The Cottage at Glass Beach by Heather Barbieri Read Free Book Online Page B

out.
    â€œShe wasn’t attempting to—”
    â€œDrown you? Oh, no. It was her peculiar idea of a water birth, I suppose. I doubt she would have considered it if it hadn’t been summer. You were a darling little thing. You didn’t cry at all. You seemed perfectly at home.” A good-size baby, eight pounds, ten ounces, with a full head of black hair and alert dark eyes. Maire recalled how the infant Nora gazed around her with interest—at the faces of the women, and especially at the waves, creating their own cradle song as they shushed against the shore.
    â€œMaybe that’s why I’ve always felt drawn to the ocean.”
    â€œDo you like to swim? Your mother did too. She won the annual open water race for her age group every year. They’re thinking about holding it again this summer. Perhaps you’d like to sign up? The girls could too, for the shorter distances.”
    â€œMaybe we will,” Nora said.
    â€œThe sea calls to us, doesn’t it?” Maire said. “What was it I read? That we contain the sea within us, made, as we are, of salt and water?”
    â€œYes, I remember hearing that too.”
    The two women turned toward the open window. The sound of the waves carried across the bluffs, the cool breeze stirring the curtains, mixing with the voices of the girls, laughing and squabbling by turns.
    â€œBut something happened, didn’t it? To my parents?” Nora pressed on. “Did they grow apart after I arrived?”
    â€œThey made their lives here, happily so. Your father became the new harbormaster. He’d worked for a shipping company in Boston; we were fortunate to obtain a man of his experience. And your mother, your mother took to wandering again, as she had before she met your father, before she had you. I don’t know what got into her. She had that faraway look in her eye.” Maire would come upon her sometimes, arguing with an unseen person behind the rocks, near the point, but when she rounded the corner, there was no one there but Maeve, eyes flashing, revealing nothing.
    â€œCould it have been postpartum depression?”
    â€œIt’s hard to say,” Maire replied. “She wouldn’t tell me what was on her mind. She was never much for confidences.” Maire closed the album. That was enough for one evening. She hadn’t anticipated how draining such discussions could be.
    The sun slipped toward the horizon, silhouetting the girls and the distant shore of Little Burke against a gold-and-plum-painted sky.
    Maire yawned. “I can’t hold my wine the way I used to. I’m afraid I’m a little sleepy.”
    â€œYou must be tired after such a long night.” It was clear Nora wanted to continue the conversation but was too polite to insist.
    â€œYes, for the very best reason. There are few greater joys than bringing new life into the world. Babies are such a gift.” She squeezed Nora’s hand, a gentle pressure. Like you were, too .
    N ora and the girls walked the beach home, twilight inking the waves. The same beach on which Nora had come into the world, on the changing tide, that long-ago evening. Had her mother given birth there, by the tide pools? There, on that soft patch of sand where the rocks curved into a perfect half-moon?
    Piano music drifted across the fields from Maire’s open window. The crystalline notes stopped abruptly at times, before she began again. She’d said she often played in the evenings, Debussy primarily, the impressionistic passages filled with a passion she didn’t readily express in words, which made Nora wonder about the deep well of memories and feeling she stored within her. Her aunt was clearly talented. Nora wondered if she’d ever yearned to pursue a concert career when she was young.
    Ella swatted at a mosquito in time with a particularly strong chord. Nora was surprised that they hadn’t seen more of them, but Maire told her the