The Last Summer at Chelsea Beach (15 page)

But Robbie slipped through her grasp. “I’m not going to let Liam ruin Thanksgiving.”

I gestured toward his hideaway beneath the steps. “How about a game of chess while we wait for dessert?” I suggested. Robbie had an amazing aptitude for the game and we would sneak in a few minutes whenever we could. But he shook his head. Even our special hiding place could not console him now.

“What are you going to do?” Jack demanded, rising, as Robbie walked toward the door and put on his coat. “What can you possibly do that the rest of us haven’t tried?”

“I can try not giving up on him,” Robbie said resolutely. “I can try bringing him home.” He ran out, letting the door slam behind him.

Charlie stood. “I’ll go get him.”

But I put my arm on his. “Robbie feels he has to try, just like the rest of us.” I pushed my own anxiety down. Robbie knew the neighborhood as well as the older boys. “If he doesn’t find Liam soon, he’ll hurry back for dessert.” I stood to help Mrs. Connally clear the plates, grateful to have something to keep me busy. But my hands shook. Would Robbie be able to find Liam and actually persuade him to come home? It was odd with Liam gone, but having him here, drunk and maybe hostile, could be worse. I hated the thought. Tonight, though, I wanted everything to be perfect.

We were halfway through dessert when the first concerns were voiced aloud. “They should be back by now,” Mrs. Connally fretted. “Robbie would have found Liam or come back by now.”

“It’s fine, Mom,” Charlie said. But his voice sounded forced.

“Yeah,” Jack chimed in. “Just like that time Charlie was late at football and you worried and worried.”

“Thanks, pal.” Charlie’s tone was sarcastic.

“Don’t mention it.”

“The weather was bad then, too,” Charlie pointed out.

His mother shook her head. “This is different.” She served coffee and we drank it quietly, all of the small talk gone. Another half an hour passed.

“Let’s tell stories,” Charlie suggested. “I want to hear the one about when the twins tried to come early.”

“Well,” Mrs. Connally began, “your father was at work when it all started.” As she began to recount the blizzard and the fire truck that had rushed her to the hospital, her husband chimed in adding parts she had forgotten. “And the doctor was so surprised when there were two!”

“If you think he was surprised, imagine how I felt,” Mrs. Connally added. My aunt and uncle laughed appreciatively.

“Folks, there’s something I, that is we, want to tell you,” Charlie began when the laughter had subsided. So he meant to tell them about us first. All eyes turned toward him. Though we had wanted everyone to be together when we shared the news, I knew he could not wait any longer. He cleared his throat. Mr. Connally looked curious, his wife pleasantly expectant, as though she might have already guessed.

I looked away. Through the window I noticed a man standing at the front door. We had been laughing so hard we must not have heard the first knock. He was wearing a uniform and for a minute, I thought it was one of the army officials who had come to the Dennison house earlier in the afternoon. But his jacket was dark blue, a police badge on the breast pocket. A chill ran up my spine. “Charlie, there’s someone at the door...”

I was interrupted by the bell ringing and the sound of a fist knocking hard and fast against the wood of the door frame.

“What on earth?” Mr. Connally said as he rose to answer it. Everyone else stood, too. Instinctively Jack moved closer to his mother. I felt Charlie come up behind me.

As Mr. Connally opened the door, the red lights of the police car flashed on the living room wall. “Mr. Connally?” the policeman asked. “There’s been an accident. You need to come with us.” As if from a great distance I heard Mrs. Connally gasp.

“Is it Liam?” Aunt Bess put a hand on her shoulder.

“Stay with Mom,” Charlie ordered Jack, following his father and the policeman out the door. He did not object as I came with him. Mrs. Connally’s wail followed us out the door.

Seconds later, I found myself wedged between Mr. Connally and Charlie in the backseat of a musty police car. We lurched forward. A loud buzz in my ears nearly drowned out the police officer’s words. “Accident...unconscious.” I understood then that Liam had crashed his dirt bike. Bile rose in my throat. I knew he had been drinking. Why hadn’t I stopped him from riding off? Charlie’s hand found mine, gripped it until my fingers numbed. The policeman kept talking to fill the space and I made out that he was the father of one of our classmates and had recognized Liam, which was how he had gotten to us so quickly.

“How bad is it?” Mr. Connally croaked.

“I don’t know. They’re still treating him at the scene.” That meant he was alive. I exhaled slightly. He would come through this. He had to. The police car turned onto Front Street, which ran parallel along the Delaware River, and then slowed by the wide expanse of water. Lights gleamed high on the Ben Franklin Bridge to the north, but on the far banks the warehouses and factories of New Jersey were shrouded in darkness.

We ran from the car. The twisted wreckage of Liam’s dirt bike lay by the edge of the choppy river. Stale, brackish air filled my lungs. Several feet away stood an ambulance, its rear doors open as a stretcher was loaded in. Charlie raced to it and I struggled to keep up. Liam thrashed wildly as the medics tried to treat him, his soaked hair plastered to his forehead. There was a deep gash on his head.

“Liam, are you okay? ” Charlie demanded.

Liam’s eyes darted wildly from side to side. He did not seem to know we were there. “Robbie? Robbie?” Then he grasped Charlie’s arm. “Save him, man.” He groaned, then fell back, semiconscious.

I froze, the ground seeming to slide from beneath me. Charlie spun away then, scanning the river. He ran toward the water and jumped in.

“Charlie!” his father cried.

“What the hell?” the policeman exclaimed behind me.

But I understood: the policeman had only mentioned Liam. He hadn’t known about Robbie, who had gone looking for Liam—and undoubtedly found him. “His little brother.” I recovered, turning to the policeman desperately. “He must’ve been on the bike, too!”

“Christ,” the policeman swore. He ran back to the car and picked up his radio. “Get the search-and-rescue boat out here, stat.”

I swung back to the water, lunging forward. “Charlie!” I searched the choppy surface. I made out his head for a second, before he dove back under, searching, heedless of the rough, icy water. I started forward, then stopped again, powerless to help.

“Go with Liam to the hospital,” Mr. Connally said hoarsely. “We need you there.”

“Please, I want to stay,” I started to protest. I could not possibly leave until I knew Charlie and Robbie were safe. But hands pulled me toward the ambulance. I climbed in and sat down beside the stretcher. Liam’s face was calm now, eyes closed. He looked like the boy I had met two summers ago. Pity and anger washed over me. Beside me the medic was working to start an intravenous line in Liam’s arm. I shrunk back against the cold wall of the ambulance, trying to stay out of the way.

The ambulance sped through the streets, sirens blaring. A few minutes later, we reached Pennsylvania Hospital and the doors opened to garish light. After they had lifted the stretcher and wheeled Liam in, I stood helplessly in the entrance bay to the emergency room. “Dear God,” I began, trying to summon the prayers I had not uttered since the day my parents went missing. The words stuck in my throat.

With a futile attempt to compose myself, I went to face what was waiting inside. Mrs. Connally and Jack had been brought straight to the hospital. They stood inside the doors locked in the same embracing position in which I had left them at the house, as though they had been magically transported there. Should I tell them about Robbie? But their faces, frozen in horror, told me they already knew. My aunt and uncle were there, too, hovering in the background, now part of this strange tableau as they waited for me. Aunt Bess stepped forward and draped my coat around my shoulders, then led me to a chair.

Minutes passed like hours. A doctor appeared. “Liam’s going to be fine,” he said, unaware how little those ordinarily joyous words could do to quell their terror. “Just a concussion and a cut to the head. He’s a very lucky fellow.”

The outside doors to the hospital opened then. Charlie limped in gray-faced, wearing a soaking wet blanket someone had placed around his shoulder. I ran toward him. “Charlie—” But he continued past, not seeing. His arms were half-extended before him, still etched in the shape of the object he had been carrying, the body that was now gone.

Years later, witnesses would still tell the story of how the oldest Connally boy had jumped into those dark, stormy waters, diving repeatedly to find his youngest brother. He had at last pulled Robbie to the surface but, unable to reach the shore, he had remained afloat treading water and cradling his brother for twenty minutes. When the rescuers finally reached them, Charlie would not release his brother and so they were pulled gently to land together, Charlie whispering softly to the lifeless body he held.

Washington, DC
November 1943

I blinked and my vision cleared, the memories of love and pain pulling me back to the present like the tide. I was still standing on the corner of 15th and H Streets, letting the crowds swirl around me as they had on the dock the day I arrived in America, and so many times in the halls of Southern. The rain was heavier now, flattening my bangs against my eyes. Usually, I loved the way it lifted the smells from the pavement, as if giving new life to the city. But now the stench of dirt and ash caused my stomach to turn.

I started walking quickly, past two policemen on wide motorcycles, desperate to get as far away as I could from the site of our encounter. Not that it would help; Charlie was here. All of the time and distance I had put between myself and the ache of what had happened evaporated like mist when I saw him standing before me. I hurried past Woodward and Lothrop, the early Christmas decorations in its windows, more austere than they might have been in peacetime, a kind of forced merriment. Workers passed one another, eyes straight ahead, not seeing. For all of the excitement of the holiday in the bustling city, Washington had a bland, antiseptic feel, so unlike Philadelphia’s messy patchwork of ethnic neighborhoods. No one, it seemed, was actually from here, or expected to stay very long.

At the corner stop, I boarded the streetcar. I gazed up through the smudged window at the dome of the Capitol, its lights blackened now in case of an air raid attack. But an eerie glow seemed to cast faint gray around it, silhouetting it against the twilight sky. As we wove through the rain-slicked streets, Charlie appeared once more in my mind. I had thought of him constantly these many months, wondering if he was still off in training somewhere or had already been deployed. And I worried about him, in a way that I had no right to, really, now that he was no longer mine. But I had never expected to see him here, even though Washington had been his place first when he’d been accepted to Georgetown (and might still have been if he had not enlisted). Yet here he was in front of me and he wanted to see me again. What could he possibly want?

A single tear rolled down my cheek, hot and unfamiliar. I brushed it away before any of the other passengers could see. I had not cried the night Robbie died, nor any of the days after. I had functioned mechanically, taking on the jobs that everyone else was unable or unwilling to manage, such as getting Robbie’s clothing for the funeral home. I had stood in the empty foyer of the deserted Connally house, flooded with images, my grief threatening to burst forth from its tight wrappings. I had remained dry-eyed, but I almost broke down as I looked at Robbie’s secret hiding spot beneath the stairs. It was almost as if, if I walked slowly toward it, Robbie would be there waiting for me in our hideaway. Our last chess game lay unfinished on the other side of the door.

I had walked upstairs and ran my hand over the duvet, lumpy with stuffed animals Robbie had not quite outgrown, toys strewn across the floor. I laid out his navy suit, threadbare and worn at the knees and elbows from being worn by at least two brothers before him, then looked around his room for the white sneakers he insisted on wearing all the time. But those were gone now, one missing when Charlie carried him from the water, the other God-only-knew-where, most likely at the bottom of the river. Choking back a sob, I had grabbed the clothes and run from the bedroom.

The funeral had taken place two days later on a gray morning, with a coating of snow that had come too early in the season, covering the sidewalks and cars for a few hours. At the church, I’d hung at the back, overwhelmed by the dark chapel and the sea of people. Among the other kids from school and families from the Pennsport neighborhood, there were faces strangely resembling the Connallys, out-of-town relatives I hadn’t known existed from New York and other places. My aunt and uncle sat on either side of me. I had not been sure they would come, but they had been waiting for me in the living room that morning, dressed in black.