The Bay at Midnight Read online

“You’ll go up to bed with me at night, won’t you, Julie?” she asked as she dried the silverware. I always had to go to bed at the same time she did, some compromise hour between the two of our bedtimes, so that she wouldn’t have to be in the attic alone.

  I looked at my mother. “I want to stay up later this summer, Mom,” I pleaded. “I’m twelve now.”

  “You’ll go at the same time Lucy does,” my mother said, but she drew me aside and whispered in my ear. “Go up when she does and wait until she falls asleep,” she said. “Then you can come downstairs again.”

  “Lucy needs to grow up,” Isabel said as she dried a plate. “She’s never going to get over her fears if you keep coddling her.”

  “What would be more helpful than your criticism,” our mother said, “is for you to offer to go up with Lucy sometimes so Julie doesn’t always need to be the one to do it.”

  “Be happy to,” Isabel said. “I’ll tell her ghost stories.”

  Mom was sponging off the counter, but stopped to look at Isabel. “When did you get so mean?” she asked, and turned away. I saw the look of remorse on Isabel’s face before she covered it with a smirk. My sister was not as hard as she pretended to be.

  I was coming to realize that Isabel was very beautiful—and that she knew it. She could get her way with just about anyone, especially our father, using a pout of her lips or the sheen of tears in her eyes. Her dark eyes were amazing, the lashes so long and lush they looked as though they must be false. She complained about her hair all the time. It was too wavy. Too thick. Too dark. But her complaints were empty; she knew her hair was the envy of every other girl in her high-school class. She had large breasts and a tiny waist. Boys stared at her when we’d walk down the street and girls were cautious around her, afraid that their boyfriends might compare them to Isabel and decide they could do better. There was no use denying that she’d gotten the looks in the family. Lucy and I had dark hair, as well, but I had to set mine on rollers to make it wavy, and Mom had given Lucy’s short hair a perm that made her look like a poodle.

  The kitchen had grown very quiet. I poured the remaining tomato sauce into a Tupperware container and burped the lid, which made Lucy giggle.

  Isabel lifted the colander from the dish drainer and began to dry it. “Ned asked me to a party tonight,” she said. “I can go, can’t I?”

  My mother continued cleaning the countertop with the sponge. “Not tonight,” she said. “You need to unpack and—”

  “I’ve already unpacked and I helped Julie and Lucy unpack, too,” Izzy said. “And the beds are made upstairs and I swept the floor up there and cleaned the toilet and sink and everything.”

  I honestly wasn’t sure if all she was saying was true or not. I knew I had unpacked my things quite capably on my own, but I said nothing.

  “And we’re practically done in here, aren’t we?” Isabel asked.

  “Yes, we are.” My mother turned on the faucet to rinse the sponge. “But I don’t want you gone our first night here.”

  Isabel smacked her dish towel down on the counter. “That makes absolutely no sense,” she said.

  My mother looked up from the sink, wringing the sponge between her hands. “I said no,” she said.

  Isabel rolled her eyes and picked up the towel again. I could hear the aggravation in her breathing as she dried one of the saucepans. She didn’t say another word, and neither did my mother. There was tension in the room, and I grew quiet myself. I didn’t know the appropriate rules of behavior when the ice suddenly grew that thin.

  Later, my mother and I were cleaning the deep drawers beneath the kitchen cabinets. Lucy stood nearby, brushing ancient crumbs from the old toaster. She’d refused to help us with the drawers because we had found mouse droppings in one of them and a spider in another. Daddy came into the room and poured himself a glass of ginger ale from the bottle in the refrigerator. He was wearing his summer uniform: baggy shorts that showed off his pale, scarred legs and one of his short-sleeved plaid shirts.

  “Charles.” My mother looked up from the task. “Would you find Isabel and ask her to sweep and organize the hall closet, please?”

  “She’s gone out,”he said. He’d taken the ice tray from the freezer and although the ice had barely had time to form yet, he cracked the tray open and dropped a couple of delicate cubes into his glass.

  My mother straightened up. “Gone where?” she said.

  “To a party with Ned Chapman.”

  My mother put her hands on her hips. “I told her she couldn’t go,” she said.

  My father looked surprised, his eyes, the same light brown as his hair, wide-open. “She didn’t tell me she asked you,” he said.

  I watched a blotch of red form on my mother’s throat. “I’m going to ground her for the rest of the week,” she said.

  “That’s a little harsh, Maria, don’t you think?”my father asked, swirling the ice and liquid around in his glass. “It’s her first night down the shore and she’s known Ned all her life. His father may be one of the biggest fools on earth, but you can’t hold that against Ned. I don’t see the harm in her going to a party with him.”

  “Yes, she’s known him all her life, but she’s seventeen this summer,” she said, as if that explained everything. “And it’s her first night here. I think she should have stayed in. Help clean up a little. Get acclimated.”

  Daddy laughed. “Acclimated?” he asked. I was not sure what the word meant, and I realized I had left my dictionary in Westfield. I didn’t like to hear my parents argue, and I buried my head deeper in the drawer I was cleaning, brushing mouse droppings into a dustpan with a small broom. I glanced at Lucy, who looked as uncomfortable as I felt. She was concentrating hard on every crevice of the old toaster.

  Daddy put his arm around my mother and kissed her cheek. “We raised her right,” he said. “She’s got a good head on her shoulders.”

  My mother looked wounded. “How can you say that when she just lied to you about—”

  “She didn’t lie to me,” Daddy said, letting go of her and heading for the door to the hallway. “She omitted a small fact.”

  “She has you wrapped around her little finger,” my mother said. “She’ll be fine,” Daddy said. He walked out of the room, turning in the direction of the front door. I knew he was working in the garage with Grandpop this evening, organizing the fishing gear and slapping a fresh coat of blue paint on the Adirondack chairs.

  My mother returned to her cleaning with a vengeance, and I could see the tight line of her lips. I knew my sister lied often to our parents. When we would go to confession on Saturday evenings, I was always amazed at how short her sessions in the confessional were. I knew she couldn’t possibly be owning up to every lie she’d told. I learned from watching her. Instead of enumerating everything I did wrong, I now gave the priest the abbreviated version. “I lied five times,” I’d say. I refused to count “pretending” as “lying.” If I counted pretending, I would be in the confessional all night. “I disobeyed my mother once,” I’d continue, “and I was mean to my little sister twice.” It was a relief to do it that way, instead of spilling all the details of my sins, and the priest didn’t seem to care.

  I put my arm around my mother’s waist, feeling very adult. “She’ll be okay, Mom,” I said.

  My mother didn’t respond. Her eyes were glassy, as though she might cry, and I felt confused by her tears. I thought she needed to be alone, so I said I would sweep the hall closet myself, and I took Lucy’s hand and dragged her out of the kitchen with me.

  At nine o’clock that evening, I climbed the creaky steps into the attic, Lucy following behind me. I clung to the railing myself. The stairs seemed more wobbly every year and if I’d had a smidgen of fear in my makeup, I probably would have dreaded climbing them, too. In recent years, Lucy and I had slept in the twin beds in the quadrant of the room closest to the stairs. This year, though, I wanted more privacy. I wanted to be able to leave the reading lamp on as long as I
liked and to simply daydream in my own little curtained space without Lucy’s incessant chatter. So, earlier in the day, we’d made up our beds in separate corners of the room, while Isabel made the double bed in the far corner behind the chimney for herself. Lucy had seemed fine with the arrangement then, but now that she climbed under her sheet in the hot attic, she was not so pleased.

  “Leave the curtain open so I can see you,” she pleaded. She was lying on her side, facing my bed, the white sheet up to her shoulders.

  “I’m going to have the light on so I can read,” I said, busying myself fluffing my pillows and turning down the covers. “It’ll keep you awake.” I wanted her to fall asleep quickly so I could go downstairs and play canasta with my mother and grandmother. During the school year, my evenings were filled with homework and television—The Andy Griffith Show or Wagon Train or Ed Sullivan. But in the summer, evenings were the time for card games and jigsaw puzzles.

  “Please,” she wailed.

  “You’ll be able to see my shadow,” I said, glad that I had made the bed closest to the curtain rather than the one against the wall. “Watch.” I walked over to the small table between the twin beds in my corner and lit the lamp. Then I pulled the curtain closed. It was tight against my bed, and once I’d climbed in, still dressed in my shorts and sleeveless top, I knew how I would look to Lucy. I’d been watching the silhouettes of my sister, my cousins, my aunts and uncles through those curtains for years. “See?” I said. “You can see me perfectly, right?”

  “Okay,” Lucy said, her voice small.

  I heard her settle down in the bed and pictured her lying there on her side, eyes wide-open, watching my shadow as I dove back into Nancy Drew.

  I read one chapter and the beginning of another. Then I pulled back the edge of the curtain closest to the head of my bed. Lucy’s eyes were closed, her thumb stuck in her mouth as if she were a three-year-old. Her ratty old teddy bear was tucked beneath her arm. Quietly I slipped from my bed. Pulling the spread from the other bed, I bunched it up under my covers, propping the book up near the pillow, then walked into the central part of the attic to see how the shadows would look from Lucy’s perspective in case she woke up. Quite convincing.

  It was impossible to descend the stairs without causing them to creak, but I did the best I could.

  My mother smiled at me when I walked onto the porch. She had reached some sort of internal peace about Izzy being at a party, and her smile was a relief to me.

  “She’s asleep?” She was sitting across the big table from my grandmother, smoking a cigarette and playing double solitaire on the vinyl, floral-patterned tablecloth. They both wore cotton housedresses, my mother’s a pale yellow stripe and my grandmother’s, baby-blue.

  I nodded, plunking myself down into one of the rockers. Like the table, all the chairs on the long porch were painted red, the paint always a little sticky from the humidity and so thick you could dent it with a fingernail. There was also a bed at one end of the porch for anyone who wanted to sleep with the sounds of water lapping against the bulkhead and crickets singing in the wooded lot next door.

  “We’ll end this game and then you can join us for canasta,” Grandma said, lifting her cup of instant coffee to her lips. When she shifted her legs beneath the table, I could see that her stockings were rolled down to just below her knees. Her English was perfect, but her Italian accent was still thick some sixty years after her arrival in the United States. I loved the music in her voice. I was ten before I realized that not everyone had a Grandma who spoke that way, turning her “th’s” into “t’s” and adding the hint of a vowel to every word that ended in a consonant.

  I rocked for a while, the concrete floor smooth and cool beneath my feet. I could see the light of a boat moving slowly along the canal toward the bay, its engine a soft and steady hum, a backdrop for the slapping of cards against the table. Tomorrow, Grandpop would get our own boat in the water, and I couldn’t wait. I’d piloted that boat myself for the past two summers, although always with an adult or Isabel on board. This summer, Daddy promised me I could go out in it alone if I wore a life preserver and stayed in our end of the canal, between my house and the place where the canal opened into the bay. It was not much territory, but I was excited at having that freedom nevertheless.

  Someone was in the Chapmans’ backyard. It was too dark to see who it was, but the person was fishing. I saw the burning tips of a couple of mosquito-repellant coils, and the faint moonlight glinted against the fisherman’s white shirt. I guessed it was Ethan, trying to catch something he could cut up. I watched the shirt move as he swung the pole behind him, then batted the air with it, the sound of the line sailing out into the canal unmistakable. I felt my own fingers itching to hold a fishing pole.

  “Are you ready to beat us at canasta?” my grandmother asked me.

  I walked over to the table and sat down as she began to deal. My mother stubbed out her cigarette in the clamshell ashtray and was pulling another one from her package of Kents when the most hideous scream suddenly cut through the air. She was out of her seat before I even realized the sounds were coming from the attic. The screams continued, Lucy barely stopping for breath between each one. I followed my mother up the stairs.

  “Baby!” My mother flicked on the overhead light and raced to Lucy’s bed. Lucy was huddled against the iron headboard, her teddy clutched in her arms and her poodle hair matted on one side of her head. Our mother sat next to her. “What’s the matter?”

  “There!” Lucy pointed toward the ceiling near the center of the attic.

  I walked over to where she was pointing and looked up. “Where?” I said.

  “There,” Lucy said again, this time a little sheepishness creeping into her voice. I looked up to see an old rag wedged against the ceiling beneath the elaborate network of wires used for the curtains. That rag had been there for as long as I could remember, probably to stop a leak before the new roof was put on the house.

  “It’s a rag,” I said. Lucy was such a baby.

  “It looked like a head,” Lucy said. “I thought it was a head and then I looked over and saw you weren’t in bed and I was up here alone!” She sounded indignant. I glanced at the curtain surrounding my little cubicle. The bunched-up bedspread seemed to have collapsed. It was obvious I was no longer there.

  My mother stood and turned out the light and the three of us looked at the rag.

  “See?” Lucy said.

  “It looks like a rag,” I said.

  Mom sat down next to her again. “All you had to do was turn on your light and you would have seen it was just a rag,” she said. “It’s not fair to Julie to have to stay up here with you, Lucy. You’re eight years old now.You have to learn there’s nothing to be afraid of up here.You know we’re all right downstairs if you need anything. Now lie down.” She reached for the sheet and drew it over her youngest daughter.

  “Can we leave the light on?”

  “You’ll never fall asleep that way.”

  “Yes, I will,” she said, her gaze darting to the rag again.

  “All right.” My mother got to her feet with a sigh, smoothing the skirt of her housedress and offering me a conspiratorial look of exasperation that made me feel very mature and brave. She hit the wall switch for the single bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. “Good night, dear.”

  “Night, Luce,” I said, following my mother down the stairs.

  I awakened at five-thirty the following morning to the crowing of a rooster. I lay in bed, smiling to myself. Early-morning pink sunshine flowed through the window in my little curtained “room,” and the sense of summer freedom washed over me again.

  I moved to the other bed in my small cubicle, crawling down to the footboard so I could look out the window. I knew where the rooster lived. I’d forgotten all about him and his earlymorning wake-up call. Across the canal, kitty-corner from our bungalow, was a small wooden shack, gone nearly black with age, its roof sagging and its yard home to shoulder
-high grasses and cattails. It was the only house, if it could even be called that, on that side of the canal and I couldn’t remember ever seeing a soul around it, but someone had to live there to feed the rooster. A dock was cut into the land near the house. I could zip over there in the runabout, dock the boat and climb up into the tall weeds surrounding the house without being seen. I mentally added “exploration of the shack” to my agenda for the day.

  I got out of bed, knowing no one else would yet be up. The curtains were pulled around Isabel’s double bed. I didn’t know what time she’d gotten home the night before and I wondered what sort of punishment my parents had agreed on for her. I hoped it was harsh. I hated that she could lie and get away with it.

  I put on one of my bathing suits and pulled my capris over it, then walked across the linoleum-covered floor. We’d been at the shore less than twenty-four hours and already I could feel the gritty sand beneath my bare feet. I tiptoed as I passed Lucy’s bed. Her curtains had not been pulled shut, and I didn’t want to wake her. I was nearly to the stairs when I heard Isabel’s voice.

  “Julie?”

  I turned to see her pull back part of the curtain around her bed. Her long, dark hair was a tangled mess, but she looked beautiful in the pink sunlight.

  I tiptoed over to her bed. She took my arm and pulled me behind the curtain.

  “I need you to do me a favor,” she said. Her shoulders were bare above the sheet and I felt shock when I realized that she had slept naked. I didn’t know anyone who actually did that.

  I sat down on her bed. This close, I could see that her eyes were red. “What did Mom and Dad say?” I said. “You shouldn’t have gone to Daddy after—”

  “Shh!” she said. “That’s none of your business.” She fumbled among the covers on her bed and picked up a small plastic giraffe, about the size of her fist. “Give this to Ned Chapman, okay?” she asked, although I knew it was more of a demand than a request.

  I looked down at the red-and-purple giraffe nestled in my hands. “Why?” I asked. I knew she couldn’t tell me it was none of my business if she wanted my cooperation.