The Sandcastle Sister (4 page)

Yet I know it’s really the reverse I’m worried about. I’m afraid we will find her and open a Pandora’s box we won’t be able to close.

“I keep lookin’ at everybody that goes by and wonderin’ if it’s her.” I barely hear Lily at first, but as I’m tuning in, I can’t miss the hope in her voice. She’s been building the meeting scene in her mind as we silently watch the water, lost in our own thoughts.

“Lily, you have to be prepared for
 
—”

“Don’t say it, okay? I know it might not work out like I want.” She pushes back from the table as if she’s afraid I’ll contaminate her.

The next thing I know, she’s at the counter, asking the clerk for information. He’s friendly and forthcoming.

“Yeah, you might still catch RC.” The guy gives her the flirty once-over, and I want to cross the room and shake a finger at him. It’s still hard to think of my little sister as a full-grown woman. “RC kinda comes and goes. Sometimes she’s out taking a boat into the shop, or she’s at the house with Johnny.” He continues on, telling us which slip number she was headed to when she came by for coffee this morning, then pointing us in the correct direction. “If there’s not a thirty-eight-foot Contender in the slip, she’s gone. If the boat’s there, she’s either on it working or she’s gone home for the day.”

The clerk looks at me as I come closer, then squints at Lily Clarette again. Is he seeing a family resemblance to RC or just wondering why we’re here? He doesn’t say, but he does watch us intently as we go out the door. I’m left wondering if it’s just a flirt or if it means something.

The March wind gives us a bracing shove as we round the corner on the boardwalk. Far in the distance, there’s weather rolling in. A nor’easter, maybe. I wrap my arms around myself as the breeze needles through my sweater, and beside me, Lily zips her jacket. It’s as if the island has changed moods while we were in the café. Now it feels wet, cold, and uninviting. Even a little threatening.

My heart lurches as we find the right row and walk along it. Breath hitches in my chest and turns shallow. I strain to see around the hulls of other crafts, wondering if the thirty-eight-foot Contender is, indeed, in its place. At this point, I’m not sure what I’m hoping for.

And then, there it is ahead
 
—the slip we’re after, and it’s not empty. A sleek-looking fishing boat rocks softly in the choppy water. The name painted on its stern seems almost an omen.
Discovery Girl
.

A pile of rags and a bucket rest on the dock near the boat’s mooring lines. Bottles of Star Brite marine antifreeze sit on the hull. Metal pings echo from the cabin.

Someone is inside.

My heart knocks against my breastbone like a wood splitter’s ax, trying to open me up.

I hear Lily Clarette take in a breath. She flashes me a wide-eyed look. I wish I were as positive about this as she seems to be. Hope and dread are like Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots having a grudge match in my stomach.

“Hello?” Lily Clarette calls before we’re very close. The use of mountain etiquette is completely natural to her. In Appalachia, you never approach a stranger’s house unannounced. You’re liable to get shot that way. “Hello in the
Discovery Girl
?”

The metal pings stop. No one comes out. Lily Clarette repeats her greeting, but this time we’ve stopped just a few feet away. I feel the dock rocking beneath my feet, or maybe that’s the world shifting off center.

A silhouette bisects the sunlight at the base of the open cabin door.

Lily grabs my hand, but I barely feel it.

My mind stumbles through time, then loses its balance and tumbles end over end as a woman in jeans and a sweatshirt emerges. A shadow hides her face until the muted sunlight slips beneath the red bandanna tied over her dark hair. Other than the clothing, she’s almost exactly as I remember her.

I see my mother.

I know it can’t be her.

I have a feeling the woman on the water is thinking the same thing.

Clouds boil across the sky and thunder rumbles, not so distant now. We’ve been here on the dock, talking, forever. With the sun hidden in a thick blanket of clouds, I have no idea what time it might be. Other than finally sitting down, none of us have moved. RC is propped on an overturned bucket on the boat, and Lily Clarette and I are cross-legged on the dock. It is as if we are three dreamers, afraid to move. Each of us fearing she’ll wake and the other two will vanish into thin air.

But this woman’s life is hardly the kind of thing I would conjure, even in my worst nightmare. I doubt if Lily could have imagined that pasts like Rebecca Christine’s exist. My little sister is getting an education in the sort of darkness that lives far off the beaten paths in the backwoods. By comparison, our twisted upbringing among the Brethren Saints seems routine, strangely sane, and almost cosmopolitan.

Where our half sister grew up, among my mother’s family and actually just a few hours from our hometown, drugs were a staple and food was an occasional visitor. The ragged cabin in which my mother birthed her first baby without the aid of a doctor was home to any number of relatives and “business associates” who came to flop, hide out, or trade for drugs. One of those visitors was probably the man who got my mother pregnant at barely thirteen, but RC has no idea who her biological father is. She grew up thinking that my mother was her older sister and didn’t learn the truth until years after Mama left the household.

As RC reached adolescence, she might have shared the same fate as our mother, if not for the intervention of an aunt who didn’t do it out of concern for her niece’s future. In reality, the aunt saw RC as romantic competition
 
—she’d caught her husband peeping at RC, just twelve years old, in the outdoor shower. The aunt then spirited RC away, drove her down the mountain, and dropped her at a group foster home.

“That’s when I found out who my mama really was,” RC says as matter-of-factly as if she were reporting the weather forecast from twenty-five years ago. “Robby tried real hard to get me out of the foster shelter. He even tracked down your mama and asked her to come talk to child welfare and tell them she was my mother. He thought he could get me out that way.”

“I remember the day Robby showed up at our farm,” I admit. I was little then, but the encounter is still clear in my mind. I was old enough to be shocked that my mother had a brother, and then to wonder what my daddy would do if he came home and caught Mama with a teenage boy there. Likely as not, I figured, it wouldn’t be good. “Mama sent us out of the house before I could hear what they were talking about and why he was there.”

“I was the reason,” RC tells me. “He came about me
 
—to try to convince her to go after custody and spring me from CPS care.”

According to RC, Mama begged her brother to vacate our place before Daddy saw. She couldn’t let Daddy find out about the illegitimate baby she’d left behind. She must’ve known what kind of punishment and purification would be required by the Brethren Saints for a transgression like that. And it wouldn’t only have happened to Mama. Such a revelation would’ve rocked the entire congregation. There was literally no telling how the elder council would have reacted or what would’ve happened to us kids. We were already walking a thin line because our mama was an outsider.

“I don’t hold any ill will over it.” RC picks at a ripped knee in her jeans and shrugs. “Here’s the thing. If you keep looking backward, all the obstacles you think are behind you are actually still ahead of you. If you’re bumping across the same things over and over, it’s a sign that you’re stuck in reverse.” She winks and nods, tucking flyaway strands of wavy salt-and-pepper hair under her bandanna. She has the relaxed countenance of a woman who’s made peace with her demons. I gather that she and her husband, Johnny, have lived all their adult lives around the sea. They’ve worked on boats, set up housekeeping on boats, traveled to some of the far corners of the world.

Lily hugs herself and shivers, blanched and shell-shocked by the family revelations. “I’m so sorry.” Her teeth chatter, the words shuddering with the cold. “I feel like, if Mama hadn’t had
our
family to worry about, she would’ve come back for you.”

“Well, most people do what they can with what they have,” RC observes. “I’m sure she was just trying to get by. And things worked out for the best. Those years in the group home weren’t great, but they did give me a little taste of normal life. I knew enough to realize I didn’t want to go back to what I came from . . . which might’ve been what led me to run off with Johnny when I was seventeen, but that’s a whole other story. People said we’d never make it, but we were young and in love, and we thought we had it all figured out. God protects the foolish, I guess. Good people helped us because they could see we needed it. We worked hard. We did okay. I can’t complain.”

I look at this woman, my half sister, her hands red and raw from scrubbing boats so other people can enjoy them this spring, and she radiates contentment. Where does that sort of stillness come from? I wonder.

“I’m glad,” I tell her. “I’m sorry we’ve never had the chance to meet before now. We never even knew about you.”

She studies me, then smiles, the wrinkles around her eyes testifying to many years in the sun. If Mama birthed her at thirteen, RC is roughly four years past my age, but she looks and seems older. I doubt she worries about it. There’s no makeup on her face, and her hair hangs from the bandanna in a long, loose braid. “I knew about y’all, of course, but when your daddy caught Robby at the house, he made it clear that none of his wife’s family were welcome there. Robby said he felt lucky to get out with his hide, basically. I figured things were better off left alone after that.”

A puff of wind wafts by. Lily shivers again, and I fold my arms tighter, tremors rattling my ribs. A fine mist has started to fall. We need to abandon our spot on the dock before we freeze to death. No doubt we’re interfering with RC’s work too. Maybe she’d like to meet for supper tonight? I do want to know her. I want to grasp at the opportunity that has been denied us all these years.

She seems to read my mind. Checking her watch, she looks over her shoulder at the boat. “Tell you what. I’ve got an hour or so left on the
Discovery Girl
here, and then I need to run to the house and check on Johnny. He was feeling poorly this morning. Why don’t y’all two enjoy the shops or whatever? I’ll finish here, look in on Johnny, and then meet you up at Sandy’s Seashell Shop for some coffee in . . . say an hour and a half? You’ll love Sandy’s place. It’s an island tradition.”

We agree to meet at the shop later. Lily and I hurry to the car and sit in the parking lot for a few minutes with the heater cranked. We talk about what a strangely wonderful experience it was, meeting RC.

“She seems real nice. I just knew she would be, from what Rob said.” Lily brims with excitement. “It’s so sad how she was brought up, though. I thought things were kinda tough for us, what with Daddy like he was, and the church, and us never havin’ much money, but we didn’t go through anythin’ like RC did. We’re so lucky.”

On any random day in the past, those words would’ve brought a protest from me. Now they feel like truth. I’ve spent so much time resenting the things that happened in my childhood
 
—the abuse, the confusion, the fear, the manipulative twisting of religion, the constant berating and threats
 
—that I’ve never considered being thankful for the empty half of my cup. For things that
didn’t
happen. I didn’t go hungry. I wasn’t forced to live in a drug den. I wasn’t targeted by some pervert. I wasn’t taken away by a jealous relative and dropped in a strange place.

I survived, and good people took an interest in me, and I was given opportunities. I got out.

Thank you,
I whisper in the silence of my own mind as we pull out of the parking space to start back to the village.
Thank you for my life as it is.
I send the thoughts off in a simple prayer. There’s a lightness in it, a sense that I really am okay.

Reaching across the console, I take my sister’s hand, smile at her as we wind past the placid waters of Pamlico Sound. Her skin is ice cold, but still it warms me. “I’m so glad we came.”

Her smile is radiant. “Me too.”

She asks if we can drive up to Fairhope and visit the museum that e-mailed Evan about the research for his book
 
—Benoit House, it’s called. Lily wants to see if she can learn anything for her history report, and we both know that the museum has in its collection antique necklaces like the one that inspired Evan’s novel. They think there might be some connection to the original settlers of Roanoke Island’s Lost Colony.

During our long conversation on the dock, Lily asked RC about the necklace my mother left for us girls. As with so much of Mama’s history, we’ve inherited only bits and pieces. My sisters and I each have a single, intricately carved bone bead. We don’t understand the significance of them, except that they’ve been in my mother’s family a very long time and are somehow connected to our ancestry among the Melungeons. RC could only tell us that she remembered Mama having the necklace and that perhaps she got it from her grandmother.

Sadly, when we reach the little community of Fairhope, we meet another dead end in Lily’s quest to uncover our history. There’s a locked gate barring the driveway of the Benoit House Museum.
Closed for private event,
the sign reads. A catering van and a florist’s truck sit backed up to the towering Victorian house. The wraparound porch has been laced with ribbon and white roses, and in the upstairs turret window, a bridal gown hangs waiting. Obviously someone is getting married this afternoon.

My mind runs quickly back to Paris, to Evan, to where he might be and what he might be doing right now. I try to remember the trip itinerary and to decide whether it would be all right to call him. I don’t want to bust an event. He’s notorious for forgetting to turn off the ringer on his cell phone when he’s giving a speech.

I’m sitting there, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel and calculating the time difference, when I’m suddenly aware that Lily Clarette is looking at me. I have a feeling she’s reading my mind again.

By now, it’s nine o’clock in Paris
 
—not a good time to call Evan. He’ll be at one of the last tour events, I think. There’s an evening cocktail reception. Unless I’ve lost track of the schedule, there’s one tomorrow, too.

I picture him in his tux, tall and lean, dignified until he grins and makes a joke about the monkey suit. Suddenly the yearning is so powerful, I feel it stab. It’s a little dagger to the heart.

Why hasn’t he called today?

Insecurity takes another nibble.

Out of sight, out of mind?

Then again, I haven’t called him since I flew into Greenville yesterday morning. I’ve been so focused on Lily. By the time I thought of it last evening, it was the middle of the night in Paris. Evan could be dealing with the same thing, hence the lack of phone calls. Busy days, short nights. With no helper there to handle details, schedules, clothes, communication, he’d have to take care of everything himself.

And he mentioned catching up with some friends in Paris. . . .

Female friends?

Stop. Stop that.

Again, I’m conscious of Lily studying me. I put the Jaguar in reverse. “I guess we should get out of the way before someone else needs to come in.”

“This’d be a beautiful place for a wedding,” my sister says wistfully. Like most girls her age, she has watched endless episodes of
Say Yes to the Dress
. Every once in a while, she worries that she should have married the hometown boy my father tried to betroth her to at seventeen.

“Yes, it would. Bummer that it’s not open for us to talk to them about the necklace today, though.”

“Maybe we can come back tomorrow.” A more-than-casual glance slides my way. “Unless you’re gonna get on a plane back to Paris, I mean.”

“Lily . . .”

Both hands fly, palms out. “I’m just sayin’ . . .”

“Let’s go poke around that little bookstore we saw the sign for
 
—Buxton Village Books. If they’ve got a copy of Evan’s novel, we’ll snap a photo to send to him. Then we’ll drive back down to Hatteras and find Sandy’s Seashell Shop.”

“’Kay.” She leans toward the window, still watching the graceful old house as we leave it behind. “Wonder who’s gettin’ married today.” She goes on to talk about helping with an upcoming bridal shower in the dorm and what kind of a wedding she wants someday. Her roommate is an expert in all things upscale matrimonial.

“Really, you girls shouldn’t be so focused on it. It’s not healthy. Get your education first, then think about finding a guy. Or better yet, just wait until it happens. When the right man comes along, you’ll know.”

“I don’t wanna be, like, over thirty and livin’ by myself with a dog.” Does she realize that she’s just described my life
 
—before the book tour whisked me away, that is? Now, I haven’t seen my apartment mate, Friday the Antisocial Chihuahua, in over three months. He’s temporarily residing with my best friend, Jamie, in her apartment, but time is running out. Jamie will be getting married and heading off on her honeymoon later this spring.

Weddings are a running theme lately.

Maybe that’s God’s way of hinting at me.

“Take time for yourself first, Lily. Decide who
you
want to be
 
—that’s all I’m saying. As beautiful as you are, guys will be standing in line when you’re ready to start looking.”

“
Pfff!
That’s not what Marah Diane says. She says it was the dumbest thing I ever did, not marryin’ Craig. She says if I thought I
had
to go to college, I coulda done it at Community . . . or online at the library.”

I grind my teeth, thinking of the backward advice that’s thrown at Lily every time she goes home to Lane’s Hill. My sisters’ lives are a far cry from idyllic. “Keep in mind that Marah Diane got married at sixteen and a half and started having kids. Does she really seem happy to you?” When I visit the family, what I see for the most part is my eldest sister yelling at her children, criticizing them, and complaining about how much trouble they are. If she’s mad at her husband, the kids take the heat because it’s forbidden for a woman of the Brethren Saints to talk back to a man.