The Bay at Midnight

She nodded again, swallowing hard, the tremor returning to her lower lip.

I sat upright on the chair, pressing my palms together in the lap of my long skirt. My braid fell over my shoulder as I leaned toward her. “I’m trying to absorb what this means for you,” I said. “For your future.”

“You know how much I love kids,” she said. “I’d planned to be a cellist first and a mom later. I’m just going to reverse the order. I mean, if I had to, like, choose between the two things, I would choose being a mother.”

Was that true? Shannon had wanted to be a cellist in a symphony orchestra ever since Julie and Glen took her to her first New York Philharmonic concert when she was five years old. Had the adults in her life, anxious to encourage that dream, ignored her more ordinary ambitions, or was Shannon just kidding herself?

“You always said you had a calling to play the cello,” I said.

“I still love it,” she said. “I still want to play and I still want to go to school…eventually. I just can’t do it now. You didn’t go to college right away. Is that so terrible?”

“Of course not,” I said. I wanted to ask if this Tanner guy planned to marry her. I wanted to ask how she planned to take care of a baby and “eventually” go to school. But those questions would not be helpful. Not yet. Instead, I continued listening to her, trying to be as nonjudgmental as possible. She would get enough of that elsewhere.

“How long do you think you can keep this from your mother?” I asked. “Is that why you want to live with your dad? You think he won’t notice?”

“I don’t know what to do, exactly.” She stretched the piece of fringe taut between her hands, then dropped it in her lap. “Tanner really can’t have me move in with him until September, because he’s living with some other people right now and there wouldn’t be room for me.”

I hated him. Selfish bastard. I wondered if one of the “other people” was his wife, but I kept my mouth carefully sealed shut.

“So…” She looked at me helplessly. “What should I do? I thought maybe I should live with you, since you know about it, and I just wouldn’t—”

“Uh-uh.” I shook my head back and forth. “You have to tell your parents, Shannon.You have to.You know that, don’t you?”

“Mom will go totally ballistic.”

“Yes, she will.” Julie would have a fit. A baby out of wedlock. Thwarted college plans after she’d driven Shannon all over the eastern half of the country to audition at the schools she’d wanted to attend. A promising future now in doubt. And above all, the worry that something might go wrong. Julie had been waiting seventeen years for something terrible to happen to Shannon. Perhaps this was it.

“Yes, she will,” I repeated. “But you still have to tell her.”

CHAPTER 7

Julie

1962

I thought that getting my period on our third full day at the shore was the worst thing that could happen to me. We were getting ready to go to our local beach, sometimes known as the “Baby Beach” because it was on the bay rather than the ocean and the water was gentle enough for toddlers. I loved swimming in the bay. I was hoping I could find some kids my age there to play with. I was already feeling lonely and had to admit that I missed the friendship Ethan used to provide. There were no other kids my age on our street. Lucy was useless because she was so afraid of everything and Isabel wanted nothing to do with me. In front of her

friends, she treated me as though I was an embarrassment to her. Lucy was in the living room, watching The Edge of Night with Grandma while she blew up her Flintstones tube. Isabel was getting the beach umbrella from the garage and I was gathering towels from different corners of the house, when I suddenly got that ache low in my belly that had become all too familiar to me in just a few months’ time. I went upstairs to the attic and into the tiny curtained bathroom, pulled down my bathing suit and saw the spot. I wanted to cry, but I tried to be stoic. These were the days before slender plastic-encased tampons or stick-on pads. I pulled out the sanitary belt I had quickly come to loathe and affixed the bulky napkin to it, all the while cursing the fact that I’d been born female. Then I put on my shorts and a top, did my duty gathering the towels, marched downstairs and stood in the middle of the kitchen, the towels, some folded, some not, a bundle in my arms.

My mother was wrapping the last of the bologna sandwiches in waxed paper when she looked at me.

“Why did you change out of your bathing suit?” she asked.

“I’m not going,” I said. “I got my stupid friend.”

For a moment, she looked confused. Then she understood. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” She walked over to hug me, but she was smiling, which made me doubt her sympathy. “Come to the beach anyway.”

“Everyone will ask why I’m not in my bathing suit,” I whined.

She shrugged as if that was no big deal. “If they do, just say you don’t feel like swimming today,” she said.

Isabel came into the room at that moment, bopping her head to the Four Seasons singing “Sherry” on the transistor radio she was carrying.

“Umbrella’s in the car,” she said to our mother.

“Turn that down, please,” Mom said.

I nearly cringed, expecting Isabel to balk at the request. She and Mom were arguing night and day, usually about curfew and the clothes Isabel wanted to wear, and I was getting tired of it. But Isabel just flicked the little round dial on her radio, lowering the volume, and she never stopped moving to the music. I liked watching her. I knew she was sexy. I knew that was the word boys used to describe her. She was wearing a hot-pink twopiece bathing suit, the bottom barely covering her navel. Her skin was a soft olive tone that would darken to a rich tan in just a few days on the beach. I couldn’t wait to be her age.

Isabel suddenly stopped bouncing around the kitchen and stared at me. “Why aren’t you ready to go, Jules?” she asked.

“I am ready to go,” I said.