A Week at the Shore

by Barbara Delinsky

  “No,” I hiss. I can’t believe that she’s raised all of this in front of Jack, toward whom I hitch my head. “But he doesn’t need an intern.”

  “I do,” Jack asserts.

  “No,” I tell him and tighten my fingers on Joy’s arm like I had when she was four and kicking and screaming at the pond in Central Park because she didn’t want to leave. I remember being mortified because other children were well-behaved, remember being horrified having to drag her because she was too big for me to bodily lift, remember being terrified that the police would cite me for child abuse, remember realizing that I’d brought this on myself by being too permissive. It was a pivotal moment in my life as a parent.

  Use your words, I would beg her, and oh yeah, doesn’t that come back to bite me now.

  “I really want to, Mom, and why does it have to be only a week? There is nothing in New York that I have to do. I mean, they won’t miss me at the cat shelter, and I can do my summer reading here as well as there, and don’t even think piano, because let’s face it, I’m no Mozart. And anyway, really, don’t we both deserve more than just a week off?”

  “Life isn’t about what we deserve,” I say. “It’s about what survival demands. I can’t take time off. I have a job.”

  “You said you were cutting back.”

  “Not cutting out.”

  “Oooo-kay,” Joy says as I had earlier, “so you can go back and I’ll stay. Annie is here, and Papa. The times I wanted to go to summer camp, you wouldn’t let me, but I’m older now, and this is different, Mom. This is Bay Bluff. This is family.”

  Softly, I say, “We’ll discuss this later,” and tack on a more urgent, “Please?”

  Grinning a grin that smacks of victory, she bobs on the tips of her toes and gives me a quick hug—though I have no idea why, since I am not giving in. And still there’s something akin to triumph in the look she shoots Jack. “I’ll get back to you,” she tells him like a CEO, and she’s the one to lead now, taking my arm, calling back, “BTW, I like your dog!”

  We’re at the top of the stairs before I say, “That was not fair, Joy. There’s a whole lot you don’t know.”

  “Why are you angry?”

  “Because there’s a whole lot you don’t know,” I repeat and pause to let her precede me on the narrow path through the heather.

  “So tell me.”

  “Jack used to be my best friend. Now he is not.”

  This message she gets. “Tell me,” she invites, eyes widening with the salacious interest of a BFF. Only she isn’t my BFF. Well, she is. But she’s also my daughter. And she’s only thirteen. So I really can’t talk about all that.

  “Later,” I say, though I hate it when people use that word. Later can mean later. Or it can mean when I feel like it, or I don’t want to, or never. For me, right now, it is all of the above in an I-can’t-deal-with-this way.

  “Well, I do like his dog,” Joy remarks.

  “That’s fine. That’s allowed.” Hoping we’re over a hump, I come alongside her, link our fingers, and look up at the house. “What do you think of it?”

  Following my gaze, she tips her head and considers. “It’s cool. Grand, actually.”

  “Not grand,” I say. Grand is twice the size, with twice the windows and chimneys. Grand has stone on the front and a circular drive passing beneath a porte cochere. Grand is what we’d seen on the drive into town. The Aldiss house isn’t that. But it does have location.

  “Very beachy,” she says. “I love the turrets.”

  “One’s in the living room, one’s in the master bedroom, and one’s in the stairwell leading to the second floor. Did you go up there?”

  “Not yet.” She glances at the Sabathian house. “His doesn’t have turrets.”

  “It does, only square,” I say, but absently. I’m caught up now by the wide steps leading to the front porch. “We used to take family pictures here each year.”

  “Seriously? I want to see.”

  “You will.” I don’t say later, because I do mean it this time.

  “We don’t have any pictures of little you in New York,” she complains as we start up the steps.

  “No. We should.” Leaving here twenty years before, I hadn’t wanted reminders. Actually, I hadn’t realized twenty years would pass before I returned. “Omigod, the rockers. Still rocking. Know how many sunsets we saw from here?” These were good memories. Letting them open, a morning glory unfurling, I drop Joy’s hand, rush to the nearest rocker, and plop down.

  “Mom.”

  She wants to go inside, but I’m not ready. Closing my eyes, I rock. Wood creaks on wood, a long familiar, eternally soothing sound.

  Then comes another creak, this one the screen door. “Here you are,” Anne says. I open my eyes to find her rubbing her hands together. “Okay. Dinner. I’m grilling steak, but are you still not eating meat, Joy?”

  Mercifully, Joy is gracious. “It’s okay. I’ll eat whatever else you have.”

  “Your grandfather likes brown rice with his steak. Does that work for you?”

  “Awesome,” she says and reaches for my hand.

  I want to resist. I could stay out here forever, where there’s freedom and fresh air. But I can only put off the inevitable so long. Letting myself be pulled from the rocker, I take the screen door from Anne and follow them inside.

  I don’t want to be here … don’t want to be here … don’t want to …

  The thought reverberates outward from my brain to my nerve endings, because nothing here has changed, not the misty seascape on the wall, the time-stained Berber underfoot, the slant of late-day light spilling through mullioned glass—and not my sense of being an outlier in this house.

  But I am here. And wallowing in the why of it accomplishes nothing.

  Tamping down my unease, I breathe deeply of the sea smell that may be more faint here than outside, but that walls can’t completely block. Salt air works for me. I cling to it for strength as I look around.

  The large front hall spills into the living room, both as dark with wood and fabric as ever, both as handsome—or potentially so, because my daughter is right. The place is a mess. Once there was plenty of sitting space. Now, newspapers, magazines, and books sit where we used to. Dirty glasses and mugs litter a side table seconds before Anne sweeps them up.

  All of that is secondary, though, to the man in his chair. Seeing him here, I’m apprehensive as I wasn’t at Urgent Care. Here is home, which makes it different. I want him to recognize me. I want him to smile and be glad that I’ve come and say that he’s missed me. I want him to love me.

  Well, that thought just slipped out. I push it away, but the point remains. I haven’t realized how high the stakes are—haven’t allowed myself to dwell on them, but now that I’m here, they hit me in the face. I want so much.

  Dad’s chair is a large leather wingback thing whose claw feet must have put down roots through the carpet and into the floorboards by now. He always loved that chair. There was something throne-like about its placement, in that it gave him a view of the entire room. The rest of us knew not to sit in it, unless he and Mom were both gone, at which point we would fight over who would sit there. Well, Margo and Anne fought. I waited until they lost interest before sneaking in and curling up on the indented cushions with the smell of leather, Tom Aldiss, and a book.

  “I need to talk with Papa,” I whisper to Joy and cross to him. When he lifts his eyes, I squat down with a hand on the nail heads outlining the chair’s leather arm. This steadies me as his sharp look does not. He is the only one of us with blue eyes; like Mom, we girls all have versions of green. Mom had wanted a boy, if only to maximize the chance of having one of her children looking like Tom. One of Margo’s sons has blue eyes. But so does her husband.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  His sharp look—startled, perhaps—softens with a smile. “How are you?”

  It’s a polite smile, but it’s something. “I’m good. And you?”

 
“I’m good, too.” He pauses, remembers. “Except for this.” He twitches the cast.

  “Those attic stairs are treacherous.”

  “Attic stairs?” he mocks, like I’m daft. “It wasn’t the attic stairs. I was running out to the car and tripped on a rock. Your mother always warns me not to run, but do I listen?”

  He’s gotten the tense wrong with regard to my mother, and certainly the details of the accident. But the story he tells is credible enough. “Does it hurt?”

  “No.” He dismisses the matter with a loud, “How’s San Antonio?”

  “We’re in New York, Joy and I.” I hitch my head toward the door, but she has gone out to get our bags from the car. “My daughter.”

  He scowls. “Well, I know that. Why do you people think I can’t remember things? I didn’t get where I am today with a bad mind.” He returns to his paper.

  “Whatcha reading?”

  “I’m not read-ing.” He enunciates the word the way he always used to when he disagreed with something I said. “I’m doing the cross-word puz-zle. People without memories can’t do those, in case you’re wondering.”

  “I’m sure your memory is fine,” I say in an effort to appease.

  He glares at me. “And if it isn’t? And if it isn’t? I have a right to forget things once in a while. I’m seventy-two, for chrissake.” His brows are still menacing when they come together. They’re more gray than his silver hair, and messier. “Don’t you have something else to do?”

  I certainly do, like ask him if he has a gun. But his own question is so Tom Aldiss–ornery at a time when Tom Aldiss is fading, that I leave the moment alone. Besides, Joy is coming through the front door with the bags. So I rise and go to help.

  The stairs to the second floor hug the round turret walls, and while worn carpet runners mute sound, the creaks beneath it have multiplied since last I was here. I know. I used to be intimate with those creaks. When we were growing up, staying out late involved risk. Mom wasn’t bad; she would often appear at her door to see which one of us it was and put a finger to her lips in warning before slipping back inside.

  “Omigod, Mom, these are amazing,” Joy breathes before I can dredge up the consequences of Dad being the one to find us.

  Having stopped several steps behind me, she is studying the photos on the wall—because here they are as they always were, lining the turret, our front porch shots from the beginning of time. Funny, how I would have walked past them. I’ve seen them so many times in my life that they’re like wallpaper, and my mind is elsewhere. Now I see what my daughter sees, no wallpaper these.

  The earliest are black-and-white close-ups of Mom, Dad, and Margo, labeled 1978 and 1979 in white marker, very small and slanted in the lower right-hand corner. Come 1980, I’m the one in Mom’s arms, and while the year remains marked in white, the photos are in color.

  Well, were in color. In those first days of color photography, the materials were primitive. These prints aren’t even in direct sunlight, but their colors have faded. Looking ahead, the color deepens as the materials improve. But the transition is an interesting one from mono- to polychromatic.

  “Poor you,” Joy wails. Having deposited her bag on the stair, she is pointing at 1982. “Anne’s the baby in Papa’s arms, and there you are, stuck on the ground, holding onto your mother’s leg. You don’t look happy.”

  I study the shot. Margo, tall at age four, stands between my parents. Her back was as ramrod straight then as now. Anne is cuddling into Dad, the wisps of dark hair on her one-year-old head buried against his throat. And yes, there I am at age two beside Mom. No, not happy. Her hand around my shoulder isn’t enough. I want to be held.

  “And this one,” Joy effuses, pointing at the picture taken two years later. I was four, still with Mom’s hand on my shoulder, but facing front, chin raised, more confident. Or is that chin-tilt defiance? Or resignation? Whatever, Anne was on her feet but leaning into Dad’s side much as she had snuggled in infancy. Margo still stood straight between them.

  “If you’re the middle child, why aren’t you in the middle?” Joy asks.

  “It just started this way and stayed this way.” I wave at the photos up the line. “We always took the same spots.”

  “Just took them?”

  “We were placed at first, then it became habit.”

  “Who placed you?”

  “Mom—Dad—I don’t remember.” I’m trying to, when Joy follows up with a question that opens a whole other door.

  “Who took the photos?”

  “Elizabeth.”

  “That Elizabeth? Was she a photographer?”

  “No, but since she lived next door, it was easy. We had a cookout together every Fourth of July. Her taking our family shot became a tradition.”

  “Was she related to Papa?”

  “No.”

  “But they built houses here at the same time.”

  “Coincidence,” I say, though I’ve never been sure. Margo insists that Dad and Elizabeth were lovers who decided to marry other people and came to regret it. But that’s Margo. Me, I’ll grant that they knew each other, liked each other, even loved each other once, but after they married others, that was done. I never wanted to think that Dad would cheat on Mom. Or that Mom would put up with it.

  I mean, seriously, what husband would keep a lover living right next door? What wife wouldn’t suspect and object? What daughter wouldn’t be able to figure it out?

  Me. For all the times I felt there was an answer just out of my reach, I could never wrap my fingers around it and pull it clear.

  I’m feeling the frustration of this when, having lifted her bag, Joy begins climbing stairs to study more pictures. They go three-quarters of the way to the second floor before yielding to bare wall.

  She gets that one fast. “The pictures stopped when Elizabeth died.”

  “Uh-huh.” I try to make light of it. But Joy gets this, too.

  “There were no pictures to take. The family scattered.”

  It hadn’t been instant, like a single day and then—whooosh—gone. Elizabeth fell overboard in early July. There were headlines—some salacious—and a search, followed by a police investigation. Even after the case was judged an accidental drowning and closed, the search for Elizabeth went on. Dad hired investigators. He was obsessed. So was Jack, who was convinced that the investigation had been tainted—whitewashed was the word he used—by Dad’s prominence, and that Dad’s obsession was akin to Shakespeare’s lady protesting too much.

  Mom was in so much pain that I could never talk about it with her. I didn’t want to make things worse by asking questions. And, really, it wasn’t a mystery. She was humiliated. Who wouldn’t be, given the headlines?

  I returned to college in late August. Margo stayed a little longer to support Mom, leaving only after her own classes had begun. Mom lasted another month before filing for divorce and moving back to her hometown in Illinois.

  None of us three ever returned. Margo met Dan during her last year at U Chicago, and since Mom was nearby, she stayed out there. I graduated, moved to Manhattan, and took a job with a commercial photographer. One of our clients, the editor of a food magazine, was putting her condo on the market and wanted photos as appealing as the ones we’d made of a chocolate ganache cake with raspberry drizzle. Her broker became my first recurring client.

  There was no point in coming home. I had Anne down to visit me, often to meet up with Mom, though she would never breathe a word of that in Bay Bluff. Dad being Dad, divided loyalties weren’t allowed. His truth was the whole truth. If we couldn’t live with it, well, that was that. No, I didn’t take sides—I assiduously did not. But Mom needed me more than he ever had. She loved me more than he ever had. Did I really have a choice?

  Mom blossomed once she was free of Dad. Though we didn’t see each other often—she was busy, I was busy—we grew closer. Her death was a blow.

  “Yup. The family scattered,” I tell Joy as we continue up the stair
s.

  My parents’ bedroom is—was—down the hall to the left. Margo’s bedroom was near theirs. They had initially planned it as a nursery with the intention of moving out one child when another came along. I remember hearing Mom say that, but when I repeated it once to Margo, her vehemence taught me to never say it again. It was what it was. Margo’s room stayed Margo’s room, evolving in style from infancy to childhood to adolescence. Anne and I, arriving within a year of each other, had rooms down the hall to the right.

  I lead Joy toward mine. The door is slightly ajar and seeming to breathe. When I push it wide, I see that Anne has opened both windows to air out the place. There is still a mustiness, but the ocean breeze is doing its thing.

  “Your. Room,” Joy declares with a mega-smile. Having dropped her bag on the double bed, she wraps an elbow around one of its tall pine posts and slowly swivels.

  Little has changed here either. The same plaid quilt covers the bed, the same corduroy covers the armchair. The desk where I did homework has the same brass lamp arching over a collection of papers and books. For a split second, I think the latter are a spillover from downstairs—but no, this room hasn’t been touched since I left, other than by the breeze that is currently etching striations in the dust.

  Nope. The mess here is all mine. These books are from my freshman year in college, deposited when I came home that horrid summer and never removed. Now they seem like fragments of a different era, relics not to be disturbed—and still, feeling a kind of morbid curiosity, I touch a cover, a spine.

  Joy distracts me with a reverential whisper. “This place is a gallery.”

  Looking around, I have to agree. Photographs are my wallpaper, covering most every inch of space. I had come to take them for granted, like the family photos in the turret—just more of those things in life that we see so often we don’t see at all.

  But Joy’s eye is fresh. Definitely, a gallery. Unlike the formal family shots climbing the stairs, these are candids of Margo and Anne, Mom and Margo, Dad and Mom. There is a shot of two high school friends taken from behind, hung here not because of my closeness to them but the beauty of the composition as they sit in the dunes.