by Luanne Rice
“Because my grandfather wanted the orchard to continue,” Chloe said. “So badly, that he put a clause in his will about either of his sons having the right to override the other, if the orchard could keep going.”
“Did he love the land more than his sons?”
Chloe held the receiver, listening to the breeze in the branches outside. Moonlight struck the apple blossoms, filling all the tres with white light. The orchard looked magical, as if she could disappear into it and be happy forever. The dirt bikes were absent tonight.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think he thought the land would keep everyone together.”
“That’s what keeps parents going,” Mona said. “The idea that something will keep the family together. Having kids, saving the family land . . .”
“Do you think any of it works?” Chloe asked, hearing the voices upstairs rise.
“Ask our real mothers,” Mona said.
Chloe stared out at the gauzy white trees. She nodded and didn’t say a word. She didn’t need to. In the silence, she could hear Mona’s voice catch in a tiny, private sob.
CHAPTER 10
On Sunday morning, Chloe was up and out so early, Sharon Chadwick didn’t even have the chance to fix her a good breakfast. Not that Chloe would eat bacon and eggs, the traditional Sunday repast, but Sharon would have cooked her oatmeal or toasted her an English muffin, if given the opportunity.
Instead, she puttered around the kitchen, preparing Eli’s. She grated cheddar cheese, chopped a tomato, unwrapped some bacon. Separating the thick slices, she placed them in the nonstick frying pan. She set the long maple table with checked placemats and matching cloth napkins, terra-cotta plates, and brown earthenware mugs.
While the bacon sizzled, she brewed coffee. She heard Eli on the stairs, his tread heavy. Her heart pounded. They had gone to bed angry with each other. The emotions were a fever in her head, making her feel too hot, almost delirious. Her back was stiff, her neck bent over like a staff as she stood over the stove. He silently entered the room, came up behind her, and kissed the back of her neck.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Sharon nodded. Words were trapped inside. She wanted to cry. They had so much; why weren’t they better able to make each other happy? They always seemed to be living at the limit of their checkbook; they were bewildered by their teenager; they didn’t hold each other the way they had so long ago.
“I’m sorry, too,” she said.
He took his seat at the head of the table. She had walked out to the curb earlier, gotten the Sunday paper, placed it on the bench. He reached for it now.
“Where’s Chloe?” he asked.
“Working,” she said, glancing up with a raised eyebrow.
“That goddamn stand. Am I too old to pound the crap out of my baby brother?” He shook his head. But Sharon felt relieved. Bonding together against Dylan’s plans seemed to strengthen them.
“I know, I know. He thinks he’s doing us a favor, giving her a job. But the stand—for the love of God! That eyesore!”
“It’s a puzzle, that’s for sure,” Eli said, “how Dylan can forget how embarrassed he used to be to have an apple stand on the property. He was so cool with the girls, but he’d never want them to come over—”
“I remember,” Sharon said. She whisked the eggs, poured them into the pan for an omelet. She had known the Chadwick brothers since high school. Back then, development had just taken hold in the valley, and kids who lived on farms were teased for being backward and holdouts, whose families were stopping the progress of new business.
“I don’t want the other kids talking about Chloe the way they used to talk about us,” he said.
“I know,” Sharon said. Kids had made fun, calling the Chadwick brothers “apple pickers”—but never within their hearing.
“She’s so sensitive. Goes to pieces if a bird falls out of the nest. All this trouble at the grocery store over hurting animals . . .”
Sharon didn’t reply. Thoughtfully, she sprinkled the cheese and chopped tomatoes into the eggs. She didn’t agree with her husband. Chloe had a huge heart, it was true, but Eli was confusing sensitivity with strength.
“Chloe stands up for herself,” Sharon said. “And for others.”
“Well, she hasn’t spent a summer working at the stand yet,” Eli said. “They’ll call her ‘hayseed’ and ‘apple picker,’ all the other names they used to call me and Dylan.”
“Things like that don’t bother her,” Sharon said.
Eli snorted, shaking his head. “Well, they should. It matters, what people think. She’s so busy saving the world, she’ll wind up losing in her own life. She’s at an age where she has to start thinking about getting ahead. College is coming. . . . But does she care about sports, the yearbook, the school paper? Things that would help her get into good schools? No. Does she care about a decent job she can put on her resume?”
“I know, I know,” Sharon said, glancing at Eli, wanting to steer him off this topic. The day had been off to such a good start. . . .
“Ace Fontaine would have promoted her to cashier—by Memorial Day, he told me. A good job, lots of responsibility, handling cash—that would be her entrée to so many other opportunities. The bank, a law firm, heck—an insurance office! She has to learn to work her way up!”
“Breakfast is almost ready here,” Sharon said.
“What’s she going to work her way up to from the farm stand? The barn? A stable? She’s going backward, not forward . . .”
Sharon folded the omelet in half, slid it on a plate, put it on the table. She forked the bacon—extra-crispy, the way Eli liked it—onto a paper towel, let the grease absorb for a moment. She thought of Chloe’s tirade about hogs in their stalls, unable to move or see the sunlight or scratch their hindquarters. Just then she felt an itch behind her leg. She shook it off. Chloe had a way of getting to her, in the deepest ways, when she least expected it.
“Mmm, great breakfast,” Eli said, leaning across the table to kiss her.
“Thank you,” she said, filling the coffee mugs.
“I’m sorry to get so worked up,” he said, shaking his head and digging in.
“You want the best for her.”
“She’s just, it’s just, she’s so . . .” he paused, looking up. “So different.”
Sharon tried to laugh. “Welcome to life with a fifteen-year-old. All our friends say it’s crazy time. And will be, for the next three years—at least. Teenagers are aliens from another planet. They’re different by nature.”
“I wonder if that’s it,” he said. “Or whether . . .”
Sharon forked up a piece of omelet, her chest constricting.
“She’s so different from us because . . .” he began.
“Don’t, Eli. She’s ours. We’re hers. We’re a family.”
“Sometimes I look at her, and, so help me, I wonder . . .” He closed his eyes.
“Eli,” Sharon said, glancing at the back door, praying Chloe wasn’t standing just outside. “She’s a teenager. That’s all it is. Stop before she hears you.”
“I know. I’m sorry,” he said. He ate some bacon, drank some coffee. His eyes looked worried. The situation with Ace had shamed him. Eli was proud of his position in the community. He insured the teachers union and the priests at their parish. He faithfully attended the Rotary, and he couldn’t stand the idea of people knowing the trouble Chloe had caused at Ace’s store. In spite of that reality, Sharon knew his present unhappiness had much more to do with his brother than Chloe.
Even though Dylan was younger by four years, Eli had always been in his brother’s shadow. Dylan was the athletic, popular daredevil in high school; Eli had worked his way through URI—slogging from dawn till dark right here, in the family orchard. Dylan’s basketball talent and charming ways had gotten him into Brown University. Shaking the orchard’s proverbial pollen off his shoulders, he had gone to the Ivy League and never looked back.
He was a c
ollege basketball star, All-Ivy his sophomore year, All-American his junior and senior years. He had rich girlfriends, wealthy mentors, all of whom treated him in ways Eli could only imagine. The family of one girlfriend took him to Europe; another took him sailing to Bermuda. He was recruited for a job in “the government.” Big secret, no one was supposed to know, but of course everyone guessed: Was it the CIA, the FBI? Dylan never talked about it. And Eli never got the chance to work it out of him because, guess what? Dylan never came home.
He lived the bachelor’s life in Washington, D.C., a brick town house in Georgetown. Sharon remembered visiting. She had been in awe of the tiny back garden, a verdant jewel with ivy and peonies and a brick terrace and garden furniture probably worth more than her bedroom and living room sets combined. It wasn’t that he was rich; it was just that he knew how to spend his money. And from what they could see, he worked too hard to find a girlfriend or the time to dote on one. . . .
It was spring. Sharon remembered driving through the city. Dylan had treated them to dinner at Jean-Louis at the Watergate, and now they were all squeezed into his black Porsche 911S, having a tour of the city.
Dylan wore a holster. Sharon, scrunched in the seat with Eli, could feel Eli staring at the gun, wanting to ask about it.
“Go ahead,” Sharon whispered, excited to learn more herself. “He won’t mind.”
“Dyl, aren’t you off duty?” Eli asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“So, why the weapon?”
“It’s just the job,” Dylan said. “I never know.”
“When the bad guys are going to come out of the woodwork?” Eli chuckled.
Dylan nodded, not laughing.
“What do you do, anyway,” Sharon had asked. She’d known Dylan almost as long as Eli; although he’d never let her—or Eli or his parents, for that matter—get very close, she considered him like a younger brother. “We know you work for the government . . .” By then, they all knew he was in the U.S. Marshals Service.
“I protect and serve,” he said with a grin.
“What, you think we’re going to go back to Rhode Island and divulge your secret missions? Come on, be serious,” Eli said.
“I’m on a narcotics detail,” he said.
They waited for him to elaborate. Eli held out his hand, said, “Okay, c’mon . . .” When Dylan didn’t continue, Sharon felt Eli getting angry. Sitting on his lap, she could literally feel his tension coming through her skin. “I’m your brother—you can’t even trust me with some stories?”
“I trust you with everything,” Dylan said quietly. “Do you ever think I just don’t like to talk about it? Nothing to do with you . . .”
“Screw that,” Eli said. He’d had a lot of red wine with dinner, more than he was used to, and Sharon could feel his frustration building.
“Come on,” she said, nuzzling his neck. “Come on . . .”
Eli’s arms were around her; they were pressed so tightly together. He might have wanted to push her away, but it was impossible. As the car sped through the city, she felt him relax.
Dylan drove them around a corner. He glanced over for their reaction, as if oblivious to the tension in the car. Sharon gasped at the sheer beauty of cherry trees, white and luminous, surrounding the illuminated Jefferson Memorial, their reflections shimmering in the black waters of the Tidal Basin.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
“Nice,” Eli said. “We come all the way down from apple country, and you show us fruit trees.”
“How’s the orchard?” Dylan had asked.
“Falling to wrack and ruin,” Eli had said. “Dad’s holding on till the bitter end. We could have made five hundred grand from six different developers, but no . . .”
“He should hold on,” Dylan had said. The top was down, the fragrant air surrounding them.
“What do you mean?” Eli had asked.
“What the world doesn’t need is another housing development, another mall.”
“No, and we need another mortgage on our house. You know what the taxes cost on the land?”
“Yes,” Dylan said. And Eli went silent, because everyone knew that Dylan had been sending his parents money the last few years, to cover the orchard’s expenses. He wasn’t rich—just a government employee, however glamorous the family thought his job might be—but he felt passionate about the orchard. And that made him a big hero to their father.
“The land isn’t paying for itself,” Eli said gruffly. “So tell me—what does the world need, if not another development.”
“The world needs more fruit trees—right, Sharon?”
“No comment,” she said, trying to laugh. “I know better than to get between the Chadwick boys.”
“Look at this,” Dylan had said, waving at the cherry trees, a pink-white cloud floating above the water, reflecting the alabaster city. “When I meet the right girl, I’m going to propose to her right here. Or at home, in the orchard.”
Eli had finally broken out with a real, true hearty laugh, shaking his head. “Big lawman. You’ve got a goddamn Porsche, you fly around the country, you know all the best restaurants, and you think that’s romantic?”
“For one thing, it’s a used Porsche, and for another, yeah, I do,” Dylan had said.
“Tell him, Shar,” Eli had said, nudging her. “You’re a woman. Do you want James Bond to propose at a nice candlelit table in a French restaurant, or ankle-deep in the mud with mosquitoes buzzing all around and the smell of rotting apples in the air?”
Sharon had stared at Dylan’s face. He was Eli’s brother in every way: strong, square-jawed, sensitive deep eyes. But in this one way, they were so different: Eli had never left home, but seemed constantly to want to leave it behind. Dylan had left as fast as he could, but seemed to love the orchard more than anywhere in the world.
“As long as he finds the right girl,” Sharon had said, “the ‘where’ won’t matter.”
The brothers had laughed—could Dylan hear the bitter edge in his brother’s voice? Eli had congratulated her on her diplomacy, and Dylan had driven them past all the beautiful, illuminated monuments toward his home in Georgetown. The whole way there, both Sharon and Eli had their eyes on the clock.
They had been trying to conceive. They were always aware of the time of month, and that night was critical. They made love in the canopied bed in Dylan’s guest room; by then, the romance had long gone. By then, sex was a science. Monthly schedules of ovulation, graphs of egg production and sperm counts, fear of failure dooming them before the first embrace. There were some nights they didn’t even bother kissing.
When it was over, Sharon lay on her back, legs propped up on the wall, as her fertility specialist had recommended. Eli had turned on his side, fallen asleep—or pretended to. Sharon could still hear Dylan’s words, spoken in the car: his dream of proposing to the right girl, while the blossom-scented air had blown through the open car. It had sounded so romantic. Her heart had ached, wondering whether some lives could really be that simple.
Her heart ached now, again, sitting at the breakfast table while Eli read the paper. Dylan had found love; he had proposed to Amanda—not in an orchard, but on the deck of her father’s yacht, moored in Newport Harbor. The wedding had been on the lawn of Amanda’s family’s “cottage”: Maison du Soleil, one of the limestone palaces on Bellevue Avenue, with a perfect lawn sloping down to Cliff Walk and a wide view of the sea.
Dylan had been appointed to the U.S. Marshals office in New York City, and they’d moved from Georgetown to the Upper East Side. They had their very own baby, after one short year of marriage, the same year Sharon and Eli—after so many years of trying—had adopted Chloe.
Eli, Sharon, and Chloe; Dylan, Amanda, and Isabel.
The two Chadwick brothers, their families worlds apart in almost all ways. Struggling brother, rich brother. Adopted child, natural child. Small town, big city. Orchard life, Manhattan life.
But death was the great equal
izer; nothing brought a man back to the orchard faster than the murder of his wife and child. His father had died years ago, but the issue of selling—or continuing—the orchard surfaced recently, when Virginia became incapacitated.
Sharon closed her eyes. The apple-blossom smell came through the kitchen windows, transporting her back to that night in Georgetown. What if all of them had known then what they knew now?
She thought of Amanda, and what she had done. Would Dylan have ever forgiven her, if she had lived? Sharon knew the question could never be answered. And she opened her eyes, knowing that other questions never could, either. Some couldn’t even be asked.
She had stopped Eli just before: “Sometimes I look at her, and, so help me, I wonder . . .” The end of that question would have been: “I wonder what our real child would be like. . . .”
Sharon sometimes wondered the same thing. She just never let the words come out of her mouth. And what did “real child” mean, anyway? Because she loved Chloe more than anything in the world; she had, since that very first day. Chloe was realer than real. Sharon kept eating, even though she had lost her appetite. Good way to gain more weight, she told herself. She’d put on fifteen pounds in the last year. Life was stressful.
She heard Dylan’s tractor. Also, distant hammering: Chloe repairing the stand. She saw the muscles in Eli’s face tighten.
Yes, life was very stressful.
CHAPTER 11
That next week, Dylan set aside several days for planting. Spring had been dry so far, so the soil was packed hard, tough to move. A stiff breeze blew, and low gunmetal gray clouds scudded overhead. White petals drifted off the trees; new leaves were the size of squirrels’ ears, a sign that stripers were migrating into the Bay. Dylan’s leg, where he’d had the surgery, ached—a sure sign of rain. The steel pins never lied.
On his way to plant, he found some new furrows where dirt bike tires had scraped the earth, scarring some old roots. He bent down, tracing the wood with his hands. The bark was torn off, the wood underneath as raw and white as exposed bone. Dylan shook his head. Kids had always been drawn to the orchard, the paths and trails, the spookiness of all the gnarled trees. He’d have to put up some new fences.
