The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls (34 page)

I am certain Sam did not mean to kill Georgie. He was a boy, turning into a man. He did not know his own strength. It was a series of events, Sam. A series of events.

I never told a soul about what I had seen, my brother raise his rifle and strike Georgie in the head. Did my father know? He was a doctor, surely he could have told the difference between a wound from falling and a wound from force. But only God knows this.

I came home twice a year, two weeks for Christmas and two weeks in the middle of the summer. One twelfth of the year. In a way our relationships remained the same—my father was still distant, my mother difficult. But the qualities of those feelings were complicated now by what I had done, by what my family had done to me. It’s difficult to say what Sam thought about everything—we were twins, we never had to articulate our feelings to each other, we just knew. But not anymore, Sam and I didn’t know each other, it was safe to say, any longer. He was distant and pleasant when I was home, which was the worst punishment I could think of, to treat me like a stranger. I never cried again in his presence, nor he in mine.

I came back and was able to eat meals with my family, discuss matters of no consequence, sleep in the same house as they only because of Henry Holmes. Only because he made me understand the exchange my parents had made. Me for Sam. But I had made the first trade: my brother for my cousin.

I experienced true love, joy, when my children were born, grief again when I lost a child in my fifth month. I had a life, separate from my family and what had happened when I was a child. And horses were always a part of my life, a blessing; taking comfort in them had always been something I’d done by instinct, and it was an instinct I never outgrew. I took pleasure in how good I was in the saddle, how well I knew my way around a horse. I was good at something in a way most people are never good at anything in their lives. Horses were a gift; how many people have such a constant in their life, separate from the rough and often beautiful mess that is their family?

At Yonahlossee I learned the lesson that I had started to teach myself at home: my life was mine. And I had to lay claim to it.

When I returned from the Northeast, I was always surprised by the palm trees, the blunt heat, the moisture in the air so heavy it was almost sickening. My parents lived in a neighborhood where they could see other houses from theirs; they lived in a house that was beautiful and cold.

Sam decided to be a doctor, like Father. He stopped exploring the natural world. He spent all his time inside, now, and when I was home I would study his cheek, made pale by his preference for the indoors; when he turned toward me, there was a flash of skin, a succinct feeling of desperation. We were lost to each other. At Yonahlossee I learned to live a life without my brother; I learned that what once seemed impossible was not. And my life all to myself was easier, in many ways. Lonelier, but a twin is as much a burden as a pleasure. I did not know life without him, we had a language all to ourselves in infancy, we shared a womb. When everyone else expected one—my mother, my father, my grandparents—we were two. And it is not easy to be two people where there should have been one. If there had only been one person, then Georgie would still be alive. Because no one else besides Sam would have cared so deeply, so irrevocably, about what his other half had done.

My parents had sent me away because they saw I was a girl who wanted too much, wanted badly, inappropriately. And back then all that want was a dangerous thing.

Woe be to you, Thea, Mr. Holmes said. We were in his library, surrounded by his books. My blouse was unbuttoned. He took my hand and kissed my thumb. Woe be to you for wanting too much. He kissed my wrist. For wanting so much. He lowered me down onto the couch, my uniform hiked over my hips.

I wanted everything. I wanted my cousin. I wanted Mr. Holmes. I was a girl, I learned, who got what she wanted, but not without sadness, not without cutting a swath of destruction so wide it consumed my family. And almost me. I almost fell into it, with them. I almost lost myself.

But I was too selfish. I wanted, as Mr. Holmes put it, too much. And none of it was a decision, a list written out, a plan articulated. We have no say in who we love. And woe be to all of us, for that.

Woe be to Sam, who never left Florida, who never lived in the world beyond its shores. He had a wife, he had a family. He did not have his twin. Woe be to Mr. Holmes, who I never saw again, who surely felt me as a loss, as I felt him. Woe be to Mother and Father, who allowed what I had done to unravel their lives. Woe be to Georgie most of all, whose first love was his last, who has turned to dust now, a stone in a Missouri cemetery the only evidence that he existed, proof that he lived and left some mark. Evidence that he existed, but not that he loved. I am proof that he loved. And perhaps that was my most important task, in this life: living a life for both me and him. Seeing things that he never did. Doing what he could not.

But woe be to Thea—no. Take it back, Henry. And surely he would have, if he had continued to know me. Surely he would have seen that my life was full, and rich, and my own.

A photograph would hang on the wall outside Mr. Holmes’s office, though I would never see it. I would never return to Yonahlossee, or my home in Florida. The photograph would serve as a reminder to him. A reminder to everyone that Theodora Atwell and Naari had won the Spring Show in 1931. I had left in disgrace, but still my picture would go up. It was tradition.

—

I
heard a train in the distance, the familiar whining. The woman next to me stood, my presence forgotten. Woe be to us. The memory sprang up, unbidden. One of the countless afternoons we spent with each other, all flooding out now, flooding out of my head and turning into so much vapor. I faltered. I put my head in my hands.

But no. I looked up again. The train made its slow ascent into the station, and the woman marched into the rain, though it would be minutes and minutes until she was allowed to board. But she didn’t care. She simply wanted to leave.

I thought of my picture in the Castle, which neither my parents nor Sam would ever see.

But what would future girls see when they looked at the photograph during their daily comings and goings, peered closely? Not the shade of my hair, rendered colorless by the photograph. Not Mr. Holmes, who stood beyond the frame. Not anything, really. Just a girl on a horse, like so many other girls.

A deep debt of gratitude to my agent, Dorian Karchmar, who took on
Yonahlossee
when it was barely a manuscript, and guided me through many revisions. It would not be a book without her.

Thank you next to my editor, Sarah McGrath, whose care and insight made the book so much better. At Riverhead Books, thank you to the entire amazing team and especially Geoff Kloske, Sarah Stein, and Jynne Dilling Martin. At Headline, my UK publisher, thank you to Claire Baldwin.

At William Morris Endeavor, thank you to Simone Blaser, Tracy Fisher, Catherine Summerhayes, and Eugenie Furniss.

I owe many thanks to the creative writing departments of Emory University and Washington University, respectively—the former, where I took my first creative writing class; the latter, where I received my MFA and then taught while I wrote
Yonahlossee
. At both schools, I studied under many fine professors. A special thank-you to Kathryn Davis, who has always been my most enthusiastic cheerleader, and Marshall Klimasewiski and Saher Alam.

Thank you to Tim Mullaney, David Schuman, and Curtis Sittenfeld, for support while I wrote.

Thank you to my mother, for teaching me to love a home. Thank you to my father, for driving me thousands of miles to and from the barn. And for not letting me go to law school. Thank you to my sister, Xandra, who has always been my biggest champion. As I grow older, I feel increasingly lucky for the love and support my parents and sister have always offered.

Finally, thank you to Mat, my husband. This book is for him; it couldn’t be for anyone else.