Other Shepards (16 page)

“Aha, look who decided to join us,” Ryan says. “You’ve been sleeping a couple of hours now.”

“We’re going to look at frogs,” Geneva says. “Ryan says they get big as oysters!”

“Big as hamsters,” he corrects. “We’ll be out back. You coming, Holland?”

“She’ll be out in a minute,” Dana answers for me. “I need a little help right now.”

Once they have banged through the kitchen door, I sit at the table, watching as Dana finishes chopping scallions, which she scrapes from the cutting board into a saucepan of sizzling butter. I get a feeling that Dana wants to tell me something but doesn’t know how to begin. The bite of hot scallion juice fills the kitchen and smarts my eyes as I wait.

“Your mother told me everything,” she says at last. “All about your imaginary friend, Annie. I had an imaginary friend once, when I was a little girl. I fell off a ladder and broke my leg in three places, and I had to lie flat on my back in a cast for six weeks. I named him Dickins, after the boy in
The Secret Garden
. He came to visit me every day. We’d chat and tell jokes and make plans for all the things we would do together after my leg healed. It saved me, I think. Having a special friend.”

“Imaginary?” I laugh. “Annie’s not imaginary, she’s as real as you or me. She’s a painter, she painted that tree in the pantry, and she painted our whole kitchen back home. Why would the parents say such a funny thing? Imaginary, ha.”

Dana looks down, examining the flickering blue flame of the stove. “Does that look medium high?” she murmurs to herself. She bites her lip, then adds a hissing shot of water to the pan. “They said you girls got carried away,” she remarks. Her voice is matter-of-fact, without judgment. “They said you and Geneva always have been so close, that you almost can hear each other’s thoughts, dream each other’s dreams.”

“Funny, that’s exactly how I would describe Mom and Dad.”

Dana turns to me and hands me a paper bag. “Break the ends off these beans and put them in here,” she says, sliding a colander over the table to rest in front of me. “Anyway, I told Lydia it was for the best that you girls were here, no matter how it came about. Saint Germaine’s a place of happy memories. Life ended for those children here, but they were alive here, too. And that’s what I remember. Beach picnics and bonfires. The games and laughing. Evenings of gin rummy or watching the stars.”

“I wish I’d known them,” I say. “I wish I’d been here for those times.”

“All your life, people must have told you about those times,” Dana says. “But those days, the other children, they’re gone, and the days that matter most lie ahead, not behind you. As for your Annie, she couldn’t possibly have created that tree, because I was here, in this very kitchen, the afternoon the boys and Elizabeth painted it. It was a rainy day like this one, and they used an oil paint set of Ryan’s. More than twenty years ago, it must have been.”

I don’t know what to say to this. I stare at Dana, who points to the back door. “The frogs are a sight,” she says. “Go on, I’ll finish up here.”

For dinner we eat fresh parrot fish and string beans, with kiwi tarts for dessert. We spend most of the dinner trying to explain to Geneva why she cannot take a frog back with her to New York. My sister, who disdains all creatures soft and cuddly, has warmed up to the cold-blooded, warty frogs of this island. This is no surprise to me and delights the Hubbards, who can talk as much about frogs as they can discuss birds or stratocumulus clouds or how much sugar is needed to make a kiwi tart.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Geneva says to me after we have eaten dinner and cleaned up the kitchen. “Just us. To the beach. Please.”

“Do you mind?” I ask the Hubbards.

“Take flashlights,” says Ryan.

“And sweaters,” adds Dana. High cupboards are opened, and giant police flashlights are handed out. Dana rubs our hands and legs with a sticky lotion of mosquito repellent, then buttons each of us into one of her own oversized cotton sweaters.

“Stay close and don’t be too long,” she calls from the door, “or we’ll worry. Don’t walk too close to the surf, and for heaven’s sake don’t go swimming.”

They watch us from the patio. For a couple without children, their parenting skills are awfully polished.

We wind down the shell path to the ocean and turn off our flashlights as we sit against the dune embankment. Darkness links its elements: sky and sea meet on a tar-paper crease, sucking sea gushes over its inky beach, black holes of sand swallow our tunneled toes. I keep a thumb on the flashlight switch; it connects me to the promise that the chain of darkness can be broken on my whim.

“Here’s the thing, and don’t be mad,” Geneva says. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch her hands knotting and unclenching in her lap, and I brace myself for her confession. “Okay. Maybe you figured it out already but I bought us those tickets. Charged them on Dad’s credit card. When the envelope came I sneaked out the receipt and stuffed it in my pocket before you could see.”

“You’re kidding, right? You mean Dad bought … ? Oh, great, Geneva. We are in so much trouble.” I flop back on my elbows and groan. “Do you even know how much trouble we’re in?”

“Look, I’m sorry. But I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for our kitchen and my fortune from Miss Pia.”

“What do you mean?” I stare out at the horizon and try to think clearly. So it wasn’t Annie after all. I had tried hard to believe the tickets were her gift. Dad will probably want us to pay him back, and two plane tickets are way more than whatever is left of my savings.

“See, the whole time I was painting the kitchen I kept thinking, This is how Saint Germaine looks,” Geneva explains. “This is the sky, these are the trees and birds. But as soon as I put in the colors I knew it wouldn’t be enough. You can’t sit in your kitchen and pretend you’re here. It was like Annie painted a postcard on our wall. She knew we’d have to see it for real, once it was up in our kitchen. And when I got that fortune, about going on a trip, and then you said how people have to make their own fortunes—well, it all just seemed to spin together. I had to get us those tickets, Holland. I had to.”

“You know the parents think Annie’s imaginary,” I say. “They think we made her up.”

Geneva pushes her toes deeper in the sand. “It doesn’t matter what they think. She didn’t come for them,” she says. “I’ll miss her. She really helped us.”

“She isn’t coming back.”

“No.”

“And now I have to be the big sister again,” I say half-jokingly. “It was a relaxing break.”

“Holland, would you do me a favor?”

“What’s that?”

“Will you sometimes call me Neeve? I like it better than my other name, and if you start, maybe it’ll catch on with the parents.”

The parents would never call my sister by a nickname, an Ick name, and I know this, although I don’t say it. There are other, deeper reasons for naming your children after distant lands.

Out loud I say, “Yeah, that sounds better, Neeve.” I am not surprised that the word, once spoken, fits her nicely.

And I don’t expect it, but neither does she, perhaps, because Geneva collapses against me as if an unexpected jolt has charged her jittery limbs. Her hug is fierce and hard and alive, over in a crushing second, and with me forever.

I
SLEEP LATE THE
next morning and wake with the sun frying my cheeks. Geneva greets me at the kitchen table wearing a coronet of wildflowers and tells me about sighting a calico monkey that she named Trudy. She and Ryan keep interrupting each other as they describe Trudy sitting on her branch, gorging on bananas. It hasn’t taken my sister long to start talking like a Hubbard.

“We practically just got here,” I say to Ryan and Dana as we sit down to a breakfast of waffles and cantaloupe. “And now we’re leaving.”

“But we’ll be back soon,” Geneva promises. “Holland and I are asking for plane tickets for Christmas.”

The Hubbards smile and squeeze us, but I can tell by their petering conversations and by the way they hardly touch their own breakfasts that they are unhappy to see us go. They accompany us to the main island on a speedy boat captained by an old man named Simon whose skin is the color of plums. The morning is fresh, my skin is bright with color and my ears and fingernails are gritty with sand. It feels good, like souvenirs of my trip packed on my body.

Once on shore, we exchange Simon’s boat for a cab driven by a woman and her daughter who are on their way back from church. Geneva sits up front with the girl, and they fan each other with the palm leaves brought back from the church service. I sit in back, on one side of Dana, and my mind takes photographs of everything—the rainbow of air, Dana’s laugh, the perfume in the sugar cane—a roll of pictures to flip through in my mind until we come back in December.

The airport appears less deserted than when we arrived two days ago. All around us, families are unloading themselves and their belongings from cabs and shuttles.

“The way life worked out, Dana and I weren’t able to have children ourselves. Your brothers and sister sure felt like ours, though,” Ryan tells Geneva and me as we stand at the gate, waiting to board. He speaks with a half-smile and a casual squint in his eye, but his words draw out careful as a poem. “When they left us, we couldn’t have been more devastated than if they’d been our very own. This weekend, seeing you girls, it’s all been something of a gift. An unexpected blessing.”

He looks as though he might say more, but then he changes the subject, pointing to the sky, and he tells us about how we will likely get some of yesterday’s rain when we fly into the city. The language of loss is hard to speak, but thankfully there is always plenty to say about the weather.

“We’ll come back soon,” I promise as I hug them good-bye.

As I take a last look at the island, I know I have been fooling myself, thinking that I needed to come to Saint Germaine so that Geneva and I would feel closer to our brothers and sister. I had not been truly expecting to find those other people here, not in spirit, not in any way. The real reason I came here was to stake my own claim on this off-limits Eden. Even while I told myself it was for Geneva, or for Elizabeth, John, and Kevin, all along I was betting myself in a secret voice, a voice I was too scared to listen to but knew enough to obey. I wanted Saint Germaine for me.

The parents wait in the terminal. They stand together, wrapped in pale raincoats, as alike as a pair of candlesticks. Ryan was right, I realize. The rain that whipped through Saint Germaine yesterday now drizzles over New York. We’ve hit the same storm twice.

The parents’ hugs are fleshless, like being caught in the press of folding chairs.

“We love you,” they whisper in our ears. I cry babyishly, and so does Geneva. I press my face into their rain-freckled coats to wipe my eyes.

When we get home, Mom draws a bath for each of us: mine in the parents’ bathroom and Geneva’s in ours. After we change into sweatpants and shirts, Mom combs our wet hair and rubs it through with some of her special peppermint leave-in conditioner.

“We should make a beauty salon appointment together, next Saturday,” she says. “The three of us. And then have a ladies’ lunch after.” Her fingers rake through my hair, slicking the peppermint oil from root to tip.

The intimacy of her touch makes me shiver. Never have I felt more like her daughter.

Afterward, we sit in the kitchen. Dad prepares Irish oatmeal, which we eat with spoonfuls of cream and honey.

“I’ll be spending more time in this kitchen,” he says with forced cheer, “now that you girls have made it look so special.”

“As a family, it’s important for us to share home activities,” Mom says carefully. I can almost see Dr. Bushnell, like the Wizard of Oz behind the kitchen door, prompting her words.

When I get the courage to face our mural, I now see how the paintings are amateurish, that our colors are impulsive, and that nothing fits together. Geneva is talented, but she is still a sixth grader; the plumes of her bird’s head look like a bulky headdress of eggplants. My sky is splotchy in places where I remember getting bored. Louis’s tree takes up an entire wall. And where is Annie’s work? In the long olive grass, in the rain-heavy sky? I cannot find her. I do not know exactly what I had been looking at before.

The parents don’t feel comfortable talking about Annie, not that night, nor any time after. Their mouths are dry with bookish phrases fed to them by Dr. Bushnell, about how they wanted to encourage our self-expression, how we created Annie as an escapist manifestation of our subconscious will, how the mural was a means of asserting our need to make our own mark on this house, to paint over the shadow of the other Shepards. Assertion, expression, creativity—they are thoughtful words, the well-intentioned words of grown-ups. Paint therapy, really; I was right all along.

“Then you never really believed in Annie?”

Dad frowns; he opens his mouth to speak and then stops as another, milder expression shapes his face, and he folds my hands between the two of his. “When you and your sister began working on your painting,” he begins, “you can imagine that at first these stories of Annie were troubling—
perplexing
—to your mother and me.”

“Then why didn’t you just say so?” He is quiet a moment. “We did say so, to Dr. Bushnell, who explained to your mother and me about imaginary friends. Like Nini or Nono, remember? The little girl who lived under the dining room table and ate Geneva’s vegetables?” He smiles. “Every night your mother and I would have to sweep the carrots and Brussels sprouts from under her chair.”

“Come on, Dad. That was a long time ago.”

“Maybe so, but like before, we held back because you girls seemed so captured. Captured by changing the walls and making the room into something new. I think of your faces at your mother’s birthday dinner, and the way your sister was talking. And we just assumed you must have seen a picture, somehow heard about the tree in Saint Germaine.”

“No, that’s not true. I never …” Even as I protest, I am not so sure. I look at Dad helplessly, embarrassed. When Dad speaks again, his voice and words are careful.