The Mermaid Collector (11 page)

“Of course it would
have
to be this one,” Ruby had proclaimed brightly to Tess several weeks later when Buzz had gladly filled her shelves with every art supply she’d requested, never minding the price. “It’s the strongest of the cottages. You can tell by the windows. See how clear the glass is? The salt won’t stick to it. It can’t.” Tess had nodded agreeably, eagerly, though she could swear the panes were as foggy with grime as the ones in the other cottages.

Those early years were flawless, long stretches of days peppered with Buzz’s unflagging adoration for her mother. She remembered dinners on the beach, eating fish cakes gritty with sand, and Sundays spent wandering flea
markets, then filling the back of the truck with a tangle of old wicker and wrought iron—
These silver platters will be perfect for mixing paints!
She recalled hanging lights at Halloween just in case they were too busy at Christmas. There had been the carob brownies that Ruby sent for Tess’s school holiday party, decorated with red-hots and frozen peas (
Like red and green Christmas balls, see?
) that no one would eat, so Tess emptied them on her way home, not wanting to hurt her mother’s feelings. She remembered making sand castles in the middle of winter, gathering wood for bonfires on the Fourth of July, outrunning deerflies and making rose hip tea. There had been grilled corn on the cob and fresh blueberry custard straight from the tub. Through it all, her mother had been effervescent, and Buzz had worn the perpetual flush of a man in love.

Tess had truly believed it could last.

“Damn.”

She looked down, horrified to see how deep she’d been making her cuts while her mind had drifted. It was no good, she thought. At this rate, she’d carve her poor mermaid down to a toothpick, she was so undone.

She just needed to see Pete. She deserved an explanation, didn’t she? She deserved to be told to her face why he hadn’t come. She should have demanded one hours ago. Instead, she was hiding in her woodshop, as if she were the one who’d done something wrong. She’d been so sure this time, so certain he was finally ready to make a commitment to her, that promise for which she’d waited so long.
So why hadn’t he? He was free now; there were no excuses, no other women to consider, no complications—at least, none she knew of.

Screw it. She set down her tools, brushed off her hands, and stuck her feet into her sneakers, her heart racing. Fine. If he wouldn’t come to her for dinner, then she’d bring dinner to him and show him just how much work she’d gone to for him.

Confident of her plan, Tess packed up the pans and loaded them into her VW Bug. She was snapping her seat belt into place when she saw the woman in white had returned to the porch, this time with one of her mother’s quilts, which she was draping over the railing in full sun. The outrage, already bubbling, flared up in full, bursting and hot. Tess climbed out of the car and marched across the driveway.

Hearing her approach, Beverly glanced up. “Oh, hello. You must be Te—”

“You can’t leave that in the sun,” Tess said firmly. “It’ll fade the colors.”

Beverly frowned, startled. “I wasn’t going to leave it outside long. I just noticed it had a strange smell, and I thought I’d let it air out a bit, that’s all.”

Tess drew down the spread, bundling it carefully in her arms. “If you think it stinks so badly, then Buzz can find you another one.”

“There’s no need to be rude. All I meant to say was that it—”

But Tess had already turned and walked off, taking the quilt with her into the car and piling it on top of her pans, determined to get the whole lot as far from that woman as she could.

IT HAD TAKEN HIM MORE THAN AN HOUR
, but Tom had managed to lay out all four mattresses, the cushions on the home’s only sofa, ten towels and five bedspreads on the back lawn of the house. All that remained were the sheets Tom had balled up into enormous piles at the top of the rise.

He stood and surveyed the sea of linens. Now that they were in the sun, he could see just how badly yellowed the old mattresses were, the unfortunate and unidentifiable stains so stark against the grass. Lumpy and grim, they were pathetic. The bedspreads were not much better, their scalloped edges frayed and torn.

All morning he’d watched the tiny screen of his phone, compulsively checking the signal bars that fluctuated madly up and down every time he crossed a room or a doorstep. Finally, he’d climbed into the car and driven to the edge of the road where he’d been relieved to find a signal and soon after, a text message from Dean, telling him he was close, not more than a day away; Dean was confident of it. After reading it, Tom had put in a call but got voice mail and left a message, telling Dean that service was spotty on the Point but to
please
try anyway.

The night before, Tom had had a savage nightmare of
Dean taking a turn too fast and plummeting off a rocky cliff. In his sleeping panic, Tom had rolled off the bed, landing on the smooth wood floors. When he lay back down, he heard mice in the walls. After that, his dreams had been cluttered with visions of Tess Patterson, brief but potent glimpses that seemed only to strengthen his recollections. After waking, as he’d made coffee from a jar of instant he’d bought in desperation at a gas station, he’d recalled the strange encounter in her cottage. Had he really been only an hour in her company? It seemed so much longer. Even now Tom felt as if he’d known her for some time, as if he could recall every inch of her room from memory, the colors of her bedspread (peach and pumpkin flecked with gold); the color of her cabinets (mauve with pearled knobs). He even swore he could still smell her shampoo on his skin when he woke, and he continued to take compulsive whiffs of his sleeve just to be sure.

But why wouldn’t he ruminate on her? It had been a very long time since he’d been that close to a woman—two years, to be exact. Nancy Martin, the English teacher from the middle school had been going through a divorce, and Tom had given her a ride home from a conference. They’d gone out to dinner four times and made love after their second date. Then Dean had gone off on one of his disappearing acts, so Tom had cancelled their fifth date at the last minute, promising to reschedule, but by the time
Dean had resurfaced as he always did weeks later, unwashed and practically undead from his binge, Tom had forgotten his promise. The truth was he was thankful for the excuse. He couldn’t care for Dean and care for a woman at the same time. It didn’t work that way; it couldn’t. What woman could understand that? Not that he hadn’t enjoyed Nancy, and not that he hadn’t found himself grateful (just the word filled him with guilt) to be free of Dean in those impossible days of his brother’s absence, but no matter the fleeting moments of relief when Tom felt he could actually breathe for once, no matter those, Tom knew he could never choose them over Dean.

Still, he’d made valiant efforts at dating over the years since the accident, thinking from time to time that sex might be a reasonable way to cope with it all. He’d started running, mostly at night because he couldn’t sleep. He tore through parks like a man being chased and wouldn’t stop until he couldn’t breathe, until he was certain his heart would bounce straight up his throat and land on the sidewalk, done with him; some nights he truly hoped it would. One night he ran all the way to Oak Park, another night to the lakefront. By the middle of that first summer after their parents had died, most of their friends had drifted away—
faded
was the word that Tom used—paling from their company like steam under a defroster, and he hadn’t blamed them. They’d been mostly Dean’s friends, mostly other swimmers, but there had been one girl from
his class who’d come to check in on him several times in August, on her way to Williams. She’d sent Tom postcards until Christmas, but he never wrote back. Once Dean was home from the hospital and still not able to walk, there was just too much to do.

In his mid-twenties, once he began teaching in earnest, Tom tried again, but he often felt like an old car left sitting too long. Everything worked well enough, but he felt sluggish. The few times he had enjoyed a woman, Dean would stumble into some kind of trouble, and Tom would have to wash his hands of the romance. In secret, he’d always thought of himself as one of those men who might excel at sex if all the stars aligned, who could find himself remarkably agile in the moment, surprisingly so, thrilling his lover, who had never expected such prowess, such exuberance from such a serious person. But whatever chance he had for those moments of startling glory was left in that snow, buried in that embankment.

But it had been nice with Tess Patterson, nice to hold her, to squeeze into her shower, nice even to put away her food. Maybe it was the brevity of it, the surprise of her that had aroused him, that kept him thinking of her still. Maybe it was just being alone. He could have started running again as well, but where was there to run in this place? With so much darkness, a person could run right off a cliff if he wasn’t careful.

No, he couldn’t run. So if Tess Patterson wanted to see him again, if she wanted him near her again, he would
enjoy that. Until Dean arrived, he might just enjoy a lot of things.

RICKY BOGGS WAS DRAGGING BOXES
of roofing tiles from the back of his pickup when Tess pulled up to the site. She knew Pete had been helping out at the Marshall job when Ricky found himself low on help, which always happened during festival season. Workers, even the most dependable men, took full advantage of the season’s short-lived whimsy, committing transgressions that were usually forgiven a few days after the celebration ended. Tess didn’t see Pete’s truck anywhere, but that didn’t mean anything; he might have loaned it out, or he might have walked over from his dad’s office in town.

“He’s not here, Tess,” the contractor called out to her before she even reached him, his voice as wary as his expression.

“And you’re not going to tell me where he is, are you?” she said.

“Tess…”

“I just want to talk to him, Rick. I’m not going to set anything on fire.”

“Go home, hon.” He shoved the tailgate closed and clapped his hands clean. “Don’t do this to yourself.”

Tess glanced around the job site, seeing the familiar faces of men she’d grown up with and gone to school with; they were looking at her as if she were a lunatic. Her
cheeks burned. She wanted to crawl under her front seat; she wanted the earth to crack open and swallow her up—anything to avoid their pitying stares. But what did she expect? They all knew her history with Pete Hawthorne. They knew how he’d broken her heart when he’d left her for Angela, knew how she’d waited and how she’d pined. She stepped back to let a group of men come for the boxes Ricky had just piled on the grass. What the hell was she doing? She wasn’t the crazy one. She wasn’t the one who had something to be ashamed of. She wasn’t the liar, the jerk.

She was just the fool.

She walked back to the VW, climbed in, and pulled out, too angry to cry, but too determined to just go home. So he wasn’t at the job site; so what? She’d just keep driving, just cruise around until she saw his truck. What did she care if it took all morning, she decided as she steered through town. Her day was shot.

WHEN SHE REACHED THE SEAFOOD MARKET
, she swung her car into the parking lot. Julie, Tess thought. The only person in town who wouldn’t judge her, who wouldn’t say, “I told you so” any more than Julie had ever said it over the years that Tess had been wrong about Pete Hawthorne. But when she pushed through the front door of the store, Tess didn’t see her friend anywhere.

“She had to go home and help Sue with the chowder
orders, hon,” white-haired Bert Russell shouted above the crescent of customers that had curved around the counter, calling out requests. “She’ll probably be back in an hour or so if you want to wait for her.”

But Tess couldn’t wait. The tears she’d been too angry to let loose were finally pushing their way up her throat and nearing the edges of her lids. She felt herself jostled by a new rush of customers, locals who wanted to get their fish before the flood of tourists descended on the town and cleaned out every case, every muffin tin, every chowder bowl.

She turned and pushed through them, determined to get back to her car where she could fall apart in private. She managed, barely, drying her eyes with paper napkins as she raced down Route 9, seeing nothing but the road, then suddenly, a break in the pines up ahead, the telltale white marker on the tree; her breath caught. It was the road to the Point.

Good, she thought, her rage returning, hot and fierce again. If she couldn’t clear things up with Pete, she’d clear things up with Tom Grace and stop anything before it started. Not that she imagined he would expect something. If anything, he might be more embarrassed than she was. After all, he didn’t seem the sort to end up in a stranger’s bed. Just seeing that flash of her bare skin had clearly undone him, leaving him fidgeting like a horse stuck in a stall with a tireless fly.

She took the pocked road all the way to the end, to
where the keeper’s house sat, stark and quiet, just the top of the tower visible beyond it. The Volvo was there; Tom was home. Uncertainty fluttered through her.

She needed this, Tess told herself. She needed this one piece of closure today; otherwise it was all too much. She couldn’t make Buzz keep Pink safe from a stranger; she couldn’t find Pete and make him explain, make him want her back. But if she could make herself clear to this teacher, if she could close the door with him—the door that hadn’t been opened, merely cracked, the slightest, thinnest peek of a crack at that—if she closed it firmly, then that would be something at least.

Coming up to the porch, Tess pulled back the screen door and prepared to knock, then stopped, hearing movement, thumping sounds, at the back of the house. She came carefully around the side and stared, awed. The lawn was nearly covered in mattresses and cushions, and there, same white shirt, sleeves rolled up now, was Tom Grace, spreading out quilts and blankets, securing their corners with stones, as if he were planning a mass picnic.