by E. Lockhart
25
Everyone heads to New Clairmont, leaving me and Mummy alone at Windemere to unpack. I ditch my bag and look for the Liars.
Suddenly they are on me like puppies. Mirren grabs me and spins me. Johnny grabs Mirren, Gat grabs Johnny, we are all grabbing each other and jumping. Then we are apart again, going into Cuddledown.
Mirren chatters about how glad she is that Bess and the littles will live with Granddad this summer. He needs somebody with him now. Plus Bess with her obsessive cleaning is impossible to be around. Plus again and even more important, we Liars will have Cuddledown to ourselves. Gat says he is going to make hot tea and hot tea is his new vice. Johnny calls him a pretentious assface. We follow Gat into the kitchen. He puts water on to boil.
It is whirlwind, all of them talking over each other, arguing happily, exactly like old times. Gat hasn’t quite looked at me, though.
I can’t stop looking at him.
He is so beautiful. So Gat. I know the arc of his lower lip, the strength in his shoulders. The way he half tucks his shirt into his jeans, the way his shoes are worn down at the heel, the way he touches that scar on his eyebrow without realizing he’s doing it.
I am so angry. And so happy to see him.
Probably he has moved on, like any well-adjusted person would. Gat hasn’t spent the last two years in a shell of headache pain and self-pity. He’s been going around with New York City girls in ballet flats, taking them to Chinese food and out to see bands. If he’s not with Raquel, he’s probably got a girl or even three at home.
“Your hair’s new,” Johnny says to me.
“Yeah.”
“You look pretty, though,” says Mirren sweetly.
“She’s so tall,” says Gat, busying himself with boxes of tea, jasmine and English Breakfast and so on. “You didn’t used to be that tall, did you, Cady?”
“It’s called growing,” I say. “Don’t hold me responsible.” Two summers ago, Gat was several inches taller than I. Now we are about even.
“I’m all for growing,” says Gat, his eyes still not on my face. “Just don’t get taller than me.”
Is he flirting?
He is.
“Johnny always lets me be tallest,” Gat goes on. “Never makes an issue of it.”
“Like I have a choice,” groans Johnny.
“She’s still our Cady,” says Mirren loyally. “We probably look different to her, too.”
But they don’t. They look the same. Gat in a worn green T-shirt from two summers ago. His ready smile, his way of leaning forward, his dramatic nose.
Johnny broad-shouldered, in jeans and a pink plaid button-down so old its edges are frayed; nails bitten, hair cropped.
Mirren, like a pre-Raphaelite painting, that square Sinclair chin. Her long, thick hair is piled on top of her head and she’s wearing a bikini top and shorts.
It is reassuring. I love them so.
Will it matter to them, the way I can’t hold on to even basic facts surrounding my accident? I’ve lost so much of what we did together summer fifteen. I wonder if the aunts have been talking about me.
I don’t want them to look at me like I’m sick. Or like my mind isn’t working.
“Tell about college,” says Johnny. He is sitting on the kitchen counter. “Where are you going?”
“Nowhere, yet.” This truth I can’t avoid. I am surprised they don’t know it already.
“What?”
“Why?”
“I didn’t graduate. I missed too much school after the accident.”
“Oh, barf!” yells Johnny. “That is horrible. You can’t do summer school?”
“Not and come here. Besides, I’ll do better if I apply with all my coursework done.”
“What are you going to study?” asks Gat.
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“But we want to know,” says Mirren. “We all do.”
“Seriously,” I say. “Something else. How’s your love life, Johnny?”
“Barf again.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“When you’re as handsome as I am, the course never runs smooth,” he quips.
“I have a boyfriend named Drake Loggerhead,” says Mirren. “He’s going to Pomona like I am. We have had sexual intercourse quite a number of times, but always with protection. He brings me yellow roses every week and has nice muscles.”
Johnny spits out his tea. Gat and I laugh.
“Drake Loggerhead?” Johnny asks.
“Yes,” says Mirren. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” Johnny shakes his head.
“We’ve been going out five months,” says Mirren. “He’s spending the summer doing Outward Bound, so he’ll have even more muscles when I see him next!”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Gat says.
“Just a little,” says Mirren. “But I love him.”
I squeeze her hand. I am happy she has someone to be in love with. “I’m going to ask you about the sexual intercourse later,” I warn her.
“When the boys aren’t here,” she says. “I’ll tell you all.”
We leave our teacups and walk down to the tiny beach. Take our shoes off and wiggle our toes in the sand. There are tiny, sharp shells.
“I’m not going to supper at New Clairmont,” says Mirren decisively. “And no breakfast, either. Not this year.”
“Why not?” I ask.
“I can’t take it,” she says. “The aunts. The littles. Granddad. He’s lost his mind, you know.”
I nod.
“It’s too much togetherness. I just want to be happy with you guys, down here,” says Mirren. “I’m not hanging around in that cold new house. Those people are fine without me.”
“Same,” says Johnny.
“Same,” says Gat.
I realize they discussed this idea before I arrived.
26
Mirren and Johnny go in the water with snorkels and fins. They kick around looking for lobsters. Probably there are only jellyfish and tiny crabs, but even with those slim pickings we have snorkeled at the tiny beach, always.
Gat sits with me on a batik blanket. We watch the others in silence.
I don’t know how to talk to him.
I love him.
He’s been an ass.
I shouldn’t love him. I’m stupid for still loving him. I have to forget about it.
Maybe he still thinks I am pretty. Even with my hair and the hollows beneath my eyes. Maybe.
The muscles of his back shift beneath his T-shirt. The curve of his neck, the soft arch of his ear. A little brown mole on the side of his neck. The moons of his fingernails. I drink him up after so long apart.
“Are you looking at my troll feet?” Gat asks. “God, don’t do it.”
“What?”
“A troll snuck into my room in the middle of the night, took my normal feet for himself and left me with his thuggish troll feet.” Gat tucks his feet under a towel so I can’t see them. “Okay? Now you know the truth.”
I am relieved we are talking about nothing important. “Wear shoes.”
“I’m not wearing shoes on the beach.” He wiggles his feet out from beneath the towel. They look fine. “I have to act like everything’s okay until I can find that troll and kill him to the death and get my normal feet back. Have you got weapons?”
“There’s a fire poker in Windemere.”
“All right. You’ll help me. As soon as we see that troll, we’ll kill him to death with your fire poker.”
“If you insist.”
I lie back on the blanket and put my arm over my eyes.We are silent for a moment.
“Trolls are nocturnal,” I add.
“Cady?” Gat whispers.
I turn my face to look in his eyes.
“Yeah?”
“I thought I might never see you again.”
“What?” He is so close we could kiss.
“I thought I might never see you again. After everything that happened, then when you weren’t here last summer.”
Why didn’t you write me? I want to say. Why didn’t you call, all this time?
He touches my face. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he says. “I’m so glad I got the chance.”
I don’t know what is between us. I really don’t. He is such an ass.
“Give me your hand,” Gat says.
I am not sure I want to.
But then of course I do want to.
His skin is warm and sandy. We intertwine our fingers and close our eyes against the sun.
We just lie there. Holding hands. He rubs my palm with his thumb like he did two summers ago beneath the stars.
And I melt.
27
My room at Windemere is wood-paneled, with cream paint. There’s a green patchwork quilt on the bed. The carpet is one of those rag rugs you see in country inns.
You were here two summers ago, I tell myself. In this room, every night. In this room, every morning.
Presumably you were reading, playing games on the iPad, choosing clothes. What do you remember?
Nothing.
Tasteful botanic prints line the walls of my room, plus some art I made: a watercolor of the magnolia that used to loom over the Clairmont lawn and two crayon drawings: one of Granny Tipper and her dogs, Prince Philip and Fatima; the other of my father. I drag the wicker laundry basket from the closet, take down all the pictures, and load them into the basket.
There’s a bookshelf lined with paperbacks, teen books and fantasy I was into reading a few years back. Kids’ stories I read a hundred times. I pull them down and stack them in the hallway.
“You’re giving away the books? You love books,” Mummy says. She’s coming out of her room wearing fresh clothes for supper. Lipstick.
“We can give them to one of the Vineyard libraries,” I say. “Or to Goodwill.”
Mummy bends over and flips through the paperbacks. “We read Charmed Life together, do you remember?”
I nod.
“And this one, too. The Lives of Christopher Chant. That was the year you were eight. You wanted to read everything but you weren’t a good enough reader yet, so I read to you and Gat for hours and hours.”
“What about Johnny and Mirren?”
“They couldn’t sit still,” says Mummy. “Don’t you want to keep these?”
She reaches out and touches my cheek. I pull back. “I want the things to find a better home,” I tell her.
“I was hoping you would feel different when we came back to the island, is all.”
“You got rid of all Dad’s stuff. You bought a new couch, new dishes, new jewelry.”
“Cady.”
“There’s nothing in our whole house that says he ever lived with us, except me. Why are you allowed to erase my father and I’m not allowed to—”
“Erase yourself?” Mummy says.
“Other people might use these,” I snap, pointing at the stacks of books. “People who have actual needs. Don’t you think of doing good in the world?”
At that moment, Poppy, Bosh, and Grendel hurtle upstairs and clog the hallway where we are standing, snarfling our hands, flapping their hairy tails at our knees.
Mummy and I are silent.
Finally she says, “It’s all right for you to moon around at the tiny beach, or whatever you did this afternoon. It’s all right for you to give away your books if you feel that strongly. But I expect you at Clairmont for supper in an hour with a smile on your face for Granddad. No arguments. No excuses. You understand me?”
I nod.
28
A pad is left from several summers ago when Gat and I got obsessed with graph paper. We made drawing after drawing on it by filling in the tiny squares with colored pencil to make pixilated portraits.
I find a pen and write down all my memories of summer fifteen.
The s’mores, the swim. The attic, the interruption.
Mirren’s hand, her chipped gold nail polish, holding a jug of gas for the motorboats.
Mummy, her face tight, asking, “The black pearls?”
Johnny’s feet, running down the stairs from Clairmont to the boathouse.
Granddad, holding on to a tree, his face lit by the glow of a bonfire.
And all four of us Liars, laughing so hard we felt dizzy and sick.
I make a separate page for the accident itself. What Mummy’s told me and what I guess. I must have gone swimming on the tiny beach alone. I hit my head on a rock. I must have struggled back to shore. Aunt Bess and Mummy gave me tea. I was diagnosed with hypothermia, respiratory problems, and a brain injury that never showed on the scans.
I tack the pages to the wall above my bed. I add sticky notes with questions.
Why did I go into the water alone at night?
Where were my clothes?
Did I really have a head injury from the swim, or did something else happen? Could someone have hit me earlier? Was I the victim of some crime?
And what happened between me and Gat? Did we argue? Did I wrong him?
Did he stop loving me and go back to Raquel?
I resolve that everything I learn in the next four weeks will go above my Windemere bed. I will sleep beneath the notes and study them every morning.
Maybe a picture will emerge from the pixels.
A witch has been standing there behind me for some time, waiting for a moment of weakness. She holds an ivory statue of beautiful goose. It is intricately carved. I admire it only for a moment before she swings it with shocking force. It connects, crushing a hole in my forehead. I can feel my bone come loose. The witch swings the statue again and hits above my right ear, smashing my skull. Blow after blow she lands, until tiny flakes of bone litter the bed and mingle with chipped bits of her once-beautiful goose.
I find my pills and turn off the light.
“Cadence?” Mummy calls from downstairs. “Supper is on at New Clairmont.”
I can’t go.
I can’t. I won’t.
Mummy promises coffee to help me stay awake while the drugs are in my system. She says how long it’s been since the aunts have seen me, how the littles are my cousins, too, after all. I have family obligations.
I can only feel the break in my skull and the pain winging through my brain. Everything else is a faded backdrop to that.
Finally she leaves without me.
29
Deep in the night, the house rattles—just the thing Taft was scared of over at Cuddledown. All the houses here do it. They’re old, and the island is buffeted by winds off the sea.
I try to go back to sleep.
No.
I go downstairs and onto the porch. My head feels okay now.
Aunt Carrie is on the walkway, heading away from me in her nightgown and a pair of shearling boots. She looks skinny, with the bones of her chest exposed and her cheekbones hollow.
She turns onto the wooden walkway that leads to Red Gate.
I sit, staring after her. Breathing the night air and listening to the waves. A few minutes later she comes up the path from Cuddledown again.
“Cady,” she says, stopping and crossing her arms over her chest. “You feeling better?”
“Sorry I missed supper,” I say. “I had a headache.”
“There will be suppers every night, all summer.”
“Can’t you sleep?”
“Oh, you know.” Carrie scratches her neck. “I can’t sleep without Ed. Isn’t that silly?”
“No.”
“I start wandering. It’s good exercise. Have you seen Johnny?”
“No
t in the middle of the night.”
“He’s up when I’m up, sometimes. Do you see him?”
“You could look if his light is on.”
“Will has such bad nightmares,” Carrie says. “He wakes up screaming and then I can’t go back to sleep.”
I shiver in my sweatshirt. “Do you want a flashlight?” I ask. “There’s one inside the door.”
“Oh, no. I like the dark.”
She trudges once again up the hill.
30
Mummy is in the New Clairmont kitchen with Granddad. I see them through the glass sliding doors.
“You’re up early,” she says when I come in. “Feeling better?”
Granddad is wearing a plaid bathrobe. Mummy is in a sundress decorated with small pink lobsters. She is making espresso. “Do you want scones? The cook made bacon, too. They’re both in the warming drawer.” She walks across the kitchen and lets the dogs into the house. Bosh, Grendel, and Poppy wag their tails and drool. Mummy bends and wipes their paws with a wet cloth, then absentmindedly swipes the floor where their muddy paw prints were. They sit stupidly, sweetly.
“Where’s Fatima?” I ask. “Where’s Prince Philip?”
“They’re gone,” says Mummy.
“What?”
“Be nice to her,” says Granddad. He turns to me. “They passed on a while back.”
“Both of them?”
Granddad nods.
“I’m sorry.” I sit next to him at the table. “Did they suffer?”
“Not for long.”
Mummy brings a plate of raspberry scones and one of bacon to the table. I take a scone and spread butter and honey on it. “She used to be a little blond girl. A Sinclair through and through,” Granddad complains to Mummy.
“We talked about my hair when you came to visit,” I remind him. “I don’t expect you to like it. Grandfathers never like hair dye.”
“You’re the parent. You should make Mirren change her hair back how it was,” Granddad says to my mother. “What happened to the little blond girls who used to run around this place?”