Seashell Season

by Holly Chamberlin

  “Right now? I’m thinking I’m clueless about the future. About my future with my daughter.”

  David nodded, and I began to ramble on.

  “Did I tell you there was a time when I was convinced Alan had managed to spirit Gemma out of the country, that they were living in some remote coastal town in, I don’t know, Portugal or New Zealand?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But you can always tell me again.”

  “And there were other times when I was certain he’d abandoned her shortly after the abduction, just left her all on her own somewhere, Moses in the rushes, though unlike Moses’s mother, I doubted that Alan cared if she was found by someone kind who would raise her as her own. There were times when I wondered if he’d killed Gemma and then himself, a murder suicide. The imagination runs wild when it has little fact, little real knowledge to go on.”

  “Now the fact of Gemma,” David said, “can take the place of imagination. That should be a relief, even if things are tough for a while. When does she get here?”

  “They’ve booked a flight into Portland, the day after tomorrow.”

  “That was a nice bit of luck, someone in child protection needing to fly east, being able to accompany Gemma.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Though I wish I could magically swoop down on her right this minute and transport her home in the blink of an eye.”

  “Patience, Verity,” David said. “Patience.”

  Oh, I know all about patience. Trust me.

  Chapter 5

  Last night—the night before Gemma was due to arrive, the last night of my seventeen-year-long vigil—was one of the most fraught of my life. My mind was and still is a jumble of questions and apprehensions, of expectations and fears, of hopes and, yes, of fantasies.

  Once school starts in late August—or is it early September? I’ll have to find out, now that I’m going to have a high-school student living with me. Anyway, once school starts, Gemma’s days will be filled with classes and after-school activities and homework. She might want to go to the winter ball and the prom. I wondered how I would afford a formal dress for her. Then I remembered that the wife of the printmaking instructor at the college is a professional seamstress. Maybe I could work out a payment schedule with her, or we might exchange a dress for a piece of sculpture or a painting.

  Point being that in a few months Gemma will be properly occupied, but the question of what to do with her until then—while we’re getting to know each other—needs to be solved . . . and quickly. So, naturally, I began to panic. She’s sixteen—well, technically she had turned seventeen in March; Soledad Valdes told me that Alan had given Gemma a phony birthday in August—way too old for childcare or a day camp. She isn’t too young for a full-time job, but the thought of sending my daughter to work after the trauma of the past weeks prevented me from even glancing through the local papers for job ads. This girl needs rest, I thought. Rest and care and coddling. Of course, she could stay at home when I’m teaching at the college or when I’m at my studio there, working on pieces for my big gallery show in July. But what would she do here? Sleep. Read. Watch movies. Play video games. Sunbathe, providing she used sunblock. (Alan burns easily. Does Gemma?) She would be lonely, sad, angry, and, quite possibly, bored. It doesn’t escape me that I’m going to have to—let’s put it bluntly—sell myself to her as a person she wants to live with, not just until she turns eighteen, but for some years after that. I want her to like living with me and sharing my world. I want her to find her own new world to share with me. I want her to love me, a total stranger.

  Of course, I turned to thoughts of Cathy Strawbridge and what she would be up to this summer. Annie had told me that Cathy had taken on another babysitting gig, which means that three days a week she’ll be occupied from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. There’s also soccer. Cathy loves to play soccer, and there’s always some sort of summer program that keeps her busy in the hours she isn’t working or attending violin lessons. And Cathy has friends. I’ve met a few of them over the years, and I know that at this point in her life there are three girls in particular with whom she spends as much time as she can. They’re nice girls, all from stable homes; all do well in school, and one of them, Becca, is said to be a math prodigy. Hildy is even more devoted to soccer than Cathy, and Melissa is the group’s leading mall rat, though the girls, all fifteen, are too young to get themselves to the mall in South Portland or the ones in Kittery or Newington without an adult driver. Still, all this means that Cathy and her friends probably won’t have any real time to devote to getting to know Gemma—or Marni, we’d still have to see about that—and even if they did, I can’t count on their being interested in spending time with my daughter, a person I know very little about. What I do know—that Gemma and her father had lived a peripatetic lifestyle, moving from place to place every year or so, and often on the spur of the moment, and that my daughter had spent her formative years in the care of a criminal and troubled man—well, none of that bodes well for a smooth fit. I have no exact idea what experiences my daughter has accumulated in her years with Alan, but I feel pretty certain that those experiences will isolate her from Cathy and her posse, girls who have always lived safe, ordered, innocent, normal lives.

  In the end, I had to content myself with putting together a list of activities that might interest Gemma—would she laugh at the idea of miniature golf?—and places she might like to visit with me when I had time off. We might go to the Ogunquit Museum of American Art (kind of a high entrance fee, but I might be able to wrangle some free tickets from someone at the college), to Portland for the shopping (assuming she likes to shop . . . and about that, as about so much else, I have no idea), to the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Wells for long walks through the woods (does she have proper shoes for hiking? Is she allergic to pine trees?). Has she ever been to the top of a lighthouse? Has she ever been, however briefly, back to the East Coast after being spirited away by her father? I’m fairly certain Alan had never brought her anywhere near New England, but maybe he’d taken her on vacation to Disney World in Florida. Did he have that sort of money?

  Here’s another question: Has Gemma ever been to church? Would she want me to take her on Sundays? I could do that easily enough; though I haven’t been to a church service in years, going to one each week would be a small sacrifice to make. Has she ever been to a zoo, or gone on a ski trip, or ridden on a roller coaster? Oh Lord, I thought, does she have a pet, a dog or a cat or a bird, that she’s being forced to leave behind? Soledad Valdes hadn’t mentioned a pet, but maybe she and her coworkers had simply overlooked this detail. And what about Gemma’s medical records, and her school records? Where are they? I need them.

  Sleep, when it came, was fitful, and when I woke this morning at five, an hour before the alarm was due to go off, I felt an immediate and almost overwhelming sense of fear that warred viciously with an immediate and almost overwhelming sense of excitement.

  This, I thought, even more so than the day of my daughter’s birth, is the most important day of my life.

  Chapter 6

  We were to meet in a private room at an airport hotel. This had been orchestrated by the child protection people, who had been looking after Gemma since her father’s arrest.

  While I waited alone in the nondescript room for her arrival, I found myself thinking about a man named Harold Mair.

  Let me explain.

  I’d been renting the house on Birch Lane, in which I currently live, from the owner, Mr. Mair, for almost a year at a very reasonable price when he died quite suddenly, and I thought, now the house will be sold, or his surviving relatives, whoever they may be, will raise the rent to a prohibitive amount and I’ll be forced to move. I’d always known I’d have to leave the house at some point in time; I’d just hoped it would be at some point far in the future.

  Imagine my surprise then when Harold Mair’s will was read, and I learned he’d left the house to me. The mortgage had been paid o
ff long ago, so getting the news of my unexpected windfall totally floored me. “But why?” I asked his lawyer. “I’m not family. He hardly knew me, not personally.” The lawyer had simply shrugged. “I have no idea why,” he said, and I swear I got the feeling he was lying, that Harold Mair had confided in him. “But I’d not look a gift horse in the mouth.” Well, I certainly didn’t, and I came to suspect that Harold Mair, a man who had lived his entire eighty years in Yorktide, had of course known of my daughter’s kidnapping, and though he’d had the delicacy never to mention it to me, this childless, widowed man must have decided that to leave me his home was his way of offering comfort. I have no proof of his intentions, but that’s what I believe. I would never have been able to afford to buy a lovely little house like this on my own. Mr. Mair was my very good guardian angel. Now I had a permanent home to give to my daughter, if someday she were to come home.

  That someday is now.

  I looked at my watch. Gemma and her guardian for the journey were due in minutes.

  I wondered what I would see when my child walked into the room.

  Gemma’s hair would have changed color over the years, something the sketch artists I’d hired for my website devoted to the case had tried to take into consideration. At two months, Gemma’s hair had been scanty and pale brown. Now it might be as dark as my own. Or maybe she was coloring her hair blue and purple and green. Women of all ages are doing that now.

  How tall was Gemma? Did she have her father’s aquiline nose? Did she have my habit of cocking my head to the left when thinking hard about a problem? Was my own mother, long gone, traceable in my daughter’s smile or the shape of her hands? Gemma’s eyes, too, would have changed color. They might be dark brown, like mine, or maybe they were blue-green, like Alan’s. I never fully grasped the eye color dominance thing they teach you in high school biology.

  I’d been wondering about all this for years, always supposing that my daughter was alive and growing into womanhood. But along with these speculations were also those horrifying, sick-making moments when I’d become convinced she was dead, at that very moment the victim of a gruesome murder. The lack of real, solid knowledge was torture. Whoever said ignorance is bliss is, well, ignorant.

  I heard a voice in the hall. A woman’s. A feeling akin to terror overcame me. I realized I was about to get what I had been wishing for so fervently for over seventeen years. And I wondered if I was ready for it.

  Chapter 7

  She stiffened in my arms. I released her immediately.

  Mistake number one, I thought.

  “Gemma,” I said.

  The girl, the young woman, my daughter, frowned. “My name is Marni.”

  “I know,” I said. “I mean, I know that’s the name your father gave you. But your legal name is Gemma. And it’s what I’ve called you since the day you were born.”

  “You haven’t seen me since I was a baby.” Her tone was off-putting, her expression grim.

  I was acutely aware of the representative from the child protection agency at my back, and I wondered if this reunion would be any easier if Gemma and I were alone, without a witness.

  But on some level, I was terrified of being left alone with this angry young person before me.

  “Yes, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about you every single day,” I said. “I’ll try to remember to call you Marni, but it’ll be hard. I’m sorry.”

  “I can’t call you Mom. I won’t.”

  “That’s okay. I didn’t expect you to.” But oh, I thought, how I hoped you would!

  She was dressed in a pair of jeans that were almost threadbare at the knees. A T-shirt with the words ABERCROMBIE & FITCH printed in faded letters. A pair of dirty sneakers. Her hair was scraped back into a ponytail. I noticed she had only two bags; one was a stained duffel bag, and the other one of those old hard-bodied suitcases, without wheels, and badly scuffed. I wondered how much she had left behind. But maybe all her worldly possessions were in those two bags.

  “How was the flight?” I asked. I was beginning to feel a bit desperate. I wanted to say so many things, important things, but I knew this wasn’t the time. Or was it? I felt very much in need of help. There’s no standard script for this sort of thing, is there, meeting your own child seventeen years after she’d been kidnapped and led to believe you were dead?

  Gemma shrugged.

  “Did you get something to eat? It’s almost noon. You must be hungry.”

  “I’m all right,” she said.

  I looked hard at this stranger standing before me, not quite meeting my eye, and tried to visualize the latest forensic portrait on the website I’d set up so many years ago. Bring Gemma Home it’s called. There was some resemblance between the imagined portrait and the real person, but not much. Still, I wondered if I would have recognized Gemma as my own without prompting. Would my maternal instinct have been enough to pick her out of a crowd?

  “You’re staring at me.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said hurriedly. Mistake number two. The last thing I wanted to do was to make her feel uncomfortable, but I seemed to be doing just that. “It’s just that I’m so happy to see you. I’m so happy you’re here.”

  “I didn’t ask to come,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “You should know that this wasn’t my idea.”

  “Yes.”

  “They didn’t give me a choice.” Gemma shot a dark look at her travel companion. The woman—her name was Mallory Smith—didn’t react. I thought she was probably used to dealing with angry, sad kids.

  But I’m not.

  Gemma looked around the room then, at the ceiling, back to the door, at the windows. “So, what’s next?” she said.

  “Next,” I said, barely able to keep the tremor out of my voice, “we go home.”

  Chapter 8

  Verity went to the ladies’ room.

  The woman who’d come on the plane with me—Mallory—asked me if I was okay.

  Really?

  “Yeah,” I said. A lie.

  We look alike. Verity and me, I mean. Not totally alike but enough.

  But I feel no connection to her at all. None. There was no big moment of Wow, I know her. I could have been handed over to a stranger, and it wouldn’t have felt any different. It wouldn’t have mattered.

  These past few weeks have sucked, and I doubt things are going to stop sucking anytime soon.

  I suppose I could have slipped away from my so-called guardian at the airport here or in Arizona, but it didn’t even cross my mind, that’s how—I guess you could say that’s how depressed I feel. Literally depressed, like flattened. Maybe I’m sort of in shock. I mean, I wasn’t always like this. When I first heard that Dad had been arrested and then when I was told he’d done what he did, stolen me, and then lied about it to me for years, I was furious, totally, absolutely, awesomely furious. I broke some plates and all our glasses, and I took a scissor and cut up his favorite T-shirt, the one from a Rolling Stones concert back in the eighties. I swear, I could have killed someone. Probably him. They say most murders are committed by someone who knew the victim well, maybe even loved him. I understand that.

  When she, Verity, came back to the room, my jailer smiled one of those fake sympathetic smiles. “We’ll check in with you in a few days, okay?” she said brightly. “See how you’re settling in.”

  I said, “Whatever.”

  Verity said, “I can’t thank you enough for all you and your colleagues have done for my daughter.”

  I’m her daughter. But that doesn’t mean she’s got a right to me.

  And as soon as I turn eighteen, I’m out of here.

  When Mallory left the room, Verity and I were alone for the first time. It did not feel good.

  “Here,” Verity said, “let me carry one of those bags.”

  I shouldered my duffel bag and picked up Dad’s old suitcase. “I’m fine,” I said.

  That was a lie, again.

&n
bsp; But hey, I’m the daughter of a liar, so what do you expect?

  Chapter 9

  The ride to her house took about forty minutes. I checked the time on my phone. I don’t have a watch.

  I said nothing on the way because I didn’t have anything to say. She said stuff like, “Is the air conditioning on high enough?” and “Do you need to stop at the store for anything before we get home?” Yes, the AC was high enough. No, I didn’t need anything. Except to get back on a plane to Arizona.

  I was born here, I thought. Maine. Not Rhode Island, where Dad had told me I was born.

  My first thought when we pulled into the driveway of the house on Birch Lane was: This is a lot nicer than anyplace Dad and I ever lived in. My second thought was: Don’t be disloyal to Dad.

  “This is it,” Verity said. “Where I live. My house.”

  I was struck by her choice of words. “You own it?” I asked.

  “Yes. By a stroke of good fortune, actually.” And she told me about how the old man who’d owned it before had left it to her in his will. I wondered if he’d been her sugar daddy—I mean, why else would some old guy who’s not your grandfather or your uncle leave you an entire house? But I said nothing.

  “We can bring the bags in later,” she said. We got out of the car, and I followed her around to the front door. There were three kind of long low steps leading up to a porch that ran the entire length of the house. “It’s called a bungalow,” Verity said. “Or a Craftsman-style house. It was built in 1932.”

  And why, I thought, would I care when it was built and what it was called? Still, I had to admit it was kind of cool that she owned the place. Dad and I had never owned any of the houses or apartments we’d lived in. And Verity’s car was in way better shape than ours. Well, the car that used to be ours. Not the one Dad stole—the one that was legitimately ours. It occurred to me then that I had no idea what had happened to the car. I don’t think it’s worth very much, but still, if someone we trusted could sell it for us, then Dad could get the money and use it to pay the lawyers. But then again, we don’t know anyone we can trust. We never have. And I don’t know if people in jail can “make” money. It’s all so screwed up.