The Gilly Salt Sisters (31 page)

T
he fourth time Claire lost a child was the quickest and the last—a swirl of blood laced down her thighs, a dizzy spell, and then it was over, like Genesis in reverse. Instead of starting out
covered with a vast blanket of nothing, Claire ended up that way, tucked knees to chest in bed, empty as a begging bowl in a famine. She took off all her jewelry—Ida’s pearl that she always wore, earrings, even her wedding ring—and stowed everything in the vanity. From now on, she vowed, she would be as plain as she could get. She would meet the world on its own terms alone, no adornments.

Whit took her to a specialist in Boston and then to another doctor for a second opinion, but the verdict was always the same. Nothing seemed to be wrong, and yet everything was.

“What about adoption?” she croaked at Whit after five days, the first words she’d spoken.

He sat down next to her on the bed, an anvil of judgment. “Absolutely out of the question. I need a proper son and heir, a Turner child by blood, not some lowlife that no one else wants.” He leaned down and gave her a little pep talk. “Claire, you can’t let these incidents defeat you. We’ll just keep trying. The Turner name can’t die.” He reached out and gripped her thigh under the blanket, then inched his hand up her body. She locked whatever joint he chose to touch—shoulder, elbow, wrist—but Whit didn’t seem to notice or care. “Anyway, you have lots of other responsibilities. What about your committee work? Also, Icicle needs a good run.”

That was true. Now that Claire had learned to ride him, Icicle was a solace, a miracle of muscle and intuition. But he grew agitated when he didn’t get his daily exercise, Claire knew. She sat up and sighed. She wasn’t sure what it said about her marriage that a horse could get her out of bed when her husband couldn’t, but she didn’t think it was anything good.

So she rose, slipped her jeweled wedding band back on, then a pair of earrings, a brooch, and the pearl necklace, and accomplished a great deal. In a single week, she reorganized the library by subject and letter, taking the collection of antique books with damaged spines to the bookbinder for repair. She sorted out the china cabinet in the dining room, discarding the chipped gravy
boat and two cracked dinner plates. She rolled up the threadbare Persian runner in the downstairs hall and replaced it with a new carpet of sea grass and leather.

“Have you lost weight?” Cecilia West asked her over lunch in Wellfleet. “You look thinner, and you’ve been so quiet lately!”

Katy Diamond, their third, eyed her critically. “Yes,” she agreed, “quite thin.”

“I’ve had a stomach bug,” Claire replied, unfolding her napkin across her lap and moving the salt shaker across the table. She wanted to pick it up and smash it.

“Lady problems?” Cecilia asked, and before Claire could even deny it, Katy laid her hand on Claire’s arm and squeezed out her sympathy.

“I heard that in Europe women drink barley water for those things,” Katy said.

Claire eyed her coldly and shrugged the other woman’s fingers off her forearm. Katy had a fat toddler at home and a second baby on the way. She could drink any kind of water she wanted, apparently.

Claire stuck out her chin and accepted the menu from the waiter. “Well, at least I’ll be able to fit into my new bathing suit come this summer,” she said, eyeing Katy’s bulk and flipping open the menu. “Unless, of course, I lose any more weight and it ends up being too big. Maybe you’ll want it if that happens?”

Katy blushed furiously and stared down at her plate.

“Where have you been?” Agnes Greene screeched when Claire returned to the library committee. “We’ve been lost without your suggestions regarding cocktails for the August benefit. What do you think? Should we serve sidecars or not?”

Claire wanted to tell Agnes that she could drown herself in stupid Katy Diamond’s barley water for all she cared, but the woman’s chatter was unrelenting, and soon she found herself pulled under a wave of chintz tablecloth samples, plans for shopping trips to Boston, and debates over whether married women should dare try to wear miniskirts. Claire closed her eyes. Elsewhere in the
country, protests over the conflict in Vietnam were raging, and men were walking on the moon, but here in Prospect, it seemed, earthbound life would never change.

That year, as Claire watched the annual bonfire pyre rise on Tappert’s Green, she felt as brittle as the sticks being heaped on top of one another. Every morning, as she cantered past the structure on Icicle, she measured its progress: First it rose to her hips, then to her waist, then to her shoulders and beyond. Icicle spooked at the building racket and almost threw her, and she yanked hard on his bit to get him under control. She rode home in a snit.

Nothing in her life was working out the way she’d thought it would. She’d left the marsh fully prepared to be dazzled by the wealth of Turner House, only to find out that it wasn’t as ritzy inside as she’d believed. Lately she’d noticed curious things going missing. First it was the portrait of Armistead Turner, the family founder, which had hung at the end of the upstairs hallway. Claire had woken one morning to a dark and empty square where the painting once was. Then it was a set of china she used every Christmas, and next it was a diamond choker of Ida’s that Claire had never been allowed to wear. Initially she speculated that perhaps the items had been sent out for repair or restoration, but when months went by without their returning, she started to think otherwise.

It was true that Whit had his moments of generosity—with Icicle, for instance—but mostly he kept the household finances on a tight lead, begrudging Claire’s requests for tennis lessons or trips to Europe, things her richer friends enjoyed. His temper could flare then. “Lord, Claire. What do you think? That I’m made of money?” Actually, that
was
what Claire thought. He was born from Ida, wasn’t he, flesh of her flesh, all his genes Turner ones? Money had made Whit. It seemed logical that he would make money in turn. Claire couldn’t understand why on earth he stewed over Salt Creek Farm. He’d grown up alongside her and Jo, after all. He’d seen firsthand what life in the marsh was like. There was no way she was going back there.

As Claire watched the final touches being put on the bonfire pyre, an idea came to her. Maybe if Whit saw how nonsensical people’s belief in the salt really was, he’d give up pursuing ownership of the marsh. Clearly, telling people that the stuff was toxic hadn’t broken the pull of the salt over the town. Chet Stone and his buddies completely ignored all Claire’s warnings and insinuations, and she knew perfectly well that people like Mr. Upton kept stashes handy. It was time for more drastic measures. “I don’t want people burning salt at this year’s bonfire,” she told Whit that evening over dinner.

He looked at her blandly. If Claire had changed during their years of marriage—her bones thinning out, her hair dulling to a more manageable crimson—he’d changed, too. Threads of gray flecked his temples, and his eyes were growing deeper-set. Looking at him, Claire realized she couldn’t remember the last time they’d made love. Well before her most recent miscarriage, she knew, but when? She felt a rush of heat spread across her belly and thighs and a flush steal over her chest, but Whit was impervious to her arousal. He sawed at his steak, one eye on the clock set on the mantel.

“Good point,” he said. “The less anyone else has to do with the salt, the better. I’ll talk to the constable. Salt’s a chemical, right? There must be some law on record that bans burning chemicals in public areas.” He folded his napkin in perfect thirds and laid it next to his plate, the half-finished steak a pulpy mess in the middle of the white porcelain. Claire averted her eyes. Whit hadn’t attended a December’s Eve festival since they’d gotten married six years ago, Claire knew, though, unlike her, the town would have welcomed his presence with open arms. But Whit wasn’t a man who required adoration—not even, she realized as he strode from the room without even a peck on her cheek or a single backward glance, from his own wife.

The night of the bonfire, Claire left the bedroom window cracked open to the wintry air as she combed her hair before bed and waited for Whit to come upstairs—one hundred cruel strokes
with a coarse boar-bristle brush, a penance for beauty. Through the gap in the window, she could smell the quivering excitement of smoke building and then the headier notes of pitch and wood turning to ash.

She sat very still in front of Ida’s vanity, shivering in her sleeveless nightgown, her electrified hair spread down her back, and she waited, but there came none of the familiar sounds of flute trills, or the happy squeals of teenagers, or the usual bursts of delighted laughter when Jo threw the salt packet to the flames and a bright flash of peaceful blue erupted. Instead Claire heard indistinct murmurings and the crunching of feet on iced-up grass as small groups formed, broke apart, and came together again without any center to hold them. As children on this night, she and Jo used to huddle together in bed, a hot-water bottle between them, their arms wrapped around each other’s waist for comfort.

Claire waited for the familiar sounds of the bonfire celebration to begin, but the night air hung dead and thick like the poisoned atmosphere inside a bell jar. Without the salt, the fire had lost its appeal for people. She listened as, one by one, the citizens of Prospect began to depart, fracturing off from one another in disconsolate pairs or trios, dragging their feet in the frost-laden grass of Tappert’s Green, fishing in their pockets for noisy rings of house keys, resigned to going home without a glimpse of what the year would bring them.

Claire closed the window and climbed into bed, waiting for Whit to come and join her, and when he did, she rolled toward him, her nightdress bunched around her waist, her lips parted, but he simply turned off the light, folded the covers over himself, and patted her arm absently. “Not tonight,” he said. “I have an early meeting tomorrow about a property near Hyannis.” Claire’s belly clenched, but Whit was her husband, the choice she’d made, and so she snapped off her own light and stretched out like a dead woman next to him.

She rose before the sun was up, ripped from sleep by a choking sensation—her old asthma. Her mother used to bring her
a steaming bowl of salt water and cover her head with a towel when she got like that, Claire remembered, forcing her to breathe the salt, but now she fumbled for her inhaler, trying not to wake Whit.

When she could suck air in again, she slipped out of bed, dressed quickly, and tiptoed out to the stable behind the house to saddle up Icicle. The sky brightened to a half-lit moment between night and dawn, and before she could stop herself, Claire cantered through town, down the lane, and out to the marsh. She slowed Icicle to a walk and then dismounted at the boundary of rushes between the lane and Salt Creek Farm, pulled back to a place she didn’t want to be.

Wheezing a little, she stepped through the rushes, passing in front of the new barn. She looked down at the ground near the barn’s foundation, but the marsh’s earth had healed itself faster than its inhabitants had. Any traces of the fire—any signs of scorching or leftover ash—were long gone, absorbed into the ground’s fecund mud.

She turned to the graves. Stone was the only material that lasted out here. Everything else—wood, earth, cinders, and even human bones—was indifferent fodder for the salt. Out of old habit, Claire walked to the weir where her brother had drowned so long ago, and saw that Jo had flooded the basins for the winter. Nothing remained of them but murky surface water.

Claire returned to the graves and sank down by them, regretting that she had nothing to offer any of her kin, living or dead. For a brief moment, she thought about leaving some kind of token for Jo, but she’d come to Salt Creek Farm bearing nothing, not even a tarnished penny, and besides, what would she have offered her sister? Nothing seemed adequate. A flower or a leaf? The autumn had taken them all. A message scratched in the mud? But expressing what? The more Claire longed to say, the less she was able.

In the end the sun started to peek over the horizon, breaking the morning’s spell, and Claire ran out of time. Jo would
rise soon, too, and if Claire wasn’t careful, she knew that her sister would spy her through the kitchen window. Before it grew any lighter, she stepped back onto the lane and swung herself up onto Icicle again and retreated the same way she’d come: empty-handed, heavy-hearted, leaving only a trail of curved hoof prints hooked in the sand behind her, never guessing that one day they would lead her back home.