CHAPTER 2
Julie
I was still sitting on the porch half an hour later, the letter on my lap, when I was surprised to see Shannon walking toward our house. She was a distance away, but I would have recognized her at a mile. She was five feet nine inches tall with long, thick, nearly black hair. She’d been a presence from the day she was born.
I was worried about her. When Glen and I allowed her to skip the third grade, I’d never thought ahead to how I would feel watching my seventeen-year-old daughter go off to college, moving into a world outside my protection. I liked to have at least the illusion of control over what happened to the people I love. Glen said that’s why I wrote fiction: it gave me total control over every single character and every single thing that happened. He was probably right.
But there was more that worried me. Something had changed in Shannon during her senior year. She’d never been shy about her height; she’d had an almost regal carriage, a haughty confidence when she’d jerk her head to toss her hair over her shoulder. Recently, though, she seemed uncomfortable in her own skin. I was certain she’d put on weight. A few nights earlier, I’d found her in her room eating from a bowl of raw cookie dough! I’d lectured her about the possibility of getting salmonella from the raw eggs in the batter, but I’d really wanted to ask her if she had any idea how many calories she was consuming.
I would sometimes catch her staring into space, an empty look in her almond-shaped eyes, and she rarely went out with her friends anymore. She’d had one boyfriend or another—all the artsy, musical types—since she was fourteen, yet I didn’t think she’d been on a date for at least six months. Her new homebody behavior made it easier for me to keep an eye on her, but I couldn’t help but be concerned by her sudden transformation.
“I just want to end my senior year with a bang,” she’d said, when I’d inquired into the change in her social life. “I don’t want to be a slacker.”
I knew Glen had talked to her about how important it was to keep her grades up during her senior year, in spite of her early acceptance into the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. No problem there. She’d ended her high-school career as senior class president with a 4.2 grade point average, but still, something seemed wrong. I wondered if she was afraid of leaving home. Or maybe she was having a delayed reaction to the divorce. It had been nearly two years and I thought she’d handled it well—aside from the fact that she seemed to blame me for it—but perhaps I’d been kidding myself.
She spotted me as she turned onto the sidewalk leading up to our house.
“Hi!” She waved. She was wearing a white-and-lime-greenprint skirt today, the sort of skirt my sister Lucy liked to wear—long and flowing—and I liked the way it looked on her. That was another change: Shannon seemed to have traded in her low-rise pants for this more feminine look.
“What are you doing home?” I called from my seat on the rocker.
“I have some time before the next lesson,” she said. “Thought I’d take a break.”
We lived in a neighborhood of turn-of-the-century houses near Westfield’s downtown. It was an easy walk for her to and from the music store, as well as to the day-care center where she spent two afternoons a week as an aide, caring for the toddlers.
She climbed the porch steps, carrying a can of Vanilla Coke.
“Love that haircut,” she said as she settled into the rocker Abby Worley had vacated only a short time before.
I’d had my hair cut to my chin a few days earlier in preparation for a photo shoot for my next book jacket. My hairdresser had added blond highlights to the auburn shade I’d worn for the past decade, and Shannon commented on it every time she saw me. Even my mother had noticed, telling me the cut-and-color looked “sassy.” I knew she’d meant it as a compliment.
Shannon leaned forward to get a good look at me, her own hair falling away from her face in a thick dark curtain. “I think you need some new glasses, now,” she said.
I touched my rimless frames. “Do I?” I asked. I thought my glasses were stylish, but I was usually three or four years behind the trend.
“You should get some cool plastic frames,” she said. “Like in a bronze color.”
“I don’t think I’m ready to be that cool.” I was amazed at my ability to carry on such a mundane conversation when my mind was still reeling from Abby’s visit.
Shannon took a long drink from her Coke. “Actually, Mom,” she said, “I came home because I need to talk to you about something.” She glanced at me. “I’m afraid you’re going to be upset.”
“Tell me,” I said, wanting her to spit it out before my overactive imagination had a chance to fill the silence.
She gnawed at her lower lip. Her dimples showed when she did that. “I’ve decided to live at Dad’s for the summer.” Shannon looked at me directly then, waiting for my reaction. I tried not to show any, my gaze intent on the dogwood in our neighbors’ front yard.
This is no big deal, I told myself. Glen only lived a few miles away, and it would probably be good for them to have some time together before she went away to college. So why were tears welling up in my eyes for the second time in an hour? This is the last summer I have with you, I wanted to say, but I kept my cool.
“Why, honey?” I asked.
“I just…you know. I’ve lived with you since the divorce, and I know Dad would like it if I…you know…if I stayed there this summer. I’m trying to be fair to everybody,” she added, although I saw right through that. Shannon was a good kid, but she was not so noble that she’d put her needs second to someone else’s.
“What’s the real reason?” I asked her. “Has he been trying to persuade you to move?”
“No.” She shook her head in a tired motion. “Nothing like that.”
“He works long hours.”
She laughed, the sound popping out of her mouth before she could stop it. “Now you get it,” she said. She smoothed her hair away from her face, her Italian charm bracelet nearly full of the small rectangular charms, all related to music.
“Get what?” I asked.
“Mom, I’ll be eighteen in three months,” she said, her voice pleading with me to understand. “You still treat me like I’m ten. I have to let you know my every move. Dad treats me like I’m an adult.”
So that was it. “Well,” I said, “now that you’re just about in college, maybe we can change the rules a bit.”
“You’d have to totally revamp your rules for them to be tolerable,” she said. “You don’t let me breathe.”
“Oh, Shannon, come on,” I said. That was always her argument. She said that I smothered her, I gave her no freedom. I was overprotective—that much I’d admit to—but I was not her jailer. “You haven’t even asked to do anything in months, so how can you say I don’t let you breathe?”
She rolled her eyes. “There’s no point in asking you if I can do anything, because you’ll just say no,” she said.
“Shannon. That’s not true and I think you know it.”
“When you go on your book tours, you still make me stay with Erika’s family even though she and I haven’t been friends since we were, like, twelve, just because her parents are even stricter than you and you know I can’t get away with anything there. I hate that.”
“You never asked to stay anywhere else,” I said, frowning.
“And you call my cell phone constantly to check up on me,” she said. “Do you know—”
“Not to check up on you,” I corrected her. “I call you because I care about you. And I don’t call you ‘constantly.’” Our too-frequent arguments often had this flavor. They started off in one direction and then took a circuitous route that left my head spinning. “What is this really all about?” I asked.
She let out an exasperated sigh, as though I was too dense to possibly understand. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that soon I’ll be on my own and I think it’s time I got some practice, so that’s why I think I should live at Dad’s for the summer.”
“You won’t be on your own at Dad’s,” I countered, although I knew Glen would do all he could to please his only child. He’d greet any potential conflict between Shannon and himself with his usual passivity. I’d had to be the disciplinarian—the bad guy—with our daughter from the start.
I thought about Shannon’s graduation ceremony. Glen and his sister and nephew had sat a few rows behind Mom, Lucy and me, and I’d felt as though the three of them were staring at me. I wanted to go up to Glen after the ceremony, throw my arms around him, point to Shannon and say, Look what we did together! But there was a wall between us, one that was probably my fault. I was still angry for what he’d done to me and to our marriage. Shannon knew nothing about any of that, and I planned to keep it that way. I would never have harmed her father in her eyes.
“I know I won’t actually be on my own,” she said. “That’s not the point. I’m just going to do it, Mom, okay? I mean, I don’t really need your permission, right? To stay with him?”
I couldn’t think clearly. “Can we talk about this later?” I asked. I looked down at the letter in my lap and realized I had folded it into smaller and smaller rectangles until it could fit neatly in the palm of my hand.
“What’s that?” Shannon pointed to the fat wad of paper.
I unfolded it carefully, still feeling some disbelief that Abby Worley’s visit had occurred at all. “I had a visitor,” I said.
“Who?”
“The daughter of Ethan Chapman. He lived next door to my family’s summer bungalow when I was a kid. He was my age. His older brother, Ned, died recently and Ethan’s daughter—her name is Abby—found this letter in his belongings. It was addressed to the police.”
I handed the letter to her and watched lines of worry form between her eyebrows as she read it.
“Oh, Mom,” she said, exasperation in her voice. “Like you really need this.”
“I know.” It came out as a whisper.
“Ned was Isabel’s boyfriend, wasn’t he?” She used Isabel’s name more easily than anyone else in the family, perhaps because she had never known her. To Shannon, Isabel was the aunt who had died long before she was born. The one we rarely mentioned, even though Shannon looked more like her with every year. The thick dark hair and double rows of black eyelashes, the almond-shaped eyes and deep dimples. Shannon was now seventeen, the same age Isabel had been when she died. She knew what had happened the summer I was twelve and she understood that those events were the reason I held on to her so tightly: I would never let her run wild as Isabel had. Shannon knew it all, but that didn’t stop her from resenting my attempts to keep her safe.
“Yes,” I said. “Isabel’s boyfriend.”
“Your hands are shaking.”
I looked down at my hands where they rested in my lap and saw that she was right.
“What are you supposed to do with this?” She handed the letter back to me.
“I’m going to talk to Ethan about taking it to the police. And if he won’t take it, I’ll do it myself.”
She let out a long breath. “I suppose you have to,” she said. “Have you talked to Lucy about it?”
“Not yet,” I said, although I’d been thinking of calling my sister when Shannon had arrived. I needed to talk to someone who understood how I felt.
Shannon stood up. “Well,” she said, a bit awkwardly, “I have to get back to the store. I just wanted to tell you…you know, about moving to Dad’s. Sorry that my timing sucked, and that it turned into this big, like—” she waved her hands through the air “—this altercation or whatever.”
I nodded. “When will you go?”
“In a couple of days. Okay?” She was longing for my blessing.
“Okay.” What else could I say?
She handed me the empty Coke can. “Would you mind sticking that in recycling, please?” she asked.
I took the can and held it on my lap next to the letter. “Have fun at work,” I said.
“Thanks.” She bounced down the porch steps with an ease known only to the young.
“Shannon?” I called as she walked down our sidewalk.
“What?” She didn’t bother to turn around.
“If you talk to Nana, don’t say anything about this to her.” It was an unwritten rule in my family never to talk to my mother about the summer of ’62.
“I won’t,” she said, lifting her arm in a wave.
I stood up then, letter and Coke can in my hands, and walked into the house to call my sister.