She really shouldn’t have tormented the girl like that, Jo conceded to herself after Dee left. After all, she knew better than anyone what it was to be taunted. For the entire year following her brother’s death, her mother had dressed her and Claire in scraps of black so they’d stood out wherever they’d gone, marked by their grief. Jo had been only nine years old. She was too young to understand the adult silence that fell when she and her mother and sister walked into the bank or the pharmacy in town, but at the same time she was too sorrowful to fit into childhood anymore. Her clothes had rings and mud on them from her working in the marsh before she came to school, and her lunch smelled of boiled cabbage. The other children started giving her a wide berth, picking up and moving their lunches when she approached their tight little groups, making up rhymes about her that they’d sing in the coatroom.
She’d never been popular to begin with, but she had never really minded because she’d always had Henry to eat with, Henry to go on the swings with, and Henry to explain to her the words she couldn’t read for herself. When there’d been two of them, the town children left them alone, but now that Jo was singular, all her oddities were magnified, even to her.
For comfort she turned to Our Lady. Every Sunday she trailed her mother to church, Claire’s toddler hand folded in the pleat of her own, and stared at the Virgin throughout Mass, her missing face a blank riddle that Jo couldn’t solve, the cracks in the paint catching at the edges of her imagination, reminding her of her own small sins.
“There’s more to adoration than plain love,” Mama would tell Jo before bed, her flat voice echoing in the darkness. “Remember that. There’s a pain involved you can’t imagine.”
Jo started paying better attention to the particular kinds of things the townswomen left for Our Lady. The Gillys always deposited their salt, but Jo discovered an unspoken language of offerings. Girls aching for love left fresh flowers, and girls who’d been betrayed left dried. Women worried about their children left sugar and honey, and women with money problems slipped quarters under the bottoms of their votives. And when it was time for confession, everyone without exception would take two fingers and slowly trace the empty arc of the Virgin’s face, as if they preferred to confess their failings to her instead of to the Lord.
Father Flynn despaired of it all. “I’d like to remind everyone not to leave parcels of food or other items sitting out in the sanctuary,” he would sometimes be reduced to announcing before his sermon. “It only attracts rats. If you’d like to engage in private worship, the votives are kept under the last pew, and a nickel donation is appreciated.” But the women of Prospect roundly ignored him, keeping their own counsel about how and to whom they should pray.
“Why?” Jo pressed her mother.
But Mama never answered. “Go to sleep,” was all Jo ever got.
When she got tired of staring at Our Lady and her plethora of offerings in church, she’d move her attention over to Whit Turner, who sat in the pew across from her and who, though two years younger, made her laugh with the faces he pulled behind his mother’s ramrod back.
Every week it was just Whit and his mother, Ida. His father, Hamish, wasn’t a man of religion and so didn’t attend services. Ida, on the other hand, had been born poor and Catholic, and though she was no longer poor, the Catholic part had stuck good and hard, the way it was supposed to.
Before she was Ida Turner, she was Ida May Dunn, a dirty-kneed girl squatting in her drunken father’s fishing shack with her half-witted sister, wholly dependent on the Catholic Temperance League for clothing, pantry staples, and basic morals. It was amusing for Jo’s mother to watch Ida mince into St. Agnes all buttoned down and proper, because as a girl, Mama claimed, Ida had run as wild as the crosshatch of tides along Drake’s Beach. Some of those currents, Jo knew, could suck a body under, and some of them would only roll a person’s bones around a little, and woe to the poor soul who didn’t know which was which.
The same caution applied to Ida herself. Halfway through church she’d sense Whit squirming and turn to catch him mid-grimace, two fingers stuck in the corners of his mouth, waggling his eyebrows at Jo. “Whittington Turner,” she’d hiss audibly, pinching his earlobe in between her varnished fingernails, “if you look to that Gilly girl one more time, I’ll blind you.” That would sober Whit up. Jo would watch him straighten his back as tight as Ida’s and fold his hands on his lap, and she’d marvel at how he could slip those stiff Turner airs on and off like a pair of socks.
After Mass, when the weather was fine, Mama would set Jo free on Drake’s Beach with instructions to come home with something for the dinner pot. The Depression and war years were well over, but life for locals was still lean-toothed. For the most part, people in Prospect took their sustenance from the sea: fish, snapping lobsters, kelp, clams dug from the shore. But things were slowly changing. The new Mid-Cape Highway was finished (sometimes Jo liked to fantasize that her father had run off to work on it), and every year more people were trickling into their little village. Near Hyannis the wealthy frolicked in their family compounds, even added onto them, and every summer pastel cars adorned with fancy grilles and fins clogged the roads. Stuck behind them in traffic, Jo would squint and be reminded of the box of petits fours she’d once seen Ida pass around after Easter Mass that her mother had refused to let her eat from.
“We don’t take from Ida Turner,” she’d snapped, slapping Jo’s hand back down to her side. “We’re scant, but we’re better than all that.”
Thanks to Ida, lots of people in town were scant.
“I’m out of chops,” Mr. Upton would sadly tell them from May to August. “I’m out of fillet, chuck, and hamburger, too.” So it was liver, shanks, and oxtail for Jo and her family. They listened as the strains of big-band records and the rattle of cocktail shakers floated down Plover Hill and watched as the Turners had the clapboards up and down Bank Street painted a pearly gray, trimmed back all the hedges in town, mended the pickets around Mr. Upton’s market, and instituted a fine for any shopkeeper who didn’t keep his windows clean.
“Pretty soon the Turners are going to have us all in uniforms,” Mr. Upton grumbled to Jo’s mother when she delivered salt to him. “Lately you can’t spit without hitting something new they’ve bought. I hear they’re even eyeing properties over on the mainland now.” Jo’s mother’s eyes would darken at these revelations, but she wouldn’t say anything, just hand over Mr. Upton’s salt with a frown. They had their own worries, Jo knew. Each summer they were selling less and less salt. The summer people, it turned out, preferred their salt fine and white. They didn’t see the point of the Gillys’ lumpish stuff.
Given that their bread was buttered on opposite sides, Whit and Jo should never have become friends—there were better than a hundred and one reasons against it. Ida hated Mama, for starters, and Mama hated Ida back with a passion she reserved for the marsh’s feral cats.
“Sluts, every one of them,” she’d sniff, toting another sack of kittens to its demise. “Loose as a boatload of drunken sailors. Leaving poor innocents to starve. Strutting around with her tail stuck up in the air.” (Sometimes it was hard for Jo to tell if her mother was cursing Ida or the cats.)
Maybe the enmity between their mothers should have fueled similar high feelings between Whit and Jo, but it turned out they both had the same ornery streak painted down their spines in red. His was more obvious, but Jo possessed it, too, and so instead of repelling each other, they clicked together like magnet and metal, each the material the other needed. And for a while—for many years, in fact—nothing managed to pull them apart, not their mothers, not the fact that he was a wealthy Turner and she was a dirt-scraping Gilly, not the two-year difference in their ages.
But it couldn’t have lasted forever, and not for all the usual reasons people in town flapped their gums about—not because of the fire, or because of Jo’s and Whit’s reverse stations in life, or because Jo’s sister was always the prettier Gilly. In fact, as
with most small-town scandals, the real reason for the split between Jo and Whit was far simpler and bigger than most folks thought to consider: Death came between them. And even though she would never like to admit it, and despite all appearances to the contrary, in her heart of hearts Jo had some very good reasons for thanking the lucky stars that it did.
The first time she made the proper acquaintance of Whit, Jo was seven and up to her elbows in wet sand on Drake’s Beach. If she had enough time and if the weather permitted, she liked to forage a little after church, running a line out into the surf to catch fryers or gathering a cluster of kelp, but mostly she dug buckets of clams: gristly and small, but rich enough when her mother stewed them. For the Gilly women, a bucket of clams meant that another day’s grocery money got to stay put in the jar in the kitchen. Jo had her head tucked down and was concentrating, and so she was startled when she heard a boy’s voice ask a question.
“Where do they come from anyway?”
She stopped digging and turned. Usually she had the beach to herself, but there stood Whit Turner, immaculate in his church pants and a pressed oxford shirt.
“What?” she said, confused. She’d never seen Whit out by himself before that afternoon. His mother usually whisked him off to lunch at their country club.
Behind Whit the panicked shadow of his governess appeared like a hovering insect, but Whit ignored her. “I mean, they don’t have mothers and fathers, and clams don’t lay eggs—or do they?”
Jo had never thought about it before. To her, clams were free food. That was it. She dug them up and her mother steamed them, end of story. But then, Whit didn’t have the personal relationship with hunger that she did. Only people with full bellies questioned where their food came from, Jo knew. The rest of humanity just bowed their heads and thanked the Lord for his bounty. She shrugged and shoved her spade back into the sand. “Not everything’s got a mother.”
Whit frowned, considering what she’d said, which was new for Jo. Usually Mama told her to be quiet and get back to work, and Claire just prattled at her. Whit bit his lips. “Everything has a mother. Even Jesus.”
Jo thought of the chipped outline of Our Lady, faceless in her eternal vigil, and shrugged. Whit sank down in the sand next to her, his shoulders bowed over the hole she’d dug. “Sometimes I wish I had a different mother,” he mumbled, tracing a pattern in the wet sand with one finger. “Mine’s not that nice.”
Just then the eavesdropping shadow of his governess came to life. “Whit Turner,” she scolded, hauling him up by his elbow. “You know you’re not supposed to be down here, and you’re certainly not supposed to be telling tales on your family. You’re a Turner. You have to act like one. Now, come on, we’re going to be late for tennis.”
Whit rolled his eyes and grinned at Jo. His hair was tousled, like Henry’s used to get, and she had an urge to reach out and smooth it. It wasn’t that she missed Henry’s company, exactly—for he had led his brief life with his nose buried in encyclopedias and books, his weak heart fluttering like a restless canary in his chest. It was more that she missed the possibility of it. She looked at Whit and then, knowing that her mother wouldn’t like it one scrap, threw out an invitation. “If you come back tomorrow,” she said, pointing down the beach with her spade, “I’ll be over there. I know where there’s sand dollars.”
Whit’s governess started dragging him away, but before they got too far, he turned and yelled, “If you find out where those clams come from, let me know!”
Instead she got an earful about Ida Turner that evening when she told her mother about the encounter. “I’d make another friend if I was you,” Mama said, slamming a bowl of mash and peas on the table.
Jo pouted. “But why?”
Mama snorted. It was a stupid question. Even Jo recognized that. She braced herself for a lecture. “Because,” Mama declared, “no matter what you do, you’re never going to get the mud out of your clothes, the brogue out of your voice, or the brine out of your blood.” She stuck a spoon in the potatoes and peas and kicked her chair away from the table. “Ida is scared of sinking, even though she’s squatting up on Plover Hill like a big old crow. But trust me, Ida knows plenty about scraping bottom.”
Jo sighed and bent her head to her plate, taking a bite of the clams. For the first time, she found the taste of their salt unpleasant. “I bet the Turners don’t eat like this,” she said, pushing her dish away.
Her mother regarded her coolly. “The less you worry about the Turners, the better. Now, hush up and eat the food God’s given you.” Claire started squalling, and Mama shushed her. “Not you, too,” she said, dipping a crust of bread into some milk and handing it to Claire. “Don’t tell me there’s another one in this house complaining about the order of things.”
Jo bit her tongue and tried to swallow the rest of her meal. Had she been complaining? She didn’t think so, but it was hard to know how Mama would take things sometimes. Jo looked out through the kitchen window, across the marsh. Beyond it, just over the dunes, lay Drake’s Beach and the memory of her afternoon with Whit.
“Did you hear me?” Mama said. “After supper the far ponds need scraping. Take your sister with you, but don’t let her wander none.”
Jo sighed and looked at Claire, who blinked her wide toddler eyes, her flame-red hair gnarled in fierce little curls. “I won’t,” Jo promised, but under the table she had her fingers crossed. She couldn’t promise the same for herself.
The next week Whit surprised her, screaming down the beach on a motorbike. It was ridiculous. The bike was too big for him, and he wobbled like a punching clown, but there he was, flying down the shore, a wicked smile plastered on his mug. Right before he got to Jo, one of the tires caught a stone and the bike pitched sideways, throwing Whit off and spraying sand in an arc.
“Are you okay?” Jo said, running to help him.
Whit stood up, grinning like a hyena, and brushed off his jeans. “Nice, huh?”
Jo put her hands on her hips, her heart pounding. Ever since Henry’s death, she’d been shy of accidents. “No, it’s not.” An awful thought occurred to her. “Did you steal it?” Although why Whit would have needed to steal anything was beyond her.
He smirked. “The Weatherly brothers lent it to me.”
“What?” She knew the Weatherly brothers—Tim and Hank. All the girls in town did. They were a senior and a sophomore in high school and famous for their pompadours, the packs of cigarettes they kept rolled in their T-shirt sleeves, and their motor vehicles. The Weatherly brothers were Prospect’s pet grease monkeys. “Why would they give a bike to a little kid like you?”
Whit shrugged. “Dunno. Why do people do anything?”
“But look. You scratched it.” It was true. Along the back fender, there was a four-inch gouge in the red paint. Whit crouched down to have a look. “You’re going to get it now,” Jo said, unable to keep from gloating. “You know how the Weatherly brothers are about their transportation.”
Whit sat back on his heels. “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think what?”
“I don’t think they’re going to mind.”
Jo gaped at him. “Are you crazy? Of course they’re going to mind. Timmy almost knocked Hank’s head off last spring when he crashed their jalopy.”
Whit rubbed his thumb over the scratch. An uncanny adult look settled on his face. “Yeah, but I’m just a little kid. What can they do to me? Besides, if I come home beat up, they’ll have to explain to my mother why they loaned the bike to me in the first place, and you know as well as I do that Timmy and Hank aren’t such great talkers.”
His logic was impeccable. Jo was impressed.
“I’ll just tell them it was there all the time,” he said. “They won’t believe me, but what choice will they have? They’ll end up blaming each other, and that’ll be that. Now, come on, help me push this thing upright.”
It was the first inkling Jo ever had of the kind of man Whit would eventually t
urn into. The seed was there inside him the whole time, but that day she was blinded by the optimism of the cloudless summer sky, tricked by the easy breeze blowing on her neck. She was barefoot in the sand, and the heat seeped through her arches into her calves. There was something about Whit that filled up the empty spots in Jo’s bones. When she was with him, she felt like she had a little piece of Henry tethered back on the earth. “All right,” she said, and knelt to help him. She giggled. “We’re partners in crime.”
Whit did something then that she would never forget, a gesture that seemed innocent at the time but would later infect her, the way a rose thorn buried in flesh could fester. He pushed the hair back out of his eyes and took his hands off the bike. “We’re partners in everything,” he said, spitting in his palm and holding it out.
“Partners,” she said, spitting in her own palm and pressing it to Whit’s. Neither of them said anything for a moment, and the spot where their hands were joined grew warmer.
Jo stood up. “Come on. Let’s go back. I bet the Weatherly brothers will be wanting their bike.”
Whit said something unexpected then. “I heard my mother saying she wanted to buy up your mom’s place,” he said, “but don’t worry. I’ll make sure your salt stays safe.” Jo took a step back, stumbling over a rock. Her temper wasn’t like Claire’s, who at age three could already throw a howler of a tantrum, but now she felt a tingling travel up her spine and settle at the base of her brain. She remembered what Ida had said to her at Henry’s Mass. It should have been you.
Jo stepped forward and gave Whit’s shoulder a shove. “Shut up, Whit Turner. You don’t know what you’re saying.” She spit thick saliva.
Whit shrugged and started heading back toward the dunes without her. “Suit yourself,” he said. “I’m just telling what I heard.” He paused and held out his hand. “Are you coming? I’ll give you a ride on the bike before I take it back.”