Bittersweet

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  Galway shook his head. “I think it would be up to the head of the family to approve. Where did you—”

  “Oh, I read it in one of the papers.” I gestured vaguely toward one of the half-filled boxes to cover my tracks. “Some cousin or something, I have a hard time keeping you all straight.”

  “Honestly”—he shook his head—“unless the inheritor had married in or something, I doubt it’d ever be approved. He’d have to be pretty convincing.” He chuckled. “Or strong-arm his way in.”

  The hairs on my arm stood up. “Like by finding proof of a serious transgression?” Indo had told me to keep my eyes out for “solid evidence of anything untoward.” Was she was expecting me to blackmail my way into Winloch?

  Galway frowned. “Can you find me that paper? I’ve never heard of something like that happening.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Maybe over there?” I said vaguely. “To tell you the truth, it’s all bleeding together.” He started flipping through the box I’d gestured to. As he did, I seized upon the bankruptcy papers I’d discovered earlier. This wasn’t just an effort to distract him. Something he’d said made me see the document with new eyes.

  “Winloch is held in trust,” I repeated.

  “That was Samson’s vision.”

  “Have you seen this?” I handed him the papers detailing the bankruptcy. He examined them for a while and frowned, then looked up at me questioningly.

  “This is nineteen thirty-two, I think,” I said, looking at the numbers over his shoulder. “Three years after the stock market crashed.”

  He nodded.

  “And this,” I said, handing him a financial statement that showed the Winslows to have hundreds of thousands in assets, “is from only two years later.”

  He pored over the document.

  “Lots of families filed for bankruptcy and lost everything,” I continued. “But I bet not many came out of the crash not only keeping a place like Winloch but even richer than they were before.”

  He cocked his head to one side. I noticed the particular green of his eyes, tinged with a smokiness that reminded me of the ponderosas back home. “So?” he said.

  “Aren’t you curious?”

  “Curious about what?”

  “About what your grandfather—third king of Winloch—did to keep this place.” It wasn’t so much that I thought I would discover anything worth Indo’s time, more that my mind had finally snagged something worth pursuing. I couldn’t imagine letting it slip from my grasp. I could see him hesitating. “Oh, come on, you think I’m hatching some diabolical scheme to bring the Winslows down?”

  His eyes crinkled as he smiled. “Of course not.”

  “So then let’s find out what happened.” I leaned down to his ear, felt my hot exhalation pool there. I felt powerful just inches from his skin. “It’ll be fun.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Wedding

  Ev finally slunk from our bedroom well past eight that night, her slender frame brittle and hunched. She was sober in body and spirit. Though I hated not confronting her right away about what a wretched position she’d put me in with Murray, I couldn’t help but take pity on her pathetic, hollow-eyed self. I served her up Masha’s leftover chili and sat with her at the kitchen table, looking down at our darkening cove as the bats darted for mosquitoes.

  She finished her bowl in silence. “More?” I asked.

  She shook her head as her eyes filled with tears. I reached across the table for her tight hand, but she pulled it away. “Don’t be nice to me,” she sobbed.

  “Would you rather I tell you Murray is a monster and you’re a horrible friend for leaving me alone with him?”

  She nodded, hiccuping through her tears. She looked like a child.

  “What did you do with Eric?”

  Her lips curved into a heartbroken smile. “Everything he wanted.”

  “You’re better than that.”

  She shook her head. “It’s like I’m infected, and everything, everyone I touch gets it. You shouldn’t—you should just stay away from me, Mabel. I mean it. Go back to your family. Go home.”

  My first reaction was to rail at her. But I stopped myself. I knew what it felt like to be Ev. To believe you were a pariah. A poison. A ruiner.

  Like it or not, the memory of my mother’s voice came back to me: “Be sweet.”

  I stood. Put my arms around Ev’s shoulders. Held her until her tears dried.

  Like little girls, we crawled into the same bed that night, brushed each other’s hair, and made shadow puppets on the ceiling. The monkey lamp on the Hepplewhite table between our beds cast a comforting corona over the room. Ev whispered she was sorry, and awful, that she would buy me anything to make up for horrible Murray and his horrible hands. Her feet found mine. Her toes defrosted.

  “Mabel Mabel Mabel,” she murmured as she drifted off to sleep, “don’t change a thing, I love you just the way you are.”

  The next day was perfect for a wedding. Ev and Lu and I set out to pick wildflowers as ordered by Tilde with a pinched smile, and arrived back from the Winloch meadows with burred, laden arms—black-eyed Susans, tiger lilies, daisies—before heading into Trillium to help with the arrangements, which would be set along the pathway to the wedding tent (“Why they couldn’t hire the florist to do this is beyond me,” Tilde griped). We were all in better moods—Ev, I supposed, for being free of the Eric drama; Lu because of Owen; and me because of what I’d discovered in the Dining Hall attic and the person I’d discovered it with. In and of themselves the papers about the bankruptcy were nothing, but in contrast to the veritable wealth the Winslows had boasted only two years later, I knew they revealed a story, something secret, maybe even untoward, and my heart skipped at the thought of not having to discover that story alone.

  Cousin Philip’s bride-to-be was sweet as apple pie. She took me for a servant, but I could hardly blame her for asking me to find her another pair of panty hose; the phalanx of Winslow staff was impossible to track. In the second bedroom, the bride’s future mother-in-law hemmed and hawed over which dress to wear, while, in the meadow below us, Tilde insisted loudly that the rental company absolutely must return to move the tent ten feet to the left for the sake of the ceremony view, and, all the while, the heady smell of sandalwood incense poured across the open meadow from Indo’s downwind porch, until someone was dispensed to extinguish it. Ev and Lu rolled their eyes from the sidelines of this circus, but they and the other girl cousins, many of whom had married in, were warm to Philip’s fiancée. I staved off jealousy, even though this was the day another girl was becoming a Winslow for good.

  The wedding was to be held at five, followed by a cocktail hour on Flat Rocks, and then dancing under the stars. I stopped to pee at Indo’s house after I changed into my dress at Bittersweet.

  “I found something,” I mentioned. “Bankruptcy papers from the thirties. Is that what you wanted?”

  She was draped across the love seat in a kimono, a wet washcloth upon her brow. She lifted a finger to her lips.

  I came closer. “Why don’t you just come out and tell me what you want me to find? It would save us both a lot of time.”

  She pulled herself to sitting. It didn’t look easy for her. “You need to know what we’re made of, my dear. What has made us Winslows.”

  I sat down. “Sure, right, you’ve pretty much already said that. I get it, you’re all very fancy and mysterious and believe this is a little country that no one else can be a citizen of, but it’s not lost on me that you Winslows aren’t exactly friendly to outsiders. I imagine your brother wouldn’t love the idea of me poking into your secrets.”

  She patted my knee. “Too bad I can’t trust anyone else.”

  “What makes you think you can trust me?”

  She rose and drifted from the living room.

  “I don’t have to help you, you know,” I called behind her. “I could just stop searching.”

  I waited on her couch. It took her a good
fifteen minutes before she revealed herself, wearing a dashiki I knew would make Tilde’s head explode. “Ah,” she intoned, as though the conversation hadn’t paused for even a moment, “but I know you won’t.”

  We ate well: whole lobsters, peekytoe crabs, risotto balls, oysters, quail and pasta primavera and grilled artichokes and more, followed by individual molten chocolate cakes topped with freshly churned ice cream. The feast almost justified the bride’s father’s jokey thirty-minute toast, which tried, in vain, to make up for the fact that he had obviously paid for none of this. The waiters wore bow ties. The wine and spirits flowed freely. Although this was a “country” wedding (an adjective I’d heard Tilde deploy with a certain trace of disappointment more than once that day), I had never been at anything so fancy in my life.

  At the first strains of music from the band, Ev and Lu and the rest of the young Winslows got up and danced to a song about lost love that I didn’t recognize but everyone else knew by heart. I stayed in my seat, and was surveying the space when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to find Galway standing above me, holding out his hand.

  I took it, assuming he was asking me to dance. But instead he led me across the tent, past round tables festooned with rustic floral centerpieces and pillar candles, and to a table closer to the water, where a tiny white-haired woman held court. She was surrounded by a handful of rapt older gentlemen, Birch included, and I tugged against Galway’s hand, shy to be introduced. He squeezed back in response and offered a reassuring smile.

  “Gammy Pippa,” he said, crouching before the matriarch, “I’d like you to meet my friend Mabel.”

  The woman looked up at me, and, a moment later, joy overtook her face, which was already warm, open, and lined with wrinkles. Age had only enhanced her great beauty. She reached her hand up to take mine. “Hello, dear.”

  The men around us watched as I crouched before the old woman. I found myself flushing as Galway placed his hand on my lower back.

  “I can see you’re someone special,” she said to me, but I could tell she was really describing me to Galway, as though giving her stamp of approval.

  “She’s Genevra’s roommate,” Birch cut in from above.

  Gammy Pippa’s face registered a flash of irritation, but she didn’t succumb to it. Instead she placed her hands on either side of my face. It was an intimate gesture, one I was not expecting. “But we’re keeping her, right?” What on earth had Galway told her?

  “Pippa,” Birch admonished sharply, “Let the poor girl go. She’s not interested in us old folks.”

  The woman withdrew her fingers from my cheeks as quickly as she’d put them there, and I instantly felt woozy. The room swam. I stepped back, stumbling on Ev’s borrowed platform shoes, and Galway caught me. “Are you okay?” he asked, but I knew they were keeping track of us, and what I wanted, in that moment, was to be invisible.

  I pulled myself away from him and lurched toward the outside. As I left the tent, I heard Birch remark to the gathered quorum, “Someone’s been drinking.”

  My face burned. I fought back hot tears. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I felt wretchedly embarrassed. What did that mean—“keeping her”? I heard Galway call after me, but I raced ahead, nearly tripping on a root of the shade tree planted at the corner of the Trillium property. I gathered myself, and headed for the grand home.

  Trillium was empty and unlit, thumping with the muffled sound of the party. I realized that my ears were ringing from the band, and that I was, in fact, a little drunker than I’d thought. I couldn’t find a light switch, then remembered a flashlight I’d seen just inside the screen porch earlier in the day. With it, I found my way to the downstairs bathroom. I sat on the toilet and let myself shake, setting free all the strangeness of the interaction. Once my hands were still, I rose again to wash them. My face was a shock in the mirror—I had spent so many hours looking at Winslows that I expected aquiline features and a rosebud mouth. Instead, I was met with my moon face, my nonexistent cheekbones, my dull, small eyes set too far apart. My dress was too tight, too black, too polyester. I would sneak out the back door and back to Bittersweet.

  My feet led me into the summer room, where Tilde and Birch had hosted their opening-of-the-summer party only a few weeks before. Through the open door, I could hear the crickets pulsing in time, vibrant laughter drifting in from the dance party. I remembered the uncomfortable moment between Indo and Tilde at the summer’s opening dinner, meant, somehow, for me, but I pushed away the recollection in the interest of the Van Gogh. What I wanted now, to comfort myself, as a balm against the strange turn the night had taken, was just to see the magnificent painting in the shadows.

  The wall where it should have been was blank. I cast my flashlight over the empty space again and again, searching desperately, but the Van Gogh wasn’t there.

  “They put it away for outsiders,” came a voice, and I jumped out of my skin. I thought of Murray first, and Galway second, but for better (or worse) it was neither of them. My flashlight revealed Athol sitting across the room, his sleeping baby in his arms. He’d been there the whole time. “Sorry to frighten you,” he said, not sounding sorry at all.

  “It’s such a beautiful painting,” I said. “I just thought I might be able to visit it.”

  Athol blinked in the glare from the flashlight. I moved the beam from his face. I could hear his even inhalations, and the wheezing of the dreaming baby. “Can I get you something, May?” he asked, sounding just like when he scolded little Ricky.

  “No. No. I’ll go find Ev.”

  I made my way hastily onto the porch, my steps gaining momentum as I let the screen door swing shut behind me. I was grateful to be back in the world of the crickets. I started toward the party and ran smack into Galway. “You okay?” he asked.

  “I think your brother thought I was trying to steal something.”

  Galway laughed. “Which brother?”

  “Athol.”

  “The only thing he has to fear is time stealing his good looks,” he said loudly, as though he wanted Athol to hear. To me, he added, “He takes everything too seriously.”

  I realized my hands were trembling again, and let Galway take one of them. The touch of him stilled me. And then he said, “I want to show you something.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Kiss

  He led me straight behind Trillium, away from the music and people. It was even darker in the forest. I couldn’t make out a trail, but he seemed to know the way, leading us around trees, pointing out roots to avoid, rocks to step over. His voice was gentle and his hand firm.

  Then, abruptly, he stopped, reaching out to feel the trunk directly before us. I could sense its imposing size—it loomed, bigger than the other trees around it. Still, I was surprised when he began to climb it. He turned and instructed, “Follow me.” I tested a two-by-four nailed sturdily into the wood. There was nowhere to go but up.

  Galway climbed carefully, checking each rung as he ascended, and I stuck closely behind him, grateful that the darkness masked how far below we would find the forest floor. The footing was sure and secure, but as we got higher, I began to wonder how much farther up we’d have to go in order to reap whatever rewards were offered at the top. A view? A grand, secret tree house? A spaceship? Anything seemed possible.

  Then, at once, the canopy gave way. We were close to the stars. I felt Galway scramble onto something wide above me. His arm reached down and guided me onto the platform on which he was standing. My heart raced as I vowed not to step an inch in any direction lest I plunge to my death. I held his elbow tight. But I couldn’t help notice the stars, bigger and brighter above us. One of them streaked across the sky, leaving a bright line in its wake.

  There was another one. And another. Magic, even though I knew it was just meteors. We stood beside each other with our heads tipped back, pointing and wordless, as each star tore across the sky. I took in the world below us too—the lake visible only where it reflected l
ights from the bay. And then, there came a burst of fireworks.

  “Just in time,” Galway murmured.

  They came quick and large from Burlington, bursting open the sky above us all. “Are they for the wedding?” I asked, impressed.

  “It’s Independence Day.”

  I’d completely forgotten it was the July Fourth weekend; I realized I hadn’t seen any buntings or decorations anywhere at Winloch. “Don’t you guys celebrate?”

  “Mum thinks it’s tacky. We used to say we observed Bastille Day instead, but that just sounds pretentious.” The fireworks were still exploding above us—red, green, swirls of golden light. “As if it isn’t pretentious to call it Winloch Day and have everyone dress in white. It’ll be next weekend.”

  I nodded up at the sky, and felt Galway draw closer. We watched the fireworks in silence, listening to the booms ricochet and crescendo across the water. As the sky lit up, he stepped before me, took my face in his hands, and kissed me.

  He tasted of blackberries. I forgot all fear that I might not know how to do it right, and I kissed him back. And let me tell you, it was beyond what I had ever imagined, that first kiss, out of my dreams, under the stars, our bodies growing warm and together, a sweet truth surrounding us, the lake lying below us like glass.

  Our bodies touched, but softly. I didn’t know if he was being reticent for my sake, but I appreciated the quiet lust between us, nothing of Murray’s aggression or need. We stopped to watch the finale. I thought he was going to kiss me again, but he spoke instead. “I hate to do this, but I have to drive back to Boston tonight.”

  “Oh.”

  “Work stuff.”

  “What is it”—I felt embarrassed not knowing already, but couldn’t help myself, because the omission combined with Ev’s disparagement had made me wonder if he didn’t kill people for a living—“what is it that you do?”