Boston Mercilessly slamming the heavy oak door behind her, Samantha Coley automatically took a moment to rattle the brass knob, insuring that it was safely locked (damn door had never latched properly, anyway). Hurriedly skipping down the worn brick steps, she climbed into her Camry without so much as a backwards glance.
Slipping the car into drive, she cautiously eased her way out into the fast paced weekday Boston traffic.
"You will not cry!" she fiercely admonished herself, gripping the wheel tightly.
What was that stupid T-shirt saying? "This is the first day of the rest of your life."
Finally, safely over the Mystic River Bridge, merging into a thinner line of outbound travelers, Sam allowed herself the questionable luxury of lighting up a Marlboro. Opening the sun roof just a crack (it was still chilly for mid-May)
she watched as her first, satisfying exhale climbed up into the sky beyond.
Grimly, Sam thought, "Maybe I should give these up along with Jeff. Sort of like getting all my traumas over with at once." Then she wryly chuckled out loud, honestly admitting to herself that she liked her smokes far too much ....
certainly more than she liked her ex-husband at the moment. "Bastard." she thought.
Comfortably settling into a steady 70 mph on I-95 North, Sam flipped on the car radio. "Japanese were asking Saturday why someone would choose Children’s Day, a national holiday of family outings, to try to spread poison gas in one of Japan’s most crowded train stations..." droned the reporter in a well modulated voice. "One of the bags left burning Friday contained sodium cyanide, the other diluted sulfuric acid. Had the vapors combined correctly, they could have formed enough hydrogen cyanide to kill at least 10,000 people in seconds... ".
Shaking her head, Sam abruptly changed the station, eventually finding a soothing Mozart aria. With nothing to look at but miles of endless trees, Sam unwillingly found her thoughts retracing the past year’s events.
It had actually started out to be a very good year .... in fact, one of the best.
Satisfied and secure with her career in the special communications field at MIT
for the SETI program plus happily married (or so Sam had thought ...) to, as all of her friends constantly reminded her ... "A great guy", life felt like it could not have been much better. But to Sam, the ultimate icing had been put upon her cake that year. After thirteen years of marriage, she’d found herself pregnant. At 36 years of age, it was, without a doubt, a surprise. But not an unpleasant one. True, Jeff was at first somewhat overwhelmed at the prospect of such a huge upheaval in their, by then, well-planned-everything-in-it’s-place lives. But as time went on, Sam believed that he rather began to relish the foreign idea of fatherhood. At least to Sam, he had seemed to begin to act so.
Or, in retrospect, had she just so desperately wanted Jeff to be accepting of the new life that, in reality, she had projected his accidence?
"Not that it matters now." Sam thought bitterly, flicking her cigarette out the open roof. Nothing really seemed to matter anymore. At least not since last January, a good four months ago. During that stretch of time, Sam had remained carefully devoid of all feelings and emotions. In Sam’s neat analytical mind, the reason for this self-imposed emptiness was very simple. For she knew without uncertainty that if she were to allow any of her pent up sensibilities to seep through to the surface, she would surely become a raving lunatic.
Bass Harbor, Maine Five grueling hours later, Sam pulled her vehicle into the ferry terminal’s gravel parking lot in the picture postcard fishing village of Bass Harbor, Maine.
Slowly, unfolding her small frame, she stepped out into a fine, gray mist that smelled pungently of the Atlantic.
"Take a whiff of that, kid." She said to herself, breathing in deeply.
Immediately, Sam began to cough. "Got to give those damn smokes up ...".
Silently, she stoically promised herself a fresh start once on the Island.
Both mentally and physically.
She checked her watch, realizing that she had made good time on the drive up.
The ferry for Swans Island wasn’t due for another half hour. Coffee, she thought.
Glancing hopefully about, she spotted a weathered sign that read "Bub’s Bait & Tackle" hanging lopsidedly over a door. Gradually working all the tight kinks out of her body from the tiring journey as she walked, Sam headed for the door.
Inside, there really was the proverbial pot-bellied stove, warmly glowing against the chill in the early spring air. The small store, it’s ambiance caught somewhere between a Seven-Eleven and a 1950 Woolworth’s, was empty with the exception of a matronly looking woman perched behind a battered counter reading the latest issue of The Inquirer.
Unhurriedly pushing her thick reading glasses up on top of her head, she finally addressed Sam.
"Help ya?"
"I’d like a cup of coffee," replied Sam, "to go, please."
"Only kind we’ve got." Muttered the woman, heaving herself off the stool.
Shrewdly eyeing Sam’s Barry Bricken tweed jacket as she handed over the steaming Styrofoam cup, she decided to become gabby after all.
"A little early for summer folk, ain’t it?"
Gratefully, Sam took the offered cup, putting her change down on the worn counter.
"Actually," she tried smiling at the sullen woman. "I guess I’m not really "summer folk". I own a house out on the Island that I intend to live in all year round."
"Ever been out there in January?" Sniffed the gloomy woman.
Wisely deciding to ignore that barbed lure, Sam strolled about the tiny market, slowly savoring the hot, rich coffee. Unexpectedly, she felt the first genuine surge of emotion in months go through her. God! It felt good to be back!
Is it really possible that it’s been fifteen years since I’ve been home? Sam wondered. She and Jeff, both thoroughly immersed in their respective careers, had never really even taken a proper vacation in all of the years that they had been married. But, even if they had somehow been able to find the time for one, Jeff had no desire to "Rough it". A phrase he thought synonymous with Sam’s home state of Maine.
Sam’s parents, though they had certainly never warmed to Jeff the way that she had hoped they eventually would, had been perfectly content to work their annual visits around their daughter’s hectic schedule. Each June, when the dogwood on the Commons was in it’s full glory, her parents would leave the Island for Boston to stay with them in their spacious apartment on Charles Street. Sam remembered how much they enjoyed coming to "The City", as her dad insisted on calling Boston, much to Jeff’s chagrin. Although looking back now, Sam wondered if her father had used that particular phrase simply because it did seem to cause Jeff such irritation?
Her father died five years ago. And, as so often happens when a couple spends a companionable lifetime together, her mom lived barely a year beyond that. Sam, being an only child, was heartsick and forlorn at losing the only family that she had. It was shortly after that, at Jeff’s continuous urging, that Sam finally sold her family home on Swans Island, painfully facing the fact that she and her husband would never use it as a restful, quiet retreat.
She had turned the property, furniture and all, over to an enterprising young couple from Hackensack, New Jersey who were eager and thrilled to have their own little piece of Maine. They had extravagant plans to turn the lovely old Queen Anne style home into a prosperous Bed & Breakfast.
Unfortunately, the logistics of their dream were totally impractical. This was something that the inexperienced man and woman fully realized some two years later when, after only nineteen paying guests (they really couldn’t count family and friends) they were both not only bored but broke as well.
When they had sheepishly contacted Sam, she had, without first consulting Jeff, happily made the arrangements to take back the mortgage on her parent’s old property. The thoroughly relieved couple literally jumped the first ferry back to the mainland and Sam made the necessary arrangements to have the house closed up for the interim.
Now, the big, old house situated on a couple of rocky, rambling acres with assorted outbuildings in sundry stages of disrepair was to become her final sanctuary.
Peering out one of the store’s dirty window, Sam could just make out the incoming ferry off in the distance.
"See?" she thought caustically, "You really can go home again."