“Out of the question. You went behind my back—”
“And I’m sorry I did that, Mom. But now that you know, I’m asking you straight up to let me finish the class.”
“After today?” Camille said, “You ought to be grounded for life.”
“I have been grounded for life,” Julie muttered. “Ever since Dad died, I’ve been grounded for life.”
Camille pulled off the road, slamming the car into park alongside a vast, barren salt meadow. “What did you say?”
Julie tipped up her chin. “You heard. That’s why you pulled over. All I’m saying is, after Dad died, you stopped letting me have a normal life because you keep thinking something awful is going to happen again. I never get to go anywhere or do anything. I haven’t even been on an airplane in five years. And now all I want is to take surf rescue like everybody else does. I wanted to be good at one thing.” Julie’s chin trembled and she turned away to gaze out the window at the swaying grasses and blowing afternoon clouds.
“You’re good at so many things,” Camille said.
“I’m a fat loser,” Julie stated. “And don’t say I’m not fat because I am.”
Camille felt ill. She’d been blind to what Julie wanted. Was she a terrible mother for being overprotective? Was she letting her own fears smother her daughter? By withholding her permission to take surf rescue, she’d forced Julie to go behind her back.
“I don’t want to hear you talking about yourself that way,” she said gently, tucking a strand of Julie’s dark, curly hair behind her ear.
“That’s right, you don’t,” Julie said. “That’s why you’re always busy working at the shop or in your darkroom. You stay busy all the time so you don’t have to hear about my gross life.”
“Jules, you don’t mean that.”
“Fine, whatever. I don’t mean it. Can we go home?”
Camille took a deep breath, trying not to feel the places where Julie’s words had dug in. Was it true? Did she throw herself into her work so she didn’t have to think about why she was still single after all these years or why she harbored a manic fear that something awful would happen to those she loved? Yikes. “Hey, sweetie, let’s do each other a favor and talk about something else.”
“Jeez, you always do that. You always change the subject because you don’t want to talk about the fact that everybody thinks I’m a fat, ugly loser.”
Camille gasped. “No one thinks that.”
Another eye roll. “Right.”
“Tell you what. You’ve been really good about wearing your headgear and your teeth look beautiful. Let’s ask the orthodontist if you can switch to nighttime only. And something else—I was going to wait until your birthday to switch your glasses for contacts, but how about you get contacts to celebrate the end of freshman year. I’ll schedule an appointment—”
Julie swiveled toward her on the passenger seat. “I’m fat, okay? Getting rid of my braces and glasses is not going to change that.”
“Stop it,” Camille said. God, why were teenagers so hard? Had she been that hard? “I won’t let you talk about yourself that way.”
“Why not? Everybody else does.”
“What do you mean, everybody else?”
Julie offered a sullen shrug. “Just … never mind.”
Camille reached over and very gently brushed back a lock of Julie’s hair. Her daughter was smack in the middle of prepubescent awkwardness, the epitome of a late bloomer. All her friends had made it through puberty, yet Julie had just barely begun. In the past year, she’d gained weight and was so self-conscious about her body that she draped herself in baggy jeans and T-shirts.
“Maybe I do need to let go,” Camille said. “But not all at once, and certainly not by putting you in harm’s way.”
“It’s called surf rescue for a reason. We’re learning to be safe in the water. You know this, Mom. Jeez.”
Camille slowly let out her breath, put the car in drive, and pulled back out onto the road. “Doing something underhanded is not the way to win my trust.”
“Fine. Tell me how to win your trust so I can take the course.”
Camille kept her eyes on the road, the familiar landmarks sliding past the car windows. There was the pond where she and her friends had once hung a rope swing. On the water side was Sutton Cove—a kiteboarding destination for those willing to brave the wind and currents. After a day of kiteboarding with Jace nearly sixteen years before, she’d emerged from the sand and surf to find him down on one knee, proffering an engagement ring. So many adventures around every corner.
“We’ll talk about it,” she said at last.
“Meaning we won’t.”
“Meaning we’re both going to try to do better. I’m sorry I’ve been so buried in work, and—” A horrid thought crash-landed into the moment.
“What?” Julie asked.
“A work thing.” She glanced over at her daughter. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll deal.” Her stomach clenched as she thought about the project she’d been working on for Professor Finnemore. The moment the ER had called, Camille had dropped everything and burst out of the darkness—thus ruining her client’s rare, found film forever.
Great. The one-of-a-kind negatives, which might have offered never-before-seen images nearly half a century old, were completely destroyed.
Professor Finnemore was not going to be happy.
Every time he came back to the States from his teaching post overseas, Finn made a stop at Arlington Cemetery. He walked between the endless white rows of alabaster markers etched with black lettering, nearly a half million of them, aligned with such flawless precision that they outlined the undulations of the grassy terrain. Somewhere in the distance, a set of unseen pipes was playing—one of the thirty or so funerals that took place here each week.
He paused at a headstone upon which was perched a small rubber bathtub duck. On the back of the toy, someone had written Hi, Grandpa in childish scrawl.
Finn paused before taking out his camera. The messages from little kids always got to him. He shut his eyes and murmured a thank-you to the soldier. Then he photographed the marker and added the memento to his bag. As a volunteer for the Military History Center, he visited Arlington whenever he was in town, recovering items that had been left on headstones. With his fellow volunteers, he helped catalog the items for a database so each remembrance, no matter how small, would be preserved.
Moving on, he made a detour to view the markers of his first bittersweet accomplishment. Working with a group of villagers in the highlands of Vietnam, he’d discovered the crash site of four U.S. soldiers who had gone missing fifty years before. The soldiers—an aircraft commander, a pilot, a door gunner, and a gunner—had been hit with enemy fire, and their chopper had crashed into a mountainside. For decades, the men had been lost. Finn had talked to their families, hearing echoes of his own family’s story. With no way of knowing what had become of their loved ones, there was no place for the grief to go, no closure. It lingered like a fog, impenetrable on some days, lifting on others, but it was always present.
The remains had been interred in a group burial service with horse-drawn caissons and a white-gloved honor