“Seems like all that riding’s left you up on a high horse,” Dee said.
Claire raised her eyebrows, and when Dee didn’t respond, she wondered if the girl really was lackadaisical or just plain stupid. She fiddled with Icicle’s mane.
“Do you ever wonder how I knew about you and Whit?” Claire asked suddenly, but Dee didn’t rush to answer the question. Maybe this was how the child planned on apologizing, Claire considered—with simple silence. Maybe she was trying to convey negative sorrow. But wouldn’t that end up being joy? And Dee was about as far away from a state of delight as Salt Creek Farm was from heaven. “I found your earring in our car,” Claire continued. “Some trashy silver hoop. I threw it out and didn’t say anything to Whit, but that’s how I knew.”
Dee reached up and fondled her own earlobe. It pleased Claire to see that she didn’t have any jewelry to her name out here—not since Claire had ripped the locket off her throat and put it around her own. Of course, Dee should have known better than to accept it from Whit in the first place. Claire could just imagine him pulling it out of his pocket and dangling it off his forefinger and thumb as if daring Dee to take some kind of gateway drug.
Dee blushed. “I didn’t go after him, you know,” she whispered. “I wasn’t the one who started it. You have to believe that.” She eased toward the barn doors, eager to leave, but Claire wasn’t done. She stretched out her hands, her fingers spread like tentacles.
“What were you thinking? He’s twice your age and married. Did that even matter to you? He was way too much for you to handle. Why, I caught him trying to choke you to death!”
Dee pursed her lips and picked at the skin around her fingernails. “He didn’t really mean it. He was just surprised. About the baby and everything.”
Claire narrowed her eyes. “Are you serious? Are you really that naïve? Because if there’s one thing I can tell you about Whit, my dear, it’s that he always means it.”
Dee shook her head. “I know what you’re trying to do, and it’s not going to work. When Whit lays eyes on his child, he’ll want me back. I know it. And he wasn’t trying to kill me. He was just scared, is all.” She stood up and pulled her cardigan closed tighter. “In the meantime stay away from me, and I won’t go near you.”
She tried to pass Claire, but Claire reached out and seized one of Dee’s fleshy upper arms, digging her fingers in hard. “I wouldn’t be throwing ultimatums around if I were in your shoes, Dee. There isn’t a Temperance League you can go running to for charity anymore, and I doubt anyone else in town is going to risk your father’s or Whit’s wrath just to give you a bed and a hot plate of food every night. It’s us or no one.” Dee wrenched her arm free and glared at Claire. “How far along are you anyway?” Claire asked, nodding at Dee’s stomach.
Dee wrapped her arms around her middle like she was trying to hold in a secret, but it was a little late for that in Claire’s opinion. “Six months,” she whispered.
Claire gasped. “Are you serious?” She turned away from Dee, doing some quick math in her head and not liking the sum she came up with. “What are you planning on doing?”
Dee’s lip wobbled. “I don’t know anymore.”
Claire gazed out the open doors of the barn to the newly flooded evaporating pools and thought about the babies she’d lost. She’d never gotten a chance to hold any of them. Dee’s child might be the closest she ever came, but if Dee left the marsh, it would mean another child Claire never embraced.
However, Salt Creek Farm was a dangerous place for an infant in more ways than one. Claire thought of the stopped hearts of the boys in the graves across the salt flats, her own brother among them.
“What should I do?” Dee asked.
Don’t let her go, a voice inside Claire urged. But if she was going to get Dee to stay, she was going to need help. She was the last woman on earth Dee would want to listen to, although that could be fixed. Claire knew how salt could corrode a person’s better judgment and wear down second thoughts. She took Dee by the hand, gripping harder when she tried to pull away.
“No, I want to help,” she said, smiling, making sure to show all her teeth the way she did when she wanted to coerce her coterie of country-club ladies. “You need a friend now, a soul you can confide in. Luckily, I know just the right someone.”
Still clutching Dee by the wrist, Claire led her out of the barn and closed the doors, moving with the slow deliberateness she’d use around a horse she didn’t want to spook.
“Come on,” she said, and set off down the lane. It was Easter, Claire thought, her heart swelling with a rush of extra blood, the time for offerings, and at long last she had a gift for Our Lady that couldn’t possibly be refused.
Chapter Twenty
Dee might never have been an ace student or anything, but she wasn’t a total dimwit either. When Claire accused her of letting Icicle out of the barn, she knew it was Claire’s way of telling her to keep her hands off her horse, her man, and everything else in her life.
But that proved easier said than done. Now that Dee was living in close quarters with Claire, her curiosity was stronger than it ever had been. When Claire was out working or riding Icicle, Dee would sometimes sneak into Claire’s room and have a little look around. She started off just standing there, inhaling the air, but after a while she began prying more boldly, cracking open the wardrobe and rifling through Claire’s old salt clothes, fiddling with the hairbrush on top of the dresser, examining what kind of skin cream Claire liked. When Dee found Claire’s diamond wedding band in the bureau’s top drawer, she tried to slip it on her finger, but it only went to the knuckle. She sighed in frustration and put it back. There were other things she would have liked to explore—a faded diary with a broken lock, a packet of photographs of Claire in high school, a series of birthday cards—but she was always too scared she’d get caught.
Sharing space with Claire allowed Dee to see that Claire wasn’t exactly the fire-wielding vixen she’d painted in her imagination. Around Jo, Dee was surprised to find that Claire was polite and almost meek. And Jo, who never uttered more than three words in a row to anyone in town, was turning out to be so bossy that Dee sometimes wished she could tape up Jo’s mouth for a little peace and quiet. And then there were all the crazy things going on with Dee’s body. Her breasts felt like a pair of party balloons. There were days she swore she was retaining half the world’s water. Even her face was changing shape.
Her father had called her a slut and said she deserved what she was getting, and Whit had gone one step further and called up the devil against her, but if salt could change how she saw Claire, Dee thought, maybe there was hope for her, too. Maybe by the time the baby came, all the bad parts would have leached out of her, leaving her as pure and shining as a flake of Joanna’s good stuff.
She pushed the drawer closed, her knees aching as she crossed the room. It was Easter, but she couldn’t tell it from the quiet out on the farm. Claire had baked something that smelled cheesy and promising, but that was the only sign of any kind of celebration. Dee listened, but the house was truly empty. She’d go out and see Icicle, she decided. At least he was good company.
“I’m taking a walk,” she called loudly, just in case anyone cared. “I’ll be out in the barn.” But no one answered. Not even the clock ticked.
The place Dee felt best in was the salt barn. The dry aroma cleared her mind and relaxed her aching back. She swung open the door and inhaled, wishing she could knit something for herself out of that smell and live cocooned in it. It was better than the hippie sticks of incense that kids used to burn at high-school parties back in Vermont—probably better than the pot they scored. Even Icicle, tucked away in the corner with his hay, and in spite of his manure, made the whole atmosphere kind of cozy.
He always nickered when he heard Dee enter, but she’d come prepared, pulling a carrot out of her coat pocket. She let him nuzzle her neck with his hot nose, then fed him the carrot, flat-palmed, taking pleasure in
the chomping noises he made and laughing when he bumped her, knocking her a little sideways.
Her center of gravity was shifting. That was for sure. When she climbed stairs these days, her hips felt disjointed and her knees rubberized, but there was more than just a physical adjustment going on inside her. Right before she’d dropped out of school, they’d studied rivers in geography, the only class Dee had ever liked, maybe because she knew that it was the closest she was going to come to traveling. Rivers, the teacher had told them, sometimes reversed their courses under amazing circumstances, say, giant earthquakes. Dee pondered that now. The more pregnant she got, the more she felt like one of those waterways. She might be confused and churned up at the moment, but she was starting to suspect that giving birth was going to upend her completely. For the hundredth time, she wished she didn’t have to do it.
Life is hard, her father had always droned whenever she complained about the littlest thing. Back then she’d assumed he was trying to get her to shut up, but what if he’d been telling her the absolute truth? Day-to-day existence wasn’t hard, Dee was starting to see; all of life was. As far as she could tell, it began with bone-grinding pain and ended even worse, and what a person was supposed to do with the parts in between seemed to her to be about as clear as a dream.
She remembered the time after her mother had died, when the air in the house seemed to have stilled forever. The clocks were stopped. The phone was left unanswered. Even the refrigerator hummed more quietly. Dee wasn’t sure she hadn’t died, too. Cutt barely looked at her. Her relatives arrived and vanished. Dee returned to school, where no one mentioned she’d been gone, and came home to an empty house. The details of Dee’s mother—the smoky color of her eyes, her funny laugh, the shape of her feet—faded a little bit more each day.
Dee wondered if Cutt missed her like that now, if the rooms above the diner seemed empty to him when he came up after his shifts, and she decided probably not. For one thing, she wasn’t really gone, not all the way. The day after she arrived on Salt Creek Farm, she’d even called Cutt and told him where she was.
“I don’t have a daughter,” he’d said, and then hung up the phone, loud and hard. Her father knew where to find her. He just didn’t want to.
Still, it was funny. Out on Salt Creek Farm, where there wasn’t much of anything, Dee felt more alive than she had in months. Maybe, she thought, nestling one hand under her belly, it was the baby weight, filling up the parts of her she hadn’t known were empty, or maybe what people in town said about Gilly salt really was true. It was playing tricks on her mind, making her think she was full when she wasn’t, happy when she was sad, and worth more to somebody than a plate of eggs and ham.
Claire just about scared the piss out of Dee when she jumped out of the shadows in the barn. Dee knew perfectly well that three women shut up together—one of them pregnant and cranky, one nursing a broken heart and a grudge, and one who was half french fry—couldn’t be a good combination, especially when they were all there because of the same man.
But she was wrong again. Claire wasn’t out to get her. She just wanted to help. You need a friend, she said, coming up close to Dee and slipping her white fingers around the girl’s wrist, right over her pulse, the same way Whit had. She pulled Dee out of the barn and down the dusty lane. And I know the right someone.
For a blind moment, Dee worried that Claire was taking her into the dunes for a private beating, so she was relieved when the place they stopped at turned out only to be St. Agnes. The last of the handful of Easter worshippers had left, and Father Ethan Stone was just stepping out of the rectory. He blushed hard when he saw Claire, but he didn’t take his eyes off her either, Dee noticed. Claire grew as fidgety as a grasshopper in Ethan’s presence, and he wasn’t much better. He blinked at Claire.
“Hello,” he said, adjusting his collar like he wanted to remind her—or maybe just himself—of his vows. On her part, Claire was shameless. She stretched her neck and tugged on her braid, biting her bottom lip.
“Happy Easter,” she said. Dee felt as if she were watching a girl her own age instead of a woman of thirty-one. In contrast, the Virgin shone behind Claire in a little patch of sun, keeping all her secrets to herself.
“Oh.” Dee startled herself by speaking out loud, understanding blooming in her brain. “You brought me to see the Virgin.”
Claire regarded her. “Who did you think I meant?” Dee didn’t answer, but Father Stone smiled, and Claire raised her eyebrows at him.
He wasn’t born a priest, Dee said to herself. And if Claire keeps it up, he won’t stay one for long. Which, if you asked Dee, would be a general service to womankind. A man that fine shouldn’t be locked away in a musty old church, she thought. Claire put her hands on Dee’s shoulders and pushed her past Father Stone toward the sanctuary door. Dee raised her own eyebrows at him, the way Claire had.
“This is women’s business, Ethan,” Claire called over her shoulder. “We need to borrow the church for a little while, if you don’t mind.” And, the Lord bless him, the man scrambled out the door like he couldn’t wait to get away. Dee didn’t catch his reply, but if it matched the heat in his eyes as he stared at Claire, she thought that was probably for the best.
Inside, she halted, struck dumb by the light bathing the Virgin, her gaze getting stuck on all the strange things about the painting: the gray fishhooks scooped along the hemline, the open eye painted on the palm.
Dee followed Claire up the center of the church’s tiny aisle. Dee was in trouble and needed someone on her side, she knew, and maybe Our Lady was really good for it. She kind of covered all the bases. She was holy, but human, too. Dee had never really thought about it before, but the Holy Family was a lot more like a regular family than she’d ever given them credit for. Their problems were pretty familiar—unexplained pregnancy, a rebellious son, his weird friends. She looked at her own situation in comparison and thanked her lucky stars that when she died and went to judgment, at least she’d get herself some resolution. Poor Jesus just got himself resurrected. His troubles never ended. One day he’d even have to return again, to judge the living and the dead, but hopefully that was still a long ways off.
Claire crossed herself and slid into a middle pew, and after a moment Dee did the same. They were silent for the longest time, both of them facing the altar, as if they were passengers on a perilous mountain road, unwilling to take their eyes off the twists and turns unfolding in front of them. It was worse than actual church. Finally Claire cleared her throat and got right down to the heart of things. “Why?” she cried.
For a moment Dee panicked. For such a little word, “why” sounded pretty big. What was Claire asking about? Dee wondered, her brain racing lickety-split. The times Dee had snuck into her room lately and tried on Claire’s wedding ring? Or the fact that she hadn’t been completely forthcoming about how far along she really was in her pregnancy? As if to prove a point, the baby kicked her just then, and she shifted, not wanting to call attention to it. She bowed her head. No. She knew exactly what Claire was asking when she asked the question why. She wanted to know about Whit. Dee didn’t have anything to offer her but the truth. She held it out, her voice wavering. “I thought maybe he really loved me.”
“I suppose you thought you loved him, too,” Claire said, her lips barely moving, her shoulders straight. For the first time, Dee realized that Claire always held herself as if she were on the back of a horse—upright, ready to yank the reins if she needed to. Dee wondered if that came naturally or if it was a by-product of life with Whit. She considered Claire’s statement. Had she thought she loved Whit? That question was easy to answer. It was the easiest one, in fact. “Yes,” she admitted. She shifted her bulk. If Claire was going to ask her questions, she figured, she was going to do the same. “And what about you? Did you love him when you got married?”
Claire’s head snapped up. “What?” She didn’t pronounce this word the way she’d said why. This was an accusation, a How d
are you?
Dee eased an inch to the left on the pew. “It’s just that… well, I heard all about how you once loved Father Stone, and I wondered if you loved Whit like that, too.” She balled her hands back into fists and held her breath.
Claire seemed to weigh Dee’s insinuation, but when she spoke again, it wasn’t to address questions of her own past. She leaned forward, and her voice got so low it almost flickered. “I know you’ve been going through my things,” she said. “Next time you snoop, you might want to close the curtains.”
Dee rubbed the pew’s fine wood, her fingertips searching for a crack or cranny in which to hide. She was damned if she’d cry in front of Claire. “What do you want from me?” she finally asked, but before Claire could respond, the answer came swelling up through Dee like the vibration of a huge bell, so powerful she wondered that half the town couldn’t hear it, too. Your baby.
She sat back, breathless. Of course. It was so plain. Claire was exactly the kind of person who wanted all the things she didn’t have—children, Whit when he’d belonged to her sister, Ethan when he belonged to God. And Dee bet that Claire didn’t care how she got them. She folded her hands around her belly and stood up. “We can go now.” The baby gurgled and twisted, and Dee laid a hand on top of it, as if to reassure it for the first time that everything was going to be fine, even if she wasn’t sure that was true.
“Did you get the answer you needed?” Claire’s voice jabbed behind her like a spade plunging into earth. Dee squared her shoulders and steeled herself. She wasn’t going to let Claire—or anyone—dig into her. Not anymore.
“Sure,” she said. “For now.”
Chapter Twenty-one
By the end of June, summer had finally started unfurling itself in earnest, a bright flag that had been rolled too tight during winter. Eelgrass, pea blossoms, climbing roses, ticks, mice, and even moles poked their dim noses up out of the blessed black dirt and took a sniff of the new season. As if in celebration, the first crust of salt formed early on the eastern basins, turning the ponds from plain mud puddles to pools frosted with delicacy.