Mama had told Jo the story before she died. She’d come to the sanctuary as soon as she could after giving birth during that terrible nor’easter, she said. The roads were frozen, the houses buried under feet of snow, and trees were tossed from their tips to their roots across the lane. The church had been empty, and Father Flynn was stuck in town, as was Jo’s father. Jo’s mother was exhausted after giving birth, but she thought, Now or never. She packed a sharp chisel in her coat pocket and set forth out of doors.
Jo imagined Mama’s surprise when, stepping into the church, she saw not just Our Lady but a second, more earthly Madonna—Ida May Dunn—crumpled at the feet of the Virgin, a newborn babe in her own arms, her clothing stained and rumpled.
The two women recoiled at first and then struck their deal, united in a common desire for secrecy. Jo’s mother had come to break a curse, and Ida had come to unload one. And so it was done. Mama hammered the face out of the Virgin, hoping to put a crack in the past and somehow save Henry, and Ida helped her, and when it was over, neither woman left empty-handed. Mama walked out of the church with two babies instead of one—a girl to cancel out her doomed boy—and Ida departed with the last glimpse anyone would have of Our Lady’s face, never guessing how it would come to haunt her.
“Here you are.”
Jo jumped. Ethan had returned with Father Flynn’s address. He held on to her hand a moment before he released it. If he knew what she needed it for, he might not give it to her at all, she reflected. Didn’t priests always protect their own? On the other hand, maybe it would give him some peace when it came to Claire. He wasn’t the only man in Prospect to have sinned on a spectacular scale, and no doubt he wouldn’t be the last.
“Thank you,” Jo said, putting the address in her pocket. She stared into Ethan’s troubled eyes and was tempted to tell him how much Claire still cared for him, but it wasn’t her place. She wasn’t her sister’s keeper, much as she sometimes felt she was. Hard as it was, she was going to have to get used to that, and maybe, just maybe, Claire would start to do the same in return. Jo gave one more uneasy glance to Our Lady and headed back into the full daylight, knowing that the scrap of paper in her pocket could provide either a beginning or an ending to her story, or maybe neither. Fate wasn’t always so clearly written, and even when it was, who was to say it always stayed that way?
Chapter Twenty-five
Dee came home to Salt Creek Farm with Jordy in the middle of July, and to welcome him—the marsh’s little king, its boy treasure—Claire embarked on an unparalleled march of culinary offerings. Each morning she rose before the sun and turned out marbled rings of cake, raisin and anise scones, flaky sheets of phyllo dough drizzled and rolled with honey, salt, and a secret blend of herbs. She scented ramekins of crème anglaise with rose water and orange, and made a peanut brittle so simultaneously salty and sweet that it confused her tongue into rapture.
It was a joy having a baby in the house, and Claire’s body seemed to reflect that. Her clothes grew snug in all the right places, emphasizing her hips and breasts, putting extra swing into her steps, and her newly released hair began to settle into pleasing ripples and waves. She spent so much time in front of the steaming oven and stove that her skin became infused with the oily scents of vanilla, caramel, and brown butter. She dipped her fingers in so much chocolate and cocoa powder that she stained the tips of them a smoky espresso color.
“Nature’s finest manicure,” she pronounced with a laugh, waving her nails at Dee, but Dee didn’t seem to notice. She was limp as old lettuce these days. Maybe it was the strain of taking care of a newborn, or perhaps it was hormonal. The nurses had warned all of them about that. The “baby blues,” they called it, but Dee’s blues seemed to have darkened from standard periwinkle to a dangerous indigo of late. Claire frothed a bowl of eggs harder and started sprinkling flour into the bowl.
“What do you think?” she asked Dee, checking to make sure she was still in the room. Sometimes she crept away before Claire even noticed, sneaking up the stairs to her room, where she would sleep for hours on end, letting Claire and Jo fuss and cluck over Jordy, changing him, swaddling him, heating his bottles like a pair of competing hens. “Clove cake, or lemon-lime? I could do either.”
Jordy was on the table, nestled into the ample curve of an enormous wooden salt bowl that Claire had lined with a quilt. Dee had been horrified with this arrangement at first, but she relaxed as soon as she saw how well the bowl cupped the baby.
“All Gillys get cradled in this,” Claire reassured her. “My mother used to say it’s what hardened our spines.”
Claire glanced at Jordy now, marveling that in six short weeks his eyes had changed to hazel, his hair had thickened, and he’d learned to suckle his fist. As if he sensed he was being watched, he woke with a startle, but he didn’t cry. Claire waited to see if Dee would pick him up, but she didn’t, so Claire banged her wooden spoon on the side of her mixing bowl, trying to snap Dee out of her funk.
Lemon-lime, Claire decided, reaching for the zester. It suited her mood. She squeezed some drops of citrus juice into the batter and tossed away the crushed fruit halves. The problem with happiness was that it was such a brittle net, she thought. Lately she didn’t dare test it, for she worried it would snap under the pressure and spill out whatever she’d snared, leaving her with nothing. Maybe that’s what Jo had been trying to tell her on her wedding day, she mused now, with those horrid hooks painted on Our Lady’s gown—that sometimes you had to be cruel to feed your own soul. Claire remembered the day she’d let that fish go on the beach with Whit standing behind her. Maybe she had made a mistake after all, letting it slip away. She could see that now.
Jordy let out a mew, and Claire twitched, but Dee unfolded his receiving blanket and hoisted him to her shoulder. Claire loved the way Jordy felt in her arms. He shared the same comforting heft of a sack of flour. Whenever she got the chance, she sniffed him as she would one of her pastries, wishing she could smooth icing over his velvety tummy and lick it off. She was ashamed to admit there were times when she almost thought he might be—should have been—hers.
For a moment, at the start of the C-section, the doctors hadn’t been sure Dee was going to live. She was bleeding, her blood pressure had dropped to an almost subhuman level, and a nurse began readying a crash cart. Altogether it had been a terrifying moment for Claire, but not because of the graphic drama unfolding in front of her. On the contrary, it had been so very terrible because Claire had been forced to make an uncomfortable moral choice: For whom was she going to root? The baby or Dee? Mother or infant? Old life or new?
She chose the child.
Later, after Dee was recovering and the machines had stopped their beeping and nurses had taken some of the tubes out of her nose and arms, Claire wondered why she simply hadn’t prayed for both Jordy and Dee. Was that maybe the way the human brain worked in emergencies, she wondered—shutting down critical blood vessels and nerves, vanquishing distractions, so a person could make impossible decisions? Or was this defect of loving too narrowly unique to her own hardened heart?
“We’re never going to eat all this, you know.” The flatness in Dee’s voice sometimes tipped her most banal statements toward profundity. It drove Claire crazy. In this instance, however, she had to concede that Dee had a point. They hadn’t even started on the Bundt cake from yesterday, and here Claire was piling lime sponge on top of it. A plate of plastic-wrapped doughnuts sat festering in the far corner of the counter, by the jug of wooden spoons, and the refrigerator harbored a week-old coconut custard. Claire sighed and stared down at the pan in her hands.
“Well, I’ve already gone and mixed the batter. I might as well bake it.”
Dee checked Jordy’s diaper and then, satisfied with the results, rearranged his clothes and slung him back over her shoulder, patting his back a little harder than Claire would have. Claire bit the inside of her cheek not to say anything.
“Why don’t you sell all that stuff???
? Dee asked.
Claire looked up. “What?”
“At the farmers’ market in Wellfleet on Saturday.”
It was stunning, really. The girl was duller than a box of rocks, but she flashed the occasional sign of intelligence. It wasn’t a bad idea at all, Claire thought. The flavored salts she’d introduced in Hyannis were taking off. Maybe her baking would, too. The paltry amount of money she had left in her bank account was almost gone and the farm still had a heavy cloud of debt squatting over it, but maybe Claire’s confections could help start to dispel it.
Dee’s voice pulled her back to the kitchen. “I could come with you. Well, Jordan and me. You know, for an extra pair of hands. Actually, four extra hands.” Jordy let out another mew.
Claire eyed her, considering. Dee had been a terrible waitress, she remembered. Polite enough, but sulky and tragically inaccurate with her orders. She could never remember how customers wanted their coffee, how they took their eggs, or whether they preferred honey or syrup when it came to their pancakes. Or never seemed to remember. Now that Claire thought about it, Dee had always known what she wanted with no trouble.
She snapped back to the problem at hand. It would be healthy for Dee to get out of the house and mix with a little society. It would be good for them both. “Why not?” she said.
Who knows? she thought. Maybe Dee would turn out to be something of a saleswoman after all. She’d obviously sold herself hook, line, and sinker to Whit. Maybe a flirtation with the outside world wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for Salt Creek Farm. Maybe it was just what they needed.
On Saturday morning Dee changed her mind. “I’m not feeling so well,” she complained, pressing a hand to her temple. “The baby was fussing half the night, and I’ve got a headache something awful. I’m going to stay here and sleep with him.”
Claire tried to hide her relief. Clattering around the kitchen with Dee slumped at the table while she baked was one thing, but being boxed behind a table together for hours in the heat was hardly an appealing prospect. Claire leaned down and gave Jordy a kiss, cupping the warm bulb of his head.
“Be good,” she whispered, and went off to find Jo, who had some salt deliveries to make to restaurants and some errands to run. “Do you want us to bring you anything?” Claire asked, but Dee just shook her head.
A couple of hours later, Claire was sold out of everything at her stand.
“If I could, I would eat one of these every single day of my life,” her last customer raved as she devoured Claire’s final banana muffin. “What did you put in here?”
Claire shrugged. “Sea salt, vanilla, and a little something secret.”
“It’s heaven. You should open your own shop or something.”
Claire began to protest but then stopped. It wasn’t such a stupid idea. Why couldn’t she open her own shop? When was the last time she’d had anything of her own? She was living in her sister’s house with her husband’s mistress and son, working her family’s salt flats. Even Icicle, her very soul, had been a gift from Whit. Claire looked at the woman, who was licking the last crumbs off her fingers like a famished cat. She was wearing tasteful brown lipstick and an enormous pair of diamond studs. Her capri pants were starched, her blouse clean, and she had on French espadrilles. Once Claire had dressed just like her. “Maybe one day,” she said.
“Well, take this.” The woman dug in her purse for her card. “Let me know if you do. These muffins are to die for.” Claire took the card and then glanced at her watch. She still had forty minutes before Jo was due back. Across the aisle one of the vendors was selling peaches so ripe they were almost weeping. Cobbler, she thought. And peach-and-pepper jam. She was halfway to the fruit stall before she realized that Ethan was standing under its awning. She hadn’t recognized him in the shadows, and she hadn’t seen him since she’d left him half naked in the sand.
“Ethan,” she said, coming up behind him. The one person she was both desperate to encounter and ashamed to. He was wearing his collar, she noted, but with a short-sleeved shirt that showed off the graceful bows of his forearms. If she looked hard enough, Claire bet, she could find his pulse. It was the same spot where she’d kissed him over and over. She stared down at her shoes, tongue-tied.
“Claire.” Why did her name always come out of his mouth like music ringing from a bell? She felt the vibration in her stomach and the backs of her knees. “Your hair,” he said, “it’s—”
“Down.” She reached up and smoothed the frayed ends.
“I like it. It suits you.”
“Thanks.” Claire was finding it difficult to catch her breath. She sometimes felt that over the past thirteen years her veins and arteries had constricted themselves to their smallest functional sizes, allowing her body’s blood to circulate, but nothing extra. Not laughter. Not affection, and certainly not passion. At least not until Ethan had come along again. She’d been so ravenous for him that morning in the dunes that she hadn’t even felt remorse, but what was she supposed to do? Sometimes, it seemed, the only way to exorcise the past was to relive it.
She clasped her fingers behind her back now and bit her bottom lip. Her problem, she realized, was that she was a woman who always had everything she didn’t want. And maybe now that included Ethan. For he wasn’t the same as the boy who’d left. He was a man with twelve years on him that Claire knew nothing about. She’d been foolish to try to make herself believe that history didn’t matter.
“What are you even doing out here?” she finally asked. Too late, the answer came to her. Avoiding you. He blushed. “Same as everyone else. Shopping. What about you?”
Was this what they were going to be reduced to? Claire wondered. The kind of small talk they might have made at a cocktail party? She couldn’t imagine a future filled with chitchat about the weather. “I’m selling some things I baked,” she replied.
“Business going well?”
She tried to keep her voice light. “I sold out of everything in two hours. If you come next week, I’ll save something for you.”
Ethan looked pained. “Claire, about that. I don’t know how to say this, but… I’ve requested to be transferred. Wait—” He took her hand when she tried to pull it away. “I saw your sister the other day, and it started me thinking. What if I’m making a mistake?”
Claire felt her throat pinch closed. They were the words she’d longed to hear from him for so long, but years too late. They were ghost words. Even if he did break his vows for her, Claire realized, she’d never banish the specter of God hanging between them. She hung her head. When was she going to learn? Love wasn’t a list to be kept in the heart. It was the duties you got up to fulfill every day and the sacrifices you made. Jordy had made her see that. She shook her head, unable to force words out, and Ethan let go of her hand, tears welling in his eyes. “I guess we’re done here,” he choked.
Claire turned away. She couldn’t look him in the face anymore. “Yeah,” she managed. “I guess we are.”
She could feel his eyes on her back as she walked toward her stall. Next week, she decided, she’d make devil’s food cake spiked with rum, and she’d charge her customers double for it or let them stand there salivating. From now on, nothing of hers was going to be free for the taking again—not when it came to cooking, not when it came to Whit, and especially not when it came to Ethan Stone and her poor mangled heart.
She and Jo drove back to Salt Creek Farm with the windows in the truck cab cranked all the way down. It didn’t help with the heat, but at least it moved the air around, even if the breeze made conversation difficult, which was actually fine with Claire, since she was feeling about as friendly as a scorpion. They rolled onto the lane leading down to the marsh. In the distance the marsh was its usual summer patchwork of violently odd colors—magenta, green, iron red, and brown. With the heat and sun came algae and microorganisms, and then the mud in the salt flats bloomed into a harlequin’s coat.
They still hadn’t talked about what was
in Ida’s letter, not since the hospital, but it was growing between them like the season’s heat. If she knew who he was to her all along, Claire mused, why was she so angry when I went and married Whit? It wasn’t as if Jo ever could have. In fact, the idea was distressing, really. Claire wondered if Jo and Whit ever kissed before Jo read Ida’s letter, and if Whit ever suspected their real relationship. If so, he’d done a remarkable job hiding it.
I should burn that letter, Claire thought. It was upstairs in her bureau drawer now. She’d grabbed it out of Jo’s hand in the hospital and never given it back, but Jo hadn’t asked for it. Even so, it wasn’t Claire’s to keep, and she was tired, she realized, of carrying the load of her sister’s burdens. The truth was out now, and besides, there was only so much atonement one could make in life.
The cicadas were screaming, and a row of pelicans dipped and rose like a squadron of bombers cruising the horizon. Evening was settling over the marsh like a square of silk. Icicle would want a gallop on the beach and a splash in the surf, and then Claire would give him his feed. She felt the knot that had twisted in her stomach at the farmers’ market begin to unravel. By the end of her ride, she hoped, her muscles would have relaxed completely and she’d be able to breathe again. As she neared the barn, however, she saw that the doors were open, which was odd. She’d been extra careful about closing them. She frowned and swung one door wider, a wave of heat hitting her as she took a step inside, and then she froze.