They arrived that same day, pulling up to the weather-battered stone of Ft. Rillieux well before sunset. They got out of the truck, and Mary grabbed the bouquet of red carnations she had purchased at the market just over the bridge and walked to the fishing pier that jutted out into the Gulf. After the tea-colored swamp, the Gulf—with its aqua waters and rhythmic waves—was like a counterstretch. Mary closed her eyes, feeling the sun on her face. “Mom and I came here,” Mary said. “A few months before you were born.” Then she looked down at the flowers in her hands. “Here,” she said, pulling the bouquet apart. She extended half of the blooms to Hannah. “Let’s toss these in.”
Hannah took the flowers and looked down at their red petals. “Why are we going to throw them in?” she asked, not looking at her sister.
Mary felt the bottomlessness in her stomach that she had felt during those first weeks after Diane had died, when she would scrub the floors until her hands bled. “For Mom,” she said, looking out at the pastel sky and sea. Then she took a flower from her bunch and tossed it in. Mary looked at Hannah, and Hannah, understanding somehow what this meant, did the same. With her brow tightened and her eyes filling, Hannah tossed her flowers in one by one with her sister.
“Is Mom going to find them?” asked Hannah.
“Yeah,” replied Mary. “She’ll find them.” And the girls stood there in silence watching as the red flowers scattered and parted ways in the vast blue sea.
MARY AND HANNAH SPENT THE NEXT several weeks on the road drifting gradually but purposefully northward. They lived out of the Blazer or the tent or, when needed, small forgettable motels like the Water’s Edge. They saw the Smokey Mountains and Graceland and the feral horses of the Outer Banks. And after Bardavista, Hannah didn’t ask for Diane again. Anyhow, it had always been Mary to whom Hannah was fixed. It was as if Mary were the sun that Hannah orbited while Diane was a mourned but nonessential moon.
Since they left Sandy Bank, Hannah had turned five and Mary nineteen. They lived like the girls from one of Mary’s stories, bonded and inextricable, the line where one ended and the other began a malleable, gossamer thing. And it was in front of another silver-sided diner that Mary put the Blazer in park. Then she shifted to look at the passenger seat, where Hannah was sleeping. Hannah wouldn’t understand what had brought them to this place, of all places. She wouldn’t understand that in an inevitable way it was always where they were headed. No matter their direction.
Mary reached over to give her sister a gentle rousing. “Bunny. We’re here.”
Nine
1982
Mary and Hannah sat across from each other in the booth of the sunny Rhode Island diner.
“Where are we?” asked Hannah.
“We’re in a nice town. It’s called Northton. We’re going to be here for a while.” Mary glanced out the window at the parking lot and the wide busy road beyond. “Stay here for a sec,” she said. “I’m going to go get a newspaper.”
Mary slipped her sunglasses on and walked out the front door of the diner over to a red metal box. She pulled a few coins from her back pocket, dropped them in, and opened the door, pulling out a thick newspaper.
Mary opened the door to the diner, and the cool air from outside collided with the humid grease-scented air from inside. She slid in the booth, opened the paper, and flipped to the thick classified section.
Without looking up, Mary responded to her sister’s unasked question. “We need to find a place to live,” she said.
“What do you mean?” asked Hannah. After their time as nomads, the idea of living somewhere had become foreign.
“You need to start school,” said Mary, not looking up as she read the description of an available apartment.
“School?” Hannah said the word as if she’d never heard it before.
Mary glanced up, then looked back down at the classifieds. “Yeah, school.”
“Are you gonna come?”
Mary was silent for a moment, not exactly pleased with what came next for either of them. “No,” she answered. “I have to get a job.”
The girls’ lunches were set down and they consumed them in silence, Hannah slowly eating her grilled cheese and fries, Mary’s eyes scanning the ads, not looking up even as she ate her cheeseburger. When they were finished, Mary walked up to the cashier to pay. “Do you have a phone book?” she asked the woman perched on a stool in front of the register.
The cashier reached under the counter and pulled up a thick yellow book, setting it with a thud on the counter. Mary opened it, leafing quickly through the white pages, toggling back and forth until she found the page she was looking for. Then she tucked her black hair behind her ear and ran her finger down the row of black letters until she stopped. Her finger then traveled horizontally across the page and she looked up suddenly. “Can you tell me where Northton Avenue is?” she asked the cashier.
The cashier pushed her large gold-templed glasses up on her nose to get a better look at the girl in front of her. Mary, with her sun-darkened skin and yellow brown eyes, must have seemed like some strange half-domesticated species. “You just take the highway down one exit and take a right on Burke Street,” she said. “Northton crosses Burke after a half mile. You can’t miss it. Beautiful homes there.”
“Thanks,” said Mary, putting her change in her back pocket and ushering Hannah out of the front door.
“Where are we going to sleep tonight?” asked Hannah. It was a familiar question and one asked without anxiety.
“I don’t know yet,” said Mary. “We’re probably going to find a motel.” She opened the driver’s-side door, letting Hannah climb in ahead of her. “But we need to go see something first.”
Mary followed the route the cashier at the diner had given her, taking the highway, following Burke Street, where they passed stately old homes with large oak-lined lawns. The diner had been a humble touch in what was a very nice town, with its wide sidewalks and shiny black lampposts; it was as well regarded as Newport, just a few miles up the coast.
Turning onto Northton, Mary looked at the house numbers, counting them down in her head until she came to 1264 Northton Avenue. It was a lovely old stone Tudor, sweeping and graceful, with neatly trimmed hedges and a long flat driveway. Mary pulled in, keeping the Blazer at the edge of the driveway but facing the house. The tiny panes of the windows shone and shimmered in the sun, and Mary could see an expansive patio at the side of the house. With its peaked roofline and rambling scale, it looked like a house from a fairy tale. It looked exactly as Mary had thought it would.
“What is this place?” asked Hannah.
“It’s a house,” replied Mary. “It’s pretty, right?”
Hannah nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Really pretty. It looks like a castle.”