Bittersweet (33 page)

“Here,” Tilde shouted over the wind, leaning forward. I thought for a moment that she was going to offer to switch places with me, but within an instant I felt her hands on mine; dry, slight fingers curling over the backs of my hands where they gripped the oars. I pulled back as she pressed against me with surprising strength. Rowing together, we regained a buffer from the shore. Once we were a safe distance from the rocks, she helped me dip the right oar into the water until we were lined up, organized. Then, together, we rowed, heads down, parallel to the rocks of the Winloch shore, aiming for a little cove beyond us, where the water calmed.

As soon as we were in the protection of the cove, Tilde let me go, leaving a breeze on the backs of my hands. My arms were sore. We drifted. Then, from above, there came a rumble. The outer bay was the color of an eggplant. Thunderheads churned above.

“There’s a weather alert,” she said matter-of-factly. She was facing me, not the lake, but somehow she knew exactly what I was seeing.

“Like a storm?” I asked, my voice rising involuntarily.

“Exactly.”

I realized, with alarm, that Tilde Winslow was probably perfectly content to see me dashed against the rocks. But if she knew the forecast, why had she joined me?

She gestured over my left shoulder. I rowed in that direction. We were soon in a smaller inner cove—hardly bigger than our boat. Within it, the water moved in a soothing lap. Tilde reached out and grabbed the low-hanging branch of a red pine to keep us in place.

“I met Birch when I was very young,” she said crisply. “Too young to see the world clearly. He was handsome. Well-educated. Established.” A smile formed on her lips as she remembered. “A Winslow. I was so swept up in the fairy tale that I didn’t think about what marrying him would make me.”

She leaned forward. Her face was beautiful in the stormy light tunneling down through the trees. The strange illumination erased the harsh lines from her skin. She came closer and closer, and I thought, strangely, of Galway’s face in the moment before he kissed me. I could feel her soft breath against my earlobe.

“Ask me,” she whispered.

“Ask you what?”

“What did it make me?”

“What did it make you?” I repeated obediently.

“A Winslow.” A thunderhead rumbled directly above. “Do you want to be a Winslow?” she whispered. Of course I did.

Of course I didn’t.

She took my silence for assent. “Then do not mistake knowledge for power.”

“I don’t know anything,” I said. My voice came out whiny and wrong. The flat sound of it rebounded off the rocks before the wind tossed it up into the air.

Tilde’s mouth did not move from my ear. The hairs on my neck were standing at attention, but I couldn’t tear myself away. She waited until my protest had drifted off before speaking again. “And do not mistake silence for blindness.”

The world lit with a flash. I gazed upward to see a needle of lightning cut across the whole sky. It was followed too soon—far too soon—by a crack of thunder. Involuntarily, I squealed. Undaunted, Tilde grabbed my arm.

“Respect our secrets, Mabel Dagmar. Or even those you call friends will not be able to protect you.” She said this calmly, inches from my face. She did not look mean. Just honest.

I realized what this was. Fair warning.

I nodded, new electricity sizzling between us as the stormy light cast us in its silver glow. I might have expected anything then—to see Tilde sprout wings and claws, like some mythic creature, and lift me into the cracking sky; or to feel her fierce hands push me from the boat.

Instead, she looked up to the storm above us, then down to the water now sloshing, ever more greedily, under the bucking rowboat. “Poor girl,” she remarked in her plastic tone, examining my face as though I were a specimen under a microscope. “Afraid of storms? Switch places with me.”

It was unbelievable, the strength with which that slim, sinewy woman rowed us back to the Flat Rocks dock all by herself. Thunder filled our ears, lightning bolts tested themselves within the clouds above. At first, my terror was split between the hungry depths and the woman rowing, but she proved herself, rounding the point beyond Trillium, making a healthy dash back to the dock, the pull of the lake toward shore now an ally.

I turned to see a sheet of water racing toward us. Rain at its most devastating. The white wall moved across the world until it
overtook us. I shrieked, but the storm ate my voice. Still Tilde rowed, almost there, until I grabbed happily for the dock, tied the painter, and dashed for shelter.

By then it didn’t matter where we stood, outdoors or in. We were already soaked to the bone.

I
woke the slumbering beast. She did not give in easily, but relentless show-tune singing brought her about, as did the smell of percolating coffee and the promise that she’d get caffeine only if she emerged into daylight.

The Ev I’d met almost a year before had been flawless—perfect skin, hair like ermine, slender but curvy. The Ev who emerged from the bedroom that morning was a haunted shell. She had acne and eczema, straw for hair, skinny limbs that jutted from her torso at the wrong angles. She stooped when she walked. Her eye sockets were hollow.

“I’m sleeping,” she mumbled into the kitchen, shielding her eyes against the sunlight blaring off the water. She was wearing an oversize sweatshirt so I couldn’t see her shape. I wondered about the baby, but I knew better than to ask. Every time I looked at her, the sound of her anguish (“It’s my fault, it’s my fault”) played in my ears.

I pushed aside the guilt gnawing at me and wrapped the final cucumber sandwich in wax paper. “We’re going for a picnic.”

She didn’t even have the strength to roll her eyes. I decided it was to my advantage that everyone had been telling her what to do. Now it was my turn.

“Sit down,” I commanded, handing her the promised coffee. I checked the wall clock. “We’re leaving in forty minutes.”

Ev—who would have disdained my alpha stance only a month before—sat and ate, chewing the scrambled eggs obediently, sipping at the coffee even though it had burned my tongue. I told her to put on some clothes; she retreated to the bedroom and dressed. I gathered together our discarded shirts and pajamas, underpants and jeans, and filled our laundry bags for the regular pickup we had missed for weeks now. “Brush your teeth,” I commanded. I found her lingering upon the toilet twenty minutes later. “Did you pee?” I asked, as though she were a potty-training toddler. She nodded obediently and followed me outside.

We walked up the same familiar road. I led by a few steps; she lurked at my heels—I had the sensation of dragging along a reluctant child. When I turned to confirm that she was with me, her face was a mask, her expression impenetrable. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d been outside.

“Where are we going?” she asked as we came in sight of the Dining Hall.

“Bead Beach,” I answered nonchalantly. Back in July, she had talked of that place with pleasure, and I was hoping the mention of it would reinvigorate her and force her forward, especially since I had no idea where it was.

“But we’re going the wrong direction,” she replied with more vehemence than I’d heard from her since John’s death. Mission accomplished.

We hiked into the Winloch woods behind the Dining Hall. I resisted the memory of the last time Ev and I had wandered under those trees together. Tried to push aside the horrible sound of Abby’s entrapped bark under Mrs. LaChance’s porch, to forget the fact
that no one would tell me where the poor dog was now. Ev must have been replaying the same terrible memories—the hideous sight of Mrs. LaChance’s death mask, the wretched surprise of John’s body far below us—because she cut us away from Echinacea before we were at risk of seeing it, skirting a path closer to the water. The going was rougher nearer to the lake—large rock faces to scramble up; treacherous, weed-choked terrain at the damp, low spots where Winloch’s small streams fed into the vast blue; and, at one point, right in our pathway, the sturdy, rusted-out hull of a long-abandoned Model T.

Ev and I hardly acknowledged each other, save to hold a snapping branch, lest it spring back and hit the other. Above us, pine limbs rubbed with a nervous squeak; far off, able to fly wherever he desired, the pileated woodpecker knocked insistently upon a grub-filled trunk; and below us, on motorboats and yachts, other people enjoyed their summers—sunblock, water skis, lemonade.

All at once, Ev cut down toward the lake. She used the trunks of the pines to brace herself against the slippery, needle-covered slope. She disregarded me, pushing ahead, her long legs carrying her farther in one stride than I could make in three. This was how it was supposed to be.

In sight of the beach, Ev halted. I had given up on being graceful, finding it much more effective to slide down on my bottom, and now pulled myself to standing a few feet above her, stumbling and slipping into a tree trunk by her side. She pursed her lips. Already I was thinking how hard it was going to be to scale back up the eroding hillside, but I told myself it didn’t matter.

“So where are all those beads?” I asked in a chipper tone, eliciting Ev’s grimace. I tumbled down onto the marshy sand and didn’t turn back to check that she was coming. A moment later I felt her soft footfalls behind me.

Bead Beach was as Ev had described it—an exposed, sandy expanse, with hearty reeds growing from the clay deep below. Looking out upon the outer bay, I realized we stood somewhere on the shoreline between the Trillium point I’d rounded with Tilde and the horrible rocks on which John had met his end. Though the terrain surrounding us was rocky, the beach itself was a peaceful place—Winloch’s soft belly. Lu had explained to me, what seemed like a decade before, that wind swept in off the outer bay and churned clay up from the lake bottom and tossed it onto the reeds that dotted the beach. The clay dried in droplets around the long, thin plants, hardening in the sun, leaving gray beads with perfect, reed-thick holes in their centers. If one put one’s fingers around the dried orbs and pulled up delicately, they were easily collected, for stringing into necklaces and bracelets. Looking out across the sand, I found it easy to imagine feral, girlish versions of Lu and Ev, nature’s beads strung over their milky torsos, pretending they were the original inhabitants of this land.

Ev and I explored each end of the beach by ourselves. At first I was shy about collecting the beach’s fruit, but I noticed Ev carefully hunched over the tops of the reeds on her end of the sandy waterfront. I studied her form, noting how gingerly she plucked the small balls from their homes. I found a particularly sturdy-looking spattering of dried clay and tested it. The first few beads crumbled in the force between my thumb and pointer finger. I softened my grip, and they came more willingly. I collected a ripe handful before noticing that Ev had found a spot to sit on a fallen tree and was gazing out at the open water.

I remembered her weeping over John’s body, how fragile she’d seemed, and broken. I made my way to her, lugging the canvas bag that held our picnic. “Lemonade?” I offered her the thermos, but she shook her head and kept her eyes on the lake before us. I followed her lead and took in the soft wind upon my face, the caplets of fresh
water licking up at our toes, the swish, in and out, of the water upon the shore.

I felt light-headed. I didn’t know if I could do what I must. But then, I thought of Tilde in the rowboat: “Respect our secrets.”

Say Tilde knew, somehow, that Birch was John’s father—perhaps an explanation for why she was unfriendly; the realization that one’s husband had cheated with a woman now living in his care would harden anyone. Still, Tilde hadn’t exactly been good to Ev or Lu, as far as I had seen, had she? She’d been cold—mean, even—to everyone I liked at Winloch: her daughters, Indo, CeCe.

And she didn’t want me to tell the one secret I knew.

If she knew the secret, it wasn’t mine anymore, was it? Nor was it hers. Neither of us could control it anymore. It could pass along to anyone it wanted.

It wasn’t that I thought knowing would make Ev feel any better, certainly not. But as awful as it was that John had left her, and in the way he had, wasn’t it confirmation of how impossible their life together would have been?

“Do you still think it’s your fault?” I asked. The moment Birch and Pauline had conceived a child together, something awful and inexorable had been set into motion. Something even the love John and Ev shared couldn’t have stopped. “It isn’t. It never was.”

I was the executioner.

Ev didn’t move a centimeter, but I knew she could hear me.

“Ev,” I said, examining her in my peripheral vision, “your family has a lot of secrets. I stumbled across one of them and I told it to John.” My pulse was rising, sweat gathering in all the parts of me that were terrified. I didn’t want to tell her, and maybe I wouldn’t have to. Maybe she wouldn’t ask.

“Which secret?” she asked.

I cleared my throat. “I think … I mean, I’m pretty sure, because I did a lot to check it out, and I don’t think there’s any other explanation,
but I think, Ev, I think John was your half brother. I mean, that your dad and Mrs. LaChance …”