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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006
Copyright © Paullina Simons 2005
Besame Mucho Written by Consuelo Velasquez © 1941 & 1943 P.H.A.M., Mexico Latin-American Music Pub. Co. Ltd, London. Used by permission
Paullina Simons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007162499
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780007390816
Version: 2017-09-25
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,Yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst …For there, they that carried us awaycaptive required of us a song,And they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,Sing us one of the songs of Zion.How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?Psalm 137
The song of songs, which is Solomon’s.The Song of Solomon
The Carapace
Carapace n. a thick hard case or shell made of bone or chitin that covers part of the body of an animal such as a lobster.
Once upon a time, in Stonington, Maine, before sunset, at the end of a hot war and the beginning of a cold one, a young woman dressed in white, outwardly calm but with trembling hands, sat on a bench by the harbor, eating ice cream.
By her side was a small boy, also eating ice cream, his a chocolate. They were casually chatting; the ice cream was melting faster than the mother could eat it. The boy was listening as she sang “Shine Shine My Star” to him, a Russian song, trying to teach him the words, and he, teasing her, mangled the verses. They were watching for the lobster boats coming back. She usually heard the seagulls squabbling before she saw the boats themselves.
There was the smallest breeze, and her summer hair moved slightly about her face. Wisps of it had gotten out of her long thick braid, swept over her shoulder. She was blonde and fair, translucent-skinned, translucent-eyed, freckled. The tanned boy had black hair and dark eyes, and chubby toddler legs.
They seemed to sit without purpose, but it was a false ease. The woman was watching the boats in the blue horizon single-mindedly. She would glance at the boy, at the ice cream, but she gawped at the bay as if she were sick with it.
Tatiana wants a drink of herself in the present tense, because she wants to believe there is no yesterday, that there is only the moment here on Deer Isle—one of the long sloping overhanging islands off the coast of central Maine, connected to the continent by a ferry or a thousand-foot suspension bridge, over which they came in their RV camper, their used Schult Nomad Deluxe. They drove across Penobscot Bay, over the Atlantic and south, to the very edge of the world, into Stonington, a small white town nested in the cove of the oak hills at the foot of Deer Isle. Tatiana—trying desperately to live only in the present—thinks there is nothing more beautiful or peaceful than these white wood houses built into the slopes on narrow dirt roads overlooking the expanse of the rippling bay water that she watches day in and day out. That is peace. That is the present. Almost as if there is nothing else.