Family of Liars(70)

PART EIGHT


   After





81.


SUMMER AFTER SUMMER, though I get older, Rosemary is always ten years old.

I ask her if she is lonely during the winters, when the island is empty.

“I’m just asleep or something, Carrie,” she tells me. “It’s fine. I’m cozy. Then I wake up.”

She visits me the summer I am eighteen, when I have graduated from North Forest and am headed to Vassar College. I chose Vassar because it’s only ninety minutes from New York City, the closest I could get. That year I am taking both codeine and sleeping pills during the day. I spend much of my summer asleep or stupidly numb.

She visits the summer I am nineteen, too, after my first year of college, when Penny and I both have boyfriends visiting. Penny is forcing herself into the shape my parents wish for her. A straight girl, a Sinclair, the stiff upper lip, a daughter to be proud of. She is headed to Bryn Mawr, though. An all-women’s college.

That summer Penny and I drink and forget, reveling in sex and loud music and excursions to the bars in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, where no one ever asks for ID. We ignore Bess, who responds by insinuating herself with our parents, being the hard worker with the bright smile, the noncomplainer, the athlete, the well-read dinner-table conversationalist. Rosemary sees me only now and then, that year, bribing me to read to her with potato chips she’s stolen from the Clairmont pantry.

She visits the summer after my second year of college, when at twenty years old I have left Vassar for a rehab center. My time at the center involves weeks of withdrawal and therapy and hope and support—but when I get to the island, I slip back into old habits and take any pills I can lay my hands on.

I am no credit to the family.

Rosemary visits the following summer, as well, but that year, when I am twenty-one and have stumbled through a third year of college hardly attending any classes, I spend June and July back in rehabilitation. I don’t arrive on Beechwood until August.

I get to the island a little heavier, very fragile, but sober and optimistic. I began making jewelry in the rehab center: rings and bracelets of thin bands of silver twisted around one another. I would like to learn to work with stones. Or maybe with fine metals. There are studios in New York where I can take classes.

I have a sober friend from rehab, Deja. I am quitting college and will share an apartment with her in September.

I hope dearly that I have kicked the pills for good this time.

It turns out to be true.

I see Rosemary only once that August. I wake one morning and she is sitting at the foot of my bed, eating a blackberry muffin. She has broken it into several pieces inside a yellow china bowl from downstairs.

“Hi, buttercup,” I say. “You’re up early.”

“You sleep late,” she says. “I like to get a muffin when they’re still warm.”

“You can heat it in the microwave,” I tell her. “Twenty seconds.”

“It’s not the same.”

Rosemary looks tired. Her skin is pale underneath her tan. She’s wearing a Muppets T-shirt and worn jean shorts.

“Are you okay?” I ask. “I’ve missed you. It’s good to see your freckle face.” I sit up and lean my head on her small, bony shoulder.

“I’m not really that okay,” she says. “I like coming to see you, but I’m so, so tired.”

“How come?”

“I can’t come here forever,” says Rosemary. “I mean, I want to, but it’s like—it takes a whole lot of energy.” She pokes her muffin crumbs with a finger. “My bones hurt and it’s hard to keep my eyes open.”

“I thought maybe I imagined you,” I tell her. “I thought maybe it was the pills, making me see you. But I don’t take them anymore. And you’re still here.”

She laughs. “I’m totally here.”

“Good.”

“You take way too many pills, Carrie. You used to, I mean.”

“So they tell me.”

“You have to get better,” says Rosemary. She is so small and earnest. “I can’t make you better, but I keep coming because I’m worried.”

“Is that why you come? Because you’re worried about me?”

“Um-hm.”

“I thought you came because you needed me.”

She shakes her head. “I was worried you’d be an addict and do terrible things, and you did do them.” Her face crumples and she begins to cry. “You did that one thing, first. It wasn’t what I thought you’d do. It wasn’t what I thought, at all. But then there was the cover-up and I couldn’t stop you with the drugs and I’ve been so worried,” she says, sniffling. “I can’t stop anything. I’m just a kid. But I keep coming because I can’t stop when you’re not okay.”

“You thought—you thought I would kill myself?” I say, understanding. “After you died?”

Rosemary nods. “But you didn’t. You did him instead.”

I didn’t know she knew. About Pfeff. A true Sinclair, she never said a word.

I begin to cry, as well. Because Rosemary has loved me knowing the most hateful thing about me.

Because she is dead, and not really here to love me at all.