Seashell Season (21 page)

And not get caught stealing a freakin' car.

Chapter 59

“D
id 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 order. 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.

Then, as I sat there sketching, something occurred to me. I don't know why. Well, yes, I do. It probably had something to do with my realizing that I want to remember my past. I turned to a new page of the sketchbook, and without making a concentrated effort to see Dad's face in my mind's eye, I just started to draw. I'd never tried anything like that in the short time I've been sketching, drawing something from memory, especially not something so . . . so intimate and subjective as a human face. The face of someone I love.

It was a disaster. I got as far as sort of outlining the shape of the head and the eyes, nose, and mouth when I stopped. Not only did the unfinished image on the page look nothing at all like the image of my father in my head, it hardly looked like a human face at all.

Maybe I'm just not ready to tackle that kind of a project.

Or maybe I've already started to forget.

Chapter 61

“S
he wrote back to my father.”

Annie and I were sitting at her kitchen table, cups of coffee before us.

“So?” she said. “Didn't you say he sent her a card and a twenty-dollar bill? Maybe she just thanked him for it.”

“I know, but I just didn't think she would contact him. I told her we aren't close.”

“That doesn't mean
she
can't be close to her grandfather.”

“I know,” I said. “He wrote her back. I saw the envelope this morning when the mail was delivered. That's when she told me she'd written to him.”

“Why does this bother you?” Annie asked. “I think I'm missing something.”

“I never understood why my father remarried so soon after my mother's death.” I hadn't planned on saying that. But there it was, an old hurt revealed.

“Common wisdom has it that people—men, in particular—remarry soon after they're widowed because they enjoyed being married. In a way, it's a compliment to the first spouse.”

I frowned. “I'm not sure I buy that. And to get remarried to a woman so totally unlike my mother!”

“Is that what this is about?”

“What?” I know I sounded defensive.

“Your being upset that Gemma is in touch with your father. Are you still angry with him for having moved on with his life? Doesn't he deserve to be happy?”

I didn't answer right away. I felt embarrassed. Was I really so immature? “I told you what he said to me after Alan took Gemma,” I said then, pointedly not answering Annie's question. “He asked if I'd done something to make Alan angry enough to steal my child.”

Annie sighed. “Come on, Verity,” she said. “The man was probably at a loss. I mean, how often is the average person witness to the kidnapping of someone close to him? I can't really believe he meant anything by it. He was probably just trying to figure it all out, as were you.”

I thought about that. It made some sense. But I wasn't—I'm not—ready to reverse my position regarding my father.

“It's been how many years since your mother died?” Annie asked then. “Over twenty, right? Let it go, Verity. At least, let your daughter have a relationship with her grandfather if she wants to. Who knows? Gemma might be the one to heal the rift between you and Tom.”

My first thought was to doubt that Gemma might affect any such thing, but then again, miracles do happen. Gemma had come home. She was no longer in the grip of her crazy father. And that led me to exclaim:

“How could Alan have allowed her to get multiple tattoos—let alone one tattoo!—when she's only a kid? Worse, she said she got the first one when she was fourteen!”

“Are you certain Gemma's father knew about the inking?” Annie asked.

“She says he took her to a friend of a friend who did both for a discount. Isn't that illegal, getting a child marked with a needle and ink?”

“If it isn't, it should be. But then again, I'm squeamish. And curious. I've seen the heart on her ankle. Pierced by an arrow, no less. What's the other one she's got?”

I winced. “It's a tramp stamp. Right above her butt. A pair of wings with a heart between them.”

“Ow. Well, at least it isn't a skull or a nasty word. And tattoos can be removed, if you want them to be. And I'm not sure we should be using that term, tramp stamp. Women need to respect the choices of other women. Stick together and all that.”

“Sorry,” I said. “You're right. Anyway, I doubt Gemma's going to want her tattoos removed. She'll probably be accumulating more ink before too long. Not that I'll give her permission, but that won't stand in her way.”

“Don't make assumptions. You might ask her not to get another tattoo until she's eighteen. She might say okay.”

“Or she might run right out and get some particularly sensitive part of her body pierced.”

“Is she really that reactionary? That perverse?”

I sighed. “I don't know. It seems as if she is, at least with me. But not all the time. I'm being grumpy. I should give Gemma the benefit of the doubt. And the space and time she needs to come to terms with the sense of dislocation and loss she must be feeling.”

“It couldn't hurt to try.”

And I am trying. Honestly. I'm trying all the time.

“Do you know,” I told Annie, “that when Gemma first came home to me, she was so down, so closed off, I was afraid she'd try to commit suicide. So many teens do.”

“Gemma's not the type,” Annie stated with certainty.

“I know that now. At least, I think I do. Anyway, is there really a
type
to commit suicide? Isn't it entirely possible that almost every person at some terribly low point in his or her life could be tempted to end it all?”

Annie thought about that for a moment. Finally she said: “Tempted, yes. But to actually go through with it? No, I don't think that the majority of people would make that choice. For some it would be because of religious reasons. For others, fear of what might be an even worse existence after life on earth. Some people might just decide that the prospect of a good cup of coffee in the morning was enough to live for.”

“Or, in Gemma's case, a good cup of coffee accompanied by a chocolate doughnut.”

Annie laughed. “The girl does have a sweet tooth!”