Beach Plum Island (7 page)

The girl ate as if she had skipped not only breakfast, but dinner and lunch the day before as well. Ava made an entire package of bacon and turned half a loaf of bread into French toast, serving it in the dining room with Vermont maple syrup, bananas, and whipped cream. They talked about Ava’s pottery, which was on the table and scattered around the house.

Then Gigi turned to Olivia. “Are you an artist, too?”

“Some might call me that. Right now I’m doing some river landscapes like that one,” Olivia said, gesturing to the painting hanging above Ava’s head. It was an oil painting of the salt marsh rendered in deep reds and plums and oranges. Ava had hung it on the back wall to give the room more depth, as if there were another window opposite the sliding doors opening onto the patio and the beach beyond it.

“She’s much more famous than I am,” Ava said.

“That painting has cool colors,” Gigi offered.

“Gee. Thanks,” Olivia said. “Sadly, the landscapes I’m painting now are tedious to look at.”

“Your new work is
not
tedious,” Ava protested.

“Yes it is. My palette is too muddy these days,” Olivia said. “I still can’t believe anyone would want to suffer through those brooding colors. Looking at them makes me feel positively Dutch.”

“Well, even if they’re horrible, people always want to buy landscapes,” Ava said.

“Right, and there’s nothing better than pandering to the tastes of weekend tourists.” Olivia stood up and gestured to Gigi. “Come on, kid. Ava cooked. That means you and I are stuck with kitchen duty.”

To Ava’s surprise, Gigi went along cheerfully, talking to Olivia nonstop about drawing and painting:
Are landscapes harder than people? Are oils more fun than acrylics and watercolors? What happens if nobody ever buys your paintings?

At that last question, Olivia cackled and said, “Then you get yourself a day job and paint at night. I once spent an entire summer proofreading telephone books for money. Of course, that was before you were born,” she added. “Back in the days when people actually
used
telephone books.”

“Back when we all had telephones attached to our kitchen walls and we couldn’t walk more than six feet away from the wall if we were having a conversation,” Ava added, then laughed at Gigi’s horror-stricken expression.

Olivia went home once the kitchen was clean, saying that Gigi had inspired her to get out her watercolors and leave the oils alone for a while.

“She’s pretty cool,” Gigi offered. “Is Olivia your best friend?”

The girl sounded so wistful that Ava wanted to hug her, but didn’t dare. “One of them. I’ve known her a long time. Friendships take a while to grow.” Ava wanted to ask Gigi if she had any friends, but she didn’t dare do that yet, either. “Would you like to try making a pot? Maybe like one of those jars you were drawing on the beach?”

“For real?”

“Of course. And let me tell you this right now: I don’t let just anyone work in my studio and touch my tools. Only people I trust.”

“Wow. That would be so sick!”

Whenever Gigi smiled, as she was doing now, Ava could see how much she resembled their father. She felt a pang, seeing her dad’s same dark brown eyes and the dimple in Gigi’s left cheek.

Gigi mastered hand building quickly. Her deft fingers quickly formed the coils for her first jar. She painstakingly followed Ava’s instructions about smoothing the walls with a flat wooden tool as she rounded its belly and did a decent job on the lid, too, making a square lid for a round pot. An interesting choice, Ava thought, though who knew what would happen in the kiln.

Ava showed Gigi where to put the pot on the metal shelves with the other greenware, then explained how it would need to dry for two days before she could fire it. “Once I fire it in the kiln, you can come back to glaze it. Then it’ll go in the kiln one more time, at a higher temperature, so the glaze turns into glass. After that, you can take your pot home.”

“This is so awesome,” Gigi said. “Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome.” As Ava watched the girl diligently rinse the tools in the sink, she asked, “So where are you supposed to be right now?”

Gigi didn’t turn around, but by the defiant toss of her head, Ava knew she was about to lie. “Nowhere. It’s summer, remember?”

“Don’t even try to lie to me. I’m a high school teacher and I have two sons older than you are,” Ava reminded her. “I won’t be mad. Just tell me the truth.”

The girl spun around, her cheeks almost as pink as the tips of her hair. “All parents say they won’t be mad when you tell them the truth. Then they are anyway.”

“First of all, I’m not your parent. I’m your sister. Second, I really care about you. I’m sure your mom does, too. She just wants you to be happy.”

“That’s what all mothers say.”

“No. Some mothers actually drown their children, or shoot them or shake them or give them away.”

Gigi looked startled, then giggled. “
God.
You’re even more morbid than I am.”

Ava doubted that. “I’m telling you the truth. I care about you, and about your mom, too.”

“Uh-huh. That’s why you were at the house every day Dad was dying.”

“I
wanted
to come. Your mom made it clear she didn’t want me around.”

“I believe you,” Gigi said with a sigh, her narrow shoulders slumping. “Mom didn’t want anybody around, especially not you or Elaine. I didn’t blame Elaine for doing what she did at the funeral, you know. If I were you guys, I’d be pissed off at my mom, too, for stealing your dad.”

“Oh, honey. Your mom didn’t steal him. Our dad hadn’t been happy for a long, long time.” Ava bit her lip, wondering what she could say that would be true without being too honest. “Everything that happened with our parents was long ago. It had nothing to do with you, me, or Elaine. Nobody outside a marriage can really know what’s happening on the inside of it.”

She stopped talking, reminding herself that the girl was only fifteen. If Gigi had been older, Ava might have said that falling in love was like visiting a foreign country: Occasionally, you felt so at home in a new place, you wanted to stay there forever, adopting new customs as your own. More often, things went stale. If you were lucky enough to get out, you could search for a new country to visit. Or maybe you’d quit traveling to new places altogether, as Ava had done.

“There are more mysteries about love than you and I could solve in a lifetime,” she told Gigi. “What I want to know is what you’ve told your mom about where you are.”

“She still thinks I’m at riding camp.”

“
Riding
camp?”

Gigi glanced up at Ava’s incredulous tone. “Yeah. You know. Horses? My mom has this thing about them. Like, horses are her obsession.”

Ava chewed her lip, trying not to laugh at the look of disgust on Gigi’s face. “So I’m guessing you don’t love horses like your mom does.”

“That’s not true! I probably love horses more than I love people, actually. But I hate competitive riding. And the people who do it,” she added.

“So how did you get out of going? Doesn’t your mom drive you there every morning?”

“No. I ride my bike. Mom doesn’t leave the house, not ever. Not since Dad died, except for the funeral.”

“Not at all?” Ava touched her own forehead, imagining Katy’s pounding head, cottony with grief. “That poor girl. I should stop in on her.”

“She wouldn’t see you.”

“Maybe not, but we need to go to your house and at least tell her where you are.”

“No!” Gigi looked stricken. “She’d kill me if she knew!”

“Why? Does she really hate us that much?”

“I don’t know. But she doesn’t
like
you. She thinks you and Elaine have been bitches to her. Not that Mom would ever say the b-word,” Gigi added quickly.

“I don’t blame her,” Ava said. “We haven’t been very nice to her in the past. But I think she might really need some help, don’t you? The kind of help you probably can’t give her by yourself.”

A long silence followed, while Gigi chewed on a fingernail. Finally she nodded and said, “Okay, I guess.”

Ava’s car was ancient, so old and sketchy it was easy for Gigi to imagine they were leaving a trail of rusted-out car parts behind them as they rattled over the bridge from Beach Plum Island toward Newburyport. She wondered if Ava was poor and then felt bad about wondering. If Ava was poor, wouldn’t that mean Dad hadn’t taken care of her, when he’d always given Gigi everything?

But Ava was a grown-up. A mom. Gigi had seen Ava’s sons—her nephews!—at the service, two blond kids older and taller than she was. She was curious about them, not just because they were guys and went to public school—always an attraction, since the kids in her prep school were mostly posers—but because Ava’s sons clearly loved music as much as she did. There were guitars and amps and sheet music all over Ava’s living room, and even a drum set. She had kind of been hoping the boys would come home while she was there.

Now Gigi was glad they hadn’t shown up. They would probably hate her anyway because her mom had stolen their grandfather. And she would have been totally humiliated to have them see Ava driving her home. She couldn’t quit chewing her nails, wondering what would happen. Mom could be in one of those painkiller comas and not even wake up when they arrived. Or maybe she’d go totally ballistic when she discovered Gigi had been hanging out with Dad’s other family instead of riding. She was relieved when Ava put on some chill tunes, a burner CD, so they didn’t have to talk.

Mom was upstairs in her bedroom, where she always was these days, lying under a blanket like it wasn’t the last day of June and eighty degrees. She looked like a little kid, her pale hair knotted and her face puffy and pink. Beside her was a whole blizzard of crumpled Kleenexes.

The maids cleaned twice a week, a trio of Brazilians that sounded like parakeets when they flitted around the house, talking in their singsong way and cleaning things Gigi would never think to clean, like the tops of picture frames, and folding the toilet paper ends into triangles. The cleaners had been here today, judging by the slick sheen on the counters and wood floors downstairs, but her mom hadn’t let them into her bedroom since Dad died. Her bed was a mountain of blankets and pink sheets; there were so many clothes on the floor that it looked like her dresser had exploded, and there was a tray on her night table that smelled like cat food. Gramma Dawn must have left the food but not been back yet to retrieve the tray.

Gigi’s scalp prickled with shame, having Ava see her mom this way, as helpless as an abandoned kitten. Before Dad got sick, Mom was prettier and more fun than any of her friends’ mothers, and Gigi was proud to belong to her. Dad was, too.

“Your mother’s the sun and I’m her moon,” Dad always said. Then, to crack Gigi up, he’d add, “Not that I plan to moon her with you in the room, though. I’ll save that for later.”

“Bob! Do you always have to be so inappropriate?” her mother would say, but she’d be giggling, too, like she was hardly older than Gigi.

Gigi left Ava in the bedroom and carried the tray of food downstairs. She set it on the counter and stood at the sink, her nose and eyes running as she stared out the window. Rain spattered like handfuls of gravel against the glass, as if the sky were crying, too.

She scraped the plates into the trash, rinsed them, and loaded them into the dishwasher. This kitchen, with its gleaming giant stove and a refrigerator big enough to fit a cow inside, was the opposite of Ava’s tiny kitchen, with its painted yellow cupboards and small white wooden table. Ava’s felt like home. This one embarrassed her, suddenly. It looked like it should be inside a hotel, not a house. No wonder her mother stayed in bed. The two of them were rattling around in this house like dice in a bus.

She went back upstairs. Outside her mother’s bedroom door, Gigi was amazed to hear Mom actually talking to Ava.
Talking.
These days Mom never talked, not even to Gramma Dawn, unless it was to ask for another glass of water and one of her “nerve pills.” Mom’s friends had pretty much stopped coming around or calling. This was a relief, sort of, since Gigi was the one who mostly had to answer the phone and say, at her mother’s insistence, “Mom can’t come to the phone right now. She’s resting.”

It sounded like Ava had pissed her off: Gigi could hear a thrumming tension in her mother’s voice. Well, fine. Mad was definitely better than sad. Gigi slumped to the floor, her back against the cool wall, and listened.

“You don’t understand. She
has
to go back to that camp,” Mom was saying. “I can’t have her running all over town unsupervised. She’s only fifteen, for God’s sake.”

“But she hates the camp,” Ava said. “Why make her go back? Can’t you get the money refunded?”

“This isn’t about the money! This is about what’s best for Gigi! She needs structure over the summer and she needs to conquer her fear of riding. I know she loves horses. It’s just a matter of getting enough experience and building confidence.”

Gigi heard a rustling sound. Was her mother actually sitting up? She was afraid to look.

“She does love horses,” Ava said. Her voice was soothing and warm, the way it had been with Gigi that first day. Ava’s kids were lucky, knowing their mom wasn’t going to fly off the handle and slap them, or crumple and cry in front of them, the way Mom started doing after Dad got sick last year. “But I think the camp environment might be too stressful for her right now.”

Gigi sighed with relief. Thank God Ava didn’t say anything about her not wanting to ride competitively. Mom was so sure Gigi had what it took to be an Olympian, or to at least compete in the Grand Nationals. Gigi would rather set herself on fire than do that.

“
Everything
is stressful right now,” Mom said. “Gigi misses her father. She has to get back in the saddle and keep going.”

There was a small hesitation, as if Ava was struggling not to say the most obvious thing:
Oh, like you’re doing, lying here day after day? Is that what you mean by getting back in the saddle?

But Ava wasn’t mean enough to say anything like that. Instead, she said, “Maybe she could go back to camp next summer, when she’s had time to grieve. I think Gigi needs a complete change of scene for a little while, something that doesn’t remind her so much of her dad.”