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.Maybe it was the name of the place itself.Cloisters.It sounded feminine to her.Girlish.She’d learned that morning that a cloister was just a covered walkway in a religious building, but she understood that it was also the root of the word cloistered.And that meant something else.Something more.Separation.Isolation.Purity, maybe.The gardens and the terraces reminded her of the secret garden: that walled garden from the play, that secluded little world of magic and—what were the words in one of the songs in the musical?—spirit and charm.When Mary Lennox tries to get the little crippled boy to rise up out of his wheelchair in the second act of the show, she sings precisely that: Come spirit, come charm.She saw Willow pushing up off the ground now and walking toward her.She acted as if she hadn’t noticed and wandered a dozen yards closer to the Cloisters itself.Her cousin followed, exactly as Charlotte suspected she would.“Have you ever met a nun?” she asked Willow when the younger girl was beside her.“No.I don’t think so.You?”“No.How about a monk?”“No.I know I’ve never met a monk.”“Me neither,” she said.Then: “The gardens in there made me think of the secret garden.Maybe it was the little walkways and stonewalls.It’s like in the play.”“And the novel.”“Yes, in the novel.I don’t mean to relate everything back to the play.” She finished her pretzel and put the paper napkin in her pocket.Willow looked so little to her right now, but also so strong.So courageous.So much more like that fictional Mary Lennox than she was.“You’re really going to tell them, aren’t you?” she said.“About what we did? Yes.I’m sorry, Charlotte.Really I am.But I can’t lie.”She nodded.“During the deposition later this year?”“Actually,” her cousin said carefully, “I thought I might do it before the deposition.”“So it isn’t a complete surprise for everyone.”“Uh-huh.”“I was beginning to suspect that,” she said.“If possible.”“Yes?”“If possible, would you wait until after the press conference? Let my father have that?” She could see that her cousin was pondering the idea, and so she added, “After all, the depositions won’t be for a little while.But the press conference is this Tuesday.You’ll have plenty of time to tell everyone what happened afterward.”“I could do that.”“Thank you.”The girl licked at a drop of frozen yogurt on the back of her spoon.“What about you?”“What about me?” Charlotte wondered.“Are you going to tell your parents—or wait until they hear it from mine?”“Oh, I’ll have to think about that,” she said, but her sense immediately was that it would be better for them to hear it from her than from Uncle John.Or from Uncle John’s lawyer.Or, perhaps, from Paige.“But I’ll probably tell them myself,” she added.“Do you want to pick a day now?”“No, I’d rather not,” she said in her most mannered, most adult voice.“Is that okay?”“Sure.Charlotte?”“Yes?”“We’re still friends, right?”“Yes, Cousin.We’re still friends.” She knew she should say something more reassuring to Willow, but she couldn’t.Not yet.She was not happy with this turn of events, and she felt as if she had been needlessly cornered by.Not exactly by her cousin.But by the events themselves.What had happened.On the one hand, she understood that her cousin was correct and they shouldn’t lie; on the other hand, telling the truth seemed to be almost a betrayal of her father.First she shot him.Now it comes out that she’d been smoking dope and drinking beer, and—worse—she hadn’t told anybody.She had seen enough courtroom dramas on television to hear in her head some lawyer from the gun company telling a jury that while this was all real sad, the fact was that Charlotte McCullough was stoned when she ignored her cousin and shot her father.This was a real tragedy, but it sure as heck wasn’t the fault of the Adirondack Rifle Company.She turned back to her family on the beach blanket and stared for a long moment at her father.He still looked a little dazed to her, as if he weren’t listening to a word of whatever Aunt Sara and Grandmother were saying.She saw he had an unopened can of Diet Pepsi by his left leg, and she noticed that he was the only one there who wasn’t drinking anything.Afraid that her father was thirsty but was unwilling to be a bother, she loped over to the blanket and knelt beside him, and there she popped the top of his can of soda and held it to him like an offering.The goblet of wine at communion.That gold chalice she had just seen inside the Cloisters.Drink, she said to him in her mind.Drink, drink.Thirty-oneOn Monday morning, while he and Charlotte were taking Tanya for a walk before breakfast, he told her.The plan he and Catherine had agreed on the night before was that he would break the news to their daughter and then leave early for work so she and Charlotte could discuss Mom and Dad’s immediate plans before heading across town to Brearley.They’d considered telling her together, but it was clear to them both that they’d end up squabbling if they tried to work as a tag team on this one.He guessed he could have been more eloquent (or, perhaps, more assertive) in his defense when he and Catherine had argued, though in hindsight it really hadn’t been much of an argument.They hadn’t discussed her ultimatum at all since she had presented it to him at the Cloisters.He’d thought about it, he’d thought about it all the time.But mostly it had just exhausted him.He felt simultaneously defensive, convinced that she didn’t appreciate how hard he’d been trying lately, and disappointed in himself that it had taken him so long to understand that his self-absorption was gnawing away at their marriage.His life, it was clear, was now completely unraveling.“What have you decided?” she’d asked simply when they both were in bed Sunday night.“About?”“Please.The press conference.”“It really has come down to that, hasn’t it? Just that one.thing?” He was too tired to say more.He’d spent most of Saturday afternoon and all of Sunday numbed by the realization that his wife wanted to leave him.He felt sorry for himself (I am crippled and in pain and my wife is leaving me), but it had been so obvious in hindsight that his marriage was trending this way that he wasn’t surprised.Just fatigued.“That one thing is a gauge of where we are—and where we’re going.”“It will be fine, you know.The press conference.You can trust me.I know what I’m doing.”“You’re bringing needless attention and ridicule down on our daughter and on my brother.That’s what you’re doing.”“No, I—”“Yes, Spencer.That’s all there is to it.”Maybe if she’d said something less adamant he would have been less stubborn.Maybe if she hadn’t interrupted him he would have said something else.Who knew? Certainly he didn’t.“Well, I can’t cancel it,” he told her in response.“Not now.It’s far too late for that.”“You can cancel it.Absolutely you can.But you won’t.”“Catherine—”“No.I told you how I feel,” she’d said, and she had actually climbed out of bed that moment, something she rarely did once she was settled under the sheets, and pulled out her suitcase from the back of the walk-in closet.“You’re going to pack now?” he’d murmured.“I’m going to get a few things ready, yes.Enough to tide me over for a few days across town.Tomorrow I’ll need to help Charlotte gather her things, and so I might not be able to focus on my needs.”“Your needs,” he had repeated, but that was as close as he’d come to saying something hostile [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]