* * *
—————
“Where’re we sleeping?” Ben asks. “It’ll be too cold to stay out here.”
He’s right. Though it feels almost like summer when we’re lying flat in the full sun, by evening the temperature’s sure to drop. The cabins aren’t heated, but they’ll still offer protection. A tent might be warmer, but to even think of bringing one always seemed like some sort of betrayal since the cabins must feel abandoned enough as it is.
“I was thinking Five,” Zach says. “Someone or something took a dump in Two and I haven’t been able to go back into Three ever since that thing.”
“That thing” was the time Zach lost his virginity, which apparently did not go exactly as he planned, though he’s never elaborated beyond that.
“One and Six had too much damage in that storm last year,” Blake chimes in.
“What about Four?” Ben asks.
“It’s haunted,” Reggie and I say at once and then begin to laugh.
“Shut up,” Blake tells us.
“What?” Ben looks confused.
“Have you seriously never heard what went down in Four?” I say.
“Lakeside Four is where Blake declared his love to Robin Ladoucer only to have her grind his soul, may it rest in peace, into the floor with her steel-toed boots until all that was left was dust.”
I raise my eyebrows. “I thought he dropped trou and she couldn’t stop laughing.”
“Isn’t that pretty much the same thing?”
“You guys are the worst,” Blake says, but the way he says it I know that he means the opposite.
“Fine,” Ben concedes. “Five it is.”
* * *
—————
There are noises in the woods that I never noticed before. We’d cooked hot dogs on sticks over the fire and burned our fingers trying to roast marshmallows for s’mores. Then we swam in the lake on principle, even though by that time the sun was gone and it was far too cold. A watery moon hung just above the tree line and cast a glow on our wet skin.
When we were younger, we used to slip out of our cabins and do the same thing, sneaking down to the water’s edge, peeling off our shirts and pajama pants as we went. Sometimes we’d get caught by counselors who were out after their own curfew, hidden in the shadows and sharing long, overly wet kisses or wrestling around on the hard ground. They would send us back to our cabins with a silent understanding that neither group would turn the other in. On the nights we weren’t caught, we would make the last part of the run entirely naked and splash into the water with barely a sound, disappearing beneath the dark surface, careful to give no sign that we were there. Sometime around middle school we started leaving our shorts on. I wasn’t the first one to do it, but I was relieved when it happened and I felt almost guilty that I had let it go on so long.
Now, staring up at the underside of the cabin roof long after the others have dropped into sleep, I’m struck by the din coming in through the windows. It’s not only the steady thrum of the crickets. There are other sounds as well. Frogs noisily broadcast their presence from the tree trunks beyond the clearing, beckoning potential mates closer, like Tinder for amphibians. A few feet from my head, moths throw their bodies against the screen while something louder, something larger, moves heavily across the forest floor outside.
I am struck all at once by how I am a part of all this for the very first time. Life begetting life and all that Old Testament stuff. Not that the baby is mine, not in any biological sense, but it will be mine legally. It will be mine as far as the world is concerned. The tabloids will probably show a shot of the baby alongside one of those photos that Mom is digging out of her boxes. Celia Hicks will see to that, I’m sure. She’ll want there to be enough headlines marveling at our family resemblance that her fans never suspect they have had the wool pulled over their eyes. With any luck, this’ll take up enough of her attention that she’ll never realize that her own daughter has done exactly the same thing, that I’ve been a willing accomplice, that their secret is no longer theirs alone. It also belongs to me.
The next day we rise early since the cabin’s screened windows do little to block out the sun. We have time to hike the entire trail that runs around the lake. We carve our initials into the rafters in Cabin Five. We shout out obscenities across the open surface of the water and wait for the four-letter words to echo back. Ben climbs a tree where he once tied a bandana around a branch and reports that the bark has grown up and around the tightly twisted fabric and claimed the cloth as its own. When at last we pile into the cars and pull past the gatehouse, I look for a long time out the rear window until the lake has entirely disappeared. Blake stays quiet as the truck bounces over the dirt road and I know we’re thinking the very same thing: this was the last time. Now that childhood is behind us, we will never come here again.
Esther
It turns out I am more nervous about seeing Lissa than I was about what Mother would say when she found the pregnancy test. I suppose it’s because Mother is predictable while Lissa is, after all, essentially a stranger. It has been nearly four years since I last saw her, and when she left, I was a child, knobby-kneed and flat-chested. Aside from being family, we had nothing in common. Even so, when my period came for the first time later that fall, I wished more than anything that Lissa were there to tell. Instead I had to alert Mother, after which there was the requisite speech about becoming a woman and the importance of virtue. I nearly fainted when she started talking and it was not just because I was embarrassed. The whole part about virtue came about six weeks too late.
I look through the pictures I have of Lissa and me together. Not the professional shots, of which there are many, but instead the overexposed prints that we all collected from those disposable cameras you bought at convenience stores, the kind that used actual film. We look happy in the snapshots. Even though I am so much younger than Lissa, it does not look like she is on the swing set next to me because she has to be. She is smiling. She is enjoying herself, ignoring the camera. In only a few of the pictures does she stare right at the lens with the unbridled disdain of a teenager. I flip through these and wonder if that’s all it was, her age, or if there was more behind the look than just that. In one she is holding an inflatable beach ball under one arm. The wind has blown her hair forward and Lissa’s third finger is extended, brushing her bangs away from her face. Was it on purpose, the use of that finger in particular? Probably. Lissa specialized in subtle acts of rebellion. There were thirty-four candy bars under her bed, after all. But still, I wonder who was behind the camera. I wonder for whom the obscenity was meant.
Mother watches me from the hall as I sift through the photographs, fanning them out across my bed. I ignore her. I expect her to move on after she reassures herself that I am doing nothing much of interest, but instead she steps forward and into the room. She twists one of the carved wooden finials at the foot of my bed frame and clears her throat.
“What have you got there?” she asks.
I hand her the picture of Lissa and me at the house in Saint John. I was wearing a hat that Lissa had woven out of reeds. It was lopsided and scratchy and the inside rubbed against my forehead, but those things didn’t matter. I wore that hat everywhere for the whole rest of that summer and I cried for a day and a half when the wind blew it so far out into the ocean that it was beyond rescuing. I thought that Lissa might blame me, might love me less for not being careful. But Lissa seemed to have forgotten that she’d made the hat in the first place and kept asking why I was so upset. It was Naomi who leaped into the water as I stood crying on the beach and tried to save it, but by the time she got beyond the waves, the tug of the currents had already carried the hat away.
“My goodness, you both look so young,” Mother says, and I see her mouth relax into a smile that might almost be natural.
“We were young. We’d have t
o be. She’s been gone for so long.”
Mother looks genuinely wounded and for the first time in a long while, I remember that this woman is my mother in more than just name, that there might have once been a part of her that actually cared.
“Yes, well, your sister always did have a flair for the dramatic. Did you know I often wondered if she broke her leg on purpose? I don’t know why. It just struck me as something she would do. For the attention.”
I am angry, though I cannot tell whether it is because the statement is ungenerous or because I have to admit that it is true. Whatever her failings as a parent, my mother knew Lissa well.
“It runs in the family, I guess.”
Mother ignores this. Possibly she did not hear me. She has chosen a photograph from Christmas at the lake house and is running a nail along the border.
“It’s all of us together,” she says.
I look. She is right. Someone else must have taken it, a cook or a nanny or else one of the crew. I watch Mother for a moment, intrigued by the emotions playing out across her face. Does she think there are cameras here in the room with us or is she genuinely remorseful about whatever it was that made Lissa go?
“Do you ever miss her?” I ask finally.
“Don’t ask ridiculous questions.”
“It’s not ridiculous. You never talk about her. What am I supposed to think?”
“It takes commitment, what we do. Elizabeth wasn’t strong enough. She wasn’t devoted to the cause. We’re better off without her.”
“You mean the show is better off?”
“I mean we, as a family, are better off letting her follow her own path. And I don’t blame her for it. In fact, I’m happy that she’s found direction, that she’s found peace.”
“How could you possibly know anything about her if you haven’t spoken with her in three and a half years?”
“I know that if something were really wrong, she would have called. I’m her mother, after all.”
“Mom,” I say and she looks startled. I have never called her that before. “Why did she leave? What happened?”
Instead of answering, Mother stands and straightens her skirt.
“Lights out in five minutes. We have a big day tomorrow.”
I wait, but from her look it is clear that I should not expect an answer. I start to brush a hand across my bedspread to gather up the pictures and put them back into their bin. Mother straightens one of the ceramic horses I keep on a shelf over my desk.
“I miss her every day,” she tells me from the hall.
I look up to ask Mother again why Lissa left, but she is already gone.
* * *
—————
I can’t focus during the interview. I don’t remember any of the questions and I stumble over the answers we’ve agreed upon. Roarke holds the narrative together with some help from Libby and they play the whole thing off as wedding nerves. I try to relax and answer questions about flower arrangements and rolled fondant. People want to know the color of the bridesmaids’ dresses and whether any of my nieces and nephews will be included in the service. I tell a story about three-year-old Millicent, who was being fitted for a flower girl dress and ran out of the boutique wearing nothing but a pair of Mary Janes and streaked across a busy parking lot. Naomi tripped as she tried to chase her daughter and was nearly hit by a car. The memory of the mortification on my mother’s face is enough to distract me for the rest of the taping and I somehow plow through to the end.
I expect Libby to lay into me for making a mess of the interview, but instead she sets aside her note cards and says, “Wait here. I’ll go see if she’s arrived.”
My palms have been sweating since we started the session and I wipe them down the sides of my dress, aware that the curls in my hair are beginning to fall and stick to the back of my neck.
“If I sweat any more, I think I’ll dissolve into a puddle like the Wicked Witch,” I tell Roarke.
He puts his arm loosely around me.
“It’s the lights. They were hotter than usual.”
I laugh. “You’re a terrible liar. We both know that isn’t true.”
“I think that what we both know is that I’m not a terrible liar. Otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten this far.”
“Fair enough.”
“You’ll be fine,” he tries to reassure me. “And with any luck, you’ll find out what you need to know.”
I swallow hard and try to breathe out slowly. My morning sickness has mostly gone away since we got back from Cuba, but now I feel a surge of nausea. Roarke’s look of concern goes out of focus and I blink rapidly as I will myself to remain upright. Fainting would be too cliché. We are interrupted by a loud crack as a metal door swings open and Libby walks back into the studio.
“She’s in my dressing room.”
I stand motionless, frozen in time, until Roarke asks, “Do you want me to go with you?” and I come back to myself enough to shake my head and follow Libby into the hall. It is the same corridor we walked through just before the interview, but it seems brighter now and longer. The walls and ceiling bleed together and I feel as if I am walking through a tunnel that goes on and on without any end. I do not see the door to Libby’s dressing room until I am standing right in front of it, and even then I am confused for a moment until I reach a hand out to touch the wall and the cool granularity of paint rolled over plaster brings things into focus.
“Ready?” Libby asks.
Her pupils widen and I know that she has found my sister for me in no small part because her own sister has been taken to a place where she cannot be found.
“Ready,” I echo, hoping that by saying it out loud I can make it true.
Libby turns the knob to open the door and then backs out of the way to let me enter, and because at this point there is no way around it, I walk forward even though I am not at all certain that I have the strength to face the person inside. I hear Libby shut the door behind me as Lissa stands. She looks unsure of herself, which surprises me for some reason. “Leap before you look” had been one of her mottoes. I did not think she was capable of being nervous. She takes a step forward as if to hug me, then stops. Her hair is darker than I remember, longer. “Unkempt” is what Mother would call it, but Lissa looks beautiful and a little wild. She looks like the person she was always meant to be.
I have played this moment out countless times over the years, but in my mind, Lissa was always the one to speak first. She is supposed to say something irreverent or else offer an apology. She is supposed to tousle my hair the way she used to or make a joke about how much I’ve grown. But instead she just stands there and all of the things I have imagined saying in return slip away and I am left with nothing. I open my mouth and what I produce is something between a giggle and a sob and all of a sudden I am blubbering so much that for a second it seems as if I can’t breathe.
Eventually I manage to get out, “How could you leave me all alone?”
And now her arms do wrap around me and I feel her rib cage shaking and I know that she is crying too.
* * *
—————
It is a long time before we are able to say anything, and when we do talk, it is not at all how I expected. She wants to know how the remodel turned out in the upstairs bathroom and whether you can take a shower now without freezing or getting burned. She asks what happened to Mrs. Peacham’s labradoodle, Roscoe, whom Lissa used to take for walks and who liked to pee in the spot where our own dog, Blister, had been buried, as if making some sort of offering to the dead. It is the little things she seems most interested in and then I realize that it is the little things that she has not been able to find out about on TV.
After a long while, I ask, “Why did you go?”
We are sitting on a narrow couch. Lissa’s feet are tucked up beneath her and I am lying
with my legs up over the armrest so that my head is on my sister’s knee. She smooths my hair back from my face.
“It’s complicated,” she tells me.
“Isn’t it always?”
Lissa leans her head back and looks up at a water mark on the ceiling.
“You know how it is there. I was suffocating.”
“So it wasn’t anything more than that?”
I feel Lissa’s muscles tense, but even so, I know that if she tells me it was just the cameras she was trying to escape from, I’ll believe her. That’s how much I want it to be true.
Instead of saying no, she asks me, “Why?”
And because this is the entire reason I asked her here to see me, I say, “I’m pregnant.”
There is a moment when it is as if the air has gone out of the room because neither of us is breathing, but then it passes and Lissa says, “I was afraid of that.”
I sit up and face her, my eyes flashing. Saying it out loud to Lissa, I realize for the first time that I have decided to have this baby. Not by default. Not just because Roarke found me and I didn’t take the pills. I have decided that I want it no matter how he or she came to be.
“Aren’t you going to ask me who the father is?”
Lissa shakes her head and bites down hard on her lower lip. I can see the blood.
“I don’t have to,” she whispers finally. “I already know.”
* * *
—————
Candy calls not long after that to make sure we are on schedule for the campaign event. Mother had eventually conceded to announcing Caleb’s run at the bandstand in the town park rather than on the church lawn at the insistence of his campaign manager, a classmate from Yale named Ellory Lester who has become a sudden fixture and is now always at Caleb’s side. He went on about how the polling shows that Caleb has his work cut out for him with the secular voters in the district while, naturally, he’s got the evangelicals in the bag. This is why it is so important that the announcement be made in neutral territory. As a result, Roarke and I have to be ready before we leave the studio since there is nowhere to change once we get to the park.
The Book of Essie Page 17