“He wants us to follow him,” Emily said to her father.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. He always knows, though.”
Her father got to his feet and wiped sweat from his forehead. In the full sun he was brown and lean, and the silver-blond hair blazed. Emily’s heart contracted.
“He’s not old,” she thought. “Why did I used to think he was old?”
“Lead on,” he said to Elvis, and the man and the girl set out beside the Boykin, dancing like a dervish in his eagerness.
He bounded straight across the blinding field and into the trees where the maritime forest began, ending ultimately at the dolphin slide on Sweetwater Creek.
“I know where he’s going,” Emily said suddenly, laughing aloud. “Come on, Daddy. We’ll be late!”
Walter Parmenter shook his head, but lengthened his stride to match his daughter’s. Soon they were deep in green shadow, the air near-solid with heat and steaming vegetation and the drone of insects. Elvis ran ahead like a bronze bullet, his curly ears streaming back in his own breeze.
They burst out of the forest and onto the bluff that looked down into the creek. The tide was near out, and the blue ribbon of water cutting the great sea of cordgrass hardly moved. Out over the creek, from the branches of the fallen oak, something large dropped into the water, and something else croaked. Emily had a moment’s sick, kaleidoscopic image of spoiled-fruit flesh and dying firelight; smelled the amniotic smell of sex and the stench of vomit and the sour breath of dying woodsmoke; felt the shape of the great blackness boiling behind her. And then all of it was gone. There was only heat and stillness and the little sullen lap of the retreating tide.
But there had been something. Down on the little beach there were fresh, deep, wet grooves in the sand, and the water still rocked a little, slapping at the banks. Far downstream a great thrashing died away.
“Oh, we missed them,” Emily cried. “They came early; Elvis knew they were here. But we missed them! I wanted you to see…”
There was a swell and wash of creek water below them, just off the beach, and a large bullet-shaped silver head broke the water and hovered there. The huge, all-seeing black eye regarded them, and the closed, comic-strip smile saluted them, and then there was a great roll of rubbery silver flesh and the dolphin dove under and slid downstream, as silent as a ghost fish, to join his retreating pod.
“He waited for us!” Emily cried, tears and sweat stinging her eyes. “He did once before, when Lulu and I were here; Lulu said she thought they came when they knew you needed them.”
Her father smiled down at her.
“My God,” he said. “The river dolphins. I’d completely forgotten about them. I saw them when I first came here, right here on this bank.”
“Did…my mother bring you here?”
Walter Parmenter laughed, an easy, almost boyish laugh.
“Your mother never willingly went outdoors in her life. It was your Aunt Jenny, before I ever met your mother. They’re really something, aren’t they?”
They sat down on the grass beneath the fringe of willows and small live oaks. His mission completed, Elvis lay down beside Emily, his pink tongue lolling sideways out of his grinning mouth. For a long time they sat in silence.
Then her father said, “Did you know that the ratio of salt to water in seawater is exactly the same as the ratio in human blood? I read that some place. No wonder so many people are addicted to the sea.”
Emily smiled at him.
“Do you remember that time you had to come get me at camp in the mountains, and everybody thought I was just homesick and being a baby? It wasn’t that at all. It was that I just couldn’t breathe away from saltwater, from the river and the creek. I still can’t, really.”
“No,” her father said. “I didn’t know that.” He put his arm around her shoulder and drew her toward him. Emily laid her head on his shoulder, very carefully and slowly, as though the shoulder would of itself heave her off.
“I didn’t know much about you at all, did I?” he said. “I have a lot of catching up to do.”
They sat in silence again. Emily did not lift her head. Beside her, Elvis snored rhythmically. She touched the breast pocket of her shirt and felt the stiff outline of folded paper.
“Tell me about my mother,” she said.
EPILOGUE
ON A BLUE SEPTEMBER MORNING, the first one in a long time not to dawn white and thick and breathless, a pretty girl in a long flowered skirt and pink tank top stood before a pair of great wrought-iron gates, looking through them. Inside, on the clipped grass and the white paved paths crossing it, and alighting from a fleet of shining compact buses, other girls almost identical to her laughed and called out to one another.
Emily knew they were not like her, though. Their hearts did not drag; their blood did not fizz with the poison champagne of terror; their tongues were not cotton in their mouths.
Abruptly she turned and ran back to the green SUV parked at the curb, dusty from the rutted driveway of Sweetwater and dappled with the genteel shade of Rutledge Street downtown.
She put her head in the window on the driver’s side and kissed her father’s cheek. It was glassy-slick and pink with fresh razor burn, and his damp hair showed the tracks of a comb.
“You’re going to be late, Emmybug,” Walter Parmenter said. “Run on. Jenny or I’ll pick you up here about four.”
She went around to the other window and leaned in and kissed the dome of a shining coppery, curly head.
“I’ll be back. And I’ll still be me.”
“I know.”
She walked slowly back across the quiet street and up to the gates. Again, she stopped.
“You don’t have to do it all,” Lulu said clearly into her left ear. “Just take what you want and let the other stuff go.”
“Go get ’em, Emmy,” Buddy said into her right ear.
Emily squared her shoulders and spit on her fingers and slicked the unruly hair back off her forehead, and walked into Charlotte Hall.
About the Author
ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS’s bestselling novels include Nora, Nora; Low Country; Up Island; Fault Lines; Downtown; Hill Towns; Colony; Outer Banks; King’s Oak; Peachtree Road; Homeplace; Fox’s Earth; The House Next Door; and Heartbreak Hotel. She is also the author of a work of nonfiction, John Chancellor Makes Me Cry. She and her husband, Heyward, split their time between their home in Charleston, South Carolina, and Brooklin, Maine.
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Books by Anne Rivers Siddons
Homeplace
Peachtree Road
King's Oak
Outer Banks
Colony
Hill Towns
Downtown
Fault Lines
Up Island
Low Country
Nora, Nora
Islands
Sweetwater Creek
Credits
Jacket design by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
Jacket photograph © Caroline Woodham/Getty Images
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint from the following works:
“The Wild Side of Life,” by Arlie Carter and William Warrem © 1952 (renewed) EMI Unart Catalog Inc.; all rights reserved; used by permission.
“Last Night’s Moon,” “Skin Divers,” and “The Hooded Hawk” from Skin Divers; “Memoriam,” “Miner’s Pond, Part I,” and “What the Light Teaches” from The Weight of Oranges/Miner’s Pond: all by Anne Michaels, all used by permission of McClelland & Stewart Ltd. and Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
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SWEETWATER CREEK. Copyright © 2005 by Anne Rivers Siddons. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition August 2005 ISBN 9780061755040
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Siddons, Anne Rivers.
Sweetwater Creek : a novel / Anne Rivers Siddons.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. South Carolina—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.I28S94 2005
813'.54—dc22 2005046279
ISBN-10: 0-06-621335-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-621335-5
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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