“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.
“I even prayed the rosary every night, I wanted so much to be good and pure and holy. But I was always fascinated by sex. I knew that having sex prior to marriage was a sin, but I was drawn to it. I was drawn to boys.”
“I remember that,” Daria said.
“In high school, I had sex with a few different boys,” Chloe said.
“I’d come home afterward and pray to God to forgive me. I promised myself that it would never happen again, but, of course, it always did. Then, when I was seventeen, I became pregnant.”
Daria removed her arm from around Rory’s shoulders to lean toward her sister. “Who was it?” she asked. “Who is Shelly’s father?”
Rory held his breath. Chloe didn’t so much as glance in his direction, and he knew she wasn’t going to give him away.
“It doesn’t matter. He was just a boy.” Chloe gnawed at her upper lip.
“I was terrified,” she continued.
“There was no way I could tell Mom and Dad, and there was no way I could ever have an abortion. I was away from home, in my freshman year of college, but I didn’t really have very many friends. I was younger than most of the other kids, both chronologically and socially, but I pretended that I had this great social life and that’s why I didn’t come home for holidays. I was just afraid Mom would figure out I was pregnant if I went home.”
Chloe scratched her cheek.
“I really don’t know what I thought I was going to do when I came to the Sea Shanty that summer. I was wearing oversize clothing, but I knew I couldn’t do that for the whole summer.
I remember being glad that the weather was so bad that first week, and it didn’t seem too strange to be wearing sweatshirts and whatever. I hadn’t gotten any prenatal care. I had no idea how far along I was. In retrospect, I know I was about eight months pregnant. “
She glanced at him now, but quickly shifted her gaze to a spot on the floor, and Rory wished he didn’t have to hear this. Yet, he only had to hear it, he thought. Chloe’d had to live it.
“One night, I woke up in bed and I was in labor,” Chloe continued.
“I
was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go into Mom and Dad’s bedroom and say, “Guess what, Mom, I’m having a baby.” I know this sounds crazy”-she looked at Daria ” —but I don’t think I ever really believed it. Not even then, when I was in so much pain. You hear about teenage girls delivering babies when they didn’t even know they were pregnant, and it sounds so crazy. But I can understand it. I had somehow managed to ignore what was happening to me. So, even that night,
I felt detached through it all. It’s hard to explain. I knew I had to get away from the house, though, so I went out on the beach. ” Chloe lowered her head. She was breathing through her mouth. Her nose was red, and when she looked up again, her eyes were overflowing with tears. Rory had the urge to move next to her, to take her in his arms and tell her he was sorry for all she’d been through—and for his role in it. Instead, he stood up, plucked a tissue from the box on one of the end tables and handed it to her before taking his own seat again next to Daria.
“It was horrible,” Chloe said, blotting her eyes with the tissue.
Daria moved across the room to sit next to her sister. She put her hand on Chloe’s back.
“It must have been so frightening,” she said.
Andy stared at both women, and Rory had the feeling he didn’t care about Chloe’s trauma. He just wanted Shelly to be all right.
“I thought I was going to die,” Chloe said.
“I thought I deserved to die, and there was no way I could turn to anyone for help. I just lay there on the beach, crying and terrified. And then… it was the strangest thing. The baby just came out of me. I wasn’t even sure it was alive. It was so dark out there, and the baby didn’t cry. I was certain it was dead. And to be completely honest, I was relieved. If it was dead, no one ever had to know. I washed myself off in the water. I didn’t even look at what had come out of me—that’s how I thought of it. Not as a baby, but as something foreign that had been inside of me and, to my relief, no longer was. I went back in the house, went to bed and fell asleep, and I slept until the next morning, when you found Shelly.” She looked at Daria.
“I can’t describe how I felt when I heard you had found the baby and that she was alive. I was in so much denial, that I actually convinced myself that maybe it wasn’t my baby that you’d found. Some other baby had somehow gotten out there on the beach, but I knew in my heart she was mine. I felt such relief that she was alive, but terribly guilty that I had left her out there to fend for herself. And, of course, I still couldn’t admit to Mom and Dad or anyone else that the baby was mine. Except for Sean. I went to see him that afternoon. He was still Father Macy to me then. Still a priest and not a man I loved.”
