Those coded parts of the diary were the most disturbing, yes, the hottest thing May had ever read. Once she had painstakingly picked them out she couldn’t get them out of her head. ‘Oh. Hi.’
‘How’s the hand?’
The knuckles were criss-crossed with surgical tape, but the shallow cuts were already healing. An accident, John had told everyone, even Ivy. May had tripped and stuck out a hand to save herself. Do you want to talk about what’s happening? her father had asked her. May had answered flatly, No.
‘Uh, it’s okay.’
May felt rather than saw Lucas shrug and stroll away, and all the time Doone’s obsession made her skin shiver as if she had a fever.
He touched me. I knew he wanted to. All the time he wants to, but his hands move nearby in the air instead. But today, after we swam in the sea, he gave me my towel.
‘Towel’ was one of those words written plain, because Doone couldn’t find it in the whale book.
Nobody was there. He dried me and lifted a coil of my hair between his fingers. Touched my shoulder with his finger, his eyes shut. Both of us shaking.
The very clumsiness of the available words, the make-do of the language, stirred a response in May. She closed her eyes and the scene made itself vivid. She saw Lucas bending his head, intent on drying the beads of salt water from Doone’s pale shoulders and the precise articulation of his finger joints as he played with the sticky curl of her hair. It wasn’t the same Lucas who fooled on the beach with the rest of the Beams, nor even the version of him who fondled and necked with Ivy. She never even named him in the scribbled pages but he was Doone’s alone, violently painted and coloured out of nothing with words that sometimes didn’t even fit together. And mine, May thought. Mine, too, because of her.
She opened her eyes, realising that she had been hugging herself so tightly that her fingernails had dug into her upper arms.
Marty Stiegel was looking at her. ‘You okay?’
There were already people standing in line for blueberry pancakes. A little girl held a balloon and her brother tried to grab it from her.
May nodded her head. ‘Yes.’
The blur of burning gas wavered and fined down into little blue points as Marty fiddled with the controls. ‘Right. We got customers, so let’s make pancakes. You want to take the orders and set out plates for me?’
‘Okay. Whatever you want.’
Marian was loudly giving instructions too, from behind the pies and muffins. It was very hot next to the barbecue and the crowd pressed all round them. Tom Beam was there and Elizabeth Newton in one of her ladylike dresses. May saw Leonie’s pale face swim out of the sea of all the rest and turned sideways so that her shoulder partly blocked the unwelcome view. She hadn’t seen her for two days, since the night of the broken glass. Lucas had gone, to play softball or to hang out with Ivy at the beach. She rubbed her forehead with her fist and tried to concentrate on what Marty was telling her to do.
Leonie thought May looked ill. It didn’t escape her notice that the girl wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Marian was rattling the tin of quarters to attract her attention and Tom moved to make room for his wife behind the makeshift counter. Leonie took her place obediently, with the heat of rebellion invisible inside her. She was thinking that nothing tied her here, to Tom or her mother-in-law or the Pittsharbor Day bake stall, and she had been wrong to bend her head to their demands for so long. If Tom and I loved each other, she thought. If we did, then Marian’s intransigence would be funny, and I would be able to bear the closeness of my baby nieces and nephews, and Pittsharbor would be as precious to me as it is to them. But we don’t love each other.
Instead of sounding a knell, the truth began to offer her some hope of escape.
Elizabeth worked from the other end of the stall. She didn’t recognise many of her customers for cookies and muffins. There were few local people in the line, or anywhere on the church green. At the height of summer Pittsharbor belonged to the visitors and she saw no harm in that. Tourists brought prosperity to a coastline that had once been frozen with poverty; she was a summer migrant herself, just like the Beams and the others, although Marian considered herself above the rental tide that flooded the coast every year. It was a shame Aaron and Hannah were so resistant to Spencer’s proposition. The land was ripe for development.
Characteristically, Marty was a blur of energy. He juggled his two pans, flipping an unending series of pancakes out on to the paper plates May held for him. He even found time for good-humoured conversation. ‘I got a great shot of you.’
‘What?’ Her sore hand wobbled and she almost dropped a loaded plate before thrusting it into the outstretched hands of a waiting customer. ‘Three dollars, please.’
‘Down at the beach. When you were playing volleyball with the other kids. I’ll show you tonight, if you want to come over before the party.’
‘Party?’
‘After the town fireworks. Just beer and barbecue, for the five houses and whatever kids are around. Maybe not the Fennymores. Are you and your dad and sister coming?’
May moistened her lips. ‘I … I guess so. Although, I don’t know.’ A party for the bluff houses meant Leonie as well as Lucas. Darts of confusion shot through her. A hand clutching loose change opened under her nose. ‘Miss? You gave me a dollar short.’
Marty had already turned back to his pancakes.
The afternoon grew hotter. The sky was a thunderous metallic blue and the sea seemed exhausted into stillness. The crowds that had thronged the green over lunch-time thinned out as people drifted down to the harbour and the beach. Karyn and Elliot arrived to relieve Marian, who swept the babies away to buy balloons. Tom took over the pancake-making and when Marty left, May seized the opportunity to slip away too. A little later Richard and Shelly arrived with their children and suddenly there were more helpers than customers.
Leonie stood by her husband’s shoulder. ‘Is there something I can do?’
He flipped yet another pancake on to a paper plate and heaped it with sweet blueberries before folding and anointing it with sugar and cream. A woman who should have refused the temptation accepted the plate and dug a plastic spoon into the ooze. ‘Nope. Thanks.’
Leonie knew well enough what Tom thought of her cooking, but the curtness of his dismissal made her head jerk up and her mouth fill with a retort. Before she uttered it she looked along the efficient line of Beams working the bake stall and turned away abruptly.
The churchyard was enclosed by a tidy white picket fence and a gate that led on to the green. Leonie clicked open the gate and stepped inside. Immediately the air felt cooler from the prospect of shade under the trees edging the plot. She put her hands in the pockets of her shorts and wandered along the path between the gravestones. Most of the inscriptions were familiar to her, but she let her eyes travel once more over the memorials to Purrits and Hanscoms and Deeveys.
What to do? she asked herself hotly and incoherently. What to do for the best?
In the farthest corner stood an old yew tree. When she reached it Leonie stopped in its green-black shelter, stroking the ribbed, fibrous bark with her fingertips.
