Seashell Season

by Holly Chamberlin

  Cathy put a sealed plastic container on the bar top, along with the lemonade and glasses. I peered through the wall of the container. I was pretty certain I saw chocolate chips. But I waited for Cathy to open the container and offer me a bar. I mean, I’m not a total cretin.

  “A few friends are coming over tomorrow night to hang out,” she said then. “Just girls. Why don’t you come?”

  It’s kind of the last thing I want to do, hang out with Cathy’s friends, but right then I felt that if our truce was going to hold, I should probably say yes. So I said, “Okay.”

  “Good. You’ll like my friends. I’ve known Hildy, Becca, and Melissa since I was a toddler.”

  To hell with the truce. Instant regret for agreeing to join them. Talk about being an outsider. But before I could voice some lame excuse for backing out of the invitation, Cathy was babbling on. I should be nice and not say she was babbling.

  “Do you know there are families in Yorktide and Ogunquit and Wells that have lived here for generations? Hundreds of years, in the same houses, on the same land. That’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? I mean, to grow up with such a sense of belonging to a place. To have roots.”

  Honestly, I’d never thought about it—not even when that Matilda Gascoyne, from one of the old families, had said hi to Verity and me in town—and I said as much. By the way, there were chocolate chips and what I think were dried cranberries or cherries in the granola bars. They were amazing.

  “Well,” Cathy said, “think about it now. Think about how you’d probably feel sort of special, knowing that someone way back in say the early 1800s looked out of her bedroom window, which is now your bedroom window, and saw pretty much exactly what you’re seeing right now, in the twenty-first century. The same trees, the same ocean, even some of the same houses. It kind of blows my mind. I wish I had that sort of connection to the past. I think I’d feel sort of indestructible somehow, like a part of me would always be in the present, even the present a hundred years from now. People would always know that Cathy Strawbridge was a person. I’d be alive in memory.”

  Boy, I thought, is this chick a romantic. But I thought about what she’d said. I thought about the way people in Yorktide stare at me, how they think they know all about me, The Little Kidnapped Girl, and I thought, living in the same town where your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents lived and died must be the most claustrophobic thing ever. You could never be yourself, could you? You’d always be so-and-so’s child, grandchild, great-grandchild. Everything you did or said would be compared to everything your ancestors did or said, and you’d be judged accordingly. There would always be someone else’s reputation, good or bad, to exceed or to live down.

  “I think it sounds really suffocating,” I said. What I didn’t add was that I was probably the last person to have any real understanding of the benefits there might be to sticking around the old family homestead for any length of time. Not with my past, never staying in one town or apartment for more than a year.

  I went home soon after that and after thanking Cathy for the snacks. I think she was disappointed with my failure to share her excitement about, I don’t know, family history or whatever. When I got home, I turned on the TV in the living room, and even though there’s, like, a million things to watch at any given time, I couldn’t find one show or movie I wanted to watch. So I turned it off, and I thought about my life with Dad.

  For a long time I didn’t have a sense that we were running from something, Dad and I, when we moved to a new apartment in a new neighborhood, or even the time when I was very little, maybe second grade, when we moved from New Mexico to Arizona. Well, the reason I was oblivious that time was because I was really young, maybe seven or eight. But the other times after that, no, I guess I mostly just accepted Dad’s vague explanations, which could range from, It’s time to skedaddle (said with a smile and a wink), to the more prosaic explanations like, The landlord is raising the rent, and we can’t afford to pay more than we’re already paying. I heard that sort of explanation often enough, that someone was basically persecuting us, so at some point along the line, I can’t remember when exactly, I decided there was something iffy about Dad’s claiming we were the victims of yet another—let’s call it conspiracy. Or, more specifically, that he was the victim. When I finally stopped to think about it, I realized that every single time he left a job—either because he quit or because he was fired—it was because his boss was a jerk, his coworkers were idiots, he was too smart for the job and his colleagues were jealous. On and on and on.

  But like I said, it never really occurred to me that behind or at the bottom of all the moving around was a big dark secret that, if found out, could stop me and Dad from being a family. I see now that Dad worried that the longer we stayed in one place—or he stayed in one job—the better the chance someone might recognize him from the Wanted posters (where do people put those things, besides the post office?) or he might make a verbal slip and accidentally reveal that he wasn’t who he said he was, Jim Armstrong, with a daughter named Marni. Now, that’s not to say maybe Dad wasn’t legitimately fired a few times—he could be a real whiner at home and with his passing acquaintance buddies, so why not also on the job?—but mostly it must have suited him to be let go.

  Anyway, whenever Dad made the announcement that we were moving to a new apartment and sometimes a new town, there was the hurried packing of our stuff into pillowcases, an old sleeping bag he had gotten somewhere, a few battered old-fashioned suitcases (the kind without wheels, like the one I brought with me to Maine), and what cardboard boxes he could coax from the local grocery store’s loading guys. We didn’t have very much, so it never took very long to get ready to leave, which we invariably did crammed in someone else’s car if ours was “acting up” at the moment (which it often was; maybe Dad had no money for gas that week) and once, in a flatbed pickup truck Dad rented from a guy who lived next door, and on we went with our clothes; some books (mostly mine); a toaster oven that always burnt the toast and whatever else we tried to cook in it because something was wrong with the wiring; two small cacti we had for a while, until we forgot them during one move; and a random collection of what I now see as crap but that for a long time as a child I saw as treasures—an aqua-colored plastic vase; a picture showing the desert at sunset (torn from a magazine and taped onto a piece of stiff cardboard); a small ceramic statue of a coyote in a slinking posture. None of those so-called treasures exist any longer. They got lost or badly broken along the way, but I still sometimes think of them, especially the slinking coyote, the visual opposite of that old cartoon character Wile E. Coyote from the Bugs Bunny programs. My coyote was magical, like the coyote often is in Native American legends, sometimes a hero, sometimes an antihero, and sometimes a comic trickster. Sometimes, he’s all three at once. Crafty, intelligent, stealthy. That was my coyote. He was the closest thing I ever had to a pet, I guess. Or a real friend. Wow, that sounds pathetic. Forget I said that.

  I turned the TV back on and found something to watch after all. Some cartoon show about wrestling.

  Chapter 55

  “I hope Gemma will have a good time with Cathy’s friends.”

  Annie sat down across from me at my kitchen table. Even though the coffee at my place isn’t half as good as it is at hers, out of fairness I do have to be the host sometimes. “You sound worried,” she said.

  “I am,” I admitted. “Frankly, I’m surprised she accepted Cathy’s invitation.”

  “Because they haven’t really been talking since the anniversary party, you mean.”

  I frowned. “What was that about, anyway?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. Cathy won’t tell me. I assumed they argued about something.”

  “I didn’t even know that anything had happened. I just thought . . .” I shrugged. “I don’t know what I thought. Well, I guess I put it down to the fact that they’re two very different young women.”

  Annie laughed. “They’re like night and
day! And I don’t think it’s only because of how they each grew up. But maybe it is. Who can say?”

  Ah, yes, I thought. There’s the old nature versus nurture theme again.

  “She asked me about the day she was taken,” I said.

  Annie looked surprised. “Really? And what did you tell her?”

  “I kept it simple, by which I mean I left out the violent shaking and the vomiting that followed the phone call from Barbara and the fact that when we were at Barbara’s house later that afternoon, two police officers had to restrain me.”

  “Christ, why restrain you? You never told me that!”

  “They thought I was going to harm myself,” I said, at this distance of seventeen years feeling none of the shame I’d felt for a long time after. “I don’t remember it too clearly, but supposedly I was sort of ranting on about it being all my fault, Gemma’s being missing. Supposedly, I started to scratch my face.”

  Annie sighed and put a hand on mine. “Poor you. Okay, so if you left out the ugly details, what did you tell Gemma?”

  “I told her I’d been at the office when Barbara called. I told her that Barbara left Yorktide soon afterward because she couldn’t stand the memories. Gemma also asked if her father had had friends, and I told her about Rob. Oh, and she asked why I didn’t leave town too.”

  “How did she take it all?” Annie asked.

  “Calmly. I guess she needed to know.” And then I smiled.

  “What?”

  “She mentioned Alan’s love of NASCAR to me one day and how she thinks it’s lame, and I told her how I’d spend hours at a local pub with him, watching the cars go around that stupid track over and over again, just because he liked my being there with him. And then we talked a bit about being in love. And about falling out of love.”

  “Verity, this sounds like fantastic progress! You’re actually getting more than one-word answers! And you’re talking about things that matter. You must feel so relieved.”

  I did. I do. Still . . .

  “At least once a day,” I told Annie, “I find myself apologizing to Gemma for something, even stuff I can’t possibly be blamed for. I’m sorry your room isn’t bigger. Not that she’s ever complained about it. I’m sorry we’re out of the milk you like. Which is full fat, by the way. I’m sorry it’s raining today and you can’t go out on your bike. I’m sure I’m driving her nuts. What I really should be saying is, I’m sorry all this has happened to you. You’re innocent in all this.”

  Annie leaned forward. “As are you, Verity,” she said in that forceful way she has that can make you believe almost anything she’s saying. Almost. “Don’t ever forget that.”

  But the thing is, I do forget that, all the time.

  “I’ll try not to,” I said. “Now, how about another cup of coffee?”

  Annie grimaced. “No offense, but no thanks.”

  Chapter 56

  This morning, when I was going through the pile of magazines on the living room coffee table, looking for something good, like a copy of People (no luck; I don’t think Verity likes celebrity gossip, though I get a kick out of it), I found the card Verity’s father had sent me not long after I came to live with her. I have no idea how it got there. Anyway, I’d spent the twenty dollars he sent me on that bag, but I’d never written back to him. Now I decided I would send him a note or something. At least I could thank him for the money. I probably should have done it before. For all I know, the guy’s on a fixed income and twenty dollars means a lot to him. I mean, he’s probably retired. I know Marion is retired. So far she hasn’t given me any money, not that I’m looking for her to.

  You know, Dad always used to say that money is the root of all evil. I think having that attitude was for him a way to justify the fact that he never had any money. I doubt that anyone with a decent amount of money in the bank thinks it’s evil.

  Anyway, I wrote a thank-you note to Verity’s father, and then I thought: Why do I feel sort of antsy? And then I thought: Because I’m nervous about going to Cathy’s house to hang out with her friends. I’ve never had my own group of girlfriends, not the sort that had parties at one another’s houses and told one another secrets and had pillow fights while wearing their pajamas. (Do real girls really do that, or is that totally male fantasy? It’s gotta be male fantasy.) I never even went to a sleepover when I was a kid. Dad wouldn’t let me. He’d say he didn’t know the parents well enough to trust them. Now I know the truth. He didn’t know the parents—anyone—well enough because we were in hiding and he didn’t want to know anyone closely in case they somehow figured out who we really were. So I was kept home while other kids were having fun staying up all night and gorging on ice cream and pizza. Whatever.

  I needed to clear my head.

  I told Verity I was going out on my bike for a while, and she told me to be careful, like parents are supposed to do. Like Dad always did, even if I was only going to the corner and back. Anyway, I headed to the post office in town to mail the note to Tom. It was the first time I went into the heart of Yorktide on my own, without what protection Verity could offer, which wasn’t much, though she did her best to fend off idiots who wanted to stare at me, say stupid things to me, or worse, take a picture of me, The Little Kidnapped Girl. I didn’t get off my bike and go inside the post office, though, just stuck the envelope in the mailbox outside the building and headed back to the house. Still, I felt kind of good that I’d made the trip on my own (mostly just focusing on traffic and not getting myself run over by moronic drivers and avoiding hitting the tourists who for some reason tend to wander out into the middle of the street).

  When I was coming up our driveway, I saw that neighbor Verity had told me about, Mr. Pascoe, at his front door, bent over and looking closely at the doorknob. Then I saw he was actually peering at the lock and jiggling a key in it. I hadn’t met either Mr. or Mrs. Pascoe yet, though a few times I’d seen one or both of them peeking out a slit in the curtains in what I think might be their kitchen. From there they can see our kitchen and the back deck. I was tempted just to go inside and ignore the old man—Verity had warned me that the Pascoes liked to talk endlessly and that they could be nosey—but he looked kind of pathetic all bent over, and a better instinct made me go over to him after I’d parked my bike.

  “Can I help?” I said.

  I must have startled him—maybe he has bad hearing and hadn’t heard me coming—because he turned around quickly and dropped the key. I bent over and picked it up.

  “Darn thing won’t turn,” he said. He seemed genuinely flustered, whether because of dropping the stupid key or meeting me in this way.

  “Let me try,” I said.

  Mr. Pascoe stepped aside, and I inserted his key into the lock. It was a bit stiff. “I think maybe the lock should be oiled,” I said, continuing to jiggle the key. And then I got the key to turn, and I pushed open the door.

  You’d have thought I handed the guy a check for a million bucks or something, the way he smiled at me. “How can I ever thank you?” he said.

  I was embarrassed. I shrugged. “It was nothing. Maybe you should try a spare key. See if that works any better.”

  I began to turn to head back to my house—Verity’s house—when he said, “It’s so nice to finally meet you. My wife and I are so glad you’re all right.”

  I felt . . . I felt touched. This guy and his wife were strangers, and yet they were glad I was okay. See, I believed the old man. Against all my worst instincts.

  And am I all right? Am I really okay?

  I smiled. “Thanks,” I said, and hurried back home.

  Chapter 57

  “I hope you have a good time.”

  I didn’t look at Verity. I couldn’t because I didn’t want her to see any evidence on my face of the near panic I was feeling.

  “Thanks,” I said, getting out of the car. You can do this, I told myself. You’ve done much scarier things.

  Had I really?

  Verity pulled away from the Stra
wberries’ house, and I rang the doorbell. Annie opened it, and I felt glad it was her and not Cathy. I still needed a bit of time before joining those girls.

  “Follow the sound of the shrieking,” Annie said in a tone that made me feel like a conspirator, like we both knew this was hard for me. But maybe I was imagining that.

  There wasn’t really shrieking, but there was laughter. I went downstairs to the basement, where I found Cathy and three other girls sitting where Verity and I had sat the first time I’d been to the house.

  “Marni!” Cathy jumped up and rushed over to me, and I tensed, knowing she was going to throw her arms around me. But she didn’t; she just took me by the arm and led me over to the others. I resisted the urge to yank my arm away. Finally she let go.

  “Everyone,” she said. “This is Marni, my new friend.”

  The three girls said things like “hi” and “hey” and I sank into the one empty chair with a weak smile. “Hi,” I said.

  “Help yourself,” Cathy said, pointing to the low table on which were bowls of chips, dips, and what I found out were mozzarella sticks. They were kind of cold by then but still good. And there was soda.

  “Since Marni’s new to the group,” Cathy said, “let’s everyone tell her about who we are, and then she can tell us all about her.”

  It sounded like a horrible idea to me, especially that last part. What could I possibly say about myself without dragging into it the fact that I was kidnapped by my father, who’s now in jail? (Not that everyone doesn’t already know.) I mean, most days I feel like a total stranger to myself, so how am I supposed to describe that stranger to anyone else? But before I could make a dash for the stairs, the girl sitting to my right began.

  “I’ll go first,” she said. “My name is Hildy, and the biggest thing you need to know is that I’m totally into soccer.”

  Cathy laughed. “She’s obsessed!”

  No surprise there, I thought. Hildy looks like one of those super-healthy people, who probably runs five miles each day before breakfast and lifts weights before and after lunch. Seriously, I bet that girl can bench-press five hundred pounds or something. (I don’t really know anything about bench-pressing. I just know the expression.)