Bittersweet (32 page)

Galway was the only one who pressed me, that first day, in the kitchen. “Ev told me you saw John yesterday.”

“He drove me to the store.”

“What did you talk about?”

“They were running away. To California.”

“What did he say about it?”

“I can’t remember, Galway.”

“Try.”

I had told John of his paternity on the day his mother had been murdered. He’d slipped his hands around her neck, squeezed out her life, jumped to his death all because of me. So did I blame myself?

Well, why had he just taken my word for it? How could it be my fault if I’d simply discovered someone else’s secret? Why on earth
had he killed the mother he was so loyal to? And if he really loved Ev so much, how could he have left her and their unborn child behind?

I opened my eyes. “I don’t remember anything.”

Galway sighed. “Mabel, it was yesterday.”

“And I’ve been through a lot since then.”

He watched me for a long moment. “Okay,” he said, his voice soaked in doubt. He opened his mouth as though to speak, then closed it again.

“Yes?”

He hesitated. “I hope you’re not holding something back.”

For the first time since discovering the horror, I felt a white-hot emotion sear through my foggy state. It was the only time I felt anything so strong in those days, like a nail hammered into a single, unlucky nerve that had escaped anesthesia.

I rose from the table. “Like a marriage?” I asked, my voice trembling against my will.

He looked perplexed.

“You’re married, aren’t you?” I said, my voice shaking. He opened his mouth to explain, but I saw, in the wince in his eyes, that he was. Before he could speak, I railed, “Get out. Get out get out get out.” And he did. He stood right up and he walked right out.

“Where’s Abby?” I asked. I asked Birch as he stood in our doorway, Galway when he came back and wouldn’t look at me, Detective Dan in the morning, Ev late at night, and, in between, the curious cousins, my voice rising in a panicked insistence as each of them, in turn, answered with a pitying look.

“Rest, dear,” Tilde said, offering me another pill. Her chilly fingers pressed into mine as she passed me the water glass.

They couldn’t find John’s truck. It seemed to have vanished into thin air. “He wouldn’t let that truck out of his sight,” Ev told the police.
She believed, I knew, that someone else had been in that house, that someone else had driven off after committing double murder. “Please find that truck,” she begged, but no one else knew it was the plea of a wife, and I didn’t take up her cause.

Ev and I were never left alone. There was no place to whisper in that small, tight cottage filled with listeners. But I heard her mumbled chant—“It’s my fault, it’s my fault”—in those moments when no one else was listening.

She did not say a word of her marriage, or of the baby, to anyone, so I followed her lead. I kept my mouth shut. I watched her carefully. I made sure she ate. I gave her full glasses of water and stood beside her until she drank them down.

One morning I realized the bolts were gone, from the porch door, bathroom, and bedroom. The holes the screws had made were filled with Spackle, sanded, and painted. Doubting my own memory, I wandered back to the safety of bed.

We slept long and hard. Adults swept in and out, their hushed concern carrying into our room. I relished how the world moved to accommodate our trauma, and I’ll confess that, in the midnight hours, when I awoke, with a startle of new horror at what we had seen with our own eyes and the pressing questions about that vision—how John LaChance had been capable of committing such a terrible act, where Abby had gone in the wake of it, and whether I was responsible for the gruesome violence—I was comforted by a familiar sensation from my girlhood:

Dreaming a startling, awful truth, frigid water pouring down my sleeping gullet. My slumbering, drugged mind clawing at the surface of wakefulness, trying to burst out for air. Finally recognizing my surroundings. Stifling my cry, slowing my heartbeat, unclenching
my fists. Willing myself to forget the whole truth of the terrible world in order to focus on what was happening in the immediate. Straining to hear the familiar sound of the grown-ups just outside my door, busy listening to the radio, full of plans and beliefs, made competent in the face of crisis. Their presence established, turning in my bed, pulling the duvet up around my neck, and slipping, once again, into the gift of night.

I
awoke with a start. It was bright in our room, but the specter of John’s lifeless face looking up at me—the vision that now ended every dream and started every day—was seared into my mind. Ev snored in the bed beside mine; if the days preceding were any indication, she would stay out until sundown, awaken for a meal, then slip back under the covers after taking another pink pill. I didn’t have the guts to ask her if they were safe for the baby.

It seemed as though I had been sleeping for months. I couldn’t count the days anymore. But they had turned hot, I knew that much, and someone, some time ago, had mentioned it was now August. I forced myself out of bed before John could pull me down into another nightmare. I hated closing my eyes anymore; bruised and feverish, they were damaged by the weight of their slumber.

In the bathroom, I took a look in the mirror. Not a pretty sight (stringy hair, mossy teeth), although I had to admit that all the meals I’d slept through had made me look more like a Winslow than ever before (cheeks taut, belly flat). I passed lukewarm water over my face. Brushed my teeth halfheartedly. Forced on a pair of Ev’s flip-flops and stumbled out the door.

Oh, the world. It was dazzling that August—every wavelet in its place, every cloud passing along at a fast pitch; Winloch as Samson
Winslow had imagined it. No sweatshirt needed, no sweat on the brow. The dust skipped up from underneath my heels.

When I arrived at the edge of the Dining Hall, I craned to see if Galway was coming from his cottage. But the road was empty and I wasn’t going to seek him out. I hadn’t seen him alone since that night I’d confronted him about his marriage. He’d been in Bittersweet on and off—he’d cared for us in person, and protected us by answering Detective Dan’s questions about why it had taken so long to call the police (apparently “traumatized girls” still worked as an excuse in rural Vermont). I expected an explanation, an apology, some kind of olive branch (which I would, on principle, have rejected), but he had been strictly professional with me, as though he were a social worker assigned to my case.

My stomach growled. I considered going into the Dining Hall for breakfast but couldn’t stand facing Masha. She was the only person who knew that I knew of John’s paternity. The only one who could guess what I’d told him in his pickup. Even if she kept her thoughts private, I couldn’t bear the look of her judgment. She’d begged me not to tell him.

So there was only one way to go, into the great meadow toward Flat Rocks. As I crested the hill and cast my eyes over the rooftops, it occurred to me that I didn’t want to see any of the Winslows. It had filtered down to me in spurts and whispers that Indo was back, but I didn’t have the strength for whatever that conversation would entail. Nor did I have the fortitude to slap on a happy face for Birch, or the wherewithal to fend off his suspicions. He had been watching over us like a hawk, and I had been sure to keep by Ev’s side whenever he was near. So far, he’d seemed as baffled as the rest of the Winslows about why John would have done such a thing, which I took as a good sign. But I couldn’t tell what he was thinking behind his fatherly façade. It was risky to come over to this side of the property alone.

It was windy in the Trillium meadow, closer to the water. The
trees skirting the grasses bent in complaint, filling the world with a rushing conversation. The edge of the sky was tinged with purple, but weather looked a long way off. A few weeks before, this place had echoed with the sound of children’s laughter, but even though the day was hotter than I’d ever felt it, perfect to spend around a lake, Winloch was nearly as devoid of life as it must have been in the dead of winter. Nothing to cut a summer vacation short like a murdered (and murdering) servant.

A swim would have done me well, but, once on Flat Rocks—just a natural place again without the plastic toys and damp towels—I remembered that I didn’t have my bathing suit. Bittersweet seemed miles away. I took in the dinghies tied up on the dock. A shed above the waterline held life preservers and oars. I needed some perspective. Although I’d never rowed a boat in my life, I figured this was as good a time to start as any.

“Want some help?” a woman’s voice asked ten minutes later, as I bobbed in the rowboat, trying to fumble its painter from the dock’s cleat. The life preserver was cutting off my air. I had grown more and more seasick and indignant at the slippery line and rocking boat. The water splayed angrily along the shore. I squinted at the figure above me.

It was Tilde.

“Where are you off to?” she asked, squatting and undoing the painter in one easy twist of her wrist. She held it in her hand, looking down at me. I imagined, for a glorious moment, that if I rowed backwards I could pull her into the drink. “Can I come?” she asked. Before I could reply, she stepped in, jostling the boat so that I had to hold on for dear life until she was seated behind me.

I started rowing.

We slammed into the boat next to us.

“You’re seated in the wrong direction,” she said tonelessly. “Turn around.” Her way made more sense; I should be able to reach the
oarlocks. But I was afraid to start the rockiness all over again. So she coached quietly—“There now, swing that leg over, don’t fret, you’d have to jump up and down to capsize us”—until I was facing her. She pushed us from the dock.

I had been in the boat with Lu at the helm a good dozen times. I had imagined the work to be harder than it looked. Water was a strange substance, like memory—much to push against, but nothing solid to hang on to. But when, under my hands, the dinghy’s oars dipped and dipped, and my arms pressed and pressed, propelling the craft felt easy. Before I knew it, we were farther out than I’d been on any of my swims.

I was so focused on getting it right that I didn’t fully register, until we were far from shore, that I was now absolutely alone with a woman who seemed to detest me. I brought the oars up to rest on either side of her. Little rivulets spilled toward her white trousers.

“I just needed a break,” I murmured.

Her face was gaunt. Ev’s nose. Lu’s chin. Galway’s forehead. “Are you doing all right?” she asked. I supposed the deaths had made us as close to allies as we’d ever get.

I shrugged.

“It’s awful.” She shuddered, showing the most emotion I’d seen from her.

We had started drifting back to shore. I took up the oars again and pulled against them, heading toward the point where Trillium sat. I had never been around it. She offered tips. “Try not to turn your wrists.” Then, a minute later, “Brace your feet here on the thwart below me, and you’ll get more power.” My arms began to burn. We were nearly underneath Trillium now, its windows dark in contrast to the morning light.

I could feel Tilde looking up at her house with me. Then her focus shifted; I felt her eyes on my face. I turned to meet them.

“They found his truck,” she said quietly.

The whereabouts of John’s pickup had been a real source of consternation for the police; they’d been searching for it in the three weeks since we’d found the bodies. Rumor had it Detective Dan was ready to shut down the case but for the missing truck. The Winslows were eager to have their speculations confirmed about John drunkenly ditching it outside a bar before walking home to commit matricide. Just as it had been comforting to blame Jackson’s suicide on his soldiering, so would it be convenient to blame John’s hideous behavior on drink.

“Where was it?” I asked, realizing the waves below us were rougher than they’d been when we set out. We were bucking.

“Canada. Some drug addict drove it north.”

I felt a momentary sense of relief—one I did not expect, that led me to ask hopefully, “Did he have anything to do with the murder?”

She shook her head. “He checked out of a halfway house the day after.”

“Where did he find the truck?”

“Bus station. He says he found it three days after you found John and Pauline. It was parked behind a shipping container, out of sight.”

Why on earth would John have left his pickup at the bus station?

All this time I had rejected what I knew about John as a sensible man and relaxed into the comforting tale I’d told myself from the beginning: it was an open-and-shut case. John had flown into a rage. Sometime during that long night he had choked his mother to death. Realizing what he’d done, he’d leapt to his death on the rocks below.

I believed this even though it was breaking Ev’s heart.

I believed this even though I knew how much John had loved his mother.

I believed this even though people didn’t jump off cliffs backwards. Every morning, in the split second between remembering his face below mine and fully waking, I’d ask myself: If he’d jumped, wouldn’t he have ended up facedown?

But I had to believe that John had done it. It was better that way—neat, over.

A particularly strong wave bashed the side of our boat. Water poured in. Tilde hardly reacted; her pants were already soaked. I picked up the oars again and rowed harder, putting my whole body into each drag, fighting against the waves until we rounded the Trillium point and caught sight of the outer bay. The wind came hard, furrowing the water. I put my head down and rowed.

The howling gale coming off the lake rushed into my ears, sending my hair tumbling. The world was made of whitecaps. The little dinghy dipped and bucked. My oars were useless as the thrashing waves pulled us, inevitably, back against the shore. The rough sandstone that edged the water over here resembled the rocks onto which John had plunged, and I found myself rowing any which direction, panic rising fast, just to escape.