Returning to Shore Read online

  Later, when Susannah had heard about Clare’s proposed visit, she was surprised Clare didn’t want to go.

  “I don’t even know him,” Clare had said.

  “Aren’t you curious?” Susannah had asked. “I mean, this guy’s your father. You have his genes.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’ll like him.”

  “You don’t like your mother,” reasoned Susannah, “but aren’t you glad you’ve at least had an opportunity to get to know her?”

  You couldn’t argue with logic like that.

  5

  The house was on one end of the island, nestled among the pines. There was a light on outside, by the door, where squadrons of insects had met their demise. The door was unlocked. Richard stepped in and flipped on the light in the kitchen, then started carrying Clare’s stuff in from the car.

  Once the car had been emptied they stood awkwardly for a moment in the kitchen.

  “Would you like something to eat now? Something to drink?”

  “I’m OK,” said Clare. “I just need to call my mother. I’m supposed to call and let her know I arrived safely.”

  “The phone’s right there,” said Richard, pointing to a table in the corner.

  “That’s OK, I’ve got my cell.”

  “No reception out here,” said Richard. “Closer to the bridge, sometimes you can get something, but right here, we seem to be out of range.”

  Clare called on the kitchen phone, and Richard left the room, as if he thought she might want to have privacy. But he needn’t have; Vera wasn’t answering. Clare got her bright voice-mail message. It ended with “ciao”—a leftover from her life with Peter.

  “I’m here, Mom,” said Clare. “I made it.” She waited for a moment, then she added quickly. “Have a good time.” Then she hung up the phone. She waited for Richard to return.

  “Guess I should show you around,” he said.

  The house was a small cottage that had been expanded over time, wings added in two directions. The kitchen, Richard explained, was the original structure. Walls had been taken down to make one large room out of three. All that was left from the old living room was the fireplace. Beyond the kitchen was a bedroom filled with boxes.

  “Stuff from California,” Richard said. “This house was completely furnished—it’s been rented out all these years—so I didn’t need to unpack much.”

  On the other side of the kitchen there was a living room with a high ceiling. One wall was a bookcase, two stories high, entirely filled with books.

  “My mother, your grandmother, was a high-school English teacher,” said Richard. “She loved books. She had all her literature alphabetized by author,” he said. He went over to a shelf and tilted his head to read the titles. “This is all Henry James,” he said, pointing down the length of the shelf. “Have you read anything by James?”

  “The Turn of the Screw,” said Clare. “I had to read it for school.” She felt lucky she had been able to answer so quickly. She’d had to write a paper about it; that’s why she remembered it. The paper was all about point of view, how you couldn’t trust the narrator, how her version of things was just the way she presented them, not necessarily the way things really were. If Richard had asked her more about it, Clare could have said some “insightful” (her teacher’s comment at the end of the paper) things about Henry James, but he didn’t ask. She was a little disappointed. She wanted her father to think she was smart. She didn’t know why it mattered, but it did.

  In the other downstairs bedroom there was a desk and a big table, both covered by papers and computer equipment. There were piles of papers and books on the file cabinets. There was a single bed in the corner, and a chest of drawers. That had a pile of papers on it, too.

  “Terrapin Central,” said Richard.

  “What’s terrapin?” Clare asked.

  “It’s what I study,” said Richard. “The Northern diamondback terrapin.”

  Clare shrugged.

  “Here, let me show you something,” Richard said, his voice was suddenly filled with excitement. He turned to his computer and brought up an image on the screen. It was a big turtle. Someone was holding it up for the camera, with two hands, and the turtle looked angry to have its picture taken.

  “Malaclemys terrapin, a threatened species, the wonderful, elusive turtle of the salt marsh. Isn’t she a beauty?” asked Richard. At first Clare thought he was kidding, but then she realized he wasn’t. He was staring at the turtle as if he really thought so.

  “Number 986. A recapture. Found early this morning.” He shuffled among his papers on the desk and pulled up some sheets stapled together. He put on reading glasses and scrutinized the print. “Female, 1,448 grams. Some marginal scarring along the right carapace. First observed 20th of June, 2011.”

  He stopped talking, took off his glasses, and looked up at Clare. She hadn’t noticed his eyes before, and now she saw that they were brown. Vera had blue eyes, and her own eyes were a hazelish-greenish that her friend Susannah had insisted she call “green.” A mix of her parents’ eye color—or maybe her eyes were entirely her own. She had tried to seem interested in what Richard was saying, but she hadn’t really been following him. She was wondering, instead, where she was going to sleep. Certainly not here, but it didn’t seem possible that all those boxes could be moved from the other bedroom.

  Richard seemed to have read her thoughts. “Well, enough of this for the moment. Let me show you upstairs,” he said. “I cleaned out the bedroom up there; I thought it was nicer than the one in back. You can get a glimpse of the marsh.”

  Clare hadn’t realized there was an upstairs, but there was. It was built into the peak of the roof, one-half of the living room’s open ceiling. It was a small bedroom, with a tiny bathroom and closet. The ceiling sloped, and the bed and bureau were built in. It felt like a cabin on a ship.

  “I’ll bring your things up,” said Richard. “You look around. See what else you might need.”

  In the bathroom, towels had been laid out on the edge of the sink. The bathroom smelled of lavender—the source, a cake of soap still in its paper wrapper in the soap dish.

  In the bedroom, the bed had been made up. The quilt still had a price tag on it. Clare guessed that it had been purchased for her visit. On the wicker table by the window there was a vase with some roses in it. So he had planned for her coming, had gone out of the way to make things nice for her. She wouldn’t have guessed he was the kind of man who would think to cut roses, put them in a vase. But he had.

  Richard brought her bags up the stairs in two trips.

  “I’m going out now to make my rounds, checking to see if there are any new nests—it’s terrapin nesting season. Might be an hour or so. You can come with me if you like, or maybe you’d rather stay here. Unpack. You must be tired. It’s been a long day.”

  Clare nodded. “I guess I’ll stay.”

  “Did you want me to make some dinner? Do you want to have something to eat before you go to bed?”

  “No, thanks, but I’m not really hungry,” said Clare. “I think I’ll just go to bed.”

  “If I’m not back before then, good night,” said Richard. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Good night,” said Clare. He closed the door behind him as he left the room. She sat down on the foot of the bed. She heard him walk down the stairs, and not soon afterwards she heard the screen door snap behind him. He didn’t urge her to eat something for dinner; he didn’t ask her if she needed help with anything. She couldn’t believe he’d just go off and leave her alone in this strange house, but he had. He’d just gone off to do whatever he did with those turtles, as if she hadn’t just arrived.

  She got up slowly and began to unpack. She arranged her clothes in the drawers and hung her two summer dresses in the closet. She emptied her backpack and stacked her books on the bureau. She’d been using a postcard from Susannah as a bookmark, a picture of a cute bear cub in a tree, and she took it out and wedged it in the
corner of the mirror. She felt suddenly hungry, but when she opened the bedroom door and looked down the stairs the house seemed dark and unfamiliar, and she didn’t want to walk all the way to the empty kitchen. In the little shopping bag Eva had given her was a plastic container with the piece of wedding cake. Clare ate it now. It was a huge piece of cake, sweet and buttery, with a hint of almond. She ate it all, and she licked the icing that had smeared along the plastic lid. She knew she would feel sick later, but she didn’t care.

  She went to the window and looked out. She could smell the marsh, a bit like the smell of the sea, but denser, sadder. She couldn’t see much of anything—just a few frail lights, far in the distance. There was the sound of the first stirrings of wind, a rustle in the marsh grass. What did her mother imagine things were going to be like? Did her mother imagine her father would just leave her on her own in a house in the middle of a dark nowhere, the first night she got there?

  And what had she imagined? In fact she hadn’t had the space to imagine anything at all before now. Her mind had been full thinking about her mother marrying Tertio, and thinking about Peter, the fact that it would now be impossible that he and her mother would ever be together again. But during the car ride out here she had hoped that her father’s silence was just the way he was when he drove, and once they got to the house he’d be different, more conversational, more interested in her. She’d hoped that they would stay up late talking, getting to know each other. That he would explain why he’d been out of her life for so long, and why he’d decided to turn up in her life now. That he’d say, “Clare, I’m so glad we have a chance to be together, at last.”

  Right.

  For the first time ever, she felt angry at Peter. If only he hadn’t been so … what was it, unwilling? unable? to be just a little bit more of what her mother wanted him to be. Then maybe Vera wouldn’t have wanted to “move on” (her words) from him. And they could have been together, as they were in the years before, the three of them, happy. The way families were supposed to be.

  6

  Clare awakened to sunlight pushing into the room and a smell—the smell of the marsh—that seemed at first to be part of her dreams. She had kicked off the quilt sometime during the night and she pulled it back up over her shoulders and closed her eyes, but she didn’t fall back asleep. The combination of the smell, which filled not just her lungs, but her whole body, and the feel of the sun, warming one side of her face, was hauntingly familiar. She opened her eyes and let the room come into focus: her stack of books on the bureau, the postcard she’d tucked into the mirror frame, the vase of roses on the table by the window. She closed her eyes again. There was something she remembered from when she was very little … it was morning, and she was blinking in the sunlight and smelling the marsh. Yes, the marsh. So she did have a memory of Blackfish Island. She had been here. She got up and went to the window. The house was on a hillside that sloped down towards the marsh. If her father cut down the trees—pitch pine and scrub oak—there’d be an expansive view of the marsh and part of the bay. But if anyone had ever cleared the trees, that had been long ago, and they’d been left to grow up again. All she got now were little sections of the view, little pieces of distance.

  When Clare went downstairs she found a note for her on the kitchen counter. It said, “Help yourself to breakfast. I’ll be back shortly.”

  It was unsigned. They hadn’t yet faced the issue of what she should call her father, and so she had done her best to avoid calling him anything at all. “Dad” sounded fake, somehow, but “Richard”—she’d never heard him referred to as Rich or Dick—sounded odd, too. It was easy for him; there wasn’t much else to call her except Clare.

  The handwriting was small and surprisingly even, as if he had drawn a pencil line to guide him. She’d read an article once about telling personality from penmanship, but all she remembered was that if the letters leaned backwards that meant the person was somewhat shady. Or was it insecure? These letters were all straight up.

  Richard came back in just as she was pouring milk on her cereal. He didn’t say good morning; he just asked, “Everything OK there?” nodding at her breakfast.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “It’s exactly what I eat.”

  He smiled a little. “I can’t take any credit for that, I’m afraid. Your mother sent me a list of your food requirements. I just made a trip in to the supermarket and bought what she listed: orange juice without pulp, two percent milk, French vanilla frozen yogurt, veggie burgers, green seedless grapes.” He pointed at a large fruit bowl. There were about eight bunches of grapes; they spilled out of the bowl.

  “That’s a lot of grapes,” said Clare, feeling unpleasantly like a small child.

  “She said you liked grapes.” He made himself a cup of coffee and came and sat across from her at the counter. He stirred his coffee, took small sips. He looked like he had something to say to her, but he didn’t know how to begin. When she finished her cereal she carried the bowl over to the sink.

  “Want me to put this in the dishwasher?” she asked.

  “I haven’t used the dishwasher yet,” he said.

  “You haven’t?”

  “Just one of me. Easy enough to wash what I use. But I suppose with you here now it might be worth trying.”

  Clare opened the dishwasher door and was about to put her bowl in, when she realized it was full of paper products.

  “I’ve been using it as storage,” Richard said. “Let’s just pile stuff up here and I’ll figure out another place for it later.” He started to hand things up to Clare, and she set them on the counter. They stood close beside each other, but only once did his arm brush against hers. They worked efficiently, as if the passing of paper towel rolls and boxes of paper napkins from his hands to hers had been choreographed in advance. Clare noticed how similar their hands were—the same shape, the same curve of their thumbs. Vera had long slender hands, an octave and a note, but Clare’s hands were squarer, her fingers shorter—she could barely reach an octave. Even though her father’s hands were bigger and his nails were rough, her hands had been formed from the same mold. It had never occurred to Clare before that hands could reveal a connection between them, that hands could matter that way.

  Soon the dishwasher was empty, and the counter was stacked with rolls of paper towels, paper napkins, paper plates. Richard reached for the cereal bowl and set it in on the top rack of the dishwasher.

  “Why don’t we give this thing a test run now,” he said. “It worked for the last tenants, but it’s been a while.” He put in detergent and started up the dishwasher. There wasn’t anything to watch, but they both stood there, looking at the dishwasher, listening to the water rushing in, invisible behind the white door. Clare wondered if they would continue standing there for the entire cycle.

  “I guess it works,” said Richard, finally. “I’m going out now to finish my rounds of the island. Do you want to come with me?”

  “I guess so,” said Clare.

  “Your mother instructed me to remind you to put on sunscreen,” said Richard. “If you don’t have any, there’s some in the bathroom.”

  “Oh, I have plenty,” said Clare. “She packed me enough to last the next three summers.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Richard. He smiled, but only slightly.

  “Are we going to be going swimming?” asked Clare.

  “It’s low tide now,” said Richard. He sounded as if she should know this. “No swimming. But if you want to go this afternoon, I could show you where people swim.”

  Clare wondered if that meant he expected her to go off swimming on her own. She couldn’t imagine Vera would be very happy about that.

  “OK,” she said.

  There was a path that ran from the house down to the marsh. Clare followed behind Richard. It wasn’t a path anyone had designed, it was just a sandy, worn path. At Tertio’s house in the country—now Vera’s house, too—all the paths were part of the landscaping design. T
hey were carpeted with wood chips, freshly applied on a regular basis by the landscaping service. Nobody ever made a path just by going someplace.

  ***

  The tide was so low it was hard to imagine the sea had ever covered what now looked like part of the land. You could tell where it had been, though, because it had left behind a band of seaweed when it had receded. Richard walked quickly, and seemed to expect Clare to keep up. Far out in the marsh Clare saw the arched wooden bridge. It seemed to connect nothing with nothing. When they came around the bay side of the island Richard slowed his pace. There were boats at anchor, lying on their sides. They looked sad somehow, like beached whales dying on the flats. Richard was scanning the beach in both directions.

  “Are you looking for something?” Clare asked.

  Richard stopped and turned to her. For a moment she wondered if he had forgotten she was there.

  “Terrapin tracks,” he said. “This is the season when the females come up on shore to deposit their eggs. I’m trying to locate the nests, and put a cage over each one to protect it from predators: foxes, skunks, coyotes.”

  Clare kept her eyes on him while he spoke and tried to think of a question to show she was interested. “Do you catch the turtle in the cage?” she asked.

  Richard smiled, as if he’d never thought of this possibility before. “No, the turtle just lays her eggs, buries them in the sand. Then she goes back to the sea. The eggs are on their own.”

  “If the eggs are buried, how do the foxes know they’re there?” asked Clare.

  “They’ve got great noses,” said Richard, and he tapped his own, which was long and sunburned.

  “What happens when the eggs hatch? How does the mother turtle get back to the babies if they’re all in a cage?”

  “Good question,” said Richard, and Clare brightened. It wasn’t like she was really interested in the turtles—after all, they were just turtles—but she wanted Richard to feel she was interested. She wanted him to talk with her. “Once the female terrapin has laid the eggs, she’s done,” said Richard. “She returns to the bay. When the eggs hatch in September, the hatchlings have to make their way on their own up over the dune, and to the marsh.”