Bittersweet

Now, I looked across the Plattsburgh train depot and swelled with indulgent love at Ev’s grumpy scowl.

‘Be sweet,’ my mother had said.

A command.

A warning.

A promise.

I was good at being sweet. I’d spent years cloaked in gentleness, in wide-eyed innocence, and, to tell the truth, it was often less exhausting than the alternative. I could even see now, looking back on how Ev and I had gained our friendship, that sweetness had been the seed of it – if I wasn’t good, why on earth would I have dared to touch Ev’s sobbing self?

There was no sign of anyone coming to meet us. Ev’s mood had settled into inertia. It would be dark soon. So I headed south along the tracks, in the direction of a periodic clanging I’d heard for the past half hour.

‘Where are you going?’ Ev called after me.

I returned with a greasy trainman, toothless and gruff. He let us into the stationmaster’s office before trudging away.

‘There’s a phone in here,’ I offered.

‘The Dining Hall is the only place at Winloch there’s a phone, and no one will be there at this hour,’ she snarled, but she dialed the number anyway. It rang and rang, and, just as even I was beginning to lose hope, I spotted, through the dusty, cobwebbed window, a red Ford pickup rolling up, complete with waggling yellow Lab in the truck bed.

‘Evie!’ I heard the man’s voice before I saw him. It was young, enthusiastic. As we stepped from the office – ‘Evie!’ – he rounded the corner, opening his tanned arms wide. ‘I’m glad you made it!’

‘I’m glad you made it,’ she huffed, brushing past him. He was tall and dark, his coloring Ev’s opposite, and he looked to be only a few years older. Still, there was something manly about him, as though he’d lived more years than both of us combined.

‘You her friend?’ he asked, fiddling with his cap, grinning after her as she wrestled her suitcase in the direction of the parking lot.

I shoved Paradise Lost into my weatherworn canvas bag. ‘Mabel.’

He extended his rough, warm hand. ‘John.’ I assumed he was her brother.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_017634fb-1d16-5f1b-b64e-71200fbbf87d)

The Journey (#ulink_017634fb-1d16-5f1b-b64e-71200fbbf87d)

JOHN’S FOUR-DOOR PICKUP WAS old, but it was clear he took great pride in it, second only to his yellow Lab, who barked triumphantly from the flatbed at the sight of us. Ev struggled to toss in her suitcase until John lifted it in one hand – mine was in his other. He placed them down beside the giddy canine, who was, by then, doing her best to lick Ev’s ear. ‘Down, Abby,’ John commanded as he strapped our luggage flat. The dog obeyed.

Ev let herself into the front seat, a scowl tightly knit upon her brow. ‘It stinks in here.’ She pointedly rolled down her window, but it wasn’t lost on me that she had smiled under Abby’s lapping attention.

In the backseat, I checked the dog over my shoulder. ‘She’s okay?’

John turned on the ignition. ‘She’d whine if we brought her in.’ As the engine growled to life, his hand hesitated over the radio dial, then dropped back onto the steering wheel. I would have liked music, but Ev put up an arctic front.

We drove ten miles in silence, the country road canopied in electric green. I pressed my head against the glass to watch the new maple leaves curling in the breeze. Every few turns offered a tempting glimpse of Lake Champlain’s choppy waters. I turned over in my mind which brother John might be. He seemed less the type to donate to the Met, so I decided he was the ‘asshole’ to whom Ev had referred – she clearly had a strong aversion to everything of his, save Abby.

‘Aren’t you going to apologize?’ Ev asked John when we pulled into line at the ferry that would take us from New York State to Vermont. I hadn’t known there was going to be a boat ride, and I was doing my best to hide my excitement as the muddy smell of the lake wafted up to us. Being on open water seemed just the thing.

John laughed. ‘For what?’

‘We were at that station for two hours.’

‘And it took two hours to get there,’ he countered warmly, turning on Elvis. I had only seen men capitulate when faced with Ev’s indignation.

Once onboard, I clambered up to the passenger deck. It was a clear evening. The western sky began to orange, and the clouds turned brilliant as fire.

I was glad to have left John and Ev in the pickup, figuring they could use some privacy to iron out their sibling rivalry. I opened Paradise Lost. My conversation with the college president at Ev’s birthday reception had secured my spot in the upper-level Milton course, and I was planning to have the book ‘under my belt’ by the fall, when I could read it with a professor who could tell me what it meant. It might as well have been written in Greek; it seemed to be all italics and run-on sentences, but I knew it was Important, and I loved the idea of reading a book about something as profound as the struggle between Good and Evil. I also felt an affinity for Milton’s daughter, forced to take dictation for her blind, brilliant father. It was my girlhood, but glamorous, trading sumptuous words for other people’s dirty clothing.

But just as I began the first line – ‘Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree’ – I heard a bark and lifted my eyes to see John and Abby climbing onto the deck. Beside them, a sign read NO DOGS, but a man who worked the ferry patted Abby on the head and shook John’s hand before moving belowdecks. John strode toward me, into the gusting air, one hand on Abby’s collar.

‘Where you from?’ he asked over the roaring wind.

‘Oregon.’ A seagull streamed by. My hair, whipping, stung the sides of my face. ‘But I know Ev from school.’ We looked out over the water together. The lake was oceanic. I released my finger from the book, watching the pages flutter violently before it closed on its own.

‘Is Ev okay?’ I asked.

He let Abby go. She settled at his feet.

‘Is she mad because of the inspection?’ I fished.

‘Inspection?’

‘The inspection of her cottage. In six days.’

John opened his mouth to say something, then closed it.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘I’d steer clear of all that family stuff if I were you,’ he said, after a long moment. ‘It’ll make it easier to enjoy your vacation.’

I’d never been on a vacation before. The word sounded like an insult coming from his mouth.

‘You don’t seem like the other girls Ev’s brought,’ he added.

‘What does that mean?’

His eyes followed the seagull. ‘Less luggage.’

That was when Ev appeared, bearing ice cream sandwiches. Her version, I suppose, of an apology.

Back on land, finally close to Winloch, worry about the inspection slipped through my fingers. The roadside hot dogs were flabby, the mosquitoes ravenous, and Ev was still grumpy, but we were in Vermont, together, on an open road winding through farmland. Dusk shrouded the world.

We filled up at the only gas station I’d seen for miles, and a knackered Abby joined me in the backseat, promptly laying her heavy head upon my knee and curling into sleep. We drove on, past a shuttered horse farm, signs for a vineyard, and an abandoned passenger train car, and finally, as dusk gave way to night, onto a two-lane highway that streamed south under a starry sky. At one point, the road broke out into a causeway that looked like something out of the Florida Keys – or at least pictures I had seen of the keys – and the moon burst forth from behind the clouds. It lit a yellow ribbon on the water and cast the dark outlines of the distant Adirondacks against a purple-black sky.

‘How’s your mother?’ Ev asked. At first I thought she was speaking to me, but then, she knew how my mother was; she’d comforted me about her only the night before.

In the gap made by my racing mind, John spoke. ‘Like always.’

Oh wait, I realized, he’s not Ev’s brother.