Chapter 17
Sitting and eating her tuna fish sandwich on Pam’s back deck, she spotted a white heron flying over the marsh that alighted in the estuary. Seeing something so gracefully beautiful usually filled her with peace, but for the first time, she wished she had someone to share it with. Was her relationship with Daniel changing her and her naturally solitary nature?
She had always been so good by herself, so at ease in her own company. She had thought being on this deserted island would be like a private party, a chance to be free, away from people and their endless demands. Instead, it was as if this island, usually crowded with people she loved, was filled with their echoes, their voices and laughter. Maybe it was just that – the fact that Captain’s had always been about people.
Chewing her sandwich and looking out over the wide green and gold marsh, it hit her again that she finally had what she had desperately wanted: a key to that house and all its telltale memories. Albums and albums filled with photos and other clues and artifacts. Exactly what she had dreamed of, and the key was sitting in her pocket.
Hannah put down her half-eaten sandwich. She wasn’t hungry anymore. Why wasn’t she in the Barefooter house right now? That was why she was here, right?
She took her plate inside and left it in the sink. She would clean up later. She had to go now, enough! She ran out of the house, heading south toward the house.
When she arrived at the house she was panting, and had to bend over and put her hands on her knees to catch her breath. She looked up at it. What was she waiting for? What she needed was there, not the albums of the Barefooters these days, but the ones from their shared childhood. The ones that held pictures of her mother as a little girl. The little girl in the diving contest who was both proud and afraid. Who was that girl? Why did her mother never speak of her childhood?
Hannah climbed the stairs, unlocked the door, and went straight to the shelves near the door stacked with all the photo albums. As she opened each to check which one it was and set it aside, she was amazed at how much there was here. Vacations the women had taken together all over the world, each fully documented in individual albums. There were albums depicting different eras of their lives. Hannah lifted the one from the shelf she had always loved the most, the one dedicated to the Barefooter’s children. In the first half of that album, Hannah was the star, their Barefoot Baby. The latter half of the album showed the other Barefooter’s children as they appeared. There was Pam’s son, Jacob, born when Hannah was eleven years old and a year before Pam’s brief and seemingly-happy marriage dissolved. Five years later came the first of Amy’s three boys, Ryan, followed by Elliott and then Sam. Even after all the other the Barefooter children had been born, Hannah was still called their Barefoot Baby and treated like their collective child.
Hannah, though tempted to go through its pages again, put the baby album down. Now, where was it? She piled album after album on the couch until she found it sitting at the bottom of the pile. Unlike the others, dressed up in fine leather, canvas, or pretty printed cloth covers, this one had a cheap brown vinyl cover that was cracking and peeling. Why hadn’t they replaced it? Sentimental feelings for vinyl?
She opened it to the first picture, the biggest in the album that covered a full page. It was all four of them sitting with their legs dangling from the boardwalk in front of Amy’s parent’s house. Amy’s father dead of a heart attack, her mother in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s, and her three older brothers living on the other side of the country, the family house on Captain’s was occupied by Amy and her family now, only the occasional brotherly visit filling the house beyond capacity with their combined families. The house looked different in the photo, somber in gray rather than the sunny yellow it wore now.
It must have been that first summer. They looked about seven years old, but what was notably different was their body language. They sat next to each other, yes, but there was space between their bodies. The only exception was Pam and Keeley, whose thighs were touching. They leaned more eagerly toward the photographer than toward each other. Their smiles are tentative, eyes squinting against the sun. Amy really did look like a tiny curly-headed doll and Zooey, sitting at the end next to Amy, was as ridiculously tall and skinny as described, even seated.
Looking closer at her mother, Hannah noticed that the usual wide confident grin wasn’t there. This girl looked self-conscious, her smile tentative, her shoulders up around her ears instead of down and back. Her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.
Hannah turned the pages, looking closely at each photo of her mother. All of them that summer are the same, smiling but not quite. The space remains between the girls, though they are captured again and again throughout that first summer playing together. Whatever made that space disappear hadn’t happened yet.
Who had taken the photos? Hannah went back to the beginning and looked at each photo carefully. They were all taken near Amy’s house. Had Amy’s parents taken them? Maybe her older brothers?
Hannah closed the album. She couldn’t stand the guessing, the wondering. If only the album could speak. That’s it; she was going to call Aunt Amy. Let her hang up the phone on her again. Fine, but Hannah was going to try.
Having left her phone sitting in its charger back in Pam’s house, she ran back down the boardwalk to get it. Inside, she let herself catch her breath, and then she dialed, walking out onto the back deck to stare out over the marshes.
Amy’s phone rang. Two rings. Three. “Hello?” Amy, impatient sounding, at the other end.
“Aunt Amy, please don’t hang up,” Hannah said quickly.
A sigh. “No, I’m not going to hang up. But I’m mad at you. You want to know why? Because you should have made that reporter retract what she said about your mother. The book was a work of fiction, and you let her make it personal. That was wrong, Hannah. You’ve got to learn to stand up for yourself! And your mother, in this case!”
It was an old refrain. A true one, too. When pushed down, Hannah tended to stay there, usually in shock. But this time was different. “But-“
“No, don’t start making excuses. If that’s why you called, then I am hanging up,” Amy said, her voice rising in warning.
“Don’t! That’s not why I called. First of all, I want to thank you and all the Barefooters for the key to your house. It’s like a treasure trove.”
“It’s your house as much as it’s ours. I always disagreed with Keeley shutting you out when you hit your teens. You’re still a Barefooter, even if you’re not a baby anymore. Well, you’ll always be our baby, no matter what. I’m glad you’re enjoying it. Have you had Daniel there yet?”
“Uh,” Hannah said. Was she going to keep her end of the bargain? She didn’t know if she should marry anyone at all. Was this even about Daniel?
“Hello?”
“Uh, not yet,” Hannah said, crossing her fingers. “Soon.”
“Good. So, what else? What’s up?” There was a snapping sound on Amy’s end. Amy was either signaling one of her dogs or one of her boys. Amy’s whole family used snapping to indicate and discipline. It seemed to work; all three of Amy’s boys, though boisterous, were as well behaved as any young boys could be expected to be.
Suddenly, something was stuck in Hannah’s throat. She cleared it and coughed. “I was looking at the albums from when you guys were little, and it made me wonder about something.”
“No! Over here!” Amy called out and then spoke into the phone. “Sorry, Sam wasn’t paying attention. You were wondering about something?”
“Well, the album from when you guys were really little. The summer you met?”
“Yeah, we were seven when we became friends. I know what album you’re talking about.”
Hannah tried to keep her voice neutral, remembering the condition and quality of that particular album. If there was anything Aunt Amy hated, it was petty judgment. “What’s the story with that album? It’s different from the others.”
Amy chuckled, “You’re trying not to comment on the super-classy vinyl and its pitiful condition, are you? Good, I’m glad we raised you to be polite, after all. That album will stay just as it is forever, a peeling plastic totem to our childhood. We bought that album together the next summer, when we were eight, and put it together all by ourselves.”
“But who took all the photos? Your parents?” Hannah asked.
“My brother, Jim. He was camera-crazy that summer, just got one for his birthday. He took pictures of everything: us, the dogs, neighbors, our parents. Oh, and then there were tons of “artistic” photos of the boardwalk that didn’t work out so well. Basically, shots of boards. He got bored with it by the end of the summer and left the camera on the island over the winter, but somehow the camera survived the salt air. I found the negatives in his room and we took off with them, had prints made right across the channel at a general store that used to be there, Clark’s, where that bar is now.”
“We used all our savings making prints of stuff like thumbs, people covering up their faces, and the tail-end of a passing boat, but at least there were plenty of shots of us, too. That cheap album was all we could afford after we blew most of our money on the prints. Luckily, the store carried that, too. Ah, it was great, though. We spent a whole rainy day piecing it together. So, other than the gorgeousness of the album itself, how do you like it? Weren’t we the cutest?”
Hannah thought of Jim Dougherty, just two years older than Amy, one of three older brothers, running around Captain’s with a camera. Jim was energetic even now. Whenever he came east to visit Captain’s with his family, he was always on the move and doing something, never just hanging out. He probably made quite a pest of himself that summer. She was glad he had, or she wouldn’t have seen such a different Keeley than the one she knew.
“Yes, you were all very cute,” Hannah said. “Well, Aunt Zo was pretty skinny and awkward looking.”
“Skinny in a cute way! Zo was such a pushover back then, you’d be surprised. I think it was her parents, coddling her the way they did. They made her a softie.”
Hannah wanted to hear about her mother. “Speaking of surprised, I was looking at the shots of my mom and she just didn’t seem like herself in them. She didn’t really smile. It’s weird, kinda Mona-Lisa-like. Why didn’t she smile like she does now back then? She’s all grins now.”
There was a pause. Amy said, “What do you mean, didn’t smile? Of course she smiled. We all did!”
“Mom smiles with her entire face, that’s how she smiles. But not in the photos in that book, the photos from that first summer. I looked to see if there were other albums, the next one’s when you guys were nine, I think. You look older. Well, in that one, she smiles like she does now, a whole-face smile. Why didn’t she do that when she was younger?”
There was another pause. “Your mother, she…, I don’t think…,” Amy said and then paused again. “Listen, Hannah. Your mother didn’t have an easy childhood. Most of us have troubles, but she had more than most. But that’s all water under the bridge.”
“What troubles? What happened?”
“Hannah, I can’t tell you that. That’s your mother’s story. When she’s ready to tell you, she will.”
“Aunt Amy,” Hannah said, trying to keep the angry frustration out of her voice. “Mom never tells me anything. Nothing. Not one word.”
A sigh. “I’m sorry, Hannah. That’s just your mom. The past is the past as far as she’s concerned. Maybe it’s a way for her to deal with it.”
“I can’t deal with it!” Hannah said, and then lowered her voice. “You don’t understand. I’m just trying to come to terms with her, with our relationship. I know, I just know that it’s the key to fixing what’s wrong with me. There’s something wrong, Aunt Amy. It’s like I’m shut down. It didn’t matter before, but now there’s Daniel, and it matters. Please help me.”
“Oh, Hannah! You’re not shut down. You’re as sweet a girl as you could be. And you and Daniel are going to be fine. What is this really about?”
Hannah hesitated. Should she? “You know my novel?”
An intake of breath on the other end of the line. “Yes?” Aunt Amy said softly.
“Well, it wasn’t all fiction.”
Aunt Amy was quiet. A minute ticked by. Hannah waited.
“Hannah, honey? I’ve got to go. We’ll talk soon, okay? Bye now.” She hung up.
Hannah put the phone down on the table and sat with a thud. She shouldn’t have said that. What was Aunt Amy thinking now? She sat and watched the birds fly over the marsh and waited for the phone to ring, hoping.