The Sweetness of Salt(59)

What was he staring at so intently, I wondered. And why was he in here all alone? Still shivering, I slid into the very last pew and hugged my arms against my chest. For a while, I just stared at the back of the man’s collar, at the streaks the rain had made along the slippery material. Anything to block out the impossible fact that twenty years ago my father had deafened my mother. Anything to prevent the impossible task of trying to understand how, even as a little girl, I had never completely believed her explanation about why she wore a hearing aid. Trying to comprehend all of it was like being in the middle of some vast vortex.

The man in the front row stood up. Walking slowly toward the marble woman, he pulled something from the pocket of his coat, placed it carefully on the flat pedestal where she stood, and then turned back around. Pulling a Red Sox baseball cap from his jacket, he adjusted it on top of his head, moved slowly toward a side door near the front, and disappeared.

When I was sure he was gone, I walked slowly toward the marble statue. My pants were as heavy as plaster, but it was the shivering that made it difficult to walk. Up close, I could see that the woman was holding a little boy. His feet were also bare and his tiny marble curls clustered gently around his face. I looked down at the base of the statue.

There, in a neat row, was a single line of perfectly white stones.

Hundreds of them.





chapter


44


Sophie draped another warm towel over my head and rubbed. I closed my eyes, inhaling the blended scent of lemony fabric softener and paint primer, which seemed to infuse everything now. It was a strange combination—sweet and acrid at the same time. Sophie’s fingers gripped my head and rubbed down, over and over again, until finally I pulled away.

“What?” she asked. “Too hard?”

“I can do it myself,” I answered, grabbing the towel from her hands. “I’m not a baby, you know.”

Sophie plopped down on the other side of the bed. “I’m sorry,” she said miserably. “I can’t do anything right today, can I?”


She was still in her own wet clothes, despite insisting, when I finally returned, that I get into a hot shower. I hadn’t realized how cold I actually was until I stood naked under the hot water. My fingers were blue. The tips of my ears were so cold, the water felt as if it was scalding them. Now, I sat on the edge of her bed, wrapped in her big green bathrobe. My feet were encased in a pair of red and blue knitted slipper socks that came up to my knees. A cup of chamomile tea was resting on top of her dresser, which, for some reason, looked oddly bare, as if something was missing.

Sophie watched me rub my hair for a moment more without saying anything. Then she brought her fingers to her forehead, kneading the skin gently. The sleeves of her thin T-shirt clung to the sides of her arms and the knotted ends of her red bandanna dripped against the top of her overalls. “God,” she said again. “I knew I shouldn’t have…”

I stopped drying my hair. “Shouldn’t have what? Told me about Dad? Told me the truth?” Sophie looked at me quizzically, as if trying to understand my tone of voice. “Because at the very least, Sophie, that is what you should have done. A long time ago. What you shouldn’t have done—for the last twenty years—was keep it a secret.” I let the towel fall into my lap. “I mean, I can almost—almost—understand the whole code of silence about Maggie, since I never even met her. But Mom? Mom, Sophie? I would have never kept something like that from you!”

“How do you know?” Sophie’s eyes flashed. “You’ve never been in the same situation—not even remotely. In all the years you’ve grown up with Mom and Dad, I bet you’ve never heard them say one negative thing to each other, let alone witnessed a scene like that. So don’t tell me what you would or wouldn’t have done. You don’t have the faintest f*cking idea what you would have done!”

“Yes, I do!” I yelled. “I know exactly what I would have done! And you know why? Because I know what the word loyal means. And I know that there is nothing more important in the world than being loyal to your family—no matter what!”

Sophie’s lower lip trembled as she stared at me for a long moment. “Oh, Jules,” she said, sinking down against the bed. She buried her face in her hands, rocking back and forth slowly. Then she lifted her head. “He used to say the exact same thing to me.”

I stared at her. “What’re you talking about? Who did?”

“Dad,” she said sadly. “He used to give me the whole loyalty routine too. ‘Nothing is more important than being loyal to the family.’” She stood up and began to pace around the room. “That’s how he convinced me never to talk about Maggie. Or Mom. Or even me.” She looked at me. “Do you know where I went that summer after I graduated from high school?”

My brain started to race. That was the summer I won the Acahela Summer Camp Spelling Bee and Sophie had freaked out, throwing my trophy down the hall. A few days later, she had moved to Portland, where she was going to start classes at the University of Maine that fall.

“You went to Maine,” I said. “For school.”

“I didn’t go to Maine!” Sophie’s eyes were huge. “I went to a f*cking psychiatric hospital in New Jersey, Julia! For four weeks!”