Seashell Season

by Holly Chamberlin

  Chapter 112

  Alan called this morning, right on time. He had no excuse for not calling last week. At least, I guess he didn’t because he didn’t mention it. Neither did I.

  Anyway, I had decided I would take the call, but I know now for sure that the magic in our relationship, such as it was, is gone. And if I stick to the decision to keep him in my life, I’m going to have to accept his severe limitations. (I can’t preach to Verity about her relationship with her father if I don’t follow my own advice!) I’m going to have to live without expectation of his making smart choices for himself. I’m going to have to live with the expectation of disappointment. Maybe, someday in the future, I’ll stop even being disappointed by Alan. Maybe I’ll have learned how to abandon every last little bit of emotional connection. Who knows?

  He asked how I was doing. I said fine. He asked if it was hot. I said yes. I asked him if he’d gotten his annual summer cold yet. He said no. I didn’t ask anything about his case.

  We were off the phone in record time. When he said, “Love you,” just before hanging up, I said, “You too.” I think I still mean it.

  See, even though my feelings for my father are damaged, not what they once were, I do feel bad that he’s all alone in the world. Really all alone. I mean, I certainly can’t help him, not from out here and not when I can’t even handle knowing all the details of his day-to-day life in case they make me too upset. And Mom and Marion (I’m going to call her Gram; I think it will make her feel like I’m not mad at her for lying about Alan) can’t help him, either, even if they wanted to, and I know Marion—Gram—wants to rescue him somehow. Some people might say my father doesn’t deserve help, supposing there was any real help to give. But I don’t know about that. I don’t think Alan Burns deserves to be abandoned. I just don’t.

  I guess I don’t think anyone deserves to be abandoned.

  I was thinking last night about that poster in Verity’s studio at the college, about what that guy Sir Francis Bacon said about “strangeness in proportion” being what makes something really beautiful. And I was thinking, that’s one of the problems with Ellen Burns-Cassidy. I’m not talking about her physical appearance as much as I am about the way she presents herself to the world. Too perfect. Everything right where it should be. But when you really look at perfection, you see that it’s not only boring, it’s also sometimes ugly.

  That said, I do hope Ellen will be okay. That Richard won’t abandon her. But what if he needs to save himself?

  Not my problem.

  By the way, Verity gave me the silver and turquoise ring to keep. I love it. And the minute she gave it to me, it dawned on me that I’d never asked when her birthday is! I mean, how self-centered am I? Anyway, I was too embarrassed to ask her, so as soon as I could, I e-mailed my grandfather, who got back to me right away. October seventeenth is the answer. I so won’t forget it.

  We’re all going out this afternoon to celebrate the end of The Ellen and Richard Show, which is what I’m now calling their time in Yorktide. They’ve gone back home, by the way. I guess they lost money, abandoning the McMansion they’d paid for through the very end of the summer. I don’t care. And I gave their bike to that place for old people, Pine Hill. Not everyone there is ancient and incapacitated, and the staff person Verity and I talked to when we dropped it off said she thought there’d be a fight for its use. Well, she was smiling when she said it, and anyway, Verity said the administration sets up schedules for the use of all the recreational facilities and stuff. There’s still no verdict on the stoplight, by the way, but the fight’s not over.

  As for the watch Ellen and Richard gave me, we sold it. Not that we need the money the way Ellen implied, but we want it and are going to have fun with it. Five hundred dollars! It’s splurge money, Verity says. Now all we have to do is decide what we want to splurge on. And the phone, well, I’ll hang on to it, because someday my old one is going to break or get lost, right?

  Anyway, like I said, Verity, David, Marion, and I, and the Strawberries (I really should stop calling them that) are going to a lobster pound right on the water (duh, where else would it be?) in Kittery Point. After that we’re going to an outdoor concert with a local jazz band. I don’t know anything about jazz, but I know I’m going to have a good time.

  I really know it.

  Epilogue

  Greetings from Yorktide, Maine!

  It’s just over a year since I came to live with my mother. Can you believe it?

  Where to begin?

  Well, I got through my first New England winter without killing anyone or, more important, without killing myself. People here joke about that sort of thing—cabin fever and stuff—so it’s okay if I do too now. I’d never seen so much snow in my life, outside of the movies, I mean. It was pretty gorgeous and also kind of overwhelming in a frightening sort of way, especially when you looked out over the ocean right after a storm and all you could see was—monochrome. The sea and the sky and the rocks and the sand were all tones of white and gray and black. No spot of color anywhere. It was pretty eerie, like something out of a movie about ancient mythical lands populated by wizards and trolls and half men/half beasts. Even though I’m still a novice with the art thing, I had to try to draw and even to paint those bleak but beautiful winter landscapes. Some of the pieces came out okay. Some, not so much. Manipulating paint is hard.

  And the cold! Whoa. Everyone here walks around dressed in, like, a million layers, and no one seems to mind that they look like the Michelin Man. Mom had to teach me how to dress—like I was a little kid again!—because if you don’t know about layering and what winds off the ocean can feel like (sandpaper scraping over your skin) and SmartWool socks, you’ll be seriously sorry and probably get frostbite. And the minute the temperature climbs to, like, forty, people start wearing shorts, and some even wear flip-flops when there’s still snow and ice hanging around in dirty patches. I was as eager as anyone to get back into T-shirts and to put away my thirty-pound L.L.Bean boots (which I got at a secondhand shop), but there was no way I was going to expose any part of my body below my neck before the temperature got up to at least sixty-five. Which it finally did in, like, May. It was just one more adjustment to make so that I’d learn to fit into my new world. Like getting used to having home-cooked meals in place of frozen dinners, and a washing machine and dryer actually in the house so that you didn’t have to drive miles to the local laundry place and hang out with a random bunch of people, most of whom were as annoyed as you were to be there, while your clothes got destroyed by a crappy industrial-strength machine.

  And then there’s the whole winter sports thing. Mom and I don’t really have money for skiing, which is crazy expensive, but Annie and Marc found this great deal for a day at some mountain in New Hampshire, and one day in January they invited me along. You know how I feel about sports, but the idea of skiing seemed kind of cool—the scenery, I thought, would be good—so I borrowed some of Annie’s old equipment, and David gave me a fleece scarf/hat thing he said he’d never worn. He says he doesn’t look good in bright blue. Men can be so vain! It was really nice of Annie and Marc to offer me the opportunity to go with them—all expenses paid, if you can believe it—but in about a minute I realized skiing just isn’t for me. I kind of knew it wouldn’t be, like I said, but I thought, what the hell? I’ll give it a try. And then I was on my butt more often than I was on my feet, and Cathy and her parents and all these little kids were whizzing by me and laughing while I tried to get back up onto my feet without impaling myself somehow on the tips of my skis.

  Bottom line—I suck. Really suck. It’s a freakin’ miracle I didn’t break my head or something. Never. Again.

  I have to admit I got a little sentimental around Christmas. It was the first one I’d ever spent without my father and the first one I’d ever spent with my mother, and if that isn’t enough to unsettle even the most hard-hearted person, I don’t know what is. Mom seemed to sense my mood though, and she was sensit
ive enough, as usual, not to press me to “share.” I mean, I had a good time overall. Yorktide and the other towns around here were totally decorated in pine boughs and big red ribbons, and almost every house had at least a few strings of colored lights around the windows and over the front door. And don’t forget the wreaths. It’s hard not to feel upbeat with everyone you meet in the convenience store and the post office and even the gas station, if you can believe it, passing around gifts of homemade candy and cookies. We had dinner with Annie and Marc and Cathy and David at the Strawbridges’ house on Christmas Day, but on Christmas Eve, Mom and I went to midnight mass (which was actually at ten o’clock) at an Episcopal church she told me she used to go to sometimes ages ago, and I was so surprised by how peaceful I felt, almost like I was in another, much better world. Maybe it was the music and the incense, but by the time the service was over, I felt kind of high, in a good way. The mood lasted even after we’d left the church and gone home, where we sat around for a while, drinking hot chocolate and listening to an old CD Mom has of a Christmas album some singer named Johnny Mathis made in the sixties or something. I’ve always been suspicious of any experience even remotely warm and fuzzy, but right then I was happy enough to hum along to “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”

  Still, I thought a lot about all the Christmases I’d spent alone with Alan, and how he would buy these packaged Italian-style cookies with pink and green icing (I loved those cookies) and how he’d stuff my stocking (really just a sock) with candy (of course) and silly little things he’d get at the dollar store or from the gum ball machines at the grocery store: little plastic monsters and marbles and bead bracelets that would break by the end of the day. One year he found a silver tinsel tree on the sidewalk, obviously thrown out by whoever had once owned it, and he brought it in. It was about two feet high, and though its stand was half broken, we managed to sit it on our kitchen table, though it made eating there kind of difficult. We decorated the tree with tiny candy canes and round red glass balls we got at the hardware store for, like, two dollars a box. Finally, after about four or five years, the tree just fell apart (and most of the balls had gotten broken by then) and we had no choice but to throw it into the garbage. Dad really loved that tree, even more than I did. I thought of him, alone in his cell (but for the snoring cell mate he complains about), probably without any glittering decorations and certainly without any presents and Annie’s amazing roast goose and Mom’s homemade chunky cranberry relish (I’d never seen cranberry relish that didn’t come in a can!), and I tried to remind myself that Alan Burns was where he was because of his own choices, and I shouldn’t feel sorry for him. But it was no use. I did feel sorry for him. I didn’t let it ruin my own Christmas season though, and I didn’t feel guilty for that.

  Mom got me a silver and turquoise bracelet to go with the ring she gave me last summer, and I got her this new modeling tool she wanted (I asked David to find out for me what she secretly wished for). She told me I didn’t need to get her anything (she said I should save my money), but come on, like I could sit there, tearing open a gift from her and not give her something in return. I’m not a total jerk. Anymore.

  About making friends.

  I feel like Cathy and I are friends by default, and she probably feels the same way, but that’s okay. I never really had a close friend before coming here to Yorktide, at least, never a close friend for very long, what with all the times we moved and with Dad’s being so obstructive about my social life—when he wasn’t oblivious to it. I guess I never knew how to make and keep a real friend. It’s still not really an easy thing for me to do, and Mom tells me that when she was young, she had trouble making and keeping friends too. She’s told me how Dad managed to isolate her from her college friends and the artists she’d hung around with, but she says she doesn’t blame him for that anymore. She says she was responsible for her life—if only she had known it then! Anyway, aside from Cathy, there’s this girl I met at YCC when I was hanging around one afternoon, waiting for Mom to get done teaching a class. I was in the library, sitting in one of those big faux leather chairs they have (a lot of them are cracked, but whatever), flipping through one of those huge coffee table books (this one was on the symbolism of churches and cathedrals), when this girl sat in the chair close to mine and said hi. LaJuana—that’s her name—was also waiting for her mother, who teaches American history, and we got to talking. She doesn’t go to my high school and she lives in Bermondsey, which is a few towns away, so she doesn’t spend a lot of time in poky little downtown Yorktide (which is actually kind of sweet), so that’s probably why I hadn’t seen her around. We kind of hit it off—she’s snarky in a funny way—so we hang out sometimes. (She drives and has her own car. I drive now, but Mom and I share a car.)

  And a few times I’ve hung out with Daisy Higgins and Sophie Stueben, girls I first saw at Mom’s opening last summer but didn’t get to meet until school started. Sophie’s got a past almost as dramatic as mine, and Daisy’s been through a lot too, losing both of her parents so young. Sophie and Daisy are really tight, so it’s more like I’m just an acquaintance than a friend, but that’s okay. It’s not like I need a lot of friends or even that I want a lot of friends. I still sometimes feel a bit overwhelmed by all that’s happened in my life since last spring when Dad stole that car. I feel like there are enough new people around already for me to get to really know—Mom and Marion, David and the Strawbridges, and even Tom, long-distance.

  As for guys, even though there are a few cute ones in school, I’ve decided not to get involved with anyone—not even just for sex—for at least a few years. And when I do decide it’s time to be open to a relationship, I think I might want to find someone a bit older, someone who’s seen more of life than the average pampered kid, someone who’s handled bigger problems than not being able to afford a pair of fancy sneakers. But who knows? Maybe I’ll wind up falling for the boy next door. Not that there is one older than little Michael Gallison, but you know what I mean.

  I just finished my junior year with good grades overall and a certificate of excellence in art. Yeah, turns out I’m a prodigy or something. Just kidding, but I do have talent. I know you’re thinking, Why is she eighteen and still in high school? It’s because Alan held me back from going to first grade with everyone else my age. He said he didn’t think I was ready. He’s the one who wasn’t ready.

  Whatever.

  I got along okay with most kids in my class. The fact that, like Cathy said, the school doesn’t tolerate bullying and has that group called Respekt Yourself helped! And I’ve found that kids—young people—make a lot less of a stink about things than most adults. I mean, only two people said anything to me about my past, and neither was obnoxious about it. Anyway, that was way back last September, just after school started. By now I’m just one of the crowd. Fine by me.

  Back to my father. It’s not great news, but no big surprise, either. Because he wouldn’t accept the plea bargain, in the end he got a pretty severe sentence—ten years jail time and fines, though I don’t know how he’ll ever manage to pay the fines because he’s broke. There’s some chance for an early release. I don’t know the details—once I would have wanted to—but knowing Alan, he’ll blow that somehow and wind up serving the entire decade. The trial and sentencing was reported in the local papers, and for about a week I was the hot topic again in Yorktide. But this time I took my celebrity in my stride, and soon enough it was over. I’ve had too many fifteen minutes of fame for one person, thank you very much. Now I’d like to live the rest of my life quietly.

  Like that will happen!

  Marion—like I said, I call her Gram; it makes her happy—is pretty devastated by the ten-year sentence. She writes to Alan every week. I saw an unfinished letter on her kitchen table once when I was visiting her. When she came into the room about half a second later, I pretended I hadn’t seen it, and Gram stuffed the piece of paper into the pocket of her sweater. I’m not sure if Mom knows Gram writes to her
son, and I have no idea what Gram tells him or even if he writes back. I could ask, I suppose, but I don’t. I don’t really want to know.

  I write to him now, also. It’s easier than talking on the phone and hearing that too familiar note of whining and persecution in his voice. But he is, after all, my father, so I guess I owe him something. I tell him about school and the weather and keep as neutral as I can, only occasionally mentioning Mom. It’s not easy, believe me, and a part of me feels like I’m doing wrong by my mother by pretending she’s not now a huge part of my life. But it is what it is. I’m trying not to get further dragged into the melodrama I was born to be a part of. I don’t want to have to hear any rantings or self-defensive lies on Alan’s part if I talk too much about Mom.

  One thing I did tell him though. I told him she’s teaching me to draw and to paint. He said: “Is she forcing you?” I wasn’t surprised at his reaction. I wasn’t. Still, I was a bit hurt. He doesn’t care about me, not really, just his limited version of me. “No,” I told him. “I asked her to teach me. I like it.” To that he said nothing, and I won’t mention it again. Nor will I send him anything I draw or paint. He’ll only see it as being from Mom.

  Anyway, Alan is Alan, and I have no illusions at all about his worth to my life. When he gets out of prison—if he manages not to get himself killed before that—I suspect he’ll want to see me, but right now I don’t know how I feel about that. Nothing would be the same as it was before he stole that car, and now I know what we had together was largely a lie.

  I know I have the power to make the decision to see him or not, and I’ll think long and hard before making that decision. A big factor is what it would do to Mom if I agreed to meet with him. Of course I know Mom would never stand in my way if I did want to see Alan—she’s proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that she’s got my best interests in mind and that she’s a fundamentally fair person—but still, I don’t know. Alan Burns really hurt her, almost destroyed her, and the sacrifice of Mom’s peace of mind just might not be worth any happiness or satisfaction I might get out of seeing my father face-to-face. We’ll see when the time comes.