One Summer in Savannah: A Novel

by Terah Shelton Harris

Genres: Family Life; African American; Southern; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

"Nothing short of astonishing. The best writers are brave writers, and Harris has proven herself among those ranks." —Mateo Askaripour, New York Times bestselling author of Black Buck

A compelling debut that glows with bittersweet heart and touching emotion, deeply interrogating questions of family, redemption, and unconditional love in the sweltering summer heat of Savannah, as two people discover what it means to truly forgive.

It's been eight years since Sara Lancaster left her home in Savannah, Georgia. Eight years since her daughter, Alana, came into this world, following a terrifying sexual assault that left deep emotional wounds Sara would do anything to forget. But when Sara's father falls ill, she's forced to return home and face the ghosts of her past.

While caring for her father and running his bookstore, Sara is desperate to protect her curious, outgoing, genius daughter from the Wylers, the family of the man who assaulted her. Sara thinks she can succeed—her attacker is in prison, his identical twin brother, Jacob, left town years ago, and their mother are all unaware Alana exists. But she soon learns that Jacob has also just returned to Savannah to piece together the fragments of his once-great family. And when their two worlds collide—with the type of force Sara explores in her poetry and Jacob in his astrophysics—they are drawn together in unexpected ways.

"An unforgettable portrayal of familial tragedy, bravery, and redemption." —Kim Michele Richardson, New York Times bestselling author of The Book Woman's Daughter

 

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Release date: July 4, 2023

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark

Print pages: 460

Sample

SARAH

 

IT’S DIFFICULT TO PINPOINT the moment I started loving my daughter. I wish it were when she fluttered inside me for the first time. Or when I cradled her tiny body seconds after birth. The truth is, my love for her started much later, when the reality of her conception had faded enough for me to see only her, when I realized that she, like me, was a survivor.

Probably, though, there was no one moment but an aggregation of moments, many of them happening because of her vulnerability: when she suffered through her first bout with colic, during her fussiness over cutting three teeth simultaneously—moments when a maternal mixture of emotions and hormones hummed through me, signaling that it was normal for me to love her and reminding me over and over again that having her was well worth the emotional cost.

I study her now, playing down in the water. Her long hair catches in the breeze, whipping sandy strands across her golden face, her unafraid green eyes watching, waiting for the next wave. These features—his features—are all I remember about her father. And yet, what I didn’t know about him I see in her, like a window into a stranger’s soul. Her drawings always resemble, a bit too perfectly, her intended goal. A dog. A tree. A house. Her proficiency for mathematics, in algebra, in trigonometry, in calculus. Talent you’re born with, not taught. I often wonder if she doesn’t eat fish because he didn’t or if she loves to swim because he did. One thing is for sure: she is all him and none of me. And that single thought terrifies me.

“Mom!” Alana yells, pulling me from my thoughts. “How long was I under that time?”

I close my notebook, its lined pages almost blank, and glance at my watch. “Fifty-two seconds.”

She twists her full lips and churns her arms to control herself in the strong current of Howard Cove. “I can do better.”

Alana possesses the intensity of someone far beyond her eight years. She is already stronger, more determined, more driven than I was when I had her at eighteen, like she is living her life at a faster clip than everyone else.

“One more time, and then we have to go.”

“Aww…Mom,” Alana says, her shoulders collapsing with the weight of disappointment. The water moves her a bit, and she makes herself straighten up and tread again. “Can’t we stay just a little while longer?”

I don’t want this day to end either. Just after nine, Alana had leaped into my bed, sending a wave of sheets billowing into the air. She settled against me, her right forearm propped against my thigh, her left hand moving steadily, her finger drawing something on my knee, probably another clock. I wrote two lines of a poem, the fingers of my other hand entwined in her unbrushed hair, my mind churning for a third line. We clung to each other like that, the bed strewn with books, transfixed in the rhythm of our everyday life, surrounded by silence, until Alana’s stomach, or maybe it was mine, growled, a deep bellow. We looked at each other and laughed. Alana glanced at the yellow watch (her fifth one this year) strapped to her tiny wrist. Five past noon. Had we forgotten to eat breakfast? Again?

It was my idea to come to Jasper Beach. As I sliced avocado for our turkey sandwiches, I pointed out to Alana, who was masterfully mustard-smiley-facing the bread, that the entire house glowed with the return of the prodigal sun. Down East winters are frigid and brutal, biting to the bone. It had been an exceptionally long winter, with record-low temperatures and record-high snowfall. So when the early summer sun beckons, heating the water to a tolerable temperature,

 you heed its call.

Now, the afternoon sun gathers at the break of the horizon, and an ashen blanket of clouds looms overhead. A sharp wind whistles around my ears and whips against the gravel beach below. That’s the thing with Maine: Don’t like the weather? Wait five minutes.

“It’s getting late, and I want to get home before the rain.” I stand, my left hand saluting the setting sun. “Ready. Set. Go.”

Alana wipes her nose, inhales deeply, and dunks back underwater as I gather our things, which is no small task. I’m prepared—overprepared—for everything. Into our monstrous bag, I stuff a pair of goggles, two beach towels, sunscreen, empty bottles of water, a fully stocked first-aid kit, a book I knew Alana wouldn’t have time to read, a second bag of chips we hadn’t opened, a safety whistle, and hand sanitizer. I hook the small, pink life jacket over my arm, chuckling to myself for bringing it along since Alana can swim now; she has been able to for two years. But when I start packing our beach bag, somehow, it ends up in there.

I acknowledge the smothering grip I maintain on Alana. Being a mother is a lesson in impossible love. I know I need to let go. That I will have to. And I have. I no longer tote extra clothes, a rain jacket, bug spray, blankets, and garlic powder (for jellyfish stings) on these beach trips. But I can never be too careful when it comes to Alana. Her safety.

I collapse the umbrella, grab a dry towel, and walk to the water’s edge. Jasper Beach is a rarity. Heaps of ruddy-brown stones stretch its entire length, from the sedimentary cliffs closer to Old Radar Hill to the caves at the far end. Under each of my steps, rhyolite stones crunch, their polished surfaces rubbed smooth by the sea. As the waves skulk to the shore and recede again, the beach hisses.

Alana pops out of the water, gasping for air, and I dutifully look at my watch.

“How long was that?” she asks, wading out of the water, running her fingers through her hair.

I open the towel and engulf her. “Fifty-nine seconds. Good job.”

“I knew…I could do it!” she says, her voice muffled by the towel. “Next time, I’m going to go for a whole minute.”

“I know you will,

honey.”

I bend down to her level and dry her body. It’s red and blotchy from the May sun. I find the sunscreen in the bag and squeeze a dollop in my hand.

“Wait. I thought we were leaving. Why are you putting more sunscreen on me?”

I lather my hands and rub her shoulders and on down to her fingers. “Because I don’t want you to burn on the way to the car. Remember how bad that burn hurt last summer?”

Alana crosses her skinny arms and shifts her bony hips with the proclivity of a teenage girl. “It didn’t hurt that bad.”

“Well, I don’t want you to hurt at all.” I finish and dab a bit on the tip of her nose.

“Mom!” She wipes it off.

I stand as she slips her feet into her flip-flops, and I hand her her bag, a pair of hot-pink sunglasses as she checks her watch again. She smiles and adjusts it around her wrist, clearly pleased the second hand is still steady on its journey around the dial. I wonder how long before this one starts ticking backward or stops altogether.

“Could my dad wear a watch?” Alana asks. “Or did they always break like mine do?”

After eight years, she increasingly wants to know more about him. Her interest always starts with a question. Sometimes it’s pure silliness: “Did my dad watch reruns of Gilligan’s Island when he was a kid?” Today: her perplexing fascination with time.

I swallow hard to ease the constriction in my throat, a move imperceptible to her eye, and respond. “I’m not sure.” My voice pitches up on the final syllable. I never know the answers to her questions. Since she’s filled with all sorts of mysteries I attribute to her father, maybe, just as watches strangely malfunction around her wrist, the same happens to him too. But when I answer her, I look the interested-and-thoughtful part as best I can. We’ve been on this seesaw for almost a year now, and I don’t know how long it will continue.

“Why don’t you ever swim with me?” Alana asks as we slog to the car.

I am grateful that her tender age often means she doesn’t dwell on questions or the answers for too long.

“Well, today, I wanted to write,” I say.

As a girl, I had been happiest in the water, floating among the reeds, the water lapping over my body, the sky in its vastness above me. The air tasting like salt and sunshine, like freedom. Back then, it didn’t cost much to be free, just a strawberry

Charms Blow Pop and the belief you could conquer the world.

“Can we come back next Saturday?”

“We’ll see.”

“Hold on,” she says, stopping and foraging through her bag. When she finds her yellow notebook, she flips to the page with MOM written across the top.

“See your page? It’s almost blank. If we come back next weekend, then you can swim,” she says, her emerald eyes dancing. “It could be an LT task, Mom.”

Alana has built her life around time. The minutes it takes to brush her teeth. The seconds she can hold her breath. The hours to finish a drawing. But it is the missing time, time spent sleeping, at school, or doing chores—what she deems her lost time—that she obsesses over the most. What could she accomplish in the eight hours she sleeps, she often wonders. Her Lost Time notebook lists things she feels she misses during Lost Time. Activities like putting together a five-thousand-piece puzzle (eight hours) and memorizing the dance routine to “Thriller” (two hours) fill the pages.

“We’ll see.”

But again her mind is already moving ahead. She’s focused on more reminders in her notebook, like the one that causes her to start bouncing as she walks. “My Google project! What about the Google Science Fair? Can I do it? Pleeeaaassseee! I’m finally old enough.”

I hold my smile, hoping it doesn’t look nearly as lopsided as it feels, while my mind churns and a flutter of panic knifes my heart. Talk of the Google Science Fair started when she read an article about one of the finalists. Six at the time, Alana had been two years too young to participate, a reprieve I know is now up. Still, I hadn’t expected this quite so soon. I thought I had at least another month until the applications opened.

I sift through various responses I had planned for this moment, fully aware none will be adequate, and decide on the noncommittal choice: “We’ll see.”

Alana’s steps slow. “You never say yes. You never let me do anything.”

Her words slap me, hard. Suddenly, I am aware of myself, exposed, as someone I don’t recognize.

I clear my throat and keep my voice level. “What about today?”

“It was your idea.” Alana kicks the sand with each delayed step. Her head is

tucked, her arms dangling, her bag trailing behind her.

My mind whirs with the complications her participation in the Google Science Fair would introduce. Winners’ and finalists’ names, pictures, and projects are published online and circulated for the world to see.

No, I have to focus on salvaging the rest of our good day. Such a day is not to be wasted.

“Well…I thought I would let you pick where we eat, but since everything is my idea…” I sigh playfully. “I guess we’ll just eat at home.”

In a blink, her expression changes again, from disappointment to jubilation. “Can we go to McDonald’s?” she yells. Her voice carries across the water, disturbing a flock of seagulls. “Please! Please! Please!”

I smile wide.

“Yessss! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer fish chowder from Helen’s?” I tease.

As Alana bounces and rattles off her order (“I want a cheeseburger. No, I had that last time. A caramel frappé! A big one!”), I inhale and exhale deeply, loosening the knot in my chest, feeling slightly relieved that I avoided this hurdle. For now.

“Mom,” Alana says a few steps behind me as we reach the parking lot. “Wait for me.”

“You’re the one moving like a turtle.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Oh no?” I say, securing the heavy bag up on my arm. “What if I beat you to the car?”

She smiles, revealing a row of slightly crooked and spaced-out teeth whose future behind a string of braces is all but certain, before darting the remaining feet to the car. Her long legs quickly outpace mine; her laughter fades in the distance between us.

---

In the booth, even as Alana smacks on her chicken nuggets and fries dipped in a concoction of mayo and ketchup, her large caramel frappé at her fingertips, she doodles in her notebook, stopping only to check her watch. She blackens the lines of what looks like a box with buttons and levers, her tongue protruding from the side of her mouth, a cute quirk she’s had since she was four. Underneath the

box, a string of numbers and mathematical equations stretches the width of the notebook and continues for several lines.

Before, an afternoon at the beach and a trip to McDonald’s would have been enough to fill her for days. Such treats are rare, indeed, and not expected. I could replay the day for her, keeping the outing at the forefront of her mind until the next time. I am a master of distraction.

But as she grows older, my distractions don’t transmit their old potency and dilute far sooner than desired. Her ability to focus after a camera flash is improving. It’s only a matter of time before she sees right through me, through all of this.

The noise level crescendos and plummets as families flood in and out. Restless kids bark their orders before scurrying off to the play area. Two girls from Alana’s class stop and say hello. As always, I wish they would invite her to join them. They never do, and I know she would not accept anyway. Alana hates school and displays an even deeper aversion to the kids, especially the girls, in her class. But it doesn’t stop me from hoping that she can be a normal eight-year-old who watches cartoons, listens to One Direction, and engages with humans, not just ideas. After acknowledging her, the girls move on, arm in arm, giggling, unbeknownst to Alana, who barely lifts her head to look at them, let alone speak. I utter apologetic hellos to their parents as they navigate to clear tables, balancing trays of french fries and Big Macs around darting kids.

Not that I try to join the adults either. Like my daughter, I am lost in my own mind. The welt from Alana’s “you never let me do anything” still smarts. I am just as aware of my prohibitions as she is. No, we aren’t going to visit Grandpa and Sylvia. No, you can’t have a Facebook or Instagram account. No, you may not meet your grandmother.

There’s so much I will one day have to tell her about the basis of these nos, the origin. It’s a harsh truth to face, about me, her, and him. She will ask about him again. And not simple questions. She’ll ask how we met or why he isn’t here or why I never talk about him. What do you say to your daughter who is half the DNA of a person who causes your heart the daily battle of forgiveness versus vengeance?

This cowardice embarrasses

and shames me. I know I shouldn’t be afraid of my past, but I am.

Until that day, I do need a win, and not a temporary one. I need to say yes, and not to a large, caffeinated coffee drink. A yes to make up for all the nos. A yes to buy me time to become brave enough to tell her the truth.

I gulp, pushing down the unease that chokes my dry throat, and force the words out. “Is that your project?”

She nods as she slurps the last of her drink.

“What’s it about?”

“Interconnectedness of all things and the realization that instantaneous travel…”

I barely hear her; in my distracted mind, her voice trails off as if someone has turned down the volume. My heart pounds and aches all at once at my decision. Everything in me signals that flight instinct that has served me well, that warns me not to make this choice. And yet, when she finishes speaking, I say, “Okay, you can enter the fair.”

Alana stares at me, her mouth agape. “Really?”

I nod several times and force a smile, my fingers pumping my straw in and out of my empty cup.

Alana’s eyes widen, and her smile broadens before she leaps out of her chair and hurls herself into my arms. Her classmates stare, then snicker at Alana’s overt sign of affection. A current of heat runs through my body. I hold her, kissing her still-damp head and inhaling the scent of her, all coconut oil and salt water, and remind myself that this, this is all that matters. Then, she fist-pumps the sky, and she’s peppering me with a barrage of questions: Can we submit her idea tonight? How long do I think the entire process will take? Do I think she can win? To all I answer: we’ll see.

As we gather and pitch our trash, Alana begging for a second frappé before returning her focus to her project, I finally feel layers of tension dissipate, my slumped shoulders lifting. I have done it. I have bought myself time in having to answer the truly difficult questions.

Time. It is the word that echoes in my head as Alana settles into the front seat while shadows grow deeper around us. The rain stayed away till now, and the air snaps with an ominous feeling. Flashes of light pulse, and in return, a rippling wave of thunder roars. Time. How much time?

“Mom,” Alana says, stifling a yawn as I start the car. Before I turn onto Rogue Bluff Road and hit U.S. Highway 1 back to Lubec, she will be asleep. “Can you recite a poem?”

“Which one would you like?”

“The one about the tiger

.”

“Tyger Tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

I’ve been reciting poetry to Alana since her birth. For me as a child, bedtime stories consisted not of tales from Dr. Seuss or Walt Disney but of the poems of Frost, Tennyson, and Brooks. I am the daughter of a gentle but capricious father with an unapologetic love of poetry. He sees the world through a prism of language, blending into magical lines and stanzas. That sounds rather beautiful, but if I’m being honest, this “love” of his can be as alienating, even as destructive, as it is astounding.

But I’m not dwelling on my father right now. Poetry has become as much my and Alana’s realm as it is his. Speaking the words of the prolific Blake makes me consider my own dry spell. Two decent poems in six months? Definitely not okay for a poet who is supposed to be finishing her second collection.

When I wrote my first collection, inspiration pumped through me. Poetry was an outlet for everything I couldn’t say to those I needed to say things to. I didn’t expect to be published or garner enough royalties to put a modest down payment on our house and supplement my measly teaching salary—but I did. Nearly unheard of these days. But with the high school’s abrupt closure and writing becoming my sole income, my reason for writing became less of an outlet and more of a necessity, and the words dried up.

I follow the winding, lonely Highway 1 out of Machiasport toward Lubec, population 1,652 and shrinking, the easternmost town in the continental United States, four hours from an airport, and our home for the past four years. At night, there isn’t much on the road. The occasional headlight pierces the black-stained sky; an abandoned building or sporadic house rises from the dead earth. In twelve hours, it’ll be a different place. Under the morning sun lie green meadows spangled with purple lupines vying for attention against the sprawling horizon and sporadic views of the gray-blue waters of the Bay of Fundy.

There, host to some of the highest tides in the world, I’m home. I grew up along the high tides and salt marshes of Georgia’s lower coastal plain. “The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars,” my

father often quoted. Every day, the tide rolls out, new water rolls in, with no memory of yesterday, a fitting refuge.

I glance at Alana; her chin rests on her chest, her seat belt cutting into her sun-kissed cheek. I contemplate repositioning her, when the shrill ring of my cell phone breaks my thoughts. Eyes still on the road, I rummage through my purse. The options of who can be calling are limited to the fingers on one hand. The word Dad illuminates my display screen when I finally hold my phone up.

“Hi, Dad. I was just thinking about you.”

I know his response will not be a typical greeting.

I was nine years old when my father started incorporating poetry into his speech. He finds peace in poetry, spending hours every day studying the artistry of it in all its forms, styles, and rhetoric. It brings a fresh sense of life to communicating, he once told me when he still spoke in prose. After my mother died in a car accident when I was five, words became difficult for him, and he spoke less and less. Eventually, other people’s words became his way entirely.

I wait for his mellifluous, basso profundo voice, which resonates with confidence and only hints at his Georgia roots. Everyone close to Dad gets their own special greeting. Mine? A Sara Teasdale:

I thought of you and how you love this beauty,

And walking up the long beach all alone

I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder

As you and I once heard their monotone.

But instead:

“Sara, it’s Sylvia.”

Sylvia and my father have been companions, neighbors, and coworkers in his bookstore for over twenty years. As a child, I secretly hoped that they would get married, but their quirks (my father’s speech and Sylvia’s refusal to share either her house or his) prohibit it. Sylvia is also a confidant of mine, but she is not someone who calls me from Dad’s phone. Hearing her voice—hushed, serious but calm, loving, all at once—I’m taken back in time. It’s the same tone she used to coax me out of bed after I learned of my pregnancy nearly nine years ago. Her voice pushes at those old memories, another reminder that my wounds have resisted healing after all this time.

“It’s your father, hon.” I count the number of breaths I take before she continues. Three. “He…he…had a heart attack.”

I grip the phone tighter. “Is he…”

“He’s stable.”

“What happened?”

“He’s been under a lot of pressure at work.”

“Pressure…?” My father runs a tiny bookstore, Poetry & Prose, and while I’m sure it offers its own kind of challenges, I don’t understand—

“The Barnes & Noble closed a few months ago,” Sylvia says, interrupting my thoughts, “so he’s been rearranging the store, moving whole sections around. Redecorating. Expanding, really. We’re the only bookstore left now.”

Sylvia continues, her voice shaky with the effort of holding back tears. “I’ve been begging him to let Jacob help him, but you know your father.”

I picture him, boxes in his arms, with an unapologetic tilt of his head, his deep-set eyes bright with pride and surrounded by thin, rectangle frames that rest low on the bridge of his prominent nose, saying:

“Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press

My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain;

Lest sorrow lend me words and words express

The manner of my pity-wanting pain.”

My mind, seconds before stagnant from the shock, snaps to with questions: Why didn’t he tell me about the expansion? How is he paying for it? Who is Jacob? The weight of Sylvia’s tears keeps these questions tamped down in my throat, leaving room only for the pertinent one.

“Where’s he now?”

“They just wheeled him into surgery.”

A piercing siren squeals through the phone. I envision her pacing outside the hospital’s emergency room, her gray locs shaking as she moves, her black reading glasses perched on top of her head.

The siren fades, and I hear her say, “You need to come home.”

I stare at the road, trying to construct the memories of a place I called home for eighteen years. The intoxicating sweet smells of magnolia blossoms that perfume the South. Lazy Sunday afternoons on Dad’s porch, curled up with a good book, a glass of sweet tea within arm’s reach. The coiling strands of kudzu vines that blanket everything. A place I swore I would never return to.

“Sara, did you hear me?” Sylvia asks. She draws a long breath, like a smoker taking a

drag. “Your father needs you.”

I want to remind her, of all people, why I left in the first place. That even my ill father can’t make me step foot back in Savannah.

But all I say is “I’ll leave in the morning.”

 

JACOB

MY BOAT LURCHES, ITS motion propelling me forward, then rocking me back. Though I can hear the soft whirr of the trolling motor, the boat remains stuck. I am doing something wrong. Again.

The engine growls, louder this time, as I try once more to start it. ...