Bittersweet (11 page)

My anger ebbed. I kept going, cutting and taping, until I had a complete picture laid out before me. Only then did I sit back against the red chair. Abby laid her head upon my lap. I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew, I heard an unfamiliar motor roaring off into the night, and the screen door nipping at Ev’s heels. I sat forward, taking in the messy room, disoriented, irritated I’d been wrong about her whereabouts. She was standing over me before I had a chance to begin cleaning up.

“Was that John?” I asked.

Her pupils were dilated, her hair messy, lipstick smeared. “Why on earth would I be getting a ride from John at this hour?” She prodded Abby with her foot. “He should be taking her home at night.”
That was when she noticed my collage. I wanted her to divulge her secrets, but instead, she plucked the paper from the mess and pored over it.

Blond family. The lake. Polo shirts. Sunglasses. Insignias. Rowboats. Beautiful people. Money.

“Is this us?” she asked, delighted. Before I could answer, she pulled two pushpins from the wall. Centered the collage above the mantelpiece and pressed the pins into its corners. Then stood back, and frowned. “Or were you making it for your mom?”

“Why would I make it for my mom?” I balked.

She blinked at me. “Because she sent you that package?”

I snorted. “Please. I don’t make anything for my mom.”

She edged back toward me. “Why not? I mean, I know she made you cry before we came up. But she seems … nice.”

“Mothers always seem nice when they aren’t yours.”

“Mine doesn’t!” She guffawed, plopping down on the floor beside me. I laughed with her.

“She’s only nice to show me I’m not,” I offered, once our humor had faded. Instantly, I felt guilty—my mother was the one who’d urged me to “be sweet.” Maybe she really was as nice as Ev thought and it was only my own cruel mind that turned it to meanness.

Ev began to braid my hair. Silence settled over us. “You think …,” she began, once she’d restarted the braid for the third time, “you think it would have been better if I’d gone out with John?”

“Aren’t you guys … together?”

“A girl can still have a little fun.” Her voice sounded sad, as though even she was disappointed in herself.

“But I thought …” Her fingers deftly wove the plaits she’d made. I realized no one had touched me for a good while. The words sounded so simple, so stupid, as they tumbled out, but I couldn’t help myself: “I thought you loved John.”

She paused as she considered my question. “I do.”

“But he doesn’t love you?”

She smiled proudly. “John LaChance has wanted to marry me since I was six years old.”

“So what’s the problem then?” I found myself growing irritated at the tug on my hair.

“It’s complicated.” She pulled hard at my scalp. “He … he can’t give me what I need. Not all of it. Not now.”

“But that’s not love,” I pressed, thinking her selfish. “Love is sacrifice. Putting someone else first.”

“Exactly,” she said, “that’s exactly what I told him. I’m not asking for much, just that he keeps his word, you know?” She sat back, gripping the braid in her hand, and squinted her eyes in appraisal. “You’re so kindhearted, Mabel.” She let the braid go. “I’m sorry to burst your bubble.”

I opened my mouth to tell her it wasn’t fairy tales I believed in, just the tender way I’d seen John grasp her hand.

But she was already off to the next subject, nodding toward the collage. “Tomorrow you can do your family.”

I watched her push the bolt into place on the front door. Together, we brushed our teeth, turned out the lights, and drew the bedroom door closed behind us. She locked the bolt there too.

I listened to her sink into sleep. It was best to let her believe the project had been spur of the moment. That it wasn’t something I’d done hundreds of times before. I was proud of myself for biting my tongue. For not replying, “No, Ev, I never do my family.”

I
had no idea where Ev was sneaking out to—or who her mystery “other man” was—but as June edged on, she spent less and less time in Bittersweet. John, too, steered noticeably clear of us. I missed his shy charm, how Ev danced around the kitchen humming when she knew he would be coming by, the lap of Abby’s tongue across my fingertips. But every time I asked about him, Ev’s response was to pluck an Empire apple from the full bowl atop the kitchen table and disappear down the road. She returned in the evenings, and sometimes after midnight, tight-lipped as to her whereabouts. I kept my ears open for the growling, unknown motor I’d heard in the night, but she wandered in soundlessly from then on.

When writing unsendable letters to my mother, cutting pictures from magazines, half drowning and calling it swimming, or pretending to read Milton could capture my attention no longer, I rolled up my sleeves in the Dining Hall attic. Indo’s treasure hunt gave me distraction, the chance to chew up a few hours here and there during which I could forget my solitude. But it also offered something more. Foolish as it may sound, Indo had whetted my appetite. I couldn’t resist the chance for access to the Winslows’ inner workings; after all, I was the girl who’d researched them on interlibrary loan in the spring.

Did I forget how vehemently Tilde seemed to dislike Indo, especially on the subject of the Van Gogh? Did I think Tilde would really approve of my riffling through the family archives? Well, no. But she’d been mean to Indo and to Ev. And anyway, the “archives” were only some abandoned papers I was casually sifting through without direction.

There was something else—something I shouldn’t have dared to dream about but did all the same—Indo’s offhand suggestion that her house was up for grabs. Still, now, mentioning that remembered hope brings a blush to my skin, because, really, who would be foolish enough to believe an eccentric old woman’s ramblings? And I didn’t even know what she was looking for, not really. Anyway, hadn’t Ev
already offered up the vision of us as old biddies sitting on the porch together? She had, certainly. But perhaps I had already started to doubt her constancy, to try to map out other ways I could keep Winloch mine. In any case, I know myself well enough to admit that once someone has introduced a suggestion to an imagination like mine … well, let’s just say by the first day I sat down with the family archive, I had already pondered how much it would cost to have Clover’s toilet replaced.

The moth-nibbled, mouse-nested Winslow papers made me sneeze. Their crumpled, knife-thin edges flaked off like autumnal leaves in late fall. They had acquired an ancient, musty smell from the many seasons they’d been waiting in the attic. Some of the papers were thick and heavy and marked with fading fountain-pen ink. Those old documents held crossed, European sevens and bore the imprint of typewriters, so that, as I ran my fingers over the backs of the pages, I could feel the ripple of backwards words set down a hundred years before. The newer pages were thin as onionskin and already yellowing. Some bore sickly sweet–smelling purple mimeograph ink; others were scrawled with handwriting that pointed to more recent failings in the teaching and execution of proper penmanship.

But regardless of whether the Winslow papers were young or old, the collection, as a whole, was in ruins. Coherent order was nowhere to be found. It took me a few half days to simply put the piles of paper in some kind of chronology. I roped Arlo, Jeffrey, and Owen, eager for action, into dragging a few unused dining tables up the creaky attic stairs, and we stacked the papers onto each one, decade by decade, before the boys scrambled off in search of greater adventure.

There were very few documents from Samson’s day—a copy of the original Winloch deed, a half dozen sheaves from one or another of his companies—and then, from the era after Samson died, when Banning the first was coming of age, there was a slim pile of papers
regarding war bonds, succession, a box of personal letters, and a few newspaper clippings that mentioned his sister Esther, who had become a physician. Someone had taken care to save those articles, and I read with great admiration about her bravery and determination.

There were some papers in there regarding a bankruptcy from sometime in the thirties—I couldn’t tell if the smudge at the end of the year read “2” or “9,” but it seemed unlikely the Winslows would have gone bankrupt and held on to this paradise, so I set it back down on the pile, even as it burned a question mark into my memory.

It wasn’t until Bard—Birch’s father, Ev’s grandfather—came to power, in the midthirties, that the papers grew voluminous. There were work orders, deeds, clippings, many more pounds of paper creating many more pounds of dust. On more than one of those June afternoons, I picked up the trail of a bought tract of land—apparently Bard was something of a land baron—followed it for a few years, and then, when the scent ran cold, shook my head at the sheer vagueness of my task, and at how well Indo, of all people, seemed to know me. I was just supposed to be looking for a manila folder. But she had been right—I couldn’t resist a juicy tale.

I pulled myself away and wandered downstairs, bidding good-bye to Masha, Winloch’s ample, white-haired, Russian cook. She took a moment from stirring her minestrone to answer with a gruff nod.

My favorite spot in all of Winloch lay at the lip of our cove, on the flat, smooth rock on which the great blue heron had perched the first day I ventured beyond Bittersweet. The rock was big enough to hold only one body, easily reached by swimming, or, if one didn’t mind a bit of a scramble, by climbing down the ledged incline through scratchy undergrowth. I liked that the spot lay between private land and public. Basking on the warm swath, I could turn my head out, to the push and pull of the outer bay only inches away, where motorboats
sped in toward Winslow Bay, and, in the distance, a marina flashed silver and white when the sunlight hit it; or I could turn my eyes in, toward Bittersweet, making out our small, sandy beach, even as the stairs, cottage, and the rest of Winloch was hidden from view. It was here that I felt the most in my element—hidden, but watching.

I believed I was the only one who knew about the spot, which was sheer folly, since I’d stayed at Winloch for all of three weeks and the Winslows had been there for more than a century. But one morning I clambered down through the forest, backpack full of snacks and reading, a morning of solitude ahead of me, only to discover someone already lying in my place. She was on her stomach, her long blond hair spilling down over her bare lower back, just brushing her apricot bikini bottom. I imagined her a selkie, that mythological creature of the Celtic lands, a girl who’d shed her sealskin to become human. But at the sound of me, she lifted her head, and I saw she was only a girl. A girl who looked as much like Ev as Indo did, but still a child—gawky, insecure, on the brink of beautiful.

She held up her hand to shield her eyes from the sun. “Are you Ev’s friend?”

I squatted down as she sat up. “May.”

“Lu.” She stuck her hand in her bag and pulled out two cigarettes. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen.

“No!” I must have looked horrified. She returned them to their original spot and pulled out two lollipops instead.

“You’re Ev’s sister?” I asked. It was hard not to scrutinize her face—it moved in and out of exquisiteness. She had one little mole on her right cheek—the only imperfection I noticed, if it could even be called that. “I thought you were at tennis camp.” I sat beside her.

She snorted. “Yeah, ’cause I’m so athletic.”

“There was a sit-ups requirement at my high school, and you can imagine how well I did.”

She looked me up and down—the full thighs, the soft belly—and
genuinely giggled, but before her pleasure could grow into a full laugh, she caught it abruptly, her shoulders shrinking impishly by her ears. A look of delight flitted across her face as she pointed over my shoulder into the cove and, with the other hand, put a finger to her lips. “We’re not alone,” she whispered.

I turned, expecting a large creature—another human, a dog, perhaps—but, as far as I could see, there was nothing to note. Lu’s finger pointed a path to what looked to be a dead head, a decaying stick making its slow way down to the lake bed.

“It’s a turtle,” she whispered, and as I leaned forward in disbelief, the stick popped underwater. Lu let out a gleeful gasp. We scanned the cove for the surfacing head. It finally appeared, far to the left of where I was looking. Lu spotted it first. “They swim faster than they walk,” she explained.

“What kind is it?”

“Probably a painted turtle. Could be a snapping turtle, but I’d have to see its shell to know for sure. Don’t worry,” she said, noting the alarm on my face, “they’re much more afraid of us than we are of them.”

“What other animals live here?” I asked.

Her face lit up. “We used to have otters—you could tell because, in the early spring, there’d be cracked-open mussels on the shore. And muskrats too—they made their nest in that little spot over there between the rocks. There are beavers inland—everyone’s always in a fight over them damming the streams because it raises the water table. And let’s see … ospreys. They don’t live in the cove, but they fish here, and near the ledges, in the morning and the night. You see them soaring way up, and then they swoop down, making their bodies like arrows, and they’ll catch small bass or minnows. Oh, and the wood thrush!” She closed her eyes then, dipping her foot into the water. “She sings at dawn and dusk. The most beautiful melody.”