Firefly Beach (20 page)

A
T THE HOSPITAL
, S
KYE WANTED TO HEAR EVERYTHING
. If she ignored the antiseptic smell, the nurses walking by, and Skye wearing pajamas during the day, Caroline could almost imagine they were just two sisters having coffee. Only it was tea, lukewarm, in paper cups. And her sister’s face was bruised, shades of yellow and fading purple.

“What’s he like?” Skye asked.

“He has an amazing boat,” Caroline said. “Like a floating laboratory, so high-tech, you can’t believe it. They analyze the sediment and artifacts right there—”

“Not the boat,” Skye said. “Him.”

“He’s guarded,” Caroline said, flushing as she remembered his arms around her shoulders, his deep kiss. “Very guarded…never mind about that. How are you?”

“Why won’t you let me care about you?”

“What are you talking about?” Caroline asked, shocked by the question.

“I want to know about you, and you always turn it back to me.”

“I answered you—”

“In the most
perfunctory
way, just to get me off your back. You’re like this all the time. Maybe you don’t even know you’re doing it.” Skye exhaled. “Does he realize he’s in love with you?”

“Skye,” Caroline said, shaking her head.

“He is. Of course he is. Why else would he come to Black Hall? Don’t tell me it’s for that sunken ship. There are plenty of buried treasures around the world. He’s here for you. You got under his skin all those years ago, and now he’s come to sail away with you.”

“That’s not true,” Caroline said.

“Love,” Skye said, staring out the window.

“Love is not the answer to everything,” Caroline said, shaken by Skye’s accusation. “No matter how much you want to believe it.”

“Is he what you expected? After all this time, does he match the picture you had of him in your mind?”

“I don’t know,” Caroline said, comparing her image of Joe as a cowlicked child with the serious blue-eyed man. Oddly enough, they weren’t completely different, only the man had lost that boy’s loving, open smile.

“It must be like a wish finally coming true,” Skye said. “Seeing someone so important after all this time. It would be like…”

“Like what, Skye?” Caroline asked, alarmed by the change in her sister’s tone.

Skye’s head was down, but when she started to talk, Caroline could tell she was trying not to cry.

“Like Andrew Lockwood coming back to life,” she said.

The sisters sat in silence. What if it were possible? Caroline could see him now, that other tragic boy from their past. His eyes were brown, not blue, and he had lived in the mountains, not by the sea. She put her arm around Skye.

“Did Homer come home? Mom was here this morning, and she said he was gone again all night.”

“He’s back.”

“Where do you think he goes, Caroline?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Simon told me you’re letting him stay at the inn. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” Caroline said, sipping her tea.

“Did Joe ask about me? The reason I called?”

“Yes, he did.”

Skye shook her head. Her face was pale, and it seemed to be getting paler. Caroline knew her sister well, and she could see that she was uncomfortable, embarrassed about the drunken phone call. Caroline’s first impulse was to comfort her, but she held back.

“Shitfaced to the max,” Skye said. “What can I say?”

“What are you going to do about it?” Caroline asked.

Skye opened the drawer of the bedside table. She removed a gray pamphlet titled “Forty Questions.” Glancing at the questions, Caroline could see that they were meant to help a person determine whether or not she was an alcoholic.

“It’s rigged,” Skye said.

“How?”

“It makes me seem like an alcoholic.”

Caroline let Skye’s statement hang in the air. In the hallway, a voice came over the public address system anouncing that Dr. Dixon was wanted in the emergency room. Someone on the floor had their television turned up high. Game-show bells and laugh tracks sounded noisy and festive.

“Dad wanted us to feel the ecstasy of life,” Skye said. “Had you ever felt it, Caroline?”

“Yes,” she said, thinking of the moonlit nights, the cries of nightbirds. She thought of dusty trails and thorny banks, wild animals screeching in the night, adrenaline flowing in her blood.

“It was incredible,” Skye said. “I hated it, I was so scared, but I got used to it.”

“To what?”

“To the surge. That feeling of really being alive. But we can’t sustain it.”

Caroline thought of kissing Joe last night. “Maybe we can,” she said.

“I think I’m supposed to die young,” Skye whispered.

“You can stop drinking instead,” Caroline replied.

“It’s complicated,” Skye said. “You make it sound so easy.”

“I don’t think it’s easy.”

“I don’t even know if I want to.”

“That’s for you to decide,” Caroline said, sounding peaceful but feeling the opposite.

Skye didn’t respond. She was staring at the pamphlet of forty questions, frowning at it as if she wished it would disappear.

Michele warned Clea: Watch out.

Caroline was in a horrible mood. She refused to accept the salmon from the fish man, she told Michele she hated daisies on the tables in the bar, and she asked a group of rowdy young artists from Montreal to keep it down even though they were making no more noise than any other rowdy young artists over the last hundred or so years.

Clea had pulled up with a trunkful of old clothes to ask what Caroline thought she and Peter should wear to the ball. She half considered leaving, to come back another day, but ignoring problems had never done anyone in the Renwick family any good. So she walked into Caroline’s inner office.

“Since the theme this year is favorite paintings,” Clea said, “I thought we should go as one of Dad’s. I mean, don’t you think?”

“If every one of Dad’s paintings burned in hell, I’d be happy,” Caroline said, furiously tapping numbers into her calculator.

“Dad was many things, but he did make beautiful pictures,” Clea said, stepping back and lowering her voice to speak to Caroline the way SWAT negotiators speak to hothead terrorists.

“I saw Skye this morning,” Caroline said.

“How was she?”

“Weighing the options. Whether she’d rather die young or give up drinking.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. Dying young sounds so romantic, doesn’t it? Artistically drinking oneself to death. Too bad it’s so messy. And it makes people so mean.”

“Like Dad.”

“We’re not supposed to notice he drank,” Caroline said. “Or else we’re supposed to excuse it because he was Hugh Renwick.”

“What do you mean?”

“He got away with things no one else could. He had Large Concerns. Life was dark, and brutal, and harsh, and infested with evil. You know? And he saw so
deeply
because he was this great artist. He couldn’t
not
see.”

“Why are you in such a bad mood?” Clea asked, struck by Caroline’s intensity, by the anger in her gray eyes.

“Lies were the truth in our family, have you ever noticed?”

“Like what?”

“Like Dad drank because Skye shot a man. He was so broken up with guilt over letting her hunt, he shut himself up in his studio or my bar with a bottle of scotch. Supposedly because he loved us so much, right? Because he had wanted to protect us, and instead he’d ruined us. But what a lie!”

“How?”

“Because if he really loved us, he would have stayed in our lives. He was here, but he was gone.”

“He lost hope,” Clea said quietly.

“But why?” Caroline asked. “We still loved him. I don’t know about you, but I still needed him. More, if that’s possible.”

“I know.”

Caroline squeezed her eyes shut. Slashing the tears away with her index fingers, her chest shook with repressed sobs. Clea watched; Caroline would never just let it out. This was the thing they couldn’t understand, the way their father had just decided to depart. He was
right there,
sitting in plain sight, but he was a million miles away, in a haze of scotch.

“He’d brought daughters into such a barbaric world,” Caroline said. “So much for ‘the ecstasy of life.’ Too bad his philosophies were in such dire conflict. He forced us to hunt our entire childhood, and suddenly he never took us to the mountains again. It was over.”

“It wasn’t over,” Clea said. “He was sick. That’s how I see it—sick with grief.”

“You’re more understanding than I am,” Caroline said.

“Feeling bitter doesn’t work,” Clea said, covering Caroline’s hand. Caroline allowed it; no one could say the things to her Clea did. Maybe because she hadn’t seen Andrew die, Clea was softer, more trusting and unguarded, than either of her sisters. She didn’t suffer in the same way as Caroline and Skye.

“He wanted to be near you, Caroline,” Clea said. “It’s why he came to your inn.”

“To drink!” Caroline said, holding back a sob.

“What’s wrong?” Clea asked. “You sound awful.”

“Am I aloof? Do I stop people from caring about me?”

“Not exactly,” Clea said, alarmed by how frantic Caroline sounded.

“ ‘Not exactly?’ What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re…competent. That’s what it is. You handle everything so well, you give people the idea you don’t need them.”

“I need them plenty,” Caroline said angrily, crumpling up her paper, starting over. “I need Skye to get a grip on herself.”

“Uh-huh,” Clea said, seeing the contradictions in her sister, the fact that even in a fury she could still not express her own needs—Caroline once again projecting her own feelings outward onto those she loved.

“I’m sorry,” Caroline said. “But if you’d heard Skye, you’d understand. She is in bad shape. We have this whole family legend going about art and drinking. Skye and Dad. What a lie.”

“Maybe that’s why I married a minister,” Clea said, smiling at Caroline. “Finally, a man I can trust.” But even as she said the words, she knew they were true. She could never love an ordinary man, one who thought white lies were okay, who might believe a secret affair was acceptable if no one found out, who could lie to himself and his family about drinking himself to death.

Caroline turned her attention to her calculator and stack of receipts. Clea watched her flip through invoices, her fingers skipping over the keys. This was Caroline in action, Caroline being excellent. Clea had observed all her sister’s escape attempts, and this was one of the most effective.

“Did you have fun last night?” Clea asked.

“What?” Caroline asked, her fingers stopping mid-click.

“Last night?” Clea asked, smiling. “Did you have fun?” When Caroline didn’t reply, she went on. “You did go to the
Meteor,
didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Caroline said. She closed her eyes, gathering her thoughts. Her gray eyes flew open, and she exploded, “You should have heard him, he’s just as crazy as Skye. Even more so! You’d think I’m to blame for every single person’s crummy childhood from here to Boston.”

“You’re not to blame for mine,” Clea said.

“He wanted an account of what happened the night his father died. It was horrible.”

“It sounds it,” Clea said soothingly.

“He basically grilled me. I told him what I could, and he started off being very high-and-mighty, saying I could not know how he felt. But he must have felt sorry. I think he did, because he pulled me over—so hard, it hurt my shoulder—and kissed me.”

“Kissed you?” Clea asked.

Caroline nodded, miserable. She stared at her hands. Clea sat back, not wanting to say the wrong thing. Caroline never reacted to men this way. She was so guarded, she set herself so apart, she never let them get to her. Their father had schooled them in the ways of men and women, and Caroline had chosen her armor carefully and early. But it was off right now, Clea could see, plain as day.

“He shouldn’t have done it,” Caroline said. “He can’t stand me.”

“If he can’t stand you, why did he kiss you?”

Caroline blinked. Her lashes were long and dark. They rested for a second on her pale cheek, then opened. Her eyes were clear, periwinkle blue, and full of distress.