Three

In the shock of hearing Holly’s whisper, Mark forgot everything: their surroundings, the woman behind the counter. Six months they’d been trying to get Holly to say something, anything. Why it had happened here and now was something he’d parse out later with Sam. For now, he had to keep it together, to not overwhelm Holly with his reaction. It was just…Christ.

Mark couldn’t stop himself from lowering to one knee and pulling Holly against him. Her fine-boned arms went around his neck. He heard himself saying her name in a shattered murmur. His eyes were stinging, and he was appalled to realize that he was on the verge of losing it.

But he couldn’t control the tremors of relief at the evidence that Holly was apparently ready to start talking again. Maybe now he could let himself believe that she was going to be okay.

Feeling Holly wriggle to free herself from his tight grasp, Mark pressed a fervent kiss against her cheek and forced himself to let go. He stood, evaluated his emotion-clenched throat, and realized there was a good chance his voice would crack if he tried to say anything. He swallowed hard and blindly studied the Pink Floyd lyrics on the wall—not reading them, just focusing on the color of the paint, the texturing on the Sheetrock beneath.

Finally he slid a guarded look to the red-haired woman behind the counter—Maggie—who was holding the bag of stuff he’d just bought. He saw that she comprehended the significance of what had just happened.

He didn’t know what to make of her. She was all of five foot two, with wild red curls that squiggled and zigzagged like hieroglyphs. Her figure was slender, dressed neatly in a white tee and jeans.

The face, half-hidden by those rampant curls, was pretty and fine-featured, her skin pale except for the fever-colored flush on her cheeks. And her eyes—dark and heavy-lashed, the color of bittersweet chocolate. She reminded him a little of the girls he used to know in college, the funny, interesting ones he would stay up half the night and talk with, but never date. He had dated the trophies instead, the ones that other guys had envied him for. It was only later that he had wondered what he might have missed out on.

“Can I talk to you sometime?” he asked, sounding more abrupt than he’d intended.

“I’m always here,” Maggie said lightly. “Stop by whenever.” She nudged the shell across the counter. “Why don’t you take this home with you, Holly? Just in case you need it again.”

“Hey, you guys!” A smooth, sunny voice came from behind Mark.

It was Shelby Daniels, Mark’s girlfriend from Seattle. She was smart, beautiful, and one of the nicest people Mark had ever known. You could take Shelby anywhere, in any kind of company, and she would find a way to fit in.

Shelby approached them, tucking a swing of gleaming blond hair behind one ear. She was dressed in khaki capris, a neat white shirt, and ballet flats, with no adornment other than single pearl earrings. “Sorry I was a few minutes late, you two. I had to try on something in the shop a couple doors down, but it didn’t work out. I see you got some things, Holly.”

The girl nodded, silent as usual.

With a mixture of worry and wry amusement, Mark realized Holly wasn’t going to talk in front of Shelby. Should he say anything about what had just happened? No, that might put pressure on Holly. Best to leave it alone, stay loose.

Glancing at their surroundings, Shelby said, “What a great little shop. Next time I’m here, I’ll have to pick up some things for my nephews. Christmas is going to be here before we know it.” She curled her hand around Mark’s arm and smiled up at him. “If I’m going to make the flight, we should probably go now.”

“Sure thing.” Mark took the bag from the counter, and reached for the shell in Holly’s hand. “Want me to take that, Holls?”

She clutched it more tightly, wanting to carry it herself.

“Okay,” Mark said, “but try not to drop it.” Looking back at the little redhead behind the counter, he saw that she was reorganizing the pens in the cup by the register, straightening a row of tiny stuffed animals, busying herself with unnecessary tasks. Low-slanting light came through the windows and struck the brilliant red in her curls.

“Bye,” he said. “And thanks.”

Maggie Conroy gave him a cursory wave without really looking in his direction. Which was how he knew that she’d been set as thoroughly off balance as he had.

 

After dropping Shelby off at the airport, with its single strip of runway, Mark took Holly back home to Rainshadow Vineyard. It was about five and a half miles from Friday Harbor, on the southwest part of the island at False Bay. You had to drive with care on Sunday to avoid people on bicycles or horses. Black-tailed deer, tame as dogs, emerged from meadows of tall summer grass and blackberry bramble to saunter across the roads at their leisure.

Mark left the windows of his pickup open, letting the ocean-softened air flow into the vehicle. “Do you see that?” He pointed to a bald eagle soaring overhead.

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you see what he’s carrying in his talons?”

“A fish?”

“Probably. Either he pulled it from the water, or stole it from another bird.”

“Where’s he taking it?” Holly’s voice was hesitant, as if she, too, was surprised to be hearing herself talk.

“Maybe to the nest. Male eagles take care of the chicks, just like the females do.”

Holly received this information with a prosaic nod. From what she knew of the world, this was entirely plausible.

Mark had to force his hands to unclench from the steering wheel. Delight had filled him from head to toe. It had been so long since Holly had spoken, he’d actually forgotten the sound of her voice.

The child psychologist had said to start with non-verbal interactions, such as asking Holly to point to what she wanted on the menu, with the eventual goal of saying an actual word.

Until today, the only time Mark had ever gotten Holly to make a sound had been on a recent drive along Roche Harbor Road, when they had seen Mona the camel in her pasture. The camel, a well-known resident of the island, had been purchased from an exotic-animal dealer in Mill Creek, and brought to the island around eight or nine years ago. Feeling like an idiot, Mark had entertained Holly with imitation camel noises, and had been rewarded when Holly had briefly joined in.

“What helped you to find your voice, sweetheart? Did it have something to do with Maggie? The red-haired woman?”

“It was the magic shell.” Holly looked down at the conch, cradled tenderly in her small hands.

“But it’s not—” Mark broke off. The point wasn’t whether or not the conch was magic. The point was that the idea had connected with Holly, that it had been offered at just the right moment to help her find a way out of her silence. Magic, fairies…it was all part of some childhood lexicon he didn’t know, some territory of imagination he had abandoned long ago. But Maggie Conroy hadn’t.

He had never seen Holly connect with any woman like that, not Victoria’s old friends, not her teacher, not even Shelby, with whom she’d spent a fair amount of time. Who was this Maggie Conroy? Why would a single young woman, still in her twenties, voluntarily move to an island where more than half the residents were over the age of forty-five? And why a toy store, for God’s sake?

He wanted to see her again. He wanted to know everything about her.

The late Sunday afternoon light was honey colored and heavy, glazing the tidepools and shallow channels of False Bay. The habitat, about two hundred acres of sand flats, looked like an ordinary bay until it emptied completely at low tide. Gulls, herons, and eagles browsed amid the buffet of marine life on the sand flats: shore crabs, worms, mud shrimp, bent-nose clams. You could walk out for at least a half mile in the rich silt before the tide came in.

The pickup turned onto the private graveled drive of Rainshadow Vineyard and approached the house. Outwardly, the place still looked worn and ramshackle, but inside they had been making structural repairs. The first thing Mark had done was fix Holly’s bedroom, painting the walls robin’s-egg blue and the trim creamy white. He’d brought over the furniture from her old bedroom, and had reattached the fabric butterflies to the poster bed.

The biggest project so far had been to create a bathroom decent enough for Holly. He and Sam had taken the walls down to the studs, installed new pipes, leveled out the floor, and put in a new bathtub, a high-tank toilet, and a marble-topped vanity. They let Holly choose the paint color once the walls had been Sheetrocked and plastered. Naturally she had chosen pink.

“It’s period-appropriate,” Mark said, reminding Sam that the color swatches had all come from a Victorian palette grouping.

“It’s godawful girly,” Sam had said. “Every time I walk into that pink bathroom, I feel the need to do something manly afterward.”

“Whatever that is, do it outside so we don’t have to see you.”

The next undertaking had been the kitchen, where Mark had installed a brand-new stove with six burners, and a new refrigerator. He had proceeded to strip at least six coats of paint from the window and door framework, using an infrared paint remover and sander borrowed from Alex.

Alex had been unexpectedly generous with tools, supplies, and advice. In fact, he had started dropping by at least once a week, possibly because renovation and construction were his area of experience and his help was so obviously needed. In Alex’s hands, scraps of useless wood could be turned into something clever and marvelous.

The second time he’d come to visit, Alex had built a set of cubbyholes in Holly’s bedroom closet for her to store her shoes. To the little girl’s delight, some of the cubbies had been set on a hidden hinge, swinging out to reveal a secret compartment. On another occasion, Alex brought over one of his construction crews when Mark and Sam discovered that some of the header beams on the front porch were buckling and crumbling like Styrofoam. Alex and the crew spent a day installing new supports, fixing damaged joists, and putting in new rain gutters. The job had been more than Mark and Sam could handle on their own, so they had sincerely appreciated the help. But knowing Alex…

“What do you think he wants?” Sam had asked Mark.

“For his niece not to be flattened by a collapsing house?”

“No, that would be attributing human motivations to him, and we agreed never to do that.”

Mark tried, without success, to hold back a grin. Alex was so cool and emotionally distant that on occasion you had to question the existence of a pulse.

“Maybe he feels guilty for not having more to do with Vick before she died.”

“Maybe’s he’s using any excuse to spend time away from Darcy. If I didn’t already hate the idea of marriage so much, I sure would think twice about it after seeing Alex’s.”

“Obviously,” Mark said, “a Nolan should never marry anyone who’s too much like us.”

“I think a Nolan should never marry anyone who’d have us.”

Whatever the reason, Alex had continued to contribute to the restoration. As a result of their combined efforts, the house had begun to look better. Or at least like something normal people could live in.

“If you try to kick me out after all this,” Mark had informed Sam, “you’re going to end up buried in the backyard.”

They both knew, however, that there was no chance Sam would ever kick them out. Because Sam, perhaps to his own surprise more than anyone else’s, had taken to the child with instant devotion. Like Mark, he would have died for Holly if necessary. She got the best of everything they had.

At first cautious with her affection, Holly had quickly become attached to her uncles. Although they had gotten warnings from well-meaning outsiders not to spoil her, neither Sam nor Mark could see any evidence that their indulgence was doing any harm. In fact, both of them would have been happy to see a little more mischief from Holly. She was a good child, always doing what she was told.

When Holly wasn’t in school, she accompanied Mark to his coffee-roasting site at Friday Harbor, watching the massive drum roaster heat raw arabica beans until their pale yellow skins caramelized to deep-gleaming brown. Sometimes he bought her ice cream at a shop near the harbor dock, and they would go “boat-shopping,” browsing along rows of yachts, Nordic tugs, family cruisers, and crab boats with haystacked pots on the back decks.

Sam often took Holly out with him to tend the vines, or to hunt for starfish and sand dollars at low tide on False Bay. He wore pasta neckties she had made at school, and pinned her artwork on walls throughout the house.

“I had no idea what this was like,” Sam had said one evening, carrying Holly into the house when she’d fallen asleep in the car. They had spent the afternoon at English Camp, the site where the British had lodged during joint occupation of the island until it had been awarded to the Americans. The national park, with its two miles of shoreline, was the perfect place to have a picnic and throw Frisbees. They had indulged in acrobatics to make Holly giggle, leaping to catch the Frisbee. They had brought her little tackle box and fishing rod, and Mark had taught her to cast for sea perch along the shore.

“What what’s like?” Mark had opened the front door and flipped on the porch lights.

“Having a little kid around.” Somewhat sheepishly, Sam clarified, “Having a little kid love you.”

Holly’s presence in their lives offered a kind of grace neither of them had ever known before. A reminder of innocence. Something happened to you, they discovered, when you were given the unconditional love and trust of a child.

You wanted to try to deserve it.

Mark and Holly went into the house through the kitchen, setting the packages and the conch on the table in the old-fashioned corner breakfast nook with built-in benches. They found Sam in the parlor, a painfully bare room with uncovered Sheetrock walls and a fractured chimney temporarily encased in steel mesh.

Sam was at the fireplace, building a frame for a soon-to-be-poured cement slab to support a new hearthstone. “This is going to be a son of a gun to fix,” he said, in the middle of taking measurements. “I have to figure out how we can use the same chimney to vent two different fireplaces. This one leads directly to the upstairs bedroom, can you believe that?”

Leaning down, Mark murmured to Holly, “Go ask him what’s for dinner.”

The child obeyed, going to Sam’s side and putting her mouth close to his ear. She whispered something and retreated a few steps.

Mark saw Sam go very still.

“You’re talking,” Sam said, turning slowly to look at the little girl. A questioning note had tipped his husky voice.

Holly shook her head, looking grave.

“Yes, you are, you just said something.”

“No, I didn’t.” A titter escaped her as she saw Sam’s expression.

“You did it again, by God! Say my name. Say it.”

“Uncle Herbert.”

Sam let out a breathless laugh and grabbed her, pulling her against his chest. “Herbert? Oh, now it’s going to be chicken lips and lizard feet for dinner.” Still clasping Holly, he looked at Mark with a wondering shake of his head, his color high, his eyes containing a suspicious glitter. “How?” was all he could manage to ask.

“Later,” Mark said, and smiled.

 

“So what happened?” Sam asked, stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove. Holly was busy in the next room with her new puzzle. “How did you do it?”

Mark uncapped a beer and tilted the bottle back. “Wasn’t me,” he said after a biting-cold swallow. “We were in that toy shop on Spring Street, the new one, and there was this cute little redhead behind the counter. I’ve never seen her before—”

“I know who she is. Maggie something. Conner, Carter…”

“Conroy. You’ve met her?”

“No, but Scolari’s been trying to get me to go out with her.”

“He never mentioned her to me,” Mark said, instantly offended.

“You’re going out with Shelby.”

“Shelby and I aren’t exclusive.”

“Scolari thinks Maggie’s my type. We’re closer in age. So she’s cute? That’s good. I thought I’d check her out before committing to anything—”

“I’m only two years older than you,” Mark said in outrage.

Setting down the spoon, Sam picked up a glass of wine. “Did you ask her out?”

“No. Shelby was with me, and besides—”

“I call dibs.”

“You don’t get dibs on this one,” Mark said curtly.

Sam’s brows lifted. “You’ve already got a girlfriend. Dibs automatically go to the guy with the longest dry spell.”

Mark’s shoulders hitched in an irritable shrug.

“So what did Maggie do?” Sam pressed. “How did she get Holly to talk?”

Mark told him about the scene in the toy shop, about the magic shell, and how the suggestion of make-believe had worked a miracle.

“Amazing,” Sam said. “I never would have thought of trying something like that.”

“It was a matter of timing. Holly was finally ready to talk, and Maggie gave her a way to do it.”

“Yeah, but…is it possible Holly would have started talking weeks ago if you or I had just figured it out?”

“Who knows? What are you getting at?”

Sam kept his voice low. “Do you ever think about what it’s going to be like when she gets older? When she starts needing to talk to someone about girl stuff? I mean, who are we going to get to handle all that?”

“She’s only six, Sam. Let’s worry about it later.”

“I’m worried that later’s going to get here sooner than we think. I—” Sam broke off and rubbed his forehead as if to soothe away an oncoming headache. “I’ve got something to show you after Holly goes to bed.”

“What? Should I be worried about something?”

“I don’t know.”

“Damn it, tell me now.”

Sam kept his voice low. “Okay, I was going through Holly’s homework folder to make sure she’d finished that coloring page…and I found this.” He went to a stack of paper on the counter and pulled out a single page. “The teacher gave them a writing prompt in class this week,” he said. “A letter to Santa. And this is what Holly came up with.”

Mark gave him a blank look. “A letter to Santa? We’re still in the middle of September.”

“They’ve already started running holiday commercials. And when I was at the hardware store yesterday, Chuck mentioned they were going to put out Christmas trees by the end of the month.”

“Before Thanksgiving? Before Halloween?”

“Yes. All part of an evil worldwide corporate marketing plan. Don’t try to fight it.” Sam handed him the sheet of paper. “Take a look at this.”

Dear Santa

I want just one thing this year

A mom

Please dont forget I live in friday harbor now.
thank you

love
Holly

Mark was silent for a full half minute.

“A mom,” Sam said.

“Yeah, I get it.” Still staring at the letter, Mark muttered, “What a hell of a stocking stuffer.”

After dinner, Mark went out to the front porch with a beer and sat in a comfortably beat-up wooden chair. Sam was tucking Holly in and reading her a story from the book bought earlier that day.

It was still the time of year when sunsets were long and slow to fade, painting the sky over the bay in saturated pinks and oranges. Watching the shallows glitter between the brackets of deep-rooted madrone trees, Mark wondered bleakly what he was going to do about Holly.

A mom.

Of course that was what she wanted. No matter how Mark and Sam tried, there were some things they couldn’t do for her. And although there were countless single dads who were raising daughters, no one could deny that there were milestones that a girl wanted a mother for.

Following the child psychologist’s advice, Mark had set out a couple of framed pictures of Victoria. He and Sam made certain to talk about Victoria to Holly, to give the child a sense of connection with her mother. But Mark could do more than that, and he knew it. There was no reason Holly had to navigate the rest of her childhood without someone to mother her. Shelby was as close to perfect as it got. And Shelby had made it clear that despite Mark’s ambivalence about marriage, she was willing to be patient. “Our marriage wouldn’t be like your parents’ marriage,” she had pointed out gently. “It would be ours.”

Mark had understood the point, even agreed. He knew he wasn’t like his father, who had thought nothing of backhanding his children. Theirs had been a tempestuous household, filled to the roof with caterwauling, violence, drama. The Nolan parents’ version of love, with its screaming fights and lurid reconciliations, had featured all the worst components of marriage, and none of its graces.

Understanding that even though his parents’ marriage had been a perfect disaster, it didn’t have to be that way, Mark had tried to remain neutral on the concept. He had always thought that when or if he ever found the right person, there would be some kind of inner confirmation, a sanction of the heart that would remove all doubt. So far that hadn’t happened with Shelby.

What if it never happened with anyone? He tried to think of marriage as a pragmatic arrangement with someone you cared about. Maybe that was the best way to approach it, especially when you had a child’s interests to consider. Shelby had the kind of personality—calm, pleasant, affectionate—that would make her a great mother.

Mark didn’t believe in the illusions of romance, or of soul mates. He was the first to admit that he had an earthbound mind, anchored in cold, hard reality. He liked it that way. Was it unfair to Shelby to offer marriage based on practical considerations? Maybe not, as long as he was honest about his feelings—or lack of them.

Finishing his beer, he went back into the house, tossed the bottle into the recycling bin, and went to Holly’s room. Sam had tucked her in and left the night-light on.

Holly’s eyes were heavy-lidded, her small mouth twisting in a yawn. A teddy bear had been tucked in beside her, its bright button eyes regarding Mark expectantly.

Staring down at the little girl, Mark experienced one of those moments when you had a sudden and intense awareness of who you had been not all that long ago, and discovered that you were now in a different place entirely. He leaned over to kiss her forehead, as he did every night. He felt her spindly arms go around his neck, and heard her say in a drowsy, dream-colored voice, “I love you. I love you.” And, turning to her side, she snuggled her bear and went to sleep.

Mark stood there blinking, trying to absorb the impact. For the first time in his life he knew what it felt like to have his heart broken…not broken in a sad or romantic sense, but broken open. He had never known this before, the desire to surround another human being with perfect happiness.

He would find a mother for Holly, the perfect mother. He would build a circle of people for her.

Usually a child was the result of a family. In this case, however, a family was going to be the result of a child.