The Shore (26 page)

I told Sally Lumsden that Renee and I got split up in foster care. That's basically what happened.

The police wanted to think that it was one of his meth buddies that cut his throat, or that he'd gone crazy on the drug and cut his own throat, but I kept confessing and confessing until they finally had to admit that maybe I'd done it, and even then
they didn't put me in handcuffs like I thought they should; instead they wrapped me in another blanket and had a doctor dope me.

I went to family and juvenile court but I didn't get a jury; I remember being a bit annoyed that it wasn't a real trial, that if they were going to put me through that I wasn't going to get all the bells and whistles like they showed on the TV we got to watch in the detention center. They decided that it was self-defense, manslaughter instead of murder even though manslaughter sounds nastier. It was a lady judge, who might not have been a judge, just a social worker. I don't remember that time very well. They sent me to a juvenile psychiatric hospital where I had four different therapists, plus group time with a bunch of sociopaths that killed cats and tried to light shit on fire. Bo was wrong: nobody beat my ass in there, even though some of the other kids did whisper about the freaky shit they would do to me if they got the chance.

I'd been fine in our little house with him smoking up and losing his temper, not knowing if he was going to kill us or forget to feed us one day to the next, but once I got to the hospital I started having screaming nightmares, cried for no reason, hid in closets because I felt like I had to. The doctors weren't worried about that, though; being wrong in the head in ways that just hurt me didn't matter as much as being wrong in the head in ways that could hurt other people. Even after I'd convinced them all that I wasn't going to kill again, that I did have empathy and loved cats and was scared of fire, it took six years and a court order to get me out.

I didn't see Renee at all at first, but we wrote letters back and forth. Hers were mostly pictures in the beginning, but by
the time I was put in the hospital she could tell me what was going down. She got placed with a family right away, one that had been taking foster kids for years and knew how to help her. At first she had nightmares, wet the bed, and begged them to bring me to her, and when we both started getting better they did bring her to visit me at the hospital a few times. Then she cut all of her hair off and started blaming me for everything, and wouldn't talk to me or see me anymore, but I still wrote her foster mom to know how she was doing. Just before she turned eighteen she ran away with her boyfriend; at first they thought that she'd been kidnapped, but she left a letter in her foster mom's purse saying that she was choosing to go. I haven't heard from her since.

I drive back down the gravel path and park in front of Matthew's before I call Seth. It's a Saturday, so he's free and, from the speed with which he picks up, watching his phone. I remember that I promised I'd call him when I got to the island, and I feel guilty. He won't call me when he thinks I'll be driving because I can't resist picking up, even on the freeway at ninety miles an hour. When I'm late getting in at night he gets scared, not that I'm fooling around with someone else like a lot of the guys I've known would think, but that I'm dead somehow. Can't fault him for it: I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and put my ear to his ribs to hear his heart beat, just to make sure he's still alive. Even the people you can depend on, you can't depend on to never die.

“You got there OK?”

“Yeah, sorry I didn't check in when I did. It kinda threw me, being back here.”

“Found anything yet?”

“One of our landlord's daughters still lives in their house—she was around when it all happened. She found me the name of someone they used to work with. Could you look him up for me real quick, baby?”

He wakes up his computer, and I give him the name and address that I've copied down. I lean back and put my feet up on the dash while he searches through hits, and wonder how the hell I would have done this before the Internet. Charles Morgan goes by Chick; he's about sixty-three now and listed as being a resident of the Tasley Assisted Living Facility and Rest Home; the local paper has a brief story about his car accident in 2007. Seth gives me that address, and I start gearing myself up to being the old man's missing niece or whatever I have to do to get them to let me see him. I'm about to hang up when I hear Seth shouting for me to wait a moment.

“I almost forgot. So I've been going through old tax records and shit, since you left. I think I found one of your aunts.”

“Really?” I can't tell if the fizzing in my stomach is excitement or dread. Strangers that used to know my parents are one thing, actual family is another.

“It took a bit of looking. Bo Gordy had an older sister, and I haven't found an obituary for her or anything like that, so it looks like there's a good chance that she's still alive. Do you know where Belle Haven is?”

He talks slowly as I scribble down the name and address, but doesn't try to keep me on for long afterward.

“Call me tonight, OK? I want to know how you're doing.”

“I will, I promise,” I tell him, even though I know I'll forget again.

I'm grateful that he doesn't try and talk for longer. Seth likes to talk, likes to hear me talk, but right now I don't know what might come spilling out of my mouth. He thinks he knows everything, that there's nothing else that I could possibly spring on him. I didn't think there was, either, but now that I'm here I wonder if there is any statute of limitations on the human conscience.

I flip a coin: heads, I should go talk to Charles Morgan in the old folks' home. Which makes me instantly want to go find Bo's family instead, so I turn south onto the highway and head down to Belle Haven.

I drive by it three times before I decide that it's the right house—the plastic number by the door has fallen down, and the green shutters have moss growing on them in places. I screw up my courage, get out, and rap on the door: no one answers. No one answers the second knock, or the third, but I can hear a dog barking in the house next door. After a few minutes of standing there like an idiot, not knowing what to do, I go back to the car and find my notebook again. It's a straight shot up the highway to Tasley, and I remember where the assisted living facility is. Instead of going anywhere I sit there in the front seat, feet up on the dash again, staring into space and thinking about not much of anything. Seth had told me to do it all from home, contact people by email instead of showing up on their doorsteps. I told him that I didn't want to wait, but in reality I didn't want to be at the mercy of strangers. I didn't want them to know who I was, where I lived, to be able to find me. I hadn't really considered
how much door-knocking it might involve, how many agonizing, polite conversations would be necessary.

As I sit, an older woman in jeans and a plaid jacket comes down the street toward me, carrying a sack of groceries; I only register her when she puts the sack down on the top step of the green-shuttered house and fumbles in her jacket pocket for her keys. My body falls out of the car and sprints across the street while my brain is still getting into gear, so when she looks up at me I don't know exactly what to say. So the truth comes out.

“Miss Maureen Gordy?”

“Yes?”

“I'm sorry to just turn up like this, but I'm your niece.”

She doesn't gasp or faint or anything like that, but her eyes narrow a bit, and I can see that she doesn't believe me.

“Are you, now?”

At least this much I've planned for. The birth certificate and driver's license come out. She looks them over twice before handing them back.

“Well, I haven't got any money and the family as a collective, as small as it may be, doesn't have anything worth taking, so if you are a con artist you might as well give up now and try someone else. But if you're really Chloe, you may as well come in.”

I follow her into a small kitchen, where she begins unpacking the grocery sack. She nods me into a chair.

“I'm not really surprised that you're back—everyone and his brother is obsessed with genealogy these days. Pointless waste of time, is my opinion. Finding out you're descended from a prince just gives a person jumped-up notions of himself. Coffee?”

I don't want it, but I'm scared of annoying her, so I nod.

“But you didn't have to come all this way from Georgia for a copy of the family tree.” She dumps twice as many grounds into the filter basket as necessary, fills up the reservoir, and sits down opposite me; the power button on the machine is taped in a permanent “on” position.

“I got a couple of reasons, and none of them's money, so don't worry about that.”

“If you want me to tell you how wonderful your dad was when we were kids, then you're out of luck, I'm afraid.”

“No, I know that. I grew up with him, didn't I?”

That makes her smile a bit.

“One of the big ones, I guess, is my sister. Renee. She was nine when we left, so as she got older she forgot some things about how it was. She ran away a while back, and I haven't heard anything from her.” I pull a picture out of my wallet, now years out of date. “I was hoping she'd taken her rose-colored glasses back here, tried to find our family maybe.”

Maureen looks at the picture, and I know that she's seeing Bo. What on him were thick slug lips are on Renee a plump, kissable mouth; his bleary bug eyes her large, clear ones. Her skin is bone white like his, her hair gingering up in the picture but still curly. Maureen looks up at me, then back down.

“Haven't seen her, I'm sorry to say. Can't believe he made something so pretty.” She hands the picture back to me. My stomach sinks, but I wasn't expecting to find her, anyway.

“I guess the other thing is really why I came, though. I called him Daddy, but when they did the DNA test, after they took us away, he and I didn't match. At all. And there wasn't anybody left around to tell me why that was. So I hoped, if I came back
here and found people that knew them, back then, I might find someone with a fair guess of who my dad is. Or was.”

Maureen pours herself more coffee and stands, staring into her mug for a few minutes, sloshing the liquid in small circles as if she's seeing the future in the reflections on the surface.

“After Mom died, Benny and I got tired of his shit pretty quick. Lester might have known, but he died in California a few years before Bo.” She sloshes some more, then gulps down the coffee and pours another cup. “Benny might know something, but I really doubt it. He left the Shore in the sixties and didn't come back for good until he retired from the shipyard, and I know that he didn't talk to Bo or Lester in all that time. Hell, he barely talked to me for most of it. But if you're out of leads it won't hurt to ask him. He's quiet but he'll probably talk to you.”

I push my half-drunk coffee away and get slowly to my feet. “Thank you for your time, ma'am. Sorry to have bothered you like this.”

“No, wait. Wait.” She waves me back down into the chair. “I've got something to say first.” I sit back down, nervous that she's about to chew me out, but instead she sips on her coffee for a while.

“Bo and I never got along,” she finally begins. “Sometimes families just don't work out. I stopped talking to him when he was still a teenager. Rumors get around quick out here, but all I really knew was that he'd found a wife and had a few kids, not quite in that order, until a cop came knocking on my door to tell me that he was dead. And I don't want you to think that we didn't care—I asked them to let me take you. You'd never met me, I'd not made an effort to be a part of your lives as far as they could see, it was no surprise that they said no. I tried to visit
you, they wouldn't let me do that either. And maybe I shouldn't have, but eventually I stopped trying.”

“I don't blame you for not talking to him,” I finally say. “Didn't talk to him myself if I could help it.”

She cracks a smile at that.

“None of the rest of it is any of your fault either—it was just a messy situation. We all did what the cops and the social workers told us to. Maybe Renee had the right idea.”

She lets out a big sigh then. “Well, I know you've got other people to talk to probably. But I want a chance to start over.” She holds out her hand, and I shake it, a little bewildered. “Hi. I'm your Aunt Mo. Screw whether you're my actual niece or not—everybody is a step-something these days. I've got a son named Charlie, who's maybe a year or two older than you, I'm divorced and I've lived on Accomack Island my whole life.”

“Hi, Aunt Mo,” I say. “I'm your niece Chloe. I've lived in a psych ward for a long time but I'm mostly not crazy. I manage payroll for the county where I live and I'm getting married next year.”

After they discharged me from the hospital they couldn't just drop me back into normal life again, so they sent me to a residential rehab facility. It sounds like another hospital, but it was just a set of apartments owned by the government, where people could learn to lead a normal life with someone watching over their shoulder. I had nightmares still, but I didn't let anyone know. They helped me find a job delivering newspapers and got me signed up for classes at the local community college, but I felt like I had a normal-person disguise on.

I didn't tell my first boyfriend why I lived in a rehab community, or even that it was one. Some of the other kids at the hospital had gotten together and broken up and gotten together with other people while they were in, but I had a hard time getting all romantic feeling about anyone that might want to light me on fire or rape me in the mouth with steak knives, so he really was my first boyfriend. It lasted until he found out about what happened to my stepdad.