Seashell Season

by Holly Chamberlin

  At one point Ellen said, “Alan showed some promise when he was very young, you know.”

  “Promise of what?”

  Ellen sort of smiled sadly. “Promise of being normal.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I mean, I can’t argue that my father is normal, can I?

  Sitting across from Ellen as she sipped a second glass of Prosecco (what is that? It’s bubbly like champagne, but if it were champagne, it would be called champagne), for some reason I thought about what Verity had told me about why she didn’t have another baby after I was taken away. That it would somehow be a betrayal of me. And she was always so sensitive to what might upset me, from meeting Marion for the first time, to not bothering me about what Dad and I talked about, to knowing the truth about her relationship with David. Was it betraying Verity for me to be sitting here, having lunch with Dad’s cousin? The idea made me uncomfortable, and I pushed it away.

  “I have a little something for you,” Ellen said suddenly. She reached into her bag, took out a smallish box, and handed it to me. There was a red ribbon tied around the box.

  “But you already gave me the money,” I blurted.

  “That was different,” she said. “Go ahead—open it.”

  I did. It was an iPhone.

  “But I have a phone,” I told her.

  “This one is the latest model. You don’t have that, do you?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “You’ll need one.”

  Why? I thought. Why will I need one, really?

  “Thanks,” I said. I put the phone back in the box and stowed it in my bag. My twenty-dollar bag I’d bought with the money from Verity’s father.

  After lunch, we walked down to the water, and Ellen asked if I’d ever walked along Marginal Way, the path up on the cliffs to our left. I told her I hadn’t. Not yet. She told me I should, it’s beautiful, and then she told me she had a surprise.

  I half laughed. “Another one?”

  “Richard saw you out on your bike the other day.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Until I get a license, it’s the best way to get around.”

  “He said it was an old machine.”

  “Not too old. Anyway, our friend Marc checked it out before we bought it. It’s in perfect shape.”

  Ellen still looked doubtful. “Well, Richard and I would feel better if we knew you were riding something high-end, something safer and better made.”

  I immediately felt kind of insulted, like did she really think Verity would give me a piece of crap to ride or that I would be so stupid as to get on a bike that was falling apart?

  I controlled my temper. It took some effort. Maybe she was sincere. What do I really know about her, after all? I should try not to be so judgmental.

  “Really,” I said, “that’s okay. I like my bike.”

  “Now, Gemma, it’s a done deal.”

  I didn’t know what to say without being a total jerk, so I kept my mouth shut and squinted out at the ocean. Suddenly Ellen said: “Thank you for letting us do these things for you. You know we don’t have children of our own. It’s been . . .” She looked away then, toward the other side of the cove where the boats were moored, and gave a small sigh. “It’s been difficult at times.” Then she turned back to me and, for the first time, touched me. Just her hand on my arm, briefly. “You’re really the one helping us. You’re really our gift.”

  After that, we got back into her black Lexus GX SUV and drove to a bike shop in Kennebunk, where there was a Trek bike waiting for us. A guy from the store asked me to get on it and he made some adjustments and then I got off the bike and he put it on the rack on top of Ellen’s car. “I have the same model,” Ellen said, smiling. “Maybe we could ride together one day.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Sure.”

  Verity was out when I got home after a few more stops with Ellen—she wanted to browse some shops in Kennebunkport; in one of them she bought a vase that cost two hundred bucks—but she’d left a message on the kitchen table saying she’d be home by about five. To make us dinner, of course. There must be some days when she’s not in the mood to cook a full meal, but since I’ve been living with her, she’s done it every night, except for the few times we’ve gone out.

  I went into my room then and lay down on the couch. Though I’d done nothing more strenuous than get in and out of Ellen’s car, I felt exhausted. And kind of confused.

  Like I said, I don’t really need a new phone or a new bike. My old ones are perfectly fine. I don’t really need anything. But I have to admit, I like getting stuff. I mean, it’s a bit of a novelty for someone like me, who only got a gift on her birthday (her false one!) and Christmas, and who periodically went through what Dad liked to call “belt-tightening phases,” which he tried to present to me as a sort of adventure or challenge. Let’s see if we can get through two weeks with no candy or cookies, or Pasta is a basic food, Marni. It’s just bread in disguise. Let’s see if we can eat spaghetti for dinner every night this week. In ancient times people pretty much survived on bread.

  I’m not sure I ever believed that, but a kid doesn’t argue with the person putting food on the table, even if the food was limited or boring. Well, maybe a spoiled kid argues, but not someone like me. Until I was about twelve and the truth began to dawn on me—that Dad’s “fun” belt-tightening periods were really about his not having enough money to feed us properly—I kind of enjoyed doing without. I mean, at least Dad and I were doing it together. It was us against the world.

  It’s pretty clear that Verity won’t be happy about Ellen and Richard showering me with stuff I didn’t ask for (even if they say I’m the one doing them the favor, and I’m not really sure I believe that). And I can guess why, though of course she wouldn’t say. There’s her pride, of course, and she’s afraid I’ll like them better than I like her—and I do like her—because they’ve got more money. It’s kind of insulting actually, that she or anyone at all who knows me would think I give a shit about money, but I see why she would feel insecure. After all she went through when I was with Dad, not knowing if I was alive or dead . . . shit, even being questioned by the police in the beginning! Of course she doesn’t want some rich cousin coming in and trying to buy me away from her. But I’m not going anywhere. Verity’s going to have to figure that out and believe it.

  I mean, I’m not going anywhere until Dad is released. Someday.

  Chapter 81

  When Gemma told me about the iPhone and the bike, I thought my blood pressure was going to soar high enough to send me into cardiac arrest.

  The gifts are extravagant, and it was presumptuous of Ellen (does Richard know about the phone and the bike?) to provide for my daughter items I’d already provided for her. Okay, Gemma had come with the phone, but I was paying for it now. She’s my daughter, and I support her.

  To be fair, Gemma didn’t seem particularly excited about either gift. And this morning after breakfast, she went out for a ride on the bike I’d bought her. And when I was dusting, I found the new phone, still in its box, on a bookshelf in the living room.

  I thought about telling her—asking her, I mean—to return the gifts, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I still can’t. I don’t want to deprive Gemma of attention or of the sort of things I can’t afford, especially when from what I can tell, she’s had so little in the way of extras in her life, but I can’t shake the feeling Ellen is trying to buy my daughter’s affections. David agrees with me, as does Annie, but they’re prejudiced in my favor, so maybe we’re all being overly suspicious. Can anyone blame us?

  But neither David nor Annie is as worried as I am about possible fallout.

  “They’ll be gone in a few weeks,” David reminded me when we spoke last night on the phone. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Yes, there is,” I insisted. “What kind of damage are Ellen and Richard going to leave in their wake? They’ll have raised her expectations too high for me to meet.”

&nb
sp; “Verity,” David said in that terribly patient way he has, “don’t insult your daughter. Okay, I hardly know her, but she doesn’t strike me as someone obsessed with money.”

  No, I thought, she doesn’t, but money can corrupt. It can screw up even the most down-to-earth person if it comes at the right time and in the right quantity.

  Huh. Ever since Ellen’s comment about breaking the diamonds out of the safe, a memory has been niggling at me.

  When Alan proposed to me a few weeks after I’d told him I was pregnant, it was with a fairly substantial, brilliant-cut diamond solitaire on a yellow gold band. Before discovering I was pregnant, I’d been unhappy in the relationship and had vaguely considered leaving Alan, but when I saw how happy he was to be starting a family, I’d convinced myself everything would be okay between us. So I accepted his proposal. My father was thrilled, as was Marion. Thinking back on it, I see that Marion also expressed a sort of relief. “Everything will be okay now,” she said, and at the time I didn’t question her. I suppose I thought she meant that now the baby would be legitimate. Marion is old-fashioned that way. Now I know she believed that by marrying Alan, I could further take him in hand and keep him out of too much trouble.

  Anyway, I wondered how Alan could have afforded the ring. His mother and his one friend, Rob, had no money to spare, and I wondered if Alan had taken a bank loan. I hoped he hadn’t. How long would it take him to pay it back? He didn’t make much money, and he was bad at saving what he did make—though he had used the argument of financial security when pressuring me to give up my art.

  I figured the ring might be a fake, or at least, that the stone was a CZ or maybe even a white topaz, though I knew little about identifying stones. And if it was fake, or even partly so, there was no way I was going to call him on it and hurt his overly sensitive feelings. After all, it was the thought that counted, and with a baby on the way, it was smart of him not to spend money on something not strictly necessary.

  When I eventually broke the engagement, not long before Alan ran off with our daughter, I tried to return the ring, but he insisted I keep it. “I know you’ll come back to me,” he said, tears in his eyes. “I know you’ll see the truth, that I’m the one man who will ever love you entirely.” I admit to a moment of panic at that point. I thought: What if he’s right? What if Alan is as good as it’s going to get for me? But somehow I summoned the courage to take Gemma and move out. I put the ring back into its box and tucked it into a corner of a dresser drawer in the room I occupied at Barbara’s place.

  About six months after Alan took off, I badly needed cash. With the rent to pay (Alan had always paid at least a part of it) and having lost time at work due to depression and an ulcer that had come out of nowhere and kept me in bed for almost two weeks—let alone the doctor bills that my measly insurance wouldn’t cover—selling the ring seemed the obvious solution. I took the loathed thing to the family-owned jewelry store in downtown Yorktide to see what they might do for me. Imagine my shock when Mr. Nettles recognized the ring as one that had been stolen from a friend’s jewelry store in Ogunquit the previous year. He couldn’t be 100 percent sure, he said, and suggested I take the ring to the police. I did. And there was a record of the theft and a full description of the ring. Later the rightful owner claimed it. And yes, the stone was indeed a real and a very good diamond.

  No one suspected me of dirty dealing. By then, with Alan and Gemma long gone, and Alan’s criminal past public knowledge, all anyone felt for me was pity.

  One thing’s for sure. I’ll never tell Gemma the ring saga. My one brush with important jewelry, and it turned out to be someone else’s stolen property.

  Chapter 82

  I invited Marion for lunch yesterday. Gemma and I hadn’t seen her since the Fourth of July festivities, and I was feeling a little guilty about that. I made Marion’s favorite lunch—a tuna melt with Swiss cheese and tomato on white bread (she would accept a cheap squishy bread, but I would not and so used a good loaf of toasting white)—bought a bag of cookies from Bread and Roses in Ogunquit, and set the table on the back deck with china plates and real glasses and cotton napkins. On her own initiative, Gemma picked a handful of daisies and a few stalks of Queen Anne’s lace from the garden and arranged the simple, delicate flowers artfully in a small vase at the center of the table. She has an eye after all, I noticed, and I wondered if she had constructed flower arrangements before. Alan certainly wouldn’t have taught her how to.

  Marion arrived promptly at noon—she’s a person who eats breakfast at six, lunch at noon, and dinner at five every day she can possibly manage it. Being retired now, this means almost every day of every week. I could tell immediately something was on her mind.

  We sat at the table, and I served the hot sandwiches and lemonade. Gemma, as was usual, scarfed down her food in moments, but Marion, always a slow and deliberate eater, was even more so this afternoon.

  “Is the sandwich okay?” I asked, knowing the food wasn’t the issue.

  Marion raised a ghost of a smile. “Fine, Verity. Thank you.”

  I resisted encouraging a confidence. Asking Marion to share what was bothering her could and often did result in a very long litany of minor ailments, a good many of which, I suspect, are imaginary. Well, real enough to Marion. It turned out, there was no need for me to encourage Marion to speak.

  “Alan’s cousin hasn’t called me since she and her husband have been in town,” she said with a sigh.

  Gemma said nothing. What could she say? And the last thing I wanted was to make excuses for Ellen’s social snobbery.

  “Since they’ve been here in Yorktide,” Marion went on. “Well, there have been so many memories.”

  That’s when I began to get really nervous. The last thing I wanted was for Marion to start strolling down memory lane and reveal secrets I didn’t want Gemma to know, not now, maybe never. But short of being rude, I didn’t know how to stop her.

  “Did you know, Gemma,” she went on, “that Alan’s father, Albert, died when Alan was only just nineteen? It was a terrible loss for the both of us.”

  “But you still wear your wedding ring,” Gemma said. “Unless you got married again?”

  “Oh no. Albert was the only one for me.”

  “Sorry. I mean, that was a long time ago. You must have been lonely a lot.”

  I smiled at my daughter. She was revealing herself to be a far more perceptive person than I’d thought at first.

  Marion went inexorably on. “Since shortly after our marriage,” she said, her voice a bit shaky, “Albert was intermittently institutionalized for mental exhaustion. That was the term we used.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Gemma asked. “The doctors?”

  Marion didn’t quite answer her question. “I never told Alan what was wrong with his father,” she went on, fiddling with the napkin in her lap and not meeting Gemma’s eyes or mine. “I never told him where exactly his father was going when he went away. I told him that Daddy had a weak constitution and sometimes needed complete rest.”

  “And he believed that?” Gemma asked, her tone harsh now and suspicious. My entire body was tense.

  “He did believe that,” Marion said forcefully. “At least, he never questioned me, not even after his father’s death. By then, I saw no reason to tell him the truth. And the rest of the family, well, they never had much use for Albert, so no one saw the point in interfering with my decision. But sometimes I think that maybe they should have. . . .”

  “What do you mean?” Gemma demanded.

  “Marion, I don’t think—”

  Marion ignored me and leaned forward across the table, finally looking her granddaughter in the eye. I don’t think I’d ever seen her so intent and sure of her purpose. “No,” she said. “I think Gemma should know. There was some trouble with Alan and a few girlfriends before he met your mother.”

  I didn’t know why Marion was telling this to Gemma, unless it was to relieve a burden of guilt. And if that we
re the case, then Marion was acting selfishly. Again.

  “What kind of trouble?” Gemma shot me a look, and I felt my heart sink.

  “Nothing physical. Just—”

  “Stalking,” I said when Marion seemed not able to go on. “There were restraining orders. Alan didn’t take rejection lightly. He couldn’t let go.”

  Gemma said nothing for a few minutes. Neither did Marion nor I. And then Gemma spoke. “You know how the police realized Jim Armstrong was Alan Burns, don’t you?” she said. “The fingerprints from his second arrest, the car theft. He told me he’d been arrested when he was young for throwing a baseball through someone’s window—he said it was an accident—and that’s why the prints were on file.”

  Marion shook her head. “That never happened.”

  “In fact,” I said, “he beat someone up pretty badly. Broken bones. A concussion.”

  “It was an unprovoked attack,” Marion went on more steadily than I would have given her credit for. “Alan thought the man was interested in his ex-girlfriend.”

  “The victim was hospitalized for almost a week,” I told my daughter.

  Gemma shook her head and let out a bark of laughter. “I always thought Dad was a total passive-aggressive, when he wasn’t just being annoying. He actually hit someone?”

  “He has—at least, he had—a temper.”

  “I know that,” Gemma said. “He gets pissed off all the time at someone from work or the guy behind the counter at the drugstore or someone he thinks is going to cut him off on the road even though the guy doesn’t. It all seemed random to me. Stupid, like when he’d get fired for starting an argument, but . . . I guess I never pictured him actually getting violent.”

  “At least he never hit a woman,” Marion said.

  Gemma looked at her grandmother as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Does it even matter?” she asked. “Look at what else he’s done!”