She drops her deck of cards on the table; slippery, they slide to the very edge. Gwen lounges on a chaise, pretends to paint her fingernails, lists game after game they could play, but dismisses each one before the others even notice. She will decide the game, and they will object. She will say, “I suggested that one, but we decided it was too slow, too few players, too long, too hard for Libby, too easy for Tom; this is the one we’ll play.”
Now the fire is lit and the game—Parcheesi—is laid on the rug, all while their parents whisper harshly in the kitchen about the proper way to move porch furniture.
The rain comes. It is quiet and there is tea and the turning of pages and the rolling of dice. Their father plays. Thunder, not an anchor, vibrates in their chests, in the window frames. Gwen sits by the window when it’s not her turn, watches for lightning, no fear. Their father lets out a whoop, sending two Parcheesi pieces back to the start. Libby and Tom groan in unison.
“He cheats,” they say. “Gwen, come from the window, we need a witness.”
Tom hears his parents one night. At thirteen he is no longer in the nursery with the girls, no longer lies next to Libby when she whimpers in her sleep, no longer fetches cups of water in the night. He is downstairs now, down the back hall off the kitchen, the glassed porch with a brass bed that his mother says is fit for royalty. It’s his father who says it is an old-lady bed.
He hears her first. Early, before the birds. The black, shagged limbs of the pines around his room go prickly and yellow in the sudden light from the kitchen window. He hears the pull clink against the bare bulb. He hears the whine of the cabinet in the pantry, tea and cookies. The water sloshes fast and tinny into the kettle and the stove snaps to light itself. His mother’s bare feet pad the painted floor; he hears her go from the sink to the back door, to the pantry, to the bottom of the back stairs. Is she looking for something? The kettle thinks of whistling and the stove clicks off, and he knows the tea is steeping and she is at the kitchen table, her feet on the rung of a chair. He hears her breath stutter out of her; he knows that sob. Libby cries like that, labored inhales and exhales. Like an asthmatic, he thinks. Though he knows no one with asthma. He pulls back the blanket, tugs it from its hospital corners, and wraps it around his shoulders. Sitting on the step of his threshold he leans against the closed door and waits.
Tom sits and whispers, “Please, birds, wake up, please let it be four fifteen, let the sky lighten, birds, please start singing.”
He has never thought much about the birds and their chatter, about Sam Peabody or the towhee who tells you to Drink Your Tea. Now he craves their soft first flights, from low branch to low branch. Their songs will fill the nursery, and his sisters, for a moment, will be awake too.
Scarlet leans into the steam. Her stuttering breath brings it in and then pushes it away. Her hand encircles the mug but doesn’t touch it, the mug too hot. And nothing seems worse, which makes her breath harder to move. Sometimes it just stops all together. The less she breathes the more she cries. The window is ajar, and the breeze through it chills her, blows right across her shoulder blades, making her press her elbows to her sides. She wishes for her bathrobe, but she can’t close the window, for closing the window would mean moving her hands, and she wants only to hold the mug.
Gwen is still in the nursery, but Scarlet knows it is in her, too, the strange realization that beds could be for more than sleeping, and certainly should be far away from one’s siblings. Their mother sees only Libby, with her tanned skin and downy hair, like she was born from the warm summer hay of the meadow. Scarlet has forgotten what beds are for.
Her husband, their father, thumps and bangs down the stairs, not at all like it is the middle of the night. The stairs creak under his feet, under his shushing slippers, shush thump shush thump. He stands in the doorway at the bottom of the steps, his hands grasping high on the doorframe like he’s ready to launch himself into the room. But as with most of his entrances, he flags, hesitates. He tucks his wide chest under shoulders and slides past her to the fridge, cracks and shuffles an ice tray, and slides back to her side. He slips two cubes into her tea, and she turns to him quickly. But the ice has already softened at the edges and he has turned away.
She starts anyway. Who needs his help, she says, all venom and whisper. He robbed her of something; that it isn’t right, that the tea should just cool on its own and then she can hold the mug. Now the mug is still too hot and the tea too cold.
Even the way you drink your tea is oppressive, says the roll of his eyes. She misses it.
He wants to make her more tea, but it is too late, her moment for tea is lost. He hates that she robs him of every opportunity to be close, to do something nice for her, and she hates that she can’t get near him without him ruining things. He hugs her too hard. He does that to the children too, she sees it in their faces. And she knows that he has found someone to hug as hard as he wants. She doesn’t know that he brought another woman here once.
The woman from the other island, he brought her here when his family was in their winter home, back for a wedding that he couldn’t tolerate. He brought her to the house and let her touch the animal heads, something he hated anyone doing, but he let her. He laughed with her when she broke a wineglass.
“My wife will ask about that.” This woman is building lies as she stands here separate from me. Her presence is a new lie I have to tell. But he didn’t take her to her house, buzz her quickly over the thoroughfare, a fast ride of slap and spray. Instead, he took her to a room, the last room down the back hall filled with mothballs, and pillows that didn’t make it back to their rightful spots when they opened the house. She told him her hair would smell of camphor for weeks. He said that she should be happy; she would repel bugs. It was black fly season.
PART II
SIX
GWEN
July 4
On the Fourth of July they always ate lobsters. Gwen looked forward to this feast all year. The decadence of it all was not lost on her. Remy had come by that afternoon and dropped them off, while Gwen and Libby lay on beach towels on the float. Too numb and sleepy from lying in the sun most of the morning, they hadn’t even heard the boat until it bumped up against the float.
“Hello, Willoughbys,” said Remy.
“Hey, Remy. Hey, Maddie,” said Libby, looking up at the caretaker and his daughter standing in their boat.
Remy pulled their spare trap up from the water, where it was tied to the float, while his teenage daughter, playing stern man in yellow waders and a tank top, sorted out five shedders. They exchanged a few pleasantries, or tried to, with Remy’s response always being “Suppose so” or “That’s the truth.”