Breakwater Bay: A Novel Page 8

  Then the whole process would start over again in full. The whole ceiling would then be cleaned. The entire foyer would be repainted in original colors, the woodwork polished, and the floors revitalized. And the process would be repeated in every room.

  Meri worked late, then wandered through the rest of the first floor to see what progress the other workers were making. She was procrastinating, she knew. As much as she was curious about what was in the box sitting out in her car, she was afraid to find out what it contained. But she couldn’t put it off much longer. Gran was probably sick with worry. Alden hadn’t looked too happy about it either.

  At least he had the city to distract him; Gran was sitting in the house all alone.

  Carlyn was still plugging away at her computer when Meri left. She looked up when Meri waved good night and went back to whatever she was doing.

  Carlyn could be working for more money in a comfortable office instead of being surrounded by dust and hammering and skill saws, not to mention potential lead poisoning. But she liked to be where the action was, even if her desk had been scavenged from the curb, and the power was constantly going off while wires were rerouted, or some questionable hardware was exposed. Their project wasn’t a high priority on the historic restoration list.

  Plus Meri suspected she was just a little enamored of Doug. Which was funny. A teddy bear Doug might be, but Carlyn usually went after hot bodies. Even so, Meri noticed that her friend tended to brighten whenever he entered a room.

  Unfortunately Doug was happily married.

  She shrugged. Everybody’s life was complicated in one way or another. It was time to get hers back on track.

  Meri drove home with that damn box sitting on the passenger seat beside her. She fought the urge to just sit in the car and look inside. It might be awful or totally benign, but either way she’d rather be in the privacy of her own apartment when she found out.

  Ten minutes later Meri sat on the couch, feet together on the floor, hands in her lap, studying the crumpled cardboard box like it was the Ark of the Covenant. Slowly, she pulled it forward and carefully lifted off the top.

  At that point she decided she needed a glass of wine. There was just enough pinot grigio for a half glass left in the bottle in the fridge. She brought it back to the couch. Sat down. Looked in the box. Saw a stack of her report cards, secured by a rubber band.

  Maybe this wouldn’t be so mind jarring after all. Mentally crossing her fingers, she lifted them out. The rubber band fell away.

  Her mother had saved every report card from every school year. She looked at a couple. Straight As. She hadn’t received a B until fourth grade in geography. She remembered it perfectly and actually smiled. She’d been shocked when she opened it and saw that big fat B. She’d been mortified to take it home. She’d sat by herself on the long bus ride home and hung her head when she handed it to her mother.

  Her mother had been sympathetic. Gran said, “The world’s too big to know everything. Don’t you worry about it.”

  And that was that. Though she did put in extra study time on that subject and aced the next marking period.

  She put the cards aside and lifted out a pair of baby shoes, white and tiny, with a handwritten card inside: Meri’s first shoes.

  Fireworks went off in Meri’s heart. She was loved, she knew it, but it wasn’t until she saw those shoes that she understood. She held them, tiny and a little brittle from years of storage. They had a little strap with a tiny nacre snap on the side. She placed them in her lap while she looked at the rest of the contents. Letters from Huey to her mother when they were in college. A jewelry box and a man’s wedding ring. Huey’s. The man who should have been her father.

  So she might never know who her real—no, not real—her birth father was, but she thought Huey would have loved her. And she knew Dan did. She was a Hollis. Now she just had to keep saying that until she completely believed it. Because whenever she stopped and wondered, a niggling fear took a bite out of her peace of mind.

  She took out a white paper doily from her parents’ wedding reception, Huey and Laura Rodgers, June 3, 1983, Christ Church. A photo of her father—she stopped herself—a photo, creased and worn from much handling, of Huey Rodgers on his graduation from flight school. A dried corsage from Meri’s senior prom folded inside a piece of waxed paper. A dance card from somebody’s sweet sixteen party.

  All this time she had thought her dad was dead, that he had died before ever seeing her. Dan was the best father anyone could have, but a question started deep inside her mind and gradually worked its way to the surface. But what if her biological father wasn’t dead? Did he know about her?

  Was that why her birth mother had run away? She was afraid of him? An involuntary shudder racked Meri’s body. Maybe it was better not to know.

  She took out a large plastic baggie, sealed and resealed with tape. She had to stop to find scissors to open it. She didn’t want to force it open and take the chance of tearing any of the contents. Long years of training had engrained neatness and methodology in her until it was second nature. And though part of her wanted to tear through the plastic, she took her time removing the tape, then carefully slid the contents onto the table.

  On the very top was a photograph of a girl and a boy at the beach. Not Huey and Laura. The runaway? Prepregnancy days. They were young, happy, without a care. What had happened to end that happiness? Meri flipped the photo over. No names, no place, no year, just blank white backing paper, yellowed with age. She turned it over and brought it closer to the light, peered at it as familiarity settled on her. And a little disbelief.

  Meri set her baby shoes aside and went into the bathroom to look in the mirror, looked again at the photo and again at herself. She looked like the girl. Now that she saw her photograph, she understood why she’d looked just a little different from her half brothers.

  She always figured it was because she had a different dad. She did, and also a different mother. Her mother smiled at her from the photo. Dark hair pulled back on one side. The straight nose, the blue eyes just a little more almond shaped than her mother Laura’s eyes. She couldn’t tell about the height. The boy stood half a head taller, but there was nothing to judge by. But she recognized Easton Beach. It was less than ten blocks away.

  Could they possibly have lived right here in Newport? No, that was crazy; they must have been on vacation. That was it. Vacation and then when she got pregnant, she came back because . . . the boy lived here?

  Had her mother’s parents searched for her? Had they been inconsolable not to know what happened to her? Why was she buried in the Calder family plot?

  Something between anxiety and anticipation pulsed through Meri’s extremities. She tried to tell herself it was just the day’s coffee at work. But she knew what it really was. A similar feeling had pulsed through her just the other day at work when she lifted her cleaning cloth and saw gold.

  Meri went back to the living room and propped the photo against a malacca box she had found at an antique store in Portsmouth. She continued to pull things out of the cardboard box. A death certificate. Baby Rose’s. Rose Jones. Mother: Riley Jones. Father: unknown. The certificate had been put in the bag with Riley’s possessions—if Riley was her real name; certainly Jones wasn’t.

  A key ring with a circular medallion, yin and yang, enameled white and black. A cheap bracelet like the ones you won at a carnival or got out of a machine. Two house keys. No car keys.

  No driver’s license. Maybe she hadn’t been old enough to drive. That was a daunting thought. A teenage runaway. Where were her parents? Why hadn’t they come to take her home? Had they given up hope of ever finding her?

  Meri yawned and glanced at the clock. Had she really spent almost an hour looking at a few trinkets and mementos?

  She had so many questions. And at last, hopefully she would learn some of the answers. Because when she returned the things to the bag and moved it from the box, she caught sight of one last item.
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  She knew what it was, the thing she had been anticipating and dreading, a small notebook, black marbled like the ones you used in school. And she knew what must be inside.

  Chapter 8

  Meri took a sip of her wine, which was now room temperature, and reached for the notebook. She held it in both hands, just looking at it, knowing that once she opened it she would have to follow it to the end. Then laughed at herself. It might be one of her early essays left over from school.

  She opened it to the first page.

  It was her mother’s writing—not hers. Never the neatest, it was so familiar to her that she could almost feel her mother’s presence. Nonsense, of course, but this whole past weekend had been so gothic and weird that she just fell into a mood and wondered if she would even be surprised if her mother materialized right there in her living room.

  And a thought struck her so off topic that it took her breath away. Was this Alden’s world? Every day surrounded by the fantastic, the frightening, unreal creatures that populated his pages, the faeries, the ogres, the ghosts? Did they also infiltrate his brain, become a part of his life, his way of thinking? Things that had to be tamed, accepted, or driven away.

  Because the bizarre things she’d confronted this past weekend were enough to rock her world. Of course hers were real, and his weren’t, were they?

  She’d have to ask him someday. Right now, she had her own demons to deal with.

  She flipped through the pages. It wasn’t like true diary entries, but half sentences on one page, a short paragraph on another. Sometimes a whole page or several that flowed together in a long stream of writing. And it seemed to skip back and forth from things as they happened, to her mother’s memory of things that had passed.

  There was a lot. Every page but the last few were filled with her mother’s loopy scrawl. Why did you have to get sick? Why didn’t you tell me all this before you died?

  Meri riffled through the pages looking at dates. At first the entries were close together. And started with the night of Meri’s birth. Then the dates tumbled from past to present without obvious reason, a burst of entries followed by long silence. Sometimes a year went by before she wrote again.

  Until the last fifteen pages. There the writing became weaker, stretching out on the page then cramming the letters together as if the words were racing to the end, as if they were afraid time would run out before they were finished. As it had.

  The last entry ended with more later if I can. It was dated two days before her mother died.

  Meri turned back to the front page. Took another sip of wine.

  There was a long inscription on the top margin, as if written as an afterthought. As a prologue?

  The script was so faded that she had to move to the chair that sat beneath the reading lamp. She turned it to full wattage and squinted at the script.

  I know I have to put this down on paper. So much has happened that already it is hard to remember how things came about. But they did. And one day it might be important.

  April, 1984

  I guess it really started the night we heard on the news that a plane had gone down, a passenger plane, the same airline Huey flew for. His flight. It started that moment, the pain. Way before they officially notified me I knew the truth. Huey was dead along with his crew and eighty passengers. It was a mechanical failure, there would be an investigation. I would be remunerated.

  Remuneration. It was too soon for my husband to die. It was too early for the baby to come. But he did, and she did.

  For two months I lay on my back trying to save the only thing left of my marriage while inside I raged against being left alone after two years of happiness. I loved Huey and I swore I would never love anyone else, except this baby if God would only let me keep her.

  But he didn’t. She just came, hardly with a pain, or a cry, no time to even get to the car much less to the hospital. Katy Dewar came from over at Briggs Pond. But it was too late when she got here.

  Meri wiped tears away, reached for her wine. Surely this was more than any daughter needed to know.

  I went a little crazy. I wanted to die, what was left for me? Huey gone, my little girl gone. We would have named her Rose. They let me hold her for only a second. Then took her away. I begged for just a few more minutes, but Katy said there were things to be done. Rose was never even put in the crib that Huey and I found in Grover’s junk store and refinished together. I never saw her again. Little Rose. We buried her a few days later. But that was after the storm came.

  Meri shook herself. This was more than she could stand. She closed the book, got up, and went to the window to stare out. The street was quiet. It was late and off-season. Everyone was in bed, getting a good night’s sleep before work the next day. Where she would be tomorrow, up on that scaffolding cleaning away paint like nothing had happened.

  Her eyes were gritty and her stomach burned. She needed tissues, water, and something to eat. She went to the kitchen and opened the fridge.

  Empty, except for a six-pack of water. She took a bottle and closed the door. Looked in a cabinet and found a nearly empty jar of peanut butter, no crackers, no bread. She got a spoon and carried the peanut butter and bottle of water back to her chair.

  They tried to take me to the hospital but I fought them off. Why take care of me? There was nothing left to me. Nothing. Empty. Crazy. I could see them looking at each other, Katy worried, Mother worried and scared. I heard Katy say she wouldn’t leave until I was “out of the woods.”

  The next afternoon, or maybe the next, a storm came in, a big one. One minute it was sunny and then black. The wind howled, just like I felt, and the rain came so hard you couldn’t see across the yard.

  It was warm and bright inside though. All the lights on, not even flickering as they did in most storms. I just thought of that now. Why didn’t the lights go out? Mother had forced me to the kitchen to eat some soup she had made. Katy helped me to my chair. I didn’t need help. I wasn’t physically sick, my heart was broken.

  Mother had just filled the bowls when there was a pounding on the door. At first I thought it was the wind, or a tree branch, but Mother rushed to open it. And little A from across the way fell inside to the floor. He was soaked and freezing. He tried to say something, but his teeth were chattering so hard we couldn’t understand him.

  “Is it your father?” Mother asked. He shook his head. “Her. On the beach. Help her.”

  God, I’ll never forget his words or the look of sheer terror on that boy’s face.

  Meri sat up. Little A? Who was little A? But she thought she knew. What other A lived in the only house across the way, but Alden? She read ahead, wondering where all this was going. There was some more writing that was indecipherable, but she just skipped over it. She’d go back later and read every word. But for now . . .

  K, who’s a sturdy woman, told me to gather some heavy blankets and she carried him upstairs. When I reached the bedroom where she’d taken him, he was already under the covers. We piled on more blankets. K told me to watch him, and she and Mother hurried away. He was so pale, I just fell down on my knees like a child and prayed that he wouldn’t be taken, too.

  The passage ended. Meri turned the page.

  My God, she’s a mere child. Not much older than A. She wasn’t anyone from around here. I couldn’t imagine why she would be out here alone and on the beach.

  She was awake but could barely stand, and K and Mother had to practically carry her up the stairs. I went to get a nightgown for her and when I came back, she was sitting on the bed wrapped in a blanket. When she raised her hands to put on the nightgown, I saw and understood.

  She was pregnant. Very pregnant. And my heart broke all over again. Even as I looked enviously at her huge round belly, she doubled over and screamed. I recoiled, I admit it. But only for a moment, then I prayed that she would deliver her baby safely and it would be healthy and it would live.

  They laid her back on the bed, just as another cry was
wrenched from her.

  I’ll call for an ambulance, Mamma said. K lifted the nightgown, pushed the girl’s knees up, and said, No time.

  And that’s when things began for me. When my will to live came back again.

  Everything began happening at once, and not easy. Not like with me. Not just an exhale and she was gone. But with flailing and screaming. The baby came quickly. Katy said she must have been in labor for hours. It was horrifying to consider. Out in the storm and in labor. I hope when A wakes up, he can tell us what happened.

  He did wake up. The baby came on the most bloodcurdling scream you’ve ever heard, and I remember thinking this girl never had Lamaze classes. It was a stupid thing to think at a time like that, but that’s the way the mind works sometimes.

  Katy did what midwives do and swaddled the baby in a blanket that had been heating on the radiator. I was holding the girl’s hand; she’d been clutching it so hard that it hurt, now it lay still in mine. But she was breathing.

  The door burst open and A stood there wrapped in a quilt. “Don’t hurt her!”

  K came to him and leaned over and braced her hands on her knees to look him in the eye. “She’s fine. That was good screaming. She’s had a baby. Do you want to see?”

  He nodded. I remember his cheeks were flushed, but the rest of him was shockingly pale. The quilt trailed behind him as he followed her over to the crib where my baby would never lie. Now a healthy baby lay there.

  He peered down at her then looked at me. “Is that your baby?”