Kiss River (32 page)

Monday, June 8, 1942

I’
ve been here a month now and High Point still feels strange and too big to me. Dennis and SueAnn laugh when I say that, because I guess High Point isn’t very big at all compared to a lot of other cities, but every place is bigger than Kiss River.

Dennis’s house is really old, but he takes good care of it. He doesn’t have a lot of money, though. I am trying to help out. Yesterday, I painted the bathroom.

Dennis got me into school here, pulling some strings, I think, because he is not my legal guardian. School is almost over for the year already. The other kids are nice, but I don’t really have any friends yet. I am so different from everyone. Some of them make fun of the way I talk, but I know they’re only teasing me. At least I hope they are. I honestly never realized how different I speak from everyone else. I am supposed to be a high-school freshman, but I am way behind what they are learning. I know what Dennis meant now about needing to get a better education than I could get in Kiss River. I am used to all different ages being
in one classroom, but here I am with a lot of kids my own age. Dennis is tutoring me at night so I can keep up. He gave me the choice of working extra hard so I could stay with the other freshmen or going back a year or two. I sure don’t want to do that. I will have to go to summer school, and then I should be caught up enough and I won’t feel so panicky next year when I’m a sophomore.

I have to go to church with them every Sunday. It’s part of the rules of living here. The only big rule, really, besides going to school. I actually like church, even though I am still confused about when you’re supposed to stand up and kneel and all, and I’m amazed Dennis and SueAnn can figure that out since I don’t see the rhyme or reason to it. I also don’t have any idea what the priest is saying because it’s all in Latin, but since I am learning Latin in school, I guess I will understand some of it in time.

I also have a library card here, and the library is amazing! I go there after school some days and Dennis has to bring a crowbar to pry me out of there. He laughed the first time he picked me up and saw all the books in my arms! “You don’t have to bring the whole library home at one time,” he told me. “The books will still be here tomorrow.”

I feel sorry for the kids I went to school with in the Banks. They don’t know any better. They don’t know what they’re missing. But then, they also are with their families, and I know I will probably never be with mine again.

Dennis is much kinder than I ever realized. I even told him about Sandy turning on me, although I said nothing about him being a spy, of course, only about him being a traitor to me. Dennis could have said, “I told you so,” but instead he held me while I cried about Sandy, and SueAnn got tears in her eyes and smoothed my hair. They did ask me if that was the reason I wanted to run away from Kiss River. I told them it wasn’t, but that I couldn’t tell anyone the real reason, and they have not said a word about it since. I wonder what they think that reason is, but it doesn’t seem to matter to them. They both care a lot about the world and making it better, and I think they’ve taken me on as a
project. That’s okay. I feel so lucky to be here with both of them. Otherwise, where would I have gone?

I miss home. I miss my parents, and I would give anything to watch the stars from the gallery with my father or even to have Mama holler at me right now. When the war is over, I will try to go back to see them. I hate that they are worried about me. But I’m still glad I did what I did. I know they’re safe, even if they are probably very upset over the way I left. Of course, I wonder all the time if Mr. Hewitt found and understood my carving on the lens.

Here at the Kitterings’, I have become a paper reader. The newspaper here in High Point is amazing! Living in Kiss River, you had to keep reminding yourself that there were things happening in other places. This newspaper tells you not just about the rest of America, but the whole world, and Dennis loves that I’m reading it. He talks to me about the articles. But he doesn’t know what I’m really looking for, which is an article about the capture of a traitor in the Coast Guard. I read nearly every word in the paper looking for that news, and so far I have not seen it. I am afraid to see it, for so many reasons. If he’s caught, would he think I had turned him in somehow after all and then would he send someone to harm my parents? That horrible dream I had is still fresh in my mind every time I close my eyes. Or maybe Mr. Hewitt didn’t find a note from me and never bothered to look close enough at the lens to see his name. Or maybe he knew I’d run away and didn’t even bother to look for a note. The way I chose to get the message to him seems sillier by the day, and the less sure I am that he saw it. I am ashamed to admit it, but I am relieved every time I read the paper and don’t see Sandy’s name there. Love is such a crazy thing. How can I still love someone who hurt me so badly? How can I want him to be safe even when he was doing something so terrible and costing Americans their lives? And what about Mr. Sato? Sandy was willing to let him go to prison or an internment camp, when
he
was actually the one doing the spying.

I can wear my ruby necklace here, and I do wear it every day.
At first I thought I should throw it away or at least give it away because it came from a man who turned out to be a cruel and horrible liar. But I decided to keep it. Everybody has good in them, I figure, and I’ll wear it to remember whatever good parts there were of Sandy.

T
he weather was hot, sultry and hazy on Monday morning, and Gina was up early, out on the beach with Clay and Sasha. They stood in the water a few yards east of the lighthouse, the water splashing nearly up to their thighs. With any luck at all, today she would learn the identity of her grandfather, a man who, if he had not been arrested as a spy, might very well now have an estate worth millions. One hundred thousand dollars would be nothing to him. She had to guard her motivation closely, though. It was the lens she cared about, she told herself, over and over so she would start to believe it. The salvaging of the lens.

“I don’t like the look of those waves,” Clay said. He stood with his hands on his hips, staring at the water. The weather would be a factor in being able to raise the lens, and Gina had been encouraged by the absence of rain that morning. But Clay was right. The waves seemed to be growing wilder as they watched. The buoy, though, was still a distance beyond the breakwater.

“It’s not that bad out where the lens is, though,” she said.

Clay shrugged. “It’ll be up to the barge operator.” He looked at his watch. “They’re due here at ten, right?”

“Right.”

“Maybe it will settle down by then.”

“If they can’t do it today, will they do it tomorrow?”

“I would hope so,” Clay said. “I guess it depends on what other obligations the barge operator has.”

“We’re visiting Walter tomorrow, though,” she said.

He gave her a slightly patronizing smile as he put his arm around her. “That’s tomorrow evening,” he said. “Try to relax, okay?”

Walter had suffered a heart attack the night of Henry’s birthday party, but he was recovering well in the hospital in Elizabeth City. You wouldn’t know he was recovering at all, though, by the way Henry and Brian were grieving. They sat glumly hunched over the chessboard at Shorty’s, barely talking. The men had been a threesome for so many years. They’d grown old together, and Henry and Brian must have been feeling their own mortality as much as they were missing their old buddy.

“Hey, you two!”

They turned to see Kenny walking toward them, and Sasha looked like a dolphin as he leaped through the water to reach him.

“I talked to Smitty, the guy who owns the barge,” Kenny said as he neared them. “He wanted me to come check out the conditions up here.” He looked at the waves. “Whoa. Not looking too good for a salvage operation.”

“But underwater, where the lens is, wouldn’t it be calm?” Gina asked, still clinging to her optimism.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Kenny said. He was going to be one of the divers doing the underwater work. “If the barge is bobbing up and down, the lens will be bobbing up and down too when the crane lifts it up. Not a good thing.”

Gina didn’t respond. She wanted a miracle to occur. She wanted the waves to suddenly flatten and the sea to grow calm.

“I’m afraid this isn’t going to happen today,” Kenny told her. “I don’t want to get that barge out here and then have it turn around and go back. That would jack the price tag up considerably.”

Clay squeezed the back of her neck, the same gesture she’d
seen Alec do to Olivia, and she leaned against him, giving in. She would have to wait one more day.

Worse news faced Gina inside the house. Logging on to the Internet, she found a long e-mail from Denise, and it contained the words she had been dreading: Rani and Denise’s daughter, Sunil, had been moved to the state institution on Thursday night, when their orphanage abruptly and chaotically shut its doors.

I wish I could tell you everything is fine, Gina,
Denise wrote.
And if you ever prefer that I do that, just let me know. But even in that short couple of days we got to know each other, I realized you are not the kind of person to hide from the truth.

The main problem with the state orphanage where our girls are now is that it is so institutional. The ayahs are overworked and just don’t seem to have the same warmth about them that we all got used to. The physical space is even grimier, if you can imagine that, and both our girls were infested with lice within a day.

A big problem now is that I can’t see Rani as much as I used to. She is in a different part of the orphanage from Sunil, and I’ve only been over to her part of the place a couple of times. She was weepy when I was there, but it may just be that she needed her nap. I have spoken with the director of this place, making sure they know that Rani needs special medical care, so maybe that will help.

I am getting the usual runaround from the courts, and the negative attitude toward foreign adoptions seems worse than ever. Can you tell I’m getting depressed? I can only imagine how you must feel, so many miles from your beautiful daughter. I will try to see her again tomorrow, Gina. Maybe they will let me take Sunil over to that part of the orphanage to visit with her.

The situation was getting worse and worse. Gina printed Denise’s message and carried it outside to Clay, where he was working on repairing the roof of the old outhouse.

He stopped his work to read the e-mail. He was shirtless and beautiful as he stood next to the ancient privy. The dappled shade from the trees sent patches of light across the face she had grown to love. God, it felt good to have someone to share this e-mail with!

Shaking his head as he read, he reached out to pull her to him.
“It seems criminal,” he said into her hair. “Aren’t there authorities over there who can do something about this?”

She was accustomed to such questions. She used to ask them herself.

“Some of the authorities are the cause of it,” she said, drawing away from him. “I’m so afraid she’s going to die, Clay. If she does I’ll feel so guilty.”

“Why guilty?” he asked. “You’ve said there’s nothing you can do.”

“But I’ll always wonder if there was something more I could have done,” she said.

She was trying, though. She looked at the ocean, at the place where the waves billowed above the lens. She was trying everything she knew to try.

Tuesday, July 7, 1942

I
am fifteen and I am pregnant. There. I’ve put it down in writing. I think up until now I haven’t really believed it, but when I read those words back to myself, I have to admit they’re the truth.

With everything that’s happened, I didn’t realize I’d missed a period until two days ago, when I woke up in the middle of the night and suddenly remembered I’d brought no sanitary napkins with me and that I’d better get out and buy some. And then I realized I’ve been here two months and haven’t needed any, and I began to panic. I told SueAnn, who I can talk to about that sort of thing, and she immediately took me to her doctor. He did a test on me that we won’t know the result of yet, but he felt inside me and said I am definitely pregnant. I thought I would cry when I heard the news, but I just went sort of still and stared at the ceiling above the examining table, pretending he had made a mistake and it wasn’t true. When we got home, SueAnn told Dennis, which was horribly embarrassing to me, but he just got very quiet and serious and said we would work this out somehow. That’s when I started crying. He could’ve yelled and said
he’d warned me and what a tramp I am and all of that, but he didn’t say anything of the sort. And neither did SueAnn. Both of them being so Catholic and all, I felt like a terrible, sinful person. I heard the two of them talking till very late last night. I heard them mention my name a few times, but their voices were low. This morning, Dennis told me what they’d decided to do. He didn’t have to tell me I have no choice in the matter. I already know that.

First, he said, he would arrange to have a priest talk to me. I need to confess what I’d done and promise never to sin that way again. Even though, Dennis added, he knows that Sandy “used me and discarded me,” I am still not completely innocent. He is right. I most certainly am not. I feel like a stupid girl who has messed up her life. The thought of talking to a priest about that sort of thing is horrid, though. But I will do it.

Then Dennis said, “You and I will get married.”

I must have looked shocked out of my mind, and he raised his hand to keep me from saying anything, not that I could have.

“You can’t walk around pregnant out of wedlock,” he said. “And I don’t know if you noticed this, but I love you.”

I was still speechless. I used to think Dennis loved me when he would talk to me at Kiss River, but since we’ve been here, he’s treated me more like a kid sister or even a daughter than a girlfriend. Now I know he has been avoiding treating me like a girl he’s interested in, not wanting to scare me off. The funny thing is, when he said he loved me, I got tears in my eyes and I realized that I love him back. Not the way I loved Sandy, not like a girl should love a man she’s going to marry, but I love him for all he’s done for me. He wasn’t the man I’d ever expected myself to marry, but he was right that I couldn’t be pregnant and unmarried or I’d be scorned by everyone in High Point.

“That is too much for me to ask from you,” I said.

“Well, it comes with a price,” he said. “I can’t raise another man’s child, especially not a man like Sandy. When you have the baby, you’ll have to adopt it out.”

Without thinking, I placed my hands on my stomach as if I was protecting the baby inside me, holding on to it. I hate the way Sandy treated me, and I hate how he’s hurt his own coun
try, but deep in my heart I still love him. Is that crazy? He is a cowardly, money-hungry traitor. How can I still go weak in the knees when I think about him? The baby inside me is his, but is it the child of the gentle man who loved me so sweetly, or of the vicious criminal who caused the deaths of hundreds of good men out of greed? What I knew right then was that I couldn’t go through this alone. I could go home to Kiss River, possibly putting myself and my family in danger and then having to face my parents with what I’d done, but
that
would be a fate worse than death. If Sandy was still there and not arrested, I could confront him and tell him he was about to be a father, but I don’t think I could survive him being mean to me again, especially now. I need to stay here, and I need Dennis’s help. I will marry him, and I will give this baby up, when the time comes. Right now, thinking about that actually sounds like a relief. I know I look like a woman, not a girl. I can pass for much older than I am. But I
am
a girl, and I’m afraid of being pregnant and I can’t imagine being a mother.
Damn.
I have really messed up my life.