Summer's Child (12 page)

D
ARIA SAT ON THE BEACH UNDER AN UMBRELLA
S
ATURDAY
afternoon. The beach was crowded, but she’d managed to find a small patch of sand near the sea oats for herself. She was reading an architectural magazine—or at least she was trying to. Guilt was taunting her, sapping her concentration. Her old Emergency Medical Services supervisor had called her that morning, telling her they were desperately short-staffed, begging her to come in.
They must think I’m being stubborn
, she thought. They didn’t know it was fear and shame that kept her from climbing into the back of an ambulance and rushing off to the scene of an accident.

“Let’s go crabbing.” The voice came from behind her, and she turned to see Rory approach her chair. He had on a gold T-shirt, black shorts and a straw hat that made her laugh.

“Crabbing?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ve done that since we were kids.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Rory said. “We spent half our time crabbing back then, and I didn’t even like the way crabs tasted. But I do now, so how about it? I even got some bait in anticipation of you saying yes.”

Daria thought of the old crab net and traps gathering dust
in the Sea Shanty’s storage shed. She looked up at him. “You deserted me back then, do you know that?”

“Deserted you?” He looked like Huck Finn in that straw hat.

“Yeah. You dumped me for the older kids.”

Rory studied the horizon, as though pondering what she’d said. “Yeah, I guess I did. I remember that hanging around you began to seem like a liability, ’cause I was trying to fit into a different group. Never did succeed, anyhow.” He smiled at her. “Sorry.”

“You’re forgiven.” She stood up, deciding to leave her chair and umbrella right where they were. “Let’s go crabbing,” she said.

“Great! Should we drive?”

“How about bike?” she suggested. She knew that he and Zack had rented bicycles for the summer, and she had one of her own.

Rory got the bait from his cottage, while Daria gathered the old equipment from the storage shed. She met him in the cul-de-sac, where they split the equipment between her bike and his, and they set off across Kill Devil Hills for the soundside pier.

She rode behind him, trying to focus on the cars instead of the way he looked on his bike. They’d had a few conversations over the past few days—on the beach and at the Sea Shanty and once at the athletic club—and every conversation had the same focus: Grace or Zack. Rory had seen Grace several times now, and Daria wondered how far that relationship had gone. He talked about being enamored of her, but not about the intimate details Daria both longed to know and hated to imagine. She’d met his adorable son, Zack, who looked so much like Rory at that age that she’d had a hard time looking him straight in the eye. While riding on her bike behind
Rory’s, she had to admit that she had herself one more good male friend. Great.

The pier was remarkably empty for the time of year, but the day was so splendid, that Daria imagined everyone was at the beach. They carried their equipment to the end of the pier, put a fish head in the trap and lowered the trap into the water. Rory tied a second fish head to a string and dropped it over the side of the pier. He wiped his hands on a rag with a grimace. “Been a while since I’ve had fish head on my hands,” he said.

“You might as well just give in to it,” she said. “No way you can crab all afternoon and not go home smelling like the sound.”

He sat next to her on the pier, their legs dangling above the water. The sound was littered with Hobie Cats and waverunners and windsurfers, and in the distance, a parasail soared above the water.

“Weird,” Rory said. “For a minute, I felt like I was a kid again, sitting here with you. Then I looked down at our legs and saw these grown-up legs and it gave me a jolt.”

She smiled. So he’d looked at her legs and seen grown-up legs, nothing more. She guessed he preferred Grace’s long white legs to the tanned, muscular ones she possessed.

Rory had a beach bag with him, and he opened it and handed her a can of Coke.

“Thanks.” She took the can from him and popped it open.

“So,” Rory said after taking a swallow of the soda, “What do you remember about the morning you found Shelly?”

Daria felt a deep disappointment. In the conversations they’d had over the past week or so, Rory had not brought up this topic, and she’d been pleased that he seemed to be letting it go. Now she felt betrayed. Was this why he wanted to spend time with her today? To pick her brain about Shelly for his show?

“I don’t want to help you with this, Rory,” she said. “You know I’m not happy that you’re looking into the story. I think it’s a big mistake.”

He was quiet for a moment. “I was just making conversation,” he said.

“You were not.”

“Was too. I was just remembering how you became Supergirl. An eleven-year-old hero. I didn’t know any other kid, myself included, who could have picked up a blood-covered baby and carried it home. I would have run home and gotten my mother. And by that time, the baby probably would have been dead.”

She felt as though she’d been a bit harsh with him and decided to open up, if only a little. “Finding Shelly changed my life,” she said. “In a whole lot of ways. I learned the facts of life overnight. I didn’t know what the placenta was—I was disgusted by it—but when my mother explained how the baby was nourished by it, it fascinated me. I decided then that I wanted to become a doctor, probably an obstetrician. It had been an amazing feeling, having that little life in my hands, and I wanted to experience that again.” Daria had not thought about this in a long time, not consciously, at any rate, but it seemed that the memory of carrying the newborn infant, when she had been little more than an infant herself, was still inside her after all these years.

“So, what happened?” Rory asked. “Why didn’t you become a doctor?”

“I really wanted to,” Daria said. “I was passionate about it. I took premed courses in college and everything. But Mom got sick. She had a fast-moving colon cancer. I quit and came home. Mom was terrified of dying, not because of dying itself, but because of leaving Shelly. She made me promise to take care of her, which was what I would have done, anyway. She
told me I was like Shelly’s mother. She said it was me who truly gave her life, and it used to blow me away to realize that if I hadn’t gone out on the beach that morning, Shelly would never have been part of our family. Mom always let me help with her. Shelly was so beautiful and so…spirited, right from the start. A real smiley baby. She brought joy back into our house. My mother had been going through a depression before I found Shelly. I didn’t realize it then, but of course I do now. Shelly brought her back to life.”

“You sound as though you think there’s something almost…magical about her.”

She smiled at him. “Don’t you?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “She’s definitely out of the ordinary.”

“But she needed a ton of supervision back then,” Daria said. “I know you think I’m exaggerating when I tell you she can easily be taken advantage of, but it’s true. Right before Mom died, Shelly was kidnapped by this guy who was preying on young girls in our neighborhood. She didn’t even realize she was in danger, just got out of the car when he stopped at a light. She knew she wasn’t supposed to go off with strangers, but the man told her he wasn’t a stranger, so she went with him.”

“But, Daria, she was only eight then. We all did idiotic things when we were eight. You don’t have to protect her to that extent anymore.”

“I’m aware of that,” she said defensively. “She still doesn’t have good judgment, though. Trust me on it.”

Rory didn’t argue. He pulled up the string, looked at the untouched fish head and dropped it into the water again.

“Didn’t you feel some resentment about having to take care of her, since it meant you had to give up your dream of being a doctor?” he asked.

“None at all,” she said honestly. “I thought taking care of
Shelly was my life’s calling, the way religious life was Chloe’s.” She remembered talking over her decision with Chloe back then. Chloe had cried; she’d wanted Daria to be able to finish school. Once Daria had reassured her that she was doing what she wanted to do in taking care of Shelly, Chloe seemed to accept her decision more readily. “I got more carpentry training. Do you remember how I used to make furniture with my father?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Well, I loved building things, and I found an outlet for my medical interest by becoming an EMT. I have no regrets.”

“Why aren’t you an EMT now?” he asked.

“Ten years was long enough. I really loved it, though.” Her throat closed up on that last sentence, and she began pulling the trap from the water, hoping for a crab to help her change the subject. She was lucky. “Look,” she said. “We’ve got two of them.” She pulled the trap onto the pier and emptied the two large blue crabs into the bucket.

Rory extracted another fish head from the bait box and put it into the trap. He was less vigorous in wiping his hands on the towel this time, and Daria lowered the trap back into the water.

“You said that Shelly can’t leave the Outer Banks,” Rory said. “Does that mean you plan to live here forever?”

She hadn’t allowed herself to think that far ahead. “I don’t know,” she said, although she did not see how her situation would ever change. “Right now, though, Shelly needs to be here, and I love it here, so there’s no problem.”

“But it’s so sparsely populated. How do you meet people? How do you meet men?”

Daria laughed. “There are men here,” she said. She had dated numerous men on the Outer Banks, but dating had never played the critical role in her life that it seemed to play
for other women. She’d been different: she raised her sister, wore sloppy clothes, worked as a carpenter. Chloe had told her she lacked the “primping hormone,” and she guessed that was the truth. That didn’t mean, however, that she didn’t have longings. And the man she longed for most was sitting right next her at that moment. “Men tend to see me as their pal,” she said.

“I don’t understand that,” Rory said. “You’re attractive and smart and athletic and interesting.”

“Thanks.” She felt herself glow despite her attempt to conceal how much those words meant to her.

“But in a way, it makes sense,” Rory recanted his first statement. “You’re straightforward and don’t play games. Not like a lot of other women. And I fear Grace is one of them,” he added as an aside. “So, I could see how guys might treat you like you’re one of them.”

“Well, I haven’t been totally antisocial,” she said, wanting to correct any warped image of her he might be getting. “I’ve had a few…love interests,” she said, for want of better words to describe the men she’d dated. She remembered the man to whom she’d lost her virginity at the age of twenty. Several days after that momentous occasion, he’d dumped her for a pretty, prissy eighteen-year-old, and Daria feared it had been her performance in bed that led him to leave her. For a couple of years after that, she was afraid to make love. She would not tell Rory about that particular guy.

“I had a long-term relationship with someone,” she said. “I met him when I was twenty-three, right after I moved here, and we dated for a couple of years. He wanted me to quit my carpentry job and wear a dress and red lipstick, and needless to say, we fought a lot. He finally moved away. Then when I was twenty-seven, I met Pete. The infamous fiancé Shelly mentioned to you. He was a carpenter and an EMT, so we
saw eye to eye on most things and got along great for a long time.”

“What happened?”

“Shelly was a problem for us,” she said. “Just like Polly was a problem for you and your ex-wife. Pete said I let Shelly run my life and that I should just—” Daria shook her head “—cut ties with her, I guess. Or at least let her fend for herself.”

“I can’t see you doing that.”

“You’re right, there was no way I would. It wasn’t an issue at first. Shelly was only sixteen when Pete and I started seeing each other, so it was a given that I was responsible for her. But as she got older, he wanted me to place her somewhere.”

“Place her? She doesn’t really need that, does she?”

Daria had never thought so, but ever since the plane crash, she was not sure exactly what Shelly needed. She thought of telling Rory about that incident. It would be so good to tell someone, and she was certainly doing her fair share of gut-spilling here. But she didn’t want to burden him with that, or to color his positive feelings about Shelly. She still wondered what the family of the pilot had been told about how she had met her death. Whatever they’d been told, they’d been lied to.

“No, I don’t think she needs a placement,” she said. “But she does still need
me
. Pete was offered a job in Raleigh, and he wanted me to go with him, which, of course, meant leaving Shelly behind, and I couldn’t consider that. Even if Shelly would have been willing to move to Raleigh, Pete would never have allowed her to live with us.” Saying this out loud, reliving it, made her angry with Pete all over again.

“He doesn’t sound like a very sympathetic sort of guy,” Rory said.

“Not when it came to Shelly, anyway.”

“You’re right. It does sound like our problem with Polly, although in retrospect, Glorianne and I had drifted apart on a
lot of other issues as well. I don’t like thinking about it,” he said with a shudder. “It was a terrible time, with Polly getting stuck in the middle. That’s when she died, and I can’t help but think that the stress of living with me and Glorianne contributed to that.”

Daria touched his arm. “I think it was better that she was with you, no matter what the circumstances, than to be left alone after your parents died. Don’t you?”

“I think so,” he said. “I hope so.” He looked out to sea, and she saw sailboats reflected in the lenses of his sunglasses. Two small lines creased the skin above his eyebrows, and she wanted to touch them, erase them.

“You’re a good person,” she said softly. “I wish you weren’t so hot on digging into Shelly’s past, but I’m still glad you’ve come to Kill Devil Hills this summer.”