The Bay at Midnight

keeping this baby? I didn’t mean to get pregnant. I didn’t set out to mess up my college plans. But it happened and now I’ll deal with it. And there’s something else I need to tell you.”

Oh, God. “What?”

“Tanner is coming here next week,” she said. “He’s staying with his friends in Morristown for two weeks, and then he has to go back to Colorado and I’m going to go with him. So, I’ll be going to a doctor there, ultimately, anyway.”

“You mean, you’d be going there now? To stay?”

“In about three weeks,” she said. “And I don’t know if we’ll stay there forever, but we’ll be there at least until he finishes his Ph.D. program. Then, who knows where we’ll end up.”

I felt panicky. “Let’s talk this over, Shannon,” I said, standing up from my seat on the bed. “Talking something over doesn’t make you any less a grown-up. I talk to Lucy about important decisions I have to make, and this decision is certainly important.”

She sighed. “I have to get to work, Mom, so maybe we can talk later, okay?”

“All right,” I said. What else could I say. “But please, Shannon. Please let’s talk later.”

I called Glen at work the moment I got off the phone with Shannon. I spoke quickly, telling him about her going to a doctor we didn’t know and her planned move to Colorado. He listened quietly. He was always quiet. I’d once appreciated his gentle, compliant nature. Now I hated it. “Can you exert any influence over her since she’s living with you?” I pleaded.

“I think we need to let her do it her way,” he said finally.

“You’re afraid to make waves with her,” I said. “You’re always afraid to make waves. I would probably still not know you were having an affair if what’s-her-face hadn’t called to tell me.”

Glen said nothing. He knew it was the truth.

“Do you want her to move away?” I asked, looking for some response. I would take any response at that point.

“I think if she’s old enough to get pregnant,” he said, “she’s old enough to deal with the consequences.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Eleven-year-olds can get pregnant, Glen.You think an eleven-year-old should deal with the consequences?”

“She’s not eleven.”

“Don’t you care that she’s leaving?”

“She would have left for college anyway,” he said, most likely with one of his c’est la vie shrugs.

I hung up. I couldn’t remember ever hanging up on anyone before in my entire life, but I could no longer tolerate his inability to confront difficult situations head-on. That’s what had cost us our marriage. I wasn’t going to let it cost me my daughter.

I got online to e-mail Lucy regarding Shannon’s latest plans and discovered a message from Ethan.

The police found Bruno Walker’s sister. She said he’s on a solo sailing trip around the world. The cop I spoke with said they’ll find him and “cut his trip short.”

And they questioned Dad.

See you tonight.

CHAPTER 30

Julie

1962

I loved to ride my bike around Bay Head Shores, but Lucy never felt very steady on hers. She would ride on our end of the dirt road, and that was about it. One day, though, I told her that if she would ride her bike to the corner store with me, I would buy her penny candy. She loved those strips of button candy, and I could tell she was tempted.

“It’s too far, though,” she whined.

We were sitting on the sand in our front yard, our bikes parked in the driveway.

“How about this,” I said, coming up with a way to shorten the trip. “We can walk our bikes across the blueberry lot, and that will cut off about a fourth of the distance.” It would probably be an even harder trip doing it that way, since we would have to carry our bikes over the deepest sand, but my suggestion seemed to work.

“All right,” she said, getting to her feet. She shuffled barefoot toward her bike, afraid of stepping on one of the holly leaves that sometimes blew over from the Chapmans’ yard. I had to admit, the points on those leaves hurt, but Lucy looked like a spaz walking that way.

We walked our bikes more easily than I’d anticipated across the blueberry lot, but I was perspiring anyway by the time we got to the street on the other side. We mounted our one-speed, low-to-the-ground bikes and began riding in the direction of the store, dense woods on either side of us. Although there were no cars on the road, Lucy still hugged the shoulder, causing her tires to slip off the pavement and into the sand from time to time, but I didn’t say a word. When we neared the corner of Rue Lido, she held her left hand up in a turn signal even though there were no cars in sight, and I had to stop myself from laughing. I didn’t want to discourage her from making this trip again.

We pulled into the lot next to the little store and parked our bikes. Inside, I bought eggs and milk for our mother, candy buttons and root beer barrels for Lucy, licorice lace and Mary Janes for myself and a pack of teaberry gum for Isabel, because I knew she liked to use it to cover up the fact that she’d been smoking. I put the bag containing our purchases in my bicycle basket and we got back on the road.

We were on the long stretch of Beach Boulevard when I heard the sound of a truck somewhere behind us. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure Lucy was well to the side of the road and saw that she was practically riding in the woods. Then I saw the vehicle that was making the noise: It was the mosquito truck, coming toward us, just ahead of a dense fog of DDT.

The mosquito truck drove through Bay Head Shores every week or so. I liked the smell and I liked the way you