Safe Harbor Page 4

  “He looks like the man in the shadows,” Shelley observed.

  Kip chuckled. “He can run, but he can’t hide.” He turned to Diana and her boyfriend and beckoned them with a wave. “How about it, guys? Wanna join us for a game of Frisbee?”

  Diana shook her head, but after a quick conference her boyfriend said, “Count me in,” and jogged across the lawn to them.

  “Shelley, Mark. Mark, Shelley,” Kip said briskly, presenting them to each other. “Come on, spread out, everyone. We’ve got to turn Becky into a champ before my father burns the hot dogs.”

  They began tossing the plastic disc around. Naturally, Kip and Mark showed off, making dramatic catches when ordinary ones would do, flinging the disc behind their backs and catching it between their legs. Becky’s tosses were wobbly, and more often than not they veered off course, but she managed to avoid the tree branches.

  Shelley had always been a decent athlete. While not as flamboyant as Kip and Mark, she threw with an efficient, accurate snap of her wrist, and she wasn’t afraid to chase down an errant toss.

  Within a few minutes she was sweating. She shouted words of encouragement at Becky and derisive remarks at the two male hot-shots. Occasionally her vision would snag on Diana, seated by herself under a tree, watching the game. Diana appeared cool and composed, not a single glossy hair out of place, not a hint of perspiration on her brow. Her hands were clean, her fingernails polished. She looked fabulous.

  Back home in Westport, Shelley probably would have sat out the game, too. She would have been concerned about her appearance, her demeanor. She would have wanted any boys present to understand that she was a girl, a breed quite different from them, someone they should desire from a carefully cultivated distance. She would not compete athletically with boys, or yell playful insults at them, or sprint and leap. She would never, never sweat in front of them.

  But here, the only boy she really cared about was Kip, and there was no point in acting like a girl with him. He hadn’t even noticed her female attributes when she’d had on her string bikini. To him she was just another guy, a pal, someone to elbow out of the way when they raced each other to catch one of Becky’s wild tosses. Acting ladylike around him would be a waste.

  Seated primly on the sidelines, Diana looked infinitely more attractive than Shelley. But darting around the lawn, laughing and panting and playing with all her might, Shelley was having infinitely more fun.

  Chapter Three

  DEAR SHELLEY,

  I know you’re mad at me, and I don’t know if writing this letter will help. I wish I could explain things in a way you’d understand, but I’m not sure that’s possible.

  I can’t always be with you, even when I want to be. But you’re growing up, and accepting that fact is part of becoming an adult. Even though I’m your father, I have a life separate from you, and sometimes it makes demands on me that I must act on, whether I want to or not. This is a hard lesson, but you’re a smart, mature young lady and I think you can handle it.

  I will again be unable to come to the island this weekend. There are too many pressing matters here in Connecticut. But I’m glad you’re spending your summer on the island, and I hope you’re enjoying it “to the max,” as you might say.

  I love you, Shelley. I know you’re disappointed that I’ve missed these weekends with you, but I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.

  Be good--Love, Dad

  Shelley reread the letter again and again. Her father’s handwriting was atrocious, a slanting, aggressive scrawl. But she deciphered every scribble, every loop and slash; she let every word imprint itself in her heart. It was such a rare thing for her father to send her a letter. That he had, that he’d taken the time to write and beg her forgiveness, gratified her as nothing else could—short of seeing him.

  He claimed she was smart and mature, able to accept disappointment, able to forgive. Because he viewed her with such respect, she felt compelled her to live up to his praise. She would stop resenting him, stop pleading with him. She would be the daughter he loved.

  “What did he write?” her mother asked. She had already skimmed her own mail and was now looking across the kitchen table to Shelley, who clung to the single sheet of stationery on which her father had penned his brief letter.

  “Nothing,” Shelley said automatically. This was between her and her father. If he’d wanted her mother to know, he would have sent her a copy of the letter.

  Still, Shelley realized that being secretive would only feed her mother’s curiosity, so she added, “Just that he’s sorry he can’t come to the island every weekend.”

  Her mother pursed her lips, as if she didn’t quite believe Shelley. Rising from the table, she crossed to the sink and busied herself fixing hamburger patties for their dinner.

  Shelley scowled at her mother’s back for a minute, then carried her letter upstairs to her bedroom under the eaves. Stretched out on her bed, she read the letter one more time. She had told her mother the truth about what it said—an abridged version, maybe, but essentially the truth. What mattered most to Shelley, though, were the personal nuances, the father-daughter stuff, the parts she hadn’t told her mother: I love you, Shelley. You’re growing up. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.

  “I forgive you,” she whispered, folding the letter carefully along its original creases and slipping it back inside the envelope. She hid the letter in the middle drawer of her dresser, tucked between two folded shirts. Then she smiled at her reflection in the mirror and went back downstairs to help her mother fix dinner.

  An hour later, the dishes done and the table wiped, Shelley told her mother she was going to Kip’s house. Ensconced in the parlor with her usual props—a magazine and a glass of sherry—her mother nodded without looking up.

  Terrific, Shelley thought sourly as she pocketed her house key and left the house. Her mother was angry with her. She’d simmered all through supper, picking at her food, responding to Shelley’s conversational gambits with terse answers. When Shelley finally said, “What’s the matter, Mom?” her mother had grumbled about how tragic it was when girls couldn’t trust their own mothers.

  Shelley trusted her mother. It was just that... Climbing onto her bike, she sighed. The letter was between her father and her. He’d written it to her. No matter how much she trusted her mother, she didn’t have to share her mail with her.

  The last time she’d been to Kip’s house, Saturday evening, the place had been swarming with guests. Tonight, except for the single light in an upstairs window, it appeared vacant. The air was still and mild, fragrant with the scent of mowed grass. Evening mist was beginning to rise off the water and drift across the land, giving the world a delicate soft focus.

  Shelley parked her bike by the front veranda, climbed the steps, and knocked on the door. Kip’s voice drifted down to her from the illuminated second-floor window: “Who’s there?”

  She walked to the far edge of the veranda and craned her neck. She saw his back-lit silhouette in the window. “Me,” she shouted up. “Shelley.”

  “Oh—hi! Hang on, I’ll be right down.”

  He vanished from the window. Ten seconds later, he was opening the door to her. “Come on in,” he said.

  “Where is everybody?” she asked as she entered the house. Its silence unnerved her. Whenever Mrs. Stroud was home she had the stereo on, playing one of her classical music tapes.

  “The Rosses invited my mother over to see the slides they took of their sailboat trip to Nantucket. They invited me, too,” he admitted, then jabbed his finger toward the back of his mouth to indicate that he found the idea nauseating. “I forced myself to say no.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Shelley said with a grin. “Where’s Diana?”

  “Where else? With Romeo.”

  “His name is Mark,” Shelley declared, “and I think he’s very nice.”

  “Oh, great. Now you’re in love with him, too.”

  “Don’t
be ridiculous,” Shelley retorted. “I just thought that, considering how embarrassing Saturday might have been for him, he held up pretty well.”

  “Embarrassing?” Kip exclaimed, leading Shelley up the stairs. “What was embarrassing about it?”

  “Oh, come on. There he was, being evaluated by not just your parents but you, your grandmother, your aunt and uncle, friends from Grove Point—”

  “Hey, if he wants to date Diana he’s got to pay the price.”

  They had reached Kip’s bedroom. In summers past, Shelley had spent many rainy afternoons in this room. It was almost as large as the entire two-bedroom second floor of the Ballard cottage, and perfectly adequate for hanging out in. But although it was already the third week of July, this was the first time she’d been inside Kip’s bedroom that summer.

  She wasn’t sure why that was. Part of her suspected it was because this summer she and Kip were fifteen, and that made everything different. Boys’ bedrooms suddenly took on a new meaning.

  Not much in the room had changed since last year. The bed was made—but sloppily, with the spread uneven and the sheet under it wrinkled. The hardwood floor was clear—but only because a variety of junk was heaped haphazardly on the bookshelves and the top of the dresser. The oval braided rugs lay on either side of the bed, and the red-white-and-blue kite Kip and Shelley had launched every year on the Fourth of July was rolled and propped against a corner of the window seat overlooking the side yard. The only alteration Shelley noticed was that Kip had removed the poster of the solar system which used to adorn one wall, and hung in its place a framed parchment map of Block Island with pen-and-ink sketches of clipper ships sailing around it.

  “I was reading,” he told her, rummaging through the clutter on his dresser top for something that would serve as a book mark. He settled on a scrap of paper covered with gin rummy scores, stuffed it into the copy of The Catcher in the Rye lying face down on his bed, and put the book on the night table.

  “I read The Catcher in the Rye in English this year,” Shelley remarked, lifting the dark red paperback from the night table and flipping through the pages to see how far Kip had gotten into the story.

  “We were supposed to read it,” he told her, “but I got stuck in Mr. Goober’s class—”

  “Mr. Goober?”

  “Well, his real name is Mr. Goebler, but everyone calls him the Goob. He said he wasn’t going to teach Catcher because it was a dirty book. He made us read The Turn of the Screw instead. You ever read anything by Henry James?”

  Shelley shook her head.

  “He sucks eggs,” Kip said. “Anyway, first thing I did was take the T into Boston and buy a copy of Catcher. I figured, if the Goob thought it was dirty, it was something I wanted to read. So far it’s great.”

  “You think so?”

  “You didn’t like it?”

  Shelley shrugged. “I thought it was okay. I know it’s supposed to be this classic and everything, but...” She gazed thoughtfully at the book, tracing the stiff edge of the cover with her fingertip. “Well, it’s just...it’s about a boy. I mean, everything we read in school is always about boys coming of age. We read Huck Finn and The Red Badge of Courage and Billy Budd, and they’re all about boys. Boys growing up, boys facing crises, boys becoming men and all that. We never read anything about girls.”

  “Maybe nobody’s written a good book about girls.”

  She gave him a withering look. “You want to read a good book about a girl coming of age? To Kill a Mockingbird. The best book I’ve ever read,” she told him. “It won a Pulitzer Prize, it was made into a movie, it’s a great book. I don’t know why they don’t teach it in school. They should. I’m really sick of reading about boys coming of age all the time.”

  Kip frowned. It dawned on her that he was a boy coming of age; maybe he took her comments as a personal insult. “On behalf of boys all over the world,” he said sarcastically, “I apologize for inspiring such boring literature.”

  “I didn’t say it was boring,” Shelley hastily clarified. “I just said it would be nice to read about girls sometimes, too.”

  “Boys who are coming of age read lots of stuff about girls,” he said, grinning mischievously.

  “In Playboy, right?”

  “You know me too well, Shelley,” he said with a sigh. His smile became sincere and he held up his hand to make a pledge: “I promise that I will read To Kill a Mockingbird.”

  “Good. And then you can read The Diary of Anne Frank, and Little Women, and—”

  “Hey, why don’t you just write me a list?”

  “I will,” she said. “Better yet, let’s bike down to the library tomorrow and I’ll pick out some books for you.”

  “What a vacation,” he protested. “I’ll read your books if you’ll read Guadalcanal Diary. You turn me into a wimp, and I’ll turn you into a marine.”

  “Yuck,” she said before bursting into laughter.

  Kip laughed, as well. “You wanna play backgammon?” he suggested.

  “Okay.”

  He reached up to pull the box down from the shelf in his closet when the sound of a moped motor rumbled through the open window. “Uh-oh,” Kip murmured ominously. “The lovebirds are about to make the scene.”

  Shelley tiptoed to the front window, ducked down so as not to be visible from the front yard, and looked out. She saw the moped coasting up the driveway, with Mark steering and Diana perched behind him, her arms wrapped around his waist. “Maybe we should go downstairs and turn the porch lights on and off,” Shelley said.

  Kip shook his head. “They aren’t going to get in too much trouble. Diana knows I’m here. Whatever they do, they’re going to have to do it outside.” He knelt beside Shelley and peered out the window. “I can’t see them anymore—can you?”

  “The angle isn’t good.”

  “Let’s go upstairs.” Kip helped her to her feet. Together they hurried out of his room, down the hall to the small bedroom and up the ladder through the attic to the cupola.

  From the tiny room atop the roof they had an unobstructed view of the front yard, the moped, and Diana and Mark, who were seated on the porch steps, talking. “See?” Shelley said in Diana’s defense. “Your mother doesn’t have to flash the lights at them. They know how to behave.”

  “Sometimes.” Kip and Shelley arranged themselves on their knees, resting their arms on the sill in front of them and gazing out through the open window. The cupola was dark, so they didn’t have to worry about being detected from below. “After you and your mother and the Sussmans left Saturday night, my father had one of those disgusting little chats with Mark,” Kip informed her. “You know: ‘What are your intentions, young man?’ That kind of stuff.”

  “Oh, God, how embarrassing! I’d die if my father did that to a guy I was dating.”

  “That’s the trouble with you, Shelley—you’re too introverted. You’ve got to learn how to direct your hostility outward. Diana didn’t threaten to die. She threatened to kill my father.”

  “What did Mark do?”

  “He had the script memorized: `I like Diana, we’re good friends.’ The whole thing was really gross.”

  “You were eavesdropping, I take it?”

  “I couldn’t help myself,” Kip said, feigning innocence. “I was in the kitchen with my mother, cleaning up. They were in the living room, right across the hall. Besides,” he added with a grin, “my mom was eavesdropping. Every time I made a noise she’d shush me and strain to hear what Mark was saying.”

  “Like mother, like son,” Shelley scolded.

  “Yeah? Well, here you are, spying on them.”

  Shelley mirrored his smile. “I don’t feel so guilty. They aren’t doing anything worth spying on.”

  It was true. Diana and Mark sat quietly, Mark’s arm looped around Shelley’s shoulders, their voices drifting indistinctly through the night air. They looked nice together, Shelley thought, suffering an unexpected pang of jealousy. She wished she were a few
years older, having college guys like Mark falling in love with her.

  “So,” Kip broke into her thoughts. “Given how exciting this is turning out to be, would you rather go back downstairs and play backgammon?”

  Shelley considered. Backgammon was okay, but what they had now—the cupola, the night, the pleasantly cool breezes and the lulling sound of Mark’s and Diana’s voices floating up from below... She didn’t want to leave this. She wanted to stay up here with Kip, thinking about how wonderful it would be to fall in love.

  Not with him, of course. Even though he was tall and well built, even though his face had grown into his eyeglasses and his eyes had grown intensely handsome, even though this summer he smelled less often of suntan lotion and more often of aftershave lotion, and his voice had settled into a husky baritone, and his arms and legs had developed muscular contours...

  Kip was her friend, and she would never risk destroying their friendship by falling in love with him. She wanted to share this tranquil evening with him, though.

  “Let’s just talk,” she said. “Guess who I got a letter from today?”

  “Who?”

  “My father.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Kip pulled a face. “What did he have to say for himself?”

  “He said he was sorry he couldn’t come to the island so often this year.” Sighing, she lapsed into thought for a moment. “You know, he never talked to me about his job before. He’d go to work, he’d come home, and when I asked him what he did he’d say, `I made money.’ This letter—it was like the first time he actually said anything to me about how hard he worked. He confided in me, Kip.”

  Kip continued to gaze at her, measuring her response. Gradually his lips curved in a smile. “It was nice of him to write. My dad never writes to me.”

  Because he always comes to the island and sees you, Shelley thought. In all the years her family had summered on Block Island, this was the first time her father had ever sent her a letter from home—and the first summer he hadn’t come every weekend.