Twice Loved (copy2) (5 page)

“So y’ve already heard.” Josiah studied his pipe, rubbing its warm bowl with his thumb as if it were a woman’s jaw.

“Aye,” came the quiet reply.

The dog reared up and leaned against Rye’s hip, pushing him slightly off balance. Again he seemed not to notice. His hand unconsciously sought the golden head, moving on it absently as he watched his father rub the bowl of the brier-wood pipe. “It won’t seem the same, goin’ upstairs without her there.”

“Well, she had a good life, though she died sad to think y’d been drowned at sea. Seemed she never quite got over the news. Reckon she knew you was safe long before I did, though,” Josiah said with a sad smile for his son.

“How’d she die?”

“The damps got her ... the cold and damps. She got lung fever and was gone in three short days, burnin’ up and shiverin’ both at once. Wasn’t a thing that could be done. It was March, and you know how gray the Gray Lady can be in March,” he said. But he spoke without rancor, for anyone born to the island knew its foggy temperament and accepted it as part of life ... and of death as well.

“Aye, she can be a wicked bitch then,” Rye agreed.

The old man sighed and clapped Rye on the shoulder. “Ah well, I’ve got used t’ life without y’r mother, as used t’ it as I’ll ever get. But you—” Josiah left the thought dangling as he studied his son quizzically.

Rye’s glance went to the window.

“Y’ve been up the hill, then?” Josiah asked.

“Aye.” A muscle tightened and hardened the outline of Rye’s generous mouth, then he met his father’s inquisitive eyes and the mouth softened somewhat.

“I’ve lost only one woman, lad, but y’ve lost two.”

Again the mouth tensed, but this time with determination. “For the time bein’. But I mean t’ reduce that number by half.”

“But she married the man. ”

“Thinking me dead!”

“Aye, as we all did, lad.”

“But I’m not, and I’ll fight for her until I am.”

“And what’s she got t’ say about it, then?”

Rye thought of Laura’s kiss, followed by her careful withdrawal. “She’s still in shock, I think, seein’ me walk into the house that way. I think for a minute she believed I was a ghost.” Rye turned his stubborn jaw toward his father again. “But I showed her I wasn’t, by God!”

Josiah chuckled silently, nodding his head as his son colored slightly beneath his tan. “Aye, lad, I’ll bet my buttons’ y’ did. But I see y’ve hauled y’r chest down here and set it on me floor as if y’ve come expectin’ to share me bunk.”

“It’s Ship I’ve come t’ bunk with, not you, you old salt, so y’ can wipe the smirk off y’r briny face and have done with teasin’!”

Josiah broke into an appreciative roar of laughter, the pipe in jeopardy, scarcely anchored between his yellowing teeth. At last he removed it. “Haven’t changed a bit, Rye, and it’s my guess y’r woman’s wonderin’ what t’ do with that spare husband of hers, eh? Well, stow y’r gear and welcome to y’. Ship and I are happy enough for y’r company. ’Tis been a quiet house f’r two years now. Even y’r sharp tongue will be welcome.” Again he pointed at Rye’s nose with his pipestem, and added, “Up to a point.” Their eyes met and they shared the moment of levity—an aging parent and the child who’d grown taller and stronger than himself.

At the saltbox on the hill, Laura was still trembling from the shock of seeing Rye again, of kissing him. As soon as he disappeared down the path, none of it seemed real. But facing Dan made reality sweep back, along with the need to accept the bizarre truth and deal with it.

***

At the door, Laura closed her eyes for a moment, pressed a hand to her fluttering stomach, then stepped inside.

Dan sat at the table, but his elbows rested on either side of an untouched plate and his mouth was hidden behind interlaced fingers. His eyes followed her across the room, hazel eyes she’d known for as long as she’d had memory. Hazel eyes she now found difficult to meet.

She stopped beside the trestle table, wondering what to say, and if the man who sat studying her so silently was still her husband. His eyes moved to her hands, and she realized her fingers were nervously toying with the waistband of her apron, so she dropped them quickly and took her place on the bench across from Dan. Her nerves felt as if they were made of spun glass. The room was painfully silent, all but for the constant sounds of the island: hammers, gulls, bell buoys, and the faraway breath of a steam whistle from the Albany packet as it pulled into Steamboat Wharf below.

Suddenly Laura wilted, resting her elbows on either side of her own plate and burying her face in her palms. Several long, silent minutes passed before she raised her eyes to confront Dan again. He was absently toying with a spoon, pressing it firmly against the tabletop and cranking it around as if to screw it into the wood.

When he realized she was watching, he stopped, and his well-groomed hand fell still. He sighed, cleared his throat, and said, “Well ...”

Say something, she berated herself. But she didn’t know where to begin.

Dan cleared his throat again and sat up straighter.

“Where is Josh?” she asked quietly.

“He finished and went out to play.”

“You haven’t eaten anything,” she noted, eyeing his plate. “I ... I wasn’t very hungry.” His eyes refused to meet hers. “Dan ...” She reached to cover his hand with her own, but his did not move.

“He looks healthy as a horse, and very much alive.”

She couched her hands in her lap, studying the plate that Dan had filled for her sometime while she was outside. “Yes, he does ... he ... he is.”

“Was he here long?”

“Here?” She looked up quickly.

“Here. In the house.”

“You know when the 
Omega
 came in.”

“No, not exactly. Nobody said a word to me about Rye’s being on board. Funny, isn’t it?”

Again she covered his hand with hers. “Oh, Dan, nothing is changed ... nothing.”

He jerked his hand free and spun to his feet, turning his back on her. “Then why do I feel as if the world just dropped out from under my feet?”

“Dan, please.”

He turned and took a step nearer. “Dan, please? Please what? Sit here ... at 
his
 table, in 
his
 house, with 
his—”

“Dan, stop it!”

He whirled away again, the words 
his wife
 echoing through the room as distinctly as if he’d uttered them. Almost everything here was Rye Dalton’s, or had been at one time—people and possessions both. Dan Morgan found himself floundering for a way to accept the fact that his friend was very much alive and had walked in here expecting to reclaim it all.

From behind, Laura watched as Dan grasped the back of his neck with one hand and dropped his chin onto his chest.

“Dan, come and sit back down and eat your dinner.”

His hand fell to his side and he turned to face her. “Laura, I’ve got to get back to the countinghouse. Will you ... are you going to be all right?”

“Of course.” She rose and accompanied him to the door, where she held his jacket while he slipped it on. She watched as he retrieved his beaver top hat from the tree, but instead of donning it, he brushed his fingertips distractedly along its brim, his back to Laura. Studying his despondent pose, her throat constricted and her fingers twisted into a tight knot.

Dan took a step toward the open door, halted, drew a deep breath, then spun and clasped her against his chest so hard, the breath swooshed from her lungs. “I’ll see you at supper,” he whispered in a tortured voice, and she nodded against his shoulder before he tore himself away and quickly stepped out the door.

As Dan Morgan moved down the scallop-shell path in the footsteps of Rye Dalton, it seemed to him that was where he’d been walking all his life.

When Dan was gone, Laura found tears in her eyes. She went back inside to find she must confront countless objects that bore witness to the curious melding of their three lives. At the trestle table she touched Dan’s fork, which still rested in the unfinished food on his plate, realizing that years ago Rye, too, had eaten with this very fork; he very likely owned it. Distracted, she put away the remainder of the interrupted meal, but still the memories persisted. She closed the doors of the alcove bed, cutting off the sight of the place where Rye Dalton’s son slept at night beside a row of wooden soldiers that had belonged to Dan Morgan as a boy. The humidor beside the wing chair had been a gift to Dan from Rye. The chair itself was one Dan had chosen after marrying Laura, though the cricket stool before it was a piece given to Rye and Laura by some guest at their wedding.

Almost against her wishes, Laura found herself at the door of the linter room, her eyes moving to the bed—how painful it was to look at it now—where she and Rye had conceived Josh and upon which Josh had been born and where Dan had come to sit beside the new mother and peer into the flannel blankets at the squirming pink bundle and predict, “He’ll look just like Rye.” Laura’s eyelids trembled shut as she remembered Dan’s words and how they’d been spoken because he’d sensed it was what Laura had needed to hear at that moment. This bed, above all, seemed a testimony to their convoluted history. It had been used by all three of them; the pineapple carving on its headposts had held the jackets of both men and the rails in between had been clasped by Laura’s hands in the throes of both ecstasy and pain.

Her throat constricted and she turned away.

Which of them is still my husband? Above all, this question needed answering.

Thirty minutes later, Laura had her answer. She stepped out of the office of Ezra Merrill, the island’s attorney, suddenly unable to face the house again, with all its reminders. And though she was twenty-four and a mother herself, Laura was smitten by the overwhelming urge to run to her own mother’s arms.

Having left Josh at the Ryersons’ house, Laura made her way to the silver-brown saltbox on Brimstone Street where she’d grown up. Returning to it, the memories grew stronger, of Rye and herself and Dan trooping in and out at will, in those days before commitments had been made. Nostalgia created a deep need to talk about those days and these, with someone who knew their beginnings.

But Laura had scarcely put foot inside her mother’s keeping room before realizing Dahlia Traherne wasn’t gong to be much help.

Dahlia could scarcely handle the everyday decisions of her own life, much less offer advice to others on how to handle theirs. An inveterate whiner, she had learned to get her way through chronic complaining about the most trivial problems; when trivialities failed to surface, she invented imaginary problems.

Her husband, Elias, had been island-born, a sailmaker who had sewn canvas all his life but had never sailed beneath it, for at the merest mention of his signing articles, Dahlia had come up with some new malady to make him promise never to leave her. He had died when Laura was twelve, and there were those who said Dahlia had driven him to an early grave with her habitual complaining and hypochondria, but that he’d probably gone to it gladly, to get away from her. Some said Dahlia should have stepped down a little harder on her daughter after Elias Traherne’s death, for the girl ran free as a will-o’-the-wisp after her father was gone, tramping the island without curfew or call, following the boys, and learning the most unladylike habits while Dahlia sat home and made not the slightest effort to control her. And there were still others who condescendingly explained away Dahlia’s weak nature by pointing out, “Well, after all, she’s an off-islander.”

No, Dahlia had not been born on the island, though she’d lived here for thirty-two years. But if she lived on Nantucket another hundred, she would still bear the stigma from which no mainland-born person could ever be free, for once an off-islander, always an off-islander. Perhaps it was because she sensed this wry disdain that Dahlia lost confidence and became so weak and puling.

Greeting her daughter now, she wheezed like the airy whine of a calliope. “Why, Laury, I didn’t expect to see you today.”

“Mother, could I talk to you?”

The expression on Laura’s face made her mother suddenly suspect there was a problem, and the older woman hesitated, as if reluctant to invite her daughter in. But Laura swept inside, dropping to a bench at the table, heaving an enormous sigh, and saying in a shaking voice, “Rye is alive.”

Dahlia felt a pain stab her between the eyes. “Oh no.”

“Oh yes, and he’s back on Nantucket.”

“Oh dear. Oh my ... why it’s ... what ... Dahlia’s hands fluttered to her forehead, then massaged her temples, but before she could dredge up an ailment, Laura rushed on. The whole story tumbled out, and long before it ended, Dahlia’s expression of dismay had intensified to one of alarm.

“You ... you aren’t going to ... to see him, are you, Laury?”

Disheartened, Laura studied the woman across the table. “Oh, Mother, I already have. And even if I hadn’t, how could I avoid it on an island the size of Nantucket?”

“B ... but what will Dan think?”

Laura resisted the urge to cry out, What about me? What about what I think? You haven’t even asked me. Instead, she replied tonelessly, “Dan’s seen him, too. Rye came to the house.”

“To the house ... oh my ...” Dahlia’s fingertips fluttered from her temples to her quivering lips. “Whatever will I say to people?”

Insecurity had always been Dahlia’s fundamental problem. Laura realized her folly in expecting her mother to analyze a situation in which security was clearly personified by Daniel Morgan, who had been the stalwart in Laura’s life for so long, while Rye had gone away and left her “high and dry,” as Dahlia had often said. But Laura couldn’t help herself from admitting, “I’ve already talked to Ezra Merrill and found out Dan is still my legal husband.” She raised troubled eyes that needed comfort. “But I ... I still have feelings for Rye.” Immediately, Dahlia presented her palms. “Shh! Don’t say such a thing. It will only cause trouble. You shouldn’t even have 
seen
 him!”

Laura became exasperated. “Mother, it’s Rye’s house. Josh is his son. I couldn’t possibly keep him away.”