Beach Trip (58 page)

It happened in less time than it took the car to hurtle past an abandoned house, in less time than it took the loop of negativity to start again in her head like an endless clang of straining winches and rusty gears. And yet for one profound moment she had glimpsed the possibility of a world without attachment, without pain, and she clung to that feeling as they hurtled through the darkness, weary travelers on an unknown road.

“Are you okay?” Mel asked, lightly touching her shoulder.

Sara stood up. Dust motes swirled in the slash of sunlight. “I need a drink,” she said.

Everyone was stunned by Annie’s transformation. Even Captain Mike did a double take when he saw her. They had worked on her all afternoon, and now she stood in the middle of the great room, waiting for the reveal. She was dressed in a low-cut blouse and a pair of white capri slacks that made her look slim and youthful. With her hair colored and her face made up, she looked ten years younger. Standing at the great room mirror admiring herself, Annie wished the snotty mothers in her sons’ preschool class could see her now. She was pretty sure no one would call her Q-Tip.

“You look
fantastic,”
Sara said.

“I told you hair color would make all the difference,” Mel said.

“Just like Cinderella,” Lola said, clapping her hands. She jumped up and down like a cheerleader.

Captain Mike was in the kitchen helping April with supper. He looked up at Lola’s clapping, and smiled.

“What do you think, Captain Mike?” Mel asked, eyeing him boldly. “What do you think of our little Eliza Doolittle?”

He shook his head and grinned so deeply his dimply showed. “Wow,” he said.

Under his close appraisal, Annie felt her face flush. She stared at herself in the mirror, smoothing her
Vixen Brown
hair with one hand, noting the
way it brought out her eyes, the way it framed her face. Amazing how so simple a change could make such a big difference. She wondered what Mitchell would say.

“And that blouse, too,” Mel said. “You have a nice figure. You should show some cleavage more often.”

The blouse was Mel’s, of course, and she had insisted that Annie wear it. It wasn’t something Annie would have ever picked out for herself but somehow, with the new hair and lips and makeup, it worked. Standing in front of the long mirror, perusing the strange creature who peered back at her in the glass, she was amazed and oddly elated. She looked like a new woman.

“If you girls are ready, you should probably get going,” Captain Mike said. It was after dinner, and he and April were in the kitchen finishing up the dishes. The women had decided to take a drive in the moonlight, on this, their last night on the island. Tomorrow they would spend the night on the yacht, moored in some magical place Lola had yet to show them, and the following morning Captain Mike would motor them over to the ferry landing so they could catch the limo to the airport.

The sun was setting as they set out on the golf cart. The sky was a deep purple, streaked with red, and the sea breeze was warm and steady. They took the maritime forest road. Mel drove with Lola in the front with her. Annie and Sara sat in the back.

Long shadows fell across the forest road. Crickets sang in the dense underbrush. Out in the tidal creeks skirting the marsh, a group of herons stood like old men on a street corner.

“What’s the name of this place where we’re going?” Mel asked Lola.

“Runaway Hill,” Lola said.

“Why do they call it that?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.” She was wearing a denim miniskirt, a white lace top, and a pair of strappy sandals, and she looked like a young girl. “I’ve been there lots of times!” she added.

“By yourself?”

Lola smiled faintly. “Sometimes,” she said.

The climb up the ridge was a steep one, and Annie and Sara finally climbed off the back of the cart and walked up. The asphalt trail meandered
up the side of the dune and ended in a small parking lot overlooking the sea. Halfway down the ridge on the other side, two dilapidated cottages stood, facing the sea.

“What are those?” Mel asked Lola, pointing. They sat on the cart in the gathering darkness, waiting for Sara and Annie to climb the ridge.

“The old caretakers’ cottages. Back before the civil war the lighthouse keeper and his family lived there. Back before the island was developed.”

It took Annie and Sara several minutes to reach the summit, and when they did, they threw themselves down onto the back of the golf cart.

“That was a climb,” Sara said breathlessly. Evening was falling swiftly, the light glimmering along the dunes and the distant rim of beach. To the north and east stretched the wide Atlantic, an immense darkness along the horizon. To the south stretched a long expanse of deserted beach and windswept dunes. There were no lights except for the distant glimmer of the lighthouse, visible just above the tree line.

It was a lonely place. Annie shuddered, wishing now that she’d worn a sweater over Mel’s flimsy blouse.

“Remember when we used to go to Myrtle Beach for spring break?” Sara asked.

“I remember,” Mel said.

“It seems like only yesterday.”

The four of them would load up the car with beer and beach towels and take turns driving from Bedford to Myrtle Beach. They’d gone their sophomore year and Annie had been so embarrassed because Mitchell had followed her there, showing up at three o’clock in the morning at their hotel door with a cooler full of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. It was a girls’ trip, and boyfriends weren’t supposed to come. Mel had told J.T. Radford he couldn’t come and he’d gone off someplace else with a bunch of his buddies but Mitchell hadn’t wanted male companionship; he’d wanted her. It was embarrassing hearing all the girls talk about how sweet and “crazy in love” Mitchell was. He didn’t have any money, of course, so he’d spent the night sleeping on the floor of their hotel room. He made himself at home, and by the end of the week he was just one of the girls, laughing and drinking with the rest of them, letting them paint his fingernails and do his hair because that was Mitchell’s way. He liked people and they liked him back. At the time it had pissed Annie off. She’d felt like there was something wrong with him, loving her the way he did. No one else’s
boyfriend was like that. Well, maybe J.T., but he pretty much did what Mel told him to do. If she’d told him to worship her from afar, he’d have done it. Annie could tell Mitchell to leave her alone and he’d just laugh and ask her what she wanted for dinner.

“Remember that time Mitchell showed up?” Mel said.

“That was the best trip.”

“He was so much fun. I’m only sorry he wasn’t there for all our trips.”

“He drove all that way just to be with Annie,” Lola said.

“Wait until he gets a look at her now,” Sara said.

Annie smiled shyly. Listening to them talk, a funny thing happened. It started small, a pinpoint of emptiness in the pit of her stomach that swelled and grew slowly to a hollow feeling just beneath her breastbone. She thought at first it might be heartburn, before she recognized it for what it was. Homesickness. Loneliness. She missed Mitchell.

They were quiet for a moment, enjoying the view. There was no sound but the steady crashing of the surf and the low roar of the wind coming up the ridge.

Annie wondered what Mitchell was doing right now. Funny how you could become accustomed to the sound of one man’s voice, the touch of one man’s arms around your waist. She and Mitchell had known each other for thirty years. They had been through a lot. They’d built a business and raised two fine boys and suffered the death of a baby. A miscarriage, twenty-six weeks after Carleton’s birth. Annie had felt like she could never be happy until she’d held a daughter in her arms but after the miscarriage she’d changed her mind. She’d been afraid then to try again, afraid the Lord was giving her a sign that she was, in some way, unworthy. Or at least that’s how it had felt to her at the time, lost in her guilt and grief.

“I’ve had a lot of fun on this trip but I’m looking forward to going home,” Sara said quietly.

“Yes,” Annie said.

She pictured Mitchell slumped in front of the TV in his favorite recliner, his stockinged feet pointed at the screen, his one glass of red wine, carefully poured out and measured according to the doctor’s instructions, resting on a side table. Things that had once annoyed her about Mitchell, seen now in the gentle light of missing him, seemed incredibly dear. His snoring, his dirty laundry left on the bathroom floor, his loud honks and
gags as he cleared his throat every morning. In the movies, love was always loud and passionate; it was always unrelenting and tragic. She had had a taste of that kind of love with Paul Ballard. But there was a different kind too, a slow, quiet contentment that built gradually over time, a feeling based on trust and fortitude, on the shared experiences of raising children, on grief and hardship and joy. That was the love Annie felt for Mitchell. She had never, until this moment, realized it so clearly. She loved Mitchell, and yet she had come so incredibly close to losing him.

“We should do this again,” Mel said.

“Every year,” Sara said.

“Yes,” Annie said.

She had come close to losing him through her own fault. Things that had seemed beyond her control at the time, situations that had caused her pain, had worked out for the best. Well, most of them had anyway; there were some things you could never explain or do over, you just had to accept them. Maybe that’s what grace was. Maybe you had to reach a certain age before you could look back and see it at work in your life.

Annie put her head back and stared up at the starry sky. A bright yellow moon rose over the sea, bathing the ridge in a clear, luminous light. One thing was certain, though. When she got back to Nashville, she was introducing Mitchell to Agnes Grace.

A phone rang suddenly, startling them with its insistent chirping. Sara pulled her cell out of her purse and checked the display. “It’s my husband,” she said, rising.

“Talk about timely,” Mel said.

Sara walked a little ways down the ridge. When she came back, a short while later, she was smiling.

“Does he miss you?” Annie asked, wondering if it was too late to call Mitchell.

Sara grinned. “Is the pope Catholic?” she said.

“How are Tom and the kids anyway?”

Mel groaned. “Haven’t we talked enough about the husband and kids? Christ, that’s all I’ve heard all week.”

“He’s fine,” Sara said to Annie. “They’re fine.” She cut her eyes over to Mel and then back to Annie. “Thanks for asking.”

Mel raised her hands apologetically. “It’s not that I don’t care,” she said.
“It’s just that I figure J.T. has his hands full, what with taking care of the kids while you’re gone.”

“Don’t call him that,” Sara said. “No one’s called him that since college.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Radford.”

“His name is Tom,” she said, shoving the phone back into her purse. “That’s the name he goes by now.”

heir last day at the beach dawned cloudy and rainy Mel, packing her bags in her bedroom, was glad. It would be hard to leave paradise on a brilliant sun-drenched day Rain seemed more conducive to her mood. Over on the dresser her cell phone was flashing its sad little light, warning of an unheeded call. She checked and was surprised to find a message from Leland.

“How you doing?” the message said. He sounded strange. Melancholy and strange. “I was just calling to see how you’re doing.”

Mel sensed that he wanted to chat, which was odd because she and Leland never called each other to chat. She hoped he wasn’t on the verge of senile dementia, some latent mental illness that would drive him steadily and progressively back into his dismal childhood. Or hers. She had learned years ago that revenge was an unhealthy obsession. She had forgiven him, she had to, to get well, but the forgiveness was for her sake and not his own. Sooner or later Leland would have to wrestle with his own demons.

She pushed a button and erased the message. She’d call him tomorrow from the airport.

She finished packing and went downstairs to check on the others. They had planned to spend their last evening on the boat, but the rain would, no doubt, change all that.