by E. Lockhart
—
IN EUROPE, I vomited into small buckets and brushed my teeth repeatedly with chalky British toothpaste. I lay prone on the bathroom floors of several museums, feeling the cold tile underneath my cheek as my brain liquefied and seeped out my ear, bubbling. Migraines left my blood spreading across unfamiliar hotel sheets, dripping on the floors, oozing into carpets, soaking through leftover croissants and Italian lace cookies.
I could hear Dad calling me, but I never answered until my medicine took effect.
I missed the Liars that summer.
We never kept in touch over the school year. Not much, anyway, though we’d tried when we were younger. We’d text, or tag each other in summer photos, especially in September, but we’d inevitably fade out after a month or so. Somehow, Beechwood’s magic never carried over into our everyday lives. We didn’t want to hear about school friends and clubs and sports teams. Instead, we knew our affection would revive when we saw one another on the dock the following June, salt spray in the air, pale sun glinting off the water.
But the year after my accident, I missed days and even weeks of school. I failed my classes, and the principal informed me I would have to repeat junior year. I stopped soccer and tennis. I couldn’t babysit. I couldn’t drive. The friends I’d had weakened into acquaintances.
I texted Mirren a few times. Called and left her messages that later I was ashamed of, they were so lonely and needy.
I called Johnny, too, but his voice mail was full.
I decided not to call again. I didn’t want to keep saying things that made me feel weak.
When Dad took me to Europe, I knew the Liars were on-island. Granddad hasn’t wired Beechwood and cell phones don’t get reception there, so I began writing emails. Different from my pitiful voice messages, these were charming, darling notes from a person without headaches.
Mostly.
Mirren!
Waving at you from Barcelona, where my father ate snails in broth.
Our hotel has gold everything. Even saltshakers. It is gloriously vile.
Write and tell me how the littles are misbehaving and where you are applying to college and whether you have found true love.
/Cadence
• • •
Johnny!
Bonjour from Paris, where my father ate a frog.
I saw the Winged Victory. Phenomenal body. No arms.
Miss you guys. How is Gat?
/Cadence
• • •
Mirren!
Hello from a castle in Scotland, where my father ate a haggis. That is, my father ate the heart, liver, and lungs of a sheep mixed with oatmeal and boiled in a sheep stomach.
So, you know, he is the sort of person who eats hearts.
/Cadence
• • •
Johnny!
I am in Berlin, where my father ate a blood sausage.
Snorkel for me. Eat blueberry pie. Play tennis. Build a bonfire. Then report back. I am desperately bored and will devise creative punishments if you do not comply.
/Cadence
—
I WASN’T ENTIRELY surprised they didn’t answer. Besides the fact that to get online you have to go to the Vineyard, Beechwood is very much its own world. Once you are there, the rest of the universe seems nothing but an unpleasant dream.
Europe might not even exist.
15
WELCOME, ONCE AGAIN, to the beautiful Sinclair family.
We believe in outdoor exercise. We believe that time heals.
We believe, although we will not say so explicitly, in prescription drugs and the cocktail hour.
We do not discuss our problems in restaurants. We do not believe in displays of distress. Our upper lips are stiff, and it is possible people are curious about us because we do not show them our hearts.
It is possible that we enjoy the way people are curious about us.
Here in Burlington, it’s just me, Mummy, and the dogs now. We haven’t the weight of Granddad in Boston or the impact of the whole family on Beechwood, but I know how people see us nonetheless. Mummy and I are two of a kind, in the big house with the porch at the top of the hill. The willowy mother and the sickly daughter. We are high of cheekbone, broad of shoulder. We smile and show our teeth when we run errands in town.
The sickly daughter doesn’t talk much. People who know her at school tend to keep away. They didn’t know her well before she got sick anyway. She was quiet even then.
Now she misses school half the time. When she’s there, her pale skin and watery eyes make her look glamorously tragic, like a literary heroine wasting from consumption. Sometimes she falls down at school, crying. She frightens the other students. Even the kindest ones are tired of walking her to the nurse’s office.
Still, she has an aura of mystery that stops her from being teased or singled out for typical high school unpleasantness. Her mother is a Sinclair.
Of course, I feel no sense of my own mystery eating a can of chicken soup late at night, or lying in the fluorescent light of the school nurse’s office. It is hardly glamorous the way Mummy and I quarrel now that Dad is gone.
I wake to find her standing in my bedroom doorway, staring.
“Don’t hover.”
“I love you. I’m taking care of you,” she says, her hand on her heart.
“Well, stop it.”
If I could shut my door on her, I would. But I cannot stand up.
Often I find notes lying around that appear to be records of what foods I’ve eaten on a particular day: Toast and jam, but only 1/2; apple and popcorn; salad with raisins; chocolate bar; pasta. Hydration? Protein? Too much ginger ale.
It is not glamorous that I can’t drive a car. It is not mysterious to be home on a Saturday night, reading a novel in a pile of smelly golden retrievers. However, I am not immune to the feeling of being viewed as a mystery, as a Sinclair, as part of a privileged clan of special people, and as part of a magical, important narrative, just because I am part of this clan.
My mother is not immune to it, either.
This is who we have been brought up to be.
Sinclairs. Sinclairs.
PART TWO
Vermont
16
WHEN I WAS eight, Dad gave me a stack of fairy-tale books for Christmas. They came with colored covers: The Yellow Fairy Book, The Blue Fairy Book, The Crimson, The Green, The Gray, The Brown, and The Orange. Inside were tales from all over the world, variations on variations of familiar stories.
Read them and you hear echoes of one story inside another, then echoes of another inside that. So many have the same premise: once upon a time, there were three.
Three of something:
three pigs,
three bears,
three brothers,
three soldiers,
three billy goats.
Three princesses.
Since I got back from Europe, I have been writing some of my own. Variations.
I have time on my hands, so let me tell you a story. A variation, I am saying, of a story you have heard before.
—
ONCE UPON A time there was a king who had three beautiful daughters.
As he grew old, he began to wonder which should inherit the kingdom, since none had married and he had no heir. The king decided to ask his daughters to demonstrate their love for him.
To the eldest princess he said, “Tell me how you love me.”
She loved him as much as all the treasure in the kingdom.
To the middle princess he said, “Tell me how you love me.”
She loved him with the strength of iron.
To the youngest princess he said, “Tell me how you love me.”
This youngest princess thought for a long time before answering. Finally she said she loved him as meat loves salt.
“Then you do not love me at all,” the king said. He threw his daughter from the castle and had the bridge drawn up behind her so that she could not return.
Now, this youngest princess goes into the forest with not so much as a coat or a loaf of bread. She wanders through a hard winter, taking shelter beneath trees. She arrives at an inn and gets hired as assistant to the cook. As the days and weeks go by, the princess learns the ways of the kitchen. Eventually she surpasses her employer in skill and her food is known throughout the land.
Years pass, and the eldest princess comes to be married. For the festivities, the cook from the inn makes the wedding meal.
Finally a large roast pig is served. It is the king’s favorite dish, but this time it has been cooked with no salt.
The king tastes it.
Tastes it again.
“Who would dare to serve such an ill-cooked roast at the future queen’s wedding?” he cries.
The princess-cook appears before her father, but she is so changed he does not recognize her. “I would not serve you salt, Your Majesty,” she explains. “For did you not exile your youngest daughter for saying that it was of value?”
At her words, the king realizes that not only is she his daughter—she is, in fact, the daughter who loves him best.
And what then?
The eldest daughter and the middle sister have been living with the king all this time. One has been in favor one week, the other the next. They have been driven apart by their father’s constant comparisons. Now the youngest has returned, the king yanks the kingdom from his eldest, who has just been married. She is not to be queen after all. The elder sisters rage.
At first, the youngest basks in fatherly love. Before long, however, she realizes the king is demented and power-mad. She is to be queen, but she is also stuck tending to a crazy old tyrant for the rest of her days. She will not leave him, no matter how sick he becomes.
Does she stay because she loves him as meat loves salt?
Or does she stay because he has now promised her the kingdom?
It is hard for her to tell the difference.
17
THE FALL AFTER the European trip, I started a project. I give away something of mine every day.
I mailed Mirren an old Barbie with extra-long hair, one we used to fight over when we were kids. I mailed Johnny a striped scarf I used to wear a lot. Johnny likes stripes.
For the old people in my family—Mummy, the aunties, Granddad—the accumulation of beautiful objects is a life goal. Whoever dies with the most stuff wins.
Wins what? is what I’d like to know.
I used to be a person who liked pretty things. Like Mummy does, like all the Sinclairs do. But that’s not me anymore.
Mummy has our Burlington house filled with silver and crystal, coffee-table books and cashmere blankets. Thick rugs cover every floor, and paintings from several local artists she patronizes line our walls. She likes antique china and displays it in the dining room. She’s replaced the perfectly drivable Saab with a BMW.
Not one of these symbols of prosperity and taste has any use at all.
“Beauty is a valid use,” Mummy argues. “It creates a sense of place, a sense of personal history. Pleasure, even, Cadence. Have you ever heard of pleasure?”
But I think she’s lying, to me and to herself, about why she owns these objects. The jolt of a new purchase makes Mummy feel powerful, if only for a moment. I think there is status to having a house full of pretty things, to buying expensive paintings of seashells from her arty friends and spoons from Tiffany’s. Antiques and Oriental rugs tell people that my mother may be a dog breeder who dropped out of Bryn Mawr, but she’s got power—because she’s got money.
—
GIVEAWAY: MY BED pillow. I carry it while I run errands.
There is a girl leaning against the wall outside the library. She has a cardboard cup by her ankles for spare change. She is not much older than I am.
“Do you want this pillow?” I ask. “I washed the pillowcase.”
She takes it and sits on it.
My bed is uncomfortable that night, but it’s for the best.
—
GIVEAWAY: PAPERBACK COPY of King Lear I read for school sophomore year, found under the bed.
Donated to the public library.
I don’t need to read it again.
—
GIVEAWAY: A PHOTO of Granny Tipper at the Farm Institute party, wearing an evening dress and holding a piglet.
I stop by Goodwill on my way home. “Hey there, Cadence,” says Patti behind the counter. “Just dropping off?”
“This was my Gran.”
“She was a beautiful lady,” says Patti, peering. “You sure you don’t want to take the photo out? You could donate just the frame.”
“I’m sure.”
Gran is dead. Having a picture of her won’t change anything.
—
“DID YOU GO by Goodwill again?” Mummy asks when I get home. She is slicing peaches with a special fruit knife.
“Yeah.”
“What did you get rid of?”
“Just an old picture of Gran.”
“With the piglet?” Her mouth twitches. “Oh, Cady.”
“It was mine to give away.”
Mummy sighs. “You give away one of the dogs and you will never hear the end of it.”
I squat down to dog height. Bosh, Grendel, and Poppy greet me with soft, indoor woofs. They’re our family dogs, portly and well-behaved. Purebred goldens. Poppy had several litters for my mother’s business, but the puppies and the other breeding dogs live with Mummy’s partner at a farm outside Burlington.
“I would never,” I say.
I whisper how I love them into their soft doggy ears.
18
IF I GOOGLE traumatic brain injury, most websites tell me selective amnesia is a consequence. When there’s damage to the brain, it’s not uncommon for a patient to forget stuff. She will be unable to piece together a coherent story of the trauma.
But I don’t want people to know I’m like this. Still like this, after all the appointments and scans and medicines.
I don’t want to be labeled with a disability. I don’t want more drugs. I don’t want doctors or concerned teachers. God knows, I’ve had enough doctors.
What I remember, from the summer of the accident:
Falling in love with Gat at the Red Gate kitchen door.
His beach rose for Raquel and my wine-soaked night, spinning in anger.
Acting normal. Making ice cream. Playing tennis.
The triple-decker s’mores and Gat’s anger when we told him to shut up.
Night swimming.
Kissing Gat in the attic.
Hearing the Cracker Jack story and helping Granddad down the stairs.
The tire swing, the basement, the perimeter. Gat and I in one another’s arms.
Gat seeing me bleed. Asking me questions. Dressing my wounds.
I don’t remember much else.
I can see 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. But what was so funny?
What was it and where were we?
I do not know.
I used to ask Mummy when I didn’t remember the rest of summer fifteen. My forgetfulness frightened me. I’d suggest stopping my meds, or trying new meds, or seeing a different physician. I’d beg to know what I’d forgotten. Then one day in late fall—the fall I spent undergoing tests for death-sentence illnesses—Mummy began to cry. “You ask me over and over. You never remember what I say.”
“I’m sorry.”
She poured herself a glass of wine as she talked. “You began asking me the day you woke in the hospital. ‘What happened? What happened?’ I told you the truth, Cadence, I always did, and you’d repeat it back to me. But
the next day you’d ask again.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“You still ask me almost every day.”
It is true, I have no memory of my accident. I don’t remember what happened before and after. I don’t remember my doctor’s visits. I knew they must have happened, because of course they happened—and here I am with a diagnosis and medications—but nearly all my medical treatment is a blank.
I looked at Mummy. At her infuriatingly concerned face, her leaking eyes, the tipsy slackness of her mouth. “You have to stop asking,” she said. “The doctors think it’s better if you remember on your own, anyway.”
I made her tell me one last time, and I wrote down her answers so I could look back at them when I wanted to. That’s why I can tell you about the night-swimming accident, the rocks, the hypothermia, respiratory difficulty, and the unconfirmed traumatic brain injury.
I never asked her anything again. There’s a lot I don’t understand, but this way she stays pretty sober.
19
DAD PLANS TO take me to Australia and New Zealand for the whole of summer seventeen.
I don’t want to go.
I want to return to Beechwood. I want to see Mirren and lie in the sun, planning our futures. I want to argue with Johnny and go snorkeling and make ice cream. I want to build bonfires on the shore of the tiny beach. I want to pile in the hammock on the Clairmont porch and be the Liars once again, if it’s possible.
I want to remember my accident.
I want to know why Gat disappeared. I don’t know why he wasn’t with me, swimming. I don’t know why I went to the tiny beach alone. Why I swam in my underwear and left no clothes on the sand. And why he bailed when I got hurt.
I wonder if he loved me. I wonder if he loved Raquel.
Dad and I are supposed to leave for Australia in five days.
I should never have agreed to go.
I make myself wretched, sobbing. I tell Mummy I don’t need to see the world. I need to see family. I miss Granddad.
No.
I’ll be sick if I travel to Australia. My headaches will explode, I shouldn’t get on a plane. I shouldn’t eat strange food. I shouldn’t be jet-lagged. What if we lose my medication?