Returning to Shore by Corinne Demas Page B

closer to them.
    â€œWhich is the kid you know in this picture?” she asked.
    Richard’s hand moved towards the photo frame and his fingers settled lightly along the edge. He looked at the photo for a long time. Then he looked at Clare. “I don’t know any of the kids in the photo,” he said. “Theperson I know in the photo was the teacher. His name was Charlie McNeil.”
    Clare looked at the man in the photo. He had dark hair that was falling across his forehead, a mustache, and a boyish, friendly look.
    â€œHe’s not alive anymore?”
    â€œNo,” said Richard softly.
    â€œHow come you have this photo?”
    â€œIt’s the way I like to remember him. He loved teaching. He inspired his students to do great stuff. He really got them to care about achieving things, even students whom everyone else had given up on.” Richard’s voice filled with—what was it?—pride? Yes, pride, as if Charlie wasn’t simply just a friend.
    Then Clare knew. The idea hadn’t occurred to her before. But now, looking back, she saw that there had been small hints, which she had observed but not actually noted. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did. She’d been afraid to let herself think it, afraid to say it in her mind, but strangely, now that she knew, at least she wasn’t afraid of it anymore.
    She looked at Richard. They didn’t say anything, but as they watched each other’s faces it was all madeclear. Clare saw that Richard could tell that she now had figured out what he had been wanting her eventually to know.
    They sat there in such quiet that all Clare could hear was the plastic clock on Richard’s desk. It made a thunking sound each time the second hand jumped from one dot to the next, like the beating of a heart.

16
    At night, in her room upstairs, Clare turned off the lights and opened the window wide. The smell of the marsh was strong and constant, familiar to her now as the smell of her own body. She pressed her face against the screen and it bulged under the pressure, then flattened again as she leaned back a little. She bounced her forehead against the screen, stretching it in its metal frame. Each time, it resumed its flatness.
    Somewhere, deep in the marsh, there was a melancholy three-note cry—some bird of night—repeated again, and once again. But no other bird answered it. Clare pulled back from the window.She stretched out on her bed and closed her eyes and concentrated on the comforting smell of the marsh.
    Once you knew something, you couldn’t un-know it. It was there, always, and there wasn’t any way you could tuck it away again, make it something that didn’t exist.
    It wasn’t that Richard was different; it’s just that something about Richard was different. Well, not that it
was
different, really, because it had been there, hadn’t it, even if she hadn’t realized it.
    Yet how could it always have been there? Richard had been married to Vera. And Richard was her father, wasn’t he? How could he have been married to Vera; how could he have had a child? It creeped her out, the whole thing. It didn’t make sense.
    But part of it did make sense. The part of it that had to do with what puzzled her before. What that woman Steffi had called Richard: “a man of many secrets.”
    The idea of what Richard was had formed in her mind, but she hadn’t allowed herself to use a word to describe it. Now she confronted the words. It was one thing to consider the terminology in general—something else entirely to find a term for her own father. “Homosexual” sounded like something out of a pamphlet on sexuality from her school health class. “Gay” sounded like something frivolous, unserious, not like Richard at all. But what would you call it if you didn’t call it that?
    Clare tried to think about men she knew who were gay. There were actors of course,