• • •
Twenty minutes later, Margaux had removed most of the sheets from the furniture and opened the blinds on the view—pines, grass, glassy lake. The living room was the highest point on the property, so you could see all the way to the Island and the other shore behind it. It was a view she never tired of. Even so, when it came time to pick her own home and view, she’d chosen a condo downtown whose only vista was of the weather that swirled around the forty-story building. Mark had wanted a house in the West Island, a low-lying structure on a half acre of land, but Margaux put her foot down with rare determination. She wasn’t going to spend two hours a day in a car so she could have a small patch of lawn to mow.
She turned away from the windows. Ryan was sitting in the faded chintz wing chair by the fireplace. The ice pack was back firmly between his legs, and he was shifting uncomfortably. She hadn’t seen Ryan since the funeral. His hair was still black and his features handsome, but there was a hardness to his face that hadn’t been there before. It was as if turning forty had erased the last layer of baby fat, flipped the page on his childhood. This was probably enhanced by the fact that he was, oddly, wearing a suit, though he’d loosened his tie, and the pants were now rumpled and wet.
“What did you do to Liddie?”
“Why do you assume I did something?”
“She wouldn’t have kneed you in the balls if you were just being a jerk. She’s used to that.”
He shook his head, and Margaux knew she wouldn’t get an answer out of him. Her family excelled at secrets.
“Swift’s going to be here soon,” she said. “You wanted to talk before he got here?”
He leaned forward and winced. “Will you vote with me to sell the property?”
“Why are you so sure there’s going to be a vote?”
“Dad always said we’d inherit this place when they were gone and that it would be up to us to decide what to do with it. How else are five people going to decide to do something?”
“You don’t think he might’ve changed his mind after all these years? You know Dad and promises.”
“He hated us equally in life, so I assume he’ll treat us equally in death.”
“He didn’t hate us, he just didn’t . . .”
“Want us? He sure made that mistake enough times.”
She sat in her mother’s old place on the couch. The flowers in the pattern were faded, and there was a depression in the cushion, an imprint of her mother’s backside. She was surprised at how well she fit into it, since she’d always thought of her mother as shapeless. What did that mean? Was she on her way to becoming her mother?
“Well, we only know for sure that you were a mistake.”
He winced. One of the odd things about their parents was how they’d never hid the fact that Ryan hadn’t been planned. That his unexpected arrival was one of the reasons they felt they had no choice but to come to camp and run it when Grandpa MacAllister died and Grandma MacAllister ran off to Florida with the tennis instructor.
“I think we can be pretty sure that we were all mistakes.”
Ryan was probably right. “What’s that saying? The one about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?”
“The definition of insanity.”
“Mark Twain?”
“Einstein, I think.”
Margaux wondered—were her parents insane or simply trapped by circumstance? People tended to resent the things they couldn’t escape, even if those things were innocent.
“Have you ever thought about what they must’ve been like before all of us?”
“Not really.”
“I think about it. They met. They fell in love. They were regular people once.”
“And what? We made them into irregular people?”
“Maybe we did. We were . . . a lot.” Margaux looked out the window again. The lake was placid. Sean was in a canoe, paddling away from shore. His arms moved fluidly as the boat sliced through the water. Margaux shivered, remembering the last time she’d been in a canoe, her frantic paddle back from the Island.
“Do you ever think,” she said, “that we’ll forget what happened that summer?”
• • •
When Margaux and Ryan were finished, she went down to the basement. Liddie was sitting in front of an old computer screen, trolling through her Facebook feed. She’d kept most of the lights off, and the blinds were closed. Her skin looked translucent in the light from the screen.
“Since when has there been internet?” Margaux asked.
“Ryan had it installed that summer he stayed here. You didn’t know?”
“Clearly. Anything interesting going on?”
“I like watching the food videos.”
Liddie clicked a button. A video for Dutch oven bread started to play. It made it look easy, and Margaux thought of her own kitchen, those moments on Sunday mornings when she and Mark would make several large batches of something they could both take for lunch that week. Perhaps she could try this next. He was a big fan of country loaf, and the recipe looked foolproof.
Why am I thinking of Mark? Ah, shit. She’d never made that call.
“Do you mind if I use the phone?”
Liddie didn’t respond, just nodded toward where the phone was lying next to the bed. Margaux dialed Mark’s cell. He didn’t pick up, so she left a message letting him know she didn’t have a signal and that she’d try to call him again later. “No point in calling yourself,” she said. “Hardly anyone ever picks up.” She wondered if he’d let it go to voice mail on purpose to demonstrate his annoyance at being excluded.
“How come you didn’t bring Mark?” Liddie asked when she hung up.
“Why would I?”
“Aren’t you guys attached at the hip?”
“No.”
Liddie started another video, for massive cinnamon rolls this time. “Work together, live together . . . Sounds attached at the hip to me.”
Margaux was the music teacher at the high school where Mark was in charge of the math department. That’s how they’d met, five years ago, at a staff mixer a few weeks after she started working there. He’d been doing impressions of the principal who’d just been fired. She hadn’t laughed that hard in a while, so when he asked for her number, she’d said yes. She knew it hadn’t happened quite like that, but looking back, it seemed as if there wasn’t any space between that night and their moving in together. Ever since then, their lives had become so entwined that this was the first time she’d spent the night away from him. They hadn’t even been separated the night of the funeral. Instead, they’d both crowded into the single bed she’d slept in as a child.
Margaux thought, sometimes, about trying to transfer to another school. It would be nice to have some hours of the day when they weren’t in the same building. But the one time she’d brought it up, Mark had seemed so genuinely puzzled about why she’d want to do it that she gave up the idea. She knew people thought he smothered her, and sometimes she thought that herself. But there was a comfort in being with someone who needed her so much that he was miserable without her. The man she’d been with before Mark, the one who’d used up her twenties, had been almost indifferent to her. It was Margaux who’d adapted to his wishes and whims, she who needed him. That breakup had crushed her spirit, and she had no interest in being that invested again.
“We barely see each other all day,” she said. “And the joint commute is convenient.”
“If you say so.”
“What do you care?”
“Wow. Major overreaction.”
On the screen, the video showed the final product, a massive six-pound cinnamon roll. Four people dug in to what looked like enough food for twenty.
“That’s disgusting.”
“Disgustingly delicious. We should ask Amy to make it.
”
“It might be outside her repertoire.”
“True.” Liddie rubbed at a spot on her arm and winced.
“You hurt yourself?”
“It’s nothing.”
She reached over and pushed up Liddie’s shirtsleeve. There were two bright marks on her forearm right below a tattoo that circled her arm like an amulet.
“Did Ryan do this?”
Liddie pulled her sleeve down. “It’s fine.”
“That’s why you kneed him.” Margaux felt shaken. Ryan had always had a temper, but he was supposed to have taken care of it. There’d been classes and medication, court ordered after he’d taken a baseball bat to a plate glass window when he was cut from McGill’s hockey team. “He grabbed you?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.” Liddie turned away from the computer. She looked hard, practical.
“But not since we were kids, right? Not since . . .”
Liddie stood up. “Can we talk about this later?”
“You mean never.”
“If you say so.”
Liddie walked around her and headed to the basement exit.
“Where are you going?”
“Kate’s here.”
CHAPTER 6
I HAD NO IDEA
Kate
Being on time for things wasn’t Kate MacAllister’s strong suit, which was why she’d arranged with the family lawyer, Kevin Swift, to get a ride.
She’d regretted that decision almost immediately. There might be some thirty-two-year-olds and sixty-five-year-olds who have things in common, but not many. They certainly didn’t, even though Swift had been the family lawyer since her grandfather’s day. So once they’d crossed the Champlain Bridge, she’d bunched up her sweater on the window and told him she was tired and would he mind if she slept for a bit? She didn’t need his permission, but he’d agreed like he did with everything her family asked of him, and with the ease she’d always had, she was out in a matter of seconds.
Kate had the strangest dreams when she slept in moving vehicles, and this time was no exception. She’d been watching the latest season of Homeland the night before, and so now she was a spy, disguising her strawberry hair and washed-out skin with a wig and makeup that made her look dark and exotic. She tied a scarf under her chin and left her bolt-hole. Her contact was supposed to meet her in the bazaar by a fruit stand. They had a code worked out, something about lemons, only Kate couldn’t remember what it was she was supposed to say.
The bazaar was loud and crowded, the air full of unfamiliar spices and the shouts of merchants in a babble of languages. She felt the panic rise within her when she couldn’t find the right fruit stand, the one that sold the best lemons, or so she’d heard. Then she spotted it, and adrenaline coursed through her. There was a woman holding a bright-yellow lemon, smelling it to see if it met her exacting standards. Her scarf had slipped over her face, and so Kate couldn’t be sure it was the right woman, but who else could it be?
She touched her shoulder. “Are the lemons good here?”
The woman turned around. Kate’s world tilted. The woman had a gash across her forehead, and her face was ghostly pale.
“Amanda.”
The car pitched, and Kate’s head smacked against the glass. She blinked hard, trying to orient herself.
“What did you say?” she said to Swift.
“I was asking you how well you remember Amanda.”
Kate looked out the window. They were on the camp road now, a road she’d know anywhere, every tree and branch and little path into the woods; she loved all of it. Her whole life, the time she spent away from here was time during which she felt adrift, uprooted.
“Why?”
“Just curious.”
She’d known him long enough to tell he was lying. Whenever Swift said something that wasn’t true, his voice rose half an octave. Sentences that had been delivered at this pitch included “This is the last time they can help you out” and “It was an accident.” She wondered where her grandfather had found Swift, what deal they’d struck to get such loyalty. She’d never thought to ask till now. To her, he’d always been around, like this place, like the pines. Both were tall and rustic, gnarled.
“Did you know her?” she asked. “I forget.”
“No,” he said, his voice that same higher pitch. “I didn’t.”
• • •
A few moments later, he parked the car on the gravel space outside the lodge where delivery trucks came to drop off enough food to feed more than a hundred people three meals a day. Liddie and Margaux stood in front of the porch, both with their arms crossed, as if they were waiting to lecture Kate for being late, even though she wasn’t. She concentrated on them, trying to distract herself from what lay within the lodge. Who.
Looking at her sisters was like looking at herself if she’d made different decisions. If she’d forgone sunscreen and good hair-care products, she’d have that same blowsy look Margaux did. And if she cut her hair and wore clothes from the boys’ department, she’d look like her identical twin, Liddie. Mary was the missing link, the connect-the-dots between them, but Kate could easily imagine her standing there in a pair of jodhpurs with her hair in a long braid that fell straight down her back. Margaux’s hair was the blondest, Kate and Liddie had the most red, and their eyes were all the same shade of hazel. Only Ryan stood apart, with his dark hair and blue eyes, as if being the boy of the family wasn’t enough to distinguish him.
She got out of the car and breathed in deeply. The air smelled different here, even from a few miles away. How did that happen?
Liddie approached her, but Margaux stayed where she was.
“You made it,” Liddie said, a mimic of her own voice, like listening to herself on a recording. She pulled Kate into a hug. It was always a disorienting feeling, like hugging herself. As if she could feel her identical DNA through Liddie’s tattooed skin.
“You knew I was coming,” Kate said. “I texted you when I left.”
“True enough. Hey, Swifty, what’s up?”
Swift looked at his feet. Liddie delighted in making him feel uncomfortable in all things, and she usually succeeded.
“I believe we have a meeting scheduled at ten?” he said.
“Abso-fucking-lutely.”
“Liddie!”
That was Margaux. Perhaps it was the role of all oldest girls, but Margaux often felt more like a mother to them than their actual mother had. Ingrid MacAllister had been uncomfortable in her skin, especially after it was stretched out by four pregnancies, including twins. She loved them, but she wasn’t close to them. She made sure they were clothed and cared for, but she didn’t get down in the dirt and play with them. Kate had wondered, sometimes, if it were a kind of revenge for what they’d taken from her, her youth. Maybe she was someone who shouldn’t have had children. Or then again, it might’ve been Margaux’s competence, even as a young girl, that made Ingrid get out of the way. Kate was surprised Margaux hadn’t had any children of her own, but like so many things in her family, she didn’t ask why.
“Chill, Margaux,” Liddie said. “I’m sure Swifty’s heard worse.”
He rocked back and forth, shifting his weight from one gum boot to the other. It was an odd choice of footwear considering the weather, as was the green fly-fishing vest he was wearing over a short-sleeved white shirt, since the lake had never been good for fishing—not big enough and too shallow.
“Is everyone here?” he asked.
“No one’s seen Mary yet,” Margaux said. “But the rest of us are here.”
“What about Sean?”
“What about Sean?” Liddie said, her eyes meeting Kate’s in the way she did when she had something more to say. Liddie loved gossip, and she often shared it with Kate, whether Kate wanted her to or not. “I might as well tell you,” she often sa
id. “Since you can read my mind anyway.”
The thing was, Kate couldn’t read Liddie’s mind; she’d never been able to. But she didn’t need to tell Liddie that, did she?
“He needs to be here,” Swift said. “I thought you knew that?”
“We don’t know anything,” Kate said.
Liddie scoffed. “You must know something. You spent two hours in the car with him.”
“I was asleep the whole time. Plus, Swift wouldn’t tell me anything he wasn’t supposed to. He’s a vault.”
Swift looked uncomfortable again while Liddie scanned him and Kate for ten long seconds. Kate knew it was her imagination, but she could’ve sworn she could feel Liddie’s consciousness pressing up against her own, trying to break through.
“Ah . . . Well, girls . . .”
“Don’t worry about it,” Liddie said. “You take everything too seriously. So where’s Sean?”
Margaux’s mouth was a line. “I saw him paddling to the Island.”
Kate and Liddie pulled a green tarp back, uncovering a rack of battered yellow canoes. The ground was littered with dead pine needles, and the sun was completely blocked out by the heavy white pines overhead. Kate shivered, wishing she’d put on the sweater she’d slept against in the car.
“We could wait till he comes back,” Kate said. “There’s no hurry.”
“No way Ryan can wait that long. Let’s get it over with.”
They worked with practiced ease to lift the canoe from the rack and carry it down to the beach. They flipped it over and slid it into the water. They’d had a crush on the canoe teacher when they were kids and had even rowed in junior regattas between the ages of ten and twelve. Then Kate had wanted to quit, and Liddie, for once, let her have her way.
“I’ll get the paddles and life jackets,” Kate said.
“Cautious Kate.”
She found the key to the paddle shed hidden under the rock where it had always been and opened the door. She grabbed two paddles and orange life jackets that smelled of mildew. She found this shed creepy, but that might’ve been because Liddie locked her in here once when she was mad about Kate getting the Camper of the Week Award. Liddie hadn’t even been punished for that, because two kids had been caught having sex on Secret Beach the same day, and Liddie’s sin paled in comparison to that kind of camp-ending disaster. That’s what their dad had called it, a “camp-ending disaster,” only he seemed excited by the possibility, not terrified like Kate was.
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