The Cottage at Glass Beach (15 page)

“Aunt Maire?” Nora asked.

“Don't you remember?” Ella fell into line next to Malcolm. “We're supposed to go to her house for dinner tonight.”

Nora had forgotten. “I'll let her know we can't make it.”

“Don't cancel your plans on my account,” Malcolm said, “though I'd like to meet her.”

“We can't leave Daddy by himself,” Ella insisted. She wouldn't let him out of her sight. “Aunt Maire always says the more the merrier. She won't mind.”

No, Nora thought, but I do. Having Malcolm in such close proximity, seeing him with the girls, made her, by turns, nostalgic and furious.

“She'd want to meet him. Everyone loves Daddy,” Annie said.

Yes, everyone loved Malcolm. Which was precisely the problem.

T
hat evening, true to form, he charmed them all—the girls, Maire, even Nora. After a glass or wine or two, Nora wondered if he was truly regretting what had happened, what he too had lost. No, it wasn't a question of if. She knew he did. But how much? Enough to change? He caught her gaze across the table and smiled, as if sharing an inside joke.

Owen wasn't at dinner that night. Maire had invited him, but he told her he would be up the coast, night fishing. Nora had to admit she was relieved.

Maire presided over the meal, magnanimous as ever, not taking sides. She hadn't missed a beat when Nora told her there would be a fifth for dinner.

“I'm surprised more people haven't discovered the island,” Malcolm said as he sampled Maire's rhubarb pie, proclaiming it the best he'd ever had.

“Too far afield and rough around the edges for most,” Maire said.

“That must be what I like about it.”

“We all feel that way, Burke's Islanders and off-islanders, few as they are, alike. It's an in-between place, my grandmother used to say. A thin place.”

“People aren't that thin here,” Annie said.

Maire laughed. “Not in terms of physical appearance,” she explained. “It means a place where the past and present meet, and in the case of Burke's Island, the new and old countries too.”

“And, most importantly, it's the place my wife is from,” Malcolm added.

My wife
, as if she still belonged to him.

“And it's got magic and secrets,” Annie said, “like the coracle.”

“The coracle? I'd forgotten about that thing,” Maire said. “Didn't realize it was still seaworthy.”

“Reilly Neale helped us fix it. We took Daddy out today,” Ella said.

“Our grandmother disappeared from the boat, that's what Reilly told us,” Annie volunteered.

“You never said—” Malcolm turned to Nora.

“That's because there wasn't anything to say,” she replied curtly.

The seals barked down on the beach, first one, then a chorus. Maire closed the sash. “Heavens, I wonder what they're going on about. They usually don't cause such a commotion.”

“Maybe they've seen a sea monster,” Annie said.

“Sea monster?” Malcolm asked. “Now that sounds exciting.”

“It's from a fairy tale in a book of Mom's,” Ella said.

“Something else for you to show me later,” he said, though it was Nora at whom he gazed over the top of the girls' heads.

T
here was barely room on the couch for everyone, and yet they piled on, Malcolm in the center, Nora balancing awkwardly on the armrest, the only spot available. “You can squish in, Mama,” Annie said.

“I'm fine, honey.” She didn't want to squish in. She preferred to maintain her distance.

“Daddy can read tonight,” Ella said, her gaze flicking to Nora with whiplike speed, then away.

“I don't have to,” Malcolm said. “It's your mother's book. See, there's her name.”

Below Maeve's and Maire's. Ella's and Annie's would be next.

“It's okay,” Nora said. “My voice could use a rest.”

Malcolm was a gifted orator. He could read anything and make it interesting. He used to read Nora poetry in law school as they lay in bed together. Frost. Blake. Keats. Long afternoons when the sun streamed through the windows, and hours could pass by.

He read the story of the selkie, caught in a net. The fisherman hid her coat so that she couldn't swim away, and she bore him children and lived with him for years, all the while yearning for the sea.

“What do you think, girls?” Malcolm said. “Is your mother a selkie?”

“She doesn't have a fur,” Annie said. “She doesn't like it.”

“Not that kind of fur,” Ella said. “The story's referring to the type that's actually a part of you, like an animal pelt.”

Annie studied her arms, as if examining them for evidence, apparently disappointed that only a light down covered her skin.

“What do you say, Nora?” Malcolm asked.

She forced a smile. She refused to play his games. “ 'Fraid not.”

She wasn't the one who'd left one night and not come back.

A
single ember glowed in the fireplace, persisting in the dark. There he was on the couch, his arm thrown back in repose, as if he'd only been exiled for snoring. The nobility of his profile—the strong, straight nose, the chiseled chin—not quite matched by his character. The sigh of his breath, steady as ever. He could sleep through anything, anywhere, putting troubled thoughts aside. She'd never had the talent. She lay in her bedroom, in the dusky light—for on moonlit nights such as this, it was never truly dark, but rather half illuminated—and in that grayed world, with its blurred margins, her awareness of him, of his nearness, intensified. He had not been this close in weeks, and the proximity filled her with expectation and anxiety.

Sleep didn't take her until one a.m. Dream after dream washed over her, before the one she would remember, hazily, upon waking. She was in the coracle, her mother sitting in front—at least, she thought it was Maeve. She couldn't see her face, her back to Nora, a child once more.
Mama
, Nora said,
Mama
, her voice rising when her mother didn't respond, the ashen terns flapping overhead, wings tattered and sullied as crumpled newspaper, the pages turning, turning, headlines of disasters, disappearances. Her mother's arms moved in time with the wings above, the waves beneath them deepening, bottomless—the sky too, everything the color of steel, polished, cold, the wind blowing, lightly at first, then wildly.
We have to go back
, Nora cried. Maeve didn't answer, didn't turn. The wind lifted her mother's hair from the nape of her neck, revealing a single green strand, a piece of sea grass, among the ringlets. Nora reached forward to remove it, the boat shifting beneath her, listing precariously. When she glanced up again, she saw that her mother's hair was made entirely of sea grass, that one lock no different from the rest. She stared at the piece that had broken off in her hand, taking in the slickness of it, the green.
Your hair
— And then Maeve was gone. A wave crashed over her. She was going down, her mother a shadow, receding into the depths.
I can't breathe
. No words escaping her lips, only a stream of bubbles racing to the surface, lost to spray.

She woke, gasping, Malcolm's arms around her. The familiar scent of him, close, warm. She held fast for a moment.

“It's all right. I'm here,” he said, his cheek pressed into her hair.

She recovered herself enough to pull away and clutch a pillow to her chest.

He sat on the side of the bed, the same side on which he used to sleep next to her. He wore a plain gray T-shirt and checked pajama pants. They'd never worn bedclothes at home. “The same dream?” he asked.

A version of the recurring nightmare she'd been having for years, from which she'd wake, thinking she was drowning, him soothing her, when he was there. “Yes,” she said.

“Is it worse since you've been here?” The edges of everything softened in the dark, their voices hushed too.

The dream had intensified the week before she received Maire's letter, as if her psyche were attuned to what was coming. He hadn't been home then. “I'm all right.”

He got up, awkward now. His hair stood on end, giving him a comical appearance about which she would have teased him, under different circumstances.

“You should go,” she said.

He nodded, a slow movement, as if this were part of a dream from which they might wake, shaking their heads over their estrangement.

They knew it wouldn't be good for the girls to find him there, to think—

He turned in the doorway. “I'm here if you need me.”

The ache, the regret, didn't hit her until after he'd closed the door, a quiet click of the latch articulating their separation, he on one side of the wall, she on the other.

O
ne day passed into the next, flowing together. Nora swam for hours, training for the race. She felt stronger, venturing farther each time, Malcolm small in the distance, the girls swimming near shore, showing him their strokes.

He showed no sign of leaving. He stuck to them like a burr.

“Don't you need to go?” she asked one afternoon, a couple of days later, toweling her skin and hair.

“Where?”

“Boston.”

To his work. His life.
Her
. Though they hadn't spoken of her. Here, she was only an idea. She had no shape, no form.

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

“When?”

He sighed. “It's good here, isn't it? We're good here, away from everything.”

Everyone. Was that what he meant?

“I didn't know you were such a strong swimmer,” he said.

“I didn't either. I like the open water.” She hadn't realized how hemmed in, how limited, she felt by the pool at the health club. It was freeing to be in the ocean, with no walls and lanes, whistles and lifeguards, to hold her back.

“You look good.”

She'd done something else he hadn't expected. It made her more interesting.

“I'm not doing this for you,” she said. “I'm doing it for me.”

H
e'd brought a kite. An ornate paper bird with hinged wings that caught the wind, diving and soaring. The patterns of its flight were intricate, thrilling. He and the girls ran through the grass, creating a labyrinth of passageways in the green, crisscrossing, intersecting, breaking away. The girls swooped through the bluebells, while Malcolm worked the lines, the cables humming. “Higher, Daddy, higher!” they begged, and he complied. If they'd asked for the sky, the clouds, he would have pulled them down. Or tried to—a blanket of blue, a pillow of cumulus. “Mama, come on!” Annie called. Nora cut the safety cord that had held her at a distance from Malcolm and joined them, arms outspread, opening herself up to the wind. “Are you flying, Mama?” Annie asked. Nora felt the warmth of the sun on her face, the breeze on her skin, a sense of lightness, uplifting, exhilarating. “What are we?” Nora asked. “Sparrows,” said Ella, banking right. The most aerodynamic birds of all. “Sparrows!” Annie cried, taking up the call. “Sparrows!” Nora threw back her head and laughed, the meadow spinning. Malcolm, the kite in one hand, took flight as well, not to leave, but follow. “This way!” Ella led, bending low, the grass, tasseled, braided, tickling arms and legs. Annie jumped off a log, airborne, then landed, light-footed, barely touching ground. “This way!” Nora right behind, breathless, Malcolm in pursuit. A perfect summer scene. A scene that almost made Nora think they could spend many days like this, countless days.

A sudden gust blasted the meadow, testing their balance. It snatched the kite from Malcolm's hands. The bird flailed and then plummeted into the top of the spruce tree.

“No!” Annie cried.

They stopped below, the joy of the afternoon draining away.

“Sorry,” Malcolm said. “I should have held on.”

Nora's eyes met his. The words didn't have to be spoken to pass between them.

“It's roosting,” Ella said hopefully.

“So it is,” he agreed. “Still, I might see if I can persuade it to come down.”

“The tree is like a mountain,” Annie said. A mountain of needles, of green.

“I can buy another,” he said, as if the time in the meadow, already receding into the past, could be re-created. He tugged on the line, tentatively at first, then harder. The bird hopped down a branch, then held fast, taunting him.

“Let's go inside and make lemonade,” Nora suggested, sensing his mounting frustration. “You must be thirsty.”

“Do you want some, Daddy?” Ella asked.

“I'd love a glass. It's hard work, being a bird, and negotiating with one. You know where to find me,” he said.

For once, Nora did.

The girls darted ahead, still birdlike in their movements, into the cottage. Nora skirted Malcolm's sedan, a sporty, sleek model. The buzz of his cell phone cut the quiet of the afternoon through a half-open window. She'd heard him at the car earlier that morning, the click of the latch, the ding of the warning light, as he retrieved the kite and, in all likelihood, checked for messages in privacy.

She glanced up. He was out of her line of sight—and she from his. The phone buzzed violently as a trapped insect against the hard plastic receptacle. The call might be important—to his career, or, more to the point, to her, to ascertain his intentions, to find out if she'd been, careful as she was, fooled yet again.

The screen flashed. It might as well have been a billboard, given how large the letters seemed. It was a text message from
her
. Nora hesitated before pressing the button. Did she want to know? To violate his trust? Too many choices, the thirst for knowledge, as benign or terrible as it might be, winning in the end.

Have you given her the papers yet?

He rounded the corner, saw her standing there with the door ajar, the warning bell still doing its
ding-ding-ding
.