The Weird Sisters (43 page)

“Sure,” Bean said, with a sharp little nod.

“I’ll see you in services tomorrow, then?” Aidan asked. He pushed himself back, stood, stepping away.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Bean said. He smiled and sauntered off to the carrels in the back, where he settled down to work. She watched him walk, the easy swing of his gait, his T-shirt hanging from thin shoulders.

She did not want him. Had she ever? It is so easy to look at love when it is over and think it was never real. But there was no dismal residue of disaster to cast a once grand affair into gray, dirty light. There was only the world Bean had come back to, the world of truth and facts and consequences, and if there was less excitement in it, there was also no lingering threat, no fear of discovery and exposure. And with that calm came Bean’s solemn accounting of what she had dreamed, and what was.

Aidan was nothing magical. Burned by her own sin, unable to seek absolution anywhere, she had made of his attention the only thing she knew how to understand. And she knew now that despite our father’s request to him, Aidan considered her a friend, was happy to have her in his flock, and, perhaps most incredibly, never treated her as though she were less because of what she had told him. He had known at some level, possibly, what she had really needed, and she loved him more for that than she ever could have loved him as a partner.

Besides, she would have died in a relationship without sex.

Shuffling a deck of due date cards absently, she looked out the front doors, to the spread of the tree over the sidewalk, where her father had quoted
As You Like It
to her. Rose’s play, really, but no matter.
I earn what I eat, get what I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good.
The words of a poor shepherd, mocked for his simplicity. This was Barney to her, and she had played the clown, finding sin where there was none. Living here had so affected us all, Rose endlessly seeking its comfort, an infant suckling at the breast. Cordy and Bean fighting its inertia, sure the secret to life lay just over the next hill, past the next taxi rank idling smog into the air. But where had it gotten us, this tattoo of our birthplace? We were still the same people, and Cordy and Bean, who had wanted it least of all, come home to roost in the nest.

Bean sat down at the desk and pulled a long drawer of the card catalog over to her. She could do nothing to change Barney, she knew. Turning the blond wood of the card catalog into the binary code of a computer catalog was only cosmetic, would alter nothing at the heart of the town, which would still creep
in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time,
but she could change her place in it. She could leave her mark, pay her debts to man and to God, and someday, anchored in it instead of weighed by it, she would take the part of her that was Barney and spin it out into the world, and this time she would not fail.

A
s Bean had foreseen, Rose came home with her only thought leaving again. Spare months ago, when she had moved her belongings back into this house, she had knelt on the floor and rolled each of her belongings through her fingers as she unpacked. They seemed different now, heavier, each piece less important. She needed little: clothes, notes for the articles she wanted to research. Good walking shoes (but Rose hadn’t, of course, any other kind). Strange how little it all mattered to her now. Rose had always been the worst of us in terms of possessions, though we thanked her for it when we wanted to look at the scrapbooks she had made of our family trips, our shoe boxes full of old papers and notes and art projects. Now she was like Cordy, wanting nothing more to weigh her down than a backpack. When she had sent her letter of resignation, artfully written to convey in the most genteel manner possible that Columbus University could take its job and shove it, a sudden weight had lifted off her shoulders. She would never have to go back to her dingy office and the gray classrooms and the exhausted students. That the lethargy plaguing her since she had set foot on the campus would never wrap its tentacles around her again, that she might even, dare she say it, be happier without that place.

Cordy herself was lying on Rose’s bed, covered slightly with the discarded clothes Rose had tossed over her when she refused to move. She was always like this, our Cordy, wanting to be near the action, watching us dress to go out, or following behind us when we did. As teenagers, we had found it grating, but now it was comforting, though Rose did complain about Cordy’s inertia, and that she was wrinkling the clothes spread around and over her.

“The clothes going into storage, you mean?” Cordy asked, deliberately rolling back onto a shirt that had fallen off her hip and crushing it under her ever-expanding bottom. Oh, the joys of our metabolism and of pregnancy.

Rose snatched the shirt out from under Cordy and shook it out. “Yes, those. Unless you’re offering to iron them all for me when I get back.”

“You’re never coming back,” Cordy said, and then blinked, as if she had not intended to speak.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll be back at Christmas, and then in August, and anytime Mom needs me.” With a practiced snap of her wrist, she flicked a pair of pants into submission and then rolled them into a tight cylinder, pressing it among the clothes inside her suitcase. She picked up a winter coat, contemplated its length, and then discarded it in favor of another.

“Not here, though. Not Barney.”

Rose stopped and stared at Cordy, who spoke with such cool certainty it made her shiver a little. “How do you know?”

“I just do,” Cordy said, and then giggled.
“Beware the Ides of March!”

“That’s a possibility,” Rose said, sitting on the edge of the bed to push in a pair of shoes. “But I imagine I’ll get pretty homesick after a while.”

“Maybe,” Cordy said. She reached out to Rose’s bedside table and picked up a bottle of lotion, squeezed some into her palm and rubbed it in. “I never was, not really.”

“You’re not like me,” Rose said.

Cordy looked at her like a curious squirrel. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m exactly like you. We’re all exactly alike, you know.”

“Sure. In the way that we’re completely different. Move,” Rose said, nudging Cordy’s leg. Cordy, ever obliging, moved off a neatly rolled row of underwear. Rose picked up the bundles and edged the gaps at the sides of her suitcase with them.

“No, in the way that we’re all the same. We all want what Mom and Dad have. We all want to be the favorite, the best-loved, the star of our own movie. And we all want to become something better than Barney, but we won’t.” She paused for a moment and then stared at the ceiling, thinking. “Not that it’s a bad thing, you know. Barney’s not so bad.”

“I’ve been telling you that for years,” Rose said.

“You’ve been telling us that for years because you were scared to leave because you thought we’d forget about you, or that we’d survive without you, and then where would you be? You’d lose the only role you ever had.” Cordy put the bottle of lotion back on the table and turned her head to look at Rose.

Rose stared at our youngest sister.
“My oracle, my prophet,”
she said finally. When in the hell had Cordy ever become so wise?

“My years on the road have taught me much, grasshopper,” Cordy said, as though Rose had spoken her thought aloud.

Such are the minds of sisters.

EPILOGUE

O
n Christmas Eve it snowed, a light fall starting in the morning and continuing through the day, the whisper of flakes promising magic and coating the trees with silent beauty. We stayed inside for as long as we could, until the tracing of frost on the windows and the promise of cold snow against our skin drew us out. Enough snow had fallen for the children to go out to Wilson’s Hill; we could hear the shouts and shrieks as they sledded down the gentle slope that had seemed so high to us years ago.

“Let’s go into the woods,” Cordy said, and headed off, so we were bound to follow. The baby had come early, or the doctors had just been off (our mother assured us this was possible, as Cordy herself had arrived almost a month later than expected), and she was enjoying the new pleasure of her own mobility. She walked, light and quick, along the gathering snow, and we placed our feet in her steps, widening them with our own imprints.

Rose and Jonathan would be married in a week’s time, a small ceremony and a small reception, the service at St. Mark’s, the reception in a restaurant. Celebrating her marriage at Barnwell College had seemed wrong now, an unnecessary return to the past. Bean had chosen the dress, a deep midnight blue that made Rose’s eyes glow, her creamy, delicate skin set off by its richness. When Rose had tried it on, she turned and turned in front of the mirror, partly amazed by her own beauty, partly to listen to the delicious rustle it gave with each twirl. Everyone else would be celebrating the end of an old year, the dawn of a new, and we would be celebrating our sister and the man who had captured her heart in the forest of Arden.

“Are you nervous?” Bean asked. She stepped over a fallen log; the moss still showed, burned and brown, through the cover of the snow.

“Not at all,” Rose said. She smiled, her teeth white against the cold apples of her cheeks. “Isn’t that silly? I should be, shouldn’t I?”

“Not necessarily. Not if you’re sure of what you’re doing.”

“I’m sure,” Rose said. And we felt that spoke of more than her relationship with Jonathan. She had come back from England taller, prouder, scented with strength like perfumed oil. An article had been accepted for publication. After the wedding, they would honeymoon out west, where the mountains gave way to the sea, and visit universities or colleges that might want them both after they returned from England. But they held nothing certain but each other, and we saw that for our Rose, this was now enough.

“Ooh, look. They’re setting up the Nativity,” Cordy said, pointing toward the church. On the lawn in front, bales of hay and a tiny shed had risen from the white, and figures, wrapped in heavy clothes, moved with crates and boards in their arms. “Remember when that cow died during the Nativity and no one knew?”

“Ugh. That’s so depressing. Do you have to bring it up?” Rose asked.

“Yes,” Cordy said, and trotted off toward the church.

We walked past Father Aidan on the front steps, knocking snow off his boots before he headed back inside, and he raised his arm, waved. “See you all tonight?” he called. We had always, for as long as even Rose could remember, gone to the candlelight service on Christmas Eve at St. Mark’s. When we thought of the church, we pictured it like that, bright with holly, the lights down, all rich reds and the waxy cream of candlelight as we—yes, even we—sang hymns to the winter, to the Christ child, to the darkness and the light.

“You know it!” Cordy said. She pointed at him, clicked her fingers. Pow.

“God, Cordy,” Bean said. “You’re so embarrassing.”

“That’s my job,” Cordy said, swinging her arms by her side.

We walked back toward home through town, shuttered shops dark behind the swirl of snow. The old-fashioned streetlights had come on in honor of the darkened sky, and they shone twice as bright with the strings of holiday lights wrapped down their posts.

“This is the prettiest time in Barney,” Rose sighed.

“Isn’t Oxford pretty at Christmas?” Bean asked. The streets were empty, only a few light footprints rapidly being covered by new snow showed that anyone had passed here at all. In the distance, the central campus quad lay pure and undisturbed.

“Not like this,” Rose said. “It’s wet. And there are these horrible neon lights that totally spoil the image.”

“The Baby Jesus would totally hate that,” Cordy said, straight-faced.

“Rude!” Bean laughed.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Cordy told Bean. “Are you going over to Matthew’s later?” Bean had begun dating a single father who lived a few towns over. He was older, his children nearing adolescence, but that was probably best for Bean, who was a great deal happier exchanging makeup tips than changing diapers.

“No,” Bean said. “He’s coming to the service tonight after he drops the kids off at their mom’s.”

“Oh, goody!” Cordy said, and thumped her gloved hands together as we turned onto our street. “It’ll be like the whole family’s here. Dan’s coming over after church. He’s a godless heathen, but I think he’s up for hot cider and Christmas bread.”

We turned into the wide patch of white covering our driveway, our lawn, our walk. The house looked beautiful, lit up and glowing, the Christmas tree in the front window glittering, warm lights in every window, our parents and Jonathan moving shadows behind the glass.

Inside, Ariel would be waiting for a feeding. Her every feature was the image of Cordy, of us. She was wholly our own. We thrilled at the sight of her tiny, helpless hands grasping at air as Cordy held her to her breast, and with each tiny breath taken, we felt the wonder in the world increase by a thousandfold. Perhaps the only person more infatuated with her was our father, who refused to let her out of his sight, or even his arms, unless she was feeding. If we had thought he preferred Cordy, that predilection paled beside the love he had for Ariel, and her birth had laid to rest any conflict between them.