Bittersweet (34 page)

I let my voice trail off into the wind, and, as it did, I turned and looked at her, slowly, carefully, to see what the realization would bring. Would she collapse, weeping? Would she banish me?

Ev’s breath rattled in and out of her chest. And then, oddly, a smile formed on her lips. She turned to look at me. We were inches apart. “Why,” she said carefully, “do you think Jackson killed himself?”

This was not the reaction I’d expected. But she was talking, and that was a good sign. “Depression,” I answered. Her eyes darted over my face doubtfully. I went on. “Shell shock. Something was wrong with him.”

She shook her head. “Someone told him Daddy was his father.”

I tried to let the news sink in, but it was impossible. Every time I thought I’d figured it out, my understanding faltered. I wanted the family tree in front of me, so I could understand the slipknot of what she was saying. Then I finally realized what she meant.

Birch was CeCe’s brother.

Birch was Jackson’s father.

“Wait,” I said, my face turning down in involuntary disgust, “CeCe and Birch are brother and sister.”

“Half. They’re only half.”

“Does that really make much of a difference?” I scoffed.

“Of course it makes a difference.”

Then it hit me: Ev was talking about herself.

“Wait,” I said, starting to feel panic rise inside myself, “you knew? You knew John was your brother?”

“Oh, don’t judge me, Mabel, it’s awful when you make that face.” She spoke nonchalantly, as though we were discussing the grocery list. “Everyone knows my father has a problem. He’s not— He can’t control himself. It’s a sickness, really. CeCe’s the one who made it
hard, saying she didn’t want all that attention. And it’s not as if the family hasn’t been good to her, or to John’s mother. I mean, god knows, it would have been so easy for Daddy to put Pauline out on the street, but he housed her, and promised John a lifetime of work.” She looked back out to the water. “John was beautiful, wasn’t he? I saw you looking at him. It’s funny, isn’t it? All he ever wanted was to be one of us, a Winslow, and all that time he was—he just didn’t know.

“Well, I guess until you told him,” she added coldly.

My mind was racing. “Ev,” I said, ready to hear something horrible, “has your father ever touched you?”

“No! You think Mum would let something like that happen?”

I thought of the bolts on the insides of the doors. Of Tilde yelling at little Hannah on Flat Rocks. Perhaps I had Tilde all wrong. Perhaps she was the one who was keeping this place from dissolving into chaos. Perhaps she really had been trying to protect me.

Before I could respond, or close my horrified mouth, Ev stripped off her clothes, piece by piece, revealing her lithe, scrawny form, the little tuft of dirty-blond pubic hair, the purple disks of her nipples. Her belly was flat as the day I had met her. She dropped her clothes onto the ground without regard and waded into the water. The lake swallowed her up, step by step—first the backs of her knees, then her hips, the swell of her buttocks, her sacrum, her wing-like shoulder blades, then shoulders—until just her head was visible, and her hair spread out upon the surface of the water like a hand. She swam then, straight out, in a line toward the horizon, not once looking back. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I wanted to. I wanted to leave her there. But with every stroke she took away from me, I felt a gasping kind of pain.

Just when I felt sure she would drown, and I was contemplating ripping off my clothes and going in after her (which would
have ended with us both going under), she turned and started back toward shore. It was only then that I could stand. I climbed back into the woods, pulling myself forward with the help of every tree trunk, until my arms ached, and my legs screamed out, but I kept going.

I
pounded on Indo’s kitchen door until I heard Fritz’s yap. I didn’t wait for Indo to come—I didn’t even know if she was able—just pushed, hitting Aggie with the door as she reached for the handle. The woman’s face registered surprise, anger, concern, all in a matter of seconds, and she stepped back when she recognized who I was. She reached out one hand. “Sweet girl.”

“Is she here?” I asked.

“I’ll never forgive myself.” She began to cry. Fritz nipped at my heels, hurtling himself against me with abundant energy. I didn’t have time for either of them. “I shouldn’t have gone home that night,” she moaned. I stepped out of her grasp, around her, passing through the jumbled kitchen, as Fritz frantically pawed the backs of my legs. “Please,” Aggie pleaded, “please,” in that tone people use when they want a piece of your tragedy. This time, I ignored it.

I marched through Indo’s rooms as though surveying them from above. I knew, from experience, that even a pile of clothes on the floor could be a person. But she wasn’t in the crimson living room, huddled in the Indonesian cushions on the rickety couch, and she wasn’t hunched in one of the creaking, precarious chairs on the screen porch. I circled back around, into the living room, toward the bedrooms, when Aggie stepped before me from the kitchen. Her
whole being was need: “Mr. John was such a good boy, I can’t believe he killed her, ohhhh.” And there were tears and she wanted to touch me, to pull at my clothes, so I dodged her again—grief seemed to slow her down—and slipped into the hallway that led to Indo’s inner sanctum.

The door was halfway closed, but I wasn’t shy. I pushed it open. Indo’s bedroom hadn’t changed since the last time I was there: rosy pinks, medicinal pistachio. She was propped upright, head turbaned, mosquito net pulled back at either side, as though she were a queen holding court in a tropical deathbed. She looked so much older. Her skin was waxy, her cheeks hollow.

I heard Aggie coming. I shut the door, slamming her and Fritz out. The dog barked and she cried. I turned the brass key in the lock. It made a satisfying click.

“You’re a sight.” Indo’s voice was like ripped paper.

“Congratulations,” I growled. “I found out your brother likes to fuck everything in sight. I suspect you already know he raped your own sister—excuse me, half sister—and Mrs. LaChance and god knows how many other helpless women. So what? You’re all just going to let him keep doing it, aren’t you? You’ll scream at your little girls to cover themselves and pay off your maids to keep their mouths shut. So what I don’t understand is why, if you sat by all these years and let it happen, now you want me to be the one who gives a fuck. That journal isn’t proof anyway, Indo. No one’s going to believe me based on that—no one who’s going to do anything about him.”

Indo sat patiently through my tirade. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

A cruel laugh rose up through me. But her expression didn’t change. “Come on,” I said. “Blood money? Kitty’s journal? You kept throwing me bones, and I did what you wanted—I fucking found out the secret, just like you wanted me to, and for what? She already fucking knew, Indo. Ev already knew John was her brother and it
didn’t matter. Do you understand me? She’s as sick as her father. She knew John was her brother and she still wanted to have his baby.

“But John didn’t know. So you know what I did? I told him. Just like you wanted me to, I fucking told him what I’d found, and you know what he did next? He murdered his crazy old mother and he killed himself and I’m supposed to have that on my head?”

I was crying now, wiping the tears away with my bare arm. “No,” I answered myself. “No,” I said striding to the bed, so that I was near to her neutral face. “No, I know who wanted me to tell, and it was you, and so I told, but now, Jesus, Indo, now what the fuck was any of it supposed to mean, why would you do that to them, why would you do that to me?” And my words were swallowed by angry sobs that racked my body, and I felt an instinct to make the marks on Indo’s neck that had been around Pauline’s, but I restrained my hands. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

I hugged my arms around myself to calm down, trying to find some sense of quiet in the midst of Fritz’s yapping and Aggie’s racket and the storm within me, but it took a long time before I could form rational thought.

Indo blinked up at me calmly. “My dear,” she said thinly, as though she was an unwilling adult forced to lure a child out of a tantrum. “I see that you’re terribly upset. But I’ll confess your thoughts sound … muddled. You’ve been through a hideous ordeal, and no one can blame you for having disordered thinking, for mixing up the truth with gothic fantasy.”

It was as though I was speaking to a different woman here, in this pastel dowager’s room. The feisty Indo I had met on the path only two months before, swearing at her dogs as they swarmed me, hardly seemed to exist anymore.

She went on. “My brother is unscrupulous. But to accuse him of such unspeakable acts …”

I couldn’t understand why she was so blind to her brother’s proclivities.
Ev’s unquestioning acceptance of her father’s rapes—or seductions, as she might have called them—though alarming in and of itself, at least confirmed I’d been right about Birch. But how Birch’s own sister, who’d lived only a few hundred yards from him for most of their adult life, and shared a home with him as a child, could be so oblivious to his violations of his own family was beyond me.

And then I realized: he had probably violated Indo too. As his sister, she was likely one of his first victims. Maybe it had happened so long ago, when they were both so young, that she had buried those memories deep, and all she could remember about them was that she hated her brother.

There was a pounding on the bedroom door just then. “Ms. Linden! Ms. Linden! Are you all right?”

Indo sighed and rolled her eyes at the door. “Don’t mind us, Aggie,” she pronounced, before putting her hand to her forehead. Her eyelids fluttered and her mouth seemed to suck at the air like a fish stranded ashore. I sagged with pity for the old, dying woman. She loathed her own brother and couldn’t allow herself to know why or what that knowing would mean.

On the other side of the door, I heard Aggie’s and Fritz’s retreat.

“Indo,” I said, softening my voice, feeling weary myself, stifling a desire to crawl onto the foot of her bed, “if it wasn’t who Birch raped, what on earth did you want me to find?”

She sniffed haughtily. “It hardly matters now.”

“Why not?”

She raised her hands as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I’m dying.”

“But you were dying at the beginning of the summer.”

“Exactly. I only had a few months to take what I know and find the proof to back it up. Sure, I’ve got memories and tales, but those don’t mean much without hard physical evidence.” She sighed. “But I didn’t have the stamina. Naturally, I thought all was lost. That
I’d missed my chance to bring this corrupt family to its knees.” She pointed her finger at me. “And then you waltzed in, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and I thought: aha!”

“Aha, I’ll give her my house?”

“Once this family crumbles, someone else will have to live here. Might as well be you.”

“Why not just punish Birch with whatever you know? Why take them all down with him?” I had no idea what her bombshell was, and suspected that it would prove inconsequential in the face of Winloch’s reach. Still, it seemed awfully harsh to want to punish every Winslow if only Birch was at fault.

“Because the cancer has spread to all of them!” she shouted, strong now. I remembered her earlier words to me about cutting out a tumor, had come to assume, given her diagnosis, that she had been talking about herself. But now I understood that she was speaking metaphorically, and she meant the Winslows. “It was different when Mother and Father were in charge. We made sacrifices. We kept secrets. We didn’t marry the people we loved because they were the wrong sorts of people.” That last sentence seemed to take the wind out of her, and she slumped back against her pillow. “But under Birch’s watch … There is no order. There is only corruption … So little appreciation of how those sacrifices must be repaid.” Tears began to form in her eyes. “My painting …”

I felt moved by her great need for that beautiful thing. I still had no idea what proof she needed, or what I would do with it if I found it, but I wanted her to know there was still time. That I could help her get some peace. Before I could say so, she spoke, her strength regained.

“Maybe if you weren’t so blinded by greed, you’d—”

“Greed?” I balked.

She ticked off her fingers. “My house. Galway’s bed. Ev’s friendship.
Pauline’s secret.” She held them up triumphantly. “You’re covetous. I thought that flaw would help my cause—that your desire to own our secrets, to collect shiny treasures like a crow, would give me my proof. But I was wrong. You never wanted to help me bring my family down.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “You only wanted to assimilate.”

“I just want to help you,” I said quietly, giving her one last chance.

She gestured around the room. “The funny thing is, none of this is even mine to give.”

I took it all in—the dresser lined with enamel boxes, the small painting of Clover and the cove below, a crocheted shawl slumping over a useless chair. I was dizzy. And confused. And angry. And exhausted. “Fine,” I said, walking toward the door, done with her.

“Stop.” The command was sharp. “Wait.”

Even though I wanted to have the will to leave, I wanted answers more. So I did as I was told.

Indo sighed. “It’s not mine to give you because it’s all stolen.”

“You’ll have to do better than that.” My hand was upon the door.

“My mother’s journal kept track of it all in the beginning,” she said. “What was stolen. When. And where it went.”

Even though I couldn’t pin down exactly what she was saying, she was telling more than she ever had. My mouth began to water. I let go of the door handle. “In the beginning?”

“I don’t want you to think ill of her. She was a good woman. The moment she became a Winslow, she loved this brood with all her heart. But it was this particular single-mindedness, this loyalty, that led her to come up with the idea. You have to understand, the Winslows were in trouble. After Samson lost his marbles, my grandfather Banning nearly ran the family into the ground with bad investments. We stood to lose everything, even Winloch. But we didn’t, thanks to my parents.” What she was saying was consistent
with what I’d guessed at, from the bankruptcy papers I’d found to Bard being behind some kind of windfall that had changed the Winslows’ fate. I let her go on.