A Charmed Place (44 page)

He came around to face her. She saw that his cheeks were flushed with emotion. Anger? Panic? Both?

"Don't let him get to you, Maddie! If you do, he's won. You know that. Don't let him."

"You don't understand—"

"Sure I do! I know his kind! They claim to care about everyone, but they care about no one—no one but themselves! People will see that. A judge will see that—assuming it ever gets to a judge. Michael's an ex who wants revenge. Everyone will see right through his motive."

"Tracey doesn't."

"Oh, Tracey—she's a kid! What does she know?"

"She's told him she wants to stay with him."

"You're not going to believe him when he says that, are you?"

"Tracey's told me that, too."

She saw Dan flinch. It was the beginning of the end.

"It doesn't mean anything," Dan said, taking another tack. "Kids her age change their minds every five minutes. Tomorrow she'll decide she doesn't like the view out the bedroom and she'll want to come back home."

"He knows about the beach—"

"Big deal!"

"And—oh, God, I still can't believe this—my mother is willing to back him up when he goes to court."

Now it was Dan's turn to stare. "Your mother? Your own mother?''

Maddie lowered her gaze and nodded.

"She can't hate me that much," Dan murmured, stunned.

"She thinks it's best, temporarily," Maddie added, trying to soften the blow.

"She said that to you?"

Maddie shook her head. "Michael told me."

"Then how do you know, Maddie? How the hell do you know?"

Throwin
g up her hands, Maddie said, "
Well, I can't very well ask her, can I? For one thing, the damn phone is
out and my cell got drowned
—and for another, she refuses to talk to me! Doesn't that tell you something? Besides," she added, beginning to pace, "Michael sounded too smug to be lying."

"He's lying! He's a lying shit! I'll wipe that smug right off his face—"

"Don't even think about it!" she said angrily. "It would just give him more evidence to take with him to court. Everything becomes evidence now!"

"That's crazy! That's stupid crazy! You're in love with another man—you're going to marry another man—that doesn't mean you're an unfit mother! Why make it sound like you're selling your body for crack
?"

Maddie suddenly stopped and brought her fist down hard on the kitchen table. "It's
everything,
don't you see? It's your past, it's my family, it's our scandalous behavior on the town beach, it's first and foremost Tracey's
choice
!
''

"Fight it!"

"And what? Alienate her forever? All I'm saying is, I have to do this slowly
... gingerly; I can't make a single false step now. Can't you see that?" she pleaded.

Dan walked away from her. With his hands flat in his back pockets, he stared through the windows at the destruction outside. In the silence that followed, Maddie heard a lone hammer. People had already started to put their lives back together again.

In a dull tone, Dan said, "Well, okay, you know best, I guess. I'm not a parent. I can't say what's right or wrong in your approach. Personally, I think you're wrong—but I'm not a parent."

Eager to smooth things between them, she said, "You're right that he just wants to hurt me. I've hardly even had a date since the divorce
... so this has hit him hard. I think with time I can make him see reason. I wish there was a better way
... it will be horrible, not being with you—"

Dan turned around slowly. "Not what?"

"Not
... not
..." And then it hit her that she'd omitted one small detail of Michael's plan: that to get Tracey back at all, she had to give Dan up. "Not being with you," she repeated faintly. "If I
... if I see you, he'll begin the proceedings. That's what he said."

The look on Dan's face became part of her permanent memory: the dark brows, pu
lled down in disbelief; the un-
shaved chin, locked in grim repose; the total stillness of his being as he forced himself to comprehend the terms she was laying before him like cards in a game of blackjack.

At last he said, "You're going to spit on his threat, right?"

"Oh, Dan—how
can
I?" she asked him in agony. "For all the reasons I've just said. I'm her mother, Dan! And Michael is, and always will be, her twisted, twisted father."

The silence was as long, as brutal, as any that had ever occurred between them.

"I can't argue with that," Dan said at last, looking away again. After another long pause, he said, "So. The wedding's off."

"If I marry you," she explained gently, "I may lose my child. I wouldn't have believed it a month ago. Now I do."

"And you want me to—what?"

"Wait?"

He swung back around. "How long? Weeks? Months? Years? Until he walks Tracey down the aisle? Until your first grandchild is born? How long, Maddie? How long this time?''

"You've loved me this long, Dan
,
" she whispered.

His jaw was clamped down tight; she could see the muscles working in his temples as he considered her entreaty.

Finally he said, "You're asking too much, Maddie. Too much of any man. Even me."

He turned to leave. His hand was on the screen door when he suddenly pulled off the cotton sweater she'd lent him and flung it at her. "Here—your father's sweater," he said in disgust. "The curse goes on."

****

Cranberry Lane looked like a war zone. Hawke was in no mood to take in more than that general impression. He'd walked out of her cottage in such a seething rage that he hadn't even noticed if
Rosedale
still had a roof or not; presumably it had. Very quickly, though, the extent of the widespread damage became clear, even to him.

A house was flattened, another one, half gone. Where it had gone was anyone's guess, but at least some of it had wedged in the lane. Dan picked his way barefoot around the debris and cut between two houses down to the beach, where he saw home after home split open and laid bare for all the world to see. A kitchen, a living room, a master bedroom—once those rooms had had a view of the ocean. Now the ocean had a view of them.

It was bad. Whatever the ocean hadn't pushed forward, it seemed to have dragged back. The beach was littered with furniture and deck planking and the broken bones of boats that had washed ashore. People wandered everywhere, most of them in awe. Some wept. One elderly couple, holding one another, simply stared in silence at the remains of what was once a tiny cottage covered over with climbing roses. He wondered if it had been theirs.

It was impossible not to feel their collective misery, but it only made his private one worse.

We should be together now. We should be sharing this together.

He couldn't believe that she'd done it again: sent him packing. After all the vows, all the tears, after all the phenomenal satisfaction of making love—off y'go, mate; that's a good boy.

Unreal! This couldn't be happening. He felt dazed by her response, and the disaster on the beach only made it feel that much more unreal.

The sound of sobbing pierced his reverie. He turned to see a middle-aged woman sitting on the deck of her home, sobbing over a framed photograph that hung limply in her hands. And yet her house looked pretty much intact. Had she lost a pet? Her grief seemed deeper than that. A relation? It occurred to Hawke, really for the first time, that people undoubtedly had died in this storm: a surfer, a resident, a motorist, a fisherman. Dot had to have fled with blood on her hands.

Maddie
could've died in this thing. She had forced her way through hell to find him and bring him home safe—and then had booted him out again. Unreal!

"She really kicked ass, didn't she?"

Dan looked up, inclined to agree.

A deeply tanned beach-bum type grinned at him from the deck of a sailboat lying on its side, high and dry. "I hear Hyannisport's a disaster, man."

He seemed too happy by half. "That your boat?" asked Dan, convinced he was looting it.

"Nah. It's my buddy's. We're taking what we can off it. It's a total."

"It looks fine to me," Dan said, still not convinced about the guy. "The sails didn't even unfurl."

The beach bum cocked his head at Dan. "You blind, man? You could drive a truck through the hull."

Only then did Dan see that the side that lay on the sand had a hole in it big enough—well, to drive a truck through.

"Huh. You're right," he said, and he moved on, relating to the boat in an intensely personal way. Totaled. That's exactly how he felt.

He walked over hard wet sand the rest of the way, jumping nimbly when debris sloshed back and forth in the flattening seas that still broke on the beach. As far as he was able to tell, the keeper's house and the lighthouse were still standing. It was only when he got directly between them and the water that he saw the change: the tower's foundation had sunk into the sand and it was now leaning, just like the one at
Pisa
. Not good.

The keeper's house, on the other hand, was still intact. Some—many—shingles were missing and some windows blown out, but all in all, the keeper's house was in better shape than the lighthouse itself. Dan was proud to see that the roof had held. He counted it as the single accomplishment of his stay in
Sandy
Point
.

So. Back to square one. No phone, no electricity, no running water. It was a lot like being in
Afghanistan
again, except without hope. The realization sliced through his gut like a rusty saber, infecting him as it went. He closed his eyes, willing away all thoughts of Maddie. She'd made her choice. Twice. You couldn't get more certain than that. He'd given it his best shot, but destiny and biology had other ideas.

In any case, the thought of waiting any longer was completely repellent to him. Weeks, months, years—any wait at all was unacceptable. He was going to have to get on with his life, hopefully without bitterness. He had to forgive, and somehow to forget.

It'd be a lot easier to do that with a drink and a cigarette, he thought, plucking a strand of seaweed from his Jeep. He was going to have to figure out
where
to get both.

As hurricanes go, Dot was no Hugo. But half a dozen towns on the mid-Cape's south shore had taken it on the chin—
Sandy
Point
hardest of all. The village was laid flat on its back for almost two weeks while Com Electric replaced rows of poles and reels of cable, and bulldozers shoved bits and pieces of houses from the roads. The only vehicles allowed to traverse the town's torn-up streets were emergency ones—chief among them the water truck. Chainsaws and generators whined nonstop during the daylight hours, wearing on people's nerves.

But at night, when the equipment was shut down, a quaint serenity prevailed.
Sandy
Point
became a sleepy Victorian watering hole once more. No TV's blared, no stereos throbbed; neither fan nor air conditioner hummed. Oil lamps and candlelight glowed through wide open windows and doors, and neighbors gathered
on porches and decks, rehash
ing the scary parts of the storm and wondering when they'd have their electricity back.

The ocean, too, stayed oddly meek—embarrassed, no doubt, by the fit it had thrown in front of everyone. It ebbed and flowed quietly now, over much less beach than before. Two feet less beach, to be exact; that's how much was missing from the front of the lighthouse. Coastal engineers said that the sand had shifted to the east, to someone else's shore.

"Not that it matters where it went," Norah told the ad hoc committee that she'd assembled at the lighthouse. "We've got to move the lighthouse
now.
The contractor needs at least thirty feet of beach to maneuver his equipment around it. We have about thirty-four at high tide."

The ad hoc committee was Norah's idea—a sop to flatter the six top contributors into coughing up the balance of the
three hundred thousand
needed to move the tower across the road. If time and money permitted, the keeper's house would be moved as well. But it was the lighthouse that was now the more urgent concern.

Hawke watched with grudging admiration as Norah explained the moving procedure in expert detail to the five men and one woman clustered on the sand. Step by step, she laid out the arduous process of moving the historic structure—the cutting of the concrete floor, the hand excavation inside and out, the installation of the cribbing and steel beams through holes cut in the foundation, and the jacking up of the lighthouse to transfer it to the dolly system on which it would be driven across the road to its newly acquired site.

The hurricane had flattened morale
s
all over town, including Hawke's, but Norah seemed to have been energized by it. She'd arrived at the lighthouse less than an hour after he returned to it on the morning after Dot's rampage, and she'd spent every daylight hour there since. A great deal of her time was spent with town and state officials, contractors, and engineers.