Harley still had not looked away from him. To Phil and Mimi, her expression probably appeared completely neutral, but Tucker saw something in it that surprised and pleased him. That distance, that safe remoteness that had always been there when she looked at him, had vanished. He realized that he had not been consciously aware of it up till now. Its presence had been subtle, like a haze in the sky that doesn’t really register until it clears and the sun shines, bright and powerful.
Phil said, “Isn’t that right, Tucker? Tucker?”
Tucker looked from Phil’s irritated sneer to Mimi’s knowing smile. “Actually, I, uh, I was thinking of staying on. Till R.H. comes back at the end of the summer, anyway. That is, of course, if Harley wouldn’t—”
Harley’s smile transformed her into a creature of extraordinary beauty. “Of course, I wouldn’t mind. Please stay.”
Tucker took a deep breath. “All right. That would be great. Thanks. I’ll try not to get in your way. I’ll pay for half the groceries and I’ll split the housework with you fifty-fifty.”
Phil guffawed. “You’re going to do half the housework? I’m sorry, but I have a hard time picturing Mr. Bush Pilot Tough Guy in a frilly apron, pushing a broom across the floor.”
“I’ve lived on my own for twenty years,” Tucker said. “Trust me, I can push a broom with the best of them. Only the apron’s leather, and there are pockets for my power tools.”
“Do you cook, too?” Mimi asked.
“Just bear meat.”
Harley said, “I don’t mind doing the cooking.”
“No, I’ll do the cooking,” Tucker said. “That’s really not a problem.”
“I don’t mind. Really,” she insisted.
“Neither do I. In fact, I’d prefer if you’d let me.”
The exchange was interrupted by excited voices from the beach. They all looked down to see Lily squatting at the edge of the water, dipping Mimi’s book purposefully in and out of the waves. Jamie and Brenna hovered over her, he laughing, she wringing her hands.
“I’m sorry, missus,” Brenna called up.
Mimi groaned, but managed a smile. “I’d better go down and supervise. Ever since I got an au pair to help out, I haven’t had a second’s peace.” She waved goodbye and descended the boulder stairway.
Phil said, “I’d like to go down there, too. I’ve been wanting to take a walk on the beach, but I want company. Harley—would you join me?”
She said, “Do you think I should? After the heatstroke?”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Phil said, “if you feel up to it, you should do it. You’ll know if it’s too much. Besides, I’ll be there if you start to feel sick.”
She shrugged. “All right.”
Phil shot a triumphant look in Tucker’s direction, then added, “Too bad Tucker can’t join us, but given his handicap, any kind of strenuous activity’s pretty much out of the question.”
Tucker rolled his eyes. “You don’t play fair,” he growled as Harley turned away and headed for the drop-off to the beach.
Phil grinned puckishly. “I warned you.” He followed Harley to the beach.
Tucker lit another cigarette and watched them pick their way down to the shore. Phil assisted Harley with a hand on her arm, which probably served no purpose other than to slow her down, but annoyed the hell out of Tucker—no doubt Phil’s sole intent.
Tucker reflected on that surprising openness in Harley’s expression, which had turned out to be temporary. As quickly as it had come, it was gone, replaced by the old familiar distance.
He expelled a stream of smoke in a long sigh. It had been like a brief, unexpected thaw in the middle of January. It tantalized you with its warmth and then the cold set in again. The only thing that kept you going through the rest of the winter was the eventual promise of spring.
Chapter 6
“TUCKER HALE HAS MARCHED to a different drummer from a very young age,” Liz said.
Harley shifted the receiver to the other ear and turned her head to listen for sounds in the hallway outside the closed door to the study, but all she could hear was the light rain that had just begun pattering against the windows. Tucker was presumably in the kitchen, making a salad to go with the lasagna Mimi had brought over, but he might start wondering where she was and come looking for her. It would not be good for him to overhear her talking on the phone about him.
“He thinks, and will tell you, that his rebellion began at sixteen.” Liz spoke the way learned people write, in complete and well-thought-out sentences, with no awkward pauses, not even the occasional “uh” or “um.” She spoke slowly, and with a pronounced Hale’s Point drawl that made her sound almost British.
“In fact,” Liz continued, “he’s been something of a wild card since much earlier—since the age of eleven, to be precise.”
Liz loved to be precise—it was in the nature of statisticians, Harley acknowledged—but still… “Since the age of eleven?” Harley asked. “How did you pick that age?”
“I didn’t just pick it,” Liz snapped, and Harley realized belatedly what an insult that would be to a woman who had spent her career quantifying facts in order to prove how factual they were.
“I know, Liz,” Harley began. “I didn’t mean—”
“Tucker was eleven years old when he found out that his mother committed suicide,” Liz said. “He hasn’t been the same since.”
It took several seconds for the older woman’s words to sink in. Harley sat perfectly still with the phone to her ear, mentally replaying the words over and over to make sure she had heard them right: His mother committed suicide… His mother committed suicide…. She was still a little dazed from the heatstroke, but she didn’t think she had heard wrong.
Liz’s voice snapped her out of it. “Harley? Dear?”
She said the words out loud. “His mother committed suicide?”
“Yes, of course. I assumed you knew.”
“No. I knew she had died. When he was five, he said.”
“It was suicide,” Liz stated with finality. “Of course, he wasn’t told the truth. He was deemed too young. R.H. told him her appendix had burst. Still, it affected him profoundly. He was despondent for quite some time. As he got older, I begged R.H. to tell him what really happened before he found out on his own, but unfortunately he didn’t take my advice.”
“How did he find out?”
“When he was eleven, he stumbled across her death certificate. The cause of death was asphyxiation by hanging.”
Harley felt as if she had been kicked softly in the stomach. All the air went out of her lungs. “My God.” she whispered.
There was a pause at the other end. Harley could sense Liz’s puzzlement. “It does happen, my dear. People do kill themselves. It’s a sad fact of life.”
“I know,” Harley said quickly. “I know. I just…” She closed her eyes and saw the darkly beautiful Anjelica as she appeared in the photograph on Tucker’s desk, and the baby in her arms, the baby with her eyes. “Why? Why did she… Why would she—”
Liz’s words were measured. “My understanding is that she was unhappy in her marriage.”
Another face materialized over Anjelica’s, also young, also sad-eyed, but fair and pale—Jennifer Sayers, Harley’s mother. She rubbed her eyes to dispel the image.
“When Tucker found out,” Liz continued, “he took complete leave of his senses. Children that age are notoriously irrational, especially the male of the species. He came to the conclusion that R.H. was responsible for her suicide, that he somehow drove her to it. He was also furious at having been misled for so many years about the cause of her death.” She sighed. “He never did regain his trust in his father, and from then on, he pretty much went his own way.”
“Which brings us around to his leaving home twenty years ago—”
“Twenty-one,” Liz corrected.
“Twenty-one, and suddenly showing up now. Which, in turn, brings us around to the reason I called. Would R.
H. approve of his staying on here for the summer? I pretty much invited him to stay, and I certainly don’t want to have to take back the invitation, but this is R.H.’s home. If I have to, I will.”
“You must understand, my dear, that in personal matters, R.H. has not always exercised the best judgment.”
Harley marveled at Liz’s diplomacy while deeply regretting the meaning behind the smooth words: R.H. would not want Tucker to stay.
“Therefore,” Liz continued, “I suggest that you rephrase the question in order to inquire whether I would approve of Tucker’s staying on.”
“Oh.” Was this strictly ethical? Harley quickly searched her conscience and concluded that it was close enough. “Then, is it all right with you if he stays?”
“But of course, my dear! I’m delighted if he stays! Tucker’s happiness means more to me than my own. He’s the son I never had.”
“Oh. Good.”
Several muted electronic beeps came from Liz’s end of the line. “And now, if you will excuse me, it appears that my microwave has finished wreaking havoc with the molecules in my frozen veal marsala. Goodbye.”
Harley dropped the receiver back in its cradle, slumped down in R.H.’s leather swivel chair, and rubbed her hands over her face.
His mother had committed suicide. She supposed she could have told Liz why that information had stunned her so, but although she liked Liz very much, their friendship had never been on that personal a level.
She uncovered her eyes. The study was a masculine enclave of leather, wood, and books, dappled with rain-silvered light from a big, multipaned window. Directly across from her, behind a tufted green leather couch on a table all its own, sat a large, exquisitely detailed model of a sailboat. Harley recognized it as an oversize twin of the one Tucker had been handling the other day in his room upstairs. It had been crafted of varnished wood with canvas sails, and she could tell from the scale that the boat it represented was a large one. It had two masts and four sails, and the word Anjelica was painted across the stern in neat maroon letters.
She looked at the two photographs on the desk, the photographs of Tucker, wondering why R.H. had kept them there, given their estrangement: the happy, clean-cut young boy at the wheel of the Anjelica and the worldly, disenfranchised teenager with the sailplane. Before and after.
She rose and walked around the room. The walls were covered in mustard-colored silk and crowded with framed pictures, a good half of them drawings or photographs of the Anjelica. She knelt backward on the couch in order to face the model, and ran a finger along the hull. It was a beautiful piece of work.
The door opened and she jumped.
“Did I startle you?” Tucker said. “Sorry. The lasagna comes out in twenty minutes.” He sat on the arm of the couch and nodded toward the model. “My father and I made that. I was seven or eight, I guess. It took months.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“So’s the original. The real Anjelica. She’s an incredible boat. A forty-foot schooner, custom-made. The most perfect boat I’ve ever seen.”
“Your father told me it was the Anjelica he’d be sailing in the Caribbean this summer, he and a friend of his, one of his retired law partners.”
“She’s a lot of boat for two men that age to handle alone. I’m glad to hear he’s still sailing her, though. I’d wondered if she was still around—she’s about thirty years old. But he always did take real good care of her.” He reached over to touch one of the sails.
“I don’t know much about these things, but are they going to actually live on it?”
“On her. Of course.”
“And they’ll be comfortable?”
He chuckled. “When he had her built, he was extremely particular about the living quarters. They’re better-appointed than most people’s homes.”
“Did he have it—her—built for your mother? I mean, he did name her the Anjelica.”
His eyes grew opaque. “He built her after she—after she died.”
“After?”
He was staring at the model. “He became obsessed with her after she was gone—when it was too late. If he’d paid that much attention to her while she was alive, she probably never would have…” His jaw clenched. “But that’s in the nature of marriage, isn’t it?”
She turned around, tossed her sandals off, and sat with her back against the other arm of the couch, legs stretched out and crossed. “What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “I mean, it’s kind of a perverse institution, isn’t it? You take two people who are madly in love, then they get married, and nine times out of ten, it goes sour. My parents were typical. The things he loved about her, that made her so different, suddenly looked like flaws that needed fixing. He took a quirky, artistic, impulsive Greek girl and tried to turn her into an uptight Hale’s Point matron.”
“Mimi’s not uptight.”
“She’s the exception,” he said.
“Do you really believe nine out of ten marriages are like that?”
Tucker kicked off his moccasins and slid down so that he was sitting against the opposite arm from Harley. He stretched his good leg out adjacent to hers, then lifted his bad leg next to it. The hair on his right leg softly tickled her left leg from thigh to ankle. “Enough of them are so you have to wonder why any sensible person would ever want to do it. The facts argue loud and clear against it. Marriage is for people who can’t think straight.”
“And you, of course, are a straight-thinking, sensible person.”
“Absolutely.”
“Much too sensible to be influenced by one bad marriage—your parents’—into condemning marriage as a whole.”
Again he shrugged. “We are the sum total of our experiences. Our characters are forged in fires we didn’t build, and there’s little we can do to change them. Or, as Popeye so succinctly put it, ‘I yam what I yam and that’s what I yam’”
She stared at him. “Popeye.”
He grinned. “I don’t just quote Thoreau, you know. I’m a well-rounded guy.”
“You are well-rounded. Ridiculously well-rounded. That’s a wonderful thing, and it’s thanks to your father that you turned out that way. It was all his doing, you know. He wasn’t all bad.”
“He was just trying to make me like him. It backfired on him, though. We couldn’t be more different.”
“Except for this thing about boats, planes, and cars. You’ve both kind of got a fetish about machines that take you places.”
He nodded grudgingly. “Boats especially.” He turned to look again at the model of the Anjelica, and sighed. “I wouldn’t want to be my father—I could never live my life the way he lives his. But I’ll tell you, right now I’d trade places with him in a second. Sailing from port to port, dropping anchor occasionally to fish or swim or eat, then off again.” He gazed at the model, but seemed to be looking at something very far away. “There’s nothing better than a long sailing trip. It’s the most relaxing thing in the world, and the most exciting, if you can imagine that. I’d give anything to be spending the summer that way.” He looked at her. “Do you like to sail?”
She laughed. “I’ve never been on a sailboat.”
He looked surprised. “Never? Not even once, the whole time you were growing up? You must have known somebody who owned a boat.”
“There isn’t a lot of room for forty-foot schooners in a trailer park, Tucker.”
“I’ve made progress,” he said. “I found out you lived in a trailer park.”
Harley looked at the raindrops battering the window and made the decision to talk about the things she never talked about.
“It was… I don’t know how to describe it.” The raindrops looked like hundreds of silver bubbles on the glass. “It was pretty low-end as those places go. A shanty town, really. Nothing more than a couple of dozen rusted-out old metal trailers on blocks in a field outside Dayton.”
Just thinking about it made her throat tighten instantly. Maybe he could hear it in her
voice. She looked at him. There was curiosity in his eyes—he undoubtedly wondered why she was suddenly willing to open up like this—but concern, also.
“The field was nothing but weeds and dirt,” she continued. “There was this mountain of tires nearby, and that was our playground, the kids who lived there.”
“Did you have any brothers or sisters?”
She shook her head. “It was just my mother and me. My father was long gone.”
“Were they divorced?”
“I’m not even sure they were ever married, not legally. My mother used to tell me that someone named Swami Bob had officiated at some kind of ceremony in the desert somewhere. She wore a white sari, and my father wore cutoffs and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt. Supposedly they exchanged homemade vows and then chewed peyote and chanted and howled all night. Only I’m not sure whether that really happened or she just… kind of made it happen in her head.”
“Ah.”
“‘Ah’ indeed.”
“What did she do?” he asked. “Did she work?”
“She drank.”
He waited for her to go on and then said, “She must have done something else.”
“You’re right—she took pills.”
His big hand wrapped itself around her calf, and he shook his head. “Sorry,” he said softly.
“The thing was, she was really sweet when she was sober. She wanted to be a good mother, and sometimes she tried real hard, but she was very young and completely aimless. I didn’t love her any less because she tried and failed—maybe I even loved her more.”
Tucker nodded encouragement, and Harley went on. “But when she wasn’t sober—which was most of the time—she was just hopeless. I had this one little corner of the trailer that was all mine, and I kept it superneat. I tried to keep the rest of it picked up, too, but it was like living with a… a child, who had no sense of order or responsibility. I’d clean up in the morning and leave for school—I loved school, school was my salvation—and when I came home, I’d be wading through overturned ashtrays and dirty dishes and bags of pot and beer cans and piles of clothes and God-knows-what, halfway to the ceiling. And Mom would always be facedown on her bed, asleep.”
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