The Bay at Midnight

He nodded. “I know,” he said. Then the tone of his voice changed, and I knew we were coming to the end of our session together. That disappointed me. I could talk about everything here. I couldn’t talk about any of it at home. “Julie,” he said, in his new voice. “I want you to feel you can come to me any time you need to. Any time. You can call me in the middle of the night if you need to. The Lord and I will always be here for you. Now, let us pray for your sister’s soul.”

That’s what we did. For a few minutes, I sat with my head bowed as he asked God to watch over Isabel. I felt the tiniest molecule of peace work its way into my heart as he spoke.

When we had finished praying and I was on my way out of the office, it suddenly occurred to me that he had not given me a real penance. The Hail Marys from the day before surely didn’t count; they were far less than I would have received from the priest in Point Pleasant for one single impure thought.

“You forgot to give me my penance,” I said, my hand on the doorknob.

“You need no penance from me,” Father Fagan said. “Your true penance is that you will have to live with what you did for the rest of your life,” he said.

He could not have been more right.

My grandparents put our bungalow on the market, and it sold quickly. That, too, was my fault. The house had meant so much to all of us and had been part of my family’s history for nearly forty years. We would never again go down the shore in the summer. That chapter of our lives was over.

No one ever said, Julie, you are to blame for this, you are a horrible person, but no one needed to. Everyone knew that was the truth. It was weeks before my mother could talk to me without asking me, “Why? Why? Why?” For a while, I felt cut off from the warm family life I had always known. That improved over time, although except for my father’s initial compassionate response to me, no one ever said, It’s all right, Julie. We know you didn’t mean for Isabel to die. Only Father Fagan provided that sort of comfort in the weeks and months that followed Izzy’s death, but I really needed to hear those words from someone in my family. And I never did.

CHAPTER 41

Lucy

“Do you recognize that little building?” Julie asked me, as we turned the corner into Bay Head Shores. She pointed to our left, where a tiny antique shop was tucked beneath the on-ramp of the Lovelandtown Bridge.

I shook my head. “Not even a little bit,” I said.

“Well, it looks completely different, of course,” Julie said. “And the big bridge was just a little one back then, but the antique store used to be the corner store. Or at least that’s what we used to call it.You loved the penny candy.”

“I remember the penny candy,” I said, picturing long strips of colorful candy buttons.

“One time we rode our bikes here and got sprayed by the mosquito truck on the way home,” Julie said.

“I remember that, too,” I said. “I fell off my bike and cut my arm.” I looked at my arm as though expecting to see a scar, but I wasn’t even sure which arm I’d injured. “We’ll probably die premature deaths because of that DDT or whatever it was,” I added.

Julie turned the next corner. “Do you want to drive by the bay and our old beach before we go to Ethan’s?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Later,” I said. I had a urinary-tract infection, which seemed terribly unjust since I hadn’t had sex in months. At that moment, all I could think about was using the bathroom at Ethan’s house.

It was early on Friday afternoon and Ethan had invited Julie, Shannon, Tanner and me to his house for the weekend. Shannon and Tanner had begged out, but I’d accepted. Something was pulling me down to the shore. I wanted to see what I remembered.

For a number of reasons, I wished that Shannon and Tanner were with us. I wanted my niece to see an important part of her mother’s childhood, but more than that, I thought that both Julie and I needed more time with Shannon and Tanner. I liked the little I knew of Tanner. I’d only gotten to spend time with him at the barbecue, but he’d impressed me and I thought Shannon could do far worse than a bright, socially conscious—not to mention handsome—young man. Not nearly young enough; I agreed with Julie on that point. Still, that was not our choice to make. The thing that wrenched my heart and that I knew was killing Julie, was that Shannon wanted to move so far away from us. I remembered what it was like to be young and in love and yearning for my independence, and visiting home had been one of the last things on my mind.

“You know,” I said now to Julie, “we’ll just have to go to Colorado ourselves a couple of times a year. We’ll take Mom with us.”

“What?” She glanced at me in confusion, then laughed. “Oh, you’re back on that topic again.” We’d talked about Shannon and Tanner for most of the ride down the shore, but I could see that Julie had now shifted gears to our old neighborhood and Ethan. “I don’t plan to go to Colorado a couple of times a year,” she said, “because I don’t intend to let Shannon go.”

“She’s pregnant,” I said. “She can become legally emancipated and do whatever she likes if she wants to.”

“Can we talk about this later?” she asked, as we turned yet another corner.

“Sure,” I said. We’d recently gotten into this dance of Julie denying the reality of Shannon’s leaving and me trying to force it down her throat. “Sorry to be a pain,” I added.

To our right, between some houses, I saw the canal.

“Oh!” I said. “Is this our old street?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wow. I’d never recognize it,” I said. Then I asked rhetorically, “Where did all these houses come from?”

Julie stopped the car in front of a sunny yellow-and-white Cape Cod.

“Do you recognize this one?” she asked.

I didn’t. “Is that ours?” The house meant nothing to me.