Bittersweet

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  “Your father says tomorrow’s the big day.”

  “Yup.”

  “Honey-bell,” she repeated. “Your father’s set the whole thing up with Mr. Winslow, and I don’t need to remind you that they’re being very generous.”

  “Yup,” I replied, feeling myself bristle. Who knew what Birch had finally said to get my reluctant, sullen father to agree to let me miss three months of punishing labor, but whatever it was, it had worked, and thank god for it. Still, I found it borderline insulting to suggest my father had had anything to do with “setting the whole thing up” when he’d barely tolerated it, and was reminded of how my mother always sided with him, even when (especially when) her face held the pink imprint of his hand. My eyes scanned the intricate pattern of Ev’s rug.

  “Do you have a hostess gift? Candles maybe? Soap?”

  “Mom.”

  Ev glanced up at the sharpness in my voice. She smiled and shook her head before drifting back into the magazine.

  “Mr. Winslow told your father they don’t have service up there.”

  “Service?”

  “You know, cell phone, Internet.” My mother sounded flustered. “It’s one of the family rules.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Look, I’ve got to—”

  “So we’ll write then.”

  “Great. Bye, Mom.”

  “Wait.” Her voice became bold. “There’s something else I have to tell you.”

  I absentmindedly eyed a long, thick bolt on the inside of Ev’s bedroom door. In the two weeks I’d slept in that room, I’d never given it much thought, but now, examining how sturdy it looked, I was struck with wondering: why on earth would a girl like Ev want to lock out any part of her perfect life? “Yes?”

  “It’s not too late.”

  “For what?”

  “To change your mind. We’d love to have you home. You know that, don’t you?”

  I almost burst out laughing. But then I thought of her burned meat loaf, sitting, lonely, in the middle of the table, with just my father to share it. Microwaved green beans, limp, in their brown juices. Rum and Cokes. No point in rubbing my freedom in. “I need to go.”

  “Just one more thing.”

  It was all I could do not to slam the receiver down. I’d been perfectly warm, hadn’t I? And listened plenty? How could I ever make her understand that this very conversation with her, laden with everything I was trying to escape, made Winloch, with no cell phones or Internet, sound like heaven?

  I could feel her trying to figure out how to put it, her exhalations flushing into the receiver as she formulated the words. “Be sweet,” she said finally.

  “Sweet?” I felt a lump rise in my throat. I turned from Ev.

  “Be yourself, I mean. You’re so sweet, Honey-bell. That’s what Mr. Winslow told your dad. You’re a ‘gem,’ he said. And, well”—she paused, and, despite myself, I hung on her words—“I just want you to know I think so too.”

  How could she still make me hate myself so readily? Remind me that I could never undo what I had done? The lump in my throat threatened to well into something more. “I’ve got to go.” I hung up before she had the chance to protest.

  But I hadn’t caught my tears in time. They flowed, hot and angry, down my cheeks against my will.

  “Mothers are such lunatic bitches,” Ev quipped after a moment.

  I kept my back to her and tried to gather my strength.

  “Are you crying?” She sounded shocked.

  I shook my head, but she could see that was exactly what I was doing.

  “You poor kitten,” she soothed, her voice turning velvety, and, before I knew it, she was wrapping me in a tight embrace. “It’ll be all right. Whatever she said—it doesn’t matter.”

  I had never let Ev see me walloped, had felt sure that, if she did, she would be fruitless in her comforting. But she held me firmly and uttered calm and soothing words until my tears weren’t so urgent.

  “She’s just—she’s not—she’s everything I’m afraid of becoming,” I said finally, trying to explain something I’d never said out loud.

  “And that may be the only way that your mother and my mother are exactly the same.” Ev laughed, offering me a tissue, and then a sweater from a bag on the floor, azure and soft, adding, “Put it on, you pretty thing. Cashmere makes everything better.”

  Now, I looked across the Plattsburgh train depot and swelled with indulgent love at Ev’s grumpy scowl.

  “Be sweet,” my mother had said.

  A command.

  A warning.

  A promise.

  I was good at being sweet. I’d spent years cloaked in gentleness, in wide-eyed innocence, and, to tell the truth, it was often less exhausting than the alternative. I could even see now, looking back on how Ev and I had gained our friendship, that sweetness had been the seed of it—if I wasn’t good, why on earth would I have dared to touch Ev’s sobbing self?

  There was no sign of anyone coming to meet us. Ev’s mood had settled into inertia. It would be dark soon. So I headed south along the tracks, in the direction of a periodic clanging I’d heard for the past half hour.

  “Where are you going?” Ev called after me.

  I returned with a greasy trainman, toothless and gruff. He let us into the stationmaster’s office before trudging away.

  “There’s a phone in here,” I offered.

  “The Dining Hall is the only place at Winloch there’s a phone, and no one will be there at this hour,” she snarled, but she dialed the number anyway. It rang and rang, and, just as even I was beginning to lose hope, I spotted, through the dusty, cobwebbed window, a red Ford pickup rolling up, complete with waggling yellow Lab in the truck bed.

  “Evie!” I heard the man’s voice before I saw him. It was young, enthusiastic. As we stepped from the office—“Evie!”—he rounded the corner, opening his tanned arms wide. “I’m glad you made it!”

  “I’m glad you made it,” she huffed, brushing past him. He was tall and dark, his coloring Ev’s opposite, and he looked to be only a few years older. Still, there was something manly about him, as though he’d lived more years than both of us combined.

  “You her friend?” he asked, fiddling with his cap, grinning after her as she wrestled her suitcase in the direction of the parking lot.

  I shoved Paradise Lost into my weatherworn canvas bag. “Mabel.”

  He extended his rough, warm hand. “John.” I assumed he was her brother.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Journey

  John’s four-door pickup was old, but it was clear he took great pride in it, second only to his yellow Lab, who barked triumphantly from the flatbed at the sight of us. Ev struggled to toss in her suitcase until John lifted it in one hand—mine was in his other. He placed them down beside the giddy canine, who was, by then, doing her best to lick Ev’s ear. “Down, Abby,” John commanded as he strapped our luggage flat. The dog obeyed.

  Ev let herself into the front seat, a scowl tightly knit upon her brow. “It stinks in here.” She pointedly rolled down her window, but it wasn’t lost on me that she had smiled under Abby’s lapping attention.

  In the backseat, I checked the dog over my shoulder. “She’s okay?”

  John turned on the ignition. “She’d whine if we brought her in.” As the engine growled to life, his hand hesitated over the radio dial, then dropped back onto the steering wheel. I would have liked music, but Ev put up an arctic front.

  We drove ten miles in silence, the country road canopied in electric green. I pressed my head against the glass to watch the new maple leaves curling in the breeze. Every few turns offered a tempting glimpse of Lake Champlain’s choppy waters. I turned over in my mind which brother John might be. He seemed less the type to donate to the Met, so I decided he was the “asshole” to whom Ev had referred—she clearly had a strong aversion to everything of his, save Abby.

  “Aren’t you going to apologize?” Ev asked John when we pulled into line at the fe
rry that would take us from New York State to Vermont. I hadn’t known there was going to be a boat ride, and I was doing my best to hide my excitement as the muddy smell of the lake wafted up to us. Being on open water seemed just the thing.

  John laughed. “For what?”

  “We were at that station for two hours.”

  “And it took two hours to get there,” he countered warmly, turning on Elvis. I had only seen men capitulate when faced with Ev’s indignation.

  Once onboard, I clambered up to the passenger deck. It was a clear evening. The western sky began to orange, and the clouds turned brilliant as fire.

  I was glad to have left John and Ev in the pickup, figuring they could use some privacy to iron out their sibling rivalry. I opened Paradise Lost. My conversation with the college president at Ev’s birthday reception had secured my spot in the upper-level Milton course, and I was planning to have the book “under my belt” by the fall, when I could read it with a professor who could tell me what it meant. It might as well have been written in Greek; it seemed to be all italics and run-on sentences, but I knew it was Important, and I loved the idea of reading a book about something as profound as the struggle between Good and Evil. I also felt an affinity for Milton’s daughter, forced to take dictation for her blind, brilliant father. It was my girlhood, but glamorous, trading sumptuous words for other people’s dirty clothing.

  But just as I began the first line—“Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree”—I heard a bark and lifted my eyes to see John and Abby climbing onto the deck. Beside them, a sign read NO DOGS, but a man who worked the ferry patted Abby on the head and shook John’s hand before moving belowdecks. John strode toward me, into the gusting air, one hand on Abby’s collar.

  “Where you from?” he asked over the roaring wind.

  “Oregon.” A seagull streamed by. My hair, whipping, stung the sides of my face. “But I know Ev from school.” We looked out over the water together. The lake was oceanic. I released my finger from the book, watching the pages flutter violently before it closed on its own.

  “Is Ev okay?” I asked.

  He let Abby go. She settled at his feet.

  “Is she mad because of the inspection?” I fished.

  “Inspection?”

  “The inspection of her cottage. In six days.”

  John opened his mouth to say something, then closed it.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’d steer clear of all that family stuff if I were you,” he said, after a long moment. “It’ll make it easier to enjoy your vacation.”

  I’d never been on a vacation before. The word sounded like an insult coming from his mouth.

  “You don’t seem like the other girls Ev’s brought,” he added.

  “What does that mean?”

  His eyes followed the seagull. “Less luggage.”

  That was when Ev appeared, bearing ice cream sandwiches. Her version, I suppose, of an apology.

  Back on land, finally close to Winloch, worry about the inspection slipped through my fingers. The roadside hot dogs were flabby, the mosquitoes ravenous, and Ev was still grumpy, but we were in Vermont, together, on an open road winding through farmland. Dusk shrouded the world.

  We filled up at the only gas station I’d seen for miles, and a knackered Abby joined me in the backseat, promptly laying her heavy head upon my knee and curling into sleep. We drove on, past a shuttered horse farm, signs for a vineyard, and an abandoned passenger train car, and finally, as dusk gave way to night, onto a two-lane highway that streamed south under a starry sky. At one point, the road broke out into a causeway that looked like something out of the Florida Keys—or at least pictures I had seen of the keys—and the moon burst forth from behind the clouds. It lit a yellow ribbon on the water and cast the dark outlines of the distant Adirondacks against a purple-black sky.

  “How’s your mother?” Ev asked. At first I thought she was speaking to me, but then, she knew how my mother was; she’d comforted me about her only the night before.

  In the gap made by my racing mind, John spoke. “Like always.”

  Oh wait, I realized, he’s not Ev’s brother.

  I wanted them to go on. But Ev didn’t ask any more questions, and we crossed the causeway in silence.

  On the other side of the glistening water, we were once again plunged into darkness. A sudden forest swallowed what became a gravel road. Birch trunks glowed ghostly in the moonlight. John’s headlights gave us glimpses of barns and farmhouses. He took each turn with the reckless speed of someone who has driven it a thousand times. Ev unrolled her window again to let the sweet night in, and we were embraced by the soft chirping of crickets, their pulse growing louder as we drove into a vast meadow. The moon greeted us again, a milky lantern.

  We slowed after a particularly skidding turn—I could feel the rocks kicking out from under our tires. “We’re here,” Ev sang. Outside stood dense forest. Nailed to one of the trunks was a small sign with hand-painted letters spelling out WINLOCH and PRIVATE PROPERTY. Our headlights pointed onto a precarious-looking road hung with warnings: NO TRESPASSING! NO HUNTING—VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED! NO DUMPING. This bore no resemblance to the grand estate which Ev had described. The skittering sound of the leaves brought to mind a movie I’d once seen about vampires. I felt a prickling up my spine.

  It occurred to me then that my mother was probably right: Ev had brought me all the way here only to leave me on the side of the road, an elaborate trick not unlike the one Sarah Templeton had played on me in sixth grade, asking me to her birthday party only to disinvite me—with a roomful of classmates looking on—the moment I materialized on her doorstep, because I was “too fat to fit in any of the roller coaster seats.” The doubt my mother had been planting began to spread through me—I was a fool to think Ev had actually brought me to her family’s estate for a summer of fun.

  But Ev laughed dismissively, as though she could read my thoughts. “Thank god you’re here,” she said, and the warmth of her cheer, and the softness of the azure cashmere, brought me back to my senses.

  John flipped on the radio again. Country. We plunged into the forest as a man mourned his breaking heart.

  We braked once, abruptly. A raccoon blocked our way, his eyes glowing in the glare of our headlights as he waited, front paw lifted, for us to hit him. But John flipped the lights and radio off, and we sat with the engine purring low as the animal’s strange, uneven body scurried into the scrub lining the road.

  We cut our way past a smattering of unlit cottages, then tennis courts and a great, grand building glowing white in the moonlight. We turned right onto a side road—although it could hardly have been called more than a path—which we stayed on for another quarter mile before sighting a small house set at the dead end.

  “No dogs allowed, but I’ll make an exception for Abby,” Ev offered as John pulled up in front of the cottage.

  “Don’t do her any favors.”

  “It’s not a favor,” she replied, eyes skimming John.

  He took Abby toward the woods to piddle. The night came rushing in: the rhythmic cricket clamor, the lapping of water I couldn’t see. The moon was behind a cloud. Beyond us, I could sense an expanse which I took to be the lake.

  “What do we have to do before the inspection?” I asked Ev quietly.

  “Make it livable. Now we only have six days until my parents arrive, and I don’t even know what state it’s in.”

  “What if we can’t do it that fast?” I asked.

  Ev cocked her head to the side. “Are you worrying again, Miss Mabel?” She looked back at me. “All we have to do is clean it up. Make it good as new.”

  The moon reemerged. I examined the old house before us—an indecipherable sign nailed to it began with the letter B. The building looked rickety and weatherworn in the moonlight. I had a feeling six days wasn’t going to cut it. “What happens if we can’t?”

  “Then I move in with my witch o
f a mother and you spend the summer in Oregon.”

  My lungs filled with the chemical memory of perc. My feet began to ache from a phantom day of standing behind the counter. I couldn’t go home—I couldn’t. How could I explain my desperation to her? But then I stepped into the night, and there Ev was, in the flesh, smelling of tea roses. She threw her arms wide to envelop me.

  “Welcome home,” she murmured. “Welcome to Bittersweet.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Window

  When my eyes opened that first morning in the cottage they called Bittersweet, shadows of tree branches danced across the bead board ceiling in time with the glug of water in the cove below. Out the window, I could see a nuthatch hopping up and down the trunk of a red pine, chirping in celebration of his grubby breakfast. The Vermont air was cool and I was alone.

  Arriving under cover of darkness had given a disappointing first impression, made worse by the threat of Birch’s inspection and my fate in the face of our failure. The house had seemed all dingy fixtures and shabby, unmatched furniture, touched everywhere with the scent of mildew; all I saw was work.

  But I understood now, as I took in the shining brass beds in the morning, the crisp cotton duvet covers, and the faint scent of coffee wafting in from the kitchen, that this was a quiet place, a country place, a place of baguettes and pink grapefruit and spreadable honeycomb, idyllic and sun-drenched in a way I had never known, but of which I had long been dreaming.

  Ev’s bed, the twin of my own, lay empty under the opposite window, rumpled sheets cast aside. From the light and birdsong, I could guess it was no later than eight. In the nine months I had lived with Ev, I had never once seen her up before ten. I called her name twice, but there was no reply. I puzzled for a few moments over her whereabouts, before lying back and closing my eyes, willing more delicious sleep. It refused me.

  I felt a hint of desire. I listened long and hard. I was truly alone. And so I (shyly, bravely) put my hand down between my legs and felt myself grow wet. I knew there was a risk Ev might barge through the door any second, so I told myself to hold still, to move only one finger, to feign sleep. It is strange how such restrictions heighten one’s desire, but there it is. Soon my fingers were buried deep and I was in another world.