Off-Island

Marlene Hauser

Description

A book about being lost, resilient, & coming of age...Krista Bourne has always been surrounded by the strength, love and wealth of her family and their homes in New York City and Martha's Vineyard. She has neverhad to think for herself. Living with boyfriend Michael and her elderly grandfather, she can also summon up the comforting ghosts of her beloved father andgrandmother. In vivid dreams she flies with her pilot father, and when awake remembers idyllic childhood holidays spent with her bohemian grandmother.When Krista impulsively walks out on her career as a professional dancer, it is the beginning of a new chapter in her life. She feels unsettled and excited by the senseof imminent change around her. This feeling turns to panic, then fear when she realises that she is pregnant and is uncertain whether or not she wants to keep thebaby, bringing her and Michael to a crossroads in their relationship. Adamant that she alone must deal with the situation, Krista rejects all offers of support fromhim, isolating her at a time when she most needs help. Krista's journey and emotional upheaval take her back to her summer home on Martha's Vineyard, where sheis surprised to find out that she does not know her family history quite as well as she imagined...Off-Islandwill appeal to readers who enjoy romance, empowering fiction and extremely relatable characters with situations grounded in reality.

Sujets

• Contemporary romance

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 27 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781788034258
• Langue: English

Extrait

Off-Isla nd


Marlene Hauser

Copyright © 2017 Marlene Hauser

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 9781788034258

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To my family, for everything.

Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen

About the Author

Chapter One
At half past seven on the evening of August 21, Krista Bourne decided she had had enough. She abandoned the ballet barre and her outraged teacher, Madame Chevalier, who shouted after her.
“Miss Bourne, if you’d rather be out in the rain then of course you should go. I am tired of your lack of commitment! You are taking my time, the other dancers’ time, and what do you give in return? Nothing.”
Krista looked back over her shoulder at her twenty wide-eyed classmates. Their arms and legs, for once not rigorously placed en attitude , dangled like the limbs of marionettes before the strings were twitched. The puppeteer gestured for them to continue with a sweep of her silver-headed walking cane and stalked after her disobedient pupil.
“You are not a dancer,” she hissed. “You are always half somewhere else. Always .”
Krista nodded her head, aware there was some justice in this statement, and softly closed the door to the dressing room behind her. Madame Chevalier continued to speak undaunted.
“Now go, take the rest with you, and do not come back until you can bring me life. A full extension!” She beat the silver handle of her stick against the dressing-room door and waited for a response, a last gesture of defiance from the girl who had dared to walk out of her class without being dismissed. The only answer was silence. Madame abandoned Krista to her ingratitude and resumed her own place in front of the mirror.
Twenty soles brushed against the hardwood floor, toes pointed from the hip and held one count before brushing back. In the dressing room, Krista slipped the pins from her hair and allowed it to fall to her waist. She rummaged in the old flight bag she brought with her to every class for the cotton T-shirt and yoga pants she’d chosen to wear earlier in the afternoon, to combat the insufferable city heat. Tears rolled silently down her face. She disliked any attention directed at her, but this was the last time she would need to endure it. Really the last. She had been daydreaming at the barre , eyes turned to the skylight, watching the storm clouds massing overhead like half-wild animals, rearing and colliding with one another, dark and primordial, dwarfing the puny flashing marquee on the Gulf & Western building.
Madame Chevalier was right. Krista Bourne would rather smell rain, feel rain, taste rain, than stretch and discipline her reluctant body even one hour longer. Giddy from her own act of defiance, Krista dressed in a hurry, quickly brushing her hair and leaving it loose. Cool air rushed through the cotton clothing as she descended the steps from the fourth-floor studio. New York had been waiting for this thunderstorm since June. With her palm gliding lightly over the chipped banister, Krista secretly asked the storm to break when she was a block from home. Let me feel the swelling, the wind, the pre-storm. Lose myself in the El Greco blue. She tossed the flight bag over her shoulder, threw her blond hair back as if it were a mane, and stepped out in the long, turned-out stride of a dancer.
“Michael,” she said aloud, her words drowned out by the evening traffic, the tired horns, and quickened her step towards home, towards telling someone that things were changing. It all began last night with her dream.

She could not land. She was afraid to land, and yet it felt as if the choice were not really hers. She could not be flying under her own power, for she was bound, arms crossed at the heart, ankles shackled together, lips sealed. She was mute. In the distance was her mother, afraid to fly, and yet here she was, unable to land. Landing would mean taking form, taking color, taking shape. A personality. Landing was death, so she remained safe in her cocoon where every notion, every desire, was within conjuring distance. No law, no order, no others, only the motion pictures of a thousand different places and a thousand foreign names. A kaleidoscope of fireworks, the high-rolling rustle of beauty, the motion, color and light of insanity.
She stood upright, entombed; yet she seemed to fly invisible through the ages. Between sensory flights, she rested as pure concentrated energy, a beating heart, a steady pulse, housed in a canopic vessel in a dark chamber where dazzling, attenuated shards of light progressed slowly over the stone wall. The light frightened her. When she attempted to escape, to fly away, a wildly beating thing, the steady pulse rooted her to the vessel, to the chamber. The shards of light drew close. The closer they came, the clearer she could see her chamber, her crypt. But it was her heart she felt she must save from the light. If it were to shine on the vessel, penetrate the seal, she knew it would mean the end. Somehow it would change her forever. There would be no going back.

Then the light touched the vessel, cracked it… and she had been unable to scream. Michael woke her up, forcing her clenched arms away from her chest.
“Are you okay?”
“Egypt,” she was finally able to say, “I dreamed of Egypt.”
She did not mention the crypt-like room, the flight through time or the danger inherent in the light. She did not mention death. Michael said he could understand why she had dreamed of Egypt.
“You’re wrapped tighter than a mummy,” he said, and helped her unwind the sheets.
“My hero,” she laughed, and sought refuge against his warm chest.

*

Krista walked towards the subway station at 59th Street, shuddering as she recalled the dream. A falafel vendor lolled against his stand, the flimsy yellow-and-red umbrella still upraised defiantly against the gathering storm, a threadbare fringe driven horizontal by the wind. Everyone seemed to relish the knowledge of the upcoming storm. A sitar player, a young man with a crew cut, smiled at Krista as she approached. She noted the odds and ends in his wicker donation basket. As she passed, she unzipped her bag and tossed him the pink ballet slippers. He nodded and she laughed, thinking things were changing fast.
Descending on the escalator, Krista momentarily considered walking home, or else taking the bus, anything so she could stay above ground and watch the storm roll in. But the train won out. It was faster, and if Krista had to choose between her redwood deck and high-backed wicker chair, or a walk down Broadway to the Village in a downpour, she would opt for home, for nudity beneath a familiar blue beach towel, and her three cats purring happily on her lap. She wanted to watch the parched oak tree in the courtyard welcome the deluge.
The train seemed to take forever. Krista missed the express at 42nd Street because her thoughts were elsewhere. They were on Ilsa, her grandmother, and what she might think if Krista were to stop dancing forever. It was she who had inspired her granddaughter to dance, to take up ballet for exercise and discipline, but also to seek freedom in movement.
“Like Isadora Duncan, see?” she enthused as together they pored over a sheaf of watercolors of the famous dancer. “Express yourself,” Ilsa repeated and repeated.
Krista recalled many summer afternoons spent in Ilsa’s small study, or else in the studio, usually lying against her grandmother’s soft arm. It was she who discovered for the Bourne family that their youngest offspring had the odd habit of sleeping with her eyes open, especially after her father’s death. But asking Ilsa Bourne her opinion of this evening’s events was impossible. She had been dead for almost two years. Perhaps, Krista thought, her grandmother’s death and not going to the Island, Martha’s Vineyard, had made the heat these past two summers particularly unbearable. Krista sighed. She missed the woman who had always lived on the Island, no matter what the season, the woman who always seemed to have secrets and secret places, the woman whose iridescent paintings would never be seen by anyone so long as they remained in the garage, the storeroom and the boarded-up Island summer house. Her grandmother for some reason had never gone off-Island and, after she had died, it seemed wrong to remove the work she had accomplished there.
Krista boun