The Ocean Between Us

So much for gallantry, thought Grace. She kept silent, though. Moving so frequently was hard on the kids, and she didn’t want to sabotage any potential friendships.

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and wheeled backward, unable to take his eyes off Emma. “See you around.”

“See you,” said Emma.

“Bye, Cory,” Katie said, her eagerness adorable to Grace but unappreciated by the boy. “Good luck at practice.”

He grinned again and took off, heading for a shiny Dodge Ram pickup truck. Navy blue, of course. An array of squadron insignia decorated the rear window and bumper.

Katie sagged dramatically against the station wagon. “Good luck at practice,” she mimicked herself. “God, I’m a hopeless dork.”

Emma ruffled her hair. “You’re not used to football gods yet.”

“Don’t ever get used to football gods,” Grace said. “They’re nothing but trouble.”

“Was Dad a football god?”

“He didn’t play football,” Grace said. But he was a god.

“What did he play?” Katie asked.

“He didn’t. He was already an officer when we met.”

Grace opened the back of the car, and the three of them loaded the bags. She was tempted by a tube of Pringles sticking out of a sack, but quickly reminded herself of the nightmare in the mirror. She was going to have to take it easy on the Pringles.

“I’ll drive,” said Emma, folding her lithe form behind the steering wheel.

“You always drive,” Katie said, out of sorts over the Cory encounter.

“It’ll be your turn before you know it,” said Emma. “Get in and buckle up. We’re taking the scenic route.”

They drove through Oak Harbor, a town that took its beautiful setting for granted. A blight of strip centers and prefabricated housing flanked the main road through town. But at the foot of the clustered buildings, and above their rooftops, the view was crafted by the hand of God—an intensely blue seascape, alive with white-winged sailboats, cargo ships with containers stacked like Lego blocks, ferries shuttling tourists and commuters back and forth to the San Juan Islands or the mainland. A forest fringe of slender evergreens swept up to a white mountain range.

When they’d first arrived here, Emma and Katie would occasionally burst into “The Sound of Music” when the mood struck them. Her silly, funny girls. Watching her two daughters together gave Grace an unexpected pang.

They were nearly grown, whether she was ready or not. Looking at Emma’s face was like watching one of those time-lapse photographs of a flower opening. She could see her turn from a tender-faced baby into a young woman whose beauty seemed to be made equally of strength and fragility. Meanwhile, Katie grew tall and thin, and became smarter and more inquisitive every year. Grace couldn’t believe how quickly time had passed, how soon they would be leaving her.

“It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” she said.

“I wish we lived closer to the water,” Katie said, never wanting to make the mistake of being in complete agreement with her mother. “The base isn’t pretty at all.”

“Bases aren’t supposed to be pretty,” Grace said.

“When I leave home, I’m going to live in one place and never, ever budge,” Katie declared.

“Not me,” said Emma. “I’m going to live everywhere.”

“Just don’t forget to write,” said Grace. She was tempted to broach the topic of college, but decided to wait. It was hard to resist pushing, though. Emma had barely touched the stack of glossy catalogs and brochures that flooded the mailbox all summer.

“I want to live there,” Grace said, speaking out before she’d fully formed the thought. She gestured at a house on the water side of the road, with a fussed-over garden and painted gingerbread trim. Like a stately tall ship, it commanded a view of the shipping lanes and mountains. It was a restored Victorian, the kind built by fishermen from Maine who’d relocated to Whidbey a hundred years ago.

“How about this one?” asked Emma. Without waiting for an answer, she pulled off the road and parked on the gravel shoulder in the shade of a huge cedar. The driveway was marked with a realtor’s tent sign and a bouquet of balloons imprinted with Open House.

Automatically Grace checked her watch. By habit she was a schedule person, but on this sunny Saturday afternoon they were in no hurry.

Visiting open houses was a hobby she’d fallen into years ago. Emma and Katie shared her fascination. There was a sort of vicarious pleasure in stepping into someone else’s world. It was a guilty thrill. Walking through other people’s homes made Grace feel as though she was visiting a foreign country with customs and habits she barely understood. She loved to study the gardens with perennials, displays of family photographs showing generations growing up in the same place. She was intrigued by the permanence of their way of life, and she studied it like an anthropologist researching a different culture.

She wondered what it would be like to live in a place where you could plant a garden and still be around to see how it turned out.

This was definitely a girl thing. Steve and Brian couldn’t stand open houses. But for Grace and her daughters, the fantasy began as soon as they stepped onto the driveway of crushed rock and shells.

The house was a disappointment, an ugly stepsister to the Victorian masterpiece down the road. Despite an impressive arbor of old roses, the garden was an uninspired mix of perennials, rhododendrons and low, leafy shrubs. Worse, someone had tried to give the place a nautical flavor by heaping driftwood in a self-conscious arrangement, creating a rope fence. A wooden seagull was perched atop the post next to the front gate. Over the door arched a driftwood sign: Welcome Aboard.

The girls walked in through the open front door, heading for a hall table laden with bakery cookies, a coffee urn, a pitcher of lemonade and some real estate flyers.

Grace hesitated before she entered the house. Unbidden, a quiet stirring occurred deep inside her. It was just a strange day, she thought, beginning with the shock of meeting her real self in the dressing-room mirror.

She could feel the fresh sea breeze rippling across the yard and stirring the tops of the trees. Murmurs of conversation drifted through the house as little knots of people inspected the unnaturally clean rooms. Her awareness of everything heightened, and for some reason, she held her breath the way she used to in church each Sunday morning, just before genuflecting.

In the blink of an eye, the peculiar moment passed. She stepped over the threshold into a stranger’s house. The spongy gray carpet beneath her feet had seen better days, and the walls were an oppressive putty color. Sometime in the distant past, a smoker used to live here. Bowls of potpourri barely masked a cindery hotel room odor. But still, the plain-Jane house cast an odd and mesmerizing spell on her.

Grace smiled and greeted the listing agent, accepting an information sheet on the house. She was a looky-loo and never pretended to be otherwise. An experienced agent could see that a mile off.

Grace strolled through an outdated kitchen with harvest-gold appliances, oversize vegetables on the wallpaper, phony redbrick linoleum on the floor and Formica countertops with the classic boomerang pattern, faded in places from scrubbing. The study was the only modern segment of the house that she could see. It contained a well-designed workstation and a state-of-the-art Mac computer surrounded by scanners, printers and devices Grace couldn’t identify. Clearly, this was the domain of a computer whiz.

One set of lookers was in the corner snickering over a collage made of seashells, which framed a chalkboard. Ignoring them, Grace passed through to the front room, and there, finally, she understood the magic of this place. The living room was oriented like the prow of a ship, with sliding doors leading out to a deck. The windows were covered by heavy pleated drapes, though someone had had the sense to thrust them wide apart. The view made Grace forget every unfortunate aspect of the little house on the bluff. It was a view that encompassed the length of Puget Sound, from the uneven teeth of the snowcapped Cascades to the dimpled blue peak of Mount Baker. The Sound was at its liveliest, as though every schooner and ferryboat, every barge and pleasure boat, put out to sea just for her viewing pleasure.

The girls were out on the deck, eating cookies. Grace pantomimed “five minutes” and headed for the stairs. The two bedrooms at the top of the landing were poky and nondescript. But the master bedroom commanded the same view as the living room downstairs.

Standing in this place, Grace felt a painful tightness around the heart. It was the sense of wanting something she could not possibly have.

She was about to leave when she became aware of a murmuring voice.

“But I thought the shipper wouldn’t schedule me until the house sold,” said a woman’s tense voice. “I can’t possibly be ready before then.” A pause. “I understand, but—” Another pause. “And what’s the charge for that? I see. Well, it’s not in my budget. I don’t know…”

Grace waited until she heard the bleep of the phone, followed by a shaky sigh she could relate to. Then she approached the woman, whose lower right leg was in a walking cast. She was an older lady whose pleasant face was trembling and swollen with unshed tears of frustration.

“I couldn’t help overhearing,” said Grace. “Sounds as though your shipper is trying to move up the date on you.”

The woman nodded glumly. “Yes. It’s horrible. I had an offer on the house, but the loan fell through, so it’s back on the market again. Now the shipper wants to stick to the original schedule or charge me a huge extra fee.” She shook her head. “You know, I can design and launch a Web site, but dealing with a moving company is totally beyond me. My name’s Marcia Dunmire,” she said. “I’m a digital engineer.”

“Grace Bennett. I’m a Navy wife.”

“Oh. Then you’ve done this a few times before.”

“I don’t mean to be nosy, but maybe I can help. Do you have a copy of your contract?”

“Right here.” The pinched expression eased from Marcia’s face. “I’d be grateful if you’d look it over. I’ve never used a moving company before, ever.” She handed Grace a carbonless copy that looked very familiar.