The Gilly Salt Sisters (14 page)

Whit frowned, considering what she’d said, which was new for Jo. Usually Mama told her to be quiet and get back to work, and Claire just prattled at her. Whit bit his lips. “Everything has a mother. Even Jesus.”

Jo thought of the chipped outline of Our Lady, faceless in her
eternal vigil, and shrugged. Whit sank down in the sand next to her, his shoulders bowed over the hole she’d dug. “Sometimes I wish I had a different mother,” he mumbled, tracing a pattern in the wet sand with one finger. “Mine’s not that nice.”

Just then the eavesdropping shadow of his governess came to life. “Whit Turner,” she scolded, hauling him up by his elbow. “You know you’re not supposed to be down here, and you’re certainly not supposed to be telling tales on your family. You’re a Turner. You have to act like one. Now, come on, we’re going to be late for tennis.”

Whit rolled his eyes and grinned at Jo. His hair was tousled, like Henry’s used to get, and she had an urge to reach out and smooth it. It wasn’t that she missed Henry’s company, exactly—for he had led his brief life with his nose buried in encyclopedias and books, his weak heart fluttering like a restless canary in his chest. It was more that she missed the possibility of it. She looked at Whit and then, knowing that her mother wouldn’t like it one scrap, threw out an invitation. “If you come back tomorrow,” she said, pointing down the beach with her spade, “I’ll be over there. I know where there’s sand dollars.”

Whit’s governess started dragging him away, but before they got too far, he turned and yelled, “If you find out where those clams come from, let me know!”

Instead she got an earful about Ida Turner that evening when she told her mother about the encounter. “I’d make another friend if I was you,” Mama said, slamming a bowl of mash and peas on the table.

Jo pouted. “But why?”

Mama snorted. It was a stupid question. Even Jo recognized that. She braced herself for a lecture. “Because,” Mama declared, “no matter what you do, you’re never going to get the mud out of your clothes, the brogue out of your voice, or the brine out of your blood.” She stuck a spoon in the potatoes and peas and kicked her chair away from the table. “Ida is scared of sinking,
even though she’s squatting up on Plover Hill like a big old crow. But trust me, Ida knows plenty about scraping bottom.”

Jo sighed and bent her head to her plate, taking a bite of the clams. For the first time, she found the taste of their salt unpleasant. “I bet the Turners don’t eat like this,” she said, pushing her dish away.

Her mother regarded her coolly. “The less you worry about the Turners, the better. Now, hush up and eat the food God’s given you.” Claire started squalling, and Mama shushed her. “Not you, too,” she said, dipping a crust of bread into some milk and handing it to Claire. “Don’t tell me there’s another one in this house complaining about the order of things.”

Jo bit her tongue and tried to swallow the rest of her meal. Had she been complaining? She didn’t think so, but it was hard to know how Mama would take things sometimes. Jo looked out through the kitchen window, across the marsh. Beyond it, just over the dunes, lay Drake’s Beach and the memory of her afternoon with Whit.

“Did you hear me?” Mama said. “After supper the far ponds need scraping. Take your sister with you, but don’t let her wander none.”

Jo sighed and looked at Claire, who blinked her wide toddler eyes, her flame-red hair gnarled in fierce little curls. “I won’t,” Jo promised, but under the table she had her fingers crossed. She couldn’t promise the same for herself.

T
he next week Whit surprised her, screaming down the beach on a motorbike. It was ridiculous. The bike was too big for him, and he wobbled like a punching clown, but there he was, flying down the shore, a wicked smile plastered on his mug. Right before he got to Jo, one of the tires caught a stone and the bike pitched sideways, throwing Whit off and spraying sand in an arc.

“Are you okay?” Jo said, running to help him.

Whit stood up, grinning like a hyena, and brushed off his jeans. “Nice, huh?”

Jo put her hands on her hips, her heart pounding. Ever since Henry’s death, she’d been shy of accidents. “No, it’s not.” An awful thought occurred to her. “Did you steal it?” Although why Whit would have needed to steal anything was beyond her.

He smirked. “The Weatherly brothers lent it to me.”

“What?” She knew the Weatherly brothers—Tim and Hank. All the girls in town did. They were a senior and a sophomore in high school and famous for their pompadours, the packs of cigarettes they kept rolled in their T-shirt sleeves, and their motor vehicles. The Weatherly brothers were Prospect’s pet grease monkeys. “Why would they give a bike to a little kid like you?”

Whit shrugged. “Dunno. Why do people do anything?”

“But look. You scratched it.” It was true. Along the back fender, there was a four-inch gouge in the red paint. Whit crouched down to have a look. “You’re going to get it now,” Jo said, unable to keep from gloating. “You know how the Weatherly brothers are about their transportation.”

Whit sat back on his heels. “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think what?”

“I don’t think they’re going to mind.”

Jo gaped at him. “Are you crazy? Of course they’re going to mind. Timmy almost knocked Hank’s head off last spring when he crashed their jalopy.”

Whit rubbed his thumb over the scratch. An uncanny adult look settled on his face. “Yeah, but I’m just a little kid. What can they do to me? Besides, if I come home beat up, they’ll have to explain to my mother why they loaned the bike to me in the first place, and you know as well as I do that Timmy and Hank aren’t such great talkers.”

His logic was impeccable. Jo was impressed.

“I’ll just tell them it was there all the time,” he said. “They won’t believe me, but what choice will they have? They’ll end up
blaming each other, and that’ll be that. Now, come on, help me push this thing upright.”

It was the first inkling Jo ever had of the kind of man Whit would eventually turn into. The seed was there inside him the whole time, but that day she was blinded by the optimism of the cloudless summer sky, tricked by the easy breeze blowing on her neck. She was barefoot in the sand, and the heat seeped through her arches into her calves. There was something about Whit that filled up the empty spots in Jo’s bones. When she was with him, she felt like she had a little piece of Henry tethered back on the earth. “All right,” she said, and knelt to help him. She giggled. “We’re partners in crime.”

Whit did something then that she would never forget, a gesture that seemed innocent at the time but would later infect her, the way a rose thorn buried in flesh could fester. He pushed the hair back out of his eyes and took his hands off the bike. “We’re partners in everything,” he said, spitting in his palm and holding it out.

“Partners,” she said, spitting in her own palm and pressing it to Whit’s. Neither of them said anything for a moment, and the spot where their hands were joined grew warmer.

Jo stood up. “Come on. Let’s go back. I bet the Weatherly brothers will be wanting their bike.”

Whit said something unexpected then. “I heard my mother saying she wanted to buy up your mom’s place,” he said, “but don’t worry. I’ll make sure your salt stays safe.” Jo took a step back, stumbling over a rock. Her temper wasn’t like Claire’s, who at age three could already throw a howler of a tantrum, but now she felt a tingling travel up her spine and settle at the base of her brain. She remembered what Ida had said to her at Henry’s Mass.
It should have been you.

Jo stepped forward and gave Whit’s shoulder a shove. “Shut up, Whit Turner. You don’t know what you’re saying.” She spit thick saliva.

Whit shrugged and started heading back toward the dunes
without her. “Suit yourself,” he said. “I’m just telling what I heard.” He paused and held out his hand. “Are you coming? I’ll give you a ride on the bike before I take it back.”

Jo hesitated. In the house, she knew, her mother would be pouring cool glasses of milk and setting out cold biscuits, squinting at the clock and wondering where she was. But there was Whit’s hand, hovering in the air, an open invitation. Jo took it.

“Don’t worry,” he said, pulling her along as if he’d been doing it forever. He moved with all the grace her brother never had. “All that stuff is for the grown-ups. It’s nothing to do with us.”

“Sure,” she answered, knowing full well she was lying as only a true Gilly could.

W
hit was the first, last, and only friend Jo ever called her own. Theirs was a backstairs friendship, conducted on the sly on Drake’s Beach, only in fine weather, and only when it was the two of them. Skirts got wide, then straight, and then short, and Elvis broke into music with his greased-back hair and crazy hips, but Whit and Jo’s private universe stayed steady.

She taught Whit to fish, skip stones, whistle with two fingers, and whittle, and he taught her to waltz, smoke, and swear in French. Perhaps if they’d gone to the same schools or mixed in any of the same circles, they wouldn’t have remained friends, but as it was, their differences served to lace them tighter instead of pull them apart. They knew not to expect too much from each other and so year after year, as soon as the lady’s slippers bloomed, they took off to the shore and picked up where they’d left off before the snow started to fall.

“Hey,” Whit would always say the first time he saw Jo after a long winter, “you’ve been a stranger.”

“But not as strange as you,” she’d snap, and they’d both crack up. Whit had a way of laughing—all the way from the bottom of his belly—that made Jo want to join in with him. Back then she thought it was because his pranks and antics were so outrageous,
but in time she came to believe it was because he had the kind of laugh that was either with you or against you, the type of noise that made you realize that in spite of all Whit’s congeniality, you still had better choose carefully around him.

They became blood friends over a frog when Jo was eight and Whit was six. Normally the two of them frolicked on the beach, but in this instance he dared her to take him into the marsh. Ever since the first time she’d shown him the place, he’d been insatiably curious about it.

The frog was a throaty, barrel-chested specimen, squatting in a cluster of eelgrass. Whit held him while Jo marveled at how human his knobby toes looked. “Let’s name him,” she suggested. “Let’s call him Sir Greenheart.” Since Henry’s death she’d been the one poring over his books about knights and pirates.

Whit looked at her askance. “It’s a frog, Jo. Not a prince. But you’re welcome to try to kiss him.” He thrust the frog toward Jo’s lips, but she didn’t scare so easily.

“Let him go.” The poor thing was bucking and twisting in Whit’s palms.

“What? Are you crazy? Do you know how much I could scare my governess with this?”

Jo put her hands on her hips. “I’m serious.”

“I am, too. Just picture it. She peels back her covers tonight, and voilà! She has company in her bed!” The frog lurched again, and Jo found herself wishing that amphibians had teeth. Before Whit could do anything about it, she leaped forward and knocked his hands apart. Liberated, the frog bounded into the reeds.

Whit’s face turned puce. “What a yellow-bellied girlie thing to do, Jo Gilly!”

She narrowed her eyes. “Well, you’re a mean, liver-sucking boy!”

She expected Whit to retaliate, not grab her hand. When she closed her fist, he put his fingers on her wrist, right where the pulse beat. “Shh,” he said, “don’t move.” He opened her fingers.

She felt a prick in the center of her palm. “Ouch!”

Whit grinned at her. He was holding his open pocketknife over his own palm, she saw, and as she watched, he poked it into his own flesh, producing a smear of blood. “Give me your hand.” He grabbed her wounded palm and pressed it fast to his. In between their skin, Jo could feel a warm, mingling slick. “Now we’re even steven,” he said after a moment, breaking his grip and snapping his pocketknife closed. “We’re one and the same. No matter what happens, there’s a little bit of you in me and some of me in you. I know how much you miss your brother. Now you’ll never be alone again.”