Her father laughed. “I never tell your mother where I am. She never asks.”
Mom knows better, Frieda thought darkly. Her mother knew she would only hear a lie or a prevarication if she did ask. Frieda stared at one of the old photos of Ruby and Frieda stuck to the door of the fridge with a magnet; it had been taken at a birthday party when Frieda was about twelve. Not long after her father had left them without a backward glance.
Frieda looked away from the picture. “Why contact me now, Dad?” she asked. “This is not a good time for me. I thought maybe you’d get that.”
“Let’s just say the spirit moved me.”
Frieda rolled her eyes. “Why didn’t the spirit move you fifteen months ago when my husband and child were killed? Oh, sure, you sent a card, but let’s be real, Dad; a card was pretty inadequate given the situation.”
“You’re right,” he said. “It was pretty inadequate and I’m sorry for that.”
Frieda didn’t reply; she didn’t want to accept an apology offered so easily. It was probably a lie.
“Is Phil hosting his famous Fourth of July party this year?” her father went on, as casually, Frieda thought, as if they were in the habit of chatting on a daily basis.
“Yes,” she said. “He canceled last year’s because of . . . Out of respect for Mom and me and Bella.”
“That’s like him. I remember the first Fourth of July party your mother and I went to at his place,” Steve said. “It was back before Tony got sick. I admire Phil’s keeping up the tradition.”
“I didn’t think you were the type to admire constancy,” Frieda snapped.
“I have my moments,” her father responded mildly. “So, are you working?”
“Of course I’m working. Someone has to pay the bills now that . . . Anyway, I’ve always worked. Ever since I was twelve and started to babysit.”
“You have your mother’s work ethic, that’s for sure. What about Bella? How is she spending her time in Yorktide this summer?”
“She’s working for Phil at the shop,” Frieda said. Steve Hitchens didn’t have the right to know more about his only surviving grandchild, a grandchild he had never cared enough about to visit.
“I hope she finds the time to have some fun,” her father said. “You’re only young once.”
“Bella is not much in the mood for fun these days,” Frieda blurted. “I need to go.”
“Okay. Can I talk with you again?”
Frieda felt her entire face contract in a frown. All sense told her to deny her father the privilege of her time and conversation. But what she said was, “Yeah.”
“Can I call on your cell phone?” he asked. “It would give you more privacy than you must have now on your mother’s landline.”
“No. Use this number.” Privacy? She didn’t want or need to have a cozy private chat with a man who was virtually a stranger.
“All right,” he said. “Thanks, Frieda.”
And then he was gone.
Frieda replaced the receiver. For a moment she wondered if she had imagined what had just transpired. Why not? Not once since her father had walked away had he ever tried to speak with her. Why couldn’t this call have been a product of the summer heat or a building fever or . . .
No. The call had come. Her father had spoken to her. And she had spoken to him. But why had she given him permission to reach out to her again? And to have the nerve to mention Tony, after all these years . . . Frieda rubbed her forehead. She would never forget Tony Worthington’s terrible death from AIDS, back in those awful dark days before the antiretroviral drugs were available and when misinformation about the disease was rampant. She had been very young, but she remembered clearly how her father had been of significant help to Phil near the end, unafraid to comfort Tony when so many people were terrified of becoming infected by his mere presence. Ruby had often reminded Frieda about her father’s generosity, but over the years Frieda had chosen to ignore, even to “forget,” this knowledge about her father in an effort to keep her anger alive.
“If my father could be such a saint to a friend,” Frieda had once asked Phil, “why was he such a jerk to his own wife and daughter?”
“I can’t explain why people do what they do, Frieda,” Phil had replied. “Sometimes I can’t explain my own motives and actions.”
Suddenly Frieda felt a bit weak at the knees and she sank into her chair at the kitchen table. Her father wanted to talk to her. This was going to take some serious thinking about. Was she up to the effort it would take to open a dialogue? Or was her anger, so ingrained, so much a habit, simply too great to overcome? At that moment Frieda simply didn’t know.
Chapter 16
Bella stuck the tube of sunblock back into the canvas bag she had borrowed from her grandmother. This was the first time she had ever gone to the beach without her family or friends or sometimes both. Being alone when pretty much everybody else was in a group, tossing a Frisbee, eating ice-cream cones, or just hanging out, felt weird, but Bella had hoped that maybe being in a seriously beautiful place like the beach might bring her some peace of mind. At least for a little while.
As much as Ariel had enjoyed hanging out with her friends, Bella remembered, digging her toes in the warm sand, she had been just as happy being on her own. And she was never bored, not even when they were stuck in the house during a major snowstorm and the power failed and they couldn’t use their computer because one of them had let the battery run out. “You have a lot more going on inside your head than I do,” Bella would say to her sister. “All that stuff keeps you from getting bored. I need, I don’t know, outside stimulation or something.”
Although these days even outside stimulation didn’t much spark her interest. And she had made such good progress before it all went wrong back in April. Colleen had helped her get to the point where she had finally been able to look at the pictures of her father and sister taken on that fateful trip. She had finally been able to talk about her father and sister in a casual context. And she had been seriously considering signing up for driving lessons.
She had even made a few small moves toward welcoming Kerri back into her life, like telling her about a pair of sneakers she had seen online she thought Kerri would love. Those gestures of friendship, small though they were, must have made her final withdrawal that much more hurtful for Kerri.
The break had occurred a few days before Bella’s birthday. After homeroom Kerri had given Bella a card. On the front was a picture of two old women arm in arm; inside it said something like Even when we’re old and gray we’ll be each other’s BFFs. “Let’s go to the mall after school,” Kerri had suggested. “Just you and me. We can get one of those giant cookies, the ones with all the colored icing. We haven’t done that in ages.”
But Bella was no longer ready for Kerri—for anyone—to be nice to her. The idea of celebrating her birthday, coinciding as it did with the anniversary of the accident, had brought to the fore all the guilt Bella felt about how she had failed her father and sister.
“No,” Bella had told Kerri, sticking the card in the back of the binder she was carrying and looking away. “I can’t.”
It was the first time ever that Kerri had gotten angry with her. “Fine,” she had said. “If you want to be sad go ahead. I can’t stop you. I just wish . . . Never mind.”
It was the last time they had spoken.
Bella adjusted her sunglasses; it was hot and they kept sliding down her nose. The situation with Kerri was bad, but maybe worse was the situation with her mother. Bella had withdrawn from her, too, the person she had relied on so totally after the accident. Weirdly, her mother now felt almost like a stranger. For one, what was up with that crazy idea of a party for Ariel’s sixteenth birthday? Bella knew that to forget was impossible, but she wanted to forget that her sister was gone. She was trying to forget, even for a few minutes at a time. And she wanted to be forgotten and left alone by others.
Except maybe for Clara, the girl she had met on
the Marginal Way. It might be okay to be with someone who didn’t miss Aaron and Ariel Braithwaite like Bella and her mother and her grandmother did, like so many people back home did—
Abruptly Bella got up from the blanket and hurriedly stuffed her belongings into her bag. This was a bad idea, she thought. The problem with going to a place beautiful to calm your mind was that your mind always came with you.
Chapter 17
Ruby found her daughter sitting in one of the two rocking chairs on the front porch, sipping a glass of iced tea. She sank into the other rocking chair and sighed. “Stupid leg,” she said. “It feels as if someone is pounding on my bone with a hammer.”
Frieda sighed. “I wish you didn’t have to suffer. Pain takes it out of a person.”
“I’m sorry, too, but it won’t kill me. Mostly it’s just an annoyance and I should try to keep my mouth shut when it acts up.”
“You have a right to moan and groan. And I might, too. You’ll never guess who I spoke to earlier.”
Ruby looked closely at her daughter. She thought Frieda looked agitated and hoped it wasn’t a bill collector who had tracked her down. Frieda swore she was in decent financial condition, but she might be keeping an unhappy secret. “You’re right,” she said. “I probably won’t. Who?”
“My father.”
Ruby’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “How did that happen?” she asked.
“He called to speak to me. Mom, did you know he was going to get in touch with me?”
Ruby shook her head. “No. I last talked to him in early May. I told him you and Bella would be staying with me for the summer and he did sound concerned when I told him about Bella’s troubled emotional state, but I didn’t give him the credit for actually acting on that concern. If that’s what he’s doing.”
“I almost hung up on him,” Frieda said. “I don’t really know why I didn’t. You know, Mom, I’ve never understood what you can possibly get out of talking to Dad.”
That was understandable, Ruby thought. When Steve was no longer obliged to send child support payments he had gone off the grid. The periodic phone calls stopped; birthday and Christmas cards continued to come but with no return address. It was only when Frieda had married that Steve’s sporadic calls to his ex-wife began again. At first Ruby considered the calls an annoyance and yet she had allowed them to continue and before long she had come to welcome the sound of her ex-husband’s voice.
“Mom?”
“Sorry,” Ruby said. “I was lost in the past and you know what a labyrinth that is. What do I get out of talking to your father? It’s a question I’ve asked myself innumerable times over the years.”
“And? What’s the answer?”
“The answer is actually pretty simple. I loved him once. I loved him enough to marry him and have a child with him. For me, that counts for something. I guess it overrides—if barely—the fact of his bad behavior toward us.”
Frieda frowned. “You’re not saying that if Dad showed up on the doorstep asking to be taken back you’d agree?”
“God no!” Ruby laughed. Not now, anyway, she thought. “Accepting his occasional calls is as far as it’s going to go, trust me.”
“What does George have to say about Dad’s keeping in touch with you? Does he even know?”
“Of course he knows, and he has nothing at all to say about it. Correction. He probably has a lot to say, but he’s too smart to say it.”
Frieda smiled a bit. “Aaron didn’t find it strange, you know. He used to say that any attempt at family harmony should be valued. With his own family being so distant—emotionally and physically—he saw Dad’s relationship with you as a good thing.”
“Aaron was a smart man. Still, it was easier for him to be generous about Steve than it was—than it is—for you.”
Frieda sighed. “Yeah. Being generous to someone who basically abandoned you isn’t the easiest thing in the world to pull off.”
Ruby reached for her daughter’s hand. “Look,” she said, “maybe I shouldn’t have gotten pregnant by a man I knew to be irresponsible. But like I told you, I was in love and I did get pregnant and have a child and I can’t regret that decision. I’m sorry for giving you a parent who couldn’t be a real father to you, at least not after the first eleven years, but he did help give you the gift of life. And before he left us he did his best by you, if not always by me. I’m not lying about that.”
“But he hurt you, Mom,” Frieda argued. “He put you through so much by walking out. And by cheating on you with half the town. He was completely disrespectful of you and your marriage vows.”
“Yeah,” Ruby said, releasing her daughter’s hand, “he did put me through a lot. I won’t deny it. But I’ve never been his victim, Frieda. I promise you that. I could have walked away at any time, but I chose not to.”
Frieda shook her head. “You can’t mean to say you got what you deserved!”
“No. But I can say I made my own choices. Some of them were bad choices, but they were mine all the same. Now, enough talk of your father and me. Let’s get back to your father and you. What did he say? What did you say?”
“He said the spirit had moved him to call me.” Frieda shook her head. “Can you believe such nonsense? After all these years of virtually ignoring me! I basically told him this wasn’t a good time for me to have a meaningful conversation with him.”
“Is there ever a good time for a meaningful or difficult conversation?” Ruby asked.
“Probably not,” Frieda said. “I don’t know. The weirdest part is that for some reason I agreed to talk to him again. That is, if he deigns to call.”
Ruby wondered. She couldn’t know what had prompted Steve to reach out to his daughter at this point, but whatever his motive, the fact that he had reached out was monumental. “Maybe,” she said after a long moment, “maybe this is the right time for you and your father to come to terms. I don’t see how having a second conversation can do any damage. If you feel uncomfortable you could always end the call.”
“I know but . . .”
“Or,” Ruby said, “you don’t have to talk to him ever again. It’s your choice.”
Frieda smiled grimly. “I almost wish someone would make the choice for me.”
“Ah, that’s one of life’s many ironies. When you’re a kid you get angry with adults for always making decisions on your behalf. All you want is to ‘do it yourself’ even if you have no idea of how to ‘do’ whatever it is that needs to be done. And then you grow up and now the responsibility for making decisions—and good ones at that!—is squarely on your own shoulders and you think, boy, did I have it easy back then.”
Frieda sighed. “That’s so depressingly true. Mom, do you think I should tell Bella that my father wants to reconnect with me? She’s got so much going on right now I don’t want to burden her any further.”
“I don’t think it can hurt to tell her,” Ruby said. “It would be better than sneaking around in an attempt to keep his calls a secret. Bella needs to know that she can trust us one hundred percent. If she thinks something is going on behind her back . . .”
“I suppose you’re right, Mom. As always.”
Ruby chuckled. “If only!”
Frieda rose. “I think I’m going to lie down for a bit. I’ll be up in time to help with dinner.”
“No worries,” Ruby said. “I’m going to enjoy the sun for a bit longer.”
When Frieda had gone inside, Ruby turned her mind to the very important question of what exactly Frieda might want to hear from her father. Clearly she wanted to hear something; otherwise she would never have agreed to a second conversation. Did she want an abject apology for the years of his absence? Did she want a reasonable explanation for his chronic neglect? Did Frieda want to hear her father say that he loved her?
Whatever happened, Ruby thought, she hoped that Steve wasn’t going to cause trouble. She supposed she could talk to him the next time he called and ask him to tread carefully with Frieda; at
the same time she didn’t want to come between father and daughter after all the years of silence and misunderstanding. She wanted to believe that if left alone Steve and Frieda might very well reconcile.
Ruby sighed. She really had no idea what might happen this summer. How could she? The future was always unknowable until it had happened and then it was the past. And there was nothing you could do about the past but try to forget it.
And forgetting was nearly always impossible.
Chapter 18
It was just after lunch and Bella was on her way to meet Clara at the cottage she was sharing with three other girls employed at The Flipper. Bella had immediately accepted Clara’s invitation to hang out; at the very least it was a way to spend her afternoon off. In the past few months her powers of concentration, never fantastic, not like Ariel’s, had become even weaker, making it that much more difficult to keep up with her favorite blogs and websites, let alone read a book or watch a movie on YouTube.
Bella turned onto Valley Road and rode up to number 26. The cottage was a one-story structure; a lot of the paint was peeling and one of the front concrete steps was broken. Otherwise, Bella thought, it looked kind of cute, in a slightly run-down sort of way. Before she could ring the doorbell the door opened.
“Hi,” Clara said. “I saw you coming. You don’t have a car?”
“I don’t drive.” There was no need for a full explanation, Bella thought. Not now, anyway. “Nice place.”
Clara shrugged. “It’s okay. Come in.”
Bella followed Clara through a small nondescript living room and down a narrow hall to a room at the back of the house. A small sign was tacked to the door. It read: Clara Crawford. Keep Out. The room’s two small windows looked out on a minuscule patch of overgrown grass on which sat a few rickety-looking lawn chairs and an overturned milk crate. But it was the room itself that caught Bella’s attention. It was a virtual shrine. Literally every inch of wall was covered in pictures of a good-looking guy on his own or with Clara. Along with selfies of the couple there were shots of the guy in a baseball uniform; diving into a pool; sitting cross-legged under a decorated Christmas tree; behind the wheel of a blue convertible; in a suit for some reason or other, maybe for a family occasion.
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