Breakwater Bay (4 page)

She shuddered. “No. But you’re not funny. It’s too close to a gothic horror story to joke about.”

“All we need is a crazy lady in the attic.”

“There isn’t one, is there?”

“No.” He picked up his mug and walked to the fireplace. “Just a few skeletons in the closets.”

“In my closet anyway. I just found out I’m not really my mother’s daughter. I don’t know who my mother is. Instead of proposing to me, Peter’s going back to law school . . .” She hadn’t meant to tell him that.

“The boyfriend?”

“Not
the
boyfriend,
my
boyfriend.”

“You have had an exciting birthday, haven’t you?”

She glared at him, a thousand things going through her mind.

“Don’t say it.”

“What?”

“Whatever you were about to say about me being a big brute, distant and unfeeling, callous and out of touch, and that I never really liked him anyway.”

“Well, you didn’t.”

“I didn’t
not
like him.”

It had been exactly what she was thinking, even though she knew it wasn’t really true. Except about Peter. Alden was worse than her dad about Peter.
Her dad.
Had he known when he married her mother that Meri wasn’t really hers?

“I was just going to say that you don’t understand.”

“Actually I do.” He put his mug down and sat down next to her. “You have a family who loves you, no, who dotes on you.”

“But—”

“No buts. They adore you. Always have. Always will.”

“But I’m not really—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, will you give it a rest? Blood is highly overrated. Family is not about somebody who can get knocked up in thirty seconds of poor decision making. It’s about who loves you unconditionally for life. When you’re good, when you screw up, when you hurt them more than they deserve.

“My mother left my father and me when I was eight. Dad neglected her, so she found somebody else. She had to choose between him and us—him and me. She chose him. That’s blood for you. After she left, your mother and Gran became my mother and gran. That’s family. Finish your tea. I’ll walk you back.”

They finished the tea in silence. She knew he was mad at her, but that was because he didn’t really understand what she felt.

He put his cup down and stood. “Come on. I’ll find you a rain slicker. I think Nora left one that might fit you. She’s as tall as you are now.”

She put her cup on the tray. “Don’t be mad at me.”

“I’m not mad.”

“You are. I know you all want what’s best for me. I know they love me, and I love them.”
I even love you, you big bully.
But she would never say so. “I just wasn’t expecting this; I wish it didn’t have to be so complicated.”

Alden passed his hand over his face.

“What now? I said I was sorry.”

“Let’s just go.”

D
an hung up the phone. “That was Alden. He’s bringing her back.”

Therese held tight to the back of the kitchen chair. She felt old. Maybe too old to face what might lay ahead. And she hated being in the position she’d been placed.

She’d had two choices, either lie to her dying daughter or lie to her granddaughter. What choices. Maybe she should have stuck with the living. Did the dead know whether their wishes were carried out or not? Did they care?

“How can I face her after what I’ve done? I should never have given her the letter, but I promised.”

“I know, Therese. This is what Laura wanted. But for heaven’s sake, hide that box. I don’t want to put her through any more tonight. She has enough to come to terms with. There’s plenty of time for the whole story to come out, once she’s gotten used to this part.”

Therese Calder slowly shook her head. “No. No more tonight.” She turned toward the hutch. God, she wanted to take the contents of that box and throw them into the fire. But it was too late for that. Once you started unraveling the past, you couldn’t stop it until you came to the end.

She slid the box toward her. It sagged a bit when she lifted it. It had been hidden away for a long time, and it was carrying a heavy cargo. She looked around the kitchen, suddenly uncertain as to where to put it.

“Here, give it to me. I’ll put it in the attic.”

“No, not the attic. Put it in the closet in my room.”
Where I can watch over it as I have for thirty years.

T
hey walked silently back over the dunes to the cottage. The rain had let up some, but a fine mist coated their slickers. Alden didn’t take a flashlight. Neither of them needed it. Even with the cloud cover they knew their way.

There had been back and forth between the houses for generations. A path had gradually formed from the tramp of years to and from.

What would happen now? Alden wondered. Would things change irrevocably? Would the path grow over? Which one of them would leave first. Him? The woman walking beside him, carrying her wet clothes in a plastic grocery bag?

Thirty years old. It was hard to believe. He still could remember the night she was born, most of it anyway. There were big gaps that he’d never been able to coax out of his subconscious. Maybe he didn’t have to know. Maybe none of them did.

He’d been against telling Meri. He didn’t like change. Not that kind of change anyway, the kind that brought upheaval as this was sure to do. Would she forgive them for keeping her in the dark all these years? Would she forgive him?

And what would learning the truth do to her?

“What?”

He looked sideways at her.

“What was the sigh for?”

“It was a yawn,” he lied. “Sorry. I was up early this morning.”

“Oh.”

They walked on. Toward the cottage, toward the yellow rectangles of light that could have been taken straight from Arthur Rackham. Hansel and Gretel, the Seven Dwarfs. Only when you got closer did it look like what it was, not a fairy tale, but a New England shake and stone farmhouse, built by pragmatic, hardworking farmers over a hundred years before.

Behind them, his house loomed like a bad memory—a monstrosity left over from the Gilded Age that didn’t quite make it to Newport. Now it was a drain on his finances and sorely in need of renovation.

Meri hesitated when they reached the kitchen door. Alden opened it and nudged her inside, shutting the door behind her. Then he shoved his hands in the pockets of his rain slicker and began his solitary walk home.

Was his promise to that poor girl fulfilled now that Meri knew? And when had his promise changed from obligation to joy?

M
eri heard the door close behind her. She’d been hoping Alden would stay for a few minutes at least, to help with the transition or lend moral support. But she should have known better.

Her dad and Gran stood together facing her like a photograph, stuck in time.

Feelings of love and remorse swept over her. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” her dad said and scooped her into a hug. “We all love you, sweetheart.”

“I know, Dad. It was just such a shock. I had no idea at all. And now . . . Well, I just feel like I don’t know who I am.”

“You’re a Calder Hollis,” Gran said.

Dan opened one arm and included Gran in the hug. She was small next to her son-in-law and granddaughter. Because Meri
was
her granddaughter—Alden was right. She knew Gran loved her, would always love her; she knew that. The problem wasn’t with them; it was with her, and she needed to figure out a way to come to terms with the other stuff herself. But that could take some time, once it had settled in, and she found out the whole story, and found her birth family, and then . . .

T
he next morning broke clean and sunny. It was going to be a gorgeous day and for seconds after waking in her room upstairs at Gran’s, Meri forgot the trauma of the previous night. But even the sun couldn’t keep realization at bay for long.

It all came back to her as soon as she saw Alden’s sweatpants and sweatshirt lying over the back of her desk chair. She curled up, unwilling to face the day. Face her new status.

Damn Alden and his “switched at birth” nonsense. But it wasn’t nonsense. Her mother had taken a baby that wasn’t hers and raised it as her own.

It would be laughable if it hadn’t been her. And she tried to imagine what she would think if she heard the story of someone else in that situation. Would she shrug it off and think so what? Laugh and say lucky kid? Or dismiss it as a fabrication since it would be impossible to pull off something like that in twentieth-century Rhode Island? Of course that proved not to be the case.

She groaned, then stopped herself, remembering Alden’s other words.
They love you even when you hurt them.
And she was not going to hurt them again. They had been good to her all her life. Whether she deserved it or not. She wouldn’t repay them by throwing that love in their faces.

Meri dressed in jeans, scrubbed her face, held a cold washcloth over her swollen eyes, covered the worst of the blotches with makeup, pulled her hair, a bit unwieldy from sleeping with it wet, into a ponytail, and went downstairs to face her new life.

Her father sat at the kitchen table, nursing a mug of steaming coffee. Gran was standing at the stove. “What would you like for breakfast?”

Meri didn’t think she could eat, but she’d taken Alden’s words to heart about hurting them so she said, “Do you still have some of that farm bacon from Scully’s?”

Gran’s face and body lightened about ten years. “Of course I do. It’s your birthday.”

Meri poured herself coffee and went to sit at the kitchen table with her father. She slowed down as she passed the hutch and noticed that the cardboard box from the night before was gone.

Had that been a part of their disclosure last night? Would they have shown her the contents if she hadn’t run away? Had they changed their minds about showing her the rest? Or was it just a box that had made its way to recycling this morning? Either way, Meri wasn’t ready to face anything more today. And really, what more could there be?

“Do the boys know?”

Her dad looked up from his coffee cup. “Not yet, but it won’t make any difference to them. They’re your brothers. You’re their sister. Period.”

“Will you tell them, or should I?”

“I will, and I’m sure they’ll be calling you.”

And what would she say to them when they did?

After a hearty breakfast, which everyone forced down with a smile, Dan collected his gear and threw it in the trunk of his car, along with a plastic container of cioppino.

“Sorry I have to run out on you like this.”

“That’s okay. I’m going to have to leave pretty early myself. Dinner with Peter tonight.”

“How’s that going?”

“He’s decided to go back to law school.”

“Smart move, but how do you feel about it? It’s a long haul, law school.”

“Yeah, but he won’t go until the fall, so we’ll have a few months to figure out what we want to do. If—”

“Don’t even worry about the other thing. If he loves you, he won’t care.”

She smiled and wondered if that was true. She thought about it. Would she love Peter if he told her he wasn’t who he said he was? Of course she would. Her dad was right.

It wouldn’t matter to her. So why did the circumstance of her own birth matter so much?

“Love you.” Dan kissed her forehead and gave her grandmother a hug. “You two take care. I’ll call you.”

They stood together and watched him drive away. Stood there until he reached the road and drove out of sight.

“Let’s get the dishes done,” Meri said. “And then I want to go over and say good-bye to Alden and thank him for letting me drip all over his floor.”

“I’m sure he didn’t mind a bit.”

“He’s always there, isn’t he? I don’t mean at home, but . . .”

“Ever since he was a boy. Reliable. Good man. His father was a good man.”

They went inside. “And his mother?”

“Alden’s mother?”

Meri nodded. “What she was like? Alden said she ran off with another man when he was eight. He never told me that before.”

Gran sniffed. “She was a piece of work, that one. Lorded it over the whole neighborhood. Called that old monstrosity ‘the big house,’ like one of those public television shows.” She snorted. “Though Laura used to say it made it sound like the state prison.

“Which would be fitting because that woman made Wilton miserable from the day she married him. Never satisfied, that one, finally left. Frankly, we all thought it was the best thing that could have happened to Wilton and his boy, though I’m sure they didn’t think so at the time.”

“And Alden’s wife?”

Gran ran water into the sink and squirted detergent under the spray. “You remember her.”

“I do remember her. She was pretty and kind of distant, I thought. But I didn’t pay much attention. I was a teenager, and then I was off at college.”

“She was a gold-digging little bitch.”

Meri nearly dropped the plate she was scraping into the trash. She’d never heard her grandmother use that word before.

“Like father like son. Alden married one just like his mother. It’s amazing the man has anything left. There’s some family money, whatever the mother didn’t abscond with. His father left him pretty well off.”

Therese took the plate from Meri and slid it into the soapy water. “Everybody says he makes good money as an illustrator, but they also say she takes every penny she can screw out of him. Now go get those other plates if you want to go over there before you drive back to town.”

A
half hour later, Meri was walking over the same meadow she’d run across the night before. Today was sunny, though, and only a few puddles remained to remind her of that headlong reckless flight.

She knew that Alden might be working, so instead of disturbing him by banging on the door—a remembered image she could do without today—she walked around the house to the ocean side, where she could look in the glass of the solarium where he sometimes worked.

His drafting table was set up, and his tools were lined up within reach. He was wearing a paint-splattered dress shirt, open at the collar and sleeves rolled up to the elbow. A curl of dark hair fell over his forehead, the rest curled around the frayed collar.