Bittersweet (35 page)

“What they stole, how they stole it, became a kind of instruction. A way of life for the Winslows. First we took goods. Then ideas, deeds, investments. I won’t lie and say I regret it. My parents saved us. I truly believe that, Mabel. Perhaps I should be ashamed that it has taken me a lifetime to acknowledge my forebears’ sins. To understand that they did wrong even as they were doing right.”

She sat up straighter in bed. “But I see that now. And I’m the only one. You think Birch gives a damn? You think he’s doing anything to stop this dangerous legacy? Not a bit. He’s ten times worse than my parents were. More sophisticated. More greedy. My parents were saving us. He just wants to get richer.”

“So he’s stealing too.” My mind was swirling with all she was implying, even if I wasn’t yet able to pin her down. I wanted to know how, exactly, the Winslows had stolen what they had, and from whom, and when it had begun, and what they were stealing now. “Who—”

“My dear,” she pronounced in an almost bored tone, “there are always parts of the world in disarray. Just as there are always people willing to better their lot by helping unload what their countrymen no longer need. It’s not half as hard as you’d imagine to locate what is no longer being appreciated. Most folks are desperate to trade their worldly goods for freedom.”

“Like where?”

“Over the years? Everywhere, really. The Far East. Darkest Africa. Central America.”

“I’ll need dates.” My mind was racing. “Specific countries. What was stolen. If you give me something I can trace, I’ll start digging.”

Her vigor drained as soon as I tried to pin her down. She leaned back upon her pillows like a sullen child. “I already told you. I don’t
have any proof. I asked you to find it and you didn’t. So there’s no point in trying to stop him anymore.”

“Indo,” I began to plead, desperate, “you have to tell me something more if you want my help.” My mind grasped for an incentive. “The Van Gogh. You want it back, right? Well, let me help bring your brother down and you can have it back.”

She began to laugh then, right in my face, a mean laugh as though I was the biggest idiot in the world. I felt my face turn hot. I heard the sound of Aggie and Fritz back on the other side of the door.

“I mean it,” I insisted. “I can help you.”

“Oh no,” Indo yelped, overcome by a manic cackle that filled the room, “oh no, my dear Mabel, no one—not even you—can help me now.”

I tried to talk to her again, but her laugh filled the room, drowning out my voice. She was as crazy as her niece and brother and everyone else in this godforsaken place. She wasn’t going to help me, even though helping me would help herself.

The door handle started jiggling below me. I could hear something metal jimmying the lock. I had to get away. I needed air, and space to think.

When the key fell to the floor and Aggie and Fritz burst through the door, I hurtled myself toward the opening, angling around them and out of the room as they rushed to Indo’s side. Their needy combination was like poison to my ears as I ran from the cottage and out into the afternoon.

W
here could I go? To whom could I turn? Indo drained of knowledge, Ev gone mad, Galway revealed to be unfaithful, I had no one—not at Winloch, not anywhere. As I tore away from Indo’s cottage and over the hill—running simply because my feet had to keep moving or I might lose my mind—I realized that, in the span of a summer, Ev’s family had swallowed all knowledge I had of who I was and what I believed. I wasn’t whole anymore, I thought, before realizing, with chagrin, that I hadn’t really ever felt whole. This terrible realization stopped my feet short. I was young, still so young, that I thought my lack of wholeness was somehow my fault. I had no idea everyone feels this way—that the most essential part of growing up is figuring out where your empty places are and learning how to fill them by, and for, yourself.

I was at the base of the hill now, Dining Hall in sight, on the road that would lead me out of Winloch. I could hear the faint rumble of a motorboat, the drone of a lawn mower, the chattering of the chipmunks bustling in the undergrowth beside the road. But any immediate human sounds—save my own—were few and far between, and I realized, with a startle, that the only person with whom I had ever felt close to whole was my brother. Even before the incident, he’d been sheltered from the facts of life by a brain both too big and
too small for what the world required, but what he knew of me was essential, pure. True. He believed I was good. He believed I was kind. He believed I had the answers.

For the first time that summer, I wondered: what would Daniel do?

Daniel wasn’t afraid of anything, which is a nice way of saying he would wade into an icy river if you commanded him. He sought out justice, which made him impossible to lie to. And he was pigheaded, a nasty way of saying he never let a question out of his grasp.

I had to find out what the Winslows had stolen. Were stealing, if Indo was to be believed. I was furious at her vagueness and sad she was going to die. But I couldn’t let that affect my search. Call that greed if you must (Indo had), but it was the only thing I knew to do next, because it’s what Daniel would have done, had he been able. I wasn’t doing it for Indo anymore; I was doing it for myself.

I had to look at Kitty’s journal again. “In the beginning.” It held answers.

I raced toward Bittersweet, sure Ev wouldn’t have dried, dressed, and made it back from Bead Beach so quickly. I would pry the journal from its hiding place under the porch’s loose board, head for the woods, and gather my wits. Knowing it documented what the Winslows had stolen would surely give me new eyes with which to read it. Once I found what Indo had been alluding to, I would figure out how to use that information. I would find the proof she wanted.

I was almost to the steps when I spotted Ev sitting on the porch couch. She was flipping through a magazine, her back to me, oblivious to my gaze. The sight of her head—blond, tousled—was so familiar that my memory called up the smell of her salty scalp. Affection tugged at my heart.

But then I remembered what she had told me at Bead Beach. All this time, even when I’d learned she’d been lying to me about the inspection, or using me to hide her true intentions to leave Winloch
with John, I’d believed there was still something strong at the core of our friendship. That we shared a moral universe: don’t marry your brother, rapists are evil, et cetera. But on Bead Beach, she’d declared who she really was. I realized, in one, tragic, honest, relieving rush, that Ev and I were never really going to be friends again. That maybe we’d never been friends to begin with.

I’d used her too, hadn’t I? Hadn’t I believed that aligning myself with her would better my lot? That I deserved what she had? It was hard to know what was real about any of our friendship now that I knew how far apart we were. Was she even pregnant? Had she ever been? Had I liked Galway only because he was part of her world? Did it matter anymore?

Wait, I told myself, it won’t do any good to chew it all over—there will be time enough. Later. So maybe we weren’t ever friends. So what?

I had to get that journal. I had work to do.

I pushed open the screen door. She glanced up at the sight of me. “Where’d you run off to?” As though none of what had been said between us on Bead Beach had occurred.

“Are you hungry?” she continued. “I asked Masha to bring sandwiches.” I remembered the picnic I’d abandoned. My stomach growled. Ev smiled. She knew the way to my heart.

I calculated whether I could retrieve the journal and keep the secret of the hiding place in the time it would take Ev to, say, go to the bathroom. I glanced down at the loose floorboard, only a foot from where she sat. My look to the board was fleeting—a split second at most—but that was all it took. Ev followed my gaze.

She straightened her impossibly long leg and pressed her big toe against the loose board.

“What happened to the baby?” I blurted, desperate to win back her attention.

She set her foot flat upon the floor, shifting her weight onto it.

“Ev,” I said, “did you lose it?”

She crouched. I stepped into the cottage and let the screen slam shut behind me. I couldn’t let her find the journal. Indo had entrusted me, and me alone, with Kitty’s secrets.

“There’s nothing in there,” I said unconvincingly. But Ev was lost to her discovery. She used her index finger to jimmy at the side of the board and, just as I had, decided she needed a tool, grabbing, from the side table, the same ballpoint pen I’d used.

She uncapped the pen and levered it so that the board yawned open. A few more forcible thrusts, and the loose wood popped from its home.

I stepped forward. I’d grab it the second she pulled it out.

She leaned over the hiding place. Frowned. Placed her hand inside and felt around. Only then did she look up at me, startled. “There’s nothing in here.”

My heart started hammering. I craned to look inside the cranny where I’d so carefully hidden Kitty’s journal. “Where is it?” I asked.

“What is it?”

“I mean it, Ev, what did you do with it?”

She shrank back, just a fraction of an inch, for just a moment, but I saw it: I’d scared her.

“Just give it back to me and we won’t have a problem,” I pressed.

“Seriously, Mabel, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She was pulling herself to standing. The second she did, she would have gained the upper hand.

I placed my hands on her shoulders. I pressed down as hard as I could. She shrieked. “Stop it!” Dodged my attempt to pull her back down. “Ouch, Mabel! Stop!” She slipped through my grasp and stood tall above me. Brushed her shoulders off. Tossed her hair, loosening the ends with her fingertips, regaining herself. She wagged a finger at me as she headed toward the kitchen. “Honestly, Mabel, sometimes I have no idea what the fuck is wrong with you.”

That night, I watched Ev swallow two sleeping pills, and kept my eyes on her until she was sound asleep. Only then did I close my eyes.

But it didn’t matter where I lay my head. I turned it all over in my mind, trying to come up with a game plan for when daylight returned—where would I find Kitty’s journal? What would I say to Indo to get her to tell me more?—until I began to lose consciousness and my memories became jumbled, and John’s face became Daniel’s and Daniel’s face became my own.

Just as I was finally drifting into slumber, a regular pinging started to pull me back to the waking shore. I tried to ignore the sound, but it came again, then again, until I found myself sitting up in bed. Across the room, Ev slept heavily. But the window above her bed rang out with a regular rhythm that I realized, after a few disorienting moments, was the sound of gravel thrown against the pane.

I stood and hunched between my bed and Ev’s, peering out into the pitch-black night, when a flashlight flipped on, and a ghoulish face appeared. I yelped, but Ev didn’t stir. I put my hand over my
mouth to stop myself from making any more noise as I squinted out at that face. The flashlight shifted, and what seemed to be the stuff of nightmares proved to be only Galway.

I tiptoed out of the bedroom, snuck onto the porch, and cringed at the screen door’s squeal.

“I need your help,” he whispered.

I wasn’t much interested in helping him, and my face must’ve told him as much.

“It’s Lu,” he pleaded.

“W
hat would you have done if Ev woke up?” I asked as we drove out of Winloch. Galway steered more cautiously than John had; less to prove, or he didn’t want our departure to be advertised, or both. The aroma of his car was good, like the sweatshirt I’d long since squirreled away under my bed. I prayed to lose my sense of smell.

“Ev sleeps through fire alarms,” he said, “and I figured if she did wake up, she’d leave us alone.”

The sentiment clung to us; we had unfinished business that even Ev would respect.

“Are you going to turn on the headlights?” I asked, once we had passed onto the meadow—he’d been using his parking lights. It was a night lit by only a sliver of moon, but out here in the country, that was enough to pretend by. He flipped on the real headlights, and we headed toward the highway. Once on it, we took an exit onto a back road that, by my calculation, led us east. “Is Lu at camp?” I asked finally. All that urgency and then nothing. I was starting to wonder how important this really was.

Galway cleared his throat. “Whatever happens, we have to keep it a secret, understand?”

That sounded familiar. “That depends what happens.”

“It could be a matter of life and death.”

I actually knew what that meant now. “I’ll do my best.”

Satisfied I could be trusted, Galway grabbed a used envelope from the dashboard. “Masha got a phone call tonight, from the camp.” He handed me the paper, scribbled with directions. “Rocky something. It’s in Maine. Anyway, it was the camp director, Marian. Very upset. She was calling for Mum and Father, and she didn’t know she was getting the Dining Hall. Masha took the message and”—he handed me his flashlight—“see for yourself.”

I made out Masha’s loopy handwriting. My eyes stumbled over the words as I tried to decipher their meaning.

“Read it,” Galway commanded.