The Bay at Midnight (35 page)
Julie
I
had prepared plenty of food—melon and strawberries, bagels and cream cheese, scrambled eggs and sausage—but none of us ate more than a bite. We sat in the dining room, since it was too hot to eat on the porch. The eggs and sausage grew cold as we talked, as we washed the air clear of things never before said. If I’d only had the courage to talk to my mother decades ago about Isabel, my suffering—and I am sure hers, as well—would have been far less. Instead, I grew into adulthood nursing my guilt, still holding on to a twelve-year-old’s version of all that had happened. Why had we spent forty years tiptoeing around the elephant in the room? Did we think it would go away, that if we starved it by ignoring it, it would shrink until it was skinny enough to slip out the door? I vowed to never again make that mistake. Bringing things out in the open when they happened
could be painful, but it was like getting a vaccination: the needle stung, but that was nothing compared to getting the disease.
After brunch, Ethan went upstairs to
my
room for a nap. His daughter, Abby, and her husband and baby were coming over later and together, we would make the arrangements for Ethan’s father.
Lucy left after helping Mom and me clean up a bit; she had a ZydaChicks rehearsal to go to.
My
mother stayed with me a while longer, though. Once the kitchen was clean, she sat with me on the sofa in the living room, holding my hand. Or maybe I was holding hers. Either way, I liked the way it felt.
“There’s one other thing we never talk about,” I said to her after we’d sat that way for a few minutes. “Something I never tell you.”
“What’s that, Julie?” she asked.
“How much I love you,” I said. “I always told you that when I was a kid, and then somewhere along the line, I got out of the habit.You’re going to hear it from me a lot from now on.”
“I knew it even when you didn’t say it,” she said. “But it
would
be wonderful to hear.”
“Also,” I was on a roll, “I think you’re smart and beautiful and vibrant. And I feel lucky to have you as my mother.” I couldn’t believe how good it felt to get those words out! “I hope I’m just like you when I’m your age.”
She chuckled. “I’ll ask Micky D’s to hold a job open for you,” she said, but then she sobered. She gave my hand a squeeze. “I…I made light of what you just said, didn’t I?” she said, shaking her head with a sigh. “That’s what we do in this family. When we get too close to the honest truth, we start squirming and back away.” She turned to face me. “I heard every word you said, Julie, and I’ll treasure them always. I love you, dear.”
We hugged, and I could have sat with her arms around me for hours. I felt blessed, my happiness at that moment marred only by my thoughts about the man sleeping in my bed upstairs. He would never have the chance I was having to heal his own family with truth and forgiveness.
When my mother left, I sat in my office—it seemed like months since I’d actually
written
in that room—and began making phone calls to funeral homes in the Lakewood area. I wanted to gather information to give Ethan when he woke up. I didn’t really know what I was doing. This was the first time I’d ever been in the position of handling such arrangements. For Ethan, it would be the third time in less than two years.
I was hanging up the phone when I heard Shannon’s car in the driveway. She came into the house through the front door and headed up the stairs, probably to do some more packing.
“Shannon?” I called.
Her footsteps stopped.
“What?”
“Could you come here, please?”
She didn’t budge. I could picture her standing there, debating whether to continue to her room or come to my office. I heard her sigh. In a moment, she was standing in my office doorway. She didn’t look at me directly. I guessed that she expected me to continue our argument from earlier in the day.
“Sit down, honey,” I said, trying with my tone of voice to let her know I had no intention of fighting.
She hesitated, then walked over to the love seat and sat down. I rolled my chair closer to her.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this morning,” I said. “I love you very much.You know I don’t want you to go to Colorado,
but if you want to go, I won’t stand in your way.” The words nearly choked me, but I got them out.
Shannon looked puzzled for a moment, as though she wondered if she’d stumbled into the right house.
“Are you kidding?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I won’t lie to you, Shannon. I’m sick about you leaving. I want to lock you in your room and keep you here. I’ll be so worried about you, because you are the most important thing in the world to me.” My voice broke ever so slightly. I doubted she’d even noticed. “But you can go if that’s what you want,” I said. “Just remember that you’re always—always—welcome to come home, with no recriminations. Okay?”
She’d broken into a slow smile as I spoke. Now she stood up, leaning over to kiss my cheek. “Thanks, Mom,” she said. “That is totally cool.”
She left the room, heading up the stairs again, and I could hear the little beeps as she dialed her cell phone, calling Tanner to tell him the good news.
Lucy
“S
he’s never going to fall,” Ethan said, glancing over his shoulder at Abby, who was balanced on one ski behind the boat. She looked relaxed, almost bored, as she cut across the water, and Ethan might have
sounded
like he was griping, but he was smiling with pride. He’d told me that he’d taught his daughter to ski when she was ten. Now, at twenty-seven, skiing was as easy to her as walking.
I was holding Abby’s daughter, eighteen-month-old Clare, on my lap. “See Mommy?” I leaned down to say in her ear.
“Mommy ski!” Clare said, pointing at her mother.
“Yes, she sure is,” I said.
“We’ll get her down.” Ethan’s tone was malevolent, and he turned the steering wheel so that Abby would have to cross
the wake of a much larger boat. I could hear her laughter over the sound of the motor as she realized what her father was doing.
“Your grandpop’s a meanie,” I said to Clare.
“Pop Pop’s a meanie!” Clare said.
Ethan was anything but mean. He’d been my brother-in-law since January when he and Julie got married, and he was a doll. I was staying with the two of them for a few weeks this summer, and he and Abby and I had gone skiing nearly every day since my arrival.
As for
me
and men, though, I thought I was finished with them. My life was too full to add a man to the mix. Between my students, the ZydaChicks, my women’s support group and my ever-expanding family, I really had no room for anything or anyone else.
Abby rode the wake of the larger boat like a champion mogul skier, elegantly rising and falling over the rolling water. But then she raised her hand and waved at us, letting us know that she was willing to give Ethan or me a turn.
Ethan slowed the boat and Abby dropped smoothly into the water as we circled around to pick her up. She climbed the ladder into the boat, her body long limbed and tan, and she gently shook her short wet hair in front of Clare’s face, tickling the little girl’s nose and making her giggle.
“You go, Luce,” Ethan said to me.
I handed Clare to her mother, climbed over the side of the boat and jumped into the water. Abby tossed the skis down to me and, as usual, I struggled to put them on. I was pitiful at every aspect
of skiing: putting on the skis, getting back into the boat, and most significantly, staying up for longer than a few seconds. All the stops and starts probably drove Ethan and Abby crazy, but they never complained and I loved every minute of the adventure—especially knowing that I was in water that was way over my head, and I was one-hundred-percent certain that I was not going to drown.
Maria
Something I figured out long ago was that life rarely turns out the way you expect it to. How could I have predicted that, at eighty-two years of age, I would find myself planting geraniums in the Chapmans’ window boxes? For that matter, how could I have predicted that my daughter, Julie, would one day be a Chapman?
By the time Julie and Ethan were married, I think we’d all gotten over the astonishing fact that we were embracing the son of Isabel’s killer, and we welcomed him into the family. No one had suffered more than Ethan during the past couple of years. He’d lost his entire nuclear family and learned a terrible truth about the father he’d idolized. I came to admire his life-embracing attitude and his resiliency. He was one of us—a survivor.
Julie and Ethan divided their time between Julie’s house in Westfield and this old bungalow in Bay Head Shores. I hadn’t wanted to come here at first. The thought turned my stomach, but I didn’t keep my discomfort to myself. I’d discovered that you can still learn things when you’re an old lady. Maybe you couldn’t change the core of your personality—that ingrained identity deep inside you—but you
could
change how you dealt with the world. The way I’d changed was that I didn’t keep things
to myself anymore. If I had a gripe or a sorrow or a joy, I would call one of my girls and share it with her. That’s why, when Julie first suggested I spend time with them at Ethan’s house, I told her how hard that would be for me. Julie listened to everything I had to say on the subject and then said they would love to have me, but she understood my concerns and the decision was ultimately mine to make. Given the choice between staying home in Westfield while my family built new summertime traditions without me, or facing my fears and becoming a contributing part of their future, I chose the latter. It hadn’t been as hard as I’d expected. The world looked different from Ethan’s backyard than it did from ours. I spent as much time with them as I could—when I could get away from Micky D’s, of course.
Julie
It was so peaceful on the sunporch. I had my computer on my lap and a cup of coffee on the table next to me. I could hear the snipping of the pruning shears as my mother worked on the window boxes and planters in the front yard. I was writing what I expected to be the last book in the Granny Fran series. Fran Gallagher was eighty-four now, and it was time for her to retire. I planned to leave the impression that she’d be called in occasionally to help her younger, greener colleagues solve their crimes, but really, it was time for her to move to Florida, find a nice old fellow to pal around with and rest on her laurels.
My fans wouldn’t be happy with me for ending my series, but I was ready to move on to something new and different. I longed to write a story with a little more meat on its bones. I wanted
to delve into life’s experiences, both the good and the bad. I wanted to write books filled with heartache and love, evil and goodness, death and rebirth—all those highs and lows that made up reality. Some of my readers would follow me along that path; others would mourn the loss of the lighthearted escape reading I’d given them for so many years. But I would be writing what felt right for me now, and I couldn’t wait to get started.
I looked up from my work as I pondered the scene in which Fran realizes she is tired of solving other people’s mysteries. The canal was calm, the tide slack as a sailboat made its quiet way toward the river. Across the water from where I sat, a handful of African-American men were fishing. Were any of them related to the Lewises? I would never know.
I went to see Wanda Lewis in the fall. She was Wanda Jackson now, and she had four sons and countless grandchildren, but no amount of family could make up for the loss of her brother. She had not welcomed me, and I didn’t stay long. I didn’t blame her for the chilly reception, but one thing I’d come to understand was that I couldn’t undo the past. I could only try to learn from it.
The sound of a motor disturbed the quiet morning, and I looked up to see Ethan steering his boat toward the dock from the direction of the bay. Ethan, Lucy, Abby and baby Clare went out nearly every morning while I wrote. Once they came inside, I would put my work away. I was trying to learn to balance my time between work and play. I was not very good at it yet, but I was improving.
Everyone got out of the boat, but only Ethan walked toward
the house. Abby and Lucy took Clare into the open side of the dock, holding her hands as they walked with her down the slope into the water that had once held such fear for my younger sister.
Ethan opened the door to the porch and came inside, taking off his sunglasses.
“How’s Granny Fran doing?” he asked. His hair and his bathing suit were wet. I knew he’d had fun this morning.
“She’s on her last legs,” I told him.
He bent over to kiss me and I could smell the saltwater on his skin. “And how’s Granny Julie?” he asked.
As if on cue, Kira Sellers Stroh, who’d been sleeping peacefully in her Portacrib on the other side of the porch, began to whimper.
“Granny Julie couldn’t be any happier,” I said.
This year had certainly been full of surprises. Shannon
did
go to Colorado with Tanner, but she was there less than twenty-four hours when she called to tell me she was coming home.
“We got to his house and all his friends were there waiting to meet me,” she said, when I picked her up at the airport. “They were really nice, Mom, but the youngest one was
twenty-five,
and I thought, ‘What am I doing here? What am I doing with this old guy I barely know?’”
Ethan walked over to the Portacrib and lifted Kira into his arms. He kissed her temple and rocked her a little, cooing to her.
“Is Shannon napping?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.” Shannon had been up with the Kira most of the
night. The baby had been born at exactly midnight on the twenty-first of December and she’d been a night owl ever since.
I moved my laptop to the floor and Ethan lowered Kira into my arms, then sat down next to me. I snuggled the baby against my chest. I liked it when she was half-awake like this, in that gurgling, not-quite-ready-to-eat state, easily placated by a little cuddling. I pressed my lips to her thick hair and inhaled the scent of baby shampoo. She was a beautiful child, with her mother’s—and her great-aunt Isabel’s—dark eyes, dark hair, and double rows of jet-black eyelashes. She and Shannon lived with us, and although Tanner sent money every month, I contributed as well. Shannon still gave cello lessons at the music store and would be entering the music program at Drew University in the fall, commuting from home. She had a hard road ahead of her. I’d given up analyzing whether I was helping her too much or too little. I was just trying to follow my heart.