The Sweetness of Salt (18 page)

chapter

42

It rained the next two days—a steady, heavy rain that turned most of Main Street into one giant puddle, and saturated the rest of the ground into a muddy, squishy layer. With her repeated trips to the Rutland bank—which took a good amount of time—along with her trip to get roofing tile, and now the rain forcing us to work inside, Sophie was hell-bent on picking up the lag.

We concentrated on the front room, which was by far the most time-consuming. Most mornings were spent on our hands and knees, sanding ourselves into oblivion. In the afternoons, we spread drop cloths over the floor and got to work painting. Sophie had chosen a pomegranate red for the walls, with cream trim around the edges. The color looked putrid in the can, but as we began to spread swaths of it over the walls, I stood back, surprised. It was gorgeous.

I was about two-thirds of the way done with my wall when Sophie leaned over and turned down the radio. She had splotches of red paint on her nose and a hole in the knee of her overalls. “I just thought of something,” she said.

“What?”

“About Maggie. Well, about Dad, really. Back in Milford. Before you came along.”

I could feel my shoulders tense slightly as I dipped my brush back into the vat of paint. “Okay.”

Sophie coated the wall in front of her for a few seconds and then reloaded the roller, working the excess off along the ridges of the paint tray.

“His practice was struggling,” she said. “And I guess to cope with that, he started drinking. A lot. Beer mostly. He might’ve drunk other stuff, but I don’t know. And it wasn’t a regular thing. The refrigerator might just be a refrigerator for weeks at a time, which meant that things were okay. And then other days when I’d open it, looking for a piece of string cheese or an orange, I’d see the stacks of blue and white cans lined up on the left side, neat as could be. It was always a Friday night when the cans appeared, and they were always,
always
gone by Monday morning.” She wrinkled her forehead, remembering. “One time, I counted the whole mess of ’em. There were thirty-six.” She shook her head, as if the number still amazed her. “He would drink thirty-six cans in a single weekend. That’s a case and a half of beer.”

The only cans I had ever seen in the refrigerator growing up were Diet Coke and the occasional Slim-Fast, when Mom was trying to lose a few pounds. There were never any surprises when I opened the refrigerator; the shelves were always filled with hamburger and green grapes, bottled water, eggs, salad greens, and orange juice. Sometimes, if Mom had cooked the night before, there would be leftovers, carefully wrapped in foil, stacked like little pyramids on one side. No blue and white cans. Ever.

“What was he like when he drank?” I asked.

“What was he like?” Sophie repeated my question carefully, as if she had to reach back and retrieve the memory from an old, dusty place without disturbing anything else around it. “Drunk, obviously. But not always the same kind of drunk. Sometimes he’d just sleep. Other times he’d sit on the sofa for the whole weekend, without moving, and just stare at the television. He wouldn’t even get dressed. He was there physically, but the rest of him was gone. Completely gone.”

I’d never once seen Dad inactive. If he wasn’t at work, he was out in the yard or hammering something in the upstairs bathroom or installing a new light fixture above the kitchen sink. He’d built the deck that led out into our backyard one summer, and he had transformed the basement into a finished room, complete with carpeting, new wallpaper, and furniture. At night, if he felt restless, he took a walk. And not just around the block. Sometimes he would be gone for hours, walking for miles, returning only when the sky had darkened and the moon had settled itself in for the night.

“Mom made herself scarce whenever he got like that,” Sophie continued, “and she’d take Maggie and me with her. We’d go to the mall or the movies, eat lunch at some dumpy restaurant, and then go shopping some more. We’d sometimes be gone the whole day. At night, we’d tiptoe back inside the house as quietly as we could. Mom always slept with me on those nights. Always. I figured things out eventually, but before I did, whenever I’d ask her what was wrong with Dad, she’d just say something like ‘He’s not feeling well. We just need to leave him alone right now.’”

Sophie turned around again and began to drag the paintbrush over the wall.

“Sometimes, though, we didn’t leave. Sometimes we stayed home, and the two of them would argue. It’s funny. I never heard or saw them argue about anything else, ever. It was only when the blue cans came into the house.” She paused, leaning back to examine her work. “You know, he hurt her once. During one of those arguments.”

I lay the paintbrush down on the drop cloth next to my shoe. Tiny pinpoints of heat bloomed along my neck. My hands, which continued to quiver, had turned icy cold. Muscles I did not know I had—in my shoulders, my stomach, my throat—constricted themselves into tiny, tight knots.

“Hurt her?” I repeated.

“It was before Maggie came,” Sophie said. “I saw the whole thing, because I used to hide behind the couch when they fought. Part of me really believed that I could jump out and make them stop whenever I wanted to. And another part of me was just scared. They were so fucking
loud
and they said such horrible things to each other—words I’d never heard of, but could just tell, by the way their faces looked, that they were mean, you know? Hateful.”

I’d witnessed a few of Mom and Dad’s arguments growing up, but they were so infrequent that I could barely remember them. Once or twice they had bickered at the dinner table, but neither of them had raised their voice, and no one had uttered a curse word. In fact, the only times I’d ever heard them really disagree with one another was when I was in bed and they were in their bedroom—and even then, they made it a point to keep their voices hushed. Strained, but hushed.

“Anyway,” Sophie continued, “they were in the living room and Mom was following Dad around, bugging him about the blue cans. She kept poking him in the back for some reason, because he wouldn’t turn around, he wouldn’t acknowledge her. And all of a sudden he just turned and shoved her. With both hands. Right in the middle of her chest. Mom flew back—I remember she was actually airborne for a second or two—and then she hit the corner of the coffee table in the middle of the room.” Sophie reached up with her fingers and pressed them against her left ear. “She hit the side of her head, right here…”

I stood up quickly, and then steadied myself as the room began to sway around me. “Jules?” Sophie asked. Her voice was far away.

“I need some air.” I forced my legs to walk out of the room and concentrated on steadying my hand so I could turn the doorknob. The rain was coming down in sheets, but I stepped out anyway, shutting my eyes against the torrent, taking short, shaky breaths. A loud buzzing noise sounded somewhere inside my head. The cold drops pelting my eyelids and my cheeks stung like pieces of ice, but I lifted my face up and did not turn away.

Once, in tenth grade, I had come back from studying at the library and heard Mom and Dad talking upstairs. They weren’t yelling, but their voices were loud enough that I stopped in my tracks, listening.

“If I could take it back, I would, Arlene. You know I would.”

“I don’t want you to take it back.” Mom was crying. “I want you to make it right!”

“How am I supposed to do that?” Dad’s voice was pleading. “What do you want me to do?”

Mom cried harder. “I don’t know.”

I could hear Sophie behind me, somewhere in the roar of the rain. “Jules?” Her arm encircled my shoulders. “Jules? Come back inside. It’s okay. We’ll take a break. Get you dried—”

“That’s why she wears the hearing aid, isn’t it?”

Sophie’s arm went limp. “Yes,” she whispered.

I began to walk. My legs moved heavily inside my soaking pants, and water streamed down the length of my hair.

“Jules!” Sophie called behind me. “Where are you going?”

I moved forward, walking faster and faster, propelled by a sudden and unknown urgency.

“Jules! Come back!”

But I did not go back.

I did not look back.

I just kept going, moving toward something in the distance that I could not see.

chapter

43

Main Street was a wet blur of colors. I could barely make out the orange lettering of the Stewart’s sign across the street. The tiny green lawns that fronted the other buildings had all but drowned in brown puddles, and the Dunkin’ Donuts sign bled electric waves of orange and pink. A lone car drifted by, parting the water in the middle of the street like the Red Sea. I didn’t bother to step aside; by now, it was impossible to get any wetter.

The rain itself did not particularly bother me, and I had never been inside a church, so there was no reason for me to stop suddenly when I reached the front of St. Raphael’s, with its wide white doors. Maybe it was because it was at the end of the street. Or maybe I was intrigued by the fact that one of the doors was open a little, held in place by a small red brick. Whatever the reason, I climbed the steps, pulled open the door, and stepped inside.

Shivering overtook me almost immediately, a violent trembling that made my teeth chatter like castanets. My overalls were so heavy that moving forward out of the tiny vestibule I had just entered took effort. I swung open another door and stared. Rows of empty pews lined the huge room, and the vacant altar at the front was a lonely compilation of wood and marble statues. The stained glass windows were as dark and melancholy as winter. In one corner, a marble woman, all in white, stared out at me with empty eyes. Long robes clustered around the bottom of her bare feet, and a mantle covered her head. One of her arms was holding something, while the other remained empty and outstretched.

This place looked even emptier than I felt. I turned to leave and glimpsed a shadow in the far left corner. Blinking remnants of moisture from my eyelashes, I squinted through the shadows. An old man was sitting in the very front row, staring straight ahead. The collar of his tan windbreaker was rumpled and wet, and white tufts of hair curled along the back of his neck.

What was he staring at so intently, I wondered. And why was he in here all alone? Still shivering, I slid into the very last pew and hugged my arms against my chest. For a while, I just stared at the back of the man’s collar, at the streaks the rain had made along the slippery material. Anything to block out the impossible fact that twenty years ago my father had deafened my mother. Anything to prevent the impossible task of trying to understand how, even as a little girl, I had never completely believed her explanation about why she wore a hearing aid. Trying to comprehend all of it was like being in the middle of some vast vortex.

The man in the front row stood up. Walking slowly toward the marble woman, he pulled something from the pocket of his coat, placed it carefully on the flat pedestal where she stood, and then turned back around. Pulling a Red Sox baseball cap from his jacket, he adjusted it on top of his head, moved slowly toward a side door near the front, and disappeared.

When I was sure he was gone, I walked slowly toward the marble statue. My pants were as heavy as plaster, but it was the shivering that made it difficult to walk. Up close, I could see that the woman was holding a little boy. His feet were also bare and his tiny marble curls clustered gently around his face. I looked down at the base of the statue.

There, in a neat row, was a single line of perfectly white stones.

Hundreds of them.

chapter

44

Sophie draped another warm towel over my head and rubbed. I closed my eyes, inhaling the blended scent of lemony fabric softener and paint primer, which seemed to infuse everything now. It was a strange combination—sweet and acrid at the same time. Sophie’s fingers gripped my head and rubbed down, over and over again, until finally I pulled away.

“What?” she asked. “Too hard?”

“I can do it myself,” I answered, grabbing the towel from her hands. “I’m not a baby, you know.”

Sophie plopped down on the other side of the bed. “I’m sorry,” she said miserably. “I can’t do anything right today, can I?”

She was still in her own wet clothes, despite insisting, when I finally returned, that I get into a hot shower. I hadn’t realized how cold I actually was until I stood naked under the hot water. My fingers were blue. The tips of my ears were so cold, the water felt as if it was scalding them. Now, I sat on the edge of her bed, wrapped in her big green bathrobe. My feet were encased in a pair of red and blue knitted slipper socks that came up to my knees. A cup of chamomile tea was resting on top of her dresser, which, for some reason, looked oddly bare, as if something was missing.

Sophie watched me rub my hair for a moment more without saying anything. Then she brought her fingers to her forehead, kneading the skin gently. The sleeves of her thin T-shirt clung to the sides of her arms and the knotted ends of her red bandanna dripped against the top of her overalls. “God,” she said again. “I knew I shouldn’t have…”

I stopped drying my hair. “Shouldn’t have what? Told me about Dad? Told me the truth?” Sophie looked at me quizzically, as if trying to understand my tone of voice. “Because at the very least, Sophie, that is what you should have done. A long time ago. What you shouldn’t have done—for the last twenty years—was keep it a secret.” I let the towel fall into my lap. “I mean, I can almost—
almost
—understand the whole code of silence about Maggie, since I never even met her. But Mom?
Mom
, Sophie? I would have never kept something like that from you!”

“How do you know?” Sophie’s eyes flashed. “You’ve never been in the same situation—not even remotely. In all the years you’ve grown up with Mom and Dad, I bet you’ve never heard them say one negative thing to each other, let alone witnessed a scene like that. So don’t tell me what you would or wouldn’t have done. You don’t have the faintest fucking idea what you would have done!”

“Yes, I do!” I yelled. “I know exactly what I would have done! And you know why? Because I know what the word loyal means. And I know that there is nothing more important in the world than being loyal to your family—no matter what!”

Sophie’s lower lip trembled as she stared at me for a long moment. “Oh, Jules,” she said, sinking down against the bed. She buried her face in her hands, rocking back and forth slowly. Then she lifted her head. “He used to say the exact same thing to me.”

I stared at her. “What’re you talking about? Who did?”

“Dad,” she said sadly. “He used to give me the whole loyalty routine too. ‘Nothing is more important than being loyal to the family.’” She stood up and began to pace around the room. “That’s how he convinced me never to talk about Maggie. Or Mom. Or even me.” She looked at me. “Do you know where I went that summer after I graduated from high school?”

My brain started to race. That was the summer I won the Acahela Summer Camp Spelling Bee and Sophie had freaked out, throwing my trophy down the hall. A few days later, she had moved to Portland, where she was going to start classes at the University of Maine that fall.

“You went to Maine,” I said. “For school.”

“I didn’t go to Maine!” Sophie’s eyes were huge. “I went to a fucking psychiatric hospital in New Jersey, Julia! For four weeks!”

My face flushed hot. “What are you talking about? Mom and Dad never said anything about you—”

“Mom and Dad have never said anything about anyone!” Sophie said. “Think about it. They’ve never said anything about Maggie, they’ve never said anything about me, they’ve never even hinted at the reason for Mom’s hearing aid. I had to go live in a mental ward for four weeks because I was losing my mind living like that! Do you know what’s it like to live your whole life with horrible secrets inside you, screaming to be let out? Do you know what that does to you?” Her face was pink with rage; spit flew out from between her teeth. “It makes you crazy,” she said, shaking her head. “It makes you completely and certifiably crazy.” She shrugged, defeated. “Dad said everything had to be kept in the family. Taking it outside of that was breaking the family circle.”

“But
I’m
family!” The sides of my head throbbed with the force of my words. “I’m not some outsider, hanging around the circle, Sophie! I’m your sister! I’m part of you. I’m part of all of you. I’m family!” Something broke inside of me when I said those words, a sheet of glass splintering into a thousand pieces. “What was so wrong with me that none of you would talk to me? What did I do to deserve being shut out? Did I not fill Maggie’s shoes well enough? Were Mom and Dad’s expectations of me too high? Did I…”

Sobs overtook me then, blocking the words in my throat, and I cried with abandon, like a baby left behind in a darkened room.

“Oh, Julia.” Sophie encircled me with her arms. “It’s not you. It was never you. Ever.”

“Then what was it?”

“It was them,” Sophie said helplessly. “They were afraid, I guess.”

“Of what?”

“Are you kidding?”

I shook my head. “No. I’m not.”

“Of being found out,” Sophie said. She began to rub her hand in small circles along my back. “Of getting called out on the fact that Attorney Anderson and his beautiful wife, Arlene, weren’t actually perfect.”

“But all families have problems,” I said, thinking of Milo and Zoe’s parents. And Aiden’s too.

Sophie shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe they thought if other people saw us as perfect, they could stop worrying so much about the fact that they weren’t. Or maybe it kept their minds off the things that really needed to be addressed—and never were.”

“Like Dad’s drinking.”

Sophie nodded. “And Maggie’s death.”

My brow furrowed. “But Maggie’s death was an accident. I would think it would make people feel sympathetic toward them.”

The little circles on my back slowed and then stopped completely. “Not when the death is their other child’s fault,” Sophie said.

I turned around slowly. “What do you mean, your fault? It wasn’t your fault.” My heart lurched. “It was asthma…wasn’t it?”

“The asthma was part of it,” Sophie said. “But it wasn’t the cause of death.”

“What was?” The question felt like a needle going through my ears.

“Drowning,” Sophie answered. The stare she gave me was both venomous and frightened. “She drowned, Julia. And it was my fault.”