I dreamed reunions. Reunions with retribution—my hands around her neck, throttling. Reunions with rejoicing—our arms around each other, dancing wild relief.
Every day, even in the downpour, Susannah and I rode. We rode across streams and up hills and around trees. We forgot about my arm and let the horses gallop across the golf course, the grounds-keeper running after us with clenched fists. We rode out to the lake and dared each other to stand shirtless in its rising steam, arms outstretched, letting the mosquitoes feast. And we never talked about ourselves or what would happen to us. But only about Skye, and where she was hiding, and what would become of her when they finally found her.
At the end of two weeks, we rode back to the barn and saw my mother walking out to meet us. Her youthfulness fled as she held a Burberry raincoat over her head. She revealed no surprise or dismay at seeing the two of us together, and we knew she hadn’t come out to catch us or to pretend she hadn’t known all along. Without looking at each other, we both understood exactly what she would say the moment we were within earshot.
Susannah pulled her horse to a stop. I slid off Bloom’s saddle and faced my mother. The mist erased age from her face, but she looked distinctly sorrowful, and for a moment I could picture clearly: the young mother arriving to collect her child from a party and refusing—in her grief—to let him be taken away.
Water dripped down all of our faces. I took off my helmet and shook my hair loose. The rain gathered and drenched it almost instantly. My mother reached to touch my face, but drew her hand back and touched her own chin instead. Then she pulled her coat tighter around her neck, and looked beyond us—as if reading superscript from above the trees.
“Elle a été trouvé,” my mother said. She’s been found.
And despite everything we had known about Skye’s well-being, there was no need to hear another word.
21
TIME WILL MOVE FORWARD. When my husband and I first moved to the seaside town where Skye spent her childhood summers, I mapped out a careful route for myself, running every day down Locust Lane. A cocker spaniel named Jib spent his afternoons panting on his owners’ front lawn, and he would hove himself to his feet and join me a while—turning back once I got to 6A, and trotting home.
Each year Jib got a little grayer around the muzzle and accompanied me a shorter distance. Lately, he only pulls himself to his feet to say hello, then settles back into the grass after I scratch his ears. The other day, he wasn’t there at all; my heart constricted in a lonesome pang.
Impermanence: it always comes as a terrible shock. There’s no getting accustomed to it.
The Butterfields’ house no longer rides the bluff. After Skye’s death, her parents tore down the additions and had the original house moved to an inland site. The land was donated to conservation. An early herald of spring is the river of wildflowers that rises up through beach grass where the mansion once stood. Buried in its midst—if you know where to look—rests a small brass plaque:
ELISABETH SKYE BUTTERFIELD
1967–1985
SKYE LOVED IT HERE
The rest of the beachfront has not fared so well. New homes the size of luxury hotels crowd together. Revetment walls cover the holes where bank swallows once nested.
Out on the beach, the caves beneath the jetty—once full of starfish—hold nothing but barnacles and seaweed. Cigarette butts and bottle caps. Mussel shells and snails.
I SPOKE TO John Paul for the last time the day before Skye’s funeral. The phone rang at the perfect moment, in the late afternoon—early enough for my father to be at work, and late enough for me to be indoors. Ever since the news, I had been waiting to hear from him, knowing that he would not let such a tragedy occur without contacting me.
Sitting at the kitchen table while my mother sliced fennel, I recognized his ring the way a lover sometimes will—and lamented my mother’s closer proximity to the telephone.
“Bonjour, Madame Morrow,” I heard him say from across the room. “Puis-je parler à Catherine, s’il vous plaît?”
I saw her face fall, impressed and saddened by his composure. I saw her weariness as my accomplice, and perhaps the first traces of self-blame. She didn’t say anything. Just held the phone out to me, showing her age around the mouth and chin. Deep dark eyes, unable to deny me this conversation but clearly unhappy about granting it.
I pulled the cord far into the butler’s pantry and climbed up onto the counter. Sat with my feet in the sink, and my body pressed against the window. The receiver tight as possible to my ear.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
We sat there for too long a while, listening to each other breathe.
“I want to say I’m sorry about Skye,” he finally said.
“I know,” I told him. And then, after another long moment of quiet, I said, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he said, but he didn’t sound convincing.
He told me that he’d have to repeat his fifth-form year at Saw River High. “Junior year, I mean,” he corrected himself. Waverly had sent him home without allowing him to pack his things. The dorm resident had found two sheets of acid while clearing out John Paul’s drawers, along with some pot.
“They think I was selling, so there may be some legal action.” He sounded unconcerned, like he still believed his association with the wealthy granted him their exemptions. “But who knows?” he said. “I’ll probably still go to college. I just have to write a good entrance essay about the whole thing. Show that I’ve turned over a new leaf, that I’ve grown as a person. Blah blah blah.”
“Sure,” I said. “That sounds great.”
Quiet then. Neither of us wanting to admit how different his situation would be from Susannah’s and Drew’s—the results that would pertain not to the gravity of their infractions but the depth of their resources.
And of course we were right. What I heard about John Paul in the subsequent years came in bits and pieces, through Susannah and Drew. His legal-aid lawyer couldn’t sway the judge with impressive academic and athletic records. His second attempt at junior year was supposed to be interrupted by juvenile detention. And then his mother panicked and sent him to France before his sentence began, using what remained of her modest savings. John Paul changed his last named to Filage and became the caretaker of an estate near Aix. He never finished high school. Never went on to college. Never convinced his father to acknowledge him.
“What about you?” John Paul finally asked me.
“We don’t know yet,” I said.
There had been so little mention of next year that I’d begun to think somebody had called it off. That I would stay home forever, wandering through the stables and the dwindling forests, my adulthood not merely postponed but canceled.
“Are you going to the funeral?” he asked.
I told him I was.
“I wish I could go,” he said.
“Me too.” I fought back a small sob as I realized how comforting it would be to have him there, and registered his tactful listening.
“It’s hard to believe,” he said.
“I still don’t believe it.” A firmness to this admission, succinct and immovable.
“Well,” John Paul said. “I’m really sorry.” And then he said what nobody else had, in the time she’d been missing or in the two days since she’d been found: “I know how much you loved her.”
I should have burst forth with a good, soul-purging cry. John Paul would have listened silently, hearing all of my regret, and that I had indeed loved Skye, not to mention himself—loved both of them uselessly, in the present tense as well as the past. I felt the tears gather just under the top of my ribs. There they stayed in an unshed well, slowing my breath but never coming forth. If I could have wedged myself through the phone’s tiny holes, I would have found my way across the wires, into John Paul’s arms. Where I would have curled up and rested a good long while.
“Thank you for calling,” I whispered.
I swear I could hear him nod. I could hear his fingers tighten, holding the phone closer to his ear. I could hear him close his eyes and remember the scent and texture of my skin. I could hear all this, and his obligation to another girl, and most of all his inability to break promises—allowing him to be sad but never torn.
I put down the phone and untangled myself from the wall. Climbed out of the sink. I knew he stayed on the other end, listening to me cross back into the kitchen. Hearing the gentle click of the receiver as I sent him off to his long and luckless life.
I DON’T REMEMBER asking to go to Skye’s funeral. Like everything else, it was decided for me. The night they found her, my father came home late from his business trip. We sat up in the kitchen—my mother, father, and I—and he announced that he would drive me to Cape Cod for the services. I sent my mother a pleading glance, which she returned with sympathy but not action, retreating—my dereliction at last great enough to make my parents allies. The following day she loaned me her black Jean Muir, hanging it with my father’s dark suit in the back of his Mercedes, and waved from the top of the driveway as the car pulled away.
Do all funerals take place in blinding sunlight? That Saturday in May, blossoms erupted. Birds chattered. And I couldn’t stop catching glimpses of her. Like the day my mother told me, when news of Skye’s death did not quell Susannah’s fury but flame it—as if killing herself had been a personal affront to us—until I had to beg away from her and rest a while in my room. I lay on my bed—the Breyer horses and the blue ribbons absurdly childish and cheerful—staring at the ceiling, ignoring my mother’s troubled call to dinner until the sun hung low enough to cast shadows. I opened my eyes in the pitch black, surprised that I had fallen asleep, still more surprised to see a form in the far corner, sitting on my toile de Juoy armchair, wealth of curls spilling quietly in the moonlight.
But when I sat up to speak, she was gone.
Driving east, it happened repeatedly. A form in the woods, running madly behind the flowering apple trees, trying to keep up with the car. Hiding behind a birch tree at a rest area outside Springfield. Standing by the side of the highway—clearly her own lithe, longhaired self, inexplicably morphing into a slender, balding man as we passed. I did not point out any of these sightings to my father as his car alternately crept and sped from the westernmost part of the state to its eastern tip—clogged with traffic. And he, during those five long hours—even when we stopped for coffee or realized that the standstill traffic in Plymouth had been caused by a three-car pileup—spoke not a single word to me.
It would be years before I found out this was his second trip to Cape Cod. That in the past weeks he had not been away on business but scouring the woods and beaches, joining in the search for Skye. That he had been standing within earshot at the discovery, yards away from the spot where they finally found her.
Still more years, and sadly after he was no longer here to tell. Not until I held my own newborn in my arms, her eyes glassy and exhausted after long hours in the birth canal, saved and whole thanks to the miracle of modern intervention. I understood then that my father’s refusal to speak or even look at me did not stem from sternness or cruelty but a furious and fearful understanding of that worst earthly disaster, just barely averted: his rage at me, for placing the most precious part of his interior in harm’s way. Shouting to the skies, this strangest and most shameless survivor guilt: his was the child that lived.
SESUIT’S SMALL CONGREGATIONAL church teemed like an anthill—limousines and police cars swarming outside. Mourners jammed in the apse, trying to sign the guest book or find a seat in the back. I don’t know how Senator Butterfield saw me, my mousy head peering down the aisle as he stood in front talking to the minister. But he waved his hand, commanding me forward.
I pointed to my chest and mouthed. Me?
He waved more furiously, nodding. I left my father crammed against the back wall, and wove my way through the Boston luminaries. Almost everyone seemed bleached or gray. I saw Mrs. Chilton and Ms. Latham. And to my surprise, Mr. and Mrs. November, sitting close together on a pew that would be all too visible to the Butterfields. Mr. November did not look up as I passed, both hands clasping his wife’s as if her hand were all that prevented him dissolving into a puddle at her feet.
I kept walking toward the senator, not seeing anybody close to my age except for Eleanor—uncharacteristically lovely in a black skirt and lavender blouse. Her hair loose. When she saw me walk by, she narrowed her eyes and glared through her glasses, as if Skye’s death had been murder rather than suicide. I slowed my pace, terrified the Butterfields would feel the same way.
From somewhere up above, through a tinny speaker, I could hear the first bouncing chords of “Sugar Magnolia.” And Senator Butterfield did not berate me or offer any manner of blame. He gathered me into a hug that crunched the bones in my back. In my mother’s sleeveless dress, the incongruous white cast on my arm, I felt insubstantial as air.
“Catherine,” he said, his voice hollow with grief. “You’ll sit up here with us.”
Turning to look at the crowd—the balcony full to capacity, the people spilling into the foyer and out onto the grassy lawn—I knew that from this moment forward the Butterfields would keep me as a phantom daughter. That for my whole life I would have a connection to these people, beneficial to me but imperative to them. That they would write me letters and insist on visits, and curry favor on my behalf.
To them I represented Skye in her last incarnation. With every passing year they would search my face for signs of what she might have become. And I don’t know if she would have been able to forgive her father for not resigning after all, but continuing in the Senate and toward aspirations beyond, helped in no small part by the sympathetic publicity Skye’s death generated. The senator never told me himself that he had changed his mind, not knowing—or not acknowledging—that I had been privy to the original plan. I simply waited for the announcement of his resignation and instead watched his career unfold and then escalate. There were times when I glimpsed him on the evening news or on the front page of a newspaper, and something of Skye would rise inside me, a purist’s injury, an indignation that he should continue in the same vein that had led to his daughter’s anger and eventual death. But then I would think of all the things I might have done differently. I would think of my complicit silence, riding a wave that seemed of another’s making, my arms outstretched—keeping my balance despite every misgiving. And if only I had jumped earlier, abandoned that equilibrium for an uncomfortable choice, perhaps Skye would have been alive to castigate the senator herself, for all his moral failings.
And so I forgave him, in what may have been the first adult decision of my life. It felt like the greatest gift, brimming as I was with all the pieces of herself that Skye had left behind. Because to this day I am still aware, when I catch myself quoting a line of poetry or moving in a way that doesn’t feel native. Whenever I do something unwise or quixotic or exhilarating, I nod to the remnants of Skye I still contain and pick up the phone to call the Butterfields.
That day at the funeral, I sat in the front pew between Skye’s parents, each of them holding my hand. The minister spoke, and some relatives. The governor—only just embarking on his bid for the presidency—managed to break from his usual deadpan style and deliver a gentle and heartbreaking eulogy. Ted Kennedy read the 121st Psalm. There were others too, an old patrician movie star whom my mother would have loved to see. A soprano from the Boston opera sang “I’ll Fly Away.” James Taylor himself performed “Fire and Rain.”
AND STILL I LOOKED FOR HER. Driving back to the house in the Butterfield limousine (kidnapped by my new parents, my father following somewhere in the throng behind us), I stared through the trees at Maushop Lake, frankly believing I might s
ee her—sunning on Fisherman’s Landing.
In one week, the Butterfields would announce their plans to raze the house and donate its shorefront acres to the Nature Conservancy. But for now the place abounded in human life: the effort of summoning her back, at least for these few hours. Waiters passed hors d’oeuvres, and women fanned themselves with funeral programs. People clustered together, wineglasses in hand. From where I stood at the top of the beach stairs, it might have been a wedding or an anniversary party. A christening. Any of life’s events meant to conjure a particular emotion and make it communal. I left my mother’s black pumps on the grass and climbed down to the rocks and sand. Picked my way across the pathless stretch of beach where Skye and I had walked together.
Merciless sun, shining and beckoning. Casting white shadows and masking the rocks’ seaweed and high tide dampness. Barnacles breathed, and swallows swooped around me like bats as I combed the bank for Skye’s coyote. I expected tide and shore to have accelerated its decomposing, that its brilliant white teeth would be matched by brilliant white bones. I picked my way across roots and skate eggs and broken seashells. But even when I was sure I’d gone too far and retraced my steps, the remains were nowhere in evidence.
So I walked back toward the ocean. Dipped my feet in the water and felt the jagged rocks bite into my feet.
What courage it must have taken, to walk into those waters with no plan to return. The thin straps of my tank top slipping over her shoulders, my filmy skirt clinging to her legs and then fanning out around her. Cormorants drying their wings, eiders floating, laughing gulls dropping clamshells with startling retorts. The bank swallows and the heartbroken bedroom and everything she loved best resting yards away, watching her go. Wet clothes clinging to her skin like a reminder of everything sensual and adventurous: all the pieces of life to be abandoned forever.
Gossip of the Starlings Page 23