For the rest of his life, Kit would remember the sight of his small, imperfect sister leaning tenderly against this man, both of them plain and harmless against the huge sky. But try as he might, he could not ever recall dropping the bag of lobsters, one part of him glad, another tempted to call out some objection to what he was witnessing. He could not remember saying anything, but he must have spoken, for his father suddenly turned to him and said, “Shut up, Kit. It’s none of our business.”
And suddenly Kit became truly alarmed, not because of the scene that was playing itself out on the carriage-house roof but because his father had chosen to watch it from the cover of the magnolia grove, drunk to the point of sickness, to the point of scolding him as if he were a child.
Kit didn’t understand what was happening. Only minutes before he’d been in his tiny car, hair flying, the air cool against his face, and everything had been as it should be.
“I’m going up to the house,” he said, but was again, momentarily, disoriented when he discovered the escape of his lobsters and realized that his father had gained his feet and was staggering off toward the carriage house.
“This way,” he said, grabbing his father’s arm and steering him toward the house, leaving the lobsters behind.
When they cleared the trees, Kit looked up at the night sky and saw the sugary, reddish fog that heralded fine weather. It brought the sky too near and made the vague, hidden shape of the moon look like a fresh bruise. And he did not breathe freely again until he had coaxed his father into the house, where everything was much as it had always been, and shut the door behind him.
Chapter 4
When seventeen-year-old Rachel Hearn was voted prom queen at the end of her senior year of high school, a few of her more enthusiastic neighbors began to call her the Belle Haven Belle.
“Don’t,” she said to her father when he repeated this, laughing, his sleeves cuffed with garden dirt and peat. “It’s awful. Next person who calls me that is going to be sorry.”
“Oh, sure. Mr. Maxwell says, ‘Well, hey there, Rachel. How’s our Belle Haven Belle?’ You say, ‘Suck eggs,’ and kick his cane out from under him.” He chuckled at her.
“How would you like it?” She pressed the heels of her hands into the soft dirt around a young tomato plant.
“You’re going to kill that plant, Rachel.”
She dug her fingers down either side and gently lifted the dirt a bit. “You’d hate it,” she said.
“You’re a pretty girl.” He reached into a tray, gently combed apart the tangled roots of the seedlings.
“Thanks,” she said. “But I don’t like all that business. I don’t like to feel dumb, and that’s how I feel.”
“Nobody who knows you thinks you’re dumb, Rachel.” He set out the last of the tomatoes and started on the peppers. “You’ve got to remember that some people around here are getting a little bit worried about the fire. They feel like they’re living with a tiger. So they have a tendency, you see, to celebrate any lambs they come across. Anything good and certain. Presto!” He threw his hands into the air. “The Belle Haven Belle is born.”
Rachel tossed a clot of dirt at her father, which made him laugh some more. They planted seedlings for a while.
At the end of a row, Rachel’s father pushed himself up off his knees and stretched the cramp out of his back. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about going away in the fall.”
She looked up at him from under her hand, but he was backlit by sun and hard to see.
“Your mother and I are glad you’re going to college, and we know that you’re clever and you’ve got a lot of common sense and you’ll be just fine by yourself.” He picked up a watering can and gave the seedlings something to drink. “But you’ve never really been away from here, Rachel. We want you to be careful. You get into any sort of trouble, you just call us. Never be afraid to call us. No matter what’s gone wrong.”
Rachel’s throat hurt. “I won’t,” she said, coming to her feet, trampling a pepper plant on her way to him. His shirt against her face was hot with sun and work, and she was sure that she would remember the smell of it for the rest of her life.
Suzanne and Frederick Hearn knew that with a single word they could keep their daughter with them. “Stay,” they could say, and she would. She was happy enough with the chance to go to college and smart enough to see the need, but they knew she would choose them if they let her. They had therefore been the ones to insist that she leave.
“Nothing’s going to threaten your education,” her father had told her. “Not some boy, not your feelings for this town, not the fire, not us.”
Rachel’s parents were as smart as she was. With their combined decades of experience, smarter still. But their formal education was incomplete and their knowledge of the world secondhand. When they read their child’s verse, heard her stories, witnessed her grasp of mathematics and science, they were frightened by their limits and by their mortality. In their prayers they insisted that they not outlast her. But to see her come of age, to see her come into her own … that was their other wish, and at times they felt consumed by it. They asked themselves how they could possibly send her away. But to their daughter they said, “You can always come back. A few years away won’t hurt.”
So Rachel went off to a small New England college that could afford to pay her expenses and did so with a hefty scholarship. Among the brightest students, she excelled.
