Sailing Lessons

by Hannah McKinnon

  “When does he arrive?” Derek asked, puncturing her thoughts.

  “This weekend. I’m driving back to the Cape the night before, so I can be there.”

  Derek was staring thoughtfully at his plate. “Listen, I wanted to talk to you about that.”

  Here it was. He was about to tell her that he could not get away with her to the Cape, after all. She could already list the excuses: His family or his wife’s family was coming to Boston to visit. Or maybe both! She braced herself.

  “So, it looks like I’ll be in Chatham after all.”

  Piper leaped out of her chair and shrieked. “Really? You’re coming with me?” She noticed the couple at the table next to them staring, and she threw the woman a withering look. But when she turned back to Derek, he, too, was holding up his hands to calm her down. “Pipe, please. Sit.”

  She didn’t care if people stared. Never before had they been able to spend any real time together, let alone out of town. It was always a stolen moment, last minute, in her cramped apartment, where she had to worry about roommates coming and going. Derek didn’t want to risk anyone from campus seeing him, even though she’d assured him again and again that her roommates didn’t know him and therefore wouldn’t recognize him. And even if they did, they were cool; they were her friends. But that did little to allay his concerns, and between his teaching schedule and his family commitments, they’d been forced to live on what she not so fondly referred to as a “bread and water” relationship diet. There could be no sleepovers or romantic weekends. No restaurants or dates in public. A trip together still seemed out of the question. She was starving.

  “I know the first place I’m going to take you,” she cried, grabbing his hand across the table. “There’s this great spot on Oyster Pond where we can kayak. We’ll pack a picnic and some wine, and we can sit on the dock when the sun sets—”

  “Piper.”

  Derek’s expression held none of the excitement she felt. She swallowed hard.

  “When did you say you’re coming?”

  “I didn’t. I haven’t had a chance.”

  Piper let go of his hand. “Sorry. I’m just excited. We can finally be alone.”

  Derek winced. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m coming to Chatham. But not in the way you think.” He glanced around the café and lowered his voice. “It’s a family vacation. Melody planned it with her sister this week. I had no idea they’d chosen Chatham.”

  Piper stiffened. “How long?”

  “How long for? I think we’ll be there for a week.”

  “No.” Piper’s mouth felt like sandpaper. She cleared her throat. “How long have you known?”

  “I don’t know . . . maybe two days. I wanted to wait until I saw you.”

  The hope that had been fluttering through her chest grew heavy and landed square in her middle. “You saw me this morning. You saw a whole lot of me, in fact.”

  Derek pressed his lips together in embarrassment as the server came to clear their plates and bring the check. Piper waited, but she wasn’t done. Not nearly.

  She leaned across the table, the words hissing from her lips. “Remember? When you came over and climbed into my bed and we made love?” They’d laid limbs entangled all morning. And yet he’d said nothing.

  “Piper, please hear me out. We were supposed to go to Nantucket, but the rental fell through. Something about the house being for sale and suddenly securing a buyer. So, it was a last-minute change. I had no idea they’d settled on Chatham.”

  There was nothing she could say. “So you’re going to the Cape. And you’re going to stay in my hometown. But you’ll be with your wife.” She stood and tried to untangle her purse from the back of her chair. Derek stood with her and reached for the check.

  “You know what, Derek? You’ve been making promises to me for a long time now. And time after time you break them.” She wrenched her bag free from the chair and fumbled inside for her wallet. “Give me the check,” she demanded.

  “What?”

  “Give me the goddamn check.” She was getting the hell out of there. But before she did, she certainly wasn’t going to let him pay for her.

  He handed her the check, warily, and stood by as she fumbled through her wallet. Receipts and coins spilled out onto the table, but all she could find was a one-dollar bill. “Fuck.” The tears had already started to spill down her freckled cheeks. It was a matter of seconds before her nose turned bright red.

  “Piper, please.” Derek took the check gently from her hand. He set a twenty-dollar bill on the table and began to scoop up the stray change that had fallen from her bag.

  “Leave it,” she barked. Derek looked distraught, but did as he was told, and she took the smallest pang of pleasure from it. “Have fun on the Cape,” she said, and then she lurched for the exit. The door swung shut behind her, and without thinking she turned left, the wrong direction, she realized too late, from her T-stop. But she wasn’t about to turn around now.

  Piper did not look back as she stormed down Commonwealth, but she listened. Her ears strained against the city noise. There was no patter of hurried footsteps behind her, and no one called out her name. Derek wasn’t going to come after her.

  Fourteen

  Wren

  “There are things we can do for ourselves.” How many times had Lindy said that over the years?

  Wren had a distinct childhood memory of her mother standing on a small blue stepladder in the middle of the kitchen. She’d been balancing on the top step, and she’d asked Wren to hold the ladder for her even though it was clear to her that that wasn’t necessary. Later, Wren understood that Lindy hadn’t needed her help; what she’d needed was to illustrate her self-reliance.

  “See this broken bulb?” Lindy asked, as she unscrewed it overhead. “It’s been flickering for months. Driving me crazy.”

  Wren had heard her mother comment on the flickering light numerous times, always to her father. He would nod distractedly and shuffle back downstairs to the basement where he kept his office. Where the girls knew not to bother him. Where a trash can of bottles filled quickly each week, especially when he was working on a deadline for an assignment. Meanwhile the rest of them would continue on with life, as if he weren’t there, flickering light bulbs and all.

  “I asked your dad more times than I can count to change it, but heaven knows why, when I could’ve just done it myself.”

  Wren gazed up at her mother’s long fingers as they gripped the fragile bulb, turning it until it secured. “Now, go turn it on and let’s see.” Wren had hurried to the switch and flicked it. Lindy’s smile standing up there beneath its yellow glow was triumphant. “How about that, Wren Bailey? Two girls and a set mind.” Wren had smiled awkwardly; it was just a light bulb. But she understood. Lindy would not burden her daughters by complaining about their father’s shortcomings; instead she would teach her daughters how to navigate them, filling the cavities with competence and spackling the hurts with love.

  Fourth grade was the year when it all came to a head. Her father had landed a coveted shoot in Kathmandu. “I’m going to the Himalayas, girls! The tallest mountains in the world.” For the first time in a long while, their father was excited. Ecstatic. There was special equipment he’d need for the weather conditions, and the altitude. He drove to Hyannis to outfit himself. An expensive new lens was purchased for his old Nikon. “It’ll more than pay for itself,” he assured their mother. Suddenly there were travel books on the coffee table in the living room. Caleb joined them in their bedroom at night, clambering across Shannon’s bed and pulling them all in close where he paged through books, showing them pictures of icy mountain peaks, Nepalese festivals, and Buddhists. “Just look at the colors,” he’d whisper as the girls took turns flipping the pages. What Wren remembered most was that her father seemed to be back. Ebullient and available and hers, once more.

  His trip began in the first week of school, and the girls marked off the days on the kitche
n calendar until he’d return. It would be the last week of September, but Wren was used to that. Her father would come home happy and bearing gifts, and there’d be photos spilled across the dining-room table of the places he’d been. Glossy waves of images that told the story.

  One week later, their father came back. There was no celebration, no photographs printed. Caleb went up to her parents’ room and stayed there. Lindy’s mouth was set in a grim line thereafter. “What happened?” Shannon asked.

  “They hired another photographer.”

  “A poser!” her father shouted from upstairs. “A goddamned novice poser who probably never developed chemical film in his life.”

  There was no further explanation, but Wren knew it was because something bad must have happened. And she feared it had more to do with her father than the novice photographer.

  If Caleb’s work thinned out, his drinking did not. More and more often his office door remained closed, or they’d find him sitting at the kitchen table poring over stacks of black-and-white photos from his earlier shoots when they came home from school. Always the sweet yeasty smell of beer on his lips when he kissed them hello. At night she would overhear their parents arguing in hushed but urgent tones. “You need to address this, we can’t keep going on like this,” her mother would plead.

  “You don’t understand,” her father replied. “That assignment was mine. They stole it from me.”

  It always came back to Kathmandu. An unseen place Wren now hated. “How do we cover the bills this month? Have you seen the pile on the kitchen counter?”

  “Are you questioning my career, Lindy? Do you want me to quit what I love and get a job in some closed-off corporate office?” her father would hiss. “Is that what you want?”

  “We can’t pay the electric bill on talent!”

  There would be the thunder of feet on stairs, the slam of the front door. Followed by the gentle whimper of her mother through the wall. Wren would pull the pillow up over her head. Wren ached for her mother, but she was wrong. Her father was talented. Everyone in Chatham knew that. Her teachers at school said so, whenever she brought in magazines featuring his work for show-and-tell. As did Mr. Gregg, who owned the Chatham Market, and who always asked Caleb what location he was off to next. “You’ve got the best of both worlds!” he’d gush as he bagged their vegetables and milk. “Traveling the world and raising a family here on the Cape. You’re a lucky man, Caleb.”

  Wren’s father would smile and shake his head and tell Mr. Gregg he was too kind, it was just honest work.

  And when he was short on cash for the groceries, Mr. Gregg would wave a hand. “No problem. Next time. I’ll put it on your tab!” Only Mr. Gregg didn’t smile the next few times it happened. He’d glance nervously at Wren and her sisters and lower his voice. “I’m sorry, Caleb, but you need to take care of the account.” Wren tried to conceal the deep wave of shame that rose as her father replaced the apples to the bin, the bread on the shelf.

  That fall a FOR SALE sign went up in the front yard of their Ridgevale cottage, and Lindy packed them all up and moved the family to her mother’s house. This time Caleb did not mention Kathmandu.

  Beverly lived in town on School Street in a cozy neighborhood Lindy fondly referred to as the rabbit warren, a tangle of narrow lanes that looped around shingled cottages and tended gardens that bordered Mill Pond. It was nestled between the busy Main Street shops on one side and Chatham Lighthouse on the other. Wren loved it. There was an energy in town she had not felt on the sandy lane by the beach, and it appealed to her growing teenage need to be close to things happening. Each Saturday she held Piper’s hand and walked her south to Eldredge Library for the children’s program, enticing her little sister to come along with a promise of a stop at the pink front door of the Candy Manor on the way back if she behaved. On the warmer weekday afternoons, they hopped on their bikes and turned north, passing the Cranberry Inn until they reached Bar Cliff Road. There they turned right to the lighthouse, and finding the lot empty, they lined their bikes up against the beach fence at the top of the stairs and raced down the steps that ran through the steep dunes, down, down, down, until they hit the cool sand of Lighthouse Beach where they shed their sneakers and streaked across the sand to the water’s edge. Living in town fit.

  In the old house, the Bailey girls had all shared one room. At their grandmother’s they had two bright airy rooms to choose from upstairs, both wallpapered in navy-and-white chintz and outfitted with antique brass beds. The rooms felt a bit formal for a trio of girls who wore their long hair in loose ponytails and fancied Converse sneakers and jeans over the dresses their grandmother bought them each Christmas.

  Beverly had married her high-school sweetheart, Lindy’s father, Bert, who passed away in his fifties of a heart attack on a cod-fishing boat, leaving her with a broken heart and young Lindy to care for. Beverly possessed a bachelor’s in philosophy, course work she’d once found fascinating in college, but which was largely impractical to a widowed mother in a fishing community.

  After Bert’s death she collected the life insurance, paid off the house, and headed straight through the doors of the Cape Cod Community College, “the oldest student in my class—oh, how they stared!”—to earn her degree in library sciences. For the next twenty-five years she worked as the head of the children’s department at Eldredge Library. Beverly was well versed in single parenting and in living alone. But she was not a homebody. She played bridge with her Chatham neighbors and attended fund-raisers and art gallery openings. She was an active member of First United Methodist and volunteered at the Atwood House, organizing their visiting lecture series. Wren had wondered how she felt about the five of them stomping through her quiet front door. Her grandmother did not allow the girls to hang up posters of boy bands with thumbtacks in her good walls and did not tolerate them leaving their laundry strewn across the hardwood floors, but she understood the importance of having a room of one’s own. In that vein she welcomed the Bailey granddaughters with a flourish, accepting that that this generation twice removed was of an energy and mind-set of their own. Which she encouraged. She assigned Shannon, then fourteen, to the smaller room overlooking the garden, and Wren and Piper to the one across from it. There were fluffy down comforters on the beds, and lovingly chosen hardcover books on their bedside tables. New holiday dresses hung in each of their closets. “This is your home now, too,” she told them. Though there were a couple of rules. “You may decorate your rooms any way you choose, as long as you keep them clean. No boys upstairs, as your great-grandfather used to say. Dinner will be served at six each night. And if you’re going to play loud music, you best make sure it’s the Beatles.” She ran her hand through her sleek silver bob. “That Paul McCartney does things to a girl.”

  Later that year, after the accident on the beach and when their father had gone, snow came to Chatham in amounts the seaside community was not used to. The girls donned hats and mittens and grabbed shovels. Even little Piper, who stood in the drifts with a sand scooper. Cape winters were usually mild, long stretches of gray and wind and drizzle. But that first winter their father left, all Wren remembered was white snow that piled and drifted across the sandy beaches, covered the rooftops, buried the cars. The Bailey girls shoveled and dug until they had to strip off their hats and unzip their coats to cool off.

  The work was slow going. “We’ll make cocoa when we’re done,” Lindy promised when someone fussed or grew tired. Soon they’d cleared a pathway down the front steps and up the walkway to the car. And all around the car itself. The car was snow-laden and largely stuck.

  Lindy climbed in and started it, the engine clicking irritably in the cold. “All clear?” she’d shouted out the driver’s window. Shannon had pushed Piper and Wren aside and given her the thumbs-up. The car rolled back a few inches and then commenced a swift spinning of tires in the newly packed snow. Piper shrieked as it sprayed them in white. It was no use.

  Wren’s arms were tired, her
back sore. At that moment there were words on the tip of her tongue—foul colorful choices—that she could have so easily spat into the frozen air. Her father’s name sharpest among them. Piper was starting to fall apart, and Shannon looked put upon. But it was the look on her mother’s face that kept her frozen to the spot. If Lindy had ferried them through the last few months unshaken, she looked soon to shatter that morning. Standing beside the car, the exhaust fumes thicker than their frozen breath, their mother’s gaze swung back and forth between her rumpled children, the deep snow, and the frozen car. Wren saw it: the tremor in her chin as she pressed her cracked lips together.

  But she did not cry. “Sand!” her mother said, suddenly.

  Shannon and Wren fetched the sand bucket from the porch. It was so heavy that they staggered down the walkway like two drunks, the metal handle biting their fingers through their mittens. Together they sprinkled sand behind the tires, packing it with their mittened hands. The next time Lindy rolled the car back, it caught and then surged back across the sand-strewn tracks they’d made, leaving a car-shaped spot of exposed gravel where it had been. They’d cheered, jumping up and down in their snowsuits, then collapsed on their backs in the fluffy white drifts, exhausted. Wren stared up at the open sky and a chunk of the worry that had been burdening her shoulders fell way. She imagined it hitting the frozen ground and melting, spreading around her silhouette like a snow angel. Her mother was right. It was hard, and sometimes cold work, but there were things they could do for themselves.

  Still, there was their father’s absence. Wren had overheard her mother talking to Beverly one rainy afternoon at the dining room table. “I don’t think he’s coming back,” said her mother.