Tom took off his personal flotation device and uniform shirt. Even though Gwen was so small she swam in them, he buttoned and buckled them tight around her to keep her warm and safe. He held her tight while the Jayhawk lowered the rescue basket.
He climbed into the basket with her and shielded her with his body as the winch roared and hoisted them up. He held his hands over her ears, so the booming sound of the rotors wouldn’t scare her, and he didn’t let her go until he carried her into the chopper’s cabin, laid her on the gurney so the medics could take care of her. He took her hand; it was ice cold. She neither squeezed his hand nor pulled away.
She didn’t flinch when the medics took her vital signs and pricked her arm with a needle to start an IV. They all spoke to her, making sure to say her name: “Gwen, you’re safe now.”
“Gwen, do you know where you are?”
“Hey, Gwen. How old are you? Are you nine?”
“Gwen, what’s your favorite color?”
But she didn’t reply to any of them. She just kept staring off into nothing—or at least nothing that Tom or any of the others could see—peeping like a baby bird, in a language that made sense to no one but Gwen.
Then she said one word: “Mermen.”
After that, the tiny sounds resumed.
FOUR DAYS EARLIER
11
SALLIE
Love was truly a series of blunders. That’s how Sallie Benson had started to think about it. Even knowing that she was making a mess of her life, she felt powerless to stop. Here she was at West Wind Marina, on a boat two docks over from where she and her husband kept the Sallie B, waiting for her true love—a man who wasn’t her husband. Dan was at work, their kids were at school, and she was breathless with desire and guilt. She was addicted; she might as well be waiting for her dealer.
Sitting in the cabin of Elysian—the sexy sixty-five-foot sportfishing boat that she had been paid to decorate—she wondered for the hundredth time that day what she was doing. She knew everyone at the boatyard, and they knew her. She had parked in her usual spot, next to where her family’s boat—named for her, by her husband, a gift for their fifteenth anniversary—was docked.
Then she’d had to walk past dockhands and guys who had worked on the Sallie B. She felt their eyes on her, watching as she held her head high and strode down a completely different dock to someone else’s yacht. She had said hi to Eli Dean, the yard owner, and she was positive his normally friendly smile had turned into a leer.
She glanced in the mirror in the main salon: she had white-blonde hair—the same color she’d had as a child but now maintained at a price—big blue eyes that, to her, reflected the innocence she felt about the world and those she loved, and a white piqué sundress that revealed the fact she didn’t have much of a tan. How had the nice woman she’d always been become someone who committed adultery—and couldn’t get enough of it?
She had worked hard to build her business, and she was so grateful she had become the go-to designer for the moneyed set. Even some of the oldest blue-blood families on the shoreline wanted to redo their houses and, lately, yachts, with her signature style. Designing the interior of Elysian had come with particular challenges, namely, Edward’s wife, Sloane.
Sallie felt very at home here, although, naturally, she had no ownership rights. Every inch of the interior bore Sallie’s mark. Edward had insisted on it. Sloane—had there ever been such a boarding school name?—loved bright colors, especially deep shades of pink, and she had cozy inclinations. That was not what Edward wanted.
When Sallie designed the Hawkes’ house on Catamount Bluff, she had had to convince Sloane that white was the perfect base color for seaside living. It caught and reflected light sparkling off the water. And many people didn’t realize how many variations there were in the white palette—all kinds of shades, with hints of blue or green or yellow or even pink. Depending on your choice, you could warm or cool a room—or do both at the same time. Sallie would have expected that Sloane, as an artist, would understand that.
Benjamin Moore paints made over a hundred shades of white. The names were poetic: cloud white, Chantilly lace, white heron, distant gray, white diamond, dove wing, sea pearl. Sallie loved perhaps their most famous shade—linen white. With hints of pale, almost invisible yellow, it spread warmth through a room and flattered everyone in it.
And why did she love white so much? The answer seemed sacrilegious, waiting on Elysian for her lover to arrive, but it was because of her mother. When she was fifteen and her mother was dying of cancer, Sallie had sat beside her hospital bed.
Her father and little sister, Lydia, had gone downstairs to the cafeteria. Mass cards and get-well cards were propped up on the wide windowsill. It was a Catholic hospital, and there was a crucifix and a painting of Mary on the wall above the bed. Sallie had prayed the rosary while her mother slept.
“Sallie,” her mother said, taking her hand when she woke up. She gazed at Sallie with loving blue eyes that seemed to be getting cloudier by the minute. “When I get to heaven and it’s full of angels, I won’t meet anyone better than you.”
“I don’t want you to leave,” Sallie whispered. “Please stay . . .”
“Sweetheart, I would if I could. But that’s why we have to stay connected, no matter what. That’s why I want you to stay the same as you are now, as smart and kind, so when I look down from the sky, no matter how much time goes by, I will always recognize you. You’re my angel, Sallie.”
“You’re mine, Mom.”
Her mother died before her father and sister returned to the room.
Sallie had been wearing her school’s summer uniform—a white cotton dress—that day. White was the last color her mother ever saw her wearing. So even now, Sallie gravitated to white and almost always wore it.
And after she graduated from Parsons School of Design, put in her time with a famous New York design firm, and started her own company, she found herself drawn to the beauty of angel-white rooms, the color she had been wearing the day her mother died.
She wanted her mother to be able to see her, to recognize her always, as she watched over her from heaven. She hoped her mother would forgive her for what had started at Catamount Bluff: love and trouble.
That was where she had fallen in love with Edward. It had started slowly, but she had noticed that he would often show up at the house around lunchtime, when Sloane was over at Claire’s studio or taking yoga at Abigail Coffin’s wellness center in Black Hall.
He would sit at the kitchen table, watching Sallie with such admiration in his eyes. One day he walked right up to her, touched the back of her hand as she held up swatches of fabric for him to examine. Sallie’s heart had practically stopped.
She felt overwhelmed—she had never had an affair, never been unfaithful to Dan in spite of how unloved she felt. She had not felt so excited, so wanted by a man, since before Gwen and Charlie were born. She found herself thinking of Edward all the time. She lost sleep fantasizing over what might happen. Lying beside Dan, she could practically feel Edward holding her, kissing her, undressing her.
As time went on, she felt an unspoken agreement with Edward that he would come home for lunch and Sallie would be there. Every day.