Kiss River

by Diane Chamberlain

  Gina turned at the sound of her name to see Maggie O’Neill running toward her from the side door. She bent over to receive the hug Maggie apparently intended to give her.

  “Hi, Maggie,” Gina said, delighted by the enthusiastic greeting. They had met only once, that night on the dunes, and she was surprised at being recognized by the girl, much less hugged. The rest of the O’Neill family was walking toward her, and Gina held her hand out to Alec.

  “Thanks so much, Alec,” she said. She had not spoken to him since he’d changed his mind about helping her raise the lens. It had amazed her how quickly things started to happen after he made a few phone calls to the right people. That man had clout. She wished he had used it a month ago, when she’d first asked, but at least it was forthcoming now. There was more money than was necessary to accomplish the task. Not only had the lighthouse association come through, but the tourist bureau, a few of the banks, and Dillard Realty as well.

  “You’re welcome,” Alec said. “When is it going to happen?”

  “Monday, weather permitting.”

  “Will it be going to the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum?” he asked.

  “I’ve asked the lighthouse association to see if they can find a place for it up here, somewhere in the northern beaches, if at all possible. Otherwise, yes, it will go there.”

  “What time is Henry coming?” Olivia asked, and Gina glanced at her watch.

  “In ten minutes,” she said. “Clay and Lacey should have picked him up by now, and they’re bringing him over, ostensibly for a birthday dinner with just the three of them.” She turned to the crowd. “Listen up everybody!” she said loudly. The chatter in the room quieted down and people stopped what they were doing to look at her. “They should be here around seven,” she said. “Lacey is supposed to come in first to let us know they’re here, and then we’ll get ready to shout ‘surprise.’ All right?”

  The guests nodded as they returned to their games and conversations.

  “How is Lacey doing?” Olivia asked her.

  “She’s fine,” Gina said. “Still a little black and blue, but not in any pain.” She knew that Lacey had been afraid to come to Shorty’s tonight in case Brock showed up. But Brock had left town, it seemed, probably to find himself a good plastic surgeon to fix that face of his. The night before, Gina had given Lacey the massage she’d promised her on her birthday. Lacey had needed it. The muscles in her shoulders had felt like knotted ropes beneath Gina’s hands. The incident with Brock had taken something out of her, and Gina thought that was probably for the best. Lacey needed to be shaken up a little.

  The other person who was a bit nervous about tonight was Clay. This would be the first time that she and Clay would be together as a couple in front of Henry, and he was worried about how the old man would react to the realization that his granddaughter’s widower had moved on.

  “Why don’t you talk to him about it?” she’d suggested when he told her his concern, but she knew that was hard for Clay to do. Even if he did talk to Henry, the old man would most likely respond with little more than a grunt. If ever there were two men more suited to one another with regard to communication, it was Clay and Henry. Clay could talk to her, though, and that was all that mattered. They’d grown closer in the last few days, and they’d slept together every night in his bed, since it was a queen-size and hers was a double. They were using condoms now, of course, neither of them able to believe they hadn’t given birth control a thought that first night. But she had her period now, as she’d expected. She was not good at getting pregnant.

  They didn’t talk about the future, and that was a relief to her. She didn’t want to think about the fact that she was due back at her teaching job in a month. It was hardly her priority at the moment.

  “There’s Lace,” Alec said as Lacey walked through the door from the main room of the restaurant. The bruises on her face were still there, though barely noticeable in the back room’s dim light. Gina watched Lacey’s eyes dart to the pool table, and she could see the relief in her face when she realized that Brock was not present.

  Lacey gave her younger brother and sister quick hugs, then came over to where Gina was talking to Alec and Olivia.

  “We’re a little early, sorry,” she said to Gina. “I told them I needed to run ahead of them to use the rest room, but they should be in here any second.”

  “Everybody!” Gina said again, clapping her hands together, reminding herself—and probably everyone else in the room—of the fact that she was a teacher. “Be quiet now. Clay’s bringing Henry in.”

  A hush fell through the room, just in time. Gina could hear the two men on the other side of the door leading from the main restaurant into the back room.

  “What’s this door doing closed?” Henry was saying. People in the back room chuckled softly to themselves. Henry opened the door and walked in, Clay right behind him.

  “Surprise!” The sound was loud, with Maggie’s voice rising above the rest. “Surprise, surprise, surprise!” she said, hopping up and down.

  Henry grabbed his chest as if he was going to keel over, but he was laughing. “What on earth?” he asked as people began to sing. Gina couldn’t help the wide smile that spread across her face. The dapper old man looked so pleased. He stood arrow straight as they sang. His narrow tie lay neatly against his pressed white shirt, and he held his straw fedora in front of him.

  The party was a great success. Gina helped another waitress with the serving, and she liked the comfortable feeling of having something concrete to do. When she was not running around with trays of food, she was with Clay, whose finger was still splinted and whose face still bore the scrapes and bruises from defending his sister’s honor. Clay held her hand and was affectionate with her despite Henry’s presence. And Henry noticed. He spotted Clay stealing a kiss from Gina and she heard the old man say to him, “You still have great taste in women.” Bless him, Gina thought as she walked out of the room to get another tray of food. With just a few words, Henry had done his best to put Clay at ease.

  After dinner, Henry opened the cards and gifts people had brought for him. He had nearly finished, when there was a sudden thud in the back of the room, and everyone looked in the direction of the sound.

  “Walter!” Brian stood up, walking quickly around the table at which he’d been seated with his friend, and only then did Gina see that Walter had fallen forward out of his chair and lay crumpled on the floor. She got up from her own seat next to Clay and ran toward him, but Olivia and Alec were there first. Everyone backed away a bit, silent and shocked, as Olivia and Alec stretched Walter out on the floor. Olivia checked his neck for a pulse, shaking her head at her husband.

  “I’ll do the compressions,” Alec said, quickly unbuttoning the old man’s shirt.

  “Call an ambulance!” Gina shouted over her shoulder, to no one in particular.

  “Is he dead?” Maggie was standing at her side, and Gina put an arm around the girl, thinking through how to answer her, but Lacey appeared next to them before she could say a word.

  “Come on, Jack and Maggie,” Lacey said, exchanging a knowing glance with Gina. “Let’s go outside for a while.”

  “What’s Mom doing to him?” Maggie asked as she followed her older sister to the side door. Lacey held the screen door open, letting her younger siblings walk out ahead of her, and Gina didn’t hear her answer.

  The sounds were terrible. Gina could hear Olivia’s breath pouring into Walter’s lungs, and Alec grunted as he pressed down on the man’s chest. Murmured conversations filled the room, but there was no sound from Walter at all.

  Henry had moved over to the table where Walter had been sitting, and he and Brian sat next to each other quietly. They were looking into the air, not at the scene on the floor, and Gina wondered what they were thinking. Walter and Brian and Henry were all fixtures in the back room. It was hard to imagine the place without any one of them.

  Come on, Walter, she thought to hersel
f.

  Clay moved close to the threesome on the floor. “Can I take over for one of you?” he asked Alec and Olivia.

  “We’re okay,” Alec said, pressing down on Walter’s frail-looking breastbone, and Clay stood to one side, waiting to see if he was needed.

  Minutes passed. Finally the sound of a siren could be heard in the distance, and just as the medics raced into the room, Walter sputtered, coughed and started to breathe on his own. The people in the room let out their own breath in a collective sigh of cautious relief. Olivia sat back on her heels, her face damp and white. Alec put his hand on the back of her neck, beneath her hair, and pulled her toward him to give her a kiss on the side of the head, and the simple gesture touched someplace deep inside Gina and made her throat tighten up.

  The medics lifted Walter onto a stretcher and took him out the side door to the ambulance. Olivia said she would follow in her car, while Alec drove Jack and Maggie back to their house.

  “I’m taking Henry home,” Clay said to Gina, once his father and stepmother had left. “And I’ll probably stay with him awhile.”

  She nodded. “I think he’s more upset than he looks.”

  Clay squeezed her shoulders. “I think we all are,” he said. “Come over to his house when you’re done here, if you like.”

  “I will,” she said.

  Slowly, and far more quietly than when they’d arrived, people left the restaurant. Gina and the other waitress stayed behind to clean up. The silence in the room was overwhelming with everyone gone. The balloons had congregated in four places on the ceiling, probably because of the location of the air-conditioning vents, and the neatly arranged tables had been shoved this way and that to make room for the medics and their stretcher. Walter’s wheelchair was still at the table where he’d been sitting, a half-carved decoy lying near it on the floor. She had never seen the chair without the old man in it, and it looked sad and strange.

  “You go on,” the other waitress said to her as she started to clean up.

  “Oh, no,” Gina said. “I can’t leave this mess for—”

  “Go.” The waitress pushed her physically toward the side door. “You need to go be with your loved ones.”

  Gina thanked her, then walked outside to her car. Your loved ones. The words made her smile, and she turned the key in the ignition and headed over to Henry’s.

  CHAPTER 46

  Monday, June 8, 1942

  I’ve been here a month now and High Point still feels strange and too big to me. Dennis and SueAnn laugh when I say that, because I guess High Point isn’t very big at all compared to a lot of other cities, but every place is bigger than Kiss River.

  Dennis’s house is really old, but he takes good care of it. He doesn’t have a lot of money, though. I am trying to help out. Yesterday, I painted the bathroom.

  Dennis got me into school here, pulling some strings, I think, because he is not my legal guardian. School is almost over for the year already. The other kids are nice, but I don’t really have any friends yet. I am so different from everyone. Some of them make fun of the way I talk, but I know they’re only teasing me. At least I hope they are. I honestly never realized how different I speak from everyone else. I am supposed to be a high-school freshman, but I am way behind what they are learning. I know what Dennis meant now about needing to get a better education than I could get in Kiss River. I am used to all different ages being in one classroom, but here I am with a lot of kids my own age. Dennis is tutoring me at night so I can keep up. He gave me the choice of working extra hard so I could stay with the other freshmen or going back a year or two. I sure don’t want to do that. I will have to go to summer school, and then I should be caught up enough and I won’t feel so panicky next year when I’m a sophomore.

  I have to go to church with them every Sunday. It’s part of the rules of living here. The only big rule, really, besides going to school. I actually like church, even though I am still confused about when you’re supposed to stand up and kneel and all, and I’m amazed Dennis and SueAnn can figure that out since I don’t see the rhyme or reason to it. I also don’t have any idea what the priest is saying because it’s all in Latin, but since I am learning Latin in school, I guess I will understand some of it in time.

  I also have a library card here, and the library is amazing! I go there after school some days and Dennis has to bring a crowbar to pry me out of there. He laughed the first time he picked me up and saw all the books in my arms! “You don’t have to bring the whole library home at one time,” he told me. “The books will still be here tomorrow.”

  I feel sorry for the kids I went to school with in the Banks. They don’t know any better. They don’t know what they’re missing. But then, they also are with their families, and I know I will probably never be with mine again.

  Dennis is much kinder than I ever realized. I even told him about Sandy turning on me, although I said nothing about him being a spy, of course, only about him being a traitor to me. Dennis could have said, “I told you so,” but instead he held me while I cried about Sandy, and SueAnn got tears in her eyes and smoothed my hair. They did ask me if that was the reason I wanted to run away from Kiss River. I told them it wasn’t, but that I couldn’t tell anyone the real reason, and they have not said a word about it since. I wonder what they think that reason is, but it doesn’t seem to matter to them. They both care a lot about the world and making it better, and I think they’ve taken me on as a project. That’s okay. I feel so lucky to be here with both of them. Otherwise, where would I have gone?

  I miss home. I miss my parents, and I would give anything to watch the stars from the gallery with my father or even to have Mama holler at me right now. When the war is over, I will try to go back to see them. I hate that they are worried about me. But I’m still glad I did what I did. I know they’re safe, even if they are probably very upset over the way I left. Of course, I wonder all the time if Mr. Hewitt found and understood my carving on the lens.

  Here at the Kitterings’, I have become a paper reader. The newspaper here in High Point is amazing! Living in Kiss River, you had to keep reminding yourself that there were things happening in other places. This newspaper tells you not just about the rest of America, but the whole world, and Dennis loves that I’m reading it. He talks to me about the articles. But he doesn’t know what I’m really looking for, which is an article about the capture of a traitor in the Coast Guard. I read nearly every word in the paper looking for that news, and so far I have not seen it. I am afraid to see it, for so many reasons. If he’s caught, would he think I had turned him in somehow after all and then would he send someone to harm my parents? That horrible dream I had is still fresh in my mind every time I close my eyes. Or maybe Mr. Hewitt didn’t find a note from me and never bothered to look close enough at the lens to see his name. Or maybe he knew I’d run away and didn’t even bother to look for a note. The way I chose to get the message to him seems sillier by the day, and the less sure I am that he saw it. I am ashamed to admit it, but I am relieved every time I read the paper and don’t see Sandy’s name there. Love is such a crazy thing. How can I still love someone who hurt me so badly? How can I want him to be safe even when he was doing something so terrible and costing Americans their lives? And what about Mr. Sato? Sandy was willing to let him go to prison or an internment camp, when he was actually the one doing the spying.

  I can wear my ruby necklace here, and I do wear it every day. At first I thought I should throw it away or at least give it away because it came from a man who turned out to be a cruel and horrible liar. But I decided to keep it. Everybody has good in them, I figure, and I’ll wear it to remember whatever good parts there were of Sandy.

  CHAPTER 47

  The weather was hot, sultry and hazy on Monday morning, and Gina was up early, out on the beach with Clay and Sasha. They stood in the water a few yards east of the lighthouse, the water splashing nearly up to their thighs. With any luck at all, today she would learn the identi
ty of her grandfather, a man who, if he had not been arrested as a spy, might very well now have an estate worth millions. One hundred thousand dollars would be nothing to him. She had to guard her motivation closely, though. It was the lens she cared about, she told herself, over and over so she would start to believe it. The salvaging of the lens.

  “I don’t like the look of those waves,” Clay said. He stood with his hands on his hips, staring at the water. The weather would be a factor in being able to raise the lens, and Gina had been encouraged by the absence of rain that morning. But Clay was right. The waves seemed to be growing wilder as they watched. The buoy, though, was still a distance beyond the breakwater.

  “It’s not that bad out where the lens is, though,” she said.

  Clay shrugged. “It’ll be up to the barge operator.” He looked at his watch. “They’re due here at ten, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Maybe it will settle down by then.”

  “If they can’t do it today, will they do it tomorrow?”

  “I would hope so,” Clay said. “I guess it depends on what other obligations the barge operator has.”

  “We’re visiting Walter tomorrow, though,” she said.

  He gave her a slightly patronizing smile as he put his arm around her. “That’s tomorrow evening,” he said. “Try to relax, okay?”

  Walter had suffered a heart attack the night of Henry’s birthday party, but he was recovering well in the hospital in Elizabeth City. You wouldn’t know he was recovering at all, though, by the way Henry and Brian were grieving. They sat glumly hunched over the chessboard at Shorty’s, barely talking. The men had been a threesome for so many years. They’d grown old together, and Henry and Brian must have been feeling their own mortality as much as they were missing their old buddy.

  “Hey, you two!”

  They turned to see Kenny walking toward them, and Sasha looked like a dolphin as he leaped through the water to reach him.