Forever Beach

by Shelley Noble

  She went back to the living room, considered turning off the light, then noticed movement out the front window. She moved closer, immediately paranoid.

  But it was Wyatt sitting on the porch rail. Alone.

  She didn’t stop to think but opened the door. “What are you doing here?”

  “Checking up on you.”

  “I’m sorry if I wrecked your date.”

  “It wasn’t really a date. Well, it was sort of a date. Oh hell, the girl kept bringing me chicken soup, and I felt like I had to do something to repay her.”

  “Well, I’m sorry if it didn’t work out because of me.”

  “Really?”

  She bit her lip. Shook her head.

  “Come here.”

  She went to him. Leaned into him. “I’m a mess.”

  “Yep. You are. I know you’re doing the best you can by yourself. But you don’t have to be by yourself, and before you get all panicky, this is not a proposal, because then I would get all panicky.”

  That made her smile.

  “But you have peeps.”

  “I know I do, but I don’t know why you, any of you, put up with me.”

  “When are you going to give in to the fact that we all love you? Let us help.”

  “I try.”

  He held her close. She didn’t realize she’d started to cry until Wyatt’s thumb rubbed slightly at her cheek.

  She began to relax; Leila started screaming.

  “I have to go.” She started inside.

  Watt followed her to the door.

  “Not tonight. Just . . . tomorrow, but not tonight.” Tonight she needed to be alone. Not because she wanted to be, but there was something she had to do.

  Sarah comforted Leila until she fell back to sleep, then took her cell phone to the kitchen. Opened her laptop and downloaded the latest photos from her phone. She arranged them into some kind of order, though the sight of them made her feel sick and heartsore. When she was finished, she attached them to an e-mail. Added a message and a subject line.

  You did this. Can you live with yourself? And pressed send.

  Chapter 27

  Ilona carried her morning latte over to the window and looked out at the sea. Another sunny day. There were already bright umbrellas pitched across the beach below her. She never went to the beach, something left over from her system days, she guessed. They never walked to the beach in those days. She didn’t know why. Maybe because it cost money to get on the beach, money they didn’t usually have or if they did, it was spent on something else.

  She couldn’t remember what. She didn’t do drugs. She knew what drugs did. She’d grown up with them all around her. Until she went to live with Aunty. Those had been the happiest few years of her life. Just a shotgun shack on the wrong side of town, but it had been home.

  She stepped away from the window. What the hell was she doing thinking about those days? Any of the days before she came to live with the Cartwrights. It must be because of the funeral, because of the box sitting in the bottom of the coat closet, waiting to be opened or tossed out still taped shut.

  It was her day off. She could deal with the box. It was as good a time as any. She turned her back on the sand and surf, put her latte on the glass top coffee table, and walked to the entranceway.

  She stood at the door of the coat closet. Was she curious? She tried not to be.

  Was she afraid of what might be in the box? Possibly. What if she opened it and the things that Your mother thought you’d like to have turned out to be a lie. Or what if it were the last cruel joke of the promise of love.

  Ilona sighed. Then she picked up the box and carried to the coffee table, where it sat while she went to look for a utility knife to open it. She didn’t come straight back but made herself another cup of coffee, then stood at the kitchen counter, drinking it while she checked her phone for e-mails. There were quite a few. Why did people e-mail lawyers on the weekend? Didn’t they know that’s when they got all their extra paperwork done?

  On the other hand, maybe she should clear her cache before she opened the box. Because at this point she knew she was going to open it, and that she was going to think about it until she did.

  She dropped the knife on the coffee table and went over to her desk to pull up her e-mail on her laptop. She started with her personal account, systematically deleting and archiving. Read a couple. Nothing that couldn’t wait until tomorrow or the next day or week.

  Moved onto her business account. Not so many there. She scrolled down, paused, scrolled the cursor back to one with the subject line You did this.

  She automatically reached to delete it. Even though she was careful about her professional e-mail, there were always a few charities or crazies that slipped through. This one had an attachment. She never opened attachments from people she didn’t know. She glanced at the sender address, clockshop@ . . . She didn’t have to read further to know who it came from. She pressed delete.

  She continued to scroll down the page. What the hell was Sarah Hargreave e-mailing her about. Obviously a rant because Ilona had just screwed her. Not intentionally, she reminded herself. Just saw the facts and judged accordingly. This was not about Sarah and her, it was about a child who had no one to make sure she wasn’t hurt.

  Still.

  She glanced over to the box sitting on the coffee table, back at the screen. Pulled the e-mail out of the trash and opened it.

  This is the way my foster daughter, Leila Rodrigues, was returned to me after the unsupervised visit you encouraged. Wearing a diaper, a diaper she had been wearing all day because her bio mother couldn’t be bothered to take her to a bathroom. She hasn’t needed a diaper since she turned three. She’d been sitting in her own waste for a whole day and was chafed and raw and crying from the pain.

  She called herself Bad Leila and became hysterical when I told her we didn’t have diapers at home. Is this the way a competent loving mother would care for her child? Do you even know? Do you even care? Or were you just lashing out at me because of some vague slight you think I committed and for which I have no memory of? Either way. You are responsible for this. You did this. Can you live with yourself knowing the way Leila was treated and knowing it will only get worse?

  So she had a little diaper rash, thought Ilona. Sarah was always such a drama queen.

  She started to delete the e-mail again. But her finger went to the attachment. A series of photos came up and the aftertaste of Ilona’s latte turned sour in her mouth.

  Was it possible she had misjudged the situation? She thought back. She’d read the latest files, but only scanned the earlier ones. Because really, it was current behavior that mattered, not the past.

  She stopped, blinked. The past did matter. Sarah was accusing her of having an ulterior motive? She didn’t. Ilona didn’t have to work from revenge. She always worked from what was legally correct.

  Or what she could win.

  She hadn’t even talked to the kid since becoming her lawyer ad litem—since requesting that she become her lawyer ad litem. And why was that, Counselor? Irrelevant. She wouldn’t knowingly put the kid in harm’s way. But she hadn’t done much to learn what the kid wanted. Hadn’t even talked with the girl, Leila.

  And that, she had to admit, she’d done on purpose, to give her the element of surprise. And the reactions had been everything she’d hoped for and more. She’d intended to go in and ask for a postponement until she had time to study the case, but as soon as she walked in, she knew she had them. And Ilona, the barracuda, went in for the kill.

  But only because there was no obvious reason for the kid not to visit her bio mother. It was a perfectly legitimate courtroom tactic. The judge agreed with her assessment.

  He and Ilona had both spent their careers seeing through other people’s emotions.

  He’d appreciated that in Ilona. Everyone else had their own agendas. Even the social workers who needed to clear this case so they could get onto their next. They needed a su
ccess story to warrant their salaries, make themselves feel like they were doing some good.

  Not Ilona. She just wanted to see justice served . . . Words are cheap, Counselor. Had she been just or had she let her own emotional entanglement make her decision?

  God help her, she knew the answer. Ilona closed her eyes. Swallowed.

  She might have misjudged Sarah; but worse than that, she’d misjudged herself.

  SARAH INDULGED IN nearly two minutes of optimism when she heard Leila wake up and go into the bathroom. Before she was able to reach her, a wail of rage erupted from inside. The door was open and Leila had pulled down her shorts and seen the diaper. It must have confused her or brought back the memories.

  Sarah knelt down and ripped it off her, tried to lift her on the toilet, but it was too late. She could only watch as Leila peed on the bathroom floor.

  Sarah gritted her teeth to keep herself from screaming, too. “Oopsies,” she said. She lifted Leila out of the mess and into the bathtub. The bathtub she’d stayed up late scrubbing, scouring away the evidence of a terrible day.

  Déjà vu. She ran the water and put in the stopper. “Bubble bath?”

  “I hate you!” Leila started flailing. Sarah just managed to snatch her out of the tub before she fell.

  She carried her kicking back to her room. “Stop it now,” she said and shut the door.

  It took a few minutes, but Leila stopped crying and screaming that she hated Sarah.

  Sarah sat at the kitchen table nursing a cup of coffee that she knew she shouldn’t drink. Her nerves were ragged, she was exhausted, and for the first time ever, she wondered if she should just let Leila go. Had there already been too much irreparable damage? Did Sarah have the strength, the money, the time to nurture a troubled girl through to adulthood?

  “Fix the now, stupid!” She buried her face in her hands. Now she was yelling at herself.

  Fix the now. Life was just a series of nows. “So let’s just get to fixing this now,” she told herself and marched down to Leila’s room. She was sitting on the floor trying to put on a diaper from the box Wyatt had brought over.

  Sarah sighed and stepped inside. Stepped on a crinkle of paper. Pieces of torn brown paper were crumpled and strewn on the floor. Where Leila’s watch-me-grow outline had been, now only four corners where it had been taped still held ragged scraps of paper.

  “Oh, Leila.”

  Leila ignored her as Sarah dropped to her hands and knees and began gathering the pieces up.

  “No.” Leila crawled over and tried to tear the paper out of her hands. “Go away.”

  “I won’t go away. I’m going to put your poster back together.”

  Leila glowered at her. Crossed her arms; huffed. “You shit.”

  “Well, I’m still going to put this back together. You can help if you want to.”

  Leila huffed and scooted around so that her back was to Sarah.

  “Suit yourself.” She carried all the pieces into the kitchen; dumped the torn pieces onto the kitchen counter, found a roll of craft paper in the workroom and several glue sticks in the craft drawer.

  She cut a piece as long as the table and weighted it down with kitchen utensils. As soon as she spread out the first piece, she realized that she would have to iron the pieces flat again. She got the iron from the pantry, placed a dish towel on the counter, and plugged in the iron, careful to keep the cord out of reach of angry little hands in case Leila made an appearance.

  She ironed each piece and stacked them neatly to be transferred to the craft paper. Then she unplugged the iron and pushed it to the back of the counter to cool.

  And she got to work. Slowly the pieces began to form the figure of a little girl who had been so much happier a few weeks before. Now her child was just as torn and ragged as her poster.

  She was two-thirds of the way through the repair when Leila silently padded into the kitchen and peered over the top of the table. Then she looked up at Sarah with eyes so sad that Sarah wanted to cry.

  Sarah smiled instead. Leila reached up. There was a diaper in her hand. Sarah’s hope plummeted. “No can do, sunshine.”

  Leila shook the diaper at her.

  Sarah shook her head.

  Leila made grunting noises and pushed the diaper at her.

  “Leila, I’m sorry that happened with Carmen. It was a mistake, and it hurt you. But we want to go to the beach and see Bessie and Tammy and Jenny, don’t we?”

  Nothing.

  “And you can’t wear a diaper at the beach.”

  Leila’s eyes narrowed and she clutched the diaper to her chest with both hands.

  Sarah reached to rub her own aching back. “So when you’re ready, we’ll have a quick bath, breakfast, and put on our swimsuits.”

  Leila, still holding the diaper, reached for the edge of the table. At first Sarah was afraid she was going to grab the outline. But she just looked at it. Sarah picked her up. “See, good as new.”

  Almost good as new, she prayed.

  IT TOOK SOME doing: a fight over the bath, a fight over making her bed and using the potty, a fight over lunch and what DVD to watch while Sarah made a few calls even though it was Sunday. Of course no one answered, so she left messages for Danny and Randy Phelps, telling him he had to do something and to call her back. She checked her e-mail several times on the outside chance that Nonie e-mailed her back. But unsurprisingly there was nothing. She’d been stupid to think Nonie would bother writing now after having ignored her all these years.

  A small relapse occurred when Leila insisted that her bathing suit would fit over the diaper. It wasn’t until Sarah said, “You know, I don’t really want to go to the beach today,” that Leila finally gave in and let Sarah help her into a diaperless swimsuit. Maybe she would be sorry later, but right now she would accept any small victory.

  Bessie, Tammy, and Jenny were waiting for them by the steps to the beach. Bessie jumping up and down squealing, “Leila, come see.”

  For a horrible long second Leila balked.

  “Come on!”

  And finally Leila began descending the steps as fast as her little legs would go.

  Sarah held on to the back of her swimsuit until she was on the sand, then went back for the bag.

  “You look like you’ve been through the ringer,” Karen said.

  “I have.” Sarah sat in the vacant beach chair next to Reesa, who was actually wearing a swimsuit, though it was covered up by a beach robe that sort of defeated the purpose.

  “Wyatt already came by and told us.”

  “He did? Is he guarding today?”

  “Yeah, just for a couple of hours. He said he’d come by on his way home.”

  “Good. I need to thank him again. Seems like I’m always having to thank him for something. I had to call him to bring me diapers and I interrupted his date.”

  “What?” Karen lifted her sunglasses and leaned forward. “He didn’t tell us that.”

  “He wasn’t on a date,” Reesa said.

  Sarah nodded.

  “Oh man, man troubles abound.” Karen moaned and reached into the cooler and tossed Sarah a bottle of water.

  “Not you and Stu?”

  “Not today.” Karen flicked her head in the direction of Reesa.

  “What’s up?” Sarah asked.

  “In a nutshell . . . Michael moved out—”

  “He left you?”

  “He left; I didn’t try to stop him.”

  “What’s going to happen now?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “But—”

  “But there’s more,” Karen said.

  “Good or bad?” Sarah asked warily.

  “I gave notice,” Reesa said. “After the Whites’ hearing tomorrow, and the last of a huge pile of paperwork, I will no longer be employed at the CP&P office.” She leaned over and patted Sarah’s arm. “But I’m in for whatever you need concerning Leila.”

  They all looked out to where the three younger girls were th
rowing water-filled slinky balls at a plastic basket while laughing and falling down on purpose, and Jenny scanned the horizon . . . for boys?

  “What are you going to do?” Sarah asked, turning her attention back to Reesa.

  “I’m working as development director at Hands Around the World.”

  “Wow.”

  “And I’m going back to school.”

  “I bet they’re really going to miss you at Child Protection.”

  “For a while. But it’s time for me to move on and let younger, more agile and energetic workers take over. It won’t be long before I’m a dim memory.”

  “Not to us.”

  “Thank you for that. And I’ll still be doing goody-two-shoes stuff. I’m thinking school psychologist. That’s what I was studying before I veered into social work. And it pays more.”

  “But what about you and Michael. Do you want to get back together with him?”

  “Depends. We’ve been together for a long time, had three kids, probably will have grandchildren soon. He’s always been a good man. Good enough, anyway. But I can’t stand to be around the lump he’s become. I doubt if he likes me much these days. It’s not good for either of us. We both have to change. I’m on my way. I don’t know that Michael can or even wants to.”

  “What a weekend,” Sarah said and opened her water bottle. She lay back, relaxing in the sun, trying not to worry, trying not to be on edge waiting for the next shoe to drop. Really how many more shoes could drop at this point?

  The girls came up for snacks and a few minutes under the umbrella. They had just been given another spray of sunscreen when they saw Wyatt walking up the beach.

  Tammy and Bessie cried, “Wy!” And ran toward him. Leila followed after them.

  “Poor guy, the girls just love him. All the girls.” She lifted her chin toward Jenny who pulled down the leg of her two-piece and tried to look nonchalant.

  “It’s starting,” Karen said. “Boy craziness.”

  Leila was close to Wyatt when she suddenly stopped. Then she screamed at the top of her lungs and ran in the opposite direction.