Summer's Child (28 page)

D
ARIA PRIED THE MOLDING FROM AROUND ONE OF THE
screens, while Chloe mopped seawater from the porch floor. They had not spoken yet that morning, not about anything important at any rate, as though they both knew they still needed time to shift from the emotions of the night before into this bright, new day. Their energy went into the physical work of cleaning away debris from around the Sea Shanty and opening the storm shutters. Daria had told Chloe about the rescue the night before at Andy’s cottage, and she’d told her that Shelly was there and safe. But she’d said no more about it—and she’d said nothing about her time with Rory.

Across the street, she could see Rory removing the sheets of plywood from his windows. He waved. She waved back, a tightness in her throat.

Chloe finished her mopping. She set the mop in the bucket and put her hands on her hips. “How about a break?” she said to Daria. They had been working nonstop since dawn.

“Good idea,” Daria said. “You want some lemonade?”

Chloe nodded, and Daria walked into the kitchen for the drinks. She was going to have to tell Chloe about Shelly. Now.

They moved the picnic table back onto the porch, and
Daria set the glasses of lemonade down on it and took a seat. She was surprised when Chloe sat next to her and put an arm around her shoulders.

“You’re as troubled as I am this morning, sis,” Chloe said, giving her a squeeze. “I’m hoping it’s not because of everything I told you last night. Maybe I shouldn’t have burdened you with all of that.”

Daria’s heart broke for her sister, and she turned to embrace her. “I’m glad you could tell me,” she said, “and so sorry for all you’ve been through.” She pulled away, and moved to the end of the bench so that she could look squarely into Chloe’s eyes. “But to be honest, Chloe, that’s only part of what has me upset this morning.”

Chloe reached forward and held Daria’s hand in her own. “What is it, then?” she asked.

“A couple of things,” Daria said. She looked quizzically at her sister. “Don’t you think it’s strange that Shelly was at Andy’s last night?”

Chloe nodded. “Yes, but I suppose she somehow knew he was still in the Outer Banks and figured he’d be a safe person to stay with.”

“It’s more than that,” Daria said. “They’ve apparently been seeing each other for a couple of years.”

Chloe’s eyes were wide. “Andy and Shelly?” she asked. “A couple of years? Didn’t you ever pick up on anything between them?”

“Not at all,” Daria said. “You’ve seen them together. They act as if they barely know each other. Now I realize their behavior was calculated to keep us from suspecting anything.”

“Do you think he’s taking advantage of her?” Chloe asked.

Daria shook her head. “That was my first thought, but Andy’s not like that.” She shrugged. “Although, right now I’m not sure I know either of them. But I think Andy’s a good
person with good values, and I have to admit that, from the little I saw of them together last night, there seems to be a mutual caring between them. I’m just upset that they’ve kept it from me all this time. Andy and I work together nearly every day, and he never said a word.”

“They’re afraid you’d break them up, don’t you think?” Chloe asked.

Daria sighed. “I didn’t know I was considered such a shrew,” she said.

“You’re not a shrew,” Chloe said. “You’re just one of those women who loves too much.”

“There’s something else.” Daria couldn’t believe she was going to tell this to her sister.

“Spit it out,” Chloe said.

“I…Rory and I made love last night.”

Chloe winced. “Oh, Daria, why did you do that to yourself?”

“It was an emotional night, and…” No use offering excuses. “I just wanted him,” she said. “I still do.”

Chloe looked through the now-screenless porch windows toward Poll-Rory. They could hear Rory working on his cottage windows, but he was around the side and invisible from the porch. After a moment, Chloe turned her gaze back to Daria. “Well,” she said with a rueful smile, “who am I to cast stones?” Her gaze suddenly shifted toward the beach road. “Is that Andy’s van?” she asked.

Daria saw the van turn into the cul-de-sac. She stood up as Andy drove into the Sea Shanty driveway. He walked around the car and opened the passenger-side door for Shelly, and Daria was moved by his chivalry. Shelly got out of the car, and for the first time, Daria realized how perfectly matched they were, physically at least, with their long blond hair and tall, slender bodies. She held the door open for them as they walked onto the porch.

“Julie and her little boy are at the hospital in Elizabeth City,” Andy said. “Jim says they’re going to be okay. Thanks for coming over, Daria.”

“I’m relieved to hear that,” Daria said. She glanced at Chloe. “Why don’t you two have a seat?” She motioned toward one of the picnic-table benches. “I explained to Chloe that you’ve been seeing each other, but I think we’d both like to…have a better understanding of what’s going on.”

Andy and Shelly sat down as a unit on the bench, holding hands. Shelly looked nervous, and Daria felt sorry for her. Still, she was angry with both of them for their dishonesty.

“It’s just like I told you last night,” Andy said. “Shelly and I have been seeing each other for two and a half years. I apologize for not telling you, Daria. I tried a few times, but you always started talking about how Shelly needed to be protected from men, and I was afraid of what you’d say. Or what you’d do.”

Chloe had brought two rockers onto the porch, and Daria lowered herself into one of them. Her mind raced back over the previous two years, hunting for clues she might have missed. She could remember a few conversations with Andy in which he’d talked to her about Shelly’s need for more freedom. She’d told Andy he didn’t know Shelly well enough to understand.

“I’m really angry with you, Andy,” she said, leaning forward. “You lied to me.”

“No, I never lied,” he said. “I just never said anything about what was going on.”

“Shelly is…she’s vulnerable,” Daria said. “Do you know what that means?” She was not sure either of them understood the meaning of the word. “She needs to be protected.”

“Not as much as you think,” Andy said.

“I can take perfectly good care of myself,” Shelly finally spoke up. “You worry too much about me, Daria.”

“Besides,” Andy added. “I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her. I love her. I—”

“If you’d known about me and Andy, you would have tried to ruin it,” Shelly interrupted him. “You ruined things with my other boyfriends.”

“That was different,” Daria said. “No matter what you think, Shelly, those guys were going to hurt you.” Was that true? she suddenly wondered. Had she really known those two young men well enough to know that about them?

“There’s something else you need to know,” Andy said. He glanced at Shelly. “Shelly is pregnant, and we’re going to get married.”

Chloe groaned, and Daria felt her patience snap. “I thought you weren’t going to let anything bad happen to her,” she said, unable to mask the sarcasm in her voice.

“It’s not a bad thing,” Shelly said. “I’m happy about it. I want to have a baby. And I want to marry Andy.”

“You can’t have a baby,” Daria said. “Shelly, sweetheart, I’m sorry. You’re just not able to take care of a baby. You’ll have to…consider options.” She would have suggested an abortion, but found she couldn’t with Chloe sitting right there. Chloe might be a rebel where the Church was concerned, but Daria knew she was still passionately opposed to the idea of abortion.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, here,” Chloe said. “How far along are you, Shelly?”

“Not very,” Shelly said.

“She’s only missed one period,” Andy said. “But she’s not having an abortion.”

“Well, we have time, then,” Chloe said. “Time to look at your options and figure out what’s best for both of you
and
the baby.”

Chloe continued talking, impressing Daria with her calm, supportive approach. Daria knew enough to stay out of the
conversation, because right now she was not thinking clearly. Her mind was torn between what was going on here on this porch, and the sound of Rory working on the windows across the street. How did Rory feel this morning? What was
he
thinking?

Soon Zack would return with the Wheelers, and soon Grace would swoop down again on Poll-Rory. Her one sister was grieving an illicit affair and facing the end of her life as a nun. Her other sister was pregnant with a child she couldn’t possibly raise herself. And neither sister had seen fit to confide in her.

And she felt, suddenly, very much alone.

T
HE MUSCLES IN HIS ARMS ACHED WHEN
R
ORY WENT INSIDE
the cottage after taking the plywood off the windows. He could have waited to do it until Zack came home and could help him, but he’d been anxious to get some sunlight back into Poll-Rory. The cottage had sustained very little damage in the storm, and he knew he’d been lucky. There were some bare patches on the roof where he would need to reshingle, and a piece of driftwood blown up from the beach had torn a chunk from the siding, but other than that, Poll-Rory was relatively unscathed.

The answering machine blinked from its perch on the kitchen counter. The phones must be working again; the electricity had come on sometime before he’d gotten out of bed that morning. There were two messages, the first from Zack, telling him he would be returning to Kill Devil Hills that afternoon. The second message was from Cindy Trump.

“Are we still on for today, Rory?” she asked. “I don’t know if you’re back yet—I assume you evacuated. But I’m around, if you still want to get together. You don’t need to call. Just show up when you can. I’ll be here all day, mopping up.”

He’d forgotten his appointment with Cindy, but he was pleased by the reminder and the fact that she was able to meet.

Just as he clicked off the answering machine, the phone rang. He picked up the receiver.

“Rory?”

“Grace,”
he said. “I’m sorry if you went to the motel and I wasn’t there. We ended up not evacuating.”

“I wondered what happened,” Grace said. “I was just hoping all of you were all right.”

“We’re fine,” he said. “It seemed like a horrendous storm when it was over our heads, but at least here on the cul-de-sac, it didn’t do too much damage. Are you in Rodanthe? How is it down there?”

“Some of the cottages close to the water really took a beating,” Grace said. “But our…my house is fine. So, why didn’t you leave?”

“It’s a long story.” It seemed as though all that had occurred the night before had taken days to transpire, not mere hours. “Shelly was afraid to leave the Outer Banks,” he said. “So when it came time to evacuate, we couldn’t find her.”

“Oh my God,” Grace said. “Where was she? Is she okay?”

“We searched everywhere, looking in abandoned cottages and all over the beach. We finally had to give up. Daria was really upset.”

“I can imagine.”

“The power went out and the phones weren’t working.” He remembered listening to Chloe’s confessions in the darkness. He would skip over that part. “Then Daria’s co-worker, Andy, suddenly showed up to tell us that his neighbor’s boat had flipped up on the pier, and a woman and little boy were trapped beneath it. So, Daria and I went over there to help.” The image of Daria throwing herself beneath the boat to save
the child was still fresh in his mind. “And that’s where Shelly was. It turns out she and Andy have been involved for a while.”

Grace was silent for a minute, probably trying to absorb all he had just said.

“Involved?” she asked. “You mean, dating?”

“I don’t know if
dating
is the right word,” Rory said. “But they’ve obviously been more than friends. We didn’t get to talk about it much because things were too crazy over there, trying to extract the people from under the boat and getting them to the ER.”

“Are they all right?” she asked.

“They were, last I heard,” Rory said.

“Rory…could we get together tomorrow? Up there?”

For the first time, he didn’t feel enthusiastic about seeing her. His mind was still on Daria. He winced when he remembered her telling him she was in love with him. Those words had taken him by surprise, and he’d felt guilty, as though he’d used her by making love to her. He’d thought Daria was the type of woman who could not be used, who would never do something she did not have completely under her control. She seemed invulnerable—so independent and strong and self-sufficient—that he hadn’t seen the need in her for anyone, much less for him. His body had responded with instant arousal when she’d kissed him, and he had not considered stopping himself. He’d treated it almost like one more activity with his old friend, like crabbing or fishing. He hadn’t realized that, for her, it meant much more than that. He shouldn’t have let it happen. Yet, it had been so damned
good
. And he knew he would rather spend tomorrow afternoon pulling crabs out of the bay with Daria than spending time with Grace.

“Why don’t we talk again tomorrow,” he said. “See how our schedules pan out.”

She hesitated once more. “All right,” she said. “But I really would like to come up there.”

“We’ll talk then,” he said. “And I’m sorry again about standing you up at the motel.”

He hung up the phone, and stared at the receiver for a minute before getting up and walking to the front door. There was one more woman he needed to apologize to this afternoon.

Chloe was on the front steps of the Sea Shanty, sweeping away the eelgrass that the storm had brought to their door.

“Looks like you lost some screens,” he said.

Chloe barely glanced at him. “Yes,” she said. “But that’s about the worst damage that was done, fortunately. To the cottage, anyway.” She darted her eyes in his direction again, and he had the feeling she knew what had happened between him and Daria the night before. Maybe, though, it was just his imagination—or his guilt—at work. Maybe she was simply alluding to the trauma suffered by Andy’s neighbors. Or more probably, to the embarrassment she herself had suffered when she’d admitted to him and Daria about her affair with Sean Macy.

“Is Daria in?” he asked.

“She’s up in her room,” Chloe said.

“Would it be all right if I went up?”

“Why not?” Chloe said. “I guess there’s not much mystery left between the two of you, huh?”

Ouch
. “Chloe…” he began, not sure what more he could say.

Chloe sighed and leaned on the broom. “Don’t listen to me, Rory,” she said. “It’s just that my sisters are getting jerked around right now, and it’s upsetting me.”

“I’m not jerking Daria around,” he said.

“What would you call it?” she asked. “In spite of the fact that you’re involved with someone else, you have sex with a
woman who loves you dearly, who would do anything for you. I’m not excusing Daria’s behavior, but at least her motivation was noble. She did it because she’s crazy about you.”

He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing, just walked past her into the cottage and up the stairs.

The door to Daria’s room was open. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, architect’s drawings spread out in front of her. He knocked on the open door, and she looked up.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“I thought I’d come see how you’re doing,” he said.

She bit her lip and lowered her eyes to the drawings, pushing them around with the tips of her fingers. He walked across the room and sat down on the edge of the bed, rescuing her hand from its futile wandering across the drawings and holding it on his knee.

“I’m sorry, Daria,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “I started it. I shouldn’t have done that if I wasn’t prepared to accept the consequences.”

“You know I care about you, don’t you?” he asked.

She uttered a small laugh, and he knew his words sounded pale, meaningless and, he feared, patronizing.

“I didn’t know how you felt,” he said. “And…it caught me off guard when you told me.” There was more he wanted to say. He wanted to tell her he needed time to sort out his feelings for her, to figure out why, if she were to kiss him at that moment, he would do it all over again. But he knew it wouldn’t be fair to say that to her right now. It would only ease his burden and add to hers.

She looked at him squarely. “Shelly’s pregnant,” she said. And then she began to cry, drawing her knees up to her chest and burying her head against them.

“Oh, no.” He wanted to pull her into his arms to comfort
her, but remembered that was how things had gotten out of control the night before. Instead, he held her hand tighter. “What is she going to do?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “She wants to marry Andy and have the baby. I just can’t see it.”

“How…pregnant is she?” He thought of Shelly’s slim figure. “She must not be very far along.”

“Only a matter of weeks,” she said.

“So there’s time to—”

“Yes.” She sighed, as though tired of the discussion. “There’s time.”

He hesitated. “Look,” he said. “I’m on my way up to Corolla to see Cindy Trump. Why don’t you come with me?”

She shook her head. Tears still streamed down her cheeks, and he reached up to smooth them away with the back of his fingers before standing up.

“I’ll see you later,” he said. “Take care.”

The beach road was littered with shingles and shutters and the branches of small trees. Water pooled in spots, and traffic was thick with people returning to their homes and vacations. The landscape of Corolla was washed clean, its huge houses sprawling from the road to the sea. These were true houses up here, not cottages. Many of them could be considered near-mansions.

He followed the directions Cindy had left on his machine, and found her house on, of all things, a cul-de-sac. He parked in the driveway, and had to skirt an uprooted tree as he walked to her front door. Before he had a chance to knock, the door was opened, and there stood Cindy Trump in an orange bikini, looking very much as she had twenty years ago.

“Rory!” She stepped back to let him in and gave him a hug. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “You look even better than you do on TV.”

“Thanks,” he said. “And you haven’t changed a bit.” The trite words were the truth. Of all the people he’d met from the cul-de-sac that summer, Cindy had changed the least. She was tan, slender, blond and still did a bikini justice. She reminded him of some of the women he knew in Hollywood, and wondered if she’d paid a visit or two to a plastic surgeon or if she’d just been lucky with her genes.

She led him out to the stone patio behind her house and handed him a glass of iced tea.

“Sorry about the noise,” she said, pointing to the house in the lot behind her, where workers were repairing storm damage on the roof. “It’s usually very quiet here.”

Rory looked at the house under repair and was reminded of the day he saw Daria working on the roof. All of these workers were men, but in his mind’s eye, he was seeing Daria up there, and he felt that same rush of desire that had gotten him into trouble the night before.

“Did you evacuate?” he asked as they sat down at a glass-topped table.

“No,” she said. “We’re back so far from the beach, and nothing’s going to blow this house away.”

He was glad she didn’t ask him if
he
had left the Outer Banks. He didn’t feel like recounting last night’s events yet again.

Cindy was a chatterbox. She told him about her husband, who sold real estate, and her two boys, who were just entering their teens. They commiserated for a few minutes about teenage boys, while Rory explored her face for hints of Shelly. There were none. The blond hair, he had to admit, was about it.

He explained the reason for his visit: he was researching Shelly’s past, trying to uncover her parentage. “So,” he said, “who do
you
think Shelly’s mother might have been?”

Cindy laughed, crossing one long brown leg over the other. “Why, me, of course,” she said. “Isn’t that what everyone thought?”

He smiled. “Well, you were the right age and your cottage was nearest to where she was found,” he said, as if those were the only reasons she’d been under suspicion.

“You’re being very kind, Rory,” she said. “Cindy Tramp. Wasn’t that what the kids called me?”

“Perhaps some of them,” he said diplomatically, but he could tell from Cindy’s smile that her skin was quite thick.

“Well, I can assure you that I was not Shelly Cato’s mother. I have to admit, though, it was probably pure luck that it
wasn’t
me. I look back now and shudder over the kind of girl I was. I’m glad my kids are boys instead of girls. I would lock the girls up.”

“I’m tempted to lock Zack up myself, sometimes,” he said.

“It was probably just a tourist, Rory,” she said. “That’s why the police never came up with a suspect. Although…” She wrinkled her nose, looking out toward the ocean.

“Although?” he prompted her.

“I’ve always had a nagging suspicion,” she said. “I really hesitate to say this. I hate to speak ill of another woman. I know how it feels.”

Rory leaned forward, thinking that Cindy had truly not changed: she was still a tease. “You can’t tell me that much and not tell me what you’re talking about,” he said.

“I always thought it was Ellen,” she said. “You remember Ellen? The Catos’ niece?”

He nodded.

“Well, I don’t know how well you remember her, but she was pretty loose with the boys.” Cindy shrugged. “Not as loose as me, I admit, but still…She could be nasty. Do you remember that?”

He remembered it very well. He’d been exposed to it only a few weeks ago.

“There was something mean about her. One time, my aunt and uncle were visiting us. They had two little kids, my cousins, and my brother and I were going somewhere, so they hired Ellen to baby-sit for them. Well, she smacked one of the kids around pretty viciously. The little girl had a couple of bruises on her arm. I know my aunt and uncle spoke to Mr. and Mrs. Cato about it, and probably to Ellen’s mother, as well. That was the end of it, as far as I know. But I think about that incident from time to time. There was no denying that Ellen had been abusive. I could see her leaving a baby on the beach and not giving it another thought.”

Now that she said it, so could he. “Ellen doesn’t look anything like Shelly, though,” he said.

“Well, I haven’t seen Shelly since she was tiny,” Cindy said. “But I remember she had brown eyes. Very light hair, but big brown eyes, like Ellen’s.” Cindy suddenly sat up straight in her chair and looked toward the sky. “Don’t go by what I’m telling you, Rory,” she said. “It’s a big stretch from hitting a child she was baby-sitting to leaving a newborn to die on the beach.” He sensed her trying to backpedal and knew that speaking her hunch out loud had made her uncomfortable. “I was probably right with my first guess. It was most likely a tourist. Maybe if you do a show about it, that person or someone who knew her will come forward with the truth.”