Beach Girls by Luanne Rice Page A

the man would find it in something he already had and could never lose: the love of his daughter.
    She wondered who had been staying with Nell while he'd come down to the beach. Maybe he had a girlfriend. Or maybe he didn't. . . .
    In any case, nothing quite explained the stirring she felt as she wrapped the robe around her bare shoulders, ran barefoot through the sand and across the wooden bridge, up the stone stairs. Every sensation was a bolt to her heart. She took a quick outside shower, making sure to grab a few bugs from the early morning cobwebs in the dew-laden grass: “fairy tablecloths,” she had called them as a child.
    She thought of what her father had once told her: “Stevie, there are two ways to look at the world. You can either believe that there's no magic anywhere on earth, or you can believe that there's magic in every little thing.”
    Going inside to feed her thriving crow, thinking of how she had felt to know Jack was watching her swim, she really had no choice but to believe in the second.
     
    “WANT TO SING
‘Lemon Tree'?” Nell asked during recreation break two days later. “My aunt taught it to me.”
    Peggy chuckled. “My mother and Tara sing that song. They take turns playing the guitar. It's really pretty.”
    “I'll bet Stevie sings it, too,” Nell said. She liked saying her name:
Stevie.
“Stevie gave me a book she wrote. She has an aunt who inspired her to be an artist!”
    “A weird, witchy artist!”
    “Would a witch sing ‘Lemon Tree'?” Nell teased.
    “Maybe she likes to turn kids into lemons!” Peggy teased back. They had just come out of the water, and they sat on Nell's towel with Peggy's wrapped around their shoulders.
    The group sat in a circle, so Laurel could tell them a real-life story about how some of the cottages were almost a hundred years old, and how, long before they were built, the Eastern Woodland Indians used to hunt and fish on these rocky points, and how, later, the Black Hall artists used to come here to paint. “Use your imaginations,” she told the kids. “Think about the beach in a new way.”
    Nell loved the assignment. She and Peggy decided to explore the beach—and in doing so, Nell knew she was visiting places her mother, her aunt, and Stevie had gone before. They stopped at Foley's Store, to look in the drawer for love notes, and they went to the Point, where they sat on the rocks watching someone fish from a rowboat, and they cut through more backyards than Nell could count to look at secret gardens and hidden birdbaths.
    A few days later they lay in the sand—no towels—at Little Beach, another secret place they'd reached through a path in the woods. They had collected the best sea glass Nell had ever found anywhere, including two rare blue pieces. Staring at the sky, Nell thought of Aunt Aida's painting in Stevie's room. Peggy told her about school in Black Hall, and Nell told Peggy about moving up to Boston from Atlanta.
    “That's why you have that pretty accent?” Peggy asked.
    “Yes. I'm a Southerner.”
    “I'm a New Englander.”
    “I like the way you talk,” Nell said. “You sound like my mother. She was from the North. My father, too.”
    “Um, you don't have to tell me, but how . . . well, what happened to her?”
    The question made Nell sit up. Her chest deflated fast, fast, and her shoulders caved around her heart. She shook her head—she could never talk about it.
    “I'll tell you,” Peggy said, hiking up to sit beside her. “What happened to my dad. It was bad. I'm only telling you 'cause I want you to know it isn't just your mom . . . other parents die, too.”
    “I dream about it at night,” Nell whispered. “My mother being gone. I miss her all the time. And I think, if she's gone, then I could be gone too. As if I were never here. And I get afraid to fall asleep. I make my father hold me till I get so tired I can't keep my eyes open. I think if he holds tight enough, I won't go away.” A feeling of her