Calmer Secrets: Calmer Girls 2 (Calmer Girls Series)

by Jennifer Kelland Perry

  “Wow!” Ben cried out. “What a fantastic sight. Hard to fathom how a piece of fresh water ice can float down here like that.”

  Samantha let the camera rest on her chest. “Equally hard to fathom we are only seeing its tip. I wonder how deep it goes?”

  Ben laughed. “It’s hard to fathom how many fathoms.”

  Samantha groaned but grinned at him. “Your closest encounter too?”

  “For sure!”

  Before long, their boat veered away from the iceberg, venturing farther out into the Atlantic and in the direction of Cape Spear. Samantha had the opportunity to seize through her lens a colony of puffins nesting along the rugged coastline, their plump bodies peppering the rocky cliff face in great numbers. So awe-inspiring the spectacle, so welcome the salty tang in the breeze and the sharp clarity of the sunny afternoon, Samantha almost forgot about her earlier low mood.

  A quick shuffle of feet from behind distracted them. The captain emerged on deck.

  “So, Benny,” the middle-aged skipper shouted above the roar of the engine. “I see you’re not green around the gills or hurlin’ your guts up! That’s always a good sign.”

  “Ha ha, yes sir.”

  “Guess you pass the test then, my son! Though it might get rougher than this on some days, mind you.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be alright.”

  “Yes, b’y. Your father already mentioned you aren’t the type to get seasick. We cancel our tours on really rough days anyhow, so you needn’t be bothered.” He smiled at Samantha. “And how are you, my dear?”

  “Best kind,” she said, returning his smile. “Spot many whales around these days?”

  “We’ve only had a few good sightings since the start of the season, but that’s the nature of this business. You might see dozens for three tours straight, and then it could be days before you see another one. They’re unpredictable.”

  Ben nodded. “One of your crew told us you spotted orcas and dolphins last week.”

  “That’s right, b’y. You might not find any today, but I guarantee you’ll see ’em countless times over the next few months.”

  “Need me to do anything?”

  “Nah, go ahead and enjoy the tour with your girlfriend for the rest of the trip. And don’t be shy; let us know if you need anything. If you get hungry, there’s drinks and snacks aboard.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  The captain gave them a nod and withdrew again to his cabin.

  “Did you want anything to eat or drink?”

  “No, I’m good,” Samantha managed. The captain thinks I’m Ben’s girl. She couldn’t keep the wistfulness out of her voice or her thoughts.

  “Mind me asking how it’s going with Veronica and your mom?”

  Samantha held onto the deck rail with both hands and leaned over the side a bit, letting the wind hit her face. Her hood blew down, causing her hair to fly loose, but she didn’t bother pulling it back up. A flock of stout seagulls flew alongside the boat, their cries filling the air, likely hoping for fish scraps or anything they could scavenge. “Ronnie has yet to forgive her, and I can’t say I blame her. It’s gonna take more than a few weeks of sobriety to fix that relationship.”

  “As if she were perfect. Have you forgiven her for her dishonesty?”

  She made a half-hearted effort to smooth her hair. “I’m trying, but it’s tough. I understand how it hurt her pride in the beginning, but letting us all believe you were the father, including the actual father? She robbed Kalen of his son’s first years of life with her lie, and she did her utmost to wreck things for us. Hard to get past that.”

  “I hear ya.” Ben stepped closer. “If only she’d done the decent thing and owned up to the truth right from the get-go.”

  “Ah well. None of us can get back what has already been lost.”

  How pink his cheeks are turning in the freshening breeze, she thought. His dark eyes held her captive as he moved nearer. She attempted a happy-go-lucky laugh. “Hey, why are we making ourselves sound like a couple of pathetic fools? Here I am flying off to study in England on Sunday morning, and you have this neat new job here and your girlfriend waiting for you when you go home to Halifax.”

  Ben stared off toward the distant horizon, where indigo ocean met clear, blue sky. “She’s planning on coming to Newfoundland for most of the summer.”

  “Oh? When will she get here?”

  “Middle of July, I think.”

  “You must be psyched.” A knot the size of a walnut formed in her throat. She tried to swallow away the ache while she distanced herself from him, staring in the direction of the lonely, windswept cape. As the tour boat sped closer to the rugged headland, its gleaming white lighthouse came into view, beckoning to them in silent greeting.

  He moved even closer to her and touched her shoulder, startling her. She turned and searched his face.

  “You’re beautiful, Samantha.”

  At a loss for a quick response, Samantha pulled away and strode over to sit on the long bench spanning the opposite side of the deck. After a few seconds, she found her voice again. “Beautiful? I’ll never have that brand of beauty Veronica’s been blessed with, and I accept it.” She gave a small laugh, so he would get she really was fine with it. Looks were such a superficial aspect of a person, after all. “Why don’t you?”

  Ben sat down beside her. “I don’t accept it, Samantha, because it’s a lie. Alright, maybe you aren’t pretty in the conventional sense of the word, but you are beautiful in your own unique and individual way. Why are people so hung up on looks anyway?”

  Samantha grinned inwardly to hear him say what she was thinking.

  “Real beauty or the value of a person is what’s inside, you should know that,” he went on. “Stop telling yourself your sister is prettier and somehow better. You’re perfectly exquisite, inside and out.”

  She deliberated over his words for a moment. “You think you know all about me, but you don’t. Would a perfect person wish for the things I’ve wished for?”

  “For instance?”

  “I’ve thought a lot about this over the past four years, Ben. If I were without flaw, I never would have dated my sister’s ex-boyfriend. This is the glaring detail here that should’ve been apparent and uppermost in my mind. I mean, although you two had broken up, I still should’ve stayed away from you, right?”

  “But what about the love we felt for each other? How was it possible to turn it off?”

  “But ethically and morally. It was wrong, wasn’t it?”

  “I understand what you’re saying, but Veronica and I were an item for such a brief time. I can’t even scare up any anger over Kalen hooking up with her back then. We were all so young! I think we should take that into account.”

  “I guess. But if I’m the decent person you make me out to be, a part of me wouldn’t have hoped my only sister would…die. There, I said it! When she first learned of her pregnancy, I secretly wanted her to have an abortion; and when she decided against it, I thought, wouldn’t our problems be solved if she was gone? Like, wiped off the planet? All of our problems would have vanished, we wouldn’t have flown the coop, we wouldn’t have had the godawful—”

  Ben pulled her into an embrace. “Samantha, stop. You’re human. Those emotions were natural under the circumstances.” He chuckled. “Now if you had acted on them, well, that’s a different matter.”

  She rested her cheek against his shoulder, longing to tell him how it made her feel to be in his arms. “She used to joke about how I might put rat poison in her food. She had no idea how close I came.”

  He laughed into her turbulent hair. Hearing his laughter, she couldn’t stop the giggles that bubbled up and burst out of her.

  “Oh Samantha, your delicious honesty. Something else I love about you.”

  After the tour came to an end and the boat returned to dock, Ben drove her home.

  “Hey, Samantha,” he said before she opened the car door. “Are you free Friday night? W
e could go out to dinner and go for a game of pool after. Or catch a movie.”

  To her ears, he sounded hesitant. Was he being kind? But why prolong the agony?

  “I don’t know, Ben.”

  “We won’t see each other anymore. It might be our last chance to hang out.”

  Against her better judgement, she agreed. He smiled and told her he’d pick her up Friday at six.

  ***

  At five-fifteen on Friday, Samantha sat ready and waiting. She had blow-dried and straightened her freshly shampooed hair, sweeping the top of it back into a wide barrette Veronica had left behind. She reconsidered and took out the barrette, thinking her hair might be prettier hanging loose.

  Then there was the matter of which shoes to wear. She only owned two pairs that were decent for a dinner date, and neither pair had much in the way of heels. She hated high heels, they hurt her feet so. She also hated the stereotype of women loving to own lots of shoes. She was lucky if she could find one comfortable pair to wear that were still stylish enough for an evening like this one.

  She applied lipstick and mascara and changed her outfit three times before her appearance satisfied her.

  “What the devil difference does it make, anyhow?” she said aloud to her reflection, her brow puckered. “Ben is a part of my past.” Was it too late to cancel?

  A sharp rap on her bedroom door startled her, making her jump.

  “May I come in?” Darlene sounded distraught.

  Samantha opened the door. “What’s wrong, Momma?”

  “Ronnie’s here now. I called her and begged her to come over for a talk, and I think you also should be here.”

  “What’s it about?” She followed her mother down the hall.

  “Your grandfather.”

  Veronica entered the house. “Sam. I didn’t know you were here.”

  “Yeah, but I have plans to go out.”

  “Can you go out later instead?” Darlene asked. “You should know about this, as well as Ronnie.”

  Samantha’s curiosity was piqued. She agreed to stay and called Ben to ask him if he would wait for her call before coming over.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be there when you’re done. Just give me a dingle.”

  The three of them sat down in the living room.

  “Is Henry with Kalen?” Darlene asked.

  “No, Kalen’s still at work, so I left him with Gina. You said to come alone. What’s on your mind, exactly?”

  Darlene drew a shaky breath. “It concerns your grandfather. What I’m going to tell you is hard for me to say and it might make you angry at me again. Still, bear with me, because I think you should hear the whole story.” She folded her arms and hugged them to her, leaning forward. “It’s about your Aunt Donna.”

  Samantha and Veronica exchanged glances. Donna, their mother’s younger sister, lived in Halifax and worked as a journalist. The girls seldom saw their aunt. Darlene had told them before how she’d moved away from Calmer Cove and left Newfoundland as soon as she’d matured enough to be on her own. She had flown home that year for Nana’s funeral, and then when Samantha had landed in hospital after the car accident with Ben, but those were the only times Samantha could ever recall seeing her.

  “Go on,” Veronica urged.

  “When Donna was fifteen, she opened up to me about how our father, your Pop, had abused her. Unbeknownst to me or anyone, he’d molested her from time to time since she was a young girl. So, Veronica, you weren’t his only victim.”

  “Dear God,” Samantha whispered.

  “That son of a bitch,” Veronica said through gritted teeth. “No wonder she got the hell out of here. So, you’re saying he didn’t touch you?”

  “No. I guess he considered Donna the easier mark, with her timid nature back then. I was a bit of a hard case growing up and my backside got the belt whenever he saw fit, but that was all.”

  “How did he get away with it for so long?” Samantha asked.

  “Because of threats and secrecy. He told her she would be viewed as a bad girl who brought it on herself if she told anybody, and no one would love her anymore. Especially our mother, he said. Being a naïve little child, she believed him.”

  Veronica’s mouth screwed up and her voice cracked when she spoke. “How could he do those things to us?”

  “I wish I knew. I despised him for what he did to my sister; and when she confessed it to me as a teen, I wanted to tell our mother. But he made Donna feel so bad and dirty, she begged me keep her awful secret. I never thought I would say this, but I’m glad he got lost in the bottle and drank himself to an early grave. I only wish he’d died before he laid a hand on you. And I’m not trying to minimize what you experienced at all, but at least your time under his thumb was shorter than Donna’s. Oh, but I wish you had come to me when it first happened to you.” Darlene moved to her side and put her arm around her shoulders. “I would’ve believed you.”

  Veronica sobbed, but she didn’t push her away. “He threatened me, almost with those exact words,” she said, wiping her cheeks with her sleeve. “One time I told him I intended to tell Nana, that I didn’t care what anyone thought of me. Besides, I couldn’t imagine Nana thinking it was my fault.”

  “But you didn’t?” Samantha asked.

  Veronica shook her head. “He told me if I chose to be a bad girl, and I didn’t ‘play nice’ – that’s what he called it – he would find someone who would. And I would bear the blame.” Her tortured, tear-filled gaze found her sister’s face.

  Samantha felt her stomach drop like a stone. A violent tremble deep inside her spread out through her entire body. “You mean—”

  Veronica nodded. “He said he would come after you if I didn’t go along.” She wept into her hands while Darlene pulled her closer.

  Veronica had saved her from him. All these years, Samantha had lived with wide-eyed naiveté; she hadn’t had the foggiest inkling of the torment Veronica had endured from that perverted man. Only a small girl herself, Ronnie had sacrificed her own innocence – her own childhood – to protect her younger sister’s.

  Speechless from shock, Samantha sat there woodenly.

  A heavy veil lifted, a veil she’d been unaware of, obscuring a hideous, lifelong family secret. She experienced the sensation of emerging from a long, murky passageway, and she could see everything clearer, the way the world really was, and her place in it. The stark and ugly truth.

  She broke down.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope.”

  ― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

  Covering a weary yawn, Samantha looked out through the glass doors of the Avalon Mall entrance and beyond, into the wet parking lot. At last, she spied her sister pulling up to the curb in Kalen’s hatchback.

  She ran to the car through the pelting rain. Half an hour later than Ronnie said she’d be there to pick her up, but why should that alarm her? Veronica ran by her own clock. Late evening had shifted into night while Samantha had waited. Tired, hungry and impatient to get home from shopping for shoes and school supplies, then having to wait for an hour in a noisy and crowded salon for a hair trim, all she could picture was a quick snack and a long soak in a hot bubble bath. She had an early rise the next morning for her international flight.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Veronica offered, as she turned the car onto Kenmount Road. “Got into it with Momma.”

  “Whoa! Again?”

  Veronica nodded as she checked her rear-view mirror. “She cornered me when I went to collect the rest of Henry’s stuff.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the stuffed garbage bag lying on the back seat.

  “What’s she saying this time?”

  “The usual. She knows I’ll need a place when Mandy and Gina move away, so she insists I should move in with her and Cash. Can you believe her? She must think I’m gone foolish.” />
  “I don’t know. I’m sensing she means business this time. She quit the bar and she’s attending AA regularly. Or is there a possibility you could move in with Kalen?”

  “He did offer, actually, but I’d hate to give him the wrong idea.”

  “Have you told Henry yet that Kalen is his dad?”

  A ghost of a smile danced around her lips. “We’re telling him soon. I wonder how he’ll react?”

  “By the way they are getting along so far, I bet he’s going to be thrilled!”

  Veronica nodded. “I’m starting to believe that. Still, moving in together is a bit much, I think.”

  “It could be strictly platonic, though. I bet Henry would be pleased with the arrangement. Plus, the logistics for child care would be easier with Kalen right there in the same house as you.”

  “I get that, but there’s the option of subletting Gina’s place if I can find a roommate to split the rent with.” She popped a stick of gum in her mouth while she drove. “At least I don’t have to decide right away. I have most of the summer to figure it out, to see how things go.”

  Samantha looked sharply at her profile. Might Veronica be seeing a possible future down the road with Henry’s dad? Is this what she’s implying with this impromptu chat?

  Veronica caught her expression before returning her full attention to the road. “Stop that, Sam!”

  “Stop what?”

  “Jumping to conclusions, that’s what. I’ve changed. I’ve decided to give up all dating for the foreseeable future. It’s high time I got my head out of my arse and took better care of my son. He’s my number one priority now.”