Beyond the Spring Breeze novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Box
Thea, 71, opens her half-sister's box and collapses. She wakes at eighteen and hears her fiancé say she'll sign the decline by Friday.
The box came on a Tuesday, three weeks after Roz's funeral.
I was seventy-one years old, and I was standing in the office of Kittredge Boat Yard with a mug of cold tea.
The courier was a boy in a gray uniform.
He set a cardboard box on my desk and asked me to sign for it.
The return address was a lawyer's office in Oregon.
I did not know anyone in Oregon.
Then I read the name on the label, and my hands went still.
Rosalind Tilghman.
My best friend, once.
She had left town the summer Dean drowned, and I had not heard her voice in fifty years.
A month ago I read her name in an obituary.
I cut the tape with the letter opener my mother used to keep in this drawer.
The first thing inside was a photograph.
A woman in a garden, white-haired, laughing, with three grown children around her.
Beside her stood an old man with sandy hair gone silver.
He had an easy smile.
I knew that smile.
I had mourned that smile for fifty years.
Dean Mallory was supposed to have drowned in the bay on the second of May, 1976.
They never found his body.
I was eighteen, and I wore black for a year.
I never married.
I ran my father's yard, then my own, and I kept Dean's ring in the top drawer of this same desk.
I turned the photograph over.
On the back, in Roz's looping hand, it said, "Dean and me, our fortieth, 2017."
There were more.
Dean at a kitchen table with a grandbaby on his knee.
Dean with a fishing rod on a river that was not the Chesapeake.
Dean and Roz on a beach, brown and happy, holding hands.
Under the photographs lay a letter, three pages, folded in thirds.
I read the first line standing up.
"Thea, I'm dying, and I'm tired of being a coward."
I sat down.
I read the rest of it very slowly.
She wrote that she was our father's daughter, born eleven months before me, and that he had kept her across the bay my whole life.
She wrote that she and Dean had planned it for months.
She wrote that he never loved the yard or me, only what the yard could buy.
She wrote that our father had known about the plan and had looked the other way.
She wrote that I had been the easy one.
"You were so sure he'd come back that we never had to hide very far," she wrote.
"You gave up the Naval Academy for a boy who was already gone."
My chest tightened.
I remembered the day I wrote that letter to the congressman, declining.
I remembered how proud Dean looked.
I remembered Ellis Dorsey, the alternate, who got the slot in my place.
I had watched him retire as an admiral, on television, in a dress uniform covered in ribbons.
I had told myself that was the life I'd never wanted.
The letter shook in my hand.
Fifty years.
I had spent fifty years keeping a dead man's ring in a drawer.
I tried to stand, to walk to that drawer and throw the ring into the bay.
My left arm would not lift.
The office tilted.
The mug hit the floor and broke.
I heard someone say my name, though no one was there.
I heard gulls, and water slapping a hull, and a radio playing something from a very long time ago.
Then the dark closed over me.
I woke to sunlight.
It lay across my face, warm and yellow, and the window was open.
Someone was frying bacon downstairs.
My body felt strange.
It felt light.
I sat up, and my braid slid over my shoulder, thick and dark and heavy.
I looked at my hands.
They were smooth and brown from the dock.
On my left ring finger sat a small diamond ring that Dean had given me two nights ago.
I stared at the room.
Pink wallpaper, peeling at one corner.
A rowing trophy.
A calendar from Hubbard's Hardware.
April 1976.
On the desk beneath the window lay a thick cream envelope.
The return address was the Naval Academy at Annapolis.
I picked it up with both hands.
I knew exactly what it said.
I had read it in this room fifty-three years ago and then put it in a drawer.
I heard the kitchen door open below.
A man's voice drifted up the stairs, low and pleased with itself.
"Don't worry, Eldon. She's a sweet girl."
My father said something I couldn't hear.
Then the voice again, easy and warm.
The voice I had mourned for fifty years.
"She'll sign the decline by Friday."
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