Bittersweet (22 page)

The next morning, when Ev returned to Bittersweet after her daily walk, she looked devastated. I hesitated to ask what was wrong, guessing it would be another lovers’ spat and that she’d lash out at me for prying, but she seemed glad to spill her heart.

“Don’t tell anyone,” she began as she sipped the cup of Earl Grey I placed before her, “and please don’t be mad.”

“What happened?”

“We’ve been planning to leave.”

“Who? Where?”

“Me and John, goose. Just to run away together. My father’s going to sign off on my trust any day now. It’s the chance to start a new life.”

“Wait,” I said, my distrust in her growing anew, “you’ve been planning to run away with John? For how long?”

She grimaced. “Since the summer began.”

It was all I could do not to walk out the door. To ask how on earth she could have brought me to this paradise knowing she was just going to abandon me here. She had pretended, for weeks on end, that we were settling into domestic bliss, while harboring this secret all the while? Threatening me with Oregon to get me to work harder, knowing that was exactly where I’d be sent once she had disappeared and the Winslows had moved on? But I didn’t have to say a word—she could read the hurt all over my face.

“Well, you don’t have to worry because it’s not going to happen after all,” she said, dissolving into tears, as though she was the one who deserved sympathy.

I sighed. “Why not?”

She could barely speak through her tears, but managed to say, “He says we have to bring his mother.”

“So?”

“So? I’m not going anywhere with that woman. She hates me. She will literally murder me in my sleep.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t understand. She’ll never let us be happy. But he won’t leave her. So we’re not going anywhere.”

I took her hand. I thought she was being awfully melodramatic, but, then, Mrs. LaChance did seem like a doozy of a mother-in-law. And anyway, wasn’t I pleased to know her escape with John had been thwarted?

“It’ll be okay,” I said, but my voice went up at the end, as though I was asking a question.

She nodded.

“He loves you.” As I said those words, I wondered if love was enough.

I spent that week with Kitty’s journal. Indo’s suggestion that I might someday own Clover had taken on a more urgent meaning in light of Ev’s recent revelations.

John had to keep up the façade of normalcy while they figured out what to do next, so he worked morning till night. Ev was bursting with plans for the baby, and wanted to spend every minute John was occupied with me. But I needed space. I methodically cooked us healthy dinners or pretended I was absorbed in
Paradise Lost
until she wandered down to the cove for a swim or settled in for a catnap. Then I’d spring into action, laying my hands upon that familiar book in the towel in the back of the bathroom cabinet, unwrapping it into another world, until I heard her footsteps and had to hide it away again.

Scanning through, I’d surmised that Kitty’s journal followed the course of a year, from the January entry I’d read that first day to a late December entry that read simply, almost sadly: “First snow. Late this year. The Tannenbaum is decorated. I lit a candle and prayed.”

In between, the yellowed, smooth pages were filled with Kitty’s perfect hand, sloped to the right, as though she was always pushing forward. She used black ink and a fine nib, and wrote her dates either like this: “Monday, July 14th,” or without a day of the week: “June 26th.” Never once did she mention the year.

From her first entry, I had gathered that she was writing sometime between 1929 and 1935, but, aside from occasional mention of the world’s miseries, she did not elaborate much on what was happening beyond her sitting room. That was what disappointed me the most. I had thought the journal would prove illuminating, shed some light on one delicious secret or another, but the subject matter of Kitty’s writing was positively navel gazing. She hardly seemed to lift her head from the page long enough to look out a window, so little did she mention what was happening in the rest of the world—the Great Depression, the gathering storm of what would become the Second World War. Instead she wrote of her silver pattern: “B. is insisting I go down to New York for a look at Tiffany, but I have assured him I’ll do just fine with his mother’s choice”; her lapdogs: “Fitzwilliam is a fine little pug, with a wheezy breath and hardy disposition”; and visitors: “We are being joined this week by Claude, Paul, and Henri. B. and I are so looking forward to offering them shelter until they decide where to settle.”

By Wednesday I had gotten through my first pass. I had nothing to show for it. So I started again, rereading the entries out of order, trying to find something secret, about the unexpected money, or the bankruptcy. On the second pass, I did find one secret, but it was personal and filled my heart with pity: “B. has been carrying on with one of the maids, P. He has assured me it’s over, but it is a mess nonetheless, one I shall be paying for myself, that weighs heavily upon me.” I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that Bard had cheated on Kitty with a servant. It was horrible to think about but
not hard to imagine, especially as I thought of Emily and her children watching the fireworks while Athol hammered the au pair. Poor Kitty, poor Emily.

I was settling down for a third pass over the journal that Friday afternoon, Abby panting at my feet (John and Ev were in the bedroom talking seriously—his low rumble occasionally peppered by the bleat of her voice from behind the closed door), when there was a knock. I stashed the journal, cursing the intrusion, and strode blindly from the bathroom.

“Yes?” I said, as I came in sight of the figure waiting on the steps of the cottage, head turned toward the road. He swiveled back at the sound of my voice. Galway.

“Hello.” His voice was smooth.

I spoke to him through the screen. “Hello.” Abby happily stuck her head out the door for a scratch.

“What’s she doing here?” Galway asked.

“John’s fixing the bathroom sink.”

He sighed. “Sorry I couldn’t make it for Winloch Day.”

I held my hands up in a gesture of liberation.

“I would have liked to see you,” he said carefully.

I shrugged.

“Can I make it up to you?” His hand started to fiddle with the doorframe a few inches from my arm. The ball was firmly in my court.

“No need.”

“Can I take you out?”

“Really, don’t do me any favors.”

“You’re upset.”

“Why should I be upset?”

He dropped his hand. “Because I kissed you and then I disappeared.”

My face felt hot.

“Please,” he pushed. “Tomorrow night? Something casual. Eight o’clock.”

“I don’t know.”

“I found something,” he volunteered. I almost responded, “A girlfriend?” but he went on. “Something in the Winslow financial records.”

If I told him I had plans for something incredible tomorrow night, all he’d have to do was walk a quarter mile from his place and find me lying on our couch to catch me in the lie. Besides, even his company sounded better than another night spent untangling Kitty’s journal, or enduring Ev’s sudden mommy mode.

“All right,” I told him. Abby whined when I pushed the door shut on him. I walked into the kitchen, feeling his eyes on me the whole way.

T
he next morning, frigid air lifted off the water and squirreled through Bittersweet, creeping under our doors and around our windowpanes, as if the century-old structure was simply a lovely puzzle for the wind. I made scrambled eggs in the drafty kitchen with my coverlet wrapped around me while Ev tried, in vain, to start a fire in the woodstove. We ended up wreathed in smoke as Abby, whom John had left with us, barked incessantly. Our only recourse was to open the windows, which just made things colder. After that, we took to our beds.

“I have something to tell you,” I announced.

At the sound of my voice, Abby scratched against our door. When we didn’t respond, she began to whine. Ev rolled her eyes and threw her pillow at the door.

“She’s just taking care of you,” I said. “She can probably smell the baby.” Abby had been following Ev everywhere, much to Ev’s annoyance and my amusement.

“She’s driving me crazy!” Ev yelled. The dog gave one last, pleading whine, then scuttled off, presumably to check her food bowl. Her nails tapped rhythmically across the wooden floor.

Ev flopped back down into bed. “So what’s the big news? You’re pregnant too?”

I hesitated. There was no other way—she’d see me dressing, and press me for details. Even if I refused to tell her, he’d pick me up, so not saying anything would only make his appearance more awkward. And even if she didn’t see his car, all she had to do was ask around and someone would have seen us leaving Winloch together. Better to just be up front. “I’m going out with Galway tonight.”

Ev started giggling.

“I don’t know why that’s funny.”

“Wait, you’re serious?”

“It’s not a date or anything,” I said defensively, climbing from the bed. “Just a chance to talk about the Winslow genealogy.”

“God, Mabel, you’re obsessed with my family. It’s creepy.”

“Believe it or not,” I heard myself snap, “the research is for me. I know it’s hard to fathom I’d do something for myself.”

Her response was an eye roll.

“Anyway,” I continued, “the only reason I told you is I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me and Galway.”

“No,” she said sarcastically, “why would anyone get the wrong idea about you and Galway?”

I dressed in silence, pulling on a couple sweaters. I’d go out in search of Lu and Owen.

I could feel Ev’s eyes peering over her magazine. “You should be careful.”

“I know my way around.”

“With Galway.”

“I’m not good enough to have dinner with your brother?” I scowled.

“I’m just saying he’s complicated, okay? Don’t get your hopes up.”

I turned to her, furious. “You can’t lie on your back,” I spat. “You’ll hurt the baby.” I stormed out of the bedroom, cursing myself for caring, for showing her I cared, for choosing to tell her about my date in the first place, but, most of all, for knowing she was right.

Since finding the turtle corpses, Lu had put in many hours with a bookish, bearded marine biologist from the university—first in multiple calls, on multiple days, and then, on a few occasions, when he’d driven from Burlington right up to Trillium, so she could row him across Winslow Bay to Turtle Point and he could see the horror for himself. They had gathered water and soil and flesh samples, and he’d called his colleagues at Fish and Wildlife, but, so far, no one had found an explanation for the turtle colony’s demise. Lu’s response to uncertainty was vehement determination, and I sensed, the one time I met the poor scientist, simply from the way his shoulders hunched when Lu asked him, for the fiftieth time, if he didn’t really think that global warming was the cause, that he wished he’d never answered her phone call.

Still, I admired her fortitude. “We are stewards of this land,” I had heard her gravely explain to her father. So when I finally found her and Owen down on Flat Rocks that chilly day, about to launch the dinghy out across the bay, even though the last thing I wanted was to be flung about on a blustery lake, I agreed to set out with them for another round of sample gathering.

Owen rowed. Lu sat behind him, in the bow, and I faced him. As we launched across the rocking water, I realized I had hardly ever heard him speak. He brushed his auburn hair off his forehead with his slender fingers, pinkening in my gaze; perhaps shyness was the reason he was so quiet.

At last, we arrived in the cove beside Turtle Point. They had cleared a spot on the beach where we could pull up easily. I wondered how many times they’d been there since Lu and I had discovered the dead turtles.

She darted over the point. Owen and I followed more slowly, cutting brush and grasses from the area where the turtles were—I didn’t care to look closely to see how much they had decayed, but the stench
of rot remained. We placed our cuttings in jam jars, labelless and washed clean, and then Lu gave us masking tape and we recorded the date and the approximate location of the plant we’d cut from. Lu’s jaw was set, her eyes focused. Once we’d filled the canvas bag with two dozen samples, we followed her back down to the beach.

“Oh, I forgot!” she exclaimed, grabbing the last empty jar and darting off to the end of the point without further explanation.

I smiled at Owen. “She’s taking this very seriously,” I said, sounding condescending without meaning to. I suppose I already fancied I’d entered the realm of the adults, in which even the world-weary marine biologist believed one couldn’t count on finding an answer, a solution, to everything.

“Turtles just don’t die like that,” Owen replied. “I don’t know much about them, but she does, and I’ll do anything I can to help.”

“It’s good to help. But sometimes terrible things just happen and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“I don’t believe that,” he pronounced, surprising me with his conviction. He looked up at Lu as she flitted along the point, racing through the trees, another sample in hand. “No. I don’t believe that at all.”