Diane Chamberlain - Summer's Child

“She’s down there with the youngsters.” Mr. Wheeler pointed toward the second bonfire.

“No, she’s not,” Andy said.

“I was just down there. She was with them, but Zack said she went in for a swim. He thought she might have come out of the water up here to be with you guys.”

“A swim in the dark?” Daria got to her feet.

“She knows better than that.”

Rory stood up.

“Zack!” he called, waving toward the huddled group down the beach.

“What?” Zack called back.

“Come here!” Rory said.

Zack must have heard the urgency in his voice, because he came over to the adults’ bonfire at a jog.

“When did Shelly go into the water?” Daria asked.

“I don’t know.” Zack shrugged.

“Maybe five or ten minutes ago? I thought she was just taking a dip and planned to come out up here by you. She was saying some strange things.”

“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.

ivory was cold. Someone 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 at the trauma center, 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 in the Jeep to the trauma center.

“It’s my fault,” he said over and over again.

“I should have realized something was radically wrong with ,s her by how weird she was acting.” | Rory had told him it was not his fault. It was no one I

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.