The Gilly Salt Sisters (29 page)

As the December’s Eve bonfire began to approach, the wind combed the town, brittle and hard. It was the kind of weather designed to make people resent all the things they were missing, and Claire was no exception. The cold settled into the unused rooms of Turner House, lurked in the shadowy hallways, and waited to snap at her toes when she poked them out of the covers in the morning. Whit was worried about the heating bill and didn’t like her to turn up the thermostat. Claire started staying in bed longer and longer, watching frost lace the outsides of the windows of her bedroom while she picked through the icy carcass of her past, trying to determine its freezing point, even though she knew it surely had to be the day after the fire in the barn, when Whit Turner found her crying under the pear tree and thought to offer her his handkerchief.

Her mother had been in the hospital with Jo, and Claire had been trusted to be alone. Left to her own devices, she was aimless, disoriented. Wanting company, she drifted into town, then realized she couldn’t be around people after all and so found herself
loitering under the pear tree, mourning the loss of Ethan and cursing her bad luck.

She never saw Whit coming. “You look like you need this,” he said, pulling a clean square of white cotton out of his blazer and handing it to her. She knew he must have heard about the fire, because instead of tweaking her hair and calling her silly, he helped her stand up, carefully brushed the dirt off her skirt for her, and then took her for a cup of coffee.

She broached the subject first. “I guess you know what I did,” she said, sniffling, but she discovered that Whit was a man of few words when it came to the vortex of town gossip, maybe because his mother was usually at the core of it.

“I heard,” was all he said, his tone telling her he didn’t wish to discuss it, and that was a comfort to Claire, for neither did she.

It felt strange to sit at the diner counter—a place she’d gone hundreds of times with Ethan—and sip coffee next to Whit. She drank slowly, careful not to drip anything on her blouse, and wondered if rich people had different rules for holding their cups. She glanced out of the corner of her eye at Whit, but he held his mug just the same as she did hers. He smiled, running his eyes over her hair, and then dropped them down to her chest and waist. She blushed and twisted on her stool, but it didn’t deter Whit. He kept staring at her. Then he leaned over and motioned for her to do so, too. When he spoke, his breath tickled her ear. “That Ethan Stone is going to wake up one day and be very sorry he left you,” he said.

Claire put down her cup and sniffled. Just the sound of Ethan’s name still made her want to cry all over again, but something told her that if Whit was not a man for gossip, neither was he one for tears. She forced herself to sit up straight and look him in the eye. “How do you know that?”

Whit smiled and covered her hand with his own. “Because I’m going to
make
him sorry,” he said.

Claire blushed and looked down at their hands joined on the counter, watching Whit watch her. “I have to go,” she whispered.
“Thank you very much for the coffee.” And she slid her fingers out from under his, telling herself this was just a onetime date, that he felt sorry for her, that in his eyes she was still a knock-kneed, freckled girl with two loose teeth. She also remembered that he’d once been as sweet on Jo as she’d been on Ethan. She’d just burned her sister’s heart. She didn’t want to break it, too.

And yet when Whit found her the next week while she was picking up groceries, she didn’t say no to the suggestion of a walk. “Come on,” he insisted, taking the basket off her arm. “The sunset is going to be gorgeous.” So she let him lead her out the door of Mr. Upton’s and down Bank Street, and when he slipped an arm around her waist, pulling her close to his side, she didn’t resist. He wasn’t the same as Ethan, but that was good, too. It was nice to be held by someone who wanted her more than she wanted him.

After that they quietly began courting every few days. Whit was the one who suggested that Claire take the stenography course—he even signed her up for it—saying she needed something to focus her attention on while her mother and sister were gone, and he was the one who pointed out that she should wear plainer clothes to better accent her hair and eyes, and who taught her how to nestle a knife and fork together across her plate at a restaurant to signal when she was finished eating.

But he never tried to kiss her, not even once, and for that Claire was half glad and half irritated out of her mind. She wondered if Whit’s restraint was due to his history with Jo but knew she couldn’t ask. Did he care too much or too little about Jo? Claire wondered. She couldn’t tell. Finally she parked those thoughts in a dark corner of her mind. She didn’t like to dwell on what might remain between Whit and Jo. She didn’t like to think about anything to do with Jo at all, as a matter of fact.

But Whit made her confront that, too. “You have to visit her,” he eventually insisted, about a month after they’d started seeing each other. They were sitting together in the dunes. “The only way to be free of something is to face it.”

Claire wanted to point out that her sister, lying burned in a
hospital because of her, wasn’t an
it
, but she didn’t. Besides, Whit was right. “What if I don’t want to be free?” she said, pulling her hair in front of her face.

Whit drew it aside. “I think you do,” he said, making her remember her dream of running away with Ethan to a shady place where salt never formed but fish swam.

She averted her face. “Well, that’s not going to happen now.”

Whit leaned even closer to her, and she caught her breath, thinking he finally meant to kiss her, but he simply traced a finger around her cheeks and chin, the way the townswomen circled Our Lady’s face before they made confession. “Don’t be too sure,” he said. “You may not have gotten what you want”—Claire blushed, knowing he was referring to Ethan—“but I always do.”

He slipped his gaze down to her thigh, exposed where her dress had ridden up over it, and she gave a halfhearted yank to the hem. It concealed her leg but didn’t accomplish much otherwise. She could still see the outline of her flesh underneath the dress’s thin material, and she sighed, brushing sand off her lap, not knowing if she’d helped matters or just made them worse by covering up what was bound to burst out sooner or later.

W
henever Claire looked back on the afternoon that she traded Salt Creek Farm for Plover Hill, she could never help but wonder if maybe the whole thing had been some kind of blunder or misunderstanding on her part. After all, Whit didn’t come bearing a ring the day he proposed. He didn’t drop to one knee the way Claire had always dreamed of Ethan doing. He didn’t stammer with nerves when he asked her to be his wife, or take deep shaky breaths, and he certainly never put the matter of matrimony to her in the form of a question. Instead he did what he did best—made an executive decision—and Claire, good stenography student that she was, took him at his word.

She was sludging mud out of one of the empty evaporating pools that day. Whit had never set foot on the farm to see her
before, but there he was, handsome as ever, stepping along the edge of the marsh as if he owned it. Flustered, Claire immediately smoothed her hair and tried to wipe some of the dirt off her hands, but it didn’t do any good. She still felt like a hobo greeting a king. “What on earth are you doing here?” she said when he got close. “I don’t think it’s a great idea for us to meet in the marsh. You know, given everything.”

But Whit just put his hands on her shoulders. “My thoughts exactly.”

Her heart beat faster, and she cast an eye around for signs of Jo. “What do you want?” she asked, her voice low and cautious.

His dark eyes watched her as if he were keeping track of a clock. “You.”

Claire snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Whit spread his arms. “What can a place like this offer a girl like you?”

Claire paused. It was the same question she’d been asking her whole life, but walking out on your existence was easier said than done.
I need a sign
, Claire thought,
just something little
, and at that moment one of those pesky blue butterflies, the ones her mother always said were bad luck, landed on her shoulder, followed by two more. Claire shuddered and tried to flick them off, but before she could, Whit threw his jacket around her. It only made the situation worse. She imagined the crushed bodies of the insects creeping down the coat’s lining and fought off an urge to toss his jacket down into the mud.

Whit had fallen silent, and Claire realized he must have asked her a question. She looked up and found him standing almost nose to nose with her, staring into her eyes. That close, he smelled delicious, like spices and fine leather, and his skin was so polished that Claire was tempted to rub him to see if he squeaked or, better yet, granted her a wish. As if in a trance, she leaned toward him, preparing to kiss him right then and there, but that’s when she saw Jo. She made a funny kind of noise, thinking even as she did that she had nothing to be guilty of, and then, before she could
stop him, Whit was crushing her to his side and pronouncing her his future wife.

Everything in the world seemed to hold its breath for a moment—the clouds, the water slipping over the weir, the salt leaching under Claire’s feet.
Wife.
It was a word she had so long wanted to embody and thought she never would. If she couldn’t be Ethan’s wife, she debated with herself, would it be so bad to be wed to Whit? He was rich, after all, and handsome, and there was that undercurrent that bubbled between them, like the riptide at Drake’s Beach, dragging along just beneath the surface of the water. Claire let her shoulder and then her hip relax into Whit, feeling the determined length of him, and thought it might be nice to live with a man who was dedicated solely to matters of the here and now rather than to the stupid spirit.

“Yes,” she whispered, so low she wasn’t even sure she was saying it, and he gave her a squeeze.

“Go get your things. I’ll wait down the lane, engine running.”

When she got into the house, she was confronted with the sorry truth that there was nothing she wanted to take. Certainly she wouldn’t bring anything pertaining to Ethan—no yearbooks, or prom photos, or any of the poems he’d copied out to her. Besides those few mementos, her room might have been a nun’s cell. In the end she shoved two pairs of jeans, three blouses, and a week’s worth of underwear into a canvas bag, recognizing even then that it was a formality. Whit had told her to collect her things, so collect some of them she would, but she knew that nothing of her old self would survive the crossing out of Salt Creek Farm, and for Claire that was the whole point. Nothing would hurt anymore either.

Before she left, she paused for a moment by her window, which looked out over the marsh. Her mother had driven to Hyannis—there was no point looking for her—but in the distance Claire could see Jo’s stooped back as she leaned down over one of the levees. She still hadn’t gotten used to the crooked hang of Jo’s body and wasn’t sure she ever would. For Claire, having to look at
what she’d done to Jo was like staring into a mirror that showed her all the awful parts of herself. She half raised her hand to the pane, as if waving farewell, but Jo couldn’t see her and wouldn’t have waved back even if she could. Claire lowered her arm. The two of them had shared about six words since Jo’s accident. Clearly, “good-bye” wouldn’t be one of them.

Claire backed away from the glass and picked up her little bag. Whit would wait only so long on the lane with his convertible’s engine idling, she knew. If she just sat on her bed until the sun turned down a notch in the sky, he would be gone when she arrived. She thought about that for a moment, then closed the curtains on Jo and the marsh, and shut off the lamp, and then she took off running, first down the steps, then across the porch, the marsh, and finally the lane, going as fast as she could, then faster still, a burning arrow shot to uncertain flight.

J
o had tried to roughen Claire’s new life with her additions to the Virgin—those awful hooks snared along Our Lady’s hem and that eye staring out with accusation. They were the first things Claire saw when she stepped inside St. Agnes for her wedding, her veil thick across her eyes, her hands shaking in their lace gloves. Without any words she knew exactly the message her sister meant to send. Jo was placing the weight of the eye she’d lost in the fire in Claire’s open hand, where it did indeed sting and prick like those painted barbs. Underneath her veil Claire had blanched.