Bittersweet (30 page)

“That’s not true,” I said, my voice shaking. “That can’t be true.”

I knew she was a liar, but she wasn’t lying this time. Her expression was honest, if mean, especially as it melted into a mocking frown. “Poor, sweet Mabel’s getting her bubble burst.” She shrugged. “Guess you had to learn how the world works sometime.”

I felt it then—an angry devastation I had never before felt at her hands. Galway’s lie was like a punch to the gut, but the dismissal in Ev’s eyes as she hurt me was almost more unbearable. She searched my face to locate the pain she’d caused, and then, satisfied as she watched it bloom, left me alone.

I awoke the next morning pretending I’d never met Galway. My heart was a fortress. My body was a nunnery. My mind was a library. Proof would set me free.

“Masha?” I called into the Dining Hall kitchen.

The grandmother emerged from the walk-in refrigerator, wiping her hands on her apron. “Breakfast?” she asked.

I shook my head. “You’ve worked here for a while, haven’t you?”

“Oh boy.” She squinted up at the ceiling. “Thirty-six years?” Her accent was still thick, but her English impeccable. I thought, with sorrow, that Galway had probably had something to do with that. Unacceptable. I was not to think of him.

“Do you think you could remember back around the time Galway was born?” Galway was about the same age as John, and I knew the mention of his name would throw her from the scent while softening her. Still, it was hard for me to say it.

“About what?”

“About who worked here. Specifically the women.”

Masha looked alarmed.

“Oh, it’s just for the research I’m doing. Upstairs, you know? The papers that used to be upstairs. Galway asked me to help him.”

She eyed me carefully for a good long while. “It’s hard to remember.”

“I know,” I said, feeling my heart thump. “But it’s okay if you do.”

Masha swallowed. She stuck out her bottom lip in a gesture of the difficulty of recall, but I knew she knew exactly who’d been working here.

I’d have to try a different tack. “Did you know Ev is sleeping with John LaChance?” A look of panic swept across the old woman’s face. “They have a right to know if it isn’t right.”

Masha’s eyes darted around the Dining Hall. “Please,” she whispered. “Don’t make me say.”

“You don’t have to tell me the maids’ names. Just how many women worked here back then whose names started with the letter P.”

The old woman began trembling before me. I was moved to touch her, to comfort her, but that would have kept me from the
proof. I was in too far to stop now. I had to know. So I crossed my arms and waited.

“They have a right to be happy,” she pleaded. “Please don’t tell them.”

“How many women worked here whose names started with P.?”

Slowly, inevitably, Masha lifted her hand before her, like a secret, as if it held a terrible power, and from her fist bloomed one gnarled finger.

“Good,” I said. Not “Thank you,” not “Oh god,” but, because it felt like a relief to finally know I had been right, to know something for certain, however terrible it might be, “Good.”

S
omething heavy plopped down on the foot of my bed the following morning. I rubbed my bleary eyes and took the room in. Ev slumbered soundly in the other bed. Even the wood thrush wasn’t singing yet.

“I came to say good-bye,” Lu whispered.

“You’re leaving?”

“Mum’s driving me to the bus station.”

“How long will you be at camp?”

“I have not been informed.”

I sat up and swung my feet onto the cool floorboards. I put my arm around her bony shoulder. I was willing to forgive her for putting me in Birch’s fierce path. She’d probably had no idea how he would react. “It’s been great getting to know you,” I said.

“I’m not dying,” she said and laughed, planting a kiss on my cheek. She sprang up from the bed and jumped onto a sleeping Ev, who groaned in complaint.

“Good-bye, old bat,” the little sister teased. “Nice of you to come home.” Then she bounded out of the room, blowing me a kiss from the doorway.

John’s truck pulled up soon thereafter, sooner than I expected. I waved to him from the kitchen as he made a beeline for the bedroom to rouse Ev. The door closed behind him. Abby sought me out in the kitchen, her chocolate eyes urging me to sneak her a bit of leftover chicken. Grateful, she licked my hand and trotted back out onto the porch.

I picked at my bowl of oatmeal and pretended to read
Paradise Lost
. But Lucifer’s soliloquies offered no distraction. I allowed my mind to think about what I knew, and if it was right to tell. Would it make any real difference for John and Ev to know they were siblings? They had already gotten married. They had a baby on the way and were planning to move across the country to a place where they knew no one else. Was it just my selfish curiosity, my hunger to know what they would say and do once I said those words, that made me want to tell them? Or was it worse than that? I wanted Ev to myself, didn’t I? Didn’t I hope that this revelation might send John away? That, when he went away, things would go back to the way they’d been at the beginning of the summer?

Then again, maybe it was crueler to keep the secret, to withhold something so earth-shattering as the truth of someone’s origins from him, origins he deserved to know. Surely John’s paternity was why his mother detested Ev. If I didn’t tell him, Mrs. LaChance would only make their lives miserable, trying to drive Ev away.

I would have wanted to know.

Or at least that’s what I told myself.

My oatmeal was cold when John emerged from the bedroom. He poured himself half a cup of coffee, which he drank in one gulp, spilling a bit down the front of his red flannel shirt. He took in my pajamas. “You want a ride or not?” He whistled to the dog.

We barreled out of Winloch in silence, not because there was nothing to say but, at least on my end, because there was too much. My
mind raced as we accelerated over the deeply pitted road, past the places I had come to know so well. First Bittersweet, with a sleeping Ev inside, disappeared behind a curve in the rearview window. We turned past the Dining Hall, empty but for Masha’s constant watch. Then sped beyond the trio of cottages belonging to Athol, Banning, and Galway. As we revved past each well-worn building, I bid the place a kind of good-bye. I would be returning with a new perspective on things: I would have told John, or I wouldn’t. I would have called my mother, or I wouldn’t. Not to speak was as much a choice as its opposite.

We skidded around the curve where John and Ev had discovered me two nights before, and he cleared his throat as though the memory of me standing before his truck had jostled him.

“So California, huh?” I asked.

“I’ve got a friend out there. Does contracting. Going to help me with a job.”

I nodded, not saying any of the skeptical things racing through my mind—she’ll leave you in a week, you aren’t prepared to be parents, she’s your sister for fuck’s sake, why on earth would you bring your hateful mother along—and on the last count, at least, he seemed to read my mind, because as we passed the turnoff for his mother’s cottage—speeding past it even faster than we had anything else—he said, “My mother’s going to come around.”

“She doesn’t seem to like Ev much,” I pressed.

“Yeah, well, she worked for the Winslows for a long time. She doesn’t want to see me hurt.”

“Or she knows something.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

We burst from the woods, startling the goldfinches. They lifted up from the meadow and sped north, like a yellow arrow. “What if she kept a secret, and the secret was meant to keep you safe, but now she can’t keep it anymore because—”

John slammed on the brakes, and the cab swung forward, then back. Our heads bumped the backs of our seats. I craned against my seat belt to see the animal in our path, the reason we had stopped, but there was nothing there. Instead, John was staring me down.

“Ow.” I rubbed the back of my head, looking in the rearview mirror to see if Abby was all right. She was gamely righting herself.

“I don’t like it when people beat around the bush,” he replied.

“I’m not—”

“What do you know?” he pressed.

“I don’t know anything.”

“May, I’m not an idiot. The Winslows have their dramas, but as far as I know we LaChances have managed to stay above all that. So if you know something about my mother, now’s your chance.”

I was losing my nerve. “John,” I said warmly, gesturing to the road, “I just want to call my mom.”

“And I don’t want Ev to leave here with any doubts. I’m not letting you get out of this truck until you tell me what you know. Because if you don’t tell me, you’ll tell her.” He shook his head. “They hate each other enough as it is. I’m not pouring lighter fluid on that bonfire.”

The chirruping finches had come back to rest on the reeds gently rustling in the breeze off the lake. The sun was warm.

“You don’t want to know,” I said. My eyes began to blur.

“You don’t tell me, I’ll find out. I promise you that. I’ll find out the truth.”

Ever since I had suspected, then known, the truth of John’s paternity, I had imagined telling him, but never what the words would be. In my imaginings, I had had the papers with me, spreading them across the seats, and I had taken him through every step—through Kitty’s journal, and the entry naming P., and the calendars, and the research—so that, by the final if, he could draw his own conclusions. He’d be the one to declare the truth, and I’d be free of my terrible secret, but I wouldn’t have to say it.

But in that moment, in that car, it was just as it had been with Daniel, in the river. Just as startling and clear: I was being asked to be the darkness.

The answer.

The executioner.

The one who did what no one else was brave enough to do.

“John,” I said, “Genevra is your sister.”

I
thought he was going to hit me, but his hand sailed by and punched open the passenger door. Not a word, not a look. I stepped down, he slammed the door closed and sped off, away from me and Winloch, sending up a cloud of brown dust. Once it settled, all that was left of him was the distant roaring of the motor and Abby’s incredulous bark.

I followed on foot. Not because I wanted to catch up but because to go back into Winloch just then seemed an impossibility, and the road led only two ways. I didn’t blame John for leaving me—I knew I deserved it. Just as it had been with Daniel, I would accept my fate. If I must be blamed, I must, but I believed now, from the vantage point of having told, that it had been the only thing to do. As I walked, the memory of Galway’s body—the vividness of his limbs, the points of his hips, the succulence of his lips—swam back into focus. I trained my mind on the minutiae of our lovemaking, how it had felt, and tasted, and, in doing so, did not allow myself to veer off track and into the less appealing realms of his marriage, or John and Ev’s future, or the family he came from—Birch, Tilde, CeCe, Indo—and the secrets they kept.

Not a car passed me, and I relished the country route on my own, dreaming it would go on for miles. Thanks to Lu, I knew this world
well, and I admired the Queen Anne’s lace and chicory lining the gravel road, the familiar, identifiable chirp of the nuthatch. I felt my arms growing tanner in the sun and relished the sweat on my brow. I suppose I knew that to meet civilization again would be eventually, inevitably, to meet the consequences of my actions, so I was disappointed when the gravel gave way to macadam, and when I rounded the final corner to glimpse the corner store.

I had walked nearly six miles, ostensibly to call my mother, but as I drew closer to the telephone box, I wanted less and less to hear her voice. All this time I had planned to tell her I was coming home, but, as my steps carried me along, I realized I didn’t want to. To do so would have been a gesture left over from some long-ago self who needed someone to tell her who to be. The daughter Doris Dagmar had spoken to back in June, dependent, repentant Mabel Dagmar, no longer existed. And I was glad of it. Liberated. I was a maker. Controller of destinies. If I had to leave, I’d cut my own way out.

I went inside and bought a box of red licorice. Then I turned around and walked home.

Ev glanced up from her book when I came in. “Where’s John?” she asked. I hadn’t forgotten about him; no, the vision of his hand punching open the door was seared into my mind, but the long walk in the sun had done its trick of making the morning’s conversation in his truck feel distant. I hadn’t prepared myself for her inevitable question.

“Oh,” I said, taking a moment to gather my lie, “he dropped me off.”

She craned her neck toward the driveway.

“At the store.”

“He made you walk home? That’s six miles!”

“I’m going for a dip. You want to join me?” But we both knew she would say no.

Without Lu and Galway, with my knowledge now passed along to John, Winloch seemed empty, almost as though it were a forgotten place and Ev and I, once again, its only inhabitants.