Return to the Beach House (32 page)

“Can you handle a half meat and half veggie? Or are you one of those vegetarians who—”

“Careful,” he warned. “You’re about to stumble into fighting territory.”

She laughed. “I figure if you’re still eating cheese you can’t be a complete fanatic.”

“She also told me about Gayle’s Bakery. Supposedly it’s right up there with the pizza.”

Lindsey propped herself up on her elbow and looked down at him. “Pizza and a bakery in the same day? You’re going to make it your mission to fatten me up, aren’t you?”

“I’ll make you a deal—I’ll match you pound for pound.”

“And that’s supposed to impress me? You can drop twenty pounds in a month by running an extra half mile and cutting ice out of your diet.” She kissed him. “Tell me you love me.”

“I love you.” He returned her kiss. “We are so connected I honestly don’t know where I end and you begin. If I ever commit a crime, they’ll send my DNA out for testing and it will come back that I’m the guy who loves Lindsey Thompson.”

“That’s pretty impressive.”

“It should be. I’ve been working on it for hours.”

Suddenly serious, she said, “I’m scared.”

“Me too,” he admitted.

“But not for the same reason I’ll bet. We were so cocky ten years ago when we told my parents that we were different, that our love was so special we would succeed with our long-distance relationship even though everyone else who tries ends up failing. And now look at us. Turns out we’re no different than any other egocentric couple.”

How could he argue with her? They’d given themselves four weeks to figure out how to make something work that they both knew had no real solution. Take away all the fancy words and proclamations of love and what they were left with was nothing more than two people looking for a painless way to say good-bye.

Chapter 7

Lindsey put on a pair of jeans and Matthew’s old sweatshirt that had a picture of a pair of elephants with locked trunks. The caption read: W
AS
IT
AS
GOOD
FOR
YOU
AS
IT
WAS
FOR
ME
? He thought it was hysterical. She thought it belonged on a frat house wall.

Even though she knew Matthew wouldn’t be back from his run for at least an hour, she glanced out the front window anyway. It seemed impossible, but the fog was even thicker than it had been the previous morning. Too dense for anything but close-up shots, maybe some macros of the foam or the moss on the log she’d been leaning against when she saw Abbey.

There was no sign of Matthew, just as she knew there wouldn’t be. Running was as much escape for him as exercise. Despite his seemingly easy acceptance, he needed time to absorb what she’d told him the night before. Intellectually, he might understand how she’d reacted, but he was creative and imaginative, and there was nothing he could do to keep images of what she’d gone through from insinuating themselves into his thoughts.

Enough.
She would not go there this morning.

She’d spent two years agonizing over whether or not to tell him about her duel with sanity. Now she had, and there was no going back. He would either accept the lies she’d told him about not being able to meet him, and the reasons for those lies, or he’d add the lies to the list of reasons they were better off separating.

She grabbed her camera bag and Matthew’s tripod and headed outside, where she stopped to inhale the cold, salty air, taking it deep into her lungs. She could live here, she suddenly realized, feeling a kind of deep bond with what was wild and free that she hadn’t felt since standing on top of Mount Kilimanjaro with Matthew, watching the sunrise, and sharing a hotel-room-size bottle of really bad wine. Slowly, she moved toward the sound of crashing waves, trying to remember where the stairs were. She found them, then almost stumbled over a girl sitting on the top step, tucked tightly into the folds of an oversize gray hoodie and sweatpants, her back pressed to the railing.

“My fault.” The girl popped up and moved out of the way. “I didn’t hear you coming.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Lindsey said, moving to step around her.

“Hey, wait—are you the photographer?”

Lindsey studied her, noting the lack of makeup and generous spray of freckles. She had a feeling that somewhere under that wool cap and hood was a shock of deep auburn hair and the stubborn personality to go with it. “I’m
a
photographer. I don’t know about being
the
photographer. Are you looking for anyone in particular?”

“Lindsey Thompson?”

She didn’t like it when someone she’d never met knew her name. “That’s me,” she said reluctantly.

The girl brushed the sand off her sweatpants. “I’m not a stalker or anything. Grace told me about you.”

“Grace?”

She turned and pointed toward the house behind her. “My sister. She takes care of Julia and Eric’s place when they have renters.”

“Oh.” Lindsey relaxed. She vaguely remembered Matthew telling her about the girl who lived next door. “I wasn’t the one who made the arrangements so I—”

“I looked you up,” the girl said. “You’re really good, even if what you do isn’t my thing. I did volunteer work at a free clinic when I was in high school, and I saw enough of the messed-up things people do to each other to last me a lifetime. I can’t imagine taking pictures of it day after day.”

“You learn to distance yourself.”

“What about when someone’s shooting at you, like those journalists who just died?”

Lindsey didn’t want to go there with this girl, still she felt compelled to answer. “It’s hard to explain, but you become so focused on what you’re doing that your world is reduced to the image you see through the viewfinder. You hear the bullets and bombs, but convince yourself they’re not meant for you.” Matthew understood this feeling of invincibility and knew there was nothing he could say or do to change it. The most dangerous thing she could do was to think too much about being cautious. And it wasn’t as if he worked in a zoo.

“Sorry, still not my thing.”

Lindsey laughed. She liked Rebecca’s attitude, but especially appreciated her moxie.

“I looked up your husband too. His stuff blew me away. Not that yours didn’t. It’s just that—”

“It’s not your thing.”

“If I could take pictures of animals that were one-tenth as good as his, I’d be camping on the doorstep to
National Geographic
.”

The husband part was a natural mistake, but the assumption usually came from someone older. “I’ll let him know he has a fan.”

“Do you think he’d talk to me? No one around here knows anything about what it’s like to be a real photographer. My teachers keep telling me I need to be practical and learn how to shoot weddings and babies as a backup. Oh, and let’s not forget ‘architecture,’ which is a euphemism for real estate brochures and websites. Can you imagine anything more boring?

“My freshman counselor even tried to get me interested in fashion by telling me I could meet celebrities. Who in their right mind would want to take a picture of Kim Kardashian when they could go to Canada for Spirit Bears or Sumatra for tigers?”

Obviously, the girl had done her homework. Both stories had been award-winners for Matthew, the Sumatra-tigers piece winning the Veolla Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award. “Do you want me to ask him or would you rather do it yourself? He should be back from his run in an hour or so.”

The girl hesitated and then smiled. “To be honest, I’d rather you did it. But what kind of photographer am I going to be if I can’t be a little pushy when I need to be?”

A seagull walked past Lindsey, almost stepping on her foot. “I think I’ve just witnessed a new way to describe fog.”

“It usually doesn’t hang around too long, at least not this dense and not this time of year.” She nodded toward the tripod. “If you wait, it should start clearing in a couple of hours.”

“Which leads to lesson number one—sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

“Rebecca—actually Becky,” she sheepishly admitted. “Rebecca just sounds a little more the way I like to think of myself now that I’m pushing twenty-one.”

Lindsey raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, so I just turned nineteen a couple of weeks ago. It’s the ‘teen’ part that drives me nuts.”

“Doesn’t matter what age you are. The photograph is all anyone cares about.” The more Lindsey traveled, the more people she met, the more she’d come to believe the old cliché: age doesn’t matter. A starving two-year-old looks at the world through ancient eyes, while the centenarians of Okinawa seem childlike in their joie de vivre. “So, Rebecca it is.”

“You were saying something about lesson number one?”

Lindsey laughed. “Lesson one is that you never let the weather dictate the shoot. Animals still have to feed and drink and mate and take care of their young, whether it’s raining or snowing or so foggy you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Think of the emotional response to a picture of a puppy left out in the rain. Or an elephant looking for water in a burned-out, dust-filled landscape.” The images were hers from her early career. Remembering them gave her a surprisingly bittersweet yearning for that all-too-brief time before she joined the crusade to change the world.

“I thought you took pictures of people.”

“But as you know, I live with someone who is one of the world’s best nature photographers. Some of that is bound to rub off.”

Rebecca grinned. “Want another roommate?”

“First we’d have to have a house.”

“Everyone talks about being footloose and free, but I’ve never actually met anyone who is. Do you have any idea how exciting that sounds to someone like me? What’s it like when Matthew is getting ready to go out on a story? Has he always been as good as he is now? Was he born that way? I know there are prodigies in everything, so I would imagine photography has them too.”

“I didn’t know him when he was a kid, but I’m sure he always had potential.” Lindsey finger-combed her hair out of her eyes, wishing she’d thought to bring a cap. “I don’t think he’d be all that excited about the prodigy thing. He works hard to get those ‘lucky’ once-in-a-lifetime shots.”

“I love hearing that.”

Lindsey knew there had to have been a time when she was this young and enthusiastic, but the memory was buried too deep to easily summon. Impulsively, she asked, “I’m exploring this morning. Want to come along?”

“Are you kidding?” Moving backward, Rebecca held up her hand. “Give me just one minute. I’ll get my camera. It’s right by the back door.” Even in the gray of the fog, Lindsey could see Rebecca blush. “I was hoping you’d ask,” she admitted. “You don’t mind, do you?”

Lindsey shook her head and waved her on. She hadn’t believed for a second that their meeting was accidental. “Bring a tripod if you have one.”

She was back in the promised minute, and they started down the stairs. Rebecca had to work to keep up with Lindsey’s long stride as they crossed the beach, following the sound of the ocean to the packed sand where the walking was easier. Lindsey unerringly wound up at the log she had been leaning against the morning she’d photographed Abbey. There were times her life depended on such instincts, and she never took her sense of direction for granted.

“Do you know many of the people who live around here?” Lindsey asked, adjusting the tripod legs for a low shot of two fishermen working the waves with long, heavy poles.

“Everyone but the renters. I’ve baby-sat or house-sat for most of them.”

“What about a little girl named Abbey?”

“Her parents are renters, but they come for a couple of months every year. I think the house belongs to a relative, or maybe a friend. Someone told them I baby-sit, so I got to know them fairly well last year.”

“What’s Abbey like?”

Rebecca gave her a puzzled look, but didn’t question how Lindsey would know someone’s name and not know anything about her. “She’s really smart and really curious. Loves to play games and dress up in this box of costumes her mother bought at an after-Halloween sale.”

“So she has a good imagination?” It was a question that implied Abbey had been the only one to see the couple on the beach. If they had been figments of Abbey’s imagination, where did that leave Lindsey?

She checked her camera settings and passed them on to Rebecca, with quick explanations about the reasons for the adjustments. Rebecca’s Canon was five or six years old but had been the top of the line for entry-level 35mm cameras at the time. “I saw her on the beach yesterday morning. She had an older man and woman with her.”

Rebecca eyed her warily. “You mean
really
old, like in their eighties, but they act like they just started dating? He’s a head taller, and she does most of the talking? He wears one of those European hats. And she always wears a blue-and-white scarf.”

“That’s them.”

“Yeah, I see them every once in a while, but I’ve never known anyone else who did. I tried talking to my dad about them, but I could see it made him sad, so I never brought it up again. I figured the way he acted, something weird must have happened.”