Spindrift

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  When I put a hand on her arm, she started as though she had forgotten I was near, and gave me a quick, startled look, then hurried away from me down the hall.

  I knew it would do me no good to follow her and I paused beside a long window overlooking the lawn which sloped toward the ocean. A single, lonely figure stood down there beside the stone wall on the edge of the Spindrift property. It was Joel, looking out over the ocean he hated.

  Memory quickened in me, suddenly as real as the present. I could recall a time when Joel and I had followed the Cliff Walk clear to the Forty Steps. It had been a windy day with the spray flying high as it broke over the rocky shore of the island. We’d walked hand in hand and we had been very close that day, and terribly in love. There had been an earlier scene with Joel’s mother, and for once he had walked out on her and brought me with him. I could still remember his words.

  “Don’t fight her, Christy. She only gets stronger. Yield. Bend with the gale. And then go your own way.”

  That was what he had always done. But it hadn’t been my way—or Adam’s. And was it I who had been wrong? Was it true that I had always put Adam’s ways first? Until, after his cruel death, there was only Adam who seemed real in that numb, hospital world where I had lost myself. What if I could wake up and find myself loving Joel as I used to? Had I really tried? Hadn’t I just shrunk within myself and shut him out until his own pride would no longer allow him to reach out to me?

  If only everything could go back to the way it used to be, perhaps I would be safe again. Safe from the new emotions that stirred in me when it came to Bruce, and that I wanted none of. Safe to cope with the changes in Peter which Theo had wrought. If Joel and I could go home together and take Peter with us, perhaps our old relationship could be re-established. I hadn’t tried hard enough since I had left the hospital. There had been no reasoning in me, no real thought of Joel. Yet when I’d married him I had loved him enough to put him first.

  Joel hadn’t changed alone, of his own accord. It was I who was making him change, and the time had come for me to recover myself and do something about what was happening. Theo wanted our marriage to end, and I must defeat her purpose, if it wasn’t already too late. I had made too many accusations against Theo for Joel to accept them when he truly loved his mother. I had made angry attacks against everyone, including Joel, and now I must get myself in hand and try to heal the wounds I had made in my anguished slashing. Never mind if Theo wanted to play tricks, to shake my very sanity. If Joel and I could once more find each other, there would be nothing she could do. And this was what I wanted—only to go back and be the gentler, more contented girl I had once been. If some wilder, stronger emotion stirred in me when I thought of Bruce, I would thrust it down, stifle it I only wanted to be Joel’s wife.

  I hurried downstairs and went out on the long veranda that overlooked the water.

  10

  For a moment I stood on the veranda watching the lone figure down by the wall, strengthening my resolve and my courage. What I had to do would not be easy. Then as I watched, I saw him climb the wall and knew I had better hurry if I was to catch him.

  Outdoors, though the sun was dipping down the sky, the day was still bright and warm with Indian summer. The breeze from the sea had not yet turned chilly as it would when the shadows fell. As I ran across the lawn, Joel disappeared and I knew he must be climbing down the rocks beyond the Cliff Walk.

  As I went over the low wall I saw in surprise where he must be going. A boatshed was built out into the little sandy cove below the rocks, with a path carved down to it, and Joel, who would have nothing to do with boats since his sister and brother had died, was following the path to the shed.

  Spindrift kept a speedboat down there that Hal had liked to use, and when I reached the boatshed behind Joel, I saw that it had not yet been put away for the winter. The boat bore Spindrift’s name and it floated between two docking platforms inside the shed.

  Joel still did not know I was back of him when he stepped down into the cockpit and slipped behind the wheel. He had already untied the boat from the dock and he was clearly going to take it out. I moved quickly, stepping down into the seat beside him.

  “Do you mind if I come with you?” I said.

  He showed no astonishment at finding me there, but seemed indifferent, and I hid my own alarm. Joel had been afraid of the water ever since the accident, and I didn’t know why he was taking the boat out. But I asked no questions and he offered no explanations. For a moment we sat there in silence and there was no sound in the boatshed except for the gurgling of water in the slip and the rush of the ocean over the rocks outside. By this time the sun was slanting behind us into the west and the shadows were dark under the shed roof, with only the opening to the sea a square of sunlight ahead. It was cold here in the shade and I wished for a jacket. Joel wore only a sweater with a rolled neck, but he didn’t look cold.

  Now that I was here I didn’t know what to do. This hardly seemed the moment for the sort of talk I wanted. The man beside me seemed impossibly remote. The Joel I had been thinking of, wanting to return to, was another man—far removed from this quiet stranger.

  “Is anything wrong?” I asked, making at least a beginning. The words echoed in the hollow shed and I was sorry that I’d spoken.

  He did not answer but reached for the switch, and suddenly the motor roared into life. I braced myself against whatever was to come as we headed out of the cove. It was a calm enough day, with only a slight breeze, and the sea was blue green and smooth, stretching ahead to the far line of the horizon. We moved straight out across the water as though the coast of Europe were our destination. The Spindrift shivered with power and pointed its bow like an aimed arrow toward the invisible distance. Water curled away from either side in two great waves and the wake behind us widened, frothing and swirling. Gulls screamed as we left the shore. The roar of the motor prevented any talk, and I watched a gleam of sunlight strike off the brass cleats on the bow, washing the varnish to a golden brown. It was as if by fixing all my attention on that gleam of brass, I could still the rising of fear that had started up in me.

  At last I had to speak. “Are we going to France?” I shouted over the roar.

  If he heard me he paid no attention. His thick red hair shone in the sun, hardly ruffled, with the glass shield breaking the wind. His profile was as fine and clear cut as I remembered it—and it was still, as a cameo is still, without emotion, without life, carved.

  This time when I spoke I reached out and touched his arm. “Let’s follow the coast,” I shouted.

  He heard me and cut the roar so that we idled into a mere bobbing on the water. No one else seemed to be cruising this coastline and except for a ship in the distance we had the open ocean to ourselves.

  Joel turned so that he could look back toward the shore. “They died on those rocks in there near Lands End. Because it was a foggy day. Because I wanted to go out in the fog.”

  Why had his mind turned back to old tragedy? I wondered. Why must he torture himself? Yet now he seemed to want to talk.

  “Tell me what happened,” I said.

  He had never spoken about it to me before. What I knew I’d heard from other people. But now he began to tell me.

  “Cabot lost his direction that day because of the fog. Our sailboat crashed into those rocks and capsized. Cabot tried to swim for shore, while Iris and I clung to the boat, but the seas turned high and he never made it. Iris was frail. I can still remember how beautiful she was. How beautiful she looked that day with her hair plastered back from her forehead so that her face was all pure beauty. I can still remember her frightened eyes. God knows, I tried to help her to hold on. And did for a long time. The fog was thinning as the wind rose, and the waves were beating against us, breaking over us, so that we didn’t dare to try to make our way around the boat where we might be thrown against those daggers of rock. When she went under I still held onto her for a while, but my own strength was gone. I co
uldn’t hold her above water in that rough sea. When the Coast Guard came she was dead. I’d just had my seventeenth birthday.”

  I wanted to touch him, console him, but his face was like rock and I did not dare. I didn’t know what had caused him to come out here now to face old terrors, old grief, and I could not ask. All the things I had wanted to talk to him about were swirling through my mind, but I could say nothing. I was too late. He had gone into some distant place that I could not reach and I didn’t know him any more. Yet I had to try. In some way I had to try.

  “I’m sorry,” I said softly. “I’m sorry for everything, Joel. About what happened to you in the past, and what is happening to us now. When the time is right I’d like to talk to you. There must be a way back. For us, I mean.”

  For the first time he turned his head and looked at me and there was a gray void in his eyes, as though he didn’t know who I was. It frightened me.

  “Because of Peter we have to try, Joel. We have to try!” These were the reasonable words I had meant to speak. But they sounded like a cry of desperation.

  He reached for the starter switch and the roar of the motor engulfed us once more. We headed at high speed back for the shore, and I found myself wondering what strange land of the mind we had visited. Joel had met some private test of his own, but I didn’t know why, or what result he had found. I only knew that he had gone away from me completely and that no recovery seemed possible between us. I had intruded on some vision of his own, and now I had lost whatever chances I might have had. I’d never felt so alone in my life as when the boat shot arrow-straight back to shore and we sat there side by side.

  Now the coast of Aquidneck stretched before us, with the great houses strung along the cliffs above the water, one after another, enormous as they crouched there brooding over a past that was long gone. The surf broke upon the rocks at their feet, and among them Spindrift stood out proudly, still alive, its white grace rising from lawns that retained their summer green, from among trees on the far side that were the color of October.

  As we neared the shed Joel cut the speed and we idled neatly into the slip. If he had not handled a boat since he was seventeen, he could still do it skillfully. He got out on the dock, secured the line and then held out his hand to me impersonally. I made one last attempt when I was out on the dock.

  “Joel, when can we talk?”

  “I know everything you can say,” he told me. “There’s nothing left to talk about.”

  He went out of the shed and back up the rocks, and I followed more slowly, feeling bewildered and lost. I had done this. I had brought this about. Or had I? How well did I know my husband? Had there been a change in him long before I went into the hospital? I didn’t know. I could no longer remember clearly what it had been like before my father died and I felt even more shaken than when Theo and Fiona had come to stand behind me in Theo’s sitting room. I had told myself before that I was alone, but now for the first time I realized it fully. When I had told myself before, I hadn’t truly believed it. Fatuously, I had always thought Joel would be there to return to when I really needed him, that it was I who had changed, not Joel. Now I believed that wasn’t true. Theodora Moreland had won.

  I wanted only to regain the quiet of my room and lie on the bed and rest—as she had advised me to. Yet when I reached my room and opened it, I realized that I was not yet going to rest. I put out a hand to steady myself on the side of the door as I stood staring at the strange scene before me, feeling as though I’d at last been pushed too far and was going a little mad. I had not been in my room since I had dressed to go out with Peter and Bruce, but someone else had been here.

  Someone had taken my smaller possessions one by one and made a parade of them in a curving line across the red and beige carpet. Shoes and handbag, perfume bottles, lipsticks, coin purse, brush and comb, and other small articles had been lined up one after another to make a path across the room. Nothing seemed to have been damaged. The disturbance of my things lacked destructive malice, yet there was something enormously troubling about it. Troubling, perhaps, because I could not understand the intent. This was a childish thing to do. Childish?

  I stepped back into the hall, closed the door, and ran down the corridor and up the stairs to Peter’s room. When I knocked and went in, I found him curled on the window seat reading, while Miss Crawford knitted one of her endless anonymous garments in blue-gray wool. They both looked around as I came in.

  “Hi,” Peter greeted me cheerfully, and there seemed no malice in him.

  “Peter,” I said, “have you been down in my room since we got back from our trip?”

  He shook his head. “No. I came right up here and Miss Crawford said I wasn’t to go out again.”

  I didn’t tell him what was wrong. “I just wanted to thank you for going out with me this afternoon. It was a lovely time.”

  “I liked it too,” he admitted, and gave me the warm smile that I had not had from him for a very long while.

  I went to where he sat and put an arm around him, held him close for an instant, and he did not struggle against me. Theo had not changed him irrevocably.

  “I’ll come back this evening and kiss you good night,” I said.

  He said, “That’s fine,” and returned to his reading. But I did not come back after all, that evening.

  I left Peter with Miss Crawford and went down the hall to Theo’s rooms. Fiona was not there, but Theo sat at her desk looking over bills and writing checks. She frowned at me absently as I came in.

  “I think it’s time,” I said, “that someone tells me what is going on here at Spindrift.”

  She took off her green-rimmed glasses and looked at me. “Just what do you mean by that?”

  “There are too many tricks being played on me. Are they by your order?”

  She made an impatient gesture. “Christina, I am busy. You’ll have to explain what you mean.”

  I told her what I had just found in my room, and she regarded me with maddening skepticism.

  “Oh, come now! Why would anyone play such a silly prank?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know. I’ve checked with Peter and he wasn’t the one.”

  “Are you sure you aren’t imagining things again?”

  “I’m not imagining anything. Come and see for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

  She stood up reluctantly, a small, erect figure in her robe of citron-yellow. “Very well. I’ll come.”

  At my side she moved more slowly than usual and I was aware of the patch of bandage on her forehead.

  “Have you come to any conclusion about who struck you?” I asked her.

  “Struck me? But no one struck me.” She had done an about-face again. “I told you I’d become faint and then fallen. You’re confused, Christina dear.”

  I could feel my hands tightening into fists until the nails bit into my palms, but I didn’t answer her. The sight in my room would have to prove my point this time. Though as we neared the door I had the sudden anxiety that I would find all once more in order—and then how would I explain anything to Theo?

  But when I opened the door the parade of small articles still marched across the floor and I waved my hand at them in triumph. Theo came into the room and stood looking down at the wavering line of objects at her feet. Then she leaned over and picked up a lipstick, examining it before holding it out to me.

  “Is this yours, Christina?”

  “Of course it’s mine. All these things are mine. But when I came to my room just now I found that someone had taken them from where they belong and made this line across the rug.”

  Theo sighed. “Oh, dear. I truly don’t know what to say to you, dear.”

  “You don’t need to say anything. You just need to find out who did this and why.”

  “I’m afraid that’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean—obvious?”

  She took a quick turn about the room, the yellow of her gown shining against t
he red heart of the rug. Then she came back to me and put both hands soothingly on my shoulders.

  “Christina, my dear, don’t you see? You’ve just forgotten—the way you used to forget in the hospital. The way you forgot a little while ago in my sitting room. No one else has been in here. No one has touched these things but you.”

  I stepped back from her, staring. “You mean you believe I did this?”

  “I know it’s hard to face, dear, but that is what I think. And it will be best for you if you do face it and don’t expect too much of yourself too soon.”

  I began to lose any last control of my poise, “Of course I didn’t do it! I’m perfectly well. Someone came in here who wants to upset me and make me believe what isn’t true. So that I’ll not try to take Peter away from you. So that you can say I’m unbalanced and not fit to be a mother. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s behind everything that has happened to me since I’ve come here.”

  “Oh, Christy, Christy,” she said, at least dropping the Christina. “I don’t know how you can make such accusations. You hurt me very much, dear.”

  Once more she reached out to touch me and I pushed her hand away.

  “Stop pretending to be sympathetic. I know how you feel toward me. I know what you want.”

  With that same sad air she gestured toward the dressing table. “Look, Christy. Look in the mirror.”

  I didn’t want to look. I was suddenly afraid of what I might see, but her tone compelled me. I stepped toward the dressing table and bent to look in the mirror. My brown gabardine was creased and stained. My hair had blown in the breeze from the ocean and it looked wild and unkempt. My eyes were staring glassily and my lips had begun to tremble. I turned away from the reflection of a woman I remembered from those first dreadful days in the hospital when I had been beside myself and helpless to fight the authority which surrounded me. But even that woman, for all her weakness and fright, had not been out of her mind. Theodora Moreland was not going to do this to me.