Bittersweet

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  She straightened her impossibly long leg and pressed her big toe against the loose board.

  “What happened to the baby?” I blurted, desperate to win back her attention.

  She set her foot flat upon the floor, shifting her weight onto it.

  “Ev,” I said, “did you lose it?”

  She crouched. I stepped into the cottage and let the screen slam shut behind me. I couldn’t let her find the journal. Indo had entrusted me, and me alone, with Kitty’s secrets.

  “There’s nothing in there,” I said unconvincingly. But Ev was lost to her discovery. She used her index finger to jimmy at the side of the board and, just as I had, decided she needed a tool, grabbing, from the side table, the same ballpoint pen I’d used.

  She uncapped the pen and levered it so that the board yawned open. A few more forcible thrusts, and the loose wood popped from its home.

  I stepped forward. I’d grab it the second she pulled it out.

  She leaned over the hiding place. Frowned. Placed her hand inside and felt around. Only then did she look up at me, startled. “There’s nothing in here.”

  My heart started hammering. I craned to look inside the cranny where I’d so carefully hidden Kitty’s journal. “Where is it?” I asked.

  “What is it?”

  “I mean it, Ev, what did you do with it?”

  She shrank back, just a fraction of an inch, for just a moment, but I saw it: I’d scared her.

  “Just give it back to me and we won’t have a problem,” I pressed.

  “Seriously, Mabel, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She was pulling herself to standing. The second she did, she would have gained the upper hand.

  I placed my hands on her shoulders. I pressed down as hard as I could. She shrieked. “Stop it!” Dodged my attempt to pull her back down. “Ouch, Mabel! Stop!” She slipped through my grasp and stood tall above me. Brushed her shoulders off. Tossed her hair, loosening the ends with her fingertips, regaining herself. She wagged a finger at me as she headed toward the kitchen. “Honestly, Mabel, sometimes I have no idea what the fuck is wrong with you.”

  Dear Mom,

  Things have gone a bit off the rails since I (didn’t) write you last. Suffice to say I hadn’t imagined a world in which an incest-committing, possibly psychopathic roommate is the more appealing of two options, the other of which is that someone has been spying on me day and night, found out I have, in my possession, a family journal full of dark secrets, and has stolen it from me. I’ve considered sleeping on the couch, but Ev’s been acting perfectly like herself since dinner, as though she didn’t knowingly marry her own matricide-committing, suicidal brother. Frankly, I’m afraid to deviate from the norm lest it set her against me. We will pretend that everything is normal. Thanks to you, I’ve had plenty of practice.

  That night, I watched Ev swallow two sleeping pills, and kept my eyes on her until she was sound asleep. Only then did I close my eyes.

  But it didn’t matter where I lay my head. I turned it all over in my mind, trying to come up with a game plan for when daylight returned—where would I find Kitty’s journal? What would I say to Indo to get her to tell me more?—until I began to lose consciousness and my memories became jumbled, and John’s face became Daniel’s and Daniel’s face became my own.

  Just as I was finally drifting into slumber, a regular pinging started to pull me back to the waking shore. I tried to ignore the sound, but it came again, then again, until I found myself sitting up in bed. Across the room, Ev slept heavily. But the window above her bed rang out with a regular rhythm that I realized, after a few disorienting moments, was the sound of gravel thrown against the pane.

  I stood and hunched between my bed and Ev’s, peering out into the pitch-black night, when a flashlight flipped on, and a ghoulish face appeared. I yelped, but Ev didn’t stir. I put my hand over my mouth to stop myself from making any more noise as I squinted out at that face. The flashlight shifted, and what seemed to be the stuff of nightmares proved to be only Galway.

  I tiptoed out of the bedroom, snuck onto the porch, and cringed at the screen door’s squeal.

  “I need your help,” he whispered.

  I wasn’t much interested in helping him, and my face must’ve told him as much.

  “It’s Lu,” he pleaded.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  The Director

  “What would you have done if Ev woke up?” I asked as we drove out of Winloch. Galway steered more cautiously than John had; less to prove, or he didn’t want our departure to be advertised, or both. The aroma of his car was good, like the sweatshirt I’d long since squirreled away under my bed. I prayed to lose my sense of smell.

  “Ev sleeps through fire alarms,” he said, “and I figured if she did wake up, she’d leave us alone.”

  The sentiment clung to us; we had unfinished business that even Ev would respect.

  “Are you going to turn on the headlights?” I asked, once we had passed onto the meadow—he’d been using his parking lights. It was a night lit by only a sliver of moon, but out here in the country, that was enough to pretend by. He flipped on the real headlights, and we headed toward the highway. Once on it, we took an exit onto a back road that, by my calculation, led us east. “Is Lu at camp?” I asked finally. All that urgency and then nothing. I was starting to wonder how important this really was.

  Galway cleared his throat. “Whatever happens, we have to keep it a secret, understand?”

  That sounded familiar. “That depends what happens.”

  “It could be a matter of life and death.”

  I actually knew what that meant now. “I’ll do my best.”

  Satisfied I could be trusted, Galway grabbed a used envelope from the dashboard. “Masha got a phone call tonight, from the camp.” He handed me the paper, scribbled with directions. “Rocky something. It’s in Maine. Anyway, it was the camp director, Marian. Very upset. She was calling for Mum and Father, and she didn’t know she was getting the Dining Hall. Masha took the message and”—he handed me his flashlight—“see for yourself.”

  I made out Masha’s loopy handwriting. My eyes stumbled over the words as I tried to decipher their meaning.

  “Read it,” Galway commanded.

  “ ‘Your daughter is very sad. She has atempted suicide. She say she saw something terible. She beg me not to call you. But three weeks of this, I have no choice. Please come.’ ”

  Galway hit the steering wheel. “Three weeks,” he said in disbelief, and I wondered what we were in for.

  It was a long night and a longer road. The disdain I’d felt toward Galway in recent weeks began to loosen as we sped around the curves of rural Vermont. The road took us through the verdant alpine meadows leading to St. Johnsbury, then down into New Hampshire and through Crawford Notch State Park, and steadily away from Winloch. Our headlights illuminated farmsteads, one-room schoolhouses, and empty high schools. The whole state seemed to be aslumber.

  Galway’s concentration was fixed on the road. He was clearly worried about his little sister. It was hard to stay angry with him.

  The specter that haunted us was those three weeks. For I realized, as I did the math, trying to grasp hold of a time that had turned elastic and strange, that it had been three weeks to the day since Ev and I had found John’s and his mother’s bodies.

  “When did Lu leave for camp?” I asked. It didn’t seem possible she had said good-bye on the same day we’d discovered the bodies, but as I did the math again and again it seemed likely, even though I was unable to pin down the exact chronology of that terrible week. I tried to connect the memory of Lu’s weight upon the bottom of the bed—I’d been frustrated at her for some reason; there was a lingering sense of disappointment—and she’d jumped on Ev, and Ev had been drowsy. I’d been dreading something, but nothing terrible had happened yet. And then I connected it—Lu had left for camp on the morning of the day I told John who his father was. She was on that bus long before murder ha
d sullied Winloch.

  “Did anyone tell her about John?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “They wanted to protect her.”

  I let out a sigh of relief. “It probably has nothing to do with him then. You know what it probably is, it’s Owen, just normal teenage girl stuff.” I mused on Owen, what his life in the Bronx was like, if he’d heard about the murders, if he and Lu had been corresponding. “I’m sure that’s it,” I repeated, but Galway didn’t respond.

  Galway swung the car into a gas station on the other side of the road. He knocked on the window of the convenience store. A weary-looking mechanic opened the door and, after a bit of conversation, let Galway in. They chatted inside for a good while, as I watched stripes of light paint themselves on the distant horizon. The sky was pink by the time he emerged with two coffees and a pair of packaged Danishes. He placed them on top of the car while he filled the tank. I could feel his eyes on me through the rearview mirror but avoided his gaze. At the first taste of the coffee he handed over, weariness nipped me.

  He buckled his seat belt with a definitive click. “It’s too much of a coincidence, Mabel,” he said, picking up where he left off. “The timing of it. Anyway, she’s not the kind of kid who gets caught up in boy stuff.”

  I opened my mouth to argue. But we’d find out soon enough.

  “Look,” he said, without starting the car, “I’m sorry about what happened between us. I know my apology probably means shit to you, but I really am. I didn’t tell you I was married—”

  “You lied to me—”

  “Okay, if you want to call it that.”

  “Yes, I do. Because you’re married.”

  “But not like you think. That marriage was a legal contract, something I did to help someone. And I don’t expect you to forgive me for it, but I do want you to know”—and here his voice broke—“that I’ve never felt about anyone the way I feel for you.”

  “Please don’t say things like that.”

  “I have to,” he said, looking down at his hands. “I’m not good at lying to you.”

  It was another two hours before we pulled out the map and found our way down a dirt road wide enough for only one car. It was not unlike the Winloch road, winding and narrow, but the forest was thicker, filled with fir trees, lending the light a smoky haze. We drove for miles with no sense if we were headed in the right direction, but just as we were about to stop in the middle of the road and do a fifteen-point turn, we came upon a fork with a small wooden sign nailed to a tree: CAMP. An arrow.

  Galway followed the sign. He took the road more slowly now, saying, “Let me do the talking.”

  The camp was a collection of mossy, shingle-covered cabins. It was sleepaway camp as I had only ever imagined it: lakefront, canoes, arts and crafts, a fire pit. It was hard to imagine Lu thriving in such a damp, enclosed place.

  I followed Galway into the administration building, where a wan girl lay on a cot in the corner of the room, under a thin wool blanket. We were met by a concerned-looking woman with thick spectacles and a beak of a nose, who nodded sympathetically as Galway explained the phone call we’d received, that his parents were indisposed and they’d sent him instead. She squinted at me. “And she is …?”

  “My wife,” Galway said, taking my hand. I withdrew my fingers quickly, as though they had touched fire.

  She dropped her gaze to Galway’s offered identification. “We’re not in the habit of handing children over to just anyone.”

  Galway nodded vehemently. “In any other circumstance, I’d agree a hundred percent. But this sounds like an emergency. Naturally, my mother wanted to send someone as soon as she could. And I am Luvinia’s brother.”

  The girl coughed from her cot. The birdlike woman reluctantly handed back the license. “I’ll get Marian,” she said doubtfully, rising from her small oak desk and disappearing into an inner sanctum.

  An effusive, meaty woman came out hardly a minute later, offering her hand to Galway, then to me. “Thank you for coming.” She led us outside. The other woman scrutinized us from the doorway.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  The Camp

  Marian led us past cabins, and then along the back of the Dining Hall, inside which, thanks to a wall of windows, we saw a handful of capped, pale, foreign-looking women toiling in an industrial kitchen. Marian noticed my glance up at the working girls and said, “It’s great experience. They get to come to the States for the summer.” Yeah, I thought, and cook for a bunch of rich children. Galway tried to put his hand at the small of my back as we crested a steep slope, but I darted from his touch.

  We climbed a stairway set into the hillside, toward another set of cabins. Out of breath at the exertion, Marian huffed, “This is where the counselors stay,” explaining the towels drying on the porches, hand-me-down boom boxes, and half-broken folding chairs set up outside. It was chilly under the dense evergreens; even though it was a warm August day, one could sense October on the air. A few girls my age passed, nodding greetings to Marian as they headed down to the Dining Hall in their hooded sweatshirts and cutoffs. One looked over her shoulder at us, and I sensed she knew exactly who we were there to see.

  As we made our way uphill, Marian lowered her voice, speaking confidentially to Galway. “I hope we did the right thing. My instinct was not to call the police, since the girl did no damage to herself, but not everyone agreed with me. And I didn’t call you before because—well, because she begged me not to. I’ve never met a child who seemed so … terrified.”

  “You absolutely did the right thing,” Galway replied confidently. It was strange to see how well he wielded authority in this world. “Father wouldn’t want anyone getting hold of this information. When young girls make mistakes they shouldn’t be haunted by them.”

  Marian nodded a frantic assent. She was wrapped around his finger. “Well, here we are.” She gestured up to the last cabin in the encampment. “I don’t know the state you’ll find her in. Some days she’s inconsolable, others she joins in. I’ve tried to spend as much time with her as possible, but I have other girls to care for.” She checked her watch. “And I’m due at assembly.”

  “Just one question,” Galway said. “Do you know what set her off?”

  Marian shook her head. “Whatever happened, she’s been through trauma.” Then she headed back down the path without us.

  The Winloch cottages, with their casement windows, slender doorways, and well-appointed views, seemed positively fussy in comparison to the sparse, hand-built cabin we found ourselves stepping into.

  It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. As I discovered my surroundings, I realized that, deep in these dense woods, this was the most light that penetrated on a sunny day. The gloominess was made worse by the design of the building; where there might have been an abundance of windows, instead the walls were lined with utilitarian bunks. There was no sign of Lu.

  For the first time since we’d arrived at camp, Galway seemed indecisive. Just as I was about to take charge, a toilet flushed from behind a closed door, and a counselor emerged.

  “We’re here to see Lu,” I said.

  “I only left her because she was sleeping,” the girl apologized, gesturing toward the second bunk room.

  “Why don’t you head to breakfast?” Galway suggested, regaining himself. The girl eagerly gathered her sweatshirt and headed outside. We stepped into the room she’d gestured toward.

  At first, I thought the counselor had been teasing us—there was no sign of human life. I squinted my eyes and examined the empty bunks again, until a shape that I had taken to be a pile of linens stirred on one of the bottom bunks—I was reminded of finding Indo collapsed on the floor. I pointed. Galway followed my gesture, creeping closer. When we were within arm’s reach, her face appeared. She was ghostly, pale. Pulling her long, brittle body into standing, she dashed across the remaining space between us, then clamped her arms around me, squeezing the air from my lungs. She was scrawnier than the last time I
’d seen her, but her weight loss hadn’t seemed to diminish her strength. I tried to find air.

  She shook and keened and pulled Galway into the embrace. I was sandwiched between them, and tried not to enjoy the press of him against my back.

  A knock on the door ended the moment. Breakfast sandwiches for each of us, delivered by a curious camper. She craned her neck to see inside when I took her food, but I blocked her gaze.

  We ate, stooped, on the bunks. There was just enough light to notice how Lu barely picked at her food. She was close to emaciated, but her appetite didn’t show it.

  Galway finished his sandwich first. He leaned back in the bunk, folding his hands around his lifted knee. Watched Lu like a hawk as she nibbled. Chewing and swallowing were feats of will.

  She finally met his gaze.

  “So?” he asked, not very gently.

  Her lips turned down. I saw she was about to cry. I set down the remains of my breakfast and left my bunk for hers. I grabbed her hand. “Just tell us what happened.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, dissolving. We sat through that round of tears, until I asked if she’d rather be alone with one of us.

  She shook her head. “I only want to tell it once.”

  So we waited. And waited. I could sense Galway growing impatient, and I understood now why he’d insisted I come along. I squeezed Lu’s hand. “Did you hurt yourself?” I asked.

  Lu’s eyes opened wide. “I didn’t mean to,” she said. “I mean, I meant to, but it was only to stop remembering. I was so afraid because I thought they knew, and they would come, and …” She shivered as though she were repulsed. “Thank you for coming,” she said. “Do they know?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  She looked to her brother.

  “Masha’s the only person who knows we came. She won’t tell anyone unless I ask her to,” he answered.