Page 65 of The Summer Club
The waiting was agony. All the while the winds whistled and the rain battered Riptide. Unable to eat or think, Tish stood at the kitchen window willing Morty to come back up from the beach. He had to have found cover. He loved that damn boat too much. Surely, he’d have brought it to shore somewhere down the beach and was riding out the storm in some Good Samaritan’s house. They would laugh about this later.
By eight o’clock, when it should have been getting dark and Charley should have been getting ready for bed, the sky lightened. The rain slowed and the winds died down. Without warning, the sun peeked out from behind a cloud. Tish hurried to the door and pulled it open. Outside, the world glittered. Water was everywhere: pooled in the front yard, flooding the driveway, streaming down the street in angry little makeshift rivers. Tree limbs littered the ground wherever she turned. Tish raked her hand through her hair. “Put on your boots, Charley. We have to go look for Daddy.”
They went out the back and down the beach path holding hands. Charley’s little legs could not keep up, but Tish could not wait any longer. Despite his protests, she broke ahead into a run. At the base of the path, where the dune turned to beach, Tish halted. Before her was a sea she had never witnessed. A sea she’d only read about in Moby Dick. Or seen in old black-and-white photos at the diner in town. The storm may have left the sky, but it was not yet done with the ocean.
Tish looked up and down the beach in both directions, searching for a sign of Morty. But the beach was empty. Charley caught up and she took his hand again. “Let’s go to the cove!” she said, but he did not want to. He stared at the water, a primal look of fear working across his face. “We’re going to find Daddy!” Tish cried over the roar of the surf. “Come, darling. Let’s go.”
Their beach was foreign to her. Sun slanted off the dunes, which were water-soaked and a curious shade of coffee. Driftwood and dense seaweed tumbled in on waves. The inlet, where Charley liked to play in tidal pools, was washed away and filled with sand. Buoys littered the high-tide mark and they hurried around them. Tish caught her shoe in the long rope of a washed-up lobster trap and stumbled. The cove where Morty kept the Whaler was just ahead, around the jetty, and they scrambled up the highest dune for a better look.
The cove was protected, a shallow inlet. Surely the boats would still be there and, she prayed, the Whaler too. But when she crested the dune, she saw only a few still tethered by their moorings, bobbing on the high, angry water. The Whaler was not among them. She swung her gaze to the spot where neighbors stored their smaller boats along the shoreline: kayaks, dinghies, Sunfish. She and Morty kept a small white dinghy there that he used to get out to where the Whaler was moored. But the area was swept bare. Beyond, in the distance, she spied a few of the boats, scattered and tumbled in various locations along the dunes, their hulls gazing skyward. She gasped.
Tish raced down the dune and toward them, ahead of Charley. Heart in her throat, she ran up to each dinghy, as one might soldiers on a battlefield. The neighbors’ blue-and-white Sunfish was tossed up in the dunes on its side, its mast bent and sail torn to pieces. There was the little red rowboat she’d often seen a grandfather take his grandkids out in, half buried in sand. The watercraft were strewn like someone had lifted them skyward and thrown them back to earth, a boat graveyard. As Charley stood crying on the beach, Tish ran from boat to boat. Touching each hull. Searching the names on the sides. Crying out for Morty. Until she collapsed on the sand, her voice raw and broken.
Charley came and pressed himself against her. “Where’s Daddy?”
But Tish could not comfort him. The sun turned pink, then orange, until a blazing red filled the sky and cast them in a fiery glow. Still, Tish sat in the wet sand, unable to move.
Eventually there was a voice. A man’s voice. Tish’s heart knocked to life against her ribs. She raised herself up, spinning around to see.
“Hello!” An older man in a dark raincoat crested the dunes. Waving. Hollering. It was not Morty.
It was not Morty who came and helped her up from the sand and walked her home with her son. Nor was it Morty who brought her dinner and held her hand on the couch that night, as neighbors stopped by and poked their heads inside the cottage door with pieces of news. The jetty at Ridgevale Road had washed out. Two fishing boats were lost at sea. Part of the Chatham Pier had ripped away from its pilings. But there was no news of Morty.
The next day, as the ocean gave back some of what it had taken, there were some answers. The Coast Guard trolled the shoreline and waterways. Search and rescue units made up of local fishermen and good neighbors were dispensed. Both of the missing fishing boats from the Chatham fleet were accounted for, all men aboard miraculously alive. A boathouse that had been washed away from one person’s Harding’s Beach house had washed up fully intact on Monomoy Island, perched on the sand just as if it had always been there. But there were losses; beach houses were washed off their stilts. Boats that had been sucked into the tide were chewed up and spit back onto land. Among them, a thirteen-foot Boston Whaler with wooden seats washed up on Cockle Cove Beach the next day. Named: Charley. Just as Morty always said, unsinkable.
Wordlessly, Tish packed bags. Left food in the fridge. Sheets on the beds. And her still-wet raincoat hanging on the back of the door. When Mrs. Nickerson returned with a batch of warm blueberry muffins, Tish was already filling up the car with gas off Route 28. When the police chief pulled into her driveway to check in, she had pointed the car south toward the Sagamore Bridge. By the time the ocean had slowed its tidal pull and a new day’s sun was spilling over Riptide, Tish Darling’s battered heart was already off-Cape.
Cora
The painting was a stubborn one. But so was she. Cora picked up her brush, swirled it in the mix of titanium white and Naples yellow oil she’d chosen for sand, and set brush to canvas. There was no going back now.
All morning she painted. The kids came and went in the background, just as they used to in the old days, and just like those days she could still tell what they were doing by sound. Refrigerator door and knife on cutting board: beach picnic being made. Front door slamming: Hugh returning from his run. Shower going on late afternoon: Andi getting ready for her “nondate” with Nate. Pacing footsteps: Charley, puttering around the house, unwilling to interrupt her work but not yet comfortable enough to follow the kids down to the beach or invite them to go fishing, without her. By late afternoon, she set her brush down and sat back to consider her work.
The background was complete. The two figures walking the beach had identities. And the beach path had a destination. Cora was momentarily content.
She’d escaped to her art all day; it was time to face the family.
“Charley?”
She found her husband on the patio, not reading The New York Times in his hand. He was staring pensively out the back, toward the beach path, where she’d not long ago heard Sydney and Martin and Hugh head out to.
“What’re you doing?” she asked.
Charley shrugged. “Honestly? I’m taking up space.” He set the paper down. “I don’t know, Cora. The blowup with the kids may have settled, but it’s not the same.” He looked at her. “That’s my biggest fear. That it will never be the same again.”
“They still call you Dad,” she said as reassurance. “You will always be that to them, Charley.”
He shook his head. “Things are different. It’s not just my imagination.”
She took a seat next to his and contemplated the view. Down there on that beach, their kids were basking in the sun. Together, even with all the upset. But Charley was right. The roles in their family were no longer defined. “Hugh doesn’t know if he wants to be a father. I think he was on the fence, but ready to swing his leg over the side. And now this.”
Charley nodded. “It’s what I talked to my mother about the other day. She doesn’t understand the upset. She only sees the upside.”
“What upside?” This was what steamed Cora the most. There was none she could find.
“You have to understand, my mother had a complicated past. Her family had very little. And then she was whisked up in this life my father afforded her, because he loved her and his family had plenty.” Charley stared out at the ocean. “She doesn’t think I knew any of that, but I did. It was all over her face growing up. How torn she was between both worlds. And when my father died, well… she made sacrifices to make sure I didn’t grow up without.”
Cora had heard this before and the story still got her, but it was not an excuse. “But what does that have to do with dividing up the family like she did? Drawing bloodlines? Because that’s what she did.”