Chapter Twenty
twenty
MAY 1990
RENNIE woke in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. She knew if she made a little bit of noise, Ada would wake up and offer to make them hot chocolate or have some snacks. Ada was a bad sleeper too, but mostly because she was sensitive to noise. Rennie felt kind of awful waking her up on purpose.
Sometimes when she was little, she’d hear the wind pick up around the house and shriek as she was falling asleep. It sounded like people screaming. No one else ever heard it, though. One time, she dreamed that she looked out the window and saw a man with a beard standing in the garden. He was dressed in a suit and looking up at her, though she wasn’t sure exactly how she knew that, considering his face was gone. Out of the socket where one of his eyes should have been, a perfect, horrifying rose bloomed, the petals unfurling and then withering as she watched. It had terrified her for months.
Sometimes she couldn’t remember what she dreamed about at all. She just woke up feeling like she was breathing funny. She could never describe it to other people because it didn’t make sense to her, either. Instead, every night she aimed to push sleep off for as long as possible. She put on one-person skits in her room, cast herself in all kinds of scenarios, and created costumes out of what she found in her closet. Sometimes she’d slip jewelry from Mā’s vanity to try on at night.
Tonight, she settled on her bed in front of the small round mirror on her nightstand and clasped together a long pearl necklace she had borrowed from her mother’s drawer. She held her hair up and smiled softly at her own reflection, then glanced absentmindedly out the window. Two figures sat in the garden.
What were the twins doing out there this late? As Rennie peered closer, she realized that it wasn’t Lucille out in the garden with Ada. It was Sophie. Rennie craned her neck toward the window, her fingers fiddling with the necklace as she peered down at them.
They were talking. She saw Ada lean close to Sophie and—
Rennie went perfectly still. Had Ada just kissed Sophie’s cheek? She teetered over the edge of her bed, trying to get a better look.
Another moment passed, and Ada was walking back toward the house. She looked up for a moment, and her eyes met Rennie’s. Rennie gasped and ducked, hurrying to switch off the light. She lost her balance and pitched forward off the bed, putting her hands out to break her fall. Her fingers snagged on the long necklace, and only when she toppled forward, landing hard on her knees, feeling the sharp pain throbbing down her legs, did she realize she was surrounded by scattered pearls.
“Oh, shit.”
She sat there for a few moments in silence. She heard Ada’s footsteps on the stairs and in the hall, pausing outside Rennie’s room. Rennie stayed hunched on the ground until Ada walked away.
Rennie let out the breath she was holding. She rose to the balls of her feet and scooped up the pearls in the darkness, trying to slip them back onto the string. But it was no use: the holes were too small and the chain was torn from the clasp. She stuffed what was left of the necklace into a drawer.
Maybe Mā wouldn’t notice it was gone, she thought ruefully as she climbed back onto her bed. She wrapped her blankets tight around her and tried again to sleep.
LUCILLE knew she was sometimes difficult. Stubborn and judgmental, too. Even her own mother said so. Lucille was just honest. Sometimes she knew what Ada was thinking and she would say it for her, because she knew Ada didn’t want to say it herself. Lucille would do anything for the people she cared about. Especially for her twin sister.
But something was going on with Ada and Sophie. A strange tension had settled between the two of them, like they were fighting. Over what, Lucille had no clue. They no longer looked each other in the eye. Her sister had always been the lighter sleeper between the two of them, but now she was going to bed later and later. Lucille had had to nudge her awake in the mornings for the last days of school.
Ada also seemed nervous around their parents. Lucille was, too, to an extent. Before her parents left for Cannes, she’d tried asking her mother what was going on with Dad, and Mā had been short with her. “We’re just figuring out what to do in France,” she said curtly, and turned in a way that signaled to Lucille she was done with the conversation. Was that marriage? At a certain point their parents seemed to get so sick of each other that there wasn’t anything they couldn’t fight about. She wanted to talk to Dad about it. She missed him. They no longer spent afternoons together in the library. He always came home late and seemed on edge and distracted. He’d become too busy for his family, and that annoyed her.
She also needed to figure out what Ada and Sophie were fighting about. Late at night, after Rennie’s birthday, she’d come downstairs to sneak some birthday cake and heard something coming from the library. Ada hadn’t been in her room. Lucille had checked. She slotted her body next to the hinge of the door and heard Ada and Sophie talking and laughing.
She stepped closer. A split second later, she backed away, a layer of ice forming inside her. They weren’t fighting. They weren’t speaking to each other in front of Lucille because they wanted to talk, just the two of them. To tell each other things they didn’t want her to know. All at once it made sense. Their strange glances. Their silences. In the hallway, Lucille’s limbs became leaden. She almost wanted to barge in so Ada could see the hurt in her eyes and crumble and apologize, like she always did, sweet as Ada was. But Lucille stayed there. After a moment more she turned around and headed back up the stairs.
Lucille was no longer her sister’s confidante. Sophie was.
Lucille spent the night strategizing. She was going to be precise about this. She wasn’t going to lash out. She would let silences linger and refuse to talk over them. She would wait for Ada to confess.
Instead, infuriatingly, over the past month, Lucille watched her sister slip away from her. When Ada and Sophie exchanged glances over something Dad said at the dinner table, a bitter fury curled at the pit of her stomach and the rice felt like glue in her mouth.
During the second to last week of junior year, when they got let out of school that Friday, they all got ice cream to celebrate. But that night, Lucille heard hushed voices in the hallway. She peeked outside her room and saw headlights diminish from the driveway.
Ada’s door was open, and she wasn’t in her room.
Lucille had been the one who first invited Sophie to play with them as kids. Who was the gardener’s daughter, now, to try to break them apart? To exclude Lucille?
Lucille paced around the house. She went downstairs to Sophie and Elaine’s room. It was empty. She marched back to her room and sat on her bed. An hour later, she heard the car pull into the driveway.
She asked her sister about it the next morning, when they were making breakfast. Sophie had already gone to the library. Ada just shrugged. “Sophie and I couldn’t sleep. So she went for a drive and I went with.”
“You didn’t ask me?” Lucille had said. “What’s going on between you two?”
And then her sister stopped buttering her toast. She was going to apologize now, Lucille thought. She would tell her everything. “You were asleep,” Ada said. And then a pause. “You and I don’t have to do everything together, you know.”
Lucille’s face grew hot. She retreated into her room and felt like a scolded child.
ADA didn’t see Sophie much during the day because of Sophie’s job, so at first it was nothing more than pressed flowers tucked between pages. It was almost as if they saved their thoughts for each other, carefully compressing them in the pages of their favorite books. Ada would wait until after dinner to go into the library, and as she slipped through the door, she’d thrill at the feel of Sophie’s gaze on her back.
Today, she reached for the copy of The Great Gatsby , its blue spine sticking out slightly on the shelf. A sprig of lavender fell out when she opened it. Ada searched for a note, but there was none. Back in the kitchen, where Sophie, Rennie, and Lucille were talking over bowls of ice cream, Sophie slid her a secretive smile that slipped away as soon as Lucille looked over. Ada turned and went upstairs, holding the book. She looked at it for a long time in her room, trying to figure out what it meant. In the morning, she put it back.
“You’re being kind of weird these days,” Lucille said. She sat on the floor of Ada’s room while she was taking in a shimmery satin slip dress that she’d bought for her party. “Why aren’t you and Sophie talking?”
Ada shrugged.
“Are you guys fighting? I could talk to her.” Lucille’s finger slipped and she let out a hiss of pain. “Ow.” She sucked on her thumb and shook it out.
“It’s nothing.” Ada usually told her sister everything, but she wanted this for herself.
“Fine,” Lucille said tersely. She gathered up her dress and thread and went back into her own room.
The weekdays passed; the flowers were secret messages, and it was Ada’s job to decode them. She’d deduced that the pale pink daisies symbolized joy, lavender a sense of calm, bright red poppies a sort of anxiety. They were always tucked between the first page and the inside cover, so she couldn’t miss them.
She kept thinking about the time she kissed Sophie’s cheek. She kept waiting for Sophie to make a move, but she didn’t. At school it was so simple. Boys asked girls out to prom with elaborate posters and passed notes scrawled on binder paper. They made out against lockers and in front of classrooms before the bell rang for everyone to see.
In the mornings before school, Sophie helped her dad out in the garden. She’d been doing it for years; working alongside him as he transplanted a new species of roses, or constructed a trellis for the bougainvillea, or clipped hedges around the stone terrace. Sophie was particularly deft in taking care of the jasmine, which was best tended to late at night. Josiah always talked about it at dinner, praising his daughter easily. Sophie tried to suppress her smile. After the hottest mornings she spent in the garden, she’d come in for a glass of iced water with her cheeks flushed and damp, her tank top stretched tight against her collarbones and chest. Ada would watch her tip the glass back, a strange sort of anxiety twisting up in her.
That night, a book of poems by Emily Dickinson had been pulled forward. Between the pages lay a violet. The violet was new. And this time, something was penciled on the page.
To A— p. 41
—S
Ada flipped to the page, her fingers trembling.
XI.
THE OUTLET
My river tuns to thee;
Blue sea, wilt welcome me?
My river waits reply.
Oh sea, look graciously!
I’ll fetch thee brook
From spotted nooks,—
Say, sea, take me!
Ada stared at the poem for a long time, trying to decipher the meaning between the lines. Finally she gave up and read the poem out loud, quietly, to herself. The second time, something stirred in her chest. She set the book down and went into the garden. She cupped a soft pink rosebud and the petals fell into her palm. She carried the petals into the library. She picked a book and pressed the rose petals into the inside cover. She returned the book to its place, but left the spine jutting out, just like Sophie did.
Sophie went to work her shift the next morning at the local public library. When she came home, she went straight to her room. Ada lingered around the kitchen, and then in the garden. She couldn’t take it anymore and walked back into the library. The book was gone.
The doors opened behind her, and without even turning around, she knew it was Sophie. She stayed facing the wall.
“Hey.” She heard Sophie’s soft voice behind her. She held the copy of the collection of Yeats poems.
“You did…” Ada paused. “The violet. And the poem. What does that mean?”
Sophie tilted her head and took a step closer. “What do you think it means?”
“I…” Ada’s voice faltered. “I feel like it’s about how you feel. About how we feel. About each other. But I could be wrong and maybe that’s not what the poem means, and maybe I’ve been reading things wrong the whole time.”
Sophie seemed to swallow. Gently, she took Ada’s hand and leaned in. Ada closed her eyes. She felt Sophie’s lips press against hers tenderly. Suddenly, Ada’s insides were hot oil.
Sophie smelled like oranges and honey and sun. Ada took a breath. Then the pressure eased. They pulled away and Sophie said, softly, looking up from beneath her lashes, “Does that answer your question?”
Ada nodded wordlessly.
“I didn’t want to do something you didn’t want,” Sophie said. “And sometimes I think you’re too good for me.”
“I’m not,” Ada whispered. “And I do want this. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
The dim light of the desk lamp cast muted shadows over everything. It was Ada’s first kiss. Heat bloomed in her chest. Ada closed her eyes and reached for Sophie again.