Seashell Season (6 page)

Chapter 14

I
made something easy, pasta with pesto sauce, a salad, and bread. Gemma looked at the pesto with deep suspicion and then bent down and sniffed hard. Only then did she take a bite—after slicing the linguini into tiny pieces. She ate the entire plateful and had two pieces of bread, though no salad.

Vegetables are going to be an issue.

“Do you have any questions?” I asked when I had cleared the plates.

“About what?”

“Anything. About the town, for example? About the places we saw earlier?”

What I didn't say was,
About what really happened between your father and me all those years ago?
There will be time enough for that discussion. At least, I hope there will be.

Gemma shrugged. “No.”

Neither of us spoke after that, and once again, directly after dinner, Gemma went off to her room and closed the door firmly behind her.

By that time I was exhausted. Bone-tired. I assumed Gemma was too.

I took my time cleaning up, though there wasn't that much to wash and put away. I suppose I hoped that Gemma—Marni— might come back out of her room and want to talk. Or just to be with me.

The name thing is a problem. Try as I might to remember to call her Marni, I keep calling her Gemma. A habit of a lifetime is hard to break. And I really
should
be calling her by the only name she's ever known. Our names are so deeply a part of our identity and I suspect that my daughter's sense of her self—of the familiar face in the mirror—must be in a pretty precarious state right now. She doesn't need me always reinforcing the fact that she's been dumped smack in the middle of an identity crisis.

Later I went up to my room, closed the door, and called Annie. I was careful to keep my voice low.

“How's she doing?” Annie asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “She's not giving much away. Well, other than the obvious—she'd rather not be here.”

“Of course she wouldn't. Can you blame her?”

“No.”

“How are you holding up?”

“All right. Fine, I guess.”

“Verity.”

“Okay, not fine. Very glad she's here. Very aware she doesn't want to be. Very . . .” But I couldn't find any more words.

Annie said good night, and I crawled into my bed. As I'd suspected, sleep didn't come easily in spite of my great weariness. A barrage of memories filled my head, each clamoring for notice.

The one-year anniversary of Gemma's kidnapping. We'd made the front page of most of the local papers again.
Baby Gemma Still Missing
.
Brave Mom Hasn't Given Up Hope
.

The time I did give up hope, those months a few years later when I just couldn't muster the faith in a decent universe, in justice, in a happy ending for my daughter and me. The moment I felt that Gemma was dead. The moment I felt I couldn't go on. The terror that overtook me, and my subsequent fight to recover from despair.

The occasions when people would come up to me on the street, sure they had caught a glimpse of Alan in a neighboring town or that they had seen his face on television, at a ball game, one of a crowd, but certain it was him. More than once I lost my temper with these generally well-meaning people. “You should be telling this to the police, not harassing me with your silly ideas!”

On and on the memories came until some time after midnight I must have worn myself out. The next thing I remember, it was morning.

Day three of my new life.

Chapter 15

T
here are so many new things to freakin' process. New sites, new faces, even new tastes. Dinner was the first time I ever had pesto sauce. Usually I'm not a fan of green food—I mean, broccoli? Really?—but this smelled like garlic, which I love, and so I tried it and it was delicious. Not that I said anything about it to Verity.

Okay, so she's my mother, my biological parent. So what? What does that
mean
? What does that
matter
? She wasn't there for the first part of my life, so what gives her any rights over me?

She keeps calling me Gemma. And I keep correcting her. Honestly, right now, at this very moment, lying here on this couch in what is now supposed to be my room, I wonder if I even care. Gemma Elizabeth. That's what was put on my birth certificate. The real one. Not the false document Dad somehow managed to get. When you think about it, he's a pretty smart guy. Keeping our real identities a secret for all those years. Getting his hands on phony identification papers and whatever else he had to do to create Jim Armstrong and his daughter, Marni.

Too bad he didn't put all that talent into something less criminal.

What would it have been like if he hadn't run away with me?

That's way too big a question to ask, let alone to answer. And suddenly I felt really sick. Maybe I was having a panic attack, I don't know, but all of a sudden I felt like I might throw up and then sweat began to pop out on my forehead and then I think I might have made a sound, like a whimper.

But I got control of myself. I'm good at that, sometimes. I swallowed hard and thought about my breathing, and after about a minute I was okay.

Still, I wished I could call Dad. I can't remember when I last felt the need for my father's comforting arm around my shoulder, but I felt it then, bad.

And then I thought,
If I'm going to survive this sentence I've been handed, I'm going to have to get my shit together.
No panic attacks, no breaking down, no lowering my defenses.

I didn't think I'd be able to sleep, but I did.

I never dream.

Chapter 16

T
his morning I got a call from a representative of a local church. It's one I know of but not a lot about, other than that its members are Christian. The man who called was very nice, not at all pushy, but what he had in mind appalled me.

“We want,” he said, “to give Gemma a welcome home party. We'll invite the entire community of Yorktide, not just our little congregation. We think we can manage to barter for use of the middle school auditorium. When one member of the community is lost, we're all lost. And when one member of the community is found, so are we all found.”

It was a lovely, if misguided, offer, and I had to tread carefully in my rejection. In the end he was not to be entirely deterred and said, “Well, when Gemma has had time to get used to her new home. We'll speak again in the autumn.”

I had no choice but to agree. Just the other day Annie and Marc had reminded me—as if I needed reminding, what with the banner across Main Street!—that the community (that strange and powerful thing) had been deeply invested in the story of Gemma's disappearance and that they would want to be a part of her return—for honest as well as for prurient reasons. “You'll have to acknowledge the well-wishers,” Annie said. “As well as the vampires.”

How true,
I thought now. Ever since the story of Gemma's having been found hit the national news sources, not to mention the local papers, I've been bombarded with messages of congratulations from people I know only vaguely, tangentially, like the chairman of the town council (I've attended maybe five meetings in the last five years), as well as from my colleagues at YCC and others I know on a practical, daily-life basis, like the woman who cuts my hair once every six weeks and the hygienist at the dentist's office who scolds me for not flossing properly and the guy who owns the car wash I visit only once a year. I've even gotten a call from a major newspaper in Boston, looking for “an exclusive.” But our lives are not for sale.

I didn't tell Gemma about the proposed party or about the offer from the newspaper.

Later in the morning there were two separate deliveries of flowers, both from the most expensive florist in town. The first one, a bundle of seventeen white roses with a few ferns and some baby's breath for good measure, came from the local branch manager of my bank, and the other, a massive arrangement of purple and yellow irises, from the college. Both bouquets must have cost a small fortune.

“They're pretty,” I said, wondering if I had a vase big enough to hold the roses.

“Too bad it's not candy.” Gemma frowned down at the two tiny cards. “ ‘Welcome home,' ” she read. “ ‘We never lost faith.' ”

“As you saw yesterday,” I said, “you're a bit of a celebrity. There's no avoiding it entirely, but I hope we can manage it.”

I handed Gemma the letter I had composed after the call from the church representative this morning. It's a letter I'll ask the local papers to print, thanking everyone in Yorktide for their prayers and support all these years, and asking now for privacy. I hope it doesn't sound too much like one of those statements celebrities issue when they're getting divorced. Self-aggrandizing. Reminding people you exist and are important while at the same time asking them to forget those very things.

Gemma read it quickly and handed it back.

“Okay?” I asked, hoping for some comment, bad or good.

“Whatever.”

“I guess I should show you the website. There's no point in not showing it to you before I shut it down for good.”

Let me be clear. I don't want to give Gemma information overload, but I'd rather she learn truths from me than from a stranger.

What am I saying? To my daughter, I'm a stranger.

“What website?” she asked.

A spark of curiosity! I was thankful for it.

“A few years after your father took you,” I explained, “I created a website devoted to the abduction case. It's called
Bring Gemma Home
.” Naturally enough.

I took a seat at the kitchen table, flipped open my laptop, and opened the website.

Gemma sat next to me, within two feet, but again it felt as if she were miles away. “But you weren't sure that my father had been the one to take me,” she said. “Right?”

“Well, yes,” I admitted. “The police could find no evidence, but everyone assumed Alan was guilty. I mean, the two of you going missing the same day . . . It seemed like more than a coincidence.”

What I didn't tell her then was that the reason I'd moved out of the apartment Alan and I had shared was because one night, in one of the frenzies that had begun to come over him since Gemma's birth, he accused me of holding her “all wrong” and tried to yank her out of my arms, and as I told you earlier, if I hadn't been able to catch her as his grip faltered, she would have fallen to the hardwood floor. She might have died. Recalling that frightening moment, I never had any doubt at all that Alan was the abductor.

I snuck a look at Gemma. Her face was blank.

“Portraits aren't my strong suit,” I said, “and I don't have the reconstructive forensic skills. So each year I commissioned a sketch from a freelance forensic artist of what you might look like in the present. And here,” I said, pointing at the screen, “here's where people could send me any information that might surface, someone spotting a man and a child that could have been Alan and you. I'm told a missing persons case usually gets about six hundred to eight hundred tips. Your case got well over one thousand.”

“What did you hope was going to happen?” she asked very quietly.

“For one, I hoped one day you might stumble across the website and see I was still searching for you. I know, it doesn't make much sense. Even if you had found the website, it might not have rung any bells if Alan had lied about your past. You'd have no reason to think you were the missing girl from Yorktide once known as Gemma.”

What I didn't say to her was that I often wondered if I was putting her at risk by maintaining the website. It had occurred to me that if Alan knew about it, he might retaliate by hurting Gemma. Still, I decided it was worth my effort. If Alan did lash out at Gemma, assuming he was still insanely possessive and thinking I was out to steal Gemma back (which, of course, I was), there was a chance that someone—a neighbor, a friend—might witness his bad behavior and intervene, ultimately bringing Gemma to safety. I know. Ridiculous. But I think I can be excused for grasping at straws.

“He told me that we had lived in Rhode Island,” Gemma said suddenly. “The three of us, I mean.”

And I knew from Soledad Valdes that he had also told Gemma that I was a crack addict and that I had tried to harm her, forcing Alan to flee. “We lived right here in Yorktide,” I said. “When you were born, we had a small apartment on Front Street.” I had been forced to move back to that apartment after the kidnapping and after Barbara, the friend with whom Gemma and I had been living, asked me to leave. My presence in her home was too upsetting for her. I hadn't stayed for long in that apartment on Front Street. Alan's remembered presence there was too upsetting for
me
.

“He told me that he had no family of his own,” Gemma said then, still staring at the screen. “That both of his parents were dead. When I turned fifteen, he told me that he had stumbled across the fact that my mother had died of an overdose years before. He said now we were all alone in the world, with only each other.”

God damn him,
I thought. “I'm sorry for all the lies.”

“Not your fault.”

I doubted she really believed that.

“I have to admit,” I told her, “at one point I got pretty obsessed with the website. There were months when I checked it every few minutes in the hopes that there was some new bit of evidence. And when I wasn't able to check, like when I was driving, I was thinking about checking.”

“What changed?” Gemma asked.

I was embarrassed to admit this to her, but I went on. “What changed was that one day when I was behind the wheel, my mind totally on an e-mail someone had sent that morning with what sounded like it might be a viable sighting, I almost caused a serious accident. The details don't matter, but it jolted me back into a more normal and reasonable state of mind.” And this near-disastrous event was one of the factors that had led me to get my act together enough to apply for the job at Yorktide Community College and thereby reenter the world.

Like I said, none of it was easy.

“Could I look at it alone?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, getting up from the kitchen table. “I've got some work to do in my studio.”

I went upstairs to my studio, with the intention of finishing a few sketches, but I could do nothing but sit at my drawing board and stare at nothing, wondering what Gemma was feeling as she read through the website, wondering what would happen next.