Bittersweet (16 page)

Trillium was empty and unlit, thumping with the muffled sound of the party. I realized that my ears were ringing from the band, and that I was, in fact, a little drunker than I’d thought. I couldn’t find
a light switch, then remembered a flashlight I’d seen just inside the screen porch earlier in the day. With it, I found my way to the downstairs bathroom. I sat on the toilet and let myself shake, setting free all the strangeness of the interaction. Once my hands were still, I rose again to wash them. My face was a shock in the mirror—I had spent so many hours looking at Winslows that I expected aquiline features and a rosebud mouth. Instead, I was met with my moon face, my nonexistent cheekbones, my dull, small eyes set too far apart. My dress was too tight, too black, too polyester. I would sneak out the back door and back to Bittersweet.

My feet led me into the summer room, where Tilde and Birch had hosted their opening-of-the-summer party only a few weeks before. Through the open door, I could hear the crickets pulsing in time, vibrant laughter drifting in from the dance party. I remembered the uncomfortable moment between Indo and Tilde at the summer’s opening dinner, meant, somehow, for me, but I pushed away the recollection in the interest of the Van Gogh. What I wanted now, to comfort myself, as a balm against the strange turn the night had taken, was just to see the magnificent painting in the shadows.

The wall where it should have been was blank. I cast my flashlight over the empty space again and again, searching desperately, but the Van Gogh wasn’t there.

“They put it away for outsiders,” came a voice, and I jumped out of my skin. I thought of Murray first, and Galway second, but for better (or worse) it was neither of them. My flashlight revealed Athol sitting across the room, his sleeping baby in his arms. He’d been there the whole time. “Sorry to frighten you,” he said, not sounding sorry at all.

“It’s such a beautiful painting,” I said. “I just thought I might be able to visit it.”

Athol blinked in the glare from the flashlight. I moved the beam
from his face. I could hear his even inhalations, and the wheezing of the dreaming baby. “Can I get you something, May?” he asked, sounding just like when he scolded little Ricky.

“No. No. I’ll go find Ev.”

I made my way hastily onto the porch, my steps gaining momentum as I let the screen door swing shut behind me. I was grateful to be back in the world of the crickets. I started toward the party and ran smack into Galway. “You okay?” he asked.

“I think your brother thought I was trying to steal something.”

Galway laughed. “Which brother?”

“Athol.”

“The only thing he has to fear is time stealing his good looks,” he said loudly, as though he wanted Athol to hear. To me, he added, “He takes everything too seriously.”

I realized my hands were trembling again, and let Galway take one of them. The touch of him stilled me. And then he said, “I want to show you something.”

H
e led me straight behind Trillium, away from the music and people. It was even darker in the forest. I couldn’t make out a trail, but he seemed to know the way, leading us around trees, pointing out roots to avoid, rocks to step over. His voice was gentle and his hand firm.

Then, abruptly, he stopped, reaching out to feel the trunk directly before us. I could sense its imposing size—it loomed, bigger than the other trees around it. Still, I was surprised when he began to climb it. He turned and instructed, “Follow me.” I tested a two-by-four nailed sturdily into the wood. There was nowhere to go but up.

Galway climbed carefully, checking each rung as he ascended, and I stuck closely behind him, grateful that the darkness masked how far below we would find the forest floor. The footing was sure and secure, but as we got higher, I began to wonder how much farther up we’d have to go in order to reap whatever rewards were offered at the top. A view? A grand, secret tree house? A spaceship? Anything seemed possible.

Then, at once, the canopy gave way. We were close to the stars. I felt Galway scramble onto something wide above me. His arm reached down and guided me onto the platform on which he was standing. My heart raced as I vowed not to step an inch in any direction lest I
plunge to my death. I held his elbow tight. But I couldn’t help notice the stars, bigger and brighter above us. One of them streaked across the sky, leaving a bright line in its wake.

There was another one. And another. Magic, even though I knew it was just meteors. We stood beside each other with our heads tipped back, pointing and wordless, as each star tore across the sky. I took in the world below us too—the lake visible only where it reflected lights from the bay. And then, there came a burst of fireworks.

“Just in time,” Galway murmured.

They came quick and large from Burlington, bursting open the sky above us all. “Are they for the wedding?” I asked, impressed.

“It’s Independence Day.”

I’d completely forgotten it was the July Fourth weekend; I realized I hadn’t seen any buntings or decorations anywhere at Winloch. “Don’t you guys celebrate?”

“Mum thinks it’s tacky. We used to say we observed Bastille Day instead, but that just sounds pretentious.” The fireworks were still exploding above us—red, green, swirls of golden light. “As if it isn’t pretentious to call it Winloch Day and have everyone dress in white. It’ll be next weekend.”

I nodded up at the sky, and felt Galway draw closer. We watched the fireworks in silence, listening to the booms ricochet and crescendo across the water. As the sky lit up, he stepped before me, took my face in his hands, and kissed me.

He tasted of blackberries. I forgot all fear that I might not know how to do it right, and I kissed him back. And let me tell you, it was beyond what I had ever imagined, that first kiss, out of my dreams, under the stars, our bodies growing warm and together, a sweet truth surrounding us, the lake lying below us like glass.

Our bodies touched, but softly. I didn’t know if he was being reticent for my sake, but I appreciated the quiet lust between us, nothing of Murray’s aggression or need. We stopped to watch the finale. I
thought he was going to kiss me again, but he spoke instead. “I hate to do this, but I have to drive back to Boston tonight.”

“Oh.”

“Work stuff.”

“What is it”—I felt embarrassed not knowing already, but couldn’t help myself, because the omission combined with Ev’s disparagement had made me wonder if he didn’t kill people for a living—“what is it that you do?”

He laughed, brushing one hand through his hair. “I fight for immigrant rights.”

“Oh, good.”

“Akin to being a hit man in this family.” As if he’d read my mind.

I took one last look up at the shooting stars.

“I’d like to stay,” he said wistfully, before swinging his foot back down into the open space in the floor. We made our way down the ladder carefully, his body just below my own, and, as I reached the bottom, he kissed the nape of my neck.

I spent the next few hours of the wedding reception dancing with Lu, oblivious to the adults who may or may not have been scrutinizing me. Ev had slipped off in the time I’d been with Galway, but even that I didn’t care about—I embraced the numb bravery brought on by intoxication.

The music finally ended at two in the morning. My feet ached from dancing, and I was drunk and alone—Lu had wandered off with Owen. I clomped to the Dining Hall and swayed up the steps to my attic lair. I was too drunk, too happy, to really work, but it felt cozy in there, just the place to collect myself and take stock: I had had my first kiss, and it had been with Galway Winslow. As I touched his family’s papers, I remembered all of it, his hands on my face, the taste of him, and I held still and closed my eyes, reliving each detail again and again.

My hands settled on the family tree we had looked at together, all the names of all the powerful men who’d passed this kingdom down to their firstborn sons. My eyes followed the bloodline of Samson Winslow and his wife, Bryndis Iansdottir, down to their firstborn son, Banning, and his wife, Mhairie Williams. Reading the family tree from the bottom up, the firstborns were again prominent: Athol had descended from Birch and Tilde; Birch had come from Bard and Kitty Spiegel.

But that was where the neat line of inheritance fell apart. For Birch’s father, Bard Winslow, the second generation born into Winloch, was not his family’s firstborn son. He’d had a brother older by two years. Gardener Winslow, born in 1905.

My first thought was that Gardener must have died as a child, a historically plausible explanation for altering the clear line of inheritance. I turned to the Winslow papers and searched for his name, almost giving up until I found a copy of a marriage certificate from 1938: Gardener Winslow and a girl named Melanie.

“So why didn’t the firstborn son inherit?” I mumbled aloud, looking again at Bard, his younger brother, shining from the family tree.

I turned back to the other documents—the bankruptcy papers from 1932, the abundant bank statement from 1934, the family tree that listed Samson Winslow’s death as 1931. They were telling me a story. According to the inheritance papers, Bard’s father, Banning, was head of Winloch for only five short years, from his father’s death in 1931 until 1936, and yet he remained alive well into the fifties.

What if—I thought, my heart pounding as the idea formed—what if Bard Winslow had done something so extraordinary to save his family’s fortune that it had not only brought the Winslows back from certain bankruptcy but allowed him to both supersede his older brother’s inheritance of the Winloch leadership, and depose his father decades early?

If Bard had done something tremendous to keep Winloch for his family, I wanted to find out what it was.

I bolted back down the stairs, into the great, empty hall. I raced for the phone. I found Galway’s Boston number in the family directory. I dialed. He would be back home by now, and I could hear his voice.

The phone rang five times. I nearly hung up before a groggy female voice answered: “Hello?”

“I’m sorry,” I said too enthusiastically for four in the morning, “I must have the wrong number, I’m calling for Galway Winslow.”

“He’s not home yet,” the half-asleep woman answered, at which point I promptly hung up.

“He’s not home yet.” Which meant it was her home too. Maybe he had a female roommate, or some other explanation. But the potential of what this meant itched at me. All at once, I felt exhausted and sad. The momentum I’d built dwindled. The connections my mind had made withered. I couldn’t remember what had so excited me when I’d been upstairs only a moment before. My limbs were leaden, my tongue dry. I was no longer drunk, but the alcohol was still infecting me, making the distance to Bittersweet seem vast. I swayed out into the night alone.

Was it still even night? It’s hard to remember, all these years later, but I can see myself picking my way to the road, as though I am a bird flying above myself, and I can make out my girlish limbs, my downtrodden form, without a flashlight, pressing toward the cottage, toward bed, so perhaps I was already touched by the good light of dawn.

I felt a wakefulness, a need to glimpse the water. I was quiet, quieter than I might have been, padding down toward the cove for a chance to peek at the lake on that night one last time.

When I was halfway down, a purple sound froze me in my place. I thought, at first, it was the cry of a dying animal, that of something
feral caught in a trap. A moan, a yelp. But then, as I listened, I realized it was laughter. Human laughter. A yawning. Then more moaning. As I crouched, and moved to get a better glimpse of what was below me, on the rock where I had met Lu, I realized what I was hearing.

There, below me, a nude Ev sat astride the face of a naked man. She raised herself up in the early light and ululated into the sky, her breasts heaving, then brushing against his belly, with her rocking movement. I knew what he was doing, but I had never seen that, and certainly never done it. Her pleasure was contagious as she bucked atop his mouth until her voice rose into a fevered pitch of expressed pleasure, whooping up and up and then breaking. She collapsed atop him.

They lay still for a moment, his hands caressing her back, until she disentangled herself. And that was when I saw his face. Not Eric, as I had feared, but John. He turned her onto her back, and right there, on the rock, for any passing boat to see, he fucked her.

I was the only one watching, and I watched John and Genevra until the end, until, as he came, her voice broke into throaty sobs, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, called his name, and told him she loved him. She seemed desperate. She seemed happy. He knelt before her and lifted her up into his arms, burying his face in her neck. They sat like that, nude, wrapped around each other, until I noticed that the day was truly upon us and, unless I wanted to be caught spying, I should make my way to bed.

I
swam like a fish that first week of July, as though my life depended upon it. What I was swimming from, or to, I wasn’t sure, but if the previous weekend’s events were any indication of what could happen in two short days, I could not imagine what the rest of the summer might bring.