A Hundred Summers (41 page)

He said nothing. His body shuddered against mine, straining for breath. I could feel his heartbeat slamming into my cheek.

“Please stop torturing yourself,” I said. “We’ll never speak of it again. We’ll start over, as if it’s the second of January.”

“Lily, you know that’s impossible. How in God’s name do I make love to you again, how do I even
touch
you again, with these hands? Always, it’s going to stand between us. What I’ve done.”

“Only if we let it. Only if
I
let it.”

He said nothing.

“Besides,” I said, “there was Graham.”

Nick made a short bark of a laugh. “Yes, there was. Good old Pendleton, evening up the score.”

“Short and very unsatisfactory.”

“Lily, unlike you, I don’t feel the need to hear about your other conquests, let alone contemplate the details.” He turned around in my arms and touched my hair. “You’re going to stay here tonight, of course. You’re not going back out in that storm.”

“We can’t. My mother’s still at the house. She’s all alone. We have to get back to her.”

“Oh no you’re not. Your mother can sit there by herself and listen to the wind howl.”

The door from the kitchen opened again, and Kiki flew through. She stopped in the middle of the living room rug and stared at us. Her hands flew to her mouth to absorb her gasp.

I jumped away from Nick. Nick leaned back against the mantel.

“Kiki, darling, it’s time to go back. Mother’s waiting for us.”

“You’re not going,” said Nick. “It’s far too dangerous for you, let alone Kiki.”

“I can’t just leave her there, Nick!”

“Then I’ll go.” He straightened. “I’ve got my sou’wester. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’ll bring her with me, carry her if I have to.”

“Nick, you can’t!”

“Why not? We’re on higher ground here than at your place. It’s safer if we all stick together. I should be the one to go, anyway. I can plow through the storm better than any of you.”

“No, Nick!” Kiki flung herself around his legs. “Don’t go!”

He bent and put his arms around her shoulders. “I’ll be just fine, sweetheart. Don’t worry.”

“You can’t go,” said Kiki. “You have to stay here and marry my sister. You were
hugging
her. That means you love her.”

Nick started and looked at me guiltily.

“Out of the mouths of babes.” Aunt Julie folded her arms.

Nick gave Kiki a pat and gently set her away. “All right, then. If I’m going to go, I’ve got to go now. I’ve got my rain things in the back.”

I followed him through the kitchen to the mudroom. “You don’t have to do this. Please stay. Or let me go with you.”

“Someone’s got to stay with Budgie,” he said, putting on his coat, toeing off his shoes. “I’ll be all right. Just a September blow. I’ve seen worse.”

“And all for my mother.”

“I’ll throttle her afterward.”

“I’ll help you.”

He yanked the second boot on. I handed him his hat.

“Be careful out there,” I said.

Nick looked even larger than usual with the sou’wester piled on his shoulders and the sturdy boots lifting him up another unneeded inch or two. He looked down at me, and his hazel-brown eyes filled right up. “Oh, my God, Lilybird,” he said suddenly. “I love you so much.” His hands surrounded my face. He kissed me, hard, right on the lips. “We’ll figure this out. Somehow I’ll find a way to make it up to you. I’m not going to let anyone hold us hostage any longer. There’s seven years wasted already. Think what we might have done with them.”

“Go bring back my mother.” My voice was hoarse. “I’ll see if I can talk to Budgie.”

He kissed me again and left through the back, disappearing almost immediately in the bang of the door and the howl of wind. I ran around front and peered through the living room window. I thought I could see a blur of yellow through the rain, but it was gone almost at once.

I looked at the clock ticking above the mantel.

It was three twenty-two in the afternoon.

TO MY SURPRISE,
Budgie was awake when I went upstairs, right after Nick left.

“Well, well,” she said, a little dreamily. “Was that a lovers’ spat I heard below? I hope you weren’t smashing my mother’s delftware. She brought that back from her honeymoon.”

“Don’t even think of putting the blame on my shoulders, Budgie Byrne.” I set down the hurricane lamp and looked out the window, at the breaking waves, even higher than they were a moment ago.

“Greenwald,” she said.

“Not for long.” I turned to her. She looked pale, even against the white pillows, lipstick gone and hair lank. Her eyes were enormous, like round, dark-rimmed saucers, their blueness lost in the dim light.

“You’re in for the fight of your life, darling,” she said. “I won’t let you take him back so easily.”

“He was never yours.”

She stared at me, blinking, and turned her face away. “I’m going to tell the world what happened. I’ll ruin your mother. I’ll ruin Kiki. You won’t be able to go anywhere. You’ll see what it’s like.”

“I don’t care. Nick doesn’t care. My mother can go to hell.”

“So you say. But your soft little heart will turn. You don’t have the strength for a good fight, Lily. You never did.”

I gestured to her arm. “And you do? Slitting your wrists? Very brave, Budgie.”

“He took me by surprise. Now I’ve had time to think it over.”

I sat down at the end of the bed and leaned over her legs. “Oh, good. More plans from that fiendish brain of yours. Tell me, what are you contemplating now? What new plots to make the people around you ever more miserable?”

She lifted her left arm next to her on the pillow, quite close, so the bandage brushed her cheek. “I only wanted you to be happy. I brought up Nick to meet his sister. I brought up Graham to give you a husband. I’ve done everything for you, but it wasn’t enough. You were always jealous of my beauty, of the way men wanted me, and you wanted it for yourself.”

She said this with such drunken sorrow, with tears brimming in the pink corners of her eyes, that I felt the instant sting of truth, of that tiny shard of truth Budgie had always wielded to such effect, even when doped up with pills and desperation.

“You’re wrong,” I said.

“You know it’s true. You wanted my life, you wanted my husband.”

Budgie whispered the words into the noise of the storm, her face still turned away from me, and my eyes, for some reason, fastened on the tiny pulse at the base of her throat, nudging her skin with the speed of a frightened rabbit.

My God, I thought. She’s scared of
me
.

I wrapped my hands around her feet, anchoring us together in the narrow bed. “No, Budgie.
You
wanted them. You wanted
my
life, and
my
Nick. They weren’t yours, and you took them. You could have stepped in that winter, you could have stepped in anytime in the last six years and told me the truth and set us free, but you didn’t. You watched me suffer, you watched Nick suffer. Then, once the money dried up, you used your dirty secrets to corner Nick.”

She turned to me at last. “You should thank me. I could have talked about what I saw that night. I followed them from the party, your mother and Nick’s father, did you know that? I saw everything. You should be grateful I kept my trap shut.”

“You could have told
me,
for God’s sake! I was in agony. I thought I’d nearly killed my father. I’d given up Nick because of it.” I let go of her foot to slam my fist into the bed. “You could have
told
me! It’s what friends
do
.”

Budgie struggled up from her pillows, eyes blazing. Her voice was slurred with drugs, stuttering, the fury breaking out in spurts from the fog in her brain. “And why should you have everything, Lily? Everybody always loved you. Even Graham fell for you, and he never fell for anybody. You and your adorable straightlaced family, your sweet eunuch of a father. I’ll bet
your
papa never crept into your room at midnight and told you what a pretty, pretty girl you were, and not to say anything to Mummy or she’d beat you. Did he?”

The whole world seemed to thicken and slow to a halt around me. Even the storm paused for an instant, withholding the next gust, shocked. From a vast and impenetrable distance, I heard Aunt Julie’s sharp voice calling out something to Kiki.

She told me things that would make your toes curl, things I’ll take to my grave.

“No,” I said. “He didn’t.”

“So, you see, there were different rules to my life. I took my two hundred clams a month, thank you very much, rather than tell you the truth. It seemed the obvious choice at the time. And when Nick asked me for a divorce in Bermuda, I told him he had a sister, and if he ever wanted to know her, if he ever wanted to see his precious Lily again, he’d better stick with me and play the loving husband and not make a peep. Not a single ever-loving peep.”

“Budgie . . .”

“Oh, look at you. Look at your pretty blue eyes, all full of feeling sorry for Budgie. Do you know how often you’ve looked at me like that? You and Nick both. And I craved it and hated it at the same time.” She fell back again and closed her eyes. She was wearing a nightgown, I noticed at last, peach silk with ivory lace, covered by an open robe of matching peach silk. It shone beautifully against her skin, even in the dimness. She must have been wearing it when Nick arrived this morning. Her breasts curved beneath, still incongruously full, the lace disappearing into the shadow of her cleavage. “Now I’ve lost my stinking baby, and I’ve lost my stinking husband. What the hell am I supposed to do, Lily? You who always know the right thing.”

Aunt Julie was coming up the stairs. The thump of her footsteps cut through the roar and whine of the flying wind outside, the rattle of the old boards of Budgie’s house.

I wondered which unspeakable bedroom had belonged to Budgie when she was a child. This one? The one across the hall?

“You know the right thing, Budgie,” I said. “You always have. It isn’t hard. It’s a lot easier than fighting all the time.”

The bedroom door flew open. Aunt Julie stood there, face wild. “Is Kiki with you?” she demanded.

I jumped from the bed. “No! I thought she was with you! Isn’t she with you?”

“Oh, Jesus!” She put her hands in her hair. “She’s gone! I’ve looked everywhere!”

I flew across the floor. “The attics! Have you checked the attics?”

“Not yet.”

I went to the bottom of the attic stairs and called up. My voice was wild, frantic. “Kiki! Kiki! Are you up there?”

Silence.

“Kiki, don’t hide! For God’s sake, this is no time for games! Please let us know you’re safe! Please, darling!”

My words echoed faintly back.

Aunt Julie made a little cry. She twisted her hands together. “She didn’t go out, did she? She wouldn’t have gone out. I didn’t hear the door.”

“The cellar?”

“I looked in the cellar, damn it!”

I turned and met her eyes. My heart slammed in my chest, spreading panic through every vessel of my body.

Adrenaline.

Where would she go?
Think like Kiki.
Why would she leave? What could possibly draw my precious sister outdoors into the maw of a thundering September blow?

What, indeed?

With a snap, like a final puzzle piece locking into place, my brain returned the unthinkable answer.

“Nick,” I said. “She went with Nick.”

23.

SEAVIEW, RHODE ISLAND

Wednesday afternoon, September 21, 1938

W
e stumbled down the stairs, Aunt Julie and I, our feet clattering together down the wooden boards. I beat her to the door, flung it open to a wall of rain and wind, screamed out
Kiki! Kiki!
but the words hurled themselves back in my face.

“It’s no use!” said Aunt Julie.

I ran back to the kitchen, to the mudroom adjoining it. Another raincoat hung on the hook, poised for the constant deluges of this hottest and wettest of summers. I slung it on. Budgie’s boots were too small, but I shoved my feet in them anyway and tossed the hood of the raincoat over my head.

I had to force the door open, to lower my shoulder and push with all my might, and then it tore away off its hinges. The wind caught it and tossed it up into the air like a beach ball, and it was gone.

I staggered into the storm, screaming Kiki’s name. I couldn’t see anything. In the last ten minutes, the sky had blackened, the rain so filled the air it was like drinking rather than breathing. If I opened my mouth, I would drown. I put my hand to the side of the house and bent myself into the wind, but it was no use. I fell to the ground and crawled, and the water sloshed around my hands and knees and feet, foaming and filled with bits of seaweed, stinging with sand and salt.

Foot by foot, yard by yard, I crawled along the side of the house. I crawled past the hydrangeas, which the wind had nearly stripped of leaves and flowers. I crawled through the surging water. I reached the end of the porch, wrapped my fingers around the post, and staggered to my feet.