Details. Quinn would want details and an annotated outline and the entire freaking story beginning with the very moment that the girl was conceived. And Nora couldn’t tell her anything.
Perfect little Quinn. Lovely, good, careful Quinn, who played the part of the wide-eyed baby sister so beautifully. Her degree was in secondary education, high school English to be exact, but Nora understood that she was better suited for preschool even if Quinn wouldn’t admit it herself. Quinn was an optimist, a happy girl who had once been both the head cheerleader for the Key Lake Titans and the vice president of the student body. She was supposed to marry the captain of the football team and have lots of adorable babies to populate Key Lake. But Quinn had uncharacteristically gone against everyone’s expectations and decided to do something different altogether.
Quinn was trying to be someone she was not. Marrying that unbearably sexy, but totally weird, artist. Moving to Los Angeles. Pretending she could handle a roomful of teenagers when Nora fundamentally understood that high school students would eat her sister alive.
The last time Nora saw Quinn, her hands and wrists were hennaed, elaborate flowers and intricate designs crisscrossing her fair skin like a map. Walker was experimenting with graffiti and tattoos, and his wife had become his favorite canvas. That had been almost two years ago, a rare family Christmas at the Sanfords’, and Nora had felt downright sorry for her sister. Quinn seemed bewildered by her own life. She stared at her husband with a naked longing, a look that made Nora feel as if she had witnessed something shamefully private. But then Quinn’s eyebrow would quirk and it was as if Walker was a complete stranger to her. Lips slightly parted and head tipped just off-center, she gazed at her own husband as if seeing him for the very first time. It was unsettling. The henna began to smudge partway through the day and Quinn drank just a bit too much champagne during the gift opening and began to seem blurry and indistinct herself. She was melting away, fading like the orange dye that stained her hands.
But Quinn was great with kids. At least, she had been. A dozen years ago.
“What about Annie?” Nora asked, directing the question to the back seat. “I love the name Annie. To match your hair.”
A shuffle. The slightest scuff of blanket on car upholstery.
Did she say something?
“What?” Nora tilted her head so that her ear was angled toward the back seat while her eyes remained on the road. The last thing she needed to do was end up in a ditch with a child bundled like a caterpillar in the back. The girl would look like the victim of a poorly planned abduction. “Did you say something, love?”
“I want to go home.”
“I want that, too,” Nora said, because she didn’t know how else to respond. And it was true. But it wasn’t possible. Not anymore. Not for either of them ever again.
Nora stifled a shiver and told herself that the goose bumps sprinkled across her arms were because the air-conditioning was on too high. She reached for the vent, angled it down and away, and then grabbed her phone from its resting place in her cup holder. The girl would probably be scarred for life, would grow up to text and drive and kill herself in a fiery crash, but Nora set a bad example anyway. One eye on the road and the other on her screen, she pecked another text to Quinn: I’m coming.
Wednesday
9:10 p.m.
Quinn
What’s that supposed to mean?
Nora
Meet me.
Quinn
Now? Where?
Nora
Boat ramp.
Quinn
Redrock Bay?
Nora
10.
LIZ
THE COMMERCIALS LIED. None of those artificial glass cleaners could come close to the power of vinegar and newspaper. A little warm water in a bucket, a tangy splash of vinegar that probably should have put her in mind of pickles but instead made Liz think: clean. She had a special cloth that she reserved for this purpose alone; hand-washed weekly so that it would never become sullied by detergents or coated in buildup from the Island Fresh Gain fabric softener that she liked to use on her sheets. All Liz had to do was dip the cloth in the vinegar water, scrub the window one pane at a time, and then dry the streaks with a handful of crumpled newspaper. Usually the Key Lake Gazette, which wasn’t good for anything else anyway.
Liz Sanford’s windows sparkled.
So did the lens of her telescope.
It wasn’t hers, not really. It had been Jack Sr.’s before the day less than two years ago when he claimed he had a twinge of heartburn and died in his leather La-Z-Boy while Liz washed the supper dishes. By hand, of course. Only people who didn’t care about the state of their china would dare to use a dishwasher.
She felt guilty sometimes. Guilty for sending Jack to his office with a Tums in hand and then humming to herself as she lathered the two Crown Ducal Bristol-Blue dinner plates they had used for what would be Jack’s last meal. Guilty because Liz didn’t check on him until almost twenty minutes later, when the silver was nestled in the drawer and the Waterford crystal wineglasses had been placed in their designated spots in the reclaimed-barn-wood hutch. By that time he was already cool to the touch.
The grief counselor (her physician had insisted she see him—Liz had only gone twice) assured her that it wasn’t her fault. Nor could she blame the rib eye they had enjoyed that night. The diced potatoes she had crisped in butter and bacon fat. The warm white bread that her husband had torn off in hunks and dredged through the drippings the steak left behind.
Jack Sr. was the picture of health before he suddenly wasn’t. He had never been corpulent or breathless or sweaty, all things that would have repulsed Liz. In fact, he’d been tall, quite trim. He even had a full head of tawny hair when he died—though his tidy goatee was more silver than gold. Jack’s death taught Liz that sometimes the surface is not an accurate indicator of what lies beneath. Sometimes these things just happen. There’s no way to know. No way to predict.
No one to blame.
Liz didn’t go back to the grief counselor because she decided that she didn’t blame herself. Guilt was a sneaky emotion, a scavenger that fed on scraps meant for the burn pile, and she managed it quickly when it reared its ugly head. Liz had been a good wife. Of that there was no doubt. Jack was her king and his home was a castle, neat and spotless, the decor so subtle, so tasteful that Liz sometimes stopped with her fingertips on the slate slab counter because she was overcome by the synergy of her own design. Good lines, soothing colors, leather and wood and earth and stone. But Liz also knew the power of fire, and her fabrics were a spark of inspiration in the most unusual of places. Carnelian and tangerine, indigo and pink stirred so soft it looked like the raspberry sorbet she had loved as a girl.