At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories)(92)

Ruth had excused herself to go upstairs and rest. Noah and Sophie had just plain disappeared. Gracie felt restless and unsettled. The house, big as it was, felt too small to contain her emotions and she found herself craving a lonely sweep of rocky beach. How wonderful to be able to walk out a door and step onto the beach. Everyone had said she was crazy to keep a car in the city but she had needed the means to escape whenever the noise and the crowds became too much for her. Taking the subway to Coney Island or the bus to Rockaway wasn't the same as driving east through Queens, past the Elmhurst tanks and the old World's Fair, LIE to Cross Island to Southern State where she followed the signs to Jones Beach. That wide, smooth expanse of civilized sand was nothing like the unforgiving beaches of her childhood but knowing that the same ocean crashed against the shores of Idle Point soothed her soul.

She grabbed her coat from the hall closet then let herself out the back door, the one that led out into the garden. Two late roses, blood red and just beginning to unfurl, bloomed near the stairs. Beach roses used to line the path to the rocky beach by the lighthouse. Once upon a time, in another life, Noah had trailed a beach rose over the curve of her hip, the line of her thigh. The gesture was both sensually charged and painfully sweet, the kind of gesture a woman never forgot. She remembered the look in his eyes, the faint smell of salt on his skin, the callused tip of his index finger, the velvety softness of the petals of the rose against her bare skin. If the world had ended at that very moment, she would have died knowing her life had been blessed beyond measure.

She didn't have him—she couldn't—but she had those memories and sometimes she even managed to convince herself that those memories were enough.





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Sophie was fearless. She flew across the rocky beach in her fancy velvet dress and heavy parka as if she had been born there in Idle Point instead of on the other side of the ocean.

"Sophie, be careful!" he shouted into the wind. "The rocks are slippery!"

She didn't hear him. He probably wouldn't have been able to hear a warning at her age either. She was so small, a tiny scrap of humanity against the enormity of the wind and tides. If he had his way, he would lock her in the house until she was forty.

She leaped from rock to rock, arms outstretched, mimicking the gulls that swooped and soared overhead. She reminded him of Gracie as a little girl, so filled with physical energy and enthusiasm that the span of her arms reached the edges of the world.

"She looks like she was born here."

He was surprised he hadn't felt her presence before he heard her voice. "I was thinking the same thing."

Gracie cupped her hands around her mouth. "Soooophie!"

His daughter stopped, perched on a huge rock near the water's edge, and waved.

Gracie waved back, her oversized coat billowing in the wind like a woolen parachute. "Has she seen a gull open a clam yet?"

"I don't think so."

She scanned the area. "I remember the first time you saw that gull drop the clam onto the rocks and break it open."

"You opened my eyes," he said. The natural world had been invisible to him until Gracie came into his life.

"You should go catch up with her," she said, wrapping her arms around her slender body as winds kicked up. "Low tide's a perfect time to start teaching her about the shore."

"Like Gramma Del did for you."

She peered out from beneath her hood. "You remember that."

"I remember a lot of things, Gracie."

She was halfway across the rocks before he realized she was in motion. She ran the way she did everything, with speed and grace. She never slipped, never faltered. This beach, this place, was her heart's home and always had been.

The rocks fought him as he made his way toward his daughter and Gracie. They shifted and moved beneath his feet. Moss, slippery as ice, threatened his balance. He had been denied whatever gene it was that enabled Gracie and Sophie to navigate these rocks like they were on flat dry land. At least it was still daylight. He wouldn't want to be out there in the dark with the tide rolling in.

Gracie used to laugh at him during those hot summer nights when he refused to venture too far from the shadow of the lighthouse. She didn't understand because she was born to be part of this place while he had somehow always felt like he was passing through.

He looked up and saw that Gracie and his daughter were way up the beach already, walking along the shoreline with their heads down. He could see Gracie pointing at various bits of aquatic flora and fauna and if Sophie's body language was any indication, the child was spellbound.