The Gilly Salt Sisters

by Tiffany Baker

  But Whit made her confront that, too. “You have to visit her,” he eventually insisted, about a month after they’d started seeing each other. They were sitting together in the dunes. “The only way to be free of something is to face it.”

  Claire wanted to point out that her sister, lying burned in a hospital because of her, wasn’t an it, but she didn’t. Besides, Whit was right. “What if I don’t want to be free?” she said, pulling her hair in front of her face.

  Whit drew it aside. “I think you do,” he said, making her remember her dream of running away with Ethan to a shady place where salt never formed but fish swam.

  She averted her face. “Well, that’s not going to happen now.”

  Whit leaned even closer to her, and she caught her breath, thinking he finally meant to kiss her, but he simply traced a finger around her cheeks and chin, the way the townswomen circled Our Lady’s face before they made confession. “Don’t be too sure,” he said. “You may not have gotten what you want”—Claire blushed, knowing he was referring to Ethan—“but I always do.”

  He slipped his gaze down to her thigh, exposed where her dress had ridden up over it, and she gave a halfhearted yank to the hem. It concealed her leg but didn’t accomplish much otherwise. She could still see the outline of her flesh underneath the dress’s thin material, and she sighed, brushing sand off her lap, not knowing if she’d helped matters or just made them worse by covering up what was bound to burst out sooner or later.

  Whenever Claire looked back on the afternoon that she traded Salt Creek Farm for Plover Hill, she could never help but wonder if maybe the whole thing had been some kind of blunder or misunderstanding on her part. After all, Whit didn’t come bearing a ring the day he proposed. He didn’t drop to one knee the way Claire had always dreamed of Ethan doing. He didn’t stammer with nerves when he asked her to be his wife, or take deep shaky breaths, and he certainly never put the matter of matrimony to her in the form of a question. Instead he did what he did best—made an executive decision—and Claire, good stenography student that she was, took him at his word.

  She was sludging mud out of one of the empty evaporating pools that day. Whit had never set foot on the farm to see her before, but there he was, handsome as ever, stepping along the edge of the marsh as if he owned it. Flustered, Claire immediately smoothed her hair and tried to wipe some of the dirt off her hands, but it didn’t do any good. She still felt like a hobo greeting a king. “What on earth are you doing here?” she said when he got close. “I don’t think it’s a great idea for us to meet in the marsh. You know, given everything.”

  But Whit just put his hands on her shoulders. “My thoughts exactly.”

  Her heart beat faster, and she cast an eye around for signs of Jo. “What do you want?” she asked, her voice low and cautious.

  His dark eyes watched her as if he were keeping track of a clock. “You.”

  Claire snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Whit spread his arms. “What can a place like this offer a girl like you?”

  Claire paused. It was the same question she’d been asking her whole life, but walking out on your existence was easier said than done. I need a sign, Claire thought, just something little, and at that moment one of those pesky blue butterflies, the ones her mother always said were bad luck, landed on her shoulder, followed by two more. Claire shuddered and tried to flick them off, but before she could, Whit threw his jacket around her. It only made the situation worse. She imagined the crushed bodies of the insects creeping down the coat’s lining and fought off an urge to toss his jacket down into the mud.

  Whit had fallen silent, and Claire realized he must have asked her a question. She looked up and found him standing almost nose to nose with her, staring into her eyes. That close, he smelled delicious, like spices and fine leather, and his skin was so polished that Claire was tempted to rub him to see if he squeaked or, better yet, granted her a wish. As if in a trance, she leaned toward him, preparing to kiss him right then and there, but that’s when she saw Jo. She made a funny kind of noise, thinking even as she did that she had nothing to be guilty of, and then, before she could stop him, Whit was crushing her to his side and pronouncing her his future wife.

  Everything in the world seemed to hold its breath for a moment—the clouds, the water slipping over the weir, the salt leaching under Claire’s feet. Wife. It was a word she had so long wanted to embody and thought she never would. If she couldn’t be Ethan’s wife, she debated with herself, would it be so bad to be wed to Whit? He was rich, after all, and handsome, and there was that undercurrent that bubbled between them, like the riptide at Drake’s Beach, dragging along just beneath the surface of the water. Claire let her shoulder and then her hip relax into Whit, feeling the determined length of him, and thought it might be nice to live with a man who was dedicated solely to matters of the here and now rather than to the stupid spirit.

  “Yes,” she whispered, so low she wasn’t even sure she was saying it, and he gave her a squeeze.

  “Go get your things. I’ll wait down the lane, engine running.”

  When she got into the house, she was confronted with the sorry truth that there was nothing she wanted to take. Certainly she wouldn’t bring anything pertaining to Ethan—no yearbooks, or prom photos, or any of the poems he’d copied out to her. Besides those few mementos, her room might have been a nun’s cell. In the end she shoved two pairs of jeans, three blouses, and a week’s worth of underwear into a canvas bag, recognizing even then that it was a formality. Whit had told her to collect her things, so collect some of them she would, but she knew that nothing of her old self would survive the crossing out of Salt Creek Farm, and for Claire that was the whole point. Nothing would hurt anymore either.

  Before she left, she paused for a moment by her window, which looked out over the marsh. Her mother had driven to Hyannis—there was no point looking for her—but in the distance Claire could see Jo’s stooped back as she leaned down over one of the levees. She still hadn’t gotten used to the crooked hang of Jo’s body and wasn’t sure she ever would. For Claire, having to look at what she’d done to Jo was like staring into a mirror that showed her all the awful parts of herself. She half raised her hand to the pane, as if waving farewell, but Jo couldn’t see her and wouldn’t have waved back even if she could. Claire lowered her arm. The two of them had shared about six words since Jo’s accident. Clearly, “good-bye” wouldn’t be one of them.

  Claire backed away from the glass and picked up her little bag. Whit would wait only so long on the lane with his convertible’s engine idling, she knew. If she just sat on her bed until the sun turned down a notch in the sky, he would be gone when she arrived. She thought about that for a moment, then closed the curtains on Jo and the marsh, and shut off the lamp, and then she took off running, first down the steps, then across the porch, the marsh, and finally the lane, going as fast as she could, then faster still, a burning arrow shot to uncertain flight.

  Jo had tried to roughen Claire’s new life with her additions to the Virgin—those awful hooks snared along Our Lady’s hem and that eye staring out with accusation. They were the first things Claire saw when she stepped inside St. Agnes for her wedding, her veil thick across her eyes, her hands shaking in their lace gloves. Without any words she knew exactly the message her sister meant to send. Jo was placing the weight of the eye she’d lost in the fire in Claire’s open hand, where it did indeed sting and prick like those painted barbs. Underneath her veil Claire had blanched.

  And yet. Even mourning her mother’s death (sudden but not totally unforeseen) couldn’t dampen Claire’s new sense of contentment. Okay, maybe Turner House was a little shabbier inside than she’d expected, many of the items so used they had dents or holes, but the furnishings had clearly once been fine, and to Claire they were more extravagant than anything she’d ever before possessed.

  And the Turner name was still good as gold. Claire made friends with the kinds of people who
’d have eaten mud before they would have bought her family’s salt, not just girls like Agnes Greene but ladies from Boston and big estates in Connecticut. Whit showed her the country club, where he still had a social membership. She sped through town in his family’s old red convertible, parking it wherever she liked and knowing she’d never get a ticket, and when she told Mr. Upton that he had to start carrying caviar in his grocery, he couldn’t fill out the order form quickly enough. The good parts of her new life were scrumptious.

  At first, using the silver cutlery and bone china, or sitting at Ida’s Baroque lady’s desk, Claire had felt a little like an impostor, but soon she found her fingers learning to curve around fountain pens and fish forks. She became adept with finger bowls and figured out how to knot a tuxedo tie for Whit. Every morning she marched down the house’s main staircase and passed Ida’s portrait on the landing, and she automatically smoothed her hair as if the painting could see her. It was silly, but she thought she could feel Ida’s spirit lingering in the eaves of the house, waiting to see who would be banished from it first: the ghost of the mother-in-law or the wicked bones of the usurping daughter-in-law. The sheets even still smelled like Ida’s sachets of lavender and attar of roses. Claire had new sheets sent from Boston, but when she opened the package, the same floral odor seemed to rise from the fabric and she ran to the nearest sink and vomited.

  When the same thing happened the next two days in a row, Claire started to think that maybe the problem wasn’t the sheets. Instead it was more organic. She was pregnant.

  “I hope it’s a boy,” Whit said, sweeping her off her feet and gently placing her in the middle of the sheets she so hated. “A Turner boy with black eyes like me, red hair like you, and a temper to beat the wind.” She caught her breath. A boy, she thought. Not blond, not with Ethan’s blue eyes, but not born in the salt marsh either, where the weir had teeth and the graves had long memories.

  Still. What if the bad Gilly luck found Claire anyway, high on Plover Hill? Better to be safe than sorry, she thought. Better to take matters into her own hands than to let the past she’d set free come back to dance on her future son’s grave. What if the rumors she’d been spreading about the salt were true? Maybe the stuff was poison. Maybe that’s why all the boys always died on their land.

  She redoubled her efforts around town, reminding Mr. Upton that the salt wasn’t regulated in any proper way and slipping hints to Mr. Hopper that an epidemic of food poisoning would be tragic for the diner. It was enough to remind her lady friends that too much sodium put weight on the hips. The only people she didn’t get anywhere with were the fishermen down at the harbor, and that was largely because Claire couldn’t bear to approach Ethan’s uncle, Chet, who had Ethan’s same eyes and voice, and an unflattering opinion about Claire’s advantageous marriage that he wasn’t afraid to share.

  For a while she believed that her scheme was working. She thought she’d eluded fate, that she was safe, but it wasn’t to be. Four months into her pregnancy, she began to bleed, first a little and then in a hot rush, until everything was gone and she was just her old self again, but emptier. To compensate for purging the salt from Prospect, she took an offering of honey to the Virgin. Normally it was something only new mothers would do, but Claire was trying to sweeten Our Lady into giving her another chance at motherhood. She pictured the gravestones—both old and recent—tilted in the marsh. If she had a son, she didn’t want him to join her unholy brethren. She dipped her finger in honey and left a smear on the Virgin’s patchy skirts, then touched her forehead to them.

  “If I ever have a boy,” she whispered to the painting, “I’ll give you back your face.” She waited, but there was no sign that the image had heard her. Claire was just alone, talking to a wall.

  A month after she lost the baby, Whit told her he had a gift for her and tied a shockingly expensive silk scarf around her eyes. She originally thought that was the gift, but when she said this to Whit, he laughed and led her through the vast Turner kitchen, across the back porch, and out to the small pasture behind the house.

  “Put your hands here,” he said, wrapping her fingers firmly around the split rails of the fence. “No peeking.” Claire licked her lips and sniffed the air. She’d been spending almost all her time indoors, and it was nice to be outside again. She could smell grass and another musty odor she couldn’t identify. There was a rustling, and then Whit was untying the scarf, letting his hands linger on her braid. Claire opened her eyes and saw that he had bought her a white horse.

  “He’s an albino,” Whit said. “Not perfect, but good enough. Sired by an Arabian. Someone owed me a favor, so I let him pay me in kind.” He stroked the horse’s neck, impressed with his own command, which could summon a horse just because he wanted it. “I named him Icicle.”

  Claire regarded the animal, and as she did, it stretched its neck forward and sank its downy muzzle into her open hands. Her heart immediately melted. Was love really so easy, she wondered, like the flood tide washing into the salt channels? Was that what Ethan had found in God, what she would have felt for a child? She scowled and pushed Icicle’s nose away. “I don’t ride.”

  Whit chuckled. “Don’t worry, my love, we’ll see to that.” He was tying the blue scarf at her throat now—a little too tightly. He stepped back and surveyed the knot. “Don’t you know?” he said. “There’s not a thing about you that we can’t change.” And even though they were outside, well away from the damp mortar and plaster of Turner House, Claire thought she could hear a faint spectral laughing.

  The night she and Whit returned from their honeymoon, Claire was combing her hair before bed when Whit snuck up behind her and whispered against the side of her neck, “Don’t ever cut it.”

  She laid down the silver brush, not sure whether to smile or sigh. Men were so easily led, pulled by threads as thin as a strand of red hair, and Whit was no exception. The only man whose heart she hadn’t been able to hold was Ethan. She tilted her chin, watching her reflection in the mirror, seeing the new hollows and angles that had already formed since she’d undertaken the mysteries of matrimony. “What would you do if I did cut it off?” she asked.

  Behind her, Whit’s face darkened. “I hope you never go against me, Claire.” His words slunk down her spine and into her belly. She looked at her hands and the chunky diamond ring that had once been Ida’s. When she looked up again, she saw that Whit was holding out a necklace for her, not a pendant with sapphires or a jeweled cross, as Claire would have expected, but a dinky pearl on a silver chain.

  Solemnly, he fastened it around her neck, and then his fingers strayed to her shoulders, digging into her flesh like a hoe breaking spring ground. Claire reached up and fondled the pearl, thinking it was more like something Ethan would have bought for her and then wishing she could crush her time with him into a ball that was as shiny and smooth and wear that instead. No, she told herself. Better to leave the past unadorned. Unbidden, a line from one of Ethan’s favorite poems leaped into her mind: Asleep! O sleep a little while, white pearl! / And let me kneel, and let me pray to thee. Claire brought a fist to her mouth. Ethan’s prayers were to a different God now.

  “This used to be my mother’s,” Whit said, adjusting the chain around her neck, and the way he did it, with his wrists heavy on her clavicles, made it clear that he was sealing a pact between them. He had that tendency, Claire was learning, to want to remind her that she was his, but in sneaky ways—with trinkets and unexpectedly passionate kisses at inappropriate times. None of the women on the society circuit recognized this side of Whit.

  “He’s Rhett to your Scarlett,” the girls at the country club would say when he dipped Claire too low on the dance floor. “Heathcliff to your Cathy.” Claire never pointed out to them that neither of those couples had a happy outcome. The girls in her new set weren’t big readers.

  “She would want you to have it,” Whit said, and Claire had to suppress a snort. The wedding ring, Icicle’s fine profile, the pear
l—they were the last things Ida would want to see a Gilly woman possess. Claire shivered as an early-autumn chill slipped through the drawn curtains and the windows rattled, but she accepted the gift. That was one advantage the living had over the dead, she thought. They could still say yes to such things.

  “Thank you.” Something hard—a stray twig, maybe—thumped against the window. Whit scowled and twitched the curtains tighter, then returned to her, winding his hands around her waist.

  “Come to bed,” he said, and it was half a command and half a dare. Claire let him draw her by the wrist down onto the mattress. He pinned her arms with his knees and leaned over her, letting his breath stroke her neck. “If you ever try to break the strings between us, you’ll fail,” he said, biting her gently at first and then harder. “You know that, right?” Sex with Whit could be rough, sometimes even almost painful, but it was exciting in a way Claire had never imagined possible. Each time she let him have her, she felt like she’d survived something dangerous, which only made her want to do it again, and she succumbed now, letting her arms relax under the weight of his knees and her head fall back in pleasure.

  After Whit fell asleep, she crept out of bed and eased over to Ida’s vanity. Claire ran her fingers lightly over the table’s ornate drawer pulls. Up until now she’d avoided peeking into them, as if Ida might resurrect herself, leap through the wall, and sever her hands for the crime. Claire did her own makeup in the bathroom, keeping her small stash of cosmetics in one of the drawers there. She glanced over to Whit, but he was out cold, sprawled on his back and snoring. Taking a deep breath, she reached down to pull the middle drawer open.

  She had to jiggle it back and forth to make it slide. Something was caught in the back. She tugged harder, and the drawer flew open, knocking her hand into her belly. Holding her breath, she leaned down. Inside, she found a pair of silver nail scissors, a cracked tortoiseshell compact, a string of cloisonné beads, and, oddly, a tiny linen bag of salt crystals, torn a little from where the drawer edge had pinched it. Perhaps that’s what had made the drawer stick. Claire frowned and reached for it. The fabric was brittle and faded. She slid it out, not wanting to break the fibers of the sack further. Some of the crystals spilled into her palm nevertheless, where they winked in the moonlight, the source of all her troubles. She licked her finger and brought it to her lips, grimacing at the familiar bite—the taste of home that she’d tried so hard to forget.