The Weird Sisters (41 page)

“. . . that I prize above my dukedom,”
Bean finished with him.

He smiled at that. “
Tempest
was always one of your favorites.”

“The lost island. Like
Swiss Family Robinson.
”

“You’ve always been so good with people, Bianca. This might be an opportunity for you. Though I fear you will find the social life of Barnwell . . . lacking.”

“I suppose I’m too old to date those handsome college boys,” she mused. They turned onto Main, strolled past the Beanery. Inside, Bean could see Cordy’s braid bouncing as she worked behind the counter. Something inside her withered. Is this what we’d become? We’d inherited our father’s genius to squander it on food service and academic peripateticism and librarianship? Life wasn’t supposed to be like this. Life was supposed to be martinis and slick advertising campaigns in slick offices with slick men by her side. Not stupid, frumpy Barnwell and its narrow alley of possibilities.

“Have you talked to Father Aidan?” he asked. She clenched her teeth. Had he heard? Aidan wouldn’t have said anything, would he?

“Sure,” she said, coolly. “We’ve hung out a few times.”

“No, I mean as a priest.”

Bean paused to look in the window of the hardware store. Long ago, before we can remember, really, it had been a dress shop, with windows designed to display the finest couture Barnwell had to offer. Deliciously, however, the couple who had bought the store had taken it upon themselves to outfit the windows as though their wares were as fine as any Paris fashions. Here they had created a garden, with tools and supplies standing in for the greenery: a bouquet of hammers in a vase, work gloves blooming in neat rows, labeled with seed packets.

“I asked him to look out for you,” he said.

Bean turned, the postmodern garden forgotten. “You what?” Her voice bounced across the empty street, fluttering against the plate glass windows. “What am I, five?” She felt her mouth pulling down as her mind worked a thousand hours overtime, recasting every moment with Aidan in the light of this new information. So he hadn’t . . . he’d never . . .

“Holy shit,” she said. She had never misjudged anything as egregiously as she’d misjudged his interest in her. There hadn’t been any interest at all. None. Only textbook psychological transference and the pity of a man who didn’t actually care about her at all, who was just doing his job. She burned at the thought of how he must think of her. “What did you tell him?” Her voice cracked, hysterical.

“It’s not like that, Bianca. Just that you had come back suddenly and seemed hurt somehow, and you might need someone to talk to. Someone who wasn’t us.” This last bit sounded melancholy, a sadly accepting smile directed at the ground. Bean turned and walked away, ahead, shame pressing her shoulders forward until they ached.

In front of the post office, she pulled the envelope out of her purse and opened the slot, dropping it in, listening to the whisper of paper against paper as it fell down. The collected earnings of the library, the sale of that awful car, and all the glittering artifice of her life in the city. Thinking she could go back now was foolish. She hadn’t the wardrobe for it anymore.

Our father came up beside her and they stared into the empty darkness of the mailbox’s maw for a moment. “Barnwell’s not such a bad life. I know you always wanted more, but I wonder what you believe you need so badly that you cannot find here.” She let the door of the mailbox clang shut and they walked on. “You were the youngest to start walking, you know that? Rose crawled so well it took her ages to decide she wanted to walk, and Cordy was content when we carried her. But you, you went straight from lying down to running at full tilt. I think of that every time I read
Midsummer. My legs can keep no pace with my desires.
”

They were nearing the library. Our father, walking on the outside of the sidewalk, ducked under the branch of an elm tree that swept its leafy arm across the sidewalk as though taking a bow. “If you felt lonely in the midst of all those people, Bianca, there is nothing to be lost by letting the crowd go. The question to ask is what will satisfy you? What will bring you peace? And perhaps the answer to those is in asking yourself when you were last happy.

“The city, that burning desire you had for freedom, what has it brought you?
Sound and fury, signifying nothing.
You may think I’m a foolish old man, gone to seed already, but we chose this life, your mother and I, and we have never regretted it.
I earn what I eat, get what I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good.
We won’t hold you back, Bianca, but we want you to find happiness.”

His St. Crispin’s Day speech ended, they came to a stop in front of the library’s wide stone steps. Bean turned to our father, put her hand on his arm, and gave him a kiss on the cheek, the tickle of his beard so familiar on her lips. “Thank you, Dad,” she said. He nodded, stood with his hands still in his pockets, his shoulders hunched forward, and watched her until she got inside. Then he walked away, staring up at the sky, and Bean watched him go. She wanted to hate him for asking Aidan to look after her, for making her an object of misfortune instead of beauty. But hard as it was to admit, she knew he had done it out of love.

The knowledge hit her then, hard: someday he would be gone. His inscrutable quoting, his missives by mail, his old-fashioned fashions, the protective web he and our mother had spun around themselves, would evaporate, and leaving us only with the memories of his thoughtful smile, his distance, and a lifetime of work that would have mattered most to a man dead four centuries ago. She let the door shut, placed her head against the cool glass, and prayed.

TWENTY-TWO

T
here had been no response from New York, but they had cashed the check. Bean didn’t know what she had expected. A thank-you for the return of something that had been theirs to begin with? A reprimand for the money still owed?

She had thought an installment would make it easier, but it had only intensified the disgust she felt with herself. At night, she ran. She waited until the heat of the day had cooled, until it was dark and she could weave in and out between the streetlights, running for blocks beside darkened houses. Occasionally she would pass children playing on a lawn, chasing fireflies, playing hide-and-go-seek, aided by the shadows of trees, and she would cut to the other side of the street. People passed by, walking their dogs, and Bean nodded, breathing hard as though she were a force of nature, constantly propelled forward, incapable of stopping to chat. She ran until she was drenched with sweat, until squeezing her braid released a trickle of cold liquid down her back, until her legs screamed with every step, and only then would she turn around and go home.

Running was the only place she could forget. New York had always held distractions. Other people, new places. It was the best place to hide whatever was dark inside her. But here there was no escape. She ran and she ran, desperate to put distance between her heart and her head, memories of Edward, of Lila, of the thousand ways she’d been ready to make a fool of herself for Aidan, when he hadn’t cared for her, when she hadn’t known him at all.

Tears mingled with the sweat on her face. Every pounding beat was a recrimination, a tom-tom reminding her of what she had lost—her life in New York, her self-respect, her job, her ability to see her future. Now she saw nothing. Before it had seemed like there were a million possibilities in front of her, a thousand paths not taken stretching out into the years ahead, and now one path led straight ahead, and she was terrified to take it because it meant she could no longer hide from the fact that she was terrifyingly, completely normal.

One night, pounding her way back home, feet crying out for relief, she ran smack into Aidan. Of all the people to see at that moment, he would have been her last choice.

They were only a few blocks from the church, and he was heading in that direction, hands in his pockets, strolling slowly along the darkened streets. Her head hit his chest, her ankle twisted, and he grabbed her shoulders to steady himself as much as her.

“Bianca?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

She looked up at him. They stood, as the great movie director of our lives would have it, in the pool of a streetlight, and she knew her face was swollen from crying and beaded with sweat. She was soaked; her shirt clung to her back, her shorts plastered to her thighs with sweat. Her breathing was quick and raspy.

“Bianca?” he said again, and she noticed that he always seemed to use her full name. It sounded so strange coming from his mouth, hearing it in this town, where everyone knew who she was, everyone knew she was just Bean Andreas, trouble with a capital T. “What’s wrong?”

She looked up at him, at the gold in his hair and the light in his eyes, and she said, “I need to make a confession.” And then she burst into tears, and he pulled her close and held her as her tears and her sweat soaked his shirt and it didn’t even occur to her that after all this time, she was in his arms.

C
onfession in our faith is not like the cinematic Catholic version, with tiny boxes and screens. It is not even required, as the weekly service contains a penance in a tidy, practical, terribly English way. But we know that when she was ready, confession was the only word that seemed right. Maybe it was a slow accretion of change over time, maybe it was simple desperation, but something inside her was shifting, and the thousand ways she’d violated things she cared about felt not just amoral but like a cruel middle finger to everything good she had been given in the world.

They went into the rectory, which looked like the house of an old man—apparently Father Cooke had not taken much with him when he went to Arizona, and Aidan hadn’t bothered with redecorating. Aidan disappeared into the kitchen, and emerged with a glass of ice water and a bag of frozen peas for her foot—she wondered if he actually intended to eat them ever or if these vegetables were designated for sports injuries only—and they sat in the living room.

“What’s going on, Bianca?” he asked, when she had downed the glass of water and was holding the bag awkwardly against her ankle, which was already swelling nicely.

Bean started crying again. He reached out and took her hand, and when she quieted, he stood. “I’ll be right back,” he said, taking her empty glass. He returned with it filled, a box of tissues in his other hand. He put both down beside her, and she plucked a tissue from the box and blew her nose inelegantly.

“Take your time,” he said. “I’m in no hurry.” He moved his chair closer to Bean’s, so they sat face-to-face, and nodded at her.

She took a moment, struggling to breathe through the aftermath of the tears, trying to compose herself. “I’m a thief,” Bean blurted out finally. “I’m a thief and a liar and a whore and I don’t deserve anything good.”

“Bean,” he said. She was crying hard now, she couldn’t look at him. “Bean,” he said again. He rested his hand on her arm. “You’re none of those things. You’re human. You’re fallible. You make mistakes. And when we make mistakes, we repent. And when we repent, we can be forgiven anything.”

“Anything,” she whispered, and it was an echo, not a question. Her voice caught, she breathed as though she were laughing, four long, shuddering breaths. “I got fired,” she said. “I got fired because I stole money from my job.”

She told him the whole story. She cried, she looked away, she cried again. She held the glass of water in her lap, drinking from it when her mouth went dry from talking. He said nothing, listened, leaning forward, elbows resting on his thighs, not pulling his eyes from her. She couldn’t meet his gaze for longer than a few seconds. She told more than she had told us, she talked about the men she had seduced, the lies she had told, to herself and to others, and how she saw the lights of her future winking out in front of her like candles being extinguished at the end of the service. She told him about Dr. Manning, about the way she had fallen into his arms because it made the pain of remembering so much duller, and the ways in which she had so conveniently forgotten his wife and his children and ignored the fact that what should have been pleasurable felt more and more like pain each time. She even told him that she’d wanted Aidan to fall in love with her, certain that the good in him would cancel out the darkness in her, and he did not judge her for any of this. She did not care anymore about impressing him; she only wanted to be free of the weight aching in her chest.

“And what now?” he asked. She had finished, leaned back in her chair. The bag of peas lay sweating on the table, and her voice had grown hoarse from talking.

Bean stared off into the middle distance, barely watching the ticking arms of a clock on the mantel. “Now, I don’t know. Now, I’m just trying to keep from dragging myself down into this swamp.”

“The financial debt?”

“I’m paying it back. Little by little, sure, but I don’t think they cared about the money. I just think they wanted me gone.” She picked up a tissue and blew her nose hard.