The Gilly Salt Sisters (40 page)

Satisfied that the levees were holding, she turned to go check
on the other, smaller gates—she was worried about the latch holding on the last one—when she saw Dee wavering at the edge of the pools, so pale in the late-afternoon light that she looked only half real. Of course, that was an easy mistake to make, especially out in the marsh, where sky and water did strange things to one’s vision and worse to a person’s reason.

Jo watched the girl drift past the cluster of gravestones. Dee paused to read the inscriptions, lingering. A weedy single-file path led from the gravestones along the far side of the ponds, and as Dee neared her, Jo realized that she must look equally ghostly. She was wearing gauzy layers: a man’s pale linen shirt over lightweight trousers that were tucked into rubber boots. On her head she had a straw hat tied down by a gossamer-thin scarf to keep out what little sun there was. Dee finally arrived, slightly breathless.

“Wow,” she said, her eyes wide. “I never knew how big this place really was.” She snuffled a bit in the cold, and Jo felt an unexpected stab of pity for her. She was out of her depth in this place. And to get involved with a man like Whit, she must really have been adrift. It must be terrible to have to steal someone’s affection like a crow snitching silver, Jo thought, but to whom did Whit really belong anyway? Once she had believed it was to her, and then Claire, but now she would say it was only to himself. Trying to claim Whit had always been like trying to clench her fist around water. The liquid shimmied away, and her fingers snapped together on nothing. Jo moved closer to Dee. Maybe it was better if they both shut up and did some work before she started saying too much. She grabbed Dee’s arm.

“Come on. You can make yourself useful. I still have some salt hanging around from last summer, and I hear there are some new restaurants opening up in Wellfleet. Maybe they’ll be interested. Salt sales have been awful in Prospect, and I really ought to be making more of an effort to sell the stuff elsewhere. You can help me scoop and tie sample bags.”

Dee scrambled after Jo, puffing a little. She spoke in quick bursts that reminded Jo of a lapdog nipping at someone’s heels.
“I’m real sorry about Whit sending all those mean letters, and I’m sorry he’s making trouble for Father Stone.”

Jo snorted. So Dee had seen the letter she and Claire had tried to hide. What had the child done, dug through the trash? She eyed Dee, wondering if she’d underestimated her. “I generally consider Whit to be in the same category as those brown slugs I pull out of the mud,” she said. “He’s been trying to get his mitts on this land for years, you know, but so far nothing’s worked. Marrying my sister hasn’t got him any closer, and neither has any of his legal hoodoo. Whit Turner can have Salt Creek Farm after he does his time in hell, and that’s that.” Jo was talking to herself as much as she was to Dee. She turned to see the girl still planted in the mud like a stubborn beetle. “Are you coming?” she barked. Behind her she heard Dee scurrying to catch up in all senses of the phrase.

O
n Easter morning Claire rose before anyone else in the house, tied an apron around her hips, and set about creating her own personal resurrection.

In her life with Whit, the act of cooking had been as structured as everything else. Claire had made lists of complicated ingredients—pickled asparagus, sesame oil, salmon roe—done the shopping, and then she would come home and follow the recipe as if it were a set of instructions for nuclear fusion. Her food came out technically perfect but tasteless all the same. She never noticed Whit taking pleasure in it, and by the time dinner rolled around, she was often too exhausted to eat. She’d box the leftovers, and the housekeeper (now long gone, thanks to Whit’s increasingly draconian budget) would eat them for lunch the next day, no more enthused than Whit had been the night before.

The thing was, elaborate wasn’t an option on Salt Creek Farm. For one thing, Claire was miles from the store, and for another, there were no cookbooks. So Claire simply used what was at hand. Salt, of course, for she no longer had anything to fear from it. And eggs, butter, a dollop of farmer’s cheese. Sugar, flour, and a cluster of spring herbs pulled from the cold morning ground outside the kitchen door.

She whipped the egg whites to foamy peaks and combined them with the cheese, the chives, and the golden yolks, then set
the dish in the oven to rise. She made basic dough and twisted out rounds of floury biscuits, anointing them with a splash of vanilla, then shoved them into the oven with the eggy pudding. She found a paper bag of tiny new strawberries in the back of the refrigerator and combined them with sugar and mint, letting them soak into a syrup.

The sun rose and spread like a smear of fat melting across a pan, and the kitchen began to fill with the aromas of dough, melting cheese, and steaming vanilla. Satisfied, Claire leaned against the counter, sipping a cup of bitter coffee and fingering the heart locket she’d reclaimed from Dee and now wore along with Ida’s pearl at the hollow of her throat. If her past had its own size and weight, she thought, that pearl might be its physical manifestation: a ball of calcium and mineral meant to smother the single grain that didn’t belong. The timer on the oven buzzed, and Claire got up to check on the biscuits, opening the oven too suddenly and scalding her eyes in the process. She stepped back and fanned her face.
Really
, she thought,
all these years, and here I am still rushing into things, sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong, and, of course, getting burned for it
.

Except all her scars were on the inside. What, exactly, would the reverse of a scar be anyway? Claire wondered. She pulled the tray from the oven and stared down at the round moons of pastry puffed in neat rows. They reminded her of Our Lady’s empty face.
That’s it
, she thought, closing the oven again. The opposite of a scar was simply the gaping hole left when the heart was ripped out of something.

She broke open one of the biscuits, releasing curls of steam, and then ate the whole thing in four bites. She sipped more coffee and waited for the cheese pudding to finish baking and the biscuits to cool. It occurred to her that she should make a list of anything she had of value. There was Icicle, but selling him would break her heart. There were the few dollars she’d managed to sock away in her own bank account without Whit’s knowing, but the amount was laughable. Her eyes drifted down to her naked
hands. Of course! There were Ida’s rings sitting in the drawer upstairs. Maybe she could sell them, if she dared. Nothing would give her more pleasure. And anyway, Ida had never been one to turn up her nose at a hard profit, even if it came at her own personal expense.

Claire reached for another biscuit, amazed at how little there was of her in her own life, but it was her own fault. She had filled her days with the idle chatter of friends she didn’t care about, tasks she performed just to keep busy, and a husband she never really loved. She shivered in the warm kitchen and finished her second biscuit. Out here she slept so soundly she didn’t even dream, but nevertheless she still woke with stiff cheeks and a sore neck, as if she’d been clenching back tears all night. In the mornings Jo was usually gone by the time Claire came downstairs, and on the rare occasion when they did eat together, they were so mute that monks could have meditated on the table between them.

“Claire?” Jo stepped into the kitchen, and Claire blinked. “Is everything okay?”

Jo poured a cup of coffee and blew on it. Claire scowled, swimming back to the present moment. The oven buzzed again, and she slipped on a pair of padded mitts.

“I made a pudding,” she said, and opened the oven, this time remembering to avert her face from the heat.

Jo cleared space on the counter for the hot dish. “You never used to cook.”

Claire took the mitts off her hands. Her finger still looked naked to her without the yoke of her ring. “I don’t know what’s got into me. Maybe it’s all the physical work, but my appetite’s gone crazy.” She scooped two mounds of the pudding into bowls and handed one to Jo. “Everything I make here just turns out
good
. Taste it.” Claire chewed for a moment, then hesitated, her eyebrows drawn. Normally she ate her food plain no matter how bland it was, but now she reached for the cellar of gray salt, scooping into the bowl with her fingers. She sprinkled a measure over her pudding and then another and another, ignoring Jo’s puzzled look.

“Claire, what are you doing?” Claire barely heard her as she lifted the fork to her mouth. Mama had always told her that if she had a question, a pinch of salt would provide the answer, but Claire had never understood that, maybe because she’d never really salted her food. Now, however, she saw what her mother had meant. It was impossible to lie to yourself when you had a mouthful of salt, for it amplified all the flavors in your life—sour and spicy, tasty and sweet, bitter and rotten—making them too loud to ignore.

Claire thought she’d done such a clever job marrying Whit and trading in the damp earth of Salt Creek Farm for hard Turner wood. She recalled the paneled dining room in Turner House, but everything in this kitchen was different. Here there were no razor corners, no polished surfaces, only wear and tear, scratches and bangs, milky opacity. Claire took another bite of pudding and chewed five times, then five times again, mashing everything together in her mouth before swallowing, trying to ignore the cluster of worries hanging over her like overripe vine fruit—that Whit was going to try to pull Salt Creek Farm out from under their feet, that Dee was going to have the child Claire should be bearing, that one day she’d glance in the mirror and appear as faceless as the Virgin, because Jo would finally have claimed her skin. And what could Claire say to that, when Jo deserved it? After all, Jo had saved her—or tried to.

Jo’s voice broke through the running brook of her worries. “Were you by any chance out with Icicle this morning?”

Claire blinked. “No. But I need to go check on him. I might give him a run.” Jo turned her lips down, and a stab of panic flashed into Claire’s heart.
You can’t ever leave me
, Whit’s voice echoed in her ears.
Not now. Not ever.
She tried to keep her voice light. “Why, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Did you forget to latch the barn door last night? When I went out this morning to check the basins, Icicle was pacing around outside, that’s all.” Jo hesitated. “Do you think you forgot to latch the barn?”

Claire clattered the dishes together in the sink, splashing suds
across her shirt and watching the stains spread, their edges seeping out like ragged moth wings. She knew exactly what her sister was asking but not saying.

“I probably did. You know what I’m like.” Claire held her hands out to her sides, showing off the batter stains and flour smudges on her blouse. “I mean, look at me. I’m a mess. In fact, I need to go change. Then I’ll go out to Icicle.”

Upstairs, she pulled on an old T-shirt with a hole in it and a clean cable-knit sweater. She
had
latched the barn door. She was a hundred percent certain about that, just as she was positive she knew who’d opened it. She looked in the mirror and licked her lips. No makeup, hair uncombed, her cheeks windburned and plumped. These days she hardly recognized herself. Not that it mattered. She could put on a thousand disguises, she knew, but as long as Whit Turner was out there, the only thing she was ever going to be was a marked woman.

A
s Claire unlatched the barn, she saw a scatter of footprints so deliberate they could only belong to one person. Whit had most certainly been lurking around the edges of Salt Creek Farm. Claire could still feel him.

The sun had wholly risen and the day was turning mild. It was the first time Claire had skipped an Easter Mass since she’d been married, and it seemed vaguely criminal. Her sins were starting to fill her up, pressing against her ribs like a flock of caged birds desperate to get free. The only cure for that, she knew, was work. It was something Jo would have said, and Claire laughed a little, recognizing that perhaps she was a daughter of the salt after all. She fetched Icicle’s currycomb and a mane brush and started grooming him.