Safe Harbor

by Judith Arnold

  “I hope you explained that I’m a pharmacist, not a doctor,” Shelley said.

  He acknowledged Shelley’s joke with a brief smile, then grew solemn again. “My mother might know what she’s talking about this time,” he said. “I want to drink to you, Shelley, so don’t interrupt and drink to me. This is for you.” He touched his glass to hers and sipped.

  Her eyes shimmered above the rim of her goblet, a glittering silvery gray as she met his unwavering gaze. After a slight hesitation she sipped her wine. A tiny drop remained on her lip when she lowered her glass, and she caught it with the tip of her tongue.

  It was an astonishingly sexy gesture.

  Perhaps what startled Kip most was that he noticed, that he could look at a woman flicking her tongue against her upper lip and think it was sexy.

  Especially when that woman was Shelley Ballard. “We are good friends,” he said, as much to himself as to her.

  At last she broke her gaze from him. The corners of her mouth twitched upward in a shy smile, and she brushed a tendril of gold-tinged hair back from her cheek. “I know, Kip.” She took another sip of wine, then sighed. “I’m sorry I acted like a maniac in the pharmacy today.”

  “Not a maniac,” he argued mildly. “Just moody.”

  Her grin expanded. “I know Jack is a nice guy, and he’s been trying to get me to go out with him for months. But...I don’t date, Kip. I mean—this, right now—it isn’t a date.”

  “Of course not,” he teased. “I was planning to split the bill with you.”

  “Like hell,” she shot back. “Who paid for the pizza and beer yesterday?”

  He laughed briefly, then grew solemn. “We’re agreed that this isn’t a date. I don’t date, either, Shelley. I’m not—I’m not ready for it.”

  She nodded.

  “Everyone else in the world seems to think I should be, but I’m not,” he explained, feeling the need to justify his own touchiness that afternoon. “When you acted as if you believed I was asking you out, I thought, shit, even Shelley thinks I should be dating by now. Sometimes...” He drifted off for a moment. “Sometimes I think I’ll never be ready.”

  She looked sympathetic, and he braced himself for the possibility that she would say something awful, some platitude about how he shouldn’t give up hope, he should never say never. Her pity, however, was aimed elsewhere. “It must be ghastly having everyone in the world telling you what you should or shouldn’t do. Particularly when you know they’re only trying to help.”

  “You must get lots of `helpful’ advice, too.”

  “No,” Shelley told him. “My mother wouldn’t dare to advise me. Maybe in private she wrings her hands over my marital status, and every now and then she makes some remark about how isolated I must be, living all alone on the island. But she knows what happens to women who put too much trust in men. She’s been there, she knows. And I guess she loves me enough not to want me to follow in her footsteps.”

  Kip scrutinized her thoughtfully. It bothered him that she was so willing to condemn all men for the actions of a few bad ones. But given how he despised the well-meaning interference of his loved ones, he would spare Shelley any well-meaning interference from him—except to say, “You can trust me, Shelley. I hope you know that.”

  “I do,” she swore. “I think it’s when you combine trust with love that you get into trouble. Love robs you of perspective. It makes you ignore the things you don’t want to see. My mother loved my father—and so did I. There were so many signs, Kip, so many things I should have noticed. But I didn’t, because I loved him and trusted him.” She gazed out the window for a moment, her mouth curved in a poignant smile as the sinking sun painted the sky with streaks of fire. Not until the sun had slipped completely below the horizon did she turn back to Kip. “I’m not in love with you, Kip. So I suppose it’s safe to trust you.”

  The smile she gave him was curiously diffident. She let her eyes reach to his again, brave, beautiful silver-gray eyes, and took another sip of wine. He gazed at her defiantly raised chin, her smooth cheeks, the fullness of her lips, and thought for an insane moment how sad it was that they would never be in love with each other.

  Sad, but safe. He was as safe with Shelley as she was with him. And right now, they both seemed to need that more than anything else.

  Chapter Eight

  “HOW DO YOU KNOW all this stuff?” Shelley asked.

  He bent the brush bristles against his palm to test their softness, then swirled the brush around in the jar of solvent, rinsed it beneath the spout of the kitchen sink and tested the bristles one last time. “How do I know all what stuff?” he shot back.

  “How to refinish the bannisters.”

  Glancing over his shoulder at her, he laughed. “There really isn’t much to know.”

  “You knew what grades of sandpaper to use, and which brushes, and...I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “I’m impressed. You don’t seem like a Mr. Fix-It kind of guy.”

  “Casting aspersions on my manhood, are you? I’m insulted,” he said, feigning indignation. He shook the excess water from the brush, laid it on the counter with the other brush he’d already cleaned, and dried his hands on a towel. “You seem to forget, Shelley, that I spent many a summer weekend helping my father fix things around this house.”

  “That’s right,” she recalled. “You worked your fingers to the bone while Diana lounged around mooning over her latest boyfriend.”

  “Exactly.”

  Afternoon sunshine streamed through the bay windows, filling the kitchen with golden light. Kip had argued with Shelley over her decision to spend her day off helping him refinish the staircase railings, but she had claimed that there was nothing else she’d rather do. “Besides,” she’d informed him, “it isn’t really my day off. As long as the pharmacy is open, I’m on call.” The cell phone hooked onto her belt proved that.

  The cell phone hadn’t rung since Shelley had arrived at the house at ten o’clock that morning. Except for a half-hour break for lunch and another break at around two-thirty to split a bottle of beer on the front veranda, they’d been working straight through.

  It was nearly four o’clock now, still bright and balmy outside. “Let’s take a ride,” Kip said.

  She grinned. “Okay.”

  He tossed the towel onto the counter, adjusted his eyeglasses more comfortably on his nose, and studied the woman perched on the kitchen table in her faded blue jeans and oversized T-shirt. For a crazed moment he imagined Shelley and himself slipping through a crack in time, tumbling backwards until they were fifteen again. Shelley’s hair would be longer, her fingernails shorter, her feet shod in sandals rather than white leather sneakers. But basically she would have looked just as she looked today, her cheeks arching as she smiled, her eyes glowing, her long legs swinging freely, her attitude easy and amiable and amazingly open.

  In the nine days since he’d landed at Old Harbor he’d done a lot of work on the house. He’d insulated the windows, put new washers in the bathroom faucets, mopped all the hardwood floors with a water-vinegar solution, swept the cellar, given the lawn its autumn dose of fertilizer, repaired some roof shingles on the garage, sanded down the stairway railings and slapped on a fresh coat of varnish.

  And he’d seen Shelley. Occasionally he dropped in at the pharmacy to say hello, and every evening was reserved for her. Sometimes they ate dinner at a restaurant, sometimes at his house. One evening she’d insisted that he come to her apartment for supper. The two of them had barely fit into the kitchen, and Kip had suggested that they coordinate their respiration so they wouldn’t both try to inhale at the same time and cause the walls to implode. By the time dessert was served he had developed new insights into the meaning of claustrophobia.

  It didn’t matter, though. He’d enjoyed eating in her cramped little flat as much as he enjoyed eating in his roomy kitchen or at any of the restaurants around the island. A miracle cure: he was actually starting to enjoy eating again.


  It wasn’t simply that Shelley’s presence conquered his loneliness. In truth, the loneliness he suffered couldn’t be conquered. It was with him and always would be. Like a chronic illness, it might subside for a while, lying dormant deep within him, and then without any warning or apparent provocation it would flare up again. He was coming to understand the nature of it, to adapt to it, to treasure those moments when the symptoms weren’t pronounced and to withstand those moments when the pain rose up against him.

  Unlike his parents, Shelley didn’t expect him ever to be completely free of his affliction. She recognized the way he experienced it—sometimes it was obvious and sometimes it was buried, but it was always present, something he would live with for the rest of his life. She didn’t view it as a weakness, a flaw he could overcome if only he put his mind to it.

  He could be himself with her. He didn’t have to try hard, to force anything, to worry about earning her approval or fending off her pity. He could relax with the confidence that she accepted him as he was.

  Just like when they were kids.

  She sprang off the table and headed outside with him. Her bicycle, a spiffy black ten-speed which, she’d boasted, she had bought brand-new shortly after she’d moved to the island, was parked beside the front veranda. She waited patiently while Kip wheeled his rejuvenated bike out of the garage and met up with her in front of the house. Then they mounted, coasted down the driveway, and turned onto the street.

  In the olden days Kip would have challenged her to a race, but he’d outgrown that childish competitiveness long ago. It was much nicer to ride side by side with her, to glance to the left and see her strong profile, her hair glittering in the sunshine as the wind lifted it back from her face.

  “So,” she called to him over the wind, “what’s Diana doing these days, anyway?”

  “Well, she’s settled on one boyfriend,” Kip told her. “She married a guy named Glenn Hobart. He’s an endocrinologist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and she’s a special education teacher.”

  Shelley seemed delighted. “That’s wonderful.”

  “Actually, she’s on a leave of absence right now. She had a baby back in January. A daughter, Victoria. The most beautiful girl in the world—says her unbiased uncle,” he added with a self-mocking grin. “Diana was going to go back to work this September, but she decided to take another year off. She’s really into motherhood.”

  “And you’re really into uncle-hood,” Shelley guessed, shooting him a quick look and then concentrating on steering around a sharp curve in the road. “I wish I had a sister. You always used to fight with Diana, but still...it’s nice having a sibling.”

  “Yes,” he conceded. For all the squabbling, for all the taunting and raging and threats of retribution, he loved Diana and she loved him. Within days of his returning to Boston with his mother last spring, Diana had rearranged her life and carted her baby up to Chestnut Hill just to be with him, to offer him whatever support she could.

  He thought about how much Shelley would have benefited from having a sibling with whom she could share the burden of her family’s debacle. Obviously she couldn’t lean on her mother. When her world came crashing down on her she’d had no one to confide in, no one to unload on, no one to see it through with her.

  Kip wished he could have helped her in some way. He wished he could have been the brother she didn’t have.

  Without thinking consciously about where they were going, they found themselves veering off West Side Road toward Dorie’s Cove. They bypassed the main beach and bounced along a rutted dirt path to the edge of a grass-covered cliff. At the end of the path they braked. Shelley looked at Kip, her eyes bright.

  In no time, Kip had his bicycle chain wrapped around both their bikes, and he stashed them behind the familiar old boulder where they’d always hidden them in the past. Then he and Shelley picked their way carefully over the tumbled rocks and stones, down the cliff to their special beach.

  The sand was a shimmering salmon color, reflecting the blushing light of the late-afternoon sun. Shelley yanked off her sneakers and socks, rolled up the hems of her pants and jogged across the beach to the water’s edge. Kip lagged behind, gazing about him at the smooth rocks of the cliff, at the even smoother sand, at the wind spiraling against the walls of their hidden cove, leaving the unkempt dune grass whispering in its wake.

  How many afternoons had he spent here? How many dreams had he dreamed in this hideaway? Why couldn’t life be as painless now as it was then?

  After removing his sneakers, he crossed the sand to stand near Shelley. She gazed out at the blue-gray water of the sound, at the stripe of light the sun painted across the still water, narrow in the distance and spreading as it neared them. He filled his lungs with the clean, salty air, then let it out in a long, wistful sigh.

  “Amanda would have loved this place,” he murmured.

  Shelley didn’t turn. She didn’t say anything. Her hands on her hips, she stared resolutely out toward the horizon. If he hadn’t noticed the barely perceptible stiffening in her shoulders, he would have thought she hadn’t heard him.

  She had heard him, though—and abruptly it occurred to him that he shouldn’t have said what he’d said. This place belonged to him and Shelley and their childhood. Amanda had never been a part of it.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Shelley raked her wind-tossed locks of hair out of her eyes, but she didn’t turn. “No need to be.”

  “If she’d stumbled onto this beach when we were kids, we would have harassed her until she left.”

  At last Shelley turned, smiling wryly. “Yeah. We were pretty obnoxious.”

  “I don’t know why I even thought of her just now,” he said, still feeling a compulsion to explain, to apologize.

  Shelley’s smile grew tender. “You thought of her because you loved her and you loved this place. If she’d intruded on us today, we wouldn’t have chased her away. We would have invited her to join us. We would have shared it with her.”

  Yes. They would have. Not just Kip but Shelley. She cared so much about him, she could welcome his wife into their memories. “You would have liked Amanda,” he said.

  “Probably better than I like you,” Shelley teased.

  He reached out and took her hand. She moved to him, her wet feet caked with sand, her hair tangled and streaked with platinum highlights. When she stood toe to toe with him he released her hand and wrapped his arms tightly around her waist. “She would have liked you, too,” he said. “You’re an incredible woman, Shelley.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, then reconsidered and said nothing. Closing her arms around him, she let her head come to rest against his shoulder. He ran his fingertips up her spine and into her hair, unraveling the snarled blond waves. He longed to tell her how much these days had meant to him, how much this one day meant, this one moment alone with her in their secret cove, standing in the warmth of the setting sun while the wind curled gently around them. He hoped his embrace conveyed what he couldn’t express in words.

  Holding her filled him with the harmony of those days gone by, the peace and confidence and optimism that had once defined his existence. With Shelley he could remember what it was like to know that quiet joy.

  With Shelley he could believe that someday he might experience it again.

  ***

  THURSDAY MORNING, he got a call from Harrison Shaw, the friend of his father’s who had hired him when he’d moved from San Francisco back to Chestnut Hill. “I just thought I’d check in and see how you were making out,” Harrison said.

  Kip owed Harrison a great deal. The man had hired Kip for no other reason than that he was Brock Stroud’s son, and as a result Kip had done everything within his power to make sure Harrison never regretted granting that favor. Kip had thrown himself into his first project, a loser that all the other consultants at Harrison’s firm had declined. To everyone’s surprise, Kip had come up with a good strategy for the hemorrhaging high-tech firm
, divesting it of its least productive subsidiary and using the money from the sale to facilitate more extensive research on its fiber-optic products.

  Harrison had found a place for Kip in his firm as an act of charity. But Kip had had every intention of earning the right to stay there, and with one project, he’d done that.

  “I’m doing well,” Kip told Harrison over the telephone. “How are things back in `America’?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Kip laughed. “Sorry—that’s what people on Block Island call the mainland.”

  “Maybe you’ve been there too long, if you’re starting to speak the native tongue,” Harrison joked. “Your father mentioned that you’ve been in touch with him and your mother every few days. He said you told them you were getting some rest and exercise.”

  “Exercise,” Kip groaned. “I’ve been doing repairs on his house. What he calls exercise I call cheap labor.”

  “Well, speaking of cheap labor...I’ve got a new client I think you could do a repair on. I don’t want to rush you, Kip—I know your situation and I want to accommodate you any way I can. But we’ve got another of those teetery-tottery little high-tech companies peering anxiously into the abyss. Just your kind of thing.”

  “I don’t know if it’s my kind of thing, Harrison. I did it once, but it’s nothing like what I was doing back in San Francisco.”

  “You aren’t in San Francisco now, Kip. You’re working for me. If you can’t handle it, fine, but if you can, I could really use you back in the office.”

  Kip turned to gaze out the window. It was already nine-thirty. Since the mist hadn’t yet burned away, it was likely to linger all day. It swirled above the grass in a vague, mysterious pattern, one of Mother Nature’s glorious special effects.

  Even on gray days like this, Kip loved being on the island. The stretch of days he’d spent here had done him good. But maybe he’d been here long enough. Maybe the time had come to face real life once more.