Chapter Fifteen. Rose
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ROSE
“I want to make sure we’re in agreement on this. We can’t tell anyone else.”
I follow Grace’s glance back at the beach.
Coop is tossing a football around with a few guys, his hair a honey-colored mop from the salt air.
He’s taken off his navy-striped shirt. I watch as he leaps into the air to catch the ball, then runs down the pebbly beach till he’s tackled face-first into the sand.
He emerges laughing and searches for something to clean his specs with.
“Not even my brother?”
“Not even Coop.” I’m surprised by how much that troubles me.
Grace’s shoulders tighten. “He would never hurt me.”
If I insist without telling her why, she’ll get her back up. But she must sense that it isn’t safe. “Then why haven’t you already told him?”
She scowls. “He worries enough. I don’t want him to think—”
“That you’re cracking up?” I try to say it lightly, but I can’t. “You aren’t. We aren’t.”
Grace wades in until the waves lap against the hem of her red skirt. The current is gentler here than the Atlantic, only a soft tug. The bottom is a suck of mud, but if I stand still, silvery fish dart by my ankles.
“I know that now. But—I was so scared.” Her voice breaks.
She stares out at the sapphire horizon. “I was fighting so hard, all the time, to push the fear away. I had to hide it from everybody, but it was hardest with Cooper. That boy notices everything. I don’t know how much longer I could have gone on like that.
” She shivers and runs her hands over her arms. “I was drowning, and you threw me a rope. I wasn’t going to jump off the roof, I would never, but you saved me anyhow.
” She sniffles and swipes at her cheeks, and I’m pretty sure that behind her big aviator sunglasses, Grace Harrow is crying.
Talking about the ghost out here, with the sky so blue above us and the shush of the waves all around us, the tang of smoke and salt and suntan oil in the air—it doesn’t feel as terrifying anymore. The part that thrived in secrecy has been siphoned away.
But the other part of me is more terrified of being discovered than ever. Not only for my sake, but for Grace’s. If she has another, more public episode where she acts erratically—rashly— violently …
No one else can find out about the ghost. That’s all there is to it.
“We’re in this together. I mean that.” I bite my lip. I’ve never told anyone about Anna.
“But?” Grace prompts. I have no poker face.
“But if your father found out we’re seeing something he can’t see, what would he do?”
“He’d say I was possessed, and he would try to beat the devil out of me.” My eyes go wide, but Grace continues, horribly matter-of-fact. “Maybe he would send me to a reformatory school. But I think he’d prefer to take matters into his own hands. He’s itching for an excuse.”
Magnolia was right; Mr. Harrow is a dreadful bully.
“I don’t think he’d put his hands on the boss’s daughter, but if he could call you a sinful influence, a devil in sheep’s clothing … I don’t know how far he might go,” Grace admits. “What do you suppose your father would do?”
“I don’t have to suppose. I know.” I step into the icy water until I’m thigh-deep, right next to her. “I’m going to tell you a secret, so that you understand why we mustn’t tell another soul. Not even Coop. But you can’t let Ella know I’ve told you. Promise me.”
If pressed, Ella says her mother is in a sanitarium in Switzerland. Everyone assumes she’s consumptive, and it sounds rather romantic. I don’t want to contradict her, so I’ve never told anyone the truth. Not even Clara.
“I promise.” Grace lifts her sunglasses so she can see me better. Whatever’s written on my face must alarm her. “Jeez. Tell me already.”
Pressure builds behind my eyes and collects in my throat as I search for the right words. I could fill whole notebooks trying and never get her right. Anna was so full of life. So vivacious. Until she wasn’t.
“Anna was bright—funny—warm. She loved us desperately. She never made me feel any less hers than Ella … I was only three when Ella was born, but I remember the first time Anna got sick. She stayed in her room with the curtains closed for weeks. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, she was so afraid something awful would happen to the baby.
She went away for treatment—electroshock therapy, hydrotherapy, God knows what—and she came back different.
Docile. We were happy for a while, her and baby Ella and me, but then it happened again. It went on that way for years.
“When she was well, she was always merry. We had tea parties for our dolls and acted out stories with costumes from our dress-up trunk. She seemed more like another child than a proper grown-up. Once she woke us in the middle of the night to paint a canvas by stomping on it, which was great fun until we had to have turpentine baths. During the blizzard in ’36, she took us out to make snow angels—except she forgot our coats, and we came in blue and shivering, and Ella came down with pneumonia.
Then Anna wanted to fry doughnuts for Mardi Gras, but she started playing hide-and-seek with Ella, and I couldn’t find her when the oil caught fire.
I woke the whole house, screaming. The fire brigade came, and Father was mortified. ”
Grace is listening attentively, her brow furrowed. She looks like her brother.
“Nanny learned to keep a closer eye, and as I got older, I could look after Ella, too,” I continue.
“We prevented any true disasters. But when Ella was five and I was eight, Anna’s melancholia came back.
The treatments didn’t work. She slept all day and roamed the halls all night and only picked at her food.
Her bones poked when she hugged us, and her beautiful hair started to fall out.
Father found a Swiss doctor who promised a miracle.
He said he could reduce her ‘excesses of emotion,’ but—”
“What happened?” Grace whispers.
“He butchered her brain. Took out some of the important bits. She lives in a sanitarium now. It’s in the Swiss Alps, and Father says it’s very nice.
She’s very well taken care of. He visited her a few times, before the war.
Before he met Millie—that’s Lou’s mother—and sued Anna for divorce.
” My voice hardens. “He said he loved Anna, but…”
I stare down at the water. It blurs and I blink back tears.
When I was twelve, I asked Father if we could visit Anna once the war was over and it was safe to travel abroad.
I understood that she would never be well, and that was why Father had remarried.
But Anna is still our mother. She will always be our mother.
Father told me that there would be no point. She wouldn’t recognize us.
I refused to believe it. I still can’t.
He’s promised me a trip to Europe next summer after I graduate. I’ll go to Switzerland and see Anna myself. But what if there’s no recognition in her eyes, no delighted Rosie! on her lips?
If it’s true—
I imagine Grace locked up in a madhouse, experimented on, losing the parts of her brain that make her bright and cutting and Grace.
I imagine myself there.
“He replaced her.” Grace is staring up the beach at Stanley. “Your father replaced her like she was nothing.”
“Yes.” I gather myself. Take a deep breath.
“I don’t expect you to feel sorry for us.
Father has never laid a hand on me, and he’s generous with his money, if not his time.
He didn’t send Anna away because she was a nuisance, or an embarrassment, or because she didn’t obey him.
He wanted to help her. But if he found out that I’m seeing a ghost…
” Or that I like to kiss girls as well as boys.
“He might try to help me, too. For my own good. And I can’t risk that. We can’t risk that.”
Grace is solemn. “I’m pretty fond of my brain.”
“Me too.” I can’t imagine losing my curiosity, my stubborn streak, my ability to read and write. Can Anna still paint? She loved to paint.
My father loves me.
But he loved Anna once, too.
“Normally I would file this away and use it against you later, when I need the upper hand,” Grace jokes. “But I’m really angry on your behalf. On … Anna’s.” She says her name hesitantly, as though she isn’t sure it’s allowed.
It does me some good to hear it.
“I meant what I said, about never mentioning this to Ella,” I remind her.
“I won’t. I promise.” Grace meets my eyes, then tilts her face back to the sun.
“So. That’s why no one else can know about our ghost,” I say.
“I’ll keep it from Cooper for now. But if the ghost is our birth mother, I’ll have to tell him. Once we have proof.”
I’m not convinced that the twins are adopted, much less that the ghost is their mother. If she is, I’m not sure what it would change. Not much in their day-to-day, I imagine. But I suppose Grace couldn’t keep it a secret from her brother forever.
“You’ll talk to me about it first?” I ask. Grace hesitates, scowling at the thought of having to ask permission. “Neither of us will tell anyone without talking to the other first. Agreed?”
“Agreed.” She puts out one tanned hand. “Shall we shake on it?”
We do.
“All right,” I say. “What’s next?”