The Clairvoyants(41)

We finished putting on our coats in the vestibule of Anne’s house. William wrapped his arms around me and pulled me in.

“Isn’t she something?” he said to Anne, who remained on the couch.

She gave us a wan smile. “She is that,” she said, and I had no idea what she really thought about me.

Del rode home with us. In the backseat I gave in to the effects of the wine, the cold air whipping into the back from Geoff’s cracked window. I paid little attention to the dark landscape, lost in worries about William’s past relationship with Mary Rae, and annoyed with Del.

She faced the window, her nose nearly pressed to the glass, and I tugged on her coat sleeve.

“What was that back there?”

“What do you mean?” she said. She was using a low, incredulous voice that infuriated me even more.

“That whole bring-back-Mary-Rae scene,” I said. “I mean, they did everything but light the candle.”

“You two aren’t going to have a fight now, are you?” Geoff’s voice was jolly.

Del turned back to the window, the snow-covered fields blurring beyond it.

“Why are you spending so much time with these Milton girls?”

Del began to sing then, quietly at first. It was “A Lovely Night,” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. As angry as I was, I started to laugh, and then we were both singing, and Geoff eyed us in the rearview mirror, and William ignored us, irritated, I supposed. Just then the car slid on a patch of black ice and spun, and we clutched each other, dizzy and shrieking, and I had a flash of fear that we would join the town’s list of the dead. But the car skated, smooth and untroubled, like a fish, into a small field, and Geoff quickly regained control, and the car lumbered over the grass, the frozen hillocks scraping its undercarriage, and we resumed our path, all of us silent.





17




Despite my misgivings, we continued to attend two or three dinner parties a week at Anne’s—food Del prepared from Anne’s vintage cookbooks or meals Geoff expressed fond memories of as a child in England, and that Del and I, exposed to our mother’s meager cooking skills, had never tasted before. Duck, goose, venison, lamb. Rice and plum puddings and cakes with sugary frostings. Geoff would roll joints on Anne’s antique tavern table, and the room would fill with the smoke and music, the hushed voices of the Milton girls, who did one another’s hair or flipped through issues of Glamour magazine. Preparations for the holidays included a large tree brought over in Joseph’s truck and decorated by Anne’s acolytes. There were the expected stories about holidays past with Mary Rae. William revealed no emotional connection to them. When someone told a story in which he played a part—the time Mary Rae bought him a puppy and hid it in a hatbox she decorated as a cake—he left the room, and in this way it was an unspoken acceptance that he had once dated her.

It was Del who worried me. She’d been cool to William from the beginning, barely talking to him when we were all together. At times, it felt as if she were ignoring him entirely. At first, I assumed she needed to get used to the idea that he and I were a couple. But it was odd how long it continued. They would pass each other in a room as if they didn’t see each other. One evening at Anne’s, two weeks before Christmas, we gathered for a game of bridge. I wondered how Del had learned to play. Had my grandmother somehow taught her? Or had she played the game in the hospital? Bridge was a confusing game for me. I was never good at cards, and Del knew this. When we were children she always won—gin rummy, crazy eights, hearts. I only agreed to play at Anne’s because of William. He described his parents having friends over to play when he was a child. He’d told us his mother had made a toffee apple cake for bridge nights, and he’d snuck into the kitchen to steal slices.

For bridge night at Anne’s, Del replicated the toffee apple cake. Without fanfare, she cut slices of it onto our plates. William’s surprise was genuine. He reddened, whether with pleasure or embarrassment or the rush of nostalgia, I couldn’t say.

“This is exactly the cake,” he said, almost formally, his fork in his hand. “This is simply amazing.”

Del gave him a small smile and dealt the cards. I knew I should feel grateful to my sister for being so generous, but I felt suddenly cold. A draft had reached us at the kitchen table from the terrace, but this chill I felt seemed something else. I took a sip of my coffee—coffee was always laced with brandy at Anne’s—and my hand shook. Del paused in her dealing.

“What?” she said. “What’s wrong? Did I misdeal?”

She grew confused, and everyone had to give their cards back so she could start again.

She was too smart not to know what I felt that night. She’d orchestrated things perfectly as she always did, even as teenagers when it came to boys. David Pinney with his blond hair, the way it curled around the nape of his neck. His dark eyes, so striking against the sun-bleached hair, like two agates. I smelled the chlorine from the pool on his swim trunks, and I was afraid to glance up in Anne’s kitchen, fearful I would see David Pinney standing there, his trunks dripping water onto Anne’s slate kitchen floor. I surveyed my hand of playing cards, barely comprehending what I held. The old resentment rose up, and I knew I should discount this as childish emotion, and I knew that people rarely changed. Del, no matter her mental state, was still the sister who stole my earrings—she wore them now: Jane’s earrings dangled from her own ears. Yes, I’d stolen them myself, but once they landed in my possession, they should have been mine.