Ruby’s cell phone rang with George’s familiar tone, but she let the call go to voice mail. She would call him back later. She got up from the table and winced as her right leg took her weight. Slowly she made her way upstairs. A brief nap before she made dinner was in order.
Chapter 29
Ruby and Frieda were in the kitchen around eleven o’clock the following morning. Bella had left for work at eight, grumbling about the early hour. “Phil wants me to be at the shop to accept a delivery,” she had told her mother, who had been awake since six and working on a job since seven. “He trusts you to open up,” Frieda had replied. “That’s a good thing.” Bella had ignored her mother’s remark and gone off on her bike.
“Why didn’t I have a second cup of coffee this morning?” Frieda wondered aloud. “I could use one now. Do you want a cup, Mom?”
“No thanks,” Ruby told her. “I’m caffeinated enough at the moment. So, you haven’t told me about the play. And where did you go afterward?”
Frieda turned from the coffee maker. “The production was fantastic,” she said. “The actor who played the king was—well, he was kingly. We ran into one of Jack’s colleagues in the lobby and chatted for a while. Then we went to the Pine Hill Tavern and I saw people there I remember from when I was a girl, like the guy who gave guitar lessons to pretty much every kid in town for generations. He must be closing in on ninety by now. And Jack seems to be popular, just like he was back in school.”
“He’s popular with you these days, isn’t he?” her mother asked.
Frieda chose her words carefully. “If you mean do I like spending time with him, yes. I do. He’s nice.” And, Frieda thought, he understands what it’s like.
The phone rang. “I’ll get it,” Ruby said, going to the landline on the wall by the fridge. “Hello? . . . Oh, hello, Steve. . . . Fine, thanks.... Sure. I’ll see if she’s here.”
Ruby put her hand over the mouthpiece and lowered her voice. “It’s your father. Do you want to talk to him?”
Frieda thought for a second before saying, “Yeah, okay.” She crossed the room and took the receiver from her mother. Like Mom said, she told herself, I can always hang up.
“I’ll make myself scarce,” Ruby whispered, and rather dramatically, Frieda thought, she tiptoed out of the room.
“Hi, Dad,” Frieda said. She felt her hand grip the receiver a bit more tightly.
“Thanks for taking the call,” he replied.
“Sure. What’s up?”
“Not much on this end. I’ve been wondering how Bella’s been faring since I last talked to you.”
What could she tell her father? More to the point, Frieda thought, what did she want to tell him? “She’s all right,” she said finally.
“I know. I’m a terrible grandfather,” Steve admitted.
“You’re not any kind of grandfather,” Frieda snapped. She wondered if he would hang up on her. She wondered if he would try to argue the point.
But what he said was: “You’re right, if not technically speaking. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want Bella to feel better. I’m not coldhearted, Frieda, in spite of what you might think, and I admit I didn’t give you much reason to think otherwise. I thought a lot about Ariel on what would have been her sixteenth birthday. I spent a long time looking at the pictures your mother sent when she was born. You see, I’d given Ruby a post office box so she could let me know that each of the births had gone well.”
What is he looking for? Frieda thought. A medal? “What do you want from me, Dad?”
“What I want is to apologize for not having shown more concern for you and Bella when Aaron and Ariel died. I should have called you and not just your mother. I suppose I assumed you wouldn’t want to hear from me at such a difficult time. I shouldn’t have made that assumption, even if it turned out to be true. I should have just made the call.”
“Yes, Dad,” Frieda said. “You should have.” You should, she thought, have given me the choice of hanging up on you.
“And now, well, I’d like—and I’m not saying I deserve it—I’d like at least a small acknowledgment from you that I exist. Not that you love me,” he added quickly. “Just that you know I’m alive and in the world. Just that you know I’m here.”
Wherever here was, Frieda thought. And why after all these years should her father care what she thought of him? “And then?” she asked. “Then what? What comes after that?”
“Then . . .” Steve laughed. “I don’t know what to say.”
Neither did Frieda.
“How is your mother?” Steve asked when the silence had gone on too long for comfort. “She was fine when we talked back in May, but things change. Well, you know that better than most.”
“She’s great,” Frieda said robustly. “Fantastic. She’s in great health and she has a wonderful man in her life.”
“Yes, she told me about him a while ago. George, isn’t it?”
“Right. He’s smart and he’s got a big job at the hospital and he’s handsome and he’ll do anything for her. The other day he replaced the washers in all the sinks and then he rehung a window in the living room.”
Steve laughed again. “Are you trying to make me jealous?”
Frieda winced with embarrassment. To make her father regret his decision to leave her mother had indeed been her childish intention. “You know,” she blurted, “kids made fun of me after you left.”
“Why would they make fun of you?” her father asked.
“Because my father had walked out on me. Because he had cheated on my mother with half the town. One girl in middle school called me trailer trash.” Frieda laughed bitterly. “I remember being confused because Mom and I didn’t live in a trailer. The trash part I got.”
Steve sighed. “I’m sorry, Frieda. Kids can be cruel; there’s no doubt about that.”
“And vulnerable.”
“Yeah, vulnerable. You know, I had a tough time of it before I hit a growth spurt when I was about fourteen. I was a skinny little thing. I wore thick glasses that made me look like a deer in the headlights. I had ‘kick me’ written all over me. So, the bullies did. Broke a rib or two one time.”
Frieda almost felt as if she had been slapped. This was the last thing she expected to hear from her father, a story from his childhood, a story about his being victimized. It confused her. She didn’t want to feel sympathy for Steve Hitchens, but she was a mother who had once had to confront a boy who had teased her younger daughter to the point of tears. How could she not feel sympathy for the innocent child her father had been? “I’m sorry, Dad,” she said after a moment. “What happened then?”
“My father taped me up and sent me back to school the next day.”
“Didn’t your mother do anything?” Frieda asked. “Talk to the teacher or the bully’s parents? Confront the kids who hurt you? Didn’t she take you to a doctor? Broken ribs can puncture organs.”
Her father laughed. “Are you kidding me? Take me to a doctor? She thought I’d said or done something to provoke the other kids. She told me I’d better learn to keep my mouth shut. She told me I’d better learn how to get out of my own scrapes. She wasn’t long on nurturing, my mother.”
Maybe that’s why you aren’t capable of . . . No, Frieda thought. Her father was capable of nurturing. Look what he had done for Phil and Tony. Then why—
“Sorry,” she said abruptly. “I’ve got to go now.”
“Okay. Thanks for talking with me again, Frieda.”
Frieda hesitated. She couldn’t say “my pleasure” and really mean it. “Okay,” she said. “Bye.”
When she had hung up Frieda suddenly felt the need for fresh air. She went out to the front porch and sank into one of her mother’s rocking chairs. Could her father have been lying about being bullied? Had he been looking for her pity, hoping to be let off the hook for his bad behavior by claiming an unhappy childhood? But Frieda didn’t really think that was the case. No, she suspected her father was telling the
truth about his past. The question was, why tell her now? Why tell her ever?
Frieda put her head back against the chair and sighed. It was all such a puzzle and it had been since the day Steve Hitchens had walked out on his wife and child. Since then Frieda had spent a good many hours of her life wondering where her father was living, if he had remarried, and, most important, if he had had other children. Now she had access to the one person who could give her the answers to those questions, but she knew she would never ask. What would be the point? She certainly didn’t have any interest in building a relationship with her half siblings, should they exist. And she certainly didn’t need to learn that her father might have stuck around for his other children longer than he had stuck around for his firstborn.
And as for the possibility that her father had other grandchildren, grandchildren he might know well and see on a regular basis . . . Well, Frieda could accept—if not with good grace—that her father had virtually abandoned her, but that he had ignored his granddaughters right from the start was something she still could not forgive him for. Put aside pity for the child he was, Frieda told herself firmly. Think only of the man he is, selfish and unkind.
But that was not an easy thing to do, Frieda realized. Her father had kept Ariel’s baby pictures, and maybe Bella’s, too. Her father had called her, twice. Didn’t that mean something good? Didn’t it?
Chapter 30
“It’s got to be, like, ninety degrees.” Clara waved her hand in front of her face. “I wish the cottage had air-conditioning.”
Bella shifted on the folding lawn chair, one of several in the small, messy yard behind the cottage. She was sweating profusely, but it was better to be in the sun rather than in Clara’s cramped and airless bedroom. Still, she could use something cold to drink, but Clara hadn’t offered her anything.
Someone had left a copy of the latest issue of InStyle on the upturned milk crate and Bella picked it up. “I think my mother’s involved with this guy who works at the college,” she said, flipping idly through the pages of the magazine. “They used to go to school together.”
“So?” Clara asked. She was wearing a T-shirt with the words EDOOCATION ROONED MY LIFE emblazoned across it.
“So it bothers me.”
“Why? Is he married or something?”
“No,” Bella said. “His wife died a few years ago. She had cancer.”
Clara nodded as if something important had been decided. “Good,” she said. “Then your mother and this guy have something in common. Marc and I have so much in common. We never have trouble finding something to talk about.”
You never had any trouble finding things to talk about, Bella thought. Past tense. “That’s not the point,” she protested. “The point is that I don’t want her to . . .” Bella shook her head. “Never mind.”
“Tear out a page of that magazine, will you?”
Bella frowned. “But it’s not mine.”
“Whatever. Tear out one of those back pages with all the ads. I need a fan.”
Bella hesitated a moment and then did what Clara asked. “I found my sister’s locked diary at my grandmother’s house,” she said, handing Clara the page.
“Cool. Are you going to open it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I mean, it’s locked for a reason.”
“But Ariel is gone,” Clara pointed out, madly fanning her face. “What does it matter if someone reads her diary?”
“It’s still hers,” Bella argued, “not mine. Besides, what if she said something really critical about me? Or what if she thought something bad about me was true, but it wasn’t true and now it’s too late for me to tell her she was wrong? I’ll know she died thinking I’d cheated on a test or stolen something or worse.”
“I still say you should open it. If you can’t find the key you can probably use the end of a paper clip or something. I did that once.”
“You mean you picked a lock?” Bella asked.
“Yeah. It was easy.”
When nothing more of Clara’s lock-picking story was forthcoming, Bella said, “Look, I’m dying of thirst. Is it okay if I get some water or something?”
Clara leaped from her seat. “Oh. Yeah. I’ll grab something from the fridge. Right back.” She dashed into the house and returned a few minutes later with two cans of Diet Pepsi. “My housemate Julie bought these, but I’m sure she won’t mind.”
Bella hesitated. She felt a little weird taking someone else’s soda—and tearing a page from someone else’s magazine—but she really was thirsty, so she squashed her scruples and snapped open the can. Diet Pepsi was her favorite. Ariel had hated all soda but orange, which Bella thought was disgusting. The stuff didn’t taste at all like real oranges.
“I hated the—the celebrity my father’s and sister’s deaths brought me at school,” she said suddenly. “I mean, people I barely knew started acting all overly sympathetic, like they really, really cared. I felt people watching me all the time, like they were waiting for me to do something dramatic like fall to the floor kicking and screaming or something.”
“So what did you do about it?” Clara asked.
“Mostly I just walked away, but sometimes I’d tell someone to leave me alone. I’d say things like, ‘You don’t even know me. How can you say you feel bad for me?’ That usually shut them up. At least it made them too embarrassed to approach me again.”
“No one told me they were sorry for me when Marc left me.”
“I just wanted to be left alone,” Bella went on, almost as if she were talking to herself. “I had this best friend, Kerri. I told you about her. She kept trying to make me share my feelings, but she wouldn’t understand I didn’t want to talk about my feelings. I wanted to forget, but nobody would allow me to forget. Everyone wanted me to remember out loud.”
“I never want to forget,” Clara said softly.
“Right after the accident,” Bella went on, “my school set up counseling groups to help Ariel’s classmates process her death. People put up these little shrines in her memory. Every time I turned a corner I was confronted by a reminder of all I had lost. It was horrible. Every time I left the building I had to pass a heap of flowers and stuffed animals and messages written on poster board. ‘Rest in peace, Ariel.’ ‘We love you, Ariel.’ ‘We’ll never forget you, Ariel.’ I felt like I was going mad. There was never any escape from the reality that Dad and Ariel were gone.”
“I don’t want to forget Marc.” Clara’s voice was loud now and her tone insistent.
“But you want to forget the bad thing that happened, don’t you?” Bella asked urgently. “You want to forget even for a moment that he rejected you, right?”
Clara didn’t reply.
“I had this dream about the accident again last night,” Bella said, tossing the magazine onto the milk crate. “Actually, there are a few different versions of it. Sometimes there’s a happy ending and it’s Ariel and my father who are walking through the doors of the hotel, not the police. Sometimes I’m at the scene of the accident, watching it all happen. I try to call out a warning or to wave my arms to get my father’s and sister’s attention, but I can’t speak or move. And then suddenly I wake up and it’s like the accident happened all over again and I feel sad for hours.”
“That sounds seriously screwed,” Clara said.
“Yeah. Do you dream about Marc?” Bella asked.
Clara sighed. “It’s weird, but I don’t. When I’m awake he’s all I can think about, but when I go to sleep he’s not there. My mind is just a blank.”
“That must be a relief. Like what I said about forgetting.”
Clara shook her head. “It’s not a relief. I want to dream about him. I want to keep as much of him as I can.”
“But . . .” Bella shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe letting go a little is the right thing to do. I mean, he did end things, right? He’s probably moving on, so . . .”
“He’ll be back,” Clara said firmly. “I’m sure of i
t.”
Bella didn’t argue. She knew all about wanting so badly something that wasn’t going to happen that you started to convince yourself that the impossible could happen if only you believed strongly enough. If only you kept your fingers crossed. If only . . . But maybe Marc would come back to Clara. He was alive. Anything, however unlikely, was possible when you were alive. She was about to say something to this effect when Clara began to speak again.
“My parents were relieved when Marc left me,” she said. “I know they were. From the beginning of our relationship they’d been worried I was going to throw my life away—that was their term—by marrying young and not experiencing the world.” Clara laughed bitterly. “What’s there to experience when you’ve lost the person you loved most?”
Bella thought about that for a moment and realized she didn’t know how to answer the question. “Even if your parents are relieved that you and Marc aren’t seeing each other anymore,” she said, “I’m sure they don’t want you to be sad. I mean, they’d have to be sick to want that.”
Clara ignored Bella’s comment. “Marc left for California the day after graduation,” she said. “It was like he couldn’t bear to be in the same town as me. Why? What did I ever do to him that was so bad he couldn’t look me in the face? I didn’t get to say good-bye. By the time I got to his house the next morning he was gone.”
Bella put her empty soda can next to the magazine on the milk crate. “Maybe it was better that you didn’t see him before he left. Maybe it would have been too painful.”
“No. I needed to see him. I told you that my parents practically forced me to come to Ogunquit, right? They said that meeting new people and seeing new sights would help take my mind off Marc.”
Bella looked closely at Clara for the first time that day. The strained look of grief she had seen on Clara’s face when they first met on the Marginal Way was more pronounced now. “And it isn’t working, is it?” she asked. “Being in a new place and meeting new people.”
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