’d supported her financially, but he’d gone off and left her behind.

  “I always thought that you just didn’t want to see me,” said Clare.

  Richard shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “That wasn’t it.”

  “You never visited once, my entire childhood—years and years.”

  “I didn’t want you to grow up with divided loyalties. I didn’t want you to feel confused.”

  “I wouldn’t have been confused. My friend Susannah has a stepfather but she sees her real father a lot, too, and he lives in Colorado. And that’s a lot better than not seeing him at all.” She couldn’t keep the anger out of her voice.

  “I’m sorry, Clare,” said Richard quietly. “There were reasons that I thought it was better—there were certain difficulties. I cared for you a great deal, and I did what I thought was best—please believe me—given the situation at the time.”

  “And now? What’s different now?”

  “You’re older; things have changed. I’ve been trying to arrange for you to visit since I moved back East two years ago. I wanted you to know that I did want to see you, all those years. I wanted you to understand that.” He stopped and seemed to gather himself. “And there’s something else, too.”

  Clare’s fear came back. There was something else. But maybe Richard didn’t really want to talk about it. And maybe she didn’t have to know it, not if she didn’t want to.

  Richard lifted the peas from the board and dropped them back in the bowl. Clare picked up the marbles and dropped them, one at a time, back in the box, where they clicked against the marbles that hadn’t been used. Glass against glass.

  If you didn’t want to know things, you didn’t have to know them. Things didn’t become facts until someone actually spoke them. Until then, you could just go on acting just the way you had been acting and even if you suspected there was something that would change everything, you didn’t have to acknowledge it; you didn’t have to let it in.

  14

  Diamondback terrapins, Clare learned from Richard, came up into estuaries to feed at high tide, and returned to the bay at low tide. If you wanted to catch them you needed to do that from kayaks at high tide, or net them as they swam out across a narrow channel as the tide went out. Every terrapin caught was marked, measured, recorded, then released.

  “What’s the point of that?” asked Clare.

  “We don’t know much about these creatures,” said Richard. “We’re collecting data so we can learn about them—we need to learn about them so we can figure out the best ways to protect them.”

  Richard gave Clare a net with a long aluminum handle and they set out in the kayaks for a cove Richard called “the terrapin singles bar,” where turtles met potential mates. It didn’t take Clare long to get used to handling a kayak again, and she felt like an authentic naturalist, not just someone paddling around for fun, with the net propped in the kayak next to her. She kept up with Richard paddling to the cove. He checked over his shoulder to make sure she was close behind, but he didn’t seem to slow his pace for her benefit. In the field he became a man of purpose, his eye on the goal ahead. Clare was relieved when they reached the cove and came on shore at a small beach, where Richard unloaded his equipment.

  “We’ll circle around the perimeter once and see what’s happening,” said Richard. “Let me know if you see a turtle. Look underwater and also watch for its head. They have to come up to breathe.”

  “What if it’s a snapping turtle?” asked Clare.

  “They’re in freshwater; this is salt,” said Richard. “The only turtles here would be our babies.”

  When they were back out in their kayaks Richard demonstrated how to use the net. “The trick is to swoop it under the terrapin, but keep your center of gravity so you don’t tip your kayak.”

  “What do I do with the paddle?”

  “Tuck it next to you. And if you go over, it’s OK. You’ve done it before and it’s no problem.”

  Except for getting back into the kayak again. But she didn’t say anything.

  Richard had her do some practice sweeping with her net, then they started off. Clare paddled behind him, scanning the water on both sides of her kayak. In places the angle was wrong and the sun glared on the surface, giving a reflection rather than a window through. They were up in a small inlet when Richard cried out, “Got one coming towards us on the right.” Clare studied the water, but didn’t see anything.

  He popped up in his seat, did a quick maneuver with his kayak, swooshing his net and paddling so fast that Clare couldn’t make out what was happening.

  “Lost her,” he said after a bit, and he sat back in his seat. They paddled farther along, but didn’t spot that terrapin again, or any others. After a while Richard suggested Clare continue hunting where they were, and he was going to check things out across the cove.

  “This way we can cover twice the territory,” he said. “If you see anything, give a shout.”

  “But I shouldn’t try to catch one, should I?” asked Clare. She
was rather hoping he’d say no.

  “If you feel up to it, and have an easy shot, give it a try,” he said.

  “And what do I do with it if I catch it?”

  “Drop it in the bottom of the kayak and I’ll be right over.”

  Too soon he was paddling off and Clare was on her own. She paddled slowly parallel to the shore. She saw something that looked like a turtle head and paddled fast towards it, but it proved to be only a stick. And something she spotted moving underwater turned out to be a horseshoe crab. Still, it was pleasant bobbing in the kayak and when she was paddling where it was shallow, the long grasses made a lovely rustling sound as they brushed the bottom of the boat. She was tired now. When she came to a quiet inlet she decided to have a rest. She put her paddle beside her and took a long drink from her water bottle. She pulled her legs out up on top of the kayak. Her life jacket was hot and she unzipped it halfway, but she thought Richard might be a stickler about such things so she zipped it back up again.

  Richard was a small figure moving along the far shore of the cove. How different he seemed today from the night before. It was as if they hadn’t talked about anything. Maybe it was only when the house was muffled by darkness and rain that they were able to talk with each other. In the open sunshine Richard was a man who seemed to have no interest in talking, a man who was involved with terrapins, but nothing more. It was a relief, too, in a way, Clare thought. Out here, in her kayak on the water, she could almost forget that there was something that she had chosen not to know. It was still there, but maybe she could outwait it, and it would just disappear.

  The water here was calm and the surface was un-rippled. It was like looking through the glass of an aquarium. A spider crab picked its way along the bottom. A school of silvery fish, small as dimes, darted around the grasses. Suddenly Clare spotted a turtle—it was unquestionably a turtle. It was swimming in a leisurely way, right alongside her kayak, totally unaware of her. It was a big turtle, twice as big as any of the painted turtles on Tertio’s pond, and it looked just like the terrapin whose picture Richard had showed her on his computer. She forgot entirely that she was supposed to try to catch it; she forgot, even, to call out and let Richard know that it was there. She was entirely caught up in watching it. What fascinated her was how graceful it was, how it moved so effortlessly through the water, just by stroking with its feet. It was a remarkable design, this turtle, a perfectly balanced buoyancy. Although it looked like a creature that would be rock-heavy, it did not sink to the bottom, nor was it so light it rose, as if inflated, to the surface. It navigated through the water with the confidence of a fish, holding its breath so long that it was easy to forget that it was a creature who, just like her, needed to breathe the air. It swam underneath her kayak, but when she looked for it over the other side, it had disappeared so completely that it was easy to believe she had just imagined it.