Page 80 of The Summer Club

Charley, her second great love in this life, is going to be all right. He has done her proud, raising all three kids, even if she had not considered all three his to raise. She was wrong about that, she understands now. Charley did not go to Yale or to medical school. He did not escape the Darling family ties as she’d so desperately wanted, but rather embraced them. For, she realizes now, he had never seen them as ties. His life was robust, full of opportunity she had not considered. And in the end, happiness. Which, if she is honest, is all she ever wanted for him to begin with. Oh, she was mistaken and for that she is glad. His definition of that storybook ending was different than hers, but no less valuable. And Cora? Well, if she robbed him of a future as a doctor, she bestowed on him the gift of being a family man. Tish wonders about that. Family: it is something she held in the palm of her own hand, once upon a time. It is no small thing, she knows.

Outside, the water is calm, the air still. It is not enough to look. Suddenly, Tish needs to feel the night outside. She lifts her cashmere shawl from the back of the chair and unlocks the patio door. Charley had made her promise that she would not come and go from her cottage, without first requesting assistance from the front desk, the driver, any of her many choices at this lavish spot on the ocean. But Charley is a worrywart and the summer sky is not to be missed. Tonight is the first time she has broken that promise. Just a little visit with the ocean air, she tells herself.

Barefoot, she pads across the flagstones, leaving the door ajar. She giggles to herself. She is a kid again, a teenage girl, sneaking out of the house. Out into the night! Well, not too far into the night, just across the small patio is a lovely chaise lounge. Tish moves gingerly toward it and eases herself down onto its cushions. Wrapped in her shawl, she draws her knees up against her chest and reclines. It is heaven.

It is quite dark at this edge of the resort. Mooncusser Cottage is perched along a grassy bluff, its fenced white border gleaming in moonlight, the water dancing through the slats of the pickets. Below, on the sandy beach, Tish hears the water lap. Fishing boats rock gently on the bay. So too does her mind.

Morty brought her here. Not just to the Cape, but to life. A city girl who was afraid of the wild dunes and ocean expanse. A stubborn, first-generation Irish-American girl, first among her nursing class at Columbia to graduate before marrying into a white-collar Protestant family. Always striving for more. To straddle the two worlds she lived in, both past and present. To fit in among the Darlings. His little Riptide, Morty called her.

A breeze stirs off the water and Tish lifts her nose to it. The brackish scent fills her senses. Her heart thumps against her ribs. She is back in 1958, and young Charley is wiggling in her arms. Towheaded and suntanned, she can barely contain all his boyishness, but she does.

“Over here!” Morty calls to her. She turns. There he is, her husband. Her beloved. Standing at the end of the beach path that rolls down the dune behind their happy, shabby little cottage. Unfurling itself through salt grass and sand, right to the water’s edge. Where Morty stands now, waving to her. “Come,” he calls to her again. “Come, my love!”

Tish’s eyelids flutter. A buoy’s bell clangs somewhere out on the bay. A stray star streaks across the sky.

Her heart thumps once, twice. No more. “I’m coming.”

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