Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [55]
It had been taken six months to the day before Mary died, and just the sight of it had sent Alice into a tizzy. She tore the picture up and threw it in the trash, only to regret doing so an hour later.
There were always small reminders: she still felt a twinge every time she drove by the Liberty Mutual headquarters on Berkeley Street where Mary had worked; or at Easter, remembering the silly rabbit-shaped cake Mary used to bake each year. She often wondered who Mary might have become. What sort of life would have unfurled from out of her youthful dreams, what sort of children she and Henry would have brought into the world. It was strange to think that Alice had turned into a mother of three, while her entirely maternal sister never had the chance to bear a single child.
Daniel had always tried to steer her away from the what-ifs, which he considered only wasteful, morbid thoughts. But now he too was gone. Since seeing that newspaper article so many months earlier, Alice was haunted by memories of her sister even more than usual. Maiden Mary, the newspaper had called her—anyone who was old enough to remember that night remembered her story.
The part they didn’t know was that Alice was to blame. Sometimes she thought that carrying the knowledge of it around was a piece of her penance. Lately, as if God were emphasizing this, she had become painfully aware of the pairs of old ladies everywhere she went. In church pews and at the beauty parlor, and walking along the sidewalks of Boston, arm in arm. The men didn’t last—that was something they never told you when you were young and desperately searching for one, thinking he’d make your life all that it was supposed to be. No, in the end, it was only women; in the end, just sisters. She had her friends, but that was different. Friends kept their distance after a certain age. She couldn’t exactly invite Rita O’Shea over for a slumber party or call her at midnight with her worries.
If Mary had lived, they might be here in Maine together. If Mary had lived, Alice’s whole life might have been different.
It was almost lunchtime. She thought she might as well stay in the cottage for a while and make herself a sandwich. She went to the kitchen—her old tiny summer kitchen, which she had complained about countless times over the years, yet so preferred to all the marble and stainless steel next door. She opened up a can of tuna, draining the water into the sink. She had cleaned out the fridge a week earlier and filled it with new condiments and pickles and seltzer and Pepsi and a dozen fresh eggs. In the freezer, there were Popsicles and several leftovers from her own kitchen back home, wrapped in tinfoil. On the counter, she had lined up a bag of onions and a stack of paper plates and cups. In the coming weeks, her children and grandchildren would come through, adding their own bits and pieces, so that by the end of the summer there would be four half-eaten boxes of cereal and several almost empty bags of chips in the cupboard; in the freezer, a lone frozen waffle and a gallon of ice cream from Brigham’s with one bite left in the bottom of the drum. But the staples came from Alice.
She had once heard her grandson Christopher ask Kathleen how it happened that the cottage was always fully stocked. “Magic,” Kathleen had said, and Alice had interrupted, “Actually, there’s nothing magic about it, Chrissy. It’s called your grandmother.”
Now she pulled a small onion from the bag and a knife from the block on the counter, part of a set she had bought off the TV a couple winters ago. She began chopping.
She chopped