Beach Plum Island

by Holly Robinson

  And then her mother must have heard the commotion and come running down the hall to quickly push him back into the bedroom and lock the door, dragging Ava away.

  “But who is that?” Ava had asked, over and over. “Who is that boy, Mommy?”

  Ava remembered this as clearly as if it had happened last week: she could see her brother running toward her in striped pajamas, his dark hair rumpled, his mouth round, issuing sharp cries like a jungle bird.

  Now she opened the door to the bedroom again, stepped quickly across the room, and, with her heart pounding, picked up the little stuffed dog and tucked it into the pocket of her shorts. Then she closed the bedroom door and found the bathroom across the hall.

  Ava peed standing up over the filthy toilet and returned to the kitchen as the saucepan threatened to boil over. She made the tea and added two generous spoonfuls of sugar, then carried the chipped white mug out to her great-aunt.

  Gigi and Elaine were still seated on the couch, the two of them looking as frozen as if they were having their portrait painted. Nobody was talking. Finley was bent at the waist, face in her hands.

  “Here you go.” Ava knelt in front of Finley again. “Drink this. We’ve given you a shock, showing up here with our questions. You need something hot and sweet.”

  To her relief, Finley sat up and took the mug, cradling it between her hands. “I couldn’t do it,” she repeated. “You understand, don’t you?” She was pleading with Ava now, ignoring the others. “You have two sons. You know what trouble they are! I was all on my own and Peter was too much. Never gave me a moment’s peace.”

  Ava thought of responsible, bossy Sam and sweet, timid Evan, saying a silent prayer of thanks for them both. “I’m sure it was very hard on you.”

  She did feel sorry for Finley. Without having married or had children of her own, this poor woman, with her anxious, reclusive nature, would have had a hard time raising any child. She’d taken the baby because that’s what families did for each other.

  Her great-aunt sipped the tea and made a face. Ava didn’t know if this was because of the heat on her tongue or the memories. “Her mother helped her make a list, you know. When Suzanne was pregnant. They wrote the things she could give her baby on one side of the paper, and on the other side the things a real family could give him. You know what was on her side of the list? Nothing. Not a home or a wedding ring, even. On the other side were all the things two loving parents could give the baby. That’s how Marie finally convinced Suzanne that she should give the baby up for adoption. I have to believe my sister did this not to spare herself any shame, but out of the goodness of her heart.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Ava said.

  Finley shook her head. “I don’t know about that now. Your mother didn’t want to give him up. But she agreed to let me raise him.”

  “He was blind?” Elaine said. “You know that for sure?”

  “Yes,” Finley said. “A blind child compensates, feels his way through life if his sight is gone. Quite capably, really. But other things must have been wrong with him, too. I don’t know what. All I know is that boy was so jumpy and nervous all the time, it was like he was trying to crawl out of his own skin. I did well enough until Peter started walking, but then I had to lock him up for his own good.” Her aunt’s eyes flicked toward the hall, and Ava knew she was thinking about that room at the end of it.

  “Did Mom ever come to see him here?” Ava asked. She had to know if her memory was real.

  Finley nodded. “Just the one time. You were with her, though you were just little yourself, so I’m sure you don’t remember.” Finley studied the floor. For the first time, Ava was aware of the cigarette ash around her chair, like a light snowfall. “I’d called Suzanne to say Peter was too much for me to manage anymore. Your mother drove up here to talk to me about taking Peter back, now that your father was making good money and they’d bought a house. She brought you along with her. She’d just found out she was pregnant again and told me she always felt wrong, giving up her first baby. I think she wanted to introduce you to Peter and reassure herself that she’d be able to finally tell your father about him, too. Instead her visit had the opposite effect. She knew at once she wouldn’t be able to handle a defective child any better than I could, especially tired as she was. After that visit, your mom signed the adoption papers.”

  Of course she did, Ava realized: seeing her abandoned firstborn son with Ava must have shocked her mother into realizing that she couldn’t let her two worlds collide ever again, or she might shatter. Which was what had happened, finally, in the end.

  “She thought of him as defective?” Gigi was saying now.

  “Well, in those days, that’s what people thought handicapped babies were.” Finley set the teacup down and rubbed her gnarled hands together. “We didn’t have the special programs and schools they have everywhere now. A baby like that didn’t usually live at home. Too difficult for everybody to cope. Doctors urged mothers to give their mistakes away.”

  “A mistake?” This time it was Elaine speaking, but she sounded as shocked as Gigi.

  Ava glanced at Elaine and saw that her face, always pale, had gone white. Her sister’s blouse looked limp and dirty, clinging to her skinny frame. Ava felt a pang of sympathy for her. It couldn’t be easy for Elaine to return to Finley’s house. She knew Elaine still blamed herself for Mom dying in the apartment upstairs.

  “Well, he was.” Finley had gathered strength from the tea; now she shook another cigarette out of the package and lit it. “I’m not talking about God’s mistake. I’m not a religious woman. The hypocrisy of the Catholic Church is something I can no longer abide. No, I’m talking about how that little boy was a mistake because he should never have been born. At least not to your mother. Suzanne was a fragile little thing. The pregnancy and birth, the shame on top of that, well, that took about all the strength she had in her. Then your father leaving her finished her off.”

  “What happened after you gave him up, Auntie?” Ava asked, hearing Elaine suck air between her teeth in distress.

  “I couldn’t believe there was any family on God’s green earth who’d want that child with all his problems,” Finley said, drawing smoke. “My hope was that at least they’d find a foster home for him and get him into some kind of program to teach the boy how to look after himself.”

  “Mom must have been sick about letting him go,” Elaine said.

  “I’d say she was more resigned about the whole thing. Suzanne understood what had to be done. Frankly, I think it had been hard on her, knowing her child was living with me. Everything you did, Ava, every milestone—standing up, walking, talking, starting school—reminded her of the boy she gave away. In the end, she thought giving Peter up might let her focus more on the family she had and forget about whatever mistakes she’d made as a girl. But the past always catches up with you, doesn’t it?” Finley was tiring, her hands trembling in her lap, her voice barely above a whisper now.

  Ava stood up. “Can you show us any pictures of him before we go, Auntie?”

  Finley nodded. “In that top drawer underneath the TV there’s a photograph. He was mine for a little while, wasn’t he? I still pray for that child.” Her voice quavered. “I did the best I could by him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us about him after Mom died?” Elaine asked as Ava pulled open the TV drawer. Not surprisingly, it was crammed full of papers and photographs; she had to slide her hand in and press down on the papers to jimmy the drawer free.

  “Not my secret to tell,” Finley said, jutting her chin. “I promised my sister I’d keep their secret to my grave.”

  “Why are you telling us now, then?” Gigi asked. Her voice wasn’t accusatory; she was just curious, Ava could tell.

  Finley squinted at her. “Who are you again, young lady?”

  Ava held her breath, giving Gigi the chance to tell th
e truth. She was relieved when Gigi said, “A friend of Ava’s and her sons. That’s all.”

  “Seeing these girls here, the two of them grown women, made me realize I don’t want to be buried with this secret. Keeping my promise won’t do anybody any good now.”

  “Did you ever hear from Peter again?” Elaine asked.

  “Not a word.” Finley started to cry, one slow tear snaking its way along the crevices of her cheek. “I thought I’d be able to visit the boy when my social security checks started coming regular and I could finally afford the bus to Bangor, where the social worker was who took him. But when I got all the way up there, they said he’d been removed from their system.”

  “Removed?” Ava’s chest tightened, hearing this. Maybe they were too late after all. “What do you mean?” She sat down between Elaine and Gigi and dropped the pile of papers and photographs onto the coffee table. They slid across the table’s water-marked surface, a mini avalanche of family history. “Did he die?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. Peter was taken.” Finley sounded impatient now. “I wasn’t allowed to know the name of his new people without your mother’s permission. Even your mother didn’t know who adopted him. That wasn’t done back then. In those days, birth mothers weren’t allowed to know the adoptive family. Everyone’s privacy was protected.”

  “What about Dad?” Ava asked. “When did he find out about Peter?”

  Finley squinted at the ceiling. “Maybe a year or so after Elaine came along, I think it was. Your mother had some kind of breakdown and told him about it then. She called me right after that, said she’d made a terrible mistake, telling him. He was that upset. I don’t think their marriage ever fully recovered.”

  “Did Dad ever try to find Peter when we were growing up?”

  “No idea. He certainly never came to me about it. Even if he had, it wouldn’t have done him much good. His name wasn’t even on the birth certificate and of course there wasn’t any of that DNA testing back then. I suppose he could see, too, how difficult it was for your mother to cope with just you two girls, and decided to leave well enough alone.”

  “He was respecting Mom’s wishes,” Elaine pointed out.

  “Maybe. Or maybe he was taking the easy way out, as men do.” Finley leaned forward, sorting through the photographs on the table with her gnarled fingers until she found the one she wanted. She held the picture up in front of the three of them, her hand trembling a little.

  It was a color photo of a small, serious-looking, dark-haired boy on the same sofa they were seated on now. Peter was dressed formally, in black trousers with red suspenders, a white shirt, and a little red bow tie. Was this picture taken on Christmas? Ava wondered. Or was it a photo to accompany his adoption papers?

  Peter’s hands were folded in his lap and he looked about five years old. He had the same square jaw and high cheekbones that Ava and Gigi had inherited from her father, but a feline tilt to his dark eyes that he—and Elaine—had inherited from their mother. Ava could almost hear Finley’s voice admonishing him to “Sit still, for once in your life!” His legs were so short, they stuck straight out in front of him like a doll’s as he solemnly looked at the camera.

  Except he couldn’t have actually been looking at anything. Peter was blind, Ava reminded herself, despite the fact that nothing about his expression suggested he couldn’t see the photographer. There weren’t any other obvious disabilities. He looked alert and curious. Perhaps Finley concluded he had problems because Peter was hyperactive, or suffering from anxiety. And what boy wouldn’t, being closeted during most of his early childhood in a single room, with only a sedentary middle-aged woman for company?

  Ava wanted to weep, seeing Peter—her brother!—posed like that, trying hard to behave, innocent of whatever fate awaited him. She felt a sense of recognition so deep, it was nearly primal: This boy was her family. Her blood. Her history.

  Ava picked up the picture and, without asking permission, slid it into her pocket with the little stuffed dog.

  They drove home in near silence, stopping only once at a highway rest stop when Gigi said, “I’m starving hungry! I could gnaw off my own arm! You two must be cyborgs or something, going so many hours without food.”

  Ava said she had no appetite. Elaine sighed and said, “I’d sooner slit my wrists than eat any crap fast food loaded with enough salt and fat and toxins to fell a herd of elephants,” but she stopped anyway.

  However, once they’d gone through the drive-through, the food smelled so good that both Ava and Elaine started begging Gigi for fries the minute they pulled back on the highway. They had to stop again at the next exit.

  “I need gas anyway,” Elaine muttered. “Might as well eat something here.”

  “This time, get your own dinners,” Gigi said.

  “Yeah? And who do you think bought yours? Santa?” Elaine snapped back.

  That was the only altercation. Ava was grateful for the relative peace in the car. She was too exhausted to deal with any more drama, and still reeling from the sensation of walking through her own nightmare at Finley’s house.

  “Can we call places tomorrow and try to find out what happened?” Gigi asked from the backseat as they turned onto High Street to drop her off in Newburyport before continuing across the bridge to Beach Plum Island.

  “Count me out,” Elaine said. “I’m not ready to do this.”

  Ava wasn’t sure she was ready, either, but she told Gigi she would. “It won’t be easy, though,” she warned.

  Peter’s last name on the birth certificate was Laurent, Suzanne’s maiden name, and the father was listed as “unknown.” But knowing Peter’s last name might not even be useful if he’d been adopted into another family. Ava didn’t know what the adoption laws were.

  “What if Peter’s already dead?” asked Elaine, whose thoughts must have been traveling in similar, if darker, circles. “Do we really want to know?” She sucked down the rest of her soda and rattled the ice in the cup, steering the car easily with one hand but driving too fast for Ava’s comfort. “Think how horrible we’d feel.”

  “It didn’t sound like he had anything wrong with his health, just his eyes,” Ava pointed out. “And he’d only be in his early forties by now. Forty-three, if he was born two years before I was.”

  “We have to prepare ourselves for that possibility, though,” Elaine said. Her profile was sharply etched against the window, as elegant as some ancient priestess’s against the white collar of her shirt in the darkened car.

  “Also, he might not want to see us,” Gigi said, sounding glum. “Would you want to see the kids your dad didn’t give up? The kids he actually stuck around to raise?”

  “No,” Elaine said. “I still don’t, actually.”

  “Nice,” Gigi said. “Real nice.” She fell silent for the rest of the ride home.

  Ava knew Gigi was hurt. By the way Elaine glanced into the rearview mirror to look at her, she knew Elaine realized it, too. She hoped Elaine was sorry, but didn’t have the energy to intervene. Times like these made her wonder if having sisters was worth the effort—and why the hell she’d started this whole treasure hunt for a brother who would surely complicate their lives even more.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Elaine and Tony had a Sunday ritual they’d started five years ago when Elaine joined his marketing company: they would meet at the gym for an eight o’clock spin class, then treat themselves to dim sum in Chinatown. This Sunday was so hot, however, that Tony called early to suggest the North End pool instead of dim sum.

  “We can eat at the snack bar,” he coaxed. “You’ll love it. So retro.”

  “A public pool?” Elaine laughed. “God. I didn’t know you were so communal.”

  “Are you kidding? I love that pool!” he declared. “It’s the best place on the planet to ogle hot Italian guys in gold necklaces and Hugo Boss. And where else
can you wear heels with your bikini? Come on. Live a little. They even have ice cream at the snack bar.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But you’re treating.”

  “Absolutely! The pool is three bucks for the day and the ice cream’s a dollar. It’ll break the bank, but you are so worth it, sweetie.”

  They showered and changed into their swimsuits after spin class. Tony drove them to the pool in his green Mini Cooper, a car so ridiculously like a go-kart that Elaine couldn’t even make fun of it. Besides, Tony adored it, saying it was the perfect city car: “If I can’t park it, I can just put it in my pocket.”

  The Mirabella Pool was at the edge of Boston’s North End and had a stunning view of the harbor. “See?” Tony said. “It’s like Club Med in the middle of the city.”

  “Not quite,” Elaine said, rolling her eyes at a trio of older men with brown, well-oiled barrel chests. The men were playing dominoes. “But the water looks clean enough.”

  The pool was deliciously cold, too. They swam laps, then floated on their backs, talking about work and Tony’s new boyfriend, George, who had just moved in with him. Afterward they found an open square of concrete where they spread out their towels and slathered each other with sunscreen. Tony was olive-skinned and dark, with a strong jaw and sensual mouth; he looked like he’d grown up right here in the North End.

  Finally, Elaine couldn’t stand not telling him everything. Tony was her best friend and knew her better than anyone. Better than Ava, sometimes.

  “So it turns out I have this big family now,” she plunged. “I told you about my half sister, Gigi, right? Well, now it looks like I have this brother someplace. He was born before Ava, and my parents gave him up for adoption because they were still in high school and he was blind and disabled.”

  “What? Are you kidding me?” Tony sat up so fast that his sunglasses flew off his head and onto the cement. A teenage girl in a red bikini, platform sandals, and an entire chain-link fence of bracelets stooped gracefully to pick them up. She returned the glasses to Tony with a blindingly white smile.