The Good Father

by Diane Chamberlain

  “What time did she leave?” I asked.

  “A couple of hours ago,” Nando said. “Why don’t you call her?”

  “Good idea,” I said, pushing away from the counter. “I’ve got her number in the van.” I raced out the door. He probably thought I was one weird dude, but with any luck, I’d never have to see him again.

  I wove through the parking lot one more time, dodging the eyes I imagined were following me until I got to the van. Quarter of a tank of gas. I’d give it a few bucks’ worth. Just enough to get me where I needed to go.

  36

  Robin

  Alissa and I were alone in the house with Hannah, although the housekeeper was vacuuming down the hall in the living room. I knew the two housekeepers who worked for me in the B and B very well and I cared about them as people, not just as my employees, but I barely knew anything about the Hendricks’ housekeeper other than her name: Ella. Mollie gave me a gentle lecture early on about how to treat the B and B staff. I was too friendly with them, she said, and that would make it hard if I ever needed to ask more of them. “Keep it professional at all times,” she told me. I’d tried to find the right balance between my friendly nature and my role as their employer. Behind Mollie’s back, though, I still asked the B and B staff about their boyfriends and their home life and I’d even loaned one of them a few dollars on a couple of occasions. But now I understood why Mollie had kept her distance from her staff. I understood why their housekeeper was an older woman, industrious, quiet and plain. I imagined all those qualifications were what Mollie demanded in a housekeeper after James’s fling with Will’s mother.

  I fiddled with the baby monitor while Alissa rocked Hannah on her thighs. She was studying Hannah’s face the way I had when the baby was first born. She was a little late with her bonding, but it was intense now and it was real. What I knew about Will—if it was the truth—would hurt her so much.

  I could only imagine how Mollie had felt when she’d learned the truth about her husband. Then what a shock for her to discover Alissa was seeing the son of “the other woman”—and carrying his baby! How painful for her. I hoped it would be at least a few days before I bumped into James. I felt disgust toward him that would take a while to go away. I would never be able to look at him the same way. He’s only human, I told myself. Well, so was I, but I would never betray my spouse that way. Would Dale? Like father like son, Will had said. I had the sickening feeling that Dale was already betraying me.

  I wanted to be wrong about that. I wanted Will to be lying to me. I wanted an explanation! I needed one. There are things you don’t know and have no need to know.

  Screw you, I thought to myself, stepping away from the baby monitor.

  “I just remembered I left a scarf in Dale’s apartment,” I said to Alissa. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Okay,” she said without looking up from Hannah.

  I climbed the stairs to Dale’s apartment and let myself in with the key he’d given me shortly after we’d started dating. That key had meant so much to me back then. It had meant he was serious about me and that he trusted me. That he had nothing to hide from my eyes.

  I walked across his living room. The door to the room he used as his office was closed but unlocked, and it let out a squeak when I opened it. I rarely went into that room. I’d always viewed his office as his private space. It was tiny, almost claustrophobic, the walls lined with law books, the oversize desk as neatly organized as Dale himself. My heart pumped hard as I sat down at that desk. What would I say if he came home and found me in here? It was a risk I had to take. I felt intrusive and sneaky, but also justified. If he found me, I’d tell him the truth and hope against hope that he had an explanation for his payment to Will.

  And yet, as I opened the top right drawer and pulled out his checkbook, I knew it didn’t matter. There was nothing he could say to explain away that check in Will’s pocket. Regardless of what I found, I knew I no longer loved him. I wasn’t sure what I felt, but it wasn’t love. I loved Alissa. Hannah. Mollie. Whatever love I’d felt for Dale had eroded over the past few weeks. Maybe it had been disintegrating for months.

  I glanced through the check register. It showed the last one he’d written, number 1432 to “W.S.” for forty-five-hundred dollars. I flipped back through the pages and counted seven more checks to W.S. for as little as two thousand and as much as eight thousand. Random rewards to the rat. I closed the checkbook, slipped it back into the drawer and slowly got to my feet. I left the office, not even bothering to close the door behind me. What did it matter? I now knew exactly what I felt for Dale: disgust.

  37

  Erin

  On the Road

  Bella was an easy traveler, mesmerized by Wonder Pets! and Dora the Explorer, but I wasn���t having that comfortable a time of it. The sound of Carolyn’s old DVDs playing in the backseat was disorienting and I kept having to check my rearview mirror to remind myself it was Bella back there, not my daughter. I was still thinking about my conversation with Michael. A grief game? I tried to muster up the annoyance I’d felt when he first mentioned it, but I was having trouble doing it. That was always the way Michael viewed the problems of the world, wasn’t it? How can I create a game to solve this problem? he’d ask himself. I felt torn between my anger at him and my empathy. He’d been grieving all along, just in his own unique way. I shook off the thought. The empathy I suddenly felt toward him didn’t fit well with the wall I’d built around myself to keep him out.

  I felt more and more anxious as we neared the coast and I thought it was because my plan to find Bella’s mother seemed half-baked. I had an old picture and a name. That was it. What if no one recognized Robin? What if Travis had custody of Bella because Robin was an unfit mother? But as we passed the exit for Atlantic Beach, I understood the real source of my anxiety. The exit sign caught me by surprise and I quickly looked away from it. Ridiculous. I needed to get over this. Judith once told me I might need to walk out on the pier again to rid myself of the haunting visions I had from the night Carolyn died. I’d need to face the fear. “You’ve built the pier into something it isn’t,” she’d said. That was true. The pier was a soul-eating monster. “If you can walk out on it someday,” Judith had said, “it might put an end to those visions.” I’d told her to forget it. She might as well have been telling someone with a phobia of high places to leap from the Eiffel Tower. And yet, maybe she was right.

  I took the next exit and got back on 70 heading in the opposite direction. I stared directly at the sign for Atlantic Beach and drove onto the exit ramp.

  “We’re going to take a little side trip,” I said to Bella. She didn’t respond. She was trying to sing along with a song on the DVD, stumbling over half the words but completely absorbed.

  Atlantic Beach was quiet and there was plenty of parking at the pier. I allowed myself no time to think, getting out of the car quickly and opening the back door for Bella, but I felt the tremor in my body just beneath my skin. Bella was still glued to the video screen.

  “We’re going to go for a little walk,” I said, reaching for the buckle of her car seat.

  “No!” she said. “I want to watch this.” She was going to need a nap soon. There was a large inn in Beaufort. Michael and I had stayed there many years ago. This time of year, there’d almost certainly be vacancies. As soon as we checked in, we’d take a nap. Then we’d walk around town, Robin’s photograph in hand, and start asking people if they knew her. I pictured us walking from shop to shop on Front Street, and suddenly the whole idea seemed even more far-fetched and overwhelming, but it was the only thing I could think of to do.

  Right now, though, I had a more pressing need.

  “Come on, honey,” I said. “You can watch again in a few minutes. We’re just taking a little walk to see the ocean, okay?” I sounded so brave and calm! I held her hand as we walked toward the pier. Inside the tackle shop with its smell of fish and metal and oil and salt, I paid a dollar and received o
ur tickets. Then we walked through the open door and out onto the pier. The first wide strip of boards was over land, but even so, my heart raced.

  The day was brilliant, but only a handful of fishermen were on the pier, and the scene was nothing like it had been the night Carolyn fell into the sea. In daylight and uncrowded, it was almost unrecognizable as the same pier. But there were the horizontal wooden slats along the railings. There were just two of them, but they were wider than in my memory. Safer. I pointed to the fishermen in the distance. “People are fishing out there,” I said to Bella. I tried to calm myself by speaking in an even voice, but I must have been hyperventilating because I needed to stop between the words fishing and out there to take a breath. We walked along the part of the pier that stretched long and high above the beach, but when we reached the strip above the crashing waves, I couldn’t take another step. I could see the end of the pier far in the distance, the place my daughter had disappeared forever, and the boards turned to cotton beneath my feet. I grabbed the back of one of the built-in benches to steady myself. I would never be able to do this. I lifted Bella into my arms, turned around, and nearly ran back to the exit.

  “I want to see the fish!” Bella wailed in my ear.

  “We need to get back to the car,” I said, winded. “You can watch Wonder Pets! again. Then pretty soon we’ll have some lunch and then a nap.”

  In the car, I let her buckle herself in, my hands trembling too hard to help even if she’d needed me to. Then I sat behind the wheel and shut my eyes as I leaned back against the headrest. Premature, I thought to myself. If I couldn’t manage the diving board or the bridge over the creek at my apartment complex, how did I think I could possibly manage this? I drove out of Atlantic Beach and my breathing didn’t settle down again until I was back on 70, heading for the safety of Beaufort.

  * * *

  The inn was still there. It was a long, three-story building with a porch that faced the water. It was nearly empty on this October afternoon. I checked us in, and it wasn’t until we were riding the elevator to the third story that I realized our room—333—was the same one Michael and I had stayed in. With all the empty rooms, how did I get that unlucky? I thought of taking the elevator back down and asking for a different room, but by that time, Bella was so irritable that I didn’t dare.

  Once we were in the room, I tucked her into the queen-size bed for a nap. Then I went onto the balcony and looked out over the shops across the street and the waterfront beyond. In the distance, I could see Carrot Island and I thought I could make out a couple of ponies by the water’s edge. I was only now beginning to calm down from those few minutes on the pier. I tightened my jacket around my shoulders and sat down on one of the white rockers, leaving the door to the room open so I could hear Bella if she woke up. I remembered this view from when Michael and I shared this room so long ago, when Carolyn had been an idea in the future, one of our three or four imagined kids. Our family. That future that had seemed so full of hope and simple then. We thought we could plan it. Control it. I remembered loving Michael so much. I remembered making love to him over and over again. There’s magic in this room, we’d decided. We would set out for a walk through town but make it only a block or two because we couldn’t wait to get back to our room to make love again. I was working on my pharmacist license back then and I’d talk about drugs and chemicals and he’d ask questions as if I was talking about the most fascinating thing in the world. And he was just discovering the “social power of gaming,” he called it. I thought he was the most remarkable man. A passionate idealist. That was long before he ran away from us. From Carolyn and me. Metaphorically. Literally.

  We’d been drowning and he ran away.

  38

  Travis

  I rolled into Beaufort on fumes, the needle on my gas gauge hovering right above empty. The whole way there, I was thinking how crazy this was. I always told people that Bella’s mother lived in Beaufort, but the truth was, she could be anywhere. She’d definitely lived in Beaufort after she got out of her cardiac rehab program because my mother knew someone who knew someone who knew Robin’s father. But now? More than two years later? I couldn’t imagine her staying in a little place like Beaufort. When I let myself think about her, I pictured her back in school getting the education she’d always wanted. Becoming a nurse or maybe even a doctor—unsaddled by the baby she never wanted me to know about.

  The only reason I could think of for Erin to be here, though, was because she thought Bella’s mother was here. I pictured her trying to find Robin with only that old photograph to go by. Beaufort was small, but it wasn’t so small that everybody knew everybody else.

  I didn’t have Robin’s picture, but I had her last name. Unless she’d gotten married. Whoa, that felt like a knife to my heart, but why should it? She’d cut me out. And then I had another thought: she might not even be alive. I hoped she was. I really did. I hated the thought of her dying before she’d had a chance to live. Wherever she was, though, whatever she was up to, I didn’t think she’d welcome Bella with open arms if Erin showed up on her doorstep.

  My main hope right now was that she was still in Beaufort and Erin and I would both be able to find her. She’d be the point of intersection. The only way I could get to Bella. But I couldn’t deny that I wanted to see Robin. I’d be shaking up her life one more time and putting her in a really weird position, but yes. I wanted to see her.

  I stood on the boardwalk that ran along the waterfront. On one side of me were the docks and a dozen or so gleaming white boats that screamed Money! On the other side was a long string of shops and restaurants. Touristy places, though. If she still lived in Beaufort, what was the chance she ever set foot in them? Although if she still lived in Beaufort, maybe she worked in one of them. I headed down the boardwalk and walked into one of the shops—a small place that sold pottery and jewelry and kitschy souvenirs.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the gray-haired lady dusting one of the display shelves. “I’m looking for someone who lives in Beaufort and I know this is a long shot, but would you happen to know a girl named Robin Saville?”

  She turned to face me, looking me up and down, and I thought I saw her nostrils flare for just a second. I hoped I didn’t smell as grungy as I felt. “You don’t look like a reporter,” she said.

  It was a weird comment. “No, I’m not a reporter,” I said.

  “You’re not from Beaufort, either, are you?” she asked.

  I shook my head again. “Do you know her?”

  “Everybody knows her, honey,” she said. “She’s engaged to the guy who thinks he’s going to be our next mayor.”

  “Let’s hope he’s the next mayor,” said an elderly man sitting behind the glass jewelry case. I hadn’t even noticed him and his voice gave me a start.

  “We’re not in agreement there,” the woman said, “but we can probably agree on Robin, can’t we? I don’t know what a sweet girl like that wants with a family of money grubbers.”

  I felt like I was going to keel over. “Robin Saville?” I asked. There couldn’t be another woman with that name, but I was having trouble getting it through my head that the first person I asked knew her. That everyone knew her.

  “Can you tell me where I can find her?” I asked.

  Now she looked suspicious. “Why do you want to know?”

  I could imagine how I looked to them. She was engaged to a guy running for mayor? Some clean-cut dude who apparently had money? And here I stood—this scruffy, smelly guy. “We’re old friends,” I said, and I thought how lame that sounded. How made up. Yet my throat choked up when the words came out of my mouth. “I knew her when we were kids, but I haven’t seen her in years and I thought since I was passing through Beaufort, I—”

  “She runs that Taylor’s Creek Bed and Breakfast place right down the street,” the man said.

  “Hush!” The lady shook her duster in his direction. “Don’t tell him that!” she said. “You don’t know who this boy is
.”

  “Oh, what’re you worryin’ about?” the man said.

  “It’s okay,” I said to her, heading for the door. “Really. We’re old friends. No problem.”

  Back on the boardwalk, I started running toward my van, my heart pounding in time with the slap of my sneakers. I was so close to her! I hoped she wouldn’t slam the door in my face. I hoped she could remember at least a little of what had choked me up in the shop—that friendship we’d thought would tie us together forever.

  39

  Erin

  My plan to find Bella’s mother was starting to seem more ridiculous by the minute. Bella and I walked along the waterfront, stopping in the shops and restaurants, showing her picture to everyone we met. After our fifth unsuccessful stop, we were about to cross the street when a red Mustang pulled up to the curb in front of us. A woman threw open the passenger-side door and nearly burst from the car.

  Bella suddenly let out a squeal and did a happy little jump at my side. She let go of my hand and ran toward the woman, whose hair was very long and very blond. No wonder no one I’d shown her picture to had recognized Robin! She’d dramatically changed her looks since that youthful photograph had been taken.

  “Bella!” The woman lifted Bella into the air and spun her around and my hand felt empty where Bella had been holding it. But this was what I’d wanted, right? What I was here for? I’d wanted to see this reunion between mother and child. I pressed my hand against the lump in my throat.

  The woman hoisted Bella a little higher in her arms, then looked at me. “Hi, Robin,” she said. “I’m Savannah.”

  What?

  “I’m not Robin,” I said. “I thought you were Robin.”

  She frowned at me. “What do you mean, you’re not Robin?”

  “I’m not. I’m actually looking for Robin.”