She would save her family. What did it matter, the ruining of Veronica Pencott’s name, when her true self was unknown to anyone on the island. Anyone alive. Lucy Veronica Phelps. Bob’s mother had urged her to use Veronica. Elegant enough to hide the stink of cow shit between her toes.
As she slid the gun barrel into her mouth, the metal squeaking against her dentures (she wouldn’t be found toothless), she imagined Maddie sitting next to her. Her chiming laugh. Her scent. Like fresh-cut cantaloupe and white soap. Veronica told her to stay na?ve, enough to believe in all their affirmations. And make up her own.
She would be leaving something behind after all. Her family. How silly she had been—believing she could erase herself from this world before leaving it.
50.
Dom
He was in his room. Waiting. He had accomplished the missions Veronica assigned him. Wash his hands (check), change his clothes (check), hide his dirty clothes in the woods (check). Never tell the truth. Not even to Maddie. Especially not Maddie.
He dug in his pocket and found the crushed honeysuckle flowers he’d picked. He’d watch her use her front teeth to snip the end of each bud, one after another. Until she smiled, laughed, said her tongue felt fuzzy. Maybe he’d convince her to play a game of Gods versus Mortals. He’d volunteer to play the bad guy, and when they went back in, their mom would be awake and their dad at the stove stirring a pot of sauce. He’d give both his parents hugs, his heart thrumming from the chase through the woods, his thigh muscles twitching, the cool night air wicking the sweat from his arms. All of it an antidote, a magic potion hand-delivered by Zeus himself, to make the creepy-crawlies vanish forever.
Maddie came to him, barefoot and crying. Bloody. He held her. He knew she wouldn’t leave him now. She needed him to tell her everything would be all right.
51.
Leslie
The last dead baby had been full term. It was her eighth pregnancy. Eva had just turned two. She’d insisted on giving birth in the city hospital near Our Garden. The delivery nurses had looked at her funny—this white woman laboring among rows of black mothers.
She pushed for six hours. Jules kneaded the knots in her calves with his strong hands. The soil from Our Garden stuck under his nails. He counted her contractions until the numbers blurred.
The doctor who delivered the baby left when he saw it was dead. Leslie would never forget the swish of the swinging doors as the room emptied. The one nurse remaining—Margaret, her name tag read—urged them to take a photo with the baby. They may not want to look at it now, she said, but someday … The nurse swaddled their baby in a blue hospital blanket and he looked like he was sleeping. Like he’d open his swollen eyelids and blink hello. Crack open his blue lips and howl. They took turns holding him. Leslie asked Jules, You won’t leave me, will you? We can try again, can’t we? Repeated I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry until she choked on her tears and snot and threw up in a pan next to the bed.
The nurse finally found the photographer. The same man happy new parents paid to take photos of their sleepy babies. Baby’s first bottle. Baby’s first diaper. Baby’s trip home from the hospital. The camera flashed. The baby—they had planned to name him Linnaeus after Jules’s beloved botanist—was taken away.
Epilogue
When the sun begins to sink into the gold-tipped waves, their mothers call them for dinner. The children leave their plastic buckets on the sandbar, filled with flailing hermit crabs, sea snails, and the honey-colored shells worn thin by tumbling waves so they are gnarled like toenails. That’s what the children call them. Toenail shells.
Sandy arms and legs are toweled off and dressed in long-sleeve shirts to protect from the bite of green bottle flies. As the clouds turn the color of bruises, each family finds their table on the beach, the red-white-and-blue tablecloth weighed down with rocks gathered by the children. They settle down to eat as the sun sets on this last day of summer.
A summer they call unforgettable. What a summer. They talk about the caterpillars instead of the unspeakable things that happened at the Castle.
They pass plates of steaming shellfish—crab, lobster, mussels, and cherrystones—and roasted corn on the cob, red potatoes, and sweet sausage, all of it wrapped in seaweed and burlap and buried deep in the sand with fire-hot stones.
The fathers are proud of the feast. Cooked right there on shore, steps from where the shellfish were harvested, in the way of the Shinnecock tribes of long ago who lived only on what the island offered up. The infinite bounty of the sea. The men roll up their sleeves and flex the muscles they’ve earned at the factory. They paint lines under their sun-and beer-reddened eyes with shards of pink clay their children find on the beach. They whoop like the Indians they watched in spaghetti westerns as kids—white men in face paint. They slap their palms against open mouths until one of the mothers tells them to sit down and eat.
There are no exclamations—Oh, how gorgeous or Look at that color or It’s like the sky is on fire—because all the comparisons were made long ago when they first moved to the island. Or, they were born on the island, and watching the sun rise from and sink into the sea has always been routine. The beauty is their inheritance.
Thanks to the Colonel, the Grudder men think, not that they would mention his name aloud. Not yet. The island needs time to recover. The scant leaves left after the caterpillars’ feast will soon turn color and fall to the ground. The island will go into hibernation, a much-needed respite to recoup its strength. On the third of November, Bill Clinton will win the presidential election with forty-three percent of the vote. Sheriff Stroh and his men will have a hellish week. Seven DUIs. One hostage situation at the Wildcat Café on the west side. A Grudder executive will hang himself in his private cabana at the Oyster Cove Country Club clubhouse. The hanged man will mention, in his suicide note, his disapproval of the first lady, Hillary Clinton, being given an office in the West Wing. He’ll call it “unnatural and perverse.”