The Last Summer at Chelsea Beach (41 page)

I awaken with a gasp, rather than a scream, strangely calm despite the violent images. I blink my eyes open. Sunlight blazes through the curtainless windows, bathing the room in light. My muscles ache in a strange but not unpleasant way and my cheek is raw from where Liam’s stubbled face had rubbed against mine, over and over again. I stretch and turn, reaching for Liam once more. I find myself looking for Liam, needing him. Self-loathing rises in me—I cannot—will not—depend on anyone again.

But the space beside me is empty and below I can hear the dull, repetitive rhythm of Liam’s saw. Memories of the previous night flood my brain. What had happened? And what did it all mean?

Pushing the questions away, I change into clothes and head outside, eager for fresh air. I bypass the back porch where Liam is working and set out for a brisk walk. I start instinctively in the direction of the beach. As I near the boardwalk, I stop, surprised. Once I would have avoided the water, but strangely now I am drawn toward it. I take off my shoes and the damp sand is cold under my feet as I walk the beach parallel to the shoreline, but staying back from it. Gulls cry out as they dip low to the water. The wind seems to change directions. The air resists me, whipping sand across my skin; it takes all of my effort just to keep moving.

I pause to rest. A warplane buzzes overhead, and I look up at the sky in that nervous way I have not quite shaken from the air raids in London. It is one of ours, of course. Taking in the wide contours of its wings, I cannot help but think of Charlie.

I tear my eyes from the sky, focus straight ahead. I think back to my earlier nightmare. My dreams have evolved, I realize. In the earlier years, I’d been nearly powerless. Lately, I had been able, albeit with great difficulty, to resist the current a bit. “I’m getting stronger,” I say aloud. If my dreams could change, then maybe they aren’t inevitable. Does there exist a remote chance of ending the nightmares entirely? Energized by the possibility, I start back.

I do not go to the Connallys’ but back to our old rooms at the duplex where my clothes remain, to shower and change. As I dry my hair, a car door slams below. Someone is here. I’d been so caught up in my night with Liam that I’d nearly forgotten: the other Connallys are coming. Let it be their parents, I pray.

But Charlie is always early. Through the window I spy him, stepping out of the car, just as he had the day we met. He walks with a slight limp, a scar that will perhaps fade over time or maybe not heal at all. For a moment, my heart soars.

I finish dressing and then rush down the stairs. Near the bottom, I stop. Despite my shower, Liam’s scent seems to linger around me, screaming the truth. This time last year Charlie and I had been planning a future together. How has it come to this?

I take a deep breath and step outside. Charlie turns. “Addie,” he says, that catch still in his voice, taking me in as though it had been years and not just days earlier in England. He stares at me with disbelief. He didn’t expect to see me and he is surprised, even more so than in Washington. “What are you doing here?” His words stab at me. This was my home, too.

But before I can respond, the passenger door to his rented Oldsmobile opens and Grace’s long, willowy frame appears. “Hello, Adelia.” Grace steps toward me, impossibly chic with her hair in a silk scarf, eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. As she nears Charlie’s side, my heart breaks. Seeing him standing with Grace, it is like the time he had gone on that date at the shore, only a million times worse. My eyes sting. The quiet haven Liam and I have created these past few days seems fragile and overfull. I’m in the way. I should leave.

“Liam,” Charlie says, looking over my shoulder. His voice seems to choke on the word and I know that this is the first time the brothers have seen one another since everything happened. Charlie recovers and starts toward his brother with long, confident strides. Liam stands frozen, his face helpless, overwhelmed by emotions and the reunion that is so much harder than he had imagined.

The brothers shake hands, unable to feign a hug. “Addie’s here,” Charlie remarks. How odd that this should be the first thing that they discuss. Close behind me, I feel Liam stiffen. He does not want to share me.

Liam laces his fingers in with mine. Charlie’s eyes drop lower and then rise again, widened with surprise. Liam’s gaze lifts defiantly to his brother’s, daring him to say something. I brace for confrontation; neither Charlie nor Liam is one to back down. I pull my hand away, unwilling to be caught between two men again.

Grace walks up beside Charlie and for once I am glad she is here. “Hello.”

“I’m Liam,” he offers, trying to break the tension. “And this is Addie.”

“We’ve met.”

“Oh, yes, of course.” Beside me Liam tenses again, uncomfortable with the history he does not know.

“Nice to see you again, Grace,” I manage to say.

The brothers eye each other icily. Charlie’s fists are clenched low to his side.

“Thanks for coming,” Liam offers.

“I wanted,” Charlie says slowly, “to be here for Mom.”

Liam raises his hands, acknowledging that it will have to be enough. “Mom and Dad won’t be here until tomorrow,” Liam says. So for tonight it would just be the four of us, with no one else to break the awkwardness.

The boys walk to the car to get the bags. “I heard your plane crashed,” Liam says, switching to the war, somehow an easier topic.

“I was in a dogfight over Munich,” Charlie replies, describing it all to his brother in a way I have not heard before.

“I wanted to go, too,” Liam offers, surprising me. I cannot picture him enlisting. Would it have been a shot at redemption—or suicide? “They wouldn’t take me, though, after everything that had happened.”

At the mention of the fighting, Charlie grimaces with frustration. “I should be over there.” Some part of him was still with the soldiers he had left behind.

“He wanted to go back, or even to the Pacific,” Grace says in a low voice so the boys cannot hear. A knife shoots through me as I remember the pain and fear of his going to war the first time. “But they wouldn’t clear him medically.” Even as I exhale with relief, I feel for Charlie. Being sidelined and unable to help is so contrary to who he is—it has to be killing him. I start after him, my first instinct to try to offer comfort in the way only I can. Then I stop. It isn’t my place anymore.

The boys have come inside and Liam is showing Charlie some of his work on the house. Charlie peers out the back door critically. “You aren’t rebuilding the shed.”

“No, I thought it would leave more space for the garden.” The tension returns between the brothers, their rift unhealed by time.

“Let’s go to the beach,” I blurt. Anything to break the awkwardness between them.

Both boys looked at me with simultaneous surprise. “You?” Liam asks.

I shrug. “I didn’t say I was going in the water.”

“Addie is afraid of the ocean,” Charlie explains to Grace.

Liam chimes in. “Yeah, and there was this one time when we first met her that we threw her in.”

“We?” Charlie repeats with mocking disbelief. As the boys carry the story, talking over one another, a look of curiosity crosses Grace’s face. She has Charlie, but there is still a part of his past she will never share.

A wave of sympathy for Grace washes over me. “Come, I’ll help you get settled.” Grace smiles thankfully in return. She isn’t the enemy really, I reflect as I lead her up the stairs to the guest room Liam has just finished restoring. Even if she had not come along at the field hospital, Charlie and I would not be together. It was timing and fate—if I dare to believe in that again—and who we are that had kept us apart—not another woman.

An hour later we are settled on the beach, the air a degree or two cooler with the first hint of fall. The smell of suntan lotion tickles my nose, sending me back. Charlie pulls a football from his bag. “You aren’t serious.” Liam groans.

“Of course.”

“All right. You asked for it.” Liam leaps to his feet, planting an easy kiss on my cheek that sends shivers through me.

“Your leg is too weak,” Grace frets. I, too, worry that Charlie cannot manage. But he limps gamely after his brother.

I watch, marveling how the light and the way they move are unchanged after all these years. Once I would have had my camera with me to capture the moment. The photos might have been the same, save for the boys’ size—and the fact that two of them are missing.

A few minutes later they return the ball to the blanket. Liam runs to the water’s edge and dives in, owning the waves as he did in his surfing days. Charlie follows, leaving me alone with Grace once more.

I peer north, drinking in the familiar topography of the tall hotels and piers. The shore has the feeling that the war is over already. The beaches are crowded, the boardwalk bustling. But the scars of war remain. The Convention Center, once used to train new recruits, now houses convalescing veterans. I imagine them sitting by the door in their wheelchairs gazing sadly across the ocean at the unseen fighting that had ruined their lives forever.

“You don’t like the water?” Grace asks, trying to make conversation.

“I’ve always been afraid of it,” I say. “And then after everything happened with Robbie, I hated it even more.”

“But he drowned in the river, right? Not here.”

“Yes, but it’s still the water.” It’s all jumbled together somehow in my mind. “I didn’t like it, even before.” For a second, I’m annoyed. It’s really none of her business. But she is trying to be kind. I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry we didn’t have time to get better acquainted in England.” Liam is not the only one who needs to make amends. “My aunt needed me to come home. It was a difficult time.”

“It still is,” Grace blurts, and I know then that Charlie still lives with his ghosts.

“Time heals,” I reply softly.

“I hope so.”

I had been so focused on my jealousy of Grace, I never stopped to think how she might feel about me. “I didn’t ask for that. It’s over, Grace, and if I’m being honest it has been for a long time. We’re different people now.”

“I know, and I’m glad he’s got his memory back.” Grace’s chin juts out defiantly. “I want him to choose, not win by default.” Her words are an echo of Liam’s as she stands and takes a step toward the ocean.

* * *

That night Liam grills again, steak this time, the charcoal briquettes sending up embers like tiny fireworks into the almost dark sky. At the table, Charlie produces a bottle of red wine. I eye the glass he holds out to me uncertainly. I desperately want it to dull the awkwardness and pain, but do I dare in front of Liam? “It’s okay,” Liam says calmly. “I’m fine.”

When we’ve finished and cleared up, Liam heads back outside. “A few more hours of work. I want to get the garden just so before Mom arrives.” He does not ask Charlie to help and Charlie does not offer.

Grace yawns. “Excuse me. It’s been a long day with the travel and I’m exhausted.” She starts for the stairs, then turns back. Doubts flicker across her face at leaving the two of us alone. But she is too proud to hover.

Charlie watches her protectively as Grace climbs the stairs. I expect him to follow, but he remains seated, dividing the rest of the bottle of wine between our two glasses. “You’re looking well,” I observe. “You have your memory again, too.”

He nods. “All of it, thanks to you. When I saw you, it came flooding back.” Was he glad? Or were there parts he would rather leave forgotten?

“What are you going to do now?”

“I’m too injured for active duty. I’ve been offered a promotion, and a job in Washington if I want one. But I don’t know.” He, too, has been reshaped by his experiences, perhaps too much so to ever go back.

“You could go to Georgetown at night.”

His face brightens. “I could, couldn’t I?” School is an old dream, to dust off and try anew. If only everything else was that easy.

“I’m glad you’re well.”

“Thanks. The rehab was intense and Grace has been a wonder.” He speaks her name a bit self-consciously and I feel the punch in my gut that might never go away. “She’s a lovely woman. But this thing that has always been between us...” He reaches out, hand floundering midair. “I can’t fight this.”

My breath catches a bit at the unexpected shift back toward us. Such conversations are too dangerous—and at the same time moot. “You must. You’re getting married.”

“I didn’t mean for it to happen like this. I’m sorry if that sounds disloyal to Grace, but it’s true. She was so kind.” Kind. I would never want to be described that way by a man who purported to love me. I feel a moment’s sympathy for the woman who has everything she’d ever wanted. “Anyway, I wouldn’t have wanted to come back to you like this.” He points toward his legs. His limp is minor and almost healed, but to Charlie the imperfection makes him somehow less of a man. “I’d always wonder if you were here out of love or pity.”

“You should know the answer to that.” I am suddenly angry at Charlie for making decisions for all of us, just like Claire said he always had.

But I was the one who walked away, I remember then. And our dream had died before he was ever injured, so long ago we had not even realized. “Even if we could turn back the clock we’d still be standing here or somewhere pretty close.”

“How can you say that? We had everything when we were together,” he says. He gestures upward. “It just isn’t the same.”

“There’s a reason that feelings like that come only once, Charlie.”

“I still think we would be together.”

I shake my head. “There was a time when I believed that. I thought we were some sort of star-crossed lovers and that all that kept us apart was circumstance.”

“When did you stop feeling that way?”

“Today, when I saw all of us together and how we changed. I’m not that same scared kid who put you on a pedestal. You need that, Charlie, you always have. Grace gives you that adoration. I can see it in her eyes. God bless her, she’ll probably be able to do it for the rest of her life.” Part of me would always want him, and wonder what would have happened if I had made a life with Charlie. But that door is now closed.