Seeking Carolina. Terri-Lynne Defino
Читать онлайн книгу.
She remembered the cold. She remembered hiccupping in the silence, and being held in strong, trusted arms. The clarity of that moment remained. Johanna never doubted the veracity. Eyes closed, she pulled his image out of baby memory. Daddy. Johanna was certain she remembered him bigger and more handsome than he actually was. “He loved us, Nina. He loved us so much.”
“Of course he did. So did Mom. They couldn’t help what they were. Even today, treating mental illness is such a crapshoot. Can you imagine what it was like for them?”
“Especially when they were separated. When they lost custody of us.”
“And then again with Emma and Julietta.” Nina sighed. “At least we didn’t know we were desperately poor and squatting in an abandoned farmhouse. We ate. We were mostly warm.”
“And we were constantly left all alone and unsupervised for days on end. Every child’s dream.”
“While they hunted, or picked through dumpsters. I believe nowadays they’d be called freegans.”
Both sisters laughed. Gallows humor had its merits.
“At least we had a home,” Nina said. “Jules and Emma didn’t.”
“Mom and Dad were pretty deep into the crazy by then.”
“Jo, that’s unkind.”
“Oh, come on, it’s true. I don’t have to pretend with you, do I?”
“No. You don’t.” Nina settled. “How did we all escape it, whatever genes made them…you know…”
“Crazy?”
“Mentally ill.”
“Same thing.” Johanna answered. “Maybe just stupid luck.”
“It does seem that way. I still worry a little about Julietta, but I don’t think she’s like they were. She’s just Julietta.”
Johanna stroked her sister’s hair. None of them had ever doubted the extraordinary love affair between their parents. It was all in the letter Gram kept in her jewelry box. She told them the story as if it were a movie script, a dark comedy, or a tragedy of love blooming in a mental facility and culminating in a high-speed chase that left their father dead. But the story never included their mother dying too, only vanishing so completely, she might as well have.
“Do you think she’s dead?”
Johanna opened her mouth to answer, and discovered it was she who had asked the question.
“I have no idea.”
“Do you wonder? Or have you stopped?”
Nina turned onto her side again. Her brow furrowed. “It’s like the nightmares,” she said, “we all have them, and we all wonder. How can we not? She’s our mother.”
* * * *
My girls, look at them sleep. Like babies, in one another’s arms. They whisper truths and hide them. They lay bare their souls and conceal them. They console and they hurt. Words are ever like that, never quite saying what is meant. Golden seraph. Wild sylph. Reasons one and two I wish for the locket, for the wish inside, and to have back my painful life.
Chapter 3
Ten Lords a’Leaping
More snow. Bitterly’s record accumulation was already almost met, and it wasn’t even Christmas. Johanna stood at the big front window, watching the snowflakes fall and doubting she would see New Jersey any time before the spring thaw. Though she hadn’t told her sisters yet, she closed for the season after getting the call about Gram. Christmas would have helped line the coffers of her slow season—tourists loved Cape May during the holidays almost as much as they did during the summer—but business was always slow between New Year’s and Valentine’s Day, and didn’t really get good again until Easter. She had been tempted, but never closed for the winter. It scared her a little, having no income, but Thanksgiving was profitable enough, if lonely. Watching the recorded Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade while eating holiday-in-a-container from the gourmet health-food shop wasn’t as much fun without her sisters’ snide commentary. Hosts whose hair never moved. Obviously lip-synched Broadway extravaganzas. This form of holiday-bashing was one of their favorite traditions of the season for as long as she could remember.
Her smile faded, but did not vanish. She had only just turned thirty their last Christmas together. Poppy died the summer prior and Gram could not face the holidays without all her girls. Even then, Johanna had been slacking on her visits home, but she returned to Bitterly and the melancholy-from-all-directions that permeated every visit. At least she had managed to avoid Charlie and his wife and kids and the newborns she had met briefly at Poppy’s funeral.
And now he was finally free.
The thought came unbidden, warming her from tips to toes. Of all her reasons for avoiding Bitterly, he was no longer one of them.
He’s still got it bad for you.
Nina’s tease whispered between her ears. There was a time Johanna had been confident, even smug, about how bad he had it for her. A whole summer of just the two of them exploring the woods and one another. Over the years, she let herself daydream they hadn’t stopped at exploring, that instead of prolonging the exquisite agony of waiting, they’d consumed one another in a teenage blaze of passionate glory. But those fantasies always ended up with her pregnant instead of Gina, of being stuck in Bitterly when every dream she ever had was to escape it, to become someone new, someone who was not even related to the little girl who’d set her life on fire, and been forced to watch it burn.
Johanna darted into the kitchen and grabbed the old, corded phone off the wall. Dialed. It rang once, twice. Emma picked up on the third ring.
“I want to do Christmas here,” she said before her sister finished saying hello.
“Jo?”
“Yes, it’s me. What do you think? You do the turkey. Nina and Jules will do the sides. I’ll do all the baking. Your boys can help, if they want.”
“So you’re really staying?”
“Yes, I’m really staying. Say yes. Please?”
Emma sniffed. Her voice cracked. “On one condition.”
“Name it.”
“I want to make lasagna, too.”
Johanna laughed, grateful her shaking hands did not show through the phone. “Done. Do you need to talk it over with Mike or anything? I know his parents are still nearby. His brother.”
“We do Christmas Eve with them. I actually assumed we’d all be here at my house this Christmas. But Gram’s is better, much bigger, and it will feel…right.”
“Fabulous. I’ll tell Nina and Julietta when they get back from shopping.”
“Shopping? For…?”
“A new outfit. Julietta has a date with Efan…”
* * * *
Fifteen minutes later, Johanna hung up the phone, buoyed by the gossip and planning for Christmas dinner. The heights and depths of her emotions in a single morning exhausted her in the same way dancing all night would. She didn’t know how much she could take before collapsing.
Already the idea of baking pies and breads and cakes and cookies flew through her head like recipes being born. Johanna would fill them all so full of dessert they wouldn’t be able to look at another carb for a decade. She imagined Ian and Henry and Gio, flour on their faces and batter on their fingers, baking with her. She would teach them how to mix the dough for butter cookies, and how important it was to work on a cold surface. As she imagined her little nephews piping icing onto perfect star and Christmas tree shapes, the number of children gathered around the baking counter multiplied.
Johanna