Seashell Season

by Holly Chamberlin

  But I got control of myself. I’m good at that, sometimes. I swallowed hard and thought about my breathing, and after about a minute I was okay.

  Still, I wished I could call Dad. I can’t remember when I last felt the need for my father’s comforting arm around my shoulder, but I felt it then, bad.

  And then I thought, If I’m going to survive this sentence I’ve been handed, I’m going to have to get my shit together. No panic attacks, no breaking down, no lowering my defenses.

  I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep, but I did.

  I never dream.

  Chapter 16

  This morning I got a call from a representative of a local church. It’s one I know of but not a lot about, other than that its members are Christian. The man who called was very nice, not at all pushy, but what he had in mind appalled me.

  “We want,” he said, “to give Gemma a welcome home party. We’ll invite the entire community of Yorktide, not just our little congregation. We think we can manage to barter for use of the middle school auditorium. When one member of the community is lost, we’re all lost. And when one member of the community is found, so are we all found.”

  It was a lovely, if misguided, offer, and I had to tread carefully in my rejection. In the end he was not to be entirely deterred and said, “Well, when Gemma has had time to get used to her new home. We’ll speak again in the autumn.”

  I had no choice but to agree. Just the other day Annie and Marc had reminded me—as if I needed reminding, what with the banner across Main Street!—that the community (that strange and powerful thing) had been deeply invested in the story of Gemma’s disappearance and that they would want to be a part of her return—for honest as well as for prurient reasons. “You’ll have to acknowledge the well-wishers,” Annie said. “As well as the vampires.”

  How true, I thought now. Ever since the story of Gemma’s having been found hit the national news sources, not to mention the local papers, I’ve been bombarded with messages of congratulations from people I know only vaguely, tangentially, like the chairman of the town council (I’ve attended maybe five meetings in the last five years), as well as from my colleagues at YCC and others I know on a practical, daily-life basis, like the woman who cuts my hair once every six weeks and the hygienist at the dentist’s office who scolds me for not flossing properly and the guy who owns the car wash I visit only once a year. I’ve even gotten a call from a major newspaper in Boston, looking for “an exclusive.” But our lives are not for sale.

  I didn’t tell Gemma about the proposed party or about the offer from the newspaper.

  Later in the morning there were two separate deliveries of flowers, both from the most expensive florist in town. The first one, a bundle of seventeen white roses with a few ferns and some baby’s breath for good measure, came from the local branch manager of my bank, and the other, a massive arrangement of purple and yellow irises, from the college. Both bouquets must have cost a small fortune.

  “They’re pretty,” I said, wondering if I had a vase big enough to hold the roses.

  “Too bad it’s not candy.” Gemma frowned down at the two tiny cards. “ ‘Welcome home,’ ” she read. “ ‘We never lost faith.’ ”

  “As you saw yesterday,” I said, “you’re a bit of a celebrity. There’s no avoiding it entirely, but I hope we can manage it.”

  I handed Gemma the letter I had composed after the call from the church representative this morning. It’s a letter I’ll ask the local papers to print, thanking everyone in Yorktide for their prayers and support all these years, and asking now for privacy. I hope it doesn’t sound too much like one of those statements celebrities issue when they’re getting divorced. Self-aggrandizing. Reminding people you exist and are important while at the same time asking them to forget those very things.

  Gemma read it quickly and handed it back.

  “Okay?” I asked, hoping for some comment, bad or good.

  “Whatever.”

  “I guess I should show you the website. There’s no point in not showing it to you before I shut it down for good.”

  Let me be clear. I don’t want to give Gemma information overload, but I’d rather she learn truths from me than from a stranger.

  What am I saying? To my daughter, I’m a stranger.

  “What website?” she asked.

  A spark of curiosity! I was thankful for it.

  “A few years after your father took you,” I explained, “I created a website devoted to the abduction case. It’s called Bring Gemma Home.” Naturally enough.

  I took a seat at the kitchen table, flipped open my laptop, and opened the website.

  Gemma sat next to me, within two feet, but again it felt as if she were miles away. “But you weren’t sure that my father had been the one to take me,” she said. “Right?”

  “Well, yes,” I admitted. “The police could find no evidence, but everyone assumed Alan was guilty. I mean, the two of you going missing the same day . . . It seemed like more than a coincidence.”

  What I didn’t tell her then was that the reason I’d moved out of the apartment Alan and I had shared was because one night, in one of the frenzies that had begun to come over him since Gemma’s birth, he accused me of holding her “all wrong” and tried to yank her out of my arms, and as I told you earlier, if I hadn’t been able to catch her as his grip faltered, she would have fallen to the hardwood floor. She might have died. Recalling that frightening moment, I never had any doubt at all that Alan was the abductor.

  I snuck a look at Gemma. Her face was blank.

  “Portraits aren’t my strong suit,” I said, “and I don’t have the reconstructive forensic skills. So each year I commissioned a sketch from a freelance forensic artist of what you might look like in the present. And here,” I said, pointing at the screen, “here’s where people could send me any information that might surface, someone spotting a man and a child that could have been Alan and you. I’m told a missing persons case usually gets about six hundred to eight hundred tips. Your case got well over one thousand.”

  “What did you hope was going to happen?” she asked very quietly.

  “For one, I hoped one day you might stumble across the website and see I was still searching for you. I know, it doesn’t make much sense. Even if you had found the website, it might not have rung any bells if Alan had lied about your past. You’d have no reason to think you were the missing girl from Yorktide once known as Gemma.”

  What I didn’t say to her was that I often wondered if I was putting her at risk by maintaining the website. It had occurred to me that if Alan knew about it, he might retaliate by hurting Gemma. Still, I decided it was worth my effort. If Alan did lash out at Gemma, assuming he was still insanely possessive and thinking I was out to steal Gemma back (which, of course, I was), there was a chance that someone—a neighbor, a friend—might witness his bad behavior and intervene, ultimately bringing Gemma to safety. I know. Ridiculous. But I think I can be excused for grasping at straws.

  “He told me that we had lived in Rhode Island,” Gemma said suddenly. “The three of us, I mean.”

  And I knew from Soledad Valdes that he had also told Gemma that I was a crack addict and that I had tried to harm her, forcing Alan to flee. “We lived right here in Yorktide,” I said. “When you were born, we had a small apartment on Front Street.” I had been forced to move back to that apartment after the kidnapping and after Barbara, the friend with whom Gemma and I had been living, asked me to leave. My presence in her home was too upsetting for her. I hadn’t stayed for long in that apartment on Front Street. Alan’s remembered presence there was too upsetting for me.

  “He told me that he had no family of his own,” Gemma said then, still staring at the screen. “That both of his parents were dead. When I turned fifteen, he told me that he had stumbled across the fact that my mother had died of an overdose years before. He said now we were all alone in the world, with only each other.”

  God damn
him, I thought. “I’m sorry for all the lies.”

  “Not your fault.”

  I doubted she really believed that.

  “I have to admit,” I told her, “at one point I got pretty obsessed with the website. There were months when I checked it every few minutes in the hopes that there was some new bit of evidence. And when I wasn’t able to check, like when I was driving, I was thinking about checking.”

  “What changed?” Gemma asked.

  I was embarrassed to admit this to her, but I went on. “What changed was that one day when I was behind the wheel, my mind totally on an e-mail someone had sent that morning with what sounded like it might be a viable sighting, I almost caused a serious accident. The details don’t matter, but it jolted me back into a more normal and reasonable state of mind.” And this near-disastrous event was one of the factors that had led me to get my act together enough to apply for the job at Yorktide Community College and thereby reenter the world.

  Like I said, none of it was easy.

  “Could I look at it alone?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said, getting up from the kitchen table. “I’ve got some work to do in my studio.”

  I went upstairs to my studio, with the intention of finishing a few sketches, but I could do nothing but sit at my drawing board and stare at nothing, wondering what Gemma was feeling as she read through the website, wondering what would happen next.

  Chapter 17

  I sat staring at the screen of Verity’s laptop for a long time, scrolling through page after page of the website, reading e-mails from people offering sympathy or what they thought might be clues as to where I was, clicking on links to what seemed like hundreds of newspaper articles about the kidnapping. I wondered if she’d kept a paper file of those articles too. And I read all of the statements she’d written, from the time the website first went up until . . . until the morning after she learned I was alive and well and living in Arizona.

  My dream has come true. My child has been found. I offer my heartfelt thanks to everyone who has helped me to keep the flame of hope alive all these years. I’ll keep this site updated for the next few days, but for the sake of my daughter’s privacy, it will be shut down after that.

  Most people would say that here was proof of my mother’s love for me, of her desire for my safe return. But just because she wanted me back doesn’t mean I wanted to come back. Verity is a stranger to me, in spite of the fact that she thinks she knows me. In spite of the fact that she thinks she’s got a right to me.

  As I scrolled through each page of this—this tribute—to me, I wanted to shout, I’m not missing! I never was missing! I was right there all the time, being me, with my father! But then I thought—Wait a minute, I was missing. I was missing to myself.

  And then it occurred to me, sitting there at Verity’s kitchen table in Maine. Not once in my life did I suspect that my name, or Dad’s for that matter, were false. Yeah, he’d told me he’d run off with me, but he’d also made it plain that my mother hadn’t wanted me and that with no family on either side, there was no one to come looking for us. There was no one who cared. Stupid. Why didn’t I put it all together long ago!

  Looking at all those drawings of me-but-not-me, all based on a few not very good photographs taken of me as an infant, a gallery of Gemma Through the Ages . . . It gave me the creeps. Some drawings were pretty accurate, and some were way off the mark. And none of the images looked—alive. I mean, every single image looked to me like the portrait of a dead person. Flat. False. Or maybe not a dead person but a puppet or a doll. They gave me the chills. The people who make those missing person pictures like the ones Verity had commissioned aren’t painting idealized portraits to hang in some museum. They’re essentially making shit up, aren’t they?

  Dad wasn’t one to take a lot of photos of us—now I know why—and we weren’t on Facebook (he’d tried to stop me from getting an Instagram account, but I’d figured out how to get one without his knowing; you don’t need the details), but I’d seen enough photos of myself in the early years of my life to know what I looked like in first and second and third grade. But those sketches. I don’t know, it was like I was on display in some creepy museum, what’s that place, that famous wax museum. All these strangers staring at imagined images of me . . . I felt kind of violated, even though I understand why Verity built the website.

  I think I understand.

  I exited the website and closed the laptop. Then I went back to my room.

  Chapter 18

  I lay awake for a long time last night, wondering how Gemma felt about all I’d told her, and about what she’d seen on the website. When I came back downstairs and into the kitchen to start dinner, my laptop was closed and she was out back, her arms on the rail of the deck, her head held toward the sky. I let her be and went about preparing two chicken breasts for the oven.

  I didn’t mention the website at dinner, and I didn’t really know how to ask what she had thought about it without seeming to put pressure on her to tell me what a devoted mother I’d been for all those years. I did ask if there was anything she needed immediately for her room, like another lamp or lightweight blanket (it’s not quite summer weather here yet and could continue to be cool through the end of the month), and she said that no, she was fine. Again she ate ravenously, and right after dinner she went to her room and I was faced with another lonely evening.

  You know, before Gemma came home to me, I sometimes wondered if I’d be able to tell if an imposter showed up on my doorstep, someone pretending to be my daughter. Why anyone would do such a thing, I have no idea, but still, the weeks and months and years were so long and there was so much time to imagine.... I never believed for one second that those forensic sketches I commissioned were all that accurate. How could they be? The first image was based on the face of a two-month-old and two-month-olds all pretty much look alike. Really, how could anyone create the future from such a poor source? And even if the first artist had had a more fully formed, individual face from which to work, people might be a lot thinner or fatter than the artist imagined them to be. A broken nose might not have been mended. Hair might have been cut or dyed.

  Now Gemma is home with me, even if she’s calling herself Marni. I don’t at all doubt that this young woman is my biological child. But what if the real Gemma died long ago, you might ask, and Alan snatched someone else’s child as his own? Anything is possible in this crazy world, but I refuse to consider that scenario. Besides, the only way Gemma’s biological connection to me could be finally proven would be through a DNA test, and even if I had the nerve (the cruelty?) to ask her to take one, I doubt she’d comply. And if she did agree, and if such a test should prove that Gemma was not really my child, what then? Would I throw her out? Or would I accept what had been given to me—someone I could take care of.

  Though it might seem hard to believe, there were times over the long and lonely years when I felt that it might not be such a good thing if Gemma came home to me. It might, I thought, be too painful for us both, a relationship doomed to failure. There were times when I thought that if only I could know for sure that Gemma was well, I would be content to live without her. There were times, in the depths of despair or sheer exhaustion, I felt willing to let go of hope.

  Hope. I wonder if Gemma feels at all hopeful about her life right now.

  She won’t tell me anything about the last time she saw Alan before she got on that plane to Portland. I know it took place in prison. Soledad Valdes told me that; I suppose she thought I should know. Anyway, this morning I made the mistake of asking Gemma—over a breakfast of pancakes and local bacon, prepared to whet her appetite for something more substantial than Froot Loops and hopefully to soften her mood—if she wanted to talk about the last time she spoke with her father face-to-face. She shut me down pretty quickly with a sharp no. I wasn’t stupid enough to try again.

  Whatever exactly happened at that last meeting, whatever exactly was said and whether there were
tears of anger or sadness, whether there were slamming doors or desperate hugs, it can’t have been a success. Gemma can’t have left that prison building feeling positive about the future, uplifted, optimistic. She probably felt depressed, sad, and maybe even furious at what Fate (and her father?) had thrown at her—an uncertain future with a total stranger halfway across the country.

  Me.

  Chapter 19

  Verity wants to know if I need to talk about the last time I saw Dad, before I was shipped off to stay with her. Is she crazy? What does she have to do with Dad and me? How can it make any difference to her what went on between us? How can her knowing what we said to each other change anything for me now?

  Anyway, it was a disaster, that meeting. First off, let me tell you there’s pretty much nothing that can prepare you to see your father—or your mother, I guess—in jail. I thought I’d be okay, that I could handle the whole thing without freaking out like some girly girl, but the minute the social worker woman driving the car pulled into the visitors’ parking lot outside this big ugly building that looked like a fortress—like it’s supposed to, I guess—my stomach fell into my sneakers and my heart started to race and it took every ounce of self-control I possessed not to fling myself out of the car and run off. Which is a good thing, because I’d probably have been mistaken for an escaped prisoner and been shot to death by an alert guard. Shit like that happens, I’m sure.

  It was amazing how quickly the police found out Jim Armstrong, my father, was not really Jim Armstrong but Alan Burns. A man who had been on the run from the law for seventeen years. The wheels of justice might turn slowly, but when it comes to running fingerprints through a database, bingo, a match can turn up in a matter of seconds. At least, that’s how it seemed to me.