The Gilly Salt Sisters (37 page)

And just like that, they became three.

T
here was no etiquette guide in the universe that told you how to handle waking up in a house you’d fled from as a teenager with your estranged sister in one room across the hall and your husband’s pregnant teenage mistress in the other. If there were, Claire thought, the prevailing wisdom would surely just be,
Don’t.
Don’t wake up. Don’t rise to the occasion. Don’t go back in the first place.

Her first day home had been full of logistics—which room Dee would take, which of Claire’s old clothes still fit, what to do with Icicle—and her first night had been an agony of bad dreams compounded by a lumpy mattress. She rolled onto her side in her childhood bed, tangling her legs in the faded sheets, and considered scratching a tick on the wall the way prisoners did in movies, but the prisoners only did that because they hoped they might be free one day, Claire knew, whereas she had nowhere else to go.

She sat up and yawned. It was still early, only around six, she guessed, from the color of the sky, but she remembered this bluish hour on Salt Creek Farm all too well. She never admitted it to anyone, but this was also the hour when she occasionally prayed, and so that’s what she did now, slipping her legs over the narrow edge of her bed and sinking to her knees, asking for the backbone to get through the next few hours ahead of her.

Our Father, who art in heaven
, she began reciting in her head, but
her mind soon wandered. She gave up and stared out the window at the bleak acres of mud below her. Scraped empty before the spring flood, the basins were nothing to her. In fact, it was hard to believe they were the source of so much trouble in her mind. She’d spent the past decade blaming the salt for everything acrid in her life: her miscarriages, her increasing struggles with Whit, their money problems. But now, viewing the marsh like this, she saw how wrong she’d been about everything from the ground up.

She scrambled to her feet and rummaged in the wardrobe until she found a set of old clothes: faded denim trousers worn thin and a pale linen shirt. How odd that her old things, her former skin, had been waiting all this time for her to slip back into them, but then nothing ever went away on Salt Creek Farm. The junk around the place was testimony to that. Claire wound her hair back and pinned it into place, then took a hard look in the mirror. She was only thirty-one, but over the past year she’d begun to notice rogue strands of gray colonizing her temples and crown. It didn’t really bother her, though. She figured that since everything else in her life with Whit had faded and muted, why should she be any different?

Claire scowled and yanked the curtains closed. How long would she get alone up here? she wondered. An hour? An entire day? Soon enough Jo would come knocking, and Claire would have no choice but to slide on a pair of boots, pick up a shovel, and step back out into the salt as if she’d never left it. There was only one rule for women on Salt Creek Farm, but it had lasted the ages: If you were standing on the land, you worked it, strong or weak, sick or well, like it or not. It was digging season, Claire’s least favorite time. No matter what chore she ever did in the spring—repairing sluices, scraping mud from the shallow collection basins—she always ended up with dirt packed under her torn fingernails, bloody blisters on her palms, and sore muscles. Jo never got so much as a splinter.

Claire spread her fingers apart on the windowsill, her eye catching on the hefty diamonds in her wedding band, and without
stopping to think she slipped the ring off and tucked it into the top drawer of the bureau. There. That was easy. The first step of separation: Remove the visible vestiges of marriage. Each day, Claire vowed, she would shed another piece of Whit until she was as slick and raw as one of the salt basins, no better than the low land spread out around her. She touched the pearl around her throat and hesitated. That she would keep. She had earned it.

She shivered and buttoned the top button on her shirt placket, and then she flung open her door, blinking against the spring wind. She eased down the steps, skipping the fifth one that always squeaked, and found some boots by the door, and then, without a noise, she slipped out of the house and, for the first time in twelve years, turned herself free.

S
he needed to check on Icicle. Jo had sequestered him in the back of the salt barn the day before, and he seemed fine there, but Claire would have to get some feed in for him, she knew, and straw for underfoot, and he was due for new shoes in two weeks’ time. She tried not to think about the beautiful old tack she’d left behind in the stable on Plover Hill: the hand-stitched saddle, the engraved steel bit, and the stirrups to go with it. The reins she’d worn to buttery softness. Three sets of riding boots, all of her breeches, her dressage coat, plus velvet-covered helmets and kidskin gloves.

She wrapped her arms around herself. These clothes were far lighter than she was used to, and they were currently all that stood between her goose-pimpled skin and the larger world. She wasn’t wearing her coat. She wasn’t wearing socks with her boots. She wasn’t even wearing a bra.

And it was fine. It was better than fine. Laughing a little, she opened the barn and greeted Icicle, then fed him the bit and eased him outside, where she swung up and over his broad back—no saddle, no stirrups, no blanket, even. Just the familiar heat of
Icicle moving through the air, threading through the dunes and then flying down the wet sand onto Drake’s Beach.

She might have run forever—or at least as long as the beach—but a figure stopped her. She squinted, wanting and not wanting it to be who she thought it was. She slowed Icicle to a walk and picked her way closer, and there, wavering like a vision in a dream, was Ethan Stone, gathering sea glass by the water’s edge, his black trousers rolled neatly above his delicate ankles, sandy hair whipping across his eyes, not looking a thing as he had the last time they’d met in church. He hastily stood up when he saw Claire coming.

“Claire. Out again, I see,” he said, reaching up and helping her dismount, his hands resting on her hips as he drew her level with him. His voice was husky in the morning air, deeper than when he was conducting services, and the one word of her name was a whole song when he said it.

She took a quick step away from him. She hadn’t slept, she was disoriented, and what she wanted to do was fold herself against his chest. She wanted to lift the edge of his shirt just a little and test his skin to see if it was cool and slippery, like swimming-pool tiles, or warm like the belly of a sleeping cat. Instead she curled the reins around her hand and wished she’d worn a pair of gloves, not to mention a bra.

“What are you doing all the way out here?” Ethan asked as she relaxed one of her fists and smoothed a stray piece of hair off her face.

Claire knew what he was really asking. What was she doing so close to the marsh? She looked down at her feet. “I come here sometimes.”

Ethan gazed out at the water. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve stood at the edge of the Atlantic? I’ve forgotten how green it can look. I wonder if I still have my old sea legs.”

“I thought you purposefully gave up a life of fish.”

Ethan laughed. “I did. But not all of the old tar got removed.”
He turned his gaze on her. “What about you? Do you ever regret the life of salt you left?”

Claire avoided his eyes. How would she even begin a catalog of her life’s laments? At the start or the end?
Maybe the middle
, she decided, for if she wanted to name the beginning, it would have to be Ethan. “No,” she said.

Of course, he didn’t know she’d just come full circle, back to the place where she started. She wondered if his gaze would change when he finally started hearing all the things that were whispered about her in Prospect, if he hadn’t already. If so, she figured she might as well be the source. She took a deep breath and bowed her head.

“Okay, sometimes I do wonder if I made the right choice,” she admitted, and then a confession slipped out of her that she had no intention of revealing. “I had a miscarriage sometime ago,” she heard herself say. “My fourth one.” She hadn’t meant to tell Ethan that part of her story—not so abruptly—but the words tumbled from her lips accidentally, like a plate falling from a high shelf.

Ethan took a step closer to her and reached out as if to take her hand, then thought better of it. “I’m so sorry, Claire.” He meant it, Claire could tell, but was he grieved as a priest or as someone who’d once loved her? She knew it shouldn’t matter, but it did. She rested her chin against her chest. How many times had they stood in this same spot just like this? How long had it been since Claire had felt so safe?

If she was confessing, she thought, she might as well tell it all, whether the context was human or divine. There were things she had wanted to say to him for years, and who knew if she would ever get another chance as good as this one? She lowered her voice out of habit. The walls in Turner House had been porous. It was not a house that facilitated the keeping of secrets. She stared up at Ethan. “I’m sorry I never let you say good-bye. I should have. After the fire I just—”

He stepped closer. “We were so young, Claire. I didn’t handle things the right way with you.” All these years she’d been waiting
to hear words like these, but now that she just had, she found they weren’t enough. She wanted him to say he’d been wrong.

He brushed a toe in the sand. “I feel partly responsible for the fire, too, you know. If you hadn’t been so upset, you might not have lit the match.”

Claire fell silent at that, remembering the awful crush of panic she’d felt in the barn as the temperature had risen and ashes swirled around her head.

Ethan cleared his throat. “So how is Jo?”

Claire shrugged. Her sister seemed a stranger to her now, even with a thin wall between them. She bit her thumb. She could feel the heat radiating from the fronts of Ethan’s thighs. And then, without thinking twice about it, she reached up and shook her hair loose, remembering how Ethan used to inch his fingers across her scalp and hold the back of her head steady when he bent down and kissed her—his lips as tender as the sole of a newborn’s foot. Claire leaned closer, but Ethan cleared his throat and took a step away from her, as if he’d been reading her thoughts.

A rush of shame came over her, and she tucked her hair back behind her collar again. She shuffled her feet on the damp sand, trying to think of what to say, but longing had made her dumb. She reached up and began winding her hair back into its braid, pulling as tightly as she could until every last piece was in place. She would put herself back together, she thought. It could be done. Choices could be made and unmade, truths blotted out like the Virgin’s face.

He’s a priest
, she told herself as she turned back to Icicle.
He’s taken vows to keep people’s secrets.
Yet her soul still rested uneasy. She closed her eyes, but all she could conjure were the grayish series of salt piles heaped along the edges of the marsh at the end of a long, hot summer. What would they say if they could speak, Claire wondered, and would it even matter?

An engine sputtered in the distance, and she tensed. Across the dunes she spied the glare of a red car, the one she used to drive, speeding toward Salt Creek Farm. Without hesitating she threw her leg over Icicle, who snorted and took an uneasy step sideways.

“Claire!” She could hear Ethan calling her name, a question buffeted by the wind, but there was no time to answer it. For the second time since Ethan had returned, Claire spun her back on him and fled. At that moment all she cared about was beating Whit back to Salt Creek Farm.