Seashell Season

by Holly Chamberlin

  I wonder if he plays cards in prison. What does he have to bet with?

  “Look at the time,” Verity said suddenly, glancing at her watch, and grabbing a rag to wipe the paintbrush. “I’ve got a meeting with the department head, but I should be back in about half an hour.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Verity nodded toward the book opened in front of me. “Rodin,” she said. “Interesting?”

  I shrugged, still pretending that art bored the life out of me. “He’s okay.”

  Verity sort of smiled and left the room. When she had gone, I peered into all four corners of the ceiling. There was no obvious sign of a security camera, though I know security is an issue. Verity keeps the room locked when she isn’t there; she’d explained that the stone and wood and clay she uses in her sculptures isn’t cheap and that she can’t afford to lose a piece to a thief. And, she said, there were always those strange people who think that vandalizing art is a way to make some sort of statement.

  “Like what?” I’d asked.

  “Don’t ask me,” she’d said. “I’m not one of that crazy bunch.”

  Anyway, with Verity out of the room and as far as I could tell no security guard watching me via cameras, I was good to go. I had no idea if I was about to steal school property or if Verity had paid for the sketchbook on her own, not that I’d feel any better about stealing from her than I would from the college. Stealing was Dad’s thing, not mine. Stealing people and things.

  There’s a tall metal cabinet against one wall. I’d seen inside before, and I knew it was where Verity stored supplies. I opened the door of the cabinet and grabbed a sketchbook from the top of a stack of about ten and stuffed it into my bag. I don’t always carry the bag (I’d bought it with the twenty dollars Tom had sent me) so I hoped Verity wouldn’t suddenly ask me why I was carrying it now. I wasn’t entirely sure I could keep the guilt off my face. But even if she caught me with the sketchbook, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be angry. She would be Verity, which means she would probably apologize to me for some bizarre reason and assure me that all I had to do if I wanted something was to ask. She’s annoying that way.

  As promised, Verity was back about half an hour later. “Ready to go?” she asked. “I’m too tired to work more today. Maybe I’ll do some at home after a nap.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  I was glad when we drove away from the campus. Away from the scene of the crime. So, you’re asking: Why steal a sketchbook? Why not just buy one? How much could it cost? The thing is, I’m so high profile in this town that all I need to do is walk into a bakery and order a coffee and the entire population of Yorktide would know exactly how many sugars I put into my coffee in about two minutes flat. (Two, by the way, sometimes three.) I just don’t want people—strangers—gabbing about how The Little Kidnapped Girl bought a sketchbook. Just like her mom! people would say. See? It’s the mother’s influence that counts! Or some silly stuff like that.

  Anyway, there was no need to steal a pencil. Pencils are easy enough to come by at home, and unlike a sketchbook, a few missing pencils won’t be noticed as easily. Verity keeps stacks of all sorts of pencils around the house. I just chose a few—one dark soft lead, one hard light lead, one thick charcoal—and brought them to my room. Pencils can also be used for writing, I’m told. Or they were, back in the old days. Only kidding. Of course I know they can be used for writing. Dad is a mechanical pencil freak, the cheap yellow plastic kind that cracks really easily. He was always bringing them home from whatever office he was working in at the time. I mean, he was always stealing them.

  I feel kind of ridiculous hiding the sketchbook—it’s not like I’m doing anything illegal—but I just don’t want Verity or anyone, really, knowing what I’m doing. Don’t ask me why, exactly. Maybe—and this is just a guess—maybe I need something entirely my own, something private. Since being shipped to Maine to live with Verity, I feel so . . . exposed. (I can’t forget that idiot Mirelle Turner.) I feel so out of control of any aspect of my own life. Back home with Dad, I knew what was what. I knew how and where to carve out my own life in spite of—well, because of—his overprotectiveness. But here . . . it’s different. I feel so powerless. And keeping a secret can give you some power. At least, it can give you the illusion that you have power over the person you’re keeping the secret from. I wonder: Did keeping my real identity from me all those years give Dad a sense of power over me? I don’t really want to go there.

  I also don’t want to think too much about the fact that I find myself both resenting and being okay with the fact that maybe I’ve inherited what artistic interest (I won’t say talent) I have from Verity, someone who’s still such a stranger to me.

  My mother.

  Chapter 52

  I let the phone ring three times before I answered it. I’m not totally sure why. I mean, I knew it was Dad calling, and I wanted to talk to him. I want to know some real things about my father, from before the moment he snatched me from my crib and his life of deception began. (Although for all I knew, he’d been living a bunch of lies since the day he first could talk.) I wanted to ask him if he had liked growing up around Yorktide. If he remembered the Nubble Light. Verity’s taken me there; it’s pretty famous, she said. I wanted to ask him if he remembered the name of his favorite lobster pound from when he was a boy; maybe, I thought, I’d suggest to Verity we go—if it’s still around—but I wouldn’t tell her why. Not that she would refuse to take me. She’s so freakin’ nice to me.

  But I haven’t asked Dad any of those things. I’m not totally sure why not, except that part of me expects I’ll only hear more lies, and even if Dad did tell me the truth and answer honestly, how would I know?

  So we talked about boring day-to-day stuff. Well, maybe not boring for him. Maybe day-to-day is fraught with terror for my father. If it is, he’s not saying. I feel like I have less and less to say to him each time we talk. And he either has less and less to say to me, or he’s protecting me from the ugliness of his life behind bars. Whatever the case, it’s depressing, and I got off the phone pretty quickly. He didn’t protest.

  I took out the sketchbook and one of the pencils I’d cadged and began to doodle. I say doodle and not draw because while my hand moved, my mind was a million miles away; I wasn’t copying something I saw right in front of me like I had been that first day in Verity’s studio.

  And I wondered. How did my father keep all those secrets for all those years? It’s hard keeping secrets, even the ones you have to keep because if they’re found out, they could hurt you, get you into trouble. I wonder if there were times when he wanted to tell someone what he had done, the truth about who he was and who I was. When he was drunk, which wasn’t often, but I wonder if then, sitting at some dive bar next to one of his buddies—I wouldn’t call them friends, and he never did either—I wonder if he was seriously tempted to come clean and relieve himself of the burden he was carrying. He had to have felt the burden of what he’d done all those years ago, even if he didn’t actually feel guilty for stealing me away from my mother, who, it turned out, wasn’t a violent drug addict bent on putting out her cigarettes on her baby daughter’s arm. I mean, my mother has never smoked in her entire life. That’s what she tells me, and I believe her, because from what I can see, she’s not a liar. Annoying sometimes, but not a liar.

  Anyway, I wonder what he’s telling himself now? Himself and other people, his cellmate and the guys he sits with in the cafeteria, about what happened seventeen years ago. (Do you have to sit with the same people all the time? Or is it like on Orange Is the New Black and high school, people get into cliques?) Is he telling his version of the truth about what he’d done and the good reasons he’d had for doing it? That he was saving his daughter’s life by taking her away from her abusive mother? Would anyone really believe him or would everyone nod and think, This guy’s a nut? Probably they would think he’s a nut. A sane person doesn’t drop off the face of the earth with a two-mont
h-old infant he believes is in physical danger. A sane person goes to the police or a family member or a friend, someone . . .

  How did he keep it all a secret from me? I mean, my origins, my real origins. Didn’t he ever feel that he owed me the truth about who I really was, at least let me have my real name? How dare he keep me in ignorance all those years, my entire life! And just to cover his own tracks. Still, I really don’t believe that holding the truth from me made him feel any sense of power over me; he’s not that kind of person. The kind of power he wants over people isn’t a strutting power. It’s something meaner. It comes from his own deep sense of weakness and need. I learned that much over the years!

  I wonder if it ever occurred to him that if I ever discovered the truth—that he stole me from a perfectly good mother—that I’d hate him. I wonder if he was ever scared of losing me that way. I wonder if instead he thought I loved him so unconditionally, I’d stick with him no matter what insane crap came into the light.

  I wonder if he ever truly loved me. Ever truly loved anyone. I wonder if he knows how. Because possession isn’t proof of love. It just isn’t.

  The experts (like I really know; I read this online somewhere once) say that a father’s relationship with his daughter—how he treats her, if he loves and respects her or if he ignores and disrespects her, if he nourishes her ambitions and interests or if he thwarts them, if he tells her she’s beautiful or that she’s too fat or has too big a nose—all this matters very, very much to the sort of woman the girl’s going to become. Not so much the mother. The father. So where, I wonder, does this leave me? Because although my father professes to love me—and I’ve always believed he did, that he does still, while he’s rotting away in a prison cell—he’s so totally screwed up my life that it’s hard to reconcile the two. How can you love someone and basically force her to live a lie of your own devising? I mean, where’s the logic in that? But maybe for people like my father, logic has very little to do with love or with anything else in life. People like my father. Screwed up. A liar. So entirely self-centered that he simply can’t see beyond his own whacky needs.

  I looked down at the sketchbook and almost laughed out loud at what I had drawn. Weird, grotesque clown faces. Dad is afraid of clowns.

  Then there was a knock on the door. I stashed the sketchbook and pencil under the couch and opened the door to find Verity. Of course. Who else would it be?

  “You okay?” she asked.

  It was what she usually asks after a phone call from Dad. Never What did he say? though I know she must be curious.

  “I’ve been worse,” I said. “And better.”

  “Any interest in going to that new ice cream place out on Rosehip Highway?”

  If she was trying to bribe me with food, it was working. “Yeah,” I said. “Let me just run to the bathroom first.” That’s where we keep the aspirin, and I could feel a real splitter coming on.

  Chapter 53

  It was the first time a phone call from Alan hadn’t sent Gemma after me like a particularly hungry cat after a particularly fat mouse. I was happy about that, being spared an attack. On the other hand, I wondered what had been different about this call from her father to have made her less hostile to me. Had he disappointed her in some way? Was she beginning to realize the magnitude of Alan’s failure?

  While we were eating our ice cream cones on a bench at the top of the beach, Gemma brought up the subject of a bicycle.

  “I thought about what you said, about not being able to get around too easily without wheels. So I guess I should have a bike after all.”

  “Sure,” I said. I was happy she had asked me for something; it was the first time since she moved in with me that she’d asked for anything. She hadn’t even asked for the real bed I’d offered. It makes me feel good to be able to give her something she wants, specifically something that will help her to gain some independence in her new world.

  The cost could be a problem, but I feel sure we can find something at a yard sale or through the local papers. And Marc is an avid cyclist. Maybe he can check the bike over before we buy it and then help fit the seat to accommodate Gemma’s height.

  A memory came to me then, and I hesitated, unsure if I should share it with Gemma. It didn’t hold particularly bad vibes for me, but who knew what it might trigger for my daughter. But then I went ahead.

  “Your father and I had a tandem bike for a while,” I said. “A bicycle built for two.”

  Gemma grunted. “I didn’t know he could ride a bike. But I guess everyone can at some point in their lives.”

  “We had some fun with it—this was about six months into the relationship—but then it was stolen, and we couldn’t afford to buy a new one. Remember, I was in college then.”

  “And Dad never made any real money, did he?”

  I answered carefully but honestly. “No,” I said. “I don’t think he did.”

  “Did he ever play sports? I mean, other than cards and pool. He likes to gamble but only with pennies.”

  I frowned at my half-eaten ice cream. “Now that you mention it, I don’t think he did. We’d have to check with Marion about the years before I met him, but I don’t recall his ever mentioning being on a team. He liked NASCAR though.”

  Gemma laughed. “Tell me about it! How boring is it to watch cars go around and around a track, over and over again! It’s only good when someone crashes. Well, you know what I mean.”

  “I used to watch races with him, at a bar he liked. I was bored out of my mind.”

  “Then why’d you go?” Gemma asked.

  “He liked me to be there with him. And for a long time, I liked to be there too.”

  This last admission was met with silence. I wondered all sorts of things, only one of which was: Does Gemma believe me, that I wanted to be at the bar with him? After a time she said: “That’s what people in relationships are supposed to do, right? Do stuff that makes the other one happy.”

  “Until it gets out of hand or abusive or until the stuff becomes something that does you harm.”

  “Or until you fall out of love.”

  “Or stop loving someone,” I said. “There’s a difference.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been in love.”

  “You will someday.” I winced. “Sorry. I used to hate when adults would say that sort of thing to me, like they really know the future.”

  “Yeah. I hate it too. Adults don’t really know much more than kids, do they?”

  “Some do,” I said. “I’d like to think I’ve learned a few lessons over the years. But it’s true there’s always more to figure out. Growing up never ends in some ways.”

  “It sounds tiring.”

  I laughed. “It is!”

  “By the way,” Gemma said, wiping her hands on a paper napkin, ice cream cone gone. “What are we having for dinner?”

  Chapter 54

  My new bike is pretty cool. It’s a Tyler, which isn’t a big famous brand, but I don’t care about that as long as it works. Yeah, I know I said I didn’t want a bike, but I figured, what the hell? While I’m here, I might as well have my own transportation so I don’t have to rely on Verity for everything. I don’t want her to think I really need her or anything. What I need is independence.

  What I also need is to be forgiven, something kind of new to me. No, let’s be honest. Something entirely new to me.

  I leaned the bike against the Strawberries’ house and knocked on the front door. The Strawberries have one of those old-fashioned knockers. It’s in the shape of an anchor, I guess because they live close to the water. (We all do here in southern Maine.) Anyway, I can’t be sure, but I thought I saw a curtain in the living room twitch, as if someone was deciding whether or not to open the door, based on who was out there. A Jehovah’s Witness? Don’t answer, though I have to say I’ve met a few, and they’ve all been very nice. A guy with a big cardboard check from the lottery? Answer. I was about to knock again when the door opened and there s
tood Cathy. Before she could say something like, I hate you; get out of here, I said:

  “I want to apologize again for what I did at your parents’ party. It was stupid, and I’m really sorry.”

  Cathy half smiled and shrugged. “It’s okay,” she said. “I forgive you. Come in.”

  I followed her inside and to the kitchen. Why does everyone always end up in the kitchen? I’m not complaining. It’s where the food is kept.

  “Just like that,” I said. “You forgive me?”

  She shrugged again and opened the fridge. “Yeah. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it. Jason should have just walked away when you pretended to flirt with him. I’m thinking I should break up with him.”

  “Don’t break up with him just because I was a jerk!”

  “I’m not.” Cathy took a pitcher of lemonade from the fridge and two glasses from a cabinet over the sink. “My mom made some awesome granola bars,” she said. “Do you want one?”

  I’m not a fan of health food, or, as Dad calls it, “nuts and bolts,” but I said sure. Sometimes granola bars have chocolate in them.