Secrets at the Beach House

by Diane Chamberlain

  They were quiet for a few minutes and the familiar churning of the ocean was all she could hear. Summer or winter, the sea sounded the same.

  Cole broke the silence with a sigh. “Sometimes I wish she’d died,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked quietly.

  “So I’d be free of her.” He rolled onto his side to look at her. “I’m responsible for her now, you understand that, don’t you? I mean . . . her family’s worthless.”

  “I understand that you’ll do whatever you have to do to be at peace with yourself,” she said.

  “I want to be certain she gets the right kind of care. And I’ll want to visit her sometimes, if they think that will help.”

  She felt him searching her face for some objection that wasn’t there. “It’s all right,” she said. “I don’t need to hold on to you that tightly.”

  He rolled onto his back again and put his arm under her head. She looked up at the stars and thought of the house on the bay, waiting to be filled with love and tradition. In a few weeks they would set their furniture inside it, hang curtains at the windows, and make it theirs. They would watch these same stars from their own solid wooden beach chairs.

  Their names would be carved beneath the seats.

  Epilogue

  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER

  From her van, Kit spotted Maris standing in front of the arrivals terminal and she broke into a smile. Maris had put on some weight since Kit last saw her and she now wore her hair in a short coppery pixie style, but the cinnamon skin, the long artsy earrings, the African print skirt, and the regal way she held her body—all of it was pure Maris.

  Kit drove carefully through the clot of vehicles until she reached the curb. She nearly jumped out of the van, waving and calling Maris’s name as she ran toward her, and Maris’s face lit up when she saw her.

  “I love your hair!” Kit said, pulling her into a hug.

  “I can’t believe I’m finally here.” Maris drew away and held Kit at arm’s length. “Damn, girl, you look good!”

  “Hey!”

  They turned to see a cop pounding his hand on the side of the van. “You can’t stay here!” he shouted. “Take your mutual admiration society on the road!”

  Kit held up her hands in surrender. “We’re on our way,” she assured him. She lifted the handle of one of Maris’s enormous black suitcases and began rolling it toward the van.

  It took both of them to hoist each of the two suitcases into the rear of the van, and Maris wedged her carry-on between them. “I know it looks like a lot,” she said, “but a month is a long time. Plus I needed to bring my tools of the trade.”

  “No problem.” Kit nearly had to shout over the cacophony of car horns. “We’ve got plenty of room.”

  Once inside the van, Kit navigated carefully into the line of cars jostling for space in front of the terminal and in a few minutes they’d reached the entrance to the parkway, heading down the shore.

  “So,” Kit said, settling in for the drive, “I was trying to think how long it’s been since I’ve seen you. Nine years?”

  “I haven’t been to Mantoloking in more than twenty,” Maris said, “but when did you and Cole and the kids come out to visit? ’03? ’04?”

  Kit nodded. “’04, I think, so ten years ago. Hannah would have been twelve and Aidan and Thomas were ten.” She reached over to touch Maris’s shoulder. “It’s been way too long,” she said.

  “Don’t I know it! We’ve been so busy at the firm, and my first impulse when Janni called was to say ‘no’, even though I really wanted to say ‘yes’, but Sean said if I was waiting for a slow time to get back to Mantoloking, I’d be waiting forever.”

  “You guys are that busy?”

  “We are,” Maris said. “It’s a double-edged sword, of course. Great money, and we love what we’re doing, but we don’t have a minute to catch our breath.” She tilted her head at Kit. “What are you smiling at?”

  Kit sped up to pass a car, then glanced at her old friend. “I was just remembering the first night I met Sean,” she said. “It was the annual Christmas party in the Chapel House. Do you remember? You and Sean were dancing and I thought he was some hot young surfer dude you’d picked up on the beach. I had no idea he was an architect friend of yours and I certainly never thought you’d end up married to him.”

  Maris laughed. “He still looks like a hot surfer dude,” she said, “just not so young anymore. His hair’s still long, but it’s mostly gray now.”

  “Wait till you see Jay and Cole,” Kit said. “Completely gray, though I have to say that they wear it well.”

  “They both look good in those Christmas card pictures,” Maris said, then she laughed. “Interesting how Jay and Cole have gone gray but you, Janni, and I haven’t.”

  “Yeah, it’s a miracle.” Kit smiled. “Janni actually doesn’t color hers. She’s only now getting a few silver strands in her hair.”

  “She still looks like a kid, at least in pictures.”

  “She does. I think she weighs what she did in high school. I blame my extra twenty pounds on pregnancy because I have to blame them on something.”

  “Oh, well.” Maris shrugged. “Twenty pounds. Thirty. Forty.” She patted her thigh through her skirt. “Gray hair. Wrinkles. Sagging boobs. None of it really matters in the long run, does it?”

  Kit nodded. “I think we worried about all the wrong things when we were younger.”

  “We were babies back then.”

  Kit pulled back into the right lane and turned on the cruise control. She took her foot off the gas and felt her body relax. “I remember back when I moved into the Chapel House,” she said. “I was just starting that Public Relations job at Blair and I was what . . . thirty? Thirty-one? And I thought about how hard it was going to be to change careers at that advanced age.” She laughed. “I’ve changed two more times since then.”

  “I love stumbling across your articles, Kit,” Maris said. “I can hear your voice when I read them and it makes me miss you. I read the piece you wrote for the Huffington Post a couple of months ago—the one about adopting teenagers? It was excellent.”

  “Rennie was a huge help with that one,” Kit said. It had been a challenge to pin Rennie down long enough to pick her brain, but her input had made the article that much richer. Kit had been able to tell both sides of the story.

  “Rennie will be at the house today, right?” Maris asked.

  “I hope so.” Kit didn’t bother correcting her use of the word “house”. They all did it. “She and her husband and kids were already there when I left, but while I was waiting for you, Cole texted me to say that Rennie got called to Blair for a delivery.”

  Maris slowly shook her head, a smile on her face. “It’s still hard for me to imagine Rennie as an adult, much less a doctor,” she said.

  “She’s amazing. You should hear conversations between her and Cole. Cole’s got the experience, but she keeps up with every advance in the field. You’d think she invented obstetrics.”

  “Uh oh.” Maris laughed. “Does that create some tension?”

  “It can get a little heated sometimes, but honestly, I think Cole gets a kick out of it. He’s extremely proud of her. She’s taken over the bulk of his practice and he’s mostly doing fetal surgery these days.”

  “Just . . . mind-blowing,” Maris said. “Whoever could have guessed that’s how things would turn out?”

  “I know. It’s wild.”

  “What do you think would have become of Rennie if you’d never stumbled across her on the beach?”

  “Oh, Maris, I can’t even go there.” It wasn’t the first time that thought had crossed Kit’s mind, and it was impossible to imagine. “All the ‘what ifs’,” she said. “What if I’d never met Janni at that conference nearly thirty years ago? It was such a fluke.” She shuddered at the thought of an alternate life she might have lived. “I think we all got lucky,” she said.

  “I remember when you first moved into the C
hapel House,” Maris said. “You’d had it with men. You never wanted to get married again. You didn’t want to be tied down. You certainly didn’t want to have kids. All you wanted to do was run.”

  Kit laughed. “I remember that woman,” she said. “She was running away from everything.”

  “I’m glad you stopped running from Cole.” Maris’s voice was gentle.

  Kit glanced at her again. “He seemed like a dangerous person to give in to back then,” she said.

  “I know,” Maris agreed. “You always had the specter of Estelle to compete with.”

  They fell quiet and Kit guessed they were both thinking about the same thing.

  Maris finally broke the silence. “I think you were amazing back then, Kit,” she said. “The way you dealt with that whole situation.”

  “Thank you.” She bit her lip, remembering. “I only wish it could have turned out differently. It was so hard on Cole.”

  “He didn’t blame himself, did he?”

  “A little, I think. But to be honest, it’s the one thing we’ve never really talked about. He said she took up too much of our energy when she was alive and he wasn’t going to keep giving her that power.”

  “He tried so hard to help her,” Maris said. “And you were so understanding.”

  Kit shrugged. “I just kept reminding myself that he’d chosen to be with me,” she said. “I knew it was me he loved.”

  “Everyone knew it was you he loved,” Maris said. “Everyone, including Estelle. We knew it way before you did.”

  Kit smiled. “Lucky I figured it out before it was too late,” she said.

  They were quiet as she drove through Point Pleasant and over the canal bridge, and Kit tried to see the shore through Maris’s eyes. She’d been away so long. When they turned onto the ocean road, Maris rolled down her window. “Ah, the Atlantic!” she said as the warm salt air filled the van. “I swear, the Pacific has never smelled quite right to me.”

  “Oh, I think San Francisco has other charms to make up for it,” Kit said.

  “It doesn’t look too bad here,” Maris mused as they drove past Bay Head homes that had already been repaired.

  “Well, nearly two years have passed since Hurricane Sandy,” Kit said. “I can show you a video of how it looked through here after the storm. Completely flooded.”

  “Did your house have much damage?”

  Kit tightened her hands on the steering wheel at the memory. “All the Mantoloking houses were damaged,” she said, “but we were lucky, especially considering we’re right on the bay. A house a block away from us was completely destroyed. We had flooding and needed a lot of reconstruction work done to the downstairs and it was a mess, but it could have been so much worse.” She looked at Maris. “Did you know the storm cut a new inlet right through Mantoloking, from the bay to the ocean?”

  “I saw pictures of that on the news,” Maris said. “I couldn’t believe it, seeing little Mantoloking on CNN. It’s not still like that, is it?”

  “No, they’ve done a remarkable job of rebuilding the coast in that area.”

  Maris leaned close to the windshield, squinting at the road ahead. “Where are we?” she asked. “I can’t get my bearings.”

  Kit understood how she felt. “This is Mantoloking,” she said.

  “You’re kidding!”

  The landscape had changed shape dramatically in the last two years as homeowners tried to rebuild their lives. The houses were newly elevated on pilings, or covered in Tyvek sheeting, or in some cases, simply gone. Construction trucks were everywhere. But Maris hadn’t seen the worst of it yet. That was about to come. And she seemed to know it.

  “My heart is pounding,” she said.

  They drove in silence for a short distance and then Kit made a left turn onto a wide sandy lot bordered by the scrubby trees and shrubs so common along the coast. She parked next to Aidan’s station wagon, right behind a slightly off-kilter Port-a-Potty tucked into the trees.

  “Why are we stopping here?” Maris asked.

  “Oh, Mar.” Kit bit her lip at the confusion in Maris’s voice. “This is it.” She pointed to the barren lot. “This was the Chapel House.”

  Maris stared at the flat expanse of sand in front of them, a look of disbelief in her eyes. Then she did what they had all done: She cried.

  “I didn’t expect to feel this way,” she said once she’d pulled herself together and they had gotten out of the van. “I mean, I knew it was destroyed . . . I know that’s why I’m here . . . but this is just so . . .” She shook her head. “It’s so in your face. How can it be totally erased? All the life that was in that house!” Her voice cracked. “All the memories.”

  “We’ve still got them,” Kit said. “Nothing can take them away.” She tugged Maris’s arm. “Come on,” she said. “Are you ready to see everyone?”

  Maris looked blankly at the empty lot. “Everyone?” she asked. “Where are they?”

  Kit nodded toward the ocean. “Just over the dune on the beach.”

  The sun was sinking low in the sky behind them as they skirted the rows of newly planted beach grass on the dune, and Kit could hear the squeals of Rennie’s kids above the rhythmic sound of the waves. A blue striped beach umbrella came into view, along with Janni and Jay’s white beach canopy. Half a dozen folding beach chairs were scattered on the sand. John Chapel’s old wooden chairs were somewhere out to sea.

  Cole was waist deep in the water, jumping the waves with Janni and Jay’s three-year-old granddaughter Brigit on his shoulders, and in the distance, Kit saw her own daughter and twin sons straddling their surfboards, waiting for a decent wave.

  Maris stopped walking. “Who are all these people?” she asked with a laugh. “Is that Hannah out there on the surfboard?”

  “Right. With Aidan and Thomas.”

  “That’s Aidan and Thomas?” Maris looked incredulous. “Oh my God, Kit. They’ve turned into men!”

  Kit laughed. “I know. I swear, it happened overnight.” She pointed to a man sitting on a surfboard several yards north of the others. “And the guy over there is Hannah’s fiancé, Jordan. Then those four girls sunbathing are Aidan and Thomas’s girlfriends, and Elizabeth, Janni and Jay’s daughter and . . . I’m honestly not sure who the fourth one is.” She laughed. “Kids multiply around here. That guy body surfing out there is Janni and Jay’s son, Derek.”

  “He and Elizabeth are brother and sister, right?” Maris asked. “I mean, biological?”

  “Right. They were four and five when Jan and Jay adopted them and total hellions.” Kit shuddered at the memory. “But they’re sweethearts now, especially now that Derek’s a father.”

  Maris put her hands on her hips. “I’m totally overwhelmed,” she said. “All these people who didn’t even exist last time I was here. Unreal.” She nodded toward the boy and girl playing in the sand at the water’s edge. “Are those two Rennie’s?” she asked. “I recognize them from her Facebook page.”

  “Yes, and their dad is—”

  “Maris!” Janni appeared from around the corner of the white canopy. She raced toward them across the sand, her ponytail bouncing in the air. “You’re here!” Janni stood on her tiptoes to wrap her arms around Maris. “You’re such a wonderful friend to do this!”

  “I’m so sorry about the house, Jan,” Maris said, as they pulled apart.

  Janni held up a hand to put an end to the sympathy. “Thanks, sweetie, but we’re looking forward now, not back,” she said, though the words still sounded like they took some effort. Kit didn’t think Janni would ever get over losing the house that had been in her family for generations.

  “Hey, you’re here!” Jay called as he walked toward them from beneath the canopy. He hugged Maris, then held her by the shoulders and studied her face. “Wow, look at you!” he said. “You look fantastic.”

  She reached up and tousled his wild gray hair. “I love this,” she said. “I’d kill for this thick head of hair.”

  Cole h
ad spotted them and was walking through the surf toward the beach. He lifted Brigit from his shoulders and set her down in the sand next to Rennie’s son and daughter, then headed toward them. Maris didn’t wait for him. She kicked off her sandals and ran toward him across the damp sand. Kit watched her with a smile. She knew Maris had always loved him. Did she still? Did she see the same thing Kit saw when she looked at him? How his white hair only brought out the blue-green of his eyes? How his smile still produced those sexy dimples in his cheeks?

  Cole held his arms out wide, grinning as he waited for a hug. “I’m wet!” he warned Maris.

  “I don’t care!” she said, and they came together in an embrace that lasted long enough to put a lump in Kit’s throat. She wished Maris still lived close by. She wished they could all be together in the house again, this time with their kids and grandkids.

  She wished she could have the impossible.

  “So, are you really allowed to have a fire on the beach these days?” Maris asked a couple of hours later, as sparks rose into the dusky air above them. They sat on the folding beach chairs in a half circle around the fire Cole had built close to the dune, just the five of them now, toasting marshmallows on long skewers. “Or are we breaking the law?” Maris added.

  “What exactly is there left to burn down?” Jay asked, his voice somber.

  Janni poked him with her elbow. “We’re looking forward, remember?”

  He held his toasted marshmallow out to her in apology, and she plucked it from the skewer and popped it in her mouth.

  An hour earlier, they’d eaten sandwiches and salad with the kids. Rennie had arrived just in time for dessert and she’d looked beautiful and tired as she hugged Maris and gathered up her exhausted children and sunburned husband. Then everyone else disappeared as if by magic, murmuring “boardwalk” or “movies” or words Kit didn’t catch. She was certain her own sons and daughter knew that tonight, the Chapel House beach belonged to this coterie of old friends.