CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Empty sack can’t stand upright alone.”
—GULLAH PROVERB
I knocked on Tim’s door before my head told me exactly what action was appropriate. Tim opened the door in a pair of jeans and no shirt, a towel in hand. His wet hair dripped onto his shoulders.
“Oh, I’m sorry . . .” I backed up. “I interrupted you.”
“Nope.” His smile was wide. “Just getting ready to go out.” He opened the door wide and made a sweeping gesture. “Come in, Meridy. What’s up?”
I shook my head back and forth, unable to find words for my anger—yet.
He threw his head back and laughed. “My God, this is like traveling back in time. Look at you. I can tell you’re mad as hell. What’d you get in trouble for this time? What did your mother say to you?”
“It’s not Mother. . . . It’s Beau.”
“Damn, I’m such an insensitive idiot. I already warned you about that.” He spread his hands open. “Come in . . . now.”
I walked into the foyer, ran my hand across the wood table, plopped down on his leather recliner in the living room. I looked around the room. “Tim all grown up,” I said, and glanced at the evidence of a man I’d known only as a boy with Danny. “Who do you think he would’ve grown up to be? What do you think he’d have been . . . like?”
“Beau?” He pulled a T-shirt over his head. “I’ve never even met him.”
“No . . . Danny.”
“You changed subjects on me there, changed men on me.” Tim sat on the arm of the chair. “I think he would’ve been amazing, would have done all the things he said he’d do. Been smart, funny, still our best friend. Wise. Good-looking . . .” He tousled my hair. “Or maybe not. Maybe not any of those things. That’s the advantage he has over us. . . . He gets to be frozen in that perfect time.”
I nodded. “That perfect, adorable time. I guess I still envision him as eighteen, full of promise.”
Tim nodded. “Promises he might or might not have been able to keep.”
“I can’t imagine he wouldn’t have kept them . . .”
“He probably would have. But that’s not why you ran here. What’s up?”
“I called home. A woman answered my phone.”
Tim put his hand on my shoulder. “Did you know her?”
“Yep, she’s the new junior partner in the firm, helping with this huge negligence case along with Alexis, who’s been plugged into my best friend’s spot.”
“Alexis is your best friend?”
“No . . . absolutely not. You met my best friend, Cate . . . she was Harland’s wife. Then he lost twenty pounds, bought a vintage Mustang convertible and decided that his paralegal was much more interesting than his present wife. So he swapped cars and wives. Just plugged a new one in each slot. And I’m supposed to let the new one be my substitute friend. You know, like in school when a teacher comes in because your teacher is out sick, and you’re supposed to treat the substitute with as much respect? Just like that. Now I call my house and this other woman answers my phone. I guess she wants to plug into being—” I groaned, slumped in the chair.
“Could you be jumping to conclusions, my dear?”
“Maybe . . . but Beau was in the shower and she was purring.”
Tim jumped up, clapped his hands together. “Get up. This is crazy. We’re going out. Now.”
“Out?” I looked down at my shorts and rumpled T-shirt. “No way. Not looking like this.”
“Where do you think I’m taking you? The Seaboro Yacht Club? No, we’re off to an oyster roast and some cold beer. Weatherly’s husband is running for office and is having an oyster roast down at the public beach. We’re going. No more moping around.”
“I’m not moping,” I protested.
“Oh, you’re moping all right. In fact if you don’t get your mopey butt out of my favorite chair, you’ll win moper of the year.”
I laughed and he joined in. “There is no such thing,” I said, jumped up, thinking that oysters and beer sounded like the absolutely best thing I could think of. “But there is one thing I want to do before we go.”
“No, you may not go home and change into nicer clothes or do your hair or—”
“Do you have a computer, Internet access?”
“Of course.”
“Do you mind if I use it real quick? Mother doesn’t have it and I wanted to look something up.”
I followed Tim to two closed wood doors. He hadn’t shown me this part of the house and as I drew closer, I realized it was his office. He pushed the door open. An oversized pine desk filled the center of the room; three carved chairs covered in leather scattered around it. Papers, books, framed pictures and rolled blueprints filled the space.
A flat-screen computer sat on his desk. “How come you never showed me your office?” I asked him.
“It’s a mess.”
“A beautiful mess.” I walked over to the computer. “It is so full of you.”
He walked up behind me and clicked a button, and the Internet glared from the screen. “Yeah, so full of me that my ex-wife couldn’t find room for herself here.”
I typed in a search engine, looked up at Tim. “No, she could have found room just like I could have found the words to tell Beau the truth. If you really need or want to find something . . . you will. Even if it is too late.” I sighed, typed in, “Name meaning Meredith,” and stepped back from the computer.
Tim read what I wrote. “What are you doing?”
“I want to know what my name means.” I punched a few keys until I found the name Meredith and clicked on it. A Welsh name meaning “sea lord” flashed on the screen.
“So you’re a sea lord. That makes a lot of sense, except your name isn’t Meredith,” Tim said.
“Mother said my name came from Meredith. I asked her after Tulu told me that names have power . . . that someone could lose the right to their name.”
“Well, I don’t believe you’ve lost the right to your name. You’ve always been . . . I don’t know . . . part of the sea.”
“Used to be.”
“Was, is, still are . . . whatever. You’re still lord of the sea even without someone else to tell you. Now let’s go—we’ll miss watching Weatherly’s husband make a fool of himself. He and his opponent each get to talk about why they want to be mayor . . . should be interesting.”
“Okay, then, let’s go.” His elbow brushed my shoulder as I turned off the computer; his hand reached down for my hand as I got out of his chair. “You heard about Tulu, right?”
Tim nodded. “I’m sorry. I know you cared a lot about her.”
“I feel like we weren’t done. She had so much to give.”
“I know.” He nodded.
“I ran to her house. I thought she’d like to know that I’d figured out some of what she’d been trying to tell me. I knew she’d have more and more to say. Before she died, she tried to warn me that opening up my heart would be dangerous. Maybe she knew.”
“Knowing Tulu, she probably did know she was leaving. But I guaran-damn-tee that she didn’t want you to close up your heart.” He hugged me and we left his house.
Tim drove his pickup truck and it wasn’t until I had walked over the new boardwalk and tossed down a plaid blanket on the sand that I realized we were on the same beach where we’d celebrated graduation those long years ago.
The Keeper’s Cottage that had once squatted on the end portion of the beach was missing. Blankets, tents and tables were scattered across the beach. On the firmer ground of grass and pine straw a large stump from a once-proud live oak stood with a tent over it. Streamers hung down the sides of the tent and danced along the ground. I pointed to it. “What’s that for?” I asked Tim.
“Weatherly’s husband, Mitchell, will get up there to make his speech—try to make us all feel like this is an old-fashioned political party where the candidates get up on their ‘stump.’ ”
“Very clever.” I sank to the blanket and stretched my legs out. The day’s heat was now hidden in the deeper parts of the sand, and a tepid breeze—the most we could hope for—whispered in from the sea. “I might not get up from here all night. This is so . . . nice.” I dug my toes into the sand.
Tim sat down next to me. “Nothing like a little sea and sand for some perspective, huh?”
I nodded. “Everything seems upside-down lately. Everything. I never thought Harland would leave Cate, you know? Never. She’s funny and smart, and like me, she never forgot what she wanted or who she was. And Harland just decided he’d try something new. I never thought I’d talk or think about the Keeper’s Cottage again. I never thought I’d come back to Seaboro . . . You just never know what’s going to happen or what people are capable of doing.”
“Meridy, I have a very hard time believing that you would’ve fallen in love with a man who is capable of cheating on you.”
“You know what? I probably didn’t. But people forget who they are. . . . I’ve seen that. The numbing quality of life makes us forget who we are, and then we’re doing things we never would’ve done otherwise. After Danny died, I thought I’d never fall in love again. Ever. I’d resigned myself to that. Then I met Beau. . . .”
“And you fell in love.”
“Not at first. In the beginning I admired him. But I remember the day I knew he loved me.” I closed my eyes and felt it, remembered the feel of my dorm room quilt under my legs. I opened my eyes. “You don’t want to hear this, do you?”
“Oh, yes, I do.” He stretched and leaned back on his elbows. “If I’ve missed all this, at least I can hear about it.”
“It was my junior year at university and I’d been elected by my sorority to run for class president. I was scared to death. I was incredibly nervous about my speech in front of the students and faculty at the Student Forum Center. This was not the kind of thing I asked for or even wanted. I called Beau—he was in law school at the time and I told him I didn’t think I should’ve been elected to run. He told me my magnetism bubbled under the surface and that other people saw it too but didn’t know what it was. . . .”
Tim nodded. “Yep.”
“I told him I’d been chosen because of my grades and volunteer work, but he told me how I had no idea, that I was so much more than the sum of my grades and accomplishments. And then I knew he loved me—really just me. You know?”
“I know,” Tim said.
“But then I kept trying harder to earn this undeserved love from him. You’d think trying to be good would make you a better and better person, but all it did was make me obsessed with my image and pretense, and then I couldn’t find any feeling at all, besides the feeling that I cared what other people thought of me. And now that I want to get past that, through that falseness, I might have lost him. And even though I’m sure it’s my fault for letting him think I was more than I really was—I set myself up for the fall. I wish there was a way back to my heart without ruining who Beau and I are together. Does that make any sense at all?”
“You make his love sound like some kind of reward. Like you won his love with good behavior or something.”
A seagull dived, emerged with a fish dangling from its mouth. “I don’t know.”
“Meridy, this is exactly what happened to me; my wife left me when I wouldn’t conform to who she wanted me to be. It doesn’t have to be that way. It just doesn’t.”
“Well—I guess it is.” I dug my toes into the sand. “Ugh, enough of this . . . go get us something to drink.”
Tim jumped up. “Yes, ma’am.”
I leaned back on the blanket and stared out to the sea I was definitely not the lord of. What I didn’t tell Tim was that I had also known then that I loved Beau.
I lay back on the blanket and closed my eyes. And Beau had loved me well. This restlessness had nothing to do with how well he’d loved me or taken care of me.
Sand scattered across my skin and I startled, sat up. Tim and Weatherly looked down at me.
“Hi there, Meridy, long time no see,” Weatherly said in a cultured voice she’d mastered by sixth grade.
I stood up, offered a hug. “It’s good to see you, Weatherly. How are you?”
“I’m just exhausted.” She ran her hand through her coiffed and blond-streaked hair. “This campaign has been so much more grueling than I thought and . . . oh, it’s boring. I’d heard that you were back in town. I was hoping I’d get to see you. Then I heard you left again.”
I held my hands up. “I’m here.” I smiled, but my lips shook. I was acutely aware of my wrinkled shorts and T-shirt next to Weatherly in her floral lime green ironed sundress with matching purse and earrings—something I would’ve worn if I was at home in Atlanta.
“Well, it is really good to see you. There are so many things to catch up on,” she said, touched my hand.
Tim edged away. “Okay, I’m leaving you girls alone to yap. I’m gonna go help the men crack open the oysters. Can’t have a grumpy, hungry crowd when it’s speech time.” He winked at Weatherly.
“Maybe you shouldn’t help build the fire.” I elbowed Tim.
“Very funny.” He feigned a punch to my shoulder and left Weatherly and me staring at each other in the awkward initial moments of attempting to fill vacant years with conversation.
She smoothed her sundress and sat without causing a single wrinkle. “Sit, Meridy. Tell me how you’ve been.”
We exchanged common chatter about children, where we lived and the facts that allow conversation to keep moving. Weatherly leaned in closer. “When was the last time I saw you?”
“I think at the Fourth of July parade a few years ago.”
“You know, Mr. Cragg told my mama about your great idea for the arts festival to raise money for the Keeper’s Cottage. Fabulous. I can’t believe none of us thought of that. I thought it was terrible, all that pressure they were putting on Tim when it would’ve wiped him out.”
“Thanks, Weatherly, but I had a selfish motive too.”
“You know what, Meridy? I’ve tried to remember that night a thousand times and picture you in it, but I never can find you. I know Danny was still there, but I don’t remember where you were.”
“I was with Danny. . . . Then I passed out and then they rushed me to the hospital . . . or that’s what they told me anyway.”
“So you didn’t see . . . Danny after that?”
“No.” I cringed and Weatherly must have seen my face.
“I did,” she said.
“I know. . . . Mother told me you saw him at the top of the tower before it fell.”
She touched my arm. “I saw him fall off.”
I stiffened in surprise.
“I saw Danny fall from the tower. . . .” She looked away when she said this, as though the Keeper’s Cottage still stood on the beach.
“I couldn’t do anything though, Meridy. He landed in the most horrible way . . . all twisted and . . .” Her mouth became a thin line as she pressed her lips together. “And then the tower fell on top of him and there was chaos and smoke and a policeman dragged me away and Danny was just . . . gone. And they couldn’t get to him and they couldn’t find him . . . and he was gone.”
“He died when he fell,” I whispered.
She nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders, lifted her eyebrows “When? You never came back and you never called anybody ever again and . . . I called your house a hundred times back then, and I finally figured you didn’t want to talk to me. I told your mother to please tell you to call me. . . .”
My first impulse—to blame Mother—was replaced by a feeling of empathy. Mother had been protecting me the best she knew how. Complete denial, complete shelter: it was how she’d survived and how she felt she’d help me endure the tragedy.
I placed my arms around Weatherly’s shoulders. “I never knew you called. And I’m sorry I never called. Thank you so much for telling me this. . . . I’ve always wondered exactly how he died. But you know what? I knew anyway. I knew before you told me. I saw it in my mind.”
She nodded. “You would. . . . That’s how you two were.”
“Let’s get some oysters,” I said, squeezed her hand.
We jumped up from the blanket. “Yes, let’s,” she said, and hooked her arm in mine, and I laughed, remembering how badly I wanted to be invited to her birthday party in fifth grade.
The remainder of the evening, for long moments, I forgot Ashley’s voice on the phone, forgot Tulu was gone, forgot anything except the joy of the beach, the sea and this party with old friends. In one moment I stood back and looked at the beach through my adult eyes, stared at all of us grown and yet still gathering to celebrate life’s moments at the curve of the beach where the river ran to meet the sea.
The stump speeches were given and applauded; oysters were baked over an open fire; chilled wine and beer flowed. I laughed more than I had in as long as I could remember.
Tim found me sitting in a sagging lawn chair, staring out to the sea. “Whatcha doing?” he asked.
His face wavered in front of me. “I definitely, most definitely, had too much cold beer.”
He laughed. “And when was the last time that happened?”
I groaned. “I have no idea.”
“Only one way to work that off—dancing.” He swooped me up into his arms and with the rest of Seaboro we jived to beach music until I collapsed, sweating and dizzy, onto our blanket.
I held up my hands. “I give. I’m done. . . .”
The night had crept up on us and the half-moon provided the remaining light. Tim held his hand out to lift me up. “Okay then, let’s go.”
He walked me to his truck, opened the side door, but stood still, blocking my way to the door. “What?” I whispered, leaned against the truck, pushed my hair out of my eyes.
He touched the side of my face. Then his hand remained on my cheek. The fog of beer, dance and moonlight cleared. He leaned forward and for the first time in all the years I’d known this man, I wanted to kiss him. But what I wanted to do was not who I wanted to be. The distinction was clearer than the blazing stars overhead.
Tim ran his thumb along my bottom lip and I think I let out a sigh, or maybe it was a whisper that said, “No.”
He tilted his head. “This would not be a very good idea, would it?”
I shook my head. “A long time ago, it might’ve been.”
He nodded. “Maybe.” And he lifted his hand from my face, mussed my hair with a wink.
I stood for a few moments and stared at the sky—alone. I allowed the briefest moment of want for Tim Oliver to pass by and over me. I didn’t understand why I craved this kiss, except that the feeling was some part of the closeness that existed when someone knew who you had been and who you were, then cared about you anyway. It was an unearned love and I craved it desperately.
Tim started the car as I climbed in. He patted my leg. “Let’s get you home.”
“I’m not really sure where that is . . . ,” I said.
The true silence of night filled my room: an owl call, a soft murmur of wave, branches scratching the roof outside my window. Sleep came nowhere near me and I doubted it visited Sissy either, two doors down the hall. I slipped out of bed and pulled on a pair of velour sweatpants and a T-shirt. I tapped my fingers on Sissy’s bedroom door; she opened it before I’d finished.
I grabbed her hand, whispered, “Come with me.”
She held up a finger, reached back into her room and grabbed some slip-on tennis shoes. She was dressed in silk pajama bottoms and a tank top. I led her to my room, closed the door. She sat on the bed. “Oh, I thought we were going outside. I thought I’d get that beach walk you asked for last time.”
“We are.” I walked over, lifted my window.
“You’re crazy,” Sissy said. “We can just walk down the stairs and go out the front door—we’re not little kids sneaking out.”
“Oh, yes, we are.” I jumped up on the windowsill, slung my legs around and planted my feet on the roof. “Come on, prissy Sissy.”
“Ooh, I hated when you called me that.” She came to the window, placed her hand on the sill as if testing for firmness. “I was not that prissy.”
“Prove it,” I said, squatting on the roof.
She laughed. “If you’re finally trying to kill me, it just might work, because right now I really don’t give a flip.”
I motioned for Sissy to follow me down my well-etched path over the roof, down the back of the trellis and to the soft ground.
Sissy landed with a grunt and sprang back up. “Have you always done this?”
“Since I was twelve.”
“How could I not know that?”
“Because that’s what sneaking out is all about—no one knows.”
Sissy shook her head in the moonlight falling into the backyard through scattered clouds. She glanced up at the sky. “You can see the stars so much better here than in the city.”
I nodded, started walking. “Yep.”
“Where were you tonight?” Sissy asked. She walked ahead of me, talking over her shoulder.
“Tim took me to a party. . . .” I felt I needed to give further explanation, begin with the phone call to Beau and how I ran to Tim’s house, but I hesitated.
“And?”
“And nothing . . . that’s where I was.”
“Is something going on . . . with—”
I held up my hand before she could finish her question. “Sissy, don’t even ask me that.”
“I’m sorry, I guess I see the monster of infidelity behind every tree and bush.”
“Me too, sis, me too.”
She twirled around, walked backward in front of me. “You too?”
“Sure.”
Sissy stopped, waited until I came up next to her; then she swiveled and fell into step with me, as if my admission of seeing the same monsters allowed her to walk next to me.
“It’s kinda scary out here at night . . . like the world goes on forever,” she said.
“No, it’s awesome.” I flipped my shoes off and ran my toes into the moonlit froth at the edge of the wave. “Just awesome.”
“Well, look at us—here we are. I’ve completely screwed up my life and you’re the one that’s all fine now. How the hell did that happen?”
“All fine now? Hardly.”
“You know, I just don’t get it. You never did anything right when we were kids, and everyone liked you better—Tulu, the boys, the neighbors.”
“Not Mother.”
“That’s not true. She just . . . got frustrated.”
I ran my toes along the edge of sea and sand. “The tide is coming in.”
“How do you know?” Sissy crouched down, ran her finger in the sand, and I could envision her at ten years old showing me how to dig fast enough to grab the ghost crabs scurrying below to hide.
“I just started noticing again. . . .” I squatted down next to my sister. “Did you know Mom had a really hard childhood?”
Sissy turned to me. “Well, I knew she grew up on a farm in south Georgia.”
“She was telling me how hard it was, how she sacrificed so much of herself to make sure we never had a life like she had. Here I thought she was being so selfish, always worried about her image, when part of the way she acted was nothing but her idea of protection for us. Nothing is what it seems anymore, is it?”
“Yeah, look at Penn. A mistress for five years. Spending our family money on a condo, clothes and I don’t want to imagine what else, while he gave me a hard time about signing the girls up for horseback-riding camp because it was too damn expensive.”
“I’m sorry, Sissy. I really am.”
“Well, now that I’ve spilled all my trash, why are you here?”
“Well, I originally came home a few weeks ago to write a curriculum for our private school. But now I’ve come back to tell the truth and also—I know this sounds lame—figure out who I want to be. I’ve lost that knowledge through the years and I’m thinking that telling the truth might help me find it.”
“What does that mean?”
“Do you really want to hear it?”
“As long as it doesn’t have anything to do with Penn or family or marriage or money . . .”
“That’s a wide variety of topics there. No, this has to do with the fire.”
Sissy sighed. “Terrible night. I still can’t believe it happened. Still . . . Danny . . . all that.”
I looked up; the sky spun above me in crystal-dotted chaos. “Danny and I were sending off firecrackers—the ones Tim bought us for the graduation party. One landed on the crumbling roof that slanted into the bedroom on the right side.” I closed my eyes and saw the flame run across the cedar shake shingles. “So it was never the bonfire. It was the firecracker I set off that hit the roof. And I never told anyone. Only Danny knew and he’s . . . gone.”
Sissy ran her hands through her hair. “You never told . . . anyone this?”
“I was a coward.”
“No, you were probably scared. Have you told Mom?”
“No.”
“Damn, Meridy. Just damn.”
“I know. I’m reaping what I’ve sown—I know.”
I felt, more than saw, Sissy shiver. “That is not what I was going to say. Is that what you think of me? That I would say . . . that?”
“Yes . . .”
“Oh, my God, I have been the most terrible, judgmental sister known to man.” Sissy grabbed my hand. “I was going to say . . . you are so brave and it wasn’t your fault. Mom and Daddy sent you away. You were eighteen—what else could you do?”
“Tell the truth.”
“How? No one would’ve believed you. Mother wouldn’t have let your confession out as much as they wouldn’t have let accusation in.”
“Mother will have to get over it. I’m not sure Beau will.”
“Of course he will. He loves you.”
“Sissy, his life is completely built upon integrity, honesty and making sure people pay for what they’ve done—especially if they’ve hidden their culpability—and I’m using his words here, if you can’t tell. He came here a few mornings ago and I told him.”
“How did I miss that?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “He came and went . . . quickly. But this blame not only goes against all he believed about me but all he believes about life in general. I’m not sure he can . . . love me even if he wants to. We were on two completely different planets as it was—then I told him about this and it didn’t help at all—trust me.”
“I think we train them that way, Meridy.”
“What?”
“We train men not to accept the weaker parts of us. We show them just how perfect we are, so then they fall in love and marry us and then we can’t show them who we really are . . . because then they might not love us. It’s all so insane and stupid. . . .”
An opening appeared in my heart—the water-rushing kind of feeling that comes with revelation. “Exactly.”
“But me? I’m wrecked.”
I glanced at her face in the opaque light—at her beautiful bone structure handed down from Daddy’s McFadden family. Her face required no further adornment.
Sissy sighed. “Damn, we’re just falling apart, aren’t we? The whole fam-damily is falling apart.”
“Yes, yes, we are.” A laugh bubbled from inside me.
We walked together as I told her of my reluctance to let everyone in Seaboro know about my part in the fire. I didn’t want to ruin Mother’s reputation after how hard she’d worked to get here, how far she’d come—to this place in local society.
“You see”—I faced Sissy—“it doesn’t matter who I am now, because it’s all come back.”
“Is that why you tried to kill yourself the day you left?”
“Kill myself? I never . . .”
“Then why did you swim all the way out in the ocean? You completely freaked us all out.” Sissy waved her hand toward the waves.
“I wasn’t killing myself. I was . . .” I held my palms up in denial.
“Then what were you doing?”
“Leaving my heart out there.”
“What?”
“Shutting down so I wouldn’t feel anything like Danny’s death again. I guess that is the best way to explain what I was trying to do. And it worked for a while—but not anymore.”
By now we had wandered past Tim’s house. I pointed up at his porch, lit by gas lanterns.
She looked up too. “Tim was so cute in high school.”
I laughed, poked at her. “You thought he was a hellion.”
“A cute hellion.” She went on.
“Look at me now. I married a man I don’t even know. We’ve lost over half our money; my girls are doing terrible in school; I can’t think or sleep. . . .” She stretched, looked at me. “So I might as well have snuck out at night, smoked cigarettes, dated the hellions, got a B instead of an A. . . .” She pulled off her tank top, yanked down her pajama bottoms and ran naked toward the ocean. “And skinny-dipped in the middle of the night,” she hollered, and disappeared beneath the surface of the sea. Only a circle of disturbed water showed where she’d gone under.
I opened my mouth to laugh or yell, but neither came out. I jumped up, flipped my sneakers off, rolled up my pants and waded into the water. Sissy’s head popped up five feet out; then she stood completely naked and stretched her arms out to the sky. She squealed and disappeared back under the water, then reappeared.
I threw back my head and laughed.
“Get in here, Meridy McFadden.”
“No way. You’re nuts.”
“I dare you.”
Daddy’s words washed over the waves: Now you know—Meridy will always take the dare.
I pulled my T-shirt over my head, yanked off my sweatpants and underwear and threw them toward shore, then dived into the vast sea. An emotion bubbled up from below my ribs and I recognized its face: the freedom and daring I’d last felt before I set off the firecracker. The face of these sensations had not risen since then. I immersed myself in them, under the water, and let the emotions surround me completely until the fear dissolved into the ocean floor.
Sissy’s laugh echoed under the waves, and then vibrated across the night as I came to the surface. She bobbed in the water, only her face visible. “I knew I could get you in here with a dare. You always take the dare.”
“I haven’t lately. I can tell you that.”
“Then you haven’t been yourself.”
“Exactly.”
For a few minutes, we swam in the dark sea, diving, turning and floating on our backs. Then I swam toward shore, which Sissy reached before I did. She ran toward her clothes and yanked them on in frantic, quick movements. I slipped my own clothes on and we plopped down next to each other. Sissy curled her knees up under her chin.
“Well, then,” I said.
“Yes, just well, well.”
The sound of the incoming tide washed over us. I whispered, “Sissy, I can see the difference now—this huge difference between living my life and doing my life. After Danny died, I did my life—one thing to do after another, always something else to do. Because you don’t need a heart to do, but you do need one to live.”
“Who’s there? Who is that?” A screeching voice, not unlike a cracked ambulance siren, shattered across our conversation. A beam of light skipped across the sand, landed on Sissy’s face.
She held up her hands. “Mrs. Hamlon, it’s just Sissy and Meridy.”
Charlotte Hamlon swung her flashlight, and the light landed on my face.
“You’re on my property,” she screamed.
Sissy stood, stepped forward, wiped her hair off her face. “Mrs. Hamlon, calm down. It’s not your property. . . . We’re at the ocean and it’s just Sissy and Meridy.”
Charlotte approached us—a dent in the darkness with a beam in front of her. “I’ve been watching you from my deck,” she said, swung her flashlight with her words, creating a dizzying pattern. “You were skinny-dippin’—I saw you. This is completely inappropriate, absurd. I’ve already called the police.” She trained the light firmly on our faces. “I always knew your family was crazy, completely crazy—should’ve never married outside Seaboro, for God’s sake.”
I shrugged my shoulders at Sissy, wished I could see her facial features to know if I should laugh or cry. My sister had just been called “inappropriate” for probably the first time in her entire life.
Sissy’s voice came wrapped in a stifled laugh. “She called the police . . . on me. I knew something like that would happen if I hung out with you.” Full laughter poured out and we both ran back toward our own home.
We collapsed on the thin strip where sand met grass in back of our house, attempted to catch our breath.
“She called you inappropriate.” I lay back and stared at the sky.
“She doesn’t know what inappropriate is until she’s seen another woman riding her husband like a damn horse.”
I let out a strangled sound that came out something like “Gross . . . ughh.”
Sissy rolled on her side toward me. “Now, that is what I call inappropriate.”
A slight rustling sound came from behind us before we heard our names. “Sissy? Meridy? Is that you?” Mother called to us.
“Yes, Mom,” Sissy called out.
We stood and walked to the porch, where Mother sat in a rocking chair. After we’d settled in our own chairs with afghans Mother brought from the house—Sissy had refused to change clothes, wanting to stay wet and sandy—we told Mother about Charlotte.
“Sorry, Mom. Really . . . sorry,” Sissy said as though she were five years old and had just broken a china plate.
“Ah, don’t be sorry. Charlotte is always looking for something wrong with the family. You just gave the poor woman something to talk about.”
“What is her problem?” I asked.
“She dated your daddy before he left for college. . . . She has had it out for me since the Thanksgiving he brought me home to meet his family.”
I laughed. “You’re kidding. How come you never told us this? It explains a lot about the woman’s consistently sour face.”
“There are many things young children do not need to know about.”
I laughed and there, as one day turned to the next, with my sister soaked from the sea and Mother at my side, I sat content. A tepid breeze blew off the water and crossed the porch, whispered across my cheeks, rustled the hair around my face. I sighed, remembering the feel of Beau’s finger running across my cheek on the day we met, and I wondered if I’d feel that soft touch again.