The Summer's End Read online

  “Mary Alice Monroe has become the premier nature writer among southern novelists.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Pat Conroy

  Praise for the Lowcountry Summer Trilogy

  The Summer Wind

  “Monroe reveals a variety of insights . . . with perception, wit and intelligence . . . [and] imbues her setting with such color and chemistry that any reader will be pining to visit after only a few pages into this book. Her characters soak up the atmosphere and so do the readers. . . . Monroe captures the essence and spreads it on her pages, and she does it with stories that touch the mind and the heart of her readers. The Summer Wind may be part of a trilogy, but it is also a stand-alone story of depth and compassion. It is the perfect beach read, and a whole lot more.”

  —The Huffington Post

  “Distinct, complex, and endearing characters . . . Mary Alice Monroe continues to make Charleston proud with her authentic and purposeful writings.”

  —Charleston Magazine

  “Monroe’s vivid imagery of the Lowcountry’s smells, tastes and sights brings you up to the door of the Sea Breeze, so even if you’re at home far from the ocean, you can imagine yourself there.”

  —The Herald-Sun

  “Monroe deftly explores the unique problems each woman faces. . . . These are modern women addressing the prickly questions of identity and purpose in today’s world, a world very different from the one their grandmother knew as a young bride. . . . Written with convincing Southern charm and thoughtfulness, The Summer Wind explores the bonds of sisterhood and the challenges of modern womanhood with warmth and genuine affection.”

  —BookPage

  “A series I urge everyone to get into, it makes the perfect beach read and I know you will be fully invested in this family as much as I am.”

  —A Southern Girls Bookshelf

  “The second book in the Lowcountry Summer Trilogy, The Summer Wind . . . pulls at your heart strings even more than the first.”

  —Posting for Now

  “The perfect summertime beach read. And even after the summer season is long gone, you can pick it up and be back at the beach in no time flat.”

  —Maurice on Books

  The Summer Girls

  “Monroe knows her characters like no one else could, and her portrayals of the summer girls are subtle, realistic, carefully crafted, and pitch-perfect.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “More than just a beautifully written, moving portrayal of three sisters finding themselves and each other after years of separation . . . [The Summer Girls] deals head-on with significant issues so skillfully woven into the narrative that I often stopped to consider the import of what I’d just read. If you’re a dedicated environmentalist, this book is a must-read. If you’re just someone who enjoys a good story, you’ll get that, too, and much more.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Cassandra King

  “This book contains drama, humor, and romance which any good summer read does. Plus it has the message about the care and treatment of dolphins. Monroe is an expert at making this blend and The Summer Girls is one of her most successful efforts.”

  —The Huffington Post

  “Mary Alice Monroe sings a song of praise to the bottle-nosed dolphins that bring so much joy to the men and women who gaze at the creeks and rivers of the lowcountry each evening. Like all her books, The Summer Girls is a call to arms.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Pat Conroy

  “Mary Alice Monroe at her best . . . The Summer Girls reminded me of what I love about Southern fiction.”

  —Heroes and Heartbreakers

  “A captivating story of how the ocean and a charismatic dolphin reunite sisters in the alluring ecological setting of the lowcountry of South Carolina. The story resonates on a personal level and, moreover, delivers a powerful reminder of the importance of protecting dolphins and the environment in which they live.”

  —Patricia Fair, Director, Marine Mammal Program, NOAA

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  Dedicated to my daughters—

  Claire Dwyer, Gretta Kruesi, and Caitlin Kruesi.

  You are my heroines.

  ISLAND TIME

  By Marjory Wentworth

  Piercing the layers of night with flames

  that melt the long hours before dawn,

  the sun gently peels a shroud of fog

  from the misted island. She embraces

  the ripening surface of the earth,

  where houses wrapped in sleep emerge from darkness

  like hundreds of seeds scattered along roadsides.

  Streetlights are still burning. Beneath them,

  cars pass. Weary ships with passengers

  given time to rearrange the memories of night,

  as the day spreads itself before them

  like an unwanted offering.

  Each unfilled hour, ticking

  ahead on the clock in their minds.

  A woman rises from bed to sit

  at her window and wait for daylight

  to take hold of the world

  spinning into place. She is

  searching for a child, the ghost

  of a child, a scrap, his small voice

  in the wind, a carved smile

  on the face of the moon—

  just any familiar sign

  from one of a billion stars.

  And while shrimp boats glide out to sea

  on the rows of first light, she watches

  a dolphin caught in the marsh

  swimming an endless circle

  Excerpt from Noticing Eden, Hub City Writers Project, 2003. Printed with permission.

  Chapter One

  The dawn of another summer day. Mamaw tightened the soft cashmere throw around her thin shoulders. Slivers of light pierced the velvety blackness over the Cove, and pewter-colored shadows danced on the spiky marsh grass like ethereal ghosts.

  Mamaw sat huddled on an oversize, black wicker chair on her back porch, her legs tucked beneath her. The fog was moist on her face and the predawn chill seemed to penetrate straight to her bones. She couldn’t seem to get warm with Lucille gone. Since her dear friend’s death, many nights she’d awakened from a fitful sleep and come outdoors hoping the fresh air would settle her. She’d found scant warmth or peace in the chill of predawn. In the distance, the Atlantic Ocean, her mercurial friend, roared like a hungry beast. The waves were devouring the dunes in a relentless rhythm. Echoes reverberated over Sullivan’s Island.

  Over a week had passed since Lucille’s death. Yet she still felt her old friend’s presence around her, hovering in death as she had in life. Dear Lucille. Death came to us all. She knew that. Mamaw was no stranger to death. At eighty years of age, she could hardly have been spared the loss of loved ones. She’d buried her parents, and, too early, her son and husband. Tonight she felt the past was more alive than the present. Memories of her loved ones played vividly in her mind.

  Mamaw drew a long, ragged breath. From far away, she heard the mournful bellowing of a ship’s foghorn. From a nearby tree, a bird began calling out his strident dawn whistles . . . a cardinal, she thought.

  She listened, stirred from her lethargy by the dawn song. She watched as the morning light, in degrees, brightened the skyline, revealing the ragged tips of green sea grass, palm trees clustered on a hammock, and the towering Ravenel Bridge, appearing
as two great sailing vessels, in the distance. Slowly, the rising sun illuminated the darkness, peeling away the shroud from her heart. She felt her despair dissipate with the mist. Mamaw said a prayer of thanks to the rising sun and took a deep breath of the cool, mud-scented air.

  Another day was dawning. The worst was over.

  Foolish old woman, she chided herself as the gray sky shifted to blue. Look at yourself, sitting in the dark, mourning your friend. Wouldn’t Lucille give you what for if she spied you moping like this outdoors in the damp chill, still in your nightclothes? Who had time to lollygag? Their plan for the summer was not finished! She’d invited her three nearly estranged granddaughters to Sea Breeze in May—and they’d come. The first time they’d been together in over a decade. True, it had so far been a tumultuous summer of change and growth, ups and downs, joys and heartaches. But it was her triumph that they’d weathered the vicissitudes together. Eudora, Carson, and Harper had rediscovered the sisterly love they’d shared as children when they played together during the summers here on Sullivan’s Island. Howling at the moon? She should be crowing like a rooster!

  Yet, much was still to be done and she was running out of time. It was already August. The sea turtles were finishing another season, the children would be heading back to school, the ospreys would soon head south with the other migrating birds and butterflies. Summer’s end was fast approaching. Soon, too, her Summer Girls would be leaving.

  Mamaw felt a twinge of loss at just the thought. She would miss them—their sweet faces, their chatter, tears, laughter. The footfalls in the house, the drama, the hugs and kisses liberally offered. What a summer it had been!

  Her smile slipped. Not only would her granddaughters leave in the fall. She, too, would be leaving Sea Breeze. Moving to a retirement home when Sea Breeze was sold. With her granddaughters and Lucille gone, she would, she thought with a shudder, be utterly alone.

  Mamaw lowered her cheek to her palm. She at least knew where she would go at summer’s end, but where would her girls go? Each of the women was unsure of what her next step would be when she left the safe embrace of Sea Breeze. Dora’s divorce was pending, Carson was pregnant, and Harper was, for lack of a better term, completely adrift.

  “Ah, Lucille,” she said aloud to the presence she felt hovering in the pearly light. “You were the one who always rallied me in my dark moments. We lured them here. And there is still much yet to do to finish our plan.” She sighed. “I don’t know if I can do it alone. But I must try.”

  Mamaw’s eyes rose to the sky, where great shafts of pink and blue continued to break through the horizon. A smile eased across her face. The moon might be gone, she thought. But the sun was rising on another day.

  In another room of Sea Breeze, Harper lay on her bed in the steely light, her hands tucked beneath her head, listening to the mighty roar of the ocean. How loud the sound of the waves was this morning, she thought. The echoes reverberated in the still night. She thrilled to the sound, so different from what she was accustomed to in the city.

  In New York, Harper awoke to the blare of police sirens, honking horns, and banging garbage trucks. So much was different here. She was different here. Over the past few months since she’d arrived on Sullivan’s Island, her body had slowly acclimated from the fast pace and sense of urgency she experienced in the city to the slower, quieter rhythm of the lowcountry. She no longer went out to parties or bars until late at night, nor did she charge out of bed in the morning at the sound of an alarm. At Sea Breeze her days were ruled by the sun. Early to bed, early to rise.

  Harper smiled, wondering if she’d ever foreseen how much she’d enjoy this lifestyle. No, she didn’t think she had. In fact, initially she had quite dreaded the prospect of spending time at Sea Breeze this summer. She recalled her outrage when, only a few days after her and her sisters’ arrival, Mamaw had announced her true intentions: that the women stay the entire summer. Harper stretched languidly while the light brightened to give the room a pearly glow. As she turned to her side to look out the window, her hand brushed against something. Surprised, she sat up to investigate. Sheets of paper lay strewn across her bed and scattered on the floor.

  She rubbed her eyes as understanding took hold. Her book . . .

  She must’ve fallen asleep while reading her manuscript, she realized, yawning. She rose from her bed and gathered the two-hundred-some sheets into a pile, taking her time to put the pages in order. As she did, her eyes reread a sentence here and there. Not bad, she thought to herself. The emotions in the words felt true. Then again, she was a biased judge. Her mother had made it brutally clear when she was just a girl that she didn’t have talent. Just like her father, her mother had said dismissively, waving away Harper’s fledgling attempts at short stories and poems. Her mother was a renowned editor, so Harper had taken her words as fact. Those fateful words still stung, even after decades.

  Since then, Harper hadn’t shown her writing to anyone. She’d pursued a career as an editor, discovering she had a talent in assisting others with their stories, with taking their innermost thoughts and putting them onto the page.

  Yet she’d found editing others’ words didn’t bring her the same satisfaction as writing her own. So she’d continued writing—in her room, in coffee shops, on trains—in secret. Like a sinful pleasure she could indulge in when she wanted to dish out her anger or amusement. Not until this summer, this block of time she’d given herself without interruption—or rather, the time that Mamaw had thrust upon her, not taking no for an answer—had Harper decided to write a book. A whole body of work with a beginning, a middle, and an end. She would never know whether she could actually write a book until she’d finished one. And, she thought, picking up the papers in her hands, she was nearly done.

  Harper rose and placed the manuscript on her desk, resting her hands on the pile of papers, overcome with a sense of ownership and pride.

  Her book.

  Her sisters thought she’d been taking the summer off, shamelessly idle while they scrambled to find jobs and apartments. True, she’d been enjoying her break at Sea Breeze, gardening, swimming, talking with her sisters, and roaming the far ends of the island. But she’d been privately working, too. She didn’t dare tell anyone about it, because if she did, she knew they’d want to read it.

  No, she thought, slipping the manuscript into the desk drawer. She would keep her manuscript all to herself. She wasn’t as outgoing as her sister Carson, who was quick-witted and clever. Nor was she as bold as her eldest sister, Dora, who had strong opinions on every subject, even when unasked. Harper expressed herself best on paper.

  And, she thought with a rueful smile, her sisters wouldn’t be pleased to learn that she was writing about them.

  Outside her window she heard the strident dawn whistles of a bird singing in a nearby tree. She paused to listen, wondering what kind of bird it was that awakened her most mornings. She vowed to find out. She wanted to learn the names of the birds and the trees and the plants of this island that she’d come to love. She’d spent all of her twenty-eight years in beautiful places—her mother’s fashionable apartment overlooking Central Park in New York City, the house in the Hamptons, and her grandparents’ manor house in England. Not to mention the exclusive boarding schools and Ivy League college she’d attended. But nowhere did she feel so at home or content, or as much herself, as she did here in the lowcountry, by the ocean, at Sea Breeze.

  She’d be leaving soon.

  The thought came unbidden and struck a chord of sadness in the morning’s sweet music. Harper went to the window and opened the wooden slats of the plantation shutter to peer out. Pale gray light illuminated the shadows. Carson was always nattering on about how glorious it was to be out on the water when the dawn exploded over the ocean. How it was her favorite time of the day. Carson could be so passionate about anything connected to water.

  Harper suddenly felt a stirring to witness that sight for herself. Why not now? she asked herself. Befor
e it was too late. What was she waiting for?

  She quickly slipped into a swimsuit and denim shorts. Laced up her running shoes. As quietly as the mouse she was nicknamed after, she slipped open the sliding door that separated her bedroom from her grandmother’s. It rattled on the track, and grimacing, she paused. She didn’t hear Mamaw stir in her dark bedroom. Harper tiptoed quickly across the carpet, closing the door behind her.

  The house was quiet, everyone still asleep in the wee morning hour. Even Carson, who, for all her talk, had begun sleeping in after announcing her pregnancy. Making good her escape, Harper flew out the front door, aware that the sun waited for no man or woman. She was met with cool and sweet-tasting morning air. The wind that had roiled the ocean all night had chased away the humidity and heat, leaving the morning air unusually refreshing for August. In the quiet, all sounds were amplified. Above her, the leaves of the great oak tree rustled in the breeze and the palm fronds rattled. Beneath her feet the gravel crunched loudly as she hurried across the driveway to the garage. The rusty, trusty old bicycle leaned against the wall. She pulled it out from the garage, swung her leg over the seat, and took off.

  Despite her twenty-eight years, Harper felt no older than thirteen as she pedaled furiously along the streets. The neighboring houses appeared blanketed in the shadows, their occupants still asleep in the hush over the island. Only a few feral cats darted soundlessly across the roads. She hadn’t seen as many of them clustering on the island this summer as she remembered from her girlhood summers spent at Sea Breeze. People said it was the coyotes. She kept her eyes peeled as she pushed on along the muted street. Past Stella Maris Catholic Church, with its hallowed steeple. Past the ominous, giant molelike burrows of Fort Moultrie. Past the tight cluster of restaurants, shuttered now and deserted. Only a few joggers and an occasional automobile shared the road with her.

  At last she reached the northern tip of the island, where Carson had told her the surfers gathered. She turned off Middle Street toward the sea. Several cars, all with roof racks for surfboards, crowded the narrow side streets. Harper pushed the wheels of her bike through the soft sand of the path past the tall barrier of shrubs. The surf was unusually loud this morning. When at last the path opened up to the beach, she stopped to catch her breath.