Sisters One, Two, Three

by Nancy Star

  They pulled into the driveway where Ginger noticed, but did not point out, Callie’s car was still not back. Mimi went up to fetch her quilting bag so she could get to work on her tribute-to-Glory quilt. Ginger checked her phone to see if she had service. When she saw she did, she started googling.

  There were three Diggans on the island that she could find. Two were in Vineyard Haven and one was in Chilmark. On the second try she found the one she wanted.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  After Ginger identified herself, there was a brief silence. When the woman on the other end of the phone spoke again, her voice was muffled, as if her hand was over the receiver.

  The next voice on the phone was clear. “Hello. This is Thomas.”

  A memory clicked into place. Casper Diggans’ nephew, her neighbor Evelyn’s son. “Thomas Clarke?”

  “Wasn’t sure you’d remember me. Been a long time.”

  “Of course I remember you.” She tried to place when exactly they’d last seen each other and with a start realized it was the day of the accident. She last saw Thomas when he was coming back from fetching Callie, back from the far side of the cliffs.

  Mimi burst out of the kitchen, talking loudly into her cell. “Yes, ballads. Mournful ballads. I assume you have some in your repertoire.”

  “Are you here?” Thomas asked. “On the island? With Callie?”

  “I’m on the island,” Ginger said. “That’s Mimi you hear in the background. Callie’s out. I don’t know where. That’s not why I’m calling—but she isn’t, by any chance, with you?”

  “No, sorry. You know how Callie is, though. She feels cooped up if she’s inside too long.”

  “Aren’t mournful ballads the whole reason people hire bagpipers?” Mimi asked. “Hold on. I’ve got another call.” Ginger could see her sister was in her element, multitasking beyond what ordinary mortals could manage. “Yes, a scattering at sea. Have you ever catered a scattering? Can I put you on hold? I disconnected my bagpiper and he’s calling back.”

  “Sorry?” Ginger realized she hadn’t heard what Thomas just said.

  “I was just saying how Callie sometimes gets it in her head that she has to go for a run, right away, or all of a sudden she’ll decide there’s a dog she needs to look in on at that exact second, and off she goes. She kind of keeps her own schedule. You said there was something else?”

  “No,” Mimi barked into her phone. “Lobster rolls cannot be on cold buns. You can? Toasted and buttered?”

  “I have a question. It’s out of the blue, I know.” Ginger struggled to drown out Mimi’s voice. “I have a couple of questions, actually.” She stopped, because, where to begin?

  Mimi paced in front of her, checklist clutched in her hand. “Hydrangeas.” She had moved on to the florist.

  “Would this be better in person?” Thomas asked. “I’m not far. I can come over now, if you like.”

  From where Ginger stood, she could see Mimi’s list was long. When her sister was done with the florist, she was going to call about renting tables and chairs, and the next thing after that was confirming the captain and the boat.

  “Maybe I can come to you,” Ginger suggested. “If you’re not too far. Are you walking distance?” She could feel Thomas hesitate. “Or we can talk later, if that’s better.”

  “No, no. Come here. That’s good. It’s a bit of a hike, but it’s a beautiful one.”

  Ginger scribbled down directions and then went upstairs to change into hiking clothes. She had brought bug repellent and hiking pants but, worried that was overkill, had left both in her suitcase. Now, as she pulled them out, a blue-and-green Planet Earth beanie came with them. Julia’s beanie, from their Mount Washington trip, was hiding in the suitcase all this time. She put it on and went downstairs to tell Mimi she was going to see Thomas Clarke.

  Mimi, negotiating with the bagpiper, waved her away. “Okay. Whatever. I heard you.” And then back to the bagpiper, “Absolutely not. I am not paying for four hours.”

  By the time Ginger reached the main road, she was sweating. She took off the Planet Earth hat, but kept it pressed against her nose for several minutes, inhaling a dim hint of the berry scent that was Julia’s favorite shampoo. Now, when she thought about Mount Washington, all she could do was wonder at whatever made her think it was worth it to have an argument over a hat.

  The sun beat down as she kept a lookout for the sign to the old brickyard, which, according to the directions, was just beyond the second fork. After the second fork, she was to turn right at the old farm stand. Did old mean abandoned or was there a newer farm stand nearby? Why hadn’t she thought to ask Thomas how long this hike was supposed to take?

  With Julia’s hat in her back pocket she walked on, thinking about the days before Julia left, how worried she was about Julia’s closed bedroom door, how sure she was that Nick’s smile, when he walked in the house, was a smirk. Was it?

  A rogue branch tickled her cheek and she quickened her pace. The sun grew hotter on her nose. Her eyelashes picked up sweat from her cheeks. The trees thinned. She tasted a hint of salt in the air. The path spilled into a parking lot. Without intending to, she had walked to the sea.

  At the head of the lot, a teenage boy wearing bathing trunks and an official-looking shirt sat on a low beach chair. He noticed her approach and stood up. “Welcome to Great Rock.” He sounded like he’d been trained to say this. “Did you drive in?”

  “No.” She started to explain and then noticed he held a binder and a pen and was waiting to write something down. “You’re not asking because you’re curious.”

  “No.” He shook his head and smiled and his face changed from some idea he must have had of professional seriousness to his normal state of open ease. “I’m supposed to keep track of who drives in and who walks in. We run out of parking fast. I hate turning people away. I really appreciate people like you, who walk in.”

  “I didn’t really mean to walk in,” she told him with a laugh. “I’m actually lost. Do you know where Blackberry Hollow is?”

  “No, but I’m sure I can find it.” He pulled out his phone to check and then apologized. “Sorry. No cell service. Comes and goes. Pretty annoying. I’ve seen the road, though, I’m sure. I don’t think it’s far. Long as you’re here, you should grab a look at the water. The storm the other day swept away all the seaweed and pebbles. Looks like the surface of the moon down there. Really awesome. Won’t last, either. Happens just a couple of times a year. Worth a look.” Done with his ambassador job, he sat down and opened his book. It was, she saw, The Great Gatsby. He noticed her take in the title. “My girlfriend told me I have to read this. Have to. So . . .” He shrugged and lifted up the book to prove he was doing what he was told.

  And Ginger wondered, did his girlfriend’s mother ever think he was smirking? If Ginger had tried to get to know Nick, would Julia be walking beside her now?

  “She’s down there,” he said, pointing to a staircase made of railroad ties.

  “Julia?” Ginger felt as if she’d been slapped. How did he know her? When had she arrived?

  “Mariah. My girlfriend. According to Mariah, this is the best beach on the island.” He glanced down and took in Ginger’s pants tucked into her socks. “I went through with a brush cutter this morning,” he told her. “Part of my job. Keeping the path clear. It’s clear now, straight to the beach.” He went back to reading. His duty to report on the conditions of the trail was now done.

  “Maybe I will check it out,” Ginger said. “Just a quick look.”

  “Awesome,” the boy said without looking up.

  The path descended in a gentle slope and then steepened. At the bottom, a wooden staircase led to the sand. As she stepped off the last tread, she began to shiver. It’s just the breeze, she told herself. She hurried past several unoccupied blankets and stopped at a group of large rocks facing the shoreline. She climbed onto the biggest one and tucked her feet into an indentation in the stone. Then she faced the sea.


  Spine checks. She needed to schedule those before the school year was up. It was easy to get through the boys quickly. Large gangs of them would stuff themselves into her office to get checked together. But the fifth-grade girls were modest. No matter that she’d perfected her technique, lifting up the back of their shirts so that no one else could see, or that she used a practiced patter to distract them: “Your hair looks beautiful today” or “Your sweater really matches your eyes.” Most of them still felt awkward about their bodies and if they had to see her, which they did, they preferred to see her alone.

  Julia had beautiful posture until she met Nick. Nick was tall and slumped and wouldn’t you know it, soon Julia was slumping too. Ginger knew she should not point this out. She remembered exactly what it felt like to have her posture criticized. But she hadn’t been able to stop herself. The result was as expected. The day she said something about Julia’s posture, it suddenly took on a more pronounced and quite intentional curve. She shook away the thought and watched the waves crash on the shoreline.

  Shore break. That’s what Callie called it. Ginger sat up straighter and stared at the ocean, ready for anything. A moment later she slumped, like Julia. Being ready was really no help.

  A large rock jutted out of the sea directly in front of her, the top like a bald head with a fringe of seaweed hair. A trio of cormorants landed and huddled close, leaning hard against each other as if that would keep the waves from sweeping them away. Farther out she could see the giant boulder that gave the beach its name. Great Rock. At first glance she thought the shapes on top of the giant rock were cormorants too. Then one of the shapes uncoiled. It was a boy.

  There was a group of them: five teenagers perched near the front of the rock, which rose high, at least twenty feet above the water. The teenagers stood, flapping their arms, preening, like birds about to take flight. Then, no warning, one jumped in.

  It wasn’t safe. She stood up and watched the others hurry to the edge, watched them peer into the water. She was too far away to hear them, too far away to see their expressions, but their bodies telegraphed distress. Of course she knew CPR. She was a strong swimmer, certified as a lifeguard in swimming pools. But she did not go in the ocean. She had not dipped in a toe since she was thirteen years old.

  She scanned the beach, but there was no one else there. Just the teenagers’ empty blankets and discarded towels, and too far away, up the stairs, up the path, the boy on the lawn chair reading The Great Gatsby for his girlfriend, Mariah.

  A head popped out of the water, the diver, a boy. He bobbed and splashed. They were just having fun. He motioned and called to his friends to dive in and join him. A second boy did, and then a third, and she sat back down. They were having fun, and she was ready to save them. She laughed, and the cormorants, surprised, flew away in a rush.

  When she looked back at the rock, there was one person left, a slight figure, the only girl. Mariah. The girl, Mariah, moved to the edge of the rock and stopped, as if considering whether or not to jump in.

  “Don’t,” Ginger said quietly, but the girl was too far away to hear. Ginger’s fingers felt inexplicably cold as she imagined it was Julia standing there. Julia would have jumped in fast just to prove her mother wrong.

  Ginger heard the echo of her voice. Do not jump off rocks. Do not stay out past twelve. Do not slump. Do not smirk. It was inevitable that after a while, everything else would fall away and all Julia would hear was the not, not, not until Julia herself disappeared.

  With perfect form, the girl, Mariah, knifed into the sea. When her head popped up, her friends applauded, the water exploding with their exuberance.

  At the unoccupied blanket next to her, two seagulls fought each other over a bag of kettle corn, pecking, pushing, fighting to get to the bounty inside. Then, as if an alarm had sounded, they flew off at once, leaving the pockmarked bag behind.

  In the parking lot on Mount Washington, when she stood in crushing silence beside the hot car as Julia stuck the Planet Earth hat on her head, Ginger wished they could take a break from each other. She didn’t take it any further than that. Just a fleeting wish she admitted to no one, not even Richard. A wish, she knew, mothers were not supposed to make. And somehow it was that wish—of all the wishes she’d ever made, and she had made many—that one foul, half-thought, careless wish that had come true.

  Her shoes felt heavy as she trudged back across the sand. She was almost at the steps when Mariah emerged from the water.

  “Hello,” the girl said, and then smiled before running off to get her towel. That was all, just hello, and then, as seawater dripped down her chin, a smile.

  The smile made Ginger mute. It wasn’t only that Mariah seemed about the same age as Julia, or that she looked so beautiful, with the same flushed-cheeks look of being young and in love. It was that Mariah had done exactly what Julia would have done, all Julia ever wanted to do: jump off a rock with grace and abandon and walk out, just fine, from the sea.

  Ginger hurried up the stairs to the path. When she passed the boy on the low chair, he looked up and asked, “You okay?”

  She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and said, “Yes, fine, thanks,” and then added in a whisper, “Just a little sad.” She quickened her pace so that she would be beyond the bend before the sweet boy had a chance to ask her, “Why?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  When Ginger passed the huge boulder with the stack of bricks on top for the second time, she realized the trail she was on was a loop that she’d now gone around twice. She proceeded slowly after that, scanning the woods on either side for the turnoff she’d missed. Fifteen minutes later, there it was again, the rock with the bricks piled on top.

  Humiliated. That’s how she’d feel if she had to dial 911 and tell the dispatcher, I’m lost in the Menemsha Hills. I don’t know where. She imagined the embarrassment of a helicopter search, of hearing the motor of the engine overhead, of waving to be seen in the dense brush. But even humiliation was not a possibility. The intermittent cell service was currently in the “no bars” mode. Her last-ditch idea, to make her way back to the beach and beg a ride from Mariah or one of her friends, turned out to be equally futile because now the turnoff for the beach seemed to have vanished as well.

  She sat down, leaned against a large tree trunk, and began berating herself for a myriad of failures. Failing to bring water, failing to bring a map, failing to bring food, failing to dress appropriately for hot weather. She proceeded on to bigger failures: failure to work harder to make things right with Richard, failure to work harder to give her daughter more space to be herself. Her thoughts stopped at the sound of motion from deep within the trees. She jumped up as a pony pulling a carriage burst out of the woods.

  The woman in the driver’s seat made a clicking noise and the pony stopped. “Didn’t mean to scare you. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” Ginger said. “I’m just jumpy. Jumpy and lost.”

  The woman’s felt riding helmet and sunglasses obscured her face. “You look lost.” She yanked on the reins, and the pony begrudgingly gave up on eating the low foliage. “Where do you want to be?”

  “Blackberry Hollow. Do you know where that is?”

  “Sure do. And you’re right. You are very lost.” She pointed to a metal ledge behind her seat. “If you want a lift, climb on. Not exactly built for passengers, but I haven’t lost anyone yet.”

  Ginger eyed the small space between the wheel hubs. It did not look at all safe, but her lack of orienteering skills gave her no alternative. She climbed aboard.

  The woman, Holly, showed her where to stand and how to grip the waist-high metal bar so that it wouldn’t knock out her teeth when she had to duck under a branch, or ram into her chest when they ran over a stump. “Don’t worry,” Holly said when she saw Ginger’s wary look. “It’s not far. Maybe five minutes, if I can keep this crazy pony from nibbling on the scrub oak.” She gave another soft click of her tongue and the pony took off at a
gentle trot.

  After a few minutes the path narrowed and the pony slowed to a walk. Holly glanced back to make sure her passenger had come through the brambles okay. “You visiting Thomas?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I’m a genius. Also, it’s the only house on Blackberry Hollow. He your caretaker?”

  “No,” Ginger said, and then, “I don’t know. I’m just visiting. My sister Callie lives here.”

  “You’re Callie Tangle’s sister?” Holly leaned over and patted the pony. “Callie likes Wilma. Not so much my other pony, but who can blame her. He’s not likable. She loves my dogs too. I got four Welsh springer pups right now. Echo started out one of mine. Sweet dog. Lean right”—Holly shouted and then—“hold on,” as she made a sharp left. She pulled the carriage to a stop. “Thomas’s place is just ahead. Tell everyone Holly says hello.”

  “I will. Thanks. Can I pay you for your trouble?”

  “Do I look like a taxi?” Holly and her pony disappeared back into the woods.

  Ginger hiked up the road in the direction Holly pointed. She could hear traffic in the distance, cars and trucks whizzing by out of sight beyond the ridge. The air smelled of pine, hay, and exhaust. In the distance, she could make out a pitched roof. Solar panels caught glints of sun that ricocheted into her eyes. It seemed like all the insects of the world had arrived, conspiring to buzz around her head. The trees thinned. Her back felt wet with sweat. The sun beat down hard. Her feet were blistered and her mouth parched, and now, little flashes, like lightning bolts, were appearing in the corner of her eyes. She felt faint. Time skipped forward. She didn’t remember walking up the steps to the house, but here she was, standing at the front door. She didn’t remember knocking, but she heard a woman’s voice. “Coming.” Time skipped again and the woman was in front of her, calling in an urgent tone, “Thomas!”

  Ginger watched as if from above. The woman seemed familiar. She wanted to ask her name. But when she spoke, the words that came out of her mouth were, “I’m feeling unwell.” Her hearing was the last thing to go. There was the tapping of someone’s feet as they ran and then a thud, which she somehow understood to be the sound of her own body hitting the floor.