Seashell Season

by Holly Chamberlin

  Think about it: I was fifteen and very likely facing a life of raising a kid on my own with only my father for help. Not good. The kid would have been doomed from the start.

  I had no girlfriends I could talk to; though I knew of some girls at school who had been pregnant, I wasn’t at all close to them, and I wasn’t about to go advertising my situation to strangers. So I told my buddy (note I’m not calling him a friend), and he was no help, not that I’d really thought he would be. First, he denied a baby could be his. When I asked him why, was he sterile, and if so how did he know, had he been tested? Of course he had no answer. Then he told me he had no money, so I’d better not bother to ask for any. Then he said he knew someone who knew someone who’d had an abortion without her parents knowing and that was what I should do. Nice advice. Very helpful. “Maybe,” he said finally, his face brightening, “maybe you’ll, you know, lose it.”

  In the end, I was lucky. My period showed up a few days later, and I was spared having to make what totally would have been the most difficult decision of my life.

  Lesson learned. I was insanely careful after that. Not careful enough to stop having sex, but careful enough to keep beer out of the equation and to provide the condoms myself.

  I probably shouldn’t have told Cathy and the others I’ve had sex. I mean, not that I’m ashamed or anything. That’s so old-fashioned and totally antifeminist, and I’m a feminist. But it’s also not like I want people to think I’m bragging about it. It’s not something to brag about. It’s not like it takes any skill!

  And all the activities Cathy and her friends are involved in!

  Most of the schools I went to had no real money for after-school programs like soccer and orchestra, though most schools were able to afford some sort of crappy little band. Which was fine by me, because sports bore the life out of me, as you know; I have no interest in learning how to play an instrument; and I’ve always liked, ever since I was little, to be alone or, at least, not supervised by some annoying adult. And supervising me was something my father was always doing. Trying to control me, being overprotective, breathing down my neck. I had enough of that sort of thing at home, so I learned early on how to escape by blocking him out (that’s a nice way of saying ignoring him) and by walking away (that’s another way of saying sneaking away).

  Sneaking away, sometimes at night, when Dad was asleep.

  Compared to Cathy and her friends, I’m wild and crazy, I guess, but I don’t really see myself as a risk taker. I mean, I’ve taken risks (I’m not talking about sex here), but mostly because I was forced to. Like, there was the time—a few times, actually—when Dad forgot to pick me up after school when I had to stay late for detention, and I lied to another kid’s mom about him waiting just around the corner and then I walked home alone in the dark along some pretty empty roads where there was no place to hide if some creep pulled up alongside me in his car.

  Okay, I bet you’re saying, so if your father was such a control freak, so overly possessive of you and always so concerned for your safety, how could he possibly forget to pick you up from school? And how could he have neglected to take me to the dentist a few years in a row, which he did neglect to do, not that I like going to the dentist but parents are supposed to make you do the stuff that’s good for you even if you put up a stink. The answer to those questions is that I really don’t know.

  I mean, I can’t really explain my father, not even now, except to say that somehow this weird and annoying obsession with my safety existed right alongside this weird and only sometimes annoying habit of almost forgetting I was even in the room. To be honest, as time went on and I turned twelve and then thirteen, I preferred the times he got all broody and preoccupied because it allowed me space. I could be on my own and do what I liked until suddenly, and it was like someone had snapped two fingers in his head, he’d remember I was there in his life and freak out about every little detail of my day. Who did I talk to between classes? How many potato chips had I eaten at lunch? (I mean, have you ever known anyone who counted potato chips? Unless they’re anorexic or something and then it’s just sad.) Did anyone suspicious follow me home? I remember thinking: What? Is he for real? Who the hell would want to follow me home? Okay, a psycho stalker might trail a teenage girl, but every time Dad asked that question, I got the impression he meant someone—official. Someone wearing a suit and driving a fancy car. Someone wearing those so not discreet earphones.

  Now I know I was right.

  Like I said, seriously annoying stuff but nothing worse than that. He never once hit me. He tried to punish me a few times that I remember—no video games for a week, stuff like that—but he was never able to go through with it. I think he was afraid I wouldn’t love him anymore, but seriously, where would I have gone if I suddenly decided I didn’t love my father? Could he really have been worried I’d leave him?

  The times I’d fight back and tell him to leave me alone, he’d get all sad looking, and sometimes his eyes would get wet. (I started to wonder if he could cry on command, if it was an act.) Once or twice he raised his voice with me, saying things like, I’m the parent and I know best, but his bark was way worse than his bite and I’d just stand firm, and the next thing you know, he was apologizing to me like crazy and telling me how much he loved me and asking me if I wanted to go out to my favorite place for dinner (if we had the money) and almost groveling.

  In the year before our life together completely fell apart, I’d come to see it all—Dad’s behavior, I mean—as pretty pathetic, but I didn’t take any pleasure in that. I felt bad about thinking my father was pathetic. I know a lot of people probably think I’m cold, but I’m not. “You’re all I’ve got,” he’d say. “You’re the only one who loves and understands me.” And at those moments I hated not him but my mother for putting me in this position by being a violent drug addict. Which, of course, she seems not to have been at all . . .

  Anyway, the point is that it’s a seriously heavy burden to bear, meaning so much to someone, especially when you’re only a kid and he’s an adult and should be able to stand on his own two feet.

  And not get caught stealing a freakin’ car.

  Chapter 59

  “Did you like that movie we watched last night?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Benedict Cumberbatch is such a good actor, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And it’s horrifying to think that so few years ago gay people were considered sick.”

  “I know.”

  I restrained a sigh and focused on keeping the car on the road. Sometimes Gemma is so frustratingly uncommunicative. For example, when Gemma had come back from her solo trip into town the other day, I’d asked her how it went. She’d shrugged. “Fine. Why shouldn’t it have?” We both knew why it might not have been “fine,” but I didn’t pursue the matter; it only would have sounded as if I wanted an argument. And I’d had no idea she’d helped Mr. Pascoe with the lock on his front door. Mrs. Pascoe told me when I ran into her in the grocery store. “Bert said she was so nice,” she gushed. “Just a lovely young woman!” I suspected that one or the other of the Pascoes was exaggerating for my benefit, but that’s okay. Still, I wondered why Gemma hadn’t told me about the incident.

  I didn’t get much out of her about the get-together at Cathy’s house, either, other than it was “okay” and the onion dip was good. And it seems Annie didn’t get much out of Cathy, either, at least, nothing she felt should be passed on to me. I don’t mean to say I’m spying on my daughter. It’s just that any little bit of information about her I can glean from other sources is welcome.

  “We’re here,” I said unnecessarily as I pulled the car into a spot outside The Grey Gull. It’s a family-style restaurant overlooking the ocean at York Beach. “I hope we can get a table upstairs. The view’s better.”

  We did get a table upstairs, and Gemma went off to the ladies’ room. While she was there our waitress came to the table to pour water and take a drink or
der. I asked her to come back when Gemma had returned.

  Gemma rejoined me a few minutes later. “I drank, like, a gallon of seltzer before we left the house,” she explained, settling in the chair across from me. I’d let her have the seat with the better view of the water. “I think I’m getting addicted to it.”

  Better than soda, I thought. My plan was working!

  “The waitress came to take a drink order,” I told her. “I didn’t know what you wanted—though now I’m guessing seltzer?—so I told her to come back.”

  Gemma laughed. “Dad would have just decided he knew what I wanted and ordered it.”

  Gemma, too? My God, I thought. What other experiences do we have in common, and how can I find out what they might be without sounding as if I’m digging for dirt on Alan?

  “Really?” I said casually.

  “Yeah. He did it all the time, not that we went out a lot. But whenever we did, he’d order for me even if I was sitting right there with my mouth open to tell the waiter or the counter guy what I wanted. It drove me nuts.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I’d tell the waiter what I really wanted. And if I’d, like, gone to the bathroom and Dad had ordered for me while I was away and something I didn’t want showed up, I wouldn’t eat it. I mean, he’s a super-controlling person. I think he means it to be caring somehow, but it can really get on your nerves.”

  And then I decided to take a risk.

  “He would do the same thing with me,” I said. “Only, when I’d protest, he’d give me this look like I was a moody child and say something like, ‘Now don’t be silly. Of course you want a hamburger.’ After a while I just started giving in and ate what he’d ordered for me because the times when I’d argue, he’d look hurt, like I had rejected him. At least, I thought he looked hurt.” Maybe, I thought, Alan had been faking it as part of his plan of manipulation. But was he smart enough to devise a plan?

  Gemma shook her head. “But didn’t it make you insane?”

  “Not at first,” I admitted. “But yes, after a while.”

  “Wow. It’s weird, him acting the same way with us . . .”

  “Not so weird,” I said. “Alan is Alan. People rarely change all that drastically. At least, in my experience they don’t.”

  The waitress returned then, and we ordered our drinks (Gemma had a soda; you can’t win all the time) and dinner. When the waitress had gone, Gemma said: “He took the house keys with him to work once. I mean, he took my set.”

  “Why?” I asked. Oh boy, I thought. I was right. People really don’t change.

  “He said he’d heard there was some child molester running loose. But he was wrong. I mean, there was a child molester running loose, but he was three or four towns away, and the police had found him the night before.” Gemma looked at me closely. “Did he ever do that sort of thing to you?”

  I sighed, though I hadn’t meant to. “Yes,” I said. “There was a big thunderstorm once, long before I had you. It was my day off work, but I needed some cash and I wanted to return a book to the library. When I went to leave the apartment, I couldn’t find the keys. So I called him at his office to see if he’d noticed them before he left for work. Sometimes I was careless with them. He told me he’d taken my keys because he didn’t want me out in bad weather. I told him I needed cash to pay back our neighbor who’d lent me ten dollars the day before. He said he had my bank card and would get the money for me.”

  “Shit. What did you do?”

  I shrugged. “I stayed home. And I stewed. What did you do?”

  Gemma laughed, as if I’d asked a stupid question. Maybe I had. “I left the apartment unlocked!” she said. “I wasn’t about to be anyone’s prisoner. Besides, we had nothing much to steal.”

  “You stood up for yourself. I didn’t. Not for a long time.”

  “Dad never frightened me.”

  And there was the difference. Alan had frightened me. Not always, but after a time.

  How self-sufficient she is, I thought. I’m impressed by my own daughter.

  I decided then to share some of the nice things Alan had done for me early on. It can’t hurt to be fair, can it? “Your father was very sweet when we first met.”

  “Really?” she asked, a distinctly dubious note in her voice. “How did you guys meet anyway?”

  “On line for coffee. It was one of those fancy overpriced coffee shops that seem to attract the very people who really shouldn’t be spending their money on specialty drinks. Students, for one, like I was. Anyway, when it came time for me to pay, I realized I didn’t have my wallet. The guy behind me—your father—said he’d pay for me. I turned around and—well, that was it. I was immediately attracted to him. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. Nothing so romantic.”

  “So what happened then?” Gemma asked. I thought she sounded genuinely interested.

  “We took our coffees to a table in a corner and sat there for almost two hours, talking. Eventually I had to go to a class, and he asked if he could walk me there. I said okay, and then he asked for my phone number. The rest was pretty much history.”

  “Was he your first?”

  It wasn’t a question I’d been expecting, but I supposed there was no point in lying. “Well,” I said, feeling more than a little embarrassed, “yeah, as a matter of fact.”

  “And you were nineteen? That’s kind of old.”

  “Everyone’s different,” I said, thinking about the fact that Gemma and I hadn’t yet talked about sex and birth control and STDs. We would have to, and soon.

  “Why couldn’t you remember those good things about Dad later, when things got weird?” she asked suddenly.

  “I did remember them. But remembering made the present worse. You can’t live on the fumes of what used to be, not for very long. It’s what’s happening now, in the present, that makes us happy or sad. And it’s the present that sets the tone for the future.”

  Our dinner arrived then, and as usual Gemma ate as if this were her last meal. All conversation about anything more important than the food ceased. It wasn’t until we were in the car and on our way home to Birch Lane that I said: “You asked me if Alan was my first.”

  “And you want to know if I’ve had sex. Yes. I have.”

  “Oh. All right.”

  “And yes, I know about protection.”

  “Okay.”

  “Anyway, I’m not really interested in getting involved with anyone right now, so there’s nothing to talk about.”

  “Okay. But if you need anything at some point . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  The uncommunicative Gemma was back.

  Chapter 60

  I rode my bike, the Tyler, to the beach yesterday afternoon. With Marc’s advice, we bought it from a bike repair guy who has his own business out of his garage. Marc’s bought bikes and parts from him before, so we knew we could trust him. It cost eighty bucks, and though Marc said there was no charge for the minor adjustments he made to the bike before I could comfortably ride it, I wonder if Verity gave him something anyway. In my experience, not a lot in this world comes without a price. Anyway, I took my sketchbook and a few pencils in an old set of panniers Marc had passed on to me. For free.

  When I got to the beach, I found a relatively private spot to myself about halfway to the Wells town line, and sat on a log that had been worn smooth by exposure to the sea. It seemed weird to me at first that there’d be a tree trunk on the beach, but Verity says they often wash up; sometimes a tree on the coast of an island is torn down in a storm and falls into the water and sometimes, the tree trunk isn’t a tree trunk at all anymore but a mast from a boat that’s come apart. Other weird stuff washes up too, Verity said, though so far I’ve only seen mounds of stinky seaweed and some battered lobster traps. (It’s illegal to take them, as they belong to the fishermen and have identification on them. All those people who display old lobster traps on their front lawns are probably breaking the law.)

 
Anyway, I sat down on the log, got out my sketchbook and a pencil, and thought about what Verity had said about the past, present, and future. It was true. If you were going to live a normal life, you had to let go of the way things used to be. I mean, you had to stop expecting things to be the way they were.

  I think I’m coming to understand that. Even if Dad gets out of jail tomorrow—that would be a miracle and probably a serious miscarriage of justice!—we could never have our old life back.

  Still, I want to remember that old life. At least, I don’t want to forget it. And life here with Verity isn’t as awful as I was afraid it was going to be, which makes keeping memories of the old life alive more difficult.

  Here’s another thing. As close as Dad and I were—as close as we are—we never really talked about the sorts of things Verity and I talk about, like Life with a capital L and even, briefly, sex. I don’t think it’s because we’re father and daughter and some topics are supposed to be off-limits, if you’re like from the dark ages. I don’t know why it is. Does Dad even think about the big stuff? He must. Doesn’t everybody at least sometimes? Maybe Life overwhelms him too easily so he can’t risk spending too much time and energy trying to figure it all out. If that’s the case, maybe he should be spending the time trying to think things through.

  But what do I know?

  After all that thinking, I got down to some serious sketching, by which I mean I concentrated on looking closely at the other end of the log on which I was sitting. There were the remains of some roots, and they were sticking up and out like skeleton fingers or something else equally as creepy. I also made a fairly decent detailed drawing of a big clamshell that was sticking half out of the sand. There’s a lot going on with seashells, all these lines and ridges and subtle colors. I can see why Verity likes to collect them and to paint them.