Secrets at the Beach House

by Diane Chamberlain

  She held up a hand to stop him. “None of the above. And I’m sick of deep self-examination. I want to have this baby.”

  “What about Boston?”

  “Cole. Don’t do this to me. Won’t you help me?”

  He looked remorseful. “Of course I will.”

  “Could you hold me, please? Just for a second?”

  He pulled her against him. “I don’t think I can hold you just for a second,” he said into her hair. “Ah, Kit. It’s going to change your whole life.”

  Kit sat across from Rennie at McDonald’s a few days later, smiling at the light in the girl’s eyes as she described her day at school. She was making friends. Two girls had reached out to her. Two young-sounding fourteen-year-olds, like Rennie herself.

  Rennie looked good. It wasn’t just the new, ready smile and the growing self-confidence. It was more than that. She was taking pains with her appearance, wearing skirts to school, curling the ends of her long light brown hair.

  Kit had never heard Rennie string so many words together in such a short space of time as she was doing now. But she wasn’t really listening. In a minute she would turn the tables on this kid, ask for some of the same understanding she’d given her for the last month or so.

  Rennie stopped talking to take a bite of her hamburger and Kit seized the opportunity.

  “I need to tell you something,” she said.

  Rennie set down the burger. “Do I have to leave the Chapel House?”

  “Oh no. Nothing like that.” Rennie had that worry hanging over her head day and night. They’d applied to the county to become her permanent foster home, but there was a snag because of the “unusual domestic situation”. Rennie knew that at any moment she could be snatched from them. “No, it has to do with me, not you. I wanted you to know that I’m going to have a baby.”

  Rennie sat back in her chair. “Why?”

  She hadn’t expected that question and she had no answer. Because I want a baby was a lie. Because I had sex with a soon-to-be-married man and it just happened was the truth but hardly the words she could say to Rennie.

  “Some things are hard to explain,” she said.

  “But you’re not married or anything. Who’s . . .” Rennie blushed. “I guess it isn’t any of my business.”

  “He’s no one you’ve met.” She hadn’t figured out yet what role she wanted Sandy to play in this. She wished she could keep him out of her life altogether, but was that fair to him? To her baby? Or would her baby be in for even more heartbreak and confusion if she involved Sandy? As hard as she tried, she couldn’t imagine Sandy as a father. He was a child himself.

  Rennie looked out the window, her hamburger forgotten. “I don’t understand why women ever do it. Have sex, I mean. It hurts so much.”

  “Rennie, it only hurt you because of the circumstances. When you’re older and in love with someone and—”

  Rennie shook her head furiously. “I’m never doing it again.” She closed the Styrofoam box around her hamburger, a symbolic gesture. “Kit, would you tell me something? Please be honest.”

  Kit nodded.

  “Did Dr. Chrisman say anything to you about . . . maybe that I’m not normal. You know, not made like other girls or something?”

  Kit felt a lump form in her throat. None of them knew the depth of Rennie’s suffering, she thought. “You’re perfectly normal, Rennie. It hurt because your body wasn’t ready. Rape is nothing like making love.”

  “I’m never going to do it again,” Rennie said. “Absolutely never.”

  Kit smiled and rested her hand on Rennie’s. “Tell me that in another ten years,” she said.

  28.

  Traffic was light on the parkway as he drove home from his parents’ house. He’d had dinner with them to celebrate his first fetal surgery at Blair, a male with a diaphragmatic hernia. The team had been incredible. He was certain they’d saved the baby’s life.

  He watched himself on television from the couch in his parents’ living room. He looked pretty good, came across sounding more alert than he’d been feeling at the time. He’d just walked out of the OR and couldn’t get that euphoric grin off his face.

  He only wished Kit had been in town to see the press conference, especially since she’d been responsible for setting it up. But he’d taken her to the airport that morning to catch her flight to Seattle. She’d been nervous. She punched the buttons on his car radio with the change of every song and chewed on the back of her thumb.

  “Do I look pregnant? Will my parents know as soon as they see me?”

  He looked obediently at her stomach, where the denim of her jeans was stretched taut from hip bone to hip bone, and felt a sudden rush. He looked back at the road and locked his fingers around the steering wheel. “They won’t know until you tell them,” he said.

  He kept his physical feelings for her chained down these days. He was getting very good at it. He could almost convince himself that his desire for her had been an aberration. It was only at moments like this, when he was caught off guard, that the feelings came to the surface.

  Jay met him now in the Chapel House driveway.

  “On your way to Blair?” Cole asked, checking his watch. It was a few minutes before ten.

  Jay nodded as he lifted the garage door. “Appendectomy. How’s your mom?”

  “Good. More like her old self.”

  Jay paused before getting into his car. “You know, Rennie was a little weird tonight.”

  “Weird?”

  “I can’t put my finger on it. Antsy. I was helping her with her algebra and her concentration was nil. She’s usually pretty sharp at math.”

  He felt a flash of panic—something was wrong with Rennie, and Kit was three thousand miles away. But that was idiotic. There were four other adults in this house. Surely they could handle whatever was troubling one fourteen-year-old girl.

  He set his ear against Rennie’s bedroom door on his way to his own room. He listened for a moment, but all he could hear was the ocean.

  It was two in the morning when she cried out his name. He was still awake himself, staring at his ceiling, wondering why he couldn’t sleep. He opened her door and the light from the closet lit up her face, wide-eyed and pale.

  “Rennie?”

  “I’m sick or something.”

  The room was warm, but Rennie was shaking hard enough to make the old iron bedframe squeak. Cole sat on the edge of the bed and laid the back of his hand on her damp forehead. It was cool. “What’s wrong? Are you in pain?”

  “No. I don’t know what it is. All night I’ve been kind of nervous and . . .” She swallowed hard and it took her a few seconds to speak again. “My heart’s going real fast and it’s pounding against my ribs like I’m going to have a heart attack. And I can’t catch my breath.”

  He took her wrist in his hand. Her pulse hammered against his fingertips. He stood up and got a blanket from the closet and laid it over her, thinking that he and Rennie were most likely suffering from the same malaise—a little separation anxiety, with Kit in Seattle. He sat down again. “You know, sometimes,” he began carefully, “when a person is upset he has a physical reaction. Maybe his heart races or he hyperventilates—has trouble catching his breath.” He tucked the thick stack of blankets around Rennie’s shivering shoulders. “I know I feel a little . . . well, like there’s an empty spot in the house when Kit’s not here. That’s probably why I had trouble sleeping tonight.” Was that the truth? “Maybe you’re upset about it, too.”

  “I don’t understand why she couldn’t just call her parents to tell them. Why did she have to go there?”

  “It’s the kind of thing that’s hard to say long distance.” He spotted the phone on Rennie’s night table. “Let’s call her,” he said without thinking. It would be past eleven in Seattle. He’d probably wake her parents.

  Kit sounded sleepy when she answered the phone.

  “Rennie and I miss you,” he said. “I can’t sleep, and Renni
e’s very shaky and her heart’s doing the jitterbug, so I thought if we called you we’d feel better.”

  She was quiet, probably trying to make some sense of his words. “She’s having some kind of anxiety attack?” she asked.

  “Exactly. Rennie’s right here in bed shaking up a storm even though she’s under eighty blankets.”

  “She let you in her bedroom?”

  “Incredible, huh?”

  “I’ll say. Put her on.”

  Rennie tucked the receiver between her ear and the pillow, and Cole walked to the window. The moonlight lay in a narrow sheet of silver on the water.

  “Uh-huh,” said Rennie. “I just feel like I’m cracking up or something.” There was a pause. “But I can’t help that my heart’s racing.” A shorter pause. “Yes.” A long, deep breath. Another. And another.

  Cole smiled to himself, thinking of Kit calmly working her magic on the other end of the phone. For nearly ten minutes he watched the moonlight playing with the waves, hypnotized. The tension in his own body was melting.

  Rennie was peeling off one of the blankets by the time Cole took the phone from her.

  “Does she seem better now?” Kit asked.

  Rennie had stopped shivering. Her arms were folded across her chest.

  “Much,” he said. “And how are you doing? How did it go with your parents?”

  She sighed. “As well as could be expected. They think I’m the lowest slime that ever crawled the earth, but they didn’t disown me.”

  “Hurry home, okay? I love you.”

  “I love you too, Cole. Good night.”

  29.

  Thank God she no longer lived in Seattle. She lay awake in the bed of her childhood, unable to sleep since hanging up the phone. The familiar streetlight outside her window threw a triangle of white light across the ceiling.

  She was a disappointment to her parents. A sudden disappointment, for all her life she’d pleased them. Until the last couple of years. First the divorce, now this.

  She hadn’t seen them in over a year, and she was stunned at how they’d aged. They moved and spoke with an air of defeat. Had they always been that way? They seemed too old to hurt with her news, and for a moment she thought it would be noble to have an abortion if it meant sparing them pain.

  They had stared at her, simply stared, when she told them. After a moment her mother spoke. “I could never love a child who was conceived so . . . haphazardly,” she said.

  “I’m not asking you to love it. I’m only here to tell you that it exists, and I didn’t want to tell you by phone.”

  “Has the baby’s father offered to marry you?” her father asked, his eyes so innocent that it hurt her to look at him.

  “I don’t want to marry him, Dad.”

  Her father stared at her again, as if he couldn’t decipher the code in which she was speaking. “You’re going to make your life and the life of a little child miserable if you have no husband.”

  “I’ve had a husband and that made me miserable,” she’d said.

  Now, the streetlight illuminated her room and she looked at the ragged crack in her ceiling that had been there forever. It still reminded her of a mountain range. She used to pretend there were tiny people who lived on the ceiling and skied down the mountains. Once, she drew little villages around the mountain range with a charcoal pencil, balancing herself on her desk. Her mother had been furious. She made her repaint the whole ceiling. The villages disappeared, but to her relief the mountain range remained.

  She could only remember the times her mother had been angry with her. Had there ever been tender moments? She raced through her memory in a kind of panic, but she couldn’t think of any. Maybe that was why she felt so little for the baby inside her. You needed to be nurtured before you could nurture someone else.

  In the mornings now she felt well—well enough to run smoothly and tirelessly. And her appetite was finally back, like an old friend. The date bread her mother made that morning had disappeared by dinnertime. She felt so well that she was beginning to think about Boston again. It was out of the question, of course, but she wondered if she’d made the decision about the baby on a whim. Maybe Cole had been right. Maybe she should have had the abortion.

  She stared at the mountain range and laid her hands on her nearly flat stomach. How could she feel this good and be pregnant? It wouldn’t have surprised her if she woke up one morning to discover she’d never been pregnant at all. There was no longer any evidence of it. No need for saltines. No yawning her way through the afternoon. She fed herself well and told people about the baby, but it seemed as though she was giving credence to a delusion. It would be terrible if she had hurt her parents and humiliated herself over some hormonal imbalance.

  She sat up and reached for her watch on the dresser. It was three-thirty. She was never going to fall back to sleep. She missed the rhythm of the ocean in her ears. She didn’t belong here any longer. This had been no more than a duty call.

  The sky above the bay was purple as she climbed the front steps to the Chapel House the following day. In the living room, she held Rennie a long time, longer than the girl might have liked, and she knew very well it was her need and not Rennie’s. I mothered you, she thought, startled as she remembered talking with her on the phone. And I did a pretty good job of it, didn’t I?

  Kit dialed the phone in the library. She sat back in the chair and let the smell of the leather soothe her. This time she would go through with it. She’d started to call Sandy so many times that she knew the number by heart. She’d memorized her speech as well.

  “Hello?” The voice was young, almost girlish. Kit felt an unexpected rush of sympathy for the woman on the other end of the line.

  “May I speak with Sandy Cates, please? This is Kit Sheridan.”

  She sensed the woman’s hesitation. “Can I tell him what it’s regarding?”

  Kit almost laughed. What could she possibly say? “It’s personal.” Let him work out his own problems with his open-minded, understanding wife.

  Sandy’s voice was smooth and familiar.

  “Sandy, this is Kit Sheridan.”

  “Kit! How are you?”

  “I’m all right, but I need a minute of your time.” She drew in a breath. “I need to preface this by saying that I don’t want anything from you. I don’t want to interfere in your life . . . but I think it’s only fair to tell you that I’m pregnant. Nearly four months.”

  She waited while he chewed on that.

  “You’re saying that it’s mine?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you had an IUD.”

  “I do. It didn’t work.”

  “Hold on a second,” he said. She heard a door creak in the background. Heard it click shut. Then he was back on the phone. “Shit, I’m sorry Kit. Here I am trying in vain to make babies in California and you’re pregnant in New Jersey.” He laughed. “You’re planning on having it, I take it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I would have helped out with an abortion.”

  “I decided against an abortion. Look, Sandy, I know you have a wife now and you’re starting your own family. I don’t want to make things difficult for you. I think we just have to figure out what’s best for the baby.”

  “Well, I’ll pay child support. That goes without saying. But for right now I think I have to keep this kind of quiet. Kara’s upset about not being pregnant herself. She’s pretty sensitive all of a sudden and I—”

  “It’s okay, Sandy.” She didn’t want to hear about their marital problems.

  “Well, could you let me know . . . when it happens? We could talk more about it then?”

  “Yes.” She was relieved that this phone call was almost over and that he hadn’t jumped at the chance to be a father to her child. “I’ll call you then.”

  At first she thought she was dreaming, but then the scream came again, splitting the house from one end to the other. She sat up quickly, her heart pounding in her chest. It h
ad been a long time since she’d heard that scream.

  She put on her robe and slippers and walked into the hallway. Maris stood in the middle of the hall in a short nightgown, clutching her pillow to her chest. Cole was already with her, holding her arm with both hands and whispering to her, his lips against her ear. Rennie stood in the doorway of her bedroom in her long flannel nightgown, openmouthed.

  Poor Maris. She must feel so exposed. Kit ushered Rennie back to her bed. “Just a nightmare,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong.”

  “But she looked so scared.”

  “She’s okay.” She kissed Rennie’s cheek. “Go to sleep.”

  Maris was back in her room and Kit decided not to go in. She’d probably had more attention than she wanted, and anyhow, Cole would be with her. She sank back into her own bed, but she couldn’t sleep. The ocean made an odd sucking sound, and for the first time she became aware of a feeling unmistakable for anything else: her baby was moving. It was silent and spooky. Some tiny foot or elbow was nudging her, maybe in protest at the rude awakening or to let her know her denial of its existence would no longer be tolerated.

  She was supposed to have a husband right now to wake up. Someone to rest a heavy hand on her belly. It was horrible, being alone with this baby. She would have felt only slightly more terror if she thought a burglar was tiptoeing around her room, just out of her sight.

  She rolled onto her side, determined to find a position that would stop the movement.

  The sun shone like a spotlight on the wall of her room in the morning. She got up to pull down the shades and returned to bed. Sleep was the only solution. She should run instead, but what was the point? The Boston Marathon was one week away and she’d be watching the finishers on TV. Damn.

  It was Saturday, and she heard morning sounds coming from all corners of the house. The floorboards creaked predictably with each set of footsteps in the hall and on the stairs. Doors squeaked open and banged shut. Voices were subdued by the early hour. She heard Cole and Maris talking in the hallway, and she willed one of them to open her door and ask her what on earth she was doing still in bed.