Chapter Four Saturday
Four
Saturday
There’s only one way to get to the island.
No charming ferry slicing through waves.
No tiny airport with a lone runway and a rickety passenger staircase wheeled up to the plane.
Just two lanes of narrow asphalt stretched like a tightrope over the vast mouth of an endless, shimmering bay.
One way in. One way out. That’s it. Birdie used to joke that once they made it onto the causeway, there was no turning back.
From where Grace currently sits—car shifted to Park, boxed in by midday traffic—it’s hard not to understand what her mother meant.
She’s literally stuck in the middle of it.
“You’re kidding me?” Jenny’s voice flickers in and out from the bad reception—one of Sea Drift’s many charms. “You’re actually down there? Right now? This very minute?”
“Technically, I’m on the bridge,” Grace clarifies, her phone in the cup holder and set to speaker mode.
Behind her, a car strapped with boogie boards and beach chairs honks in quick succession, like the driver’s impatience will move things right along.
“If we’re being official, I still have time to change my mind.
” Grace dips her fingers into a bag of pretzels she picked up at a rest stop—the only thing she’s eaten all day.
“For all intents and purposes, I’m not there yet. ”
Late yesterday afternoon, after she reluctantly agreed to the offer (I guess.
But probably only for a long weekend. I doubt I’ll stay all week.) and 36then gave Caleb her credit card information, Grace spent hours convincing herself she was a fool.
Of course she couldn’t go back to Sea Drift.
Not now. Not ever. Despite the water and sand selling the illusion, it wouldn’t feel like a vacation. Not one bit.
When her alarm blared at seven this morning (not that she’d slept), she swore she’d call Caleb and cancel.
She told herself the same lie while she stuffed an assortment of faded tees into a bag.
And again, shortly after nine, while she backed Birdie’s Jeep—which Grace hadn’t sold yet and had chosen over her own newer SUV at the last minute—out of the driveway.
Grace navigated through town—a place that never felt like hers so much as a convenient zip code for Adam’s commute—still playing chicken (Just pick up the phone!) with herself.
As she drove over the bridge into New Jersey, then sat in traffic for three hours on the Parkway South, Grace kept saying it: Next exit, I’ll pull off, make a U-turn, and place the call.
Only, she never did.
Deep down, something tugged at her—a question she wasn’t ready to answer, one she’d been putting off for a long time.
She didn’t want to go back to Sea Drift—to write, to grieve, to plot out her next steps.
But she wasn’t ready to completely let it go, either.
Which is how she ended up at her current coordinates—trapped between two shores, the wreckage of her present behind her, the ghosts of her past up ahead.
“Well, I’m impressed you made it that far,” Jenny states, competing with the sound of her children. “It’s a good step.”
“Really?” Grace fumbles with the older car’s knobs, still trying to remember how to operate the temperature panel.
Birdie wasn’t impressed by technological advancements.
Bluetooth. Satellite radio. Even so, there’s comfort in being in the Jeep.
“Because right now,” she adds, and glances at her laptop and her mother’s photo album on the passenger seat, “it mostly feels like a mistake.”
In the past, Grace cried on the drive home every summer, devastated when their week in Sea Drift was over.
The only time she didn’t was the year she brought Adam, the first summer they were dating.
He aired 37small grievances about the house all week.
No central air. No fancy coffee machine.
It was nothing like the lake house, the one they’d visited together earlier that June and which he’d described as rustic, though it was professionally decorated to look as if it’d been torn from the pages of Architectural Digest.
“He has a lot of . . . opinions,” Birdie noted to Grace one morning on that trip. They were having coffee on the patio while Adam—hoping to work out the kinks in his muscles caused by the home’s springy mattress—was out on a run.
“A little bit.” Grace laughed, still in that phase of a relationship where everything about a person—even his flaws—seems endearing. “Lucky for him, he has a lot of good traits, too.”
Prior to that week, Birdie had met Adam twice on visits into the city. She liked him; there was much to like. He was steady. Reliable. Successful. Driven. He brought Birdie flowers the first time the three of them had dinner and always held doors open.
“He doesn’t care for it here,” Birdie said, her words framed as a fact.
“That’s not true!” Grace exclaimed, as if offended by the remark. “Of course he does.”
Birdie didn’t respond, just gave her daughter a look.
“Fine,” Grace huffed. “It might not be his favorite place on earth.”
“But it’s yours,” Birdie said.
Near the street, the sound of footsteps on the pea gravel driveway signaled Adam’s return.
“You laugh different when you’re around him,” Birdie said, eyeing a seagull overhead.
“What?” Grace swatted her mother’s hand. “No, I don’t.”
“You do. It’s more subdued. Restrained.” Birdie stood and, without asking, took Grace’s empty mug. “Just make sure you’re letting him see you. The real you. The one who’s always loved nothing more than being here.”
The next few days, Grace tried to disregard her mother’s comments, even as Birdie’s words echoed in her head.
38
“So did you enjoy yourself?” she asked Adam as they drove over the bridge.
“Sure.” Adam’s fingers curled around the steering wheel as he navigated them back in the direction of their life in the city. “The house is . . . cute.”
“I know,” she said, as if she needed to apologize for the property, though it wasn’t technically theirs. “It hasn’t been updated in a long time.” She forced a laugh. “Maybe ever.”
“It was nice,” he said as they crossed the causeway, the highway entrance up ahead.
“I can see why you were inspired to write about the setting—well, a fictional version of it, as you keep insisting—for your book.” He cleared his throat, offered a side-eye.
“Speaking of which, think you’ll ever let me read it? ”
At that point, Grace had been working with her editor on The Tides for months.
Even so, she’d yet to let Adam skim a single page.
Grace said she wanted him to wait until it was perfect—no more revisions or copyedits—then privately told herself she was being foolish whenever she wondered if there were other reasons she kept putting it off.
“Of course.” She summoned a bright, flirtatious smile. “But not until it’s officially done.”
“Well, in the meantime, I get why you love it there.” Adam glanced in the rearview mirror, perhaps to confirm that the island was indeed behind them.
“Though it might be more of a you-and-Birdie thing.” Adam laughed.
“Or a fiction-research thing.” He reached over, squeezed Grace’s thigh.
“If only for the sake of my back. That bed was a doozy.”
Grace laughed, but it wasn’t real.
Now brake lights blink out one by one, a slow-motion domino effect. Grace taps the gas, cautiously at first, then with more certainty as the knot of vehicles unravels, like a tangled necklace finally shaking loose.
“Traffic’s moving, so I’d better go,” Grace explains to Jenny.
“I just wanted to tell you my whereabouts—116 Surf Street—in case I go missing or something.” Her eyes lower to her fingers, knuckle-white from gripping the steering wheel, and the permanent line of pale skin where her wedding 39band previously hugged her—a once silent, sparkling promise.
“I thought at least someone should know where I’m at. ”
“Noted,” Jenny states. “So what’s the plan for once you’re down there?”
“No clue,” Grace admits. “Probably cry on the beach for a few days.”
“Better than crying inside at home.”
“Maybe,” Grace adds, not certain yet if she agrees.
“Well, you know how to reach me.” Jenny’s presence—even though she’s not physically there in the car with her—is certain and reassuring. “I can be there in two hours if you need anything. Just say the word. I might have three tiny people in tow, but—”
“Thank you, Jenny. I’m sure I’ll be all right.”
Before Grace has a chance to say goodbye and hang up, Jenny speaks again. “Grace?”
“Here we go.”
Jenny laughs. “Look, I know my family never vacationed down there, but from what you’ve told me about the island over the years, as well as what I remember from the way you described the setting in your book, it’s a pretty small place.
” She pauses. “A lot of familiar faces.” Another brief interlude.
“A lot of . . . memories, you know? Not only of Birdie.”
“I’ll be fine,” Grace reassures her, understanding her subtext. “I’m not still sixteen.”
The call drops. There’s no need to dial Jenny back.
They’ve both said what was needed for the moment.
Instead, Grace buzzes down the windows, welcoming in the distinct smell of salt and brine as the Jeep glides over the bridge’s crest. For a moment, it’s nothing but sea and sky.
Sunlight dances on the water. Gulls coast in the breeze. Fishing boats bob in the bay like toys.
And then, like magic, it appears.
The island.
Rows of beach houses. The black-and-white lighthouse on the north end. The Ferris wheel toward the southern tip. The wide Atlantic 40unfurls beyond it—a glimmering invitation Grace isn’t sure she wants to accept.
This was always Birdie’s favorite part. Not the arrival, but the moment right before it.
“I’m sure this probably sounds silly, but I love this,” she said once.
Grace was a teenager, her bare feet pressed against the hot dash, a dog-eared magazine on her lap.
“Right here, Cece,” Birdie went on, the open windows welcoming in a rush of warm air.
“Right this minute.” Her mother’s long silver hair flapped around her face.
“When everything good is still in the future. When the magic of our week here hasn’t quite started yet. ”
Back then, Grace—desperate to just get there—had laughed and rolled her eyes. But now, as the bridge slopes downward, she understands Birdie’s point in a different way.
Grace inhales deeply, gaze set straight ahead.
The tires rush over the break between the bridge and the roadway as she tries to determine if the fluttery feeling in her chest is hope or something else.
Mostly, though, as she clicks on her blinker, preparing to leave the causeway and everything else behind it, she finds herself silently hoping that her mother was right.