“Let me see the screen,” Kate said. Sam handed her the phone. It had a rose-gold case. Beth had thought it pretty and that Sam would like it. She’d driven to the Apple Store at Providence Place and bought it the first day the new iPhone had come out. It had a good camera with telephoto enhancements, and Beth had hoped Sam would start taking pictures. She had never stopped encouraging Sam’s interest in art—any form would do, from photography to watercolors to the dry and more scholarly pursuit of studying other artists’ work.
“To answer your question,” Sam said, “I don’t need school things.”
“I thought all kids did.”
Sam shook her head again. “I don’t want anything new.”
“No?”
“I don’t want anything that Mom hasn’t seen. Hasn’t touched. If I got new shoes, she’d never know about them. Or a new jacket. She’d never be able to tell me she liked it, or didn’t like it, or button it up for me the first time I wore it. She still did that, you know. It was so funny; I’m old now, but when I got my winter coat last year, she did all the buttons for me before I walked out the door to get the bus.”
“You’re not old now. You’re just sixteen. You were always hers, and you still are. Her little one.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Kate’s chest tightened. She wanted to do and say the right thing. She had always been an on-the-sidelines aunt. She’d loved this girl from the minute she first met her as a tiny, red-faced infant in the hospital, the third to hold her after Beth and Pete. But Kate lived the life of a pilot, more at home in the sky than on earth. She had avoided relationships and commitment since she was sixteen. So how could she, right now, be everything Sam needed?
“What should we do today?” Kate asked. “Besides get your phone fixed?”
“I was thinking,” Sam said slowly, “that I should go home.”
That stopped Kate in her tracks. She pressed her lips together, gathering her thoughts. She wondered if Sam knew that Pete was basically living at Mathilda’s. Kate planned to kick him and Nicola out, but she’d been too absorbed in Sam and racking her brain to figure out where the funny little key she’d found in Beth’s drawer fit.
“I want you here,” Kate said. “Does it seem I don’t?”
“You’ve been great,” Sam said, giving her a crooked smile. “Even though I know you’d probably rather be flying places with Lulu, whatever.”
“There’s time for that, but right now I’m concentrating on you,” Kate said.
“You’re a lesbian like Mathilda was, right? In love with Lulu—it’s obvious. Why won’t you come out?”
“I’m not,” Kate said, not completely surprised by Sam’s assessment but knowing the truth would be too hard to explain.
“In this day and age, is it seriously so hard for you to be honest about yourself?” Sam asked. “You’re allowed to be who you are! Do I have to be the one to tell you that? Didn’t your grandmother and Ruth show you?”
“Sam,” Kate said, wanting to shut the questions down.
“Okay, whatever,” Sam said, grabbing her phone back, frowning with little lines of hurt furrowing her brow. Despite the splintered screen, she gave it all her attention and resumed her swift double-thumb typing.
Kate knew that Sam would have liked her to confide in her. To have an adult moment, a grown-up aunt-and-niece moment in which Kate told her what she never told anyone. And Kate was pretty sure her niece expected to hear Kate say that, yes, she was a lesbian. She might have been surprised to hear that Kate wasn’t anything. She felt wild, bottomless love for Lulu. And for Beth and Sam, too, for Scotty. But since that day in the basement, she had never felt romantic love, not even slightly. Parts of her heart and body had shut down during the hours of imprisonment.
Before that, her mother had called her boy crazy. She knew only one way to fall in love—madly—and it had started in first grade. Every school year she would be entranced, fascinated, in love with one particular boy. Billy in first grade, Dennis in second, Palmer in third, Patrick in eighth, all the way up to Michael when she was a sophomore.
She would dream about them when she was really young, turn bright red if they spoke to her. She couldn’t wait for her first kiss, and it happened when she was fourteen and went with Patrick Reilly to a beach movie. Whatever was playing, they didn’t bother to watch. They walked to the end of the beach and skipped stones into the dark water. She found the flattest, most perfect scaler. When she handed it to him, he pulled her close. The kiss was fire, and she melted through the soles of her feet right into the sand.
Patrick was her boyfriend until sophomore year when his family moved to New Hampshire. Kate had cried for a month. Then Michael asked her to frostbite with him. Frostbiting was sailing in winter regattas when the water was cold, sometimes crackling with ice. They would bundle up in dry suits, sail even if it was snowing, both of them so competitive they’d put the rail under and sometimes capsize.
The crash boat would rescue them, and one of Kate’s favorite parts of the race would be warming up with Michael in front of the fire at the yacht club. They would sit close to each other on the sofa, arms touching, drinking hot chocolate and plotting how they would annihilate the competition the following Sunday. One time he reached for her hand. The next week she scooted across the sofa and put her head on his shoulder. From then on, they began losing regattas because they’d rather be kissing than racing.
Frostbite season ended, then came the spring series, and by summer they had figured out how to balance making out with high-performance sailing. They were sixteen, and Kate had started fantasizing about the next step. She and Michael were in love. Every time they were together, they went a little further. They would lie together, holding each other, and she would imagine what it would be like with their clothes off, and the thoughts would start to take over and keep her from being able to think of anything else.
Then she didn’t have to imagine anymore. She lost her virginity in Michael’s bedroom while his parents were at work. His body was hot and gave her a fever. She literally got delirious, her head spinning so hard when he touched her breasts and between her legs, when he entered her, that she couldn’t breathe and wasn’t sure whether she was awake or dreaming. She hadn’t known bodies could do that.
Lulu had been jealous. She had never told Kate how she felt about her, but Kate knew. The way Lulu would always sit really close, the back of her hand accidentally-on-purpose brushing Kate’s, gazing at her as if she was hers—as if she could see into Kate’s soul like no one else.
The thing was, Kate knew it was true, and she felt the same way. The feeling was so intense it sometimes made Kate uncomfortable, especially when it stirred up her dreams. The day after such dreams, Kate would flaunt Michael to Lulu. She’d tell her about the things they did and those they wanted to do. Lulu would never smile during those talks.
Michael and Kate were each other’s first. They climbed into his bed whenever they could. He used condoms, and then she got her doctor to give her the pill. Supposedly she had to wait a full cycle before the birth control would kick in, and it was so hard to wait to feel what it would be like without anything, even that thin layer, between them.