A Week at the Shore

by Barbara Delinsky

  Dream on, I type and send.

  “Oh-ho, no,” Joy laughs. “We’re staying here. Things are just getting interesting.”

  Her tone is too cocksure for comfort. She knows something I don’t.

  I look up at her, but she’s still facing the boat. The engine starts, then idles while Jack releases the last of his lines. I don’t have to look to know this. I lived it too many times to forget. “What things?” I ask.

  “Anne’s boyfriend is coming to dinner.”

  Jack’s boat leaves the dock with a huge, crescendoing growl.

  * * *

  My goal for dinner is to mend fences with Anne. I usually know the right thing to say to people, but I’m not doing so well with her. She liked that I like her shop, but when I mentioned our bluff and the Hartleys, the good will vanished. She’s my sister. I accept that our memories of childhood differ. I accept that she resents Margo and me for abandoning Dad. I accept that his health creates a dilemma. But there has to be common ground.

  Determined to find it, I join her in the kitchen early to see what I can do to help. Billy—Bill, Mallory, Bill—Houseman is there with her. From the moment Joy said he’d be coming, I repressed the thought. With so many other battles to fight, I can’t afford one about Bill. But here he is.

  How to deal with him in a way that doesn’t worsen my relationship with Anne?

  I remember him having greasy hair and a stringy beard, wearing jeans that sagged and biker boots. I remember him holding a can of beer in his hand, always a can of beer. He had attitude written all over him, and he reinforced it with petty crimes, from shoplifting to “borrowing” people’s cars to painting graffiti on the schoolyard wall. I remember him being a smoker.

  He isn’t smoking now. Nor do I smell it on him. His hair is short, his five o’clock shadow respectable enough. He wears nice-fitting jeans, an untucked shirt rolled at the cuffs, and flip-flops, and he holds a bottle of what looks like craft beer. The only thing I see that is even remotely rebellious is his ink. It covers both arms and climbs one side of his neck.

  Even with that, he looks reputable. I might guess that he’d done it just for tonight, except that he seems at ease with himself. In fact, that’s the one thing that hasn’t changed about him—the insolent look. He knows that I remember the old Billy and is daring me to comment.

  I smile and extend my hand. “Bill. Wow. It’s been a while.”

  He hesitates, wary, before saying a measured, “It has. How’re you doing, Mallory?”

  “Great. It’s really something being back here.”

  “Is that good or bad?” Anne asks over her shoulder. She is at the sink husking corn.

  Crossing the floor, I nudge her aside. “I can do this. As long as it doesn’t involve cooking, you’re safe.” When she raises her hands and steps back, I continue with the ear she was working on and say to Bill, “Thanks for helping out with the house. It looks good. Is that what you do? Home repair? Property management?”

  “Nah. Fixing things is fun. I’m a correctional officer.”

  I did not expect that. “Really?” I ask, looking back, but that lazy grin gives nothing away.

  “You mean, being on the outside rather than the inside?” he says, summing up my surprise. “It’s true.”

  Anne has been clanging metal in a low cabinet. Emerging with the largest pot, she plunks it on the counter. “How’s that for a shock?”

  “Hey, Annie, I’m glad.” I pull several pieces of silk from the corn and drop them in the sink with the husks. “I’m impressed. He cleans up good.”

  She does laugh at that, kicking sideways to jab Bill’s leg with her foot.

  “Fine,” he grumbles. “You win.”

  I look from one to the other. “Win?”

  “She said you’d be sweet, I said bitchy.”

  “Why would you think that?” I ask him.

  “Because you always were.”

  “Really?”

  He nods.

  “Bitchy?” I ask in dismay.

  He nods again.

  “If I was bitchy to you, I’m sorry. Maybe what you took for bitchiness was terror? You did that, y’know, terrified people.”

  “I still do. That’s why I’m good at what I do.”

  “I’m sure,” I say with a convinced look, then ask Anne, who is opening a large cardboard box, “What’re we having with the corn?”

  “Lobster. And cornbread. And grain salad. Is Joy okay with that?”

  “Everything but the lobster. Don’t let her see you put them in the pot. She’ll have nightmares when they scrabble to get out.”

  “Are you talking about me?” Joy says, swinging into the kitchen. To judge from the red on her cheeks and nose, she got too much sun, but she is freshly showered, has her wet hair in a top knot, and is wearing a tee shirt with a huge fried egg on the front. When she sees my eyes on the egg, she proudly twirls to show me her back, where SUNNY SIDE UP is written in large letters.

  “I like it,” I say, but she is twitching her nose and, before I can stop her, she is peering into Anne’s box.

  “Omigod,” she breathes. “They’re moving.” The smile leaves her voice, and she looks at Anne. “You’re going to boil them alive, aren’t you? That’s awful. I can’t be in this room.” She is starting to turn when she sees Bill. Her eyes go straight to his arms, one of which is bringing beer to his mouth, the other propped on the counter on full display. “Omigod,” she repeats. Her eyes go to his face. I want to say that, yes, there’s an element of terror. But no, she isn’t frightened. The f-word she is, is fascinated.

  “Those are amazing,” she says with awe. “I’m Joy, by the way. When did you get them?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “How long did it take? I mean, all that had to take a crazy load of time. What is this one? Wait, wait—are these your own designs? My Spanish teacher has a biggie,” she forms a circle with both hands, “but it’s on her shoulder, and she usually covers it up, and hers is nowhere near as gorgeous as yours. So, did you design these yourself?” She reaches out, almost touching him but not quite. Her eyes rise to his. “Did it hurt?”

  Bill looks overwhelmed. Anne is suppressing a grin.

  I come forward. “Know what we need, Joy? Flowers.” Grateful that the clippers are still in the same old tool drawer, I hand them over. “Cut lots for the lots of vases in the dining room.”

  “We’re eating in the dining room?” Joy asks, eyes as wide at that thought as at the tattoos, and I feel a pang. We eat in Chrissie’s dining room, but rarely our own. Joy equates dining room with family, which is different in her mind from just us two.

  “Uh,” I look quickly at Anne, who gestures, Sure.

  “O-kay,” Joy agrees and heads out, but not before telling Bill, “We aren’t done with this conversation.”

  He waits until the screen door slaps before squinting at me. “Where did she come from?”

  I simply raise a hand to say, Don’t ask, and return to the corn.

  * * *

  Having slept through much of the afternoon, my father is in better shape than I’ve yet seen him. Maybe it’s having dinner in the dining room on a large mahogany table done up with linen napkins and the family silver. Maybe it’s having lobster. Maybe it’s seeing all those vases filled with flowers—and I do mean filled. Joy went overboard, and while her experience is limited to the tiny garden behind Chrissie’s brownstone or bunches of flowers from Whole Foods, she has a knack. One vase holds red phlox, another orange and yellow gerbera daisies. The two largest vases sprout fans of purple-blue Russian sage, the three smallest offer nosegays of violets and buttercups.

  My mother’s arrangements were more refined. But Dad appreciates Joy’s. He moves from one to the next in patent admiration. Nothing on his face suggests worry, as it would if he had left a gun in the one vase I might have skimmed too quickly, or, for that matter, anywhere else in this room. His good mood may be that he feels safe here.

  It ma
y also be having people around this table, and, for a split second, I wish Margo were here to feel the nostalgia I do. If she could open her mind to the memories in this room, she might soften. She might agree with me that family is worth saving. She might commit to finding a path forward with Anne.

  She might even get an understanding of what Dad’s life is like—might even feel a drop of compassion for the man. His world has shrunk, his family is dispersed. I’m not sure whether Anne actually eats dinner with him each night, or whether she just sees that he’s fed before she leaves. Whatever, I’m guessing that five for dinner is more than usual.

  Of course, that could have the opposite effect, which is why it’s probably better that Margo is at her pre-theater dinner in Manhattan. Typically, Alzheimer’s patients are stressed by new or challenging things. Seeing Margo might freak him out.

  That said, he greets Bill with a handshake and calls him by name, suggesting he’s been here before. And I’m glad. Bill is a surprise. He seems to calm Anne. For that alone, I like him. Moreover, the guy here today is a huge improvement over the one I remember when we were growing up. I won’t say he’s charming, since I can’t call a discussion of inmates at a medium security prison in Cranston charming. He supervises the carpentry shop there, and while I ask a question or two, they go nowhere fun. And there’s still the matter of the tattoos, at which Joy continues to slide surreptitious glances. He does, though, tell my father about the legal battle an inmate is waging against a conviction that was based on the testimony of a single eyewitness.

  “Tricky thing, eyewitness testimony,” Dad says. He is studying his lobster, not sure where to begin, then jiggling one of the feelers in uncertainty. But he does remember the law. “If the initial identity is made from a police sketch, a witness is more apt to confirm the accused in person, whether he believes it or not. He may not want to be wrong. He may be swayed by a prosecutor who promises lenience or even immunity on a charge of, say, aiding-and-abetting. Let’s face it, eyewitnesses aren’t always good people, especially if they’re hanging around places where crimes take place.”

  “What if they are good people?” Joy asks. I try to catch her eye to keep her from breaking Dad’s momentum, but she’s on a riff. “What if there’s just one person who survives an awful crime, like a school shooting, and she has to identify the suspect?”

  “Oh sweetie,” Anne says as I would have if she hadn’t beat me to it.

  Seeming unaware how tragic it is that a thirteen-year-old knows to ask this, my father lifts his lobster fork and, dispassionately, says, “That scenario introduces other questions, like the effect of trauma. Terror can color eyewitness testimony. And if the witness is injured during the event and loses consciousness, his recollection may be spotty.”

  “Emotion,” I say without meaning to, but if Joy thinks of school shootings, I think of that night, right here, twenty years ago. In the aftermath, we were all highly emotional.

  My father either doesn’t hear or can’t compute. “Then you have the matter of time between the crime and the trial. And memory. It isn’t stored in the brain intact. It has to be reconstructed. The mind retrieves pieces and puts them together. There’s room for error.”

  What he says makes so much sense that I wonder if he and I are wrong and Anne right. He may not have Alzheimer’s at all. Right now, he is perfectly lucid.

  But then, setting the fork aside, he frowns and looks around the table. Anne is sucking sweet scraps of meat from the feelers, while Bill has forcefully bent the tail backward and is tugging chunks of meat out with a regular fork. Joy is holding her corn in both hands and eating it row by careful row. I twist off a claw.

  Watching me, Dad twists off a claw.

  “I never thought of memory that way,” I say, working at the meat. When no one speaks, I realize that either I take the bait, or the opportunity is lost. “Is that what you do, Dad—fit pieces together?”

  He removes a piece of meat, dunks it in butter, and eats it. Almost absently, he says, “It is.”

  “Do you do it when you think back on that night out on the boat?” I dare ask. I’m aware that Anne has paused to listen.

  “Of course, I do,” he says. “I’m the only eyewitness to what happened to Eleanor.”

  “Elizabeth,” I whisper.

  “Elizabeth,” he whispers back—and how pathetic it is that despite his mistake, I’m pleased that he and I connect.

  “It was a long time ago, Dad,” Anne says.

  He frowns. “There are so many pieces. I forget some and remember others. Like the weather. Like the sky this afternoon.”

  Joy sits up. “Sunny here but stormy in the Vineyard?”

  Again, his eyes seek out mine. “It was foggy when we left. I remember that. I hadn’t wanted to go out at all, but she wanted to talk. I didn’t think we’d go far. And we didn’t. But the wind got strong all of a sudden, and the snow … the rain came.”

  He pauses, seeming stymied. I hold my breath, willing his mind to clear.

  “Buckets,” he finally says. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Buckets. We were going up and down, all over the place. I was struggling to hold the boat steady. It was so bad that I tossed her a flak jacket.”

  Life jacket, he means, but no one corrects him.

  “I told her to put it on, but I don’t know if she did. I couldn’t watch her and manage the boat. I remember—” He uses both arms, one with cast, one not, to wrench an imaginary steering wheel to the right. “I had to head us into a wave that was coming in sideways or we’d capsize, and when I finally got us righted and I looked back, she was gone.”

  “The Coast Guard confirmed micro-bursts,” I say, wanting him to know that this was corroborated.

  But my remark ticks him off. His blue eyes cut me. “The Coast Guard wasn’t there. The Coast Guard didn’t know what it was like. The Coast Guard had no idea how strong those waves were.” He is reliving it in angry bursts. In the next instant, he quiets and averts his eyes, seeming bewildered. “Then it was done. Gone. Calm again. But I couldn’t find her.”

  “We know, Daddy,” Anne says. “You looked. We all looked.”

  I work on my salad—quinoa, farro, spinach, and feta—and recoup from what I feel is a dressing down. Which is absurd. But this is what I remember growing up here. After a minute of telling myself that it’s all right, that I can take a scolding if that’s what it takes to jog his memory, I have the courage to ask, “Why didn’t you want to go out in the first place?”

  “The weather.”

  “But she insisted. What did she want to talk about?”

  “The estate.”

  “You mean her house?”

  “The family estate.”

  “Her family estate?” I specify to make sure we understand.

  He sighs. “Yes, Margo. For God’s sake, ask John Doe. He knows all about it.”

  Anne and I exchange a glance. Calling me Margo isn’t the worst part here. It’s John Doe. He was a frequent presence when Dad was on the bench. And this is his second reference.

  “John Doe?” I ask.

  He gives a single nod, like that ends it, and casted wrist and all, deftly removes the tail meat from the lobster, at this moment knowing what to do without having to think.

  “Who is John Doe?” Anne asks.

  Eyes on his meal, he continues to eat.

  I glance again at Anne, who shoots me a baffled look.

  “Is John Doe a real person?” Joy asks with such innocence that I bless her little heart. If anyone can get away with a follow-up in this, she can.

  “Oh he’s real,” Dad says and reaches for his corn.

  “How can a parent name a child John Doe? John Doe is in books and movies and on TV. It’s what you call an unidentified person lying in a morgue, or an unidentified suspect in a crime. I mean, what does that say about someone who actually has the name? That he’s a nobody? If I had that name, I’d do whatever I had to do to be a somebody.” She turns to Bill. “Your gu
ys must know all about John Doe.”

  “Some do,” Bill says.

  “Are any of them named John Doe?”

  “Nope.”

  “But lots of guys in prison have tattoos, right? Is that where you got yours? Are there people who do them right there, like, tattooists?”

  “Tattoo artists,” he says, “and there are some. It’s all undercover, so they have to improvise tools.”

  “Like how?”

  “They use a stapler. Melted Styrofoam. Soot. It’s disgusting. Inmates pay them by trading food or smokes or maybe money if they have a phone and can transfer it. There’s no sterilization or anything, so there’s a lot of infection. I didn’t get my tats in prison. I wouldn’t be so dumb.”

  “Where did you get them?”

  “Joy,” I caution.

  She turns innocent green eyes on me. “What, Mom. This is interesting.”

  “You’re not getting a tattoo.”

  “I’m just asking him about his.”

  “Don’t get one,” says Bill.

  Her head swings to his, loosened curls flying to follow. “Why not? You’ve done okay with them.”

  “In a prison?” he asks. “That where you want to work?”

  She has no answer.

  Grateful for that, at least, I take a closer look at Bill. He is earnest in a way I wouldn’t have thought Billy Houseman could be. But no, he’s not Billy. He’s Bill.

  And my father eats. No reaction to mention of tattoos, which he verbally denounced many times, or to prisons, which once would have sparked a lecture about the evils of going near one. Rather, he puts one forkful of salad carefully in his mouth, chews, then goes for another.

  Bill tells Joy, “I got these when I was nineteen and doing nothin’ good with my life. Then I decided to change that. So I started at CCRI. Community college. Only courses cost, and I had to eat. Teachers hire research assistants. I wanted one of those jobs. But they didn’t want me. They looked at my tats and figured I wouldn’t be a good worker.”

  “Seriously?” Joy asks. “I see people with tattoos all the time.”