The Gilly Salt Sisters (19 page)

T
hat spring Claire dug and shoveled the drainage ditches in the marsh and didn’t even complain when her hands blistered so badly
they started bleeding. Ethan would kiss them better when she saw him, and then she would take over from there. Love, she was discovering, could make even the salt sweet.

Ethan would go only so far with her, though. She’d worm her hands under his shirt, and he’d allow that. She’d lick the side of his neck, and he’d let her do that, too. But when she started tugging at his belt, he would grab her wrists. “If you don’t stop,” he’d say, lowering his arms, “I won’t be able to either, and that’s not what I want for us.”

“What do you want?” she finally asked him, smiling. It was the end of March. They’d been a couple for four months, but Claire felt like a whole new girl. The first thing Ethan had gotten her to do was quit smoking.

“It makes your hair smell,” he complained, unbraiding her red curls, “turns your fingers yellow, and how many times have you accidentally burned yourself?”

Claire bit her lip. “But you smoke.”

He leaned down and kissed her. “I only do it in fishing season, for my father. It’s one of his qualifications for official manhood. Promise me you’ll stop.”

She thought she would miss the sizzle of tobacco, but delayed gratification was even more delicious than indulgence, she was learning. She would run the pad of her thumb over her empty bottom lip and summon up the fullness of Ethan’s mouth on hers, and her urge to smoke would vanish, replaced by a far more carnal craving.

Ethan loved to read poetry—the Romantics, especially: Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge. He had an amazing memory and could quote entire passages to her as easily as if he were reciting the names of his family. When Ethan was busy down at the docks, Claire would wander the shelves of the library in Prospect, reading those poems for herself, bundling the words on her tongue and stowing them safe in her heart. She learned that to look at an object—a daffodil, a Greek urn—to really
look
at it through beautiful words could make the rest of her life seem beautiful, too.

Because of Ethan, Claire learned to sit still in Mass. He’d quit singing, but he still paid such rapt attention throughout the service that Claire started wondering if she was missing something with all her fidgeting. She sat motionless on the pew, her hands folded on her knees, her eyes drawn forward, and she even started telling more of the whole truth to Father Flynn during confession. On the surface, she knew, she looked angelic—hair smoothed, lips gently curved—but in her soul she was still as choppy as the whitecaps breaking off Drake’s Beach on a windy day. She just no longer wanted everyone to know it.

“What’s with you these days anyway?” Jo ribbed her. “You’ve turned into a regular Pollyanna. To be honest, I think I liked the old Claire better. At least we all knew what we were getting.”

Claire shrugged. She couldn’t explain it either. It just made her happier to please Ethan than it did to please herself.

Only one thing terrified her, however, and it was something she kept to herself. Much as she scoffed about the bad luck the women in their family had with marriage, Claire secretly worried it might be true. After all, no Gilly woman that she knew of had ever managed to leave the salt, and no boys had ever managed to grow up in it. What if she and Ethan had a child together one day? Would her family’s blight find them, adding another stone to the graveyard of dead boys by the barn? The idea made her shudder.

“Please keep Ethan safe,” she prayed during Mass, trying not to catalog the accidents and disasters that could befall a man of the sea. “Keep watch over him. Keep him close. Keep him like your own.”

Little did she know how powerful prayers could be. Even littler did she suspect how very well hers would be answered.

B
y the end of high school, Claire was so in love with Ethan that it was old news in Prospect.

“Hey, it’s the mister and missus,” Mr. Hopper teased them one Saturday night when they came into the diner for burgers after
a movie. They were seniors, and their futures were looming. “When are you kids going to get hitched?”

Ethan blushed. “I think we’re a little young.”

Mr. Hopper waved a hand. “Best time for it! Before you know any better.” And with a wink, he slid them free milk shakes.

Her own cheeks burning, Claire glanced at Ethan through lowered eyelashes. “Do you ever think about it?”

Ethan took a careful sip of his milk shake. “The future?”

“
Our
future.” Her nerves thrilled just saying it. She tickled his wrist with her fingertips. “If we were married, you know what we could finally do…” Ethan edged his hand away. They’d experimented fairly creatively over the past three years, but Ethan always drew the line when things started getting too serious physically. There were some things Claire couldn’t negotiate.

“Of course,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “But we
are
young. I can’t do something partway, Claire. You know that. I need to be sure first.” It was true. It was one of the things she loved best about him. When he was away fishing in the summers, for instance, he was gone heart, soul, and body. When he studied, he concentrated so hard he couldn’t hear anything around him, and when he prayed, angels could have trumpeted over his shoulder and he wouldn’t have heard them. This year in particular, he’d been spending a lot of time with Father Flynn, but Claire couldn’t fault him for that. If she had a father like Merrett, she thought, she’d look for a substitute, too, but maybe she’d choose someone closer to home, like Ethan’s uncle, Chet.

As their senior year went on, Claire wondered if Ethan would propose. When Christmas came, she unwrapped the book of poems he’d bought her and thumbed through the pages without seeing any of the words. On Valentine’s Day she buried her nose in the folds of the red rose he’d presented, hoping to feel the hard glint of a ring in the petals. By the time the prom arrived, she was floating in a fevered cloud of silk, perfume, and hair spray. But Ethan just swayed with his hands anchored on her hips like usual and whispered “I love you” in her ear, but he didn’t get down on one knee.

By graduation Claire had gnawed her fingernails to ragged crescents. Ethan accepted his diploma with a firm handshake and threw his mortarboard in the air with everyone else, but he didn’t pull her into the dusty shadows and reach into the pocket of his robe for a small velvet box. Claire entered salt season as bitter as a crabapple that year and straightaway reverted to squabbling with Jo.

“Do you ever think you’re just going to dry up in all this stuff?” she asked. They were in the barn, making up little burlap sacks. Claire flicked her braid over her shoulder and watched as Jo wrenched another bag’s neck closed with twine. It reminded her of the way Mama wrung chicken necks whenever they decided it was time to eat from the coop.

“Just be glad you don’t have to sell it, too,” Jo said. That was
her
job—sitting in the makeshift stall they’d decided to set up in town, shilling Cape salt to tourists. Claire hated the commerce as much as she loathed the marsh. It was another embarrassment. She didn’t bother to answer Jo now. Instead she lit a cigarette. Ethan had been gone for three weeks already on his father’s boat, and her nerves were ringing like firehouse bells.

She looked up to see Jo wildly flapping her arms. “Put that out! You know this place is a pile of timber sticks!” It was true. Smoking in the barn was about as dumb as puffing away next to a gasoline pump. The dust alone was so arid it was already halfway to fire, never mind the worm-infested siding, the warped flooring, and the splintery roof.

Claire didn’t care. She tilted her head and blew a stream of smoke straight up. “Don’t be such an old biddy,” she said. “You never have any fun.”

Jo ground her teeth. She looked about an inch away from killing Claire. Claire could tell how mad Jo was by how quiet her voice came out. “Of course I don’t have any fun! Take a good look around, Claire. Daddy never left a forwarding address, Mama and I work seven days a week, yet the sea doesn’t stop flowing, the salt doesn’t stop forming, and things around here don’t stop
breaking.” She narrowed her eyes and stepped closer to Claire. “Gilly women weren’t put on the earth to have fun.”

Claire took a final drag off her cigarette and rolled her eyes before she stubbed it out. No one had to tell her that twice, which was exactly why she wasn’t planning on staying a Gilly for long.

“Suit yourself,” she said. “Die an old maid. See if I care.” And without another glance, she left Jo to finish all the work.

T
he first summer that Whit returned from boarding school, he and Jo agreed through their usual signals to meet on Drake’s Beach a full hour after Mass was over. It was later than their normal time, but Whit let Jo know with a waggle of his eyebrows that he had a surprise in store for her. She blushed in her pew, glancing over to make sure her mother hadn’t noticed, and hid her face. On the one hand, the old thrill of Whit’s impish charm pulled at her, tempting her to match his acts of derring-do with some of her own, but things had changed between them. At least they had for her. Since that awkward kiss he’d given her in the barn and after his months away, Jo had had time to figure some things out, and she knew without a doubt that no matter what happened, she and Whit could never be a couple.

In the course of the past year, Whit had grown much taller, and his shoulders were filling out while his hair had gotten even darker, flopping over one eye in a manner that Jo was sure the girls in his set found irresistible. In fact, he seemed almost a different person, stretched to unfamiliar proportions, an impostor who somehow knew all the tics and signs of their secret language. Jo watched as he helped Ida out of her pew and then shook Father Flynn’s hand with both of his own, as if they were playing a game of fists that Whit was determined to win.

An hour later, against all her better judgment, Jo was on
Drake’s Beach, the wind whipping through her dark hair, her toes curled like anxious snails in the sand. The beach was so weather-beaten and stony that going barefoot on it was a trial of faith, but Jo did it anyway, figuring if she could bear the pain, she could handle almost anything. Again and again she glanced up through the dunes, to where the lane ran, but no one arrived. Relieved, she turned to go back to the marsh, but just then she heard a whistle coming from the sea. Two beats, then a pause, then the same two beats again.

She turned to the water and saw that Whit had chosen to inaugurate their season of beachcombing by sailing a brand-new dinghy around the point. He navigated the surf easily, arriving in a flurry of sailcloth and breeze, and threw his legs over the side, jumping down to steady the little craft.

At the sight of the boat, Jo’s mouth filled with saliva and her hands started sweating. In spite of living among the puddles of the marsh, she was distrustful of the sea. It had to do with Henry’s death. She pictured the bloated corpse of her brother as her parents hauled him from the inundation pond, his arms spread wide like a person throwing out a warning, and she took a step back toward the dunes. She did not want to go sailing.