Sailing Lessons

by Hannah McKinnon

  Her phone dinged. “Where are you?”

  “Crap.” She raced for the closet. Shannon had invited her to lunch with Lindy at her golf club, and now she was late. She plucked a pale-blue shirtdress off a hanger, prayed it wasn’t too wrinkled, and slipped it over her head. As a last-ditch effort, she grabbed a bright orange Lucite cuff bracelet from the silver tray on her bedside table. She’d snagged it the day before from a jewelry order that had come in at the shop and was glad she had. The pop of color on her wrist made her smile. She was halfway out the door when the house phone rang. She hesitated, then checked: it could be Lucy’s school. But the caller ID showed an unfamiliar Arizona number. Without answering, Wren set it back in its cradle.

  It was the perfect beach day, clear and hot, so she hoped the main drag into the village would be quiet. The Jeep top was still down from the glorious weather of the day before, and the wind whipped at her hair. She turned on the radio.

  When they were little, Caleb used to take them into town for breakfast on weekend mornings, letting Lindy sleep in back at the house. He’d pile the three girls into the wood-paneled station wagon and drive up Route 28 to Larry’s PX for blueberry pancakes and whipped cream. Wren remembered sitting in the backseat beside Piper, still in her footy-pajamas with her blankey wrapped around her neck like a scarf, as their dad cranked up the car radio. It was always classic rock: Cat Stevens, Neil Young, James Taylor. Caleb’s voice was rich and raspy, and when a good song came on he threw his head back and belted out the lyrics. He knew all the words to all the good ones, and she learned them, too, listening to him and singing along. Her favorite was Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle.” Caleb would roll the station wagon windows all the way down and their long hair would blow across the backseat, a sea of blonde rivulets, until there was no discerning one child’s hair from the other. “My little birds,” he called them.

  They’d all sing together, “When you coming home, Dad? I don’t know when. But we’ll get together then. You know we’ll have a good time then.”

  Wren had the latest correspondence from her father tucked in her purse.

  I’ll be there the twenty-third, he wrote. I’ll be taking the Cape Regional Transit Authority in Harwich. I won’t be any trouble. I booked a room at the Chatham Motel. Wren pulled into the club parking lot and grabbed the letter from the glove box.

  • • •

  “The bus?” Shannon said, sitting on the back deck of the club. “He’s taking a bus home?”

  A breeze came up over the green, and the Nantucket Sound sparkled behind her under the midday sun. She’d waited until they ordered before sharing the news. They’d ordered salads and oysters, toasting the start of summer vacation with Bloody Marys. But despite the high sun and clear skies, a somber mood soon blanketed their table.

  Lindy was sitting back in her chair, hands in her lap, listening quietly, her face as placid as the water. Since the disclosure of the first letter’s arrival, Lindy had remained stalwart in her post: the sudden return of their father into her daughters’ lives was for them to decide how to navigate. She would impose no outward opinion one way or the other. But Wren could tell that this odd piece of news poked at her curiosity.

  “Does he not have a car?” she wondered aloud.

  Which gave further rise to the many questions that had been swirling in Wren’s mind about their father’s present situation, and what was drawing him back to them after all these years.

  “I’ll bet he lost his license.” Shannon tipped an oyster back without pleasure.

  “I’ll bet he’s broke.”

  “Shannon.” Lindy’s voice was firm, but not upset. “You are under no obligation to anyone other than yourself and your family, honey. None of us are. But let’s not jump to dire conclusions just yet.”

  Shannon shrugged. “Try telling Piper that. In her world he’s coming home so we can all be a big happy family again.” She dabbed her mouth with her napkin and stared out at the sound. Wren could feel the ire emanating across the table.

  “Piper just finished grad school. She can barely afford to live in the city, Shan. She’s in no position to offer your dad handouts even if she wanted to.”

  “Has that ever stopped her before?”

  Wren sighed. It was true; Piper may have been the one with the least amount of resources to give, but she was also the first to offer more than she had. Whether it was running up credit card bills or giving away too much of herself to men who weren’t good for her. It had landed her in trouble before; trouble that she often confided in Wren in phone calls late at night, or in Lindy when asking for a small loan “just to get me through” on her rare visits home.

  “That’s all I know,” Wren told them both. “He arrives this weekend.” She helped herself to an oyster and tried to concentrate on its briny sweetness.

  Her mother, she noticed, had not touched her lunch. She crossed her arms and leaned forward between them. “There’s something you two need to remember. After the boat accident, I’m the one who told your father he couldn’t stay with us, at least not until he got some help. That was me. You didn’t do anything to make him leave. And you don’t have to do anything now that he’s coming back.”

  Shannon reached for her Bloody Mary, and Wren realized with surprise that the glass was empty already. “I’m still not sure I want to see him, period.”

  Wren had hoped differently; she knew Shannon harbored the most anger and reservation about the whole idea, but she needed her older sister in this. She wasn’t sure she could do it alone.

  “You don’t have to,” Lindy said. “You’re a grown woman.”

  Wren shifted uncomfortably in her seat. It didn’t matter that they were grown women, as she’d called them. Wren had felt the flutter of those hard childhood years since the realization of Caleb’s return. She didn’t like the division she was starting to sense between them.

  The server arrived, scanning the mostly full plates. “Would you ladies like me to wrap these?”

  Shannon held up her empty glass.

  “Another drink?” the server asked.

  Before Wren could object, Shannon nodded. She had to get back to the store, and surely Shannon had had enough.

  But Shannon leaned back luxuriously in her seat. “Lunch is on Reid and me! Take your time. Mom, do you want dessert? They have a sublime blueberry tart. Local.” Her voice was a bit too loud. She thrust the menu across the table, nearly knocking over Wren’s water glass. Wren glanced at the nearby tables of diners.

  Lindy, too, was eyeing the empty glass in front of Shannon. “I’m going to finish my salad. You should, too, honey.”

  But Shannon wasn’t listening. She was scrolling through her phone, her neatly plucked brows furrowed. “I want to show you both my latest listing, but I can’t seem to find it . . . Oh, wait. Here it is! Reid landed the old house on Oyster Pond I was telling you about at dinner. We’re listing it at one-point-six.” She handed her mother her phone.

  Lindy shaded the screen with her hand before passing it to Wren. “Good lord, I remember when that house was built. Couldn’t have cost more than fifty thousand back then.”

  Shannon beamed. “We beat out two other agencies!”

  Wren watched her out of the corner of her eye, as she leaned over her mother’s shoulder and pretended to look at the photos on the screen. To the naked eye, Shannon was the picture of poise. Her blonde hair was pulled back, her Linda Farrow cat-eye sunglasses perched neatly atop her head. Wren would never have known the brand and certainly not the cost, except for the fact Piper had swiped them off Shannon’s head the second she walked in the kitchen the other night at Lindy’s. “Fancy pants. These would’ve cost a pretty penny,” she’d exclaimed to the kitchen as a whole.

  Reid had winced. “Don’t remind me.”

  “Hey,” Shannon had said, snatching them back. She polished the lens with the corner of her shirt. “Don’t be rude, Pipes.”

  Piper had whispered in Wren’s ear,
her breath hot and accusatory, just like she used to when they were little. “Twelve hundred dollars.”

  Wren had nearly choked on her wine.

  She knew that their older sister didn’t like to talk about money, that she considered it déclassé, but twelve hundred dollars would’ve covered the entire accent lighting budget in her new store and probably the new toilet in the back bathroom, too. Wren knew Reid and Shannon were well off, likely more so than all of the rest of them combined, and to her credit Shannon never once boasted about it. But the excess worried Wren at times. It wasn’t just the house, the cars, the hired help for the property. Even the kids had state-of-the-art sports equipment, the most expensive shoes, the very best instructors: all things they would outgrow. It just seemed so lavish.

  “Congratulations,” Wren told her, handing her back the phone. Shannon’s appearance was crisp and manicured, like the other women outside. But Wren could detect the chinks in her older sister’s armor; small things no one else would notice. It was in the way Shannon fiddled with her watch while they were talking, turning it to and fro on her slender wrist. And how she’d glanced around for the server throughout the entire meal, well before the level of her Bloody Mary reached its halfway mark. And there was more: behind the erect posture there was that glazed fatigue in her eyes Wren had been noticing in recent months, the red rims of her eyelids. Wren felt for her; she knew that the sometimes annoyingly high standards Shannon may have expected of the rest of them were nowhere as stringent as the ones she expected of herself. Shannon was not just Type A. She was Type A+. How tiring it must be listening to that endless voice inside her head: “Sold a house? Get another listing! Avery won her tennis match? Now teach George to sail!” For all her admirable accomplishments, Wren was pretty certain Shannon never slowed down enough to enjoy any one of them. It was a rat race she’d signed herself up for, a circuitous route that went round and round like a hamster wheel, with no finish line in sight.

  Now, with their father coming back, Wren worried how she would handle this, too. Shannon had always been so buttoned up in her emotions. Unlike Piper, who would flee, either down the street as a child or back to the city these days, hiccupping back tears as she went. Or like Wren, who knew she retreated into her home and work, avoiding everyone in the family but Lucy. But not Shannon Bailey. No—Shannon got her hair done and took everyone to lunch. Now, as the sun slipped behind the only cloud in the sky, she waved down the server and asked for two blueberry tarts to go. She turned to Lindy and Wren, smiling tightly. “You’ll love them, I promise.”

  Wren tried not to notice the way her hand shook when she signed the check. Onward! she imagined the tinny voice inside her sister’s head shouting.

  Eleven

  Caleb

  He could sense the coast even before he could see it. The pitch pines, the scrub brush, the wild rose hedges along the road. He’d drifted off sometime after leaving South Station Terminal in Boston, and although he wasn’t sure how long he’d been out, he suddenly was quite sure of where they were.

  Outside the window the low beach scrub rolled away, dry and scraggly. The bus lurched and hissed slowing behind a line of cars as it pressed up Route 6. Up ahead the exit for Sandwich loomed on his right. Caleb rested his head against the smudged window pane and closed his eyes. His grandfather, Owen Livingston Bailey, had grown up in Sandwich, had found work as a builder, and eventually put up his own house and raised his family there. He’d been the one to first put a fishing rod in Caleb’s hands. From the age of five or six on, whenever he visited his grandfather, they’d pull out the dented dinghy from behind the shed and carry it down to the kettle pond just across the road. All afternoon, rain or shine, they would sit and cast their lines for perch and bluegill. Caleb was patient and quiet, his grandfather said. The two things that made a good fisherman. As their lures bobbed and floated atop the pond surface, Caleb would study his grandfather’s knobby fingers, thick and gnarled with age like tree branches. It was hard for the older man to hold a pencil or work beneath the hood of his Ford pickup, his fingers fumbling to grip the tools he needed. But somehow he could still thread a line and spool a reel despite the trembling in his hands. It didn’t bother Caleb; rather, he liked to watch the old man’s hands work. They were slow and familiar, and in familiarity was comfort. The languid afternoon stretched itself across the pond as the two hunched together on the wooden seat of the dinghy staring at their red-and-white bobbers.

  Sometimes they spoke, of boyhood stuff like school and siblings. And about girls—how the ones in his class were a strange and chatty bunch who followed him around—what not to say to them even if they were bothersome. And later, especially if he liked them, what he should say. His Grampa Owen was the man who taught Caleb how to fish—to bait a hook, spool a reel, cast a line. All with few words: a nod here, a grunt of agreement there. He taught him to feel the line—how to know when to let the spool spin, when to reel it in. Lessons that took him from kettle pond to college, and eventually out into the world at large. Lessons in how to be a man.

  Caleb knew he had not become that man. As much as he’d wanted to. He’d been given a talent for capturing images and a woman whom he loved with a fierceness that he could never seem to capture. And he’d lost it all.

  Twelve

  Shannon

  It was the fourth day of summer vacation and the kids were flopped across the living room furniture in various states of repose, still luxuriating in the freedom of their school-free mornings. In that vein, the kitchen countertops looked like the beach after high tide had washed in and out, detritus scattered across their surfaces.

  “Who made toast?” Shannon called out in the direction of the living room. No one answered.

  She grabbed a dishtowel and swept the crumbs into her hand, polishing the countertop as she made her way to the garbage. There was an open jar of peanut butter with the knife still stuck in it, and what looked to be raspberry jam smeared on the marble surface. Someone had left a burned bagel in the toaster oven. Shannon sighed. It didn’t matter that she’d risen before each of them and offered to make an egg frittata for breakfast. They’d each rolled out of bed and straggled downstairs only to collapse on the couch and flick on their various devices, grumbling that it was too early to eat.

  “How about bacon?”

  Silence, except for the fingers tapping on screens.

  So she’d retreated to her office upstairs to download photos and work on images for the agency’s latest listings. Now, an hour later, Winnie was still hunched over her phone on the couch. George was sprawled belly-up on the leather ottoman watching the Disney Channel upside down. The only difference was the evidence, strewn across the kitchen, that they had indeed eaten.

  Shannon scooped up the empty juice glasses and plates and loaded the dishwasher. “George, Hermit Crab school starts in thirty minutes. Run upstairs and get dressed.” It was the morning she’d been dreading, the same morning she’d dreaded with Winnie and Avery, a few summers earlier. George was starting his first day at sailing camp.

  George appeared at the kitchen island. “Do I get my own Opti?”

  Shannon regarded him over the counter: his cherubic face, still filled out with childhood plush. The mop of blond hair that he swept aside each time he spoke. She forced a smile. “Yes.”

  “Not true,” Winnie called out authoritatively from the couch. “Not until you’re a Sprite. And that’s with an instructor. You can’t go on your own until you’re a Seaman.” Winnie had been in the Seamen last summer.

  George’s face fell. “You’ll get to try out all kinds of boats,” Shannon assured him. “Including an Opti. Now go get ready. And don’t forget your water shoes.”

  George glared at his sister, who had already returned her focus to her phone, whooped loudly and took off. The second she heard his footsteps on the stairs Shannon leaned over the countertop and put her head in her hands.

  “Breathe.” Reid came into the kitchen and poured himself a
cup of coffee.

  “Easy for you to say. Your family grew up on the water.”

  He came over and put a hand on her back. “So did yours, honey.”

  Shannon shook her head. It wasn’t the same. Reid’s family had long belonged to the yacht club. He learned to sail before he learned to ride a bike. It was true that she and her sisters had also learned those things. But in local waters and in humble watercraft. Caleb had first taken them out fishing in the family’s dinghy on Oyster Pond. As for sailing, they’d had an old wooden Beetle Cat that he was forever working on, that they stored on blocks in the backyard of their Ridgevale Beach home before taking it over to Lighthouse Beach. It was the first watercraft she’d ever sailed in alone, and the very same one her mother decided to sell, years later, after she told the girls that their father would not be coming home.

  • • •

  It had been a late fall day, beginning in a silvery frost as the girls waited for the school bus outside Beverly’s house. The sisters were waiting by the mailbox, shivering and huddling together as they tried to stay warm. Piper had discovered a puddle laced with ice and was dragging a stick through it, etching its frosty surface. Shannon stood back, not wanting to get splashed.

  Behind them, Lindy waited on the front porch cupping a steaming mug of tea, as usual. What was not usual was the weighty dread that had settled in Shannon’s stomach ever since her father’s leaving. It had happened before—these “trips” he’d take—sometimes for weeks. Sometimes for a month. But Caleb had always called or sent word in the form of a postcard from some place the girls considered exotic: the red desert from the Arizona badlands or the white peaks of Denali. They were used to his coming and going, the ebb and flow of missing him and then reuniting, listening intently to the grand stories of his travels as he splayed the photographs across the dining-room table for their eager consumption. With great animation he’d tell them about the places he had been to and the people he had seen. It was a small way of bringing them along for the journey. The homecomings were celebrations, a balm to his absences that would sustain them until he went off on another assignment. But that was before what had happened that morning on Lighthouse Beach. He’d been gone for over a month by that time.