SAFE HARBOR
Judith Arnold
Kindle Edition
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Copyright 1991 by Barbara Keiler
Kindle Edition License Notes
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PART ONE
SHELLEY
Chapter One
“SHELLEY?” HER MOTHER HOLLERED up the stairs. “Kip’s here.”
Shelley gave the reflection in the mirror above the dresser a final, anxious inspection. She fussed with the skimpy crocheted triangles, rearranging them along the woven string that circled her rib cage just below her breasts. On the one hand, she was afraid the triangles didn’t cover enough of her; on the other, she acknowledged dolefully, she really didn’t have much worth covering.
Some girls expanded out by the time they reached fifteen. Shelley seemed only to expand up. This past winter was the first during which she hadn’t grown any taller—although at five foot nine, she was quite tall enough. Not only was she tall but she was built like a basketball player, with broad shoulders, long limbs, large hands and lean hips. Her limp hair was a bland shade halfway between brown and blond. Her eyes, an equally bland shade of gray, were set too close together. Her nose was too big, her lips too fat; her fingernails refused to grow and her feet were calloused from too many summers spent running around barefoot.
And she was flat-chested.
Whatever had possessed her to buy a string bikini? She should have just pulled her bicycle out of the trunk of her father’s car when they’d reached the Old Harbor ferry dock, kissed her father good-bye and biked straight home. She should never have stopped in at the boutique on Water Street and blown thirty dollars on a scrap of crocheted turquoise yarn. She should have stuck to her old familiar one-piece suits so the entire universe—to say nothing of Kip Stroud—wouldn’t have to contend with the pathetic sight of her straight-as-a-board figure.
She’d wandered into the boutique because she’d been melancholy yesterday afternoon, desperate for the kind of pick-me-up she got from buying something she didn’t need. Seeing her father off on the ferry back to New London always put her in a funk. She understood that while she and her mother were free to spend all summer in their cozy vacation house on Block Island, at the end of each weekend, her father had to “go to America,” as the islanders called returning to the mainland, so he could put in time at his office. “Even bank executives have to work, princess,” he’d tell Shelley whenever she complained about his absence from the island during the week. “I’ll be back Friday night. I promise.”
The Ballards had been summering on Block Island for eight years. But this year, for the first time, Shelley’s father didn’t always keep that promise. Sometimes he didn’t join Shelley and her mother until Saturday. One weekend he didn’t come at all. “Things have been difficult at work,” he would say, although Shelley couldn’t fathom how he could make things any less difficult by hanging around in Connecticut on the weekends when the bank’s corporate offices were closed.
She missed him, but it wasn’t for herself that she wished he would come to the island every weekend. It was for him. If anyone needed a strong, curative dose of Block Island, it was her stressed-out father.
The island was the best remedy Shelley knew of for all the hassles and tensions of winter in “America.” Maybe it was the sea breezes, maybe the slower pace of life, maybe the morning fog and the midday heat and the heavy scent of honeysuckle that permeated the air. Maybe it was magic. Whatever it was, Shelley was always happier on Block Island than she was back home in Westport. So was her mother, and so was her father when he was here.
“Shelley?” her mother hollered again.
“Coming!” Turning her back on the mirror, she grabbed her oversized Yale T-shirt, threw it on and pulled the hem halfway down her thighs. Then she smoothed the frayed edges of her denim cut-offs, grabbed her backpack and bounded down the narrow stairs to the first floor of the tiny cottage.
Kip was waiting for her outside at the bottom of the porch steps, his ten-speed bike balanced between his legs and a battered red backpack riding his shoulders. Like her, he wore a baggy T-shirt—his featured the Harvard crest, in deference to his Boston-area roots—and cut-off jeans. A month and a half of summer had imbued his skin with a golden glow, and his thick brown hair was long and rich with sun-bleached highlights. He’d grown at least four inches and gained at least thirty pounds over the winter. He looked a lot more like a man than a boy.
Shelley shouldn’t have noticed. She had known Kip too long and too well to think of him as a guy. He was her buddy, her best friend on the island. Ever since her first summer here, when she’d been at Scotch Beach with her parents and a scrappy eight-year-old kid with goggly eyeglasses had marched over and said, “Hey, you wanna see a dead snake?” they’d been pals. She had eagerly tramped through the dune grass with him to check out the reptile carcass, and they’d argued heatedly about whether a person could get poisoned from touching a dead snake, and by the end of the argument he had called her a dumb girl and she’d called him a poop-head, and they’d made a plan to meet at the beach again the next day.
For the next seven summers, they’d been spending their days together at various beaches, or in town, or biking along the cliffs. They’d been whiling away their afternoons licking ice-cream cones in Old Harbor and making pests of themselves on the porch of the National Hotel, listening to the folk singers hired to entertain the beer-drinking clientele. They’d been winding down in the evenings sipping lemonade and playing backgammon on one of the breezy verandas of his parents’ house. They’d been having picnics, trading secrets, exploring hidden coves.
During the winter Shelley rarely thought about Kip. They never wrote or called each other. She had her home friends and he had his. But every year, as June rolled around and her mother embarked on preparations for the family’s annual migration to the island, Shelley experienced a quiet thrill at the comprehension that soon she and Kip would be tearing around the island again, bickering, swapping secrets, spying on his older sister and acting as if they’d never been away from each other.
“Come on, slowpoke,” he called to her as soon as she tossed her mother a perfunctory kiss and raced out of the house. “You’re getting as bad as Diana, taking forever to get ready.”
“I didn’t take forever,” she said, refusing to take his needling seriously. She swung one leg over the seat of her bike, shouted through the screen door that she’d be home in time for supper, and then lifted her sandaled feet onto the pedals and coasted down the rutted dirt driveway to the street. A year ago she wouldn’t have bothered to wear sandals, but now that she was fifteen she thought she ought to do something about the unsightly callus rimming her heels.
“Wanna go up by Dorie’s Cove?” Kip asked, then turned right without giving her a chance to answer. Not that she minded—she and he had discovered a well-hidden inlet near Dorie’s Cove on the west shore, and that was their favorite beach.
Kip’s bike boasted five more gears than Shelley’s, but he took the hill slowly so she could catch up. “Those are your new sunglasses,” she observed once she’d pulled alongside him.
“Yeah. My dad picked them up at the optician’s and brought them down this past weekend.”
“I like them,” she said. They were similar to his regular glasses—tortoise-shell, aviator-style—
and a vast improvement over the hinged clip-on shades he used to attach to his glasses before he had a prescription pair of sunglasses.
“I look real cool now, don’t I,” he said with a self-mocking smile.
“Oh, yeah, real cool.”
“Beat you down the hill,” he challenged her, then shot ahead as the road veered left and descended down a steep, twisting slope.
Shelley cursed, but her voice was lost in the wind. She sped past weathered cottages with tiled roofs and wind-blanched shingles, past rolling green acreage, gnarled maples and dwarf pines, past pot-holes and picket fences and quaint signs hanging from porch railings, reading: “Sea View” and “Windlass” and “Queen of the Mist.” For all their fancy names, none of those houses was anywhere near as nice as Kip’s. His family owned a rambling Victorian year-rounder, over one hundred years old, with upstairs and downstairs porches, a full dry basement and a cupola. They’d never bothered to name the house. It was simply the Stroud place, a glorious gray structure trimmed with white gingerbread, perched on two verdant acres surrounded by dense hedges and stone walls bordering a narrow road as hilly and serpentine as the road on which the Ballards’ much smaller cottage stood.
Shelley loved the Stroud place. She loved the painstakingly restored woodwork inside, the fresh paint outside, the breezy verandas with their flower boxes and Adirondack chairs, and most of all the cupola with its breathtaking views of both Old Harbor and New Harbor. The house her parents owned was an unwinterized four-room Cape Cod furnished in a style her mother called “Goodwill Modern.” Shelley was grateful that her family could afford the house, no matter how modest it was. But still...the Strouds’ house was wonderful.
At the bottom of the hill she caught up to Kip again. The wind flattened his hair back from his face in a way that, combined with his dark-lensed glasses, gave him a mysterious, dashing appearance. The sun played over his cheeks, revealing the faint outlines of his shaven beard. His jaw seemed thicker than it had been last summer, his brow higher, the bones of his face more solid. Once again Shelley was forced to acknowledge how much he’d matured over the past year.
Maybe she was the one who had matured so much. Last summer she hadn’t been at all conscious of how good-looking he was. Then again, last summer he’d had those doofus clip-on sunglasses, and he’d been skinny. Instead of a real, razor-worthy beard his jaw had been covered with peach fuzz, and his voice had squeaked like a clarinet in an amateur’s hands.
Last year she’d adored Kip because he was her friend. This year, though... This year she kept getting hung up about stupid things like whether he was going to laugh at her when he saw her in her new bikini.
Nearing their private cove, they steered off the road and dismounted. After locking their bikes together and stashing them behind a massive granite boulder, they picked their way down the rugged slope to the sheltered beach below. As always, it was unoccupied. Shelley sometimes wondered whether anyone else on the whole island knew of its existence.
Kip swung his pack off his shoulders, dropped it onto the sand and kicked off his leather mocs. “Man, it’s hot,” he complained, even though a brisk westerly breeze swept the humidity from the air. “I need some R&R. My old man made me help him paint the deck chairs this past weekend.”
“Life’s tough,” Shelley said unsympathetically. She wished her house had a deck to put chairs on.
Kip tugged a blanket out of his pack, unrolled it and spread it out on the sand. Then he pulled off his T-shirt and sprawled out across the blanket. “Life is tough,” he declared, although his broad smile gave him away. “My father’s a slave-driver, Shelley. You know how he can be.”
“Oh, yes. He carries a whip with him wherever he goes.” Actually, Shelley considered Kip’s father an absolute teddy-bear.
“What I want to know is, how come I had to help him paint the deck chairs and Diana didn’t? Doesn’t that seem sexist to you?”
“Very.” Shelley sat on a corner of the blanket and opened her backpack, from which she pulled a towel and a bottle of suntan lotion. Sooner or later she was going to have to remove her T-shirt and shorts, but she stalled by searching for her sunglasses. “What was Diana doing while you were slaving away on the deck chairs?”
“You wanna know what she was doing?” Kip rolled onto his side and propped himself up on one arm. “She was down in Old Harbor, flirting with this college guy who’s got a job renting mopeds at Aldo’s for the summer.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. She says she’s in love.” He smirked.
“Why shouldn’t she be?” Shelley said, although she felt a little disloyal taking Diana’s side. Diana was three years older than Kip and Shelley, and summer after summer they’d snickered over her adolescent moods, her taste in clothes, her coquettish hip-swaying walk and her melodramatic sulks. But during the past winter, Shelley had experienced a few intense sulks of her own, and she’d started experimenting with new fashions. She hadn’t fallen in love, but she’d spent an awful lot of time squealing with her girlfriends over assorted pop musicians and dreaming about Danny Clayburn, a gorgeous senior at her high school who didn’t even know she existed.
“If what Diana’s in is love,” Kip joked, “I hope they come up with a vaccine before I come down with it. She just sits around sighing all the time. When she’s not sighing she’s working on her tan, and when she’s not doing that she’s bitching at me.”
“You probably deserve it,” Shelley teased. Having exhumed her sunglasses from her pack, she’d run out of delaying tactics. The moment of truth had arrived. Taking a deep breath, she unzipped her cut-offs and slid them down her legs. Before she pulled off her T-shirt, she discreetly adjusted the bows of the skimpy straps that held the bikini bottom on her hips. Then, acting as nonchalant as possible, she peeled off her shirt and braced herself for Kip’s response.
He didn’t whistle. He didn’t blurt out, “What the hell have you got on?” He didn’t say, “What a coincidence! I spent the past winter growing a beard and a smattering of chest hair, and you spent the past winter turning into a foxy babe.”
He would never say that--not only because she hadn’t turned into a foxy babe but because Kip didn’t seem to be into boy-girl type stuff. Like Shelley, he was fifteen, and everybody knew boys matured later than girls. If he could ridicule his sister’s infatuation with a summer employee at Aldo’s, he undoubtedly had no idea what infatuation was all about. His full ration of hormones hadn’t kicked in yet.
Which was fine, Shelley decided. She herself had just started dating this year, and so far she’d found the experience to be more hype than pay-off. It was nice having some guy take you to the movies, and it added to your stature at school. But kissing was a pretty messy business, all in all, and anything beyond kissing generally led to her shoving the guy’s hands away and the guy whining that all the other girls do it, or that after he’d blown all that money on the movie he’d earned the right to paw her, or—the ultimate insult—that if she didn’t like it there must be something wrong with her.
Maybe what was wrong with her was that she could barely fill a B-cup. If she had bigger breasts, she’d probably have more nerve endings and being touched would feel more exciting.
In any case, while she wanted Kip to think she was a knock-out, she didn’t want him to kiss or her try for a feel. That would spoil their friendship.
He might have at least noticed the bikini, though. He might have at least said something like, “Hey, you got a new swim suit.”
What he said, after the grand, anxiety-producing unveiling of her bikini, was, “The water sure looks great today.” Then he pulled off his sunglasses, hoisted himself to his feet and jogged down to the water, splashing through the shallows until the waves were lapping his thighs and then taking a clean, graceful surface dive into the gently rolling surf.
Shelley glanced down at her body and shuddered. The tan lines left by her other swim suits emphasized how sickly-pale her belly was. Her chest was
truly an embarrassment, revealing only the faintest shadow where a more fortunate girl would have cleavage. With a small groan, she folded her shirt and shorts in a neat pile and then stood and picked her way down to the water’s edge.
The tide was low. Kip had surfaced and was standing a good thirty yards from shore, where the waves reached only up to his waist. His skin glistened with drops of water, and the newly sprouted hair on his chest looked darker and less curly. “Come on in,” he beckoned, slicking his hair back from his face and waving to her. “It’s not too bad.”
It was icy, but Shelley hadn’t come to the beach to squeal and snivel and act like a coward. Certainly braving the chill waters of Block Island Sound wasn’t as daunting as stripping off her outer clothing had been just a minute ago. She filled her lungs with air, then raced headlong into the water, refusing herself the opportunity to stop. Once the water was at her hips she dove under, feeling her scalp contract and her skin erupt in goosebumps. Before she emerged she ran her hands briskly over the triangular cups of her suit to make sure they were still covering what they had to cover. Reassured that everything was in place, she bobbed up to the surface, felt for the smooth, sandy ocean floor with her feet, and let out her breath.
“It’s freezing,” she complained, just for the hell of it.
“Is not.”
“You could build a snowman out here.”
Kip laughed, then vanished under the surface again. In less than a second Shelley felt his hand around her ankle, giving her a sharp tug. She barely had time to take a breath before she tumbled backward and the foaming water closed over her head.
She and Kip had wrestled in the water more times than she could count. They had dunked each other, raced each other, splashed and tickled each other. This time, though, the horseplay seemed different. His fingers felt so strong on her leg, and when she floated back up and felt him behind her, his chest brushing up against her bare back, it was...well, different.
Safe Harbor Page 1
