The Gilly Salt Sisters (41 page)

She’d just finished his tail when the barn doors opened and Dee appeared silhouetted on the threshold. She had on one of Jo’s old linen blouses, a ratty cardigan, a pair of long wool socks, and sweatpants. Up until now Claire had refused to be alone with
Dee. If she opened her bedroom door and saw the girl in the hall, she slammed it. She stomped out of the salt ponds if Dee set foot in them and pushed her chair away from the table as soon as Dee bellied up to it. Claire wanted an apology, but she wasn’t sure in what guise. Did she want Dee to hoist her sleeve and display a lattice of fresh cuts, or lop off all her hair, or quit eating until she and her baby wasted conveniently away? Or, worse, did she just want the girl to disappear and leave the child with her? It felt to Claire as if Dee had stolen something she’d been meant to have.

“Please don’t meddle with my horse,” she finally said, debating whether or not to add
in addition to my husband
, though she wasn’t sure she could call Whit that any longer.

Dee frowned and thrust out her jaw, and that action maddened Claire. Here she had readied herself for an apology only to be startled instead by a surge of adolescent rudeness.

“Seems like all that riding’s left you up on a high horse,” Dee said.

Claire raised her eyebrows, and when Dee didn’t respond, she wondered if the girl really was lackadaisical or just plain stupid. She fiddled with Icicle’s mane.

“Do you ever wonder how I knew about you and Whit?” Claire asked suddenly, but Dee didn’t rush to answer the question. Maybe this was how the child planned on apologizing, Claire considered—with simple silence. Maybe she was trying to convey negative sorrow. But wouldn’t that end up being joy? And Dee was about as far away from a state of delight as Salt Creek Farm was from heaven. “I found your earring in our car,” Claire continued. “Some trashy silver hoop. I threw it out and didn’t say anything to Whit, but that’s how I knew.”

Dee reached up and fondled her own earlobe. It pleased Claire to see that she didn’t have any jewelry to her name out here—not since Claire had ripped the locket off her throat and put it around her own. Of course, Dee should have known better than to accept it from Whit in the first place. Claire could just imagine him pulling it out of his pocket and dangling it off his forefinger and thumb as if daring Dee to take some kind of gateway drug.

Dee blushed. “I didn’t go after him, you know,” she whispered. “I wasn’t the one who started it. You have to believe that.” She eased toward the barn doors, eager to leave, but Claire wasn’t done. She stretched out her hands, her fingers spread like tentacles.

“What were you thinking? He’s twice your age and married. Did that even matter to you? He was way too much for you to handle. Why, I caught him trying to choke you to death!”

Dee pursed her lips and picked at the skin around her fingernails. “He didn’t really mean it. He was just surprised. About the baby and everything.”

Claire narrowed her eyes. “Are you serious? Are you really that naïve? Because if there’s one thing I can tell you about Whit, my dear, it’s that he
always
means it.”

Dee shook her head. “I know what you’re trying to do, and it’s not going to work. When Whit lays eyes on his child, he’ll want me back. I know it. And he wasn’t trying to kill me. He was just scared, is all.” She stood up and pulled her cardigan closed tighter. “In the meantime stay away from me, and I won’t go near you.”

She tried to pass Claire, but Claire reached out and seized one of Dee’s fleshy upper arms, digging her fingers in hard. “I wouldn’t be throwing ultimatums around if I were in your shoes, Dee. There isn’t a Temperance League you can go running to for charity anymore, and I doubt anyone else in town is going to risk your father’s or Whit’s wrath just to give you a bed and a hot plate of food every night. It’s us or no one.” Dee wrenched her arm free and glared at Claire. “How far along are you anyway?” Claire asked, nodding at Dee’s stomach.

Dee wrapped her arms around her middle like she was trying to hold in a secret, but it was a little late for that in Claire’s opinion. “Six months,” she whispered.

Claire gasped. “Are you
serious
?” She turned away from Dee, doing some quick math in her head and not liking the sum she came up with. “What are you planning on doing?”

Dee’s lip wobbled. “I don’t know anymore.”

Claire gazed out the open doors of the barn to the newly
flooded evaporating pools and thought about the babies she’d lost. She’d never gotten a chance to hold any of them. Dee’s child might be the closest she ever came, but if Dee left the marsh, it would mean another child Claire never embraced.

However, Salt Creek Farm was a dangerous place for an infant in more ways than one. Claire thought of the stopped hearts of the boys in the graves across the salt flats, her own brother among them.

“What should I do?” Dee asked.

Don’t let her go
, a voice inside Claire urged. But if she was going to get Dee to stay, she was going to need help. She was the last woman on earth Dee would want to listen to, although that could be fixed. Claire knew how salt could corrode a person’s better judgment and wear down second thoughts. She took Dee by the hand, gripping harder when she tried to pull away.

“No, I want to help,” she said, smiling, making sure to show all her teeth the way she did when she wanted to coerce her coterie of country-club ladies. “You need a friend now, a soul you can confide in. Luckily, I know just the right someone.”

Still clutching Dee by the wrist, Claire led her out of the barn and closed the doors, moving with the slow deliberateness she’d use around a horse she didn’t want to spook.

“Come on,” she said, and set off down the lane. It was Easter, Claire thought, her heart swelling with a rush of extra blood, the time for offerings, and at long last she had a gift for Our Lady that couldn’t possibly be refused.

D
ee might never have been an ace student or anything, but she wasn’t a total dimwit either. When Claire accused her of letting Icicle out of the barn, she knew it was Claire’s way of telling her to keep her hands off her horse, her man, and everything else in her life.

But that proved easier said than done. Now that Dee was living in close quarters with Claire, her curiosity was stronger than it ever had been. When Claire was out working or riding Icicle, Dee would sometimes sneak into Claire’s room and have a little look around. She started off just standing there, inhaling the air, but after a while she began prying more boldly, cracking open the wardrobe and rifling through Claire’s old salt clothes, fiddling with the hairbrush on top of the dresser, examining what kind of skin cream Claire liked. When Dee found Claire’s diamond wedding band in the bureau’s top drawer, she tried to slip it on her finger, but it only went to the knuckle. She sighed in frustration and put it back. There were other things she would have liked to explore—a faded diary with a broken lock, a packet of photographs of Claire in high school, a series of birthday cards—but she was always too scared she’d get caught.

Sharing space with Claire allowed Dee to see that Claire wasn’t exactly the fire-wielding vixen she’d painted in her imagination. Around Jo, Dee was surprised to find that Claire was polite and
almost meek. And Jo, who never uttered more than three words in a row to anyone in town, was turning out to be so bossy that Dee sometimes wished she could tape up Jo’s mouth for a little peace and quiet. And then there were all the crazy things going on with Dee’s body. Her breasts felt like a pair of party balloons. There were days she swore she was retaining half the world’s water. Even her face was changing shape.

Her father had called her a slut and said she deserved what she was getting, and Whit had gone one step further and called up the devil against her, but if salt could change how she saw Claire, Dee thought, maybe there was hope for her, too. Maybe by the time the baby came, all the bad parts would have leached out of her, leaving her as pure and shining as a flake of Joanna’s good stuff.

She pushed the drawer closed, her knees aching as she crossed the room. It was Easter, but she couldn’t tell it from the quiet out on the farm. Claire had baked something that smelled cheesy and promising, but that was the only sign of any kind of celebration. Dee listened, but the house was truly empty. She’d go out and see Icicle, she decided. At least he was good company.

“I’m taking a walk,” she called loudly, just in case anyone cared. “I’ll be out in the barn.” But no one answered. Not even the clock ticked.

T
he place Dee felt best in was the salt barn. The dry aroma cleared her mind and relaxed her aching back. She swung open the door and inhaled, wishing she could knit something for herself out of that smell and live cocooned in it. It was better than the hippie sticks of incense that kids used to burn at high-school parties back in Vermont—probably better than the pot they scored. Even Icicle, tucked away in the corner with his hay, and in spite of his manure, made the whole atmosphere kind of cozy.

He always nickered when he heard Dee enter, but she’d come prepared, pulling a carrot out of her coat pocket. She let him
nuzzle her neck with his hot nose, then fed him the carrot, flat-palmed, taking pleasure in the chomping noises he made and laughing when he bumped her, knocking her a little sideways.

Her center of gravity was shifting. That was for sure. When she climbed stairs these days, her hips felt disjointed and her knees rubberized, but there was more than just a physical adjustment going on inside her. Right before she’d dropped out of school, they’d studied rivers in geography, the only class Dee had ever liked, maybe because she knew that it was the closest she was going to come to traveling. Rivers, the teacher had told them, sometimes reversed their courses under amazing circumstances, say, giant earthquakes. Dee pondered that now. The more pregnant she got, the more she felt like one of those waterways. She might be confused and churned up at the moment, but she was starting to suspect that giving birth was going to upend her completely. For the hundredth time, she wished she didn’t have to do it.

Life is hard
, her father had always droned whenever she complained about the littlest thing. Back then she’d assumed he was trying to get her to shut up, but what if he’d been telling her the absolute truth? Day-to-day existence wasn’t hard, Dee was starting to see; all of
life
was. As far as she could tell, it began with bone-grinding pain and ended even worse, and what a person was supposed to do with the parts in between seemed to her to be about as clear as a dream.

She remembered the time after her mother had died, when the air in the house seemed to have stilled forever. The clocks were stopped. The phone was left unanswered. Even the refrigerator hummed more quietly. Dee wasn’t sure she hadn’t died, too. Cutt barely looked at her. Her relatives arrived and vanished. Dee returned to school, where no one mentioned she’d been gone, and came home to an empty house. The details of Dee’s mother—the smoky color of her eyes, her funny laugh, the shape of her feet—faded a little bit more each day.

Dee wondered if Cutt missed her like that now, if the rooms above the diner seemed empty to him when he came up after his
shifts, and she decided probably not. For one thing, she wasn’t really gone, not all the way. The day after she arrived on Salt Creek Farm, she’d even called Cutt and told him where she was.

“I don’t have a daughter,” he’d said, and then hung up the phone, loud and hard. Her father knew where to find her. He just didn’t want to.

Still, it was funny. Out on Salt Creek Farm, where there wasn’t much of anything, Dee felt more alive than she had in months. Maybe, she thought, nestling one hand under her belly, it was the baby weight, filling up the parts of her she hadn’t known were empty, or maybe what people in town said about Gilly salt really was true. It was playing tricks on her mind, making her think she was full when she wasn’t, happy when she was sad, and worth more to somebody than a plate of eggs and ham.