“I’ll be here,” he said with a smile. “But there’ll be snow by then. You might realize that you’re a tourist after all. Not sure a farm girl can handle Maine in the winter.”
“I’m tougher than you think,” I tried to say it like a joke but the lead weight of good-bye wouldn’t release my words. They sank to the ground.
“No coward soul is mine,” he muttered.
“Tomorrow you’ll be at lines with Sarah,” I said, unable to keep the complaint in my mouth any longer. “I’ll be gone.” I knew he couldn’t change it, so I can’t say why I wanted him to argue with me.
“I know.” He gently reached for my hand and turned it palm side up. His rough finger stroked the white skin, slowly, thoughtfully.
“Nathan?” He met my eyes and I could see the ocean waves in his dark blue orbs. “Did you know that Cleo and I are graduating early? Like Claude. Just one more year and I’ll be away at school …”
“Decided to mention that, did you?” he said with a grim smirk. He squeezed his hand around mine. “Go Huskers?” he asked quietly.
“Maybe. I’m starting to like the East Coast. If you ignore the people, of course.”
“Of course.” He released my hand and took a steadying breath. “So tomorrow morning, huh? This is it?”
No. No. This isn’t it. This can’t be it. Why couldn’t he ever hear what my mind was shouting? “I suppose so.” I tilted my head back at the sky and inhaled. Long, quiet minutes passed as we watched the sky grow dim, his hand still clutching mine.
I finally asked him, “Are you ready to go home? Are we through?”
His eyebrows tilted down like the question perplexed him. “No,” he answered as he watched a gull cut a slim, white line over our heads, “We’re not through. But I’ll walk you home.” He rose first and gave me his hand, pulling me up in his firm grip until I was so close that our bodies almost touched. He looked down, his face bending over mine and what thoughts raced through his mind, I’ll never know. I don’t remember thoughts. Just sensations. Something like drowning. In the best possible way.
I felt the kiss in his eyes, so instinctual and pervasive that the ghost of it tingled on my lips, but Nathan refused to move any closer. That stubborn glint burned in his eyes.
He might have had the strength to resist, but I did not. I raised my face, watching his eyes tighten. With uncommon understanding, Nathan gently turned to the water and looked at her while he spoke to me. “I’d be a hypocrite, after what I said to Will.”
Something hot ran down my shoulders into my ribs. Disappointment flavored with relief. It wasn’t that he didn’t see me, he just convinced himself he shouldn’t. Same outcome, but the subtle difference meant everything. “If you let him hit you, you’d be even.” I’m not sure I knew I said it out loud or that it was funny until his laugh, buoyant and free, broke loudly over my head.
“Nice logic, Jennifer.” He sighed the word “Tempting” in a way that made it impossible to tell if he was tempted by the punch or the kiss. Before I could respond, he grabbed my hand in a decidedly friendly way and tugged me forward. I nearly dug my heels into the sand trying to retrieve the stunning tension of hope, but he had made up his mind. I couldn’t beg. When he walked, I obeyed, allowing him to lead my weak, reluctant feet over the sand and dirt and grass to the back door. I prayed he would stop, break his rules, see me how Newell never let himself see Little, but he opened the door and held it with his outstretched arm, waiting as I passed under. My hair grazed his hand as he closed the door behind me. The faint touch shivered on the back of my neck and I stopped to catch my breath. He stopped too, still and silent. We paused there, not more than a handful of seconds, unable to do anything more but look at the floor together, before he walked into the living room.
Mother and Sarah looked up from a photo album as we entered, the quilt from my bed was wrapped around my mother’s shoulders. It looked very right, piled around her neck, protecting her. At great sacrifice I left Nathan’s side and sat beside her. She pulled me under one arm, the blanket engulfing me and I smelled her familiar scent mingled with the clean, powdery smell that clung to everything in Sarah’s house.
“Are you bringing this home?” I asked, fingering the tiny, familiar squares. I loved the idea of her keeping it, but it didn’t seem right to take it from its home where Hazel made it.
“I think so,” Mother answered, rubbing my arm.
Nathan stopped in the doorway, leaning against the thick wooden frame. He looked tenderly at Sarah as she sat across from her sister. The same way I looked at Hester on the rock. “Good night, Sarah,” Nathan said with a knowing smile that said, I know it is a good night for you. He looked to my mother and I. “It was nice to meet you, Claire. I hope you come back soon. We’ll miss you, Jennifer.” I tried to understand the strange set of his face, tried to hear his mind over the sound of his words. “I’m glad you came. I’ll see you again.” I felt my mother’s stare, Sarah’s eyes fastened to my pink cheeks but I ignored both of them, not able to acknowledge anyone but him.
“I’ll miss you, too,” I said, my throat swelling around the wounding words. “I hope you’re right.”
He gave me a small wave and turned. When the door clicked closed behind him something splintered and fell inside my chest. I took a quick breath, surprised by the physical pang. I avoided Sarah’s concerned gaze – avoided her pity.
My mother turned the page of the album. “He seems like a nice boy,” She murmured. I couldn’t even find the power to nod. An odd, concurring ‘hm’ came out of my throat. She pointed out a photo of her mother, saying, “That was her first year here, before she met my dad.” I looked at the blurry face and blonde hair of the girl who fell in love with a Smithport fisher. She was short, like Claude, slight like Sarah, defiant like my mother. I wondered what trait we shared, other than the thick, light hair. Maybe just our love for the two women looking at her photo.
I tried to concentrate on that accomplishment – the fact that they sat in the same room – and forced myself to ignore the instincts that called me back outside, urged me to run across the cove and talk to him. The compulsion to speak to Nathan throbbed inside of me, but I stayed and looked at the pictures, my head on my mother’s shoulder until I grew too heavy with the sadness to sit upright. I took myself upstairs and slid into bed, opening the window wide to catch the sighs of the ocean. Tonight she sounded like my heart felt. One breath after another. And nothing else.
At nine o’clock, when the last of the light seeped out of the dark sky, I pulled myself back up, crept downstairs and found Sarah alone in the living room. She looked up when the stairs creaked. “Where’s my mom?” I asked, looking toward the kitchen.
“She went for a walk down to the water. We thought you went to bed.” Sarah said, closing her eyes.
“I tried. Are you all right?” I asked.
One eye popped open and scanned me critically. “You told her you wouldn’t come home unless she came to get you?”
“I didn’t really mean it,” I sighed.
“That was playing with fire, Jennifer.”
“I know. But it worked, didn’t it? Aren’t you glad?”
A tired smile lit her face and Charlie whined happily, as if he felt her pleasure. “Indescribably.”
“Me, too,” I said. “You two look good together.” My feet padded against the thick wooden planks of the floor and I walked behind the couch, gently touching her head. “I think I’ll go join her.”
“Jennifer,” Sarah’s voice caught me at the doorway to the kitchen. “I’d bet good money that he’s here in the morning.”
I only met her eyes for a moment. I was too fragile to avoid the way the hope pulled into my chest like a deep breath. It was just enough to dull the shards of disappointment.
“Thanks, Sarah.”
I slipped outside into the still night. The wind was the only thing stirring as I crossed the shadowed yard. Unlike the night with Nathan when the moon was a bright circl
e, tonight it hung lopsided in the sky, looking punch drunk and weary – the morning after.
My mother stood far from the water, taking in the black shapes of the land and trees against the sky. “Mama?”
She turned slowly to me and then back to the water. “You were so quiet I thought you were asleep already,” she said.
“Hardly. I was just thinking. About leaving. It’s going to be hard for me. I fell in love… with this place.” There was a certain power in saying it so plain – in almost admitting out loud to another human being that I loved him.
“I know,” she said bracingly. “But it will still be here. We can come back.”
“Is that what you told yourself all these years? That it would still be here when you were ready to come back?”
She gave a laugh and shook her head. “No. I told myself it fell into the ocean. Then I didn’t even have to think about it. It didn’t exist. I think I believed my own lie.”
I sat down at her feet, feeling the cold sand through my clothes. “I’m glad you came.”
Her doubtful eyes pressed me. “Even if it means leaving?”
“I was coming anyway,” I admitted. “Tuesday.”
Before she could vocalize the stunned question on her face I told her that I never really decided if Little was right. “I kept worrying it was wrong, to blackmail you that way.”
“No, this time the crazy woman was right. I’m glad you did it.” She sank to the ground next to me, pulling the hair from her eyes. “You’re grounded. But not for long.” The next time she spoke it was with a different voice, something more personal. “I feel like I’m seventeen again tonight,” she said and I knew she wasn’t telling me as a daughter. She was talking to another woman. “I feel like the night after her funeral when I sat out here and tried to understand what it all meant. I tried to decide what to do. I thought Sarah would know … I don’t think I realized that she was just a kid, too.” her voice trailed until it was just a sigh mingled with the breeze. “I think that is a special gift – knowing how to blame the right people. I wonder what my life would have been if I stayed when Sarah came home.”
“Do you regret it?” Only after I asked did I realize I feared either answer.
“You? Your dad? Never.” She proclaimed. “I found love. I got a girl who looks like a golden wheat field. What regret is there in that?” And when she said the word ‘golden’ I remembered Nathan’s line. Nothing gold can stay. It sounds conceited to say, but I understood for the first time that he meant me. I was the gold. He was warning me. He was warning himself. I don’t know what happened to my face when I realized, but I never heard my mother’s next words. She caught my expression and stopped speaking altogether. For a moment she studied me and when I met her eyes she said very gently, “And there was Harvey. It’s hard to leave the first boy you love when you’re seventeen.” My eyes felt hot as the tears collected. “But you know what Emerson says, right? When half gods go, the gods arrive. I always loved that one.”
That’s when the tears dropped and she pulled me under her arm. I didn’t agree with her- the implication that there was something or someone better than Nathan. But she gave me a line. In the quiet moonlight, on her beach, she played the “non-game.” I didn’t need to confess the turmoil inside. She didn’t need to say she knew. It settled around us as surely as if we spoke the words aloud. I smelled her neck as I leaned into her, thinking of how she didn’t have a mother when the heartache hit her.
“Will you promise me something?” I asked.
She nodded her head and squeezed my arm. A light from a single boat flashed far out at sea and we watched the tiny dot make its way over the vast waters.
“Please don’t tell Cleo. She’ll never forgive me.”
My mother chuckled and shook me lovingly. “She’ll figure it out eventually.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” I pulled up my head to see her. Her face looked like the ash covered ground after a forest fire. Decimated. Destroyed. Peaceful. Just about to burst into new life. She deserved a new secret to plant. A good one.
“Do you know that Little has a tattoo?”
“Really? I guess I’m not shocked. What is it? Or dare I ask, where is it?”
“Two black wings right in the middle of her back. To get her up to heaven. Because the only man she ever loved is there. She is going to tell him off and then kiss him like no one’s ever been kissed.”
Mother leaned her head up to the sky and laughed. “That would be something to see.”
I thought of those small wings, growing limp and saggy on Little’s wrinkled back as the decades passed. “Do you mind if I go say one last good-bye?"
There was a grimace in her eyes as her smile retreated. “I guess that’s okay. But it’s late. Don’t stay long.”
I watched her puzzled expression as I stood and turned left, away from Boulder Bend and Nathan. “I’ll be home as soon as I’m done.” If Sarah was right – let Sarah be right! – I’d see him in the morning. Morning was a deep, warm longing in my stomach.
The moon’s confused gaze followed me to Pilgrim’s Point, laying a broken path of light across the uneven ground. Before I made it to the back door I called out without restraint, like Darcy. “Little!” The night shook with the sudden sound and high overhead a bird burst from a tree in a wild flap of feathers. The sound felt good in my throat, filled it with words instead of waiting tears. “Little!” I shouted again and rapped her back door sharp enough to wake her, living or dead. The curtain over the window shook as she pulled the door open and stood in front of me.
She didn’t look surprised to see me. She didn’t ask. Didn’t admonish. Didn’t joke. She waited, her face set in a sober frown. Before I could speak one word the brewing storm shattered inside of me and water, saltier than the sea, washed down my face. She pursed her lips in sympathy, the wrinkles falling into each other across her puckered face, but she didn’t interrupt the loss washing over me. Didn’t try to save me from it. “I came because …”
The wind gave a mighty push across my body and wrapped me in the fresh spray of the ocean. Like a quilt. Like words curling around me. Like ghosts reaching out their insubstantial hands to comfort the stark, isolated, magnificent suffering that wound its barbs around my very breaths.
I looked at her eyes, swirling with the same stormy waves, the same hidden currents, as the fathomless ocean. And in that moment I knew that Newell had seen. Whatever excuses he invented or reasons he gave himself, he must have noticed the blue flames lapping through the icy whites of her eyes.
“I have a story,” I whispered.
For further information on quotes used:
Charlotte Bronte. “Parting”, 1846
Dickinson, Emily. #198” An Awful Tempest Mashed the Air”, The Complete Poems, 1891
Collins, Billy. “Directions” Art of Drowning University of Pittsburgh Press; 1 edition, June 15, 1995
Frost, Robert. “Lodged” West-Running Brook, 1928
Frost, Robert. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” Yale Review, October 1923
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. This Side of Paradise, 1920
Hermann Hesse. "Lying in Grass" / "Im Grase Liegend" Poems, 1915
Translated by James Wright and published in English in 1971.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. “Changed” Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes, 1876–79.
Moore, Thomas. Moore's Irish Melodies, 1876–79.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. “A Psalm of Life” Knickerbocker Magazine, October 1838
Oliver, Mary. "The Journey", Dream Work, 1986
William Shakespeare. Julius Ceasar, 1599
Shelley, Percy. “Ozymandias” Examiner, January 11, 1818
Tagore, Rabindranath. “Vocation” 1913
Tennyson, Alfred. “Break Break Break” Collection of Poems, 1842
Additional embedded quotes:
“Abandon Hope all ye who enter here.” Dante’s Inferno, Divine Comedy. Inferno (Italian for "Hell")
is the first part of Dante Alighieri's 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy.
“like a thunderbolt…” Tennyson “The Eagle: A Fragment” was first published in 1851, when it was added to the seventh edition of Tennyson’s Poems, which had itself been published first in 1842
“When the half gods go, the gods arrive” Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Early Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York, Boston, Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, 1899
“No coward soul is mine” Emily Brontë, The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, ed. Clement Shorter, collected by C. W. Hatfield (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923
Acknowledgements
With love and gratitude I thank my daughter for giving Jennifer the breath of life,
My husband, for giving me the greatest love story,
My little elf, for taking long rides in the country with me while I searched for the right words,
My sister, who is the sole reason I finished,
My nana, who already flew home,
My writing group- John, Danyelle, Keisha and Lisa- you are true believers in the impossible,
Tristi for her editing suggestions, (any and all mistakes are mine and not the lapse of any other)
My test readers, for their honest feedback and willingness to help,
And every person who gave me a kind word to fill my frequently- depleted ego.
I have the greatest friends on earth.
A writer is never really happy with a finished product, but a writer is always grateful for a finished product. Thank you.
* * *
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
On Little Wings Page 32
