Returning to Shore

by Corinne Demas

  Clare tried to think about what else she could do. There was no public transportation to Blackfish Island. There might be taxis somewhere, but she hadn’t seen any. She didn’t know anyone in Provincetown, though; she didn’t know anyone on the Cape. There was that woman, Steffi, but she didn’t even know her last name. She could call Aunt Eva, but she’d only get her worried. It wasn’t as if Eva could just drive down from Maine and pick her up. There really wasn’t anyone else to call except Richard. Eventually he’d have to come home.

  At last Richard answered the phone. He sounded breathless at first, as if he had run to catch the call. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he said. He didn’t sound either angry or surprised. He didn’t ask her any questions, either.

  Half an hour later, when Clare saw his old station wagon inching its way through traffic towards the wharf, she ran towards it. It was the same car that she had felt so uncomfortable riding in when she had first been picked up by Richard at the Cape Cod Canal, and now it was the most welcome sight in the world.

  Richard spotted her and stopped so she could jump into the car. “Are you all right?” he asked once she was settled in her seat.

  “I’m fine,” said Clare. “I just didn’t want to have to go back with them on the boat.”

  “Where are they?” asked Richard, looking out the window.

  “They left a while ago.”

  Richard stepped on the brake and turned to look at Clare.

  “That man should be shot,” said Richard.

  “Who?”

  “Your friend’s father—leaving you alone before I arrived to pick you up.”

  Then Clare had to explain how it had turned out that Jaylin’s father didn’t go with them at all; it was just Jaylin and her brother and his friend. And the reason they had to leave was because of the tide. She sounded as if she were defending them, and she wasn’t sure why.

  Richard didn’t say anything.

  It was a relief to get out through the crowded streets of Provincetown and out into the open highway. Clare rolled her window all the way down and let the warm highway wind blow against her face.

  She looked over at Richard. “How come you’re not asking me why I didn’t go back with them?” she asked.

  “I figured if you wanted me to know, you’d tell me,” said Richard.

  “I wouldn’t have gone with them in the first place if I’d known Jaylin’s father wasn’t coming, but I was already on the boat and they’d started it up.”

  “It’s all right, Clare. I understand.”

  “How come you’re being so nice?” asked Clare.

  “Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “I made you come all the way to Provincetown to get me.”

  “That’s nothing,” said Richard.

  The car wheels thumped a welcoming drumbeat on the planks of the Blackfish Island Bridge. Clare took in a deep breath of the reassuring smell of the marsh. She felt as if she was coming home. Everything was distorted in Provincetown. Now, on Blackfish Island, everything was restored. Richard, here, was just a man who studied terrapins.

  “The reason I didn’t want to go back with them is that I got a little scared on the boat,” said Clare. “Jaylin’s brother likes going through the waves.” Clare paused for a moment, then added, “And he and his friend were kind of obnoxious.”

  “And your friend Jaylin?”

  Clare didn’t say anything.

  “Not such a good friend?”

  “Not really,” said Clare, softly.

  “I’m sorry I was out walking on the beach. You were trying to get me on the phone for a long time, weren’t you?” asked Richard.

  “Yes.”

  “And she left before she knew you had been able to get a ride?”

  Clare nodded. She hadn’t thought she was going to cry, but she was crying now, silly, burbling kind of crying, like a little kid. She’d told Richard only part of the reason, but somehow she thought that maybe he guessed. He seemed always to figure things out.

  “Oh, Sweetie,” said Richard. He took the steering wheel in his left hand and with his right hand he reached out towards Clare and stroked her hair back over her head. His hand rested there behind her head and she leaned back into it, and let the weight of her head, the weight of everything, rest in his palm.

  21

  They went out together early in the morning to check for terrapin tracks. It was almost the end of the nesting season, and Richard said no new nests had been found for the past two days.

  “We get a break until the end of August,” said Richard. “Then we have to check all the marked sites every day to see if any hatchlings have emerged.”

  “I wish I could be here to help,” said Clare.

  “Maybe you could come back then,” said Richard. “If Vera will let you.”

  “She’ll have to let me,” said Clare.

  It was a foggy morning. Richard was wearing his usual clothes—tan shorts and blue work shirt—but Clare was glad she had grabbed her sweatshirt when they left the house. The sky and the water were the same almost colorless grey-blue, and there was no horizon. Even the big houses on the top of the dunes were softened, some of their extremities lost in the mist. Some black-backed gulls strutted along the flats. One found a spider crab worth eating and took it off to devour on an upturned dingy, but a more aggressive gull snatched it away. The loser’s complaint was the only sound on the entire beach.

  They walked almost halfway around the island, and didn’t spot any terrapin tracks.

  “This could be it,” said Richard, “but I’ll keep looking. There are sometimes a few late nesters.”

  “What are you going to do with your mornings if you’re not out checking for terrapin tracks?” asked Clare.

  “Oh, I’m sure I’ll find something,” said Richard. “There’s always mountains of data to study.”

  Slowly clouds in the sky began to take on definition and now and then the sun managed to push its way through and brighten patches of the beach. Clare took off her sweatshirt and tied it around her waist.

  “Why do you care about them so much?” asked Clare.

  “Do you think I care about them too much?”

  “I’m not saying it’s too much,” said Clare. “It’s just that I wondered why them? And why you?”

  “Want to sit down for a minute? Take a break?” asked Richard.

  “Sure,” said Clare.

  They walked up towards the dunes, where the sand was drier, and sat down next to each other. Vera would never sit on bare sand, only on a beach chair or a blanket. Clare was thinking about how she had changed since she first came to the island, when she, like Vera, would have always had something between herself and the beach.

  “When Charlie died,” began Richard, “I felt I had no one; I had nothing. I couldn’t think of what to do with myself. I’d made enough money so I didn’t have to work anymore, and there wasn’t anything keeping me in California. So I came back here.”

  Richard picked up a handful of sand and then opened his fingers just enough so it flowed out, like a sand timer, depositing a small, even mound of sand.

  “I’d never been particularly interested in nature before I met Charlie,” he continued, “but he was a science teacher and loved all those creepy, crawly things, and eventually he won me over.” Richard paused and looked directly at Clare. “I couldn’t save Charlie,” he said. “The terrapins were here. I thought I stood a fighting chance of saving some of them.”

  “What do you mean you couldn’t save Charlie?” asked Clare.

  “I was right there when he was hit,” said Richard. “I was coiling up the hose by the garage door. Charlie had just come home and was picking up the mail from the box at the end of the driveway. I looked up when I heard him push the metal mailbox closed. He was straddling his bike, flipping through the mail. I saw the car coming fast around the curve in the road. I couldn’t get to him in time.”

  Richard rested his elbows on his knees and sunk
his face against the heels of his hands. His voice was muffled. “Dear God,” he said, “why am I telling you all this?”

  Clare looked out at the wide, flat beach. The water was gone, returned to the bay, but you could tell how far it had risen towards the dunes, and you could read the pattern of its movements in the ripples it had left behind.

  Clare looked back at Richard. Their arms were almost touching and she leaned sideways and tilted her head so she was leaning against his shoulder.

  “You do have someone,” she whispered. “You have me.”

  Richard put his arm around her and pulled her close to him, so her cheek was against his collarbone. He didn’t cry so you could hear him, but she could feel him crying. She slipped her arms around him and pressed her face against his chest.

  22

  The clouds covered the sun and once again it turned cool. When the rain started, Richard told Clare to go back the way they’d come, the shorter way home. He’d continue to circle the longer way around the island, checking for terrapin tracks, and meet her back at the house.

  Clare pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and pulled the sleeves down over her hands. She jogged a distance and then, when she was tired, she walked.

  She wasn’t looking for terrapin tracks, but her eyes, once trained to search for them, spotted them instinctively. They were fresh tracks, she could tell, and they were headed up from the water, towards the dunes. While she and Richard had been sitting together down the beach, a terrapin had come up on the shore and walked right across the footprints that Clare and Richard had left in the sand. Clare looked down the beach to where she had parted with Richard, but he had already gone around the corner of the island, and she couldn’t see him. She followed the tracks up across the beach, lost them in the softer sand of the low dunes, and picked them up again. The beach grass pricked her ankles.

  She saw the terrapin before she heard her, and Clare instantly dropped into a crouch. The terrapin must have just buried her newly laid eggs, and now she was tamping the sand down on the spot with her plastron, her bottom shell. She smoothed the sand and disguised the spot so that it would look like any other place in the dunes. She moved professionally and quickly, so intent on her business that Clare wasn’t sure if she hadn’t been seen, or if she had been, but was just ignored. When the terrapin turned to start walking back to the water Clare spotted the mark on her shell. It was Eleanor. It had to be. Clare had an urge to call out to her, to make a connection, but she knew the best thing for her to do was to keep still. She stayed low and watched Eleanor, who, at last satisfied, scrambled over the beach grass, down through the dunes. Clare stood up now to watch her. She moved faster than Clare ever thought a turtle could move, across the stretch of open beach and back down into the water. She never once looked back at the nesting spot she had made, to the future generation of terrapins she had left, as a promise, behind.

  It was raining heavier now, and Clare knew the tracks might soon be lost. She studied the spot to memorize it, found a piece of driftwood to mark the place, and piled a cairn of stones at the edge of the dune where the nest was made. Then she started running to get Richard. He was a fast walker, and she calculated that she’d catch him sooner if she met him as he came around the island on the other side.

  She started running, but she didn’t run very far before she tired out. She cut across the dunes and took the dirt road through the center of the island, near their house, and then cut down to the marsh. She hiked along the mat of reeds at the high-tide line. In the distance she finally saw Richard, walking in her direction. She broke into a run.

  “Daddy!” she cried. “Daddy! Daddy!” The word had come to her from someplace deep inside her; it came unbidden, like a snatch of music you didn’t remember you’d ever heard. He wasn’t Richard, or Dad. He was Daddy. It was his name in the language of her childhood, the name she had called him once, so long ago that she hadn’t remembered. It was the name from when she had been that little girl in the photograph. It had been here, waiting for her on Blackfish Island, just as he had been here waiting for her, too.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With gratitude to my editor, Andrew Karre, well met on “Blackfish Island”; my agent, Edward Necarsulmer IV; my writing group: Barbara Diamond Goldin, Patricia MacLachlan, Lesléa Newman, Ann Turner, Ellen Wittlinger, and Jane Yolen; Elaine Lasker von Bruns; Artemis Demas Roehrig; and, as always, Matthew Roehrig.

  Special thanks to diamondback terrapin experts: Barbara Brennessel, Don Lewis, and Bob Prescott, and to Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Corinne Demas is the award-winning author of numerous books for children and adults, including Everything I Was for Carolrhoda Lab and The Writing Circle. She is Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and a fiction editor of The Massachusetts Review. She lives with her family, her dog, and two miniature donkeys in Western Massachusetts and spends the summer on Cape Cod. Visit her online at www.corinnedemas.com.