The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners (23 page)

“He’s concerned about one person—himself.”

“You haven’t seen him recently,” Max said. “I’ve tried to tell you, things have changed. He’s staying away from trouble, he’s a good worker, he’s been a caring friend to Pell. I’m very impressed with him, the changes he’s making. If you came and saw him, you would be too.”

Silence as David took that in. Max could almost hear his skepticism, his grave disappointment.

“Dad,” David said, “you’re too good to him. Mother is dead because Rafe thought it was a better idea to take some pills and get high than stay with her for—what? How long were you gone that afternoon? Thirty minutes? An hour? How can you forgive him for that?”

“Because I love him,” Max said. “He made a terrible mistake, and he has to live with it. And because your mother would want me to.”

“I have to go now, Dad,” David said.

“David, do you have a message for me to give Rafe?”

“Goodbye, Dad.”

Max held that inside now, his son’s goodbye. David was a good person, brilliant in his way. Max and Christina had sent him to Eton, then Cambridge. He had tried his best with Rafe after Violetta’s death, but Max had watched with dismay as he’d spent most of his energy rising high in the Bank of Kensington instead of tending to his grief-stricken boy.

“Max!”

Lyra had spotted him through the window, was calling him onto the square. He smiled, pushing his own private disappointment in David down, and stepped outside into bright sunshine. Lyra linked her arm through his.

“Max, I’d like you to meet my daughter Lucy,” Lyra said. “And Pell’s boyfriend, Travis Shaw.”

“How do you do?” Max said. He shook Travis’s hand, but Lucy spontaneously stood on tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “Thank you,” he said.

“Pell’s told me so much about you,” Lucy said.

Pell nodded, but didn’t speak. Max gazed at her; in so short a time, he’d come to love her. She was Lyra’s daughter, but wonderful in her own right. She’d shown up at the hospital last night, right after Lyra called. Max had watched her checking her voicemail, staring into space, wide-eyed with some kind of private torment. She was present for her mother, Max, and Rafe—but her heart and mind were elsewhere. Now he realized where: with Travis.

Max saw the way they leaned into each other. There was silent, unspoken support flowing from one to the other. Pell’s eyes looked stricken, as if she was carrying a secret weight. He knew that it had something to do with why Rafe had been on the steps last night.

“Did you have a good trip over?” Max asked Travis. “Nicolas met you?”

“Yes, sir,” Travis said. “Thank you.”

“I would have gone to get you myself,” Max said.

“But your grandson’s been injured,” Travis said. “How is he?”

“Improving,” Max said. “You’re kind to ask.” He watched as Pell looked down at her feet, and Travis put his arm around her.

“I hope he’s better soon,” Travis said.

“Thank you,” Max said, knowing that all would be well between him and Pell. Travis’s great heart shone out.

Max felt Lyra take his hand. Whether for support or from sheer joy, he didn’t know. Glancing down at her, he saw a completely different woman. Her eyes sparkled, and she beamed up at him. “My daughters are here!” she said.

“Nothing could be more wonderful,” Max said.

John took that moment to pull Nicolas across the tree-lined plaza to get a closer look at the Davis family reunion. Lyra happily introduced him to Lucy and Travis, and Nicolas made a kind remark about Travis being a fisherman. There was plenty to interest John, but Max couldn’t help note his old friend seemed most fascinated by Lyra’s and Max’s clasped hands. John’s eyes glinted with delight. Max really couldn’t begrudge him. Except for Rafe’s condition—and David—Max felt fairly delighted himself.

Twenty

T
ravis and I were together again. But things had changed. I had left Newport as one person, but now I was another. Life adds up. It also subtracts. Love is cumulative. Doubt is corrosive. Nothing is set in stone. Illusions in a family, in life, can cause terrible damage. I’d set my father on a pedestal. Seeing him knocked off nearly caused me to destroy everything.

How can I explain how hard it was, waiting for Travis to arrive? I’d heard his messages, the growing concern in his voice. In my room at my mother’s, I lay on my bed, hand on my stomach, wondering how I could have kissed Rafe, nearly thrown myself into something I’d never come back from. Travis was my only one. Rafe had been a stand-in. And what a way to treat a person—Rafe, I mean. As if he didn’t matter on his own.

When my mother called from the hospital, I nearly fell apart. Because I cared about Rafe—my feelings for him, although confused, were real. By the time I got to the hospital, he’d taken a turn for the worse. He’d had a seizure, lost consciousness. There was swelling in his brain; a doctor came to talk to Max about surgery to relieve the pressure.

My mother paced the floor. While Max consulted with the surgeon and then, I gather, called Rafe’s father in New York, my mother was inconsolable. She and I hadn’t really talked since my return home from the boathouse. We hadn’t cleared the air, and I was still angry with my father, and shocked and horrified at the idea that she had really thought about killing us that night at the bridge. But I was also taken by the fact she wasn’t apologizing to me, trying to explain, to smooth things over. All of her attention was on Max and Rafe.

“I thought he was okay,” she said. “I really did, I was sure of it….”

“The doctors are with him,” I said. I’d been with my father through many surgeries. I’d seen him have seizures. I felt I knew about head trauma.

“He could have died, there on the hill,” my mother said. “But he didn’t. He made it here….”

“And he’ll get through this,” I said. I felt cold and, as I’ve mentioned, a little superior in my hospital and bedside experience.

“Max won’t be able to take it,” my mother said, suddenly falling apart, starting to cry. “If he loses Rafe. Please don’t let it happen, please, please….”

My mother was praying. I stood up from the chair where I’d been sitting. I watched her bow her head, sob into her hands.

“Mom,” I said.

“Pell,” she said, almost as if seeing me for the first time. “Is it me? Do I bring such terrible things to people I love?”

“No,” I said.

She grabbed my hand. “What I did to you … putting you in such danger. I am so sorry. Please, Pell—don’t be mad at your dad. It was all my fault.”

Fault
. What a useless word. It hit me—we were together, my mother and I. She was praying for Rafe, a boy she’d previously—even hours earlier—seemed completely unable to stand. And she’d just said “people I love.” My mother.

All these years without her, I’d pictured her on the glamorous island of Capri, surrounded by rich, famous, shallow, beautiful people. I hadn’t expected to find her in a warm, cozy house, perched on a rocky overlook full of gardens, surrounded by some of the most wonderful people I’d ever met. I hadn’t anticipated Max, and the way he felt about her, and the way my mother obviously felt about him, and how depths and heights of love could heal every heart.

“Mom,” I said, hugging her.

We stood there a long time. Max came back, and my mother took his hand. They went to sit quietly in a corner of the waiting room. I watched her try to soothe him. The nurse came out to say they could see Rafe. I watched through the door, saw my mother lay her hand on Rafe’s forehead.

It’s strange. Seeing her that way, so warm and caring toward Max in his moment of crisis, toward Rafe as he lay injured in bed, I felt my father with us. As if he’d come back to be with me, stand by my side, bear witness to my mother’s transformation. I felt him forgiving all she had done, all she’d been unable to do. I felt his spirit, but I wished I could see his face. I closed my eyes, brought him close in my mind.

“She’s good,” I said to him. And I meant it two ways. She’s doing well—she’s healed herself from the pain that drove her away from us, and she’s a good person, someone I can feel proud of, someone who cares.

My father had only wanted the best for me and Lucy. I knew that. He would never have driven my mother away, and he couldn’t really explain to us the truth of why he’d needed to protect us from her. It would have planted a dreadful, immutable fact in my mind: my mother had considered killing me.

Instead, my father let us keep our love for her. He’d never told us she might have hurt me, might have intended the worst there was. Because of him, we’d been able to hold her close, Lucy and I, in a golden glow of what once had been and what we’d never stopped hoping could be again.

And here we were. All three of us together.

While my mother took Lucy home, to let her settle in and get over her jet lag, and while Max stayed at the hospital with Rafe, I walked with Travis. We sent his bag in my mother’s car. He and I climbed the Phoenician Steps—all eight-hundred-something of them. My legs ached, but the physical exertion was nothing compared to the difficulty of facing what I’d done.

“I should bring the team over here,” he said. “A few times running up and down, we’d be in shape and ready for the season.”

“Travis …,” I said.

But he just kept walking up, as if he didn’t want to slow down, stop, listen to me, hear me confess. He sensed it, I could tell. I must have looked like a wreck—I’d been up all night, and even though I’d showered after the boat ride and making out with Rafe, I felt disgrace and betrayal clinging to me.

When we finally got to the top, I grabbed Travis’s hand.

“I have to talk to you,” I said.

“This is amazing,” he said, not hearing me.

He chose that moment to look around, and for the first time seemed to see the spectacular view. Rain had washed the air so clean, there wasn’t a trace of humidity to dull the sparkling blue. The cerulean bay gleamed, hardly a line between water and sky. We saw the white wakes of brightly colored fishing boats; my gaze was pulled southeast, in the direction of Il Faraglioni.

“You have to listen to me,” I said, shaking him.

He tried to keep ignoring me, just staring out to sea at Ischia, then right toward the mainland, over the water to the dark shape of Mount Vesuvius.

“I did something,” I said.

Finally he looked at me. “I know,” he said.

“How?” I asked.

“Because I know you, Pell,” he said.

We sat down on a grassy slope, shaded by olive trees. Sunlight dappled through the silver leaves, and tiny lizards skittered across flat rocks. There was space between us; we didn’t touch, just stared out to sea. I wanted to explain everything, but suddenly I couldn’t speak. He knows me, he said. I thought he did. But I also thought I knew myself.

“I want to tell you what happened,” I said.

“You don’t have to.”

“Yes, I do.” And I started talking. My mother, my father, the revelation about what had happened on the bridge, my father telling my mother he didn’t want her to live with us if she couldn’t keep us safe. My running out, deciding to leave. Rafe, the boat ride, the seahorses.

“He showed you seahorses?” Travis asked. For some reason, that detail seemed to hurt him more than any so far. He’d heard, all along, about my father’s nicknames for me and Lucy.

“Yes.”

“Go on,” he said, steeling himself.

I told him how Rafe had refused to take me to Sorrento, wanted me to have it out with my mother. How I’d been crazed, thinking of my father, of what he’d kept from us, of how everything I’d believed about him, and about our little family, was suddenly flipped. My wonderful father, so flawed he’d actually driven my mother away.

“I wasn’t ready to go up to my mother’s house,” I told Travis. “I couldn’t bring myself to face her. So I went to the boathouse.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s where Rafe sleeps.”

Travis looked away again, staring at the bay, at the boats, as if he wished he were on one of them, fishing far away from me. My heart was beating in my throat. I took Travis’s hand. He had to look at me for this part; I tugged, so he’d turn his head, and he did, and I was staring into his eyes.

“I kissed him,” I said.

He looked momentarily stung, then blank. And then he walked away. He stopped looking at me, and he started back down the steps, as if toward the marina, to find Nicolas, to get him to take him as far from me as he could get.

Travis felt stung, as if wasps had gotten him. But instead of his skin burning, it was his insides. Little venomous insects had flown down his throat, jabbing him with poison. Could he die from this? The picture of Pell kissing another guy.

He felt sick, burning up. The image was there in his mind, it wouldn’t go away. Had Rafe put one hand on her head, the other on her waist? Had he touched her face? Had the kiss been slow? Had it been intense? How long had it lasted?

Pell had told Travis she loved him. He remembered the first time. It was even before Toronto, before things got so physically serious. Going back to last winter, the start of Christmas vacation, right after the wreath-throwing. His family had just gotten back together. Carrie had returned, bringing Gracie.

The baby in the house had distracted everyone from the fact Carrie had disappeared for a year, all the reasons for her taking off. Gracie was so cute and sweet, funny and curious. The whole family congregated around her, staring at every move she made. Travis started feeling as if they were watching a magic show so they wouldn’t have to talk.

He and Pell walked the school grounds, just as they had a few weeks earlier, looking for Beck at the height of the drama. Winter, and snow was a foot deep. The paths were shoveled but icy, and a bitter ocean wind blew between the buildings.

“How are you?” Pell asked, after they’d walked in silence awhile.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s all weird.”

“Which part?”

“Things are messed up,” he said. “Carrie’s home, and that’s great. But she had a kid. No one even knew.”

“Your family had a lot going on,” Pell said.

Travis nodded, his chin buried in a muffler. She was right. Trauma had hit the Shaws. Family secrets; sounded like the title of a chick flick, but they were real. His mom had been with another guy before marrying his dad. Carrie had come from that relationship, and when the truth came out eighteen years later, it nearly destroyed everyone.

Travis’s dad had died in a terrible accident, Carrie had run away, and it had taken a year for her to return home, for them all to start to come back together. Travis had been going out with Ally, a girl from back home in Ohio, when he’d first moved to Newport. Pell had seen him through everything, even the breakup.

“Why did it have to happen?” Travis asked Pell, walking through the snow. “Why’d my dad have to die? Everyone’s sitting home, smiling at Gracie, and he’s gone—he’ll never know his grand daughter.”

“I don’t know why such terrible things happen,” Pell said, taking his hand.

“If my mom had told the truth back when they were young,” Travis began, and Pell stopped him.

“I’m sure she did the best she could,” Pell said. “She must have decided it would hurt him less to not tell him the truth.”

“It hurt him more,” Travis said.

“I know,” Pell said. They walked a few more minutes, then stopped. She looked at Travis in that deep way, her blue eyes knowing so much, as if she’d lived her whole life already. Her eyes were filled with sadness, and that’s when she said it. “I love you, Travis.”

“I love you too, Pell,” he said.

They held each other, their bodies pressing together as the cold wind blew around them. Then she tilted her head back and looked up at him. He’d seen a sharpness in her blue eyes—a promise. He’d had the feeling she wanted to say more. But they hadn’t been going out long—they were so new. Maybe she’d felt it was too soon to say that much.

Now, walking down the crooked, rugged stone steps on Capri, Travis burned with the news about Pell kissing Rafe. He hated what she’d done, more than almost anything he could think of. It had hurt him worse than anything since his dad’s death. But suddenly he stopped, one foot in the air, before it hit the next step. And he knew: exactly what Pell had been thinking that snowy day.