Juno's Daughters (7 page)

Jenny pictured the blond young man in the kitchen. “Speaking in tongues?” she said. “Really? What about snakes?” Jenny wondered idly if Frankie had given her sister the tattoo that she'd stuck in her pocket for her.

He shot her a glance. “I wish I could say snakes, if that would impress you, but no. Alas, no serpents.”

“And where did all this holy rolling take place, if I may ask?”

“You may. Colorado Springs.”

She nodded. “I'm from Sacramento.”

Not far from the tree stump Frankie called to Lilly and Miranda in response to a command that Jenny had not heard, “Something to drink, too, or just cookies?”

“If you can carry a soda,” Lilly yelled after her, “we'll take that, too. Otherwise just cookies.”

David tossed a new log on the fire and it sparked, but the cold still licked at their backs. Jenny wondered who among them had noticed Trinculo arriving at the party with Lilly. Probably everyone. As Dale was fond of pronouncing,
everyone knows everything
. As if on cue, she heard a loud guffaw from Lilly in the vicinity of the barn. She hoped that she and Miranda would have the sense not to burn it down.

“You're not from here, then.” Trinculo swept his gaze over the people around the fire. “Though, I don't suppose many people are.”

David broke a piece of wood over his leg. “She's been here long enough to break a few hearts.”

Mary Ann headed in to get a jacket. “Stop putting on a show, David. Your heart will mend,” she said.

He carried the ax to the woodpile for more logs. “Will not,” he said, but he was smiling.

Trinculo raised his eyebrows at Jenny. “Old boyfriend?”

“Old friend.”

“I see.”

They watched the flames in silence.

When Frankie returned she came dragging a blanket from around her shoulders to the grass like a medieval robe. She carried a plate of cookies and had a Jones soda tucked under her arm.

“Have you seen Lil? She and Miranda asked me to get them some snacks, and when I came back out they were gone.”

“I don't know, babe. Maybe they went for a walk.”

“But I brought them cookies.”

“I'll take one. Do you mind?” Trinculo plucked a cookie off the plate and gobbled it in one bite.

Jenny laughed.

He bugged his eyes out at her. “I'm starving.”

Frankie was unimpressed by his antics. She leaned her head against Jenny's shoulder. “There's plenty of food inside the house.”

Jenny pulled her daughter in to her side and adjusted the blanket so that it enveloped them both. The wind from the ocean had picked up a little and it was rustling the very tops of the pines.

Trinculo looked at them for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “In the house.” He glanced back at Jenny. “Can I bring anyone anything?”

“No thanks,” said Frankie quickly, before Jenny could answer.

An hour or so later, Trinculo had not returned to the fire. Jenny, realizing that she had not heard Lilly's voice in quite a while, wandered off in search of her. She found a variety of people milling in the house around the snacks table, but no Lilly and no Trinculo. Peg was in the kitchen mixing baking soda into a glass of water.

She saw Jenny and nodded toward her concoction. “Bit of indigestion. This always helps.”

“Have you seen Lil?”

Peg shook her head and drained her glass. “No. Have you seen Chad? I ought to give that boy a good kick in the keister for bringing green-toothpick brownies to the welcome party. The place is swarming with mainlanders and children. He should know better than that.”

“Frankie didn't?”

“I put them up there.” Peg inclined her head toward the top of the fridge. “Frankie's in the back room watching TV. She told me that would be all right with you.”

“It's fine. She'll just fall asleep in front of it anyway.”

Jenny took a cracker off a near-empty tray and nibbled the edge of it thoughtfully. She grabbed a few more and headed for the deck. A number of people tried to draw her into a conversation, or a song, or an argument, but she shrugged off each effort and kept wandering around the house and the yard until her handful of crackers was gone. The absence of both Lilly and Trinculo was beginning to seem ominous. She ducked around behind the couch where she had tossed her bag and fished through it for her phone.

The light was flashing and she had several texts waiting. She knew they were from Lilly before the message even rolled across her screen. Lilly was the only one who ever texted her, and Lilly only ever did it when she needed something. Jenny crouched behind the couch reading her daughter's messages through the curtain of hair that fell around her face.
@Egg Lake. Trink hi. Pls. Cm
.

Trink high? Jesus. Jenny snapped the phone shut and, struck by a bolt of mother's intuition, grabbed the afghan off the back of the couch. She wove through the clumps of people milling in the house, past a couple kissing on the porch, and set out over the cool grass with only the full moon lighting her way. It grew dark on the trail from the pasture and the occasional root or rock caught her foot and sent her stumbling now and then, but she could see enough of the path to keep from falling flat on her face. The pine needles under her feet were damp with fog and the path held cold corners, like the pockets of chilled water in a sun-warmed stream. She wrapped the afghan around her shoulders and narrowly avoided walking into a broken branch. After a few minutes she began to hear voices. A girl laughing. Miranda. Lilly's voice chiming in after. She laughed, too, but Jenny knew her daughter well enough to detect the frustration in her tone. A man's voice. Then splashing.

Jenny burst out into the clearing to see three figures silhouetted in the moonlight at the edge of the T-shaped dock on Egg Lake. Only two of them were wearing clothes.

Lilly had her hands on her hips. “C'mon. You're going to freeze to death,” she said. “Come
now
.”

“Maggie,” drawled a man's voice. “You are ruinin' my liquor.”

Lilly threw up her hands. “Who the hell is Maggie?”

“It's from
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
.” From Miranda, “He played Brick.”

“He's closing his eyes,” wailed Lilly. “Oh God, we can't let him go to sleep.”

“What have we here?” Trinculo waved his arms in the air above his body. “A man or a fish? Dead or alive?”

“Well, that's the right play, at least,” said Miranda.

The dock shook with Jenny's footsteps. Both girls turned to look at her, their eyes reflecting the moonlight. Trinculo lay on the edge of the dock on his back, with his feet brushing the water.

“What in the
world
is happening?” Jenny reached for a pile of clothing and finding it sopping, let it lie. “Lilly, what did you
do
?”

“I didn't do anything,” she cried. “I mean, I brought him some brownies. But they had green toothpicks in them, so it was obvious that they were hash brownies. And he didn't have to go eat
three
of them.”

Jenny leaned over Trinculo's prone body to look at his face. He had a fine form, she could see that even in the dark. Broad shoulders. Narrow hips. Strong arms.

His eyes flew open and he stared at her with dilated pupils.

“Get up,” she said.

He did so, wordlessly, and she wrapped him in the afghan. He began to shiver as soon as the blanket touched his skin.

“Where are his shoes?” Jenny practically barked the question at Lilly.

Her daughter, uncharacteristically docile, searched around for Trinculo's shoes and, finding them, set them by his feet so that Jenny could help him step into them.

“I think I'm going to throw up,” he groaned, bending forward. He doubled over and retched off the dock into the water.

Miranda took a step backward. “Eww.”

When Trinculo straightened Jenny put her arm around him and began to lead him back on the path to the house. She was aware of Miranda and Lilly standing guiltily behind. She could sense the looks of horror and excitement that passed between them.

“Bring his clothes, will you?” she called over her shoulder.

“Okay.”

“Sure thing.”

Trinculo's teeth were chattering as Jenny led him, naked except for his Nikes and wrapped in an afghan, up the path, toward the house. It was a measure of how interesting summers on the island often got that the sight of him in that condition warranted no more than a few raised eyebrows and the occasional call of, “Jenny? You need some help?”

“We're fine,” she answered back, and led him up the stairs into the house.

Peg was waiting with her arms crossed over her chest. “Dale is moving Frankie from the back room.” She shook her head. “That Lilly.”

Trinculo lifted his head, which had been nodding with his chin against his chest. “Lilly.” He repeated her name as if he were just now realizing that he'd left her behind.

“She's fine,” said Jenny, giving him a push toward the back that was forceful enough to set him wobbling.

Once in front of the futon, she gave him a gentler shove until he was lying on the spot that was still warm from Frankie's body. She covered him with another quilt and then, before turning off the light, noticed a smudge of something on his cheek. She brushed at it with her fingers. A shred of temporary tattoo curled off and fell to the floor. A snake. Jenny shut the door behind her with a firm click.

I
t was one a.m. and the embers of the fire sizzled in the fog. Inside the warm house, Jenny, Lilly, Frankie, Dale, Peg, Mary Ann, David, and Miranda reclined in various positions on the couches, leather chairs, and floor cushions and polished off the last of the chips, grapes, and cookies that remained on the wide wooden table. Trinculo slept in the TV room. Ferdinand had gone home early and Caliban had begged a ride back to town with the owner of the harbor ice cream shop. Ariel was doing stretches in the corner and Jenny watched as Frankie, snuggled under a blanket with her head on a pile of coats, watched him under half-lowered eyelids.

“Not Gonzalo. But perhaps Adrian or Francisco,” said Dale sleepily, after Peg had mused aloud whether or not Chad would be good to play one of the lords. He had done an excellent job as Le Beau in
As You Like It
and had been lobbying since May for a role in
The Tempest
. Before leaving again that evening he had pulled Peg aside to say how sorry he was about the brownies and how much he wanted to be in the play.

Peg had forgiven him. “They did have green toothpicks in them, after all,” she'd said. “Trinculo could have at least asked what that signified before he ate
three
of them.”

Now, Peg pulled both of her legs into the oversize chair and rested her chin on her fist. “I wonder if he could handle Stephano.”

Jenny was only half following the conversation.

After putting Trinculo to bed she had waited on the porch with a glass of wine until Lilly and Miranda emerged from the woods. The girls arrived whispering and holding Trinculo's dripping clothes away from their bodies. They were roughly the same slender shape, but Lilly was clearly Lilly from her lumpy dreads. They were almost to the house before they noticed Jenny on the porch. Lilly saw her and froze. Miranda took a step or two more and then she, too, stopped and stood still. It was almost comical, thought Jenny. Almost.

“Get up here, Lilly. March.”

Miranda reached for the wet clothes in Lilly's hand. “I'll put these by the fire.”

Jenny glanced from Miranda back to her daughter. One leg of Lilly's long underwear had ruched up to just below her knee, exposing a slice of sun-browned calf. The other disappeared into the fuzzy, ankle-high Ugg that had consumed a third of Lilly's first paycheck. Pine needles clung to her sweatshirt. From the very way she held herself as she slunk up the stairs, Jenny could see that Lilly was wavering between launching some kind of offensive claim of her own innocence to seeking quick absolution through immediate and contrite capitulation.

“This may all seem like a big joke to you,” said Jenny softly. “But giving someone drugs without their consent is a violation. It can feel, to the person who got them, like an assault.”

Lilly glanced up from the chair she had settled into with genuine shock. “I didn't
give
him the brownies. I had gotten some for me and Miranda and
he
snatched them. All three.”

“Did you tell him that they were hash brownies? Or did you allow him to eat them without telling?”

From the look on Lilly's face it was clear which of the two alternatives had occurred.

“But they did have green toothpicks in them,” protested Lilly weakly.

“Lilly.”

“I'm sorry.” Lilly sounded on the verge of tears. Her eyes held genuine confusion. “I guess I was thinking because, well, he is a
grown-up
and all . . .”

Jenny sighed and took a pull from her wine. There was Lilly in a nutshell. Confident she was old enough to seduce the guy but not mature enough to take responsibility for what might happen.

“Lilly, you're going to be eighteen any day now. It's time you started acting like a grown-up, too.”

Lilly had taken a clump of matted locks in her hands and squeezed it thoughtfully. Then she had ducked her chin and looked at her mother with the mischievous half smile that males of all ages found so fetching. “I'll try to make it up to him,” she had said.

Jenny frowned at the memory, even as she looked at her older daughter now, who was curled up on the same sofa as Frankie and looking markedly unrepentant. Trinculo snored in the back room unmolested, but the rest of the snake tattoo, ragged and patchy, clung to the skin of Lilly's throat.