Family of Liars(71)

Because Bess and Penny have stood by me and will never tell, but our bond will always be stained with the blood on our hands. Our sisterhood will never recover. We will always be each other’s secret-keepers, and it is my fault that we are this way.

My darling Rosemary, she has been pushing herself for four summers to come back, worried I would cut my wrists or drown my own unworthy self, then worried I would kill myself with pills, burdened by knowledge no little kid should ever have.

She should have been riding her bike up and down the wooden walkways. She should have been developing a figure and outgrowing her stuffed lions and learning to put on makeup and reading Judy Blume books and folding down the pages on the sexual bits. She should be having crushes, on pop stars and athletes and ordinary people. She would have been starting boarding school, and I could have sent her letters and cards, tucking cash into the envelopes.

    Dearie Rosemary (I’d write),

Rehab was hard, this second time. I won’t lie. I was scared I wouldn’t make it. But I am handling things okay here in New York City.

My roommate, Deja, waits tables, and I am working behind the counter at a boulangerie on Bleecker Street. The bakery smells so good, all the time. You would love it. But the bakers themselves are very bitchy in the back room.

The front of the shop is cute and painted blue. It is like working in the sky. When I come home at Christmas I will bring a bag of croissants.

I take jewelry class on Monday nights, and we can have studio time any night of the week, so I go in there a lot of evenings and do things with PLIERS. (I like pliers.) Other nights, I go out with friends, to coffee shops that are open twenty-four hours, or for Chinese food. There are a couple people I know from North Forest here, finishing college in the city, and a couple new friends from the jewelry class. Maybe I will try ceramics, too. I did a one-day workshop and it was really messy. I think you would like it.

I think about you every day, buttercup. Here is some money so you can buy stuff without having to ask Mother. I hope the beasts of North Forest are being good to you and your tennis game is vicious. (Daddy said it’s vicious, that’s the word he used.) Anyhow, we will play next summer on the island. And swim. And generally loaf around. And you will be my favorite thing about spending time on Beechwood, and I will endeavor (most seriously) to be your favorite thing, too.

One love, two loves, a million loves

from your big sister,

Caroline Lennox Taft Sinclair





That is what I would have written her.

I can see my own letters so clearly, as if I were already living that life, as if Rosemary were really at North Forest, playing tennis and making friends. I can see them even as I sit next to Rosemary’s exhausted little ghost body now, sobbing and stroking her hair. I wrap my arms around her fragile frame and tell her I love her.

Relief floods through me, even as I weep, because I can see my own letters, and that means I can see a future beyond this island, beyond this addiction. Although I will never, ever escape what I have done, and although I might never forgive myself, and although I will never free myself of the Sinclair family, and will always want my father’s love and the place in my family it confers, and although I will never love Bess and Penny free of resentments and obligations and shared secrets and guilt, I will,

in a small way,

in a limited way,

move on.

“I want you to stop worrying,” I tell Rosemary. I breathe slowly and my crying stops.

“You always say that.” She sniffs. “You always tell me cheerful things, like Mother used to, and you want to play games and read stories, and that’s nice. But you see, I’m still so worried. I’m so tired, Carrie. I don’t know what to do.”

“I want you to rest.”

“I need to.” She takes a tissue and wipes her nose. “I don’t feel good here, even this one visit. It hurts to be here, but I’m scared to not come.”

“I am not going to kill myself,” I whisper. “I was not and I am not.”

“For real?”

“Yes. Is that what you need to hear?”

“Kind of,” she says. “But you—” She gestures around, as if there’s a bottle of pills somewhere. “You can die doing that stuff. That’s like a fact that people know.”

What can I say to reassure her? What can I say that will be true? “I have been really sick and sad,” I tell her after a minute. “Sick in lots of ways. And guilty. And ashamed and angry. I have been all these things for a very long time, and trying to numb myself out of it and forget my way out of it, burying it all as deep as I can bury it. You know what I mean?”

Rosemary nods.

“But I am telling you, now, all these feelings. So they’re not buried anymore.”

“Okay. So what?”

“What are the feelings?”

“Yah.”

“Okay. Um…I have been sad, because you died. And that still feels fresh, nearly as fresh as when it first happened. And I’ve been so angry at Pfeff and Penny, and so horrified and ashamed of what I did, I couldn’t live with myself. I’ve been punishing myself for that, and at the same time, I’ve been escaping from it all. The pills let me do both at once, I think.”

Rosemary sniffs. “That’s strange,” she says. “?’Cause you took them before. Before he died.”