Tighter (19 page)

“So she’s your ward now,” said Katherine. “But you’re not from the island, are you?”

“No, my name’s Jamie Atkinson. I’m not from around here, but I’m living at Skylark this summer. I have Jessie’s job, taking care of Isa.”

Katherine Quint nodded, a tug of her head. Nothing in her face seemed to care anything about who I was or why I’d come here. “Then you were a summer friend of Peter’s?” Her eyes twitched and blinked, reminding me of an old movie strip, and I understood what Isa had meant, that Katherine’s “wrongness” was immediately apparent just from looking at her, from being seen by her. “He never mentioned you.”

“This is my first summer on Little Bly. I never met him. Or Jessie. I’ve really got nothing to do with Bly.”

“Nothing and everything.” She sniffed but she’d grown rigid, and as her fingers began to twist up a tatty blanket across her lap, I sensed that my presence disturbed her. “And if you didn’t know my son, then why are you standing in front of me?”

“Because he sent me,” I said, with such calm it was as if I’d planned to say it all along to give her a fright or something, though I hadn’t, not at all, and my own words hit me with the same atomic force that I saw in Katherine Quint’s reaction.

It pulled down her guard. She straightened herself upright, but then just as quickly crumpled back in the chair, as if she’d lost her strength. But her energy had changed. Her eyes blinked around the room
the crazy people can always see clear down to the ugliest truth. Problem is, nobody believes ’em.

“Who are you to me?” she asked. “Why should I speak to you?”

“I’m nobody. I came here because I need …”
All you need’s a little proof.
“I need to be released from this burden, this weight that Peter’s presence has put on me.”

She was shifting in her seat, unwilling, angry, but I sensed that she knew exactly what I was telling her.

“So I came to find you, to see if there was anything you knew about Pete’s last visit. It’s not something I wanted. This history, Peter and Jessie, everything that happened last summer—I inherited it, in a way. I didn’t choose it.”

“What’s
choice
got to do with anything?” snapped Katherine, blinking, shifting, and then it was almost a full minute before she decided to speak to me again. In the intervening silence, I could hear Isa, across the room, flipping through magazines and probably listening in. “Last time I saw my boy, he came alone, in that fancy car.” Katherine’s voice had gone flat as she relayed this information. “Same one you drove in, like he was the prince of Bly. He came for the ring to give her. The one his father’d given me, and his father him. I couldn’t. Not at the time. I just couldn’t. A mother knows.”

“Knows …?”

“When her child isn’t loved enough.” Katherine’s gaze had found her lap and finally settled there. “I didn’t give it to him, and I suppose I regret that now. I told him things I wish I hadn’t. It was his mistake to make. It was his ring, no use for me anymore.” Her hand, blanched and formless as a peeled potato, suddenly reached out and seized my wrist.

And then I saw the ring on her pinkie finger—the only finger it must have fit, probably. The band was as thin as Christmas tinsel, the diamond hardly bigger than the sightless pupil of one of the portrait children. And I guessed at what would happen even in the split second before it did, as Katherine tugged off the ring and then closed my fingers around it.

“Take it back to Bly,” she said quietly. Her eyes were soupy, so feverish, I could hardly stand to look at her. “And bury it at his grave. You’ll do that for me, won’t you?”

“Yes,” I told her, faintly.

“Promise me?”

“Promise.”

“And then you never come back here, never again, not in that fancy car, not any other time in any other car. I could spit in your face for how you look like her.” She was leering, her lips curled back and revealing grayish gums, as if to show me she might make good on her threat right then. “A mother shouldn’t have to see that same girl twice.”

I drew back, nodding; I couldn’t really muster outrage or fear when all I sensed was her maternal grief, unanchored and void, another kind of madness.

“Hi, Kate. May I interrupt for a minute?”

The male voice was so close and unexpected that I jumped to a soldier’s stand, the ring clamped in my fist, my fist in my pocket, my heartbeat the pound of the surf in my ears.

The doctor smiled. “No need for ceremony.” His name tag read
FELIX CAREY, MD
. He looked young to be a doctor, but he held himself with the confidence of someone used to a lifetime of good grades and prizes.

“You’re late, Felix,” said Katherine, all petulant and sugary girlish again. “Don’t you know it’s terrible to keep a woman waiting?”

A nurse brought over a handful of pills and a glass of water. A yellow oval, a blue capsule and two little white dots. My mouth went dry, wanting them. But Katherine’s fingers grabbed so fast that a white pill fell to the carpet and had to be scrambled for.

“Oh dear,” she murmured, and as she looked down, I saw that her hair was thinned in patches to a pinkish scalp. It made me queasy, like I’d caught a glimpse of her naked. She swallowed all her pills so greedily I had to look away.

“Felix, this is my niece,” said Katherine. I could tell she enjoyed the tiny rebellion of this lie.

“A family visit.” The doctor smiled agreeably. “And you are …?”

“Just Jamie.”

“Hello, Just Jamie.” He smiled. How kind of you, his smile intimated, to spend time with your crazy aunt Katherine. If only he could see how I was shaking. Would he know me for what I really was? In a moment of digital clarity, I saw my whole life unfold as a game of chance. The acrobat or the veterinarian. The mansion or the shack. The committed or the dispossessed. The question was—did it depend on my will or my luck?

“Jamie?” The doctor was passing his hand over my face. “We lost you for a minute.”

“I’m fine.” I smiled. No, I wasn’t lost. There was nothing wrong with me. Dr. Felix Carey could sense that. He assumed I was on the winning team. Team Sane.

“She won’t be coming back,” said Katherine, singsong. “Hard as it is to leave. Once you’re in, they always want you to stay awhile. But you know that already, don’t you?” Her smile, wrung up too high in her face, was grotesque.

“Isa!” I wheeled around—I couldn’t bear to be here another minute. “Isa, let’s go!” Quick with my mumbled goodbyes, my excuses, grabbing for my bag and heading for the comfort of the red
EXIT
sign, my one hand sunk like a stone to the bottom of my pocket, the fingers of my other hand snapping for Isa, hurry hurry hurry
wee wee wee all the way home.

TWENTY-THREE

“I saw,” Isa whispered.

She hadn’t said a thing, not one single thing the entire trip home. We’d skipped the Dairy Queen—she hadn’t wanted it—and we’d hit some traffic delays before the ferry. Now it was half past seven, way late for dinner, and we both were tired.

But now I realized that Isa was more than just tired.

I looked over. Nobody was on Bush Road and so we were cruising it, the wind picking up Isa’s long, dark hair in a snap and billow. I couldn’t see her face. “Saw what?”

“Saw her give you the ring. The ring she wouldn’t give him, that he wanted to give Jess.”

“Isa.” My heart was in a sudden skip-rope. “What do you know about that?”

“Everything.”

I waited. It was a full minute before she continued.

“The day. The day … before. Peter came back to Skylark from visiting his mom. He was looking for Jessie. She’d biked to town to pick up some things. We were all going to Green Hill later. Connie was out back, in her garden. It was only Peter and me in the kitchen. And he was so mad.”

My hands were shaking. I pulled the car off the road. I didn’t trust myself to drive. I maneuvered us to a safe spot in the meadow and braked. The grasses here were long, higher than the car door, and the sky burned with the wild reds of sundown. Shifting in my seat, I looked at Isa, whose face was labored with memory, though she was working as hard as she could to contain herself.

“Go ahead, Isa. I’m listening.”

“I don’t know if I can say it. I never did before. Out loud, I mean.”

My fingers touched her shoulder. “Another time, then. But it might make you feel better, to let it go.”

“He was really angry at his mom,” she blurted, “for saying Jess was spoiled and silly and not worth the family engagement ring.”

“He told you that?”

She nodded. “He was slamming things around. He said it was
his
ring. His ring for Jessie. And that’s when I told him what I’d seen.”

“What, Isa? What had you seen?”

It couldn’t have been more than five seconds, but time made no sense to me; the moment before her confession was nearly unendurable for us both. “Jessie and Aidan,” she whispered. “I saw them from the lighthouse. She’d taken Aidan up to the third floor. All I meant to do was explain that maybe Jess didn’t want that ring, either. Not yet, anyhow. But then, what he did … after I told him. What he did …”

“What?” I reached out and touched her shoulder. “What did he do, Isa?”

She had pulled herself into a ball, her arms belted around her knees, her toes locked at the edge of the seat. She spoke her memory as if still spellbound by it. “He was smiling. That scary smile, more like a mask. He got a long fireplace match from the kitchen drawer. He took the sugar bowl from the dining room. He called me into the dining room. I went in. It was too dark. He lit the match, he wanted … he wanted to melt the bowl. To ruin it. He was doing it right in front of me. The silver turned all blackish. He only burned around the bottom. Where you wouldn’t be able to see it. I was scared.”

I could imagine it perfectly. Pete’s smile and the match like a jacklight, the firelight disfiguring his face, finding its hollows. “And then what?”

“He was laughing to himself. He said, ‘Isa, here’s a lesson you won’t learn at school. When you believe something is perfect, don’t be fooled. It just means you need to search harder for the defect. For what makes it worthless.’ ” Her hands covered her face. “Sometimes I hear him saying that in my dreams. Sometimes I wake up, and it’s just like he’d been whispering it right in my ear.”

“No, no. Those are just bad dreams.” I shoved closer so that the weight of her body could fall against my support.

“It’s all my fault.”

“None of it’s your fault, Isa. None of it.”

“It is, though.”

“Shh.” As I smoothed her hair away from her face, she quieted.

“All Jess wanted him to know was that she wasn’t ready,” she whispered. “She was always saying she wasn’t ready. That Pete was too clingy. She even told me she wouldn’t be mad if I let it slip out that Aidan was hanging around. But then, when I did let it slip out, Pete … he ended up killing them both. He did, Jamie, didn’t he?”

And even when I couldn’t answer, she kept asking this question, as the sun dropped away and cast us in cooling shadows.
He did, didn’t he, Jamie? Didn’t he?

TWENTY-FOUR

“You’re taking me tonight, right? Per our deal?”

I whipped around, startled. “Don’t you know how to knock?”

“Sorry.” Milo didn’t seem sorry at all as he ambled past me to sit in the armchair by my bookcase.

“And we don’t have any deal, Milo.” I reached for the Baggie on top of the bookshelf. I was really coming down to the last of my pills, and the one I’d taken an hour ago had been from Mom’s muscle-relaxing stash. I knew from experience that its effects were next to nothing, maybe a pinch stronger than an ibuprofen. Which was comical, which was hardly any help at all.

Two days since Pendleton. I’d wanted to find out things, and now that I’d learned them, all I wanted to do was forget them. Peter had believed that we were fated to our destiny. That we had no choice, only the illusion of choice. Was that the thought he’d held on to when he brought down the plane?

I pushed it out of my mind. Refused to dwell there. Most of the time I’d spent comforting Isa, who had gone into a bit of a shock since her confession. Now I understood why she thought about it all the time, why it still frightened her. She had needed to believe in their true love and romantic elopement to take the tarnish off the secret of Jessie’s disloyalty and Peter’s torment. Which was the truth?

I’d also written Mom, but I hadn’t sent that note yet. My saved draft was a safety blanket. I pulled it out and wrapped myself in it, imagining her and Dad coming out to Bly to collect me. But I couldn’t go home, or make any decisions that stuck, not yet, and Isa was the reason. She needed me now more than ever. I was her everything—big sister, friend, parent. Letting go of her secret had taken a toll, and I had to get her through it.

So if she wanted to play, I played. If she got bored, I found us a new game. When she whispered her nightmares, I shooed them off and comforted her, promised they weren’t real. We dealt cards and built worlds out of the Sims. We dozed through narratives of forests and oceans and penguins on Blu-ray. We picked mint and squeezed lemons for lemonade, we tossed and caught popcorn in our mouths and left Connie to vacuum the stray kernels.

Yesterday we went to Green Hill, where I’d hung out with Sebastian when he’d swung by to see me after work, and then the three of us caught a movie in town. I almost dropped the whole story on him right then. But Isa had been right there, and somewhere between the Mud Hut ice creams and the ride back, I’d lost my nerve.

But tonight I’d tell him. Not just about Jessie and Peter, but about Hank and Uncle Jim, about Pendleton and Katherine and Isa’s confession. Even if Sebastian thought that every single word I spoke was madness, he’d hear me out, and I needed his logic more than ever.

“You look spacey. Are you okay to drive?” Milo’s question was written deeper in his eyes.

“I won’t be driving. Sebastian’s picking me up on his bike, so you can’t come with us. We’ve got some private things to talk about.”

“You should sober up and drive yourself anyway. You’ve known that guy for, like, three weeks? Last thing you need is him in control of transportation. And you promised, you
swore
, that you’d take me next time.”