Firefly Beach (34 page)

“So,” Joe said finally, putting down the pie plate. “You can’t make up your mind.”

“Not really.”

“Well,” Joe said slowly. “Tell me your reasons for both sides.”

“Okay,” Sam said, perching on the rail. He was so clumsy, so accident-prone, Joe had to fight the urge to grab him by the collar and haul him off to keep him from going overboard. It was an exercise in tolerance to let him stay there. “I should get back to work. The whales aren’t in the passage, but I could be taking water samples, measuring salinity…”

“Stuff like that,” Joe said, agreeing.

“Or I could stay here…”

“Yeah?”

“A little longer. The gold’s pretty cool, and we found the mother lode today. I’d like to be here when we bring it up.”

“Hmm,” Joe said, smiling inwardly at the “we.”

“So…you can see my dilemma,” Sam said. “I don’t want you to think I’m after anything. I mean, any of the gold.”

“I don’t,” Joe said quickly.

“Because, frankly, I think gold sucks compared to other things. You know? Other things matter more.”

“Yeah? Like what?” Joe asked, thinking of his own list.

“Well, family,” Sam said. “Nature. The ocean. Love, I guess.”

Joe nodded. He looked across the water, at the lighthouses blinking on the mainland. The night air sent a chill down his back. Love. Joe whistled.

“Oh, yeah,” Sam said. “One more thing for the list. Good peach pie.”

“That pie was great,” Joe said, nodding. “Thanks for bringing it to me.”

“No sweat. Great enough to matter more than gold?”

“Tough call,” Joe said.

Sam was about to give up on his glasses. Sliding them back on, he glanced over and saw Joe holding out his hand.

“Give me your specs,” Joe said, gesturing “come on,” and Sam handed them over. Joe reached into his pocket, pulled out his knife. He had been away at school, absent from Sam’s childhood and all the toys an older brother might have put together, bicycles he might have repaired, but standing on the deck of the
Meteor,
Joe tightened the screws on Sam’s glasses.

“There,” he said, handing them back.

“Hey,” Sam said, putting them on. Although straighter, the frames were still crooked, and Sam was grinning.

“They look good,” Joe said inanely.

“I think I need a new prescription,” Sam said.

The
Meteor
rode higher on the rising waves, and the breeze was picking up. Here they were, standing on the deck of a treasure ship, talking about eyeglasses, when the feeling of good-bye was hanging in the air.
Good peach pie. Great.

“So, how much longer you guys staying up here?” Sam asked.

The question took Joe by surprise. He hadn’t thought in terms of the calendar. He had been thinking about the wreck, the gold, and some unfinished business on land. He wanted to visit Firefly Hill, see the spot where his father had died. He was his father’s only son, and he wanted to pay his respects. But he knew none of it would take much more than a week.

“Ten days?” Joe asked. “At the most.”

“Because,” Sam said, “I was thinking I’d stick around for a few more days. Maybe help out, bringing up the gold or something. Recording sediment samples. Unless I’ll be in the way.”

Joe shifted his gaze from the horizon to his brother. He shook his head.

“No,” he said. “You won’t be in the way.”

Sam nodded.

Joe wanted him there. But he wasn’t good at saying what he wanted, getting the things Sam had mentioned earlier. If it was an object, if it lay on the sea bottom buried in silt, if centuries had left their mark in its metal, Joe Connor was your man. But if it lived and breathed, if it had a name and knew the meaning of love, forget it. Joe was out of his element.

And yet, here was his brother, sticking around for a little while longer. Joe hadn’t even had to ask. Imagine what might happen if he tried opening his mouth. If he tried leaving his ship, heading for solid land, driving to someone’s door.

Tried to say what was on his mind, in his dreams.

Just imagine.

Skye sat on the window seat in the bedroom she still shared with Simon. She loved foggy nights. They made her feel safe and protected. She believed the fog hid sins, provided a place for people to hide. Skye had felt scared and sinful for so long, and the fog had always been a refuge.

She had clay under her fingernails. Today she had sculpted for hours in her studio. Somehow the tide had turned. She didn’t understand how, but speaking up to Caroline had loosened something inside. Or maybe Caroline had finally hit home. Back at work she had tried again to do
Three Sisters
, a piece that would capture the way she felt about herself, Clea, and Caroline.

It had to show their closeness, but it had to show their separateness too. Skye had tried to sculpt it all different ways: abstract, very abstract, representational, surreal. She had formed one solid mass, meant to express her feelings about sometimes not knowing where she ended and her sisters began. One angry day, she had plunked down three separate balls of clay, unformed and unconnected, to show how immature she and her sisters really were and how little they really knew one another.

But ever since the other morning, on Firefly Beach with Caroline, something new was emerging. Skye was doing a piece of three women standing in a circle. They were holding hands, with one woman looking into the center of the circle, one looking out, the other looking in.

She found the combination intriguing. Because there were three, at all times two sisters holding hands would be facing the same direction. And one would be facing a different way. No matter how you looked at it, two would always be united. And one would be separate. But which two? And which one?

Doing the work, Skye felt a little safer than she had been feeling. She knew she was struggling. She needed that intense connection with her sisters, but at the same time she shrank from it.

For such a long time she had thought her main problem was the resentment she felt about Joe’s father killing himself in the kitchen downstairs, her mother offering to trade her own life—and Skye’s—for Caroline’s. The beauty of a wild life, she thought. With so many traumatic events to choose from, how did you isolate the one that was making you would be relieved to die?

For all these years she had thought she was the only one to suffer. The others had found a way to beat the sorrow, to escape its spell. Out of three girls, why her? They had all survived the hunts, all carried guns. Why had she been the one to make an irrevocable mistake? To kill a man.

She never talked about it, had hardly ever told a soul. Her sisters knew some, and her father, but her husband didn’t and neither did her mother. The details of that day were too private and terrible. If she told anyone, if she ever started talking about it, the facts might eat her alive.

Kill,
she thought now. It sounded like what it was: sharp and hard and short and ugly like a bullet. She reached behind a book on the little window seat bookcase and took out her vodka bottle. She refilled her small crystal glass and took a sip.

Drunk or just drinking, Skye had passed many hours trying not to think about the hunt, about the gun and Andrew Lockwood, about any of it. She had drunk to get loaded, to get wasted, to get happy, to get sad, because she loved the taste, because she was against killing animals, because her husband liked rough sex, because she had nightmares about snakes under her tent, because her father had stopped loving her, because she hated
Swan Lake,
because she had gone to Redhawk, because she was mad at her mother for offering to trade her life for Caroline’s, because Skye herself had killed a man dead.

Working on her small sculpture that day, her impression of
Three Sisters
, Skye felt something shifting. A change in her breathing, a lessening of the pain deep inside. Prey turning on the hunter. Thinking of the worst and knowing she wasn’t alone. Nothing extreme, really. Unless you considered the desire to live extreme. Skye teetered on a suicidal seesaw: some days she wanted to live, many she would be relieved to die.

Just thinking that, huddled on her window seat clutching her secret bottle of vodka, Skye thought about living. She took a sip, tears rolling down her cheeks. The vodka dulled her feelings, made her fear more manageable, but it killed so many other things too. When was the last time she had enjoyed a morning? Eaten and not felt like throwing up? Left the house and not wanted to hide from the first person she saw? Sculpted something she was halfway proud of?

“You never have to feel this way again.”

She thought of the words Joe Connor had said to her, and she wondered what he had meant. She looked at her glass, took another sip. Skye no longer wanted to feel this way. She felt empty and desperate and sick and scared and ready to get better.

She wondered what she would have to do, and at the same time she wondered how a person could call a person on a ship at sea.

A
UGUSTA
’
S GRANDCHILDREN WERE SPENDING THE DAY
with her. They were outside, running in mad circles around the yard, loving the world of Firefly Hill as their mother and aunts had as children. Augusta sat on the porch with her tray of drink things and a few old scrapbooks, wishing the kids would tire themselves out and come sit with her. If only she had felt this way thirty years ago.

Augusta had not enjoyed her own children enough when they were young. The worst part was, she had realized it even at the time. She had had no choice in the matter. Like an illness she couldn’t cure, she was consumed with their father. The best she could do for her daughters, as much as she loved them, was to
manage
them. Plunk them down with paints and paper; hand them seeds and dirt and a flowerpot; tell them to write poems about their school day. Being with their father had always taken top priority.

When they were tiny she had let them bake cookies and freeze Jell-O in ice cube trays, making a complete mess of the kitchen. She had let them eat their favorite foods, never forced them to have vegetables or fish. The year Caroline was twelve, she had made herself macaroni and cheese every night.

Anything to keep them occupied, so Augusta could be with Hugh. She had been so afraid of losing him. She seduced him every chance she got. Wore negligees in broad daylight just to get his attention. Read art history, studied the collections of great museums to help him further his career. Instead of helping her daughters with their homework.

Hugh had been her obsession. When he was away, she had assumed he was with other women. It drove her crazy, dominated her thoughts. She had tried to concentrate on her daughters, but her own insecurity was much too huge. When Skye would beg for a story or Clea would need help with her music lessons, Augusta would tell them to ask Caroline. So Augusta could be with Hugh.

Augusta’s eyes filled, just thinking of him. She had loved him so much, and he had been so difficult. His work came first, then his fun, and somewhere down the list, Augusta and the girls. Or the girls and Augusta. She had never been quite sure of the order, and her jealousy and guilt over this fact grew even greater after the accident at Redhawk.

Hugh’s love for the girls showed in their portraits. Especially the ones of Caroline.
Girl in a White Dress
, his most famous work, had caught her beauty, fragility, and solemnity. Augusta still remembered the day he sketched her, right there at Firefly Hill. Augusta had watched, feeling like the wicked stepmother in “Snow White,” seething with the wish that Hugh was painting her instead.

Caroline had worn a straight white evening gown. She had stood on the porch, leaning against one of the columns, staring out to sea. Her eyes full of troubled passion, she had the air of a girl in a Greek tragedy. Augusta remembered staring at her oldest daughter, wondering what could make her feel such deep and helpless longing. The expression on her face was authentic sorrow, and it had wrenched Augusta’s heart. Hugh had captured the emotion perfectly.