by Luanne Rice
“You’re the only one who gets it,” I said.
“Same with you,” he said.
“But Roo.”
“She doesn’t love me anymore,” he said.
“I don’t believe that.”
“I saw her two days ago, and she’s changed. Not the outside part, the way she looks. That’s obvious, and not what I’m talking about. But inside. She’s pulled away from me.”
“You don’t have to let her,” I said. And I meant it. But I also wanted Newton to hold on to me, to kiss me again, to want to be with me.
“It’s her choice,” he said. “She deserves to have this one, she has so few others. She wants to leave me.”
There was nothing I could say to that. It felt like she wanted to leave all of us. And that made everything so confusing. I wanted to feel Newton’s arms around me, to lie next to him in the sand and get warm. And that made me feel so guilty, I shook my head like a wet dog, drops flying everywhere.
“Whoa,” he said. “You okay?”
“I messed up,” I said.
“With the text?”
“For sure. And maybe with this?”
“This?”
“You know,” I said. Did I have to spell the kiss out for him?
“Yeah, I do. Maybe we’ve both messed up.”
My heart dropped. I half wanted him to contradict me, to say this was just what he wanted. But the idea of that made me slightly sick. Being with Newton behind Roo’s back was just wrong. Even though I knew that, I wanted him to hold me again. What was the matter with me?
He hugged me then. Held me tight so my body was pressed against his, our clothes soaking wet but our skin burning hot. We stayed that way for a few seconds, and then he let me go.
“Want me to help you find your glasses?” I asked.
“I think you’d better go,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”
He touched my cheek and walked away, toward the bight, to dive in and look for his glasses. He was right to tell me to go. But I couldn’t leave him searching in rushing water, after dark, by himself. Standing there, I swear there were two of me. The part that wanted to be a good sister, to be loyal to Roo. And the part that wanted more kisses from Newton, more everything.
So as the moon rose higher and flooded the beach with white light, I sat on the cold sand by the narrow stream, arms around my knees drawn up to my chin, shivering so hard I felt I might shake apart. And I watched over my sister’s boyfriend as he dove and dove for his glasses, and tried not to think about our kiss, yet unable to think of anything else.
Once I saw that he was safe, that he had found his glasses and wasn’t going to drown, I left the beach. I started walking home along the sandy lane. But when I got to the main road, I knew I couldn’t face my mother. I still tasted Newton’s kiss on my lips, felt the pressure of his arms around my shoulders, and I couldn’t bear to walk into the house where I’d grown up with Roo.
So I went left and stayed along the road’s shoulder, ducking out of the streetlight when the occasional car drove by. I passed the bait shop and dock, the fish market, and Paradise Ice Cream. It was past ten p.m., and the businesses were long closed. My curfew was one, but even if I didn’t make it home by then, my mother would assume, or at least hope, that I was having fun at the dance.
I’m not sure I had a plan, but my feet seemed to know where they were going. I tried not to think about Newton. Or how the only other time I’d been kissed I’d also wound up falling into salt water.
How different tonight had been. I suddenly, confusingly, knew what the word passionate meant.
I passed the graceful, white Episcopal church set back from the road, and a few hundred yards north, I passed the thrift shop. The turnoff to town came next, but I stayed on Shore Road and headed up the rise that overlooked the skein of tributaries and marshes coming off the Connecticut River.
When I got to the creek where Roo had had her accident, I sat on the bank. I heard the water gently rushing in, and saw it sparkling in moonlight. Roo’s shattered glass and taillights glinted, embedded in the silt. I looked up and saw a shape gliding overhead: an owl hunting the marsh. The sight eased the pressure in my chest and connected me to my father and Roo: Wait for the early owl.
I sat there a long time. My dress glittered with beach sand, but mostly it had dried. My mind was pretty empty, and I wanted it that way. There wasn’t much I could bear to think about. And I definitely didn’t want to go home.
Eventually, I began to walk again. Instead of heading back toward Hubbard’s Point, I went down Ferry Road. Some houses were dark, but the blue one with the coral pink door had a few lights on. The barking began as soon as I stepped foot on the driveway.
Martha opened the door even before I climbed the front steps. Lucan bounded out, greeted me, thumping my legs with his tail.
“Hello, Tilly,” Martha said.
“I know it’s really late,” I said. “I’m sorry to intrude.”
“You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important,” she said.
“My sister,” I said, my voice starting to shake. “You were with her after she crashed. Yours was the face she saw and the voice she heard.”
Martha nodded, looking at me with a steady gaze.
“I wanted to thank you. For being with her. When she needed someone. It should have been me.”
“You mean you should have been the person to find her?”
“The wrong sister got hurt,” I said, my voice breaking. “I’m horrible. I should have been the one.”
“Come inside,” she said, putting her arm around my shoulders.
We walked through her big house, spookily lit by flame-shaped bulbs in Victorian brass sconces, blackened by time and salt air. In spite of the spring night, she had a fire burning in the library, where the two threadbare velvet chairs faced the hearth, and she settled me in one, wrapped a plaid shawl around my shoulders, and went to get tea.
I stared at the flames, letting their quick dance quiet my mind. Lucan stayed beside me, his big noble head resting on crossed paws, and together we watched the fire. Martha soon returned with a tray.
She had made tea in a brown English teapot, and poured it into two bone china cups with violets on them. Shortbread was stacked on one plate, and two dog biscuits for Lucan were on another.
“Thank you, it’s delicious,” I said, sipping the tea.
“I’m glad you like it. It’s from the herbs in our garden. This mixture is called Maytime—chamomile, bee balm, peppermint, and rosemary. Althea was the best gardener I ever knew. When I drink this tea, I remember how much she loved it here, all the tender care she showed her plants, and Lucan … and me.”
“Your sister,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “From the minute I met you, I knew we were kindred spirits.”
“Because we have sisters?”
“And because we feel responsible for what happened to them.”
I glanced up, over the rim of my cup. She was staring at the fire through her wire-rimmed glasses. She must have been getting ready for bed when I arrived; she wore a flowing white nightdress with a black shawl wrapped around her shoulders; her long, white hair cascaded down her back. She looked so sweet. What would she think of me if she knew I’d kissed Newton?
“You took care of Althea,” I said. “Nona told me.”
“I did. I wouldn’t have missed a minute of it.”
“I wish I could take care of Roo.”
“Maybe someday you can. For now, I’m sure your visits give her a lot of hope.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, my heart twisting.
“How is she doing?”
“In some ways better. You mentioned hope—she has a doctor she likes, and he says maybe she’ll even take photographs again.”
“Oh, that would be wonderful!”
“I can’t see how she’d do it—she can’t move a muscle.”
“The doctor wouldn’t have told her i
f there wasn’t a chance—he wouldn’t do that to her. She must have a talent.”
“She does! She’s amazing.”
“Then she has to take pictures. In order to heal and thrive, she must. When we were young, Althea and I loved to sing. We went to a harmony workshop in the mountains of West Virginia. It was right in the heart of Appalachia, and our teacher grew up singing with her sisters. She told us that singers have to sing, or they get sick. A person has to use her talents, Tilly.”
I listened, thinking about that.
“Althea did. She loved to sculpt. Even when she got older and wasn’t able to do as much, we made sure she got into her studio every day. We hired two students to take her piece to the forge.”
“And did you sing?” I asked.
“Yes. Every night before bed—you saw the piano. I’d play, and we’d both sing, in the harmony we learned in those mountains. It was our secret language: song.”
“You helped her,” I said. “Why did you say you felt responsible?”
“We can have the best intentions,” she said. “And still hurt the person we love so much. I saw what I wanted to see—that Althea was getting better, recovering from pneumonia—a complication from her illness. Then, one night, she begged me to take her into the herb garden. It was a night just like this—warm, bright with the moon.”
“She wanted to see it rise?”
“Yes.” She tilted her head back, looking through the window at the sky. “Sometimes it’s hard to believe that’s the same moon. The very same one Althea saw that night, the one we used to watch as girls. But it is—the moon never changes.”
“What happened to her?”
“We stayed out for an hour,” Martha said. “We sang songs about the moon, every single one we could think of.”
“It sounds wonderful. She must have been happy,” I said, my throat aching with tears
“Oh, she was. We both were. But her lungs were very frail. She’d been sick for a year, and her respiratory system was compromised. The air felt balmy, so I thought she would be fine. But in fact, it was the worst weather for her; clear and cold would have been better. The humidity made it hard for her to breathe. It was like damp cotton filling her lungs. She died in my arms, right outside, on the terrace, before the ambulance arrived.”
“I’m so sorry, Martha,” I said. I tried to imagine how it must have felt, and my heart broke for her.
“I thought I was helping her, giving her what she wanted, the chance to be in our beloved garden and see the moon. She seemed fine one moment—but she was dying the next.”
“You didn’t know!”
“No, I didn’t.”
We sat still for a long time, thinking of our sisters. Moonlight slanted through the mullioned windows, casting shadows on the faded rug. I glanced over at Martha and knew that I was sitting in Althea’s chair; I wondered how often the two Muirhead sisters had sat here, how many moonrises they had watched over their decades together.
“I kissed my sister’s boyfriend tonight,” I blurted out.
“You did?”
I nodded. “He was rescuing me because I fell into the bight—” I stopped myself. “I don’t want to give excuses, it doesn’t matter how it happened, it just did.”
“Do you love him?”
I thought about that. I pictured all of us together over the years: running on the beach with Roo and Newton, riding in the car with them, taking the bus to school with them, swimming in Long Island Sound with them. Them. I loved them together, and I loved Newton as a part of them.
But I also loved him separately.
“I do, sort of,” I said. “I’m just not sure how.”
“You don’t want him to disappear from your life,” Martha said.
“No.”
“Maybe you feel that if you keep him close, it will bring her back.”
I gave that some thought. Martha refilled our teacups and passed me a piece of shortbread. It tasted delicious, with an unusual flavor. I saw a tiny lavender flower baked into the dough and realized she put herbs in everything, even sweets. Maybe this was her way of keeping Althea close, using her herbs all through the day, in everything she did.
“Could you tell me something?” I asked.
“What?” she asked.
“What exactly happened after Roo’s crash?” It took all my courage to ask. Martha took a deep breath, closed her eyes as if remembering—or maybe pulling up the strength it would take to tell me.
“I saw the car coming, and heard it hit Lucan,” she said.
I saw her watching for my reaction, and I steeled myself not to flinch so she would go on.
“My first thought was for him,” she said. “He’d been thrown clear, and was trying to run. I grabbed him, held him, so he wouldn’t hurt his leg more. But the car had flipped. I heard the metal crunch, and the glass break, and I thought there was no way anyone inside had survived.”
“But she had.”
“Yes. I heard her cry out, so I ran over, looked in, and she was hanging upside down, held in place by her seat belt. And she asked for Lucan. She was so injured, but her thoughts were for him.”
“That’s Roo. That’s who she is.”
“She mentioned someone else,” Martha said. “You.”
“Me? Why me?”
Martha leaned forward, looked at me with the gentlest gaze ever. It made my heart seize, and I was afraid to hear.
“She thought she was dying. She was bleeding hard, and the trauma was obviously great. She told me, ‘Tell Tilly it’s not her fault.’”
“Oh my God,” I said.
“She believed she didn’t have long—and honestly, neither did I.”
“Everything is so broken between us now.”
“No,” she said. “It’s not.”
“You haven’t seen her. You don’t know, Martha.”
“I know one thing, Tilly. When it comes to sisters, there’s no such thing as broken.”
“I can’t face her again.”
“You can, Tilly. She needs you. And …” Martha bit her lip, looked into the fire, then back into my face. “Even more, you need her. Your sister is strong—I can still see the purpose I saw in her eyes that terrible day, hear the resolve in her voice. You are the tender one here. I know you don’t believe that, but it’s true. You need her.”
“I don’t deserve her,” I whispered.
Then Lucan barked, and the doorbell rang. It was my mother—Martha had called her while she was making tea. I stood up from my seat by the fire, and sand trickled from my drying dress onto the floor. My mother thanked Martha, and I suppose I did, too, and we said good night and walked out into the brilliant light of the full moon.
Dr. Howarth connected the tiny gold wires leading from the electrode planted in my brain to a bundle of connections attached to the laptop and the computer-brain interface program he had designed just for me. Yes, wires in my brain. The idea terrified me so much I could barely think.
“Picture the cursor moving, Roo,” he said. “Watch it on the screen and tell it where to go on the keyboard. Thought into action, that’s what CBI is all about.”
I was propped up in bed, and the computer was set up on a tray table in front of me. The screen was open and blank except for a cursor. He told me a lot about how CBI relies on signal acquisition and signal translation, device output and operating protocol, but the basic idea was for me to picture moving the cursor across the keyboard, typing out my thoughts.
I tried.
Move, cursor!
It didn’t budge.
I felt like a blocked magician, trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat, or attempting to push a vase off a table, using only mind control. And I felt total panic, because if this didn’t work, what would I do?
“Your only job is to move the cursor,” he said. “You don’t have to think about your brain, or electrical impulses, or how it works. It’s just between you and the cursor.”
I tried, I concentrated, I talked t
o the cursor. Beads of sweat popped out on my forehead, rolled into my eyes. I heard embarrassing little eeks of frustration emanating from my mouth.
“Let’s take a break,” he said.
I didn’t want to, but I felt exhausted.
“As a little girl, you learned to read,” he said. “And you tried so hard. Every letter, every word took enormous concentration. Perhaps your teacher asked you to ‘sound out’ the words. And you did. And as you grew up, and you loved to read, it became second nature. You didn’t think about how to do it—you just did it. Your mother told me you would read all night if she let you. It became easy, a joy. That’s what will happen here, Roo.”
Nina came in to check on a pressure sore on my hip that had become infected. She was one of my favorite nurses, with shoulder-length dark hair and big brown eyes, a wide smile that always lifted my spirits.
“Oh, you’re busy,” she said. “I’ll come back later.”
“That’s okay, we’re taking a break,” Dr. Howarth said. He stepped away while she swept the curtains around my bed for privacy.
“You’re doing great,” she said to me. “Don’t get discouraged—the first part is always the hardest, but then it will become second nature—it really will. Are you using mindfulness on this? Your deep breathing?”
One day last week, Nina had come into my room and pulled a chair right up to my bed.
“Roo,” she’d said. “You know I’m mainly an RN. I’m also a meditation teacher. Dr. Hill asked me to see if you might like to try it. Do you want to hear about it?”
I was curious, and I loved Nina, so I looked up.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s simple. It’s called mindfulness. It helps with ‘monkey mind’—the way our thoughts are constantly jumping around, up and down, like a monkey swinging through a tree.”
Now I was really interested—my mind did exactly that, all the time.
“The idea is not to stop the thoughts—they will come, that’s normal. But we can stop following them, and learn to let them go. So instead of worrying everything to death, chewing it over and over, we allow the thoughts to come and go. But our mind needs somewhere peaceful to land—our breath.” She paused and took a breath herself. “That’s right—so simple, and right here, wherever we are, in this very moment. So you breathe in and you breathe out. And you feel the breath coming into your body, and you feel it leave; your chest rises, then falls. And that’s where you put your attention. Okay?”