May God grant her grace, Jo thought as the outline of Dee’s features began to take shape, and keep her soul forever in salt.
It was only a small prayer—Jo was rusty after so many years of absence from St. Agnes—but it was heartfelt and it was the best she could do. In time, she hoped, it might even be heard.
Chapter Thirty-one
On the face of it, Claire believed, Salt Creek Farm wasn’t the kind of place to inspire pilgrims. Marshy and windblown, choked in pickleweed, there were no haloed glories hiding in the barn, no gold-leafed idols to bow down to on the tipsy porch, no charms to be bought or blessings to reap. There were only acres of salt, miles of sand, and Jo, scarred up and down her right side but just fine in the places where it counted.
And yet, miracle of miracles, people chose to travel from as far away as Tokyo and Paris to find the place. Some of the visitors who arrived were culinary specialists. They owned starred restaurants or wrote award-winning food columns. Some of them worked in the food industry, running marketing for giant corporations, and some were taking time off to try to piece together the scraps of their souls again. Most recently a famous chef had arrived in despair because he had lost the sensation of taste. Pastis, bouillon, foie gras—it was all the same to him, he said. The world had turned to a pile of rubbish in his mouth. Jo and Claire spent three days with him at the end of August, the ripest time of year, the last push of the season, and when they were done, he’d not only regained his sense of taste, but also had an entire notebook of fresh recipes.
Not everyone got such fine results, though. Jo greeted each prospective visitor on the porch of the farmhouse with a silver spoon of salt and a list of rules (no disturbing the collection basins, no drinking, no wandering unescorted through the marsh, and above all no mindless chitchat), and then she asked three simple questions: What is your first memory? Who do you love? What do you think you’ll find here?
Some of the travelers took a quick taste from the spoon and fled, their gums blistering. Some flubbed their answers, and the ones who stayed got to trade in comfortable beds and conversation for lumpy mattresses and long afternoons with only their shadows for consolation.
On the first day of instruction, Claire would spread her different blends of salt on the table in a hodgepodge of bowls and ask her pupils to choose. “Pick the one you like,” she would say, for the first hurdle that anyone had to undertake with the salt was an exercise in letting go. When a person stumbled over his tongue or took too long answering, Claire made him pick again until the salt loosened his lips and his words slipped out easily.
“You have to use everything when you work with salt,” Claire reminded the students. “You can’t pick and choose. If the silt is full of iron and turns the color of rust, you have to learn to work around it.”
They didn’t know yet that the price of happiness was loss, but Claire had learned that lesson by heart, and she was going to pass it on. Her students couldn’t imagine ever being forced to trade their newfound fluidity for a condition of painful solidity, but if they wanted to make salt, they would figure it out. Or rather some of them would. The ones with hearts up to the task. The ones who accepted that breaking their backs and blistering their hands for a scoop of salt, only to watch Claire dissolve it in a bowl for the next newcomer, wasn’t cruelty but a kind of poetic progress.
Her second lesson was to take her students out to the graves at the edge of the marsh. Luckily, their curse against boys seemed to have broken when it came to Jordy. Maybe because he was Gilly in soul but not blood, or maybe the curse had run its course. Whatever the cause, Claire was grateful. Here she simply observed. The pupils who cataloged and ordered the graves by date would do fine but never produce anything startling. The ones who wandered and ran their fingers over the stones showed promise, but Claire wasn’t so interested in them either. She was looking for the one or two students who stopped, put their hands in their pockets, and bowed their heads, struck by the fact that in a salt marsh time meant nothing. Those were the students Claire sent out to scrape the first of the season’s salt crystals, for they were the ones she didn’t have to teach a blessed thing to.
When the visitors left, most of them drove straight out of town with chapped lips, aching shoulders, and hands wrinkled from the brine. They motored past the Lighthouse Diner, sped by the leafy canopy of the pear tree (which still produced the same gnarled fruit), and totally ignored Plover Hill and Turner House, which Claire could understand but which stuck in her craw nonetheless.
She knew that the pursuit of history wasn’t the reason people came all the way out to this little spit of coastline, but she still wished they would take a look around. If they did, they might learn a story about salt they didn’t know. But then, Claire had chosen to spend her life with the stuff clinging to her lips and tongue. It had become the only tale she could tell, the single thing she was certain she would leave behind when her time eventually came.
Ethan liked to claim that the quickest way to check a person’s heart was to look in his eyes, but Claire begged to disagree. “Don’t listen to your stepfather. Just feed a person a pinch of salt,” she’d whisper to Jordy, “and his lips will tell you what you need to hear.”
Jo and Claire had always tried to do that for Jordy. They schooled him well in the history of Prospect, telling him most especially about Turner House and the last man who’d ever lived in it. Just as she and Jo had to prepare the ground before they flooded the marsh, Claire knew, they also had to take care of the foundations of their own line. Jo and Claire had finally gotten around to tidying up the detritus of Salt Creek Farm, and some of the old letters and diaries they’d found were telling. They’d gathered them up, tied ribbons around them, and put them aside for Jordy’s eighteenth birthday, which at the time had seemed an eon away. First Jordy crawled, then he walked, and then he learned to talk, but with each new leap in his development Claire’s heart would lurch a little as she considered the confession she’d have to make one day.
“You don’t have to tell him everything,” Ethan pointed out, which shocked Claire, for although he was her rightful husband, she still sometimes thought of him as a servant of the Lord. When he gave earthbound advice, it always surprised her.
Claire shook her head. “No,” she said. “I do. He deserves to know. Besides, he’ll never really be mine otherwise.”
Ethan kissed her cheek. “Nothing is ours in the end,” he said, and shuffled off to finish the knitting his uncle had convinced him to take up, leaving Claire rooted on the spot, wondering if the bonds of love were really as frail as all that or if they were perhaps woven for sterner depths than a single strand could reach.
“Are you ready?” Jo asked, squeezing Claire’s hand in the entry of the cottage she and Ethan shared in town.
“One minute,” Claire muttered, smoothing out her hair in the hall’s mirror. Where does the time go? she muttered to herself as she surveyed the ruins of middle age in her reflection. Her torso was thickening, her cheeks were no longer quite so taut, and her red hair, once her glory, was almost all gray now. Some days she almost didn’t recognize herself. She turned to Jo, who handed her a thick bundle of papers, and together, being as quiet as they could, they tiptoed into Jordy’s room and woke him.
“What’s this?” he muttered as Claire and Jo presented him with the documents—some of them so antique their ink was almost vanished, some crinkled and torn, and some in handwriting Claire recognized very well, even if it wasn’t totally authentic and was signed with a little heart. And then there was the letter penned in her own hand.
“Happy birthday, Jordy,” Claire said, brushing the hair out of his eyes the way she used to when he was a young boy. “These are for you. When you were a baby, your aunt and I decided that this is the day you should have them.”
He sat up in the narrow bed he still slept in—the same one Claire had slumbered in as a girl—and took the packet out of her hands. Jordy was accustomed to old things—everything i
n his life from his furniture to his shoes was used, faded, and comfortably worn—but this was an odd gift, even from the likes of Jo and Claire. “What is it?” he asked, untying the ribbons that held everything together.
Claire paused. “It’s your inheritance.”
Jordy rubbed his eyes, and Claire could guess what he was thinking. Jo gleaned salt for a living, and Claire blended and baked it. As far as Jordy knew, the only things she and Jo had to hand down were old bread rolls and a working knowledge of how to scrape mud.
Claire took the bundle out of his hands and gently pulled the first document from it. “Start with this,” she said. It was a legal paper, a deed to Turner House, which had sat empty on Plover Hill since Whit’s death, looming over the town like a depressed gargoyle.
Jordy scanned the jargon and handed the page back to Claire. “I don’t understand.”
Claire looked over at Jo and took a deep breath. “It’s your house now, Jordy. Whit Turner was your father.” Jordy looked around the room in confusion. An open trunk lay in the corner, half packed, and a suitcase was propped by the door. In a few weeks, he would be going off for his freshman year at Boston College and starting a new existence. Claire bet he wasn’t expecting to begin it now. For Jordy’s whole life, she and Jo had always told him they didn’t know who his father was—the better to protect him—and he had always believed them. Now he was finding out he was the son of an old and prominent family, once the richest in town.
“What am I supposed to do with a house?” he finally asked. “Especially one like that?”
“Oh, it’s not for now.” Claire folded up the deed and slipped it back in with the other papers. “It’s for someday. You’ll know when.”
“So why give it to me right before I leave?” he said. “Who’s been taking care of it all this time?” From the tone of his voice, it was clear he’d been looking forward to tailgating parties and college dances, not roof repairs and domestic chores.
Jo leaned over and patted one of his legs with her scarred hand. “Just read the papers, Jordy, and you’ll understand everything. There’s a letter in there from Claire, an apology for what happened the night your real mother died.” She looked over to the suitcase by the door. “Claire loves you, Jordy. Try not to judge her too hard. She never wanted to tell you any of this. I know it’s breaking her heart to do it, but it’s the right thing. She loves you enough to risk losing you. Remember that.” And with a quiet click of the door, she left Claire and Jordy alone to come to their own conclusions.
Claire often wondered how it must have felt for Jordy to go from being a boy with two parents to an orphan, from poor to a homeowner, fatherless to an heir, all in the reading of a pack of old letters. She wondered, too, what he thought of the story she’d written of his mother’s death by fire in the barn, but he never shared that, and Claire never had the courage to ask him about it. Ethan was right, she decided. Sometimes things were better left untouched.
The only way to lay history to rest, Claire had learned, was to keep it alive, and in transforming Turner House into the Historical Landmark Association, Jordy had swept away some of the cobwebs of the place. The house still hulked on Plover Hill, eyeing the village with its menacing rows of windows, but now anyone could walk inside. Anyone could poke through its dusty corners and shout up its tall chimneys, making the walls echo. The Turner insignia was still engraved on every available surface, spiky as ever, but it had been tempered and mixed with the names of Gillys, and in that way maybe softened.
Like the house, Jordy’s life was neatly divided, even as it was also a hodgepodge of conflicting elements. He’d departed for college as planned, but Claire knew he’d gone with an altered soul. It was as if he’d gained weight, as she supposed he had. He took up history instead of economics as a planned course of study, then married young, had a daughter, and tragically lost his wife to cancer, leaving Jordy thirty and alone, grieving, and raising a daughter he had no idea what to do with. “Come home,” Claire had pleaded with him over the phone, the line crackling like a fire between them.
There was a long silence, and then Jordy had asked, “For how long?”
For once Claire had said exactly the right thing. “Let’s let the salt decide.”
Starting with the packet of letters and clippings, Jordy had been able to build a collection of memorabilia and artifacts stretching from Prospect’s start as a whaling outpost to its current incarnation as a summer haven for the wealthy. St. Agnes was the same as ever, along with Salt Creek Farm, but in the end Claire found it ironic that Whit had gotten his wish in a manner of sorts. Prospect had become a Destination.
Now the bottom floor of Turner House was public, open weekends and every day except Monday. Jordy and his daughter, Rose, inhabited the second floor. They didn’t need much—barely a suite of rooms between them—and of course they spent most of their time at Salt Creek Farm. In the summer Jordy gave lectures and tours, and in the winter he was simply Rose’s father. One day, he claimed, he might even start a book, and Claire wondered what would happen if their story was ever written down, fixed in black and white.
“Just wait,” she always told Jordy when he brought the subject up, for as the salt was something she regularly consumed but didn’t truly own, the history of the Gillys and Turners wasn’t really hers to give away either. There would come a time when the marsh would pass to Rose, and then, at long last, the strands of the past—Turner and Gilly alike—would be woven into a single neat braid like the one that hung down Rose’s back.
But all that was in the future. For now Claire was content to watch Rose through the blurry prism of Salt Creek Farm’s windows, her arms moving in sync with Jordy’s and Jo’s as she learned to rake, while the wonderful smell of fresh bread was rising from the kitchen. If she knew anything, Claire thought, it was simply that though our time on earth was short, our lives were long. They seeped and spread, watery and wide, moving in unexpected directions.
Claire reached up and touched the locket at her throat, her thumb fixed on the pearl. If she had to atone for her sins, she figured, so be it, she was ready, ice pitted in her bowels, frost gathered in her hair, and salt scattered painful beneath the papery skin of her feet—for as it was in the beginning, she suspected, so would it be forever in the end.
Acknowledgments
First thanks go to my agent, Dan Lazar at Writers House, for being an advocate, a friend, and for bringing out the best in me and my work time and time again.
Thanks to Caryn Karmatz Rudy for walking me down the first part of the editorial path and for her continuing friendship. And a spectacular thanks to my editor, Helen Atsma, the fairy godmother of editors, for getting me across the finish line.
It takes a village to put out a book, so thank you to everyone at Grand Central Publishing: Jamie Raab for running the whole show; Deb Futter for support; Carolyn Kurek, Maureen Sugden, and Celia Johnson for their sharp eyes. And thanks to Catherine Casalino for the beautiful cover.
I think I owe some drinks to the Council of Mental Health and Domestic Crises, otherwise known as Pam, Andrea, Laura, and Lynn. Thank you for always being at the other end of the phone line with open ears and open hearts. And thanks to my dining committee, Jack and Nancy, for testing recipes.
Thanks to the Debs—Kris, Meredith, Eve, and Katie—for keeping up my spirits and always responding so nicely to any e-mail tagged FDEO. Thanks to Joshilyn Jackson for giving public speaking advice and for showing me the authorial ropes.
I have immense gratitude for all the independent booksellers in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially Elaine Petrocelli at Book Passage and Calvin Crosby at Books Inc., for their love of good stories and their care and respect for local writers and readers.
Finally, my family needs the biggest thanks of all. Without my own sisters, Lala and Bella, I wouldn’t have inspiration for the relationships in this book, and without the Drever tribe I wouldn’t have a cheering section. And without Ned, Willow, Raine, and Auden
, my own clan, I wouldn’t have anything at all.
About the Author
TIFFANY BAKER is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Little Giant of Aberdeen County. She lives in Marin County, California, with her husband and three young children.
Also by Tiffany Baker
The Little Giant of Aberdeen County
Contents
Front Cover Image
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Tiffany Baker
Copyright
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.