Lighthouse Bay (2 page)

She wasn’t going to call Winterbourne Jewelers. She was going to call her sister.

L
ibby perched on the edge of her rented couch in her rented flat on Villa Rémond and tapped out her childhood phone number; familiar yet half-forgotten, stretched out of shape by international dialing codes. As it rang, she noticed she was holding her breath. She forced her shoulders to relax.

“Hello?” a voice croaked, and Libby realized she had made the error of not checking international time zones properly. She had woken Juliet.

Voiceless with embarrassment and self-blame, she allowed the silence to go on a little too long.

“Hello?” Juliet said again, this time with a tinge of fear.

Libby hung up. She didn’t know what else to do. Who was she kidding? Juliet wouldn’t welcome her coming home. If she knew that was what Libby planned, she might actively discourage her.
Don’t come back. Ever.
That’s what Juliet had said to her. And Libby had replied,
I never will. Ever.
For twenty years, Libby had made good on that promise.

But things teenagers say to each other shouldn’t be plans for life, and there were good reasons for going home. Mark’s voice started up in her imagination.
You’ll paint. We’ll look at the sea together. Maybe get to the bottom of the Winterbourne family mystery. How could I
not
buy the cottage? Our annual retreat.
Then he’d handed her keys that she’d swore she’d never use, and a title deed that she swore she’d never read. Once in a while he’d mention it, always
before an opal-buying trip to Australia. Checking if she was sure she didn’t want to go. But she’d held firm. If Juliet had seen her with Mark . . . God, if Juliet had
told
Mark . . .

Libby glanced around her flat. It had always been too expensive, but she’d stayed because Mark wanted her to live somewhere central. She focused on the door to the bedroom, holding her breath, certain that at any second Mark would walk out, tall and strong, dressed only in his boxer shorts and his blue silk robe, his dark hair curling over his ears. And he would smile at her and touch her hair and he would be flesh and blood and breath. But he didn’t walk out. He never would again.

And one of the only other people who knew what that loss felt like was Juliet.

L
ibby and Mark’s favorite café had been on Boulevard Saint-Germain, a café whose art-deco interior had barely been touched since the 1930s. They always sat just outside the entrance, at the table to the left of the door. Mark became irrationally irritated if they arrrived and somebody else was at their table. He always had a copy of
The Guardian
with him, usually bought from the international newsagent, but sometimes it was the copy he’d brought with him from London.

Today Libby arrived at the café alone, placed the folded copy of
The Guardian
where Mark would have sat and ordered their usual: a café au lait for her, an espresso for him. Then she waited for the drinks to arrive, taking in the familiar view of the pale cream and white neoclassical buildings on Rue Saint-Benoît, the traffic, the pedestrians in their dark coats, the unfurling leaves on the elms overhead. She breathed in the scents of Paris—exhaust fumes, cut lilies, rain on pavement—and wondered how it would
be possible to leave. The farewell party at work had seemed as though it were happening to someone else; some happy, unconflicted woman with no dark past and a bright future.

“You are expecting your friend?” the waiter said to her as he placed Mark’s espresso next to the newspaper.

Libby forced a smile, but her heart pinched.
No, he’s never coming again.
She sipped her coffee while Mark’s cooled in the morning air. She closed her eyes and imagined a conversation with him, drawn from so many of their conversations.

“How was the journey down?” she asked.

“Good,” he replied. “I got a lot of work done on the train.”

“Have you been busy?”

“Always.” A slight smile, a tap of his knuckles on his newspaper that said,
Let me read.

Libby opened her eyes. Gray clouds had gathered overhead and a damp chill was in the air. Her flight was leaving in three hours. Behind her ribs, her stinging heart pulsed coldly. Everything ached. Slowly, she drank her coffee. The last time. She gathered her bag and keys and stood. The last time. A light shower started as she walked away. She turned to look behind her. Mark’s coffee sat untouched on the table, his newspaper flapping in the breeze.

“Good-bye,” she said, leaving Paris and Mark behind her.

The last time.

T
he ocean.

Libby’s breath caught in her throat as she peeled off the highway and down onto the oceanfront road for her first glimpse of the wide Pacific. It was a perfect February day. The blue sky was cloudless, and the sun shone white-yellow above the water. The ocean sparkled in shades of blue and green, underlit with gold. The afternoon sea breeze was picking up, ruffling the water into whitecaps and buffeting under the wings of seagulls. At the top of a cliff, Libby pulled the car over. She crossed the road to the grass verge and took a moment to breathe it in.

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.

S
he 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.