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One step and Cara was inside the house, floating back in time. Her mother’s was one of the few remaining original beach cottages on the island. It was all cramped and worn, but comfortable. Tongue-in-groove walls and heart pine floors warmed the small rooms that her mother kept immaculate. Lovie’s eye for comfort and charm was evident in the muted, worn, oriental rugs, the ivory-colored walls adorned with family photographs and paintings of the island done by local artists, many of them old friends. Mismatched, plump sofas and chairs clustered in spare but cozy arrangements before a large front window that provided a breathtaking view of the ocean beyond.
The family heirloom antiques were kept at the main house in Charleston, out of harm’s way from hurricanes, children and visitors in swimsuits. Only the “not-so-good” pieces were brought to the beach house. Cara’s friends had always wanted to come to her house to play because her mother never said, “Feet off!” “Careful!” or “Don’t touch!” Icy sweet tea was always in the fridge and sugar cookies in the pantry. Life here at the beach was so different than in the city. In so many ways.
She followed her mother single file through the front room down a narrow hall to the two bedrooms at the end—hers and Palmer’s. As she walked she felt the pressure of memories lurking in the musty walls and darkened corners.
“Your room is made up for you,” Lovie said, opening the bedroom door. A gust of ocean breeze whisked past them into the hall. “Do you want me to close the windows?”
“No, it’s fine. I like them open.” How like her mother not to use the air-conditioning, she thought, inhaling the moist, sweet-scented air that seemed to soften the bones. They stood facing each other.
“There are fresh towels in the bathroom,” Lovie said with a quick gesture.
“Okay.”
“Feel free to use the toiletries. There’s soap and shampoo. A spare toothbrush.”
“I’ve brought my own, but thanks.”
“The hot water’s slow in coming.”
“I remember.”
“Well then,” Lovie said, clasping her hands anxiously. There was a moment’s awkwardness, as though they were strangers. “I’ll just leave you to freshen up.”
“That’d be great.”
Her mother’s hand lingered on the bedroom door and there was such yearning in her face that Cara had to turn away from the bruising intensity.
“Take your time,” Lovie said, closing the door behind her.
The door clicked, and in the resulting privacy, Cara took a deep sigh of relief and dropped her suitcase. It landed with a thud. Round one went pretty well, she thought, considering the ruts they’d avoided. She was exhausted from the long drive and the tension of the duet with her mother brought a worrisome throbbing to her forehead. Rubbing the crick in her neck, she slowly surveyed her old room. Amazingly, it was exactly as she’d left it twenty years earlier. The old black iron double bed covered with a pink crazy quilt filled most of the floor space. Pink-and-white gingham curtains fluttered at the single window over her sturdy pine dresser with the rosy marble top. A narrow door beside the window opened to the screened front porch.
It was a girl’s room, comfy yet spare. Her posters of rock stars had been replaced by paintings of palm trees, but all her old books were still here. She ran her fingers over familiar titles that had carried her through the summers for years: Nancy Drew, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, The Hobbit, Wuthering Heights, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Words that had helped form a young girl’s mind. What books did she need to add to her shelf to help her through this next phase of her life?
She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and stopped short, surprised at the reflection. It was a surreal moment, one fragmented by time. Back here in her old room, she half expected to see the skinny, stringy-haired child that had once stared at this mirror with tear-filled eyes. That poor, pitiful girl.
By Southern belle standards, Cara wasn’t considered the beauty her mother was. All Cara’s parts were too big. At five feet ten inches, she was too tall, her body too thin and her chest too flat. Her feet were enormous and her lips too full for her narrow face. And her coloring was all wrong. She used to curse God for His mistake of giving her her father’s tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed genes and Palmer their mother’s small-boned, blond-and-blue-eyed genes.
Lovie, however, adored her daughter’s dark looks and used to call Cara her Little Tern because of her dark, shining eyes and her glistening, black-crested cap. And sometimes, teasingly, she called her a Laughing Gull, another black-headed bird but with a loud, cackling call.
Cara leaned closer to the mirror and brought her hand up to smooth the flesh of her cheeks. All nicknames aside, the South of the sixties and seventies was not an easy place for a skinny, unattractive girl to grow up in. But this ugly duckling grew up to be a dark swan. Cara’s once-mocked gangling looks had matured into what colleagues now referred to as “strikingly attractive” and her previously scorned aggressive intelligence was described as “the appealing confidence of a successful career woman.”
Tonight, however, even those descriptions felt woefully out-of-date. She was neither a child nor a young woman. In her reflection she saw the new fragility of her skin, the fine lines at the eyes and corners of her mouth and the first strands of gray at the temple. She thought with chagrin that she was no longer striking nor successful. Rather, she appeared as tired and sagging as the old beach house.
I’ll just lie down for a minute, she told herself, turning away from the mirror and slipping from her clothes. She left them in a pile on the floor. Wearing only her undies and a T-shirt, she pulled back the covers and stretched out upon the soft mattress, yawning. Just long enough to rest my eyes.
The old linen was crisp, and ocean breezes, balmy and moist, whisked over her bare skin. Her mind slowly drifted and her eyelids grew heavy as she felt herself letting go, bit by bit. The life she’d led mere hours ago seemed as distant from her now as the city of Chicago. As her mind stilled, the quiet deepened further. Outside her window, she listened to the ocean’s steady, rhythmic motion, lulling her to sleep, like the gentle rocking of a mother’s arms.
Her mind floated as helplessly as a piece of driftwood through the turbulence of the past few days’ events that had sent her on this journey. It began on Tuesday morning when her office phone rang and she was invited, without warning, to Mr. David Alexander’s office. Dave was executive vice president of the chopping block. Everyone knew that an invitation to his office was the equivalent of an invitation for a long car ride in the Mafia.
Why didn’t they just shoot her, she’d wondered wildly as she rode the elevator to the thirtieth floor. She was a workaholic mainlining hours of work and she was about to be cut off from her supply. She’d lost a major account, but that happened in the advertising business. She had a great track record. Wasn’t she already hot on the trail of another account? As she walked through the halls she was aware of an unusual, tense silence in the spread of gray cubicles and cramped offices broken only by an occasional ring of the phone followed by a muffled sob. Empty file boxes lined the halls, and most frightening of all, armed guards stood by the elevators. She swallowed hard and walk stiff-leggedly through the maze of halls and rooms. The rumors were true, after all. Heads were rolling on a mass scale.
By the time she’d arrived in Mr. Alexander’s office, her body was moist with a fine sweat. She woodenly took a seat. Refused the offer of coffee or water. In the end, there were no surprises. He informed her in his thin, nasal voice that he was terribly sorry but as executive officer, she would bear the brunt of the loss of a major account. While listening to him drone on about the firm’s generous severance package, Cara crossed her legs, folded her hands neatly in her lap and looked out the plate glass window, numb with shock. When the humiliating session was over, she rose, politely thanked Mr. Alexander for his time, told him she would collect her personal things later, then left the building—accompanied by an armed guard.
She’d gone straight home to her cramped, one-bedroom condominium on the lake. The somewhat shabby space represented every penny she’d saved in the past twenty years. She’d bought it because it was near the water, the last vestige of homesickness after a long exile. Yet it wasn’t the safe haven one returned to when hurt by slings and arrows. It wasn’t a home that marked milestones or greeted family members. These walls held no memories of laughter or treasured moments. With its minimalist style, the cool colors of ice-blue and gray on the walls and upholstery, and the scarcity of personal items, there wasn’t a clue to her personality or interests. Her condo was merely where she went to sleep at night. It was a place to store her meaningless possessions, every bit as stark as a bank vault.
And it was all she had in the world.
It was chilling to wake up at forty years of age to find she had no friends, no interests and no investments in anything unconnected to her work. She had delayed too long, put such things on hold until she had time. She had defined herself by her job and now, suddenly, everything was gone and she was back once again in her mother’s house, in the bed she’d slept in as a child, every bit as uncertain at forty as she had been at eighteen.
Cara wrapped her arms around herself and shivered, feeling the kind of bitter cold that went straight to one’s marrow. The kind that felt very much like fear.
Sometime later, she wasn’t sure if she was dreaming or if she really felt her mother’s touch at her temple, smoothing back the soft hairs from her face, and a tender kiss placed on her forehead.
Female loggerheads return home to nest. Is it imprinting or genes that prompts this behavior? Smells or sounds? Perhaps magnetic fields? No one knows for sure.
CHAPTER TWO
The South Carolina moon can lull one to sleep with its silvery glow, but the coastal sun is as sharp and piercing as a bugle call. Cara pried open an eye to the glaring shine flowing in from the open window. It took a moment to place where she was and to register the contrast of blaring car horns to the relentless, cheery chirping of birds. The long drive, the lost job—it all came back in a blinding flash. Groaning, she plopped a pillow over her head just as the telephone began ringing down the hall.
When it became obvious no one was going to answer it, she threw the pillow off, tugged her T-shirt down over her panties, then scuttled like a sand crab down the narrow hall to where the cottage’s single phone rested on a wooden trestle table.
“Hello?” she answered with a froggy voice.
There was a pause. “Olivia?” The woman’s voice on the line was high with uncertainty.
“No, this isn’t Lovie,” she replied, stifling a yawn. “It’s her daughter.”
“Oh.” Another pause. “I didn’t know Lovie had a daughter.”
Cara rubbed her eyes and waited.
“May I speak to your mother?”
No one had asked her that question in over twenty years. Cara blinked sleepily while she gazed around the living room. The house was as quiet as a mouse.
“She’s not here.”
“But…I’ve found turtle tracks!”
Gauging by the panic in the voice, Cara figured the woman was one of her mother’s novice volunteers for the island’s Turtle Team. “Uh, great,” she replied. “Thanks. I’ll tell her when she comes back.”
“Wait! Don’t you want to know where they are? I’m at the 6th Avenue beach access. What should I do? Should I wait here?”
Cara sighed and woke up a little more. “Really, I don’t have the foggiest idea what to tell you to do and without coffee I couldn’t even venture a guess.”
From out on the porch she heard the footfall of someone trudging up the steps. Thanks heavens, the cavalry, she thought.
“Hold on,” she told the woman on the phone. “I think that must be her now.” Cara stretched the cord of the ancient black phone to peek around the corner. The front door swung open. Instead of her mother, however, she saw a young woman enter the house free-as-you-please. Her shaggy, blond hair cascaded over her eyes as she bent down, struggling with several plastic grocery bags. With a muffled grunt, she kicked the door shut with her heel.
The young woman was hardly threatening in appearance. Pregnant women usually weren’t. She wore a pastel, A-line floral dress that was very short and cheaply made of thin rayon that lifted higher in the front where the fabric strained against her belly. When the woman raised her head she shook her hair back and their eyes met.
Cara ducked her head back behind the corner, tugging down her T-shirt. In contrast, the woman didn’t seem the least astonished to find Cara in the house. Cara leaned against the hall wall listening as the mystery woman moved on into the kitchen without so much as a hello, opening and closing cabinets as though she owned the place.
“Excuse me,” Cara called out with authority. “But who are you?”
“Didn’t your mama tell you about me?” she called back. Her voice carried the drawl of a rural southern accent.
It flashed through Cara’s mind that she’d fallen asleep without a meal or so much as a good-night to her mother. They hadn’t had a chance to talk about schedules or visitors or a girl who might stop by in the morning. Cara assumed she was either a neighbor or someone hired to help with the shopping.
From the phone, a strident voice rose up. “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?”
Cara called out to the woman in the kitchen. “I’ve got a frantic phone call here about a turtle. Do you know where my mother is?”
“I’ll take it.”
The voice drew nearer and in a moment the face was looming before her. Cara saw that it wasn’t a woman’s face at all, but a teenager’s. The girl had a sexy, baby-doll kind of face, all rounding cheeks and full, pouty lips. Her youth surprised Cara and her gaze dropped to the belly. Instantly the girl’s hand moved to rest on the rounding curve. Looking up again, Cara saw the girl’s pale-gray eyes turn icy. Lined as they were by dark kohl, the challenge she read in them gave her a hardened, tough-girl appearance that set Cara immediately on edge. With a slightly raised brow that was dangerously close to a smirk, the girl returned a cool glance at Cara’s outfit. For a second, no one spoke as they sized up one another.
The voice of the caller rose up between them. “Hello? Hello?”
The girl reached out her hand, palm up, and wiggled her fingers.
Cara narrowed her eyes and handed over the phone. The girl deliberately turned her back to Cara in a snub and began speaking to the woman on the phone, confirming the address and giving instructions with the confidence of someone who had done this many times before.
Why, the little punk, Cara thought to herself, affronted. Then fatigue got the best of her. “Whatever,” she muttered, turning and heading back down the hall. At least the girl, whoever she was, knew what to do with the pesty phone call. En route she noticed that the door to her brother’s old room was open. Peeking in, she caught a glimpse of the rumpled unmade bed and on top of it, a pink, frilly nightgown.
Cara’s heart fell as the mystery was solved. The girl was a houseguest, she realized. So much for plans of a private mother-child reunion. The cottage was barely large enough for the two of them, but with three, it would be crowded. There would be no escaping the recalcitrant teen-mother who appeared equally thrilled to see her. If she’d known there’d be guests…
Grabbing her pillow from the floor where it had landed, she tossed it back onto the bed, then slumped against the pillows. What was she expecting, anyway? Her mother had always put others in front of her—her brother, her father and the guests who always seemed to fill the Charleston house.
But the beach house had always been different. She’d hoped that here…
Cara’s mouth pinched and she thought herself a fool. She’d learned long before her teens to take care of herself and not to expect anything. In the piercing morning light her room no longer appeared as charming. The colors in her old quilt were sun-bleached and the paint had yellowed on the walls. Although a gentle breeze still fluttered the thread-bare curtains, without air-conditioning, the humidity would be brutal by midday. Cara began to regret her hasty decision to return home.
The beginning of a headache from too many days of stress and too little sleep nagged. Lying back, she punched her pillow a few times, then relinquished her troubled thoughts to a deep, brooding sleep.
Toy Sooner stood at the kitchen sink rinsing out the coffeepot, tapping her foot in agitation. She carefully spooned out six tablespoons of coffee grinds into the filter, then pushed the start button. She knew Lovie enjoyed a fresh cup of coffee when she returned from her turtle watch. Toy had gone to the Red and White to purchase a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. There wasn’t much she could afford to do to show Miss Lovie how grateful she was, and Lovie had said a hundred times or more that she didn’t expect any thanks. Things like that just made Toy want to thank her all the more.
Toy wasn’t used to people giving her something without expecting something in return. To live here with Miss Lovie was like a dream come true. This was the nicest place she’d ever lived and she had a room all her own, too. Best of all, there wasn’t any fighting or hollering at her all the time. She didn’t know before living with Miss Lovie that mealtime could be so nice, with a clean tablecloth and napkins and a knife, fork and a spoon—for every meal!
And they had meals regularly. Not an open can of soup in front of the TV or McDonald’s out of the bag, but real dinners with vegetables. Lovie talked to her, too, like she was someone worth talking to and listening to. Not just some worthless, ungrateful kid who was dumb enough to get her self pregnant, like her parents said. They’d stood at the door of the trailer and wouldn’t even let her in when she tried to come back home. “If you was grown up enough to up and move in with Darryl then you’re grown up enough to take care of his kid,” is what they told her. Now what kind of parents is that? They wouldn’t even help when she told them about Darryl hitting her. “You made your bed, now go lie in it.” That’s all they had to say. That and how she ought to go to church, too, and pray hard for the Lord’s forgiveness for being such a sinner.
But Lovie told her again and again that love was never a sin. Not loving, now that was the very worst kind of sin, she said. Miss Lovie was the saintliest person Toy had ever met, and if she said so, then Toy believed it. She always had a way of making Toy feel better about herself instead of making her feel like nothing…worse than nothing. Something to be discarded, which is what her own mother made her feel like.
That’s why it made her so mad to think that Miss Lovie’s own daughter didn’t appreciate how lucky she was to have someone like her for a mother. Just let Cara spend a day with my mother and see how she feels, Toy thought with resentment.
From the moment she heard that Caretta Rutledge was coming home, Toy knew it would be bad news for her. First of all, she heard from Miss Lovie that Cara was some big shot ad executive in Chicago. That figured. Toy knew the type. It wasn’t just that they grew up on the right side of Broad and went to the best schools. Or that they had nice clothes and fancy houses. It was like, deep inside, girls like Cara knew they were better. They didn’t have nothing to prove.
That’s how the rich stayed rich, she figured. It was like some club and they had some secret code that only they knew and that girls like her couldn’t ever clue into. As if she wanted to…She could tell just by the way Cara looked at her pregnant belly that it was a royal put-down. Toy had lots of experience with being looked down on, but it hurt feeling cheap in this house where she’d finally been so happy.
She wiped up the coffee grinds with a sponge. She loved that everything was just so in this house and she actually enjoyed keeping things clean. Growing up, everything was always a mess, with clothes and papers lying all over the place, the laundry never done. She couldn’t ever remember having folded towels in the linen closet or flowers on the table. Living here was like another world. Opening the cabinet, she still got a shiver of pleasure just seeing the neatly stacked sets of matching china.
She’d hate to leave. Lovie wanted Cara to stay the whole summer, but Toy didn’t think Cara could last that long. For Lovie’s sake, she didn’t want to screw things up between them. She didn’t know why, but this time with her daughter was real important to Miss Lovie and Toy would do just about anything for Lovie Rutledge.
The scent of fresh brewed coffee filled the kitchen. She’d just laid out the doughnuts on a pretty plate when she heard steps on the front porch. She quickly wiped the sugar from her hands and hurried to greet Lovie at the door.
“Hey, Miss Lovie!” she called out, grabbing the red bucket from her arm. “I was beginning to wonder if you were going to stay out there all morning.”
“It’s not that late, is it?” Lovie replied, pausing to catch her breath.
Toy’s brows gathered as she monitored Lovie’s level of exhaustion. “Why don’t you sit down for a spell? I’ll get you some water and a nice fresh cup of coffee.”
“My, that sounds nice,” Lovie replied breathlessly as she lowered herself into a chair at the small wood table just outside the kitchen.
With her eye trained on Lovie’s pale face, Toy brought a tray from the kitchen and set it before Lovie. “Did you find anything today?”
Lovie’s face immediately brightened. “Our third nest! Emmi and I probed and on only the third try the probe sunk right in. You should’ve seen Emmi’s face! One hundred and fifty-four eggs. Isn’t that wonderful? Unfortunately, the mother laid them directly in the middle of the beach access path. That big wide one on 17th Avenue.”
“That wasn’t too smart of her.”
“I’m sure the poor old girl had no idea it was a beach path. So we had to move the nest. The dunes are quite high between 16th and 17th Avenue so after Emmi and I checked around a bit, we found a nice place for the nest. All in all, a good day.”
“But a long one for you,” she amended with a serious look.
“Oh, I’m fine, really. A little out of breath, but not the least bit fagged out.”
“No pain?”
“None at all.”
“And you got that message from the volunteer about 6th Avenue?” she asked, bringing a small bowl filled with pills to Lovie.
“I did, thank you. Flo passed it on to me.” She looked down at the pills and wrinkled her nose.
“Come on, Miss Lovie, you know you got to. See? I bought you a doughnut to help with the swallowing. ‘A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,’ just like the song says. Now, come on, don’t put it off.”
Lovie grimaced as she faced the mound of pills but Toy remained at her side, arms resolutely crossed over her chest as she waited. She hated to play the heavy but the doctor hadn’t been fooling around when he’d taken Toy aside and told her it was her job to make sure that Lovie swallowed each and every one of the pills. She tried to keep the conversation about turtles going to take Lovie’s mind off the swallowing.
“So, did that call about 6th Avenue turn out to be a nest?”
After a noisy swallow Lovie set the glass down and shook her head. “A false crawl. She came up the beach quite far, then wandered around a bit before turning back. We searched carefully but didn’t find a nest. I suspect she’s the same mother who laid the eggs a little farther down on 17th. The tracks were similar.” She stared at the remaining pills with dejection.
“Come on, now, just a few more,” Toy prodded. She watched as Lovie took a deep breath, grabbed the two final pink pills, then swallowed them with a shiver of disgust.
“There, that’s done.”
“Horrid things. I don’t know why I still bother.”
“Don’t say that. You know why. We want you around for a long time.”
