Lighthouse Bay

by Kimberley Freeman

  That smell. So familiar, waking in her long-buried feelings. Seaweed. Salt. A smell both invigorating and overpowering. She inhaled great lungfuls of it. From here she could look to the north and see the promontory that curved around the northern tip of Lighthouse Bay—her childhood home—with the old lighthouse catching the sun on its limewashed bricks. Her heart stammered.

  Libby turned and crossed the road back to her car. She’d bought it two days ago, still jetlagged from her arrival in Brisbane. She hadn’t driven a car in years. There was no need in Paris, and during any holidays she spent with Mark, he would drive. He was precious about his Mercedes and any suggestion that she could take a turn at the wheel was met with a quick but gentle refusal. Driving this little Subaru off the lot had been an interesting experience. She dropped the clutch, kangaroo-hopped it to the driveway, then had to remember how to hill-start before she could make it out onto the incline into traffic. But it had come back to her quickly, and she took heart in that.

  Libby started the car and pulled back onto the road that wound along the cliff’s edge and to the north. The cliff slowly tapered down, and the white-golden beach came into view. It was empty but for a few fishermen and the occasional mad sunbather braving the midday heat. Lighthouse Bay was too far north to be convenient, like the famous beaches of Noosa and Peregian. When Libby had left town in the late 1980s, it had been a backwater, a place young people escaped from to the bigger smokes of Brisbane or Sydney. But as the road guided her up into the town, she could see that things had changed. The main street was now a shopping strip. Beach-clothing stores, al fresco restaurants, a gourmet ice creamery, shiny takeaways, a large bottle shop. The slow but determined creep of progress was visible in a small shopping complex, with white painted plaster and lots of glass windows and a smoothie chain store with street frontage.

  Then there it was, almost exactly the same as the last time Libby had seen it, perhaps with fresher paint: her father’s B&B. When Libby was a child, the summer would see all four rooms full, and the winter would see Juliet and Libby playing in them empty, pretending to own a castle. But no, it was her sister’s business now, with JULIET’S painted on the front window where once it had said REGGIE’S. Libby slowed but didn’t stop. There would be time to see Juliet soon, but not now. Not while Libby was grappling with the strangeness of being back here. In the place she said she’d never return to. Ever.

  The road branched off in two directions now. One would take her back to the beachfront and then to the cottage. The other would take her a little farther inland, through the suburb she had grown up in, and past the cemetery where her father was buried.

  Libby indicated and headed towards the cemetery.

  Lighthouse Bay Lawn Cemetery was small and shady. She parked her car on the street and walked along parallel to the low iron face until she reached the gate. It squeaked open, then clanged closed behind her. For a moment she was bewildered. He was in here somewhere, but where? She walked along between the headstones, glancing at them for familiar letters. Around the fish pond and down the narrow path towards the back fence. Finally she found it.

  Reginald Robert Slater. b. 1938, d. 1996. At rest.

  Libby read the simple inscription over and over again. He’d only been fifty-eight when he’d died; the same age as Mark. But at the time she’d thought him old. She’d thought his sudden death from a heart attack par for the course for the elderly. No lingering death from sickness that would have tempted her to come home and say good-bye. She hadn’t even come to the funeral: it was simply too far from Paris.

  A butcher bird on a nearby tree started to sing, breaking into the thoughts that had made her squirm with guilt. She wished she’d brought some flowers to put on his grave, but she realized that it would have been an empty gesture. Libby raised her eyes and took in the rest of the cemetery. Her mother was in here somewhere too, but she had died before Libby’s second birthday, just three days after Juliet was born. Libby had no recollection of her and had never missed her. Not the way she was suddenly and unexpectedly missing her father.

  She could hear the sea drawing and shushing in the distance. She was struck by a raft of sensations so fierce and overwhelming that she thought it might knock her to her knees: grief, regret, aching love, cold guilt. Sometimes, in the days since Mark’s death, Libby had wondered why on earth she was still alive. Why hadn’t the pain killed her yet? It seemed impossible she could feel this bad and not die of it.

  But she went on. Broken inside, but still moving her body, still breathing in and out. She walked down the row of graves back to the car, idly reading headstones. Most names were unfamiliar. But one, under the spreading branches of a tree, she knew very well. Andrew Nicholson. Andy. She wondered if Juliet still visited his grave.

  Libby slid back into the car. Today, she couldn’t face seeing Juliet. Today, she would deal with the simple yet overwhelming task of seeing the cottage Mark had bought for her—for them.

  She recognized the cottage as soon as she saw it, standing there alone on the bottom of the gravel path to the lighthouse. Not just from the photographs Mark had shown her, but from her own youth. She stretched her memory backwards for local history. The cottage had been built in the 1940s as the new lighthouse keeper’s residence. When she had lived in Lighthouse Bay, the cottage had been empty. Pirate Pete had chosen to live in the lighthouse, which was a relic of the nineteenth century. And now thinking of Pirate Pete brought more recollections. She and a group of her teenage friends, daring each other to go up the path towards the lighthouse and knock on the door. Giggling like fools. Pirate Pete swinging open the door, his long gray beard and his icy eyes. “You kids leave me the hell alone!” Pirate Pete had featured heavily in their late-night slumber-party scary stories. Except he wasn’t a pirate, of course. He was just a lighthouse keeper and, perhaps, a lonely old man.

  She pulled the car into the overgrown driveway and turned off the engine, then sat there for a few minutes, hands locked on the steering wheel, letting the thoughts and memories wash over her. In her handbag were the keys—keys she thought she’d never use. Libby sighed. This wasn’t what she’d expected to do with her life this week. She hadn’t expected to return home, in mourning, with no job, to a cottage that she owned but had never seen the inside of.

  Mark had traveled to Queensland once a year to buy opals. Six years ago, he had taken a side trip to nearby Winterbourne Beach, a place named after his family and a popular diving location because of a legendary treasure his family lost in a shipwreck at the turn of the twentieth century. “While I was there, how could I not go to see the place where my baby girl was born and bred?” he’d said. “The cottage was for sale and I wanted a way to show you how much I love you.”

  Blinking back tears, she scooped up her handbag and climbed out of the car. The first key she tried fitted the front door lock, and then she was inside.

  Musty. Old things. Itching dust. The windows were covered in a fine crust of salt, fogging the view of the outside world. First mental note: get windows cleaned. She crossed the living-room floor—brown tiles, thin brown rug, old square wooden table, no chairs—and unlatched the aluminum sliders. With a heft, she pulled each one open, letting in the sea breeze. It may have been originally built in the 1940s, but the decor was wholly 1970s. The kitchen bench was bright green laminate, the splashbacks were made of tiny tiles the color of pond scum. The gas stove was laced with cobwebs and dotted with cockroach droppings. Second mental note: scrub everything with industrial-strength cleaner.

  A short hallway led to a miserable bathroom, a laundry with a back door, and two bedrooms. The first, the main bedroom, was painted pale pink. The bed was wrought iron, king-sized, with a mattress on it still in plastic wrapping. A quick check of the cupboards unearthed pale green linen, also still in wrapping. She stopped and took a breath.

  Once, they had almost come. Mark had organized the time off work, Libby had chosen colors for the bedroom. These colors. But a week before
their flight, her feet had grown cold. “Just give me another six months,” she’d said. “I’ll write to Juliet and see how she feels about it all. There’s a lot of bad blood.”

  “What kind of bad blood?”

  But she’d never been able to tell him. Her hold on him was already so tenuous: if she’d articulated her shame, her guilt, would his feelings have cooled? Six months became a year. A year became two. She hadn’t written to Juliet, and he’d stopped asking: maybe he thought he could work on her slowly over time. But time had run out.

  The second bedroom was not really big enough to be a bedroom; it was more of a studio, with a whole wall of sliding aluminum windows. It was set up as an art room; two blank canvases stood on easels, cobwebbed. It made her sit down on the floor and cry.

  When Mark bought the cottage, she had wondered why he would pressure her into going back to a place she’d sworn she’d never return to. But all he’d wanted was for her to give up the job with Pierre-Louis and take life easier, relax and paint, her dream since she was a child. And here it all was: a little cottage, a view of the sea, a way to get started. And Mark wasn’t here to see how grateful she was, how much she appreciated this gesture of love.

  Libby cried for what seemed like an age, then pulled herself to her feet and palmed tears off her face. She flicked the light switch: nothing. No electricity. She returned to the kitchen. The fridge was standing open, empty. Nothing in the pantry. No cleaning products or dishcloths under the sink. She needed the basics. That meant a trip to the general store. The longer she was in town, the greater the risk she’d run into her sister accidentally. But she couldn’t bring herself to go to the B&B just yet. One more good night’s sleep and then she’d do it. Definitely.

  The sticky heat made her tired. Libby just wanted to curl up and sleep. But she had to spend the afternoon getting the cottage in order. She dressed in a sleeveless cotton top and shorts, tied back her long, dark hair and summoned as much energy as she could. By sunset, she had a light scum of perspiration and cobwebs all over her. She considered a shower, but then remembered she was on the sea. So, instead, she found her bathing costume and headed to the beach.

  Years of city living a long way from the sea had made her wary. What if there were jellyfish? Sharks? But the water was blue-green and clear and warm, rolling all around her. She waded in to her waist, then dived into a wave. The constant pull of the waves was replaced by the sound of water bubbling against her ears, then she was up again, gulping air and laughing. The idea that she could be out this late in nothing but a bathing costume, swimming in the sea, was ridiculous. In Paris at this time, she’d be layering on gloves and a scarf for the walk back to the Metro, grinding for space with other commuters. Here on the beach, the only other person was a fisherman up to his ankles in the tide, half a kilometer away.

  She floated on her back for a while, letting the waves carry her. Salt water on her lips, hair streaming behind her. Then she waded back out onto the beach and sat on the sand to dry by air. The sweet bruise of dusk in the sky; brazen pinks and golds gave way to subtle purple and pewter. She was wrapped in velvet: the soft sand, the sea mist over the headland, the temperate breeze, and her own human softness, her flesh and muscle and aching heart. Libby closed her eyes.

  When she opened them again, the fisherman was gone and dusk was falling away to night. She rose and dusted off the sand, and trudged back up towards the cottage. The beach was separated from civilization by a strip of vegetation: banksias, pandanuses, mangroves. Ghost crabs scuttled away from her as she made her way up the sandy path to the street. She let herself into the cottage and was pleased that the musty smell was gone. The sea breeze was rushing in at the windows, making the light lacy curtains flutter. She made a peanut-butter sandwich, showered off the salt quickly under unheated water, and thought about making a start on setting up a canvas and opening some of the boxes of paints. But weariness had other ideas for her, and she climbed into bed instead.

  Around 11 pm, she woke wondering what had prickled her from sleep. A car engine. She lay in the dark awhile, listening. The car wasn’t moving away or moving closer, just sitting in the same place.

  She rose and pulled back the corner of the curtain. Yes, a car sat on the road right outside her house. Headlights on. Motor running. Not moving. Libby watched it, curious. Then, with a slight thrill of apprehension. It was too dark to see what kind of car it was, let alone the number plate. Five minutes passed. Ten. Finally, it pulled into the street, did a U-turn, its tires crunching on the gravel shoulder, and roared off.

  Three

  It wasn’t a good day for an entire mothers’ group to come in. Cheryl had called in sick at seven, and Juliet hadn’t been able to track down Melody to start early. Juliet reasoned that if she left the dirty linen in room number two, she could manage the tea room by herself until lunchtime when Melody was due. Then after lunch she could slip upstairs and strip the linen, make beds, give the only occupied room a quick vacuum, and be down in time for the after-school trade. But this plan relied on a normal morning.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” said the round-faced young woman with the equally round-faced baby on her hip, “but we had intended to meet at my place and I forgot the renovators were coming to build my new linen cupboard. Just too much noise.”

  “Of course I don’t mind,” Juliet said, smiling, frantically doing calculations in her head. There were twelve of them. Even if every single one of them ordered scones with jam and cream, there would still be fourteen scones left over for her regular customers. Should she get started on a scone mix now just in case? Before they all started asking for bottles to be heated and coffees made a dozen different ways?

  Juliet didn’t have time to resolve this question. The orders started coming and she started running—carefully and gracefully—between tables and kitchen, ruefully eyeing the four unopened loaves of bread set out to prepare ready-made sandwiches for lunch. Today would be a nightmare and that was that. She simply had to put her head down and work hard. Luckily, working hard was something Juliet was well used to. She tied back her long, brown hair and got on with it.

  Juliet’s B&B and Tea Room, or as her business was popularly known, Juliet’s, owed a little of its success to location: it was right on the beach, with a wide wooden deck undercover for toddlers to feed seagulls and harried mothers to soothe their sleep-deprived eyes on the sea. But the business owed most of its success to Juliet. “She’s a marvel, that Juliet,” she heard people say frequently. Once or twice she’d heard, “Married to her job too,” but only after she’d turned away the affections of Sergeant Scott Lacey, former career ratbag at Bay High who now enforced the law at the local police station. But Juliet was neither a marvel nor married to her job. When her father had died fifteen years ago, he left the business behind and somebody had to pick up the reins. She’d only been twenty-three, but she knew she couldn’t let all her father’s work go to waste. She’d added the tea room, renamed it Juliet’s, and hadn’t had a day off since. Even away for three weeks on a meditation retreat in New Zealand, she had phoned Cheryl every day to check in, solve problems, and add to the enormous to-do list for her return.

  At eleven-thirty, while Melody cleared the tables on the deck, and Juliet frantically made sandwiches, and the phone rang unanswered in the background, the bell over the door went and Juliet thought, Please, no more customers. Just give me ten minutes to make these sandwiches.

  But then Melody came to the kitchen door and said, “Juliet, somebody here to see you.”

  Juliet looked up, wiping sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand and blowing a strand of loose hair out of her eyes. “Who?”

  “She says her name is Libby.”

  Despite the sticky warmth in the kitchen, Juliet’s entire body went cold. “No. Are you sure?”

  Melody spoke warily. “That’s what she said. Is everything okay?”

  Juliet never swore. It wasn’t that she was prudish, it was simply that the wor
ds were often spoken with such anger or coarseness that they made her flinch. But on this occasion, as she put down the butter knife and pressed her palms into the stainless-steel work bench, she shouted, “Fuuuuuck.”

  Melody, only nineteen and now more frightened than puzzled, backed away. “It’s okay, I’ll tell her you’re too busy to see her now.”

  Juliet untied her apron. “No, no. I’ll see her. She’s my sister. The one I haven’t seen in twenty years.” Her heart looped a fast rhythm. Twenty years. Not since . . . Juliet shook her head. “Here,” she said, handing Melody the apron. “Make four ham and salad, four turkey Swiss and cranberry and four . . . oh, use your imagination. Where is she?”

  “Out on the deck. I haven’t finished cleaning up after the mothers’ group yet.”

  Juliet swallowed hard. Her mouth was dry. She went out through the swinging doors, across the carpeted tea-room floor and out to the deck. Libby sat with her back to Juliet, wearing a crisp cotton shirt and expensive-looking jeans, her black hair gleaming in the sun. Juliet’s hand went self-consciously to her own sweaty hair, knotted at her nape. All around were tables full of empty cups and plates and spoons. Seagulls were feasting on the half-chewed remnants that toddlers had dropped. Juliet flapped them away.

  Libby turned. “Juliet,” she said, jumping to her feet.

  “I hadn’t expected to see you.” Did that sound too cold? Should she have said, “I’m glad to see you”? Was she glad to see her sister after twenty years and approximately eight Christmas cards that always arrived in February? No, what she wanted to say was, “Why are you here?” because she was afraid—suddenly, seriously afraid—that Libby was here to claim her half of the business that their father had left to both of them.