Libby clasped and unclasped her hands, alternating the weave of her fingers.
“We’re thinking about next steps,” she continued. At first he registered only his relief that they were done talking about the house. He didn’t want to talk about where that money would go. He didn’t want to talk about how terrifying it had been to see her half dead on the beach. She must have read this on his face.
“And we are really happy together. We’ve been friends a long time, and then it just grew into something more, you know?”
“Are you saying you’re gay?” he asked, wanting her to say yes, wanting her to be honest with herself, finally.
“I’m saying I’m with Patricia.”
At this he saw their father, not because of the last three years that she had been lying to him, but because she had been lying to herself.
“You don’t have to look so disgusted, Tom. You know, I realize that you believe the coming flame will wipe out people like me, but maybe you could drop the neo-con crap for five seconds and just remember I’m your sister.”
They were silent for a moment.
“You think I care that you’re gay?” He said this quietly.
Tom couldn’t look at her as he spoke. He surveyed the slate tiles on the Burketts’ roof, looked for their striation, the tooth at the end of each shingle. “I care that you can’t talk to me about it. I care that you’ve been in a relationship for three years and you’ve been pretending it’s something else. Call a spade a spade. I care that you’ve been lying to yourself and me.”
His mouth was dry, and a hot sweat at the back of his neck made him feel sick. He felt seventeen again. He felt the urge to run, to start the engine and fly from this quiet spot. To find the car keys and take to the small hills of the island too fast, making his stomach lurch up into his ribs. I don’t care that you’re gay, he wasn’t talking to her anymore. I care that you cheated on my mother, that you’ve been lying to all of us for decades. I care that you are worthless and that I am ashamed. I care that you are dead and never came clean. I care that without even realizing you taught this sweet girl to perpetuate your lies.
Tom looked at her here now. She was flushed and her hands dangled from her wrists, resting on her knees. He and Libby were the hope for the future of the Willoughby clan. Gwen was a lost cause, and Danny not far behind her. But only if Libby accepted things, only if she could stop living the lie that their father had so mastered.
“If you are just experimenting, fine. But a three-year experiment? That is not an experiment; it’s a way of life. At first I waited for you to say something. I just kept thinking maybe you weren’t that serious about her, but eventually it seemed you just preferred the lie. Is that it? Are you not serious about her?”
Libby’s fingers worked over each other, picking at nails and cuticles, careful and slow. She looked a bit confused, the way she always looked when doing homework as a child, or trying to work out a burr from the dog’s coat with a doll comb.
“You don’t want me to be straight?”
Why did they all think he was oblivious? Why did they spend their lives underestimating him?
“Of course I—Hawk—” He pointed, his finger following the bird’s path as it soared over them. “Of course not. Just because I voted for Bush twice doesn’t mean I’m a brain-dead bigot. Melissa and I have talked about how long it would take you to embrace it. To be open with me. Why has it taken this long?” Libby crossed her arms, watching the hawk. It circled back over the island and then out past the mouth of the creek, looking for fish. She seemed to be considering something, the same expression on her face as that day staring at the whale rock. He wondered what part of her was dying now, or was being resuscitated.
“We are serious,” she said. Here he saw something he recognized. A sheen of embarrassment in her eyes. At least she was telling him. At least there was no dark path, no looming loss. She would not be buried with her lie.
“So you’d call her your girlfriend?” he asked.
“What, would you prefer I say wife?” She leaned back against her hands and looked him in the eyes.
“If that’s what you mean, if that’s the truth, yes. I mean, you could do a lot worse than Patricia.”
“Well, she wants to move in together.”
“Then ‘wife’ would be the more appropriate term, don’t you think?” His sister with a wife, and he about to lose one.
Libby sat up straight, took a deep breath.
“Yes, actually. Patricia is my wife.” Suddenly, all relief and assurance, she was the image of Scarlet. And he wanted to cry. Because she was gone. His mother. And because Libby would be a wife too, and he knew too well what happened to wives. But maybe a wife with a wife of her own was different.
The lobster pots began to dip now. The post office would be closing soon. He stood and clasped the wheel.
“So will you be the wife who cleans or the wife who cooks?” He smiled and started the engine. “Hoist that anchor. The mail waits for no man.”
Libby rolled her eyes, but she laughed and pulled up the anchor. Tom doubted Libby could actually afford to buy him out. Would she still joke with him if he took this house from her?
TWENTY-FIVE
DANNY
July 11
On the covered portion of the porch Danny sat on the wide white rail, leaning against the gray shingles of a pillar, his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, a beer leaving a damp ring on the thigh of his jeans. Gwen and Libby sat in wicker chairs facing him, and the setting sun behind him.
“There’s a lot of smoke, but they don’t look worried,” he narrated.
It was Tom and Melissa’s night to cook. Danny watched them down on the concrete pier in the soft glow of sunset and the brightening light of the lone dock bulb, both of them staring down into the coals of the barbeque that was chained to the rusty pipe railing. Danny imagined that they struck the same postures when conceiving each of their children. He saw them standing together in white lab coats, looking skeptically into a petri dish, Tom gently agitating the contents, Melissa with her arms crossed.
He wondered what they said behind closed doors. Their house was a collection of closed doors. After Scarlet died, Danny stayed with Tom, stayed with each of his siblings, passed between them, like a mild virus or an infirm house cat that couldn’t be left alone. Until winter break was over and he went back to school.