Page 73 of Ghost on the Shore

Part Three

Right Where You Left Me

Chapter Thirty-One

Grace

“Do you think we can get this done before school starts up? I’m due back in less than two weeks.”

Garth surveys the kitchen, which is now gutted down to the studs. “Flooring is done. Sheetrock and painting won’t take too long. Cabinets and countertops are scheduled to go in on Wednesday.” He shrugs. “As long as the electrician and the plumber show up and finish on time, I don’t see why not.”

“That’s what I wanted to hear.”

The kitchen is last on the list of home improvement projects I need to tackle. With a whole lotta help from Garth, my non-licensed, quasi general contractor, I’ve painted the exterior of the house, hung new shutters, replaced the front door, removed every scrap of flowered wallpaper from the bedrooms and changed out all the light fixtures. The walls are now painted in coastal grays and pale blues, and once the dust settles from the kitchen remodel, I’ll be able to move my furniture out of storage and back intomyhouse. I’m trying not to call it Viv’s house but it’s still hard.

It’s been a summer.

After that God awful meet the parents fiasco, I let Owen know that I wasn’t ready to dive into anything serious.

If anything, opening up to Owen made me realize that I have unfinished business in just about every area of my life, and if I was truly serious about moving forward, I needed to do some soul searching in terms of my past.

I’ve come to dub this:Operation Coming Clean, and my first mission? A visit to my brother and his wife out in Santa Barbara. Figured I’d start off easy, and a weekend at their sunny beachside home was just what the doctor ordered. The sun, the surf and the love of family made spilling my truth and my tears less painful than I expected. And who knew? It gets easier and easier every time you do it.

Doctor Clare Dawson will never be the Marmee to my Jo March, but I’m building a relationship with my mother now and that’s a good thing.

Both my mother and my father had questions—lots of them—and I knew they both felt bad about not seeing the signs or even suspecting something was wrong with me back then. They weren’t the perfect parents, they fell short in many ways, but for that I’ll never blame them. I was as secretive as a CIA operative in my formative years, so there’s no way they could have known, even if theywerepaying attention.

Can you contact her parents? Do you know where she lives? When will she legally be able to seek you out? What is her name?So many questions that I answer as best I can.I know her parents’ names and I know they were living in New Jersey when the adoption was finalized. I think she can seek me out when she’s eighteen but I’m not sure. No, I don’t know her first name.And I don’t tell them that I call her Birdie in the quiet of my own mind.Who is the father?I tell them who Damienwas, and I tell them that he’s gone. It all hurts, but that’s the part that physically pains me deep when I say the words out loud.

Damien.

Every time I started to clean out Aunt Viv’s house, some force would draw me to the shelves and have me reaching up for that book where the pictures were stashed. I’d sit back on the couch, stare at them and get lost in the past.

But now those pictures are framed. I took them to a professional when I was in Philly visiting my mother, and now they’re matted, airtight and framed in a way that will stand up to the test of time. They’re in a box, safe in the bedroom closet. I’ll hang them someday, but not now.

In late July I reached out to Frannie and Reese, and we set up a girl’s weekend down at Frannie’s beach house in Nags Head. It was a wine-soaked, emotional get together filled with mostly laughter, but some tears. Frannie couldn’t get over the fact that they never realized I was pregnant, even though I was more than six months along by the time school broke for summer.

Reese cracked, “That only happens with the first pregnancy. You pop immediately the second, third and fourth time.”

“I can’t wait to pop,” Frannie said, smiling down at her belly.

And I’ll admit, while it was hard to hear about Reese’s children and the excitement over Frannie’s first pregnancy after struggling to conceive for so long, I was happy for them, and happy to have them back in my life again.

I did trip and fall once while traveling down the road to redemption, and nothing could have prepared me for it.

The last time I saw Gianna Oliveri was sometime in January, a couple of months after Damien was deployed.

I’d written three or four letters to every one Damien sent back, and at that point I hadn’t heard a word from him in over a month. My last three letters came off as increasingly frantic, and in my very last letter I told him I was pregnant, with the due date written in angry block letters.

Crickets.

I still wasn’t desperate enough to go knocking on her door or her brother Eli’s. I was too proud. But when I practically ran smack right into her on campus one day, I broke down and asked her in the most roundabout way possible if she had any news.

But the girl was like a shark getting her first taste of blood in the water. She cocked her head to the side, surprised and downright gleeful. “You haven’t heard from him?”

“I have,” I hedged. “Just not in the last two weeks.”

Make that six weeks.

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