Ross stood first, grabbing the loose ends of his belt. “Tandi, wait a minute. I . . .”
Gina blinked in surprise, looked from me to Ross and back as she pulled her sundress into place. “Tandi, it’s not what it looks —”
“So is this where you were last night?” I spat. “First my daughter and now Ross. If I have it, you want to get your hands on it . . . just to prove you can. That’s how it’s always been, right? I was an idiot to think things could be any different.”
“Tandi, I didn’t mean for this to . . .” Gina stood, faced me. “It wasn’t any . . . Nothing happened, okay? I wasn’t with him last night, I swear. Just calm down, okay?”
“Leave,” I growled.
Her lips pressed into a thin line, her nostrils flaring. “You know what? You’re the same brat you always were. I sold my car for you —to help you out, to get us a place. And if we’re going to talk about people keeping secrets, why don’t we talk about yours? I’ve seen you over here with the lights on at night, sneaking around when you think no one’s watching. What are you doing in this house all the time, Tandi?” She rammed her hands onto her hips, glared at the walls. Beside her, Ross looked completely confused, but Gina had homed in. “Maybe making a few bucks on the side, because there’s lots of stuff around here that’s worth some money. Wonder what Brother Bill-bo next door would say if I told him you’re in here all the time —that you come over here for hours sometimes. No telling what you’ve stolen out of this place, because that’s who you are, Tandi. You’re going around trying to make these people think you’re so good. You think they really love you? You think they won’t figure it out? You’re nothing. We’re just like Mama and Daddy, and we always will be. Once these people find out who you really are, you’ll be out on the street, and you’ll come crawling back, looking for somebody to make it okay. Blood runs thicker than water, Little Sister.”
Fear made me hesitate, freeze up just long enough for Gina to narrow her sights, put me in her crosshairs. Blood runs thicker than water . . .
Her posture softened, her head tilting to one side, the strap of the sundress sliding down her shoulder. Her lips curved upward at the corners, the expression almost tender, alluring. “You should see yourself. You look like a deer caught in the headlights. Relax. It’s okay. Hey, it’s not like the old lady can use this stuff anymore. Why shouldn’t somebody have it? Come on, we could look around, and —”
My anger exploded in a white-hot flash, and before I knew it, I was crossing the room, grabbing the fireplace poker, brandishing it at my sister. “You get out of this house! I’m not anything like you and Mama . . . and Daddy, and I never will be. You get out and don’t come back!”
“Right now.” The voice came from behind me, and I realized it was Paul’s. He was standing in the entry hall, his face deadly serious. In his hand, he was holding a heavy wooden spindle from the porch railing, tapping it against his palm like a baseball bat. His red hair was wild around his head, his face flushed beneath the freckles as if he’d been running. “If Tandi wants you out, then get out. Both of you.”
Gina coughed indignantly, drawing her head upward.
Ross lifted his hands, palms out, and sidestepped toward the door. “Look, dude, this isn’t worth it, okay? I didn’t come for a fight. I’m gone.” He turned and quit the room.
Gina flashed a look filled with resentment and anger, and even though we’d played this scene out so many times before, it still stung.
She stormed after Ross, her heels clicking through the entry hall and across the porch.
Tears filled my eyes, and I wiped them impatiently, then turned away from Paul, filled with pain and shame. You’re nothing. We’re just like Mama and Daddy, and we always will be. Once these people find out who you really are, you’ll be out on the street, and you’ll come crawling back. . . . Gina knew me. She knew my life from the very beginning.
“I’m sorry, Paul.” I swallowed the acidic mix inside me, stuffed it down, and pulled a hard covering over it. “You should leave too.” Why wait for it to happen on its own? Who was I fooling, thinking I could change my life, change everything about me? I was like Iola —an actress on a stage, playing a part for the rest of the world to see, denying who I was.
If Paul knew where I’d come from, he wouldn’t want a thing to do with me. Neither would Sandy or Brother Guilbeau or the rest of the Seashell Shop girls. It was easier, less painful to just speed up the natural progression of things. I could do Iola this last favor, clean out the letters and throw them away, and then leave. If Trammel was a big story in Texas now, there might be some money to be made telling my side, letting the world know what it was really like, living in his house . . .
“I’m going,” Paul said, and the hard place inside me clenched tighter, the skin ripening, preparing for harvest, a bitter fruit.
He lowered the wooden spindle, his fingers relaxing against the cracked surface and peeling paint. I nodded, closed my eyes. I didn’t want to watch him walk out, to see the beginning of the end of this life.
“But just to get my hat. It blew off as I was running over here.”
I looked at him standing there, thumbing over his shoulder in a ridiculous peach-colored shirt with dancing geckos on it. I couldn’t speak.
“. . . and the kids, I guess,” he went on. “I left them at Bink’s. I was afraid there might be trouble here.” Outside, vehicles started and roared away, and Paul turned an ear to the sound, listening until they were both gone before he looked at me again. “Besides, if I leave, my long ladder’s going with me. I priced new ones at Home Depot the other day, and do you know how much those things cost?”
A puff of laughter pushed past the mountain of pain —impossible laughter that came from somewhere new, somewhere soft and bright, far from all the old wounds. I wanted to step into it, but I was afraid. That place was wide open, vulnerable. “Paul, you don’t have to . . .”
He smiled and shook his head, met my eyes. “Not everyone’s the same, Tandi. Not everyone is working the angles, looking for something. People can care about you just for you. Just because you’re worth caring about.”
I felt the warmth inside, the explosion of the light I’d seen in my dream flowing over me, enveloping me. I wanted to step into it, to be covered by it, blinded by it. The only thing stopping me was fear. It clenched my throat, made words impossible to find. I could only stand there, silent.
“Anyway, we’ve got work to do.” Paul straightened, suddenly all business. “We have to come up with a plan. I just found out there’s a county commission meeting on Monday. They want to condemn this house and the property around it as a flood-control zone, then dig a borrow pit here to excavate sand to restore the beaches around those multimillion-dollar homes that are sitting in water since the storm. In the end, they’ll turn this whole place into a holding pond for flood retention. If they do that, not only is this house finished, but there won’t be anything left of Fairhope that’s worth having.”
He walked out the door, and I stood looking around the house, thinking of everything that had happened here, the way this place had changed my life. Changed me.
It wasn’t right that Iola’s house be destroyed in order to save homes that had been built only a few years ago. This couldn’t happen.
“It’s wrong,” I whispered. “If people knew how much you loved this island . . . If they knew everything you did for them . . . If they knew who you really were . . .”
It came to me then. The answer. If we were to have any chance of saving Iola’s house, we had to tell the people her story.
CHAPTER 24
Is there, in you, a forgiveness for sins of the father or the mother? Is there an absolution for the innocent? For the fragile life that had no say in its beginnings? For a wife who carries secrets to the wedding bed?
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I have sinned the sin of lies and love. I have hidden all the parts of me he does not know. For him, I have become the mask. The mask of passion, of love. I have entered into this sacrament a shell with nothing inside that does not hide in the shadows, and now there is life growing, and it is loved, yet it lives so near the darkness.
Will you forgive me, Father? Will you forgive this child?
I yearn to cast aside the fear, to tell.
And I fear I can never tell.
I wonder at this web of lies, and I feel it tightening. Love cannot live in the darkness, in the shadows. It is a growing thing, a thing of light.
I, a child of lies, know this so well.
But I come before you, and I fall on my knees, and I beg of you, Father. Show mercy. . . .