The Bay at Midnight

by Diane Chamberlain

  “What are you doing home?” I called from my seat on the rocker.

  “I have some time before the next lesson,” she said. “Thought I’d take a break.”

  We lived in a neighborhood of turn-of-the-century houses near Westfield’s downtown. It was an easy walk for her to and from the music store, as well as to the day-care center where she spent two afternoons a week as an aide, caring for the toddlers.

  She climbed the porch steps, carrying a can of Vanilla Coke.

  “Love that haircut,” she said as she settled into the rocker Abby Worley had vacated only a short time before.

  I’d had my hair cut to my chin a few days earlier in preparation for a photo shoot for my next book jacket. My hairdresser had added blond highlights to the auburn shade I’d worn for the past decade, and Shannon commented on it every time she saw me. Even my mother had noticed, telling me the cut-and-color looked “sassy.” I knew she’d meant it as a compliment.

  Shannon leaned forward to get a good look at me, her own hair falling away from her face in a thick dark curtain. “I think you need some new glasses, now,” she said.

  I touched my rimless frames. “Do I?” I asked. I thought my glasses were stylish, but I was usually three or four years behind the trend.

  “You should get some cool plastic frames,” she said. “Like in a bronze color.”

  “I don’t think I’m ready to be that cool.” I was amazed at my ability to carry on such a mundane conversation when my mind was still reeling from Abby’s visit.

  Shannon took a long drink from her Coke. “Actually, Mom,” she said, “I came home because I need to talk to you about something.” She glanced at me. “I’m afraid you’re going to be upset.”

  “Tell me,” I said, wanting her to spit it out before my overactive imagination had a chance to fill the silence.

  She gnawed at her lower lip. Her dimples showed when she did that. “I’ve decided to live at Dad’s for the summer.” Shannon looked at me directly then, waiting for my reaction. I tried not to show any, my gaze intent on the dogwood in our neighbors’ front yard.

  This is no big deal, I told myself. Glen only lived a few miles away, and it would probably be good for them to have some time together before she went away to college. So why were tears welling up in my eyes for the second time in an hour? This is the last summer I have with you, I wanted to say, but I kept my cool.

  “Why, honey?” I asked.

  “I just…you know. I’ve lived with you since the divorce, and I know Dad would like it if I…you know…if I stayed there this summer. I’m trying to be fair to everybody,” she added, although I saw right through that. Shannon was a good kid, but she was not so noble that she’d put her needs second to someone else’s.

  “What’s the real reason?” I asked her. “Has he been trying to persuade you to move?”

  “No.” She shook her head in a tired motion. “Nothing like that.”

  “He works long hours.”

  She laughed, the sound popping out of her mouth before she could stop it. “Now you get it,” she said. She smoothed her hair away from her face, her Italian charm bracelet nearly full of the small rectangular charms, all related to music.

  “Get what?” I asked.

  “Mom, I’ll be eighteen in three months,” she said, her voice pleading with me to understand. “You still treat me like I’m ten. I have to let you know my every move. Dad treats me like I’m an adult.”

  So that was it. “Well,” I said, “now that you’re just about in college, maybe we can change the rules a bit.”

  “You’d have to totally revamp your rules for them to be tolerable,” she said. “You don’t let me breathe.”

  “Oh, Shannon, come on,” I said. That was always her argument. She said that I smothered her, I gave her no freedom. I was overprotective—that much I’d admit to—but I was not her jailer. “You haven’t even asked to do anything in months, so how can you say I don’t let you breathe?”

  She rolled her eyes. “There’s no point in asking you if I can do anything, because you’ll just say no,” she said.

  “Shannon. That’s not true and I think you know it.”

  “When you go on your book tours, you still make me stay with Erika’s family even though she and I haven’t been friends since we were, like, twelve, just because her parents are even stricter than you and you know I can’t get away with anything there. I hate that.”

  “You never asked to stay anywhere else,” I said, frowning.

  “And you call my cell phone constantly to check up on me,” she said. “Do you know—”

  “Not to check up on you,” I corrected her. “I call you because I care about you. And I don’t call you ‘constantly.’” Our too-frequent arguments often had this flavor. They started off in one direction and then took a circuitous route that left my head spinning. “What is this really all about?” I asked.

  She let out an exasperated sigh, as though I was too dense to possibly understand. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that soon I’ll be on my own and I think it’s time I got some practice, so that’s why I think I should live at Dad’s for the summer.”

  “You won’t be on your own at Dad’s,” I countered, although I knew Glen would do all he could to please his only child. He’d greet any potential conflict between Shannon and himself with his usual passivity. I’d had to be the disciplinarian—the bad guy—with our daughter from the start.

  I thought about Shannon’s graduation ceremony. Glen and his sister and nephew had sat a few rows behind Mom, Lucy and me, and I’d felt as though the three of them were staring at me. I wanted to go up to Glen after the ceremony, throw my arms around him, point to Shannon and say, Look what we did together! But there was a wall between us, one that was probably my fault. I was still angry for what he’d done to me and to our marriage. Shannon knew nothing about any of that, and I planned to keep it that way. I would never have harmed her father in her eyes.

  “I know I won’t actually be on my own,” she said. “That’s not the point. I’m just going to do it, Mom, okay? I mean, I don’t really need your permission, right? To stay with him?”

  I couldn’t think clearly. “Can we talk about this later?” I asked. I looked down at the letter in my lap and realized I had folded it into smaller and smaller rectangles until it could fit neatly in the palm of my hand.

  “What’s that?” Shannon pointed to the fat wad of paper.

  I unfolded it carefully, still feeling some disbelief that Abby Worley’s visit had occurred at all. “I had a visitor,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “The daughter of Ethan Chapman. He lived next door to my family’s summer bungalow when I was a kid. He was my age. His older brother, Ned, died recently and Ethan’s daughter—her name is Abby—found this letter in his belongings. It was addressed to the police.”

  I handed the letter to her and watched lines of worry form between her eyebrows as she read it.

  “Oh, Mom,” she said, exasperation in her voice. “Like you really need this.”

  “I know.” It came out as a whisper.

  “Ned was Isabel’s boyfriend, wasn’t he?” She used Isabel’s name more easily than anyone else in the family, perhaps because she had never known her. To Shannon, Isabel was the aunt who had died long before she was born. The one we rarely mentioned, even though Shannon looked more like her with every year. The thick dark hair and double rows of black eyelashes, the almond-shaped eyes and deep dimples. Shannon was now seventeen, the same age Isabel had been when she died. She knew what had happened the summer I was twelve and she understood that those events were the reason I held on to her so tightly: I would never let her run wild as Isabel had. Shannon knew it all, but that didn’t stop her from resenting my attempts to keep her safe.

  “Yes,” I said. “Isabel’s boyfriend.”

  “Your hands are shaking.”

  I looked down at my hands where they rested in my lap and saw that she
was right.

  “What are you supposed to do with this?” She handed the letter back to me.

  “I’m going to talk to Ethan about taking it to the police. And if he won’t take it, I’ll do it myself.”

  She let out a long breath. “I suppose you have to,” she said. “Have you talked to Lucy about it?”

  “Not yet,” I said, although I’d been thinking of calling my sister when Shannon had arrived. I needed to talk to someone who understood how I felt.

  Shannon stood up. “Well,” she said, a bit awkwardly, “I have to get back to the store. I just wanted to tell you…you know, about moving to Dad’s. Sorry that my timing sucked, and that it turned into this big, like—” she waved her hands through the air “—this altercation or whatever.”

  I nodded. “When will you go?”

  “In a couple of days. Okay?” She was longing for my blessing.

  “Okay.” What else could I say?

  She handed me the empty Coke can. “Would you mind sticking that in recycling, please?” she asked.

  I took the can and held it on my lap next to the letter. “Have fun at work,” I said.

  “Thanks.” She bounced down the porch steps with an ease known only to the young.

  “Shannon?” I called as she walked down our sidewalk.

  “What?” She didn’t bother to turn around.

  “If you talk to Nana, don’t say anything about this to her.” It was an unwritten rule in my family never to talk to my mother about the summer of ’62.

  “I won’t,” she said, lifting her arm in a wave.

  I stood up then, letter and Coke can in my hands, and walked into the house to call my sister.

  CHAPTER 3

  Lucy

  My cell phone rang as I got out of my car in the McDonald’s parking lot in Garwood. Seeing on the caller ID display that it was Julie, I answered it. “Hi, sis,” had barely left my lips when she launched into the conversation she’d had with Ethan Chapman’s daughter. I leaned against the car, listening, trying unsuccessfully to conjure up a cohesive image of Ethan and Ned Chapman. Ned barely existed in my memory, and Ethan was twelve and blurry around the edges. I didn’t like his daughter’s reason for showing up on Julie’s doorstep one bit.

  “You know what, Julie?” I said when she’d told me everything.

  “What?”

  “I grant you, the whole thing is unsettling,” I said, “But I think Ethan Chapman’s daughter should solve the mystery on her own. Leave you out of it.You don’t need this.”

  “That’s what Shannon said.”

  “I have a very smart niece,” I said.

  Julie didn’t respond.

  “What are you thinking?” I reached into my shoulder bag for my sunglasses and slipped them on. Who knew how long I’d be standing out here talking with her? I couldn’t walk into McDonald’s while having this conversation: Our mother was in there.

  “If George Lewis didn’t do it,” Julie said, “I can’t just sit back and let the world think he did.”

  “Yes, you can,” I said, although my zeal for justice was normally, if anything, stronger than Julie’s. “Let Ethan’s daughter take the letter to the police, then. As long as she does it, I don’t see why you have to be involved at all.” I was surprised at how upset I felt. My creative, sensitive sister was already clinging to the edge with Shannon—Isabel’s double—getting ready to go away to college. I didn’t want anything to add to her stress and I was annoyed with Abby Chapman for dragging her into something she really had no need to be part of.

  “That’s just it,” Julie said. “I don’t think she’ll do anything about it without his okay. I have to talk to him. I’m in a bind.”

  I could tell she’d already made up her mind. “Okay,” I relented. “If you have to, you have to.”

  A group of kids walked past me, their laughter loud in my ear.

  “Where are you?” Julie asked.

  “I’m in the McDonald’s parking lot.”

  “Don’t tell Mom about this.”

  “Do you think I’m crazy?” I couldn’t believe she thought I needed the warning.

  “And I got some other good news today.” Julie’s voice was tinged with sarcasm.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Shannon wants to live with Glen for the summer.”

  “Ah,” I said. Shannon had spoken with me about that possibility. She always ran things past me before she laid them on Julie. She told me things she wouldn’t breathe to another adult. I was the person who’d taken her to get birth control pills when she was fifteen; Julie would kill me if she knew. This year, with Shannon the age Isabel had been when she died, Julie seemed to snap, tightening her grip on her daughter just when she should have been loosening it. So, I’d told Shannon that while it would be hard on her mother to have her live with Glen for the summer, I thought it was a good idea. It might help Julie get used to letting her go.

  My lack of surprise at Julie’s announcement made her suspicious.

  “Did you know?” she asked.

  “She’d told me she was considering it,” I admitted.

  There was a brief silence on the line. “I wish you’d told me,” she said.

  “It wasn’t a sure thing, and I thought it should come from her.” I felt guilty. “It might be good for both of you, Julie.”

  Two men in their mid-thirties walked past me in the parking lot, not even glancing in my direction. I was approaching fifty, the age of invisibility for a woman, and I was more fascinated than distressed by the phenomenon. It seemed to have happened overnight. Four or five years ago, even though I’d worn my silver-streaked hair the same way I did now—in a long French braid down my back, with thick, straight bangs over my forehead—I’d still been able to turn heads. My skin was nearly as smooth and clear as it had been then, and I wore the same type of clothes, mainly long crinkly skirts and knit tank tops. Nevertheless, men my age and younger now looked right through me. Maybe I was giving off the scent of decay. I didn’t mind. I was taking a long, possibly permanent, break from dating.

  “She seems…distant or something,” Julie was saying in my ear, and I turned my attention back to the phone call. “She’s changing. Have you noticed? I think she’s putting on weight and she doesn’t go out anymore. I’m worried about her.”

  Julie was right. Shannon did seem more withdrawn lately, more reserved in our conversations, and she didn’t call as often. I hadn’t noticed the physical change in her until Saturday, when I saw her walk across the stage to get her diploma. There was a heaviness about her, more in her spirit than her body, but I made light of it to relieve Julie’s anxiety. “She’s just having a growth spurt,” I said. “And as for the social life, you used to worry when she did go out.You need to be more careful what you wish for.”

  Julie sighed. “I know.”

  We wrapped up the conversation and I slipped my phone into my shoulder bag as I walked across the parking lot and into the restaurant. It was full of kids, Garwood’s summer-school students, who were different from the kids I taught at Plainfield High School. Garwood’s students were from mostly white, middle-class families, while Plainfield’s public school population was ethnically diverse and economically challenged. I taught ESL—English as a Second Language—because I relished being surrounded by all those kids whose varied skin colors and languages were overshadowed by their universal yearning to belong.

  I spotted my mother at the opposite end of the restaurant. She was standing next to a table in her red-and-white uniform, holding a couple of trays in her hands, talking with a young woman and her two little kids. So many of my friends my age had to visit their elderly parents in nursing homes. I got a kick out of the fact that I visited mine at McDonald’s. Mom was the greeter who always had a smile for everyone, who supervised kids in the play area and who straightened the place up with as much care as she did her own home. She looked smaller to me than she had just a month ago. I used to think she was so tall, b
ut either her spine was contracting, shrinking her, or her height had been an illusion to me. Her hair was white and very pretty. She had it done every week, and it was always soft and natural looking. Her snowy hair was set off by her caramel-colored skin, inherited from her Italian mother. People always thought she’d just returned from a cruise to the Caribbean. Isabel had looked the most like her, but I got her perfect nose and full lips and Julie got her large dark eyes. We were both very lucky to get any part of our mother’s beauty at all.

  I came up behind her.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said.

  She looked delighted to see me, as I knew she would. She wrapped one arm around my waist.

  “This is the daughter I was telling you about,” she said to the young woman. “The bohemian one.”

  I laughed, and the woman smiled blankly. I was certain the twenty-something-year-old woman had no idea what bohemian meant, but she smiled nevertheless.

  “Your mother said you just got back from Nepal,” the woman said, holding a French fry in front of her little son’s mouth.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “It was a fantastic trip. Have you been?”

  “Oh no.” The woman nodded at her children. “I haven’t been anywhere in three years, for obvious reasons.”

  I hadn’t been to Nepal in three years, either, but it was the trip my mother loved to drag out to impress people. To her, it sounded exotic. I wished I could take her there, but although she was remarkably healthy for eighty-one, I was afraid the altitude and the walking would do her in.

  “Do you have a minute to visit?” I asked her.

  “Of course!” She excused herself from the young woman, but then noticed a mess left on one of the tables. “You take a seat and I’ll join you in a minute,” she said.

  I bought an iced tea and sat down at a corner table. Mom was finding more things to do and chatting with one of her much, much younger co-workers, an Hispanic girl with a delicate tattoo on her wrist that made me want to get one myself. I did have a tattoo of a butterfly on my hip—a very foolish mistake made in my twenties when I didn’t realize exactly how gravity would affect that part of my body in middle age. For that reason, I’d tried to talk Shannon out of getting the tattoo of a cello on the small of her back, but she’d insisted and, I had to admit, it was kind of pretty when she wore her low-rise pants. The tattoo was so artfully done that even Julie only freaked out for about ten seconds when she saw it.