By the time the workers take us to the cars out front, we don’t even look like the same kids. There’s the four of us, three other girls, a boy who’s five, two babies, and Stevie, who’s been told that, if he wets his pants again, he’ll get a whipping right then and there.
We’re not allowed to talk in the car. On the way over, the worker does the talking. “Girls, you will sit politely with your legs together like young ladies. Do not speak unless you are spoken to. You will be mannerly toward the attendees at Miss Tann’s party. You will say only good things about your time at Mrs. Murphy’s house. There will be toys and colors, cakes and cookies at the party today. You will…”
I lose track of her voice as the car goes over a hill and comes within sight of the river. May fades like a speck of sun on the water, and Rill comes out. She stretches toward the crack at the top of the window, and pulls in air and catches all the familiar scents.
For just a minute, she’s home.
Then the car turns a corner, and the river’s gone again. Something heavy and sad settles over me. I lean my head against the seat, and the worker tells me to stop; I’m smashing my hair bow.
In my lap, Gabion falls asleep, and I cuddle him close and let his hair tickle my chin, and I’m back home again anyway. These people can control everything about me, but they can’t control where I go in my mind.
But my visit to the Arcadia is too short. Pretty soon, we pull up to a tall white house that’s even bigger than Mrs. Murphy’s.
“Anyone who does not behave will be very sorry,” the worker says, and points a finger in our faces before letting us out of the car. “Be friendly with the guests at the party. Sit in their laps if they ask you to. Smile. Show them that you are good children.”
We go inside, and the house is filled with people. Other kids are there too, and babies. Everyone is dressed in pretty clothes, and we have cakes and cookies to eat. There are toys for the little kids, and before I know it, Fern and Gabion and even Lark wander away from me.
A man takes Gabion outside to play with a blue ball. A dark-haired woman sits with Lark, and they color in a picture book together. Fern laughs and plays peekaboo with a pretty blond-headed lady who sits off in a chair by herself looking tired and sad. Fern makes her laugh, and pretty soon, the lady is carrying my sister from toy to toy, like Fern can’t walk for herself.
They finally cuddle into a chair to read a book, and my heart squeezes. I think about Queenie and how she used to read to us. I want the woman to let go of Fern, to give her back.
A man comes into the room and tickles Fern on the belly, and the woman smiles and says, “Oh, Darren, she’s perfect! Amelia would have been this age.” She pats the chair arm. “Sit and read the book with us.”
“You go ahead.” He kisses her on the cheek. “I have some people to talk to.” Then he leaves the room.
Fern and the woman are on their second book when the man comes back. They’re so busy, they don’t even notice that he sits down next to me on the sofa. “Are you sisters?” he asks.
“Yes, sir,” I answer just like I’ve been told to. Ma’am and sir to everything.
Leaning away, he takes a good look at me. “You do favor one another.”
“Yes, sir.” I stare down at my hands. My heart speeds up, bumping around my chest like a wren caught in the shanty house. What does he want?
The man lays a hand on my back. My shoulder blades fold around it. Little hairs tug at the bottom of my neck. Sweat drips under my scratchy dress.
“And how old,” the man asks, “are you?”
CHAPTER 13
Avery
The cottage is quiet and filled with moonlight as I swing open the door. I fumble for the light switch and brace my cellphone against my shoulder as I wait for my Uncle Clifford to answer the question I’ve just asked. He’s put me on hold while he orders food at a drive-through window.
I’m consumed by the strongest memory of arriving here after dark for a visit, just my grandmother and me. The cottage was exactly like this, moon spears fanning over the floor in the shape of palmetto fronds, the air smelling of salt water, and sandy carpets, and lemon oil, and furniture that has lived long by the sea.
I wiggle my fingers. I can almost feel her hand wrapped around mine. I must’ve been about eleven or twelve—that awkward age when I’d quit holding her hand in public, but here in our magic place, it was okay.
Standing in the entry now, I reach for that sense of comfort, but this visit is pungent with opposing tastes. Bitter and sweet. Familiar and strange. The tastes of life.
Uncle Clifford comes back on the line. After a long walk along the beach and supper at the Waterfront Restaurant, I’ve decided that my uncle might be the only means of making progress in my quest, for now. Trent Turner ditched me by taking off in a jeep with the guy in the uniform. I waited around in my car, but the Turner Real Estate office remained closed all afternoon.
So far, this trip is looking like a bust.
“What was it that you needed, Avery? What about the Edisto house?” Uncle Clifford wants to know.
“So, I’m just wondering if you and Dad came here much with Grandma Judy? When you were little, I mean.” I’m keeping it casual. Trying not to tip him off to anything. Uncle Clifford was a federal agent in his younger years. “Did Grandma Judy have friends she met here or people she came to see?”
“Well…let me think….” He ruminates for a while, then simply says, “I don’t guess we went there all that much, now that you mention it. We visited more when I was young. Once we were older, we liked Granny Stafford’s place on Pawleys Island better. The house was bigger, and the sailboat was there, and more often than not, we had cousins around to play with. Usually, Mama went to the Edisto cottage by herself. She liked to write there. You know, she dabbled in poetry a bit, and she did the society column for a while.”
I’m momentarily dumbfounded. “Grandma Judy wrote a society column?” Otherwise known as the weekly gossip.
“Well, not under her own name, of course.”
“Under what name?”
“If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.”
“Uncle Clifford!” While my dad is straitlaced, Uncle Clifford has always been wild and a bit of a tease. He’s given Aunt Diana a full head of gray hair, which, as any good Southern lady would, she colors regularly.
“Oh, let your grandmother’s secrets stay secret.” For a minute, I think there’s a hidden message in that, but then I can tell he’s just toying with me. “So you’re down at the Myers cottage, huh?”
“Yes. I just decided to get away for a few days.”
“Well, drop a line in the water for me.”
“You know I don’t fish. Yuck.” Being saddled with girls, my poor father worked hard to form an avid angler from at least one of us.
Even Uncle Clifford knows it was a lost cause. “Well, now see, that’s one way you don’t take after your grandmother. She loved to fish, especially down on Edisto. When your dad and I were little, she’d take us there to meet up with somebody who had a little jon boat. We’d go up the river and spend half the day fishing. Don’t remember who it was we went with. A friend, I guess. He had a little blond-headed boy I liked to play with. Name started with a T…Tommy, Timmie…no…Tr…Trey or Travis maybe.”
“Trent? Trent Turner?” The current Trent Turner being Trent the Third, his father was a Trent too, and he’s around my uncle’s age.
“Could’ve been. There some reason you’re asking? Anything wrong?”
Suddenly, I realize I’ve gone one question too far and inadvertently unlocked the detective’s office. “No. No reason. Being on Edisto just started me thinking about things. I wish I’d come down here more with Grandma Judy. I wish I’d asked questions while she could still remember things, you know?”
“Well, that’s one of the paradoxes of life. You can’t have it all. You can have some of this and some of that or all of this and none of that. We make the trade-offs we think are best at the time. You’ve accomplished a lot for a girl—I mean, a woman just thirty years old.”
Sometimes I wonder if my family doesn’t see more in me than is really there. “Thanks, Uncle Clifford.”