The Cottage at Glass Beach (14 page)

“No need.”

“I miss my boys. I wish I'd hadn't been upset that morning. I wish they knew how much I loved them.”

“They knew. I'm sure they did. You're a kind woman, Maire. The kindest I've ever known.”

“I'm not, really. But I try.”

“That's all a person can ever do.”

She buttered a piece of bread. “So you don't mind seeing to it? To the boat?”

“I'd be happy to. Is there more I can do at the cottage?”

Maire sensed he was asking about more than standard repairs. “I'm sure things will come up. It's a work in progress. I know Nora appreciates your help.”

“Does she? It doesn't always seem like it.”

“She's suffered disappointments. They've made her cautious.” She held his gaze to make sure he understood. He didn't look away, as Joe and Jamie might have done. His eyes remained steady. They were beautiful eyes, dark, long-lashed, shining with intelligence. “Are you going to tell her who you are?” Maire asked, curious about how he would respond. She knew there was more to him than met the eye, from the minute she saw him, exactly what, she couldn't say, though she guessed. She hadn't pressed him. She didn't want to drive him away.

“I'm not sure I know myself—and would she believe me if I did? She doesn't trust easily.”

“She needs time. She doesn't fully understand the island yet. What's possible. I'm not sure I do myself, and I've lived here my whole life.”

It was enough that he was there, sitting across from her, this man who had come into their lives so suddenly, who filled a void she hadn't known existed.

Chapter Thirteen

N
ora heard the sound of tires negotiating the drive, their steady progress crushing the shell fragments before halting in front of the cottage. The engine went silent. The radiator ticked and hissed, as if, in the process of cooling, it might detonate. A door slammed. Footsteps crunched. She didn't pay them much mind. She was in the middle of gluing fasteners onto the sea glass, drilling holes, linking links, tasks that required focus and a steady hand. One or two more, then she'd rise and see who it was. After all, no one would be visiting except Polly, with the mail, or Alison, delivering an order from the store or dropping by to say hello.

Ella, however, seemed particularly attuned to the arrival. Out the door she went, and into the blinding light, a single word leaving her lips like the cry of a gull, shattering the tenuous quiet: “Daddy!”

Nora dropped the piece of glass she'd been working on. It skittered across the floor and spun before going still.

Annie looked up from her puzzle. She held the fin of an angel fish, feathery, brilliant, in her right hand, a question in her eyes.

Nora nodded, fighting the instinct to grab her and hold her close. Annie raced out of the cottage and into her father's arms. Through the curtained window, Nora saw her daughters and husband. Malcolm, tall, slender as ever, more tan than when she'd seen him last, the girls wrapped around him like vines, all arms and legs.

What was he doing there?

She opened the door. The light, coming from the east at that midmorning hour—a long day ahead—cut into the room, forcing her to squint against the glare, he at the locus of its brilliance, as always, a second sun around which others orbited, with his smile, his very presence. She looked past him to the road, expecting others to appear in his wake—advisers, journalists, photographers—for he was rarely alone. The road was deserted.

Their eyes met over the girls' shoulders, their disheveled hair, their expressions wild with hope and abandon.

He was here, at last.

“Malcolm.” Nora spoke as if moving a chess piece across a board. No matter what she was feeling right now, no matter how much her heart thrummed at the sight of him—not so much with anticipation as with anxiety and confusion—everything would have to be handled with utmost care.

“Nora.”

They used full names now, the time of endearments in the past.

The girls slid away from him, watched her, watched him, watched them watching each other.

“Why don't you play on the beach for a while?” she suggested. As much as she wanted the girls there as a buffer, that would only prolong the encounter and expose them to unnecessary tension. She hoped it would be short, this meeting or whatever it was—a few minutes, an hour, a day at most. She could entertain the thought of sitting down together for a meal, lunch or, if need be, dinner. That, she could manage. Then he would get in the car and drive away. He was good at that. She wouldn't allow herself to be drawn in—into a fight, or into revisiting the piercing sense of loss that had once driven her to break a full set of dishes and scream obscenities while the girls were at school. And yet the wound was there, refusing to heal. She felt a tug now at the edges. She hadn't realized how easily it might break open. She didn't know what she'd do if it did.

Ella's eyes darted from one parent to another, her expression pleading.

“Your mother and I need to talk.” Malcolm backed Nora up for once. How odd to be united in this one small thing.

Ella motioned to Annie. “Let's go,” she said. Nora clenched her teeth at how easily she obeyed him.

Ella paused after a few steps, looking over her shoulder. “You're not going to leave, are you?” she asked her father.

The wind ruffled his hair, still wavy and brown as ever, the hair she once ran her fingers through. “I'll be right there,” he said.

He made promises easily, Nora thought.

The girls disappeared over the bluff in the direction of the coracle.

“So this is the place,” Malcolm said, taking in the view. “Burke's Island.” The words sounded foreign on his tongue, wrong.

They stood there, suspended, he in the drive, she on the threshold. She held on to that moment, weighing whether to admit him or turn him away. He was on her turf now. “I guess you'd better come in,” she said finally, the flush of power already ebbing. She couldn't disappoint her daughters, and so she motioned him inside, offered coffee, as if he were a friend or acquaintance dropping by for a chat. “I confess I'm surprised to see you.”

“Ella called. I wanted to see the girls.”

She'd forbidden the girls cell phones, at least until they were fourteen, clearly in the minority among the other parents, but holding firm, for now. The separation was forcing her to rethink the rule, but she hadn't planned on revisiting the matter until they returned to Boston. Her gaze fell on her own phone, resting on the desk. Ella must have used it to text him.

“And to see you.” The transition was nearly seamless. Maybe he meant it, maybe he didn't. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

“Really? What for?”

“Nor—” His eyes softened as he resurrected the nickname, deep-set blue eyes holding the same expression that had attracted her all those years ago, making her feel as if she were the only person in the room. A look she'd thought was meant specially for her. Maybe it had been, for a time, though over the course of their marriage she'd seen it at work as he wooed everyone from colleagues to constituents to waitresses with a nearly indiscriminate charm.

“How long do you plan on staying?” she asked.

“I have a few days off.”

Remarkable.

“And you have a place in town?”

“I thought—” He gazed around the interior of the cottage, taking in the dimensions, the number of rooms.

“You'd stay here?” She laughed, incredulous. “That's presumptuous, even for you.”

“Burke's Island isn't exactly tourist central.”

No, it wasn't—which was precisely the point.

“I'm thinking about what would be best,” he continued.

“For whom, exactly?”

He reached across the table.

She kept her hands in her lap.

“I've missed you,” he said. “I've missed the girls.”

“Have you?”

“Do you think the life we had means nothing to me?”

“It does seem that way.”

He shook his head. “I can't separate myself from you. I don't want to.”

“You have a funny way of showing it.”

“I'd like to try.”

“I wasn't the one who called you,” she said. There had been times, many times, when she had, leaving countless unanswered voice-mail messages, until finally one night that spring, she'd thrown the phone against the wall in frustration. “What happened?” Ella had asked. “It broke,” Nora said, sweeping up the pieces with a broom and throwing them away, the metal waste-bin lid clanging with a finality she wasn't quite willing to accept.

“I understand.” How penitent he was, how attentive, now that she'd made a break from him—or attempted to.

She pursed her lips. It was up to her, for once. She glimpsed the girls watching through the window. They hadn't gone to the beach after all. They'd lingered to see what would happen when their parents were alone in the same room. “You can sleep on the couch,” she said at last. “I'm doing this for their sake, not yours.”

“I'll take what I can get,” he said.

“You always do.”

T
he girls led him to the coracle, each daughter holding a hand, their father suspended between them, their prize. Across the wildflower meadow they went, making new paths through the grass, down the bluff, their footsteps sinking in the sand. Nora walked some distance behind, a bystander, as the girls skipped across the shore, the beach a darker gray where the waves had rushed in. A flock of shearwaters made for the point in a hectic dash, startled from their shoreline scavenging, their wings and voices slashing the quiet afternoon with a screeching white fury. The girls too flailed their arms, chirped and shrieked, hungry for their father's affection.

“Look at our boat! Daddy, look!”

“Yours? It was waiting here for you, was it?” he asked.

“It was!”

Each sentence marked with an exclamation point, stabs of joy flying at her, across the sand, where she stood, apart.

“Come with us,” Ella said to him. She looked at Nora then, daring contradiction. There wasn't room for all of them. Ever since Malcolm had arrived, there had been new tension between Ella and Nora, intensifying after Nora reminded her to ask first before using the cell phone.

Malcolm raised an eyebrow.

Nora inclined her head slightly.
Oh, go ahead.
The three of them could have their fun.

Annie hesitated before getting in. Nora made no move to stop her. Safety had been the primary concern, and Malcolm was with them, after all, an honored passenger. He sat up tall in the boat, like a mast, at the center of everything yet again. Ella had never asked her to join them, and Nora hadn't wanted to, the very sight of the boat filling her with an inexplicable dread. She sat on a piece of driftwood as they cut across the cove, the boat riding low in the water, their voices ringing happily, cheering when Malcolm launched into a song. “
The Sailor McNee went to sea on a trim little boat called the Fiddle Dee Dee
.” “
Fiddle Dee Dee
,” they joined in the chorus. “
Fiddle Dee Dee
.” It was as if he'd been there for days, as if the family had never come to the island without him. How easily he slipped into their lives, like a hand into a glove.

The fortifications of a sand castle lay at her feet, shaped by father and daughters with buckets and funnels. Between the encroaching tide and inherent design flaws, it had become a ruined kingdom, the ocean flooding the battlements, crumbling the walls.

Back they came, Annie waving to her, Nora waving in return—a convivial scene, if one didn't know better.

Malcolm crossed the beach and stopped before her, droplets of water rolling down his calves, handsome as always. “It's your turn,” he said to her, as the girls bobbed in the half-grounded boat.

She shook her head. “I'm good.”

“Mom never comes out in the coracle,” Ella called. “She doesn't like boats.”

“I never said that,” Nora replied.

“It's a fabulous little boat.” Malcolm's mood wouldn't be dampened. “I've never seen such a fine design for something so simple. It's an antique, isn't it? Whose was it? Do you know?”

The sun brought out the gold in his hair, no hint of gray—even after all they'd been through—gilding the highlights in their girls' hair too, the same shade as his.

“It was my mother's.” She'd rarely mentioned Maeve, even to Malcolm. Their history had been so brief, she had little to work with. It wasn't until Maire's letter arrived and Nora came to the island that she'd been compelled to question the past more fully, to attempt to confront what had happened, that early loss amplifying the more recent one, her life turned upside down once more, everything jarring loose.

“And the cottage?”

“We lived there when I was small. The details aren't important. Sometimes it's easier to move on.” She gave him a pointed stare.

He looked away. “I don't have the talent for that.”

“Don't you?”

“And what about you?” An edge crept into his voice.

“What do you mean?”

“Haven't you met someone?”

“Who would I have met?” She didn't like being interrogated, least of all by him.

He jerked his head toward the rocks at the point, where Owen was fishing. She hadn't seen him there earlier. He must have been around the other side of the rocks, only recently shifting his position so that he was in full view. The girls must have pointed him out. Ella must have.

“He was shipwrecked.”

“How dramatic for you.”

“It had nothing to do with me. I don't control the weather or the shipping lanes.”

“No, you like to control everything else.”

She bit back a reply. He had her there. She'd been careful, watchful, ever since she was a child. It had served her well in law school—drawn, as she was, to the precision, to the enforcement of rules—and in raising the girls. During the separation, as things seemed to be slipping from her grasp, she had felt the need to tighten her hold; especially now, with Malcolm here, with his forcefulness, his recklessness.

“Ella said you were first on the scene,” he continued.

“What were we supposed to do? Leave him there?”

He shrugged.

“Maire asked him to stay,” Nora said. “It wasn't my doing. Don't assume everyone shares your wandering eye.”

“I'm not assuming anything.”

“Aren't you?” She paused. “What is this really about?”

“You tell me.”

“Oh, I see, you don't want me—but you don't want anyone else to have me either, is that it?”

“I never said I didn't want you.” His gaze fell on the tattoo. “When did you get that? Part of a midlife crisis or something?”

“That would be your department. No, it's an island tradition, I guess you could say.”

“I didn't think you had it in you.”

“You don't know everything about me, Malcolm. You might think you do, but you don't.”

Annie came toward them. “Are you fighting?”

“No,” they said, in unison.

“Because it sounded like you were.”

Nora sighed. She felt Owen's eyes upon her, but she didn't look in his direction. Were they making a spectacle of themselves? It wouldn't have been the first time.

“I don't want you to fight in front of Aunt Maire,” Annie said. “I don't want you to fight at all.”