Seashell Season

by Holly Chamberlin

  “You don’t have to meet her, at least, not yet. If you want more time—”

  “I said it’s okay.” I kind of yelled the words, but Verity didn’t seem to care. Is she really that good? I know I’ve provoked her in the past weeks, but not once has she been rude back to me. Something’s got to snap at some point.

  “Good,” she said. “I mean, I’ve told her to come over this Thursday at three, all right? She’s been so eager to see you since you’ve been . . . Since you’ve been back.”

  Oh right, I thought. She knew me once. As much as you can know an infant. And of course, I have no recollection of her.

  “So, are you guys close?” I asked, not that I really cared.

  Verity didn’t answer right away. Finally she said, “We once were very close. And then we were estranged. But we’ve become friends of a sort again. Allies, almost.”

  “Allies against my father?” I snapped. Again, Verity ignored my tone.

  “No. I mean allies in loss. We’ve tried to help each other over the years.”

  “Why were you guys estranged? What happened?” This time, I did care about the answer.

  But Verity just shook her head. “It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “It’s in the past. Look, I really should be getting to my studio at the college. There’s still so much to do before my show in July.”

  She looked at me then with an expression of concern. “Are you sure you don’t want to come with me?”

  “I’ll be fine here.”

  “You have my cell phone number, right? Just call me if you need anything.”

  What? I thought. Like a ticket back to Arizona?

  Finally she left, and I went out to the back deck and flopped onto one of the plastic lounge chairs. (There’s no way I’m going to hang out on the front porch and be a public attraction.) I’d wanted her to go, I’d wanted to be left alone for a while, away from her suffocating concern, but it’s odd. Almost as soon as I heard her car drive away, I realized I was lonely. But I wasn’t sure and I’m still not sure what I felt lonely for.

  Chapter 34

  “I’ll get it.” Verity went to open the front door, and I waited in the kitchen. She had laid out milk and sugar for coffee, and there was a plate of oatmeal raisin cookies she had baked that morning. I snatched one before my mother and my grandmother got to the kitchen. Fortification or something. Not that I was nervous.

  I don’t know what I expected Marion to look like—I think I probably had no expectations, actually—but I was still kind of surprised. Here was this tiny little woman, not skinny like Verity, in fact, a bit fat, but not even five feet tall and with features that came straight from a rubber baby doll. Not literally. I mean, her face was soft and small, and her eyes are either way too big for her head or she keeps them wide open like that on purpose. I didn’t want to stare at her to find out, but really, she has, I don’t know, this air of defeat about her, like she’d long ago given up trying to fight back at life, or maybe like she’d never even known how to fight back. Anyway, she was wearing what reminded me of a leisure suit from the seventies, not as bad as that, but a matching, pale-blue short-sleeved jacket and pants, and she was clutching an enormous fabric patchwork bag to her chest. It struck me that she was using the bag as a sort of shield against what she thought was going to be a difficult meeting, and suddenly I wished I had a sort of shield too.

  “Gemma,” Verity said. “This is your grandmother.”

  “It’s Marni,” I said. “Hi.”

  Marion took a small step forward, and for one horrible second I thought she might want to hug or kiss me. But she stopped, and I saw her eyes had gone all watery.

  “I can hardly believe it’s you,” she said.

  Something possessed me to be a bit of a jerk. “Believe it,” I said with obviously false brightness. “It’s me. Marni Armstrong, in the flesh.”

  Marion was clearly flustered, so Verity led her to the table and sat her across from me. Did she think if she sat Marion next to me I’d scratch her or something? Marion and I sat there in silence while Verity chattered about the weather or something as insipid—I wasn’t really listening—and brought a pot of coffee to the table. I like coffee. I’ve been drinking it since I was about ten. When Marion saw me pour a cup for myself, she smiled.

  “Your father always loved coffee,” she said. “Does he . . . Does he still?”

  I nodded. “Dad doesn’t look like you.”

  “No. He takes after his father. Two peas in a pod. Look.” Marion began to rummage through that huge bag of hers, and finally she extracted a small leather wallet-type thing, inside of which were old snapshots. She extracted one from the pile and handed it to me. “That’s Albert, when he was about your father’s age now.”

  I studied the photo of a man who could have been Dad’s double. It was weird, seeing my father’s father, my grandfather. I handed the picture back to Marion. “Thanks,” I said, reaching again for the coffeepot.

  “I hope you like it here, Gemma,” Marion said now. “Sorry. Marni. I mean, I hope you like it here in Maine. It must be very different from what you’re used to. Not that I know much about Arizona, places like that. I’ve never traveled, you see. Not farther than Connecticut.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s different.”

  Marion looked disappointed that I wasn’t chattering on. I knew I wasn’t making it easy for this woman who was my grandmother. You’re supposed to respect your grandparents. And this woman looked so—insignificant. Like if you closed your eyes for thirty seconds and then reopened them, she’d be gone as if she’d never been there. I looked quickly to Verity and saw she was frowning. Only slightly, but still. And then I felt kind of bad for Marion, Dad’s mother. It couldn’t have been easy for her, knowing—suspecting—that your only child had stolen your only grandchild, and now he was sitting in a jail cell somewhere, alone and possibly the victim of seriously violent criminal types with nicknames like Killer or Blood ’n’ Guts.

  “I’ll adjust,” I said. “Being close to the ocean is nice, I guess.” Especially, I thought, since I’d never seen it in real life before. And because I almost passed out at how amazing and beautiful it is.

  Marion’s face lit up. “Your father used to love going to the beach when he was a boy. He used to build the most beautiful sand castles. Intricate, they were. I don’t know how he managed it. And nobody taught him, either.”

  Verity raised her eyebrows. “I never knew that,” she said. “He never mentioned it.”

  I said nothing. So my father had loved the beach. I loved the beach. And I was wrestling with the image of my father as a child, a little boy kneeling by the water, constructing a sand castle. I’d never thought he had much imagination, not the adult I know. Where had it gone? I wondered if he ever thought of those times, when he was small. I wondered if he ever missed those days before everything got all complicated. Before he messed things up.

  Marion asked me a bunch more questions about Dad and about me. Did I have a recent picture of him? I went into my room and brought back my one photo of Dad and me. Marion looked at it for a long time before asking her next questions. Was he in good health? I shrugged and said, “I guess so. He never goes to doctors.” Did I enjoy school? “It’s all right,” I said. “I do okay.” Did I like art, like my talented mother? I shook my head. “No.”

  It went on like that for a while, with Verity sitting silently except for when she asked us if we wanted more coffee. Marion said no and I said yes. Finally, after about an hour (which seemed like six hours), Marion got up to leave.

  “I hope I’ll see you again soon,” she said. She sounded almost wistful and unsure, as if I might really refuse to see her. Well, I hadn’t been particularly warm and fuzzy toward her, had I? But was I supposed to be?

  “Sure,” I said.

  Verity walked Marion to the door, and I stayed sitting at the kitchen table. A few minutes later Verity was back.

  “It’s been hard on her,” she said qui
etly. I think it was meant as a reproach.

  “Yeah. She’s . . .” But I didn’t know what I wanted to say.

  Verity began to gather the cups, the milk, and the sugar. “Hamburgers for dinner, okay?”

  I nodded and went off to my room, suddenly feeling like I might start to cry. I lay down on the couch and stared up at the white ceiling. It could have been worse, I suppose. And it was only as bad as it was because of my lousy attitude.

  My hands were shaking from all the coffee.

  Chapter 35

  Alan building sand castles. Now there was a thought. During the four years of our relationship, all he’d ever done was at best ignore and at worst insult my creative work. What had happened to him from the time he was that little boy playing with sand and broken shells and the time he was the young man I was planning to marry?

  Well, there’s no point in wasting any time on that sort of speculation. The fact is that I don’t really care about Alan’s transformation from a state of innocence to a state of . . . well, whatever state he’s been in for all his adult life.

  There were some sticky moments, but overall the meeting between Gemma and Marion went all right. I would have liked there to have been a Hallmark reunion—Gemma and Marion falling into each other’s arms—but those don’t come very often in life and possibly never when there’s been something as bizarre as the return of a kidnap victim who, until a few weeks ago, had no idea she’d been kidnapped.

  And I really do have to find the right way to suggest to Gemma that she not drink so much coffee. Four cups in the space of an hour seems extreme. But maybe she’d drunk so much because she was nervous. Not that coffee was the thing to calm anyone down. At least I hadn’t caught her sneaking the vodka.

  At dinner Gemma announced she wasn’t prepared to call Marion Grandma. Of course not, I thought, not when you can’t even bring yourself to call me Mom.

  “I’m sure she’ll understand,” I said, not at all sure she would.

  “Was Dad nice to her?” Gemma asked, poking at her broccoli—her hamburger was already half eaten—and not meeting my eye.

  What a question! Was it nice of a child to encourage his mother to conceal his troubled past from someone—in this case, me—who might very well become a victim in the present? But here I was, also concealing Alan’s troubled past from our daughter. At least, I thought, she’s out of his clutches. For now.

  “He was dutiful,” I said. “He visited her once a week and brought flowers on her birthday and Mother’s Day. That sort of thing.”

  Gemma nodded and pushed a piece of broccoli around the rim of her plate. “It’s true he’s an only child?”

  “Yes. And so am I. I’m afraid you have no aunts or uncles or cousins.”

  Can you guess what Gemma did? That’s right. She shrugged and said, “Whatever.”

  Chapter 36

  I was on the back deck, lying on the plastic lounge chair I’d claimed as my own, my eyes closed and a glass of iced tea on a small table close-by, when suddenly this chipper voice broke through my thoughts. I was thinking about how I haven’t had pizza in a long time. And I bet if I told Verity I wanted pizza for dinner, she’d run right out and bring back two extra-large ones with every topping I’d requested.

  “Hi, Marni!” the voice said. I opened my eyes to see Cathy Strawberry standing at the foot of my lounge. She was wearing a Pepto-Bismol pink T-shirt and white jeans. I would never wear pink or white.

  “How did you get here?” I asked. “Do you have a car?” That would be cool, I thought. I mean, I don’t really like Cathy all that much—even though she does remember to call me by my real name, by which I mean the name I know myself by—but I could pretend enough if she were willing to drive us around.

  “Bike,” she said. “I’m only fifteen, remember? I don’t have my license.”

  So much for that. “What do you want?” I asked.

  Cathy shrugged and plopped onto the lounge chair next to mine. “Nothing. Just to say hi.”

  “Well, hi.”

  Neither of us said anything else for a while, which was fine by me. And then, out of the blue, Cathy said: “You don’t seem very happy here.”

  I laughed. “Not happy? I’m miserable.” That was an exaggeration—sort of—but sometimes I just can’t help myself. Maybe I should go into acting someday.

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. You’re not going to—”

  “What? Are you worried I’m going to jump off a bridge or something?”

  “No, of course not!” she cried. “I was going to say you’re not going to run away, are you?”

  “I said I was miserable, not stupid. So I stick it out here until I turn eighteen, if Verity can continue to pretend she loves me, and then I’ll be on my way.” I laughed again. “She’ll probably even pay me to take off. Call it my inheritance or something.”

  Cathy looked extremely uncomfortable. “She does love you. She’s not pretending.”

  And I wondered if Verity had been talking about me, about our relationship, to Cathy. That bothered me. My life belongs to me, not to these strangers. “Whatever. Anyone in this dopey little town ever run away?”

  “Not that I know of. Well, there’s this one girl in town who ran away from somewhere in Vermont a few years back, but she and her father are living here together now.”

  “A happy ending?”

  “They do happen,” Cathy said, and it was clear she really believes that.

  “I knew two people who took off.” Hmm, I thought. Why am I telling her this? “One was a guy I sort of hung out with for a while. He wasn’t a friend or anything, just sort of always there. Anyway, he tried to kill himself a few times, but it never worked out. He was such a loser. I mean, how hard is it to kill yourself?”

  “Maybe he didn’t really want to die,” Cathy said. “Maybe it was a cry for help. We had a course about depression and bullying and suicide in middle school. I think it’s pretty common, not succeeding in a suicide attempt.”

  Does she really believe you can learn about that stuff in school? “Well,” I said, “whatever happened, one day he left. No note, just cleared out some of his stuff from his stepmother’s house—his father had died—and left.”

  “If he didn’t leave a note, how did anyone know for sure he’d run away?” Cathy asked. “How did they know he hadn’t finally succeeded in killing himself?”

  It wasn’t an unreasonable question. “They knew he’d run off,” I told her, “because people had seen him leaving town. After about two or three months the police tracked him down in Albuquerque. He was living in some squalid apartment with a bunch of other kids who’d run away from home. And he was working as a male hooker.”

  Cathy’s hand shot to her mouth. “That’s awful!” she cried. “The poor boy! What happened to him then?”

  “The police hauled him home to his stepmother. A few weeks later he was dead. Seems he finally figured out how to kill himself after all. I guess those other kids he was living with in that dump taught him a few tricks other than how to get paid for sex.”

  Cathy sat back in her lounge.

  “You look shocked,” I said.

  “I am,” she admitted. “You know stuff like that happens, but . . . I’ve never actually met anyone who knew someone . . .”

  “You wanna know what happened to the other person I knew who took off? Her name was Gerri.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Why not?” I asked, and I could feel the evil jerk part of me stirring. I had an overwhelming desire to antagonize her. “It might do you some good.”

  “What kind of good would it do me?” Cathy demanded, with more force than I’d expected. “And I can’t help those people you knew, can I?”

  “Your life is so cushy here,” I went on. “So insulated. What gives you the right to ignore the crappy lives other people are forced to live?”

  “I’m not ignoring them!” Cathy protested. “My mom and I volunteer at the food bank in town. And
we shop at the store that gives all its proceeds to the day shelter at the Baptist church. It’s just that your telling me about those people you knew—the way you’re telling it—doesn’t serve any other purpose than . . . than to hurt me. You’re trying to make me feel bad about my life.”

  I wondered: So that I could feel better about mine? That didn’t seem right. I said nothing.

  Cathy got up now from the lounge. “One more thing. If that guy was such a loser, the one who ran away and then committed suicide, why did you hang out with him in the first place?”

  Cathy didn’t wait for a reply, which was good because I didn’t have one ready. She just walked off and left me feeling suddenly deflated and like the jerk that I am.

  I’ll tell you, Cathy Strawberry might be a lot of things, but she’s obviously not a jerk. Not with the sort of relationship she has with her mother. Not if the two of them really do stuff together like volunteer at the food bank. (I didn’t even know Yorktide had a food bank or people who needed it.) Someone who’s a jerk probably isn’t capable of a good relationship with anyone, I thought, let alone with her mother.

  The sun was hurting my eyes. I put my hands over them.

  His name was Kirk. That guy who finally killed himself. He wasn’t really a loser. Actually, he was kind of nice. He could be funny. I felt bad when I heard he was dead.

  Chapter 37

  “I met your mother,” I said into the phone. “My grandmother.”

  It was the second scheduled call from Dad. Verity was in her little studio upstairs. Every so often I could hear one of the wooden floorboards creak over my head.

  “Oh,” he said, and he sounded wary. “How is she?”

  “Happy you’re alive. Not so much that you’re in jail.”

  “Yeah.” That was followed by a nervous laugh.

  “Dad? You never called her after . . . after we left Maine? She was probably really worried.”

  “I know,” he said. “I felt bad about that. But I had no choice.”

  There’s always a choice, I thought. He could have sent postcards, something. All you had to do was look at Marion and know she would never have told the police where they could find her son. Even if it had meant keeping Verity in the dark. I’m not the most sensitive person around, but even I can read someone like Marion Burns pretty clearly.