Summer with My Sisters (23 page)

W
hy not, Poppy thought, regarding the e-mail. Things on Willow Way were going pretty well. Daisy had signed on again at the nursing home so that little drama was over, and in the past few days she had gone out of her way to thank Poppy for doing everyday things, like putting dinner on the table and taking the trash to the curb on pickup day, and whatever that was about, Poppy was grateful. As for Violet, she seemed her usual self, busy with the garden and taking care of Grimace. And Ian could be a lot of fun. He knew a lot of interesting people.

Without further consideration, Poppy typed a reply.

Poppy hit send and closed her laptop. Come to think of it, the people Ian knew weren’t really
all
that interesting, and they weren’t here in Yorktide. And she hadn’t known any of them that well. There was that girl, the one who worked at a Starbucks; what was her name? And there had been that guy Nate, the one who had worked at the boutique, the one who got creepier and creepier on reflection. And did she really want Ian around when there was Jon . . .

Jon. Poppy put her hand to her forehead. She felt swamped with regret. She had acted on impulse; she hadn’t used her head at all! If only there was some way you could retrieve a wrongheaded e-mail! Now she would have to hope it got lost in the ether. But maybe all wasn’t lost. If the e-mail did find its way to Ian, and he did accept her invitation, she doubted he would stay for more than a few days. He would probably get so bored with the quiet life the Higgins girls lived he’d hightail it back to Boston, like an addict needing a fix. She could only hope.

Anyway, Poppy thought, what
about
Jon? They weren’t a couple. And Ian was only a friend, not a romantic rival; they hadn’t slept together in over a year and she had no intention of sleeping with him again. And she had no proof that Jon thought of her in romantic terms. Sure, he had said that he liked her, the night of the town meeting. But that had probably been something you would say to anyone who agreed to share cheese fries with you. And lobsters.

Poppy got up from the kitchen table. She was making a proverbial mountain out of a molehill. Still, she didn’t look forward to telling Allie that she had invited Ian to visit. Allie had met him a few times in passing and she had made no bones about her dislike. And if Allie found Ian to be objectionable, there seemed to Poppy a good chance that her sisters would, too.

“D
o you want any sunblock?” Daisy asked.

Evie shook her head. “No, thanks. I’m good.”

The girls were at Ogunquit beach, sitting on a blanket Daisy had brought from home. (Evie didn’t dare take anything of Nico’s from the house.) Daisy had her knees up and her arms around her legs; she was wearing cut-off jean shorts and a big loose T-shirt. Evie wondered if it had belonged to Daisy’s father. She had once liked wearing her father’s flannel shirts around the house though they swamped her. But that was in the old days and the old days were dead and gone.

The sun was seriously bright and Evie was very glad for her new sunglasses. Daisy’s old sunglasses. The beach was crowded. There were families, moms and dads with impossibly cute little kids. (Evie wondered, Did being at the beach automatically make little kids and dogs cuter than when they were elsewhere?) There were couples of all ages. There were groups of friends, all girls, all boys, and mixed groups. If she were a normal teenager, Evie thought, she might be one of a group of girls like the one to her left, with little to worry about other than getting a tan and convincing a guy she liked to notice her. To be fair, maybe the girls in that group did have a lot to worry about, like parents getting divorced, or a sibling with cancer. The thing was you could tell so little about a person just by looking at them. Not always, but often. How many people who saw Evie Jones during an average day had any idea of the sort of life—the sort of lies—she was living?

“Oh my God,” Daisy said under her breath. “Look at that guy in the white bathing suit. Could he be any hairier?”

Evie laughed. “Ugh, the missing link.”

“Not that making fun of someone is right. It isn’t. But he’s just so—so hairy! Can I say something?” Daisy asked suddenly.

Evie felt her stomach drop. Ever since Daisy and Joel’s confrontation outside The Clamshell she had been expecting some sort of repercussion from her friends. “Sure,” she said. “Okay.”

“I have to admit that I was a little bit hurt when I found out you had lied to me about your past. I mean, we’re friends. But then I realized you probably felt that you had no choice, back when we first met. I thought about it and I realized that I probably would have done the same thing. So I’m not hurt anymore.”

“Thank you,” Evie said genuinely. “Thank you for understanding. And I am sorry. I don’t like to lie.”

“Do you think anyone really enjoys lying?” Daisy asked. “That’s a silly question. Some people probably get a kick out of it. Some people probably enjoy tricking people.”

“And some people can’t help lying because they’re sick.”

“And little kids lie because they’re testing the limits of their power. Seeing what they can get away with. I remember taking money from my mother’s dressing table once. It was sitting right there, a five-dollar bill. It was like I couldn’t resist. Then, when she asked me if I had taken the money, I lied and said that I hadn’t. I remember being absolutely petrified, but for some reason I just wouldn’t tell her the truth. The more she asked the more I lied and the more I began to believe the lie!”

“What happened?”

Daisy laughed. “Finally she said that if it wasn’t me who had taken the money then it must have been Poppy—Violet was just a toddler—and I caved. I couldn’t let Poppy get in trouble for something I did.”

“Were you punished?” Evie asked.

“My parents didn’t believe in punishing us. They didn’t have to. I remember my mother looking so disappointed in me and believe me, that was punishment enough. Anyway,” Daisy went on, “I think you’re really brave, to have gotten away from a bad situation. It must have taken a lot of guts.”

Evie wasn’t sure it was guts that had convinced her to leave her aunt and uncle’s house. And it
hadn’t
been a bad situation, not really. . . . But she had told a lie—another one, about the abusive man—and now she was committed to it. “Thanks,” she said, folding and refolding the edge of the blanket. Lately she had noticed that she had developed a habit of fiddling with things. It was probably a sign of anxiety.

“You know,” Daisy went on, “the administration at school tried to get me to see a grief counselor when Mom died. But I said no. Violet refused, too. I guess people left Poppy alone because she was older. But sometimes I wonder if I made the right choice. Dad never would have compelled us to talk to a professional so the decision really was Violet’s and mine to make. But maybe we were both too young to know what was best.”

“I had no choice,” Evie said. “The people at my school forced me to see a counselor after my mother died. Because my father wasn’t . . . He wasn’t any help. And neither was the counselor. I don’t think I said one word to him all the times we met. What was I supposed to say?”
All the things I was feeling. Like anger. Like hate. Like the fact that I wanted the impossible—for the accident never to have happened.

“The thing about when someone close to you dies,” Daisy said musingly, “is that everyone is suddenly so
nice
to you. It drove me crazy. It was bad enough when my mother died. I mean, everyone always assumes a kid’s going to go completely insane if her mother dies. But then when my father . . . Then it was worse. People were either ridiculously nice or they just ran the other way. I mean, what could anyone possibly say to me or my sisters that would make any sense? That we’re better off without our parents? Of course we aren’t!”

Evie nodded. “I know, right? Everyone always
looks
at you, like they’re waiting for you to explode or break down or something. I wanted to say, leave me alone. Let me get on with my life without being watched every minute, like I’m some sort of freak.”

“Imagine how it is when you lose
both
of your parents.”

“In a way, I have.”

“Oh,” Daisy said. “Right.”

“But I’m not living at home, I mean, back where I grew up, so no one knows that I’m sort of an orphan unless I tell them. Well, that I
was
a sort of orphan, before I turned eighteen.”
No one knows that I’m an unaccompanied teen.

“Right. Sometimes I feel like I’ve got this big neon sign over my head: ORPHAN GIRL. I hate knowing that people feel sorry for me. Is that terrible?” Daisy asked. “I mean, I suppose I should feel thankful that people care. Except that not everyone
does
care. Some people just want to approach you because you’re like a dark celebrity or a really bad car accident they have to stop to see so they can be part of the excitement.”

A really bad car accident . . .
It took Evie a moment before she felt calm enough to speak.
Remember,
she told herself.
It was cancer.

“It’s like, you’ll always be The Girl Whose Mother Died of Cancer. Anything wrong or stupid you do in your life, people will say: Oh, it’s probably because she lost her mother so young. And maybe your motives for doing something wrong or stupid had nothing at all to do with your dead mother! Or your father,” Evie added hastily. “Maybe you just made a mistake. Maybe you just listened to some bad advice.”

Daisy laughed. “And if you do something great someday, it’ll be: Can you imagine she’s so successful when she lost her parents when she was just a kid? It’s unbelievable!”

“It stinks,” Evie said, “that you’re defined by the stuff that happens to you. There was this girl from middle school, she’s a year older than me, and when she was about twelve she was anorexic. She got better, but I remember being in the lunchroom and kids commenting on what she was eating and wondering when she was going to get sick again. I remember thinking: I wonder if she knows everyone’s watching her, waiting for something to go wrong. I remember thinking it was horrible. It was like, no one had faith in her. How can you have faith in yourself—how can you know you’re going to survive—if everyone around you expects you to fail?”

Daisy shook her head. “You can’t. But you know, Evie, if you never go home again and if you don’t tell people about what happened in the past, the cancer and that disgusting man, you can be free of all that negative expectation. You can be whoever you want people to think you are. No stigmas attached. You can be defined only by what you choose to do in the present.”

“You mean,” Evie said, “I can lie. I can be totally alone with my lies.”

Daisy frowned. “That doesn’t sound very good, does it? You could never get married because how could you really love someone and spend the rest of your life with him and be lying all the time? Besides, with the way life is something bad or weird is probably going to happen again and then you’ll be The Woman Who Was in a Car Wreck or The Woman Who Was Robbed at Gunpoint.” Daisy smiled. “Or, The Woman Who Won the Bazillion-Dollar Lottery.”

The Woman Who Was in a Car Wreck.
Evie forced a smile. “I wish I’d win even a thousand-dollar lottery! Anyway, I’m sure a lot of people live under an alias. People in the witness-protection program, for one. But . . . But I don’t think that I could.”

Someone, Evie thought, like that poor sixty-three-year-old woman on the television show, the woman who called herself Marion. Or that poor guy Tommy. This was an unforeseen consequence of her plan (if it could be called that), coming to care for someone and having to worry about keeping her friendship and respect.

Suddenly, Daisy jumped to her feet. “Well,” she announced, “I for one have had enough of depressing for today. I need some retail therapy.”

Evie smiled up at her. “I thought you didn’t really like to shop.”

“I don’t. Except for books. Have you been in the little shop on Clove Street? The Bookworm. It’s awesome.”

Evie got to her feet and brushed sand from her legs. How was it that even when you sat on a blanket sand got all over your legs? “Do they have a sale section?” she asked. Maybe she would find a discounted book written in French....

P
oppy looked at the man standing at the front door and tried very hard to convince herself that her invitation to Ian had been a good deed and not a stupid one. An old friend was in need of a change of scenery. She had offered to provide that change of scenery.

“Come in,” she said. “How was the drive?”

Ian stepped over the threshold and dropped his beat-up leather travel bag on the hall floor. “Once I was out of Boston, no worries,” he said. “In Boston, the usual nightmare.”

Now he came forward, arms open, and reluctantly, Poppy hugged him back.

“So, where’s my present?” she asked when she had pulled away, quickly but not quickly enough to allow him to sense that in spite of her generous invitation she didn’t really want him at the house on Willow Way.

“What do you mean?” Ian grinned. “I’m not enough?”

“The handmade soap I like, the organic stuff that smells like lilacs. You know, from Scents and Sensations. You said you’d bring me a bar.”

Ian smacked his forehead. “Sorry, Pop. I totally spaced. Maybe next time.”

She hated when he called her Pop, but she let it go. His beard was longer than she remembered it. He was vain about the beard, and about his hair, which he wore long enough to pull into a ponytail or a bun on the top of his head. A lot of women found him attractive. Certainly, Poppy once had, attractive enough to sleep with. He had a good body and a sort of cool, hipster thing going and you could make all sorts of fun of hipsters, but they did have a certain style that made certain types of women (which ones, Poppy wondered now; silly ones? shallow ones?) assume there was serious substance underneath. But a beard and skinny jeans did not a man make....

“Come into the kitchen,” she said, leading the way through the house. No sooner had they entered the room than Daisy and Violet came thundering in after them.

“I heard the doorbell,” Daisy said.

“Was it Grimace’s special catnip toy? UPS is supposed to deliver it today.”

Ian laughed. “I hope I’m not a toy for whoever this Grimace is. Doesn’t sound like fun.”

“Who’s this?” Violet asked, with a note of suspicion in her voice.

“This is my friend Ian,” Poppy explained. “From Boston. He’s come for a visit.”

Daisy looked on the edge of truculence. “I didn’t know you had another friend visiting.”

“I told you about Ian,” Poppy said. “I’m sure I did.”

Violet shook her head. “No. I would have remembered.”

“Me, too.”

Poppy felt ridiculously embarrassed. “I’m sorry.” She knew she had told Allie . . .
And maybe it was her reaction that stopped me from telling my sisters,
Poppy thought, remembering Allie’s frown of disappointment.

“Are you going to introduce me?” Ian asked.

“Of course. Ian, this is Daisy and this is Violet.”

“And who’s this Grimace character?” he asked.

“He’s my cat.”

“Strange name for a cat.”

“No,” Violet said. “It’s a perfect name.”

This was followed by a deafening silence, which Daisy finally broke.

“What’s for dinner?” she asked.

Poppy laughed a bit wildly. “You know, I haven’t even thought about it. Maybe Allie can handle dinner tonight.”

“Wait, Allie is here, too?” Ian asked.

“Didn’t I mention that in my e-mail?”

“No.”

Why didn’t I?
Poppy thought.
Then Ian might not have come!
“Well, she’s here.”

Ian snorted. “
This
should be a blast.”

“We’ll go and find Allie now,” Daisy announced and she and Violet left the kitchen as quickly as they had come.

Poppy didn’t know what to say or to do next. She wondered how long she had to wait before asking Ian to leave. She didn’t want to be impolite. Maybe she could concoct a phony family emergency. Daisy and Allie would go along though Violet, who was congenitally unable to lie, would somehow spill the beans. Maybe she could . . .

“Hey. You in there?”

Poppy startled. “Yes,” she said. “Sorry. Follow me and bring your bag.” Poppy led Ian out of the kitchen and down the hall to the study. “You can stay in here. The couch doesn’t pull out, but it’s comfortable.”

Ian’s eyebrows rose. “No beds free?”

“No. Sorry.” That was a lie; her old bedroom was unoccupied and she had planned on letting Ian stay there, but now the thought made her cringe. “I’ll get sheets and towels. The bathroom is down the hall. There’s a shower but no tub, but you’ll have it to yourself.”

“Girl world is off limits then?”

“Yes,” Poppy said, not able to meet his eye. “It is. Dinner’s at six thirty.”

Ian laughed. “That’s, like, the middle of the afternoon.”

“That’s when we eat.”

“All together, around the table, one big happy family?”

“Yes.”
At least,
Poppy thought,
one big family.

Ian shrugged and pulled a cigarette case from his shirt pocket. He rolled his own. “All right,” he said. “When in Rome.”

“There’s no smoking in the house.”

“Really?” Ian said in a tone that implied: Are you freakin’ kidding me?

“You can smoke in the backyard, I guess, but bring a glass or something for the ashes and butts. Violet will kill me if she finds cigarettes in her garden.”

Ian put the cigarette case back in his pocket. Poppy turned to head to the kitchen. Behind her, she heard Ian chuckling.