A Week at the Shore

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Here you go,” she says into the sound of the rain on the roof. “Mom and Elizabeth talking with Paul Schuster. Paul Schuster,” she repeats softly, clearly remembering the man. “Nice guy.”

  I’m about to tell her that I talked with him, when she holds out another photo. “What does this one say?”

  We’re at the firepit on our own beach. Mom and Elizabeth are scraping sticks down to the green with pocketknives, which I so remember doing myself. But they’re on opposite sides, not connected at all. “That they don’t like each other?”

  “That they’re deliberately avoiding each other?”

  “That we’re making s’mores? I don’t know, Margo. Does this get us anywhere else?” I look closer. “So sad. Jack’s Dad is alone over there by the water.”

  “Richard.”

  “Did he and Dad ever talk?” I ask.

  “What could they talk about? They had nothing in common. He isn’t still around, is he?”

  “No. He teaches at Berkeley. He doesn’t look happy here.” Lonely, is what he looks. Forlorn. Abandoned, like Jack. Had he been a different sort of man, the two of them might have been close to make up for Elizabeth’s distance. But Richard just … couldn’t and, in his super academic eyes, Jack felt stupid. Rather than try to compete, he went the other way. From what I could see, he turned his life around only after his father left. Sad.

  “Richard never smiled,” Margo remarks. “What did he get out of that marriage?”

  “Jack,” I say pointedly, thinking of all the man squandered.

  Margo’s eyes touch mine before her finger taps on the tall figure with long hair and a defiant expression. “And how is our boy?”

  Our boy. I smile at that. It’s a little jab that goes nowhere. Margo knows she and Jack would have bombed. “He’s fine,” I tell her and, in that instant, wonder if Jack is better off now that his parents are gone. Both of them were emotionally dysfunctional. His childhood rebellion may have saved him from that. He is levelheaded, at least, where animals are concerned. I’m familiar with TNR programs. They rely on the volunteers. Jack Sabathian volunteering? “Interesting, actually,” I say. “He’s still here, but he’s different.”

  “Aren’t we all,” Margo murmurs and, that quickly dismissing Jack, reaches into the carton for her own handful of photos.

  For the next few minutes, we sort through them in what would have been silence had the rain not pulsed against the roof. It slows, then picks up, gusting and calming in the sky’s mimic of the surf. Margo shows me a shot of her working with Mom in the potting shed, then sets it under her thigh in the unobtrusive way that speaks of appropriation. I show her a shot of the three of us, our backs to the camera as we sit shoulder to shoulder at the end of the dock, silhouetted against a mackerel sky.

  “Mom took this,” Margo muses. “She was artistic back then. It’s like there’s a part of her that she left behind when she left here.”

  “Didn’t we all?” I say, thinking just then of goodies like sunrise and sunset and rain on the roof.

  But Margo is distant as she studies the photo. “I did. No part of my childhood made it to Chicago.”

  “Have you missed it?”

  She doesn’t answer at first. Her made-up face is carefully composed, but those green eyes, so like all of us, are troubled when they rise from the print. “Last week I’d have said no. Hell, twenty-four hours ago, I’d have said no. Then I heard Dad’s voice coming through your phone, and a window opened. I tried to close it again, tried all last night, but I couldn’t.” She is so poised, so in control but for the pain in her eyes and her voice. “Memories are always there. Y’know?”

  I do. “They’re like freckles under makeup—”

  “Hold that thought,” she cries and, in a flash, is backing down the attic ladder. Had it not been for the rain, I’d have heard where she is going—her old room? Downstairs? Out to her car?—but her footsteps are lost.

  While I wait, I push deeper into the box of photographs. The memories they bring are different from the ones I carried with me to New York. Those were dark. They were of loss and confusion, unanswered questions, distrust. But the ones in my hand are lighter. They conjure fun and closeness and love. Yes, love. Even in candid shots of Dad, who shoots daggers at my camera while actively, proudly posing for me holding a boat line in one shot and extracting a clam from the sand in another, there is feeling. I’ve always focused on the negative. Nightmares kept me away from this place, and staying away kept me from hurt. But what about comfort and warmth? There was positive here.

  Margo returns with her iPad. “My next column,” she states, and though she sits beside me again, she is distracted typing notes.

  Leaning in, I read, We can look the other way when a memory intrudes, or deny that it ever existed, but it doesn’t go away. Memories shape us as surely—and invisibly—as DNA.

  I reread that sentence. She’s hit the nail on the head. But she isn’t done.

  I’m visiting my childhood home for the first time in years. The trip was a spontaneous thing, or so I tell myself. I wonder now, though, if I’ve been waiting, just waiting for the right time, maybe waiting until the pain of staying away became worse than the pain of coming home.

  Her fingers still, then fall away from the keyboard. Raising resigned eyes to mine, she says, “Memory is life experience. When we deny it, there’s a hole where it should be.”

  * * *

  I’m still thinking of that hole an hour later. She’s given a name to what I sometimes feel. It comes at odd times, down times, times when a dream wakes me or when I hear the sea in the dark and sense a vague emptiness, a distant shadow, the motif of a song that I don’t know, but do.

  Having taken a raincoat from the mudroom hook, I’ve come down to the beach. Rain falls on my hood, my shoulders, my bare feet. It falls on the sand, thick drops dappling what was dry before and leaving a new sheen on the rest. Meeting it, the waves rush in with the force of the storm to break like dominoes along the shore, and retreat. The clouds overhead aren’t dark, just dense.

  Growing up here, I used to find these clouded days soothing. Rather than a complex world of color, there is one, and the simplicity is striking. It also haunts. Standing with my hands deep in the pockets of my wet raincoat, I sense that emptiness off in the distance.

  The sound of the sea soothes, I tell myself, then repeat the thought to drum it in. But that distant emptiness haunts, perhaps more vividly now that I’m here. It reminds me of past pain. Maybe, too, it calls me back.

  So, was I waiting, like Margo, just waiting for the right time? Did Jack’s phone call open a window that I couldn’t shut again? And if so, what now? Is it possible to live in the moment of today’s Bay Bluff, when the place is overrun by the past?

  Chapter 19

  The dilemma continues to haunt me as we ready for another dining room dinner, this time plus one. Ignoring the rain, Joy has gone out for fresh flowers to augment yesterday’s arrangements. She enjoys working in the garden, enjoys doing what her grandmother did before her. I feel guilty having kept her from this. But I wasn’t ready to be here.

  I’m not sure I am now. All three of us? With Dad? And more questions than ever? And Anne not her usual sunny self and Margo not her usual confident self? And Billy Houseman? And rain enough to frizz all of our hair?

  Oh yeah. The hair. Even if we didn’t all have Mom’s green eyes and more-or-less heart-shaped faces; even if we weren’t all roughly the same size and build, the hair would give us away. Anne may have her burgundy streak, Joy her neon scrunchie, Margo a Swarovski comb at her crown, and me a tortoiseshell clasp on the right. To a one our faces are haloed by frizz.

  Anne has brought in Italian from the restaurant of a friend in Westerly. Antipasto, rigatoni bolognese, charred cauliflower, pappardelle, with a separate side of penne and white sauce for Joy—it’s a divine spread for a precarious gathering. Although we work together putting the food on platters, there are so many elephants in the
kitchen with us that it’s an overcrowded place. When we’re together in New York, we focus on noncommittal subjects like books, movies, and UGGs. Here, Anne prattles on with local trivia—a film club forming in Bay Bluff, a tapas place opening in Weekapaug, an independent bookstore thriving in Mystic. It would be sweet and upbeat, if there wasn’t an undercurrent of desperation to it. There is no mention of accusations against Dad, no mention of Mom’s relationship with Elizabeth. Alzheimer’s disease is off the table, and, given the risk of it spilling into dinner with Dad, I’m not raising the issue of my own parentage. A baby would have been something to discuss, if neither of the men were there.

  There isn’t talk of Billy either. Anne dares Margo with a defiant look—just dares her to challenge his presence. But Margo is in the same state of uncertainty as when she first arrived that morning. Why am I here? Even after the words she wrote, I hear her thoughts. Hell, they’re my own. Is this supposed to fill the hole in my life? Is this me?

  I try to break the ice. That’s my job in this family, though whether tied to DNA or life experience, I do not know—and doesn’t that issue give me pause?

  Dad is something else. With the table even fuller tonight than last, he sits at its head looking from face to face, unaware that his pleasant expression is both out of character and blank. He’s going through motions that, in this particular moment, he doesn’t fully understand. When Anne raises her wine glass to toast our reunion, he raises his. “My daughters,” he says, echoing her words, but if he feels nostalgia, it doesn’t show. When Anne rounds the table, blaming his casted wrist for a missed buttonhole on his shirt, he docilely lets her fix it. Other than using a spoon where a fork is called for, he has little trouble eating. He nods when someone else nods and murmurs a yes here or there. But he doesn’t take part in the conversation, and his enjoyment seems superficial. As the meal goes on, his salty brows lower, his thin mouth thins more.

  I have Alzheimer’s disease, he told Margo this morning, and everything about him now suggests he is thinking of that. Deep down, in whatever pockets of clarity he finds, he is not happy.

  Nor, despite her chatter, is Anne. She doesn’t do more than touch her lips to the wine. When Bill asks her about it, she draws in a breath and rolls her eyes to blame this big family situation for her lack of appetite.

  Joy saves the meal. Seeming armed with an endless supply of questions, she asks Bill about prison food, asks Margo whether her cousins are going to summer camp in July and, if not, whether they can come here. Before I can remind her that she won’t be here in July, she asks Anne about a funny-looking purple plant in the front shrub bed. She asks Dad whether he likes sushi and, undaunted when he eyes her blankly, tells him of the time we made it. She asks Bill whether he wants another tattoo, then quickly changes the subject before anyone can mention her birthmark.

  What I hear is curiosity and nervousness. She doesn’t know the things I’ve discussed with my sisters, but she does know something’s up.

  Then, innocently enough, Margo sets her fork on her plate and asks Anne about the shop. “You were doing a great business this morning. Is it like that every day?”

  Anne lights up. “Summers, yes. I’m closed Mondays and Tuesdays November through April, but the locals all know that, and they’re mostly who’s around. I feel bad doing it, because they’re so loyal, but it’s nice to be able to sleep in during the off-season.”

  “So, times like now you’re there every day?” Margo asks.

  I hear surprise. Anne hears criticism.

  She cools. “Who else would be there?”

  I’m guessing she’ll need to rethink that in seven months, when Margo suggests, “A partner? A manager?”

  “There’s no partner, just me, and I’m the manager. It isn’t a big place, Margo.”

  “Assistant manager, then, to fill in when you can’t be there? How many others?”

  “There are four of us full-time—including two in the kitchen—and another two part-time. And a bookkeeper off-site.”

  “Who does the ordering—food and supplies?”

  “Me.”

  “Marketing? Social media?”

  “Me.”

  “Really,” Margo says.

  I hear awe. Anne hears doubt.

  Wanting to soften the look on her face, I say, “She admires you, Annie. So do I. You’re the businesswoman of us three. Who’d have known it when we were kids?”

  “You mean, because I wasn’t as good a student as either of you?”

  “No,” I say evenly. “Because you were never the banker when we played Monopoly.”

  Joy laughs. Fearful Anne will take that the wrong way, too, I eye her sharply, but she is all innocence. “What? That’s hysterical. What other hidden talents do each of you have?” She grows a grin as she looks from face to face. “It’s Truth or Dare. I mean, that’s a perfect question. What’s your hidden talent?”

  “No dares,” Margo says. “I know what those are like.” She’s thinking of her boys, for whom dares typically involve burps and farts. I suffered through one of those games and agree with her. No dares.

  Looking awkward, Bill stands. “Well, folks, it’s been nice, but I’m outta here.” After holding Anne’s eye for a minute, he is gone.

  Taking a cue from him, Dad wanders off.

  “Okay, no dares,” Joy concedes—and still I think to stop her, remind her that this isn’t a group bonding event during school vacation at the Y, that we’re adults, that we don’t need an ice-breaker. Only I want to hear what my sisters say.

  “No dares,” I remind them, then concede, “Anne’s hidden talent is business. Margo, what’s yours?”

  “Writing obits,” Margo says.

  Anne looks like she may laugh. “Obituaries?”

  “Someone has to,” I reason to forestall that laugh. “It’s providing a service at a time when people need help.”

  “I’m talking public obits,” Margo tells Anne, “the kind that run when a national figure dies. We do them ahead of time so that they’re ready to run. I’m good at it.” Dismissing Anne, she looks at Joy. “What about you?”

  Joy jolts back and points at herself. Apparently, she hadn’t thought she’d be in the game. “Hidden talent? Uh, uh.” She shoots me a defiant look and sits straighter. “Folding socks.”

  “What kind of talent is that?” Anne teases.

  I answer for my daughter. “You’d be amazed the shapes her socks take.” I’m being facetious, of course. Her socks come out of the dryer in the shapes they went in, meaning pulled off in a wad inside-out. “Deer, rabbits, cats—”

  “Your turn, Mom,” Joy cuts me off. “Hidden talent?”

  I consider. “Making chicken soup.”

  “But you don’t cook,” Anne argues.

  “From scratch?” Margo asks.

  “My daughter insists on organic, so yes, it’s from scratch.”

  Before Anne can say that the meal we’ve all just eaten is far from organic, Joy raises her hand. “Okay, next question. Dream birthday gift.”

  “Breakfast in bed,” Margo says. “I’m always the one who has to make breakfast.”

  Anne snickers. “Me, too, but I choose to do it. My dream gift is a horse.”

  “A horse?” I ask. “Where did that come from?”

  “I’ve always wanted a horse. Remember the horses in the Fourth of July parade?”

  “Remember the street sweeper that followed them?” Margo asks.

  “Remember us sitting on the curb watching?” I add.

  “And laughing,” Anne says. “Remember the candy the riders threw?”

  “To distract us from what was happening at the other end of the horse,” Margo says. Standing to gather dishes, she asks Anne, “Is Dad okay?”

  Anne reaches for the drinking glasses. “He’s good. He’ll be reading or puzzling or staring. It’s his usual after-dinner thing.”

  “My dream birthday gift,” Joy announces in a loud voice, “is my father’s name.”
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  No one speaks.

  She looks at Margo, Anne, then me. “What? You know I want that. I’ve always wanted it.”

  “I’ve explained legal contracts,” I say and grab the depleted pasta platter.

  “That doesn’t mean it can’t be my dream.”

  I hand her the platter. “Kitchen,” I instruct, and once Anne ushers her there, I collect unused silverware.

  “Don’t be angry with her,” Margo says, holding the dirty dishes while I return the silver to its drawer.

  “I’m not. I’m just surprised she said it in front of you all.”

  “Us all? Anne and me? We’re family. You’ve told us she wants that.”

  “I know.” My anger fades. I close the drawer. “It’s a touchy point for me. Evokes guilt.” And isn’t that hypocritical? Here am I, desperate to learn the identity of my biological father, and I deprive my daughter of it?

  “Want to talk about that?” Margo asks.

  “Not really.” After scooping up dirty linen, I follow her into the kitchen.

  “Can we still play?” Joy asks, meaning Am I forgiven?

  “Absolutely.” I dump the linen on a chair and rub my hands on my shorts. “What’s next?”

  “Forbidden desire.”

  “Forbidden desire?” Anne echoes, sounding alarmed. I actually think her alarm is real. She’s afraid of being laughed at. Or of saying something about being a mother.

  Putting a hand on her arm, I look at Joy and clarify, “You mean, like what do we want that we can never, ever have in real life?” When Joy nods, I tell Anne, “We can do this.” I broaden my gaze. “I want a PhD in Art History.”

  “Seriously?” Margo asks.

  Anne answers with a sigh. “It’s in character. She’s the artsy one.”

  But Joy, my too-insightful daughter, has taken it one step further. She understands that if I weren’t a mother, I’d have had other choices, and, stricken, says, “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” I ask. To hug her would give credence to what she is thinking, so I simply touch her cheek. “It’s forbidden, because I chose to be a photographer long before you were born. I love my work. I would not love being at school again. In another life, though, I’d teach fine art.”