It was Beth’s birthday, and the sun had not yet risen when the phone rang and woke Kate.
“Hey, old sweetheart,” Lulu said. “Let’s go flying. What do you say to a hike on the Block?”
Block Island. One of Beth’s favorite places in the world, a perfect place to go on her birthday.
“Yes,” Kate said, already climbing out of bed. “Let’s go.”
She had to drop Sam off at Isabel’s so she could catch a ride to school. On the way to Black Hall, Sam talked about Beth. She asked Kate to tell her something surprising about Beth, something she’d never heard before.
“She was a champion tree climber,” Kate said. “Everyone thought of your mother as being quiet, scholarly, completely wrapped up in art. But one of her favorite things to do was to see how high she could go.”
“Where?” Sam asked.
“There was a Norway spruce behind our house—not Mathilda’s, but the one where we lived with our parents, in town. It was so tall, Sam, maybe twice or three times as high as our house. The trunk was sturdy and so thick with branches at the bottom, but up toward the top it was scraggly, and the limbs were sparse. Your mom would climb a little higher each time ...”
“That sounds more like something you would do.”
“You’d think so, but I was too scared—I never got more than halfway up. I’d feel the tree swaying, and it would seem like the branches wouldn’t hold me.”
“What would she do up there?”
“Peek into birds’ nests on the way up. And then look out—she said she could see across the Sound, even past Plum Island, all the way into Gardiners Bay. When she came down, she’d be covered with sap—all over her hands and legs—and she’d be beaming. She called it ‘visiting the sky.’”
“Why didn’t I know this?” Sam asked. “She and I could have done it together.”
“Well, she stopped at some point.”
“When?”
“Um, when she was a teenager.”
“After your mom died?”
“Yes,” Kate said.
Sam fell silent, and Kate felt she’d made a mistake by telling that story. It showed how brave and exuberant Beth had been, and how tragedy had killed that part of her. It had taken so much of the fun and the thrill of life out of her.
“Sam,” Kate said. “She found her passion. Maybe she stopped climbing trees, but she ...”
“I know,” Sam said. “Loved art. Loved the gallery.”
“No. I was going to say loved you. You were everything to her, Sam. You were her sky.”
Sam didn’t reply, but when they parked outside the Waterstons’ house, she gave Kate a quick and unexpected hug. “Thanks for telling me that about Mom,” she said.
“Anytime,” Kate said, wanting to hold on to the feeling of closeness with her niece.
She watched Sam walk up the steps. Scotty greeted her at the door, waved to Kate. It was still so early—Sam and Isabel would hang around for a while, then catch the school bus. Kate picked up Lulu, and they headed for the airport. Just knowing she was about to go up into the air made her feel lighter, took weight off her shoulders. She felt Beth with her. They would visit the sky together.
Their Piper Saratoga looked lonely and neglected on the side of the tarmac. Dead leaves had skittered around the wheels, caught beneath the chocks. Rainstorms had stuck them to the wings and windshield like brown paper. Kate and Lulu did their best to brush the debris off, knowing the flight would do the rest.
Lulu was pilot this leg, and Kate would fly home. They took off toward the southwest, Long Island Sound glittering below. One sweeping turn revealed the faded autumn colors of Southeastern Connecticut. The rising sun lit the land, acres of trees dropping their last leaves.
They banked over Napatree Point. A thousand feet below, the long, narrow sandspit curved outward into Block Island Sound, creating Watch Hill’s sheltered harbor. Nothing could have protected the point from the hurricane of 1938, when the winds blew ninety-eight miles per hour with a gust of one hundred twenty recorded in New London. A fifty-foot storm surge washed away forty houses from Napatree; one hundred people in Westerly were killed. Kate stared down at the sandy spit; she and Beth had walked there every summer. She closed her eyes—everything seemed so vulnerable.
Tom Francis, a pilot friend, moored his boat in Great Salt Pond during the summer and let his friends borrow the old Jeep he kept at the airport. Kate got the key from Margie at the desk, and they set off for Rodman’s Hollow, 230 acres of pristine open space.
Kate and Lulu were at their best when they were on the move. They sometimes tried meeting at cafés or restaurants, but sitting still at a table never felt like enough. It didn’t have to be hiking in the Anza-Borrego Desert or kayaking the Colorado River; they loved local expeditions just as much.
