“Miss Terhune, I don’t know what you’ve heard about me, but if I were you I wouldn’t give it much thought because I don’t think we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other. I’m not very involved in my brother’s life. He’s usually unhappy with me, most recently because I told him not to marry your sister.”
My tone wasn’t half as offended as I actually was. “Your brother is lucky my sister even looked in his direction, much less agreed to marry him. She’s probably the best thing that’s ever happened to him.”
“That’s very likely. I wasn’t trying to protect my brother.” He smiled but just with the bottom of his face. “I don’t think your sister has any idea who my brother is.”
“That’s a traditional starting point for most marriages, isn’t it?”
He looked at me more carefully than he had a second earlier, then turned away from me. “I should go. I don’t want to upset the groom, who looks unhappy every time he checks and sees that I’m still here.” Max smiled past my shoulder and waved at Ricky, who did actually scowl. “See? I wanted to be here out of respect for the bride, who is lovely, by the way. As is her Annie. And it was a pleasure to meet you, Neave Terhune.”
* * *
An hour later I was helping Lilly jam the last of her going-away things into a suitcase. She’d had several more glasses of Champagne. We snapped it shut, sitting on it side by side. Jane and I had a schedule for Annie between us while Lilly was on the honeymoon. Lilly pulled the suitcase off the bed and clicked her way toward her new husband on new blue high heels. “You’re going to have a great time!”
We did. Days, Jane introduced Annie to the stuffed animals that had traveled with my little sister out of her own childhood and into adult life. Now they sat on a shelf in her closet, still lined up according to their complicated, long-held grudges and rosy-tinted new love affairs and new marriages.
Nights, I sang Annie all the words to “You’re a Sweet Little Headache,” and “Warm Kitty.” I had bought a phonograph and after dinner we danced in the almost empty warehouse space to record after record. Her favorite, which we played at least three times a night, was called “Make My Mistakes Again.” I’d bought it because it had a picture of a beautiful sailing ship on the record cover, and Annie sang it out full-throated and then growled at the end, her idea, she told me, of what a pirate sounded like.
I think of the times past when I had it all
I toyed with men’s wives and their daughters
And in my pursuit of this ill-gotten wealth,
I stabbed and I slashed and I slaughtered.
And for what? (HEY!)
The men that I’ve fought,
Are matched by the number of women I’ve bought.
And if I could go back and make my amends,
I’d make all those mistakes again.
And kill every last one of those bastards, my friend!
Before the happy couple got home we managed to have two picnics, one outside and one inside. Our last day we drove to Wingaersheek Beach and found five starfish. Then Lilly and Ricky returned home, which for now was a rented house in Nahant, and Jane and I packed Annie’s bag. “Don’t worry.” Lilly laughed at us. I don’t know if I looked as unhappy as I felt, but Jane certainly did. “She’ll be back for lots of sleepovers. This is her second home. Right, Annie?” Annie nodded, uncertain. After she and Lilly left me I stood in the warehouse kitchen and rolled out two dozen classic sugar cookies, singing the Pirate song, alone.
LILLY
Janey Marries
Janey met Todd Blumenthal a week after I got married and he proposed to her about ten minutes into their first date.
“It was ten weeks,” Boppit corrected me.
“You get what I mean, though. Fast. Janey said yes right off, completely sure of herself, completely sure of him. Mom finally got a daughter’s wedding that she could plan without the daughter interfering! She was so happy. I hadn’t let her put so much as a pinky finger on anything to do with my weddings. And Neave? Neave never even bothered to get married. That left Janey. When Mom started in with the lists and table settings, our little sister just smiled and said all her choices were wonderful. Janey had made the only choice that mattered to her, which was the groom.
“Mom stuffed our little sister into a blindingly white cupcake dress and perfectly awful shiny satin shoes. Jane smiled and smiled and let her do it. Mom chose daisies as the bride’s bouquet. Unbelievable. Limp little stalky weeds, and Jane told her they would be very pretty. The reception was booked into the VFW hall, whose regular caterer was asked to produce his usual rubber chicken surprise. Janey paid no attention to anything but Todd, and Todd was too busy plotting out a future full of children and Christmas trees to pay any attention to a wedding. Jane walked down the aisle looking like an explosion in a bakery, the dinner was inedible, and the whole mood was incandescent. It was a happy wedding.”
“You know,” Boppit said to me now, “they’re going to have two little girls of their own as well as taking Annie into the fold, and they’re going to rebuild an old schoolhouse into a home and raise the girls in it. They’re going to adopt a border collie named Jeffrey who will be their youngest daughter’s best friend until she’s eight years old and Linda Shouman moves into the neighborhood.”
“Then what?”
“Then Linda becomes her best friend.”
“How do you know all this?”
“How do I know anything? I told you that time-wise, things are much closer than you’d think, and not necessarily all moving in the same direction. Jeffrey, actually, I’ve met. This is his twentieth family.”
“He gets reborn?”
“I’m not sure I’d call it that. He keeps coming around when he’s called. He’s a border collie, like I said.”
“Is he going to protect the girl, like you protect Neave?”
“Better, I hope.”
“But it’s going to work, right? I help you reach Neave. You protect her from him.”
“That’s the plan,” Boppit said, nodding. “That’s why we’re here.”
“He’s bearing down on her, isn’t he? She’s in his head.”
Boppit nodded. “Yes.”
“Neave’s so vulnerable. People think she’s capable, but in a little box in the back of her mind the girl still believes in nobility and salvation and magic animal helpers. You know that book she reread every year? The one with the pirate? She actually thinks that that book is the truth: good triumphing over evil, love triumphing over everything.”
“But that is the truth, Lilly.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Dog.”
“Ridiculous? Aren’t you right now sort of talking to a kind of magical animal?”
He had a point.
NEAVE
Our Mother Dies
Our father died quick and our mother died slow. It was the reverse of the way my parents did most things, but I guess the way you make meat loaf or change a tire isn’t the sum of you. Dad was writing a letter to a local congregation suggesting that perhaps their (unmarried) minister had socialist leanings when he just tipped over and hit the linoleum. Mom claimed she knew from the sound that he was dead before the body hit the floor. Aneurism. I read some of the letter he was working on. It said even a minister needed to be a man among men.
“Man among men my ass,” Lilly had said when I reported this. Lilly wasn’t somebody who got reverent around death just because it was death, and she and Daddy had never really liked each other. “Every day he’d tell you that war was what turned boys into men. I think Daddy spent his war loading toilet paper and hamburger onto troop ships.”
I didn’t believe her. I went to my mother.
“Well, he ended the war that way. But he didn’t start it like that. He was on one of those big landing ships. It was attacked and sunk. Some other boat picked up survivors. He ended the war in Newport News. We didn’t talk about it, really.”
I let myself imagine my father floating on a debris
-choked ocean surface, maybe underneath planes still strafing the water, maybe with oil slicks burning around him.
“You weren’t curious about what he did in the war?”
“A wife doesn’t prod.”
“But…”
“You are a prodder, Neave. You have a give-no-ground temperament and it scares me. A girl who wants men to be interested in her can’t be aggressive. A person only gets to be more of what they are as they get old. You need to remember that. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to consider your own nature. I don’t want you to die alone. But the way you are…”
I figured she was right, of course, but I didn’t have a handle on what I could do about it. It was just how I’d been made. And my mother was, truly, now alone. Jane had begun her married life and decamped to a snug Cape Cod in Swampscott with Todd. Snyder was making enough money to have moved into the studio where he ran his business and stored his books and prints, though he was still coming home for dinner at least three times a week.
Eleven months after my father died my mother got a cold, which became bronchitis, then pneumonia. She struggled to keep the house running without asking anyone to help. When Lilly and Jane and I visited and found the dishes unwashed, the refrigerator empty, and the trash piling up, we were frightened. Snyder was no help. A kitchen full of dirty dishes and leftovers looked perfectly normal to him. My mother and her concerns were a kind of mystery to him, and though he made some feeble efforts to cook or clean, she rejected them. Boys were not supposed to do that kind of work, she’d say. At first she even rejected Lilly’s and my help, but we could see her drifting—staying in bed all day, and then not knowing what day it was. Then she stopped refusing help.
“Neave,” she said to me one early evening when I was standing at her sink. “Put that sponge down. Come talk to me a minute. Please.”
Her voice was so thready it gave me an ice-water-in-the-chest feeling. I dropped the sponge and my hand went to my breastbone. She was having a little trouble breathing. “I’ll boil some water and we’ll do that thing with the towel over your head for steam,” I said. “To loosen your chest.”
“Sit.”
I did.
“Your brother, Neave, looks like a grown man but he isn’t. All he knows about is comic books, which is not enough. How will he ever find a wife? He has what he calls his own business. But I’ve talked to him when he comes here for dinner, and the fact is he doesn’t really know about the world. He can’t say what he owes or who owes him. He has no business sense.”
“He’ll learn.”
“Not on his own he won’t. You and Lilly have business sense. Now you and the girls got him going on this comic-book-business idea, but you’re not done with him yet. He needs more help. And he doesn’t have anybody but you. Except for when I’m feeding him, the man lives on burnt toast and cold cereal. Tell me you’ll show him.”
“Don’t be so dramatic. You have a cold.”
“I have pneumonia and I am an old woman. And there’s something else. Neave, your father didn’t pay any taxes for the last ten years of his life.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means the house will have to be sold to pay taxes. I was hoping Snyder would have a kind of net, some money to fall back on, but he won’t. You and Lilly have each other and your little cosmetics business seems to be working. Jane has her Todd. Snyder has no one.”
She’d started with cool detachment, but that unraveled as she went on and now, to my dismay, she started to cry.
“You’re just feeling emotional because you’ve got this bad cold. You’ll be fine.” I said these words but looking at her sunken eyes, her papery face, and sandbag slump, I knew the thought of her dying was in my head. I’d just been thinking it behind my own back, but it was why I was here sitting by her side right now, letting her talk about what I needed to do for Snyder.
“Just tell me you’ll help him.”
“Yes,” I said. “You don’t have to worry, Mom.”
Three days later our mother’s lungs filled with fluid and she drowned, lying in her bed and surrounded by her children. Snyder got through a quiet wake and the graveside burial and then he began to unravel. He began to smell stale. He sat quietly in corners while my sisters and I cleaned out the house, sold it, met with an accountant who helped us pay off our parents’ debts. I didn’t believe letting him sit around and feel terrible was going to help much, so I started right in on him.
We began with cooking lessons. I told him that when we had lamb chops and chocolate cake under control we could move on to tracking sales figures and business costs. Snyder was grateful, which surprised me. The cooking lessons were a disaster but the columns of numbers, and the reasons to keep those columns, started to make sense to him. After all, he had filled out and erased and rewritten countless order forms from the backs of comics all his life. “I can do this,” he said to me one night after a long conversation about mailing costs and advertising, cash-flow charts and taxes. Then he said he was hungry and he needed a shower.
We were going to be all right.
THE PIRATE LOVER
Why Do You Hate Us?
Electra’s captor blindfolded her and brought her to a darkened chamber, where she could hear men hooting and grunting as he ordered her to stand still, arms at her side, and tolerate the blindfold until he himself removed it. When he did she gasped. There on a large bed were five men surrounding what proved to be a woman’s body, her skirt rucked up and over her head, her white legs parted—pale bent wands on a rectangle of black satin. Her fists were clenched, her wrists bound and tied to the edges of the bed.
“They were a bit rough. It’s what they pay for. If the girl can’t manage, we’ll have to find some other use for her. Our customers enjoy a variety of imaginative play—there are still many roles available for girls who have been slightly damaged.” Le Cherche pulled Electra away then, into his own private chamber.
“Why do you show me this? Who is this poor woman?”
“I believe her name was Emelia Benelotte. Pretty name, no? She rejected the marriage offer of a man who had enough influence to make her disappear from her old life, and appear in this one. True, he was thirty years older than she. Fat. But he had a great deal of money. She should have said yes to him, don’t you think? When she rejected him, he simply offered her parents a handsome fee for her and they gave her to him. Perhaps they actually weren’t venal and cruel—he told them he would be kind. Then he delivered her into my hands—he’d already had particular men in mind who wanted to do particular things with her. We’ve given her a new name and a story that makes it clear that she has been a very, very bad little girl.”
“You think this will frighten me into submission.”
“If it doesn’t, you are a fool. You see what your fate could be. Of course, you could be my own personal plaything—safe from the kind of casual group use that might be unpleasant for you.”
“Why do you hate us?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, my pet. Purr for me.” He approached Electra and stroked her head. “I said purr.” She turned her head sharply away. “You will learn,” he said dryly. “Be grateful that I am patient.”
She heard the men’s casual laughter as they left the bound and brutalized girl. Was resistance seen as sexually provocative behavior in this strange world—at best a waste of time, at worst exactly what her captor desired most? She bowed her head in as submissive a way as she could and whispered, “I understand, Judge Le Cherche. I will not be a fool.”
“So much better. Do you see how pleasant this can all be?”
Just then cannon fire sounded above them. A sailor pounded into the room. “Sir—the Cat has cut out our xebec.”
“How is that possible? Who was posted at watch?”
“They approached in small boats, sir, in total darkness and quiet. It was … we were distracted, sir. They swarmed over the side and took the xebec by surprise.”
“You were drink
ing, you mean, and playing with some of my clients’ castoffs! What about the xebec’s crew?”
“Half seem to have joined the Cat’s number. I do not know the fate of the others.”
So the crew of the Cat was at hand, active and interceding, never mind that it was a small frigate-size craft against Judge Le Cherche’s remaining three ships.
“Whoever was at watch duty will answer to me!” cried the judge. “And when we take the xebec back, and blow the Cat into eternity, we will deal with the deserters as well. Take the wench back to her quarters and tell the first officer to report to my cabin.”
The sailor into whose hands she was thrust was clearly shaken, more frightened of Le Cherche than of the cannon whistling over their deck. Sweat beaded his brow, and his grip on her arm as he dragged her toward her cell made her cry out at one point. “Hurry up, you stupid cow! If I am not back in three minutes…” The sailor never finished his sentence. He didn’t have to. In a particularly close doorway Electra watched for her chance and made a point of losing her balance—directly onto her escort. He kept his feet, but in the tangle of skirt and legs and arms she had swiftly lifted his sailor’s knife—a tool with both blunt blade and fid, each folded neatly into the handle. The man was so anxious he did not immediately feel its absence or see it folded into her skirt as he pushed her into her cell.
Within moments she had worked aside three planks and slipped into Basil Le Cherche’s straw-covered prison. She flipped the marlinspike open, examined the links of his chains, selected what seemed the weakest, and drove the fid into its center, bracing and twisting to force the link open. With determined persistence she succeeded, and the captive took the fid from her and drove it into a link on the other hand’s chains, saying, “The first time I saw you I knew you could turn the course of my life in some way, at some time. Electra Gates, I don’t understand your powers but I am grateful to them because you have brought me alive in ways I believed were gone to me forever. This moment is proof that I was wrong.”
The Romance Reader's Guide to Life Page 17