We tied our hair up, and Ada put the car into gear, reversed out of the parking spot, and pulled out into the street, taking the Black Horse Pike back to the Garden State.
“Thank you,” I said as we cruised along in the darkness, the pine barrens looming to our right, the barrier islands and sea to the left.
She said nothing, though whether she was lost in thought or just concentrating on the unlit road, I did not know.
“Ada?” I asked as we passed Ocean City.
“Hmm?”
“Why did my mother spend the summer with you?”
“I told you. That’s not my story to tell.”
“Except you called us ‘two peas in a stupid pod’ when you thought I might be . . . in trouble. Did she—” I swallowed. “Do I have a sibling I don’t know about?”
Ada was silent for a long moment, and I braced myself for the worst. “You do not,” she said eventually.
“Then what—”
“Give me a minute,” she said, still staring at the dark road. For a mile, she said nothing as I counted the road markers.
Then she began to talk. “It was 1932. She was eighteen years old. And she met a boy who she thought was going to marry her.” Ada glanced over at me. “It was not your father.”
“I assumed as much.”
“Your grandfather didn’t know. Your grandmother—my sister—called and explained the situation. I told her to send her down to me. When Rose arrived, she was terrified. The boy had vanished when she told him. And when she showed up at his house . . .” She shook her head. “He told his parents he had never met her.”
I took that in. Freddy’s response to the girl he got into trouble was horrendous, but compared to that . . . Then again, if I had agreed to have Freddy, he would have left her just as high and dry as my poor mother.
“I sat her down and told her she had about a month to decide what she wanted to do. The decision was hers to make. If she didn’t want to go on, well, we’d find someone to help. And if she did, she would stay with me until it was time, and we would find someone to adopt the baby.”
A shiver ran down my spine. You do not, she had said when I asked if I had another sibling. Oh, Mama.
“In the end, she didn’t have to decide—fate or her body took care of it for her.”
Neither of us spoke. I was trying to reconcile this with the mother I thought I knew. The one who spent her days lost in books, but who doted on her children beyond anything. When she held us, did she think of the baby that never was? Did my father know? I thought of her weeping at her own mother’s death, the woman who protected her honor and allowed her to go on to become my mother instead of some fallen woman, which, in 1932, she would have been.
“She struggled with it for some time,” Ada said finally. “She really thought she was in love and his response . . . Well, I’m not sure which was more devastating.” She shook her head slightly at a memory. “She was herself again by the end of the summer. But I think that’s why she married your father the following year. She wanted stability. Someone who couldn’t hurt her like that.”
Daddy worshiped Mama. We all knew that. He refused her nothing. And she loved him too—but not with the passion I had seen in the books I snuck from the box in her closet. Harold and I—we were her true loves. And the rest? She found her solace in books.
But Mama had been that deeply in love. And I vowed to myself, on that dark stretch of road, never to do what she did and settle for something bland to keep from being hurt.
Ada put a hand on top of mine. I looked down in the moonlight, seeing the veins and wrinkles on hers, weighed down with heavy rings. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Yes, you should have. I asked. I’m glad you told me.”
She shook her head again. “No. The ‘two peas in a pod’ thing.”
I tilted my head questioningly. Our situations certainly merited the comparison.
“You won’t wind up like her.” I lifted my chin, realizing she was right. I would have married Daniel if that were the case. “You’re too much like me.”
I looked at her profile, illuminated in the moonlight as she pulled off the Garden State onto Avalon Boulevard. She was wild and free, but she was alone.
And I didn’t know if that was exactly what I wanted or what I was most terrified of becoming.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
July turned into August, bringing warmer temperatures and men to the shore for more than just the weekend as they took their two-week vacations to join their wives and parents. The beach and town grew more crowded and, as I experimented one day with returning to the 18th Street beach, I discovered Freddy was noticeably absent from the lifeguard chair. I returned the next three days, looking cautiously at the stand before deciding where to set up camp, but when he didn’t appear, I stopped looking for him.
Ada left her newspaper at my place at the lunch table, folded to a wedding announcement in the Philadelphia Inquirer. It featured a picture of the couple, Freddy smiling but looking like he wished it were a funeral announcement instead. I wondered if they would also publish a baby announcement in a few months or if they would skip that to make it less obvious to anyone who paid attention to dates.
Probably the latter.
I looked at the girl with great curiosity though. She was pretty, but there was nothing striking about her. I wondered if marrying Freddy was what she wanted or if her parents had strong-armed her into it. From the perspective of a writer, it was a fascinating study. But none of them were my problem. I mentally wished them well and then put them entirely out of my head.
Besides, I had more interesting things to discuss with Ada. There were several undated photos, and I needed her help categorizing them. I was nearly done with the second scrapbook, covering the second decade of Ada’s life. I met Abner, Ada’s fiancé, and had studied him, going so far as to get a magnifying glass from the kitchen drawer to look even closer at the handful of photos of them. There was an engagement portrait, along with a newspaper clipping announcing their news. But another clipping soon followed, detailing the fire and loss of life.
The photos stopped for almost a year after that.
Ada came to sit at the table, nodding to the newspaper. “I thought you’d want to see.”
“I hope they’re happy.”
“They won’t be,” she said darkly.
I shrugged and let it drop. I didn’t want to spend another moment of my life on Freddy. “I’m almost done with the second album, but I had a few questions.” She peered at me. “Where are all the pictures from 1905 after Abner died?”
“Excuse me?”
“There’s nothing for almost a year.”
“Why would there be? We were a house in mourning.”
“So you just—sat there?”
“Of course not. But it would have been considered bad form to go about documenting our lives.”
“What did you do that year?”
“I went to nursing school.”
That answered my next question; of the undated photos, most of them featured Ada in a nursing uniform.
“Are these from nursing school, then?” I asked, passing them to her. “They don’t have dates or names.”