Other Shepards

by Adele Griffin

  Dana looks down, examining the flickering blue flame of the stove. “Does that look medium high?” she murmurs to herself. She bites her lip, then adds a hissing shot of water to the pan. “They said you girls got carried away,” she remarks. Her voice is matter-of-fact, without judgment. “They said you and Geneva always have been so close, that you almost can hear each other’s thoughts, dream each other’s dreams.”

  “Funny, that’s exactly how I would describe Mom and Dad.”

  Dana turns to me and hands me a paper bag. “Break the ends off these beans and put them in here,” she says, sliding a colander over the table to rest in front of me. “Anyway, I told Lydia it was for the best that you girls were here, no matter how it came about. Saint Germaine’s a place of happy memories. Life ended for those children here, but they were alive here, too. And that’s what I remember. Beach picnics and bonfires. The games and laughing. Evenings of gin rummy or watching the stars.”

  “I wish I’d known them,” I say. “I wish I’d been here for those times.”

  “All your life, people must have told you about those times,” Dana says. “But those days, the other children, they’re gone, and the days that matter most lie ahead, not behind you. As for your Annie, she couldn’t possibly have created that tree, because I was here, in this very kitchen, the afternoon the boys and Elizabeth painted it. It was a rainy day like this one, and they used an oil paint set of Ryan’s. More than twenty years ago, it must have been.”

  I don’t know what to say to this. I stare at Dana, who points to the back door. “The frogs are a sight,” she says. “Go on, I’ll finish up here.”

  For dinner we eat fresh parrot fish and string beans, with kiwi tarts for dessert. We spend most of the dinner trying to explain to Geneva why she cannot take a frog back with her to New York. My sister, who disdains all creatures soft and cuddly, has warmed up to the cold-blooded, warty frogs of this island. This is no surprise to me and delights the Hubbards, who can talk as much about frogs as they can discuss birds or stratocumulus clouds or how much sugar is needed to make a kiwi tart.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Geneva says to me after we have eaten dinner and cleaned up the kitchen. “Just us. To the beach. Please.”

  “Do you mind?” I ask the Hubbards.

  “Take flashlights,” says Ryan.

  “And sweaters,” adds Dana. High cupboards are opened, and giant police flashlights are handed out. Dana rubs our hands and legs with a sticky lotion of mosquito repellent, then buttons each of us into one of her own oversized cotton sweaters.

  “Stay close and don’t be too long,” she calls from the door, “or we’ll worry. Don’t walk too close to the surf, and for heaven’s sake don’t go swimming.”

  They watch us from the patio. For a couple without children, their parenting skills are awfully polished.

  We wind down the shell path to the ocean and turn off our flashlights as we sit against the dune embankment. Darkness links its elements: sky and sea meet on a tar-paper crease, sucking sea gushes over its inky beach, black holes of sand swallow our tunneled toes. I keep a thumb on the flashlight switch; it connects me to the promise that the chain of darkness can be broken on my whim.

  “Here’s the thing, and don’t be mad,” Geneva says. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch her hands knotting and unclenching in her lap, and I brace myself for her confession. “Okay. Maybe you figured it out already but I bought us those tickets. Charged them on Dad’s credit card. When the envelope came I sneaked out the receipt and stuffed it in my pocket before you could see.”

  “You’re kidding, right? You mean Dad bought … ? Oh, great, Geneva. We are in so much trouble.” I flop back on my elbows and groan. “Do you even know how much trouble we’re in?”

  “Look, I’m sorry. But I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for our kitchen and my fortune from Miss Pia.”

  “What do you mean?” I stare out at the horizon and try to think clearly. So it wasn’t Annie after all. I had tried hard to believe the tickets were her gift. Dad will probably want us to pay him back, and two plane tickets are way more than whatever is left of my savings.

  “See, the whole time I was painting the kitchen I kept thinking, This is how Saint Germaine looks,” Geneva explains. “This is the sky, these are the trees and birds. But as soon as I put in the colors I knew it wouldn’t be enough. You can’t sit in your kitchen and pretend you’re here. It was like Annie painted a postcard on our wall. She knew we’d have to see it for real, once it was up in our kitchen. And when I got that fortune, about going on a trip, and then you said how people have to make their own fortunes—well, it all just seemed to spin together. I had to get us those tickets, Holland. I had to.”

  “You know the parents think Annie’s imaginary,” I say. “They think we made her up.”

  Geneva pushes her toes deeper in the sand. “It doesn’t matter what they think. She didn’t come for them,” she says. “I’ll miss her. She really helped us.”

  “She isn’t coming back.”

  “No.”

  “And now I have to be the big sister again,” I say half-jokingly. “It was a relaxing break.”

  “Holland, would you do me a favor?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Will you sometimes call me Neeve? I like it better than my other name, and if you start, maybe it’ll catch on with the parents.”

  The parents would never call my sister by a nickname, an Ick name, and I know this, although I don’t say it. There are other, deeper reasons for naming your children after distant lands.

  Out loud I say, “Yeah, that sounds better, Neeve.” I am not surprised that the word, once spoken, fits her nicely.

  And I don’t expect it, but neither does she, perhaps, because Geneva collapses against me as if an unexpected jolt has charged her jittery limbs. Her hug is fierce and hard and alive, over in a crushing second, and with me forever.

  twelve

  elizabeth

  I SLEEP LATE THE next morning and wake with the sun frying my cheeks. Geneva greets me at the kitchen table wearing a coronet of wildflowers and tells me about sighting a calico monkey that she named Trudy. She and Ryan keep interrupting each other as they describe Trudy sitting on her branch, gorging on bananas. It hasn’t taken my sister long to start talking like a Hubbard.

  “We practically just got here,” I say to Ryan and Dana as we sit down to a breakfast of waffles and cantaloupe. “And now we’re leaving.”

  “But we’ll be back soon,” Geneva promises. “Holland and I are asking for plane tickets for Christmas.”

  The Hubbards smile and squeeze us, but I can tell by their petering conversations and by the way they hardly touch their own breakfasts that they are unhappy to see us go. They accompany us to the main island on a speedy boat captained by an old man named Simon whose skin is the color of plums. The morning is fresh, my skin is bright with color and my ears and fingernails are gritty with sand. It feels good, like souvenirs of my trip packed on my body.

  Once on shore, we exchange Simon’s boat for a cab driven by a woman and her daughter who are on their way back from church. Geneva sits up front with the girl, and they fan each other with the palm leaves brought back from the church service. I sit in back, on one side of Dana, and my mind takes photographs of everything—the rainbow of air, Dana’s laugh, the perfume in the sugar cane—a roll of pictures to flip through in my mind until we come back in December.

  The airport appears less deserted than when we arrived two days ago. All around us, families are unloading themselves and their belongings from cabs and shuttles.

  “The way life worked out, Dana and I weren’t able to have children ourselves. Your brothers and sister sure felt like ours, though,” Ryan tells Geneva and me as we stand at the gate, waiting to board. He speaks with a half-smile and a casual squint in his eye, but his words draw out careful as a poem. “When they left us, we couldn’t have been more devastated than if they’d been our very
own. This weekend, seeing you girls, it’s all been something of a gift. An unexpected blessing.”

  He looks as though he might say more, but then he changes the subject, pointing to the sky, and he tells us about how we will likely get some of yesterday’s rain when we fly into the city. The language of loss is hard to speak, but thankfully there is always plenty to say about the weather.

  “We’ll come back soon,” I promise as I hug them good-bye.

  As I take a last look at the island, I know I have been fooling myself, thinking that I needed to come to Saint Germaine so that Geneva and I would feel closer to our brothers and sister. I had not been truly expecting to find those other people here, not in spirit, not in any way. The real reason I came here was to stake my own claim on this off-limits Eden. Even while I told myself it was for Geneva, or for Elizabeth, John, and Kevin, all along I was betting myself in a secret voice, a voice I was too scared to listen to but knew enough to obey. I wanted Saint Germaine for me.

  The parents wait in the terminal. They stand together, wrapped in pale raincoats, as alike as a pair of candlesticks. Ryan was right, I realize. The rain that whipped through Saint Germaine yesterday now drizzles over New York. We’ve hit the same storm twice.

  The parents’ hugs are fleshless, like being caught in the press of folding chairs.

  “We love you,” they whisper in our ears. I cry babyishly, and so does Geneva. I press my face into their rain-freckled coats to wipe my eyes.

  When we get home, Mom draws a bath for each of us: mine in the parents’ bathroom and Geneva’s in ours. After we change into sweatpants and shirts, Mom combs our wet hair and rubs it through with some of her special peppermint leave-in conditioner.

  “We should make a beauty salon appointment together, next Saturday,” she says. “The three of us. And then have a ladies’ lunch after.” Her fingers rake through my hair, slicking the peppermint oil from root to tip.

  The intimacy of her touch makes me shiver. Never have I felt more like her daughter.

  Afterward, we sit in the kitchen. Dad prepares Irish oatmeal, which we eat with spoonfuls of cream and honey.

  “I’ll be spending more time in this kitchen,” he says with forced cheer, “now that you girls have made it look so special.”

  “As a family, it’s important for us to share home activities,” Mom says carefully. I can almost see Dr. Bushnell, like the Wizard of Oz behind the kitchen door, prompting her words.

  When I get the courage to face our mural, I now see how the paintings are amateurish, that our colors are impulsive, and that nothing fits together. Geneva is talented, but she is still a sixth grader; the plumes of her bird’s head look like a bulky headdress of eggplants. My sky is splotchy in places where I remember getting bored. Louis’s tree takes up an entire wall. And where is Annie’s work? In the long olive grass, in the rain-heavy sky? I cannot find her. I do not know exactly what I had been looking at before.

  The parents don’t feel comfortable talking about Annie, not that night, nor any time after. Their mouths are dry with bookish phrases fed to them by Dr. Bushnell, about how they wanted to encourage our self-expression, how we created Annie as an escapist manifestation of our subconscious will, how the mural was a means of asserting our need to make our own mark on this house, to paint over the shadow of the other Shepards. Assertion, expression, creativity—they are thoughtful words, the well-intentioned words of grown-ups. Paint therapy, really; I was right all along.

  “Then you never really believed in Annie?”

  Dad frowns; he opens his mouth to speak and then stops as another, milder expression shapes his face, and he folds my hands between the two of his. “When you and your sister began working on your painting,” he begins, “you can imagine that at first these stories of Annie were troubling—perplexing—to your mother and me.”

  “Then why didn’t you just say so?” He is quiet a moment. “We did say so, to Dr. Bushnell, who explained to your mother and me about imaginary friends. Like Nini or Nono, remember? The little girl who lived under the dining room table and ate Geneva’s vegetables?” He smiles. “Every night your mother and I would have to sweep the carrots and Brussels sprouts from under her chair.”

  “Come on, Dad. That was a long time ago.”

  “Maybe so, but like before, we held back because you girls seemed so captured. Captured by changing the walls and making the room into something new. I think of your faces at your mother’s birthday dinner, and the way your sister was talking. And we just assumed you must have seen a picture, somehow heard about the tree in Saint Germaine.”

  “No, that’s not true. I never …” Even as I protest, I am not so sure. I look at Dad helplessly, embarrassed. When Dad speaks again, his voice and words are careful.

  “Ever since you were a little girl, you’ve been sensitive to the stories and memories of Elizabeth. Always asking us about her, what was she like, what kind of daughter, sister, student was she? When you created this older sister figure, even calling her Annie, just a variation of Ann, Elizabeth’s confirmation name, we thought—”

  “That I invented Annie? Why would I?”

  I see in Dad’s face that he has asked himself this same question. “We thought you girls needed Annie. To take her away from you didn’t seem right.”

  The gentleness of his tone, his obvious yearning for peace between us, is mesmerizing. My fingers are warm inside the prayer clasp of his hands, and I decide not to upset him any more with my insistence of the truth. Because who is to say which version of our story is the one to believe?

  I discuss Annie with Geneva, but these talks aren’t very satisfying. “I wish other people had known her, had seen her,” I mention. “There isn’t any evidence that she came. Everything we used to paint the kitchen was right here all along.”

  We have found the paints and brushes, rags and mixers all stacked neatly in the cellar. The art books are in the den, wedged between a giant atlas and a stack of Life magazines in a dark corner of the back bookshelf. Their spines pop when we reopen their covers, and their pages are limp with mildew.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Geneva tells me. “Why do you have to find the scientific proof of everything?”

  Except that my sister is looking for proof, too, not of Annie but of change. I think Geneva genuinely believed that our trip to Saint Germaine would open the doors to a new and improved Shepard family. For a while, she was as watchful as a gull over our activities, waiting for the crumbs to drop from our rituals. Eventually she began to squawk with conversational bids such as, “We should grill hot dogs on the roof sometime. Hot dogs are my favorite food,” or, “Sophie’s parents are taking all their kids white-water rafting this summer. I think we should do stuff like that.”

  “Really, Geneva,” Dad would remark mildly. “You seem quite energetic tonight.”

  Being older, I know better. I know the parents will not take down the portraits of the other Shepards any more than they will roll up the bottoms of their pants and grill hot dogs on our roof. They will continue to meet in the twilight kingdom of their dining room, and their grief is a feast of pain I cannot touch. But now I know that I will not always sit at their table. Life has to keep going.

  We end up doing little things to bring Annie back into our home. We leave the kitchen window open all the time, now that the weather is warmer. We have been to MoMA, at first just to look at Starry Night, but lately we have ventured off to the photography and film exhibits.

  Some days, after school, we brew up a pot of coffee, although we have never been able to duplicate Annie’s special blend, and we drink it in our clumsy, ugly, gorgeous birds of paradise kitchen. It has become the center of our home, our favorite place to talk or do homework, and sometimes to open mail from the Hubbards, who are back in Seattle now and often send us packages or postcards. We are probably going to visit Seattle next summer, just Geneva and me. Dr. Bushnell has encouraged it.

  “I’m glad we have our kitchen,” I say. �
�It’s a safe place, kind of a protection. Like Saint Jude.”

  “How can Saint Jude be protection?” Geneva scoffs as she carefully erases a line on the pastel she is working on. Not long after our trip, the parents enrolled Geneva in an after-school art program at The New School, and since then she has been preoccupied with her plastic one-snap portfolio, her watercolor sets and brushes, and her criticisms of other students in her class. “He’s the saint of hopeless cases.”

  I flush. “Nuh-uh. Louis told me he’s the saint of travel.”

  “Believe what you want, but we just finished our chapter on saints in religion class, so I should know.”

  “Well, all I know is he helped us,” I say. “You can’t take that away from him.”

  “You don’t have to get on the defensive just because Litterbug mixed up his saints,” Geneva says. “When I get old enough to like a guy, I’m going to make sure he’s a smart one.”

  Saint Jude stays under my pillow, though. When I think about it later, it doesn’t seem like such a mix-up, and I can’t fault myself for believing in the things that comfort me.

  With Geneva in art class, my after-school time is free to watch Louis play softball or to hang out with him at the Chatterbox Diner. Louis and I introduced Kathlyn to Louis’s friend Paul Santillo, and after some begging, the parents have allowed me to see Louis officially on weekend double dates with Kathlyn and Paul, as long as I tell them exactly where I’m going and am home by ten. As for my afternoons spent at the Chatterbox or the Bishop Brown sports court, I figure part of my time spent with Louis ought to remain secret.

  “Some things are more important than rules,” I tell him.

  “Whatever you say, Sarge,” he answers. “You’re the boss.” Which is becoming especially true these days. After one polite but firm conversation, Dad backed off the science internship, and Mom never mentions the name Aaron Hill in a context of his being at all datable. It isn’t until Brett and Carla come over for dinner later that spring, though, that the parents acknowledge what I have realized for a while.