by Anbara Salam
“Yeah,” I said. My heart began a hollow pound.
Katherine squinted. “Yes to which? Siblings or only child?”
A roaring flush ran through my body. I pressed my fingernails into my palms. “Sorry?”
Katherine laughed. “Bridge, you are such a dreamer. Do you have any siblings or is it just you?”
I swallowed, pressing my fingernails harder into the flesh. “Just me,” I said at last.
Sylvia sighed. “That’s too bad. Although at least you don’t have to share your wardrobe.”
Katherine nudged her, and they started talking about garden party attire. I looked off into the bowl of the lake. My cheeks were burning. I could feel Isabella staring at me. I couldn’t bear to catch her eye. What was she thinking? Was she disappointed in me? Was she ashamed of my omission? Was it really an omission? At the academy it certainly felt like I was my own individual—liberated, independent, finally.
“So aren’t your parents dying to marry you off?” Katherine said, frowning.
“It hasn’t been raised,” I said stiffly. I looked down to see Isabella’s hand on my arm. She shot me a dazzling smile.
“Briddie’s mom is just as strict as mine,” Isabella said breathlessly. “No dating until after graduation. And her trust is all tied up until she’s twenty-one. Isn’t that right?”
After a moment, I nodded.
“Gee, that’s rum luck,” Sylvia said, the smoke from her cigarette billowing above the flashlight. “A no-dating rule? You may as well be a nun!”
Katherine laughed. “I’m sure your mom already has her mind set on the right suitor for you.” She winked at me conspiratorially. “I know what Irish Catholics are like.”
I opened my mouth and shut it again. Was it as easy as that? A convenient omission, a convenient vagueness. And there it was: total, glorious mediocrity. Meddling Catholic aunties and summer regattas. Boarding school hijinks and garden party silk. I was woozy with relief, exhilarated, askew. My eyes prickled.
“Do you think the nuns ever regret it?” Sylvia was saying. “Missing out on having a family?”
Katherine pinched her on the shoulder. “Darling Sibbs, you can tell you didn’t go to a Catholic prep school. I think those gals knew what they were letting themselves in for.”
“I suppose they’re all so ancient it doesn’t matter anyhow,” Sylvia said.
Isabella leaned back on the blanket to cross her legs. “But some of the nuns are practically our age, like Sister Teresa.”
Sylvia blinked. “Which one is she?”
Katherine nudged her. “Heavens, what’s wrong with you, Sibbs? She’s the one that fetches the mail, remember?”
“Oh, right.” Sylvia tapped herself on the head. “Gosh, how awful it sounds. Having just one year where you can speak. You’d have to fit everything you ever wanted to say into it!”
Katherine laughed. “You’d never stop talking.”
Isabella chewed her fingernail. “And then to be cooped up here the rest of your life. What a waste.”
Sylvia grimaced. “Lord save us from a lifetime at all-girls’ school.”
Isabella crossed herself ironically. “And at least we’re free to leave.”
I stared at her. “I think she’s lucky,” I said. “I wish we never had to leave.”
11.
September
The first signs of fall appeared in late September—yellow grass, crumpled mushrooms unfurling in mossy clefts along the hillside path. And so our sunbathing took on a frantic quality—Sylvia even complained she couldn’t wear her bikini in the courtyard. On weekend afternoons, Isabella and I followed the orchard path down and then north along the border of the lake, where we had discovered a stream that bubbled over a jutting outcrop. It wasn’t a waterfall exactly, but a thin trickle that shattered onto the rocks by the shoreline, prompting a cloud of condensation that caught the sunlight in rainbows.
Isabella and I went there as often as we could and spread our towels in the haze of smashed droplets. We were close enough to the lake that pulses of coolness from the water mitigated the heat of the day still burning on our backs. The air smelled sharply of ozone, like a faraway thunderstorm.
Isabella perched happily, swinging her legs over the rocks. Water from the falls beaded on her skin.
“This is heavenly,” she sighed, tipping her head back.
I made a murmur of agreement, although I couldn’t get my words straight. The afternoon heat spun in my brain and made me dozy and stupid. I was dimly aware that the pebbles under my towel were sharp and uncomfortable, but I was loath to move.
Standing up with difficulty, I hopped over to the shoreline rocks, which were furry with lichen. I stepped onto the unsteady, slimy stones just under the lake’s edge and launched myself in the rest of the way. The water was warmer at the surface and icy at the bottom. It smelled dank and green, like crushed plants, and as I treaded water my feet kicked through the mulchy softness of underwater weeds.
I swam backward toward the center of the lake and looked up at the tufty birds’ nests huddled into cracks in the rock, the fruit trees at the top of the hill, and between the boughs, the cloaked figures of the sisters, startlingly white.
There was a loud splash, and Isabella’s face bobbed toward me, the tips of her ears parting her wet hair.
“It’s so cold at the bottom,” she said. “I keep thinking something might reach up and grab me.”
I shuddered. “Don’t say that.” I looked down into the depths of the water, and although it was clear, the weeds and silt at the bottom made it impossible to see much farther than my own kicking feet.
Isabella took a deep breath, dove under the water, then clasped the arch of my right foot and yanked it downward. I yelped.
She broke the surface spluttering and laughing. I kicked out at her. “You beast,” I said.
“I think you mean the beast of the lake.” She paddled around me in a circle to face the spa. “This would make a super flick. The Beast of the Lake, with the creepy old hospital and all us innocent young girls.”
I had a sudden moment of daring.
“I hear the beast of the lake needs a virgin sacrifice,” I said, and I allowed myself to sink lower into the water. I popped the catch of my bikini top and pulled the halter over my head, then kicked up toward the surface. I held it aloft, spitting water. “But what will tempt him from his slumber?”
Isabella shrieked with laughter; she could barely keep her head above the water. Bobbing down as she concentrated, she wriggled out of her own halter and we both peeled off our shorts. She was laughing so much she was gargling water.
“You’re no use,” I said, flicking the straps in her direction. “I said a virgin sacrifice.”
She squealed, swimming toward me with wide eyes and trying to kick me under the water, blowing froth from her lips. “I think you’re the beast of the lake,” she cried between giggles, gripping my arm. Her fingertips were already wrinkled on my wrist. I thought of how if our bodies were to touch, they would slip over each other, like seals.
Isabella sighed and, in one motion, pushed back toward the rocks. With a groan, she levered herself out of the water onto her elbows and threw her wet bikini toward her bag. Her hair was sticking to her back, her buttocks tan as the rest of her. She hadn’t been bluffing about nude bathing. There were no marks on her skin from her swimsuit, and her skin was a chestnut color, darker on her forearms and her shins. She folded her arms over her breasts and shook her hair so drops of water scattered and fell upon the hot stones.
I watched her from the lake, suddenly vertiginous. As if I were seeing her from a terrible distance, or her image was a miniature projection from a movie reel. She turned to the side, and I saw the faint lines of stretch marks on the top of her thighs and the black hair between her legs. She leaned over and threw her towel over her hea
d, rubbing so vigorously her skin trembled.
I was immediately aware of my own nakedness. Compared to her, I was one of those pale grubs that worms to the surface of the soil to find rain. I tried to scramble back into my shorts, but they had loosened in the water and become so voluminous it was even more difficult to wriggle into them. The halter I merely hung around my neck. I kicked over to the rocks and pulled myself up with a great deal of difficulty. I was so weightless in the water that the heaviness of my limbs was a disappointing hindrance. I dragged myself backward over a sharp rock, scraping my thighs. I tried to attach the hooks of my top, although my fingers were numb and clumsy with cold. Finally they caught. I scraped the suit around and pulled the wet fabric over my breasts and around my neck.
Isabella was lying out on her back, naked in the sun, with the towel over her face. I glanced quickly at the curve of her body and the water still glistening on the line of her belly. Turning away, I unpinned my hair from the bun and combed through it with my fingers.
“You look nice with your hair like that.” Isabella’s voice. She evidently was still able to see me from the shade of the towel.
My cheeks prickled. “Thank you,” I said. “You look nice too.” After a moment, my pulse jousting into my throat, I said, “You’re always beautiful, though. To me.”
Isabella laughed. “Darling Briddie,” she said, blowing me a wet kiss. “Thank God we’re here together.”
12.
September
The following Saturday, I was sitting at the chair under the window in my room trying to write a letter to Rhona. I kept pausing, as if there was something clogged in the nib of my pen. It felt poisonous to write to her when I had tossed her aside so easily. But I forced myself to continue as a kind of penance. After all, she would never find out I had sidestepped the finer details of my background. I had already taken pains to briefly reference my absentminded cousin Rhona, outfitting her with a pet Dalmatian and an interest in rowing, so there was no danger in leaving a letter for her in Donna Maria’s tray.
I tapped the lid of the pen against my teeth. I knew Rhona didn’t care much for Cosmati mosaics, so I searched for idle details to offer her. I described the girls’ outfits and jewelry, how Sally’s father was a gynecologist and how she didn’t seem to be the least bit embarrassed by it. How Patricia was a twin but they weren’t at all identical, and in fact her twin had buckteeth and a low hairline. I told her of how Elena had once come to Italian lessons wearing mismatched earrings.
With her characteristic clatter of elbow on doorknob, Isabella pushed open my door, tossing her straw hat onto the second bed.
“Briddie, I’ve got a treat!” she said.
“You scared me—”
“Sister Teresa is going to take us to the spa,” she said, bouncing on the mattress.
I flapped the letter in the air to dry the ink. “Oh,” I said. “You want to hang out with the nuns?”
Isabella frowned. “She’s not really a nun.”
“Of course she is.” I folded the letter in half. “Nancy said—”
Isabella cut me off. “Fine—technically, she’s a nun.” She waved her hand. “But she’s the speaking liaison. So she gets to go all over the place. Wherever she likes.”
“She does?” I pictured Sister Teresa browsing the aisles of a department store, idly perusing a pile of woolen berets. I stifled a giggle.
“Yeah. I got talking to her out in the yard—” She pointed out into the orchard, where I knew for a fact she never went.
“What were you doing out there?”
“Just walking.” She tossed her hat in the air and caught it. “What do you say? Come on and forget about your boring letter.”
“OK,” I said reluctantly. I pictured Rhona’s reaction to me knocking off her letter to go out with Isabella—tutting and pursing her lips in her best impersonation of “older sister disapproval.” I’d spent two years of high school fastidiously keeping them apart, but Rhony’s eyes always narrowed when I spoke about Isabella, as if Isabella were a circus tiger that hadn’t quite been tamed.
“Don’t you want to?”
“No, it’s fine—but—” She was watching me with a frown. “But is there anything new to see? We were just there last week.”
“Ah.” Isabella pressed her lips together to make a chipmunk face. “You spoiled the surprise—this time we get to go inside the building!” She leaped to her feet.
“Oh?” I didn’t see what was so exciting about that.
“We can go ghost hunting.”
I frowned at her. “Sister Teresa is taking us ghost hunting?”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course not. But while we look around we can keep an eye out for anything spooky to tell the girls about later.”
I tried to picture something indistinctly ominous and settled on a silver locket swinging from an iron doorknob.
“Anyway, hurry up—she’s waiting for us.”
I felt harassed. I hadn’t been expecting to leave; she could have given me more notice. I pulled the T-shirts out of my closet and scrabbled among them for my hat. Isabella kept glancing over her shoulder toward the door.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” I said, stepping over the pile of clothes.
Sister Teresa was waiting for us by the side door. She was wearing a long tunic over white pants, and her hair was tied in a white scarf knotted at the back of her head.
“Ready?” she said, smiling.
Isabella and I nodded.
“Follow me,” Sister Teresa said. As she turned, I could make out two triangles of her skin at the nape of her neck between the scarf and her tunic. There was something sweet and endearingly clumsy about this wardrobe mishap, like when a schoolgirl’s name tag sticks out of the collar of her uniform.
We walked down toward the spa along the shady path under the pines and climbed carefully over the rock ledge. Sister Teresa was walking faster than either of us, and Isabella and I struggled to keep up with her pace. Finally, we approached the gated, overgrown garden at the back of the spa, and Sister Teresa paused while we leaned against the railings and wiped our sweaty faces.
“It is a bit of squeeze,” she said, pointing to the gates.
Isabella grinned at me. “Here we go!” She clapped her hands expectantly. Sister Teresa crouched down and slipped through a gap between the railings where the ironwork had buckled. I maneuvered through with as much athletic grace as possible, conscious that Isabella was watching me from behind. I wriggled through the brambles and took a step forward. It was a graveyard. Three rows of white stone crosses marked lumpy hillocks in the soil. At the back, closest to the building, were four crumbling headstones sunk and tilted into the earth. I shuddered, then rebuked myself for being so naive. Of course it was a graveyard. I don’t know why I hadn’t expected it, since I knew it had been a sanitarium and a hospital.
The quality of the light had changed, filtered through the yew trees. The earth was littered with spines from the trees and the scarlet, gummy spittle of crushed yew berries. A sparrow in the hedgerow cocked its head toward us. The back of the spa building was visible behind the trees. In the middle was a ramp leading to a large wooden door. The back wall had six windows with ornamental frames, their glass panes fractured here and there. The south side of the building was shadowed by the aftereffects of the fire, with a trail of blackened bricks that led up to the roof. At the top was a gaping hole where the ceiling had burned away, and for the first time I noticed an empty aperture where a clock must once have been. Sister Teresa was waiting by one of the grave markers with her hands folded.
“Oh,” Isabella said from behind me. She stopped short and looked around her. “It’s so creepy,” she said.
Sister Teresa laughed, and both Isabella and I turned to her in amazement. Her laugh was high and girlish. For the first time, I wondered how old she was.
> “You’ll grow used to it,” she said, smiling.
“Jeez, well, how often do you come here?” Isabella’s voice was exceedingly loud in the space, and I thought of how to Sister Teresa’s ears, we must sound like a horrible cacophony of jackdaws, jabbering nonsense.
“Quite often,” she said.
Noticing the condition of the graves, it was now obvious the sisters must go there regularly. The markers were polished white, and by the corner of the hedge stood a broom. I nudged Isabella and pointed over to where I spied the broom. Behind it, in the shadows, was a scythe.
Isabella snorted with nervous laughter, and we clutched each other, giggling.
Sister Teresa glanced in the direction of the scythe but apparently didn’t see the source of our amusement, and instead I saw her eyes follow the lines of the graves. As Isabella and I walked up the central path toward the building, Sister Teresa leaned over one of the older graves and picked a withered bundle of flowers from the stone. She tossed this into the hedge, retrieved a tiny pair of silver scissors from the pocket of her pants, and cut a spray of pink dog roses and placed it on the grave.
“Do you do that for all the graves?” I said, and my voice boomed in the space, growing and stretching out into the garden.
“No,” Sister Teresa said. She ran her hand along the top of the stone. “We’re not supposed to have favorites, but these are mine. Their names are gone, but we must not forget them.”
It was a lovely sentiment, but I suddenly felt queer. Imagine spending so much time with silent women that you have favorite dead people.
Sister Teresa crossed to the back door of the spa. Isabella inched in front of me toward the door, but I looked behind us at the grave markers. Their faces were pitted and crumbling, the etchings worn away to shallow scratches.
“So, you don’t get creeped out?” Isabella was saying to Sister Teresa. “Briddie and I found the ossuary at the back of the chapel and we almost lost our minds.”
