She kept her eye on the calendar, ready for the day, but then the basement happened.
It was as if her virginity returned, clamped down on every single bit of her. She couldn’t let herself remember how being with Michael had felt. She began to doubt they had ever even had sex. It was easier to pretend they hadn’t than to miss him, miss the feeling of his hands on her skin. Her heart and body had never come back to life after that. There was no more longing, no more wishing. There was nothing to wish for.
Michael kept telling her he loved her, trying to hold her and kiss her, begging her to tell him what he’d done wrong. It was only August, months away from frostbite season, but she was frozen solid. Instead of telling him it wasn’t his fault, that she had changed because of what she had been through, she stopped speaking to him. She refused to go to the phone when he called her at Mathilda’s.
She didn’t start school that September. Whenever possible, she slept all day. Eventually Mathilda eased her out of bed and drove her to a hospital in Massachusetts, south of Boston. There were other depressed girls and lots of psychiatrists, psychologists, art therapists, music therapists, psychiatric nurses dispensing meds, taking the girls on long walks in the fresh air along trails through a forest of birches and sugar maples and the falling leaves of October, but nothing made Kate come back to life.
By the time she was well enough to return to Black Hall High School, Michael had started going out with someone else. He tried to talk to Kate once, but she pretended not to see him. The truth was, she saw the hurt on his face and hated herself for putting it there. When boys asked her out, she said she had a boyfriend in New Hampshire. Lulu and Scotty embraced her and Beth, nurtured them through that school year.
Beth had survived and somehow started to heal.
Kate had died, but she had kept it to herself.
Staring at Sam, she wondered whether she would recoil from or be intrigued by the way her aunt felt or didn’t feel. Kate knew she was an oddity among the passionate Harkness-Woodward women.
“I really do want to go home,” Sam said, typing even faster.
“Well,” Kate said.
“Today,” Sam said. “I need to be with Dad. And with Mom. Because if she’s anywhere, she’s there. I know she is. It won’t matter that I can’t see her. She’ll be there, at home. I want to sleep in my own bed on the sheets she put on it. And go into Matthew’s room and put up the mobile I made for him.”
“Okay then,” Kate said.
She stood, clipped the leash on Popcorn, and went down to the street. She had to call Pete and tell him to get himself home. She had to tell him his days at Mathilda’s were over, she was kicking him and Nicola out, and that he’d better keep Nicola away from Sam. He’d better.
Her emotions weighed on her, made her feel leaden, but she told herself that with Sam gone, at least she’d be able to spend more time figuring out who’d done the drawing of Beth, to find the lock that fit the key.
20
Lulu Granville was back from Asia. She had actually requested a series of trips starting in Tokyo that kept her as far away from the people she loved most in the world, and she felt completely guilty for it. Thoughts of what she had missed sliced her like knives, especially Beth’s funeral.
Being present for Kate should have mattered more than anything, but Lulu had been too selfish. She needed time to pull herself together, to grow a shell too thick for Kate to see through. She hated herself for doing it, but the idea of seeing Kate, talking about Beth—not just her death, but the secret she’d told Lulu—was unbearable.
For many years, Lulu had been a nomad, sharing apartments with other pilots. She loved moving around, seeing the world, and because she was single, she had had the luxury of changing her base whenever she wanted. At various times she had flown out of New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. Her last share, five years ago in Greenwich Village, had been a nightmare, so she had transferred down to Atlanta and bought a cozy Victorian bungalow in Grant Park. Because shoreline Connecticut would always be her true home, she rented a guest house close to where she had grown up, on Black Hall’s Main Street. The point was to stay close to Kate. Beth and Scotty too.
But she’d chosen to be as far away as possible, just when Kate needed her most. Now that she felt centered enough to handle it, she was back in Connecticut.
She spent the morning at Hubbard’s Point beach, swimming to clear her head. Long Island Sound was blue and calm. She swam out to the raft, then around the big rock, slicing through the water with long, sure strokes. She felt streamlined as a jet in her sleek red tank suit, long hair drifting out behind her. She had left the roped-off swimming area, swam along the far side of the breakwater, heading for Little Beach. A couple in kayaks slid by, calling hello. A jerk in a Grady-White shouted that she’d better be careful; she’d get run over.
If Kate were here, they’d laugh. They’d never kept inside the lines their whole lives. Of the four best friends, she and Kate were the fearless ones. The foursome had called themselves the Compass Rose in high school, each representing a different point on the compass but swearing they’d stay together for life because they needed each other to find their way and stay on course.
Lulu was west—after the great aviator Beryl Markham’s West with the Night; Scotty was east because she was so East Coast, in love with the comforts and conventions of life in their small town; Beth was south, her personality as warm as the sea breezes off South Carolina, as sweet as magnolias; Kate was, of course, north—at times distant and chilly, but brighter than anyone, a blazing aurora, the northern lights over the Arctic tundra.
After her mother’s death, Kate had stopped seeing Michael. Her protective shell kept everyone away but Lulu, Beth, and Scotty. High school kids said she was cold, but Lulu knew she was the opposite—so warmhearted, she shut down after the nightmare, knowing what her mother had suffered. She had never recovered the part of her that had been lost that day. She refused to allow herself physical, or even emotional, pleasure.
Lulu’s heart was pumping, her eyes stung from salt water, and her muscles released the tension that had built up since her arrival in Connecticut. The idea of seeing Kate was both thrilling and unbearable. The Compass Rose hadn’t exactly stayed intact. Although the four of them had remained friends, their closeness over the years had dissolved. Even Kate’s and Beth’s. Lulu and Kate had stuck together tighter than the others.
She swam over the rocky bottom, climbing out at Little Beach and scraping her thigh on barnacles. She shook salt water off her dark-blonde hair, staring at graffiti on the granite boulders. This was a nature sanctuary. When she and the rest of the Compass Rose were young, they had respect for the beauty here. They cleaned up beach litter, would never have dreamed of desecrating the rocks with spray paint like this: a black-and-red bull’s-eye, splotches of bright blue and yellow flowers, a Jet Ski. Some idiot had actually painted Hubbard’s Point is Great! It made her feel sick.
She wiped the blood off her thigh as she walked through the oak-and-black-walnut-spiced woods, along the twisting path back to Hubbard’s Point. The graffiti made her want to never come back here again. Hubbard’s Point people had used Little Beach for decades, although it was private and a nature preserve. Now they’d damaged it. She felt like building a fence across the path.