Beachcombers Read online

  Fourth, she was grateful for Christie's enduring, sustaining friendship and especially for her wisdom this summer.

  Odd, how things turned out.

  Long ago, when she started seventh grade, Marina had teamed up with two very different best friends. Christie was her good friend, pretty, cheerful, popular, and smart. Dara was her exciting friend, always ready to try something new and outrageous, more sexy than good-looking. They remained best friends when they all started at the same gigantic university in Columbia, Missouri, but by their sophomore summer, things changed. Christie and Marina decided to go off to Nantucket to work as waitresses. They'd heard that the pay was good, the island was gorgeous, and they could party like crazy on their time off. Dara couldn't believe they were going to be waitstaff--she considered such a job way too far beneath her. She didn't need the money the way Christie and Marina did, and she went off with other college friends to backpack in Europe.

  Marina and Christie had so much fun, they returned to the island for the next two summers. During the academic year, they still spent time with each other, but Dara ran with a new, fast crowd, and the trio was never the same after that. After graduation, they went their separate ways. Dara wanted money. Marina wanted to turn her love of color and design into a career. Christie just wanted her high school sweetheart, Bob.

  Christie married Bob right after college--Marina was her maid of honor. A few years later, when Marina married Gerry Warren, Christie was Marina's matron of honor, lumbering down the aisle, eight months pregnant. After that, Marina had seen little of Christie. Their lives were so different, and they were so busy. Christie and Bob lived in happy chaos with their hundreds of children--really, only an eventual five--on a lake outside Kansas City.

  Marina and Gerry met in college. He was handsome, with thick, straight blond hair and sapphire eyes. He was smart, too, and witty. At first she thought he was just a bit too smug and shallow, but he wanted Marina, he pursued Marina, and his varied and creative attempts to charm her were irresistible. Perhaps she didn't love Gerry, but she was helplessly seduced by his desire.

  Their ambitions were similar, too, and that drew them together as a natural pair. He was a dynamite salesman; she was artistic and creative. Marina and Gerry started a graphic design/ad agency in the Kansas City area. They invested their own time and some start-up money borrowed from their parents, and they worked day and night. For a few years, work was the very air they breathed. They established themselves, grew a name, became successful, and paid back their parents. They bought a condo and the posh cars they displayed as ads for their success--a Jag for Gerry, a Saab convertible for Marina. But somehow, as the months and years went by, they never found time to relax. They were like a clock, their lives the two hands ticking around the face of the day and night, with never a second to stop.

  As their agency grew in size and reputation, their office became a kind of battleground that they had to storm daily. Marina and Gerry worked out five days a week, keeping their bodies lean and sleek. Marina wore tight black suits and four-inch heels and kept her blond hair cut short, chic, and easy to care for. She did less creative work and spent more of her time dealing with clients, executives, lawyers, techies, and accountants. At night she and Gerry often worked late, or took clients out to dinner. She felt glamorous, accomplished, successful. She was having fun, making money, and looking fabulous.

  In the meantime, sexpot Dara got married, twice. Marina was Dara's maid of honor the first time. The second time, Dara flew off with her wealthy lover to Pago Pago for their wedding and extended honeymoon. Dara's second husband owned a megabucks Kansas City real estate company. When he signed on with Warren Design & Advertising, his business and his contacts sent Marina and Gerry's company skyrocketing into the economic stratosphere.

  Marina was grateful to Dara for this. Their friendship took on a new energy. Marina and Dara attended the same parties, went on shopping sprees together, and gossiped over lunch at posh restaurants. Dara was obsessed with her appearance--she got breast implants when she was thirty, and a face-lift at thirty-two--but Marina understood. After all, she was in the ad business. She appreciated the importance of presentation.

  Over the years, Dara lost interest in their domesticated friend, but every few months Marina made time to visit Christie. In the midst of her pack of children, dogs, and cats, Christie was a calm, contented center, moving slowly, in no rush to finish any project and be somewhere else. She was right where she wanted to be. Marina admired the pace, the depth, the comfort of Christie's life. Marina felt like she was always straining, rushing, pushing, to get somewhere else.

  And as the years passed and Marina grew older, she discovered that she was beginning to envy Christie, too.

  One sultry July afternoon, she confessed a deep and powerful secret to Christie. She told Christie before she told Dara. She told Christie even before she told Gerry. The words felt so odd in her mouth.

  "Christie, I want a baby. Actually, I've gotten kind of obsessed with it. I don't want five kids like you have, I couldn't do that. But I do want a child of my own."

  "Well, honey," Christie replied, laughing, "that's one thing you can get without wearing those killer tight suits."

  Christie gave her the courage to confide in Gerry. He seemed amused, but he liked the idea. So in the middle of the hurricane that was their life, Marina and Gerry tried to make a baby.

  But the baby wouldn't come.

  They were both shocked. Their history together was one of achievement and success, not failure.

  They tried everything. Tests. Charts. Positions. Herbal and hormonal supplements. Nothing worked. They saw several doctors, who all pronounced Marina and Gerry healthy and perfectly capable of reproduction. Yet still nothing happened.

  She confided in Dara, and Dara said, "Oh, honey, consider it a blessing. A baby would ruin your figure."

  Marina couldn't understand it. She tried to be relaxed about it all, but when she saw another woman with a baby, she burned with envy. She dreamed of babies at night and longed for one every waking hour. As each month passed in failure and sorrow, she began to hate herself.

  One afternoon she sat in her slick chrome-and-glass office, staring at her computer screen, thinking over and over again in a relentless circle of pain: Why couldn't she get pregnant, what was wrong with her? She felt something wet on her hand. It wouldn't be tears. She didn't allow herself to cry in the office. She glanced down to discover that she had been stabbing the palm of her hand with the tip of her silver letter opener. She gasped and tossed the letter opener onto the desk. She pressed tissues against her hand, grabbed up her purse, and raced from her office. She didn't even stop to tell her assistant where she was going. She didn't even know where she was going--she just needed to be away from the pain.

  Once in her car, she understood exactly where she wanted to be, and she drove out to Christie's house. It was January and a new snow had blanketed the roadsides and rooftops with the pure sparkling white of confectioners' sugar. The sun was out in a high blue sky and the air was sharp and tangy.

  Christie had a fire going in the rec room. Her children were all in school. She was knitting a sweater and listening to music--in the middle of the day! Marina couldn't imagine living such a life.

  Christie told Marina to kick off her shoes and curl up on the sofa. She brought her hot chocolate and cookies, as if Marina were one of her children. She listened to Marina, and she cried with her--how grateful Marina was for that, to have her friend genuinely share her loss.

  "I'm so angry, Christie," Marina cried. "I'm so hurt. Why me? What's wrong with me? I know Gerry thinks I'm at fault, even though the doctors say we're both physically fine. But it's turning our marriage inside out. And I'm getting obsessed and bitter and angry; I'm turning into a person I don't like being. I don't know what to do!"

  Christie was quiet, knitting a row as she thought. "You could stop trying," she suggested. "You could stop hoping. You could give up. You coul
d adopt."

  "Gerry doesn't want to adopt."

  "Then let it go." Christie reached over and put her hand on Marina's. "Just let it go. You have so much, Marina. You have work you enjoy, you have a husband you love. You're gorgeous, you're free. You should love your life."

  "I want a family. I want your life," Marina insisted. "I want your children."

  Christie burst out laughing. "Are you kidding me? I tell you what, you stay here for the weekend with my bunch. Bob and I will go off on a little jaunt together and leave you in charge." She saw the alarm on Marina's face and laughed even harder.

  Marina laughed, too. She felt better already, and as she drove back home in the winter twilight, she decided she would tell Gerry that if she wasn't pregnant by her fortieth birthday, she was going to stop trying. They would have to move on. And she told him, and he accepted her decision.

  Perhaps Marina had secretly hoped that her ultimatum to herself--to Fate or Destiny or whoever gave women babies--would make her body sit up, take notice, and get to work. Get pregnant.

  Then her fortieth birthday arrived.

  And everything changed.

  Now Marina reminded herself: No wallowing! Move on! She sat up in bed, planted her feet on the cool wood floor, and surveyed her funny little loft bedroom.

  Focus, she told herself.

  What was number five? Okay, the fifth thing she was grateful for was to be on this island. The flamboyant, generous beauty both hurt and healed her. Some days the intensity of the wild blue sea, the dense clouds of pink climbing roses, flew straight to her heart like an arrow, spearing her with emotions, so that she had to crouch to the ground, pressing her knees into her chest to keep from crying. But some days the beauty soothed her, even cheered her.

  She believed that someday, someday soon, she would walk on the beach, and she would smile.

  3

  Abbie

  Abbie!"

  The instant Abbie stepped out of Jason's truck onto the driveway, her youngest sister opened the front door and flew out of the house. Lily had been waiting, watching out the window, and this tugged at Abbie's heart. Lily was twenty-two now, a grown woman, but she would always be Abbie's little sister. And Lily was little, four inches shorter than Abbie, and petite.

  "Abbie, I'm so glad you're here!" Lily was almost jumping up and down.

  "Me, too, kid." Abbie wrapped her sister in a big hug.

  Lily was the beauty of the family, with her red hair and green cat eyes. She was sexy, too, and not unaware of her charms. Abbie felt Lily's attention shift to Jason, the island man who had been on her plane and offered her a ride home from the airport.

  Jason was lifting Abbie's luggage from his truck. He was two years older than Lily and six years younger than Abbie. He'd just gotten out of the army, and he was grown up and bulked up. He'd been a hunk to start with, with his dark hair, black eyes, and the exotic looks he'd inherited from his Cape Verdean ancestors.

  Abbie reached for her duffel bag and roller suitcase. "Jason, thanks for the ride."

  "No problem." Jason nodded at Lily. "Hi, Lily."

  "Hi, Jason. Thanks for bringing Abbie home." Lily batted her long lashes at Jason. "Would you like to come in for some iced tea or something?"

  "Another time, maybe. Abbie tells me she hasn't been home for a while. You guys have some catching up to do." With a smile, Jason climbed up into his truck and drove away.

  Lily grabbed her sister's arm, pulling her toward the house. "I can't believe you're really here! I went out to Bartlett's and got a bunch of their arugula ..."

  The front hall was cool and dim; the back of the house got the sun. As she dropped her bags down by the stairs, Abbie saw the dust powdering the baseboards, the frame of the mirror, and the etched glass globes of the overhead light.

  "Look!" Lily nodded toward the hall table, where a vase of wildflowers stood next to the brass bowl where the family tossed their mail and keys. "Just for you!"

  "How nice, Lily! Thanks." Abbie hugged her sister again, but she couldn't keep her gaze from sweeping over Lily's shoulder. She'd been gone for just eighteen months. How could the house have become so cluttered in that short space of time?

  "Where's Emma?"

  "She's in her room. She might be asleep. She sleeps a lot." Lily studied Abbie's face. "We haven't gotten around to washing the windows for a while. I never think about it, until, well, I never think about it."

  And then it was as if the entire house came crashing down all around Abbie, the weight of the windows and the sofa and the chairs and the dust all balancing right on her shoulders, weighing her down so much she could scarcely breathe. And she hadn't even made it into the kitchen yet.

  Since she was fifteen, Abbie had been in charge of the house, taking care of Lily and Emma, cooking and cleaning. She hadn't been able to go to college, not with the death of her mother and the family responsibilities that had brought her. Sometimes she'd thought she would never be able to have her own family, her own life. She loved her family, but she'd longed to see just a bit of the world.

  When she turned twenty-eight, two years ago, she accepted an au pair job with a summer family and traveled with them to London. She was being paid for work, yet she'd never had so much time to herself. The children she took care of were ten and twelve, good-natured and easy. With them she went to museums, concerts, plays, and to watch the changing of the guard in front of Buckingham Palace. At night, she helped herself to a book from Mr. Vanderdyne's library. She read Dickens, Hardy, and T. S. Eliot. She watched DVDs of Noel Coward plays and Truffaut movies. She sat with her charges during their French lessons and began to learn French herself--the Vanderdynes were going to France this summer.

  Then Lily's worried emails arrived. Abbie had to come home.

  It had felt good, at first, to feel needed. Yet how good a job had she done of raising Lily if Lily was still dependent on Abbie?

  Sensing the drop in Abbie's mood, Lily was babbling, "We've been too busy working to pay attention to stuff like dusting. Even before the stock market crashed last fall, Nantucket was kind of falling apart. People have stopped building new homes. Several of Dad's clients backed out of deals. He always has some work, but you know he puts his crew first, and he's kept paying their salaries and health insurance. I've helped out financially as much as I can. I pay for some of the groceries and stuff like that."

  Okay, this was a change, and a good one. When Abbie had left eighteen months ago, Lily hadn't had any idea about the amount of money it took to run a house. With both her big sisters gone, it sounded like Lily had learned a lot.

  Lily went on, "I want to talk to you about money. You're always so good with stuff like that."

  "Okay, sure. We can ask Emma, too, since she's the money expert."

  "I don't think Emma's feeling too expert about anything," Lily said.

  Abbie's attention was caught by the photograph on the mantel. Their Aunt Stella had taken it at her daughter's wedding ten years ago. The three sisters were dressed in matching bridesmaid's gowns, lavender tulle fantasias.

  Abbie's curly brown hair was feathered close to her scalp, accentuating the elegant shape of her head, and the length of her neck. She'd inherited her father's tall, lanky, wide-shouldered swimmer's body and stood with an ironic tilt behind the froth of dress. Abbie had worn her hair short all her life. It was easy to keep--she often trimmed it herself--and it made swimming easy. She was twenty then, but clearly she was an adult. She held herself with authority. Her smile was genuine but perhaps just a little sardonic.

  Emma was a few inches shorter than Abbie--it was always remarked upon, how the three sisters were like stair steps. Like Abbie, she had big hazel eyes. Unlike her older sister, she was round, as their mother had been. Not fat, not even plump, just round. Her bosom bulged at the strapless neckline. Her waist was small, her hips wide. Her brown hair was as curly as Abbie's but Emma had freckles sprinkled over her nose and cheeks and her face was less angular than Abbie's. She
was the "cute" one, and it drove her crazy. She set and rolled and ironed and blew her hair dry, and for photos she jutted her chin out, trying to look sophisticated. She always just looked cranky.

  Lily had been only twelve that year. She'd sleeked her wild red curls into a formal chignon and lined her gorgeous green eyes with kohl. She was the shortest of the sisters as well as the youngest, and the most dainty. For the photo she'd turned a bit sideways, curling her shoulder up to her cheek in a kittenish come-hither gesture. She looked like a child playing dress-up.

  "Why is this thing on the mantel?" Abbie wondered aloud. "We all look so young."

  "Dad likes it there," Lily said. "It's the last formal photo taken of the three of us together."

  Abbie did a slow turn around the room. "It's like entering a time machine." She quickly held her hand up. "Not criticizing! Just saying." She took a moment to study her baby sister. "Wow, you have really turned into a bombshell, haven't you?"

  Lily blushed. "Do you think so?"

  "How could I not? You've got some Rita Hayworth stuff going on for you now."

  Pleased, Lily hurried to return the compliment. "And you look like--Audrey Hepburn."

  "Ha. I think I'm more Sigourney Weaver in Alien."

  Lily nodded enthusiastically. "I can totally get that!"

  "What's Emma looking like these days?" Abbie idly ran her fingers over the piano keys--it was just slightly out of tune.