Beach Girls (27 page)

She'd solemnly nodded her thanks. Then, while the other engineers resumed conferring about the bridge, she'd scrambled back down to the beach.

“So,” said Victor Buchanan, a senior IR engineer. He was tall and burly, red-cheeked, with shaggy gray hair. Jack knew that he was one of Ivan Romanov's top people—he had signed off on hiring Jack. “Do you always bring your daughter on-site?”

“Yes,” Jack said.

“A good nanny would help you with that.”

“We have a tutor. And I want Nell with me.”

Victor and two of the others laughed—Leo Derr, a young, clean-cut Englishman, and April Maguire, a smart American woman, an MIT and Structural alum, just like Jack. He had worked with her many times—she had been instrumental in setting up interviews directly with Romanov himself. The laughter seemed good-natured; so Jack smiled.

“She doesn't get in the way of my work,” Jack said to the others, standing on the road in Ladapool.

“We were just thinking of your social life!” April said.

“She basically is my social life,” Jack said, smiling wryly.

“Well, we have a good old time,” Victor said. “Tonight we'll be heading off to the Golden Peat—it's a place for tasting scotch from all the distilleries around here. Single
malts . . . not a place for a wee one!”

Jack shrugged, trying to look disappointed. The truth was, he wanted as much of his free time as possible to be Nell-centered. She'd been shaky ever since arriving in Scotland. Her nightmares were back—Dr. Galford had given him a name in Inverness, and he knew he had to call. Now she wasn't just crying for Emma—she was crying for Stevie, Peggy, and Madeleine, too. How could he have taken what had already felt awful and made it this much worse?

“You'll want to find yourself some good child care before next month,” April said quietly, when the others resumed looking at plans. Jack wondered about the twinkle in her eyes.

“Why?” he asked.

“Well, because we're getting another team member.”

Jack had heard rumors that Ivan himself was planning to oversee this project. The Brooks Oil Company was one of the firm's biggest clients, and he wanted to make sure the bridge was built on time and under budget.

“Ivan?” he said.

April waved her hand, laughing. “No. If it were Ivan, you'd be so busy, we probably wouldn't be heading off to the Golden Peat. Someone else. A ‘hired gun,' just like you used to be . . . we're subcontracting part of this job back to your old company.”

“Structural?” Jack asked, his heart kicking over.

April nodded, smiling wider as if she'd heard company rumors. “Exactly. Francesca is coming on board.”

As everyone went back to work, he glanced over at Nell, combing the beach. One hand cupped, she filled it with shells and pebbles. Occasionally she'd transfer them into her pocket and sit down to take notes, intense and focused.

His daughter was taking Stevie's assignment very seriously. He could almost picture Madeleine at the same age, walking on other Scottish coastlines, collecting impressions to share with her best friends. Jack remembered seeing her at a desk in the hotel, bent over postcards, writing ferociously.

He had felt strangely envious—he'd realized that he'd never had friends he felt that passionately about, to interrupt his holiday and to sit down and write anything. Yet Maddie had done it . . . and Nell was doing it now, her posture an uncanny echo of her aunt's. The funny thing was, they'd both written to the same woman: Stevie.

He stared at his Nell, huddled over the notepad, scribbling furiously. Was she reporting about the rockiness of the beach, the dark gray color of the clouds, the chill in the salt air, the wind blowing straight off the sea? As it happened, they were on the west side of an isthmus, connecting two parts of a narrow island halfway up the archipelago. To the east, he could see the North Sea. But if he looked west, he could see the North Atlantic—a straight shot to North America.

Hubbard's Point was out there somewhere, Jack thought. If Stevie was walking on her beach, they could almost see each other. Almost.

If there weren't three thousand miles of ocean between them.

He looked at Nell again, wondered what she was writing. Would Stevie share Nell's thoughts with that other loyal beach girl?

Would Stevie send Nell's cards on to Maddie?

What are you doing here
? he asked himself, not for the first time—not even for the hundredth time—since arriving in Scotland. Meeting Stevie had done something to him: it had stopped him in his tracks, unhooked him from the cycle he'd invented, of running and hating and hiding—from his sister, from their tragedy.

From the truth.

The wind blew into Jack's eyes, making them sting and water. He turned away, back to his colleagues, back to the comparatively simple chore of building a four-lane bridge to replace the old cart path inclined to flood at high tide.

Chapter 24

NELL FINISHED HER SCHOOLWORK,
then ran down to sit on a driftwood log. Her father and the other engineers were trying to figure out how to build a bridge pretty enough for the islanders and practical enough for the oil company to get their trucks back and forth from the refinery. Nell knew her father didn't think she paid attention to his work, but she did. She cared about the bridges he built. She cared about every single thing he did.

Her notebook was getting filled with lots of things. She took notes about the cold water, silvery driftwood, channeled whelks, and tiny clam shells. She took off her shoes to feel the water temperature and wrote:
cold!
When birds flew overhead, she shielded her eyes from the sun and viewed their shapes. Then she tried to draw outlines on the page.

This beach, like others she and her father had visited in the islands, was covered with large smooth stones and small pebbles. Some of the stones were black, and looked gnarled—like walnuts. The first time she picked one up, her fingers got all greasy. When she tried to wash them, the grease just got stickier.

Her father had been standing with Mr. Buchanan and Mrs. Maguire. When Nell had run up, to show her father, Mr. Buchanan had grimaced and rolled his eyes. “The downside of this particular project,” he said, offering Nell his handkerchief. Nell was confused, especially when Mrs. Maguire told him to put his nice linen hanky away and pulled out a small foil-wrapped square instead. She said to Nell's father, “You'll need to lay in a stock of these if she's going to roam the beach.”

Nell's father took the square, tore it open, and wiped Nell's fingers clean. Their eyes met, and her father smiled his reassurance.

“What is it?” Nell asked.

“Oil,” Mr. Buchanan said. “Brooks has very sophisticated cleanup measures, but some always manages to slip through the booms.”

“Oil? Like the kind that killed the birds?” Nell asked, squinting at her father. He nodded, but with a look in his eyes that told her to drop it. The other adults were saying something about scientists washing the birds with special soap so they could fly safely away, but all Nell could picture was their slick, black, dead bodies in that newspaper photo, and she knew that the adults were just telling a story to make everyone feel better.

Nell felt worse. How could they think that special soap could make everything okay? Her fingers still smelled like gas. Her eyes teared up to think of birds having such a gross film on their feathers.

Now, casting a look back over her shoulder, she set off down the beach. Cool, clear sunlight sparked on the cove. The rocky beach was hard to walk on, but she made her way slowly, looking down at her feet for shells. Up ahead were a flock of gulls, pecking at something that had washed up. As Nell approached, the birds wheeled away—her ears rang with their mournful cries.

Nell could see that whatever they'd been feeding on was dead, lying inert in the rocks. When she got close, she saw that it was a duck, sticky with tar, its side freshly torn open by the gulls. She raised her eyes, saw other ducks with similar markings swimming in the cove. The duck's family, she thought, thinking of Ebby—of how his fellow crows had gathered outside Stevie's house. Not even thinking, she jumped to her feet and began to madly wave her arms—to drive the ducks away.

“Leave here,” she cried out. “Go away . . . fly!”

She wanted them to be safe, not get stuck in the oil that had killed the duck that lay at her feet. And as she watched them dance across the water's surface, striving toward flight, their webbed feet slapping the waves, she imagined them lifting her up with them, flying her away—to safety, to love, to Hubbard's Point. Surely her father would have to follow her if she left . . . he would understand how much she needed to go home, back to America, back to her real life.

“I'll be like you,” she wept to the dead bird. She felt choked, as if she had swallowed a ball of tar, as if her feathers were all stuck together by a substance that wanted to kill her. She felt almost the way she had back in Georgia, right after her mother's death; as if life was unreal, as if she didn't belong with the living anymore.

She had felt that way until Hubbard's Point, until Stevie. The strange thing was, she knew her father had felt it, too. . . . She wouldn't want her father to know this, but since leaving Stevie and Hubbard's Point, her nightmares had changed.

This time, it wasn't her mother who was dead: it was her father. He was giving up on all the things he loved—his homeland, his sister, his memories. Even, in Nell's dreams, Stevie. Flying away from Stevie, her father had left something that had made him seem alive again. . . .

She glanced down the beach—her father was still standing with the others, half-watching her.

He couldn't imagine, looking at her, that inside she felt as horrible as this oil-blackened bird. Just then, her attention was drawn to some other things caught in the clump of seaweed. A snippet of fishing net, covered with the same oil. A tangle of kelp, a small colony of mussels torn from some rocks, still held together by their silken threads. And a bottle . . .

Nell reached for it. It was clear plastic, had once held soda. Although most of the label had come off, she recognized the brand. It was American . . . maybe it had floated across the ocean, riding the currents. . . .

And suddenly, Nell had an idea. She unscrewed the cap, wiped her hands on her jeans, reached for her notebook, and pulled the top of her father's fountain pen off. The gulls were circling overhead. Ignoring them, Nell began to write.

“Stevie,” she wrote. “We need you. My dad and I. We need you. . . .”

Tearing the paper from the pad, she rolled it up and edged it into the neck of the bottle. She didn't actually believe that the bottle would make it to Hubbard's Point—or even out of this cove. She couldn't let herself imagine the miracles it would take to get her message all the way from Scotland to Stevie.

But she thought back to those last minutes with Peggy, when they'd wished, wished, with all their might. . . . A message in a bottle was really just a wish . . . a wish pulled from the air, or from a girl's heart, and written down and set upon the sea. It's just a wish, Nell told herself. That's all it is:
just a wish.

Just a wish . . . if it came true, Nell knew that she and her father would go back to Hubbard's Point; her father would work on Aunt Aida's castle; Stevie would be in their lives; and Stevie would make sure Aunt Madeleine was, too. . . .

“It's just a wish,” Nell whispered out loud.

Even so, her heart was pounding—in a way that told her the wish was about to become a hope, which was one step closer to becoming real. Stevie, the non-witch, would understand, and so would Tilly. Nell wound up, stepped into the throw, and with a cry let the plastic bottle sail into the air. The glaring sunlight blinded her, so she couldn't even see where it landed.

There it was—shielding her eyes with one hand, she saw the bottle bobbing out where the birds had been swimming. Was it heading for America, or back onto the beach? Nell stared at it for a long time, feeling her heart beat in her throat. It seemed to be drifting out . . . she watched it go.

The gulls screeched louder, trying to drive her away from the ravaged duck. Intent and driven, she found a spot above the tide line and dug a hole in the rocky sand as deep as her arms could reach. Then she walked back and picked up the bird. Putting its body in the hole, she felt a terrible tug in her chest. She slowly rubbed her tarry hands in the sand, trying to get them clean. Burying the bird made her think of how beautiful things died. Her mother. And her father's spirit, her own heart.

They died, and there was nothing Nell could do about it.

Except send a message in a bottle, and wish and wish, and ask Stevie for help.

NELL'S WISH
flew like an arrow.

Stevie woke with a start and a spark, fresh from a dream. In it, the room was filled with blinding light, so bright she could hardly see. Through the glare, a black bird sang in a cage. Somehow, the way mysteries in dreams take on strange, crystal-clear meanings, Stevie knew that she had to open the cage door. When she did, the bird flew out. It landed on the windowsill, and Stevie heard it talking, like a parrot. It said, “If you let me go, you may never see me again. But that depends on you . . . because you have wings, too. You can find me and fight for me.” And then it had flown away.

Stevie had opened her eyes. She didn't really analyze the dream; she wasn't good at such things. But it had created a powerful feeling inside that she wanted to hold on to. The black bird, the cage, the flying away . . . It might have seemed oppressive, hopeless, but instead, the dream spurred Stevie to get out of bed and go for an early swim.

The sun was up above the trees, but the day was September-chilly. She dove in, swam out to the raft. Resting there, she placed her hand flat on the surface—where she and Jack had lain. The memory came back to her. She closed her eyes and could almost feel his arms around her. As a young woman, that was all she had ever wanted: to have someone hold her and never let go, to be as much a part of her as her own breath.

Of course such loves were impossible, could never last. She had proved that to herself three times. It was as if some primal, preverbal Stevie had taken command of her adult heart, demanded the closeness she had only ever really known from her parents.

But now she was a grown-up. She had fallen in love again, and why bother telling herself it didn't matter? It did. She'd been in despair because they had flown away, and she'd felt powerless to do anything except let them go. The dream was still with her, churning inside like crazy.

By the time she swam back to the beach, walked up the hill, and rinsed off at the outside shower, she felt the fire inside. The scent of late-summer roses filled the air. She toweled off, ran barefoot into the house. She filled Tilly's bowl, didn't even stop to make herself coffee, and hurried up to her studio.

When she entered the room, it was like reentering her dream: the room was blazing with sunlight. The light of Hubbard's Point . . . undimmed, luminous, radiant, gleaming, glistening, glittering, scintillating, shimmering, glowing . . . surrounding her with its brilliance, almost blinding her as she approached her easel.

Stevie had thrown all Nell's postcards in her bedside drawer. She now got them out, thumbtacked them to the wall beside her easel. There were postcards of Inverness Castle, Loch Ness, a puffin in the Orkney Islands, low mountains ringing a sea loch, a baby seal on a rock in Ladapool, and a flock of geese silhouetted by orange sunset on a bay in the Western Highlands—and the newspaper photo from Jack's letter, of the waterfowl killed by the oil spill.

Stevie stood by her easel now, pulling on clothes. She dressed in jeans and the Trinity College sweatshirt Jack had worn to the beach movie. Tilly lay on the bed's rumpled white sheets, soaking up the sun, watching her mistress. Staring at the gallery of cards and picture, through the incredible brightness, Stevie felt the stirrings of a new book—and so much more.

Her house was filled with light. She suddenly saw herself—on a journey her whole life, a circuitous and sometimes even tormented route in search of love that could make her whole. . . . All that time, and just this morning, she had finally realized that the journey led to the light inside. Where she
was
whole: she had her house, her painting, her stories, and her dreams. She had let Jack and Nell go, because they had had to. But she had wings, too.

She thought of her dream and knew that this was worth fighting for, worth flying after. Mixing paints, she peered at the photo Jack had sent her, of dead and dying oil-soaked birds. Nell's words glimmered above them. Stevie already had a title in mind:
The Day the Sea Turned Black.

She thought of the black bird in her dream, saw the crude-soaked creatures in the news photo. She thought of all the seabirds she could paint: kittiwakes, black guillemots, puffins, razorbills, storm petrels, Manx shearwaters, mallards, teals, widgeons, goldeneyes, oystercatchers, curlews, sandpipers, arctic skuas, gannets, red-breasted mergansers, eider ducks, and great northern divers.

But, because Nell had asked that the book be about ducks, Stevie decided on mallards. She checked a field guide to confirm their range—yes, they inhabited the Scottish highlands. And then, with swift brushstrokes, Stevie created a pair of waterfowl. Their story was already unfolding in her mind. The book would be set in Scotland—on a small island halfway up the Orkney archipelago. She envisioned the clear northern light, the boreal fire, the dark reflective sea. She saw the mallards—their green neck feathers iridescent. There would be a young girl who walked the beach . . .

That was all Stevie knew, for now. The story would unfold from her paintbrush and Nell's postcards. She wet her brush, and got to work.