Summer with My Sisters (3 page)

E
vie Jones wondered what people saw when they looked at her. She had never been so self-conscious as she had been these last few weeks. She was about five feet five inches, which she guessed was about medium height. Her eyes were brown fringed by long, thick lashes. Her hair had once been blond, but by the time she turned twelve it had darkened to a sort of honey tone. So far, so normal. But her hair was badly in need of a trim; the ends were all split and dry. She hadn’t been able to take a proper shower since passing through that campground three days back and she was highly conscious of the stain on the left sleeve of her pink hoodie. She had lost weight in the past weeks and had had to turn down the waist of her jeans so they would stay on her hips. She could feel a pimple coming out on her chin; she hadn’t remembered to bring any astringent with her when she left. There had been too many other more important things to remember.

But maybe people didn’t even really
see
people like her—a fairly nondescript, slightly messy teenager. Maybe she was truly anonymous to the world. But she didn’t think she was that lucky and so she prayed that her appearance wouldn’t prevent her from being hired somewhere, anywhere. She would wait tables. She would clean toilets. She would walk dogs though dogs frightened her a little. She would babysit, if anyone were crazy enough to hire someone like her—no references, no friends, no family—to watch over their child.

Someone carrying a false ID card. She had gotten it from a senior at the last school she had attended. It had cost her so much money, almost all she had saved from her allowance (which had been severely reduced months before), but she had decided it was necessary. Her heart had been racing madly while she waited behind the 7-Eleven for Jason Ames to find her when he had finished his work. His sly grin when he finally handed the card to her had made her stomach heave.

Now Evie touched the pocket of her backpack where the card was stowed. She hoped it looked real. This was the first time she would have to use it (maybe) since leaving her aunt and uncle’s house in Vermont in the dead of night a few weeks earlier. She had no fear that when she was reported missing Jason Ames had told anyone that he had made her a false ID; it would only get him in trouble. Plus, she hadn’t said a word to Jason about her plans. For all he knew she wanted the ID—complete with a phony name—so that she could get into that eighteen-and-over dance club in town.

Evie stopped before a sign set back from the sidewalk, at the base of which was a ring of petunia plants.
Yorktide, Maine. Incorporated 1678.
She had determined on Yorktide as a destination because once, many years ago, she and her parents had visited for a three-day weekend. They had gone to the beach, eaten ice cream cones (her mother loved salted caramel ice cream), browsed in the craft shops after a dinner of lobster rolls and French fries and coleslaw, visited the Yorktide Historical Society’s museum, and had even gone into Ogunquit to see a musical at the playhouse, though Evie couldn’t remember what it was. Something about pirates? She did remember her mother being so very happy, looking so lovely in her colorful sundresses and chunky turquoise jewelry, her eyes shining with pleasure. Her father, too, she remembered as happy and handsome, but she tried to block him out of the pictures in her head. She thought that if she tried hard enough she might be able to rewrite her past, cast it with only good people like her mother.
Just Mom and me . . .

It might have been smarter to go somewhere she had never been, somewhere no one would ever think to look for her, but the whole idea of running away was so startlingly new and odd and yet frighteningly appealing that Evie’s mind had felt all addled and revved up. She had no previous experience with any sort of deception, unless lying about the condition of your increasingly dirty home and your increasingly sick father counted as deception and not necessary self-protection....

Evie walked on along the main street until she saw a notice in the window of a place called The Clamshell; there was an opening for a counter person to take orders and work the cash register. It didn’t sound that hard and maybe she would be allowed some food as part of the job. She pushed open the glass door to the little restaurant and went inside.

The place was empty but for a young woman sweeping the floor and a gray-haired man behind the counter, tapping at a handheld calculator. He looked up from his work and smiled. “Sorry, we’re not open for lunch yet,” he said.

“Oh, no, I . . .” Evie gestured behind her. “I saw the notice in the window. For a job.”

The man put down the calculator and came around the counter. “Do you have any experience working in a restaurant?” he asked. “I’m Billy Woolrich, the owner.”

Evie swallowed hard. “No,” she admitted. “But I’m a good worker and I learn fast. And I . . . I really need a job.”

“Badly enough to take cash?” he asked after a moment.

Evie nodded. Cash would be perfect.... It hadn’t occurred to her before this moment that she had no way to cash a check. She wondered what else had she failed to realize.

“Well,” Mr. Woolrich said then, “maybe I’m just a foolish old man, but you have a nice face. All right, I’ll give you a chance.”

Relief flooded Evie and she struggled not to burst into tears. “Oh, thank you!” she said after a moment. “Thank you very much.”

Mr. Woolrich retrieved a clipboard, on which was clamped a piece of paper and a pen, from the order counter. “Here,” he said, handing it to her. “Just fill out this form and I’ll give you a schedule.”

Name. Evie Jones. Age. Eighteen. Phone number. She wrote it down, though the battery of her cell phone was almost dead and she had forgotten to take its charger with her the night she had run away. Address.

There, Evie stopped cold.

“All done?” Mr. Woolrich asked.

“Um, almost. I . . . I haven’t found a place to live yet. I just got in to town today and . . .”
Oh, please don’t let him throw me out!

Mr. Woolrich frowned. “Oh.”

“Maybe you could recommend . . .” Evie couldn’t go on. She knew that it was all over before it had begun, a chance at a fresh start.

And then Mr. Woolrich smiled. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I know a guy who needs a house sitter for the summer. The one he had lined up bailed on him at the last minute. And, he owes me a favor.” He reached over the counter and retrieved a pad of paper and a pen. “Here,” he said, scribbling on the pad. “That’s his name and address. I’ll call and tell him you’re on your way over. Take a left at the corner of Center Street, and then a right at Nubble Lane. His place is the last one on the road. Can’t miss it. It’s enormous and it’s got a big tower, like a lighthouse almost.”

“Thank you so much, Mr. Woolrich,” Evie said, taking the piece of paper with a trembling hand. “You won’t regret hiring me, I promise.”

“Call me Billy, please. And we’ll see you at eight sharp tomorrow morning.”

“One more thing. Does the man have a last name?” Evie thought she might sound rude calling him by his first name when she had never met him.

Billy Woolrich laughed. “Nope. Just Nico.”

Evie practically ran out of the shop, so eager was she to get to this Nico person’s house, so eager to learn if she would have a roof over her head that night. So eager and yet so frightened of his answer to her request. If this man did let her stay she would be able to take a shower and if he had a pair of really sharp scissors somewhere in the kitchen she might be able to trim her hair though she had never done it before. In the old days her mother had cut it for her; she remembered so distinctly the sound of the scissors slicing through the hair with a clean, satisfying crunch. She remembered the pair of scissors itself; the handles were inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It had belonged to her grandmother. Evie wondered where the scissors were now. She didn’t remember seeing them after her mother died. And now, with the house gone . . .

This had to be it. The last house on the road. And Mr. Woolrich was right. Billy, rather. It was huge and the tower did sort of make the house look like a lighthouse. Evie took a deep breath and rang the doorbell. Maybe, just maybe, everything would work out.

P
oppy was sitting on a stool at the kitchen island with her laptop opened in front of her. She was trying to focus on the checking account statement Freddie had asked her to review, but her mind kept slipping off to scattered memories of the final weeks of her mother’s illness. Time didn’t seem to lessen the random emergence of these memories. In fact, since her father’s passing, thoughts of her mother’s last days had been present almost constantly.

It probably didn’t help that she was wearing Annabelle’s bracelet. Sometimes it seemed to act as too strong a reminder of all that Poppy had lost. Her best friend. That was no understatement. Poppy had always been terribly close to her mother; after all, she had had Annabelle Higgins all to herself for nine years before Daisy came along. If Poppy believed such a thing was possible—and she didn’t—she would say that she was her mother’s favorite. Daisy clearly was the apple of Oliver’s eye (they were so much alike) and Violet . . . Well, Violet was such a mystery! Poppy had only a vague idea of the nature of her little sister’s emotional attachments. While she was very affectionate with her cat, she seemed to need no physical contact with humans at all, not even the occasional hug. But had she always been that way? Admittedly, Poppy’s memories of Violet as a small child were dim.

Even before Annabelle had taken ill, Poppy had talked to her mom on the phone or via Skype at least twice a week and sometimes more. When she became sick those calls became even more important to Poppy, though it had deeply saddened her to watch her once beautiful mother grow so haggard and so thin, to see her once smooth and glowing skin become dull and blotchy, her gorgeous thick hair become sparse and lank. Watching her mother on the computer screen in those final weeks was oddly like looking into her own possible future. Who was to say that she, too, wouldn’t get sick and die while only in her fifties, at the height of her career, leaving behind three young children and an adoring husband?

With a sigh Poppy closed her laptop. When these moods came upon her—nostalgia tinged with melancholy and regret—there was no use in pretending usefulness. Freddie and the checking account could wait.

At the end, when Annabelle had been moved to the hospice, she had been too weak to hold the phone (and she no longer wanted to bother with a computer). Oliver had held his cell phone to his wife’s ear so she could hear their oldest daughter’s voice....

Poppy got up from the stool and stalked over to the sink, where she poured a glass of cold water. When it was empty she held the glass to her forehead and took a few deep breaths. This was one of the bad things about remembering. It could make you feel physically unwell. Poppy put the glass into the dishwasher—a bit of tidying neither of her sisters seemed to have adopted—and looked across the room at the fridge. Like the fridges in most homes it was decorated with colorful magnets holding photos in place. The photo on the top right . . . It had been taken at the party the history department at Adams College had held on the publication of Annabelle’s book. Violet, only a baby, had been left home with a sitter, but Poppy and Daisy had been there along, of course, with Oliver. In the picture Annabelle was holding a copy of the book in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. She was laughing. Such a happy moment.

Poppy looked away from the fridge. She kept a copy of her mother’s best-selling book by the bed—
They Also Serve: A History of the Role of American Women in Wartime, Volume One: From the Revolutionary War to WWI
. All three of the Higgins sisters had read the book; Annabelle’s writing style was far more accessible to a general audience than Oliver’s. Then again, Oliver hadn’t written for the masses (that was his term) but for an elite group of intellectuals. His wife’s book had received attention throughout the popular media; even
People
magazine had reviewed and recommended it.

Annabelle had been working on the second volume when she died. Her notes—some handwritten in lined spiral notebooks, others stored in computer files—were treasured items in the Higgins house. Poppy knew that she wasn’t the one to complete her mother’s work, but she thought that someday she might seek out a young scholar to finish the second volume. In that way, her mother’s voice would live on.

Still, it was just too bad that she didn’t have an academic bone in her body. As graduation from Adams College loomed, Poppy had briefly contemplated continuing her formal education, but there was no area of study that fascinated her enough to make her want to spend her life writing and reading, studying and lecturing. In fact, the decision to move to Boston had been born out of mild desperation—what do I do with my life now? When the far-reaching future seemed too vast to imagine, deal with the immediate future. So Poppy had.

The transition had been facilitated by the fact that her parents had plenty of friends and colleagues in the Boston area. Annabelle’s former college roommate, Louise, lived in Lexington. Louise’s best friend, a woman named Barbara, owned and ran a PR agency whose clients were mostly online publications. A word from Louise had gotten Poppy an interview with Barbara, and ultimately, her first freelance assignment. One of Oliver’s brightest former students was at Harvard studying law. He kept in regular touch with his favorite professor and when Oliver told him that his daughter needed a place to live in Boston, he put Poppy in touch with Allie Swift, a family acquaintance, who owned a beautiful old mansion on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay. Poppy took a lease on the top floor apartment; Allie occupied the rest of the house.

It had all been so easy and her new job and new apartment and the new people she was meeting had kept her busy enough for the moment. There was Ian Maxwell, for one, a fellow writer for what used to be called alternative media, back in the old days. Ian knew lots of people who played in popular local bands and had been able to get Poppy into sold-out gigs and wild after-parties at the current hotspots. Poppy didn’t do drugs, didn’t smoke, and she drank sparingly, but she did love a good party.

And then there had been Ian’s friend Nate, who worked at a hip, high-end clothing shop on Newbury Street and was generous about sharing his discounts with her. Nate said he liked to see her wearing the crop tops and the miniskirts and the skinny, coated jeans. He said she looked like a model. (He wasn’t the first person to have told her that.) Sometimes he took pictures of her wearing the clothing and posted them on his Instagram account. Ian had assured her there was nothing illegal about Nate’s getting her the clothes on the cheap. But one afternoon she visited the store wearing pieces from its latest collection and the owner had given her a very suspicious and searching look. After that, Poppy began to feel uncomfortable about the arrangement and put an end to it. Not long after, Nate had been fired and Ian lost track of him.

It had been a carefree and in some ways a hedonistic few years with little responsibility other than to herself. Certainly handling her personal finances had been far less complicated than trying to handle the finances of the Higgins estate! Thank God for Freddie.
Right
, Poppy thought, glancing at the laptop.
The checking account. It couldn’t be put off forever
.

But it could wait a few more minutes. What, Poppy wondered, if she
hadn’t
moved to Boston after graduation? What if she had stayed in Yorktide at least for a year or two? She might have made her mother’s last months easier. She might have been at her mother’s bedside in the hospice when she passed, instead of stuck in northbound traffic on Route 1 during Annabelle’s final moments, desperately pleading with a God she wasn’t sure she believed in to keep her mother alive for a few more hours. She might have made a difference for her father, too. If she had been home to help him cope after Annabelle’s death, he might not have had a heart attack at all.

Poppy sighed. “What-ifs” were pointless, but sometimes they were unavoidable. Everyone knew that children often felt responsible for their parents’ divorce, no matter the assurances that they were not to blame. But Poppy wondered if it was normal for a child, even as in her own case, an adult child, to feel responsible for a parent’s death. Certainly it was normal to feel guilty for bad behavior or missed opportunities or unkind thoughts....

Her cell phone rang and Poppy saw that it was her old friend Julie Fisk, now Mayer. She let the call—the second one from Julie in as many days—go to voice mail. She and Julie had been inseparable through grammar and middle school, and had only begun to grow apart in junior year of high school when Julie started dating Mack Mayer, the man who would become her husband the summer after graduation. The idea of getting married at the age of eighteen and passing on the option of college had been almost incomprehensible to Poppy. She had been invited to the wedding and though it was a genuinely happy occasion for Julie, Mack, and their families, Poppy remembered feeling ever so slightly superior to the proceedings. A whole world was out there waiting to be experienced and here was Julie, giving it all up for marriage to a guy who had been her one and only boyfriend, giving it all up for what promised to be what Poppy saw as an insular sort of life on Mack’s family’s farm.

Now, seven years later, Julie was eager to catch up with her old friend and Poppy felt bad about those old critical and immature thoughts about Julie’s choices. She, Poppy, had gone on to college and then to live in Boston—but what did she have to show for her efforts at experiencing the wider world? A career that was merely a way to pass the time. No steady relationship. A lot of designer clothes she no longer had any place or any desire to wear. No real sense of what she wanted to do with her one and only life. What she did have to show—and it had nothing to do with her own choices—was the legal guardianship of two minors.

One of those minors came into the kitchen now, wearing a string of intensely green peridot beads around her neck and a blue caftan-like garment in a very wrinkly, crinkly cotton.

“What was your major in college?” Violet asked without preamble.

“Media studies,” Poppy replied. “It’s what used to be called communications. Why?”

“I’m thinking about my future. Was it worth it?”

“What, college? Of course it was. And I don’t mean just for the parties.”

“I’m not so sure I’ll go to college,” Violet said. “I’m considering teaching myself. That way I’ll be able to concentrate on learning what I want to learn.”

Poppy was taken aback. “But you have to go to college, Violet.”

“Why?”

“Because you just have to,” Poppy said, aware that it wasn’t much of an argument. “Mom and Dad would be horrified if you didn’t.”
There
, she thought.
That’s better
.

“I don’t think they would be horrified at all,” Violet said quite calmly. “I think they would totally support my decision. In fact, I know they would.”

“Violet, don’t be silly. How can you
know
what they would think? They’re—”

Poppy felt a wave of helplessness. The truth was that she couldn’t force her sister to do anything. Even though she was responsible for Violet’s welfare, she didn’t have the moral force that a parent had to compel her sister to do something that was in her best interests.

“They’re dead,” Violet said flatly. “Anyway, I haven’t made a final decision yet. What’s for dinner?”

“What?” Poppy looked at the oven as if that appliance held the answer. “Oh. I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it yet.”

“It’s almost six o’clock.”

“Is it? I’ll call out for pizza.”

“We need to eat more vegetables.”

“I’ll make a salad.”

Violet opened the fridge. “We have no lettuce or tomatoes. Or cucumbers. There’s a tub of olives, but they look kind of dried out.”

Poppy gripped what was left of her patience with both proverbial hands. “Then we’ll have to go without vegetables tonight, Violet. I’m sorry. I’ll go to the store tomorrow.”

Violet closed the door of the fridge and turned to her sister. “I’ll go with you if you want. We’re out of laundry detergent and kitty litter, too, so there’ll be a lot to carry.”

Poppy let go of the negative emotions that had begun to sprout in her heart. She really did love this slightly startling young girl she hardly knew. “Thanks, Violet,” she said. “That would be nice.”