Beach Girls Read online

  The scientists laughed. Stevie slouched down in her seat. Now that she had established her marital status—to the doctor, but more importantly, to herself—she felt a wave of emotion washing over her. This part of the lecture was why she had chosen the emperor penguin as her next project: because of the intense, protective love of a father for his only child.

  Stevie and her dad, Johnny Moore. Oh, she could hardly stand this next part, as Dr. Mars continued to lecture in his soft, cultured voice, to point out the pictures with his strong, tweed-clad arm. Stevie's father had been a professor, too—at Trinity College, in Hartford. He was Irish-born and -raised, a lover of the English language, a professor of Irish literature. He was best known for his papers on James Joyce and his schizophrenic daughter, Lucia. The helpless love a man could feel for the damaged girl he'd brought into this world . . .

  As Dr. Mars continued, Stevie sank lower in her seat. “There the father stands, in cruel weather, for seventy-two days. The storms are vicious, with winds blowing one hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, driving snow and ice. The father eats nothing during this time, while feeding the chick with liquid—of milklike consistency—produced by a gland in his esophagus.”

  Thinking of the sacrifices her father had made raising her, Stevie stopped taking notes and just stared at the slides. The professor continued: “Finally the females return from two months of fishing. They find their mates and chicks, among hundreds of others, by matching calls. You see, no two birds make the same precise call. And once a pair has mated, the exact sound of each other's cry is imprinted upon their—”

  “Hearts,” Stevie heard herself say out loud.

  “I was going to say ‘brains,'” Linus Mars said.

  The crowd of scientists laughed.

  “But of course, nothing is so clear-cut. The world is harsh for animals of all kinds, and it is natural for us—man—that is, Homo sapiens—to imagine an emotional connection as well as a biological one. Especially when, as is all too often the case, the mother does not return from the sea. As heroic as it might seem for the father to care for the egg, during those seventy-two days, he does not face the same southern ocean conditions, the same predators. Sometimes she doesn't return.” Stevie's eyes filled.

  “I therefore defer to the woman in the front row. ‘Heart' is also correct. In that, the body of any creature is a road map for all of its experiences, and therefore the sound of Aptenodytes foresteri's call is imprinted upon its mate's heart. And when the call is not answered, it creates a disaster that, as humans, we can imagine all too well.” He paused, staring down at her.

  When the lecture was over, the professor approached Stevie. Although she had by then dried her tears, he handed her a perfectly starched, folded linen handkerchief—just like the kind her father used to carry.

  “I'm fine,” she said. “But thank you.”

  “You seemed very engaged with the lecture.”

  “I'm writing a children's book about emperor penguins, and you gave me some wonderful material.”

  “I would have said . . . you were engaged with the love story.”

  “The love story?”

  The professor was very tall. His tweed jacket was heathery tan, of stiff, thorny yarn the color of a briar patch, and made Stevie think of trips she had taken with her father to Sligo, Galway, and the Aran Isles. He had hazel eyes with soft brown lashes. A pair of gold spectacles was about to fall out of his breast pocket; she gently pushed them back in.

  “The love of the father for his mate. And their offspring.”

  “I thought scientists didn't think that birds have love stories,” she said.

  “We don't. And they don't. But I thought perhaps you believed otherwise.”

  “I do,” she said.

  “That is honest of you to admit here in the bastion of biology—what you're saying is sacrilege to an ornithologist like myself.”

  “I'm sorry,” she said. “Artists don't always think in straight lines.”

  A troubled look crossed his brow. It lasted for a full ten seconds, and then he looked up at the ceiling and exhaled with abject regret. She wondered whether perhaps he had been too linear for too long.

  “I wish I could unlearn . . . certain things,” he said. “Rigidity of thought is a trap too many of us fall into. . . .”

  “Rigidity isn't all bad,” she whispered as she looked straight at his bare ring finger, as she thought of Kevin, at home at that minute, lying on the sofa with a beer and some bourbon, flipping channels on the TV in a miasmic puddle of despair.

  “Defend your thesis,” the professor said.

  “My husband was the most talented artist in our class,” Stevie said. “But then he stopped painting, because he said he wasn't inspired. I told him that discipline was more important than inspiration—any day. Go to your studio, and pictures will flow from your brush. That's how it happens—it's the alchemy of being an artist. The gift, you know? But it's getting to the easel that's the hard part.”

  “Did he listen to you?”

  She shook his head. “Now he never paints at all.” She felt swamped by the loneliness of being married to a man drinking himself into the distance.

  “I'm sorry.”

  Stevie nodded.

  “Do you really believe what you're saying? That discipline is more important than inspiration?”

  “Yes. I know it is. My father told me. . . .”

  “And how did your father know?”

  Stevie swallowed hard. “My father was a professor—like you. Dr. John Moore. He was also a poet. He had it all—a Ph.D., tenure, and the soul of Ireland. And then my mother . . . went away, like a mother penguin. She went to France on a painting tour that my father gave her for her thirty-fifth birthday, and she never came home.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She died in a plane crash.”

  “I'm very sorry,” he said, and seeing that she now did require his handkerchief, offered it again.

  She blew her nose.

  “A lovely call,” he said. “It's quite imprinted upon my heart.”

  She laughed, returning the refolded linen square.

  “And the discipline segment of your story?” he asked, then shook his head. “What a fool I am. Breaking into your tender narrative, for the sole purpose of driving you back on course. See what I mean by the curse of linear thought?”

  “It's okay. What I was going to say is, my father took care of me from then on. Nothing ever got in the way of it. Not his teaching, not his poetry. He stopped publishing after she died—I think I took up too much of his time. He was passed over as department head—because he had to drive me to riding lessons and take me drawing in fields along the Farmington River.”

  “He sounds like a wonderful man.”

  “He was,” Stevie said. “And father.”

  “You make the distinction? They're not one and the same?” he asked, with hunger in his eyes. “Is it possible to be one without the other? Wonderful man, wonderful father?”

  “I think they're the same,” she said.

  “Bloody hell, I was afraid you'd say that,” he said. “I've been the most appalling father to my son. Would I have stood seventy-two minutes on the pack ice with him, never mind seventy-two days? I would not.”

  “I'm sure he'd forgive you.”

  “Forgive me? He bloody worships me. The ground I've walked since the day I left his mother is molten gold to William. Is there any fairness to that?”

  “Your boy loves his father. Sounds fair to me.”

  The professor smiled. “Well, aren't you dear to say that? Very, very dear. Come now—I'll buy you a drink at the Landfall, and you can teach me the fine points of not thinking straight. What's your name?”

  “Stevie Moore.”

  “I'm Linus Mars. Please, come? I think you know things that I need to hear.”

  “About your son?”

  “About my heart.”

  “Oh . . .”

  She tho
ught of Kevin, back in New York, four and a half hours away. He wouldn't eat until she got home and either fed him or bodily forced him to pick up the phone and order Chinese. On the other hand, he would probably have passed out long before she arrived. Her own heart had been pummeled by a marriage she had once desired with all her soul. Staring up at Linus's handsome, angular face, hooded hazel eyes, she felt the first stirrings of long-buried feeling.

  Now, in the dark quiet of her house at Hubbard's Point, she let her brush move across the paper's rough surface. The baby wren stood alone.

  Stevie wiped her brow. Nell's visit had stirred her up. Again she thought of Emma. Stevie, Madeleine, and Emma.

  Hubbard's Point was cut off from the rest of Connecticut by a railroad trestle, passing over the road. Driving though the gate was like entering an enchanted realm where friends were as close as sisters. For three years, as they changed from girls to young women, they had lain on towels in the sun, soaking up warmth and promise, believing that life, and their friendship, would survive forever. They had promised to grow old together, to become just like the leathery old ladies who arranged their beach chairs in a sewing circle and wore their grandmotherly necklaces into the water.

  How easily people give up on things, Stevie thought, painting. Why didn't I work harder to stay in touch? As she feathered the small wren's wings, she thought of all the things she had done in life that the beach girls hadn't known about. She remembered how they had healed her first broken heart—a trip to Paradise Ice Cream for sundaes, a ritual burying of the maraschino cherries in the sand.

  She could have used that ceremony many times since. Laying down her brush, she put the wren sketches aside for the night. Then, because she had promised Tilly she'd take her mousing, she opened the kitchen door and let the cat run into the night. Barefoot, she walked through the yard, to stand on the rock that faced the beach. She heard the waves and saw their sharp white edges rippling through the inky blackness.

  One after another, the small waves of Long Island Sound touched the beach in steady rhythm. Stevie tried to catch her breath, get her heartbeat in synch with the waves. Tilly rustled through the underbrush. A nearly toothless cat, in search of prey. It made Stevie smile—it really did—to think of such hope in the face of dental reality.

  “Go, Tilly,” Stevie said, still gazing down at the beach, at the place where she and her friends had spent so many happy days so long ago. She looked up at the stars and found one for Madeleine and one for Emma. “And one for Nell,” Stevie said, staring at one bright star, twinkling white-blue in night's endless black.

  A WARM BREEZE blew through the screens, and the sound of crickets and night birds was a lullaby. Nell lay in her bed, her stomach aching from eating too much lobster, and tried to be soothed by the sounds of nature. It didn't work.

  “Ohhh!” she said.

  “Go to sleep, Nell,” came her father's voice.

  “I'm trying!” she said.

  “Try harder.”

  She stuck out her tongue. What kind of answer was that? Try harder! God, fathers didn't get it. Didn't they know that the harder you tried to sleep, the faster it slipped away? Nell's mother would have said. . . . Nell squinched her eyes extra tight, trying to remember what her mother would have said.

  The memory wouldn't come. Nell used to be able to fill in the blanks with her mother's words, but suddenly there were none. None! She tried to conjure up her mother's voice, and that wouldn't come, either!

  “Ohhh!” she cried out louder. Suddenly her stomachache was much worse. “Daddy!”

  He came into the small room. She saw his tall silhouette in the doorway. Then he sat down on the edge of her bed. The house was small, and it smelled musty. The curtains were ugly. Nell hated it here. Her stomach ached. She missed her mother. Seeing Stevie was both too little and too much. All of these feelings swirled through her mind, cutting her with tiny knives, making her cry and cry.

  “It's okay, Nell,” her father said, putting his arms around her.

  It's not, it's never going to be okay again, she wanted to say, but she was sobbing too hard to get the words out.

  “Maybe you shouldn't have finished your lobster,” he said. “It was pretty big.”

  Nell remembered the scene at the restaurant: her father and Francesca talking about some bridge they were building, the table so festive and covered with lobsters and clams and corn on the cob, and Nell just rolling up her sleeves and dipping the pink lobster meat into melted butter, feeling fuller and fuller, and Francesca smiling and stifling a laugh as she said, “Someone's eyes are bigger than her stomach.”

  “She's gone,” her father said now.

  “I know,” Nell cried. She closed her eyes, drawing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. She had heard Francesca saying goodbye a short while ago. She had to drive all the way back to Boston, and Nell could just tell she wanted to be invited to stay over.

  “Don't worry about her, Nell,” he said.

  “Mary Donovan's father married his girlfriend,” Nell wept.

  “I'm not Mary Donovan's father.”

  “Mommy loved lobster.”

  “I know.”

  “She told me the beach girls used to go lobstering together.”

  “Maybe they did. I don't know.”

  “Can we ask Aunt Maddie?”

  Silence. Her father's hand felt heavy on her head. Nell waited for him to say something, even though she knew he never would. Every time she asked him about Aunt Maddie, he just stopped talking till her question went away. Thinking of how her mother and aunt used to laugh together made Nell's stomach shrink and hurt so much that she just held herself with her own arms, rolling toward the wall so her father wouldn't see her face.

  Chapter 4

  IT TOOK THREE DAYS TO CONVINCE NELL that she should sign up for beach recreation: it would be fun, she'd improve her swimming, and Jack would be waiting for her on the boardwalk every single day when she was finished. Maybe physical exercise would tire her out, help her to sleep. Jack had Dr. Galford on speed dial, but he didn't want to call. He wanted his daughter to have a quiet, fun, psychiatrist-free summer vacation.

  So they trooped down to the end of the beach, Nell doing an excellent imitation of a sullen prisoner. She stood behind Jack as he introduced her to Laurel Thompson, the enthusiastic recreation teacher. Bright, blonde, seventeen, she leaned around Jack to smile at Nell. Nell obliged by retreating around Jack's other leg.

  “Hi, Nell.”

  “She's not sure about this,” Jack said.

  “Oh, that's okay,” the teacher said. Tall and thin, she flashed a smile straight at Nell. “Lots of kids aren't too sure at first. But you can be my helper today, Nell.”

  “Hear that, Nell?” Jack asked, hoping Nell would be swayed. He didn't hold out much hope, watching her dig her bare feet into the wet sand. “Nell?”

  “Nnnnn,” she said.

  “We'll have fun!” Laurel said.

  “I'll meet you at twelve noon,” Jack said, placing his hand on his daughter's head. Her brown hair felt warm in the sun. “On the boardwalk.”

  “Dad,” Nell said as other kids her age began to gather round, “I'm not staying.”

  “Hi, Nell!” said a freckled girl with red hair and a huge smile. “Remember me? You stood on my towel a few days ago! I'm Peggy.”

  Nell nodded. “I remember.”

  Jack's heart was beating fast, waiting for a smile or a frown or some sign from his daughter that this was going to be okay, that he could leave her here with a new friend.

  Peggy grabbed her hand. “You're going to be my partner in the relay race. We're together, okay, Laurel?”

  “Excellent, Peggy, Nell. Come on, everyone—line up on the hard sand, right here.”

  Still holding Peggy's hand, Nell gave her father one last look. It wasn't quite a smile, but almost. He saw her mother in her eyes. When Emma had been dying, unconscious in her hospital bed, Jack had held her face betwe
en his hands and begged her to haunt him. She did just that, every day, in the body of their daughter.

  Leaving Nell to the Hubbard's Point Recreation Program, Jack walked back along the beach, vaguely aiming toward the house where his wife's best friend had lived. He stared up at the cottages along the rock ledge, half hidden by pine trees. He tried to remember which one it was. Nell had found it.

  Leave it to Nell: she was a magnet for any little detail about her mother. Back before Emma's death, Nell would hound her aunt for stories, memories, secrets, favorite songs. Madeleine had even taught Nell the harmony Emma used to sing for “Lemon Tree.” Nell sang the song every chance she got—in the bathtub, in the car, just waiting for an adult woman's voice to pitch in out of nowhere.

  Maybe that was her motive for stopping in on Stevie Moore. Jack had certainly never mentioned her to Nell before—he probably wouldn't even have remembered her name. She was one of his kid sister's friends—none of whom he'd paid any attention to except Emma.

  Jack's chest was tight; he turned around to make sure he didn't have a shadow—Nell wasn't following him. Good. He'd needed to find something for her to do for a few hours every day. He had plans to make, and with Nell constantly around, he couldn't get anything done.

  He checked his watch: nine-twenty. That gave him nearly three hours of free time. He had plenty of time to take a walk first, before getting down to business. He crossed the footbridge over the creek, headed up the stone steps into the woods.

  “HEY —don't drop it!”

  “I'm not dropping it—you're the one with butterfingers.”

  “Will you two shut up and carry the ladder? Jeez—do I have to tell you how to do everything?”

  “What if she puts a spell on us?”

  “You're an idiot—she's not a real witch.”

  “She's a good witch, like that one in a bubble on The Wizard of Oz.”

  “Why, 'cause she likes birds? Well, birds have gross scaly claws, and beaks that peck out your eyes. Hear that, Billy? We're gonna call you Bird Boy. Just like the witch is Bird Woman. She's weird. My mom says she never hangs out with normal people.”