I fill the coffee maker for tomorrow morning, just the way Tipper likes it. “Rosemary, I am sorry I left you. I am so sorry.”
I take the trash out the door that leads to the staff building and put it in the bins over there. “Rosemary, buttercup,” I say, walking to the center of the living room. “I am ashamed. What I did was selfish and mean. I don’t know how to be a good person sometimes. If anyone else left you like that, left you when you were scared, I would be angry. I would hate anyone who treated you like that, and I hate myself for it, please believe that I do. I don’t know if you can hear me, but I do love you a million loves. I miss you. And Penny misses you. And Bess misses you. And Mother and Daddy.” I don’t know if she can hear me. She probably can’t. But the words pour out. I say everything I have been feeling. “We are trying to go on without you, but we can’t do it. Not really. We’re pretending to go on and everything’s terrible. We are terrible. It’s not your fault, darling Rosemary. Don’t feel bad about it. We just have to—we have to learn how to live, over again, I guess. And it isn’t easy.”
After that, I sit in silence.
She does not come.
I wait, but still—nothing.
Then I walk to the kitchen. I rinse a stray teacup and wipe the fingerprints off the refrigerator. I turn out the lights.
When I return to the hall, ready to head upstairs, I notice a light on in the den, where the television is.
I go in to shut it off and Rosemary is there, in her cheetah suit. She is sitting on the couch, petting Wharton’s red-gold head.
“That was a big speech,” she says.
“I’m really sorry.”
“Yah, yah.”
“I am.” I kneel in front of her.
“Okay, but I think I’m done talking about hard stuff for now,” she says. “I didn’t come for that.”
“I didn’t wake you up?”
“You can’t wake me up. I told you that a million times, Carrie. I wake up ’cause I’m worried or I want something. I’m supposed to be asleep, but I can’t be.”
“Why are you up now?”
“Well, duh. It’s eleven-thirty. Right?”
I glance at the clock. “A little after.”
“And it’s Saturday. Right? Well, ghosts can’t sleep if they never saw Saturday Night Live,” says Rosemary. “It’s like unfinished business.”
“You have not been haunting me because you never got to watch Saturday Night Live. That is not a reason.”
“No, it’s not,” she admits. “But everyone is in bed now, right? And I totally want to watch it so bad. Come on. It’ll cheer you up and get your mind off all your terribleness.”
I turn the TV on, the volume low, and settle on the couch. Wharton thumps her tail. Rosemary curls up into me.
On the screen, the Pretenders sing “Don’t Get Me Wrong.” There is sketch comedy. A guy pretending to be Reagan.
“I don’t understand it,” says Rosemary. “But it’s so good. I bet I’m like the only cheetah that ever saw Saturday Night Live.”
67.
BEFORE THE POLICE arrive on Sunday, Tipper, Luda, Bess, and I spend the morning cleaning Goose. Penny sleeps in and Harris works in his study.
Tipper did go to the cottage to show the police Pfeff’s room, but the work that needed doing in Pevensie has preoccupied her until now. She puts her hands on her hips as she looks at the chaos of the kitchen. “This is appalling. How did they live like this?”
“I came every other day, like you said,” says Luda.
“I know you did,” says Tipper. “It’s not your fault in the least. They were just piglets.”
We run the washing machine and the dishwasher, wipe counters, pour half-empty beers and cans of soda into the sink. Tipper takes the curtains down for cleaning. Luda vacuums under all the cushions of the couches. “You’ll have to get them reupholstered. God, there’s like, dried—oh, I don’t even want to know,” she says. “I can cover them with quilts for now.”
Upstairs, I stand in the doorway of Pfeff’s room. His clothes are still on the floor. The bed is unmade.
He is gone.
I haven’t let myself feel sad or sorry. I can’t afford to.
I can’t think about how his parents loved him and how broken and lost they are. I can’t think about how he was my first kiss, my first everything. I can’t think about his beloved sci-fi novels and his ridiculous socks, the way he kneeled before my mother at the Lemon Hunt, the way he swam to my boat in his hoodie, the way he kissed me at the tire swing. I mustn’t think of how he worked to make me laugh, and how he made up silly song lyrics, and how he didn’t want to waste the moonlight. One day, he might have left Amherst and traveled far away, to Italy or Mexico, in search of beautiful food and adventure. Maybe he’d have found a job at a restaurant, worked his way up to manning the kitchen, made friends everywhere he went. Cooked the hell out of the dinner shift every night. Made small things exciting and beautiful, the way he knew how.
No. I have to stop these thoughts.
He was hurting Penny. He wouldn’t have stopped. He was a terrible person. And then he was dead.
There was nothing else to do once he died but drown the body like we did. It was the only way. And now we have to live with it.
My job is to make myself believe the story we told, to let that story erase what really happened, like ocean waves erasing marks in the sand. He wasn’t a ridiculous, beautiful moonlight boy, and he wasn’t a terrible person, either. He was a cute guy I fooled around with a bit. A fling. A summer acquaintance. He drank too much, went swimming, and got eaten by a shark. What a sad tale. I feel shocked that he died, and shaken, but I didn’t know him that well. That’s my story.
It strikes me, suddenly, that Pfeff might come back. He might crawl out of the sea, shirtless and dripping. His ghost might return to this haunted island to—what?
Apologize?
Take revenge on me and my sisters?
Hurt Penny again?
A shudder runs through me.
I slam the door to Pfeff’s room and run downstairs to the safety and bustle of the cleaning project. Without Tipper asking, I get on my knees and scrub the sticky spots off the kitchen floor.
* * *
—
LATER, WHEN GOOSE is fit for company again, my mother and Luda take themselves over to Pevensie to look for quilts. I head toward Clairmont alone. I am passing the stairway to the Tiny Beach, when I hear a sound, carried on the wind. Almost like a voice, whispering.
A tune from Mary Poppins.
Take no prisoners, do some crimes
Know your math facts! Step in time.
68.
SHAKING, I WALK slowly down the steps.
The phrase repeats, so quiet I can barely hear it. Maybe I am imagining it.
Take no prisoners, do some crimes
Know your math facts! Step in time.
When I reach the beach, I see Pfeff at the far end of the cove. He’s standing in the shallow water, looking out to sea. He wears his blue striped board shorts and his Live-Aid T-shirt. His hands are clasped behind him.
He turns when I am near. “I was hoping it was you.”
“Don’t come back here, Pfeff,” I say loudly. “We do not want you.”
“I’m sorry, Carrie,” he says. “Can we talk?”
“You have to go. You can’t haunt this island.” Rosemary never visited our mother after Tipper sent her away. Not once. If I banish Pfeff, I think he will go.
“I came to say sorry,” he says.
“It’s too late for that.”
“I saw my mom last night, up in Pevensie.” Pfeff walks forward, through the water. He looks alive and solid, squinting in the sunshine. “I had to say goodbye to her,” he continues. “Make sure she’s all right.”
“Okay.”
“And—she made me see I have a lot to apologize for. She cooked me some eggs and toast in the kitchen up there.”
“Did you tell her how you died?”
“No.” He scratches the back of his neck. “I was trying to—you know. Make her feel better. Tell her I’m okay.”
“What do you remember?” I ask. “I mean, about—about how you died?” I don’t want him to tell his mother the truth.
“Not much, actually,” he says. “I was drunk. Everything’s kind of fuzzy because of that.”