“The scandal,” Julie said, more to herself than to anyone else.
“ ‘Scandal’ is too big a word for it all anymore, but Allison … It was hard for Allison to contemplate telling everyone about me.”
“Hard for Mom,” I said.
“You do understand that, don’t you, Asha? It was all so difficult. Your mum needed to get used to the idea of me before she could tell anyone.”
I tried not to think of my mother’s slipper tub in the middle of the cottage, of all the things parents never tell their children, all those years and years that Aunt Kath had fixed Sunday-morning breakfast for Uncle Lee, and read the paper with him, gone to church as a family so the children could believe their parents were together, when all that time Lee was keeping house with the other Kath.
“Did my mother …” Did my mother what? Ever think how devastated Dad would have been? How many times had I seen that devastation on Aunt Kath’s face once I was old enough to recognize what it was? “Were you … Did she love you?”
“Well, yes, I think she did. I hope so. Not at first, of course. At first she was simply curious. She came here looking for the truth about her family, and what she found was me. I might be a nice surprise, but still I was a surprise, wasn’t I?”
“She found you,” I said.
“I wasn’t what she was looking for. But I think I was better than nothing.”
Anna Page let out a “phfff” of exasperation, as if it were her father rather than mine whom Graham had betrayed.
“I think you must not know what it’s like to be … well, to be lonely, Anna Page,” Graham said in response. “Lonely in the way that I was before Allison and I—”
“You think I don’t know what loneliness is?” Anna Page demanded. “I grew up with the loneliest mother in the world, whom you clearly didn’t know, and if you didn’t know Ma, then you didn’t know Aunt Ally.”
“But your mum …” Graham put a hand to his graying hair. “Kathleen? She’s an editor. She and Allison have been … well, they’ve been Wednesday Sisters for years, haven’t they? Wednesday Sisters who meet Sunday mornings. I don’t think there is a person in the world whom Allison loves more than your mum”—he looked to Julie—“or yours, Julie.”
As if he knew us, as if he knew everything there was to know about us all.
“Loved,” he corrected himself.
Anna Page stared at him. Julie stared. I looked past them both to the fountain and the cherub, the wide expanse of dark sky beyond, thinking, Kept a bicycle. Didn’t need. Wanting to say this was all wrong, this didn’t make any sense, I didn’t believe it, I wouldn’t believe it, but sitting as numbly as a train wreck victim pinned under the weight of the conversation.
“I don’t think Allison loved even Jindas better than she loved your mum, Anna Page,” Graham said. “She certainly didn’t love me better.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “Of course she loved you and Santosh more than anyone, Asha.”
Anna Page fingered the soft cotton napkin in her lap. She reached for her wineglass, took a substantial sip. “And Uncle Jim,” she said.
“And Jim?”
“Aunt Ally loved Uncle Jim more than you, she means,” Julie said gently, her gray eyes tearing up, as if she understood the pain that this would cause Graham and wanted to ease it.
“Certainly,” Graham said. “They … Well, they had a whole lifetime together, didn’t they? Allison and I had … We’ve only known each other for … hardly more than months.” He turned to me, saying, “She was an amazing person, was your mum, Asha.”
Anna Page ran a hand through her wild hair. “Hope,” she insisted. “Nobody calls her Asha.”
Except my parents. “Asha, Asha,” my mother would say when she was exasperated with me. And sometimes, “Asha, our love.”
“1997,” I managed, the sadness bubbling over into anger. He was taking my mother and making her someone she never was. “Mom’s journals, they start in 1997.”
“1997?” Graham said. “You must be mistaken. Your mum and I, we didn’t meet until the fall of 2009, did we? Yes, November of 2009, it was—right before the flood. She’d only been coming to the lakes … well, I’m not certain, but it hadn’t been a decade. It hadn’t been a year, I shouldn’t think.”
“Leave the poor man alone,” Julie blurted. “Does it matter? Who cares when they—”
“Oh, good Lord, Julie,” Anna Page said.
“Like you’ve never slept with a married man, Anna Page,” Julie said.
Graham took a substantial gulp of the wine, as if for fortification.
“This is Aunt Ally we’re talking about,” Anna Page said, “and … and of course not! Me? A married man?”
“Oh, bullshit. After Jamie died, you told Isaac—”
“Isaac told you about that?” Anna Page’s brown eyes uncharacteristically uncertain. “I didn’t know he was married. I broke it off the minute I found out.” She looked to Graham, her face pale, then to Julie. “But when did Isaac tell you that, Jules?”
Between his job, his grief, and his son, Isaac had little time for any of us, and none for Julie even though she was family, because Julie was too much of a reminder of his mom for Oliver.
“You see Isaac?” Anna Page insisted. “When do you see Isaac, Jules?”
Julie sat back and stared at the herb garden beyond the doors as if she meant to deny something but knew she wouldn’t be believed.
“Lord, Julie,” Anna Page said. “You can’t be.”
“Can’t be what?” I asked.
Somewhere in the house, several clocks began ringing the hour: nine soft gongs from the front entryway, and from the library, and from somewhere upstairs, like the bells of Florence all chiming at the same time but not exactly together.
“You’re sleeping with Isaac?” Anna Page asked.
In the absence of the gonging of the hour, the hush was complete.
“Not before Jamie died,” Anna Page said. Almost as a question but not quite.
Graham said, “You don’t think—” He turned to me. “I …” He laughed, a single bit-back syllable of disbelief.
Julie sank back in her chair, relieved to have the spotlight turned from her.
“But Allison was my sister,” Graham said. “Your mum came to England, Asha, in search of the truth about her mother, and what she found was me. She was my sister. I’m sorry.… I thought you … Good heavens, I never imagined you thought anything else.”
I sometimes sit quite still in the boat and watch the water hens. They are black with red bills and make a noise just like kissing.… One evening I went in the boat when it was nearly dark and saw a flock of lapwings asleep, standing on one leg in the water. What a funny way to go to bed!
—BEATRIX POTTER, IN AN AUGUST 7, 1896, LETTER TO NOËL MOORE
PEOPLE WILL JUDGE, THAT’S THE THING, THE REASON JULIE WOULD have said she and Isaac kept their relationship private. Not secret but private. They didn’t need anyone butting into business that wasn’t theirs. It wasn’t like they didn’t know each other well enough; it wasn’t like they were two people who had just met. Isaac had known her as long as he’d known Jamie. Longer. Almost a year longer by the time we went to the lakes. And Julie had known Isaac almost as long as she’d known Noah, who had tendered a ring to Julie not long after Isaac started seeing Jamie. Isaac was almost as tall as Noah was—six-one to Noah’s six-two—and good-looking in a similar way: dark-haired and oval-faced, with regular features, a distinguished nose, thin lips that, on Isaac, came to a funny bow, where, on Noah, they remained straight. He wasn’t quite as funny as Noah, who used to make Julie and Jamie both laugh so hard that they nearly peed their pants. (Same genes. Same inadequate urethral sphincter.) But Isaac understood so much more than Noah ever would. Isaac never questioned her decision to have a mastectomy despite there being no disease in her breasts.
Even that first time Isaac called in the middle of the night, Noah and Julie were already having problems. They??
?d gone to bed angry—he’d wanted to blow five hundred dollars on towels, for God’s sake. When her cellphone vibrated on the nightstand, while her mind leaped to the kind of bad news that always comes with phones ringing in the dark (her dad having a heart attack, maybe), Noah only grumbled as if it might be an inconsiderate friend.
Isaac was on her front porch.
She hadn’t questioned him. She’d stopped in the extra bathroom to brush her teeth and her hair, and had gone out into the night. She was wearing one of Noah’s old white oxford-cloth shirts. Noah had told her it was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen, her sleeping in his shirt and nothing else, and if it was what Anna Page wore to bed, Julie didn’t realize it. She’d almost thrown something over the shirt, but then she hadn’t. It was a warm night, and Isaac was her brother-in-law. He’d seen her in much less at the beach.
That was the night of the day Jamie had been diagnosed, although Isaac and Jamie hadn’t told anyone yet. Isaac couldn’t cry with Jamie, he had to be strong for her, but he needed to cry, of course he did. He told Julie, and Julie sat with him on the porch swing, under the overhang of the beaded-wood porch ceiling Noah had wanted. They cried together, Isaac and Julie and the smell of the roses that had just that day opened up in the garden, bright red and white and yellow and pink roses that were all indistinguishable in the moonlight, in the night air. After a while, they stopped crying, and she went inside and got them a blanket, and they huddled together under it for a long time, the small bit of warmth each of them had to offer combining to give them strength.
Sitting side by side with their arms around each other, they talked about what Jamie should do: the surgery and the chemotherapy would be grueling, but what choice was there? She would lose her gorgeous hair, Isaac said. She would lose her nails. But they wouldn’t lose her.
“She’s in denial,” he said. “She’s hoping this is a nightmare and the test results will be wrong. She’s hoping if she gives it time, it will all go away.”
He closed his eyes and slumped against the soft cushion of the porch swing, and she stroked his head.
“Of course she is,” she said.
“But she needs to schedule the surgery tomorrow.” Still with his eyes closed, still accepting the comfort of her touch. “Will you talk to her? Talk her into it? Tomorrow, first thing?”
Julie said of course she would. Of course she would.
“Without letting her know I told you? I swore I wouldn’t tell a soul until she was ready.”
“Without letting her know,” Julie said.
Julie knew how Jamie thought; they shared the same everything, and they always had. It was nothing for Julie to call her twin the next morning and ask her to have coffee—to talk about their dad’s birthday, she said. They should do something special for their dad’s birthday. “Let’s meet for coffee at Il Fornaio to discuss it. We can sit on the patio and have cappuccinos and bran muffins.”
She let that sit there for a moment, let Jamie consider whether it would be a private enough place to tell Julie what she didn’t know her sister already knew. The quiet end table, separated from the inside world by the glass doors and from the street by the clear wind-blocks, where they liked to sit together for coffee, just the two of them, or for the cocktails Lexi poured in the evening, with Noah and Isaac and sometimes others of the Wednesday Kids.
As if Julie had just thought of it, she said, “Or better yet, how about I get us muffins and make cappuccinos, and we can sit on my front porch. The roses are blooming. They’re magnificent this year. You should smell them in the night air. Last night … last night I sat out and … and smelled them.”
It was nothing for Julie to say, when Jamie arrived to find her already sitting on the porch swing, cappuccinos and bran muffins at the ready, “Hey, you look tired. Are you okay?”
Of course Jamie looked tired. The doctor had given her a sleeping pill, but when she woke, the nightmare hadn’t gone away.
Jamie took a deep breath, and she lifted her little Deruta cup with her long fingers like Julie’s fingers, her simple wedding band where Julie wore several rings, her unpolished nails, and she pressed her bare lips to the edge, and sipped. Still holding the cup, she told Julie. Lumps and mammograms and needle biopsies. She was pretty sure there had been some mistake.
“But Mom …” Julie said.
“Mom was only the one lump,” Jamie said. “This isn’t just one. But they have to be wrong. How can I have advanced cancer? My mammogram last year was perfect. My mammograms have all been perfect.”
Julie took the cup from Jamie’s hand and set it on its saucer, and she did what Jamie would have done for her: she took her hand.
Before Jamie left that morning to pick up Oliver, they’d made the appointments together. They’d called Uncle Lee, who arranged for the best surgeon to do the surgery two days later. Say what you want about Uncle Lee as a husband—it’s all deserved—but he’s never failed to be there for his children, or for any of the Wednesday Kids.
“You’ll tell Mom and Dad for me?” Jamie said.
“I’ll take care of everything.”
“Can you take time off from the library to watch Oliver while I’m in the hospital?”
Their mother would want to take care of Oliver, Julie assured her. All the Wednesday Sisters would. It would give them something to do. They’d take him and all the Wednesday Grandbabies to Eleanor Pardee Park, like they used to take the Wednesday Kids.
“Don’t let them come to the hospital,” Jamie said. “I can’t bear the idea of the whole neighborhood huddled in the surgery waiting room like they’re sure I’m going to die.”
“I’ll get them to take Oliver to breakfast.”
Jamie started crying then. “Not waffles with strawberries and whipped cream.”
Julie squeezed Jamie’s hand that was identical to hers except for the rings. Their mother had turned out okay, but neither of them had eaten a waffle since that breakfast when she’d told them about her breast cancer surgery, when they weren’t much older than Oliver. They weren’t much for strawberries, either. They didn’t care to go to New York. Some memories aren’t worth revisiting even when they work out okay.
“Mom was fine, and you will be, too,” Julie said.
And we will be, she’d almost said. They shared the same everything, the good things and the bad.
“Isaac is beside himself,” Jamie said. “He was up all night. He was out walking. I don’t think he slept at all.”
“I know,” Julie said, and then, remembering she wasn’t supposed to know, “Of course he’s beside himself. He loves you. But this is all going to work out. This is all going to be fine.”
“I’ll lose my hair,” Jamie said.
“I have enough for both of us. I’ll cut mine, and we’ll make you a wig, and we’ll style it the same, and we’ll go out shopping for identical clothes.”
Jamie had hugged Julie then. She’d set her head on Julie’s shoulder and left it there for the longest time, the same way Isaac had in the middle of the night. Not knowing what else to do, Julie fingered Jamie’s hair the same way she’d fingered Isaac’s. Was that when she’d first thought how odd it would be, Isaac fingering Julie’s hair on Jamie’s head? Memory, it’s such an unreliable thing. It all runs together and blurs, the things that happen and the things you only imagine do, the things you want and the things you have.
Writing from about the age of fourteen until she was thirty, Beatrix Potter kept a journal in her own privately-invented code-writing. It appears that even her closest friends knew nothing of this code-writing. She never spoke of it, and only one instance has come to light where it was mentioned.
—LESLIE LINDER, IN HER INTRODUCTION TO The Journal of Beatrix Potter, 1881-1897
The extant journal begins on 4 November 1881 when she was 15, but there is evidence that she began her code writing at least a year earlier, and destroyed those pages at a later reading, judging them unworthy. The last entry in the journal is dated 31
January 1897, some fifteen years later, when she was 30. In between there are some 200,000 words.
—LINDA LEAR, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature
A FIRE BLAZED IN THE COTTAGE FIREPLACE, AND ANNA PAGE, JULIE, and I all had enough coal dust on us to mark the fact that we’d had a hand in getting it lit. It was late, but none of us could imagine sleeping. Julie, pen in hand, was settled on my mother’s love seat with one of Mom’s journals, her straight-across eyebrows knitted as she frowned down at the page. I sat back against propped pillows on the bed with a second of Mom’s journals unopened in my lap, my outstretched legs suggesting an easiness I didn’t feel. The buzz from the wine I’d drunk at Ainsley’s End had fizzled with Anna Page’s suggestion about Julie and Isaac, and Graham’s words. He was Mom’s brother? No doubt there was some logical explanation: he was Mom’s “brother” the way Aunt Kath and Brett and Linda and Frankie were her sisters, perhaps, Wednesday Sisters who weren’t sisters at all, but friends so close they liked to imagine they were. That dinner had come to such a crashing halt—Julie saying she needed air and walking out the dining room doors to the fountain, me stammering apologies and following lest she head off into the woods, and Anna Page hurrying after me—that I hadn’t begun to think of the questions I might put to Graham until we arrived back at the cottage, returned to Mom’s secret world.
“This is a very bad idea,” Anna Page said. “Aunt Ally clearly did not want these journals to be read.”
I wanted to say she had no idea what Mom would want, but in truth, she probably did. She’d had conversations with Mom that I hadn’t. She knew Mom in ways I never would.
I opened the journal. Deciphering the gibberish seemed an easier thing to endure than more of the argument we’d had on the short walk back to the cottage: Anna Page’s inquisition meeting Julie’s stoic silence on the subject of Isaac. Or not quite silence. “It’s none of your damned business, Ape,” she’d insisted. “And I’m certainly not taking advice about men from Miss Screw-a-New-Man-Every-Week-and-Pass-Them-Along.”