“Are we here already?” Opening her eyes, Claire yawned and sat up.
He blinked hard. “Just about.” The Caddy swung left onto the thumb of land that ended at the mouth of an estuary that divided Stingray Bay North and South.
Amidst the rush of coastal development, the sleepy settlement remained a nostalgic relic. Though the outhouses had been superseded by indoor plumbing, most of the four hundred dwellings were the original baches clad with fiber cement board. The permanent population of a few hundred swelled to four times that in summer, which coincided with the opening of the only store at the campground.
It was a place where inhabitants measured their day by the tides.… Collecting shellfish in the estuary when it was low, launching the aluminum dinghy—tinny—when it was high, and in-between times sitting in deck chairs and watching its slow ebb and flow.
A place where you got out of your vehicle on arrival and didn’t climb in it until departure, where nightlife was a game of Monopoly or cards and the only way to reach the store was to walk across the footbridge separating Stingray North and South or kayak across the estuary. There was no direct road access between the halves. To reach one from the other by car you had to drive for forty-five minutes around the mainland.
Toward the end of the tiny peninsula, the road became gravel driveway and Nate steered the Caddy into the communal grass yard behind a row of old baches. No one put up fences here. Claire’s bach sat at the end, freshly painted blue fiber cement board siding with white trim, patio doors at both ends and a corrugated-iron roof.
The bathroom was a lean-to accessed from the front deck, which stepped down to a lawn of hardy kikuyu grass and overlooked the wide estuary and the baches of Stingray South, five hundred meters across the water. The rear deck gave a peep of the ocean beach, which lay below a rise some twelve feet from the rear boundary. It had always been a spectacular location.
Claire handed him the house key, sliding over to the driver’s seat as he got out of the car. “I’ll be back around nine tonight.” She was going home to Whangarei to change vehicles, catch up with Steve’s mother and gather the paperwork for Nate to read over before their appointments tomorrow. “Help yourself to what’s in the freezer. I’ll bring fresh supplies with me.”
She waited while Nate retrieved his weekend bag from the trunk. “And if you feel like taking a look at
Heaven Sent,
she’s in the boat shed near the footbridge. There’s a key for it on a hook beside the fridge.”
With a nod, he went to close her door, but she reached out and held it open. “Are you sure you’re okay…being here?”
“Drive carefully,” he said and clicked it shut.
When the Caddy had rumbled out of sight, he sat at the sturdy wooden picnic table on the deck looking out to the estuary, his bag beside him. It was a typical September day, the wind a brisk spring-cleaner full of bustle and blow.
It still took thirty minutes to get cold enough to go inside.
The whole living space was about the size of his kitchen in L.A. Open-plan lounge/dining took up most of it, with a pocket-size kitchen barely large enough for a couple to stand at an L-shaped counter, holding the stove and sink. Off the kitchen a curtain partition led to a bedroom so small there was barely room to walk between two single beds. Another curtain off the living room led to a bunk room and master bedroom. When he and the guys stayed, they’d pitched a tent on the lawn, invariably commandeered by Lewis and the neighborhood’s kids through the day for use as a fort.
The covered rear deck had a railing that doubled as a clothesline for towels. In summer all the living was outdoors on the decks, all cooking done on the barbecue, and space was never an issue. As a winter residence it seemed way too small for a woman and her teenage son.
Don’t get involved.
He gravitated to a large corkboard in the living room. It held a tide calendar and decades of faded snapshots of sunburned laughing holidaymakers, himself among them. His gaze shied away.
He’d bought a bottle of scotch duty free, but he couldn’t open it. It seemed irreverent somehow, though God knows they’d had some parties here in their time. But this was a happy place, morbid drinking had no place here.
Nate dumped his bag in the small bedroom, changed into running gear and headed for the ocean beach where he pounded up and down the soft white sand of its three-kilometer length until his legs were jelly and he could barely put one foot in front of the other. Then he returned to the bach and took a shower, making a mental note to improve the water pressure. Donning a pair of boxers, he fell exhausted into one of the single beds.
Already the walls were closing in.
CHAPTER FIVE
C
LAIRE
VISITED
HER
mother-in-law first because she hated lying. Unfortunately, her deal with Nate meant she had to, and not just to Ellie.
Dan and Ross couldn’t know her mission to fetch Nate was successful, either. So in typical fashion she seized the bull by the horns and got the hard part over first. She found Ellie sorting through a pile of crotchless panties.
“Claire, I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow!” Dropping the lacy scraps on the shop’s counter, she came round and embraced her in a rattle of silver bangles and Red Door perfume. Up until a year and a half ago, Ellie Langford would have won a red ribbon for best preserved against any jam or jelly at the county fair.
She still looked younger than her sixty years, but Steve’s death had aged her. When her face was in repose, there was an extra droop of her eyes and mouth. “So how was your break? Who were you staying with again?”
“An old friend… You wouldn’t know him.” At least not anymore. She hadn’t told Ellie where she was going for the same reason she hadn’t told Lewis.
“Him?” Smiling, Ellie pulled away. “Honey, are you dating again?”
Claire suffered a moment’s panic that Steve’s mother might consider it time. Then she saw the dread behind the smile and breathed again. “Don’t scare me like that,” she chided. “It’s bad enough fending off inquiries from acquaintances.”
“I’m trying to be impartial about this.… Steve would want you to be happy.”
Then he shouldn’t have gone and died on me.
“Let’s settle for cheerful,” Claire suggested. “We can manage cheerful…right?”
“Absolutely.” Ellie returned to sorting crotchless panties into sizes. “What people don’t understand is how impossible it is to replace a perfect husband.”
Claire hid a smile. Steve used to say he barely recognized his father on his mom’s lips. Since his death, seven years earlier, Robert had been sainted, knighted and given a million-dollar makeover.
The reality had been very different.
Ellie had been a homemaker, perfectly content to let her workaholic husband rule the roost while she flitted between her garden, lunch with girlfriends, beauty appointments, the tennis club and volunteer work. Her comfortable life had ended abruptly with Robert’s early retirement. He’d become a grumpy old man whose primary purpose became hunting on the internet for facts to support his view that the world was going to hell in a handbasket. A regular caller to talkback radio, he also spent many hours formulating letters to the editor and his local M.P., which his wife had to type as he refused to learn keyboard skills.
It wasn’t as if she had anything better to do.
In desperation, Ellie had accepted a part-time job in a friend’s lingerie store and discovered a previously untapped genius for retail. Supported by Steve and Claire as guarantors, she bought the business a year after Robert dropped dead of a heart attack while arguing with his insurance company that he was “perfectly healthy, goddamn it, and they shouldn’t charge him higher premiums just because he’d turned sixty-five.”
Until her only child’s death, the Merry Widow couldn’t have been happier.
Ellie finished her sorting. “When Steve was a boy staying at the Jansen farm, he rang me every day.”
Claire doubted that, but she said soothingly, “I’ll remind him next time we talk.” She’d tried to protect Ellie from Lewis’s exploits—sassing teachers, egging houses, graffitiing bus stops—but being in the shop, his grandmother had heard all the gossip eventually.
And her solution—telling Lewis his father would be turning in his grave and what did he think he was doing, worrying his poor mother?—hadn’t helped. Claire adored her mother-in-law, but her constant referencing to what Steve would do or say to fix the situation—unsurprisingly filtered through Ellie’s value system—made her crazy.
More important, it made Lewis crazy.
A customer approached the counter with a bundle of lingerie and she stepped back, marveling as her mother-in-law talked the giggling middle-aged woman into adding a pair of crimson crotchless panties to her sensible double-D bras.
“Because it’s never too late to add fun to a marriage,” Ellie said. “Hang these in the new playwear section for me, Claire?” She handed her daughter-in-law two bundles of panties.
Hooking them to the railing, Claire smiled as she glimpsed naughty-nurse and French-maid costumes amidst the sheer gowns, open-bust teddies and corsets.
Steve would have liked this section,
she thought, and tears prickled her eyes. Their wedding anniversary would have been in a couple of months. Just twenty and twenty-one when they got married, they’d conceived Lewis on the honeymoon.
She fingered the lace, satin and bows as wistfully as an old woman with all her sensual years behind her.
You’re only thirty-four,
she reminded herself. Steve had been her one and only. What would it even be like to sleep with another man? Damn you, Steve Langford, for leaving me in the position of having to think about it.
“Claire, honey, you want to come to dinner tonight?”
She turned, smiling. “I’m heading to the bach for the rest of the week to assess what needs doing for a move. Because it looks like I have a buyer for the house. Touch wood, we’ll finalize a sale this week.”
“That’s great,” said Ellie, but her tone held dismay. Fortunately, Steve—channeled through his mother—thought a transfer to Willingham School was an excellent idea, even though it involved a permanent move to Stingray Bay when the Whangarei house sold, to avoid a ninety-minute commute.
But approving the move and having it happen were two different things.
“It’s only forty-five minutes away,” Claire reminded her. “We’ll still see plenty of each other.”
“It’s just, you and Steve built that place.”
“And it’s another link broken.” Claire picked up Ellie’s hand and squeezed it. “But this is the one that matters.”
The older woman’s eyes filled. “Oh, honey!”
“We’re not crying,” Claire warned. “Think about how much you hated the window frames instead.”
Her mother-in-law rallied. “Mustard! What were you two thinking?”
“It’s not mustard, it’s Golden Dream and it looks wonderful against the silvered wood.”
“Personally, I always thought you should have painted the clapboard instead of letting it weather.”
Claire widened her eyes. “No! Really?”
Ellie laughed. Her bangles rattled as she pushed Claire toward the door. “Get out of here! I’ve got lingerie to sell.”
Unfortunately Claire’s phone conversation with Dan was harder. “You’re kidding me,” he said when she told him Nate hadn’t returned with her. “I can’t believe he turned you down.”
“Only because it wasn’t necessary,” she replied hastily, parking the pink Caddy in the garage of her Whangarei home. Was lying as bad when you crossed your fingers behind your back? “He gave me all the authorizations I need to sell the house and dissolve the trust.”
“I thought doing it remotely would take weeks of to-ing and fro-ing with documents?”
Collecting her belongings, she nudged the door shut with her butt, dumping some of them into the five-year-old BMW station wagon that was her usual transport.
“Nate has a smart lawyer.… I’m unsure of the exact details, but he’s assured us he can work something out quickly and in the meantime I can progress the sale with documents he signed while I was there.”
“It would have been easier if he’d come home though, wouldn’t it?”
She started to sweat. “His boss wasn’t happy about him taking time off.”
“Claire, you don’t need to make excuses for him. I’ve known for a while he doesn’t want us in his life anymore. But I thought you’d break through.”
The house was musty from being closed up for three days and she opened windows. “Because I’m the poor widow, you mean,” she said lightly, hearing in his voice the pity she so hated.
“Partly,” he returned. Bless Dan and his new honesty. His bride Jo’s influence. “But also because he always dropped his guard with you.”
“There are still vestiges of the old Nate,” she said, heading straight to her bedroom to repack. “He’s doing some volunteer work for a women’s shelter on his day off. Providing a security escort if the women need one when they do a school drop-off or pick-up…attending court.” She’d overheard him arranging a replacement. “Don’t give up on him, Dan.” The way Claire had—at least until she’d seen him waking from a nightmare. She wouldn’t make that mistake again. He needed his friends, people who understood the hell he’d been through.
“I never give up on family,” he said. “And Nate’s like a brother. But I’m through with this touchy-feely hands-off approach—and yeah, I appreciate the contradiction. Soon as we’re done docking lambs, I’m heading over there with Ross to deal with this once and for all.”
Oh, Lord. Gathering a pile of laundry, she tried to keep the panic out of her voice. “He’ll be on tour with Zander.”
“I don’t care if he’s in Paris or Pretoria.… If it takes an intervention then—” He stopped. “Hey, Lewis.” All frustration disappeared from his voice. “I’m talking to your mother.…No, we’re not discussing an intervention for you.…Sheesh, teenagers, it’s all me, me, me. I’m suggesting your uncle Nate update his Facebook page.…Yeah, okay, smart mouth, so I’m not on Facebook either, but trust me, you won’t be friended when I am.”
Claire grinned. Lewis would be loving Dan’s teasing. She loaded the washing machine, set it going.
“Here’s your son,” Dan said. “Whatever he tells you about daily beatings is a lie.”
“Mum?”
“Hey, how’re you doing?”
“Good.”
In the kitchen, she filled a jug with water. “I hear you’ve been docking lambs. Is that as gruesome as it sounds?” The herbs on the kitchen windowsill drooped forlornly, so she watered the parsley and mint.
“Not really. We put a rubber ring around their tail and that stops the blood circulation and then falls off around eight to ten days later.” He dispensed his new knowledge with a farmer’s casualness. “It makes them easier to shear, plus if you don’t then sh—poop builds up—”
“Ugh, okay, stop there.” The coriander was beyond saving; Claire dumped it in the bin.
Glee entered his voice. “…and that can lead to fly strike… That’s wool maggots, Mum.”
“And that’s too much information. Seriously you’d rather dag lambs than spend quality time with your mother?”
“This is way more fun.”
“Well, I’m glad to know where I stand.” Poor peace plant in the hall, it soaked up half a jugful. “Listen, hon, I think we’ll finalize a sale of the house this week.”
“So we can move to Dullsville even sooner.” There was a scowl in his voice. “Great.”
“It means less traveling.” Willingham was thirty minutes from Stingray Bay, and a seventy-five-minute commute from Whangarei. Since Lewis had changed schools, Claire had been making the drive until the property sold. Anything to get Lewis away from his former crowd.
“Yeah, and weekends with no one to hang out with.”
Returning to the bedroom, she started to refill her suitcase, replacing summer dresses with practical jeans, tees and sweaters.
“Invite your new friends from school.”
“Like they’ll want to hang out in Stingray Bay.”
“Hon, we’ve been over this so often—”
“And you never listen to what I want! So there’s no point talking about it.”
What could she say? You’ll thank me one day. I’m doing this for your own good. Claire sat on the bed. “We’ll make this work,” she promised.
“I have to go,” he said sullenly. “Uncle Dan’s waiting.”
Her hand tightened on the receiver. “I’ll phone tomorrow.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I love you, Lewie.”
“Bye.”
Claire hung up with a sigh. When he’d been a little boy, he’d said it back. Until a few months ago, when she’d started practicing tough love, he’d say, “Me, too.” When she’d made him move schools, he’d changed it to “Bye.” Emotionally, it was a very effective punishment. But it wouldn’t make her change course.
* * *
T
HE
BACH
WAS
IN
DARKNESS
when she pulled in, earlier than she’d expected at eight-thirty, and for a moment Claire panicked that Nate had left the moment her back was turned. Talking herself down, she got out of her station wagon, walked into the bach and switched on a light. “Nate?”
No response.
Dumping a bag of groceries in the kitchen, she wondered if he’d gone to the boat shed. Then she glimpsed him through the open curtain of the spare bedroom. He was sprawled on the bed, out cold. She glanced at the bottle of scotch on the countertop. Unopened. Exhaustion, then.
He lay uncovered, one arm flung over his face as though warding off a foe. She tiptoed into the room, grabbed a duvet off the other bed and placed it over his lower body, then stood quietly for a moment, watching him in slumber.
He’d grown his dark hair longer over the past eighteen months and a lock fell across his closed lids. Instinctively she reached out to smooth it, pulling away from the intimacy with her hand inches from his face. He wasn’t Lewis, though she felt equally protective of him in this moment.
Nate groaned in his sleep and turned over, exposing a muscular back. Tentatively, Claire touched his shoulder, the skin surprisingly warm given the chilly room. “It’s okay,” she said firmly. “Everything’s going to be okay.” His shoulder relaxed, he settled more deeply into sleep. She had an impulse to crawl onto the bed with him. Like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, with only each other for comfort.
Silly.
Claire crept out and pulled the curtain across the door, stifling a yawn. She’d barely slept in the previous seventy-two hours, since she first chased Nate across the world. Deciding to follow his example, she dumped the perishables in the fridge, left the rest of the shopping on the counter and went to bed.
Crawling into the middle because it stopped the bed feeling so empty, she lay in the dark and mentally went over tomorrow’s tasks, until she fell asleep and dreamed of lambs gamboling across fields while she chased them with rubber bands.