Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [54]
Alice found him revolting. He didn’t know what he was talking about, and it was wicked of him to pick on Mary of all people. Mary, who would never hurt a fly.
Alice thought she’d try to get him onto a different topic, and so she said, “Hey, Pop, what do you think about the Red Sox? Are they going to make it to the Series this year?” She had no clue about the Red Sox, they all knew that. But it was something to say and she felt the need to protect her sister.
“You shut up,” he slurred, fully worked up now. “Mary, you used to be the good one. Now look at you. Ever since you met that man, you’re a different girl. Too big for your britches. And for what? Someone like that—he’s never going to marry a girl like you.”
Though Alice had been thinking the same thing a moment earlier, she was livid. Of course he was going to marry her. Henry was going to save them both. Maybe that’s what made their father so mad.
“My daughter turned down by a cripple,” he said with a cruel laugh, and Alice imagined socking him clear across the jaw.
She looked at her mother, but she just sat there, silent. There was no telling what he might do to her when he got like this, or to any of them for that matter. Their mother had never once come to their defense, even when they were small.
“He will marry her,” Alice said defiantly. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He rose from his chair, standing slowly, coming toward her. She vowed not to move, but at the last second, as Mary screeched, Alice got up and ran to the bedroom, with her sister close behind. He chased them up the stairs, grabbing hold of Mary’s skirt for an instant before she managed to pull away. Alice slammed the door right in his terrible face and stood holding it closed until she heard him slink off.
“He’s a fool,” she told Mary, who was crying hard now.
“Oh, come sit by me.” Her sister sat beside her on the bed, putting her head in Alice’s lap. “It will all work out, you’ll see,” Alice said, stroking her brown hair.
She was trying to sound certain, but she couldn’t sleep that night for wondering what would happen next. Three weeks later, she would know for sure. But by then Mary was gone.
Alice folded the towels one by one, filling a plastic laundry basket to its brim. She had hoped that coming up to Maine would help her stop thinking about her sister, but she realized now how foolish that had been. Maine was for quiet contemplation, Daniel had always said. Or, in her case, just plain stewing.
She carried the basket on her hip like a toddler, out through the house’s screen porch and over to the cottage. She saw a cardinal swoop down from one of the pine trees and land on a bush by the grassy patch where they parked the cars, since there was no driveway. Daniel had fancied himself an amateur bird-watcher, and had always given them silly names. She imagined what he might have called this one: Miss Scarlet, maybe.
There was a ceramic plaque on the cottage door that read Céad Mile Fáilte. “A hundred thousand welcomes.” She and Daniel had gotten it on a trip to Dublin probably thirty-five years earlier. For some time, it had hung on the front door of their house in Canton, and then she tired of it, and so, like many other posessions with which she couldn’t quite part, she brought it to Maine.
Alice unlocked the door and took in the familiar musty scent. She went to the bathroom linen closet, piling the towels one on top of the other.
So much of her life had been defined by the loss of her sister. Daniel said it was the reason for her drinking when the kids were small. For her insomnia, her moods. She told him she didn’t know if all that was true—he had never known her before Mary’s death, so how could he be so sure?
For years at a time, Alice could go along fine, not dwelling on it, until something came along again to open up the wound. This year it had been that story in The Boston Globe. Two years ago, Alice was sorting through a box that had once contained Patrick’s ice skates and was now full of papers and photographs.