Bittersweet (25 page)

My brain, the part of me that never turned off, just seemed to sail away. Instead I was all body. Hungry. On fire. Before I lost myself completely, I pulled back. “You’re not with her anymore,” I led. His last out.

“No,” he gasped, “no,” as if he couldn’t breathe without me, and he kissed me again, and lifted me, carrying me into his bedroom, where we stayed all night, wound around each other, meeting each other in a place I had never known. We made love again and again, until the planet tilted toward morning. The night was ours.

P
ing. Ping. Ping ping. Ping.

A distant sound. Watery.

My unwilling eyes fluttered open. The world was still blue. Galway’s body slept behind mine; we were two spoons nestled together. I took stock of all of him—hot belly, rhythmic exhalations against the back of my neck, hand slung over my hip possessively.

Sensing my wakefulness, he shifted onto his back. Yawned.

Ping. Ping ping. Ping.

“What’s that sound?” I whispered.

He yawned again loudly, in complaint, his muscles tightening, like a bear awakening from a winter’s slumber.

I scooted my body back against him, waiting for him to settle, noticing, with satisfaction, a few drops of blood on the bedsheets. I hadn’t told him it was my first time (or second, or third), but I wasn’t embarrassed at the evidence as I had imagined I would be. I was sore but satisfied.

He settled back down, but the strange sound continued. I was absurdly awake. “Is it a bird?”

“It’s the halyards,” he mumbled. It was a metal pinging he was, apparently, accustomed to. The yachts moored only on this side of camp. “Used to be all the masts were wooden.”

“So they didn’t used to do that?”

He groaned. “It’s not even light out.”

We couldn’t have slept for more than two hours. My eyes ached. But giddiness, and nervousness, and a creeping sense of distrust—not of Galway, exactly, but of what would happen next—were making it impossible to relax. I didn’t know how to be this woman. If he fell asleep again, I was afraid that I’d lie here for hours or, worse, that I’d find myself slipping out of bed and tiptoeing away. I had no idea how I’d come back from that. I was pretty sure it wasn’t possible.

Ev. How would Ev act on a morning like this? Would she talk to her lover? Would she hold on to the night’s promise and insist the seduction carry over into day?

I turned and put my forehead against Galway’s. The ancient box springs squeaked underneath us, and I realized, with a mixture of embarrassment and pride, how much sound we must have been making all night. The dawn filtering in through the rustling curtains brought with it the melody of the wood thrush. “I’m starving,” I whispered, feeling my nipples harden against his smooth chest. I kissed him—his sleepy lips responding a split second behind mine. “Let me make you breakfast.”

“No food in the house,” he grunted. I kissed him again with my mossy mouth. He tasted of me. He opened one eye and peered. “You’re peppy.”

I pulled myself onto one elbow. My hair was spilling down to my shoulders, loose and mussed. He reached one hand up and played with it, pushing it off my face, and I watched a fresh wave of lust wash over him. “You’re so beautiful.”

I found myself once again insatiable, joining my lips to his.

His body went slack. “You made me want waffles.”

“You really don’t have anything in the house?”

He whimpered.

I glanced out at the new day. “We have only one choice.”

“Cannibalism?”

“We shall have to raid the Dining Hall,” I declared.

“There is absolutely no way I’ll survive the journey.”

I put my head against his chest. Now that we were leaving, I regretted my earlier self. Had I been able to sleep longer, we could have stayed in bed, dopey and hungry for days.

“Suit yourself,” I whispered, placing one hand over his heart. I closed my eyes.

He stirred. “I bet there’s bacon.”

It was ending too soon.

Anyone who happened to peek out their window as dawn gave way to morning would have seen us streaming across the broad meadow and guessed what we’d been up to all night, but if they did, whoever they were kept the knowledge private, saving it in case it was worth something.

“Isn’t Masha here?” I whispered, as Galway pulled me into the unlocked Dining Hall, which smelled of yeast and last night’s brisket.

“She’s visiting the grandkids.” He pushed me against the wall and kissed my neck before breaking for the kitchen. “Forbidden meats!” he yelped in joy.

I hopped up onto the kitchen counter. He fed me. Bacon, crispy. Eggs, scrambled. Warmed blueberry muffins he found in the freezer and drizzled with honey. He slipped a honey-dipped finger into my mouth and then danced his hands up and under the sweatshirt I’d borrowed and thrown on over nothing. “Not here,” I whispered, as he tried to wrap my legs around his waist. “I see you’ve regained your strength,” I added, extricating myself and heading for the stairs. He followed me, as I’d known he would.

In that great vaulted attic room that held the Winslow secrets, Galway pushed the papers from the nearest table and ripped off the sweatshirt, took my breasts into his hands and lay me down. He
put his lips between my legs. The table was cool against my back, his mouth hot at the very center of me until I came, hard and fast, and then, before I could gather myself, he entered me, until we were somewhere else, together, moving and crying out as one.

At the other end of lust, we held each other, spent. He helped me get dressed. I took in the mess we’d made of the papers and remembered he’d had some news.

“Right!” he exclaimed, now all business. “I haven’t told you. I asked the family accountant if I could look at some of the financial files—told him I was working on this project for the family tree—so he said I could stop by.”

“Where are they kept?”

“In the family vault.”

I raised one eyebrow.

“Yeah, it’s ridiculous,” he said. “But listen. I started looking back around the time of the bankruptcy stuff, and Banning Winslow almost filed.”

“I thought he did file.”

“No. All the paperwork was filled out—that’s what we have—but at the last minute, it looks like he borrowed money or had some new source of income.”

“Who would have lent them money? No one had any.”

“Doesn’t matter. What matters is that in May of 1933, there’s a deposit made in the Winslow account of two hundred thirty-five thousand dollars. The Winslow debt is paid off immediately, with enough to spare to get the family through another month. And in June, there’s another deposit: a hundred and ten thousand dollars. This goes on. Not every month, sometimes not every year, but, Mabel, the money grows and grows until they’ve got millions in there, earning hefty interest. They’ve got enough to invest and grow, and they make it out of the war just fine.”

“Where do you think they were getting that kind of cash?”

He shook his head. “No idea.”

“How long did it go on?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, did the deposits end when the war did?”

His eyes darted warily away from mine. “We should focus on the thirties. That’s when it began.”

He was keeping something from me. But I saw that pushing him would only bring silence. “You say Banning was the one who almost filed?”

He nodded. “He was in charge.”

“I found something too.” I told him about what I’d discovered the night of our first kiss, how Bard was Banning’s second-born son, and how quickly he’d come to power—ousting his father and older brother, Gardener, in the midthirties in one fell swoop. I explained how this upheaval of leadership led me to suspect that Bard was the one who’d single-handedly saved the family’s fortune. He’d done something major to wrest the reins of control from a father who’d nearly ruined the family with his shaky investments of their trust.

How Bard had overcome his elder brother’s inheritance of the family line was another matter, but I suspected that when Gardener saw how determined Bard was to overthrow their father, he’d willingly stepped aside. As I explained my theory to Galway, my confidence in it grew, and I felt sure that Bard was the one behind the cash deposits Galway had discovered.

“I just wish we could know what changed,” I mused, as Galway began to pick up the papers we’d pushed to the floor. Why had the money started coming in when it did? Why had Bard seized power when he had? “What was Bard doing in May of 1933?” I continued.

“Well,” said Galway, holding up a piece of paper, “in September of 1932 he got married.”

Right—he’d married Kitty. I thought of her journal, the journal
Indo had insisted held secrets, but in which I could find almost nothing. It was too much of a coincidence to believe that Bard’s sudden rush to power didn’t have something to do with whatever secrets his wife’s journal held. I just had to dig deeper. And tell Galway about it. He’d know what I should look for.

I was about to begin when he froze, putting a finger to his lips.

“What?” I mouthed.

He pointed downstairs as I heard the door to the Dining Hall close. Manly footsteps marked their way across the wooden floor. We listened as they headed into the kitchen, then stopped at the sight of our dirty dishes.

“Hello?” came the voice.

“Stay here,” Galway mouthed, then called back, “Hello?” I knew I was supposed to hide. I masked my footsteps in his, finding a spot in the far corner behind an old cabinet.

It was Birch. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“Hungry,” Galway said.

“You’ve made a mess.”

“Which I intend to clean.”

I heard the water go on. I made out Birch’s words: “Good, Son. I can’t be expected to clean up all your messes.”

After that, the old pipes began to moan, masking the voices of both father and son. I strained to hear Galway’s response. But I failed.

“I
don’t want to subject you to their scrutiny,” Galway apologized formally after his father left. He helped me clean up, but it wasn’t lost on me, as we placed the discarded papers on the table where my naked body had been less than an hour before, that he hadn’t touched me since Birch’s departure. Galway planned to go back to Queen Anne’s Lace and sleep for a few hours, then head to Boston in time for another busy week of work. I wouldn’t see him again until the weekend. “We’ll tell them soon,” he said, and I thought of John and Ev’s secret, part of me doubting we would be any different. When he wasn’t looking, I slipped the Winslow family tree into the sweatshirt’s center pocket. An act of defiance.

I fell into bed smelling of the man who had made me new. It was early in the day, but it may as well have been midnight as far as I was concerned. I was grateful Ev was nowhere in sight—I had no way to explain the transformation my life had just undergone, and slipped into a slumber that seemed to last a hundred years.

I awoke to the clatter of something falling. A teacup, a saucer. I was ravenous. I wrapped myself in the duvet and fumbled out to the kitchen, searching for the shattered ceramic, but there was nothing there. Maybe the accident had happened hours before, Ev had
cleaned it up, and it had echoed in my head until my dreams could no longer contain it.

I felt as if I’d been in a cave. I burned a quesadilla, then wolfed it down so quickly I scalded my tongue. I drank three glasses of water and finally remembered to check my watch—it seemed probable it was late that Monday night. But it was 4:18 a.m.—I had slept for eighteen hours straight.

From the porch couch, I listened to the morning’s arrival. First the wood thrush roused, then the nuthatch and the black-capped chickadees, and somewhere, far away, a woodpecker tapped on a trunk, until morning had gained its momentum and Winloch was brought fully into Tuesday. Only then did I wonder about Ev’s whereabouts.

First, I called Abby’s name. The dog usually came readily—one could catch the cheerful jingle of her tags as she ran up through the woods—but I strained to listen and heard nothing. I stood at the porch door and called again, then whistled. Nothing. Ev’s tennis shoes were just where she’d kicked them off on Sunday evening before the skinny-dip. That seemed like months before, but I reminded myself it had been only thirty-six hours. I went back into the bedroom. Ev’s bed was “made” (the coverlet wrinkled and pulled up haphazardly, as close to neat as Ev ever left it). Heart beginning to flutter, I walked through the cottage, noting the unwashed cereal bowl in the sink, Ev’s jacket hanging on the coatrack.

I went back into the bedroom and inventoried her goods. I couldn’t put my finger on what was missing, but her usually overflowing drawers seemed to pull open too freely. I ran my hand across her bureau. How many times had I seen her sitting on the edge of her bed brushing her locks? She never went anywhere without her Mason Pearson hairbrush. But today it was nowhere to be found. I peeked under her brass bed. Her suitcase was missing. Ev had packed. She was gone.

Panic rose like bile. I obsessively circled the house, hoping to find
a note, a map, some kind of clue. I turned up the couch pillows—perhaps she’d hidden something for me there (a promise to send for me? A gift? An apology?). But no such luck.

She’d been so happy the night of our skinny-dip, as though she and John had finally come to some kind of peace. How could I have been so stupid? They had made up. He had agreed to leave his mother behind. They had run away. As I raced through Bittersweet, I felt more and more sure Ev and John had proceeded with their escape plan.

I showered quickly, annoyed by having to wash. I scrubbed Galway off me, wincing at the raw parts of myself that had seemed badges of love and maturity only hours before. Already, I cursed myself for that night, rejecting its memory: if I hadn’t been with him, Ev would still be with me. She’d been able to leave only because I hadn’t come home. I should have kept my promise to Birch, and told on her. He would have kept her here.

I pulled on fresh clothes and headed out into the already humid morning. Now would be the moment to tell Birch his daughter had left Winloch. I had agreed to that, hadn’t I? But then, I had no alibi for being out of the house during Ev’s departure and, given Galway’s reaction to his father’s near discovery of us in the Dining Hall, no good reason for telling him the truth about why I hadn’t been able to stop Ev from leaving. And yet: I had promised. What if Ev was in trouble? I felt sure she was with John—I felt it in my sinking gut that she had left me, definitively, for him—but what if she wasn’t? I could never forgive myself if Birch could have helped her but for my keeping her departure a secret.