Beach Colors (8 page)

A blue sports car pulled into a space next to the truck. There was only one blue sports car in town that Nick knew of. He tried not to look but he couldn’t help himself.

She was walking toward them, looking up at the board that listed the ice cream flavors. She paused for a moment reading, her head cocked up, her neck stretched like a baby bird taking food . . .
or a beautiful woman reaching up for a kiss.

“Chief?”

“What?” The image dissipated.

“Do you want some ice cream?”

Margaux Sullivan had made her choice and was standing right behind him. His mind went blank. “Oh, uh. Chocolate with sprinkles.”

Nick took out his wallet while the girl moved off to get their cones. He was acutely aware of Margaux, but he should probably pretend he hadn’t noticed her. Pretend that his heart wasn’t knocking like an engine with a bad carburetor. Yeah, like that was possible.

He was being ridiculous. He couldn’t just ignore her. First of all, he was the chief of police. Secondly, he’d just dripped all over her at the cove the day before. Had held her close enough to feel her breath on his skin. He’d seen her cry. Surely that called for some kind of acknowledgment.

He turned around. Smiled, at least he meant to smile. It felt more like a grimace.

A quick half smile in return and she looked away to scan the menu board.

Connor tugged at his pants leg.

“What, sport?”

“Why is that lady wearing black? Did her daddy die?”

Nick cringed. Even though he whispered, Margaux had to have heard him. She had. Her cheeks turned pink. It hadn’t been sunburn yesterday. She was blushing.

Margaux looked down at Connor. “Guess I’m not dressed for the beach, huh?”

Connor shook his head.

“That’s because I’m from the city. We wear black there.”

“Why?” he breathed.

Margaux moved closer to hear him. She was practically kneeling at Nick’s feet. Not that she noticed. Her attention was focused on Connor. All Nick got was the top of her head, those bright wild curls corkscrewing in the sunlight.

“Hey, buddy, I bet our ice cream is ready.” He turned Connor toward the counter. “Sorry he bothered you.”

She stood. “He didn’t bother me. I guess I better get out my beach clothes, though.”

“No. You look fine. I mean you look . . . you look good.”

“Thanks.” She dipped her chin. He stared at her. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes away. “Um, I think your ice cream . . .” She dipped her chin again.

“What? Oh.” He turned toward the service window, glanced back at her. “Nice to see you.”

He pulled out a ten-dollar bill and shoved it through the window. Took the ice cream, handed one of the cones to Connor and hustled him to a picnic table at the side of the building. He should probably have asked her to join them. No, that would be stupid. Why would she want to have ice cream with him and a kid?

A couple of minutes later, Margaux Sullivan picked her way across the gravel toward her car, licking a double pistachio ice cream. As he watched, she backed out of the parking place and slowly drove off toward Little Crescent Beach. And Nick was hit by a feeling he hadn’t felt in a long time. Regret.

T
his was getting weird, Margaux thought as she drove away. She was prepared to see him in town occasionally. But three for three was too much. She couldn’t even go for ice cream without running into the man. And his kid, she added. The same kid she’d seen at Mass. Connor Prescott. Nick Prescott.

Now she knew what the chief of police’s hair would look like if he let it grow.
Like his son’s, you dolt.
Her face heated all over again. She’d been having thoughts about a married man . . . with children. At least one.

Ice cream began to drip down her wrist. She licked it off and a smile crept to her lips. She’d never have figured him for a chocolate-with-sprinkles kind of guy.

The smile disappeared. The kid thought she was in mourning. A kid that young shouldn’t know about mourning. But he was right.

She was mourning. Not for a father or a brother, not anymore, not even for her marriage, but over her life. And that had to stop.

The sun scudded behind a cloud, seconds later the sky turned dark. The first raindrop fell as she turned onto Salt Marsh Lane. By the time she reached home, it was coming down in sheets. Nobody had said anything about rain.

Head tucked, she raced to the back door, dumped her ice cream in the trash, then stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, soaked to the skin. She slipped out of her espadrilles and headed for the stairs and a change of clothes.

She opened her closet door. Her city clothes were lined up neatly across the rack. She was looking at black, black slacks, black shirts, black dresses, black. She pulled out the top two drawers of her dresser but she already knew what she would find there. Black—lingerie, camisoles, blouses. All black.

The kid had nailed it, she looked like a bird of prey.

She was sure there must be some hand-me-downs or forgotten clothes in one of the closets. The Sullivans never threw anything useful away. So what if they might be a little out of date, a little faded.

It didn’t matter. No one in the business knew where she was and no one at the shore cared that she wasn’t dressed in the latest style.

She hit pay dirt in the bottom drawer of the dresser. There was a pair of shorts, not high-fashion, but still in wearable condition. Two pairs of stone-washed jeans and a pair of cutoffs. How about that, she
did
have cutoffs. A faded bikini that would do in a pinch. And three T-shirts with advertising across the fronts.

She went back to the closet. Rummaged in the corners where she remembered seeing a red Windbreaker and rehung it front and center.

She got down on her hands and knees and crawled into the closet, groped along the floor until she came up with a pair of pink flip-flops which she threw out into the middle of the floor. Her hand hesitated over a paint-splattered pair of sneakers, then she tossed those out, too.

She was backing out of the closet when her elbow caught the edge of a large brown portfolio. It had been pushed to the very back corner and forgotten.

She dragged it out and carried it to her bed.

It was her first portfolio, dusty and a little frayed at the edges. She sat down on the spread and just looked at it, half curious, half hesitant to look inside. Carefully she untied the black ribbon that held it closed and opened the flap. She tipped it toward the bed and a sheaf of sketch papers slid out.

On the top was a primitive self-portrait. She picked it up and shook her head. It did resemble her in a Grandma Moses sort of way, except the hair was a deep chestnut, long and totally straight instead of red and curly. In the corner was one of her early signatures.

She put it aside and looked at the next. This was a seascape. The jetty was depicted in muddy grays on the left of the canvas. Little people dotted the bright yellow beach that spread across the bottom of the canvas.

The next was another seascape, this time in a storm. The beach glowed almost white as if lightning had just lit the sky. Whitecaps jumped out at the eye from a midnight blue sea. Waves too large for the Sound, except in a hurricane, crashed on craggy rocks in a fireworks display of spray.

“Not bad,” Margaux murmured to herself. The painting, as naïve as it was, drew her in, made her wonder what was happening just outside the frame. She riffled through the rest, each getting a little more proficient. The landscapes contained more people, and the people wore more colorful outfits.

She was taken by surprise by the white wedding dress. It was one of her first fashion renderings. No landscape, no crowd of people. Only one model, one dress, with a wide billowing skirt and a train that ran off the page. It had a princess neckline with little dots Margaux thought must be seed pearls.

She remembered the day she’d drawn it. She’d been at the library looking over the newest edition of
Modern Bride
. She must have been ten or eleven. She always sat at the same table and pretended it was her studio. Except there was this older kid who always sat across from her. She didn’t mind. He just read these big fat books and hardly ever moved or made a sound.

She’d seen that dress in the magazine and pulled out her sketchbook and copied it. The model had Brianna’s long blond hair.

Margaux smiled and looked at the next sketch. A flounced dirndl of large red, magenta, and pink flowers. The colors should have clashed, but they didn’t. Just popped the skirt off the page.

Beginner’s luck,
she thought as she looked through several more designs.

She’d come a long way since those early days, but she felt akin to that young girl who’d created them. Colorful. Bold. Optimistic. Joyous. This is where she had started. This was what she was, not the cold, aggressive look she had become.

Where was her joy? She’d become so serious, so competitive, so intent on staying on top that she’d lost the joy of designing.

The realization hit her hard. Had that lack of joy been partially responsible for her losing everything?

No,
she argued back.
Louis is responsible for your losing everything. You would have recaptured the joy. Maybe when the fall show was over.

Now, she wouldn’t have that chance.

She returned the sketches to the portfolio, tied it together, and put it back in the closet. Joy was fine, but it didn’t pay the rent.

Five

I
t continued to rain through the night and Margaux opened her eyes the next morning to a rain-speckled window. She watched dumbly as the drops ran in rivulets down the pane; listened to the continuous
splat-splat
on the overhang beneath her window and closed her eyes again.

Nothing had changed. She was at the beach house, broke and out of work, and now it was raining. For a few moments while sketching out on the jetty, she’d felt almost optimistic. When she went to bed last night, she thought she might be on the mend. She fell asleep with colors dancing in her head. But this morning it was gray again. And the energy she’d felt had dissipated. She couldn’t seem to muster the energy to get out of bed.

Nor did she want to. She just wanted it to all go away. To go back a few months and make things different. To go back a few years and make things different. Do anything to keep herself from being where she was now.

She pulled the covers over her head. Maybe the next time she woke up, life would be better.

The next time she woke up, she had to pee. She pushed the covers back and, shivering, trotted across the hall to the bathroom then climbed back in bed. Pulled up the quilt. Put the pillow over her head . . . and stayed awake. She turned over, cleared her mind, but it just filled up again.

A branch brushed steadily against the cedar shakes of the house. Its
swish-swish
gradually became a tormenting mantra.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Stupid to have missed the signs that Louis was not her loving husband. Stupid to not keep total control of her business. Stupid to not notice the missing money. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

She stared out the window, the view blurred by the rain. And stupid to sit here and do nothing.

That was the trouble with being a high-achieving, workaholic A type; it was nearly impossible to sit back and do nothing. Even when she had nothing to do.

She got up and dragged on a pair of jeans she’d found the day before, surprised to find that they hung loosely on her. Not many thirty-four-year-old women could boast of still being able to fit into clothes they wore in high school. Of course most women hadn’t had their life destroyed in one massive screwup.

She pulled an old T-shirt over her head and looked down to the word scribbled across her chest.
Nirvana.
If only. There wasn’t a pair of socks in sight so she stuffed her bare feet into the paint-smeared sneakers and went to the bedroom door.

A glance over her shoulder told her she was in big trouble. The organized, neat-as-a-pin person she had been was MIA. Her clothes from the night before were lying where she’d left them on the floor by the bed. The dress she’d worn to Mass was crumpled on the seat of her desk chair. The quilt had fallen half off the bed and the sheet was twisted into a knot.

She turned her back on them and went downstairs.

She made coffee and stood with her forehead pressed to the window, looking out at the windswept beach. The lifeguard stand rose like a forlorn sentinel, clumps of seaweed twisted around the wooden stilts. A sheet of newspaper tumbled across the sand. Whitecaps chopped up the surface of a gunmetal gray-green sea.

The coffee grew cold in her mug. She flopped down into the chintz easy chair and ran her index finger around the outline of a huge faded cabbage rose.

The telephone rang. She let it ring. It would be Jude wanting to have lunch, wanting to be there to support her daughter. But Margaux couldn’t face her right now. It would almost be easier if Jude ranted and railed at her, blamed her for failing. Margaux could deal with that. She deserved it.

But nothing ever ruffled her mother’s composure or her optimism. Even when Danny died, she went on with life, grieving deeply but inwardly, while she arranged the wake and the funeral, greeted mourners, comforted Margaux and Henry as if a piece of her hadn’t died with her son.

Margaux had been young enough to think she could make up for Danny’s loss. Be the best she could be, make her parents proud. Of course, she didn’t realize until later that they would be proud of her no matter what she did.

A shudder racked her body; she drew up her knees and clung to them. God help her, she’d even married Louis thinking of her parents. She thought he could make her family whole again. He even looked a bit like Danny.

But he wasn’t Danny, he wasn’t even the man she thought she’d married.

The telephone rang again. She counted the rings—five, six, seven, eight. Then quiet.

She wasn’t being fair. Jude would worry. She pushed herself out of the chair and called Jude back.