fading, and she took off her sunglasses. “At first, we thought it was because she was in school in the winter and free in the summer, the way it is with most kids. But gradually we realized it was the beach itself that made her calm and happy. One time, when she was only about seven years old, we came down at the beginning of the summer. Dad had just pulled the car into the driveway—he hadn’t even come to a stop—when she jumped out and ran to the beach, right to the exact spot where I’d found her, although there was no way she could have known that. She sat down there and watched the ocean, all by herself, all afternoon. It was as if she could finally relax.”
Rory actually shivered. “That’s a little spooky,” he said.
“It was,” Daria agreed. “But after all these years, I’ve just come to accept that about her. She needs the beach. Period. After Mom died and I realized how happy Shelly was here, I started bringing her down on weekends. Just Shelly and me. Dad was…” She remembered her father’s years as a widower as one long fall into a life barely lived. “Dad withdrew after Mom died. He never dated or did things with friends, even though he was only in his fifties. He spent more and more time at church. Chloe and I used to say that he and God were dating.” She laughed at the memory. “He loved Shelly and me, but essentially, we were on our own. So, anyhow, Shelly had to settle for weekends at the beach. But then, when she was twelve and went on a field trip with her class to a museum in Norfolk, she disappeared. We didn’t know if she’d been kidnapped or what.” Shelly had been kidnapped once before, but she didn’t want to get into that.
“The police looked for her,” Daria continued. “The next day, when she was still missing, I called Chloe in Georgia to tell her about it. Chloe wondered if Shelly might have gotten here to Kill Devil Hills somehow. It seemed impossible, but it turned out that’s where she was. We never did find out exactly how she’d managed to get here—some combination of buses and hitchhiking, I guess. She’d broken one of the Sea Shanty’s windows to get in and had pretty much set up house for herself. I decided that was it—we’d move here.” She glanced at the widow’s walk again. “I still don’t know if it was the right thing to do for her. Maybe she should have been forced to tough it out somewhere else, because—to be honest—I think she’s even worse than she was. Whenever we have to go to the mainland now, to visit someone or to see a doctor, she gets panicky. But I love her.” She looked directly into Rory’s eyes and saw sympathy there. “To see her miserable tears me apart,” she said. “To see the total joy in her face when she’s safe on her beach makes it all worthwhile to me.”
“Maybe it was the right move for her,” Rory said. “She’s able to hold a job here, it sounds like. Would she be able to do that if you lived back in Norfolk?”
“I don’t think she would have been able to get out of bed in the morning if we’d stayed in Norfolk,” Daria said. “And she’s very responsible about her work. But frankly, there really isn’t much she can do to earn a living or to allow her to live independently. Sean Macy—the priest at St. Esther’s—and the others who supervise her give her a lot of direction in the housekeeping she does. Sometimes I think they keep her there out of pity. She probably wouldn’t be able to hold a job anywhere else.” Daria suddenly felt as though she had painted a one-sided picture of her sister. “She does have skills, though. She’s very kindhearted and likable. She’s creative. Her jewelry is actually in demand. She’s a terrific swimmer. Physically, she’s very graceful.”
“Yes,” Rory said, “I noticed that.”
“She can’t work, but she sure can play volleyball.” Daria smiled. “She excels at just about everything that’s fun. She just can’t do the serious things in life very well.”
Rory laughed. “Maybe we should all take a lesson from her,” he said. Then he leaned forward, his face now sober and not far from hers, and she saw the fine lines around his eyes. “I understand what you’re saying about Shelly and why you’d be concerned about her,” he said. “But she certainly knew what she was doing when she wrote to me about True Life Stories. She understood what the show is about and how it might be able to help her.”
Daria felt tears of frustration form in her eyes. He still didn’t get it. “Shelly is so vulnerable,” she said. “She’s fragile. She needs protection. People take advantage of her very easily. She’ll do anything if she thinks it’s helping someone else.”
“Are you saying she’s only enthusiastic about me telling her story because she wants to help me out? To give me an episode for the show?”
Daria shook her head. “No, that’s not what I mean. She really does seem to want you to do it, I can’t deny that. But I think it would be a mistake to unearth that sordid mess, or to make her face the reality of the woman who…who essentially tried to kill her.”
Rory leaned back in his chair again at that, and Daria continued.
“Shelly feels secure with us,” she said. “She knows she’s loved, she knows she’s been loved from the very first day. Why tamper with that? I don’t know what it would do to her to have the truth come out.”
“Maybe the truth would be positive, though,” Rory argued. “Maybe her birth mother regrets what she did and would love to know that Shelly is alive and doing well.”
“You’re fantasizing a happy ending, Rory,” Daria said. She felt a twinge of anger at his perseverance.
“You know, I understand better than you think,” Rory said. “The way you feel about Shelly was the way I felt about Polly.”
She had forgotten his devotion to his sister. “I can still picture Polly perfectly,” she said. Polly’d had a short, boxy build, white hair and the almond-shaped eyes of a Down’s syndrome child. She remembered how Rory had defended her against the teasing of other children and taken time out from his own activities to play with her. Seeing him with Polly was one of the reasons she’d been attracted to him.
“Remember the incident with the fish hook?” Rory asked with a laugh. “When you said you were an EMT, that’s what I thought of.”
She’d forgotten about that, but the memory came back to her instantly. Polly had managed to get a fish hook stuck through her toe. Neither Rory nor his mother seemed to know what to do to get it out, and Daria, then only twelve, had performed the feat.
“You knew exactly what to do,” Rory said. “It makes sense that you got involved in medicine.”
“Dad had told me how to extract a fish hook in case I ever got stuck by one,” she said simply. She didn’t want to discuss her EMT work and answer the inevitable questions about why she was no longer doing it, so she changed the subject. “I don’t remember Polly and your parents ever coming to Kill Devil Hills again after you went off to college,” she said.
“That’s right,” Rory said. He let out a long sigh and stretched. His T-shirt strained across his chest, and she looked away for the sake of her own sanity. “They stopped coming,” he said. “That’s when I realized they’d bought the cottage primarily for me, so I could get to spend time on the beach in the summer. But my parents never sold Poll-Rory. I’m sure they were hoping I might use it for my own family one day. Until this summer, that just wasn’t possible.”
“Why not?”
“Glorianne. My ex-wife.”
“She didn’t want to come here?”
“An understatement. She and I were very different. She was…” He looked toward the ocean for
