Chapter Seven #3
“I was excited when my mom told me I was going to have a little brother or sister,” Edie finally said.
“So excited. I was in the second grade. It wasn’t going well.
Constant behavior interventions. I refused to learn to read.
This girl Amber had smashed me in the mouth with a tetherball, and one of my front teeth turned gray.
” Edie tapped on a tooth that was as white as the others now, then closed her mouth, and Cosima could see the old gesture, as clear as day, of a little girl trying to hide her tooth.
“The bullying was intense, is what I’m saying. ”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too. All of that hangs around inside for a long time, it turns out. Maybe forever. So the idea of a little sibling, someone who would be born loving me and who I would love from the beginning? It was the most amazing thing I could imagine. And it was amazing, for a while.”
“What happened?”
“My brother Ethan’s dad left. He was a nice enough guy, I guess, but I think even then he was having some trouble with gambling at the casino.
Ethan was in Head Start, and, like me, a lot to deal with.
By then, I’m in fifth grade, and it’s actually worse, because this is where the orthodontia starts to come into play, and the burgeoning figure you are enjoying today was somewhat less appreciated by the preteen set. ”
Cosima touched the now-soft letter in her pocket, hoping the ink hadn’t run in her fall down the wet hill. Even before she was born or conceived, Phoebe had wanted her to know she was absolutely precious. Created from love. She’d named Cosima after all of existence—cosmos.
It was difficult to think that the woman who wrote the letter she’d found behind the wallpaper was the same one who built an enormous, walled empire.
She was starting to think that there really were two different Phoebe Franks.
Would the young woman who wrote the letter really have wanted her daughter to spend her life tied to the stock price of the company Phoebe made?
Why had Phoebe wanted her to come here? Who did she want her to be?
Edie kicked a pebble away from the base of the wall, pulling Cosima’s attention away from her own unproductive navel-gazing.
“My mom was with Andy by then,” Edie said. “She’d just had Chris. That’s my little brother. The pregnancy was hard on her. She struggled with postpartum depression. I was old enough to babysit. So—”
“You couldn’t have been old enough to babysit. At ten? Eleven?”
“But I’d been helping with Ethan since he was born.
I loved that little potato. If I was less excited about Chris, it was only because my mom was having a rough time, and Andy was kind of a dick.
Chris had colic. He cried so much until we figured out he needed special formula, but by then Andy was out.
He couldn’t deal. Mom was sad. I had freakishly strong arms for a child and could hold and bounce him endlessly, which was the only thing that worked.
” Edie flexed a muscle for Cosima, but her smile had gone back to the not-real one.
“I’d think your brothers would adore you, given all of that.”
“See, that’s how I know you’re an only child. No boy is going to adore his weird older sister who has the authority to get him in trouble because she half raised him. Especially once they were in school and knew how the other kids felt about me. I can’t blame them for wanting to fit in, you know?”
“I do. I blame them. You’re not weird. You’re not a frog. You shouldn’t have to take your brother’s raincoat to England because, why? He tossed it at you and told you not to get wet? And you received this as affection?”
Cosima could tell from Edie’s expression she’d hit close to the mark. Her stomach twisted, making her swallow against the unexpected pain.
“Anyway,” Edie said after an awkward silence. “Probably everything I just blurted about my formative years sounds like I’m trying to win the game, but I’m actually humbled by how good my ass looks wearing this.” She turned around to look over her shoulder at Cosima. Her smile almost a real one.
“Your ass looks very nice.” The words felt wrong in her mouth. Cosima couldn’t pretend to flirt like Edie and not have it mean something.
“Thank you. I’ll take it, even if I forced the compliment.” Edie fiddled with one of the buttons on the jacket. “But you need to be mean for the rest of the day so I don’t fall in love and end up demanding you cuddle me to sleep.”
With that, Edie turned away to inspect the rest of the wall, leaving Cosima madly extrapolating from the sensation of Edie’s shoulder bumping into hers what it would feel like to hold her in her arms in bed.
“Cosima!”
She sucked in air. “Yeah?”
“From where you’re standing, you can see the whole stile from above, right?
“I can.”
“Did you bring your nerdy little notepad?”
Cosima patted herself down and felt the spiral of the notepad in her inner pocket. It hadn’t fallen out in their adventures. “Yes. What do you see?”
“Am I wrong, or do the wall and the two staircases make a cross? Like a Christian cross?”
Cosima looked. “Yes. I don’t even have to squint.”
“This may be a super long shot, but I remember in the guest book message that the first number looked like a cross, too.”
Cosima got out the notebook and flipped through it. “You’re right. That’s twenty-two.”
“Okay. But what could that mean? I could be grasping at straws here.”
“It could be a coincidence.”
Edie climbed up one set of the stairs and sat down on top of the wall. “It probably is.” She leaned back. “It’s such a beautiful day, and the code worked so perfectly, like a fairy tale. But it’s been fifty years. Probably the next clue’s been destroyed by now, right?”
Cosima made herself think. She had helped to run an empire for one of the most particular women in the world. If she couldn’t sort through a handful of data points left behind in a guest book by a Welsh novelist, she should be ashamed.
Then she remembered something. A data point. “Give me your map.”
Edie unbuttoned her jacket, briefly scrambling Cosima’s brain with a view of her corrupt tank top. She reached into the inner pocket. “What do you need it for?”
“Can you look at when it was made, or a copyright? I know it’s a new map, but I mean the original drawing, which looks like it was hand-drawn.”
Edie inspected the map. “Here! Nineteen sixty-seven, by the Harlaxton tourism office.”
“If I’m remembering right, it has numbers on one side and letters on the other, creating a grid, so the inn is like location C-12?”
“Yes.”
“What’s location D-22? Twenty-two was the cross in the Cistercian numbers, and D is the letter associated with twenty-two in the guest book. It’s worth a shot, right?”
Edie looked up at her, eyes wide, coat unbuttoned, hair damp, clearly absolutely admiring of Cosima, and it was the best compliment she’d ever received.
Then she looked down at the map. “Fuck me!”
“What?” Cosima’s heart was racing.
“D-22! It’s the church! A cross! D-22! All of it! You’re amazing!”
“It could still be wrong. We could be missing something.”
But Cosima’s stomach untwisted and filled with butterflies.
“We could always be wrong.” Edie shrugged. “If we are, we start over, or we find something else to do. There’s no failed treasure hunt police. It’s just you and me, and the sun’s finally shining, and Morag is making jacket potatoes for lunch. We’ve already won!”
Cosima could only grin back, her hand over her mouth to hide just how big her smile was, swallowing over the first tears she’d felt for weeks and weeks that weren’t sad ones.
She would worry about how very fucked she was when it came to Edie Whitelock later.