The Bay at Midnight (15 page)

Later that evening, Ross came over and asked if I would go for a walk with him. Of course, I said yes, anxious to hear what had transpired between him and his parents. He held my hand as we walked up Shore Boulevard.

“I have to break up with you,” he said, the words slicing clear through my heart.

“Why?”
I asked. “Is it Veronica?”

“No, no,” he said quickly, then tightened his grip on my hand. “I don’t care a whit about Veronica.You know that. I love
you
, Maria. I always will, and maybe someday, when we’re out on our own, we can start seeing each other again, but right now I just can’t.”

“Why didn’t you tell your parents about us?” I asked, tears welling up in the corners of my eyes.

He rubbed the back of my hand so hard my skin burned. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

“Tell me.”

He was quiet a moment. “It’s because you’re Italian,” he said finally.

“So what?” I said defensively. “And I’m only half Italian.”

“Your mother came over on the boat, and to them, that’s…I don’t know.” He shook his head. “My parents have antiquated views about things.”

“You’ve known all along I was Italian,” I said angrily. “That hasn’t stopped you from making love to me when you feel like it.”

“I don’t care what your background is,” he said. “You know that, darling.”

“Then why are you letting them dictate who you can see?” I asked.

“Dad said he won’t pay for me to go to Princeton if I continue seeing you.” He blurted out the words.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “He wants you to go as badly as you want to go. Do you think he would actually follow through on that threat?”

“I have no doubt at all that he would,” he said grimly. “I’m so angry with him right now that I could—” He shook his head, unable or unwilling to finish the sentence.

The tears began trickling down my cheeks, and when I spoke, it was hard for me to get the words out. “But we’ve been friends forever,” I said. “Does he expect us to stop being friends?”

“We’ll always be friends, Maria,” he said.

We were in front of our houses again, back where we’d started our walk. And we were in front of the lot with the blueberry bushes as well. Standing there, we looked at each other a long time, the darkness no barrier to seeing the longing in each other’s eyes. He took my hand again, nodded toward the bushes.

“One last time,”he whispered, as he led me onto the sandy lot.

I was certain we both knew he was lying.

Julie

O
n Wednesday afternoon, I drove down the shore. I’d told Ethan I would arrive at his house around four, and although it was little more than an hour’s drive, I left Westfield at one o’clock. I was afraid that once I reached Point Pleasant, it would take me a while to find the courage to drive to our old Bay Head Shores neighborhood. And I was right.

I found a parking place in the huge and crowded lot across from the Point Pleasant boardwalk, but it was a moment before I got out of my car. Even with the windows closed and the air conditioner blowing, I could smell the ocean. People, some of them sunburned or deeply tanned, walked through the parking lot in their bathing suits, carrying towels and beach chairs or pushing cranky toddlers in strollers. I looked straight ahead of me at the merry-go-round I’d ridden on dozens of times as a
kid. It had been a ritual in my family to visit the boardwalk at least a few times a month during the summer. We’d go on the rides and eat sausage sandwiches at Jenkinson’s and frozen custard at Kohr’s. I’d lived for those family outings back then; now I was afraid to get out of my car.

Ethan had called on Monday afternoon. I was rushing in from the car, bags of groceries in my arms and dangling from my fingers when the phone rang. I saw his name on the caller ID and felt both relief and trepidation. Dropping the bags on the counter, I grabbed the receiver.

“Ethan?”

“You sound breathless,” he said.

“I just got in the house,” I said. “Any news?”

“A few things,” he said. “They’re really moving on the investigation. They interviewed me this morning.”

“Oh.” I sank onto one of the kitchen chairs. “What was it like?” I wondered how hard it had been for him. “What did they ask you?”

He hesitated. “They want to interview you next,” he said, not answering my question.

I shut my eyes. I supposed I’d been hoping the police would somehow be able to pin Isabel’s murder on Ned without the need to question me again.

“When?” I asked.

“This week, most likely,” he said. “And I was going to suggest you come here. Stay at my house. I have loads of room and—”

“Next door to the
bungalow?
” I asked, as though he’d suggested I sleep in a tree.

“Is that a problem?” he asked.

I was quiet for a long time. “I haven’t been down the shore
since Isabel died,” I said. “I’ve avoided it. It’s painful to me to even think about being there.”

It was his turn to go quiet. “Are you saying that you haven’t been to the beach…to the ocean at all in forty years?”

“I’ve been to other beaches,” I said, thinking of my honeymoon in the Caribbean. Trips to California. “Just not the Jersey Shore.”

“Well,” he said, “you’ll have to come down here to talk with the police. Of course, you don’t have to come to Bay Head Shores or spend the night at my house, but I thought it might be good for us to put our heads together. There were questions they asked me about Ned’s old friends, you know, that sort of thing, that maybe we could help each other remember. You could stay in a motel somewhere and I could meet you for dinner.”

That sounded like an excellent compromise. “All right,” I said. “I’ll wait to hear from the police, and then I’ll make reservations and—”

“You’ll have to go inland,” he interrupted me. “The beach motels will be booked.”

“All right,” I said again. “I’ll see what I can come up with and get back to you.”

“Okay,” he said. “And another thing. My friend at the department told me they’ve been talking to George Lewis’s family.”

“Wanda?” I asked.

“I don’t know who, exactly,” he said. “I do know that Lewis always stuck to the story that he was innocent.”

“I’m sure he was,” I said. “I knew he didn’t do it. Have they talked to Bruno Walker?” I asked.

“My friend said they’re having trouble tracking him down.”

“Figures,” I said. “The one person who might know what really happened and they can’t find him.”

We talked for a few more minutes, and I was putting the groceries away when Lieutenant Alan Meyers called from the Point Pleasant Police Department. Apparently, they were wasting no time. He asked if I could come to the station on Thursday morning. I said I could, then got on my computer to find a motel in the area and instantly felt like a fool.
Grow up
, I told myself, and I called Ethan back to accept the invitation to stay at his house.

Now, sitting in my car in the heart of Point Pleasant, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. It had been so easy to be brave from the safety of my home. I took a moment to give myself an emotional checkup before I opened the car door: I was okay. I got out, merry-go-round music and salt air surrounding me, and joined the tourists heading toward the boardwalk.

On the boardwalk, I thought I saw Isabel everywhere. She was riding the Tilt-A-Whirl, centrifugal force pressing her against the shell-like back of the carriage. She was sitting on a bench next to a blond-haired boy, facing the ocean, her long legs stretched out in front of her, her feet propped up on the railing. She was walking toward me on the boardwalk in a green bikini, her body tan and hard, her head tipped to one side as she took a bite from an ice-cream-and-waffle sandwich.

I sat on one of the benches facing the boardwalk, peoplewatching and letting Isabel in. How would she have fit in with Lucy and me? I wondered. Would she have helped us pull weeds in Mom’s garden? Would our father still have been alive if he hadn’t lost his beloved oldest daughter at such a young age? Why was I torturing myself with unanswerable questions?

“Dear God,” I prayed, mumbling the words aloud, “help me get through this.”

I stood up and walked resolutely back to my car. It was still early, so I drove around Point Pleasant for a while. I spotted St. Peter’s, where I’d gone to church every Sunday morning during the summer and to confession every Saturday evening. I remembered one of the last times—possibly
the
last time—I’d gone to confession there. For some reason, Mom had not been in the car with us. Daddy and Isabel rode in the front seat on the way to the church, and Lucy and I were in the back, and we were talking about my upcoming confirmation. Isabel had her taken her shoes off and had her bare feet up on the dashboard, her skirt just covering her knees.

“So, Julie,” she said as she studied her stubby fingernails. She was a nail biter and she’d bought all sort of products to make herself stop, but none of them worked. “Have you decided what middle name you’re taking for confirmation?” Isabel had taken the name Bernadette as her confirmation name. It was a great name, long and elaborate, but I was not an elaborate person and had decided on my confirmation name a year earlier.

“Nancy,” I said.

“It has to be a saint’s name,” Isabel said with an air of authority. “I don’t think there’s a Saint Nancy.”

“Well,” Daddy said, and I knew just by the tone of his voice that he was going to take my side for a change. “I believe the name ‘Nancy’ comes from the name ‘Ann,’ and there certainly is a Saint Ann. She was Mary’s mother.”

Bingo
, I thought. Not only had I picked a saint’s name, but a really important one at that.

“So she has to take ‘Ann,’ right?” Isabel asked my father. She
sounded hopeful. She did
not
want me to get my way in this. “That would sound really stupid,” she added. “Julianne Ann Bauer.”

“I’m going to take Kathy,” said Lucy. She related strongly to the baby of the family on
Father Knows Best.

“You two are missing the boat,” Isabel complained. “This is supposed to be
serious.
”

“Isabel’s right,” Daddy said. “But we can talk to the priest about whether Julie would have to take Ann or Nancy. And Lucy, there most certainly is a Saint Katharine. The important thing is for the two of you to learn about the lives of the saints you’re interested in before you decide to take their names, the way Isabel did.”

If he only knew about his sweet Saint Isabel, who was probably going all the way with Ned
, I thought.

Daddy parked the car on the street outside St. Peters, and I suddenly got the jitters. That entire week, I’d lived in fear of dying because I had not confessed all my sins the previous Saturday and I knew I would go straight to hell if I died. I simply had not known how to tell the priest about the fantasies I was having about Ned Chapman. But now I thought I had it figured out. Somehow I’d come up with the term “impure thoughts.” I must have read it somewhere, maybe in the Catholic magazine Daddy wrote for. I also remembered reading that impure thoughts were a sin even if you didn’t act on them, and that’s when I realized I’d better confess them as soon as I could. I was afraid, though. I was used to confessing to my lies and my fights with Lucy and Isabel and my disobedience. This new sin had a completely different feeling to it.

I sat in the pew between Daddy and Isabel, waiting my turn. I watched Lucy go into one side of the confessional with her lit
tle eight-year-old’s transgressions. A woman came out from the other side, and Isabel took her place. Then Lucy came out, and it was my turn.

I could feel my heart beating against my ribs as I knelt in the darkness. I heard the mumbling of a male voice and knew that my sister had finished her probably inadequate confession and was receiving her penance. Then, before I was ready for it, the priest slid open the window.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said, making the sign of the cross. “It’s been one week since my last confession and these are my sins. I disobeyed my mother and father three times,” (the trips across the canal to fish with Wanda and George) “I lied to my little sister once,” (telling her there were no crabs in the Chapmans’ dock) “I had some impure thoughts, and I fought with my older sister two times.” There. I’d slipped it in perfectly.

“Tell me about the impure thoughts,” the priest said.

Oh, God.
“I…I thought about the boy who lives next door to us,” I said.

“Often?” the priest asked.

I swallowed. “Yes, Father,” I admitted.
Every waking moment.

“And have you committed the most grievous offense of masturbation?” he asked.

What was he talking about? I’d never heard the word before, but I guessed he meant intercourse. I couldn’t imagine what else he might mean.

“Oh, no, Father!” I said, so loudly my family probably could hear me in the pews.

“Good,” the priest said. “Be sure you never do.”

Never?
I wanted to ask him if it would be okay to do it when
I was married, but he sounded so stern and frightening that I didn’t dare.

“Yes, Father,” I said.

“For your penance, say six Hail Marys and five Our Fathers and now make a good Act of Contrition.”

The rote words spilled out of my mouth. All the while I was thinking that I’d gotten out of it easy. For a few extra Hail Marys, I would continue having impure thoughts about Ned. I wasn’t sure I could stop them even if I wanted to.

Julie

I
lay in the double bed in the guest room in Ethan’s house. The room was dark, but I remembered my impressions from when I walked into it for the first time that afternoon to deposit my overnight bag on the handsome wood chair in the corner. The walls were a spectacular blue—robin’s-egg, only richer and deeper. The curtains fluttering against the open window were a bold white-and-blue stripe. The painting on the wall looked like something my mother might have created: an impressionistic view of what could either have been a body of water or a green field, depending on how you wanted to look at it. I wondered if the simple yet dramatic decor was Ethan’s doing or that of his ex-wife. I didn’t need to wonder who was responsible for the stunning carved headboard or the dresser. By the time I’d made it to the guest room, I already knew that Ethan was no ordinary carpenter.

Many things had changed in Bay Head Shores since 1962. As I drove through the area before heading to Ethan’s house, I tried to remain in control and dispassionate, as if I were a scientist making observations instead of a woman visiting a place that haunted her. The little corner store where my sisters and I used to buy penny candy had been turned into a tiny antique shop, and now it was tucked beneath the overpass leading to the large bridge that had replaced the old Lovelandtown Bridge. There were many more houses, and the area had the feeling of a resort as opposed to the simple bayside neighborhood it once had been. The sun was brilliant against the architecturally varied houses. The yards were manicured with pebbles or sand and salttolerant landscaping. I drove the curved road leading to our little beach—the Baby Beach—with a tight knot in my throat.

Okay
, I said to myself as the beach came into view.
Be objective. There’s the little playground. Could those swings possibly be the same ones Daddy used to push us on?
I didn’t think so.
There’s the lifeguard stand. And loads of people. Brightly colored beach umbrellas. The shallow area’s still roped off for the kids. But…
My eyes searched the water beyond the shallow area.
No platform.
I was glad to find it missing. I’d dreaded seeing it. I had seen quite enough.

Shore Boulevard, my old street, had changed more than I could have imagined. To begin with, it was no longer a dirt road. Houses sat nearly on top of one another, filling both sides of the street. The woods were gone. Two houses stood in the lot where the blueberry bushes had once flourished. I was surprised that it didn’t sadden me to see how built-up it had become. Instead, it relieved me that it didn’t feel like the same street at all.

I nearly stumbled upon our old bungalow. Everything seemed so different that I hadn’t expected the house to suddenly appear
on my right. I stopped the car abruptly, lurching forward, glad there was no one behind me on the quiet street. The house looked lovely and well cared for. It had been a grayish blue when I was growing up, with black shutters. Now it was a sunny pale yellow trimmed with white. An old anchor leaned against the tree in the front yard. The obviously custommade mailbox at the edge of the road was painted to resemble the ocean, and a model sailboat rested on top of it. Someone cared about the house my grandfather had built, and I felt gratitude to them, whoever they were.

Between the bungalow and the newer house to the right of it, I could clearly see the canal. The water had an instantaneous, visceral pull on me. The current was swift, the water that deep greenish-brown I remembered so well. I rolled down my window and let the humid air wash over me.
Here’s the only thing that hasn’t changed in this little corner of the world
, I thought, as I watched the canal race toward the bay.
The water, with its shifting current and its salty, weedy scent.
I stared at it, going numb, a defense against feeling anything that could shake my fragile hold on the here and now. I was amazed that, so far at least, I seemed to be surviving this homecoming.

I turned into the Chapmans’ driveway, parking behind a pickup truck I guessed belonged to Ethan, and got out of my car.

“You made it!” Ethan walked from his house and across the sand to where I was standing. His feet were bare and he was wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt. His smile was filled with an ease I did not feel and he surprised me with a hug.

“Quite a trip,” I said, trying to return the smile.

“Traffic?” he asked.

“No. Just…I drove around.”

“Ah.” He seemed to understand. “Changed a bit in forty years, hasn’t it?”

The screen door opened again and it was a moment before I recognized the woman who emerged from the house as his daughter, Abby. She was carrying a sleeping infant, six months old at the most, in her arms.

“Hi, Julie,” she said, walking toward us. She had a baseball cap on her short blond hair and a blue quilted diaper bag over her arm.

“Hello, Abby,” I said, and I leaned down to try to get a look at her baby. The child’s head rested against Abby’s shoulder. It had to be a girl. Her eyes were closed, but her lashes lay long and curled on her pudgy cheeks. “And who’s this?” I asked.

“My granddaughter, Clare,” Ethan said. He reached up and rubbed his hand softly over the little girl’s back.

“She’s gorgeous,” I said.

“Clare and I are just leaving.” Abby smiled at me. “I’m glad I got to see you, Julie, if only for two seconds,” she said.

“You, too, Abby.”

Ethan put his arm around his daughter. “See you Sunday for dinner,” he said.

“You got it.” Abby stood on tiptoe to kiss her father’s cheek. “I love you,” she said, stepping away. Then she walked toward the white Beetle convertible parked in front of the house.

“Love you, too,” Ethan called after her. He grinned, watching his daughter and granddaughter get settled into the little car. He looked at me. “I am one lucky dude,” he said.

I nodded. “Abby’s really a lovely young woman,” I said, but I was thinking about Shannon, trying to remember the last time she had told me she loved me. I told her all the time. When had
she started responding to those words with “okay” or the occasional cherished “you, too”?

“Hand me your bag and we can go in the house,” Ethan said.

I rolled my overnight bag toward him and reached into my pocketbook for my eyeglass case. I traded my prescription sunglasses for my regular glasses, then followed him into the house. Once inside, I realized that I had very little memory of its interior. When Ethan and I had played together indoors as kids—rarely, unless it rained—it had usually been at my house. We’d play cards on the porch or board games on the linoleum living-room floor. What had definitely changed inside the Chapmans’ house, though, was its furniture. The first thing that greeted me in the living room was a striking, floor-to-ceiling entertainment center in a pale wood, the craftsmanship exceptional even to my untrained eye. That was only the first of Ethan’s creations I noticed. Everywhere I turned, I saw evidence of his gift. There were end tables and a coffee table. Beautiful chairs with curved backs and silky smooth arms. The kitchen cabinets were a pale maple, and even the countertops were made of a eye-catching striated wood I couldn’t resist running my hand over.

“Tiger maple,” Ethan said. “I love the stuff. You’ll see it all over the house.”

I felt chastened by reality. I’d viewed his being a carpenter in negative terms. In my mind, I’d labeled him a man who worked with his hands instead of his head. But here were the results of his labor. He’d used not only his hands and head in the creative process, but there was plenty of evidence of his heart as well.

“The humidity here is terrible for the wood,” he said, smoothing his fingers over one of the cabinet doors. “But I don’t see
the point of making beautiful things if you aren’t going to use them, so I use them.” Damn, he was cute, and I found myself smiling at him. He radiated a relaxed, soft-voiced, blue-eyed charm. The goofy kid who had begged for fish guts was simply not in evidence, and the attraction I’d felt to him in the Spring Lake restaurant was back in spades.

I looked through the kitchen to a jalousied sunroom.

“You enclosed your porch!” I said. Through the open jalousies, I could see the backyard and canal. “Let’s go out there.” I wasn’t sure if I truly wanted to be in the backyard we’d once shared or if I simply wanted to get it over with.

“Sure,” he said.

As we walked onto the sunporch, I squinted my eyes toward the opposite side of the canal. The weathered wooden bulkhead was gone. In its place was a steel bulkhead the color of rust. “What happened to the bulkhead?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you,” Ethan said. “Come on.” He led me through the porch with its white wicker love seat and chaise longue. Once outside, I saw that our two yards were now separated by a decorative wire fence, nearly the color of the sand.

“Who lives there?” I found myself whispering.

He took my elbow. “Come on,” he said again. “Let’s sit down and I can fill you in on the neighborhood.”

There was a beautiful boat in Ethan’s double-wide dock. I no longer knew a thing about boats, but I could tell this one had power and speed.

Ethan pulled two of the handmade wooden beach chairs closer together and patted the back of one, encouraging me to sit.

I sat on the chair, a few feet behind the chain-link fence that separated us from the water.

“God.” I shook my head. “I can’t tell you how strange this feels to be here. To see this water. I feel like I was here just last week, it’s so familiar to me. And look across the canal.” I pointed to the thick green reeds where George and Wanda and their cousins used to fish. No one was fishing there this afternoon. “It’s still undeveloped,” I said.

“Right,” Ethan said. “One of the few areas on the canal.”

“The Rooster Man’s shack is gone, though,” I said, marveling at the cluster of angular gray buildings that stood where the shack had once been.

“Condos,” Ethan said. “If you’ve got about $ 800,000, you can get one with two bedrooms.”

I looked at him, openmouthed. “Are you kidding?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know how much your old house is worth,” he said.

I winced. “You’re right,” I said. “I don’t.” The current value of the bungalow didn’t matter. My grandparents would have sold it even if they’d had a crystal ball to see the future of real estate in the area.

Ethan told me about the old wooden bulkhead succumbing to erosion and being replaced by the rust-colored steel walls years earlier. He told me about the changes on our street, how quickly the houses had gone up during the seventies. We watched as a massive yacht, crowded with well-heeled revelers, sailed by in front of us, and I realized I had not even turned in the direction of my old yard. I sighed.

“It’s easier for me to focus on the bulkhead or the boats—” I nodded toward the yacht “—than over there.” I shifted my gaze to the right, letting myself truly look at the yard for the first time since my arrival at Ethan’s.

“I know,” Ethan said. “I figured you’d get around to it when you were ready.”

The old painted Adirondack chairs were gone and in their place, sleek metal patio furniture sat on the sand. More of the wire fencing surrounded the dock, and nearby was a large tree, barely recognizable as the tree I used to lean my crab net against. The screened porch that had seemed so big in my childhood still ran the length of the house, but it was not nearly as deep as I remembered it. A circular, above-ground swimming pool sat in the shade of the tree, and I could see the top of a motorboat in the dock.

“Who lives there?” I asked again.

“A young couple,” Ethan said. “The Kleins. Very nice. They moved in about four years ago and they have a boy about seven years old.”

“Ah,” I said. Now I understood the need for all the fencing. It gave them the illusion of safety. I said a little prayer that the boy would grow up to be a strong, healthy adult.

“I told them that you—someone who used to live in the house—was coming to visit me,” Ethan said, “and they said you’re welcome to come over and see how the house has changed, if you like.”

“No,” I said quickly. I didn’t want to set foot in that house of memories. “Do they know…you know…what happened?”

“No.” Ethan smiled, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “Julie, you have to realize that that house has probably had—” He looked out at the water for a moment, thinking. “I don’t remember, exactly. Probably eight or nine owners in the last forty-one years.”

I chuckled at my foolishness. To me, what happened in that house seemed like only yesterday. I wanted to ask Ethan if he
missed being able to sit out on the wooden bulkhead; the steel one offered no place to sit. I wanted to ask him if he missed the blueberry bushes and the woods we used to play in and the clanging sound of the old bridge when it swung open to let the boats through. But I realized those changes, like the eight or nine owners of our house and the Rooster Man’s shack being taken over by condos, were ancient history to him. In Bay Head Shores, he lived in the present, while I was still stuck in the past.

“This is hard for you, isn’t it?” he asked. “Being here?”

I nodded, staring at the water. “A tragedy occurs,” I mused. “Then you move on, or at least you try to move on, and you go through the motions of living your life, but you never quite forget it. It’s always there under the perfectly calm surface. And then…wham.” I pounded my fist on my thigh. “Something happens—like Ned’s letter—and you’re forced to deal with it all over again.”

“You’re the one who wanted me to take it to the police,”he said.

I looked at him sharply. “It’s not your taking it that shook things up,” I said. “The letter
existed
, whether you took it or not.”

He reached over to squeeze my shoulder. “You’re right,” he said. “And I didn’t mean to sound glib or like I’m blaming you. It was the right thing to do to take it to the cops, and they got on my case for not bringing it sooner.” He stared at his hands, rubbed them together, turned them palm side up, and I saw the signs of his work on his fingers. The skin looked rough and callused.