Bittersweet (18 page)

I finished my tea alone, hopeful that Athol wouldn’t find me there and accuse me of pilfering the china, then basked in the sun streaming onto the wide, whitewashed porch, free of unnecessary clutter, running my mind over how to handle Ev, grateful she was out of town so I didn’t have to face her yet. It had become a perfect day—the wicker furniture, the view, the fullness in my belly. Briefly, I considered curling up and drowsing on the porch swing. I doubted Birch would mind.

It occurred to me that I couldn’t hear the maid anymore. I peeled myself from the damp cushion and ventured into the summer room. The Van Gogh was back in its place. I was drawn, like a moth to the flame, back into its thrall, to the trees spiraling up toward the midnight sky. I had never known a piece of art to be something one could taste and smell and hear. I just wanted to be near it, consumed by it, undone in its company.

The maid reemerged, startling at the sight of me.

“It’s a real Van Gogh,” I said softly.

Her eyes danced over the painting for the briefest of moments before looking down. Had I been someone different, who I am today, that look would have told me all I needed to know. But instead, I saw reflected in that woman’s diverted eyes only the fact that I did not
know how to speak to people like her without causing offense, and so I apologized.

She handed me an empty striped baker’s bag. I filled it with cookies before glancing one last time up at that secret—not even knowing it was one—before finding my own way out.

T
he next day, Ev was still gone. Clover was quiet when I knocked. A sour-looking Indo opened the door an inch. “What’s that?” she asked, suspiciously pointing to the baker’s bag I’d resisted overnight.

“Cookies!” I said cheerfully, realizing I’d missed the smoky scent of Indo and her house. The sweets gained me entry.

Indo moved around Clover with greater deliberation than I’d ever seen, as if she were carefully placing one foot before the other, lest she tip forward into some kind of oblivion. She looked thinner than usual. When she moaned as she pulled herself down before the wide table on the porch, I asked, “Are you okay?”

She took a bite. Closed her eyes and chewed with careful pleasure. In contrast to Trillium’s porch, Clover’s was damp and alive, its floorboards curling in places, dirty paint peeling off as though the color were the skin a snake was shedding. The furniture, too, was unpainted and moldy, the damp wicker threatening to collapse under either of us at any moment. It occurred to me that Indo didn’t have anyone to help her. I tried not to think about what that boded for my own future.

“I hear LuLu’s got a boyfriend,” she finally said, licking chocolate from her fingers.

“He’s sweet.”

“He’s a teenage boy.”

“Yeah, but I’m starting to think that’s better than a grown man.”

“You, my dear, are wiser than you look.” I blushed at her backhanded compliment. “And you?”

“Me?” I asked.

“Any crushes?” Her gaze was direct. I felt sure she already knew the answer to that question—anyone who’d seen Galway lead me across the tent to Gammy Pippa probably suspected there was something there. But I stayed silent. Finally she ended her scrutiny. “Probably for the best,” she concluded. “Save yourself some heartache. How goes your search through the Winslow archive?”

“Actually,” I said crisply, “it would help to know what kind of information—proof, you called it?—I’m looking for.”

“Yes, yes.” She waved her hand as though bored with my requests.

“I haven’t found anything like the manila folder you described. Is there anyplace it could be besides the Dining Hall?”

“There are dozens of places,” she answered breezily, “most of them behind lock and key. It was a fool’s errand, I’m afraid.”

“Is there anything missing from the archive?” I pressed.

“Whatever do you mean?”

The question had bubbled out as though of its own volition, but now that it had, I knew why. She’d been the one to send me to the papers, to make me promises based on what they would provide me, to beg me to help find proof of something she wouldn’t name. The folder so obviously wasn’t there. And now she was acting like it wasn’t important. So maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she was testing me. Seeing how tightly I could lock my jaws when I wanted something. “I need another source. Another way to find whatever you’re looking for. If you really want me to find it.”

The smile fell from Indo’s face. She sat still for nearly a minute. Then stood, without a word, and left the porch. Fritz toddled off after her, while the other dogs snored on their moldering pillow. I
couldn’t hear her. I wondered what I should do—stay at her table? Leave? It seemed I had offended her. I stood and brushed the cookie crumbs from the table as Indo marched back onto the porch and placed a worn, old book with a tattered black cover into my hands. It smelled faintly of the earth.

“You should go,” she said firmly, her voice low.

“What is it?”

She squeezed the backs of my hands. “Good girl,” she whispered. “Hide it well. Trust no one.”

The next thing I knew, I was back on Indo’s driveway, blinking into the sun, and wondering what, exactly, was now in my care.

L
u was waiting for me on the Bittersweet porch, her feet dangling over the couch’s wicker armrest. She sprang up at the sound of me. “I have a surprise!”

I told her I’d be with her in a minute, that I really had to pee—it was the only excuse I could think of. Under the bathroom sink I found a holey towel I’d insisted on saving on our cleaning day. I wrapped the cloth around the black book I’d spirited from Indo’s and tucked the package into the recesses of the cabinet, behind the sunblock and bug spray and unopened bubble bath.

“A surprise?” I asked, emerging.

“I made it!” She handed me a friendship bracelet made of embroidery floss—peacock, crimson, jade. I wasn’t disappointed—it was as good a present as any I had gotten—but I suppose I’d come to expect Winslow presents to be, well, expensive. I hesitated a moment longer than I should have.

“You don’t like it?” Lu asked, her eyes darkening into something liquid.

“No, I love it!” I said too enthusiastically, putting my foot up onto the couch and tying the bracelet around my ankle. “Can I wear it here?”

“You can say if you don’t like it.”

“I love it. I love that you made it.” But I could tell, from the way she stiffened as I kissed her cheek, that I had hurt her.

I spent the next hour dying to take a peek at Indo’s book, distracted by imagining what it might be and say. But Lu wasn’t going anywhere fast—her intractable presence in the cottage made that clear, and my distraction only rendered her more irritated, so I tried to make amends, pressing the girl for details about Owen. All I got in return were noncommittal shrugs and this, finally spat at me as though I had offered her poison: “He’s spending time with his friends today.” So that was why she resented me—because I was her only option.

“Aren’t you lonely?” she asked. “I thought you’d be lonely, with Ev gone.”

I realized that, for the first time in a good while, I wasn’t.

“What can I do to cheer you up?” I asked after we had plowed through dozens of rounds of Spit, usually her favorite card game. Lu had beaten me every time, her hands stinging my own with harsh slaps as we sat cross-legged on the chilled floor of Bittersweet’s diminutive porch. I’d cooked her a grilled cheese on rye, but she’d eaten it sulkily, leaving the crusts. She’d shot down all my ideas—no swimming, no baking, no walk. My heart sank as it occurred to me that spending the afternoon with her was just like babysitting the neighbor kids on my parents’ block.

“Anything,” I pleaded, wanting my friend Lu back. “I’ll do anything to get you out of this funk.” If I was going to spend the day with her and not with the mysterious book Indo had produced, the least we could do was have a good time.

Lu crossed her arms over her chest defensively and stuck out her lower lip in protest against what she took to be my condescending tone. But then she shifted, peeking out the screen at a handful of chickadees flitting between bush and tree just outside our door. “Do
you have any grain?” she asked, leaping up before I had the chance to answer. She emerged from the kitchen with a handful of oatmeal, stepping over our newly dealt game and out the screen door.

The little birds, a blur of white and black and brown, startled at the creak of the hinges. She scattered some of the oatmeal on the dusty ground at the base of the porch stairs, then sat on the bottom step, pulling her feet below her, and opened her palm. The remaining oatmeal pooled there. She held still as a statue.

The black-capped chickadees flitted over, calling to each other in loud voices, announcing the good news. They jumped from tree to bush and back again, gaining confidence, until one grew brave enough to hop down onto the dirt a few feet from Lu. She remained motionless. The bird pecked at the oatmeal, then called to its friends, who joined it. They circled Lu carefully, eyeing the feast in her hand. She didn’t move or cough or sneeze. I was enraptured.

That first chickadee took the chance. It swooped down into Lu’s palm, and then out again as quickly as it had come. But she had willed her body to be as another bush, and, confident that she would neither catch nor abuse them, the birds began to land gamely in her palm, picking up pieces of food, carrying them off to eat, and returning, until Lu was the only still point in a flutter of exuberant movement and sound. The chickadees ate it all. Only when they were done, and had skittered again, did she turn to me, beaming. “I’m taking you to Turtle Point.”

We used a white dinghy tied up on the Flat Rocks dock. The last time I’d been rowed anywhere was when Galway had rescued me from Murray. I was grateful to be out with Lu on this day, and not still in peril on that one. She laughed at how tightly I gripped the life preserver (“You don’t have to hold on to it, it’s strapped to your body”) and suggested I row, but I was content to close my eyes in the stern and pray for my life.

We went straight across Winslow Bay, through the sheltered area where the yachts were starting to moor as another weekend began. Women in bikinis jumped off the backs of their pristine boats. I turned to look over my shoulder. I could see Trillium and Clover growing smaller and smaller behind us, until the trees obscured the houses. It was late afternoon, and one of the young families emerged onto Flat Rocks, but I couldn’t make out who they were. I watched Lu’s face—there was a serenity to her focus, one I didn’t want to break with conversation. She rowed fast and evenly, her back to our destination.

As we neared the other side of the bay, what I had always taken to be solid shoreline on the horizon revealed itself to be three long points, bisected by private coves. We cut toward the rocky ledges. It was quieter over here.

“Is this Winloch?” I asked as we entered a shadowed cove. The water was shallow, and I could make out a shelf of sandstone below us, bass and minnows hiding underneath our boat.

“I think so,” she said. “No one’s ever bothered me.” I was struck that, as a Winslow, Lu had no idea what it felt like to be chased off someone’s property. She went on. “This is where the townie fishermen come early in the morning. They have these horrible trawling motors, like two- to three-horsepower, that they just keep on, and they throw in their lines and just, like, trail along, waiting for something to bite.” She rolled her eyes. “Not a sport, if you ask me. And they’re way too close to shore.”

As she used her oar to push us off the stranger’s point we were skirting, I didn’t have to wonder what gave us special privileges to lurk here, but neither did I defend the townies. “Are there laws about that?” I asked. “About being too close to shore?”

“Daddy always tells a story about some Canadian who ran his line to Flat Rocks, and Gammy Pippa came down and snipped the line with a pair of wire cutters.” She giggled. “And then, you
know, sometimes people skinny-dip, just, like, to give the boaters a fuck-you.”

“Or a free show.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think anyone wants to see Aunt Stockard in her birthday suit.”

Lu gestured to the point before us. “That’s where the turtles live,” she said, and I felt genuine affection for her again. She was spoiled in ways that were mostly not her fault, that had to do with being fourteen and raised by the wealthy. Still, it felt dangerous that in only a few years she’d be on her own, blithely espousing her elitist opinions to the grown world. Hers was a strange brand of naïveté, and I wondered if anyone was going to help her with it.

We rowed across the next cove. The soft spot between the two points was a sandy beach, reedy and quiet. “We used to play Indian Princess over here,” Lu said. “Ev and I would row over with a picnic
whenever Mum was in our hair.” I felt a flush of envy for a safe girlhood I’d never had.

Lu rowed straight toward shore. She hopped out and kicked the driftwood out of the way before pulling the boat up onto the beach, tying the painter around the trunk of a pine.

Once on shore, she was a chatterbox, capably leading me up a ten-foot rock face and into the woods, then down a rarely used trail that backboned the point. The mosquitoes had found us, and we waved our arms like lunatics as she spoke. “Wild blueberries grow up here. I guess it’s probably too early for blueberries, but when Ev and I were little we used to pick them and gather them in our hands, and then we’d bring them back to the lean-to we built—no, I’m serious, we built a lean-to out of driftwood—oh, May, I wish you could have seen it, it was just perfect, and up here is where the turtles nest, in the spring you can find their white shells right around the holes, we used to— Oh!”