Bittersweet

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  I uncapped my sixth beer—had I really had that much?—and decided to strike out on my own. I made my way through the summer room, drifting before the Van Gogh until I thought I heard footsteps and, remembering my interaction with Athol, darted out Trillium’s front door. I wandered up the road that led through the meadow, past the two other cottages and Clover. Fritz appeared at my heels, yapping grumpily, as though I’d been the one to banish him from the party. Once I’d begun to crest the hill, he stopped short and woofed a couple of satisfied barks, as though to say, “Take that!” before turning back toward Indo’s.

  It was dark in the woods, and I stumbled as I climbed but acknowledged, as I swigged the beer and began to hiccup, that that might have more to do with my drunkenness than with the coming night. I could have turned onto the lane leading down to Bittersweet, but, instead, I found my feet leading me past the Dining Hall on the main road and toward Galway’s. I succumbed, quickening my pace until his cottage was in sight.

  The little house was unlit and the driveway empty, but I still peeked in every window, taking the only parts of him I could get—a mug waiting on the kitchen counter, the bed made neatly in the sparse, small bedroom. I ran my fingers over the cottage’s name, carved into a piece of wood hung up beside the door: Queen Anne’s Lace. Galway was about the least lacy person I had ever met. That would be funny except it seemed as though he was never coming back.

  I leaned my head morosely against the doorframe, then jerked it back up again as soon as I heard a shriek: high, intense, short. I froze. The sound had come from the direction of the other brothers’ cottages. I thought of Ev and John. I didn’t much care to see them at it again—more for my sense of self-preservation than anything else—so I told myself the sound was nothing and lay my forehead upon the doorframe once again. But then, I heard it: more of a scream this time. A woman’s scream.

  I thought of Murray—what he had tried to do to me. If someone was hurting another woman that way, I had to stop it. I lumbered off Galway’s porch, then stopped for a moment to collect myself, slapping my cheek to regain relative sobriety. The point of impact stung, but the world still swam. I lurched up Boys’ Lane toward the two cottages.

  In the time it took to walk from Queen Anne’s Lace to Banning’s and Athol’s cottages, I didn’t hear a thing. I began to doubt myself. The night was now almost upon me, and I considered just going back to the fireworks, expecting to hear the bursting above me at any moment. But there it was again—that sharp cry, and so I pushed on, moving off the gravel road onto the grass so that my steps were silent. As I approached, there were no clues to which house the sound had come from. So I chose Banning’s, on the left, crouching down as I ran around its side, grateful for the cover of night. I stood on my tiptoes and peeked into the first window, sure I was about to see something horrifying, but the unoccupied living room was only messy. I crouched down, replaying the same scenario with the master bedroom.

  It was then that I heard the scream again, quickly, and intentionally, muffled. It had come from Athol’s. I surged with adrenaline, picking up a large stick from the lawn and creeping toward the back of the house, where I knew I’d be able to peek around to Athol’s back porch. I could hardly breathe as I crept, wincing at every sound my body made, sure I’d accidentally tumble over one of Maddy’s noisy toys and give myself away.

  At the edge of the house, I got as far down to the ground as I could, and looked.

  A single kerosene lamp flickered on Athol’s back porch, but to my dark-accustomed eyes it might as well have been a hundred. There, upon the table, Athol lay on top of a woman, his hand on her mouth as he thrust inside of her. He was entering her over and over, ramming her head against the screen. Quicksilver lay to the side of them, sleeping, as though this were an everyday occurrence. I began to cry. It looked like he was hurting her. I had to do something.

  And then I heard her laugh. “I said ‘harder,’ ” she commanded, “hold me down and do it harder.”

  I saw her face. The au pair. Realized: she was choosing this. He wasn’t hurting her—it was part of some game they were playing.

  He returned her kiss with a probing tongue. My stomach turned. This was nothing like John and Ev. Nothing like love. This was just two sad people rutting in the woods. Quicksilver lifted his head as though he smelled me. I ran, sure at any moment I’d find that dog tearing at my heels.

  I got back to Flat Rocks just as the fireworks started. I noticed Emily sitting on a folding chair, draped with her slumbering children, and wondered if she knew where her husband was. Just then, Ev slung her arm through mine.

  “Sorry about before,” she whispered. The sky burst red above us. She pulled me over to a towel some way from the rest of the family, now oohing and aahing at the dazzling gold glitters falling above us. Emily’s baby roused at the booms, her squalls carrying over the water.

  “I have something to tell you,” Ev said quietly.

  I was hungry for the fireworks, eager to feel them rumble through me, explode what I had just seen, destroy the knowledge I now had, about Athol, about the au pair. I wanted Ev to be quiet.

  But instead, she whispered, “I’m pregnant.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Enigma

  I did the math: ten weeks along by early July, Ev had conceived before we came north. That night, in our room, as she fantasized aloud about sewing a baby quilt and buying a safe car, I wondered whether John was the father. Unless he’d come to New York in early May, she was carrying someone else’s baby.

  I couldn’t bring myself to ask her. “Does John know?” was the closest I could get.

  “Why do you think he wants me to kiss up to his mother?” I was glad the room was dark, so she wouldn’t see me wince at the flippancy of her tone. “I’m so glad I finally told you,” she gushed. “I’ve been bursting, but he wanted to keep it just for us.”

  “You’ll start showing soon,” I replied neutrally. “What will your mother say?”

  “I’m not going to have to worry about her.”

  I paused. “You’re not keeping it?”

  “Of course I’m keeping it,” she said. But she didn’t explain what she meant.

  I wanted to scream: What about me? What about college? What about us old ladies sitting on the Bittersweet porch together? Did she know what childbirth consisted of? Was she taking vitamins? I slipped into a restless slumber, for once welcoming the suffocating distraction of my nightmares.

  The next morning, when Ev returned to Bittersweet after her daily walk, she looked devastated. I hesitated to ask what was wrong, guessing it would be another lovers’ spat and that she’d lash out at me for prying, but she seemed glad to spill her heart.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” she began as she sipped the cup of Earl Grey I placed before her, “and please don’t be mad.”

  “What happened?”

  “We’ve been planning to leave.”

  “Who? Where?”

  “Me and John, goose. Just to run away together. My father’s going to sign off on my trust any day now. It’s the chance to start a new life.”

  “Wait,” I said, my distrust in her growing anew, “you’ve been planning to run away with John? For how long?”

  She grimaced. “Since the summer began.”

  It was all I could do not to walk out the door. To ask how on earth she could have brought me to this paradise knowing she was just going to abandon me here. She had pretended, for weeks on end, that we were settling into domestic bliss, while harboring this secret all the while? Threatening me with Oregon to get me to work harder, knowing that was exactly where I’d be sent once she had disappeared and the Winslows had moved on? But I didn’t have to say a word—she could read the hurt all over my face.

  “Well, you don’t have to worry because it’s not going to happen after all,” she said, dissolving into tears, as though she was the one who deserved sympathy.

  I sighed. “Why not?”

  She could
barely speak through her tears, but managed to say, “He says we have to bring his mother.”

  “So?”

  “So? I’m not going anywhere with that woman. She hates me. She will literally murder me in my sleep.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t understand. She’ll never let us be happy. But he won’t leave her. So we’re not going anywhere.”

  I took her hand. I thought she was being awfully melodramatic, but, then, Mrs. LaChance did seem like a doozy of a mother-in-law. And anyway, wasn’t I pleased to know her escape with John had been thwarted?

  “It’ll be okay,” I said, but my voice went up at the end, as though I was asking a question.

  She nodded.

  “He loves you.” As I said those words, I wondered if love was enough.

  I spent that week with Kitty’s journal. Indo’s suggestion that I might someday own Clover had taken on a more urgent meaning in light of Ev’s recent revelations.

  John had to keep up the façade of normalcy while they figured out what to do next, so he worked morning till night. Ev was bursting with plans for the baby, and wanted to spend every minute John was occupied with me. But I needed space. I methodically cooked us healthy dinners or pretended I was absorbed in Paradise Lost until she wandered down to the cove for a swim or settled in for a catnap. Then I’d spring into action, laying my hands upon that familiar book in the towel in the back of the bathroom cabinet, unwrapping it into another world, until I heard her footsteps and had to hide it away again.

  Scanning through, I’d surmised that Kitty’s journal followed the course of a year, from the January entry I’d read that first day to a late December entry that read simply, almost sadly: “First snow. Late this year. The Tannenbaum is decorated. I lit a candle and prayed.”

  In between, the yellowed, smooth pages were filled with Kitty’s perfect hand, sloped to the right, as though she was always pushing forward. She used black ink and a fine nib, and wrote her dates either like this: “Monday, July 14th,” or without a day of the week: “June 26th.” Never once did she mention the year.

  From her first entry, I had gathered that she was writing sometime between 1929 and 1935, but, aside from occasional mention of the world’s miseries, she did not elaborate much on what was happening beyond her sitting room. That was what disappointed me the most. I had thought the journal would prove illuminating, shed some light on one delicious secret or another, but the subject matter of Kitty’s writing was positively navel gazing. She hardly seemed to lift her head from the page long enough to look out a window, so little did she mention what was happening in the rest of the world—the Great Depression, the gathering storm of what would become the Second World War. Instead she wrote of her silver pattern: “B. is insisting I go down to New York for a look at Tiffany, but I have assured him I’ll do just fine with his mother’s choice”; her lapdogs: “Fitzwilliam is a fine little pug, with a wheezy breath and hardy disposition”; and visitors: “We are being joined this week by Claude, Paul, and Henri. B. and I are so looking forward to offering them shelter until they decide where to settle.”

  By Wednesday I had gotten through my first pass. I had nothing to show for it. So I started again, rereading the entries out of order, trying to find something secret, about the unexpected money, or the bankruptcy. On the second pass, I did find one secret, but it was personal and filled my heart with pity: “B. has been carrying on with one of the maids, P. He has assured me it’s over, but it is a mess nonetheless, one I shall be paying for myself, that weighs heavily upon me.” I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that Bard had cheated on Kitty with a servant. It was horrible to think about but not hard to imagine, especially as I thought of Emily and her children watching the fireworks while Athol hammered the au pair. Poor Kitty, poor Emily.

  I was settling down for a third pass over the journal that Friday afternoon, Abby panting at my feet (John and Ev were in the bedroom talking seriously—his low rumble occasionally peppered by the bleat of her voice from behind the closed door), when there was a knock. I stashed the journal, cursing the intrusion, and strode blindly from the bathroom.

  “Yes?” I said, as I came in sight of the figure waiting on the steps of the cottage, head turned toward the road. He swiveled back at the sound of my voice. Galway.

  “Hello.” His voice was smooth.

  I spoke to him through the screen. “Hello.” Abby happily stuck her head out the door for a scratch.

  “What’s she doing here?” Galway asked.

  “John’s fixing the bathroom sink.”

  He sighed. “Sorry I couldn’t make it for Winloch Day.”

  I held my hands up in a gesture of liberation.

  “I would have liked to see you,” he said carefully.

  I shrugged.

  “Can I make it up to you?” His hand started to fiddle with the doorframe a few inches from my arm. The ball was firmly in my court.

  “No need.”

  “Can I take you out?”

  “Really, don’t do me any favors.”

  “You’re upset.”

  “Why should I be upset?”

  He dropped his hand. “Because I kissed you and then I disappeared.”

  My face felt hot.

  “Please,” he pushed. “Tomorrow night? Something casual. Eight o’clock.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I found something,” he volunteered. I almost responded, “A girlfriend?” but he went on. “Something in the Winslow financial records.”

  If I told him I had plans for something incredible tomorrow night, all he’d have to do was walk a quarter mile from his place and find me lying on our couch to catch me in the lie. Besides, even his company sounded better than another night spent untangling Kitty’s journal, or enduring Ev’s sudden mommy mode.

  “All right,” I told him. Abby whined when I pushed the door shut on him. I walked into the kitchen, feeling his eyes on me the whole way.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The Apology

  The next morning, frigid air lifted off the water and squirreled through Bittersweet, creeping under our doors and around our windowpanes, as if the century-old structure was simply a lovely puzzle for the wind. I made scrambled eggs in the drafty kitchen with my coverlet wrapped around me while Ev tried, in vain, to start a fire in the woodstove. We ended up wreathed in smoke as Abby, whom John had left with us, barked incessantly. Our only recourse was to open the windows, which just made things colder. After that, we took to our beds.

  “I have something to tell you,” I announced.

  At the sound of my voice, Abby scratched against our door. When we didn’t respond, she began to whine. Ev rolled her eyes and threw her pillow at the door.

  “She’s just taking care of you,” I said. “She can probably smell the baby.” Abby had been following Ev everywhere, much to Ev’s annoyance and my amusement.

  “She’s driving me crazy!” Ev yelled. The dog gave one last, pleading whine, then scuttled off, presumably to check her food bowl. Her nails tapped rhythmically across the wooden floor.

  Ev flopped back down into bed. “So what’s the big news? You’re pregnant too?”

  I hesitated. There was no other way—she’d see me dressing, and press me for details. Even if I refused to tell her, he’d pick me up, so not saying anything would only make his appearance more awkward. And even if she didn’t see his car, all she had to do was ask around and someone would have seen us leaving Winloch together. Better to just be up front. “I’m going out with Galway tonight.”

  Ev started giggling.

  “I don’t know why that’s funny.”

  “Wait, you’re serious?”

  “It’s not a date or anything,” I said defensively, climbing from the bed. “Just a chance to talk about the Winslow genealogy.”

  “God, Mabel, you’re obsessed with my family. It’s creepy.”

  “Believe it or not,” I heard myself snap, “the research is for me. I know it’s hard to fathom
I’d do something for myself.”

  Her response was an eye roll.

  “Anyway,” I continued, “the only reason I told you is I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about me and Galway.”

  “No,” she said sarcastically, “why would anyone get the wrong idea about you and Galway?”

  I dressed in silence, pulling on a couple sweaters. I’d go out in search of Lu and Owen.

  I could feel Ev’s eyes peering over her magazine. “You should be careful.”

  “I know my way around.”

  “With Galway.”

  “I’m not good enough to have dinner with your brother?” I scowled.

  “I’m just saying he’s complicated, okay? Don’t get your hopes up.”

  I turned to her, furious. “You can’t lie on your back,” I spat. “You’ll hurt the baby.” I stormed out of the bedroom, cursing myself for caring, for showing her I cared, for choosing to tell her about my date in the first place, but, most of all, for knowing she was right.

  Since finding the turtle corpses, Lu had put in many hours with a bookish, bearded marine biologist from the university—first in multiple calls, on multiple days, and then, on a few occasions, when he’d driven from Burlington right up to Trillium, so she could row him across Winslow Bay to Turtle Point and he could see the horror for himself. They had gathered water and soil and flesh samples, and he’d called his colleagues at Fish and Wildlife, but, so far, no one had found an explanation for the turtle colony’s demise. Lu’s response to uncertainty was vehement determination, and I sensed, the one time I met the poor scientist, simply from the way his shoulders hunched when Lu asked him, for the fiftieth time, if he didn’t really think that global warming was the cause, that he wished he’d never answered her phone call.