Summer's Child (34 page)

T
HE SUN WAS A CREAMY ORANGE GLOBE HANGING LOW
over the ocean as Grace drove to Rodanthe in the morning. She was exhausted and numb, confused and dazed. Shelly was not hers; that much was clear. Yet she had come to love her, and as she drove, she prayed. Prayed and cried.

She pulled into her driveway and went into the house. She’d been living there with Eddie ever since the day he’d followed her to Rory’s house. It was Eddie who’d persuaded her to go to the bonfire the night before. It was time she told everyone the truth, he’d said. She needed to do it to be sure Shelly was evaluated for Marfan’s syndrome. Chloe, though, had beaten her at the truth-telling game. How Grace’s heart had survived that revelation, she had no idea.

She’d called Eddie from the hospital late last night to tell him all that had happened, and now she found him waiting for her in the living room. He handed her a cup of coffee, gave her a hug.

“How is Shelly?” he asked.

“She’s in critical condition,” she said, sitting down on the sofa. “They only give her a fifty percent chance of pulling through. And if she does make it, she may have even more brain damage.”

“That’s terrible.” Eddie shook his head. “What a shame.”

“I’m still in shock.” She lifted the coffee to her lips, but lowered the cup again without taking a sip. “I just can’t believe she’s not mine, Eddie.”

“I can,” he said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because,” he said, “I found the nurse.”

“What?” She set the cup on the coffee table. “How did you—”

“That doesn’t matter,” he said.

“Does she know what happened to my daughter? Does she know who adopted her?”

He nodded. “Yes, she knows. But she didn’t want to get into it on the phone. She asked that I bring you to her. She said it was the sort of thing she should talk to you about face-to-face.”

Grace looked at her watch. “Can we go today? Is it too early to go now?” She was ready to race out the door.

Eddie smiled. “Let me give her a call first,” he said. “But I think it will be okay.”

He made the call to the nurse, Grace dissecting his every word as she tried to imagine what Nancy was saying on the other end of the line.
Nurse Nancy
. How Grace had hated her all these years!

Then Eddie called Sally to tell her they wouldn’t make it into the café today and to ask her to take over for them. Finally, they were ready to leave.

They were both quiet in the car as they drove up the Barrier Islands and across the bridge to the mainland. Grace kneaded her hands together in her lap, anxiously wondering what sort of people had adopted her child. And would her daughter want to see her? She had to be prepared for the fact that she might not.

She read the directions to Eddie as they entered Elizabeth
City. They drove through a beautiful old neighborhood, with tree-lined streets and old-fashioned streetlights, finally coming to stop in front of a large brick house. Nancy and Nathan had obviously moved up in the world since Shelly was born, Grace thought, when they’d only been able to afford that raunchy little cottage for their vacation.

Eddie looked at her across the seat. “Ready?” he asked.

She nodded, pressed her clammy palms together and got out of the car.

They walked hand in hand up the slate walk to the front door. Eddie rang the bell, and Grace waited for Nancy to appear. Instead, though, the door was opened by a young woman Shelly’s age. She was tall and slender, with dark hair, an uncertain smile and a deep and definite widow’s peak.

O
NLY AS THE AMBULANCE RACED TOWARD THE BEACH NEAR
milepost 6, did the irony of the situation strike Daria full force. Here she was, one year almost to the day after the plane crash, heading for another water emergency on the beach. This time, it was an early-morning surfing accident that needed her attention.

Daria was once again a full-fledged EMT, having battled her demons over the death of the pilot, and she felt no trepidation as the ambulance parked at the end of the street. She and Mike jumped out and ran toward the small crowd that had formed around the fallen surfer. People drew back to let them through, and only then did Daria see that the surfer was a woman. Dressed in a wet suit, she lay on the cold sand, while a male surfer pressed a towel to her head.

Daria and Mike dropped to their knees next to the woman. She was conscious, even laughing a bit at something her surfing partner had said to her.

“Her board hit her in the head,” the man said. “She lost consciousness for a minute or two, but seems all right now.”

Daria took the woman’s vital signs, while Mike tended to the laceration on her head. They were strapping her onto a backboard when Daria happened to look up to see Shelly
standing near the center of the crowd, baby Mattie in a sack against her chest. Daria waved, and Shelly waved back. She remembered that Shelly planned to make dinner for everyone that night.

In a matter of hours, Rory would be in Kill Devil Hills. He was bicoastal these days, spending Monday through Thursday in California and living at the Sea Shanty the rest of the time. Zack came with him every once in a while. Their presence made the Sea Shanty a wonderfully full house, since Andy, Shelly and the baby were living there, as well. Daria needed to be certain that Andy and Shelly could handle child care without her help, although she had few doubts at this point. Both Shelly and Andy were attentive, careful parents.

During the week, when Rory was not with her, Daria watched him on
True Life Stories
. It was strange to see him on television and know that he was hers—and that they’d been brought together by the one true life story he would never talk about in public.

The crowd dispersed after the surfer had been taken away in the ambulance, and Shelly began strolling toward the Sea Shanty, talking to Mattie as she walked. This last month, she’d come to understand Daria’s overprotectiveness, because she now experienced the feeling herself. She could not get enough of her month-old daughter. She studied the way Mattie clenched and unclenched her tiny fists and the expression on her face that was beginning to resemble a smile, and she prayed that the baby was all right. She had deprived Mattie of oxygen when she was underwater; no one really knew how long she and her baby had gone without air. She herself had no memory of that night at all.

She’d had to deliver Mattie at a special maternity ward in a hospital in Elizabeth City, because her doctor was afraid the
baby would not be okay. Mattie had surprised everyone, though. She was born healthy, and she still seemed healthy. But Shelly had seemed healthy when she was a baby, too. It would only be later, when Mattie tried to learn how to tie her shoes or add two plus two that they would know what the time without oxygen had done to her.

If she let herself think about it too long, Shelly could still cry over this. Chloe helped her with the guilt, though; Chloe knew all about guilt. She called Shelly several times a week from Georgia, where she was still teaching, but no longer a nun, and she talked about how sorry she was about the poor start she’d given Shelly in life. But Shelly felt no anger toward her. No one ever talked about this, but Shelly knew that Chloe was one of those women who wasn’t cut out to be a mother. Chloe loved her, Shelly was certain of that, but it was a sisterly kind of love, not the motherly kind. She got plenty of that, though, from Daria.

In the last eight months or so, Shelly had undergone a metamorphosis. That was the word Zack had used to describe her transformation the last time he visited Kill Devil Hills, and she liked the way it felt in her mouth. She was definitely a stronger person. She’d been seeing a therapist, and he’d helped her feel less afraid about leaving the Outer Banks. He even drove her onto the mainland every couple of weeks during her session, taking her farther and farther away from Kill Devil Hills each time, and she no longer trembled at the thought of leaving the Barrier Islands. The therapist, of course, thought it was his fine work with her that had led to that result, but it was actually the baby. Mattie could do what no one else had been able to do: make Shelly less afraid. It was impossible, Shelly discovered, to focus on her own fears when she was concentrating on Mattie and her needs. Last week, she and Andy had driven the baby all the way to Greenville to be
checked out by a specialist, and Shelly hadn’t realized the magnitude of what she had done until they were in the car coming home. Andy was proud of her, and she was proud of herself.

Her family had grown quite complicated. She had a father—an
excellent
father. She started calling Rory “Dad” just a couple of months ago. It had felt funny at first, and made them both laugh whenever she said it, but now it felt natural. Just a few weeks ago, he and Daria and Shelly and Andy had gone out to dinner together and discussed how confusing the Cato family tree had become. Rory and Daria planned to get married that summer. Once they did, Rory pointed out, Daria would be Shelly’s sister and stepmother, as well as Mattie’s aunt, great-aunt and grandmother. Plus, Rory said, Shelly had a new half brother—Zack—in addition to her two sisters, one who was actually her mother, the other, her aunt. Andy had laughed and said what a crazy family he’d married into.

Someday, she and Andy and Mattie would leave the Outer Banks. Even though everything she could possibly need was there on that long narrow strip of land, Shelly wanted more for Mattie than Kill Devil Hills could offer. Andy talked about how much he would like to live in California, and Shelly was beginning to think she might be able to actually go there someday. No matter where she lived, though, she was looking forward to the day when she would bring an older Mattie back to the Outer Banks. She would walk with her on the beach in the morning and teach her the names of the shells, and she’d stay with her daughter in Kill Devil Hills long enough to make the scent of the sea part of Mattie’s soul. It would be a time with family, when she, Andy and Mattie, Daria, Chloe, Rory and Zack were all at the Sea Shanty. And she would tell Mattie the story of the girl who kicked over a horseshoe-crab shell on the beach and gave all of them a chance at life.