Bittersweet

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The Sister

  Jack-in-the-Pulpit was spotless inside. Every place had its thing and every thing had its place, but the whole building reeked of cigarettes—I felt my asthmatic lungs constrict the second I stepped inside. I realized this was one of the first Winloch homes I’d entered without a dog in it. My eyes lingered over the only picture on the living room wall: a clear-eyed, handsome soldier who resembled his cousins but would never grow old.

  CeCe made us Campbell’s tomato soup with three baby carrots each on the side. Her serving sizes were minuscule, and she nibbled at hers like a mouse. We sat at a rickety folding table in her large eat-in kitchen, surrounded by the same Vietnam-era appliances as in Bittersweet. The woodstove held court at the other end of the room. Above it, a wall that had once hung with several large frames still bore their outlines. The floor was scarred, as though the real furniture that had lived here for decades had crept out of the cottage by itself one night.

  I ate slowly, trying to pace myself, but at the meal’s end, my stomach growled. I assumed CeCe had heard the news of Indo’s collapse, but she was surprised when I filled her in, if not very concerned. Indo was CeCe’s sister, after all. But then, Indo hadn’t been exactly warm to CeCe on Winloch Day—in fact, CeCe was the only person I had ever seen Indo treat that way.

  “Did you know about the cancer?” I asked, looking around. Even Mrs. LaChance’s house had felt happier than this—sadness seemed to have soaked into Jack-in-the-Pulpit as surely as the nicotine.

  “It doesn’t surprise me she’ll die of it.” CeCe drew a pack of cigarettes from a kitchen drawer and lit up. The words were harsh, but she didn’t say them harshly.

  “Why?”

  “Indo has fed on anger for years. Blame. Deceit. Makes sense she’ll be eaten from the inside out.”

  I must’ve made a face. CeCe looked briefly shattered, as she had on Winloch Day. “Sure I’m sad,” she added. “She’s my sister.”

  “She wasn’t very nice to you on Winloch Day.”

  “People living a lie generally don’t enjoy the company of the one person who says the truth,” she pronounced cryptically.

  I rose from the small Formica table. “I should go.”

  “Oh, please don’t,” CeCe cried, grabbing my wrist with a claw-like hand. The smell of her tarred breath rose up all around me. “You’re the first person who’s really talked to me in weeks.”

  I sat down. “Ev told me about Jackson. I’m very sorry.” I was, but I was also very curious.

  She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. The room had filled with a filmy haze. I felt my lungs tighten, but my cough went unnoticed.

  “They claim they had nothing to do with it,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Any of the Winslows. Anyone who keeps their secrets.” She narrowed her eyes at me.

  “You blame your family?”

  “I can blame anyone I want.”

  “But he’d just gotten back from the war.”

  “Shell shock,” she mused. “People have been using that excuse as long as they’ve been killing each other.”

  Silence hung over us for a moment. I made out the sharp ticking of a clock, somewhere deep in the confines of another room. “But you don’t think that was why,” I said leadingly.

  “I know my son.”

  “He didn’t kill himself?”

  “Of course he killed himself. But no one wants to talk about what he did before he put that gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. That very week, he visited Indo at her place in Boston. Then Genevra at college. And the night before, he met with Birch. He had something pressing to discuss.”

  Jackson had visited Ev at school? My mind raced. He’d been in my room. Jackson Booth himself. “But you don’t know what he wanted to discuss?”

  “Au contraire, dear girl. I know exactly what it was.”

  I sat forward. “What was it?”

  She lit another cigarette. Leaned back in her chair. Drew in with a long suck, then blew out a blast of gray smoke. “I blame myself,” she said, as though she hadn’t heard me.

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “Were you there?”

  I tried to think of something philosophical to say, but I knew all too well that, if something terrible was your fault, it only made things worse when people tried to convince you otherwise.

  The canvas bag was sitting at my feet. I knew Indo would kill me if she ever found out, but I couldn’t help myself. I plucked my sweatshirt from inside the bag and unrolled it until Kitty’s journal was sitting on the table between us. Indo was dying of brain cancer, and I was running out of time. I nudged the book closer to CeCe. “Recognize it?” I asked.

  She stuck the cigarette in her mouth and picked up the journal with both hands, examining the covers before opening it and carefully squinting over the pages.

  She was taking too long. “It’s your mother’s journal!” I crowed.

  She delivered no reaction, simply turned page after page, then flipped forward to the opening of the book. She examined Kitty’s name. Then placed the book back down. Removed the cigarette. “That’s not my mother.”

  I opened the book again, pointing to Kitty’s name. “Yes.”

  “My dear,” she enunciated, “not everyone has children with their wives.”

  “Oh.” I was flustered. “I’m sorry.”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “I’m glad that monster’s not my mother.”

  I nearly blurted, “Kitty wasn’t a monster.” But instead I asked, “So who was she?”

  CeCe stubbed out her cigarette and didn’t light another one. “My mother’s name was Annabella. She’s the reason I look … Mediterranean.”

  “But Bard claimed you?” I asked, mind racing. I started searching the journal for the passage in which Kitty talked about Bard’s affair—perhaps it was about CeCe’s mother. But even before I found it, I remembered that the woman mentioned—“the maid”—hadn’t had a name that started with A. What letter was it?

  “Someone tipped off the press. He had a choice—claim me, or be exposed as the sadist he was. He had to think of his business ventures. His reputation.”

  “What happened to your mother?”

  “She disappeared.” No emotion as she said this. Just the facts.

  “Did Kitty claim you?”

  “Kitty let Bard tie me to a kitchen chair and beat me whenever I got too ‘tan.’ ”

  Perhaps CeCe was the crazy one. I’d read Kitty’s journal enough times to consider the dead woman a friend, or at least a reliable narrator. I wanted to press CeCe on the point of her mother, but I saw, as she lit another cigarette, that the subject was closed.

  I searched for the entry that mentioned B.’s dalliance. Then pushed the journal toward Kitty’s husband’s illegitimate daughter: “Friday, August 24th. B. has been carrying on with one of the maids, P. He has assured me it’s over, but it is a mess nonetheless, one I shall be paying for myself, that weighs heavily upon me.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked, pointing to the P.

  CeCe shook her head. “There was no woman whose name started with P. when I was little.” She flipped through the journal, holding her place with her index finger. “When was this written?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She doesn’t say the year.”

  “That woman kept on task. I’ve never finished a journal I started.”

  She read the dates to herself: Saturday, June 21; Sunday, June 30; Monday, July 14. She counted on her fingers and a smile began to form. “Look at this,” she said, flipping back to the first and sixth entries. “January second and January seventh are five days apart, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But she writes: ‘Tuesday, January second, here. And here, she writes Monday, January seventh.”

  “Okay.”

  “Tuesday and Monday are six days apart. Not five.”

  “Well, what does that mean?” I fel
t thick.

  “It means that these two entries were written in different years.”

  “Maybe it’s a mistake.”

  She shook her head. “Trust me, Kitty didn’t make mistakes.”

  I took the journal from her hands. Something buzzed at the edges of my mind. If CeCe was right, perhaps that was why in some entries Kitty had noted the day of the week and sometimes she hadn’t. I pored over the first week of entries—January 2 was the only date associated with a day of the week until January 7. Maybe this was a code to herself? A signal for when she’d switched to a different year? But why go to all that trouble?

  “It looks chronological, sure,” CeCe said, growing excited for the first time, “but it’s not. She could have kept the journal over decades.”

  I remembered what Indo had told me: “Pay attention to the when of it.”

  “So who,” I asked, flipping far ahead into the book and falling back upon the passage I had assumed was about Bard’s infidelity, pressing my finger on the definitive P. mentioned there, “is that?”

  She took the journal from me carefully and leaned over it, squinting at the page as though it might reveal something new. And then, in an instant, I watched her figure it out. She dropped the journal and stood back, as though a thunderbolt had slammed her.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  She pointed to her door. “You have to leave.”

  I gathered the journal, but I was desperate to understand. “Just tell me who it is.”

  “Don’t tell anyone you have it. Promise.”

  “I promise.”

  “You weren’t here.”

  “I’ll just tell them we had lunch.”

  “No!” Her voice was sharp like a dagger. “I’m not part of this.” She went to the door and held it open, her cigarette smoke blowing sideways in the wind. I shouldered my bag and made my way to the door.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” I said, disappointed. “I don’t know anything.”

  She looked wistfully out the door, at a sky that had turned stormy. “You’ll figure it out,” she said, as though the inevitability of my discovery were the greatest tragedy in the world.

  I passed out of CeCe’s cottage and back into the day. Thunderheads rumbled. The smell of rain hung in the air.

  She watched me walk down her driveway. I turned away from her then. I had nearly reached the road when I heard her footsteps. She was upon me in seconds.

  “Be careful,” she whispered in an anguished voice, pulling at my shirt. “They’ll make you do things you don’t want to. And once you’ve done them, you’ll never forget because they won’t let you. Don’t invite them in. Don’t tell them any secrets.” Her expression was childlike, damaged.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said awkwardly, trying to edge away. She grasped at me.

  “No one is fine. No one is safe. Not here.” Tears began to pour from her eyes. Out in the light, her skin was gray, her teeth yellowed. I would have comforted another person, but her demented grief was grotesque. She began to sob as she doubled over.

  I ran.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The Revelation

  I sprinted toward Bittersweet like a tornado, ready to cut down anyone in my path. I half expected to find the place gone—as disappeared as Ev—but the cottage was just as I had left it, seemingly untouched. I checked inside, greeting Fritz’s hello with a biscuit. Satisfied that I was alone—and still clutching the bag with the journal inside—I made my way under the crawl space below the porch. On our cleanup day at the beginning of the summer, the day I’d put aside all those magazines, I had also bagged dozens of old wall calendars. Apparently Antonia Winslow had never met a free calendar—whether from the humane society, an insurance company, or the grocery—that she hadn’t loved. But, unlike the magazines, the calendars were now intermixed with all the other recyclable junk, so I stooped in the cobwebbed space, rooting inside the sixteen garbage bags we’d tied and placed there, praying my hand would find only paper and not a nest of baby opossums, a colony of spiders, or a napping raccoon.

  Anything that felt remotely like a calendar I piled beside me, until my back ached from bending over. After checking outside to see no one was watching, I carried as many as I could directly into the bathroom, keeping the journal with me. I repeated this a handful of times, until I felt confident I’d rescued everything that could be of use.

  I called the dogs outside, insisting they relieve themselves before they were allowed back to their beloved pillow. Inside again, imagining Birch and Tilde occupied with the search for Ev, I bolted the porch door, fed the dogs, washed my hands, took a hunk of cheese, a bag of chips, and two more apples from the kitchen, and barricaded myself in the bathroom. How sweet was the sound of the second metal bolt slipping into place. I was beginning to understand why Tilde had thought them necessary.

  I sat with my back against the door and tried to calm myself. I didn’t dare let my mind wander to the vision of Birch pounding on the door or of CeCe collapsing in her driveway. Her family had done something terrible to her; that was all I knew.

  I dove into the calendars, ordering them chronologically. I was lucky—they went all the way back to the midtwenties and ended in 1986, with a few years missing here and there. They were scribbled upon—“Doctor’s Appointment,” “Buy Licorice”—but the dates were clear, which was all I cared about. Thank goodness Antonia Winslow had been a pack rat.

  It was slow going at first, but I got into a rhythm. First I’d locate a date in Kitty’s journal, then, using the day of the week mentioned, I’d sift through the calendars at hand and try to determine a year. If and when I did, I’d write the corresponding information on a piece of paper, so as not to mark the journal itself. Every year, she wrote in the January section, then the February one, and so forth, until she reached December and started the cycle all over again. She denoted these changes in year only by mentioning the day of the week on which she was writing. It was an easy tool for her to decipher, but just as easy to throw off anyone less determined than I.

  In this way, she’d created a journal that looked as though it had all been filled over twelve months but had, in fact, been written over the course of decades. My theory was backed up as I came toward the end of each month and noticed that her entries grew shorter, the margins narrower, the letters smaller. As the years went on, she was trying to cram as much as she could into a space that was invariably becoming cramped.

  Kitty Spiegel was a woman who could have afforded a hundred journals. But she had rationed the space in this book instead. That was a clue in itself. Maybe Indo and CeCe were both right.

  I forged on, cataloging January and February dates. I began to realize that calendrical years repeat themselves—1928 was exactly the same as 1956, which in turn was identical to 1984. I could rule out 1928, since I now knew that Kitty and Bard were married in 1932, and she hadn’t started the journal until she was ensconced at Winloch, but I couldn’t rule out even 1984, since Kitty had lived until 1992. I had to write down two, or even three possible years for every date, which opened up a maddening array of possibilities. Every entry had to be read with multiple eyes, multiple imaginings of the year from which she might have been writing.

  Now I understood why she hadn’t mentioned salient details about what was happening in the world around her. Not because she was ignorant or uninterested, but the opposite: she was crafty. She didn’t want anyone to do what I was doing right now.

  Part of me wishes that, after going through the calendars, and marking down all the possible dates on my separate piece (now seven pieces) of reference paper, I had chosen to close the journal and go out for a swim. Better yet, that I had hauled all the calendars outside to act as tinder and built a mighty fire, tossing the journal onto it, sending it into ash and oblivion. Or, had I needed to press on, that I’d thought about what Indo had said, about blood money, thought, too, about the maid’s silence in front of the Van Gogh, understood the painting’s true secret
, and hopped down the rabbit hole Indo had dug for me.

  Instead, I opened the journal to an entry I’d noticed once because it had seemed out of place: “Wednesday, November 6th. B. has gotten a new pair of shoes and is putting them to good use. An adorable sight, to see him toddling down to Flat Rocks, towel slung over his little shoulders!”

  In my first passes through the journal, the entry had struck me as strange because the words used—adorable, toddling, little—were words to describe a child, and Kitty used B. to stand for her husband, Bard. But in 1940—the year I guessed this entry was from—Bard would have been in his thirties.

  I dug out the family tree and smoothed it on the floor before me. I pored over the names of the Winslows, hoping one of them would answer me.

  And then it hit me, like the cold current of a rushing, rapid river: there was someone else in Kitty’s family whose name began with B. and he’d been eighteen months old in 1940: Birch.

  My mouth went dry. I raced back to the beginning of the journal and picked through the entries with another identity in mind. In most entries, B. was obviously Bard: “B. came home from Boston last night exhausted. Poor man, he works his fingers to the bone”; “B. has obtained a new sloop to be docked at Winloch. I only hope he’ll have time enough off this summer to enjoy himself upon it.” But then there were others in which the identity of B. was murky, or obviously not that of a husband: “B. spent the morning studying Henri, and, over snack, recounted the ‘story’ Henri had ‘told’ him,” or “B. continues to use the toilet while singing himself a little song.”

  I had never heard a grown man described this way. Heart pounding, I raced forward through the months and years, finding mentions of this second, younger B. As Birch grew from boy to man across the carefully laid pages, it became harder to distinguish the entries about him from those about his father. Up until this point the content of Kitty’s journal had been an exercise in history. Now I was reading about someone I knew. Someone very powerful.