by Luanne Rice
“You never have to feel this way again.”
She thought of the words Joe Connor had said to her, and she wondered what he had meant. She looked at her glass, took another sip. Skye no longer wanted to feel this way. She felt empty and desperate and sick and scared and ready to get better.
She wondered what she would have to do, and at the same time she wondered how a person could call a person on a ship at sea.
AUGUSTA’S GRANDCHILDREN WERE SPENDING THE DAY with her. They were outside, running in mad circles around the yard, loving the world of Firefly Hill as their mother and aunts had as children. Augusta sat on the porch with her tray of drink things and a few old scrapbooks, wishing the kids would tire themselves out and come sit with her. If only she had felt this way thirty years ago.
Augusta had not enjoyed her own children enough when they were young. The worst part was, she had realized it even at the time. She had had no choice in the matter. Like an illness she couldn’t cure, she was consumed with their father. The best she could do for her daughters, as much as she loved them, was to manage them. Plunk them down with paints and paper; hand them seeds and dirt and a flowerpot; tell them to write poems about their school day. Being with their father had always taken top priority.
When they were tiny she had let them bake cookies and freeze Jell-O in ice cube trays, making a complete mess of the kitchen. She had let them eat their favorite foods, never forced them to have vegetables or fish. The year Caroline was twelve, she had made herself macaroni and cheese every night.
Anything to keep them occupied, so Augusta could be with Hugh. She had been so afraid of losing him. She seduced him every chance she got. Wore negligees in broad daylight just to get his attention. Read art history, studied the collections of great museums to help him further his career. Instead of helping her daughters with their homework.
Hugh had been her obsession. When he was away, she had assumed he was with other women. It drove her crazy, dominated her thoughts. She had tried to concentrate on her daughters, but her own insecurity was much too huge. When Skye would beg for a story or Clea would need help with her music lessons, Augusta would tell them to ask Caroline. So Augusta could be with Hugh.
Augusta’s eyes filled, just thinking of him. She had loved him so much, and he had been so difficult. His work came first, then his fun, and somewhere down the list, Augusta and the girls. Or the girls and Augusta. She had never been quite sure of the order, and her jealousy and guilt over this fact grew even greater after the accident at Redhawk.
Hugh’s love for the girls showed in their portraits. Especially the ones of Caroline. Girl in a White Dress, his most famous work, had caught her beauty, fragility, and solemnity. Augusta still remembered the day he sketched her, right there at Firefly Hill. Augusta had watched, feeling like the wicked stepmother in “Snow White,” seething with the wish that Hugh was painting her instead.
Caroline had worn a straight white evening gown. She had stood on the porch, leaning against one of the columns, staring out to sea. Her eyes full of troubled passion, she had the air of a girl in a Greek tragedy. Augusta remembered staring at her oldest daughter, wondering what could make her feel such deep and helpless longing. The expression on her face was authentic sorrow, and it had wrenched Augusta’s heart. Hugh had captured the emotion perfectly.
Flipping through the scrapbooks, Augusta sipped her martini and called up memory after memory. She found the articles she had clipped after Girl in a White Dress became such a sensation at the Venice Bienniale. Glancing through the piece in ARTnews, she ran her fingers over the photo of the painting. The colors were true: Caroline’s glossy dark hair, the near-blue tinge of her columnar white dress, the dark blues and grays of the sea and sky.
But it was the look in Caroline’s eyes that still took Augusta’s breath away. Stunning and haunted. Augusta, and many of the most prominent art critics of the time, had never seen a portrait like it. Staring at Caroline’s face as painted by her father, Augusta still wondered: What had caused such anguish? The deaths, she was sure. James Connor and Andrew Lockwood.
Tired of thinking about it, Augusta looked up. She did penance for the past every day, watching Skye dissolve. She couldn’t mend that damage, but she could try to be a good grandmother.
“Children, aren’t you tired?” she called, her hands cupped to her mouth. “Mark, Maripat! Come on the porch and have a snack.”
“What kind of snack?” Mark asked, out of breath.
“Lemon squares,” Augusta said, holding out the blue china plate. “I made them myself.”
Each child took one. So polite, they said “thank you” and chewed slowly.
“Have another,” Augusta said. “Go on. It won’t spoil your dinner, and your parents never need to know. Would you like to see some old pictures?”
The children nodded. Augusta made room for them on either side of her. They were towheads, with Clea’s beautiful skin and Peter’s serious eyes. Mark rested his head on Augusta’s shoulder; it made her smile from sheer joy.
Abruptly, she put away the Girl in a White Dress scrapbook. And she pulled out one from truly ancient times, her days as a schoolgirl in Providence and Narragansett. She had had a simple, happy childhood. The kind she had always intended to give her girls.
“There’s my mother and father, our dog, Spunky…” she began.
“Are those your cats?” Maripat asked, pointing at Mew-Mew and Licorice.
“Oh, yes,” Augusta said. “We adored our pets. They were just like members of the family!”
“Mommy used to go hunting,” Mark said proudly. “She shot a wild pig once.”
Augusta blinked. “Wild animals are different,” she said stoically, thinking of her daughters hunting. “They can be very, very dangerous.”
Eager to get back to happier thoughts, Augusta paged through pictures of her family on the Block Island ferry, in the Arcade between Westminster and Weybosset streets, on the beach at Newport, at her ballet recital in the church hall.
“Who’s that?” Mark asked, pointing at a grainy photo of a small dog.
“Oh,” Augusta said. “That’s Tiny.”
“Tiny’s cute—a Chihuahua,” Maripat asked, smiling at his skinny body and oversized head, his little tongue hanging out. He sat on a satin pillow on Augusta’s bed.
The children were waiting, their big eyes looking up at her.
“Tiny,” Augusta said, sighing. “Would you like to hear about him?”
“Yes!” Mark and Maripat said at once.
And so, because they had asked so politely, Augusta told them.
It had all started one morning in early June, when Augusta was nine. She had gone out in her dinghy to fish for blues. The sun was high, but the day was chilly. Anchored just beyond Pequot Island, she cast her line into the water. Fish were biting. The blues were running, and they fed upon one another in a cannibalistic frenzy. Augusta caught a six-incher in the process of being eaten by a larger fish.
“The sea roiled with blood and fish guts. Seagulls screamed overhead. You can just imagine. Blues in a feeding frenzy,” she said. She told them about seeing something swimming on the surface. At first she had thought it was a shark fin, heading for the blues, on the scent of chum. But it had ears.
“Granny!” Maripat exclaimed.
“Yes, darling. It was Tiny.”
“A dog? In the middle of the Sound?” Mark asked.
“Swimming straight for the blues. Now, you know, bluefish have needle-sharp teeth. They travel in gigantic schools, and when feeding, they have been known to massacre anything in their way.”
“Granny, we know about bluefish,” Maripat said patiently.
“Fine. Anyway, I scooped Tiny from the teeth of death. He was rail-thin, shivering like mad. Half dead. The poor little Chihuahua, I thought. He must have fallen off a yacht passing by.”
“You took him home,” Mark said.
“Sneaked him in. We already had a dog and two cats, and m
y parents said no more. So I took him up to my room….” Augusta closed her eyes, remembering the cats. She felt a catch in her throat, sipped her drink to push it down. “Tried to feed him Spunky’s food, but he wouldn’t eat.”
“He was probably so tired from falling overboard,” Maripat said, touching Tiny’s picture with her small finger. “Poor little fella.”
“Yes.” Augusta stared at the photo. She had taken it herself, posing Tiny on her pink satin pillow. He had sat there, so compliantly. She sighed. “Wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t take water. He was shivering like mad, chilled to the bone from his time in the sea. I honestly thought he was going to die.”
“Did he?” Maripat asked fearfully.
Augusta paused. “No. That night I took him into my bed. I brought the kitties in with us to keep him warm. We all huddled together, like a family of foxes in a den. Nice and warm, under my lovely down comforter.”
“And you warmed him up?” Mark asked hopefully. “And he lived?”
“Oh, yes. He lived,” Augusta said, cocking her eyebrow. She gave the children another lemon square. Maripat hesitated, but Mark gobbled his right up.
“And he got along with Spunky and Mew-Mew and Licorice?” Maripat asked, licking the powdered sugar off her fingers.
“Well, no.”
“No?” Both children asked, looking disturbed. Augusta began to wonder whether she should have started this story at all. She tried to steer it back to something sweet and cozy.
“Finally, he felt like drinking. I gave him milk from one of my doll’s bottles. Then I poured some more into a bowl. I had to go to school, but before I left, I let him have the rest of my cereal.”
“Oh, he must have been so happy!”
“Mmm. I went off to school with Spunky—he always followed me. I got such good marks, children,” Augusta said, going off on a tangent. “My teachers said I was a star pupil!”
“What about Tiny?” Maripat asked shyly.
“Well, I left him in my room so my mother wouldn’t see him.”
“ ’Cause you hadn’t convinced her to let you keep him yet,” Mark said reasonably. “Did you leave the cats to keep him company?”
“Yes,” Augusta said.
“And did they become best friends?” Maripat asked, happily sensing the end of the story.
“No,” Augusta said, knowing she was in too deep. “He ate them.”
Maripat’s mouth fell open. Mark just stared at the picture album. Trying to comfort them, Augusta scattered some loose photos. Maripat tried to hold her tears inside, but they spilled out. “Why?” she asked.
“He wasn’t a Chihuahua!” Augusta explained, wanting their sympathy. “It was horrible for me, returning home from school and finding cat fur and blood everywhere. Cat limbs all over the floor, chewed to the bone.”
“Mew-Mew, Licorice!” Maripat cried.
Tearfully, Augusta told them about Tiny grinning at the end of Augusta’s bed, covered with blood. His little tongue hanging out, a demoniacal mask on his face, his fangs dripping with blood as he sprang for her throat just before she slammed the door shut.
“He was a bandicoot, darlings,” Augusta said, eyes shining. “A Vietnamese water rat, one of the most bloodthirsty species of mammal on earth. The veterinarian who came to remove what was left of the cats surmised that the bandicoot had come across the sea on a freighter, whose route had originated in Asia somewhere, and had fallen into our bay.”
Just then, Clea walked in to pick up the kids.
They took one look at her and started to wail. Clea dropped the bag of vegetables she was carrying. Opening her arms, she hugged them to her body. They sobbed against their mother’s breast.
“Mom,” Clea said, panicked. “What happened?”
“Mommy, Granny had a horrible pet that ate her cats,” Mark sobbed. “An evil pet who looked like a Chihuahua but wasn’t.”
“You told them about Tiny?” Clea asked with disbelief.
“Well, yes,” Augusta said defensively. “I did. They asked!”
“If they asked to play with matches, would you let them? If they wanted dessert before dinner, would you give it to them?”
Augusta tightened her lips, feeling awful. She didn’t dare mention the lemon squares. All she had wanted was to spend a few hours with her grandchildren, have them love her a little more. She had thought the story of Tiny would be scary and thrilling.
“I thought children loved scary stories,” she said.
Clea just shook her head. She eased Mark and Maripat off the porch, into the yard. Augusta watched her reach down, take first her daughter’s hand, then her son’s. She walked them toward the beach stairs, and they stood at the top, facing out toward the sea and listening to the waves. Their voices carried, and after a minute the tones of anxiety were gone and they were just a mother and two children talking.
Her chin wobbling, Augusta took another sip of her martini. It tasted warm, watered-down. She had never meant to make the children cry. Augusta had given them the lemon squares, shown them the old pictures only to make them love her. That’s all Augusta had ever wanted from any of the children in her life; from any of the people, really.
She glanced around for Homer, the only creature who seemed to take her for exactly who she was, faults and all. But he had wandered off on one of his mysterious outings. Even he was sick of her, and Augusta didn’t really blame him. She felt like quite a failure. It always seemed to work out wrong.
“I am so mad at my mother,” Clea told Peter.
“What did she do?” he asked.
Clea paused. She was sitting in the curve of his arm, watching their children swim back and forth in the pool. The night was clear. The Pleiades were bright, directly over the chimney, and all the other stars spread down the sky.
“She upset the kids. She told them a really awful story about a pet she had when she was little.”
“How bad could a pet story be?”
“Well,” Clea said, knowing this fell in the “only in our family” category, “it eviscerated her cats and could have killed my mother in her sleep. I’d say that’s good for a few nightmares, wouldn’t you?”
“Wow,” Peter said. “I never heard about that one.”
“Poor Mom,” Clea said. “She doesn’t get it. She’s always been the same. It’s as if she wants to do the right thing but can’t. She never could.”
“Lost in her own world.”
“She’s so anxious about being loved, she ends up driving people away.”
“She should have a little faith.”
“In other people? I don’t know…my father wasn’t the faithful type.”
“In herself,” Peter said. “She’s a good woman, and she should trust her instincts. I’ve heard her say she wished she hadn’t let your father take you hunting.”
“That would have been a good one to trust,” Clea said wryly. Her mother had tried to please him instead of listening to her own maternal instincts. How had that even been possible?
Peter and Clea sat quietly for a while. Clea felt drowsy, lulled by Peter’s hand stroking her hair and the sounds of her children playing in the pool. She could get lost in feeling sorry for her mother. How awful it must be to go through life shielded from the truth. To be so afraid of your own feelings, you could fail to protect your children.
“Do you want to swim?” Peter asked.
“No, thanks. I’m so relaxed, I don’t feel like putting on my suit.”
“Just look at that,” Peter said.
“What?” Clea asked.
“How confident Maripat seems in the water this summer. Remember how scared she used to be?”
“She would never go in the deep end,” Clea said. Last year, when they had installed the pool, Maripat would sit for hours on the curved steps. She would hang on to the side, pulling herself around. Or she would swim the width of the pool and only with her father right beside her—gasping for air with terror in her eyes.
But this sum
mer everything had changed. Clea had driven her to swimming lessons every morning. While Mark played soccer or went to the beach with his friends, Maripat spent hours in swim class, making friends and swimming alongside her teacher.
Peter and Clea now watched their daughter glide back and forth, stopping to splash her brother but neither afraid nor reliant on him. She swam on her own, lost in her thoughts, her strong strokes taking her where she wanted to go.
“She loves it,” Peter said.
“She does,” Clea agreed proudly. She had taken steps to help her daughter conquer her fear, to help Maripat feel strong and confident in something she had decided to do. It didn’t take leaving her alone on a mountain, to pitch a tent and kill her food and lie awake listening to animals moving outside. Just driving her to swimming lessons.
Caroline was out of breath. She had spent the evening climbing Mount Serendipity, taking the north trail, the one that ran almost straight up the granite ravine. The night was black. It favored the hunted. The stars had come down to strike the crest. From the ridge she had looked southeast and seen the Meteor’s lights shining like stars in the Sound. Staring, she had wondered how much longer Joe would be there.
She had seen an owl flying low through the pines, starlight on its chestnut wings. Honeysuckle grew along the trail, and she now climbed down, breathing its sweet scent of summer. The trail forked halfway down. The wide path went straight to Black Hall Center. Melancholy without knowing exactly why, Caroline took the other, narrower one, that curved left toward the Ibis River.
Almost immediately Caroline saw the fox.
He was hunting along an old stone wall, skulking so close to the ground, she thought at first he was a shadow. His coat was glossy red, the tip of his tail pure white. Caroline stopped dead. She watched him stalk a chipmunk. He crept slowly, stone by stone. His ruff stood on end, his snout pointed straight at the prey. But then he heard Caroline.
