The Gilly Salt Sisters (24 page)

Mama set her lips and pushed her foot down a little on the gas. “Gone good. But there’s more where it came from.”

Jo couldn’t argue as she touched the new geography of her face. The nerves that hadn’t died were in full revolt. They screamed at the contact with her fingers, but she clenched her teeth and took deep, even breaths. Mama was trying so hard, she knew, and she didn’t want to ruin this moment for anything, but she couldn’t help asking the one question that was sure to make the pain worse. “Where’s Claire?” she asked.

Mama’s voice gave nothing away. “Claire’s at a stenographers’ course in Hyannis. She’ll be home later.”

Jo turned her face back to the landscape she knew so well. Here she was, finally home, and her sister was still looking for ways to leave. Nothing had changed after all.

A
s usual, Jo heard Claire coming before she saw her. Claire had a tendency to bang into the house like a burst of chilly wind,
all fury and impatience. Jo heard her dump her books onto the old piano in the hall, one of the volumes knocking against the warped keys, and listened to the thunk of her shoes hitting the bare floor as Claire kicked them off. Jo peeked around the corner of the kitchen door with her good eye and watched as Claire paused to scrape her hair back into a messy ponytail. With her feet planted and her arms upraised like that, she looked like a half-assembled scarecrow. She glanced up, spotted Jo, and froze. Jo’s instinct was to duck behind the door again, but she fought the urge and emerged into the hallway, still dragging her right leg a little, watching as Claire took her first real look at her since the hospital.

Jo still had bandages covering much of her torso, but the loose clothing her mother had fished out of her closet disguised those. Her hair was growing back in, but not well. She had only a few tufts on the right side of her scalp, wispy and undecided as baby hair. The doctors said that would fill in and expand over time, but for now Jo knew that it looked problematic. And of course there was the flat glare of her new glass eye.

Claire let out a squeak and stumbled back against the door. “I didn’t know you’d be here already,” she said with one hand on her chest. “I thought you and Mama were due home tomorrow.”

Jo shrugged. “They let me go a day early.”

Claire took a faltering breath. “That’s good, right?”

“Does it look that way to you?”

“No, I guess not.” Claire bowed her head and tapped her fingers against the door. Jo could tell how much she wanted to fling it open and run through it.

Just to make her miserable, Jo stepped closer to her. “You never came to visit.”

Claire blinked. “That’s not true. I did.”

“Not often.”

Claire looked down at her fingers, white and delicate as lily petals. Even before the fire, Jo’s hands had never looked like that. “I’ve been taking a course,” she said, half sheepish, half proud.
Jo felt a twinge of her own guilt. Any chance that Claire would have to attend college had gone up in smoke with the barn. Burn therapy didn’t come cheap.

She lifted her gaze from Claire’s alabaster hands. “Mama told me. Stenography, right?”

Claire nodded, and it was then that Jo saw the semicircles of grief ringed underneath her sister’s eyes. Her skin looked pale, her cheekbones had grown sharper, and for the first time since high school she hadn’t bothered with her clothes. She was wearing a moth-eaten sweater that used to be Jo’s, jeans with the bottoms rolled, and no makeup. She put her hands over her face, and Jo knew she was going to try to apologize. “Oh, my God, Jo, I’m so sorry,” she said. “You always told me not to smoke in the barn, and I didn’t listen. I’m so stupid.”

Jo was willing to grant her that. Claire looked up, her face tear-streaked and miserable. “Will you ever be able to forgive me?”

Jo hesitated. She knew what the right answer should be, and she thought she was prepared to give it, but her heart couldn’t force her mouth to utter the words. Not charred the way it was. Not just then. “I don’t know,” she admitted, and immediately regretted it.

Claire nodded slowly and folded her arms back around herself. “Okay,” she whispered. She turned on her heel and crept upstairs without saying one word more while Jo stood alone in the hall, her new eye hanging heavy in its socket, a bunch of unused words taking up all the extra space in her mouth, squashing her tongue to a loose pulp.

The next morning Mama suggested that the two of them take a walk out to St. Agnes. “You need the exercise after being cooped up so long,” she said to Jo. “And it will be good for you to see a familiar face.” Jo scowled, not sure she wanted to see anyone outside the family yet, but resisting Mama was about as useless as swimming against a tide.

For Jo, unaccustomed to the exercise, the stroll was a painful stretch of skin and will, but complaining wouldn’t have done any
good. Mama just would have shushed her. The only other creatures out that morning were the gulls, and they cared only about the worries of their own kind.

Jo was relieved when they arrived at St. Agnes. She took a deep breath of the familiar air, rich with beeswax and lemon polish, and knelt next to her mother at Our Lady’s feet, but her mind wouldn’t quiet. What was there left to pray for? she wondered. The only real thing she longed for was to swing back time, but not even the Virgin could grant her that.

She lit a candle for Henry, and then Father Flynn entered the sanctuary. Mama dug in her handbag and drew out a small bag of salt.

“Give this to the father,” she said, handing it to Jo, who took it with a scowl. She knew what her mother was doing. Right from day one in the hospital, Mama had always told Jo she wouldn’t let her hide behind her scars, and now she was making good on her word. “Go on,” she said, giving Jo a nudge. “You’re still going to have to look folks straight in the eye. Now’s your first chance.”

Father Flynn took the bag of salt from her carefully and then ran his hands lightly in front of her face, as if he wanted to touch her but thought better of it. “God acts with peculiar reason, child,” he finally said. “His methods are not always known to us—” He paused. Jo studied his face, which was turned toward the portrait of Our Lady. “I won’t say it’s for the best,” he said at last, flicking his eyes back to her. “I certainly won’t ever say that. But you may, over the course of your life, come to see this pain as a blessing in disguise.”

Jo had her doubts about the truth of that, but instead of offending Father Flynn with her bad attitude, she regarded the Virgin. “I guess I’m just like her now,” she said. “A lady that’s gone and lost her looks.”

Father Flynn hesitated again. He had never been fond of the painting, Jo knew, so his reply surprised her. “Why, there’s a little of the Virgin in every woman, child. Your own mother knows that better than most.”

Jo glanced toward Mama, who was still kneeling in front of the candles, hands clasped, lips fluttering in silent prayer. “Don’t go bringing up tales you’re not prepared to tell, Father,” Jo snapped, and the old priest paled.

“Jo, what do you mean?” The hurt in his eyes made him look like a boy who’d just lost his favorite ball.

“Magna est veritas, et praevalibet,”
Jo said, steadily regarding him with her one good eye. “What does that mean?”

Father Flynn stammered. “Why, it’s from the Vulgate, the old Latin version of the Bible. It means ‘Truth is great and it will prevail.’ What a curious thing to ask. Why do you bring it up, child?”

Jo shrugged. It was a line she remembered from Ida’s letter. She wanted to see Father Flynn’s reaction when she uttered it. She had never been so vile to Father Flynn before—she realized that—but she was a new person, was she not? Now she had layers to herself that even she couldn’t identify. For the first time in her life, she could see why people were tempted by cruelty. There was an electrifying fizz to it.

“No reason,” she said, and then turned her back on Father Flynn and marched out of St. Agnes, leaving her mother behind. Right before the doors slammed, however, she observed something curious. In spite of his total aversion to Our Lady and the adoration around her, Jo could have sworn she saw Father Flynn place the bag of salt her mother had brought at the Virgin’s pockmarked feet and bow his head in prayer or sorrow—Jo couldn’t tell which and wasn’t sure she cared, for one was much like the other, she was starting to believe, and she wanted nothing to do with either.

S
alt was not a substance forgiving of absence, and while the hospital in Boston had advocated its particular methods of healing, Jo created her own rules of recuperation once she got home. She took her time and went slowly, choosing to return herself to the
salt by degrees: first by sight, then by taste, then, hardest of all, by touch.

She soaked strips of rags in a solution of lavender oil and chamomile and layered them across the bubbled patches of her skin. At first the contact stung, but gradually her nerves learned to tolerate the antiseptic blast. Next she poured a stream of salt under the tap in the bath, watching as the last dead pieces of tissue detached themselves from her wounds and floated away. Finally she made a paste of salt and water and applied it straight to her skin, letting the brine chap her scars into armor.

She and Claire worked out a system of avoiding each other, except for necessary interaction at mealtimes or the awkward seconds when they stepped around each other in the hall, both of them wanting to use the bathroom first. Ever since Jo’s return, Claire had stayed more or less silent—hunkered over her stenography books by the hour, her hair bound so tight it tipped up the corners of her eyes, or disappearing for mysterious stretches of time. Once Jo caught her sneaking in at midnight, and when she saw Jo, Claire jumped and put her hand on her neck, the way she used to when she was hiding love bites from Ethan. Her old girlfriends from high school—the cheerleaders and yearbook girls—were always ringing up, but Claire never returned their calls, opting to let her friends slip away until the phone sat silent. And she flat out refused to go to church.

“If God gets to have Ethan,” she spit when Mama suggested she get her tail into Mass, “then Satan can have me.”

Mama slapped her for that, right across her mouth, but Claire just wiped the back of her hand across her lips and set them into a hard little smirk. That Sunday she didn’t come downstairs until noon, two hours after Mass was done. Father Flynn didn’t bother to ask where she was that day, and Mama didn’t offer an explanation.

But Claire’s disobedience didn’t stop with Mass. Just as she was quitting the Lord, it seemed, she was also refusing anything to do with the salt. She wouldn’t put it on her food, she declined to
scoop the winter store of it into bags, she turned up her nose at the idea of helping Jo repair the sluices, and she plain balked at going anywhere near the ruin of the barn.

In contrast, Jo spent hours back on the land, relishing the humid odors and the riot of insects coming out after a long winter. One evening she came upon Whit lingering at the edge of the marsh. Behind him the outline of the barn was taking shape, its unpainted boards and planks so fresh they still leaked little pinpoints of sap. The ponds were newly flooded, and so far all the omens were fine for that year. The seawater was frothing at the right temperature. The clouds were lining themselves up in even bolls, and Henry’s pond was deepening into pink.

Whit looked up when he heard her approach, and if he was shocked by the ruin of Jo’s face, he didn’t show it. Instead he was all business. “Looks like you’re busy,” he said, sweeping an arm out at the half-built barn.

Jo dug a toe into the mud. “I wouldn’t say that. Salt’s still forming. We just don’t have a place to put it.”

Whit reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a checkbook. “I could change that. I could make you an offer right now. You and your family let me own the marsh, and I’ll let you stay. You could pay for that new barn in the blink of an eye and maybe even cover your medical bills.” His eyes roved over her scars, calculating.

Jo held her breath, thinking. Ida had never given them an option to stay on the farm, but Jo knew that it would be a cold day in hell before she signed her life over to a Turner, no matter how skint she was. “Go away, Whit,” she finally said, tired all of a sudden. She turned and started walking back toward the house, skirting the horseshoe of graves. What was it about her family’s land, she wondered, that made the past so burdensome, and why didn’t the Turners, with all the acres they owned, have the same problem?