Summer's Child (33 page)

“Like what?” Daria asked.

“She told me…she said she wanted you to be able to go to California with Dad. She said you wouldn’t have to worry about her anymore, or something like that. I wasn’t sure if that was something you were actually thinking about doing or if she was just, you know, like fantasizing or something. Because then she said she was sorry about the pilot. I don’t know what pilot she’s talking about. I wasn’t paying much attention to her. She—”

“She overheard us.” Daria pressed her fist to her mouth and looked at Rory. “Our conversation on the porch. I thought she was asleep.”

Rory thought back to that conversation, imagining how it had sounded to Shelly’s sensitive ears.

“I’m sure she planned to swim up here to you guys, because she said goodbye to us,” Zack said. “I mean, like a real goodbye, like she was leaving us for the night.”

“Or forever.” Rory grabbed his son’s arm. “Come on,” he said, running toward the ocean. “Show me where she went in.”

Running away from the bonfire, he was vaguely aware of the shouting behind him. He heard Daria yell for someone to call 911. Someone else said they would check the Sea Shanty to see if Shelly might have gone back there. And he knew that several people were running after him, as beams from their flashlights darted off the sand ahead of him.

“I think it was here, Dad,” Zack said, pointing into the black ocean. “I think she went straight out from our bonfire.”

Rory tore off his shirt and plunged into the water. “Give me light!” he called over his shoulder, and the flashlights instantly illuminated the water around him. Swimming through the breaking waves, searching the water with his eyes, he realized how fruitless his quest was. He had no idea how far out Shelly had gone, or where she had been when she let herself go under—surely that had been her plan. Sean Macy had said it was all right to kill yourself if you were doing so to save someone else, and Shelly must have thought she was saving Daria. She had no idea that her death would have exactly the opposite effect on the sister who adored her.

Rory felt disoriented in the water. The sky and water and air all around him were black, and he thought about how easy it would be to die out here. To simply slip beneath the surface into more blackness. He heard splashing as other people came into the water. One of the beams of light illuminated Daria as she fought her way through the waves.

“Daria!” he called. “How did she usually swim out here? Would she swim straight out, or parallel to the beach, or—”

“Depends on her purpose!” Daria shouted back to him. “I’m afraid…I’m afraid straight out, this time.”

She knew as well as he did what Shelly’s purpose had been.
He oriented himself to the teenagers’ bonfire, then turned and began swimming farther into the opaque sea. He had gone only a few strokes when he felt something soft brush against his leg. Seaweed, he thought. He almost didn’t bother to reach down to touch it, but he did, and his fingers slipped into the silky, undulating tangle of Shelly’s hair. Diving beneath the surface of the water, he grasped her arms and lifted her up to the air. She was a heavy weight against him, heavy and silent, and he knew she was not breathing.

“I have her!” he called. The beams of light darted around him, finally focusing directly on him as he swam, Shelly’s body still beneath his arm.

“Is she alive?” someone called from the beach. It sounded like Grace’s voice.

“Is she okay?” someone else shouted.

He was winded as he neared the shore, and Daria and Andy pulled Shelly from him, dragging her through the breaking water and laying her down on the beach. In the light from the flashlights, Shelly’s skin was already waxy and blue, and he felt a cry rising up his throat. He managed to swallow it back down as he fell to his knees next to her.

“I’ll do the compressions,” Daria said to him. “You breathe.”

He had his mouth on Shelly’s, her nose pinched closed by his fingers, before Daria had even finished her sentence. The sound of sirens wailed far in the distance as he blew air into Shelly’s lungs, breathing for her in a fury, trying his best to save his daughter’s life.

R
ORY WAS COLD
. S
OMEONE—HE HAD NO IDEA WHO—HAD
given him a sweatshirt to put on, but his shorts were still damp and the air-conditioning in the hospital was bone-chilling.

Daria put her arm around him, trying to warm him, but her effort was futile. She was equally as cold, and her body shivered next to his. They were sitting on a vinyl-covered couch in a tiny waiting room in the ER, across the hall from the treatment room where doctors were working on Shelly. Chloe, Andy and Zack were with them. He thought that Grace and Ellen and some of the neighbors were in the larger, general waiting room, but he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure of much. Not even how long they’d been sitting there, waiting for word on Shelly’s condition.

Not one of them had spoken since they’d been ushered into the room. There was so much that needed to be said, but no one knew exactly where to begin. Andy sat on one of the hard plastic chairs in the room, his eyes downcast. The only sign that he was alive was the too-rapid rise and fall of his chest. Zack sat next to Rory, on the other side of him from Daria, and Rory rubbed his son’s back. Zack had cried openly on the drive to the hospital. “It’s my fault,” he said over and over again. “I
should have realized something was radically wrong with her by how weird she was acting.”

Rory had told him it was not his fault. It was no one person’s fault. To himself, he thought that everyone shared a bit of the blame.

He looked across the small room at Chloe, where she sat alone on the vinyl love seat. Her eyes were closed, the dark lashes long and flat against her cheeks, and he guessed she was praying. Suddenly, she looked up, and her gaze met his.

“I need to talk.” Her voice splintered the silence in the room.

The others turned their heads toward her in slow motion, as though not quite certain they’d heard her.

Chloe looked at Daria. “I’m so sorry, Daria,” she said. “I’m sorry I never told you.”

“I thought it was Ellen,” Daria said. “All these years, I thought it was her. I could imagine her doing something like that. I couldn’t imagine you doing it.”

Chloe nodded. “It’s hard for me to imagine it myself,” she said. “Something happened to me back then. I snapped. That’s my only excuse. You remember what I was like, Daria. I was a pretty good kid. I attended church every Sunday. I was obedient.” She laughed. “I even prayed the rosary every night, I wanted so much to be good and pure and holy. But I was always fascinated by sex. I knew that having sex prior to marriage was a sin, but I was drawn to it. I was drawn to boys.”

“I remember that,” Daria said.

“In high school, I had sex with a few different boys,” Chloe said. “I’d come home afterward and pray to God to forgive me. I promised myself that it would never happen again, but, of course, it always did. Then, when I was seventeen, I became pregnant.”

Daria removed her arm from around Rory’s shoulders to
lean toward her sister. “Who was it?” she asked. “Who is Shelly’s father?”

Rory held his breath. Chloe didn’t so much as glance in his direction, and he knew she wasn’t going to give him away.

“It doesn’t matter. He was just a boy.” Chloe gnawed at her upper lip. “I was terrified,” she continued. “There was no way I could tell Mom and Dad, and there was no way I could ever have an abortion. I was away from home, in my freshman year of college, but I didn’t really have very many friends. I was younger than most of the other kids, both chronologically and socially, but I pretended that I had this great social life and that’s why I didn’t come home for holidays. I was just afraid Mom would figure out I was pregnant if I went home.” Chloe scratched her cheek. “I really don’t know what I thought I was going to do when I came to the Sea Shanty that summer. I was wearing oversize clothing, but I knew I couldn’t do that for the whole summer. I remember being glad that the weather was so bad that first week, and it didn’t seem too strange to be wearing sweatshirts and whatever. I hadn’t gotten any prenatal care. I had no idea how far along I was. In retrospect, I know I was about eight months pregnant.”

She glanced at him now, but quickly shifted her gaze to a spot on the floor, and Rory wished he didn’t have to hear this. Yet, he only had to
hear
it, he thought. Chloe’d had to
live
it.

“One night, I woke up in bed and I was in labor,” Chloe continued. “I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go into Mom and Dad’s bedroom and say, ‘Guess what, Mom, I’m having a baby.’ I know this sounds crazy—” she looked at Daria “—but I don’t think I ever really believed it. Not even then, when I was in so much pain. You hear about teenage girls delivering babies when they didn’t even know they were pregnant, and it sounds so crazy. But I can understand it. I had somehow managed to ignore what was happen
ing to me. So, even that night, I felt detached through it all. It’s hard to explain. I knew I had to get away from the house, though, so I went out on the beach.” Chloe lowered her head. She was breathing through her mouth. Her nose was red, and when she looked up again, her eyes were overflowing with tears. Rory had the urge to move next to her, to take her in his arms and tell her he was sorry for all she’d been through—and for his role in it. Instead, he stood up, plucked a tissue from the box on one of the end tables and handed it to her before taking his own seat again next to Daria. “It was horrible,” Chloe said, blotting her eyes with the tissue.

Daria moved across the room to sit next to her sister. She put her hand on Chloe’s back. “It must have been so frightening,” she said.

Andy stared at both women, and Rory had the feeling he didn’t care about Chloe’s trauma. He just wanted Shelly to be all right.

“I thought I was going to die,” Chloe said. “I thought I deserved to die, and there was no way I could turn to anyone for help. I just lay there on the beach, crying and terrified. And then…it was the strangest thing. The baby just came out of me. I wasn’t even sure it was alive. It was so dark out there, and the baby didn’t cry. I was certain it was dead. And to be completely honest, I was relieved. If it was dead, no one ever had to know. I washed myself off in the water. I didn’t even look at what had come out of me—that’s how I thought of it. Not as a baby, but as something foreign that had been inside of me and, to my relief, no longer was. I went back in the house, went to bed and fell asleep, and I slept until the next morning, when you found Shelly.” She looked at Daria. “I can’t describe how I felt when I heard you had found the baby and that she was alive. I was in so much denial, that I actually convinced myself that maybe it wasn’t
my
baby that you’d
found. Some other baby had somehow gotten out there on the beach, but I knew in my heart she was mine. I felt such relief that she was alive, but terribly guilty that I had left her out there to fend for herself. And, of course, I still couldn’t admit to Mom and Dad or anyone else that the baby was mine. Except for Sean. I went to see him that afternoon. He was still Father Macy to me then. Still a priest and not a man I loved.”

Rory wondered how that sounded to Zack. He had known nothing of Chloe’s relationship with Sean Macy. Zack was sitting very still on the couch, not moving, barely breathing.

“I cried and berated myself,” Chloe said, “and Sean told me that God loved the truly repentant sinner. We talked for a long time, and I knew I could trust him. He made me feel forgiven and safe. I knew right then that I wanted to be a part of the Church forever. I hoped that taking a vow of chastity would somehow erase my sexual side. Of course, that had been an unrealistic expectation, but I was young. I didn’t know.”

She blew her nose, then sat hunched over her lap, Daria’s hand on her back, and Rory knew he had to speak. Chloe had gone through that pregnancy alone. He wasn’t going to let her carry this burden by herself, as well.

“Chloe’s left out one important fact,” he said slowly.

Chloe raised her head sharply to look at him.

“This is hard to say.” He looked at Daria, squarely, trying not to flinch. “I believe I’m Shelly’s father.”

No one said a word. Daria looked at him hard, a crease between her eyebrows.

“What?”
Andy finally broke the silence.

“You don’t have to do this, Rory,” Chloe said gently.

“Yes, I do,” Rory said. “It’s time for the truth.”

“You’re…” Daria shook her head with a frown. “Have you known this all along?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I had no idea. Not until the bonfire tonight.
When Chloe said that she was Shelly’s mother, I could tell…She gave me an unspoken message…” He looked at Chloe, and she nearly smiled at him. “And I knew,” he said.

“But she was seventeen,” Daria said. “You would have only been…”

“Fourteen,” he volunteered. He wondered how to say anything more without painting a worse picture of Chloe than she had already painted for herself. “I was fourteen,” he repeated, “and anxious to experience anything I could.” He still remembered that night vividly. The dunes at Jockey’s Ridge had been chilly, the sand downright cold. It was October, Columbus Day weekend, when most of the homeowners of the cul-de-sac came to the beach for a three-day getaway. He’d been naive, but willing—no,
eager
—to learn, and Chloe had been an excellent teacher.

Rory smiled weakly at his son. “I owe you an apology, Zack,” he said. “I came down on you pretty hard this summer for your relationship with Kara.” He had even used Shelly’s birth and desertion as an example of one young couple’s poor judgment and irresponsible behavior. He waited for Zack to rub his nose in it.

But Zack surprised him. “It’s okay, Dad.” His voice was husky, and he put an awkward arm around Rory’s shoulders. “Everybody makes mistakes.”

“Daria.” Chloe turned to her sister, taking both Daria’s hands in her own. “I’m so sorry you had to take such complete responsibility for Shelly. When Mom died, I probably should have taken over, but it would have meant leaving my order, and you never seemed to mind being in the position of caretaker.”

“I never did mind,” Daria said. She sounded flat, and Rory had no idea how she was handling the revelations filling this tiny room. She had to feel betrayed by both Chloe and himself.
But he guessed that right now, her mind was on Shelly. Nothing else—no confessions, no disclosures—could eclipse that primary concern.

“If Shelly lives…” Chloe pressed the tissue to her eyes, and it was a moment before she could continue. “If she lives,” she said, “I’ll take care of her, Daria. I’ll stay in Kill Devil Hills with her. It’s time you were able to live your own life. Move to California with Rory, if that’s what you want.”

Daria said nothing. She avoided Rory’s gaze, and he could hardly blame her.

Andy suddenly spoke up again. “What did you mean at the bonfire, Daria, when you said that Shelly overheard you and Rory on the porch?”

Daria pressed her fingers to her forehead, rubbing her temples. “I think Shelly must have heard us talking about how Pete broke up with me because of her. And she heard us talking about…” Daria’s voice trailed off. “Do you remember the plane accident back in April, Andy?” she asked.

Andy nodded.

“Remember how Shelly swam out to help us? The pilot was this young, eighteen-year-old girl,” she explained to Chloe and Zack. “It turns out she was Grace’s daughter, but none of us knew that at the time.”

“Grace’s
daughter?
” Andy asked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It’s not important now,” Daria said. “What
is
important is that Pete was trying to free the pilot. She was trapped in her seat, twisted around in her seat belt, somehow. Pete kept having to go underwater to try to get to her belt. And then, suddenly, he started yelling at Shelly. Shelly was supposed to be keeping the plane afloat, but she was leaning on the propeller instead, actually dragging the plane down. She was—”

“What?”
Andy interrupted her. “Is that what Pete told you?”

Daria stared at him. “Yes,” she said. “He—”

“Son of a bitch.” Andy stood up, fire in his eyes. “Shelly didn’t do anything wrong. How stupid do you think she is? It was
Pete
who dragged the plane down. I saw the whole thing. He didn’t mean to, I know that, but he was standing on the pontoon for a minute, and that pulled the plane and the pilot under. When Pete figured out what he was doing, he started yelling at Shelly. I didn’t get why he was yelling at her. She was just treading water; she didn’t have a clue what he was yelling at her about. Pete is a frigging coward. He wanted to find a way to get you to lock Shelly up so you could go with him to Raleigh.”

“My God, Andy.” Daria’s face was ashen, and Rory knew she believed every word Andy had said. “I wish you’d told me sooner.”

“If I’d known he was pinning the blame on Shelly, I would have.”

“Poor Shelly,” Daria said. “She probably overheard—” She turned at the sound of the door opening, and the woman physician who had been treating Shelly walked into the room. Rory stood up, and the others followed his lead, as they waited to hear what their futures would hold.