Beach Plum Island Page 23

  She racewalked behind Mildred along the dim hallway, Mildred’s square-heeled shoes hammering on the wood floors, and through a kitchen with dark pine cabinets. Finley’s house was a treasure trove of secrets with its stacks of magazines and papers, the photographs stuffed into drawers, the cluttered little kitchen, but Mildred’s house was devoid of personality. The counters were clear and the floors gleamed. The only pictures on the walls were landscapes in uncertain pastels. There wasn’t a family photograph in sight. The stark contrast between Finley’s house and Mildred’s made Gigi wonder if money and education led people to tuck their personal effects out of sight, the same way Mom always said that a properly dressed man tucks in his shirt, even when wearing jeans.

  They continued out the back door to a screened porch with those wicker chairs that looked comfortable but never were. Beyond the porch lay the only indication that a real person lived here: a small square yard crowded with animal statues. Around one bed of red and white flowers, Gigi counted fifteen stone rabbits in varying sizes. The ghostly white statue of a deer peered at her from behind a bush with a puzzled expression.

  A large jar of murky brown liquid sweated on a wicker side table; sticks and leaves were floating in it. Gigi stopped to peer into the jar, wondering if Mildred was raising tadpoles. She and her father had done that every summer for years.

  “My own special sun tea recipe,” Mildred said, watching Gigi. “You’ll have to try it.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Oh, but you must!” For the first time, Mildred’s stony face became animated, her skinny silver eyebrows twitching like the threads that held them in place were coming loose. “My sun tea is famous. Everyone at UNH used to absolutely beg me to bring it to parties. The trick is to add lemongrass and mint straight from the garden.” She pointed to the twigs and leaves. “Some say bacteria grows in sun tea, but I’m seventy years old this month and healthier than most ten-year-olds. You’ll love it.”

  “I’m not really thirsty.”

  “Piffle. Look at you! Your face looks like a tomato and you’re all sweaty, like you ran all the way here from Newburyport. It’s important to rehydrate.” Mildred ladled tea into a tall clear plastic glass. She handed it to Gigi on a small enamel tray with elephants on it. On the tray next to the glass was a silver bowl of brown sugar cubes with a tiny pair of tongs.

  Gigi thought about protesting again, but what would be the point? Mildred was clearly not going to give up. She dropped a couple of sugar cubes into the tea and sat down on the wicker chair across the narrow porch from Mildred’s wicker rocker. Mildred must have been sitting out here when Gigi knocked, reading the novel on the table. The book had a woman in a red velvet gown on the cover, her shoulders bare.

  Mildred sat down in the rocker and watched as Gigi took a tentative sip. Gigi’s nose filled at once with mint and her teeth ached from the sugar.

  “It’s not bad,” Gigi said, surprised that a liquid resembling muddy pond water was drinkable.

  Mildred looked satisfied. “Nothing gives you energy like my special sun tea.”

  Mildred asked Gigi about her trip and seemed only mildly surprised to hear that Gigi had found Mildred’s address on the envelope, then used an app on her phone to get here. Maybe being a college professor had made Mildred more tech savvy than most adults. Most parents and teachers, including her own mom, acted like the devil created the Internet to lure unsuspecting children into unmarked vans and basements.

  Gigi offered Mildred a compliment about the porch. She meant it—the porch was clean and carpeted in fake green grass, so it felt like being outside—but she did wonder why Mildred didn’t have a ceiling fan out here. Her T-shirt was glued to her back and she kept having to blink sweat out of her eyes.

  Mildred nodded. “Yes, I’ve always loved this porch. It’s like I’m in Vermont. My late husband and I used to have a house in Middlebury when he taught at the college there. This feels just as remote, yet I’m only a few blocks from downtown Portsmouth. Well, you saw that for yourself, walking from the trolley stop. Once we bought this house, I never needed to go anywhere else. That’s how much I love it here.”

  This remark ticked Gigi off. “Is that why you didn’t come to Dad’s funeral? Because your porch is so perfect?”

  Mildred’s brown eyes gleamed pebble-shiny. “I was unable to attend.”

  Gigi wondered how true this was. As the woman had already told her, she was healthier than most kids. And Portsmouth wasn’t far. Maybe she didn’t drive, but if Gigi could travel by bus, so could Mildred. Again, it irked her that Mildred didn’t at least say she was sorry about Dad dying.

  “Why couldn’t you come?” Gigi asked. “Were you in the hospital or something? Traveling through Europe? I hope you had a pretty freakin’ good reason.”

  “There is no need to take that fresh attitude with me,” Mildred said sharply. “Especially when you’re a guest in my home, enjoying my tea and hospitality.”

  Your muddy water and sweaty-ass porch, Gigi thought, but clamped her lips shut.

  Mildred set her glass down on the table and folded her hands across the lap of her flowered cotton skirt. Her bare legs were boiled-egg white and her feet were securely encased in sandals with straps as wide as seat belts. “If you must know, funerals depress me. I make it a point to avoid them.”

  “Funerals depress everybody,” Gigi argued. “You should go anyway. Think how sad my dad would have been, if he’d known you skipped out on him.”

  “He didn’t know. That’s the point. It doesn’t matter to the one in the ground.”

  “But it matters to everyone else! Even my half sisters showed up, and Dad walked out on them.”

  “A painful chapter in their lives, I’m sure,” Mildred said, bobbing her long face in a way that reminded Gigi of a horse hanging its head over the paddock fence. “Still. He was their father. It was mandatory for them to appear at his service. We were only cousins. And we weren’t close.”

  “Why not?” Gigi set down her glass, her fingers numb from the cold. Meanwhile, the rest of her overheated body felt like it was puddling into the fake-grass carpet on the porch. “You were family and you lived in the same town.”

  “I was much older. Are you close to your cousins?” Mildred’s tone was politely conversational rather than curious.

  Gigi shrugged. “No, but that’s because I don’t have any nearby. I only have one uncle, and his son goes to a boarding school in a different state. I don’t see him very much.” She felt alone, as she always did, saying this. Then she remembered: “But I’m getting to know my nephews now.”

  Mildred frowned. “Nephews?” She said it like a foreign word.

  “Ava’s kids. Evan and Sam. Your cousin’s children,” Gigi added, feeling mean-spirited. “I guess you make it a point to avoid them, too.”

  Again, Mildred didn’t appear to react emotionally to this jab. Not even a twitch around her mouth. “Of course. I met the boys once, long ago, before your father met your mother.” She sat up even straighter. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I also send them birthday cards every year with a check enclosed. Unlike you, however, those boys don’t know how to send a thank-you note.”

  Probably because Ava didn’t hound them to do it the way her own mother did her, Gigi thought, glancing around the porch. There was no evidence of anyone living here other than Mildred. She couldn’t understand why this woman, who didn’t live far away and appeared sane, had wanted nothing to do with her father and his families. “Do you have kids?”

  Mildred shifted in her chair. “We had a daughter, but she died of breast cancer fifteen years ago after a long struggle. She chose not to have a family. My son was killed in a car accident the day he graduated from high school.” She lifted her square chin. “My husband was a good man. We were married for thirty-eight years when he died. Now there’s just me, waiting to join them.”


  Gigi’s stomach twisted at the sight of Mildred’s face, where the weight of loss was pulling down the corners of the old woman’s mouth and eyes, tightening her sagging skin to reveal the outline of her narrow skull. “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to feel sorry. It was all a long time ago.” Mildred crossed and uncrossed her feet. They looked like they might hurt to walk on, those feet, the toes gnarled and round like acorn caps in her sandals. “Besides, I’ve had as much happiness as anyone deserves. A career I loved, good friends.” She picked up her tea and stared into the swampy liquid without drinking it. “When you get to be my age, you realize that life is not about being happy.”

  Gigi shuddered a little. “I get why you don’t like funerals.”

  Mildred smiled. “Thank you,” she said briskly. “But enough of that. Tell me about you. You’d be what now, a sophomore?”

  Reluctantly, Gigi told Cousin Mildred the usual boring things about school, making up friends and favorite subjects she didn’t have. Adults loved to hear those things. “Right now I’m working at my sister Ava’s pottery studio,” she added. “I sing in a band with her kids, too.” Admitting she was a singer—something Gigi rarely told anyone—felt risky even here on this hidden porch.

  “That all sounds wonderful, dear,” Mildred said. Her face had plumped up again, the sorrow tucked back into its rightful place under her tongue and rib cage, the skin as soft looking as those apple-head dolls the art teacher taught Gigi’s class to make last fall. They had put the apples in a shoe box in the closet to wither, then pinched terrifyingly human features into the fragrant skin. “But I don’t suppose you came here to talk about school. There must be another reason you made this long trip by yourself.”

  “Yes.” Gigi bit her lip, wondering how to proceed. Best not to ask about the baby right away and put her off, she decided. “I wanted to know more about my dad when he was young,” she said. “You say you weren’t close, but did you see him a lot, growing up?”

  Mildred nodded. “I occasionally babysat for him. Adorable boy. Sweet and well behaved.”

  “What about when he was a teenager?”

  “I can’t say.” The old woman frowned, the lines deep grooves between her eyes. “I had moved away by the time your father was in high school. I went to college, got married. I only came home on holidays. From what I remember, though, your father was hardworking, always had at least one job as soon as he was old enough to shovel snow. His parents were so certain that he’d follow me to the university. It broke their hearts when he got married instead.”

  “What about Dad’s first wife, Suzanne? Do you remember her, too?”

  “Of course. Beautiful girl. Shy and well liked, I think, despite her father.”

  “What was wrong with Suzanne’s father?”

  Mildred plucked at a thread on the seam of her skirt, wriggled it out, snapped it between her fingernails. “Oh, you know. Thought he was better than God because he had more money than most. Owned the biggest house on the Common. They didn’t want Suzanne near our kind. We were the wrong side of the tracks. Not that our family would have tolerated hers, either. Suzanne’s parents had money, but that didn’t make up for them being French-Canadians in the eyes of most people. The French were mostly shunned. Children were banned from speaking French in Maine and the Ku Klux Klan even held rallies against the French Catholics in the nineteen twenties. I know that must seem like forever ago to you. But the point is, neither family wanted anything to do with the other.”

  Gigi hadn’t known any of this. Why would anyone care if somebody was French-Canadian, especially if both her dad’s family and Suzanne’s were Catholic?

  It all sounded like that Romeo and Juliet play they’d read in freshman English class, except those kids had been stupid enough to off themselves. At least Dad and Suzanne had defied everybody and run away together in the end. Somehow, even knowing how things eventually turned out, this thought comforted her.

  “Tell me what you really want to know,” Mildred said. “I don’t have all day. I’ve got a luncheon at the senior center. The food is subpar, green beans limp as noodles and meat like old shoes. A nutritionist’s nightmare. Most of the people are deaf, too. But they expect me. Besides, I’ve paid ahead for the meal. No refunds, you know.”

  The sun was nearly straight overhead, casting slatted shadows through the blinds over the porch windows. Gigi’s head had started to ache from the heat. “I want to know about Dad’s baby,” she said. “The one he had with Suzanne when they were teenagers.”

  Mildred twisted her crooked fingers against the fabric of her skirt. “Why would you ask about an ugly rumor like that?”

  “It wasn’t a rumor!” Gigi was mad enough to spit. Why did grown-ups always act like kids couldn’t possibly know the truth about them? “My dad told me to my face.”

  The old woman’s skin had paled to the same bleached white as her legs. “Still, there’s no reason for you and me to discuss it. That was a private matter, a secret meant to be taken to the grave.”

  “Taken by who?”

  “Whom,” Mildred corrected automatically. “By both of them. Suzanne and your father.”

  “Suzanne, maybe,” Gigi acknowledged. “But Dad was sick of keeping it a secret. That’s why he told Mom and me. And Ava, too,” she added. “He asked Ava and me to find the baby.”

  “Why would he do that?” Mildred sounded bewildered. “What would be the point? That baby would be a man now, if he’s even still alive. Your father must have been addled, talking rubbish like that to you.”

  “My dad was not addled. Only sick and dying.”

  “Same thing,” Mildred muttered.

  “Screw you!” Gigi said, then put a hand to her mouth, as if there were some way to pick up the shards of those words and swallow them. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But I hate how everybody always thinks my dad was nuts or hallucinating on drugs or something. Dad knew where he was. He knew who we were. And he also knew he was dying. That’s why he didn’t want any more secrets.”

  “I’m the one who should apologize.” Mildred folded her napkin, then opened it and refolded it again, pressing the creases straight with her fingers. “I should not have spoken disrespectfully of your father. It’s just that this is a painful subject for our family, and I haven’t had to remember it in a long time.”

  “So Dad never talked to you about what happened?”

  “Not until many years later. I wasn’t living in town, you see. Bob and I saw each other only on holidays with our parents. Never alone. I was already married, working on my master’s degree in New Hampshire, by the time Bob and Suzanne were dating. I didn’t hear anything about the baby until I went home one Christmas several years after they were married. They’d already had the two girls before your father even knew about the boy’s existence, according to my mother. Suzanne had kept it a secret from everyone. That’s the way things were then.” Mildred sighed. “Such a shame, really, two bright kids getting themselves into trouble like that in high school and ruining their lives. Bob and Suzanne should have known better.”

  “They were in love!”

  “They still should have had sense enough to restrain themselves,” Mildred said. “Love is like a drug. You have to just say no.”

  Gigi nearly laughed at the phrase she’d heard a zillion times about drugs. But then she thought about the one time she’d felt like she was in love with that guy who’d dropped out of UMass to work at the mini-mart. He was funny and kind, a stoner with bleached hair who told everyone he was saving money to go to California and surf.

  She could barely breathe around him. Gigi wasn’t brave like the other girls in town, coming up with excuses to lean over the counter to see his tattoos up close, tossing their hair and practically prancing in front of him like wild ponies. But she made up excuses to go to the corner store to get milk or eggs or whatever for
Mom, just to stare at that boy’s thick white hair and imagine how it would feel, silky as water in your fingers. She wasn’t actually in love. She knew that much. But being around that guy made her imagine what love felt like: like someone else was controlling your body, jerking you around like a puppet on strings while your belly and thighs felt like they were on fire.

  Mildred was still talking. “If only Suzanne hadn’t gotten pregnant, they might have just gone to prom and broken up after a few years like they were supposed to.”

  Gigi flushed, imagining her father as a boy the same age as the one in the corner store, and Suzanne as a ponytailed girl with her dark tilted eyes laughing up at him. But this was the moment she had been waiting for, and she seized it. “What happened to the baby?”

  “How should I know? Suzanne put it up for adoption, didn’t she? I’d heard there were some issues with the baby’s health, but I never saw the poor thing.”

  “The baby was born blind,” Gigi said. “Peter. That was his name. Suzanne didn’t want to give him up, but they made her do it. She gave him to her aunt Finley.”

  “Finley?” Mildred’s eyes popped wide open. The whites around her brown eyes were yellow and streaked red. “Are you certain?”

  “Yes. Ava and Elaine and I went up to see her. Why not Finley?”

  Mildred shuddered a little. “She lived in a different town, but I saw Finley a few times early on, when our families were forced together during holiday dinners and such. Finley wasn’t like most women. Never married, seldom socialized. She wore pants like a man, even flannel shirts and boots. I’m shocked to hear Suzanne thought that would be an appropriate home for a child, though I suppose she wasn’t in any position to be choosy.”

  “Finley was trying to do what she could to help Suzanne, which is more than what most people did,” Gigi said flatly, feeling suddenly defensive on Finley’s behalf. “Anyway, Finley had to give the baby up, too, and then somebody else adopted him.”