Beach Plum Island

by Holly Robinson

  The only other guy Gigi had ever been riding with was her father. Neal, she noticed, had the same unschooled but graceful way of relaxing in the saddle, paying little attention to whether his heels were up or down in the stirrups but easily commanding the horse with the pressure of his long legs. This was how she imagined cowboys would ride.

  They talked in little snatches, depending on whether they were trotting or walking, and whether they were on a single track or cart road. She found out that Neal was seventeen, starting his senior year at the same public high school Evan and Sam went to; he was interested in pretty much the opposite of everything Gigi liked. For instance, he was in AP calculus and she could barely manage algebraic equations. She loved English, but Neal said he’d rather slit his wrists than ever write another paper.

  “Especially one with friggin’ footnotes,” he muttered. “What’s the point of that, when you can Google everything? Get with the program, people.”

  Gigi, he said, was lucky to go to a private school, since the public school was a “sit-down-and-shut-up sort of place,” where the teachers acted like drill sergeants and he’d been in trouble pretty much all of his first two years of high school. “Been honor roll since then,” he added with a shy glance over his shoulder. “And my robotics team took first in the state.”

  They rode to one of the bridges over the Ipswich River, where they tied the horses in the shade and jumped off the bridge into the brackish water, giving some poor old dude in a kayak a heart attack because he thought they were trying to capsize him. Neal apologized and helped the guy mop water off the inside of his boat, which Gigi thought was cool.

  Afterward they took the horses to a sandy spot on the riverbank. Neal had thought to bring lead lines and halters; they tied the horses to a tree and let them graze while Gigi and Neal lay on a rock to dry, not quite touching. Gigi was aware of Neal’s muscular long arms and legs, of his chest rising and falling beside her own. He smelled like sweet hay and river water. She felt a warmth in her stomach and was having trouble swallowing. He was older than she was; had he ever had sex? She wasn’t sure she was ready to think about sex again, not after the thing with Justin.

  Again, Beast put her at ease, dunking himself in the river and then coming to shake on them, wriggling between them like some annoying little brother until Gigi and Neal were both bent over, laughing. Then it was time to head back to the barns so Neal could do the afternoon feeding. He hadn’t even tried to kiss her, and Gigi was disappointed but relieved, too. Maybe Neal really had just wanted a friend to ride with and nothing more.

  There were two barns; Neal led LazyBoy to the bigger one by the paddocks while Gigi took Bantam to the small barn near the indoor arena. She slipped off the saddle and bridle, curried her horse until he stretched his neck and curled his upper lip in pleasure, and cleaned his hooves. Then she led Bantam into his stall, kissed his soft muzzle good-bye, and carried the saddle and bridle into the tack room.

  Lydia was in there, of course, ready to ruin her day. She seemed to be everywhere; occasionally Gigi imagined this girl must be lying in wait for her. Lydia wore bright yellow jodhpurs that showed off her tight butt. She shook her long blond hair out of her black velvet riding helmet and grinned at the sight of Gigi in her T-shirt and stained jeans, still damp from the river.

  “Nice hair,” Lydia said.

  Involuntarily, Gigi put her hand up to touch it; her hair had grown out, the pink tips mostly faded, the rest of her hair nearly back to its natural blond. It had gotten wet in the river and now she felt it standing in stiff spikes. She probably looked like a pissed-off chicken. No wonder Neal hadn’t kissed her.

  “I was swimming,” Gigi said, furious that Lydia tried to keep lording it over her. What was this girl’s problem?

  “Sure you were. Good times,” Lydia said.

  “It was fun,” Gigi said, exhausted already. “How about you? How are your lessons going?”

  Lydia rested her perfect butt against one of the saddle racks. “Good. I’m getting ready for dressage at the Nationals.”

  “That’s cool,” Gigi said, though privately she thought dressage was about the most useless thing imaginable. What kind of deviant human mind would think of putting horses through those intricate steps? A horse was born to graze and run and buck out of sheer joy. “Good luck.”

  Apparently, Lydia wasn’t ready to play nice. “Heard from Justin?”

  Gigi shook her head. “He’s spending the summer on the Cape.”

  “He’s back in town,” Lydia said. “His parents have a wicked big boat docked in Newburyport. I saw Justin two nights ago at this awesome party Sheila had.”

  Lydia would know, of course, that Gigi hadn’t been invited to one of Sheila’s parties. “That’s cool,” Gigi repeated. She turned to leave.

  “He was asking about you.”

  Gigi kept moving toward the door. “Yeah? Tell him I said hello.”

  “We hooked up,” Lydia said. “He’s going to show me around Amherst.”

  Gigi thought of Justin panting in her ear like a dying dog, of him shoving her jeans down around her ankles, and suddenly felt sorrier for Lydia than she’d ever felt for anybody. “Good for you,” she said, just as Beast charged into the tack room, grinning, tongue lolling, as if he’d been hunting for her for days. Gigi put a hand on the dog’s big warm head, thinking she’d never been happier to see anything in her life.

  Except, maybe, Neal, who was striding toward her across the paddock, lanky in his low-slung blue jeans and grinning like he’d been searching for her, too.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Her brother was born exactly two years, one month, and one day before she was. Ava knew that much now. She also knew the name of the doctor who delivered him.

  The woman at the reunion registry had been right: there was still a copy of the original birth certificate on file at the town clerk’s office in her mother’s hometown. When Ava said she was doing genealogy research for a family history, the clerk had happily pulled out a copy of the certificate and let her write down the pertinent information. Ava didn’t bring up the possibility that her brother might have another birth certificate on file. She wouldn’t have known what name to ask for anyway.

  She had left the house at six a.m. to drive to Maine. With no one to talk to, and in her poky Honda instead of Elaine’s BMW, the three-hour trek to her mother’s hometown up Route 95 through a corridor of thick pines and tractor-trailer trucks belching fumes was so monotonous that Ava had to play one of Sam’s CDs to keep herself awake. Mumford & Sons: she loved the banjo and knew enough of the lyrics to sing along with it. Singing made her feel guilty about Gigi, though, and she had to stop. She should have called to ask her to come, but she’d wanted to do this alone. She didn’t quite know why; maybe because it made her feel less like she was betraying Elaine.

  Thinking about that last conversation with her sister made Ava so angry. Olivia was right. She owed it to her father, and to herself, to see this through, no matter what Elaine wanted. Otherwise, Ava would always feel like she’d let her parents down, because this secret had defined who they were as husband and wife, as parents, as people.

  After leaving the town clerk’s office in town, Ava walked to the tiny brick library her parents must have frequented growing up. After finding what she wanted on the computers, she sat outside on one of the stone benches in front and tried to picture her parents here as they’d been in high school. She hoped they’d laughed and held hands.

  Ava ate the granola bar and apple she’d stashed in her purse, then retrieved her cell phone to call the doctor whose name was on her brother’s certificate, using the phone number she’d found online in the library and hoping he wasn’t dead or living in some Florida retirement community. She didn’t know how many more of these Nancy Drew sleuthing trips to Maine she could stomach.

  Astoundingly, Dr. Mansfield answered the phone him
self on the second ring. When Ava told him she was doing a family history and thought he might have delivered her brother over forty years ago, he asked no questions and freely admitted to being a widower eager for company.

  “Sure, come visit,” he said. “Always nice to have company. Don’t get much these days.”

  It was another hour’s drive northeast to Bangor. Dr. Mansfield’s house was a small yellow Victorian in the historic district, a few blocks uphill from the brick downtown area and the Penobscot River. As the doctor made coffee and laid out a tray with a sugar bowl and a small pitcher of milk, Ava told him the real reason she’d come.

  “I hope you don’t mind.” She held her breath, half expecting him to turn her away.

  But he shrugged his bony shoulders. “Water under the bridge now,” Dr. Mansfield said, “especially since I’m no longer practicing medicine. I’ll be dead long before anybody could sue me for breaching those damn privacy laws. Come out to the porch. I’ll tell you what I know, which probably isn’t much.”

  The elderly man wore a brown cardigan over a red plaid shirt buttoned to the neck despite the August heat. They sat in a pair of green metal camp chairs on his front porch. By the way Dr. Mansfield heartily greeted the few people walking by, Ava suspected this was his morning ritual. She felt like she’d somehow stumbled into a Norman Rockwell painting.

  They drank their coffee and made small talk about Bangor and Dr. Mansfield’s wife, who’d worked alongside him as a nurse and office receptionist until her death. Finally, the doctor said, “So let’s get down to business, now you’ve got my curiosity aroused and I’ve had a good dose of caffeine to keep me awake.”

  Ava smiled. “All right. You signed the birth certificate for my brother. Here’s what was on it.” She had copied the information from the birth certificate into a notebook at the town clerk’s. She slid the open notebook to him across the metal café table. “My brother was born August 28, 1971, at Notre Dame Hospital. I know from my aunt that my mother was sent to a Catholic home for unwed mothers. She didn’t know the name, but I think it must have been St. Margaret’s, since that’s close to the hospital and the only Catholic-run home for girls I could find online.”

  Dr. Mansfield scanned the paper. “Yes, that would be right. For a while, the Good Shepherd Sisters had a maternity ward right inside St. Margaret’s. It was a big brick house with white pillars. Looked respectable enough on the outside, but it was a pile of rubble and down at the heels. Never enough money to fix it up properly. The sisters liked to tell me God always put them last on the grocery list, figuring he had to get his milk and eggs first. Anyway, once the hospital was built, the girls delivered there instead. I saw the girls both at St. Margaret’s for prenatal care and again at the hospital when it was their time.”

  “It must have been tough on my mom. She was only fifteen.”

  “I’m sure, but she wasn’t the youngest I saw. Not by a long stretch.” Dr. Mansfield’s pale gray eyes were watering, though whether from age or sympathy, Ava couldn’t be sure. His hand trembled, the paper rustling between his fingers. “I saw maybe fifty of those poor girls through the years before I moved on to private practice. Most doctors wouldn’t deliver their infants. Too high-and-mighty with their moral principles. Plus, there was no money in it. People didn’t pay big bucks to adopt like they do now.”

  “Nobody profited when the girls gave up their babies?” Ava found this difficult to believe; she’d had many friends struggle to adopt, paying thousands of dollars for an infant whether the baby was born in the United States or adopted internationally.

  “No. The sisters took care of the necessary paperwork and placements when the girls surrendered their infants. Donations were made to the Church by grateful families, of course, but that had nothing to do with me.”

  That word, “surrendered,” gave Ava chills. It made it sound as if the girls were in battle. Which, in a way, they were. “Why do you say ‘poor girls’? Were they mistreated?”

  “Not to my knowledge. The nuns were strict, of course, but not unduly harsh. Merely disciplined. They required the girls to conform to certain rules and do chores around the house. Around 1965 or so the younger Sisters even started high school classes so girls could keep up their schoolwork. That was a blessing for many. I doubt any high school in Maine would have knowingly allowed a pregnant girl to take classes back then.”

  “Like pregnancy might be catching or something,” Ava said, thinking again of her mother’s humiliation.

  “I believe they were mainly concerned about parents believing the administration condoned wayward behavior,” Dr. Mansfield said. “In any case, the nuns truly believed they were saving the souls of these girls. This was a time when there weren’t many other options for young women, Catholic or otherwise, you understand.”

  Ava nodded. Birth control pills were on the market but probably not widely used by high school girls the way they were now. Abortion was still illegal and it would have been next to impossible to find a doctor willing to perform one in Maine, even if her mother’s Catholic family would have given permission. “Did a lot of girls want to keep their babies?”

  Dr. Mansfield furrowed his brow. His scalp gleamed, pale and waxy, through the thin strands of his silver hair. “Oh, a few. But most knew they didn’t have the resources to do so.” He passed the notebook back to her and stared up at the pale blue wooden ceiling of the porch. “Despite the difficult circumstances, some girls were actually happy there. At least they had each other. A few even asked if they could stay in Bangor after the birth rather than go home. My wife and I actually took in two of those girls and helped raise their babies.”

  Ava smiled. “That must have been nice for them.”

  “For us, too.” He sighed. “We had a son who died at childbirth and couldn’t have more children. My wife understood the grief of losing a child, perhaps better than I did. Certainly better than the nuns.” Dr. Mansfield set his coffee cup down on the table, the cup rattling in its saucer as his hand suffered a small tremor. “I wish I could tell you more, but I saw so many girls. Is there anything that would have made your mother stand out?”

  Ava was silent for a minute, wondering what she could tell this man about her mother that would jar his memory. Her mother’s dark eyes, with that unusual feline tilt to them, like Elaine’s, were probably her most unique feature. But this doctor wouldn’t remember a girl’s eyes. He’d seen too many lovely girls scared out of their wits over the years to remember how they all looked.

  “I guess the only thing different about her was that Mom refused to let the nuns take her baby,” Ava said. “She ran away instead and gave him to my aunt to raise.”

  Dr. Mansfield raised his silver eyebrows in surprise. “Your aunt took him in? Then why are you looking for him?”

  “He’s not with our family anymore. My aunt found him too difficult to care for, so when my brother was about four or five, she gave him up to social services. The child was eventually adopted by another family.”

  “Ah.” Dr. Mansfield studied the porch ceiling. “Dark hair?”

  “What?”

  “Your mother. Did she have dark hair?” He shot her a sharply appraising glance. “You don’t look much like her, if it’s the girl I’m thinking of. Very young, on the small side. Pretty little thing.”

  “Yes. She was beautiful, actually. Everyone said so. My sister looks like her. I look more like our father. Mom had dark hair down to her waist. Very straight hair, and very thick.”

  Ava had a sudden memory of her mother, despairing over hot rollers she’d been so excited to buy, only to find they left her hair in strange misshapen lumps instead of the curls she wanted. “It looks like I’ve got snails crawling all over my head,” she’d said, then tossed the rollers into the trash. Mom never set her hair again, just kept it long and sleek, a curtain she could hide behind. In the 1970s, when Ava was young, everyone ha
d made a fuss over her mother’s hair. It was what every woman wanted.

  “I think I remember her.”

  “You do?” Ava realized belatedly that she should have brought a photograph of her mother.

  “Yes, now that you tell me she left with the baby,” Dr. Mansfield said. “Only one girl did that during my tenure. Your mother left the hospital the day of delivery. Escaped in the middle of the night. The nuns were so worried. They woke me up out of a sound sleep. It was summer, one of the hottest on record.”

  That fit with her brother’s late August birthday. “How did she leave the hospital? Did someone pick her up?” Ava wanted to imagine her father rushing to the hospital in the big blue Chevy he drove during high school, a car he’d inherited when his only brother was killed in an accident at the paper mill. But that was impossible if, as Finley believed, her mother hadn’t told him about the pregnancy until after she and Elaine were born.

  “No,” Dr. Mansfield said. “She called a cab, bold as brass. I don’t know where she got the money. The girls weren’t allowed to bring purses to the hospital for fear of that very thing happening. I have no idea how she paid the cab. Your mother must have been very determined, running off like that.”

  “Do you remember anything else about her baby?” Ava asked. “I called the hospital, but they don’t have a record of my brother’s birth. None of their old paper files were transferred onto their computer system.”

  Dr. Mansfield pursed his lips. “What kind of record? You have the birth certificate.”

  “His medical records. We’d like to know whether the baby was born with any disabilities. Other than being blind, I mean.”