Island Of Second Chances

Edward clucked his tongue in disapproval and left. Mark’s hands shook with anger as he clenched them into fists. He listened as his brother’s steps faded away, and then he knocked the manila folder off the table, papers flying everywhere. The ocean breeze kicked up then, scattered them everywhere.

Mark knew his brother spoke some truth; he was just one person and he could only work so fast. The competition was in two months and he wasn’t sure he had enough daylight between now and then to get it done. If he didn’t, the Timothy would never even leave the beach.

Dave and Garrett would help him finish it. He texted the two of them, asking to meet this week. Plan, strategize and figure out how to make this boat faster than Edward’s.

Taking the Timothy out to sea on an extended voyage was the only way Mark could think of to keep his boy’s memory alive, to make sure he was not truly forgotten, even as his own memories grew dim. That’s why it was more important than ever that he focus, that he work harder and longer and that he get this done.

* * *

LAURA GLARED OUT her balcony sliding glass door, doubting for a minute whether or not she should’ve even come to St. Anthony’s. Did I make a mistake?

She thought about how she’d cashed in her 401(k). It’s done now, she thought. She’d already be paying the penalty on the money, even if she put it all back tomorrow. Besides, any time she thought about packing up her things and heading back to San Francisco, she just got nauseous.

The entire town reminded her of Dean. She couldn’t leave her apartment without being flooded with a hundred unwanted memories. The dark restaurant with the cozy table in the back where they’d met sometimes. The convenience store they’d ducked into when they’d been carrying on a torrid affair and worried about running into people they knew. Laura knew it was wrong. She did. But she’d also never intended for it to happen.

She and Dean had worked on a software launch together, heads bent together for hours over their desks, which sat across from one another in the open floor plan of the company. She’d liked Dean’s outrageous, irreverent humor, which always made her laugh. She’d told herself that theirs was strictly a professional relationship, even though a part of her had known the flirting wasn’t just in her head. Now she knew none of that was as harmless as she’d thought.

She and Dean would go out to lunch, first with a group of colleagues and then increasingly one on one. Dean would share details about his unhappy marriage and his aloof, uncaring wife, and she would admit the loneliness of being single and her fear that she’d remain that way forever. She realized now how clichéd all of it was, how wrong she’d been to let things go so far with Dean. But she’d never meant for it to get physical. She really hadn’t.

Dean had joked that she was his work wife, and she’d loved the title, because she loved how in sync they were. It had felt like they shared the same brain at times. He completed her sentences in board meetings and she anticipated his every work need. Then came the office holiday party at an upscale San Francisco sushi restaurant, where he cornered her near the bathrooms.

“I’ve fallen in love with you,” Dean had told her and kissed her. She’d been shocked, and yet, she tentatively had kissed him back, and in that instant, everything changed.

After that, she became the star in her own star-crossed lovers tale, fighting valiantly for true love despite all the many obstacles. She knew it was wrong to think so. She knew that, but sometimes love came in surprising ways, a powerful force she couldn’t control.

Even now, even after everything Dean had done to betray her...to betray their love...she still felt the itch to contact him. She glanced at her phone, noticing, of course, the lack of new messages. Should she contact him? See how he was doing?

No! What was she thinking? Text Dean? Why should she care how he was? He didn’t care about her. Dean had made that abundantly clear the last time she’d seen him.

The worst part was that she felt like the heartache, everything she’d lost, was a punishment from God. She’d done the wrong thing, and this pain was what she’d earned.

She lay down on the bed, feeling as if she’d never be whole again, wondering if she could ever heal.

* * *

AFTER STARING AT the ceiling for an hour, unable to fall back asleep, Laura decided she wasn’t going to waste a beautiful day in the Caribbean and quickly donned her sturdy black one-piece suit and her newly purchased floppy straw hat.

After walking at least a mile to reach a spot of desolate beach, she couldn’t hear Mark’s buzz saw anymore, thank goodness. Beside her sat a brand-new cooler she’d found in the condo that she’d filled with drinks and snacks. She’d wanted to get away, and get away she had. Not a single sail dotted the blue-green horizon as the sun blazed down, coating everything in a thick warmth. Down the beach, she saw a figure walking—a woman in a shawl?

Laura tilted her head back on her bamboo mat and let the sunlight warm her cheeks. She inhaled deeply the smell of the ocean breeze and listened to the gentle rustling of palm tree leaves near her. She could almost feel the beach healing her from the outside in. This was why she came. To get away from it all.

She imagined her problems existing far, far away, and now the only thing she’d have to worry about was when high tide might come and wash away her cooler. This is what she needed...the absence of stress, nothing here to remind her of Dean. Just the gentle roll of waves against the beach.

Then came a distant cry.

A seagull? she wondered. She propped herself up on her elbows and glanced down the beach. The sound came from the woman walking along the water. Laura realized now that the woman wasn’t wearing a shawl at all. It was a baby sling. She held a baby, probably no older than three months, who was now wailing as the mom adjusted the baby in the fabric against her chest.

Laura felt her stomach tighten.

In her mind, she saw herself that morning she’d taken the pregnancy test. The positive filling her with both dread and excitement all at once. She was going to have Dean’s baby.

Then, she remembered Dean’s reaction. How he yelled, blamed her for the accident. Then she remembered the sudden cramping, the bright red blood. The trip to the emergency room in the ambulance as she miscarried.

Her sister had been there in the hospital when she woke up. Maddie told her she dodged a bullet, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt like the bullet hit her right in the chest.

She felt like she couldn’t breathe as she watched the mother and baby coming closer.

Anytime she saw a baby, she thought of her own, who would now never be born, the baby she’d carried inside her for a slight twelve weeks. How could something so small have changed her life forever? She knew it sounded irrational, but to her, the minute she’d found out she was pregnant, everything changed. She became a different woman, her life suddenly veering down a different path. With every baby she saw, she saw her own laughing back up at her.

I lost a baby. I lost my future. I’m thirty-five. I won’t have another one. Hell, maybe my body doesn’t even know how to make one the right way. The man I thought loved me didn’t at all. Of course I’m not fine.

She wished her mother was still alive. She wanted to hug her, wanted to ask her what she should do now.

She couldn’t look at a baby without feeling that profound sense of loss, because something deep inside her told her that she’d never be a mother now. She was thirty-five, and she’d had one chance at being a mom, and her body failed her.

She glanced at the happy mother, cooing to her baby. She wouldn’t be able to stay here, watch this, see the life she would never have.

Laura knew she couldn’t ask the woman to leave. It wouldn’t be fair. It wasn’t the baby’s fault. Or the mother’s.

In a rush, Laura packed up her things. She threw on her ankle-length cotton cover-up sundress and began walking. The buzz saw would be better than the baby crying. If she listened to the baby much longer, she knew she’d burst into tears.

After she’d walked a bit, she could hear the buzz saw again. She gritted her teeth. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.

She thought about marching in there and giving Mark Tanner a piece of her mind, when she suddenly saw a gray tendril of smoke rising up from his workshop. An acrid, unmistakable smell filled the air.

Was that...a fire?

Chapter Three (#u006139d2-6341-5940-af12-a354966c99ba)

SOMETHING WAS BURNING. At first, Mark thought it might be just his imagination, just sawdust flying from his saw as he hacked into the planks before him. Then he thought it might be someone grilling, except the fire smelled decidedly closer. He cut the buzz saw and turned around to find that the manila folder his brother brought had landed near his gas generator, and somehow had managed to catch alight. Smoke poured from the folder and heavy bits of sawdust that coated his small workspace.

Mark spun around, looking for something to douse the fire. He tried to kick sand on the flames, but that only seemed to add more sawdust to the fire, fueling it, making the flames grow.

He rushed into his kitchen, looking for a towel or a blanket, anything he could use to suffocate the flames. But before he could, a blur in a dark cover-up rushed past him and dumped a cooler full of ice on the fire, as well as two cans of some soda, and the small flames went out in a sizzling hiss.

She also happened to douse his saw, too, which now had pieces of ice covering the blade. And the flying soda cans knocked over one of the boards on his sawhorse, which clunked against his nearby worktable and sent Timothy’s bronze booties flying in the air. They landed with an awkward thump in the sand. The picture of his boy as a baby also came loose, fluttering down to the ground.

“Hey!” he cried, lunging at the photo and the bronze booties. If they were dented, so help him... “What are you doing?” He scooped up the small bronze shoes from the sand, clutching them protectively in his hands.

“Helping you,” she said, putting a hand on her hip.

She wore a muumuu, that was the only way he could describe it. The ankle-length sundress exposed only her elbows and left absolutely everything to the imagination.

She was too young to be so...dowdy, he thought. He knew she had a good body; he’d seen her legs earlier and knew the woman kept in shape. So why was she wearing a blanket out on the beach? Must be shy. Or timid. Or worse, conservative. Very, very conservative. Straitlaced, clearly. Even her outfit annoyed him.

She thrust her oversize sunglasses upon her head, pushing back her short dark bob and glared at him, her eyes looking greener than the Caribbean in the sunlight.

“Help?” he cried, sweeping his arms wide to encompass the disaster before him, even as he noticed that one of the soda cans opened on impact, sending a spray of sticky liquid onto his bare feet and all over the expensive blade of his saw. Great, just great. “Why don’t you just punch me in the face next time? You’ll create less damage.”