The Cousins

by Karen M. McManus

  I feel awful, then, for making her talk about her sister again. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  She pats my shoulder. “It truly is fine, Aubrey. It’s been twenty-four years since Kayla died, and I enjoy talking about her.”

  Something prickles up my spine then. Twenty-four years is 1997, the year my father and his brothers and sister were disinherited. That’s where it all started to go wrong. I haven’t thought about Cutter-slash-Cutty Beach in a while, or that strange line about it in his novel, but I’m struck with the sudden urge to ask Oona if something happened to Kayla there. I can’t bring myself to do it, though. It’s one thing to talk about her sister’s ex-boyfriend, and quite another to relive the way her sister died.

  Anyway, Oona is brandishing the blue dress at me with a determined expression. “This is going to look stunning on you.”

  “It can’t look worse than the first one.”

  “That was the wrong style,” Oona says, positioning the dress in front of me. “Step into this, would you? You have such wonderful arms and shoulders, we want to show them off.”

  I don’t move. “We do?”

  “Absolutely!”

  I fold my arms across my faded sports bra. “I kind of hate my shoulders, though. And my arms. I wore a long-sleeved dress to prom.”

  “Well, that was a tragic waste,” Oona says, shaking the dress. “Go on, step in.”

  I do as I’m told, clutching her elbow for balance. “My boyfriend said I looked like a kid playing dress-up.” I don’t know why I just told her that, other than that the fake intimacy of the situation is making me strangely confiding.

  Oona’s dark brows draw together in a frown. “He doesn’t sound like a particularly worthy date.” She tugs the dress over my hips, then holds the bodice up so it covers my chest. “Go ahead and take that bra off. You’ll need something strapless with this neckline. We have a lot of lovely bras that will work perfectly.”

  “Um, okay.” Once again, I do as I’m told. I almost feel a compunction to defend Thomas, except—she’s right. He’s not a particularly worthy date. “I think he might be an ex now,” I say as she zips up the back. “My boyfriend, I mean.”

  “You think?”

  “Well, for a while he wasn’t returning any of my texts. Now I’m not returning his, so…”

  I trail off, and she finishes, “That’s how it’s done nowadays, huh? Goodness, I feel for you kids. Life is complicated in the digital age. But he doesn’t sound like the catch you deserve. And—there!” She smooths her hands over my hips and beams. “Look at you! Perfect!”

  I stare. All I can see is shoulders filling the mirror in front of me. They’re broader than mine, Thomas said to me once. Despite all my time in the sun I’m still pale, my arms an unbroken stretch of freckled white until you get to the wine-colored birthmark. This dress is a lot more clothing than the bathing suit I wear to swim meets, of course, but when I’m in my bathing suit I don’t think about looking good. It’s just functional. My eyes prick as embarrassment floods my veins, and I wish I had something to wrap around me. Like a parka. “I don’t—I think it’s too revealing on top,” I stammer.

  “Oh, honey, not at all. You have a wonderful upper body. You’re like a Greek goddess! We’ll pull your hair into a twist, give you some amazing drop earrings, and you’ll be the belle of the ball.”

  “My cousin will be,” I say. I’m not jealous. It’s just fact.

  Oona pats my arm. “Your cousin is beautiful. But so are you. Anyone who can’t see that isn’t worth your time.”

  I try to see the dress like she seems to. It’s a great color, definitely. There’s just one beaded strap, which runs across my right shoulder and down the bodice. The dress is fitted, which I usually try to avoid, but the fabric is so rich—some kind of heavy silk, I think—that it flows across my body a lot better than my cheap prom dress did.

  “You need the right accessories, of course,” Oona says. “Linda?” She raises her voice. “Could you grab a pair of the sapphire drop earrings? And one of those mother-of-pearl haircombs we just got in. Let’s try to re-create the final styling as best we can.”

  “My ears aren’t pierced,” I say.

  “Clip earrings, Linda!” Oona calls.

  I blink at myself. You wouldn’t be a swimmer if you took after the Storys, my father used to say. My mother and sister could never build up that sort of arm strength. They’re far too delicate. I always took that as a subtle insult, which it probably was. A backhanded reminder that the Storys are special, ethereal, and too precious for this world. But I’m tired of hearing Dad’s voice, and Thomas’s, running through my head every time I look in the mirror. Every time I do anything. Maybe it’s time to start listening to someone else.

  I meet Oona’s kind dark eyes as she loops her arm through mine and squeezes lightly. “I wouldn’t steer you wrong, Aubrey. I promise. This is beyond lovely on you.”

  I still hate my reflection, but the more I look at it, the more it seems like I’m looking into a fun house mirror—a distorted image that doesn’t reflect reality. I don’t know how to see beyond it, yet, but I want to try.

  “I’ll take it,” I tell Oona.

  We’re too early for Dr. Baxter’s funeral on Wednesday because someone—thanks, Aubrey—insisted we leave an hour early. It took two minutes to get downtown, and they’re not letting anyone into the church yet. So Aubrey drags us, sweating in our funeral clothes, to the air-conditioned Gull Cove Island Library a few blocks away.

  “We could’ve gone somewhere that serves coffee,” Milly mutters, dropping her purse onto an empty table. She’s wearing a sleek black dress and heels, her hair pulled back into a high ponytail. Aubrey is in the same dress she wore to brunch on Sunday. I brought nothing appropriate for a funeral and had to borrow a button-down shirt and a pair of khakis from Efram. The pants are too short, and the shirt is just a little too tight. Every time I move my arms, I feel like a button’s about to pop.

  “I want to look something up,” Aubrey says, scanning the room until her eyes land on a row of big, blocky monitors. “Did you know that back issues of the Gull Cove Gazette are only online since 2006?”

  “I neither knew nor cared,” Milly says, at the same time as I say, “Yeah.”

  Aubrey cocks her head at me, and I shrug. “I used their website to research your family before I left. There’s not much about your parents in the past fifteen years, though.”

  “Right,” Aubrey nods. “So I need a microfilm machine.” She heads for the monitors, and Milly and I follow, bemused.

  “A what?” I ask.

  “Microfilm,” Aubrey says, looping the strap of her handbag across a chair in front of the nearest monitor. “It’s, like, pictures of old newspaper articles.”

  “They’re inside that machine?” I ask. It looks like a 1980s computer.

  She laughs and opens the middle drawer of a towering file cabinet. “No, they’re stored on reels in here. I have to load the reel onto the machine to read it.”

  “How do you know all this?” Milly asks, in the same brittle, impatient tone she’s been using ever since our Sunday brunch with Mildred Story.

  Aubrey sorts through rows of small boxes crammed into the filing cabinet. “I looked it up on the library website last night.”

  “Okay, but why?” Milly asks, as Aubrey extracts one of the boxes. She opens it and pulls out a blue plastic reel about the size of her palm.

  “Remember what Oona said at Kayla’s Boutique?” she asks. She might as well be speaking Greek right now, because half of that doesn’t make sense to me, but Milly nods. Aubrey turns toward me to explain. “Oona is a woman whose sister used to date Uncle Anders, and Gran didn’t like her, and she died twenty-four years ago, which is…” She pauses, frowning at the machine until she locates a peg where she can attach the reel.


  Milly finishes for her, looking suddenly pensive. “When our parents got disinherited.”

  “What’s Kayla’s Boutique?” I ask, and Milly catches me up while Aubrey feeds one end of the film into a chute beneath a glass surface on the machine. Aubrey hits a button, causing the blue reel to spin, and the screen comes to life with the front page of a 1997 issue of the Gull Cove Gazette.

  “So you think—what? Those things are related?” I ask, as Aubrey twists a dial to bring up a different page.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “But I’m curious about what happened. These editions are from November, a month before our parents got the you know what you did letter.” We’re quiet for a few minutes while Aubrey runs through the reel, weeks’ worth of newspapers scrolling in front of our eyes. “I don’t see anything,” she finally says, pressing a button to reverse the film. When it’s all back on the reel, she removes it from the machine and stuffs it back into its box.

  My mind’s been somewhere else while the newspaper pages flashed before us. “Do you guys remember that day we went to Dr. Baxter’s?” I ask. “All that stuff Hazel was saying?”

  Milly’s mouth twists. “I’ve been trying to forget, but yes.”

  “Sorry. But you know how Dr. Baxter almost knocked over the table?” Aubrey nods distractedly as she replaces the box in the filing cabinet and takes out another one. “He did that on purpose.”

  Aubrey pauses halfway through pulling the reel from the box. “What?”

  “He was watching you guys, totally clear-eyed, and then you said something—I don’t remember what—and he banged his knee on the table and started acting all confused.”

  Milly puts her hands on her hips, frowning. “You never said anything about that.”

  “I thought Dr. Baxter was doing us a favor,” I say as Aubrey starts up the process of loading the blue reel onto the microfilm machine. “Getting everyone out of an uncomfortable situation. But then Archer got that letter, and—I don’t know. Maybe we were talking about something he didn’t want anyone to know.”

  Milly’s face goes splotchy. “Look, my mother was not impregnated by one of her brothers. That’s—”

  “That’s not what we were talking about,” Aubrey interrupts. Her eyes are on the screen as she spins the dial to keep pages moving.

  “Yes we were,” Milly says testily.

  “At first, yeah. But Dr. Baxter didn’t do anything until I said, ‘I’d more easily believe they all killed somebody than that.’ ”

  There’s a long beat of silence. I can’t think of a good response—I’d completely forgotten about that until right this second—and nobody speaks again until Aubrey says, “Here it is. December twenty-second, 1997.” She twists a dial to enlarge an article on the screen with the headline LOCAL WOMAN DIES IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT. Milly and I lean over her shoulder to read the rest of the article.

  Milly speaks first, her voice breathless with relief. “It was a car accident,” she says. According to the coverage, Kayla Dugas, who was then twenty-one, left a downtown bar one night and drove her car into a tree a half mile from Cutty Beach. The autopsy report showed she had a blood alcohol level over the legal limit, but just barely. “She was alone.”

  “Cutty Beach, though,” Aubrey murmurs, her eyes locked on the screen.

  “Your father is the only one who ever talks about that,” Milly says. “And Kayla’s car accident didn’t happen on the beach. It happened near it. It’s a reference point, that’s all.”

  “Hmm.” Aubrey is still staring at the article. “It says here that Dr. Baxter was the attending physician after the accident.”

  “Of course he was,” Milly snaps. “This is Gull Cove Island we’re talking about. He was probably the only physician.”

  Aubrey finally looks up, her brow creased. “Are you…mad about something?”

  “I’m just—what even is all this?” Milly asks, gesturing between the filing cabinet and the microfilm machine. “What are you trying to prove? That our parents murdered some girl and Mildred kicked them off the island because of it?”

  Aubrey blinks. “I’m just trying to understand what happened.”

  “Why don’t you ask Mildred?” Milly says. “Since the two of you get along so well.”

  “We don’t—” Aubrey starts, but I break in.

  “We’re going to be late. The funeral starts in fifteen minutes,” I remind them. This conversation isn’t headed anywhere good, and we’ve already been here too long.

  “I’ll wait outside,” Milly says. She spins toward the door, ponytail flying.

  Aubrey watches her go, hurt and confusion written all across her face. “What is going on with her?”

  “Come on, Aubrey. You know,” I say. I always thought Aubrey was pretty in tune with other people, especially Milly, but she just stares at me blankly until I spell it out. “Your grandmother basically ignored her on Sunday and spent the whole time talking to you and me. It made Milly feel like shit.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “She didn’t have to.”

  “But Milly doesn’t care about Gran!” Aubrey insists. “She doesn’t even have a grandmother name for her.”

  “You really think that?” I ask. “You think Milly wears that watch every day because she doesn’t care about her grandmother? Because she doesn’t want your grandmother to care about her?”

  “She…” Aubrey bites her lip, her face conflicted. “She’s Milly. She’s already the best grandchild. The best Story out of all of us. Well, you don’t count—no offense—”

  “None taken.”

  “But JT’s horrible and I’m…Nobody’s ever thought I was anything like my father. Milly is beautiful and glamorous and stylish and—”

  “And none of that mattered to Mildred,” I finish.

  Aubrey’s face crumples. “Oh God. I could tell something was off when we were shopping for dresses. But it didn’t hit me, till you said it—Gran was ignoring Milly.” She twists her hands. “I was just happy that she seemed to like me. I never thought she would.”

  “It’s not your fault. The more I see of your grandmother, the more I think JT might’ve been right all along. She likes to play games.” I almost add what I’ve been thinking since Sunday; that Mildred wasn’t interested in us so much as Adam and Anders. All of her questions were just a roundabout way of forcing us to talk about them. But Aubrey doesn’t need to hear that; she already believes she’ll never be as important as her dad. Instead, I point toward the clock on the wall. “Look, we really have to get out of here. I haven’t been to a funeral in a while, but I’m pretty sure it’s bad form to walk in late.” I reach for the machine to start the rewinding process, but Aubrey stops me.

  “Hang on. I want to print this page.”

  I wait, impatient, while the machine takes what feels like ten minutes to crank out a single page. Milly’s gone by the time we get outside, and I feel a sharp stab of regret that I stayed with Aubrey instead of going after her. We walk the few short blocks to the church, out of place in our funeral clothes among all the tourists. When we arrive at St. Mary’s, a familiar, silver-haired figure greets us somberly at the door.

  “How good of you to come,” Donald Camden says.

  I haven’t seen the guy since he tried to bribe us with movie jobs. It already feels like that happened months ago. He looks older and more tired than he did at lunch that day, with bags under his eyes that I don’t remember seeing then.

  Aubrey blinks at him like he’s a mirage. “Aren’t we late?” she asks. Donald looks at her with a quizzical expression, and she adds, “I mean, I would’ve thought you’d be inside already. With our grandmother or something. The funeral starts at eleven, right?” She’s babbling now, and turning red, but Donald just holds out his arm.

  “I’m an usher for the service. Fred Bax
ter was one of my oldest and dearest friends.” The phrase sounds like an echo, and it takes me a minute to remember where I heard it last. On the steps of Catmint House, spoken by Theresa. Fred Baxter was one of your grandmother’s oldest and dearest friends.

  And then there were two, I think as Aubrey takes Donald’s arm.

  She peers into the open door. “I think Milly is already here….”

  “She is. I put her at the end of a crowded pew. She said she was alone.”

  “Okay,” Aubrey says, her mouth settling into a thin line. We walk through the church vestibule and down the center aisle; we’re a lot closer to the front than I would have thought we’d be after showing up this late. An organ plays softly in the background, but our footsteps still echo loudly. A girl in the first pew turns at the sound, and I recognize Hazel Baxter-Clement. I nod and give her a tight-lipped grimace of sympathy, and she smiles faintly. Donald finally stops, gesturing toward a pew where four black-clad people shift to their right to make room for us.

  “Thanks,” Aubrey whispers, releasing his arm. “And—I’m sorry. I’m really sorry that you lost your friend.”

  “He’s at peace now,” Donald says in a low voice, his face grave. “And in the end that’s all that any of us can ask for, isn’t it?”

  Allison took stock of herself in her bedroom mirror. She looked better than she had in a while, but then again, almost everybody looked better in a ball gown and diamonds. She’d been worried about wearing white when she was so pale, but something about this particular shade—the shimmering blue white of snow on top of a frozen lake—brought color back to her cheeks.

  She’d had no trouble zipping the dress up and immediately thought, See? I haven’t put on any weight. I can’t be pregnant. Then her traitorous brain reminded her that her period was still weeks overdue, and that her stomach wouldn’t stop rolling with unfamiliar queasiness.