Beach Girls Read Online Free PDF Page B

you.”
    She used a block of watercolor paper and paints from Sennelier on the Quai Voltaire in Paris, her favorite art supply store. A soft green wash, fine brushstrokes suggesting obsidian leaves—the color a close match for Nell's eyes. The bird, nut brown, chestnut-smooth, eyes alert and curious. Stevie knew the criticism she always received—imbuing birds with human characteristics. Could she help it if that was how she saw the world? One big anthropomorphic and wrongheaded story about creatures and humans and their ever sad-ending quest for love?
    She sketched a baby wren in the nest overhead. Learning to fly. Perched on the branch. Spread your wings. . . . You can do it. . . . The mother looking up, giving encouragement.
    Then, the next frame: baby alone, mother gone. A flood of emotion swamped her, but she rechanneled it: “Oh, Emma,” she said. And,
Nell.
    Stevie held her brush, out of breath as if she had just learned to fly herself. The sable brush dripped on the picture. Tears, she thought. Crying for the lost mother, the lonely child.
    Children abandoned by the universe—and that was how it felt to those whose mothers went away or died young—always spent their lives seeking perfect, intense union. Anything less felt like a failure. Stevie thought about all the pain that quest had caused herself and others. Discouraged by it all, she had just devoted herself to writing and painting. But she had had that closeness with the beach girls.
    How had she let those friendships slip away? Great friends who had known her, and each other, so well. Stevie closed her eyes tight, and a snapshot of Emma flashed: pixie-cut brown hair, blue-and-white-striped bathing suit, pierced earrings, laughing so hard she was holding her sides. She could make Stevie and Maddie crack up with a word or a look.
    Stevie hadn't realized till just now how much she missed her friends. Maybe they could have kept her from self-destructing in love. Her quest for intensity of connection, passion in all things, had led her to this spot: sitting alone in her quiet beach house. She had become such a recluse; she couldn't remember the last visitor she'd had before Nell. She found herself wondering about Jack, hoping he was a good father.
    Too bad wrens—humans, for that matter—couldn't learn something from the emperor penguin. She remembered a trip—a research expedition—to Antarctica, with Linus Mars, her second husband. She remembered the fragile light, the quilt of darkness, the closeness of stars—the way they had hung, low in the sky, like lanterns just waiting to be picked up and carried. She recalled the fur blankets, and how they had made her cry, because life was hard enough for creatures on the tundra without humans slaughtering them for their skins.
    Linus had held her, in love but amused. How funny it was, to love a woman with such a soft heart that she would mourn for dead animals with such fervor that she'd rather be cold than wrapped in their pelts. Even then—and it was their honeymoon, as well as a research trip—Stevie had known she had made a mistake in marrying him. The passion she'd felt for Linus was as strong as ever, but it gave way to the dawning realization that there was a fold between them—a wrinkle in their relationship, in their universe—and it was big, and came between them.
    Linus could always step back from her and see her from the distance of humor, amusement, judgment. But Stevie's fatal flaw was her longing to be
as one
with the man she loved, to merge her heart and soul with his completely. He was a scientist; she was an artist. His sketches were analytical, seeking greater understanding of the penguins' amazing adaptations to a brutally harsh environment. Hers, although also analytical, steered for the emotional, the miraculous, the outstandingly warm heart of a wickedly cold climate bird.
    Stevie had met Dr. Linus Mars in Woods Hole, at the Marine Biological Laboratory, where he was presenting a