Chapter 19
Jess
“I thought she married some fashion designer in Paris. Had five kids and got really into hemp.”
“No, that was Suzie Riley. And it was Milan, not Paris.”
“Well, I heard she moved to New York and runs a bookshop. There was lots of competition from a bigger bookstore, and she nearly got closed down.”
Jess snorts discreetly into her scarf. “You’re thinking of that film. You’ve Got Mail.”
The other mums all raise their eyebrows. Gillian snaps her fingers, and her carroty hair flies around her face with a sudden gust from the north. “I can’t ever keep these things straight in my head. I swear I lost half my brain after the third.”
Jess sighs, wishing not for the first time that she had someone to turn to, someone whose eye she could catch for a fraction of a second, who would know in that trace of a heartbeat how ridiculous she finds Gillian. How ridiculous they both find her. But she’s never found someone to fill that gap, not since Carrie. And now these women, these friends, are all having a pop at Carrie and she feels a weird twinge of protectiveness. Of melancholic annoyance.
“I’m sure she’s only back to sort out the cottage. Then she’ll be off again,”
Jess says briskly, checking her watch. She’s still got a few minutes before she has to leave for the library, and after book club the other night, she’s really over all the fresh gossip and intrigue stirred up about Carrie. “I doubt we’ll even see her.”
“Has Tom seen her?”
Amy asks slyly, eyes narrowing like a cat’s.
Jess clears her throat, bunching her fists in her pockets. “Why would he?”
“It was all so long ago, Ames. Seriously,”
Gillian says, trying unsuccessfully to tame her wild ginger mane with a claw clip. “Let it go.”
“You’re not worried then, Jess?” Amy asks.
Jess takes a minute to reply, hoping whatever answer she gives will snuff out a rumor before it’s had time to catch fire. “Tom hasn’t talked to her, or about her, in years. Not since she left. And they were eighteen, remember? Kids, basically. What does it even matter if she’s back for a couple of months?”
“Huh,”
Amy says, shrugging. “I guess so.”
“Cora Morgan’s been at it again, though. Told my second cousin Jenifer she was cursed the other day,”
Gillian says.
“A curse she placed on her?”
Amy laughs.
“Your second cousin Jenifer isn’t cursed,”
Jess snips irritably. She doesn’t like all this poking and prodding at the collective knowledge about the Morgan women. It sets her teeth on edge wondering what will be dug up next. “The girl’s a damn flake.”
Gillian stops laughing, eyes darting from Jess to Amy. “Well! I better get going,”
Amy says. She rolls her eyes, not bothering to say goodbye before turning on her booted heel and walking back to her car. The tight gossipy group disbands. Gillian shrugs and walks away, and Jess turns toward the lane that leads to the library, feeling slightly sick and hollow.
She replays over and over what she said, what Amy and Gillian said, trying to find the gaps, what they didn’t say out loud. She’s mostly annoyed at Gillian, who does try, in her own way, but is so easily influenced by the crowd. So ready to turn on someone she used to be friends with and believe every silly little white lie about her.
Without thinking, Jess lifts her hand up to glimpse the silvery scar on the edge of her palm, from the day she and Carrie became blood sisters, when they were fourteen. After watching Practical Magic, they pinched Carrie’s dad’s pocketknife and went up to the lookout, high above the rooftops of Woodsmoke. She remembers how odd and exhilarating it felt, the shock of blood, the press of Carrie’s skin to her own, how they grinned at each other in the dark and promised to be sisters forever.
Jess is so in her own head all morning at the library, constantly and absently rubbing a thumb against the silvery scar, that she doesn’t fine someone who’s had a book out for over six months. She drops a full cup of coffee in the tiny kitchen behind the desk and lets someone take out a book without remembering to stamp it. She forgets to change the sign from open to closed when she and Dawn go on their lunch break, and she finds a disgruntled note tucked under the door from a resident when they return.
“Get it together, girl,”
Dawn huffs on her way to the back stacks with a trolley of books to reshelve. “Or take some annual leave. Get yourself a haircut. Do something. But stop being so damn absent. Yes?”
Jess knows Dawn means well, but it’s not good that she’s noticing her absent-mindedness. Jess doesn’t want to appear any different, to give away that Carrie’s return has had any effect at all.
But it has.
She asks her mum to collect Elodie from school for her, vaguely citing a need to pop over to the shops in the next town. But really, she’s avoiding the other mums. She doesn’t want to find their eyes sliding away, gossip hot on their tongues about her and Tom. So she drives over to the next town and loses herself for an hour in the pre-Christmas throng of shoppers. Walking along the parade of high street shops, she sinks into anonymity. She buys a takeaway coffee with too much extra cream and feels the lump of overprocessed dairy and sugar heave like a rock in her stomach the whole drive back. She isn’t comfortable. Not in Woodsmoke, not in her own skin, not in her own life.
“Damn you, Carrie,”
Jess says inside the silent car as she pulls onto her road. “Damn you.”
The big problem, what’s cutting her up and dividing her in two, is that she misses her friend. Acutely. She doesn’t want anything in her life to change by stirring up the past, but she wants just as much for Carrie to be here. She can’t marry the two sides of herself, and it’s leaving her immobile. Disconnected. Desperate.
Still preoccupied, Jess barely registers Tom saying he has to go out that night. She’s wrangling Elodie into bed, going through the nighttime routine of a cup of water, finding Moonlight the bear, kissing her the same number of times on each cheek . . . then she hears the front door close and realizes he’s gone. Just . . . gone.
And so Jess spends another evening alone. Another evening stewing over Carrie, unable to close the division cracking her apart. She wonders if she’s made the right choices, if this life is what she’s always wanted. Or whether, without Carrie, it’s like winning a coveted prize and finding out it’s all a lie.