We Were Liars(56)

“Yeah.”

Mummy gives me a hug, one of her long, concerned hugs, but I don’t speak to her about anything.

Not yet. Not for a while, maybe.

Anyway, she knows I remember.

She knew when she came to my door, I could tell.

I let her give me a scone she’s saved from breakfast and get myself some orange juice from the fridge.

I find a Sharpie and write on my hands.

Left: Be a little. Right: Kinder.

Outside, Taft and Will are goofing around in the Japanese garden. They are looking for unusual stones. I look with them. They tell me to search for glittery ones and also ones that could be arrowheads.

When Taft gives me a purple one he’s found, because he remembers I like purple rocks, I put it in my pocket.





86




Granddad and I go to Edgartown that afternoon. Bess insists on driving us, but she goes off by herself while we go shopping. I find pretty fabric shoulder bags for the twins and Granddad insists on buying me a book of fairy tales at the Edgartown bookshop.

“I see Ed’s back,” I say as we wait at the register.

“Um-hm.”

“You don’t like him.”

“Not that much.”

“But he’s here.”

“Yes.”

“With Carrie.”

“Yes, he is.” Granddad wrinkles his brow. “Now stop bothering me. Let’s go to the fudge shop,” he says. And so we do.

It is a good outing. He only calls me Mirren once.



The birthday is celebrated at suppertime with cake and presents. Taft gets hopped up on sugar and scrapes his knee falling off a big rock in the garden. I take him into the bathroom to find a Band-Aid. “Mirren used to always do my Band-Aids,” he tells me. “I mean, when I was little.”

I squeeze his arm. “Do you want me to do your Band-Aids now?”

“Shut up,” he says. “I’m ten already.”



The next day I go to Cuddledown and look under the kitchen sink.

There are sponges there, and spray cleaner that smells like lemons. Paper towels. A jug of bleach.

I sweep away the crushed glass and tangled ribbons. I fill bags with empty bottles. I vacuum crushed potato chips. I scrub the sticky floor of the kitchen. Wash the quilts.

I wipe grime from windows and put the board games in the closet and clean the garbage from the bedrooms.

I leave the furniture as Mirren liked it.

On impulse, I take a pad of sketch paper and a ballpoint from Will’s room and begin to draw. They are barely more than stick figures, but you can tell they are my Liars.

Gat, with his dramatic nose, sits cross-legged, reading a book.

Mirren wears a bikini and dances.

Johnny sports a snorkeling mask and holds a crab in one hand.

When it’s done, I stick the picture on the fridge next to the old crayon drawings of Dad, Gran, and the goldens.





87




Once upon a time there was a king who had three beautiful daughters. These daughters grew to be women, and the women had children, beautiful children, so many, many children, only something bad happened, something stupid,

criminal,

terrible,

something avoidable,

something that never should have happened,

and yet something that could, eventually, be forgiven.

The children died in a fire—all except one.

Only one was left, and she—

No, that’s not right.

The children died in a fire, all except three girls and two boys.

There were three girls and two boys left.

Cadence, Liberty, Bonnie, Taft, and Will.

And the three princesses, the mothers, they crumbled in rage and despair. They drank and shopped, starved and scrubbed and obsessed. They clung to one another in grief, forgave each other, and wept. The fathers raged, too, though they were far away; and the king, he descended into a delicate madness from which his old self only sometimes emerged.

The children, they were crazy and sad. They were racked with guilt for being alive, racked with pain in their heads and fear of ghosts, racked with nightmares and strange compulsions, punishments for being alive when the others were dead.

The princesses, the fathers, the king, and the children, they crumbled like eggshells, powdery and beautiful—for they were always beautiful. It seemed as if

as if

this tragedy marked the end of the family.

And perhaps it did.

But perhaps it did not.

They made a beautiful family. Still.

And they knew it. In fact, the mark of tragedy became, with time, a mark of glamour. A mark of mystery, and a source of fascination for those who viewed the family from afar.

“The eldest children died in a fire,” they say, the villagers of Burlington, the neighbors in Cambridge, the private-school parents of lower Manhattan and the senior citizens of Boston. “The island caught fire,” they say. “Remember some summers ago?”

The three beautiful daughters became more beautiful still in the eyes of their beholders.

And this fact was not lost upon them. Nor upon their father, even in his decline.

Yet the remaining children,

Cadence, Liberty, Bonnie, Taft, and Will,

they know that tragedy is not glamorous.