The Bay at Midnight

by Diane Chamberlain

  “Actually, I don’t swim at all anymore,” I said. “I lost interest after that summer.”

  “Really?” he asked. “You were so good. I was remembering the time you and I raced across the canal,” he said. I laughed. I’d forgotten. We’d only been about ten the last summer we were truly friends. We’d known enough to wait for the slack tide and we were both strong swimmers for kids our age, but we got in a lot of trouble.

  “I wasn’t allowed near the water for a week,” I said.

  “I had to vacuum the entire house,” Ethan said.

  “I don’t think I ever swam in the canal again,” I said. “I swam in our dock all the time when the boat wasn’t in it, but not the canal.”

  “Ah, that’s not true,” Ethan said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I remember watching you float down the canal in an inner tube.”

  It took me a moment to place the memory, but then it came into my mind all at once. “I’d forgotten,” I said, laughing, although the memory carried with it both joy and sadness since Isabel had been so much a part of it, and though Ethan and I reminisced about several other shared experiences before getting off the phone, it was that memory which stayed with me for the rest of the day.

  CHAPTER 11

  Julie

  1962

  It was a weekday in Bay Head Shores, which meant that our father was home in Westfield. We had finished eating breakfast and Grandpop was already out in the garage working on some project, while Grandma was starting to clear the table in spite of our mother’s admonishment to relax a while. I started to stand up to help Grandma, but Mom told me to stay where I was and I sat down again. She shook a cigarette from her pack of Kents and lit it, blowing a puff of smoke into the air above the cluttered table.

  “I have an idea for something we could do today, girls,” she said to the three of us.

  “What?” Lucy sounded suspicious. Whatever it was, I could tell she was prepared to say she didn’t want to do it.

  “Look at the current,” Mom said, and I turned my head to peer through the screen at the canal. The current was moving slowly in the direction of the bay.

  “What about it?” Isabel asked. She was holding a lock of her hair in front of her face, probably scrutinizing it for split ends.

  “Well,” Mom said, “after we’ve digested our breakfast a bit, how about we take the big inner tubes and ride the current all the way from our house to the bay.”

  “Keen!” I said. It was an extraordinary idea.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Isabel said, but I knew she was intrigued. It was hard to get Isabel interested in any sort of family activity, and I was impressed that my mother had managed to come up with something exciting enough to draw in her oldest daughter.

  Grandma laughed, sitting down at the table again, her chores forgotten. “I remember when you and Ross used to do that,” she said to my mother. She rolled the r in “Ross” in a way that made the name sound very pretty. I was surprised by what she’d said, though. So was Isabel.

  “You and Mr. Chapman floated on tubes to the bay?” she asked, incredulous.

  “When we were kids,” Mom said.

  I always forgot that my mother had spent her childhood summers in our bungalow. Her father—our Grandpop—had built the house himself in the late twenties, and the Chapmans had moved in next door shortly after that. Mr. Chapman and our mother had been friends when they were kids, the way Ethan and I used to be.

  “We were probably about fifteen,” my mother continued. “Once we floated all the way to the river.”

  “Tsk,” Grandma clucked. “Do you remember how furious I was when I realized what you did?”

  Mom smiled at her, turning her head to exhale a stream of smoke over her shoulder and away from the table. “I survived,” she said.

  “Well, I’m not going,” Lucy announced, but this was no surprise and no one paid her much attention.

  “The canal was different then,” Grandma said. “There was no bulkhead, so you could walk right into it from the yard. And of course there weren’t so many boats.”

  “Gosh.” I turned to look at the water again, imagining it lapping at our sandy backyard. I wished it was still like that.

  “The tubes are a little soft,” Isabel said.

  We had four of the giant black inner tubes in the garage. Ethan and I used to float on them in the dock, our arms and legs dangling over the sides. This year, though, I hadn’t even bothered with the tubes. It was no fun playing in the dock alone. My loneliness was mounting, day by day. I made up stories about the rooster man, but I had no friends to scare with those spooky tales. I didn’t dare tell them to Lucy and make her more paranoid than she already was.

  “Why don’t you and Julie take the tubes to the gas station and fill them up?” Mom said, stubbing out her cigarette in the big clamshell ashtray on the table. “By the time you get back, the current should be perfect for our adventure.”

  After we helped clean up from breakfast, Isabel and I went out to the garage, gathered up the four fat tubes and loaded them in the car. Isabel turned the key in the ignition, then adjusted the dial on the radio until she found “Johnny Angel,” and we both sang along with it. I liked having that bond with my sister. I watched her bare arms turn the steering wheel as we backed out of the driveway. Her skin was smooth and dark, and my arms seemed pale and flabby by comparison. Isabel thought her tan was mediocre that summer because she had to work three days a week at Abramowitz’s Department Store in town and couldn’t lie out on the beach every day. She was stealing from the store; I was sure of it. She would come home with new clothes once or twice a week.Yesterday, she’d brought home two new bras, and when she was out with Mitzi and Pam, I tried one of them on, stuffing the pointy cups with toilet paper to see how I would look with real breasts, only to discover that I looked kind of ridiculous. I also tried to practice using one of her tampons so I’d be ready the next time I got my “friend.” The tampon in its cardboard tube was huge and had been impossible to get it in. It was like trying to push a Magic Marker against a brick wall. I felt scared, wondering if there was something wrong with me and I would never be able to go all the way with my husband or have babies.

  “I’ve got dibs on the biggest one,” Isabel said, referring to the inner tubes.

  “I don’t care,” I said. I knew the one she meant. It was fatter and wider and supported you so well it made you feel like you were floating on a cloud. But I wasn’t going to fight her for it.

  As we turned onto Rue Mirador, Isabel pulled a pack of Marlboros from the pocketbook on her lap, shook one partway out of the package and wrapped her lips around it to pull it the rest of the way out. She pushed the cigarette lighter into the dashboard, waiting for it to heat up.

  I was stunned. “Did Mom give you permission to smoke?” I asked.

  “She smokes herself, so what can she say?” Isabel asked. She held the pack toward me. “Want one?”

  I hesitated, then took one of the cigarettes, digging it out of the pack with my fingers in a graceless manner. I put it to my lips.

  “I’m not going to light it, though,” I said.

  “Then why did you take it?” She laughed, pulling the lighter from the dashboard. She held it to her cigarette, inhaling as the tip turned a bright orange.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said, but I did know. I just wanted to be with her. To share something with her. To be like her.

  “I get the porch bed tonight,” she announced.

  “I know,” I said. She and I had been taking turns sleeping on the porch when the weather was good. I still had to stuff my bedspread beneath my covers to placate Lucy. I’m sure she knew what I was doing, but it seemed to give her some comfort nevertheless. As long as I did that and left the light on, she was doing better upstairs alone at night.

  “What are you burying in the yard?” Isabel asked, turning the car onto Bridge Avenue.

  “What do you mean?”
I asked, all innocence.

  “I saw you bury something by the corner of the house. What was it?”

  Darn. If I didn’t tell her the truth, she would probably dig in the sand by the corner of the house to satisfy her curiosity and discover my clue box anyway.

  “It’s my Nancy Drew box,” I said.

  “Huh?” She gave me that “what are you talking about” look as she blew smoke from her nostrils. She reminded me of a dragon.

  “When I find something that might turn out to be a clue in a mystery, I put it in a box Grandpop buried there for me.”

  “A clue in a mystery? What mystery?”

  “Well, I don’t know yet,” I explained. “Sometimes you can find things and later on, when a mystery happens, you realize the thing you found might be a clue that would help the police solve it.”

  Isabel laughed. “You’re a moron, you know that? You mean you just throw any old thing you find in there, waiting for some deep, dark mystery to occur?”

  “Not any old thing,” I said, insulted. I thought of the Ping-Pong ball I’d found in the canal. Maybe I was being indiscriminate, but good clues were hard to find. I did not want her to shoot holes in my theory. Deep down, I knew the wished-for mystery would never happen, but I was having fun pretending it might. Grandpop had understood that.

  “You act like such a twelve-year-old, you know it?” Isabel’s voice was tinged with disgust.

  “That happens to be my age,” I said, folding my arms across my chest, managing to bend the unlit cigarette in the process. What did she want from me? “When you were twelve you probably did things like that, too,” I said, but I didn’t really think she had. Isabel had always been the sophisticated older sister. I could never catch up to her. I would probably still be reading Nancy Drew and making up wolves-are-loose-in-our-neighborhood stories when I turned seventeen.

  We pulled into the gas station and carried the tires over to the air pump. I tossed my cigarette into a nearby trash can. “It’s a secret,” I said, watching her fit the air nozzle onto one of the tires.

  “What is?” She looked up at me. I could see my twelve-year old self reflected in her sunglasses.

  “The Nancy Drew box.”

  She laughed. “Don’t worry, Jules,” she said. “I don’t know of anyone who would be interested in your so-called clues.”

  I felt humiliated by her condescension and my throat tightened. I had to swallow hard again and again to keep from crying as we filled the tires in silence. When we got back in the car, “Sealed with a Kiss” was playing on the radio. I thought that was the world’s saddest song, and my heart ached as I sang along with it, turning my face toward the window so my sister wouldn’t see my tears and have another reason to make fun of me.

  Once we were on the road, she reached into her pocketbook and pulled out the red-and-purple giraffe.

  “I’m going to stop at the beach,” she said, “and I want you to run over to the lifeguard stand and give this to Ned.”

  “I already gave it to Ned,” I said. “What’s it doing in your pocketbook?”

  “He gave it back to me,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  I looked at the plastic giraffe. “You think I’m acting immature,” I said. “Passing a stupid toy back and forth is really dopey.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “It’s my business if I’m the one being the messenger,” I argued.

  She snatched the toy from my hand. “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll give it to him myself.”

  I reconsidered, thinking of how I could get a look at Ned up on the lifeguard stand. Maybe he would accidentally touch my fingers when he took the giraffe from me. “I’ll do it,” I said, reaching toward her for the giraffe.

  She handed it to me. “Thank you,” she said.

  We pulled into the parking lot next to the beach, the tires of the car crunching on the crushed shells. I hopped out and ran across the sand to the lifeguard stand. It had rained during the night and the sand was damp, flying behind me in clumps as I ran.

  I spotted the usual group of teenagers lounging on their blankets around the lifeguard stand. That “Sweet Little Sheila” song was playing on their radios.

  “Hey!” Bruno Walker called when I neared them. “Where’s Izzy today?”

  I didn’t want to let him or anyone else in on our planned adventure. “She’ll be over later,” I said. Pam Durant was lying next to him on her stomach, eyes closed, and I was shocked to see that her bathing-suit top was unhooked, the straps low on her shoulders. It almost looked as though she was wearing nothing at all on top. I could clearly see the side of her breast. I quickly averted my eyes.

  I stepped closer to the lifeguard stand and looked up at Ned.

  “Hi, Ned,” I said.

  He lowered his head to look down at me, his eyes invisible behind his sunglasses, and broke into his gorgeous, whitetoothed grin. My legs felt like they were going to give out under me.

  I held up the giraffe. “Isabel wanted me to give this to you,” I said.

  He looked toward the parking lot, spotted our car and waved. He had white zinc oxide on his nose and a cigarette in his hand, and he looked so sexy with it. Women didn’t look good with cigarettes, I thought, but a man with a cigarette in his hand was something else again.

  I held the giraffe up to him and he reached low for it and maybe one of his fingers touched one of mine, but I could not be sure.

  “Thanks, Julie,” he said. “You’re a neat kid.”

  “You’re welcome.” I wasn’t ready to leave. “Why are you sending that thing back and forth?” I pointed to the giraffe.

  “I don’t think you’d understand,” he said. He looked out at the water, then stood up, blew his whistle and waved an arm, which meant that some kids were swimming out too far and he wanted them to come in closer where he could see them. Where he could protect them. The muscles in his legs were long and lean and covered with curly gold hair that I wanted to reach up and touch.

  “Yes, I would. Honest,” I said, once he’d sat down again. I wondered if he would remember where we were in our conversation. He did. He’d been paying good attention.

  “Do you have anything that’s really special to you?” he asked me, his eyes still on the water.

  I had so many things that were special to me, I didn’t know where to begin. The clue box, of course. And my collection of Nancy Drew books. I also had a music box my girlfriend, Iris, had given me for my ninth birthday. It was oval shaped, and when you opened it up, a girl rode a bicycle around a little track.

  “A music box,” I said.

  “Ah, okay, then!” He seemed pleased by my answer. “When you get older and you meet someone who’s special to you, you’ll feel like sharing the music box with that person.”

  “Oh,” I said. I doubted very much I’d be passing my music box back and forth between some boy and myself, but I pretended to understand. “So, Isabel is your…uh…your special person, huh?”

  “You keep that between us, okay?” he said, and I thought I saw him wink behind the sunglasses. “Your old lady would flip her wig if she knew.”

  I knew he meant my mother by “old lady,” but it was the first time I’d heard anyone use that term.

  “I saw Isabel sneak into your boat the other day,” I said. The words seemed to have a life of their own; I had not even thought about speaking them.

  His smile faded. He took off his sunglasses and looked down at me, blue eyes piercing through me to my heart. “You won’t say anything, right?” he asked.

  I shook my head. You can trust me with your life, I wanted to say to him, but I kept the melodramatics to myself. “I won’t say anything,” I promised, crossing my heart. I pictured myself inside the confessional booth, the smell of incense in the air. If I withheld information like that from my parents, did that constitute a lie? I wondered.

  Ned slipped his sunglasses on again and glanced out at the water to be sure everyone was
all right. “How come you and Ethan don’t pal around together anymore?” he asked, then smiled at me again. “Don’t answer that,” he said. “He’s a dufus this summer, I know.”

  I wanted to defend Ethan but found I couldn’t. I nodded. “Yeah,” I said.

  “You tell Izzy I’ll see her later, okay?” He looked toward the car and waved again.

  “Okay,” I said, knowing I’d been dismissed. It had been an incredible conversation, though. We had secrets. We’d talked almost like adults.

  I walked back to the car and got in. It smelled of the hot rubber of the tubes.

  “What did you talk about for so long?” Isabel sounded suspicious as she turned the key in the ignition.

  “About how I saw you get into Ned’s boat in the marina.” I looked out the car window toward the lifeguard stand, nonchalant as you please.

  Isabel didn’t speak, and when I looked over at her, I saw that her knuckles had gone white on the steering wheel. “And what did he say?” she asked, her voice tight.

  “He asked me not to tell anyone, and I promised I wouldn’t.”

  Her grip on the steering wheel relaxed. “Thank you,” she said. Then she held the pack of Marlboros out to me. “Have another cigarette.”

  My mother, Isabel and I tossed our inner tubes into the canal, then quickly jumped in after them, laughing as we struggled to climb aboard.

  “I’m glad no one’s taking a picture of this,” Isabel said as she struggled to hoist herself onto her oversized tube. Mom and I had already managed to get into position on our tubes, our bottoms, forearms and calves in the cool water.

  “Bye!” Mom lifted her arm in a wave to Grandpop, Grandma and Lucy where they stood in our backyard, calling out their wishes for a good trip. The current was swift and our journey was effortless. We used our hands as paddles, staying close to the bulkhead to avoid being run over. Some of the colored fishermen on the other side of the canal waved to us, as did people passing by in their boats. We’d rise and fall on the wakes of the yachts and motorboats. It was glorious.