The Geometry of Sisters

by Luanne Rice

  My beautiful sister…

  I walk along the cliff hoping to see her, hear her. I pray to hear her voice in the wind. If I listen hard enough… Mary, speak to me.

  Sitting here in the reading room, holding this diary, I feel what Lucy and I have felt all along: it's the small things that count. Things you might barely notice. Rose Hawthorne; was Hawthorne House named for her? Maybe those young girls wouldn't talk to Aunt Katharine or my mother. But I bet they'd talk to me. I think I have to go there. I turn to Mary's diary again, to the words of Beatrice—another sister listening, hoping.

  Knowing she would see her sister again—because she had to.

  And so would I.

  Stephen sat in his small office, fresh from the triumph of Providence, looking over the schedule for Boston's math competition later that month. He had arranged for another large van, made room reservations at the Back Bay Inn, and found a place to take everyone for dinner. Redmond and Lucy were going along to support Beck. Maura too. Stephen thought of how traumatized she'd been in Providence, thinking she'd spotted Carrie.

  Stephen stared at the inn's website. He'd never been there, but it looked warm and inviting: a townhouse on Newbury Street, fireplaces in the rooms. When he and Patricia had gone to Boston, she'd always wanted to stay at the Ritz. She'd liked the grand old elegant brick hotel overlooking the Public Garden; they'd have drinks at the dark Ritz bar, then dinner in the sweeping dining room with chandeliers and blue glasses. He'd wanted the opposite of that for this trip. As he thought about it, he realized he wanted the opposite of it for Maura.

  “Hey,” came the low voice.

  Looking up, Stephen saw J.D. in his wheelchair just outside the office door.

  “Hey!” Stephen said. “Are you here for the board meeting?”

  “I'm skipping it,” J.D. said.

  “Really?” As great-grandson of James Desmond Blackstone, J.D. was a trustee of the Blackstone Foundation, which administered many charitable works. The academy was a beneficiary, and J.D. sat on the school's board.

  “Yeah. This is it,” J.D. said. “Angus is taking me to Providence.”

  Stephen stared at him. He pictured Maura falling apart the other day, and shook his head. “Can you ease up?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You're getting Maura's hopes up for nothing. Jesus, J.D. Do you have any idea what she's going through? All of them, actually. Beck, Travis. Beck has another huge competition coming up.”

  “I know,” J.D. said.

  “Maura told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, when her mother's all stirred up, that can't be good for Beck. She needs this, J.D. Let Maura get through the holidays, will you? Let them all settle in here to Newport without you upsetting everyone. Maura thought she saw Carrie in the crowd—she practically lost it.”

  “Wouldn't you?” J.D. asked. “If your daughter ran away from you?”

  “Look,” Stephen said. “Maybe you mean well, but you're not helping.”

  “I'm Carrie's father,” J.D. said, his voice rising. “And I'm going to find her!”

  Stephen heard shuffling in the hall. He went to the door, saw Beck turning around, heading back the way she'd come. His heart nearly stopped, and he reached for her, touching her shoulder.

  “Beck,” he said.

  She followed him into his office, as if pulled by a magnet. She stared at J.D., all the color drained from her face. Had she heard?

  “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Campbell. I'll come back later,” she said.

  “No, Beck,” he said. “It's okay. We were just talking about you. This is J. D. Blackstone. J.D., meet Beck Shaw.”

  “Hi, Beck,” J.D. said, nearly as pale as she was.

  “I saw you,” Beck said, staring at the wheelchair. “Outside Blackstone Hall, the day we went to Providence for the competition.”

  “I saw you too. Congratulations …”

  “Are you the man who swims in Mary's pool?”

  “That's me,” J.D. said.

  “My mom…” Beck began, a small frown on her face. “She always looks up there. And I think she swam there the other day. She came home with wet hair…. Was she swimming with you?”

  J.D. nodded. The look in his eyes was pure love; he looked uplifted, transformed from the lonely, ruined person who'd barely left Ted's guesthouse a few months ago. Stephen was one of his best friends, and he'd wanted him to get better, but right now he felt like grabbing Beck and leaving the room.

  “Are you getting ready for Boston?” Stephen asked, to change the subject.

  “Huh?” Beck asked, still frowning, distracted.

  “The national competition,” Stephen said, tilting his computer screen toward her. “This is where we're all staying.” She barely glanced at the image of the brick townhouse.

  “You're going to win,” J.D. said.

  “Thanks,” she said, staring at him. Stephen saw her eyes boring in, felt her agitation start to shimmer. Had she heard what J.D. had said, or was this something else?

  Stephen put his hand on her shoulder.

  “I'm very proud of Beck. She has a talent for the abstract,” he said. “She sees beyond, and always chooses the most direct route. To arrive at something we take for granted, volumes of work have to be done first. Like a poem: a few lines of terse verse but the poet has already filtered out the extraneous. Beck knows that math helps us describe nature in a precise, universal language. Right, Beck?”

  She must have felt him pulling her back into the room, almost as if she were a wildly veering kite and he held the string, down from whatever emotions were rattling her into the stratosphere.

  “Forces of gravity, speed of light, you mean?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Stephen said. “Architectural angles …”

  She nodded, her breathing shallow and skin even paler than before.

  “Exactly,” J.D. said. “I used formulas to build the lighthouse.” The words came out of his mouth, and Stephen wanted to punch him.

  “I knew a lighthouse,” Beck said, sounding like a sleepwalker. “On the lake where my sister disappeared. It hadn't been there until the summer before. But I stood on the banks with my mother and brother, and while the searchers looked for Carrie and my father, I stared at that tower. I thought of angles. Geometry, lines from the top of the tower down to the lake. I imagined them as lifelines, things for my sister and father to grab onto.”

  “That's what I wanted,” J.D. said, his voice gravelly and his eyes suddenly brimming with tears.

  “I heard what you said,” Beck said. “When I was out in the hall.”

  J.D. nodded. “I built that lighthouse for your sister. I wanted to save them.”

  “Enough,” Stephen said, standing between his old friend and Beck. “Stop it.”

  “Stop the truth?” Beck asked. “That's a mathematical impossibility.”

  Stephen tightened his arm around Beck's shoulder, but she tore away. He heard her pounding down the corridor as he looked after her.

  He turned to J.D., fury in his eyes.

  “Why did you do that?” he asked.

  “Christ, I'm so sorry,” J.D. said, putting his head in his hands.

  “You know, I've had it,” Stephen said, his voice rising. “Your goddamn stupid obsession. You call it love, but that's not what you felt for Maura. She was married, she had a family….”

  “She loved me,” J.D. said.

  “You wanted to believe that. You tracked her down, you wasted years of your own life thinking about what you couldn't have. You built that stupid goddamn lighthouse.”

  “It was for Carrie, it was all I could do.”

  “And what about Beck? Did you think about her? Or was it ‘all you could do’ to spill what Maura's kept hidden all this time? Wasn't it up to Maura to tell her?”

  “Stephen, Jesus! She overheard me…. I never meant for that.”

  “I don't care what you ‘meant.’ She's a kid, J.D. She's been thr
ough hell. How do you think she's going to take knowing you're Carrie's father?”

  Stephen glared at his old friend, saw him a million miles away. Was he thinking of Carrie? Or Maura? Was he imagining the impact of what Beck had just overheard?

  “Beck's a sensitive, fragile girl whose family has been devastated. Think of what Lucy and Pell were like after Taylor died, and you have a tiny fraction of what Beck's going through.”

  “I didn't mean to tell her,” J.D. said.

  “It doesn't matter what you meant to do,” Stephen said. “It's what you did do, J.D. How's Maura going to feel?”

  “I know, I know!”

  Stephen tried to calm himself down; he and J.D. had gone to this school together, seen each other through a million scrapes and adventures.

  Beck was Maura's daughter, and J.D. had just hurt her. That's all Stephen could think about. Leaving J.D. there in his chair, he left his office and strode down the hall to look for Beck and find Maura.

  It was a shock and it wasn't a shock.

  I didn't know, but I did know.

  Mr. Campbell talked about the poetry of proofs, slicing away the extra material, cutting through what you don't need anymore. Denial is like padding, protecting you from the worst tumbles. It's like you've been pushed out of a plane, and you need all those pillows, cushions, aluminum panels, Kevlar shields to keep you from breaking apart when you hit the ground at a million miles an hour.

  So that guy J.D., yanked off all my protective gear with those words: I'm Carrie's father.

  Okay, I get it. Now everything I've been wondering about, working around, makes sense. All the fights, the way my parents stopped getting along after Carrie's accident. Blood types had obviously come into play. You don't need a math whiz to realize that my dad's blood and Carrie's blood didn't match, that he added things up and 1 + 1 didn't = 2.

  And my mother staring up at the fourth floor, and her wet hair. And going back in time, Aunt Katharine not speaking to her. Because she knew. Betrayals and hurt and lying.

  And the lighthouse. Built for my sister by her father… That little island had been covered with trees, rocks, scrub, and brush, home to deer and beavers. That next year, there were still trees, but on the very shore stood that beautiful, perfect tower. It was something out of a fairy tale. I just hadn't realized how much of a fairy tale there really was, full of bewitchment.

  I was under a spell.

  Leaving Mr. Campbell's office, I thought I'd go find Travis. I didn't want to see my mother. Not just then—ever again. Then I realized I couldn't bear to see my brother either. I'd have to tell him the truth. This was a secret no family should keep from each other. But how could I tell him? Look him in the eyes, say the words? So I went home and wrote him a note. I put the truth right down in black and white, left it under his pillow.

  I felt pretty sick. Almost as if I was coming down with a fever. Clammy, crazy. I wanted my mother, but not the way she really was—the way I thought she'd been. My ideas were jumbled, and that's not like me. Usually I am able to hack through the poison ivy of emotion and get to the point. But right at that moment, I was all feelings, no logic. I forced myself to start thinking, and what came to mind were Redmond and Lucy. My only true friends. If only I could hold it together until Boston. Boston was the goal I had set for myself. To really turn the corner and start fresh. Put all the bad stuff out of my head for good. I had to go.

  I imagined it like this: I'd go to the math competition, ace it, win a scholarship to the college of my choice, let Redmond show me around Boston.

  But then I would leave Newport Academy, get away from all this. Get away now. Carrie had had the right idea. We would be the runaway family. Sisters who'd had enough. I got what she'd done, why she'd left. I was with her now, with her in spirit. That's all I could think about.

  I'd been so good lately. I'd given back all my stolen objects, or almost all. The other day I'd gone down to Bannister's Wharf, put that small ceramic pineapple back in the glass jar I'd taken it from. Had my newly discovered goodness, my desire to go straight, amounted to nothing? Was I too late, and was this punishment for being so wicked and stealing? I didn't believe in hell and damnation, but I did believe in a sort of karma: it's pure math, if you think about it. When you do bad, you bring badness your way. It's like the law of percentages.

  I remembered the ride my mother had taken us on, me and Travis, one of our first days here at the academy. Through the Point section of Newport. She'd stopped in front of Hunter House, shown us the carved pineapple above the door, told us it was a symbol of welcome.

  I'd loved that ride, thought my mother, in her poetic and geometric way, had been wanting me to connect the dots, realize that she was introducing us to our new life. That ride had been a sort of cosmic pineapple, a sign of greeting and fresh beginnings to me and Travis: welcome to our new world. But when I thought back now, I remembered that she'd shown us where old James Desmond Blackstone had come from.

  The founder of our school, the man with the same name as this guy J.D. Had my mother been in love with J.D. all these years, all the time she spent with my dad? Had she just been waiting for the moment to arrive when she could be with him again? She reminded me of girls with crushes, who secretly walk past the houses of the boys they like, who arrange fake reasons to stand near their lockers at school. My mother, my wonderful mother, was that what she'd done?

  The thoughts felt like nettles stinging my skin. No more padding, remember? As I left my house and went out onto the campus, I felt lucky about one thing.

  I hadn't yet returned Angus's keys. I had been waiting for the moment to arrive, when he was away from his desk and the security office, when I could just slip in unseen and put them somewhere he'd think he hadn't looked yet. I had them with me at all times— in my backpack, wrapped in a woolen scarf to keep them from clinking and rattling.

  So I pulled them out now. I knew just where I was going: to Blackstone Hall, to the fourth floor. Mary's rooms. I knew she had a bedroom, and that she'd studied up there. That's where I needed to be, to think about all this, figure out my next move. Maybe I could stay there in secret for a while so I wouldn't have to see my mother.

  I couldn't look her in the eye. And that reality was so terrible— not wanting to see her, the first time in my life I'd ever felt any such thing, almost as if I'd lost her already, lost my mother forever. It was like needles in my heart.

  I started to run. Keys in my hand, I flew across campus. I guess I was crying. The more I ran, the thicker my tears got. The day was cold, and snow was in the air.

  Mary. She had crashed off this horrible cliff, into the sea below. What a terrible way to die, and Beatrice had suffered along with her. The Langley sisters had had lies and pain in their family, and they had loved each other through all of it. They would understand.

  The anniversary of Mary's death was coming up. The whole school commemorated the occasion. Deep down, I know Lucy and I had hoped to break through with our proofs of infinity by then. Mary had guided us; all those days we'd heard her, thought of her, felt her presence. In a way I felt we were doing our math for her too.

  Mathematicians are logical, but I found myself praying to that lost sister as I ran toward the building, not knowing where else to go. She had helped me and Lucy before, given us strength and let us know we weren't alone. But it really is a sign of how crazy I was that I talked to her out loud just then.

  “Help me, Mary,” I cried. “Help me, help me …”

  And when I took one single key off Angus's key ring and slipped it into my pocket, I felt Mary's hand guiding me.

  Everything happened so fast after that. The class bell rang, and kids started streaming out of the building, a little air between periods. My hands shook, holding the key ring. As I climbed the wide steps, I saw Redmond coming out, a big huge smile on his freckled face as he saw me. Then he noticed my tears and stopped short.

  “Beck, what's wrong?”

  “Everything,” I
wept. “The whole world is ending.”

  “Come on,” he said, grabbing my hand, the one without the keys. “We'll go up to the reading room. We can talk there….”

  I was just about to relent. He knew the reading room was my favorite place. There'd probably be a fire blazing. My favorite little book would be there, the one about the Hawthorne girl, right beside Mary's diary. We could sit on the loveseat, and maybe I could tell him a little of what was wrong.

  “Okay” I said. But the keys were the fruits of my last bad act. I had to return them right away. All but the one to Mary's pool.

  We entered Blackstone Hall, stood in the huge marble entry hall. It was dark outside, the weather bringing clouds across the sea from the east, so the enormous crystal chandelier glowed overhead. Just then a group of fancily dressed people came down the curved staircase. The men wore dark business suits, the women wore dresses and pearls. One wore a mink: Mrs. Nicholson. Angus walked behind them, laden down with a stack of reports.

  “It's the academy board,” Redmond said. Bawd. “The trustees are here for the annual meeting.” Heah. His accent made me smile, reminded me that some of life was good; maybe things would turn out okay. He held my arm to ease me back so they could pass. And just then I lost my grip on the keys. They fell to the marble floor with a metallic, musical clinkety-clink, and Angus turned around.

  “My keys,” he said.

  “I know,” I said, meeting his eyes as the board members stopped to wait for him. He stared at me, perplexed.

  “Where did you get them?” he asked.

  I don't know why I didn't lie. Well, yeah; I do. I guess when my padding went away, so did my ability to squirm out of a jam. And I was so sick of lies, and what they did to people, what they'd done to my family. The longer I stood there, feeling his disappointed and accusing glare on me, the more I actually wanted to confess.

  “I took them,” I said.

  Angus's face fell. Oh, he looked so stricken, as if I'd hurt him on purpose. I stepped toward him, wanting to take back what I'd done. “I'm so sorry, Angus,” I said. “I was going to give them back.” At that I crouched down and picked them up, handed them to him.