Diane Chamberlain - Summer's Child

Chloe wondered if Shelly might have gotten here to Kill Devil Hills somehow. It seemed impossible, but it turned out that’s where she was.

We never did find out exactly how she’d managed to get here—some combination of buses and hitchhiking, I guess. She’d broken one of the Sea Shanty’s windows to get in and had pretty much set up house for herself. I decided that was it—we’d move here. ” She glanced at the widow’s walk again.

“I still don’t know if it was the right thing to do for her. Maybe she should have been forced to tough it out somewhere else, because—to be honest—I think she’s even worse than she was. Whenever we have to go to the mainland now, to visit someone or to see a doctor, she gets panicky. But I love her.” She looked directly into Rory’s eyes and saw sympathy there.

“To see her miserable tears me apart,” she said.

“To see the total joy in her face when she’s safe on her beach makes it all worthwhile to me.”

“Maybe it was the right move for her,” Rory said.

“She’s able to hold a job here, it sounds like. Would she be able to do that if you lived back in Norfolk?”

“I don’t think she would have been able to get out of bed in the morning if we’d stayed in Norfolk,” Daria said.

“And she’s very responsible about her work. But frankly, there really isn’t much she can do to earn a living or to allow her to live independently. Sean Macy—the priest at St. Esther’s—and the others who supervise her give her a lot of direction in the housekeeping she does. Sometimes I think they keep her there out of pity. She probably wouldn’t be able to hold a job anywhere else.” Daria suddenly felt as though she had painted a one-sided picture of her sister.

“She does have skills, though. She’s very kindhearted and likable.

She’s creative. Her jewelry is actually in demand. She’s a terrific swimmer. Physically, she’s very graceful.”

“Yes,” Rory said, “I noticed that.”

“She can’t work, but she sure can play volleyball.” Daria smiled.

“She excels at just about everything that’s fun. She just can’t do the serious things in life very well.”

Rory laughed.

“Maybe we should all take a lesson from her,” he said.

Then he leaned forward, his face now sober and not far from hers, and she saw the fine lines around his eyes.

“I understand what you’re saying about Shelly and why you’d be concerned about her,” he said.

“But she certainly knew what she was doing when she wrote to me about True Life Stories. She understood what the show is about and how it might be able to help her.”

Daria felt tears of frustration form in her eyes. He still didn’t get it.

“Shelly is so vulnerable,” she said.

“She’s fragile. She needs protection. People take advantage of her very easily. She’ll do anything if she thinks it’s helping someone else.”

“Are you saying she’s only enthusiastic about me telling her story because she wants to help me out? To give me an episode for the show?”

Daria shook her head.

“No, that’s not what I mean. She really does seem to want you to do it, I can’t deny that. But I think it would be a mistake to unearth that sordid mess, or to make her face the reality of the woman who … who essentially tried to kill her.”

Rory leaned back in his chair again at that, and Daria continued.

“Shelly feels secure with us,” she said.

“She knows she’s loved, she knows she’s been loved from the very first day. Why tamper with that?

I don’t know what it would do to her to have the truth come out. “

“Maybe the truth would be positive, though,” Rory ar n gued.

“Maybe her birth mother regrets what she did and would love to know that Shelly is alive and doing well.”

“You’re fantasizing a happy ending, Rory,” Daria said. She felt a twinge of anger at his perseverance.

“You know, I understand better than you think,” Rory said.

“The way you feel about Shelly was the way I felt about Polly.”

She had forgotten his devotion to his sister.

“I can still picture Polly perfectly,” she said. Polly’d had a short, boxy build, white hair and the almond-shaped eyes of a Down’s syndrome child. She remembered how Rory had defended her against the teasing of other children and taken time out from his own activities to play with her.

Seeing him with Polly was one of the reasons she’d been attracted to him.

“Remember the incident with the fish hook?” Rory asked with a laugh.

“When you said you were an EMT, that’s what I thought of.”

She’d forgotten about that, but the memory came back to her instantly.

Polly had managed to get a fish hook stuck through her toe. Neither Rory nor his mother seemed to know what to do to get it out, and Daria, then only twelve, had performed the feat.

“You knew exactly what to do,” Rory said.

“It makes sense that you got involved in medicine.”

“Dad had told me how to extract a fish hook in case I ever got stuck by one,” she said simply. She didn’t want to discuss her EMT work and answer the inevitable questions about why she was no longer doing it, so she changed the subject.

“I don’t remember Polly and your parents ever coming to Kill Devil Hills again after you went off to college,” she said.

“That’s right,” Rory said. He let out a long sigh and stretched. His T-shirt strained across his chest, and she looked away for the sake of her own sanity. “They stopped coming,” he said.

“That’s when I realized they’d bought the cottage primarily for me, so I could get to spend time on the beach in the summer. But my parents never sold Poll-Rory. I’m sure they were hoping I might use it for my own family one day. Until this summer, that just wasn’t possible.”

“Why not?”

“Glorianne. My ex-wife.”

“She didn’t want to come here?”

“An understatement. She and I were very different. She was…” He looked toward the ocean for a moment, as though carefully selecting his words.

“When I first met her, she was very young and shy and… unassuming. Her parents had been killed in an accident. They’d had little money and left lots of debts, so Glorianne had essentially nothing. She needed me, and I liked being needed. She changed over time, though. Once we had money, it was as though it all went to her head. I’d always wanted us to live in a middle-class neighborhood, with Zack attending public school and experiencing the sort of down-to-earth upbringing I’d had. Glorianne thought we should live in Beverly Hills and send Zack to a private school, since we could afford it. I didn’t want Zack to think that being famous and having money was more important than being honest and having good values.”

Rory paused before continuing.

“So, the upshot was that we did live in a very nice upper-middle-class neighborhood and Zack did attend public schools, but I had to compromise. And that compromise took the form of where we vacationed. I would have loved to have spent all our summers here in Kill Devil Hills, but Glorianne hated the beach and she didn’t like the East Coast altogether. She always wanted to travel during the summer, and said that if I was going to limit Zack in what he could be exposed to during the year, then the least we could do was take him to Europe for the summer.” Rory looked perplexed, as though he was still amazed that his simple, unassuming wife could have changed so much.

“So, that’s what we’ve been doing,” he said.

“Till now, anyhow.”

“This summer with you should be good for Zack.”

Rory laughed.

“He doesn’t seem to think so,” he said.