Pieces of My Sister's Life (26 page)

29

W
E NEVER DISCUSSED
that night on the boat. I let the long days of summer roll against each other like fog on fog, smooth and opaque. But always it was there, as if the body followed us room to room, lay by our feet so we were forced to step around or over, pretending not to see. The national papers carried stories for days. The body hadn’t been found but rumors flew, Mrs. Maclean was questioned and questioned again, but no one questioned Eve. No one seemed to know there might have been anything to question.

We’d both quit our summer jobs before even starting, and I’d begun to wonder if that had been a huge mistake. Because Eve rarely left the house. I’d come home to find her on her bed, her breath sharp and words slurred with drink. “What’s going on with you?” I asked again and again, and there was anger in my voice, much as I tried to swallow it. At the core this was her doing. She had changed who I was forever, the way Justin and I would look back at our lives, the body intruding in every memory of our first year together. What would I tell our children about the night Justin said he’d marry me? The sky was thundery and romantic, he kissed me and told me how he’d be with me forever. And then we went home and committed involuntary manslaughter.

“You know it’s not your fault,” I’d tell Eve, and each time a hitch of pain scarred her face, showing she knew the lie that was. So much pain that I started to wonder, started to realize there must be more going on than she’d told us. I knew she must’ve seen Ryan Maclean at Jill Stanton’s party. What if she’d led him on, brought him into the house? And the more I thought about it, the more sure I was, and the more twisted my thoughts became. They’d been playing out some rape fantasy, her tears from laughter and then passion rather than pain, and when she heard us come in she played even harder, wanting Justin to see her as vulnerable but kinky, wanting him to see how good her boobs looked in her black lace bra. Why would she have worn her sexiest underwear if she hadn’t known someone would see it?

“You have to stop thinking about it,” I’d say, when inside me the thoughts dug roots and branched and grew. The guilt hung everywhere around her, Eve, who’d always been able to justify everything she did. Her eyes were hooded, her hair wild as a rag doll’s, her skin flushed in the closed-window heat. I’d sit by her and she’d grip my hand. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.

And then, after almost a month of avoiding, came the day it all slapped us in the face.

Eve and I had walked down to the corner store for groceries. I’d been shopping alone; Eve seemed to have forgotten the necessity of buying food, of doing laundry, of things as simple as showering or changing out of her nightgown. So after weeks of this I decided not to accept her excuses. She needed to leave the house, I knew that, to see there was an outside world. And so I made up a list of things we didn’t need, and I walked with her to the grocery.

We strolled through the narrow aisles and I filled our basket, keeping an eye on her to make sure she looked sane enough not to draw attention. It was working, I could see that. Eve’s shoulders began to loosen, there was color in her face. She flipped the hair from her eyes in the way that made men stare, even though her hair was unwashed and stringy and her eyes were hooded and ringed with gray.

We were comparing prices on canned vegetables when Eve suddenly reached for my arm. It was Mrs. Maclean.

She looked awful, unkempt and slightly bewildered, wandering the aisles with her sons in tow. One of the boys wore mismatched socks, the other wore too-small shorts and a stained shirt. The older boy carried the shopping basket in his small fist, and Mrs. Maclean strode ahead without checking to see if they were following.

The other shoppers stepped back to let her pass, none speaking to her but all of them watching. I wanted to take Eve’s hand, to give some kind of reassurance, but it was like my arms, my legs, my tongue had been petrified, a rod through my spine fixing me to the ground.

We watched without moving until she reached the checkout counter. Eve dropped our basket. “We have to get out of here.”

“We can’t now,” I whispered. “She’s checking out.”

“I have to.” She turned to me, her eyes liquid pools of dread. “Look at them, we did that. I did that.”

“Stop it,” I said through my teeth.

“There’s stuff you don’t know, Kerry.” She made a hiccupping sound and the can of baked beans she was holding dropped to the floor and rolled across the aisle.

I stared at her, then bent to retrieve the can. “Not now,” I said.

We watched Mrs. Maclean unload her basket and pay, watched the boys pack the bags and lift them, staggering under their weight. As soon as they disappeared out the shop door, the whispers started.

Behind us, Carol Venton hissed to Martha Franks. “You read the paper today? About the investigation? Linda told the cops he was drunk as a skunk the night he disappeared. Would you ever say that about your own husband unless you wanted revenge?”

Martha narrowed her eyes. “Can you imagine it? A man like that?”

I glanced at Eve. She was backing away from them, her face pale. I clamped my hand on her arm, willing her to stay calm.

“It goes with the power they get out of being elected, even the men who seem so honorable. Think of Kennedy.”

“At least Kennedy didn’t run away from his family.”

“Oh, I don’t think Ryan ran away,” Carol said. “He was looking at the Senate someday, and he still thought this would die down over time. He wouldn’t disappear while there were black marks on his name anyway, not the man I know. He’d want to be remembered the right way.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I remember when he was in school. A playboy through and through, the girls loved him and the boys despised him. He used to crib answers off my Melanie’s papers, and she’d just let him.”

Suddenly she saw Eve and me standing there, noticed our expressions. She rolled her eyes at Martha, then smiled at us. “Do you girls always eavesdrop on personal conversations?”

Eve’s face was tight, an odd shade of pink. She blinked slowly and spoke. “You always talk about things that aren’t your business?”

I was stunned at the strength in her voice. The words seemed to come from somewhere outside her. Martha narrowed her eyes. “Excuse me?”

“Listen,” Eve said. “He didn’t rape anybody. Maybe some girl’s accusing him because she wants publicity, but it’s a total lie. They didn’t even sleep together.”

I stared at her. “What’re you talking about? What rape?”

“Stupid rumors start and bags like you eat them up. You believe in UFOs? That you can lose ten pounds in ten days? What bullshit.”

Both Martha and Carol raised their eyebrows in unison and turned to each other. “Listen to that!” Carol said.

Martha shook her head. “Eve Barnard! What would your dad say?”

“He’d say tell the bitches to shove the rumors up their asses. How ’bout this? Why don’t you start a rumor that he raped me and I wanted it? Hell, why not. Have a ball.” She spun away and ran out onto the street.

I watched after her, my heart stuttering so quickly I thought I might faint. Should I follow her? Would that make it look better or worse?

Carol glanced at me and then bent to Martha, spoke under her breath. “Have to let some things slide, I guess, what with the way her father left. Those things can change a person.” Both of them gave pitying nods. I could see it in their eyes as they turned to me, the grief over what, in the past year, their island had become.

I strode to the newspaper rack and picked out the
Block Island Times.
There on the front cover of a paper that was usually headlined with stories like “Carl Lawrence Catches Forty-Pound Bass!” or “Delores Miles Wins First with Scrumptious Pumpkin Cheesecake!” was a large photo of Ryan Maclean shaking Ronald Reagan’s hand. And above the photo the headline: “Is This the Face of a Rapist?”

I reached for the
Boston Globe
and searched the front page. The article was in the bottom right corner. I sat down on a shelf of canned soup, heedless of the stares around me, and read.

That afternoon I biked up the hill to the cemetery, letting the pull in my legs drown out my thoughts. I rounded the path to Daddy’s grave filled with the ache I always felt here, like coming home.

When I was little I used to spend time with my mother like this, just close my eyes and try to remember her sweet-bitter smell of coffee and cigarettes. I was sure that she was listening, wherever she might have voyaged to on that particular day.

But then I started to lose her. First her smell disappeared and then the feel of my cheek on her breast. I lost that and then Daddy tore up every picture of her we’d ever had, so there was nothing left to remind me of her face. It was almost like she’d been this fantasy, something I’d held on to for as long as naïveté let me, like Santa Claus. I wouldn’t let that happen to Daddy, and so I came almost every day to etch the feel of him in repeated strokes.

I leaned my bike against the low stone wall and walked towards Daddy’s grave, then stopped short. She was kneeling by the headstone, hidden in shadows. “Eve?” I said.

She startled back, stared up at me, looking terrified even through her tears. It was the first time I’d seen her here since the funeral. I’d tried to bring her last fall on our father’s birthday, and again the next month when they’d set his headstone, but she’d adamantly refused, like seeing the gravesite would cement the fact that he was buried there in the dirt.

I knelt beside her and she stiffened, scrabbled backwards. I rested my hand against her arm. “It’s pretty here, isn’t it?”

She didn’t answer, just sat there with her fists clenched between her knees.

“Remember how he used to let us roll down that hill? How inappropriate was that, two kids rolling in a cemetery? But he said how the dead people were sitting up to watch us and laughing in their graves.”

Eve turned to me, her eyes wide. Suddenly she reached for me and buried her forehead against my shoulder, both hands clutching at my arm. I sighed and held her, remembering how it had been, hanging on to her waist just like this, our fear the same, the aching love the same as when we’d roll, her on top then me, over and over. Like we might free-fall if we ever let go. Like we might lose each other.

She pulled away, her face red and swollen, then shook her head and stumbled to her feet. I watched her run back up the hill and disappear round the other side, then looked down at my arm, at the fingernail marks left in my skin. “You’ll be okay,” I whispered, then wiped the tears from my cheeks with the back of my arm.

I closed my eyes so I could feel Daddy, his burliness, his throaty laughter, the sandpaper of his thick-callused fingers. I ran my palms over the prickles of newly seeded grass. “We’re okay,” I whispered. “We’re getting through okay.” Soon it would be nice here, not so bald. I should plant a circle of flowers around the headstone, his favorite hydrangea, LoraLee’s purple phlox. It used to make me feel a little creepy sitting there with the dead people, but now it was actually almost cozy, like a big family. I imagined the people around us: Terrance “Tippy” Fielding and Samuel S. Crawley were Daddy’s new drinking buddies, having a jolly old time under the ground.

Ryan Maclean would never have a headstone. The thought sliced through me like a swallow of icy water. Unless he was found, no one would even know for sure that he was dead. His casket would be the lashing waves, his headstone the algae-sheeted rocks that impaled the north shore. But maybe even that was more than he deserved.

The paper said he was being accused of raping an eighteen-year-old runway model. The House had opened a subcommittee investigation months ago, around the time the congressman started sleeping with Eve. He’d denied it and Mrs. Maclean had stood by his side, and since there was no real proof beyond what the girl had said, it had looked like the charges would be dropped. But his disappearance had made the controversy public.

“We’re doing great,” I said. The tears started again and I squeezed my eyes shut against them. “Everything’s—” My voice broke and I inhaled quickly. “Okay, everything’s okay. But if he’s there, Daddy, if he’s up there just tell him we’re sorry. And we’d tell his family about where he was, we’d tell if it would help and if we could, but right now we don’t know what else to do.”

The warm breeze rustled my hair like a stale breath. I watched the headstone for a minute, actually hoping he’d give me some kind of sign, maybe send up a daisy or print words in the dirt. When none came I wiped at my eyes and stood. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, then shook my head. “If there was anything that could take it back, we’d do it, but there just isn’t. It’s too late.”

I rested my hand on the cold damp of Daddy’s name. “I love you,” I whispered. I turned away and started for home.

As soon as I opened the front door I heard Eve’s voice, wild on the edge of exploding. “Of course I should have a say in it! It affects me just as much as you. You really think broadcasting it to the world’ll change anything?”

I hurried upstairs without closing the door behind me, up to the bedroom. They were there on the bed, Eve huddled against the wall, Justin staring at the quilt and looking lost. I stood in the doorway, watching, scared to enter.

“It won’t change what we did,” he said, “but maybe it’ll help us come to terms with it.”

“Come to terms! So you’ve come to terms? Do you feel even the slightest bit responsible?”

“Of course I do. We’re both responsible.”

I stared at him. How cruel he sounded, how unlike himself.

“You’re blaming me?”

“I’m not blaming anyone! I’ve never felt this awful about anything, Eve, but what I realize is you can’t change the past. What happened happened and there’s no going back.”

“What the hell does that mean? How can this be so fucking easy for you?”

Justin stared down at his knees, his shoulders hunched. “You think this is easy? And I don’t even care how hard this has been for me. What makes it hell for me is knowing how it’ll hurt Kerry.”