The Lace Reader (31 page)

I had been seeing Jack since Christmas, since the night of the Hamilton Hall dance. It happened with the inevitability of a dream. He didn’t even seem to like me at first; he just seemed angry at me, probably because I looked like my sister, and I know how much Lyndley had hurt him. Everyone knew. As Jack and I got more involved, I told myself it didn’t matter, that it was okay because Lyndley had been the one to break it off with Jack. She had made the decision. I’d been hauling traps with Jack all summer, which is how I began not coming home for days at a time. We’d work three days here, then four up in the Maritimes, just over the Canadian border. He had three hundred traps there. Plus another three hundred behind our island and over by Baker’s. Jack’s father was sick. “From the drink and from the drink,” was the way Jack put it, referring to years of 276 Brunonia

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fishing and years of frequenting the waterfront bars. His liver was shot. He had bad arthritis. He couldn’t fish anymore. Jack had tried to get his brother Jay-Jay to take over the local traps, but Jay-Jay wasn’t interested in lobstering. He got seasick. So Jack hired me. Although I was officially living on the island with May, most of the time I just stayed on the boat with Jack. The week Lyndley came home, Jack and I had been up in the Maritimes, stopping back by the Isle of Shoals, camping out on a beach there, because by then we both needed to get off the boat. By the time we got back, I was ready to spend a few days on the island, just to be on dry land. It was past midnight, and May wasn’t expecting me for another day at least, but the lamp in the kitchen was burning. I knew that Beezer was out in California. It was late, and I was hoping like hell that May wasn’t waiting up for me. But it wasn’t May. It was Lyndley who was sitting at the table in the kitchen. She hugged me for a long time. “I missed you so much,”

she said. “I didn’t think I’d ever get back here again.”

“God, look at you,” she said. “You got so pretty this year.”

“I thought you were going to CalArts.”

“Forget CalArts,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere near CalArts.”

She slept in my bed with me, said she didn’t want to be alone. I lay there all night, looking out the window, trying not to disturb her, until the sun rose in the reddest sky I’d ever seen. She was carrying Jack’s graduation picture with her. It fell out of her pocket when I went to pick her jeans up from the floor where she’d dropped them. It was wrinkled and worn. I owned the same picture, although mine was in better shape.

I was on the radio with Jack when Lyndley came down for breakfast. She looked thinner than I’d seen her, older, although it was only a month before our eighteenth birthday.

“Who were you talking to?” she asked me.

“Jack.”

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“My Jack?”

I stood up and got her some cereal. I could tell she wanted to know what was going on, but I didn’t want to talk about it yet.

“Did you tell him I was back?” she asked. It was a tentative question. She wasn’t sure how he would feel about it.

“Not yet,” I said, as if it were some big secret. It was, but not the kind she thought.

I cut up some strawberries for the top of the cereal, because I knew they were her favorite.

“Happily-ever-after granola,” was what she said. But she took the strawberries and three whole spoonfuls of sugar. She finished the entire bowl. And then she did something strange. She took off the silver earrings, the ones I’d picked out in Harvard Square. She slid them across the table to me.

“What are you doing?” I asked, suspicious.

“What’s mine is yours,” she said, and that’s how I knew she knew. She held my gaze for a long time, then picked up her bowl and went to get more cereal.

I left the earrings on the table between us. I had no idea what to do. Lyndley came back to the table and ate a second bowl of cereal as if nothing unusual were going on.

Finally she finished eating and took both our bowls to the sink and washed them with salt water. She used a dish towel to dry them, so they wouldn’t get all streaky from the salt. Then she actually put them away, which is something I’d never seen her do.

“It’s a really nice day,” she said. “It’s going to be hot.”

The sky still had traces of red.

“I’m going to go down and check the house,” she said, getting up and walking out. It was a tradition, checking the Boynton house, seeing how it had fared over the winter, and we usually did it together. But this year she didn’t ask me if I wanted to come along. And she didn’t take back the earrings either.

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I never told Jack that Lyndley was back. It seems odd now (with all that’s happened) that we never had that conversation, but it’s true. It was dusk by the time he arrived, and it was already choppy from the impending storm. I was on the dock waiting for him when he pulled in. I didn’t even let him tie up the boat but jumped in, which wasn’t very smart, because the ocean was already churning. I think he had wanted to stay on the island, at least for a little while.

“Get me out of here,” I said.

He knew I was upset. He probably figured I’d had a fight with May or something. That was a pretty common occurrence these days, fighting with my mother. When she wasn’t distracted, the two of us were always arguing about something, usually stupid things. Like who had left the water running or who hadn’t pulled up the ramp. That’s how things were going between us. It wasn’t the way I’d hoped it would be last winter, when all I had wanted to do was get back here to the island, when I was counting the days until I could come home. There is a tiny door in the lobster traps they call the “ghost panel.” It is made of wood. I noticed it one day when we were hauling traps. When I asked about it, Jack told me the reason it is there is to let the lobster out in the event that the lobsterman never comes back for his catch. If he is gone for long enough, the wood will deteriorate and free the lobster. It’s supposed to be humane. I don’t know whether it’s a relatively new invention or if traps always had them. Or maybe they weren’t necessary back in the day when all the traps were made of wood. At the end of that last day we spent together, we hauled up one of the old wooden traps, one of the few Jack still used. I looked for the ghost panel, but I couldn’t find it. Jack already had the trap rebaited and was ready to toss it back, but I was obsessed with finding that panel. I was staring at the trap from every angle, looking for a way for the lobster to get out.

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“What are you doing?” Jack finally asked.

That’s when I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore. He almost laughed, it was so out of the blue. But when he looked at me, I was crying. He’d never seen me cry before. I am not someone who cries easily.

“I can’t keep seeing you,” I said. He could see I meant it.

“What the hell is going on?”

I couldn’t tell him. I didn’t want him to know about Lyndley, not yet anyway. I needed to know he was upset about me, and I thought if I told him about her, he wouldn’t care so much about the breakup. I don’t know what kind of logic I was using; it was just a feeling I had. His face went red at first, and then slowly the color drained out. I froze in place, expecting a blow. I’d seen white rage before, never on Jack, but on Cal plenty of times. White rage is an unmistakable emotion. I really expected him to hit me. But I was wrong. He didn’t hit me. He just stood there for what seemed like forever, staring at me.

“Not again,” was what he finally said. His words were ice. For a minute I didn’t know what he meant, “Not again.” We had never broken up, never even really had a fight. “Not again” was not an appropriate response.

Then, in a flash, I got it. It was totally appropriate. Whatever I might have wanted to believe, I knew that my instincts had been right not to tell him that Lyndley was back. Jack had been in love with Lyndley since the moment he’d met her. I was just a substitute, the closest he could get to what he really wanted, which was my twin. If I’d been honest with myself, I would have realized that I’d known it all along. I just hadn’t wanted to think about it. The blow he dealt me was to the heart, and it was much worse than anything physical he could have done to me.

Angry, Jack slammed the engine into forward, gunning it to full throttle.

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cliffs off Back Beach, the boat slowed, almost imperceptibly at first. I looked up. The sky was brighter than I remember, although to the north it was all clouded over, and it was black and blank-looking as if a whole part of it had been erased. I almost said something to Jack then, almost warned him not to slow down here because the currents and the chop could easily catch you and you could lose your boat on these rocks. I ran to the bow of the boat and leaned over, looking for shadows where the rocks would be. “Don’t stop!” I yelled, climbing out onto the bow. I could see the dark silhouettes of the rocks just below the surface. We could smash to pieces here, the way so many boats have. I started to yell at him again, but the look on his face stopped me. He was looking past me at something on the cliff. My eyes tracked his. I blinked in disbelief. On top of the cliff, about a hundred feet up, was Lyndley. She was barefoot and wearing my nightgown, the one Eva had given me for Christmas, the white one with the lace on it. Her hair was blowing, and so was the gown. She looked like a goddess from some Greek myth. A wave of jealousy hit me hard. Not just because she was standing there so beautiful, with Jack looking up at her like that, but because the entire scenario seemed so completely staged. She must have been standing there for a while just waiting for us to see her, for the wind to be right and for the boat to appear in her range of vision. It was so calculated it was ludicrous, and I couldn’t believe Jack would actually be stupid enough to fall for it. At that moment I hated my sister. Utterly and completely. I wanted her to die. I wanted her to fall off the cliff and smash into a million pieces. The air was thick with the humidity of the storm that was still on the horizon but rapidly moving toward us, making it heavy and black and impossible to breathe.

She was leaning forward, into the wind, like the figurehead on an old Salem ship, the lacy gown billowing out behind her, illuminated by the sliver of the waning moon, the stars and their doubles reflecting from the black sky down to the even blacker water. Her face was The Lace Reader 281

perfect and expressionless, like an empty canvas she hadn’t yet filled in, leaving us later to paint in our own impressions of what we saw that night. Her whole body tilted forward into the wind at an impossible angle, and just as I realized that the angle couldn’t hold, it broke free, obeying the laws of gravity but shattering those of perspective, and she began a long and silent fall into the cold, black ocean below. She flipped over headlong only once, then folded her arms across her chest as if she were already dead, piercing the black water like a needle, never even making a ripple. And she was gone forever. Just like that. I heard Jack gasp, and the sound jolted me back. We stood staring for what seemed like an eternity, expecting her to surface, to come up at least once, but it didn’t happen. Then I was in the water, diving. I heard Jack on the radio, shouting “Mayday! Mayday!” into the static. I gasped for breath, went down again. He blasted the horn, a three-blast distress call, then shined the search beam into the water, trying to help me. Then I heard the splash, and I knew he was in the water, too. I dove again and again, but the ocean was empty. I couldn’t get to the bottom. I came up a third time, exhaled completely, then took a huge, bursting breath and went down yet again, as deep as I could, letting the air out as I went, so I could reach the bottom rocks where I knew her body would be. I felt the rocks sting my legs as I scraped against them, pulling myself along, willing my body to stay down. Then, suddenly, the ocean was not empty anymore but seemed filled with everything anyone had ever lost—an anchor, a bottle, an old lobster trap. My lungs hurt, first from holding my breath, now from their own emptiness. Every part of me wanted to surface, but I knew that if I came up, I would never go back down again. There is a point where the life force overcomes the will and the body simply breathes itself. It just happens. It hurts like hell when you take a breath of seawater, but the hurt goes away quickly, and then you feel the flow of water and hear the music of the spheres. You are pulled, literally, toward the light, and I remember registering it, 282 Brunonia

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realizing that it is true what all those near-death-experience people write about. I remember smiling a bare-toothed smile, the cold water freezing it in time forever.

As we broke the surface, I could see that May was already in the water, swimming toward us. The light I’d seen was not my neardeath experience but the searchlight from Jack’s boat, and it was his hand that had dragged me back to life. It was horrible. It was as bad and painful as it had been beautiful a minute ago, and now Jack was trying to smother me, his mouth over mine, breathing me, trying to keep us both afloat until help arrived.

May pulled us both to shore and was standing over us, so concerned about me. I was trying to tell her, trying to make her go back for Lyndley, but I couldn’t get the sound out. Every time I tried to speak, I gagged and threw up salt water, then gagged again. The pain in my lungs was worse than anything imaginable. He should have let me go, should have let me die with Lyndley. There was no pain in the dying, but the coming back to life was unbearable.

“Be still now,” May was saying to me, holding my head in her lap, brushing my hair off my face. I could see Jack, kneeling, coughing, Ë

a few feet away.
Tell her,
I was trying to say.
For God’s sake, tell her
Lyndley is still down there.
May was a strong swimmer. I realized now that I had been wrong worrying about her. May was stronger than I ever knew. She was the only one of us who was strong enough to save Lyndley now. But she couldn’t save her if she didn’t even know she was down there. I tried to tell her again and again. But no words came either from Jack or from me.