The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners (25 page)

“Hi, Dad,” Rafe said.

While Rafe and David sat on the terrace, Travis built a fire on the grill, using dried olive branches; Pell and Lucy cooked pasta, dressing it with olive oil, ripe tomatoes, and fresh pecorino; Max stood at the sink, cleaning the fish; and Lyra picked sprigs of rosemary and thyme. At one point, passing by, she leaned into him. Just for a moment—no words were exchanged. But he felt the quick pressure of her body, almost as if she was touching base.

He watched her stand between her daughters, admiring their cooking. He stared at the backs of their heads, three dark-haired women, so similar in their grace of movement. They spoke in low voices, happy and excited. Max felt a wave of doubt and sorrow—they were all so young. How could he be feeling this way, was he a complete old fool? But when Lyra turned, their eyes met, and she smiled.

Max was in that strange, blessed phase of writing a play when the characters have taken over and seem to be creating themselves. His new work had started as a love story between two sets of characters, but as he wrote it, he’d started to realize that he’d made his landscape too small. Life, as it had presented itself to him this summer, was proving to be too enormous and generous to be expressed through four characters, in three acts.

To the list of characters representing himself and Lyra, Pell and Rafe, he had added Lucy and Travis, Bella and Alonzo, even John and Nicolas. He hadn’t dared hope for a third-act reunion between the Rafe character and his father, but as of this morning he’d found it necessary to include a character symbolizing David.

That had been the shock of shocks, looking out the window and seeing his son walk up the stairs from the dock. David had been in London; he’d flown down, hired a private boat in Sorrento, come straight to the villa.

Max had wanted David to accompany him to the hospital, to pick up Rafe and bring him home. David said he’d needed to make a business call, he’d see Rafe when he arrived. But Max realized his son had taken time alone to make peace with Christina and with this place. From the kitchen window, Max could see the spot on the lawn where Christina had broken her hip, the fall that had led to her final decline.

Someone had left a bouquet of roses on the spot. White roses, her favorite. And when Max and Rafe entered the house from the hospital, Max saw white petals and torn leaves on the terrace’s tile floor, from where David had trimmed the roses’ stems of thorns.

The doorbell rang. Perhaps Max should have kept the evening lower key, but he knew Rafe’s welcome home needed to include Nicolas. Amanda and Renata, back from Rome, were overjoyed about their moon gate, and wanted to meet Lucy, the young woman who had provided such precise calculations for the arch. And Max couldn’t help inviting John, if only so the old gossip would see David and realize what had taken place between him and Rafe.

As twilight settled, the sky turned deep purple. The Bay of Naples sparkled with the lights of boats coming and going. Drinks were served, then dinner. Everyone sat at the long table, eating the delicious meal.

Max toasted his son and grandson and beloved guests, Lucy toasted the Gardiners and thanked them for being so kind to her family, Pell toasted everyone gathered together, Amanda and Renata toasted Lucy’s geometry and the moon gate, John toasted secrets of the summer night, and Nicolas toasted the fish. Max waited to hear from David, Rafe, and especially Lyra, but they all stayed quiet.

After dinner, when darkness had completely fallen, the sky blazed with stars. Max had always loved the night sky from this terrace—there were so few house lights around, it sometimes felt as if he could reach out his hand, touch the stars’ white fire. Never more than tonight.

Lyra had been sitting beside him. At one point, after coffee, she’d reached over and squeezed his hand. When he looked at her face, he saw her staring up at the sky with such intensity, her eyes bright and distant, he thought something must be wrong. She excused herself, and was gone a few minutes before returning with the white canvas bag she’d brought.

While everyone kept talking, Max watched her reach into the bag, pull out her tripod. She set it up beside the balustrade. Everyone at the table continued their conversations, glancing at Lyra, aware she was doing something. Max was trying not to eavesdrop too blatantly on David and Rafe, seated across the table and a few seats down. John, however, had no such compunctions.

“Well,” John said, nodding toward them. “Sounds as if things are going very well.”

“Looks that way,” Max said.

“David’s arrival has given me an idea for the title of your new play,” John said. “‘The Prodigal Father.’”

As much as Max would have liked to dismiss it, John’s title had the ring of truth and wisdom. But looking around the table, at the people who had so recently returned to one another, again he was struck by the danger of limitation, of making his story too small.

The Davis girls sat side by side, watching their mother with such interest and love; Travis seemed rapt with Pell, with the way she was focused on Lyra. Families sometimes went apart. Like ships lost at sea, they sent out mysterious signals and found their ways back to one another.

“Hmm,” John said, leaning very obviously toward Rafe and David. “Who’s Monica, do you suppose?”

“I have no idea,” Max said. “Why?”

“Seems she has called Rafe in New York,” John said. “Left several messages. David is giving him the phone number now.”

Max leaned over, watched David scrolling through his BlackBerry saw Rafe scribble the number down on the palm of his hand. Seconds later, Rafe excused himself, went tearing into the villa, obviously to make a call, as if he hadn’t just come home from the hospital.

“So?” John asked.

“So, what?”

“My title idea,” John said. “What do you think?”

“I like it,” Max said. “Very much. But with one small change. ‘The Prodigal Family’”

“Superb,” John said. “Much better. Don’t forget to mention the inspiration, though.”

“Of course not,” Max said. And then Lyra clinked her knife against her wineglass. And Max sat up straight, knowing she was finally ready to make her toast.

Twenty-Two

I
shivered, but not because the air was cool. It was another warm, lovely, perfect Capri night. Warmth rose from the rocks, along with the scents of verbena, lavender, and lemons. No, the tingle under my skin came from the sight of my mother standing by the tripod, a look of such love in her eyes.

It brought back memories.

Sitting between Lucy and Travis, I felt them lean into me, our arms and shoulders touching, as if propping each other up, or keeping each other tied to earth. I felt I might rise, as if I had wings. I felt as if I might fly up to heaven to find my father, bring him back to earth just for this moment. So he could see us all together.

The strongest memory I was having was of my mother holding me. After she clinked her glass, she pulled the telescope out of her bag, started passing it around the table.

“I have a toast to make,” she said. “To my favorite constellation …”

People called out their guesses: “Orion!” “The Pleiades!” “Lyra!”

“You’re partly right,” she said. “But Lyra the star—also known as its Latin name, Vega. Along with Capella and Pollux.”

“Lyra, dear,” Nicolas said, laughing, “I am an old man of the sea. Many years on many decks, and I’ve used a sextant all that time, plotting courses by the stars. I do not want to tell you this, but those stars are not in the same constellation.”

“They’re far apart,” I said, suddenly remembering my first days on Capri, when my mother and I were first together. “Vega, Capella, and Pollux …” The three stars whose names were engraved on the telescope’s brass tube. The telescope came to me, and I felt the letters with my thumb.

“Let me see,” Lucy said, and I showed her. Seeing the names, gleaming in candlelight, I shivered again. My mother was holding me; it was winter, and cold. I heard the river rushing beneath our feet, down below the bridge. The night was even clearer than the one right now, so freezing we could see our breath. And we’d looked through the telescope, had it pointing at the sky when my father drove to find us, to rescue us both.

“Why those three stars?” I asked.

“Well, my father showed them to me long ago. I was a little girl, and we would take star walks, just as I did with my girls. He showed me Lyra, told me that’s where my name came from. And with Cappella and Pollux: they’re us,” my mother said.

“Us?” I asked.

“You, me, and Lucy.”

And I heard it then, my mother’s voice whispering in my ear as we’d stood on that icy bridge over the half-frozen river over half my lifetime ago.
I love you, Capella
, she’d said.
My sweetheart, my star in the sky
.

“Capella,” I said now.

“I wanted there to be meaning,” she said. “I looked for it that night, in the sky. I should have been looking in your eyes. Yours and Lucy’s.”

I stood up. I carried the telescope over to my mother. She was crying, and I know she couldn’t see well enough to fix it to the tripod. I did it for her, then put my arms around her. The sound of water was everywhere. Instead of an ice-filled river, it was the warm rush of waves breaking on the rocky shore below. The tide was in. I thought of all the starfish, safely covered by the salt water, on black rocks washed by the flow of waves.

“That night is over,” I said to her. “We can’t erase it, but we’ve healed it. The ghosts of that night are gone.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

I nodded, and bent to look through the telescope. I wanted her face next to mine, our cheeks pressing together. When I was little, and she’d take me stargazing, we’d look through the scope as if we could see at the same time. We were so close, I’d imagine she could see through my eye and I through hers. In some ways, living so many years apart, I realized that we had done just that.

“Do you have it, Lucy?” I asked.

“I do,” she said. “But it’s over at Mom’s house.”

“In your backpack?” Travis asked my sister. She said yes, and he said he’d get it. My football star boyfriend sprinted off Max’s terrace, and I heard him running through the yards, over to my mother’s house.

Stars swung overhead, down to the horizon. Everyone at the table took a turn looking through the scope, sighing at the strange beauty of our galaxy. Rafe came out of the house, smiling from ear to ear.

“She was home,” he said. “Waiting for my call. Somehow I forgot I’d told her I was from New York.”

“She’s a lucky girl,” I said. I had no idea who she was, but I could see that he was happy.

And then Travis was back. He carried Lucy’s backpack in both hands, as if it held something breakable, set it down carefully on the wooden table between my sister and me. Lucy unzipped the compartment, pulled out a stiff cardboard file folder. She set it on the rustic surface, and gave me a look. Sticking out of the corner of the file, I saw the point of one gold foil star.

I’d kept this folder in my bureau drawer in Grosse Pointe, took it to Newport after our father died. For a long time after our mother left, Lucy and I would open the file, spread the paper out, and study it with care—as if we might find some clue to where she’d gone, how we could find her. But it had been many years since Lucy and I had looked at it together; the last time, we’d re-glued some of the stars. Since then, I couldn’t even remember opening the folder.

Our first moment alone together, here in Capri, Lucy told me she’d brought it with her. At first I was unsure. This trip had had its rocky moments. I’d nearly left to return home. But Lucy explained to me that’s exactly why she’d packed it, carried it all this way.
Because
my visit had at times been so hard,
because
reuniting with my mother had had its ups and downs.

I told her I threw it out
, I said to Lucy.
And I told her we still had it
, Lucy replied.

And so we did, still have it.

“What is that?” my mother asked.

We didn’t answer. Just pulled the old yellowed paper from the cardboard. The sheet had been folded so long, there were tears along the creases. Lucy unfolded it carefully, laid it on the table.

“Our map,” my mother said.

“Dorset,” I said, looking at the child’s colored-in country and ocean. The land mass, drawn with green crayon by my mother, was irregularly shaped, vaguely circular, an island.

Blue water surrounded the island; I remembered leaning over the paper, carefully coloring in the sea, using all the blue crayons in the box. Midnight blue, periwinkle, thistle blue, turquoise, navy blue, cornflower, all blended on the page, my version of the deep blue sea. And there, all around the drawing’s border, were the bright foil stars Lucy had stuck on.

“Some of them were loose,” Lucy said. “Pell and I glued them back.”

The three of us stared at it for a long time. We’d made it during the last days our mother lived with us. Our father had watched us, knowing that she would be leaving soon. Perhaps he had realized, even more than she, how important this map would become to all of us.

“What is it?” Max asked.

“A map,” my mother said, wiping her eyes. “Of a place we all dreamed of. The three of us.”

“It was a country we made up,” I explained. “We called it Dorset, after the road we lived on.”

“It looks like Capri,” Rafe said, looking over my mother’s shoulder.

“It does,” Lucy said, and staring at it now, I realized my mother had drawn the shape of Capri. She had known where she was going; it was her way of telling us where she would be. The knowledge pierced my heart; to go back ten years, remembering what our family was about to go through … how had she been able to bear it? How had any of us?

“Sometimes,” Max said, “when parents and children are far apart, they have to reach for what is there. A map, a telescope … even the stars in the sky. It’s not perfect, because it’s not the person. But it holds their place, until the family can come back together.”

“Like us,” Lucy said.

“Yes,” Max said, smiling at her.

“And us,” David said. He had come from the far end of the table to stand by Rafe and look at the map. Everyone turned to look at him. He was angular and handsome, just like his father and son; he’d said very little up to that point. He had a very reserved British manner. But just then, putting his hand on Rafe’s shoulder, we all saw his chin wobbling. Rafe nodded.

“Thank you, Dad,” Rafe said, and I knew everyone at the table was wondering what objects and symbols—what map, telescope, stars—they’d used to stay connected. Perhaps, of all of us, only Max and I knew for sure, had seen him walking the beach every single day, saving starfish as he had with his father, when he was a little boy.

“I have one more toast to make,” my mother said.

We all reached for our glasses, raised them high. My mother looked straight up, as if to toast the stars.

“Here’s to Taylor,” she said.

“Dad!” Lucy and I said, gazing up into the Milky Way, sending love and kisses to our wonderful father. Travis stood beside me; we held hands, and I sent a silent prayer to his father too.

“And,” my mother continued, still looking heavenward, “to Christina.”

“To Christina!” we all said.

And we stood there in a half-circle facing out to sea, looking up at the constellations. Down below, waves rolled in, breaking on the rocks, covering the starfish, reflecting the stars. We were each separate, and we were all together.

We had made such mistakes, over and over again. But somehow, miraculously, with clumsy and heartbreaking effort, we managed to fix them and just keep going. Life and love required advanced skill and we were all, even the oldest among us, just beginners. But standing on Max’s terrace overlooking the sea, I knew we’d all keep trying.