The Lace Reader

by Brunonia Barry

  Finally she finished eating and took both our bowls to the sink and washed them with salt water. She used a dish towel to dry them, so they wouldn’t get all streaky from the salt. Then she actually put them away, which is something I’d never seen her do.

  “It’s a really nice day,” she said. “It’s going to be hot.”

  The sky still had traces of red.

  “I’m going to go down and check the house,” she said, getting up and walking out. It was a tradition, checking the Boynton house, seeing how it had fared over the winter, and we usually did it together. But this year she didn’t ask me if I wanted to come along. And she didn’t take back the earrings either. I never told Jack that Lyndley was back. It seems odd now (with all that’s happened) that we never had that conversation, but it’s true.

  It was dusk by the time he arrived, and it was already choppy from the impending storm. I was on the dock waiting for him when he pulled in. I didn’t even let him tie up the boat but jumped in, which wasn’t very smart, because the ocean was already churning. I think he had wanted to stay on the island, at least for a little while.

  “Get me out of here,” I said.

  He knew I was upset. He probably figured I’d had a fight with May or something. That was a pretty common occurrence these days, fighting with my mother. When she wasn’t distracted, the two of us were always arguing about something, usually stupid things. Like who had left the water running or who hadn’t pulled up the ramp. That’s how things were going between us. It wasn’t the way I’d hoped it would be last winter, when all I had wanted to do was get back here to the island, when I was counting the days until I could come home.

  There is a tiny door in the lobster traps they call the “ghost panel.” It is made of wood. I noticed it one day when we were hauling traps. When I asked about it, Jack told me the reason it is there is to let the lobster out in the event that the lobsterman never comes back for his catch. If he is gone for long enough, the wood will deteriorate and free the lobster. It’s supposed to be humane. I don’t know whether it’s a relatively new invention or if traps always had them. Or maybe they weren’t necessary back in the day when all the traps were made of wood.

  At the end of that last day we spent together, we hauled up one of the old wooden traps, one of the few Jack still used. I looked for the ghost panel, but I couldn’t find it. Jack already had the trap rebaited and was ready to toss it back, but I was obsessed with finding that panel. I was staring at the trap from every angle, looking for a way for the lobster to get out.

  “What are you doing?” Jack finally asked.

  That’s when I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore.

  He almost laughed, it was so out of the blue. But when he looked at me, I was crying. He’d never seen me cry before. I am not someone who cries easily.

  “I can’t keep seeing you,” I said. He could see I meant it.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  I couldn’t tell him. I didn’t want him to know about Lyndley, not yet anyway. I needed to know he was upset about me, and I thought if I told him about her, he wouldn’t care so much about the breakup. I don’t know what kind of logic I was using; it was just a feeling I had.

  His face went red at first, and then slowly the color drained out. I froze in place, expecting a blow. I’d seen white rage before, never on Jack, but on Cal plenty of times. White rage is an unmistakable emotion. I really expected him to hit me. But I was wrong. He didn’t hit me. He just stood there for what seemed like forever, staring at me.

  “Not again,” was what he finally said. His words were ice.

  For a minute I didn’t know what he meant, “Not again.” We had never broken up, never even really had a fight. “Not again” was not an appropriate response.

  Then, in a flash, I got it. It was totally appropriate. Whatever I might have wanted to believe, I knew that my instincts had been right not to tell him that Lyndley was back. Jack had been in love with Lyndley since the moment he’d met her. I was just a substitute, the closest he could get to what he really wanted, which was my twin. If I’d been honest with myself, I would have realized that I’d known it all along. I just hadn’t wanted to think about it. The blow he dealt me was to the heart, and it was much worse than anything physical he could have done to me.

  Angry, Jack slammed the engine into forward, gunning it to full throttle.

  As we came around the windward side of the island, by the rock cliffs off Back Beach, the boat slowed, almost imperceptibly at first. I looked up. The sky was brighter than I remember, although to the north it was all clouded over, and it was black and blank-looking as if a whole part of it had been erased. I almost said something to Jack then, almost warned him not to slow down here because the currents and the chop could easily catch you and you could lose your boat on these rocks. I ran to the bow of the boat and leaned over, looking for shadows where the rocks would be. “Don’t stop!” I yelled, climbing out onto the bow. I could see the dark silhouettes of the rocks just below the surface. We could smash to pieces here, the way so many boats have. I started to yell at him again, but the look on his face stopped me. He was looking past me at something on the cliff.

  My eyes tracked his. I blinked in disbelief. On top of the cliff, about a hundred feet up, was Lyndley. She was barefoot and wearing my nightgown, the one Eva had given me for Christmas, the white one with the lace on it. Her hair was blowing, and so was the gown. She looked like a goddess from some Greek myth. A wave of jealousy hit me hard. Not just because she was standing there so beautiful, with Jack looking up at her like that, but because the entire scenario seemed so completely staged. She must have been standing there for a while just waiting for us to see her, for the wind to be right and for the boat to appear in her range of vision. It was so calculated it was ludicrous, and I couldn’t believe Jack would actually be stupid enough to fall for it. At that moment I hated my sister. Utterly and completely. I wanted her to die. I wanted her to fall off the cliff and smash into a million pieces.

  The air was thick with the humidity of the storm that was still on the horizon but rapidly moving toward us, making it heavy and black and impossible to breathe.

  She was leaning forward, into the wind, like the figurehead on an old Salem ship, the lacy gown billowing out behind her, illuminated by the sliver of the waning moon, the stars and their doubles reflecting from the black sky down to the even blacker water. Her face was perfect and expressionless, like an empty canvas she hadn’t yet filled in, leaving us later to paint in our own impressions of what we saw that night. Her whole body tilted forward into the wind at an impossible angle, and just as I realized that the angle couldn’t hold, it broke free, obeying the laws of gravity but shattering those of perspective, and she began a long and silent fall into the cold, black ocean below. She flipped over headlong only once, then folded her arms across her chest as if she were already dead, piercing the black water like a needle, never even making a ripple. And she was gone forever. Just like that.

  I heard Jack gasp, and the sound jolted me back. We stood staring for what seemed like an eternity, expecting her to surface, to come up at least once, but it didn’t happen. Then I was in the water, diving. I heard Jack on the radio, shouting “Mayday! Mayday!” into the static. I gasped for breath, went down again. He blasted the horn, a three-blast distress call, then shined the search beam into the water, trying to help me. Then I heard the splash, and I knew he was in the water, too.

  I dove again and again, but the ocean was empty. I couldn’t get to the bottom. I came up a third time, exhaled completely, then took a huge, bursting breath and went down yet again, as deep as I could, letting the air out as I went, so I could reach the bottom rocks where I knew her body would be. I felt the rocks sting my legs as I scraped against them, pulling myself along, willing my body to stay down. Then, suddenly, the ocean was not empty anymore but seemed filled with everything anyone had ever lost—an anchor, a bottle, an old lobster trap. My lun
gs hurt, first from holding my breath, now from their own emptiness. Every part of me wanted to surface, but I knew that if I came up, I would never go back down again.

  There is a point where the life force overcomes the will and the body simply breathes itself. It just happens. It hurts like hell when you take a breath of seawater, but the hurt goes away quickly, and then you feel the flow of water and hear the music of the spheres. You are pulled, literally, toward the light, and I remember registering it, realizing that it is true what all those near-death-experience people write about. I remember smiling a bare-toothed smile, the cold water freezing it in time forever.

  As we broke the surface, I could see that May was already in the water, swimming toward us. The light I’d seen was not my near-death experience but the searchlight from Jack’s boat, and it was his hand that had dragged me back to life. It was horrible. It was as bad and painful as it had been beautiful a minute ago, and now Jack was trying to smother me, his mouth over mine, breathing me, trying to keep us both afloat until help arrived.

  May pulled us both to shore and was standing over us, so concerned about me. I was trying to tell her, trying to make her go back for Lyndley, but I couldn’t get the sound out. Every time I tried to speak, I gagged and threw up salt water, then gagged again. The pain in my lungs was worse than anything imaginable. He should have let me go, should have let me die with Lyndley. There was no pain in the dying, but the coming back to life was unbearable.

  “Be still now,” May was saying to me, holding my head in her lap, brushing my hair off my face. I could see Jack, kneeling, coughing, a few feet away. Tell her, I was trying to say. For God’s sake, tell her Lyndley is still down there. May was a strong swimmer. I realized now that I had been wrong worrying about her. May was stronger than I ever knew. She was the only one of us who was strong enough to save Lyndley now. But she couldn’t save her if she didn’t even know she was down there. I tried to tell her again and again. But no words came either from Jack or from me.

  I watched powerless as Jack heaved and collapsed, exhausted, sobbing into the sand.

  PART FOUR

  Out of the chaos and the swirling of pattern, the images will begin to emerge. The first will appear at the still point. These are the Guides. The Lace Reader must use the Guides to move past the still point and beyond the veil. Beware of images that emerge at this place. They are not real. The Guides are tricksters. They will show you their magic and invite you to linger. If they are able and the Seeker is vulnerable, the Guides will fool you into believing that they themselves are the answer. Their egos are great. The Reader must resist the urge to allow the Seeker to rest here, no matter how captivating the images seem, or how true. It is the Lace Reader’s job to move the Seeker past the still point to the real truth, which lies not within the veil but just beyond.

  —THE LACE READER’S GUIDE

  Chapter 21

  RAFFERTY AND TOWNER SAT TOGETHER on the porch like an old couple on a cruise ship, blankets over their legs, deck chairs pulled up tight against the rail of the old Victorian fixer-upper Rafferty had bought his first winter here and regretted ever since.

  “Taking the cruise to nowhere”—that’s what Towner called sitting here like this. It had become her main occupation since she got out of the hospital. It was prescribed. Rest, the doctors said. When she felt strong enough, she could swim a little, as long as it was in salt water. That last part had been Rafferty’s idea, not Towner’s. He knew she was a swimmer—all the Whitney women were—so he’d asked the doctor about a little swimming. Good idea, the doctor said. So far Towner had not gone anywhere near the water.

  She’d been in the hospital for three weeks, the first on a vancomycin drip. It was a bad infection. Postsurgical, they said. With complications. They hadn’t defined the complications, but they were there. Complications were a given in Towner’s life, and they were what had worried Eva most about her grandniece. There was something inevitable about these recent complications—not about what was happening but about Towner’s reaction to it all. Eva’s words kept coming back to him: There are many ways to kill yourself.

  In the weeks that followed the infection, Rafferty read everything he could find on twins and bereavement. Twins were something special. Lose a twin at any age and you lose part of yourself. Half of you dies. Even people who didn’t know they were twins, who had lost a twin in the womb or been separated at birth, walked around all their lives with feelings of separation and grief, as if half of themselves had been lost and could never be found again.

  Ever since he read Towner’s journal, the image she had created of Lyndley’s suicide kept playing through his mind. It was classic survivor’s guilt, if you thought about it. Suicide was almost impossible to get over. Rafferty’s roommate at Fordham had committed suicide, a fact made much worse because it wasn’t talked about, because the Catholic Church considered suicide not only a crime but a sin. In some ways it had felt like sin. At least to someone left behind. It engendered the same sick feeling you get when you’ve done something from which you can never truly recover. Like sin, or a low-grade virus.

  Rafferty had been the one to discover his roommate. The image had never left him. Unlike Towner, Rafferty had never tried to kill himself, not directly. But the possibility was always there. Like the virus. Once you were exposed, it stayed with you forever, just waiting for you to weaken. You never knew what day your resistance would be down and the sickness would get its shot at you.

  Rafferty visited Towner at Salem Hospital. He stopped there most days on his way home from work. They didn’t talk much but sat on the roof porch looking out toward the harbor. When it was time for her release, it seemed natural to take her to his porch, where the view was better and he could keep an eye on things.

  She couldn’t go back to California, not yet. She didn’t want to go back to Eva’s, and he sure as hell didn’t want her to. So he offered her his daughter’s room. Only for a few weeks, he said, when he heard her hesitation. Until she was stronger.

  She liked his daughter’s room, seemed to feel comfortable surrounded by the souvenirs of a life that had nothing to do with her own: a poster of Tupac Shakur over the dresser, Beanie Babies suspended from the ceiling in a makeshift hammock.

  “How old is your daughter?” It was one of the only questions Towner ever asked him.

  “Leah is almost fifteen,” he said.

  She would have turned fifteen while she was vacationing up here this summer, if he hadn’t changed the dates of her visit.

  “What would you think about coming a couple of weeks later?” he had asked Leah when he’d called her last week. “We could take the boat up to Maine.”

  “The big boat or the little one?” she’d wanted to know.

  “The big one.”

  “Okay,” she’d said. “Whatever.”

  His ex-wife had been all over him for changing the date. And for not taking it up with her.

  “You can’t just keep changing everything,” she’d said.

  “I don’t keep changing everything, I just changed this one thing. Leah didn’t seem to mind.”

  “The things you don’t know about children could fill a book.”

  Rafferty thought she was probably right. “I’m on a case.” It wasn’t an explanation, not really, but it was all he had, so he went with it.

  “So what else is new?”

  “A murder case.”

  There’d been a long pause when he said the word. “I thought you moved up there to get away from murder cases,” she’d said finally.

  “I moved up here to get away from a lot of things.”

  It had been a direct hit, and he knew it. He hadn’t meant it, not really. It was habit.

  “You can’t just go changing things,” she’d repeated. “What if I made plans?”

  “So this is really about you.”

  Click. He’d gotten used to the hang-up. It was the way most of their conversations ended. And it was usually because of s
omething he’d said.

  He’d felt bad about the whole thing for maybe an hour. Rafferty knew that Leah probably did care that he changed things around. But he also knew that to his daughter this wasn’t a vacation, it was a “dutation.” Leah had given it that name herself. Part duty, part vacation. She was clever with words, his daughter. He’d been a little insulted when she came up with the word, even if it was an accurate description of their time together. They were awkward with each other. It was as tough for her to come here as it was for him to have her. Not that he didn’t love her. He loved her a lot. But the guilt of leaving her behind had been too much for him. When he’d left New York, she’d wanted to come with him. She didn’t like the man her mother had left him for, she’d said. “I just want to be with you.”

  “Your mother would never allow it,” had been his response. It was true, of course, but it wasn’t an answer.

  She hadn’t asked him again. It wasn’t her nature. He’d counted on that. Just as it wasn’t her nature to question the change in vacation dates. She didn’t ask questions. Which was a good thing, at least in this case. The last thing Rafferty wanted Leah to know was the real reason he had changed things around. He didn’t want her to know he’d fallen for Towner Whitney.

  Most nights Rafferty made dinner for the two of them. Pasta mainly, because it was something she would actually eat. She liked ice cream, too. Sometimes the ice cream truck made its way into the Willows, and he would walk down to the little beach to get some for her. Other nights, if he was working late, he would stop by the Dairy Witch on his way home. She liked anything with jimmies—the chocolate ones, not the rainbow sprinkles.

  “What are you looking at?” he asked her. Her gaze was distant most of the time. He had asked the question before, usually without getting any answer.