Beach Plum Island Page 4

  Elaine sipped the brandy politely, complimenting everything from his kitchen cupboards to his sofa pillows, then slipped off her heels and crossed her legs. Her bare feet usually sealed the deal. She was always careful about pedicures, and this week her nails were a pearly, girly pink.

  She bounced her foot and laughed at something the man said, then ducked her head a little, letting her hair partly cover her face, playing it shy. “I should probably go,” she said. “It’s getting awfully late.”

  This gave him the impetus to make his move. Elaine wasn’t disappointed. Her new lover was eager and delicious, his hairless bronze skin as smooth as a succulent plant, his hands gentle and pleasing as he leaned over to kiss her, whispering, “Stay with me.”

  It was just the thing to take Elaine’s mind off sorrow, and loss, and how badly she had hurt Katy. She had meant to do it. Of course she had. She just hadn’t expected to feel so miserable afterward.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Monday after the service, Ava drove her sons to their jobs—Evan to the local supermarket, where he was a bagger, and Sam to the landscaping company in Newburyport where he loaded mulch and gravel into trucks all day, making her tease him and call him “the Incredible Hulk.”

  Both boys were saving money to pay their father back for the new instruments he’d bought them at the end of the school year. Evan, quieter and less confident, played bass, and Sam had a bright blue electric guitar. They had formed a band with their friend Les, a drummer, and Ava had recently given them permission to turn her living room into a music studio, God help her.

  Back home, she ate her usual breakfast of oatmeal washed down by strong Darjeeling tea, then worked for several hours in the studio. When she’d thrown the last piece, she sat up and stretched her back. She wasn’t used to spending this many hours at the wheel. During the school year, she taught art at the local high school, which meant she was often too busy to pursue her own pottery projects at home. Ava tried to make up for this in the summer months by producing enough pottery to sell throughout the year through local galleries and craft shows.

  She decided to take a walk before glazing the pots she’d fired over the weekend. She started south toward the wildlife sanctuary, then headed inland. Here the beach grasses grew in thick tufts beneath twisting shadows of the gnarled miniature plum trees that gave Beach Plum Island its name.

  Poverty grass: that’s what some islanders called the beach heather that grew in thick carpets and seemed to need little more than air to thrive. Without it, there would be no Beach Plum Island, because the shoreline would be eroded by storms and tides. And without Beach Plum Island acting as a barrier, the northern Massachusetts coastline would be carved away by hurricanes and snowstorms.

  Ava turned around after half an hour, driven by thoughts of Elaine. She would have been even more furious at her sister if she didn’t also feel guilty. Ava had spent practically every minute of her last two years of high school with Mark, her ex-husband; he was a skinny track star so besotted with her that he had spent an entire summer’s wages to buy her an engagement ring with a diamond chip the fall after they graduated. They had married at twenty, and by the time Dad left, she was too busy with the boys to help Elaine with their mother.

  At least that was the way Ava had always tried to rationalize the events of that horrible year. In reality, in the fierce cold light of hindsight, she could have done more. She wasn’t teaching then. She had time on her hands. She never went to see them after they moved to Maine, despite several frantic phone calls from Elaine about Mom’s increasingly bizarre behavior. If she had been around, would things have turned out differently? Maybe. At the very least, Elaine wouldn’t be so angry and hurt now.

  Ava continued down the beach, lifting the soft sand with her toes and watching it spray in front of her. As always, thinking about the past made her feel as if a crowd of people were in her head, all shouting at once in languages she didn’t understand. It didn’t help that she was feeling so emotionally wrung out by her wakeful night. She’d been having a recurring nightmare for years. Now, given her father’s last words, she had begun to wonder if it wasn’t a dream at all, but an actual memory. Whatever it was, she was always left shaken by it.

  She slowed her pace, concentrating hard, gathering the few fragments she remembered. She saw herself as a small child walking down a dim hallway. She opened the door to a dark room, a room she knew she was never supposed to enter because her mother had forbidden it.

  As Ava opened the door, a little boy not much bigger than she was dashed out, grabbing her around the waist and pressing his face against her neck, making strange, snuffling animal noises and saying, “Who you? Who you?” She was paralyzed with fear as the little boy kept clawing at her arms and touching her face, laughing at her until she cried and pushed him away. Only then did her mother come running, soothing her and shutting the other child back in the bedroom, this time locking the door with a hook too high up for a child to reach.

  Her friend Olivia would probably say this recurring nightmare was all about her inner child. But Ava woke every time drenched in sweat, her heart pounding. The dream felt as real as her life.

  She forced herself to walk faster to shake her ragged mood, then stopped to pick up a mussel shell, admiring its swirling sheen of violet and pink. She wondered if she should glaze her new pitchers that way. She pocketed the shell and continued walking, surprised to see a figure standing on tiptoe near her studio, face pressed to one of the windows.

  “Hey!” she yelled. “Can I help you?”

  It wasn’t until the figure spun around, climbed onto a bicycle in the driveway, and rode away that Ava realized it was Gigi. What was she doing here?

  • • •

  Gigi wasn’t going back to camp again. Not after seeing Lydia beat the crap out of that poor horse. She winced just thinking about the way the crop had sounded, almost like gunshots, Lydia red-faced and slapping it against the flank of her sweet-tempered bay gelding.

  Lydia said she was punishing the horse for not clearing the brick wall, and only laughed when Gigi said, “But he’s a horse, Lydia. He doesn’t know why you’re hitting him now. He’s already forgotten the jump. They have the brains of three-year-olds.”

  “Yeah, like you’re such a friggin’ expert,” Lydia had huffed. “You can hardly even ride. It must suck to suck.”

  It used to be fun, going to the club for riding lessons, or for tennis camp and dinner with her parents afterward. Gigi didn’t mind the club when she was younger, though she was grateful her parents never made her take golf lessons. She’d rather pluck her eyes out with tweezers than waste hours trying to hit stupid little white balls into holes.

  Then things started changing, or maybe Gigi did, when Dad got cancer. The other girls acted like she was the one who got sick and it might be catching. They were always polite, except for Lydia, but never invited her to their houses anymore.

  That was mostly fine with her. Gigi didn’t want to be like any of them. She wanted to be an artist, or maybe the lead singer in a band. She didn’t have any burning desire to troll the mall or Instagram people. What a freakin’ waste of time and money.

  Not that money was a problem. All Gigi had to say at home was that there was another club fund-raiser for Haiti or abused women, and her mother practically emptied her wallet into Gigi’s hands.

  Mom didn’t need money now, since she never left the house. This worried Gigi. She’d told Gramma Dawn that Mom wasn’t eating or taking showers, but her grandmother seemed to think this was normal, saying, “She’ll snap out of it, dear, you’ll see.”

  Gigi wasn’t so sure, but what could she do about it? Meanwhile, it was easy to write a note to the riding camp instructor in her mother’s handwriting, saying Gigi had carpal tunnel syndrome—she was proud of that excuse—and wouldn’t be attending riding camp this summer because her wrists needed to be strong for field h
ockey season in the fall.

  Ha. Field hockey. As if.

  The only problem was that now her days loomed long and empty. Gigi couldn’t hang at the club pool; most kids her age were away at camp, so it would just be her and the little kids. Besides, she couldn’t risk any of the other moms calling hers.

  And she couldn’t stay anywhere in the neighborhood, on the very off chance that her mother left the house or that Uncle Simon, the only one in her mom’s family who seemed to think Gigi was worth talking to, stopped by to visit.

  So Gigi mostly pedaled her bike aimlessly around. Some days she’d cross the bridge and head into Amesbury, where she sat by the waterfalls and ate frozen yogurt, then maybe went to a matinee at the cinemas on Route 110. Or she would bike south from Newburyport to sit on the banks of the Parker River and draw the great blue herons and egrets in her sketch pad. Once, she had even seen a sandhill crane. She could draw, like, for fifty hours straight, if only her teachers would quit harassing her about things she wasn’t remotely interested in, like physics and algebra.

  School was for morons. She couldn’t understand those girls who tested themselves on Quizlet or made color-coded note cards and never missed a help session, posting things on Facebook like Two tests tomorrow, might as well kill myself now, so stressed!

  Today she had ridden her bike out to Beach Plum Island to see where Ava lived. Not that she could even think of her as a sister. God, she was older than her own mom! Still, Gigi was curious about her and about Elaine, too, after that freak show at the service.

  She had met them before, of course. Mom used to always invite them for holidays or whatever. “They’re family,” she’d insist when Gigi rolled her eyes and pointed out the obvious, that Ava and Elaine wanted nothing to do with them. “They should know they’re always welcome in their father’s home.”

  Today, after Ava caught her snooping around the studio—she would have liked to have seen more, but she didn’t need any lectures—Gigi biked over to the beach by the Beach Plum Island lighthouse. This beach was across the Merrimack River from Salisbury Beach on the mainland, a place her mom refused to go, saying it was filled with “transients,” and probably even “real Gypsies.” But Gigi and her dad went to Salisbury anyway.

  “Let’s go to the honky-tonk side of town,” Dad would announce on certain steamy summer weekends, and off they’d go to Salisbury Beach, where they’d bodysurf the waves or wander through the chaotic campground with its flocks of sticky kids.

  Then they’d hit the boardwalk and hang out at the arcades. Her dad was amazing at the old pinball machines. For dinner they’d eat slices of limp pizza sold out of a window. They’d finish the night with go-karts and fried dough powdered with sugar and so sweet it made Gigi’s teeth ache. Her dad always made her arm-wrestle him for the last bite.

  Gigi’s eyes filled. She swatted away the tears, wishing she could smash them like flies. She hated God for letting Dad die. More proof that God sucked. As if the hurricanes and earthquakes, terrorist bombings, and school shootings weren’t enough proof that God was totally insane.

  She locked her bike to the chain-link fence by the playground, slipped off her sandals, and carried her sketch pad down to the water, where she sank cross-legged onto the sand and fiddled with her lip ring. She’d gotten her ears pierced when she was twelve. Her mom took her to a doctor and winced when the doctor put gold studs in Gigi’s ears, despite the fact that he’d numbed her ears so completely, Gigi felt like her head was wrapped in duct tape.

  After Dad got sick, she’d bribed Miguel, one of the janitors at her school, to take her to New Hampshire in his rusty truck for more piercings. Miguel knew lots of places where people didn’t care how old you were. You could buy tattoos, fireworks, lip rings, and even guns in New Hampshire if you had the money and knew where to go.

  She’d pierced her eyebrow and then her lip out of solidarity with her father. By the end, Dad had looked half machine, connected to tubes that dripped medicine into his body like a leaking faucet. Only it seemed like maybe the faucet was dripping the wrong way, because her dad’s life was leaking out of him.

  After getting her lip pierced, Gigi had ridden her bike to the hospital. Her lip was swollen and red. At the sight of it, Mom said, “Oh, Gigi, that’s the last straw, honestly, your poor beautiful mouth,” and started to cry. She left the room “to get a little air.”

  But Dad, who was having one of his good days, sitting up and drinking something orange with a straw, asked her to sit on the bed beside him. His face was so thin by then that he’d been joking with Gigi about it lately, saying, “Finally, I look like Mick Jagger instead of a fat banker.”

  “Does it hurt?” he’d asked, reaching out to almost, but not quite, touch her lip.

  “More than my ears or my nose,” she admitted. “That’s okay. I wanted it to hurt.”

  “Why, honey?” Dad dropped his hand, his fingers landing on her wrist like a bird’s scaly cold foot.

  “I wanted to know what you’re feeling.” She pointed to the needle in his arm that connected to his tubes.

  He smiled. “Thank you. I wish I could dye my hair blue and know what you’re feeling.”

  “I could dye it for you,” Gigi said, pretending that her dad still had his hair, when in fact his head looked like a baby’s now, pink and smooth, with a few random cottony bits.

  “Maybe next time. Listen, there’s something you need to know before I leave you, G-girl. Something very important.”

  “Okay,” she said, even though her stomach had knotted. Having her dad die was important enough, it seemed, without having to know anything else. “What?”

  “I love you, and I know you love me. But I have a feeling you’re going to forget me after a little while.”

  “I won’t!”

  Dad blinked hard. “Okay. Even if you don’t, though, I want you to know that you won’t be alone in the world after I’m gone.”

  “You’re not trying to tell me to believe in God and angels or anything like that, are you?” she’d said. “Because this would be a really bad time to try and convince me that God has a plan.”

  “I hear you, G-girl. No, no. I want you to know you have other people in your family.”

  She nodded. “Right. Mom and Gramma are around every day, and now Uncle Simon is back from China or wherever.”

  “Yes, but you have other family, too.” Dad took a deep, shivery breath, his whole chest caving in. “On my side.”

  “You mean Ava and Elaine?”

  “No. I mean your brother. You have a brother, Gigi.”

  “I do?” Gigi was so stunned that she’d stopped fiddling with her new lip ring. “You had another wife, not just Mom and Suzanne?” She’d heard all about Suzanne from her mom, who said Dad’s first wife had “gone off the deep end.” This sounded exciting, though not the way her mom said it.

  Dad shook his head. One eyelid was twitching like it always did when he got tired. “No more wives. Two were plenty for me. And I could never, ever love another woman the way I love your mom, honey. Never forget that. But Suzanne and I had another child when we were very young, not much older than you.” His voice had faded to a whisper. “Named Peter. He would be so proud of you, honey, just like I am.”

  Gigi’s heart had started pounding. Could this be true? She knew all about her dad’s medicines and how her mom said sometimes he didn’t make sense. On the other hand, he’d never seemed confused about anything when she was around. “Does Mom know?”

  “She knows a little bit.” He coughed for a long time, then added, “You know how upset she gets these days. I didn’t want to bother her with any of this stuff. But I wanted you to know about Peter so you can look for him.”

  “Where is he?”

  At that, her father had closed his eyes and said, “I don’t know. There was something wrong with him. Suzanne couldn’t take care of
him. It was a terrible thing.”

  He’d just managed to get these words out when the machine that tracked her dad’s heart and blood and breathing, the one with all the colored lines on the computer, started beeping like a pinball machine when you’ve won an extra game. A nurse had come running in, saying to Gigi, “Sweetie, I’m sorry, but we need to give your dad some special medicine now. You’d better go find your mom.”

  Gigi had stood up, frightened. “Dad?”

  “It’s all right,” he’d said without opening his eyes. “Find your brother. It wasn’t my choice to give him up. I would have loved your brother no matter what. If he’s still alive, tell him that for me. It’s important. Promise?”

  “I promise,” Gigi whispered.

  Her dad didn’t die that day, so at least Gigi didn’t have to feel guilty about killing him. He’d fallen asleep, though, and wasn’t awake much after that. Only his fluttering eyelids told Gigi he could hear her.

  Gigi’s breathing was ragged now, as she sat on the beach and tried not to cry. She didn’t want to think about Dad anymore. She started drawing, focusing intently on the whorled designs in the sand. The tide had gone out, leaving the sand as rough as fish scales arranged in circles around silver tidal pools.

  The circles were calming to look at. Hypnotizing, even. She copied the designs in the sand, then amplified them, shading the curves. Her breathing, so shallow and harsh a minute ago, began slowing down as she breathed in and out with the steady rhythm of the waves lapping against the shore.

  Eventually Gigi wasn’t just drawing designs, but turning them into bowls and jars, exploring the relationships between circles and squares. The jars she liked best were the ones she’d drawn as squat and round as birds’ nests. To these, she’d added square, flat lids instead of matching circular ones. The jars looked like she felt right now, pushing upward, struggling to free themselves from the lids, maybe pop them off with a scream.