Bittersweet (31 page)

We made collages. Not of the families we wanted, or the families we had, but for each of the mainstays at Winloch.

Indo: purple flowers, hats, galoshes, box collections, all crammed into one small piece of paper.

Birch: straight lines, a smoldering cigar, a sailboat.

John: Ev’s sketch of his muscled back, set against a photograph ripped from a bikini catalog, so that it appeared John was sitting at the edge of an imaginary cliff face, looking out over a Tahitian sunset.

Melancholy settled over us. We must have eaten, we must have spoken, but all I can recall is the solitude of that night when it finally came—the crickets, the wheedling bats.

We were both waiting for John.

A
t six the next morning, Ev awoke me. She was fully dressed. Her drawers were open and empty. Far in the distance, I could hear the insistent barking of a dog.

“Are you leaving?” I croaked.

“John was supposed to be here an hour ago.”

I sat up. She sat down.

“Did he say anything?” she asked.

“About what?”

“When he left you at the store. It doesn’t seem like him. Was he distracted? Did something happen?”

My pulse raced. “We were talking about his mother.”

“I knew it,” she said, as her lovely brow furrowed. “Today was supposed to be the day. They were picking me up before sunrise.”

“You were going to leave without saying good-bye?”

Her glower turned into an indulgent smile. “You’re a goose.”

But I knew she’d planned to slip off. “Maybe they’ll still come,” I said finally.

She shook her head. “Sun’s up.”

“Tomorrow then.”

“What did he say? About his mother?”

“Just …” I sighed. “I honestly can’t remember. He wants you two to get along.”

“It’s so strange he didn’t stop by last night. It’s not like him.”

My heart was still pounding. I hadn’t expected to tell him Ev was his sister and have life just go on as usual, had I? The truth had consequences. I hadn’t wanted Ev to leave. But seeing her like this, worried, knowing that if she knew the truth she’d be destroyed, I found myself wishing I could go back. Still, if he didn’t come, she’d stay. And I could stay with her.

“Get up,” she said, slapping my legs, pulling a pair of my cold jeans from the floor. In the distance, the dog’s bark was relentless. “You’re coming with me.”

How can I describe my state of mind as Ev and I picked our way through the Winloch woods?

Safety at the weight of Ev’s hand in mine.

Self-assurance that I had done the right thing in telling John—if I’d kept my mouth shut and they’d taken his mother with them to California, the truth would have come out anyway.

Apprehension about John’s reaction to my presence—would he rail, or weep, or curse?

Relief at the possibility that he might have left her to me forever.

Ev and I hardly spoke as we made our way through the forest. The dog had not stopped barking—the persistent sound peppered the quiet morning air, disturbing the natural order of things. The light dappling through the pines was thin. I squeezed Ev’s hand.

We passed into the clearing where I had met the doe, but she wasn’t waiting for us. We cut back into the forest and scrambled up a slope of mossy rocks. Occasionally the road peeked through the trees, but no one drove on it. We were alone.

“Does that sound like Abby?” I asked, as the barking got louder.
We were close enough to hear that the dog was tired. There was a crack in its voice.

Ev shook her head.

“Maybe his mother was sick in the night,” I said. I couldn’t help expanding the story of my innocence, even though I knew all it would take was one explanation from John, and Ev would know what I’d done. Still, I thought, there must be a way out of her knowing I’d been the messenger.

We crept up a final rock, then had to cut back down its ridge to avoid a twenty-foot drop. From our height, we had the advantage of a view over Mrs. LaChance’s roofline. As far as I could make out, John’s Ford wasn’t parked in the driveway. The dog was still barking, and the sound was coming from the house. It was Abby. No matter what Ev said, I knew that bark was Abby’s.

We scrambled down a last, wiggly boulder, only thirty steps from John’s mother’s door.

“Where’s Aggie’s car?” I whispered.

“John gave her today off so she wouldn’t know we were leaving.”

Every footfall, every pop of a broken branch, every crunch of leaf cover, seemed to ricochet between the rock face behind us and the cottage before us. We had no way of knowing what was waiting inside, but, even today, I contend I could feel it as I stepped into its vapor; the air around us turned cold and sad.

“John?” Ev asked boldly. At the sound of us, Abby’s bark turned more insistent. The dog whined. Her distress was coming from underneath the porch, I was sure of it, and I tugged Ev’s arm in that direction, but she pulled me toward the cottage door. The screen was in place, but the wooden door was open, as though someone had stepped inside only a moment before.

“Ev,” I warned, but she opened the screen door and called John’s name again.

“Mrs. LaChance?” I said meekly, following Ev inside.

“He wouldn’t leave her here alone.”

It’s hard to remember, after all the questions, after replaying what was where it was supposed to be, and what was out of place, after the shock of the discovery, and Ev’s mouth like an O, what those moments were like before we found her.

Were we afraid?

We walked through the living room and onto the screen porch. John’s mother was sitting in her wheelchair, her back to us. I can remember thinking her head was at a funny angle. Ev was a half step in front of me.

“Mrs. LaChance?” she whispered.

No response.

Ev placed her hand on the woman’s shoulder, turning her toward us. Then Ev’s hand sprang back. I watched it recoil, and my eyes found their way up to Ev’s face, to her horrified expression, and then down again, scanning over the water view, to the death mask of Pauline LaChance.

The bruises around her neck showed exactly how the life had been squeezed from her.

“Oh my god,” Ev bleated, backing up, as I stood there, frozen. Directly below the floorboards we were standing on, I was aware of the sound of an animal crying, barking, trying to break free. The sound had been going on for a long time, but the buzz in my ears had drowned it out.

I turned. I saw the porch door behind Ev, hanging off its hinges. I pointed. She bolted out the door: “John?” she hollered. I followed her.

Abby’s bark was loud outside. Ev took off down the trail, but I called to the dog, and she answered me. I crouched to look below the porch and saw, through the cracks in the boards, that she was
trapped under the steps—someone had placed an old door in front of the opening she usually used. She was frantic, scraping at the barricade, and I realized her paws were bleeding.

“It’s okay, girl,” I said shakily, trying to move the heavy door myself. I could only lift it a little, so I used all my weight to push it aside and managed, after the third try, to make a gap big enough for Abby to squeeze out. She didn’t stop to thank me or take comfort. Instead, she shot off down the cliff trail, straight after Ev.

Out onto the trail I sprinted, clipping at Ev’s heels. We cut back and forth along the switchbacks. Somewhere ahead of us, where the trail met the air, Abby had started barking again. We raced to catch up.

We came abruptly onto the point. I suppose we both believed that John would be standing there. That time was of the essence. That there was logic, and explanation, and that the end of the cliff held it all.

But it was just air above us. Below us, water. Out to the horizon, nothing but blue. Ev began to speak, but the words couldn’t form themselves. They were like tumbling rocks, too heavy, too full of their own momentum to make sense, impossible to understand over Abby, whimpering and whining, her paws coming dangerously close to the edge of the cliff, stones slipping from underneath her bloody nails and onto the rocks far below.

I watched one as it fell.

There, at the foot of the cliff, his limbs at odd angles, lay John. He was on his back, looking up at us and the new day.

I thought, for a split second, that he was alive. That he might lift his hand and wave.

A
bby wouldn’t leave. Her barks were like gunshots. Ev pulled at the dog’s collar, pleading, cursing, commanding, bits of the earth cascading into free fall onto John below. Then it was my turn to pull at Ev, to gather her and tell her, in a clear, adult voice, that we had to go now. We left the dog behind.

Ev promised to stay in the Bittersweet bathroom. I pulled Fritz’s pillow across the living room floor, ordering Indo’s dogs to barricade the door. Straining to listen, I could hear Abby’s barks echoing through the forest, sharp, distant cracks of terror that measured the distance between John’s body and my ears. Ev began sobbing, and once again I commanded her to calm down; I was getting help. Keep the door bolted, don’t talk to anyone. Fritz stood at attention below me. Ev’s sobbing dwindled into a whimper.

I stood alone in the Dining Hall. Cupped the phone’s mouthpiece with my hand. “Come to Bittersweet. Something terrible happened.”

Back in the bathroom, Ev and I huddled side by side. “It’s my fault” was her constant chant during those waiting hours. Abby’s bark was growing fainter.

“It’s my fault. It’s my fault.” She didn’t want to be told otherwise.

Galway must’ve driven from Boston like a madman. I stood on my tiptoes and peeked out the bathroom’s eyebrow window, confirming it was the growl of his motor I was hearing on the breeze. Ev had dozed off. I met him outside.

Did I mention murder? What I remember is Galway dashing past me, into the house, to his sister’s side, and feeling a sudden, powerful drowsiness descend upon me.

He made me oatmeal with raisins. He led Ev into the bedroom with his hand on her back. Out the kitchen windows, the sun blazed.

I was familiar with the near dead. With the rubbery skin of a half-drowned brother. With the quickness with which one could put life back into the lungs of people who’d seemed to draw their last breath. But I hadn’t guessed how vast the difference was between that and death. Time pressed with the near dead; it ceased to matter when someone was already gone.

With panic, I realized the world was silent. When was the last time I’d noticed Abby’s barking?

“John killed his mother.” These were the words, the thoughts, I repeated as that day turned to night, as our statements were taken, as Bittersweet became the eye of the storm. It was no coincidence that I had told John of his paternity on the day someone had slipped his hands around his mother’s neck and squeezed out her life. That he had jumped to his death only cemented his guilt. That is what I was told, and believed, and said: “John killed his mother.”

Whom did I tell?

Galway, Detective Dan, Birch, Tilde, Athol, Banning, not to mention the many cousins dropping by with well-timed plates of
food, hoping to get a first-person account from the traumatized girls. I told the story (albeit sanitized to protect the innocent) dozens of times, each time, safely ensconced in that cottage—alone at the kitchen table, huddled beside Ev on the porch couch, and, once, from my bed, as though it were just a nightmare that could be swallowed again by blessed sleep.

The police were happy to get our statements at Bittersweet, Birch and Tilde by our sides, Galway taking notes. There was no talk of police stations, or official questioning. It was clear to me from the moment Detective Dan knocked on our door that, as a general rule, Winslows were not suspects.

“What did you see?”

I told them everything, everything but the fact that I had told John he was Ev’s (and Galway’s and Athol’s and Banning’s and Lu’s) brother.

Or that he was Birch’s son.

Or that he had married his own sister.

Or that she was carrying his child.