Bittersweet

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  “Daddy!” Ev declared sharply.

  “My dear,” he chastised Ev, hardly lifting his eyes from me, “you’re the one who wanted to stay behind.”

  I tried to understand what he was saying.

  Chaperone.

  Position.

  Placement.

  My ears were starting to fill with a cold, familiar, rushing sound. My soles felt cemented to the floor, as if stuck in the tarred, black mud that lined the river.

  “You must admit, Mabel, you’ve done a terrible job on all counts! Seducing my married son!”

  He interrupted himself, turning to Galway. “Poor Marcella,” he tsked. “Don’t you think even the illegal daughter of a whore deserves fidelity?” But before Galway could respond, Birch came back at me. “Nosing about in the business of my terminally ill sister! Allowing Ev to elope— Yes, Ev,” he chastised, diverting again, “I know about your little side trip, although, if you reflect upon it sensibly, do you really think a judge would be available for a marriage at ten thirty at night?” He turned to Tilde and chuckled. “They forget how many people I know.”

  So he’d sabotaged John and Ev’s wedding and known about Galway’s wife? I felt myself shrinking in the face of Birch’s power, in how it made the world what it wanted. It was alarming to hear the scope of his reach. Especially when I thought of the swastika.

  But he wasn’t done with me. “Not to mention spreading insidious rumors about my family. Dear Mabel! Your parents will be appalled.” He made a fist and frowned at it. Pulled a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and cleaned his nails methodically. The blade glimmered in the light filtering through the double doors.

  Galway grabbed my hand. His fingers were a tourniquet. “It’s time to go.” But I was rooted to the spot.

  Birch flipped the blade closed and pocketed the knife, secure in my attention. “This used to be a common arrangement.”

  Galway pleaded, “Mabel—”

  “An unmarriageable girl—an ugly girl—would serve as companion to the one with prospects. When it worked for the best, the situation could last a lifetime.”

  “They wouldn’t do that,” I mumbled, but I didn’t believe myself. I remembered my mother’s phone call: “Be sweet.” I had taken those two words as an assurance. But what if they had been more exacting? What if she had only let me believe Ev was my friend so she could get her handler’s fee?

  A look of calculated alarm crossed his face. “Oh dear, I see I’ve upset her.”

  Was that what I was? Upset? The river was roaring now inside my head, chilling my body as the cold current seemed to rise around me. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I remembered that Galway and I had had a plan, and that I had knowledge I could use against the Winslows, knowledge Indo had instilled. But what it was, what it had been meant to accomplish, I could hardly put my finger on anymore. The only thing I could hold on to, despite my best efforts, was the concise, conniving sound of Birch’s rhetoric.

  “Did your parents fail to mention our financial arrangements? Why, you’ve earned more for them this summer than they’ve made in the past year with that little dry-cleaning endeavor of theirs.

  “It was Linden, old bat, who gave me the key. That pretentious tome you’re always carrying! I asked her what on earth a girl like you was doing with such a book, and she replied, ‘I suspect her fixation betokens a fascination with sin.’ ”

  “Beware Lucifer’s rhetoric.” That’s what Indo had said that day, long ago, upon the Dining Hall stairs. I realized, too late, that she had been talking about her own brother. For he had rooted me to the spot—I was staying to find out how all this ended.

  “Remarkable,” Birch continued, shaking his head as though in disbelief. “Remarkable that you would accuse me of unspeakable crimes!” He pulled his eyes from me and turned toward his family, passing his earnest gaze from face to face. “Your court documents are sealed. But you can’t walk away from what you are.”

  “That’s it,” said Galway, forcefully taking my hand and pulling me toward the door. “Mabel,” he said sharply, grabbing my chin in his hands, “we’re not going to stay and listen to these lies.”

  “Lies?” Birch said incredulously. “You mean to say she hasn’t told you? Oh, Mabel, whatever damage you inflicted upon your poor brother, Daniel, is between you and God. But why would you drag my son into it?”

  Galway’s need was just one more current, dragging me along in its cold-fingered insistence. If we got out onto the steps, we would leave the Dining Hall, then Winloch, and then what? We might go to the police. Lu might make it to safety. But Galway would always wonder to what his father had been referring.

  It was going to be a relief. The truth. At last.

  Birch prompted me. “Daniel had never quite been right. Slow from birth, but Mommy and Daddy had to work full-time at the cleaner’s just to make ends meet. Poor Mabel here was stuck with an older brother who could hardly tie his own shoes. It was humiliating. Your parents working all the time. You had to take him with you everywhere, didn’t you?”

  Galway slackened his pull, acknowledging the futility of his efforts. I wrapped my arms around myself.

  “From what I’ve heard, Mabel here was quite the mommy dearest. She fed him, changed him, even bathed him. And one day, she decided she was done. Asked him if he wanted to go for a little swim, didn’t you, Mabel?”

  I was fighting against memory and losing.

  “She brought him down to the river. Pointed to the water and said she’d be right behind him. He trusted her, more than he trusted anyone else. He got into the water. She stayed on shore and let him be swept away.”

  “It was a mistake,” I heard myself say. That’s what I had told myself all these years. A misunderstanding, the exhaustion after a day of care for someone who could not be contained. Who would not stop asking questions. Demanding the world.

  “He didn’t die, did he?” Birch said. “It was even worse than that. He lived. Dumber, needier, than before.”

  I could feel it, the icy water rushing over my head, in the instant I saw Daniel swept off, in the moment I realized I wanted him back, that there was something worse than the burden of servitude, and it was the sin of killing, and that to hate someone so good was pure ugliness. That I had to save him so I could save myself. I dove into the frigid waters again and again, trying to find his big, bulky body, every so often seeing his gasping mouth in the waters above me as we were swept downstream, until the men pulled us out, and made Daniel alive again, until I confessed, and the hospital and the counseling and my mother weeping and my father raging …

  I looked up. The Winslows—Galway, Ev, all of them—were far away, a family in which I had no part.

  Galway tried to justify it. “You were a child.”

  I met his eyes. “I tried to kill my brother.”

  “And this,” Birch boomed, “is private property and you are trespassing.”

  “We know what you did,” I said, my voice weak. I met his eye. “I’ll walk right into the police station and tell them—”

  “Given your confession, and apology, and the fact that your attempt to murder your brother didn’t exactly pan out, you managed to avoid being put into a home for girls, didn’t you? A mental institution,” Birch explained to his captive audience. “I suppose it goes without saying that any young girl would be miserable in a place like that.”

  “Father,” Galway said briskly, finally coming to my aid, “I’ll back her story up. You can’t have her institutionalized for telling the truth.”

  “Of course not, my good boy. No. I only mean, let’s say this witness you claim to have up your sleeve, let’s say she can be … located. Let’s say she’s boarding a flight to Mexico City, under a pseudonym, at three ten this afternoon. She’s using false ID to board an international flight—isn’t that a federal offense? I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard for someone to stop her from getting on the flight, for a psychiatrist to prove her unstable enough to send her somewhere she’d b
e locked forever.”

  He had found Lu. Sweet, lovely Lu, who fought for turtles and made me bracelets, who was still mostly child. Lu, who smelled of sweat and honeysuckle. “You wouldn’t,” I said, voice trembling against my will.

  “Wouldn’t what?” Tilde asked. She’d been sitting there so quietly. But her ears had pricked up when Birch alluded to their daughter, even though he hadn’t named her.

  I had to make a decision now. Promise to either keep what a monster Birch was a secret, or tell, and send his daughter to certain misery. She’d already attempted suicide once. She wouldn’t last more than a few days in any place he’d send her.

  Galway tried to touch me, but I pulled away. I couldn’t think clearly with him muddling my mind.

  “And if I go,” I negotiated with Birch, “and I keep the murders to myself, you’ll let her go?”

  “Let who go?” Tilde pressed. “Birch, what does she mean?”

  “Don’t let him intimidate you,” Galway warned.

  “My dear,” Birch replied, taking on a condescending tone, “everything will be as it was.”

  “He’s lying,” Galway said.

  “Birch,” Tilde pleaded, “tell me right now what she means.”

  “No.” I put my hand up. I’d seen the way Galway had looked at me when his father told him what I’d done to Daniel. “No.”

  To Birch I said, “She’s going to contact me to let me know she made it. If I don’t hear from her, and hear exactly the code word she was going to use, I’ll go straight to the police. Do you understand?”

  “She’s very emotional, isn’t she?” Birch quipped to his audience, but I could tell he was considering my offer.

  Tilde was pulling at him now, but he was ignoring her. “You remember your promise to me,” she said through gritted teeth. She was speaking in the voice I remembered from that afternoon at Bittersweet, when Birch had nearly beaten down the door. Only this time, her command didn’t work—she was no longer in charge. “You remember your job, Birch. It’s your job to keep your children safe.”

  “Do you understand?” I pressed.

  He hesitated for an infinitesimal moment. But then, as he brushed his wife aside, ignoring her urgent pleas, I saw I had won. Not everything. But it was victory enough to gain Lu’s freedom.

  Birch approached me briskly, then, like a birding dog pointing out its prey. I wondered if he would strike me. Or pull the knife from his pocket and stab my carotid artery. Or simply put his hands around my neck and squeeze the life out of me while his family looked on.

  But instead, he extended his right hand.

  I took it.

  We shook once. A business agreement, sealed. Then Birch Winslow strode out the double doors.

  Galway shook his head as he watched his father leave. His annoyance, or disappointment, was useless to me—all he seemed to care about was whether he had bested the man who’d intimidated him for his whole life.

  “She’s a little girl,” I reminded him, my eyes beginning to well, thinking of Lu’s feet dangling in the water off the swimming dock, hair tucked behind one ear. I wasn’t going to have a hand in destroying her.

  I turned to leave. I heard Galway’s footsteps behind me, as Tilde and Ev and Athol and Banning all began to speak at once, among themselves, trying to draw some meaning out of all that had just occurred. At the door, I turned back to Galway, stopping him in his tracks. “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “With you.”

  “Did you know there’s a swastika on the back of the Van Gogh?”

  He didn’t have to tell me either way—I saw his answer in his eyes. He probably also knew what the Winslows had been doing for decades, beginning during Hitler’s rise to power, when they’d started to steal from Kitty’s countrymen. Hadn’t Galway hedged when I’d tried to pin him down on how long money had been coming into the Winloch coffers?

  “That’s all right,” I said crisply. “I’ll find my own way out.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  The End

  Morning comes early. Cold toes on my shin. Crumbs spilling onto the duvet. They pull us into the waking world. There are costumes to adjust, fairy wings to fix, and what am I doing with my hair, and is Daddy wearing makeup again this year?

  There is hardly a chance to catch a glimpse of our view, but I insist upon it: the watery cove, the vista, through the trees, onto the expanse. Every day, I make a point to drink in our heaven. I braid their hair, wipe jam from their fingertips, and ask myself: What if Adam and Eve had figured out how to stay in Eden after they ate of the forbidden fruit? Say our first parents were skilled in the art of negotiation, instead of newly formed. Savvy instead of obedient. Imagine they’d looked God in the eye and stood their ground, having learned something from Lucifer about the linguistic art of persuasion: “No, we are not leaving. We belong here, and here we shall make our home.”

  And then I smile.

  For where they failed, I have triumphed.

  I was self-righteous and smug as I strode from the Dining Hall that August afternoon. I felt liberated—from my history, from Ev’s coldhearted betrayal, from Birch’s accusations, even, to tell the truth, from Galway’s need.

  With every step I took, I convinced myself that I wanted no part of their lunacy. Better yet, that I had played them. For I had sworn to keep my mouth shut about only the murders. I hadn’t made any promises about the swastika, or what I knew it meant.

  As the road wound around the forested curve where John and Ev had found me so many weeks before, I quickened my pace and formulated a plan. Indo’s words resounded in my ears: “Blood money.” I was beginning to understand.

  I would call my mother collect. For the first time in months, I realized I could face my parents, knowing they had sold me off. Somehow, it made them more bearable, as though they had finally admitted how dysfunctional I had always known we were.

  If I shuddered to think of the nameless, uncountable girls I might be leaving to Birch’s rapacious appetites, didn’t I tell myself I was doing no more harm than the rest of them, keeping my mouth shut? I had no physical proof. I had saved Lu—that was heroic enough.

  Besides, I was going to do even more than that. My chest swelled with self-congratulation. As I strolled, my mind raced: over Kitty’s German upbringing, and the money that had saved Winloch and the Winslows from financial ruin, which had, conveniently, begun to flow just as Hitler ascended. The financial records Galway had alluded to, which showed money starting to come in in the early thirties. I would bide my time. Do my research. And then, almost certainly, if I asked the right questions and found the right records, I would be able to prove—or at least provide a compelling argument—that the Winslows had stolen from murdered and encamped Jews. Blood money made off the backs of Kitty’s massacred countrymen.

  But that was just the beginning. A drop in the bucket. Because if Indo had been right, what the Winslows had gained from the wartime slaughter was not only financial but—probably even more fruitful—an instruction, the blueprint they had been able to apply over and over again as time pressed on. What had she said? “The Far East. Darkest Africa. Central America.” I didn’t know my history as well as some, but I knew that war had ravaged the world in the twentieth century. Birch’s words played over in my mind: “They forget how many people I know.” The Winslows had been making money off the world’s misery. They had taken from the disenfranchised and displaced by siphoning money and goods from those parts of the world where no one would notice them missing.

  Perhaps I’d be able to provide the evidence for a legal case against the Winslows, but, even if not, I could at least mar their reputation. Make it so Birch could never do business again. Get the IRS involved.

  By the time I heard the motor coming up the bend behind me, my pace was almost a run.

  The girls flit around my ankles like chickadees, chirping as we lay out the feast. I shoo them off halfheartedly. Once they lift away, I shield my eyes from the midsummer sun and wat
ch them stream toward the tennis courts, laughing as they go, wishing I was still a girl myself.

  This is, at last, the place I imagined it to be that first bright morning I awoke in Ev’s bedroom and watched the shadows play over the ceiling. The place in which children can and should run free, and the fears that haunt a mother’s heart—a slippery footfall, going out in a dinghy without a life preserver—are reasonable.

  Adam and Eve could have stayed in Eden only had they done their best to forget what the serpent had taught them about each other, and themselves. One cannot grow and thrive when the sun is clouded over, or drink from a well when it is poisoned.

  I lift my eyes as our matriarch descends the hill, a bucket of black-eyed Susans in her arms. She is an older woman now, and plumper in a way that pleases. Her cheekbones could no longer cut glass, but then, she no longer needs to. No one rushes to assist her, knowing she would swat away our arms, cluck violently at the suggestion she needs our help.

  She doesn’t.

  It was Tilde’s white Jaguar that pulled up behind me. I thought of darting into the forest, then laughed at my dramatics. All I had to do was move into the ditch, and she’d pass me by, gunning toward wherever she was headed.

  Instead, the car crawled to a halt beside me, its motor idling gently.

  She rolled down the passenger window. “Get in?”

  It was not a demand. I weighed my options. What was she going to do, mace me? I placed my fingertips against the metal handle and opened the door.

  The climate was supple in there. The air smelled of leather. Tilde had driving gloves on—I didn’t even know they made those anymore.

  “I know about the swastika,” I began. I considered going on, but I figured that was enough. A threat to break the silence.

  We sat together for a moment. I wondered if she was going to drive me somewhere, but no. “I hope you’ll reconsider,” she replied.

  I shook my head. “I’m telling.”