Caroline sighed. “Fiona. You’ll have thirteen pets.”
I shrugged. “I’ll find homes for some of them.”
“That’s ridiculous. You don’t know how to take care of a cat.”
“Of course I do,” I said. “Cats are easy.”
“They’re living things.”
“I know that.”
“They need food and water.”
“I know that, too.”
“Consistent care.”
“Caroline. Stop. I’ll keep a few, find homes for a few more. And the rest I’ll take to a shelter.”
“But they’ll die at a shelter.”
I tilted my chin, considering. “Yes, that’s probably true.”
“No.” Caroline shook her head. “I can’t do that. I’ll keep them. I’ll figure it out.”
“Why don’t we give one to Joe and Sandrine!” I said. “A wedding present!” This struck me as an inspired idea, but Caroline shook her head.
“Not Joe,” she said, and paused. Something flickered on her face, not the cat or the house, something deeper and older. “Listen, let’s go outside for a minute.” She kept one eye on the cat as she backed out of the room.
At the end of the hall, I glimpsed the tower’s rounded interior wall, painted the same lavender as the house exterior. One small window cast a block of sunlight onto the floor. The space looked utterly beguiling, magical, fit for a princess. “Caroline,” I said, “remember our game with the queen mother, from the pond? Remember the spoon? Do you think she ever found her daughter?”
Caroline looked at me with confusion and shook her head. “Fiona, I’m sorry, I don’t remember.”
“You don’t?” I remembered distinctly the curve of the spoon’s handle, the bubbles trapped within the green glass bottle. All the stories we had once told each other. How could she have forgotten?
“Fiona, come here, I need to talk to you about something.”
I sat beside Caroline at the top of the steps.
“Renee thinks it’s happening again,” she said. “That Joe’s in trouble. The drinking, the drugs, the visions or whatever it is he calls them. We didn’t tell you last time.”
For a moment I thought Caroline was talking about someone else, a different Joe, not our brother. But there were no other Joes.
“What? What last time?”
“When he was in college. When he quit baseball.”
“You mean his knee,” I said, not as a question. I remembered the day Joe called Noni to tell her about the knee injury. I’d been at the kitchen table eating lunch. Noni had answered the white wall phone with the long curly cord. “Joe!” she said, and then, “What’s the matter?” I watched her face animate, then fall.
“Fiona, there wasn’t a knee injury,” Caroline said gently. “He was kicked off the team.”
I shook my head. “But . . . what about the coach’s letter?”
“Renee wrote it.”
“And the surgery?”
“Never happened.”
“But Joe was on crutches.”
“He borrowed them. Only for those days when you and Noni were visiting.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
Caroline was watching me. “Renee was worried about this,” she said. “Renee thought you’d be mad.”
“I’m not mad. I’m—” I stood up and walked away from my sister, down the hall, toward the tower room. Inside, it was smaller than it had seemed from the outside, and draftier, danker. The ceiling did not rise to a point but had been sealed off flat at a height of only seven or eight feet; the plaster was mottled with water stains. It felt confining, not a magical tower at all but a cell. I left the room quickly and stood for a moment in the hall, listening to the mewling kittens.
How to describe the feeling of suddenly not knowing something that you knew? After that call from Joe, Noni had cried for hours, I remembered. She’d tried to reach the coach, the team doctor. Then she called Renee, and it was Renee who explained everything. The ACL tear, the meniscus, how fragile these ligaments were, how difficult to repair fully. Noni had come away from that call no longer tearful but resigned. Her dream, Joe’s dream, gone with one slide into home.
But there hadn’t been a slide into home. Or an ACL tear or a surgical repair. I shook my head.
“You must have gotten it wrong,” I called now to Caroline, who turned to face me. “I don’t see how you could have done it. Joe would have told me. Or Noni would have found out—” I stopped. Suddenly I knew that Caroline was telling the truth. Of course they’d done it. The four of us had kept Noni’s secret for all those years of the Pause. I was the one keeping secrets now, about the blog, how I spent my time away from the office. The Skinners excelled at secrets. Honesty was where we always fell short.
“I wish you’d told me then,” I said.
“You were too young.”
“I was seventeen.”
“You always idolized Joe. And all his friends. We thought . . .” Caroline paused. “Renee and I didn’t think it was a good idea to tell you. That’s all.”
“I wouldn’t have told Noni,” I said. “I would have kept the secret.”
Caroline watched me for a beat. “Joe said that Dad told him to stop playing baseball,” she stated without emotion. “Dad said that Joe’s throwing arm wasn’t what it used to be. Dad told him this.”
“Dad?” All at once I remembered that long-gone afternoon from the Pause when Joe took me to the yellow house and we stood in our parents’ old bedroom and waited for our father. I had never told anyone about that day, and I did not tell Caroline now. The memory felt like a small, terrible bomb I was holding in my hands.
* * *
For weeks Caroline did not tell our mother that she’d quit school.
“You should tell Noni,” Nathan would say over breakfast or as they got ready for bed. He would always touch her in some way as he said it—take hold of her hand, stroke her forearm—but it made no difference.
“I can’t,” Caroline always answered. “She’ll be so disappointed.”
“Maybe. But you should still tell her.”
Through the years Nathan had finally won Noni over and now had an easier relationship with her than Caroline did. But he didn’t know Noni as Caroline knew her. He didn’t understand the peculiar combination of history both small and large that animated Noni’s parenting. Caroline remembered all the discussions of feminism at the dinner table, the college-fund jam jar on the windowsill that bristled with dollar bills. Nathan’s success was not symbolic; it was merely success.
One month after withdrawing from college, Caroline was settled in the braided hammock strung between two sturdy aspens in the backyard when Nathan brought her the phone.
“Call your mother,” he directed. “I can’t keep lying to her.”
Caroline accepted the phone but did not dial. She lay back and watched a white butterfly flounce from one droopy daisy to the next.
Perhaps, Caroline thought, Noni would remember her own pregnancies. The backaches, the troubled sleep, the brain that flitted and flew from one subject to the next while beneath it all droned the urgent soundtrack of one small heartbeat. How could Caroline concentrate? How could she possibly fit in among a bunch of adolescents who partied all weekend and believed a seventeenth-century bee worthy of discussion? People who thought only of themselves? Caroline was beyond all that; already she existed beyond herself. Caroline’s thoughts and ambitions extended wider, broader, further into a peopled future, the branching limbs of family expanding above and beyond, with herself at the center, the powerful, nurturing trunk.