Last Day (37 page)

“You hate me?” he asked. “Well, I hate myself. What if I’d gone earlier and could have stopped it?”

“Yeah, what if you had?”

“I would never have thought of what happened to her. That he could do what he did to her.” His voice broke again. “Kill her.”

“Did Pete think the baby was yours?” Kate asked. She felt sick, thinking of what he might have done to Beth if he had.

“I have no idea.”

“You just said you were pissed. You could have refused to go to Fishers Island. You must have known there would be fireworks if Beth gave him that kind of news.”

“You have no idea how guilty I feel about that. I think about it every day. What did she tell him; how did he react? What was that last day of life for her? I drive myself crazy thinking about it. Nothing you say can make me feel worse than I do already.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, her throat tight, knowing how much time
she
spent thinking about Beth’s last day too.

He stood up, started to leave. Her hand shot out and grabbed his wrist.

“Don’t go,” she said. “Jed, I’m just so glad my sister was loved. That she was happy with you. I believe you when you say that.”

“She was. We both were.”

“The drawing you did of her—it was beautiful. I could tell, just by looking at it, that you adored her.”

“That’s the word I would use too,” he said.

“Can I ask you—how did you decide where to pitch your tent?”

“Beth,” he said. “She took me to the island to draw flowers, but then she showed me that spot up the hill. It was private, under the pines, and she loved the sound of the brook.”

The brook.

Kate looked at his face, still streaked with tears. He had a faraway gaze in his eyes, as if everything he cared about was distant. What did it feel like to adore someone and to be loved this way?

“Can I see your ring?” she asked.

He pulled it off his finger, placed it in her palm. The metal felt warm.

“You designed it, you said?” she asked.

“We both did. The hearts were hers, the words were mine. Same line on both rings. My idea. I wanted the line to be about her, for her, and I needed it next to my skin.”

Kate held the ring to the flickering Edison bulb in the brass sconce on the wall. The line was engraved in tiny script, but she knew it well.

“It’s from a poem she used to read to me,” Jed said.

Kate closed her eyes and couldn’t speak. The words were from “West-Running Brook.” Beth and Jed were each other’s north, and the brook ran west.

“Pete thought—lots of people did—that Beth was settled, that what you saw with her was what you got, a lady who lived in a big house and dealt with high-priced art and rich collectors. She was so much more than that. She wanted to give it all up for me, go everywhere, feel everything.”

Kate was silent, thinking of the poem:
contraries in love
.

“She wouldn’t have given Sam up,” she said after a moment.

“No. Never. She would have fought him for Sam—we both would have.”

Kate turned the ring to see the other markings. The hearts were Beth’s, Jed had said. Under each were three dots.

“Ellipses? To be continued?” she asked.

“No. Those are drops of blood.”

Kate’s pulse quickened. She pictured the scrawled hearts on the back of the canvas and on the last page of Vasari’s
The Lives of the Artists
, the book at Mathilda’s house.

“Blood hearts,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, sounding surprised. “That’s what she called them.”

“Did you ever see
Moonlight
? The painting?”

“She told me about it. How it was stolen during that time, when they tied you up and your mother died.”

“You never saw the back of it, the unpainted side? What was drawn there?”

“No,” he said. “She never even showed me the canvas. Why are you asking about the back?”

“No reason,” Kate said, still staring at the hearts on the ring. “I was just wondering.” Then, “Where did she keep her ring?”

Jed reached into his pocket, pulled it out, placed it on the table.

It was beautiful, smaller than Jed’s. Beth had worn it. Kate picked it up. She closed her eyes and felt her sister’s passion. She turned it over and over in her hand, but Jed reached over and took it from her before she could slip it onto her own finger.

45

The first Saturday after school started, Kate went to the hardware store and bought an eco-friendly gel that wouldn’t leech into the sea. She filled a bag with safety goggles and gloves. She and Sam met Lulu, Scotty, and Isabel at Little Beach, and they scrubbed the boulders, removing the graffitied paint from the granite and quartz. After a while, Lulu, Scotty, and Kate left Sam and Isabel to finish the job and sat on a beach blanket to supervise. Julie walked the tide line, looking for sea glass.

September skies were bluer than August, the sea cleaner, less churned up by boat traffic. A good breeze blew the tops off low waves, sent beach grass skittering and tracing circles on the hard sand. Kate had always loved this time of year, when vacations were over and she and her friends had the beach to themselves. Even over here, this hidden, private place felt more isolated. People weren’t likely to come through the path.

Kate walked down to the water’s edge, picked up a piece of tide-scoured driftwood. Bleached silver by salt and sun, bark scraped off, it was a foot long, the thin, sharp tip of a broken branch. When she returned to the blanket, Scotty was on the phone with Nick, and Lulu was lying on her back, face to the sun.

Waiting for Scotty to finish her call, Kate looked at her right index finger. For nearly a year after that day in Mathilda’s library, when they were teenagers, there had been a fine scar on the pad, from where she had pricked it, coaxed blood to bubble out. The mark had long since
disappeared. When Scotty hung up, she shaded her eyes to look at Kate. So did Lulu.

After smoothing a patch of sand beside the beach blanket, Kate used the branch to write the letters
K
,
B
,
L
,
S
. She encircled them with a heart.

“Do you remember?” she asked.

“Blood sisters,” Lulu said. “We wrote in the book.”

“A long time ago,” Scotty said.

“Time wasn’t supposed to matter,” Kate said.

“And it didn’t,” Lulu said, holding out her hand, grabbing Kate’s. “Not to me.”

“Feeling sentimental?” Scotty asked.

“More like confused,” Kate said.

“About what?” Lulu asked.

“My sister’s secrets,” Kate said.

“Which we helped her to keep,” Lulu said.

“Are you blaming us?” Scotty asked.

“We promised never to keep secrets from each other,” Kate said.

“Beth and I were fourteen,” Scotty said. “You two were fifteen. We didn’t even know, really, what secrets meant. Look at them.” She nodded toward Sam and Isabel. “They think they’re so grown up, but they’re babies.”

“I think we knew exactly what secrets were,” Kate said slowly, “when we were young. How powerful they are, how they can hurt. I think we’ve forgotten as we’ve grown up. At least Beth and I did. She was my sister, and I had no idea about her real life.”

“Jed?” Lulu asked.

Kate nodded. “She was leaving Pete for him. She wanted to marry him. I didn’t even know he existed.”

“Kate,” Scotty said. “I don’t mean this in any sort of cruel way . . .”

“Nice way to start your thought,” Lulu said dryly.

“Take it as you will. But Beth was in love. Head over heels, madly in love. Feeling that way lends itself to secrets—makes it more delicious, maybe. However, it was never all one thing. There were some issues . . . she couldn’t make up her mind about. And, Kate, she was being sensitive to you.”

“How?” Kate asked.

“Well, love isn’t your thing. That kind of love, anyway.”

“Scotty, is that vodka in your water bottle?” Lulu asked.

“She’s right,” Kate said.

“You loved Beth, you love Sam, you love us,” Lulu said.

“That’s not the same as
in love
,” Scotty said.

“Will you please shut up?” Lulu asked.

“I meant it in a good way, truly,” Scotty said. “When you think of the fucking nightmare it can be, finding the right person, and even
afterward
—all Nick seems to do these days is run and train. He’s clearly trying to escape something; I only hope it isn’t me—ha. I really am sorry if it came out wrong, Katy.”

“It’s okay,” Kate said, giving her friends a big smile, reassuring them that she was fine, not offended. “But, Scotty, what couldn’t she make up her mind about?”

Scotty frowned for a second before speaking. “Well, um,” she began.

Kate had a sudden, shocking feeling she was trying to get her story straight. “Just tell me. Don’t be afraid of hurting my feelings.”

“Okay. It was just the pregnancy. You can’t even imagine what it’s like if you haven’t been . . . Sorry, but it’s like, expectant-mom brain. Hard to make decisions.”

“Like whether to stay with Pete?” Lulu asked.

“Like that,” Scotty said.

“What did she say about it?” Kate asked.

“She was under a lot of pressure,” Scotty said. “She felt she had to make everyone happy.”

That’s what Jed said,
Kate thought.

“To the point it completely messed with her moral compass,” Scotty continued.

“Her
moral compass
?” Lulu asked with complete incredulity in her voice. “She was an amazing, complicated woman.”

“Yes, she was,” Scotty said. “She taught me so much. Even at the soup kitchen. She didn’t just serve the meals. She sat down with everyone, wanted to hear about their lives. She was interested. And I’ve gotten that way too. I don’t just go there so I can be all church lady and say, ‘Oh, I’m such a good person.’ I look forward to it. Getting to know new friends. People who got in trouble but are trying to turn their lives around.”

“I had no idea you were so involved,” Kate said.

“Well, like I said, Beth taught me. The ones who knew her miss her terribly. They want to know what’s happening with her case, and I do my best to fill them in and let them get their feelings out. You just wouldn’t believe the emotion. It’s a completely different perspective than you get in stuffy old Black Hall.”

Kate smiled at Scotty. She could hear an echo of Beth’s compassion in her words. Lulu stretched on the blanket, September sunbathing. Scotty squeezed Kate’s hand, mouthed
Love you
, then peered at her phone’s screen, scrolling through Facebook.

Love. Kate thought of the words
in love
. Love, in love, love, in love. Such different states of being, of feeling. An image came to her mind—a man and a woman standing in an art gallery, close enough to kiss each other. She remembered that moment of feeling desire. The memory of Conor came with an emotion too strong to bear, so she pushed it away.

While the girls continued to scrub the garish paint off the granite boulder, as the muted soft browns and grays emerged again, streaks of pearl-white quartz, Kate walked farther down the beach. She pictured her sister and Scotty at the soup kitchen; it sounded as if Beth was guiding Scotty still.

Just before Kate got to the next rock outcropping, she stopped. She cleared a patch of seaweed from the tide line and used her driftwood branch to write in the sand. Crouching down, she wrote her sister’s name. She wrote her own. She drew two hearts, two drops of blood. She drew a full moon and squiggled a path of light on the waves. She drew stairs leading to a basement. She drew stick figures of one woman and two girls tied together, heads bowed. She enclosed the entire tableau in a heart.

46

Scotty stared at Kate, halfway down the beach, and wondered what she would have thought to know Beth had considered doing something drastic about the baby. Beth hadn’t actually put it into words, but she’d expressed such misgivings. She’d been just a few weeks along, fighting morning sickness at the soup kitchen. Scotty had hustled her outside, away from the lunch line and the smells of roast chicken and sweet potatoes.

“How am I going to do this?” Beth had asked. “I can’t handle it.”

“You’re just upset,” Scotty had said. “Not thinking clearly, understandably.”

“Scotty, I’m so worried. I’m terrified about what’s going to happen, how it’s going to affect Sam, our whole family. God, what a mess I’ve made of everything.”

“A new little baby to love,” Scotty said. “How is that a mess?”

“Pete? Jed?” Beth said.

“It’s not about them,” Scotty said.

“Well, actually it is,” Beth said. “And what about Sam? I feel as if we’ve already failed her—she’s going downhill. You see it when she’s with Isabel, don’t you?”

“She’s holding her own,” Scotty said. She’d grabbed some saltines from the condiment table, and she ripped open the cellophane and
handed Beth a cracker. Beth leaned against the church wall and took tiny nibbles.

“I don’t think she is,” Beth said.

“Frankly, Beth, I don’t see how that enters the equation. Look at my family! We were perfect—we thought we were—Nick, me, and our amazing Isabel. Then Julie, with her problems—you can’t imagine how hard it’s been. I don’t complain; I never would—but there have been sacrifices. Do we love her any less because she has issues?”

“I know how much you love her.”

“
Both
my children. And you’ll love both of
yours
,” Scotty said.

“I know. Of course,” Beth said, slowly eating the rest of the cracker. “I’m just scared, Scotty. I never thought this would be my life.”

“None of us ever think our lives would be our lives,” Scotty said. She stared hard at Beth and wondered what she was planning. What had she really meant when she’d said she couldn’t handle it? Scotty had plenty of problems, and Beth had no idea. Beth had the perfect house, money, a business, a career. It gave Scotty a strange, shameful thrill to know that Beth had screwed up. Everyone idolized her. Scotty felt glad that Beth could turn to her. She was the only one Beth was expressing her doubts to. And it was up to Scotty to support her.

Two clients from the soup kitchen walked out of the building. Rosalie, whose children had been taken from her by DCF, and Martin, one of the most tragic cases of all—a brilliant man who chose the wrong path in life.