The Gilly Salt Sisters (17 page)

She slid the letter back into the envelope and added the necklace. And then, before she lost her nerve, she walked up Plover Hill to the iron gates of Turner House and the family’s elaborate brass mailbox. Probably one of the maids collected the letters every day, Jo thought, but Ida would get this message. Jo had no doubt about that. She just wouldn’t know who had sent it. Jo shut the little hinged door of the mailbox firmly and started her way back down the hill, glancing once over her shoulder to see if she could detect any movement in the house, but there was none. The family had all gone to take Whit to school.

Jo pictured Ida opening the envelope when she returned, the pearl falling into her cupped palm like a slap. It would be a gift she thought she’d never get back but wouldn’t want to keep either, just like something else she’d once given away. Jo crunched home through the husks of the pear tree’s leaves, pleased with herself. Now she and Ida were tit for tat. When it came down to it, in fact, they were just like each other. It turned out that Jo had a talent for getting rid of things, too.

S
orrows tend to collect like dust throughout a person’s life, but Claire had only one true sorrow to her name. She had not married the man she loved. The choice was never hers to make. She knew that truth, even as she resisted it. Some women were born to play the part of the good wife, while others were put on this earth to dabble with fire, and as soon as Claire was out of the womb, it became abundantly clear which path she’d been wound up and set on.

For starters there was the fact of her hair: red as the day was long, wavy and thick. In Claire’s childhood her mother had kept it in a bob, but when Claire was a teenager, she grew it out, much to Mama’s dismay. “A waterfall of pure sin,” Mama used to call it when she brushed it before Mass, scraping the boar bristles along Claire’s scalp, making her head sting.

This always angered Claire. “It’s just like yours,” she’d point out, but Mama never answered to that. She only combed harder, tweaking Claire’s ears and yanking in all the tender spots. “Best to keep it up,” she’d mutter through a mouthful of hairpins, “away from the devil’s temptation.”

Claire couldn’t argue with that logic. Even before she hit adolescence, she knew that the devil seemed to have one eye cocked for the Gilly ladies, who, the Good Lord help them, tended to love him right back. It was why everyone in town said matrimony
never took with any of them. Because how could you wed a woman whose fingers were already ringed with brimstone?

“Marriage isn’t for Gilly women,” Mama always muttered whenever Claire asked about her father.

“That might be true for Jo, but it doesn’t have to be true for me,” Claire mused the day her mother got her ready for her Confirmation. She handed her mother a length of white ribbon to braid through her hair. She’d just started growing it, and it barely brushed the tops of her shoulders. Jo was seven years older than Claire, twenty to Claire’s thirteen, but she was so square she might have been thirty or forty as far as Claire was concerned. She was Claire’s own sister, but even Claire thought of her as an old maid.

But then Jo always had been priggish, even when
she’d
been a teenager. Claire remembered the summers when Jo and Whit had still been tight as two hoops on a barrel. They were almost even boyfriend and girlfriend, but never quite, maybe because they simply knew each other too well. The way Claire saw it, there were no mysteries left between them, and that was Jo’s mistake, for a man needed to be curious in order to want to hold on to a woman. Even at thirteen Claire knew that much.

Mama snorted at her suggestion. “Gilly women and Turner men are the worst combination of all,” she said, yanking a frail strand of hair down near Claire’s neck. You can’t trust a Turner,” she added, patting her own hair. “They’d sell their own souls if they thought they could get two nickels for them.”

Claire shook her mother’s hands off her. “I don’t believe those old stories.”

Mama sighed. “Suit yourself,” she said. Then she frowned and looked almost sorry. “Maybe it’s better that way.”

Claire turned on her heel and went to collect her sweater for church, but her mother’s opinion stuck like glue. In fact, even though Claire didn’t know it then, her mother was both right and wrong about the Turners. They
would
sell anything—even, perhaps, their own souls—but never for anything as paltry as a dime.

U
nlike Jo, Claire loathed everything about Mass—the fusty smoke from the incense pot, the smothered coughs and shuffling feet, the waxy press of the wafer against her tongue. Week after week she bowed her head and traced the Virgin’s empty face with two fingers, whispering a running, more truthful catalog of her sins before she revised them for the ears of Father Flynn.

“You have anger twisted in your heart,” he’d say with a sigh through the wooden partition of the confessional. “You must learn that God’s will doesn’t always coincide with your own. Say three Hail Marys.”

“I feel like I’m in a time warp,” Claire complained to Jo as they traveled down the lane to St. Agnes for weekly confession. “We do the same thing over and over. Dig salt and pray, and that’s it.”

But in this matter, as in most others, Jo was firmly rooted on her mother’s side. She took Claire’s arm. “Come on.” The mosquitoes were feeding as they walked along the edge of the marsh and then down the lane to St. Agnes.

“I’m getting bitten alive,” Claire moaned, swatting at the whining insects but never getting any of them. Jo, in contrast, seemed oblivious to the pests.
Probably
, Claire thought,
they’re swarming me because she’s too dry to drink from
.

Inside the little church, they made their way to the Virgin and lit two votives. As usual, Claire’s match flared too quickly, singeing her skin, and she cursed and dropped the candle, cracking the votive glass a little. “Shit,” she muttered.

“Claire,” Jo admonished. “You mustn’t use that kind of language here. Have some manners, for heaven’s sake.”

Claire rolled her eyes and struck another match. This one behaved better. She stuck her charred fingers in her mouth. Jo shook her dark hair. Unlike Claire, she wore hers loose, straight down to her shoulders. She never did anything with it, but it was pretty all the same. “You better get over your clumsiness around
fire,” she sniffed. “Remember, it’s your turn to step up to this year’s December’s Eve bonfire.”

Claire’s heart knotted. If there was anything she hated more than church, it was casting the salt on the town bonfire. It wasn’t just the mean looks the townspeople gave her or the empty circle of frosted grass they left as she inched toward the flames, and neither was it the fact that she couldn’t stay and celebrate—it was more basic than that. Claire simply hated holding all those people’s fates in her hands. It should have made her feel powerful, she knew, like she could see something special about the world that no one else could, but it didn’t. Instead, ever since the first time she’d sprinkled the fire and watched it spit out that horrifying plume of black smoke, all she felt was guilt. Even at age six, Claire could have told everyone standing around in the smoke that night that black futures were all they were ever going to get with her, but they wouldn’t have believed her, she knew. Not until she grew up and made them.

She held her palm down over the votive, gathering the warmth of the flame to her skin, and looked at her sister. Nothing bad ever happened when Jo threw the salt, but it didn’t make anyone in town like her any better than they did Claire. A Gilly was a Gilly as far as Prospect was concerned. Claire sighed. “Why do we have to throw salt to the fire anyway?” she asked for the hundredth time.

Jo bit her lip and shrugged. “It’s just what we’ve always done.”

“Well, what if we didn’t?”

Jo looked astonished. “What do you mean?”

“What if we didn’t cast the salt for the town? What if there was no bonfire?”

Jo pushed herself up onto her feet. “I don’t think that would be a good idea at all, Claire.” And without saying anything more, she turned her back and ended the conversation. Claire flushed with impatience and leaned over to blow out her votive. The fire leaped and licked at her hair, but Jo leaned down and blew out the candle in the nick of time.

“Don’t you dare tell Mama what you just said,” she snapped. “And just for that”—she nodded at the extinguished votive—“you can take my shift scraping the ponds when we get back.”

F
or no other reason than to tempt fate, Claire started smoking. She picked it up from hanging around beach parties with the wealthy kids out on the Cape for the summer. They smoked only the harshest, most spartan cigarettes: unfiltered French brands, or ones mixed with cloves. Claire’s asthmatic lungs belched and complained with every puff she took, but she loved cradling the delicate stick in between her fingers, listening to it crackle, and then grinding it out with the ball of her foot. And yes, she was always burning herself, trying to explain away the perfectly round holes in her clothes and the scar on her wrist where she’d bumped it with a live butt.

When tenth grade started, she refused to sit with the dirt-patch kids anymore, the ones who lived all the way across town, whose fathers worked as dishwashers in the tourist clam shacks, who hired themselves out on fishing trawlers or ran salvage yards. She learned to bring her hemlines up or let them down to the fashionable length, and she made sure that her hair was trimmed neatly, even if it was still bound in a braid, and that she picked exactly the right color binder out at Swenson’s five-and-dime.

She tried out for the cheerleading squad and made it. She joined the homecoming committee and the yearbook staff and started eating lunch with Katy Diamond, Cecilia West, and Abigail Van Huben: the triumvirate of Prospect High. Because she was happy for the first time, her grades improved.

“You’re going to be a college girl,” Mama would whisper to her at night, smoothing Claire’s hair with her rough fingers. “It’s all taken care of. I borrowed the money just for you.”

Jo had dropped out of school after her junior year, but it wasn’t any secret that she was better with her hands than she was with books. Claire began to notice how one day slid into another with her mother and sister.

“I’ve just done the east ponds,” Jo would inform Mama, coming in from the marsh.

“But the west ones will be needing a skim now,” Mama would reply.

“One week is about the same as any other out here.” Jo sniffed when Claire complained about this repetition. “The roof is leaking, there’s snails in the garden, and we have mud up to our earlobes. It doesn’t matter if I’m talking about today, tomorrow, or three days past.”

“I guess you’re right,” Claire said, knotting the neck of another burlap sack of gray salt. “Time’s not going anywhere fast out here.”

But she was wrong. That year the shift from summer to fall would bring her something new, and when it did, the frame of her life would never be quite the same again.