Because she is dead, and not really here to love me at all.
Because Bess and Penny have stood by me and will never tell, but our bond will always be stained with the blood on our hands. Our sisterhood will never recover. We will always be each other’s secret-keepers, and it is my fault that we are this way.
My darling Rosemary, she has been pushing herself for four summers to come back, worried I would cut my wrists or drown my own unworthy self, then worried I would kill myself with pills, burdened by knowledge no little kid should ever have.
She should have been riding her bike up and down the wooden walkways. She should have been developing a figure and outgrowing her stuffed lions and learning to put on makeup and reading Judy Blume books and folding down the pages on the sexual bits. She should be having crushes, on pop stars and athletes and ordinary people. She would have been starting boarding school, and I could have sent her letters and cards, tucking cash into the envelopes.
Dearie Rosemary (I’d write),
Rehab was hard, this second time. I won’t lie. I was scared I wouldn’t make it. But I am handling things okay here in New York City.
My roommate, Deja, waits tables, and I am working behind the counter at a boulangerie on Bleecker Street. The bakery smells so good, all the time. You would love it. But the bakers themselves are very bitchy in the back room.
The front of the shop is cute and painted blue. It is like working in the sky. When I come home at Christmas I will bring a bag of croissants.
I take jewelry class on Monday nights, and we can have studio time any night of the week, so I go in there a lot of evenings and do things with PLIERS. (I like pliers.) Other nights, I go out with friends, to coffee shops that are open twenty-four hours, or for Chinese food. There are a couple people I know from North Forest here, finishing college in the city, and a couple new friends from the jewelry class. Maybe I will try ceramics, too. I did a one-day workshop and it was really messy. I think you would like it.
I think about you every day, buttercup. Here is some money so you can buy stuff without having to ask Mother. I hope the beasts of North Forest are being good to you and your tennis game is vicious. (Daddy said it’s vicious, that’s the word he used.) Anyhow, we will play next summer on the island. And swim. And generally loaf around. And you will be my favorite thing about spending time on Beechwood, and I will endeavor (most seriously) to be your favorite thing, too.
One love, two loves, a million loves
from your big sister,
Caroline Lennox Taft Sinclair
That is what I would have written her.
I can see my own letters so clearly, as if I were already living that life, as if Rosemary were really at North Forest, playing tennis and making friends. I can see them even as I sit next to Rosemary’s exhausted little ghost body now, sobbing and stroking her hair. I wrap my arms around her fragile frame and tell her I love her.
Relief floods through me, even as I weep, because I can see my own letters, and that means I can see a future beyond this island, beyond this addiction. Although I will never, ever escape what I have done, and although I might never forgive myself, and although I will never free myself of the Sinclair family, and will always want my father’s love and the place in my family it confers, and although I will never love Bess and Penny free of resentments and obligations and shared secrets and guilt, I will,
in a small way,
in a limited way,
move on.
“I want you to stop worrying,” I tell Rosemary. I breathe slowly and my crying stops.
“You always say that.” She sniffs. “You always tell me cheerful things, like Mother used to, and you want to play games and read stories, and that’s nice. But you see, I’m still so worried. I’m so tired, Carrie. I don’t know what to do.”
“I want you to rest.”
“I need to.” She takes a tissue and wipes her nose. “I don’t feel good here, even this one visit. It hurts to be here, but I’m scared to not come.”
“I am not going to kill myself,” I whisper. “I was not and I am not.”
“For real?”
“Yes. Is that what you need to hear?”
“Kind of,” she says. “But you—” She gestures around, as if there’s a bottle of pills somewhere. “You can die doing that stuff. That’s like a fact that people know.”
What can I say to reassure her? What can I say that will be true? “I have been really sick and sad,” I tell her after a minute. “Sick in lots of ways. And guilty. And ashamed and angry. I have been all these things for a very long time, and trying to numb myself out of it and forget my way out of it, burying it all as deep as I can bury it. You know what I mean?”
Rosemary nods.
“But I am telling you, now, all these feelings. So they’re not buried anymore.”
“Okay. So what?”
“What are the feelings?”
“Yah.”
“Okay. Um…I have been sad, because you died. And that still feels fresh, nearly as fresh as when it first happened. And I’ve been so angry at Pfeff and Penny, and so horrified and ashamed of what I did, I couldn’t live with myself. I’ve been punishing myself for that, and at the same time, I’ve been escaping from it all. The pills let me do both at once, I think.”
Rosemary sniffs. “That’s strange,” she says. “?’Cause you took them before. Before he died.”
“There’s not just one reason I took them. It’s a tangled-up mess of reasons,” I say. “And I can’t promise to be happy, and I can’t promise to be well, even, but I am telling you how I feel because telling you is showing you that I’m not trying to be numb anymore. I’m going to live with the sadness and the shame, and actually feel them or whatever, and somehow not hate and punish myself so much. I’m going to just go on, one day and then another day.”
“And then another day and another day,” says Rosemary.
“Yeah, you got it.”
I will go to New York in September.
I will find a job and live with Deja.
I will stay sober.
I will meet people. Learn to make jewelry.
This new life won’t redeem me. It won’t fix the world crises that still bubble and boil at the back of my mind, hot and sad. It won’t change the fact that I killed a man, a rotten man in many ways, but still a human whose life should not have ended. It won’t change that I covered it up, that we covered it up.
But still. I can see that I have a future. And maybe that is enough.
I do not love my father’s way of thinking, but much of it has become mine anyhow. Perhaps he and Robert Frost are right on this one: “No way out but through.”
“Okay,” says Rosemary. She blows her nose loudly. “That was all super mushy.”
“Yeah.”
“But all right. I won’t worry so much anymore.”
“You can go rest?”
“I think so.”
She climbs into my lap, smelling of suntan lotion and muffin. “Snuggle snuggle,” she says.
We sit there for a bit, not saying anything.
“Is this goodbye, buttercup?” I finally ask.
“Um-hm.”
We sit for a little longer, and then Rosemary climbs out of my lap. She takes my hand and I climb out of bed.
She leads me out of my room, down the hall, and up the stairs to my parents’ floor. Their bedroom door is closed.
We climb the steps to the turret.
82.
THE ROUND ATTIC room is still stacked with boxes of Rosemary’s books and toys. The rolled carpets are still there, and the trunks. “Do you know my stuffed lions live here?” she asks. “And my 8 Ball?”
“Totally.”
She opens a cardboard box full of lions and rummages through it. “I love them all,” she says, “but Shampoo is the best for sleeping with.” She holds up her favorite lion, washed so many times it is very floppy. “Okay, now I’m going to be able to sleep super well.”
“You can take Shampoo with you?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I think so.”
“And where do you go now?”
Rosemary walks to the turret window and pushes up the sash. It opens about a foot. She pushes up the screen.