A Week at the Shore

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Well, he is cool,” Joy remarks. It is Jack in profile as he looks out to sea. His hair is longer, his features less marked. He might have been sixteen at the time, but his gaze seems prophetic.

  “I told you,” I remind her, lest she start imagining, “we were good friends.”

  “When you get past the hair, he kind of looks the same.”

  But I move on. “Tennis,” I say, pointing at a grouping of shots in which I’m running, arching into a serve, leaping sideways for a volley, executing a doublehanded backhand with a ferocious look on my face. “I was pretty good.”

  “You never play now.”

  “No time, no place.”

  “Who took these?”

  She is probably wondering if it was Elizabeth again, but it definitely was not. “My mother.”

  “You never said she was into photography?”

  “She was into lots of things—y’know, trying out bridge, then photography, even conversational Italian until she found what she liked.”

  “Accounting,” Joy says, having heard this part of the story before.

  “She was actually an old hand at it. Bills, taxes, you name it, she did it in the shadow of the toughest critic of all.”

  “Papa?” Joy asks with interest.

  “Definitely Papa.”

  “Why didn’t he just do it himself?”

  “Go ask.”

  “I will.”

  “Don’t!” I quickly cry. My go ask had been a throwaway expression, but I should have known better. As much of a role model as Jack Sab was about how not to raise an only child, my daughter is still a work in progress. “Those are the kind of memories we don’t need to dredge up. Besides, it worked to Mom’s advantage. Once she was back in Chicago after the divorce, she went to school, which she would never have done here. She became a CPA, and she was good at it. She knew how to handle difficult men,” I add, because this is on the short list of the things my sisters and I do agree on.

  “Yay for the girl,” Joy declares.

  “Absolutely,” I second, because while she’s sincere, I have a point to make, here in this house, where my mother was held back in so many regards. “She built a career when she was in her forties and competing against men in their twenties. We should all be so strong.”

  “Did she teach you photography?”

  “No, but I took over her equipment and found what worked for me.”

  “Was Papa okay with that?”

  She surprises me. “What do you mean?”

  “It was your Mom’s thing, and they got divorced.”

  “Uh … uh … that’s an interesting question.” I’ve always clumped his dislike of my art with his general disapproval of what I did. He desperately wanted a son. I was the second disappointment for him in that sense. Though he and I had shared intermittent moments of connection, I always felt it was a lost cause. I was never quite good enough.

  So maybe his annoyance with Mom was to blame for this part of it, at least. Crossing to the bookshelf, I take her camera—my very first—from the next-to-top shelf. “Could never give this away,” I murmur with a swell of affection. I brush the dust from the top with my thumb, savoring the old familiar feel of the shutter speed dial, the film winder, the on-off lever.

  “This is ancient,” Joy says.

  “Not really. At least, not in years. The technology of picture-taking has grown so fast that it just seems ancient.”

  Returning the camera to its shelf with a gentle stroke and a promise to hold it again later, I return to the other photos it helped me make. People pictures aside, the rest are black-and-white shots of the beach, many taken from the very same spot at the base of the bluff, but so different, one to the next, that I impress myself.

  “This is what our condo is missing,” Joy states.

  “My pictures are on the wall there.”

  “But they aren’t old ones, like ones with history?”

  “Don’t confuse black-and-white with old, sweetie. Besides, I have black-and-white shots hanging at home.”

  “I know, Mom, but, I mean, look at these? These pictures tell a story.” She is focused on a grouping of seascapes above the bed.

  Her comment is innocent enough. But when I look at her, something squeezes my heart. Here she is, my daughter, in the bedroom where my own childhood was spent—and how not to think of my mother in this, too? Joy was a toddler when she died, too young for them to know one another, and still Mom helped me raise her. What would my mother do? I often asked myself when I didn’t know how to handle my child’s quirks. Eleanor Aldiss had been a single mom too, in her way.

  Standing in this place now, I’m caught in dusty little cobwebs of happiness, grief, confusion and purpose. But there’s something else. For not the first time today, I feel pride, because Joy is right. These pictures do tell a story. The fact that she gets this brings tears to my eyes.

  Wrapping my arms around her from behind, I rest my chin on her shoulder and inhale her sweet scent.

  “The ocean,” Joy breathes in a way that says she’s imagining the stories. “Time. Fog. Sand.” She angles to meet my eyes. “I want to see more people pictures.”

  “You will. They’re in the attic.”

  She lights up. But my mind is a step ahead. I’m wondering why my father went up there this morning, only to stumble on the way down and break his wrist.

  The word gun comes to mind.

  Access to the attic is through the closet in the spare bedroom. Since that room is directly across the hall from mine, I’m quickly there. I see the same large, eyelet-covered bed, the same bench at its foot, the same dresser. And the closet. Its door is open to a tangle of hangers collected over the years, lit now by the attic light falling through the open hatch. Bisecting its beam, the stairs slant to a point just inches above the wood floor. These stairs, too, are wood, and while they’re secured by a metal frame and therefore sturdy, they are narrow. I understand why Dad lost his footing. Lord knew we all had done it once or twice.

  Several books lie scattered at the foot of the stairs. They are blue leather and vaguely warped, but as familiar to me as the old camera in my room.

  “Lawyer’s Diaries,” I tell Joy. Crouching, I finger the once bright, now dull lettering on the front. “Dad wrote in them every night.”

  Joy squats beside me and lifts one. “1996. Crazy.” She flips it open.

  I flip it shut. “Confidential.”

  Her eyes meet mine, her face an adorably bemused where-did-that-come-from mask. “Seriously? After so long? Like I’ll recognize names—or even understand what’s in there? What is in there?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw. Touch Thomas Aldiss’s diaries, and he swatted you away. And not just me. Any of us.”

  “State secrets,” Joy intones with the drama of a girl who has read a thriller or two. “Classified information.”

  “Nothing as glamorous as that,” says Anne from the door of the room. She has pulled her hair into a ponytail but looks only marginally more conventional. The burgundy streak snakes back from her left temple. “There are dates, appointment reminders, notes about clients when he was in private practice and about cases when he was on the bench.”

  “So you’ve looked inside them?” Joy asks.

  “Oh yeah.” My sister has one hand on the door frame and appears to feel no guilt. “He allowed us to look. He just chose which pages we could see, and he had to do that. I mean, legally. He couldn’t show us everything. What kind of lawyer would do that? What kind of judge?” To me, she says, “You remember him as a disciplinarian, but he wasn’t always so strict.”

  I’m thinking that Margo would have something pithy to say about that, when Anne tells Joy, “Papa loves music. Will you go down and play the piano for him?”

  Joy laughs. “On what?”

  There was a silent beat. “Duh.”

  “I didn’t see a piano.”

  “You didn’t look past the front rooms. Try the conservatory.”
r />   I’m the one who laughs now. “The conservatory? That’s rich. Joy, she means the sunroom, out the door at the back of the living room. And she’s right. He’ll love it.”

  “Did Margo play the piano?” Joy asks me.

  “Nope.”

  Breaking into a bright smile, she jauntily pushes to her feet. I catch her hand as she starts to breeze past me, but when she eyes me in question, I pause. How to explain that I don’t want her to leave me alone in this house, that she is my confidence here, physical proof that I’ve done plenty right?

  But I’m not going into that now, not with Anne at the door. So I just mime a kiss and release her hand.

  Anne watches after her until we hear her skip down the stairs. Then, pushing her hands deep into her coverall pockets, she enters the room. “I didn’t want to talk in front of her. I’m really glad you’re here, Mal.”

  She stops short of saying something, simply presses her lips together and looks at the fallen books. As I wait for whatever it is that she doesn’t want Joy to hear, I gather them up and, climbing the stairs just enough, slide them onto the attic floor. The attic is something to search. There are photos there that Joy wants to see, and other personal mementos of mine. There may be a gun.

  Behind me, Anne remains quiet, but she wouldn’t have come up here for nothing. After backing down the steps with care, I turn to face her.

  Chapter 6

  “I wasn’t sure you’d ever come back,” she says. The hands in her pockets bring her shoulders together, giving the illusion of a shrug. Clearly, she’s unsure of the me who is here.

  “I wasn’t either.” I glance at the attic. “Remember how we used to play there?”

  When she breaks into a smile, I relax a little. This is the Anne I want to see. Sunny side up starts with her face. “The attic was our clubhouse. Margo was the president, you kept the records, I did the food. Even then.”

  “By the way, your shop looks adorable,” I say. I’m not trying to butter her up. Well, yes. I am. I know there’s a “but” behind that smile and want to put her at ease. “I love the logo.”

  “I love the whole place.”

  “A lot of work?”

  “Nah. It’s just breakfast and lunch.”

  Giving her time to elaborate, I pull up the bottom section of stairs. It creaks as it folds, but soon enough the base covers the hatch with only a short piece of rope hanging to lower it again.

  Anne is too quiet. Normally, she would go on about Sunny Side Up, which is why I raised the issue. The shop is something she does well. But she is definitely uneasy.

  Gently, I say, “I’m not here to cause trouble, Annie. That’s the last thing I want.”

  Her eyes hold mine. They’re the same dark green as Joy’s when she’s scared. “What’s the first?”

  I consider. How to prioritize? “Seeing Dad, I guess.” So how did that work for ya? a voice inside me asks, and I wince. “He didn’t look pleased.”

  “He was unsettled, is all. He didn’t expect you to come. If I’d known ahead of time, I could have prepared him.”

  “How bad is he?”

  She wrinkles her nose. “Not bad at all. You’ll see. He eats, he sleeps, he walks, he talks. He does everything he normally did, except work.”

  “And remember who Joy is.”

  “But he does,” she enthuses with a new light in her eyes. “He kept looking back at her in the car and saying, ‘Mallory’s daughter, Mallory’s daughter,’ like he didn’t believe she was here—and he said it in a really excited way. He loves that you brought her.”

  I hoped that. The alternative was that his repetition of who she is was an attempt to drum it in so that he didn’t forget again.

  “His memory isn’t what it used to be,” Anne goes on. “He wants to see the three of us here, and Joy looks like Margo. It was wishful thinking, is all.”

  He isn’t the only one suffering from that. I cross to the window. The beauty of being on the bluff is that every window has a striking view. This one is part ocean, part land. I want to focus on the ocean half, which is more open, certainly more soothing to me, but that’s the coward’s way. Land is where the people are. Sure, open ocean can be lethal, but so can people. Is my father a murderer, or is he not? The answer isn’t out there in the deep blue. It’s here on land.

  Returning, I sit on the bench at the foot of the bed and pat the spot beside me, like I would do at home with Joy. Seeming grateful for the invitation, Anne comes right over and sits close enough beside me that our arms touch. And there’s a memory here, too.

  For an instant, we’re conspirators again. I whisper, “Remember ganging up on Margo?”

  She whispers back, “Oh yeah.” We’re both eyeing the closed hatch. “She’d be up there ordering us around, and we’d sit here so quiet, so quiet that she’d finally come to the door and look down and see us and hit the roof that we hadn’t already come back with her peanut butter Triscuits.”

  “We’d just stare up at her.”

  “It took two of us to defy her.”

  “She wasn’t always bad.”

  “She was imperious.”

  “And where did she get that?” I ask, the words slipping out before I can think better of it.

  Anne angles away to face me. “Don’t blame Dad. If he was imperious, it was because Mom needed direction. Mom was a ditz.”

  “Only when she was with Dad. He didn’t take kindly to competent women.”

  “But he has a heart, Mal. He suffered when the family broke apart. He’s been lonely.”

  There are a number of things I might say to that, the first involving my mother, who did not need direction. She proved that ten times over after the divorce. She was a strong woman held down by an authoritarian thumb. Why she allowed it was another of the questions I wanted to ask, but that would take us off topic.

  Levelly, I say, “I’m just trying to explain why Margo grew to be forceful. She wasn’t the boy Dad wanted, but he pushed her to accomplish. When she refused to go into law, there was a huge scene. Remember?”

  “It wasn’t a huge scene. It was a discussion. He was perfectly reasonable. He said she had choices, and he ended it by saying she should do what she wants.”

  Those might have been the words, but the tone was something else. I remember anger and shouting. I remember a level of hostility that drove me from the living room and had me hiding in my bedroom for hours. But that was me. I hated fights. Margo welcomed them, and Anne? Anne was always able to simply tune out the bad.

  “I’m just saying,” I try to explain, since Margo isn’t here to defend herself, “that in some regards, she had it worse than we did. His expectations for her were high.”

  Anne gives a twisted smile. “Oh yeah. Expectations. He had none for me. That made it easy.”

  She tosses off the statement like it’s a good thing, but I wonder. The lightness is a cover for what sounds like hurt. Either that’s new, or I was simply too wound up in my own thoughts to see it before.

  Wanting the space between us gone, I loop my arm through hers and lean just that little bit her way. “How is he about that now?”

  “Expectations? Good, actually. He has mellowed, Mal. Blame it on memory if you want, but he doesn’t hold grudges the way he used to. And as for Sunny Side Up? He doesn’t know what to do with someone who owns an eatery, so he’s open-minded.”

  “Does he ask you questions about it?”

  “Sometimes, like how do I know to fry his eggs over easy or where do I get these terrific mugs. He doesn’t ask about the money part of it. I’m not sure he can relate to that.”

  “To running a business?” I ask in surprise. “Business law was his specialty in private practice.”

  “I think it’s just the fact that I’m doing it. He still relates to business, at least, to hear his remarks when he’s going through the Wall Street Journal.”

  “So he does read it?”

  “Well, he must if he’s able to repeat what he does. He
still gets it, Mal. Just not,” she hesitates, “all the time.” Her back stiffens, eyes sharpen. “But I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong. This is not cause for dragging him to an Alzheimer’s specialist. He’s seventy-two. Everyone who’s seventy-two forgets things. By the time you reach that age there’s so much junk crammed in the brain that stuff just overflows and is lost. Dad does not have Alzheimer’s disease. I don’t want him labeled that way. So if that’s why you’re here—”

  “It’s not, Annie, not.”

  “But you’re worried that I’m not taking care of him.”

  “No. I’m worried that he’s doing things behind your back.”

  “Like buying a gun? I told you Jack was dreaming that up, but okay,” she nods, “I searched the house anyway. I checked his bedroom and the kitchen. I looked inside planters in the conservatory and under cushions in the living room and behind hats and gloves in the hall closet. I looked behind books—I’m telling you, I looked everywhere I could think of where he might have hidden a gun, but there was nothing. Nothing.”

  I glance at the hatch. “Not up there?”

  “Especially not there.” She seems wounded that I suggested it. “That’s the first place I checked, because he likes going up. I think there’s something about the oldness of what’s there, or maybe the smell of time, and his diaries, he loves reading those. This isn’t the first time he’s brought a few down.” Her voice has risen. “So, yeah, it was the first place I checked. That would be an obvious place to hide a gun, right? But there isn’t one up there. And here’s another thing, Mallory. He’s so forgetful that I honestly think if he stashed a gun somewhere, he’d forget where it is.”

  Which returns us to his mental health. “There’s medication for that.”

  Her eyes flare. “Not. Alzheimer’s.”

  “It’s okay, Annie,” I try to soothe her. “It doesn’t have to be Alzheimer’s, doesn’t have to be dementia at all, it can simply be memory loss, but unless you go to the right doctor, you won’t get the right help.”