Seeking Carolina (13 page)

“There is one more common factor,” she said. “In each story, the girl’s grandmother gave her the locket before leaving Italy.”

“That’s right,” Emma said.

“And she is giving it to us.” Nina added. “That’s something, right?”

“It must be.”

“Or we are over-thinking this whole thing. She was rather old.”

“But she wasn’t when she told us the stories,” Johanna said, “and promised us each the locket.”

“Another piece to the puzzle.” Emma sighed and stretched. “We’re not going to figure this out now, if ever.”

“So, what do we do about the locket in the meantime?” Nina asked. “Take turns?”

“Starting with you, of course.”

“I’m the oldest.”

“But that’s not what Gram wanted,” Julietta cut in. “Whatever her reason, she wants us to figure it out.”

“But…how?”

Again, the silence. Johanna could almost hear their minds whirring through possibilities. The crunch of tires in the driveway signaled the boys’ return, and the end of their conversation. Whether or not any of them believed in the stories or the wish, there was an unspoken agreement to keep it to themselves. The women rose from the table as if pulled by the same cord.

“Gunner and I are going to stay through New Year’s Day,” Nina said. “We’ll head back to the city on the second. Let’s see what happens between now and then. Jo? Can you stay until then?”

“I was planning on it. Actually…” She took a deep breath. Once she said the words, she could not unsay them. “I closed CC’s for the season. I’m staying in Bitterly until the spring, if it’s all right with Julietta.”

“Are you kidding me?” her youngest sister grabbed her hands and started twirling. “You’re staying! You’re staying!”

“Is this because of Charlie?” Emma teased.

“I closed the bakery before I left Cape May.” Johanna extricated herself from Julietta’s grasp. “But I won’t lie. It’s a definite perk to the decision.”

“I don’t care why you’re staying, just that you are.” Julietta hugged herself, swayed back and forth. “I say Johanna is the one who started all this, she should hold onto the locket until we figure it all out.”

“Fine by me.” Nina yawned.

“I suppose it is by me, too,” Emma said, then wagged a playful finger in her face. “But no making any unauthorized wishes.”

“I won’t.” Johanna made an X over her chest. “Cross my heart, that’s no lie, stick a booger in my eye.”

Her sisters laughed, Julietta the hardest. “You remember that? Where did we get it from?”

“Probably Gram,” she lied. It wasn’t Gram. Johanna remembered quite clearly.

Gunner, Mike, and Efan each carried one of the sleeping little boys. Hushing them all, Emma gestured upstairs where the boys were stripped, and tucked into the trundle-beds set up in what had once been their mother’s room.

“We can sleep in Gram’s room,” Emma said when they all came back down again, but Nina halted her.

“Or you and Mike can go home and have a nice night just the two of you.”

“Light a fire,” Gunner added, “turn on some music, have a glass of wine…”

“Or two,” Johanna added.

Mike slipped his arm around his wife’s waist, whispered in her ear. Emma shoved him gently, but smiled and kissed him before asking, “You sure you don’t mind?”

They left moments later, laden with Christmas gifts and dinner leftovers, half a pie and a plate of cookies. Emma would come back in the morning to get her sons.

“A glass of wine by the fire does sound nice.” Nina curled into her husband, a smile on her lips and a sparkle in her eye. He kissed her nose.

“You crack the bottle, I’ll stoke the fire.” He turned to the parlor, nearly bowling Efan over. “Oh, sorry. Would you guys like to join us?”

“No thanks,” Johanna said quickly. “I’m heading to bed.”

“And I have an early day tomorrow,” Efan said. “No rest for the wicked.”

“Isn’t it supposed to be weary?” Julietta asked. He took her hand, kissed it floridly.

“It is an alternate to the old saying,
cariad
. A play on words. Now if you will escort me to the foyer, I shall depart this warm and wonderful place to brave the elements and my lonely carriage house anon.”

“You’re so weird.”

“Which is why we get along famously.” He offered his arm. Julietta took it and fell into step beside him. Johanna watched them, their heads close and voices low, her heart doing little flips. Her youngest sister had liked boys just as any other teen. When she reached her twenties and the quirks of childhood became problematic for an adult, she seemed to retreat from the world that included men in a romantic capacity. Efan’s quirks made him a bit dorky, but that was all he was—not like Julietta, for whom a missing pair of sneakers could be a traumatic event.

Caught in the kitchen by Efan and Julietta at the front door and Gunner and Nina in the parlor, Johanna tidied up. She washed the teacups in the sink and set them on the rack to dry, piled cookies into plastic containers, put the butter in the fridge. Johanna hummed Christmas songs, sad the holiday was mostly over. The days leading up to New Year’s Eve seemed more like a deep breath after a long run, and then came the lead up to Little Christmas, once a grand event in the Coco household, now mostly forgotten, and Johanna wondered why that was so.

The front door closed softly. A moment later, Julietta was tiptoeing into the kitchen. “Oh, Jo. I thought you went upstairs. I was sneaking in for a cookie or two.”

“Help yourself.” She slid a container her way. The fair skin of her sister’s face flushed the fresh-pink of kissing. Her lips were bright red.

“You know,” Johanna hedged, “I think he was hinting he’d like to spend the night.”

“Of course he was. I’m not an idiot, Jo.”

“I didn’t mean to imply you are.”

“It’s just not me.”

“Ok, honey. I didn’t mean—”

“You all think I’m a baby. The little sister. I wish you’d all stop treating me like a perpetual child. I have three degrees and a Masters in linguistics.”

“Hey.” Johanna moved closer. “What’s this all about? You know I didn’t mean anything like that.”

Julietta slumped, took an angry bite of a cookie and several deep breaths.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean it either. It’s just…I really like him, enough to care what he thinks of me, of…how I am.”

“How you are is why he likes you.”

“But doesn’t that make it, I don’t know…gross?”

“Gross?”

“Like he’s into freaks or something.”

“Julietta, don’t say that. You are not a freak.”

“We’re all freaks, Jo.” She smiled a little sadly. “All four of us, in our own ways. I just happen to be the freakiest.”

Johanna did not quibble. She knew exactly what her sister was saying. Their reputation as the crazy Coco sisters had been well-earned, once-upon-a-time. No dare untaken, no adventure refused, no slight unaddressed, the moniker had become a badge of honor that nevertheless hurt to hear spoken aloud.

“Who wants to be normal, anyway?” Johanna asked. “Normal is boring. When do you think people stopped understanding that normal just means average?”

“Probably when it started making all those boring people feel better about themselves.”

Julietta ate her cookie. Johanna finished tidying up the kitchen. Folding the dishtowel, she opened her mouth to say goodnight.

“What would your wish be?” Julietta asked.

Johanna thought about it a lot when she was a kid. Frivolous wishes, like a pony or to go on a date with Justin Timberlake, to more serious wishes about never being parted from her sisters all gave way to one wish, the one that first came to her head when Gram told her she had it to make.

“I don’t know,” she lied to her sister a second time. “What would you?”

“It…it would be hard to pick just one.”

“True.”

“Do you think there could really be a wish in the locket? Like, for real?”

With Emma or Nina, Johanna would laugh and tell them to be serious. With Julietta, she could say, “Yeah, I do.”

“So do I.” Julietta hugged her then, tightly.

The locket, tucked back under her clothes, pressed against Johanna’s skin, warm, then cool, then warm, its rhythm again like a heartbeat.

Her sister let her go. “Don’t forget your promise.”

“I crossed my heart and stuck a booger in my eye, didn’t I?”

A tear rolled down Julietta’s cheek. “It wasn’t Gram who said that.”

“I know.”

“He was weird too.”

“A freak, like the rest of us.”

“I miss him every day.”

“I do, too.”

“Not more than I do. I…” Julietta took a deep breath. “I’m going to bed. Night, Jo.”

“Night, Jules.”

Johanna waited until her sister’s door closed upstairs to tiptoe past the parlor where Nina and Gunner were crawling all over one another beside the fire, and trudge up the stairs. She checked on her sleeping nephews. Behind her own closed door, she stripped down to nothing but the locket, climbed into bed, and fell instantly to sleep.

* * * *

Little girls should never speak of dying, or sticking needles in their eyes. They are sugar and spice and everything nice, with heaven in their eyes, and star dust glistening on fairies’ wings. They are my joy and heart’s delight. They walk in beauty like the night. Little girls should never be hungry or scared or cold. They should never know such horrors. They should never see such things.

Six Geese a’Laying

In the attic room, the boys were arguing. Charlie listened to them, making sure it did not escalate. Tony and Caleb were packed for the few days they would spend with their mother. Will still insisted he wasn’t going. He had to work. He had plans. He didn’t want to spend a week sleeping on the floor in Tracy’s house when he could have the whole attic to himself. Charlie was torn. As much as he loved his kids, he wouldn’t lie and pretend it wouldn’t be nice to have a few days completely to himself. He hadn’t had one of those since he was eighteen.

The knock at the front door took him by surprise, not the sound, but that she knocked at all. Gina stood on the porch, framed by the window, her back to him. Small and slim, slightly wider in the hips, she had let her hair grow in the year since she left. “Short and sassy” had been the pervading style during their marriage. Easier to deal with. She turned when he opened the storm door, a wary smile on her full lips.

“Hey,” she said. “The kids ready?”

“Mommy!”

Millie came running down the stairs, her purple pony duffle dragging behind her. Gina bent to catch her in a hug. Charlie’s heart squirmed a little. He quelled it before he could decide if it was a happy sensation, or a frightened one.

“
Stellina.
” Gina held her close. “How I’ve missed my little star.”

“The boys aren’t ready yet,” Charlie said when she put Millie down. “You want coffee? We still have a ton of cookies here.”

His ex-wife eyed him skeptically, but she nodded. “Go hurry your brothers along. We have an hour drive to Tracy’s, and your cousins want to have a snowball fight before lunch.”

Millie clapped her hands and pounded back up the steps. “Will, Caleb, Tony! Mommy’s here!”

At the counter in the kitchen, Charlie poured coffee, slid the container of cookies Johanna had brought over. Gina picked up a star-shaped one. “Johanna Coco, huh? Finally?” She took a bite. “Wow. This is better than I was expecting.”

Again that squirmy feeling. In the year and some since she left him, he’d mostly stopped being angry. Johanna’s return to Bitterly banished the anger completely. Much as he hated how it all happened, Charlie could not be sorry it had.

“Will is still insisting he’s not coming with you,” he said. “We could make him. I just didn’t want to push it until we discussed it first.”

Gina finished her cookie and dug out a chocolate and toffee chip. She closed her eyes in only slightly exaggerated bliss as she ate it. “Really good. I’m going to take some of these with me. If that’s okay.”

“Sure.”

She wiped her hands on her jeans. “If William comes down ready to go with me, great. If he doesn’t, I don’t want to force him. That’s not going to do anything good.”

“You’re probably right.”

Gina leaned on the counter. She sipped her coffee out of a mug, Charlie realized, Charlotte had given her for Mother’s Day, years ago. If she noticed, she didn’t say anything. After a moment, she set the mug down.

“In all the chaos yesterday, we never got a chance to talk.”

“Do we have anything to talk about?”

She smiled a little sadly. He’d forgotten how perfect her teeth were. Her olive skin, Florida-tanned, made them seem even whiter. “How have you been, Charlie?”

“Okay, I guess. I haven’t had much time to think about it.”

“Is that good?”

He laughed. “I suppose it is. Kind of. You?”

“I’ve had way too much time to think.” Gina plucked another cookie from the container. “All these years, life has been so…noisy. Soccer and school and summer camp and homework and squabbles and who gets to watch what on television. Now, life is so quiet, just me and—” She glanced at him. “Just my own voice in my head most of the time. It’s been good, and really awful.”

Charlie let go a deep breath. He sipped his own coffee. “I can’t imagine being without them,” he said, “but I wouldn’t mind some quiet.”

“You’ll have it this summer.”

His gut seized, but Charlie nodded.

“Look forward to it, Charlie. You’re a good dad. You always have been. But you need time to be Charlie McCallan, too.” She bit into the cookie still in her hand—a snowball. Again the slightly exaggerated bliss. “Damn, these are really good. So…Johanna Coco, huh?”

“I heard and ignored you the first time.” Charlie laughed. “Does it bother you?”

“Why would it?”

“Because we used to fight whenever she came to town.”

“That was envy,” Gina admitted. “She had what I never would.”

“What you never wanted.”

“Only a little true. I wanted us to work, Charlie. Not just for the kids, for us. You deserved better than a spouse going through the motions. And so did I.”

Anger battled compassion. Truth battled pretense. He pushed fingers through his hair, rubbed at the beard that needed a trim, both grown out since she left because he could, and Charlie McCallan could not find it in him to disagree. “You really have done a lot of thinking.”