A Week at the Shore

by Barbara Delinsky

  In a heartbeat, I’m furious about silence and evasion and secrets, about all that went on that I knew nothing of, all that might have helped me growing up under Tom Aldiss’s critical eye. Angrily, I say, “You watched me all those years, thinking I was your daughter? Did you not know how miserable I was—how I felt there was something wrong with me that my father treated me the way he did?”

  “I knew,” he admits in defeat and, sensing my upset, pushes up from the wall. I’m not sure if he wants to protect me, belatedly, with his height—or use it to protect himself.

  “And you did nothing?” I ask.

  “What would you have had me do?”

  “Tell me,” I say, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

  Paul is suddenly as intense as I am. “And put a wedge between you and your sisters? And risk you resenting your mother—or blurting the truth to Tom at some point, which might have caused him to treat you worse or even disown you?”

  “Or break up the law firm?” I add, because I’m not ready to see him as an icon of altruism. There were selfish reasons for what he—what they did. “Didn’t you feel like a fraud?”

  “Every blessed day,” he says with vehemence. “But what would you have had me do, Mallory? What?”

  I don’t know. Still, my anger remains. I am angry at the situation, at all those lost years, maybe even at the awkwardness I feel now, which I never before felt with Paul. I can’t process the fact that he is my biological father—am so not in control of my feelings that I resent him for that, too.

  “What if you aren’t?” I ask. I know I sound spiteful, even infantile, but that’s what anger does. When he looks confused, I say, “What if you aren’t my father after all? What if Tom was the only one with my mother during the time she conceived?”

  “They were going through a rough patch for months before and after. They didn’t have sex.”

  “She said.”

  “I’ll happily take a DNA test.”

  I think of that scrap of gauze. It would tell me if Tom and I match but, if not, it wouldn’t tell me who does. “What if she was with someone other than you?”

  “DNA test,” he repeats.

  “Why did she never tell me?” I ask. “She divorced Dad. She could have told me then. Did you ask her not to?”

  “Absolutely not. I wanted her to tell you. I begged her—” He stops short.

  “Then why didn’t she?” I cry with a resurgence of the emotions I had felt so often since my mother’s death. She didn’t know she would die so young. But I was a grown-up. I had a baby of my own. I deserved to know the truth. “Didn’t she trust me?”

  “It was Tom she didn’t trust,” Paul says. “She didn’t know what he would do if word got back to him.” He pauses, pained. “How can I say things like this today?”

  “How can you not?” I fire back. “He’s gone. She’s gone. We are not.”

  He considers that. “True. And you’re right to be upset with Eleanor, but you have to understand. She worried he would destroy me, or destroy you. Tom could be vindictive. There was this lawyer—”

  “Newcombe,” I say, remembering the name well. I remember my father’s vitriolic comments at dinner, when he got so caught up in ranting to Mom that he forgot we girls were there. “He accused Tom of accepting a bribe in exchange for giving a defendant a light sentence.”

  “Tom got him disbarred.”

  “Rightly so?” I ask. I can’t say that I always wondered. My father’s venom was so lethal that I had to believe his version.

  Paul releases a small breath. “I can’t say.”

  “Won’t say.”

  He fixes me with a look of gentle chiding. “It’s not my place, Mallory. Tom isn’t here to defend himself. I just ask that you understand why your mother did what she did.”

  Or didn’t do what she didn’t do, I think and suddenly picture Chrissie’s guilty face. These were all sins of omission. And Paul? I’m not yet ready to rationalize his fault.

  “How do I know you don’t just want this to be true? You never had kids of your own, so maybe you want to think I’m it?” Before he can say DNA test again, I rush on. I’m being irrational. But the whole situation feels irrational. “How do I know you aren’t just the last man standing?”

  His words are low but firm. “Because I know things another person wouldn’t know. I saw things another person wouldn’t see.”

  “Like?”

  “A birthmark.”

  My heart stops. My mother’s birthmark—Joy’s birthmark—both hidden where only someone with intimate knowledge of a person’s body would ever see. I stare at him, but he doesn’t blink. Either he is an expert liar who is repeating something my father told him—though why the impersonal Tom Aldiss would tell anyone something as personal as that is beyond me—or he has seen that birthmark himself. Since I have never before had cause to think Paul Schuster a liar, and since there is no other way he would have seen it, I have to accept that he and my mother had an affair. And if I accept that, I realize with a start, I have no reason to doubt the outcome.

  Overwhelmed, I back away.

  “Mallory.”

  I hold up a hand, warding off any paternal words as I struggle to accept. There’s still the matter of where he’s been all my life, why he didn’t come forward either after I moved to New York or after Mom died. There’s still the matter of where he was when my daughter—his granddaughter—was born. Tom wasn’t around. Paul might have been.

  I feel bitter about it all, confused by a world that apparently considers the whole truth and nothing but to be optional. Mostly, I feel swamped. Too much is shifting underfoot—my relationship with my sisters, my faith in my best friend, my father’s death. And yes, I’ll always think of Tom Aldiss as my father. But the rest? I’ve lost control of things I thought I knew.

  Paul says my name again. Ignoring it, I turn and run. I have no destination. All I know is that I’m grateful Joy isn’t here, grateful that the heels Margo bought me are low, grateful that the sea wall path takes me away from where I’ve just been.

  After following it along a wide arc, I see the parking lot ahead. The hearse is gone, for which I’m grateful as well. I see Chrissie’s CR-V, Lina’s Civic, and Paul’s Lexus. I see the Volvo that says Anne is still here, and a dirty truck with the cemetery logo on the side and a wheelbarrow in the back.

  I also see Jack’s Tahoe. Fortunately, it is unlocked, and while it’s hot inside, I don’t care. Pulling out my phone, I text him.

  I’m in your truck. Can we go?

  Chapter 26

  Jack trots up to the truck minutes later. His face is damp with sweat, and his frown lines are pronounced. Eyeing me with worry, he tosses his blazer in back, starts the engine, and turns on the AC full force. Then he reaches an arm sideways and cups my head in his palm. There is a calm in the gesture that belies whatever turmoil those frown lines betray.

  He does not ask who my biological father is. Does not ask about Tom or Elizabeth. Does not ask if I want to let Chrissie know I’m leaving or if I need to call Joy. All he asks is, “Where to?”

  “I don’t know,” I whisper, feeling lost, but I’ve grabbed his hand and am holding on for dear life. Jack is a rock in my world of shifting sands. “Just drive.”

  He heads out of the lot. “Home or away?”

  “Away.”

  He turns left. We pass the florist with purple petunias cascading from hooks on the porch, pass the pharmacy, pass a dozen homes with wood siding painted each its own shade of gray. I see the strip mall in the distance, the one with the Urgent Care where I had first seen Dad last Friday, but before that particular memory can sink in, I spot something else.

  The Hideaway, once known as Tuck’er Inn, nearly hidden under its prim canopy of ancient maples and oaks.

  “Here,” I say, and a swarm of forbidden thoughts take root.

  Jack eyes me in alarm when I wave him urgently toward the small parking lot. No doubt thinking I’m about t
o be sick, he swerves into the space nearest the road. But I wave again, this time toward the office.

  Shooting me concerned looks every few seconds, he backs up and drives closer. By the time he has parked, his alarm has lowered to wariness.

  I hold his gaze. “Take a room.”

  “A room,” he repeats with a speculative emphasis on the m, because something in my eyes has tipped him off.

  “A cottage.” My phone dings; I ignore it. “The sign says there are vacancies.”

  “I see that,” he says, “but we just buried your father—”

  “—who lied to me all these years,” I say, and the dam bursts, “who was married to my mother, who lied to me all these years, who was best friends with a man who lied to me all these years—and speaking of best friends, I have one of those, who, thank you very much, has also been living a lie. Call me a liar for sneaking around with you when we were kids, but not a single person was hurt by what we did. Same with the way I conceived Joy, not a single one of them was hurt, and I actually did consider that. I nearly didn’t do it because I was worried one of my parents would be hurt, and when I decided to go ahead, I told them exactly what I was doing and why. Did they return the favor? No. Did they tell me what they had done and why? No.” I’m breathing hard. “So yes, I want a room—and don’t tell me it’s inappropriate right after a funeral. I want to do what I want to do for one solid hour, because all these years, no one has thought of me, and it’s about time I’m a priority. I don’t want to think of another person.” I stop short. “Well. Except you. Unless you can’t.” We both know I’m not talking about his getting back to work.

  I don’t tack on the last as a deliberate distraction, but it does the job. He snickers and says in a voice deep enough to have come from the part of his body that we’ll need, “Are you kidding? With you?” My phone dings again. “Want to check that?”

  “No.” I switch it to mute. “Please? A room?”

  He doesn’t need to be asked again. In a heartbeat, he is out of the Tahoe, striding toward the inn’s office and disappearing inside. I don’t agonize while he is gone, don’t have a second thought. Nor do I look at my phone. Joy is with Margo and is fine. Chrissie is with Lina and is not fine, but deservedly so. Same with Paul, who is likely alone. Neither of them was concerned about me all those years; I don’t need to be concerned about them now.

  Call me disrespectful or perverse. Call me selfish. But I’ve earned this.

  Jack reappears with a wooden key fob in hand. Seconds later, he is backing out of the space and jouncing us along a dirt path behind the office. The cottages there are named after birds, as in The Piper, The Robin, and The Wren. Ours is The Swan, which I will later think of as metaphorical but now simply take in.

  Leaving the truck from either side, we meet halfway to the door. He unlocks it, sticks in his head and sniffs, then moves aside to let me enter first. He’s right; it smells clean enough. The light is dim, but dim works. I’m vaguely aware of blue and white, of a double bed, a nightstand, an armchair and a dresser, not to mention air that hasn’t moved in days, but my urgency outstrips it all.

  When I reach for the zipper at the back of my dress, Jack’s arms circle me, hands displacing mine at the tab. Before he pulls, though, he pauses.

  “Are you sure?” he asks, and for a split second, the rest of the world is there.

  But I don’t want the rest of the world right now. I don’t want any part of the rest of the world right now. For the first time in thirteen years, I don’t even want to think of my daughter, though I can’t quite say that aloud.

  Rather than speak, I rub the creases between his eyes with the pad of my thumb, run that thumb down his blade of a nose, then press my face to the spot on his neck just under the scruff of his beard. His skin is musky and damp. Two seconds, and I’m lost in it, but only until my zipper rasps and I feel a freedom on my back where there wasn’t seconds before. Drawing away, I reach for his belt. My fingers have barely begun to fiddle with its buckle, when he pushes them aside.

  Practiced in unbuckling, he doesn’t have to look. His eyes hold mine, and I swear they’ve gone molten. Molten should be dangerous where footing is concerned, but Jack is my safe place. The danger for me is back at the cemetery, back at the house, back at wherever Paul Schuster has lived all these years during which he didn’t bother to identify himself as my father. Jack Sabathian may have changed in the twenty years I’ve been away, but the heart of him has not. Lifting a hand, I touch his mouth, then the bristle of mustache above it.

  “Do you need help?” he whispers and shoots a heated glance at my dress.

  With deliberate motions, I kick my shoes aside and shrug the dress off. Bending at the waist, I free my hair, which Margo had neatly knotted that morning, but with which the humidity at the cemetery has wreaked havoc anyway. I remove pins and an elastic, then, straightening, toss my hair back. I’m reaching for the clasp of my bra when I realize that, although Jack’s belt hangs undone, his hands are still.

  “Do you have a problem?” I ask. I’ve never used this particular tone with him during this particular activity, but I’m still in the grip of defiance. And this is Jack, who knows defiance like a second skin.

  Smirking, he says in a husky voice, “Yeah, I do,” and drops his hands to his sides. “You are too fucking beautiful. Take off the rest.”

  Words and voice—both are a turn-on. Simmering inside, I remove the bra and step out of the panties, dropping both on the chair with my dress. When I turn back to him, his eyes are on my naked body. For a minute, I don’t move—and not out of shyness. Shyness was when we first made love, when I was grateful for the night, which hid the fact that my right breast was fractionally smaller than my left and that I had nicked the notch at the top of my thighs in an attempt to remove the hair there. Shyness was when I was grateful for a moonless night that hid the details of his body, which I desperately wanted to see but didn’t dare, and, besides, we were rushing to do “it” before we were caught.

  Last Sunday night, I had wanted to lose myself in his body and forget the rest of the world, but my need here is different. This need is for certainty, and Jack offers that. This need is for defiance, and what we’re doing in this cottage offers that. This need is to feel my own power as an antidote to being powerless in so much else.

  Standing before him, I watch his gray eyes smolder and his arousal thicken behind the placket of his fly. He wants to touch me but is controlling himself, and something about that control snaps mine. Closing the little distance between us, I go at his clothes, tangling with his hands when they go at my breasts.

  “Jack,” I breathe roughly, “help me.”

  “You’re doing a fine job all by yourself,” he rasps but takes pity on me with the last of his clothes. The instant his pants are off, he takes my thighs from behind, lifts me so that I straddle his hips, and, telling me to hold on, tosses the duvet away with a single hand and takes me down to the sheets. In the next breath, he is inside me and then, with only the slightest shift of his hips, deeper still.

  We both cry out at the sense of completion before we’ve even begun to move. And then we do. I may be the defiant one, but Jack is incapable of passivity. He is over me, under me, behind me, driving me higher, as I do him. I’m not sure when I lose control of the situation—whether it is with the first orgasm or the second. But, somewhere along the way, my defiance burns up, leaving only desperate desire in its place. And then, after a final, screaming climax, it, too, is spent.

  Panting, we collapse on the sheets and lie side by side on our backs with our fingers laced between us. As reality returns, I grow aware of the warmth of the room, the scent of sweat and sex, the richness of the afternoon light that slips through a gap in the drapes.

  “This was for all the times we didn’t dare come here when we were kids,” I say but in a whisper that is more nostalgic than rebellious.

  “This wasn’t about that, and you know it.”

  Yes. I do
know it. It was about defying my present-day life by focusing in on the one thing that has always rung true. Rolling onto him, I settle my legs between his. He is flaccid at last, and though I know that his ability to rebound is epic, I can’t resist this last press, body to body. I chafe his scruffy jaw with my knuckles. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure,” he says with a smug look on his handsome, flushed face.

  “Do you feel used?” I ask.

  “I feel loved.”

  “But I used you.”

  His eyes sharpen, and smugness is gone. “We use the people we love, like when we’re hurting and angry and there’s no one else we can sound off to. And if we’re too young to realize why we’re doing what we are and too dumb to understand the consequences and too stubborn to apologize, we end up not talking for twenty years, and during that time, that whole time, we’re alone.”

  I swallow. He’s right about this, too. But the direction in which the conversation is headed isn’t one I’m able to face in the midst of the rest. So, I close his lips with my hand and whisper, “Not yet, Jack.” The red readout of the nightstand digital says it is two. “My hour is up.”

  “Take another.”

  “I can’t. There’s too much … too much…” My voice wobbles. I take a deep breath to steady it, but the breath wobbles, too. There’s too much with Paul, with Chrissie, with my father and my sisters, and, yes, with Jack. That quickly it all rushes back, like an eavesdropper tumbling through a door that has unexpectedly opened.

  Jack’s face blurs, and, to my horror, I roll away to cry.

  Immediately, he sits and scoops me close. My tears come even faster then, because he is my safety net, and I’ve fallen a huge distance. How calm and organized my life was six days ago, how in control. And now?