I pictured her marrying Rory, the two of them reciting lines of poetry in a ceremony attended by commune members. I doubted my mother, or Leanne or Sarah, or my father with his new wife, would consider attending, even if they’d been invited. Nowhere in her letter had Del extended an invitation to me. Had she gotten well enough to leave Ashley Manor for good—or had she been given some sort of overnight pass?
It surprised me then to return home from class that same afternoon and find Del sitting on my front porch. I recognized her old purple ski parka, which made me instantly leery. She wore a striped stocking cap, the kind that could hang down the wearer’s back, or be wrapped like a scarf around the neck—a vintage piece she might have found at a Salvation Army store. Her hair had grown long, nearly waist-length, and she’d dyed it auburn, matching my own. Her face seemed bloated and her eyes too bright. I hadn’t seen her in three years, and I felt a mix of emotions I couldn’t have described. I swore I was happy to see her, but she looked at me askance.
“Liar,” she said.
I felt instantly regretful, and she laughed. “I could tell you missed me from your last letter,” she said.
I didn’t know what I’d written to her—all of it was an invented mess.
“Where’s your husband?” I said.
She laughed, again, flashing her bright teeth, her face altered in the time since I’d seen her. It had grown more mature, more filled with nuance I had trouble deciphering. Behind her expression lay the years of time we had spent apart. She was still the prettier sister. She said the Rory saga was a long one. She had left the manor of her own accord, taken the bus with money she’d saved.
“They just let you leave?” I said. “Or did you run away, like Gene Tierney?”
Del sang a little bit of the Laura movie theme, deepening her voice to sound like Frank Sinatra. “Laura is the face in the misty light.” We’d spent long weekends as children watching old movies or singing the songs from our grandmother’s Broadway musical albums—My Fair Lady, Funny Girl, Oklahoma!
“I wasn’t in shackles,” Del said. “Sure I could leave!”
I found I was nervous, unused to Del’s teasing outside of her letters.
“I like your haunted house,” she said. “I could have guessed this is where you’d end up.”
After our grandfather died, we had made a regular habit of sneaking into the Spiritualists by the Sea camp. A group called the Ladies’ Aid Society coordinated events and visiting mediums, and the programs were held in the old wooden temple. The cottages, spruced up each summer with paint and annuals, were, by the time we visited, privately owned, or used as seasonal cottages. There were sessions on “Meditation and Spirituality” or “Advanced Mediumship Techniques” or “Past Life Regressions,” and a medium’s cottage for private readings. Del memorized all of the upbeat inspirational songs played out on the temple piano, and when we mingled in the meditation garden, or in the gazebo placed on a spit of land near the Sound, she would sing them, to the pleasure of camp visitors. With her long, blond hair and her blue eyes, she could smile sweetly and seem ethereal, while I sat beside her on the bench like her dark opposite.
“Have you had any séances yet?” Del asked me. She dug a plastic bag filled with spice drops out of her backpack. “Summoned any spirits?” She held the bag out to me.
“Still eating this crap,” I said. The scents of spices—clove, cinnamon, cardamom, anise, wintergreen—filled me with a strange longing for our old bedroom at our grandparents’ house, for the way the sun came in across the floor in the mornings, for the strange call of the loon through our open windows.
Del chose an orange drop for me. “Clove,” she said. “Your favorite.”
Our eavesdropping at the camp had provided us with séance techniques, the language of mediums calling forth spirits from the ether, and Del had convinced me one summer to put these things to use in our grandparents’ pool shed, corralling neighborhood children eager to hear from dead relatives, from recently deceased children’s show hosts, from the local babysitter killed riding on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. Del always had a plan.
“What did we charge? A dollar?” Del dug around in the bag and pulled out a dark red drop for herself—cinnamon.
“We got up to two-fifty,” I said. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into that.”
We’d been eleven and twelve—bored that summer. It was disarming to be the focus of Del’s attention, her spotlight pointed on you, pressuring you to perform, to be who she wanted you to be. She was relentless about getting her way, annoying and a burden at times. But she also knew how to draw me in, to make something seem an adventure.
“Remember Mrs. Parmenter?” Del caught the red drop in her mouth, her eyes bright.