Charles was a believer in prayers being answered. I could only conclude that I did not pray quite hard enough.
Charles and I were married in June the following year. I feigned pain when we first made love, and to my great relief, he believed I was a virgin. We took our honeymoon in Niagara Falls, and then joined my parents at the bungalow, this time sharing the small downstairs bedroom that had always been mine. We unpacked our suitcases, then went onto the porch and I stopped dead in my tracks at the sound coming from next door: the cries of a baby.
“Whose baby is that?” I asked.
My mother was sitting at the table. “It’s Ross and Joan’s,” she said. “Sue Clements told me they got married last September and the baby was born just a few weeks ago. Ross’s parents retired to Florida, so it’s just the three of them in the house there now.”
I did the math in my head and felt a wave of disappointment that he had not married her simply because she was pregnant. He must have married her for love, then, the sort of love he and I could never have known because of all the forces against us. Would I ever get over it?
We saw the baby that evening. Joan carried him over to us in the backyard, cooing and showing him off. Although I didn’t ask to hold him, she carefully transferred him to my arms and I felt an involuntary pull of my nipples at cradling his beautiful warmth.
“His name is Ned Rosswell Chapman,” she said.
Charles leaned over and gently drew the blanket away from the baby’s cheek. Ned Rosswell Chapman sucked his fingers in his sleep.
“He’s adorable,” I said sincerely. I didn’t need eyes in the back of my head to know that Ross was approaching us from behind. It was some sort of sixth sense I had, so strong that I was not surprised when he suddenly appeared at Joan’s side, slipping an arm around her waist.
“What do you think of him?” he asked me, nodding in the direction of his son.
“He’s precious,” I said. I looked up at him and saw that he was gazing at me, the look in his eyes raw with desire. For me? For Joan? I didn’t know, and I looked quickly away from him, back to the face of his child.
We chatted a while about little Ned and about our honeymoon, and gradually the conversation shifted to the war, as it usually did in those days. Joan and I withdrew into silence as the men’s voices grew louder. Ross complained that the government was handing us propaganda about how well the war was going while hiding the truth about the number of casualties suffered. Charles argued back, showing a side of himself I had not known existed. Both men were strident and impassioned, and I could see the future mapped out ahead of us: Ross Chapman and Charles Bauer would never be friends. They were lawyer and doctor, on opposite teams. That night in our shared backyard, we forged the cool and contentious relationship with our neighbors that would remain for the rest of our years—even as our children became friends.
CHAPTER 29
Julie
I’d like you to see my obstetrician.
Would you like to go to my OB/GYN?
My obstetrician is the best in the area.
I’d practiced every way of saying it, trying to find the words that would offer the path of least resistance when I presented the idea to Shannon. I should have known it wouldn’t matter. My daughter had her own plans.
I called her Friday morning, timing the call so that I’d reach her before she had to be to work but late enough that I knew she’d be up.
“Hi, Mom,” she said, apparently seeing my number on the caller ID of her cell phone. I took it as a good sign that she’d answered despite knowing it was me.
“Hi, honey,” I said. I was sitting on my bed, cross-legged, leaning back against the sham. I’d changed the sheets after getting up that morning, just in case: Ethan was coming to Westfield tonight. “How are you feeling?”
“You mean because I’m pregnant?”
No matter what I said to her, she seemed to take it as an attack. “I mean, in general,” I said.
“Fine.”
“I thought I’d call to see if you’d like me to make an appointment for you with my OB/GYN. I know you’d like her. She’s—”
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” Shannon interrupted me. “I already have a doctor.”
“You have?” I asked. My daughter was living a completely secret life. “Where are you…are you going to a clinic?”
“Not a clinic. It’s Dr. Myers-Blake in Morristown. She’s good. A friend told me about her.”
“Myersblick?” I repeated. I’d never heard of her.
“Myers-Blake,” she said slowly. “It’s hyphenated.”
The name was still unfamiliar to me. “But how did you pay?” I asked. “Our insurance—”
“Tanner sent me money,” she said, “but she does take our insurance. I picked a doctor who did, so that once you knew, I could start having our insurance pay for her.”
I was quiet, amazed that she had thought the issue through so carefully and thoroughly when her other recent decisions seemed to have been impulsively made. Through my bedroom window, I could see the massive oak tree Shannon used to climb as a kid. I missed that girl. I missed her so much. But I looked away from the window. The future was here and now.
“I’m proud of you for getting prenatal care on your own,” I said. “But please consider going to my doctor.”
“No,” she said. “I’m in charge of my life from now on.”
“Well, listen, honey.” It was time for a new tack. “Abby Chapman, Ethan Chapman’s daughter who is about twenty-six, is willing to talk to you about how she handled getting pregnant when she was about your age. She—”
“I’m handling it just fine, Mom.” Her voice was filled with irritation; I was losing her.
“I know you are,” I said. “But, see…what she did…and maybe you haven’t considered this option…is that she placed her baby with adoptive parents, and she—”
“Mother, would you please respect my decision?” Shannon asked. “How many times do I have to tell you I’m keeping this baby? I didn’t mean to get pregnant. I didn’t set out to mess up my college plans. But it happened and now I’ll deal with it. And there’s something else I need to tell you.”
Oh, God. “What?”
“Tanner is coming here next week,” she said. “He’s staying with his friends in Morristown for two weeks, and then he has to go back to Colorado and I’m going to go with him. So, I’ll be going to a doctor there, ultimately, anyway.”
“You mean, you’d be going there now? To stay?”
“In about three weeks,” she said. “And I don’t know if we’ll stay there forever, but we’ll be there at least until he finishes his Ph.D. program. Then, who knows where we’ll end up.”
I felt panicky. “Let’s talk this over, Shannon,” I said, standing up from my seat on the bed. “Talking something over doesn’t make you any less a grown-up. I talk to Lucy about important decisions I have to make, and this decision is certainly important.”
She sighed. “I have to get to work, Mom, so maybe we can talk later, okay?”
“All right,” I said. What else could I say. “But please, Shannon. Please let’s talk later.”
I called Glen at work the moment I got off the phone with Shannon. I spoke quickly, telling him about her going to a doctor we didn’t know and her planned move to Colorado. He listened quietly. He was always quiet. I’d once appreciated his gentle, compliant nature. Now I hated it. “Can you exert any influence over her since she’s living with you?” I pleaded.
“I think we need to let her do it her way,” he said finally.
“You’re afraid to make waves with her,” I said. “You’re always afraid to make waves. I would probably still not know you were having an affair if what’s-her-face hadn’t called to tell me.”
Glen said nothing. He knew it was the truth.
“Do you want her to move away?” I asked, looking for some response. I would take any response at that point.
??
?I think if she’s old enough to get pregnant,” he said, “she’s old enough to deal with the consequences.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Eleven-year-olds can get pregnant, Glen.You think an eleven-year-old should deal with the consequences?”
“She’s not eleven.”
“Don’t you care that she’s leaving?”
“She would have left for college anyway,” he said, most likely with one of his c’est la vie shrugs.
I hung up. I couldn’t remember ever hanging up on anyone before in my entire life, but I could no longer tolerate his inability to confront difficult situations head-on. That’s what had cost us our marriage. I wasn’t going to let it cost me my daughter.
I got online to e-mail Lucy regarding Shannon’s latest plans and discovered a message from Ethan.
The police found Bruno Walker’s sister. She said he’s on a solo sailing trip around the world. The cop I spoke with said they’ll find him and “cut his trip short.”
And they questioned Dad.
See you tonight.
CHAPTER 30
Julie
1962
I loved to ride my bike around Bay Head Shores, but Lucy never felt very steady on hers. She would ride on our end of the dirt road, and that was about it. One day, though, I told her that if she would ride her bike to the corner store with me, I would buy her penny candy. She loved those strips of button candy, and I could tell she was tempted.
“It’s too far, though,” she whined.
We were sitting on the sand in our front yard, our bikes parked in the driveway.
“How about this,” I said, coming up with a way to shorten the trip. “We can walk our bikes across the blueberry lot, and that will cut off about a fourth of the distance.” It would probably be an even harder trip doing it that way, since we would have to carry our bikes over the deepest sand, but my suggestion seemed to work.
“All right,” she said, getting to her feet. She shuffled barefoot toward her bike, afraid of stepping on one of the holly leaves that sometimes blew over from the Chapmans’ yard. I had to admit, the points on those leaves hurt, but Lucy looked like a spaz walking that way.
We walked our bikes more easily than I’d anticipated across the blueberry lot, but I was perspiring anyway by the time we got to the street on the other side. We mounted our one-speed, low-to-the-ground bikes and began riding in the direction of the store, dense woods on either side of us. Although there were no cars on the road, Lucy still hugged the shoulder, causing her tires to slip off the pavement and into the sand from time to time, but I didn’t say a word. When we neared the corner of Rue Lido, she held her left hand up in a turn signal even though there were no cars in sight, and I had to stop myself from laughing. I didn’t want to discourage her from making this trip again.
We pulled into the lot next to the little store and parked our bikes. Inside, I bought eggs and milk for our mother, candy buttons and root beer barrels for Lucy, licorice lace and Mary Janes for myself and a pack of teaberry gum for Isabel, because I knew she liked to use it to cover up the fact that she’d been smoking. I put the bag containing our purchases in my bicycle basket and we got back on the road.
We were on the long stretch of Beach Boulevard when I heard the sound of a truck somewhere behind us. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure Lucy was well to the side of the road and saw that she was practically riding in the woods. Then I saw the vehicle that was making the noise: It was the mosquito truck, coming toward us, just ahead of a dense fog of DDT.
The mosquito truck drove through Bay Head Shores every week or so. I liked the smell and I liked the way you could run through the cloud of insecticide with a friend, unable to see one another until you emerged on the other side. We were naive to the perils of DDT back then. If Lucy had not been with me, I would have welcomed the thrill of finding myself smack in the path of the truck, but I knew she would not.
“Hey, Luce!” I called behind me. “The mosquito truck is coming. Let’s pretend we’re in the sky inside a cloud.”
I had barely finished my sentence when the truck drove past us. The driver either didn’t see us or didn’t care that we were there, and we were instantly engulfed in the chemical fog.
“Help!” Lucy called. “Ack! Help!”
“It’s okay,” I shouted back to her. I didn’t want to stop. It was too exciting. I couldn’t see the road ahead of me. It was like riding my bike with my eyes closed, which I did occasionally when I knew I was someplace safe.
“Julie!” Lucy’s voice had grown fainter, and I figured she must have stopped and gotten off her bike.
I turned my bike around and rode back the way we had come, but even though the fog was lifting, I couldn’t see her on the road.
“Lucy?” I called.
“I’m over here,” she said. “I went over the handlebars.”
Then I spotted her in the woods, half sitting, half lying down. I jumped off my own bike, tossing it to the ground, and ran through the fog to reach her.
“Lucy!” I dropped to my knees next to her. “Are you hurt?”
She was flailing at the fog with her hands, her eyes squeezed shut, and I looked at her legs and arms, afraid I might see bones jutting through the skin. Except for a nasty scrape along the length of her forearm, she looked okay.
“Open your eyes,” I said. “C’mon. The fog’s almost gone.”
She opened her eyes, but she was crying, trying to catch her breath, and I figured she’d been holding it to avoid breathing in the spray. Now she was forced to drink in the odorous air in big gulps. Looking down at her wounded arm, she let out another scream. It was ugly, a two-inch-wide band scraped raw along her forearm, dots of blood breaking through here and there.
“It’s okay,” I said, but she held her arm to her as if it were a fragile thing and let out a wail.
I knew I was not going to be able to persuade her to get back on her bike. The fog was thinning, and I tried to find a landmark to tell me how far we were from the house. There were woods on both sides of the road but I could see the opening to the blueberry lot a distance ahead of us.
“Get up, and we’ll walk our bikes home,” I said. “We’re not that far.”
She peered down the street, then shook her head. “I don’t want to touch my dumb bike,” she said.
Where was her bike? I looked around, finally spotting it several yards away from where she’d landed. She must have flown over those handlebars, and I felt sorry for her. She was lucky a scraped arm was all she’d suffered.
“Okay,” I said, “then we’ll leave the bikes here and walk home.”
Sniffling, she got slowly to her feet.
“You’re an old lady in a girl’s body,” I told her, helping her up. “Grandma has more energy than you.”
“Shut up,” she said.
We heard the sound of another vehicle on the road and Lucy gave me a look of alarm before running a few feet into the woods.
I turned around to see a red car heading toward us. “It’s only a car,” I said. Then I realized what car it was: Ned’s red Corvette convertible! “Hey!” I called to Lucy. “It’s Ned!”
Lucy came out of the woods and stood by my side, still cradling her arm. I waved as Ned stopped the car in front of me. Bruno Walker was in the passenger seat, and the radio poured “Cryin’ in the Rain” into the air all around us.
Bruno grinned at me. “Hey, good-lookin’,” he said, and I wasn’t certain if he was being serious or just teasing me, so I kept a half smile on my face which I figured would work either way.
“What’s going on, Jules?” Ned asked. I liked that he used Isabel’s nickname for me.
“Lucy crashed into the woods on her bike,” I said.
Ned turned off the engine and he and Bruno got out of the car. They were both tan and gorgeous, slender Ned with his softlooking blond hair and Bruno with his sexy black ducktail and muscular build. I didn’t think there were two better-looking, non-movie-star guy
s in the universe and I wished I was with one of my Westfield girlfriends instead of with my little sister.
“Are you okay, Lucy?” Ned asked.
Still sniffling a bit, she stuck her arm out for him to look at. He held it gently in his hands, studying the injury, and for a moment, I wished it had been me who had fallen off her bike.
“It’s not broken, is it?” he asked her, carefully moving her arm this way and that.
Lucy shook her head. “Just bleeding,” she said.
“Not much blood,” Ned stated the obvious. “Your mom just needs to clean it up and put a bandage on it.”
I stood right next to Ned, feigning my own interest in Lucy’s arm but really just reveling in the cigarette-and-Coppertone smell of him.
Bruno had found Lucy’s bike in the tangle of weeds and vines at the side of the road. He lifted it up over his head as if it were made of feathers and set it down on the road, studying the front wheel as he moved it back and forth. A cigarette hung from one corner of his mouth, and I could see why some of the girls thought he looked like Elvis Presley. His eyes had that hooded look to them, and his lips were thick and pouty.
“You fucked up your bike pretty good,” he said to Lucy.
“Hey!” Ned said sharply. “Cool the language.”
I was both shocked and thrilled by his use of the forbidden word. I watched as he carried the bike to the back of the car and opened the tiny trunk. It didn’t look like either of our bikes would fit in there, but he managed to get them both in partway, cushioning the Vette’s shiny red paint with beach towels at Ned’s request. The trunk would have to stay wide-open, but we were only going around the corner. He handed me the bag of things we’d bought at the little store.
“Well,” Ned looked at his car with its two bucket seats. “Lucy, you sit on Bruno’s lap, and Julie, I’ll share my seat with you.”