Читать книгу Seeking Carolina - Terri-Lynne Defino - Страница 7

Twelve Drummers Drumming

Snowflakes do not fall; they dance. Will-o’-the-wisps in Les Sylphides. White on black. The poet wind scatters them and they twirl amid the tombstones—stately guardians dressed in gray—and fall, at last, to sleep.

Disturbing that slumber is a sacrilege, I know, she cannot not bring herself to commit.

No matter the cold.

No matter the dark.

No matter she is trespassing after cemetery hours. She will stand perfectly still until she is another guardian among the stones.

* * * *

Rough hands chafed warmth back into Johanna’s hands, her arms.

“Are you crazy?”

The masculine voice mumbled words she did not care to decipher. He was right. She was crazy. Crazy as a loon. Mad as a hatter, as a Cheshire Cat. Crazy as…

She closed her eyes, unwilling to finish the unkind, if accurate, thought. Trembling, drifting, all she wanted was to sleep.

“Oh, no you don’t. Get up. Walk.” He jammed a shoulder under her armpit and hefted her upright.

Johanna’s feet moved of their own accord, half-dragged, but they moved. “Where am I?”

“Bitterly Cemetery,” the man answered, “doing your best impression of a snowman…woman.”

Oh. Right. Farts. She pushed feebly out of his arms. Her knees buckled, and she was grateful he hadn’t let go. “I can walk on my own.”

“I’m sure you can. Normally. Come on. I’ve got the heat blasting in the truck. Get warm, and I’ll take you home.”

Johanna let him help her. Bitterly, Connecticut was way too nice a town to allow miscreants. Everyone knew everyone and had most of their lives. This was no one to fear, even if he did frequent cemeteries after hours rescuing would-be popsicles from certain frostbite.

Her head began to clear. Memory edged around her trembling, the cold, her grief. The man scooted her into the truck, closed the door and came around the driver’s side. “There’s coffee in the thermos next to you.”

“No, thanks.”

His cell blipped and he turned a shoulder to answer it. Charlotte someone. She apparently wanted pizza.

Johanna tuned out, instead warming her hands in the hot air blasting from the heating vent. She thawed. Her trembling eased. Two days trying to get there in time, and she’d failed. Again. Was there no end to the ways she would fail her grandmother? Her sisters? She fought the tears rising up like rebels and failed at that too.

He handed her a crumpled tissue.

She snatched it from his hand, relieved it was only crumpled. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

“I wasn’t trying to freeze to death or anything. I was just paying my respects. I missed the funeral.”

“I know.”

“I’m sure the whole town knows.” Johanna yanked off her hat, tried to smooth down static curls. “Well, the snow isn’t my fault. The whole Northeast is covered. My car wouldn’t make it and I couldn’t rent an SUV and I’m damn sure not going to attempt these roads in anything else, so I had to take a train and then no one answered their cell phones. I had to walk from—”

“Jo.”

She startled silent. Squinted. He pulled off his snowcap and a flop of auburn hair tumbled out. His beard lit a brighter copper than his hair. Eyelashes and brows arched over hazel eyes. A face she knew, despite the years. Johanna’s heart stuttered. “Charlie McCallan? For real?”

“Took you long enough.”

“You…you don’t look…” She pulled at his beard. “You’ve grown up.”

“It happens to boys when they turn into men.” He laughed. “They get hairy.”

He wore thick workman’s overalls and a down jacket, but he was obviously and most certainly no longer the bony kid she’d once shoved into the lake.

She flexed thawing fingers. “It has been way too long, Charlie.”

“I thought maybe you’d show up for the twentieth reunion.”

“Twentieth?” Johanna slumped. “Really?”

“Last Thanksgiving. You should have come. Fifty-eight of the…what was our class? Ninety-something?” He shrugged. “Whatever it was, we had a good turn out.”

“I don’t remember getting the invite.”

An eyebrow lifted, but Charlie only shifted into gear.

Tires crunched in the snow. The packing sound reminded Johanna of riding with Poppy in his ancient plow, making safe the streets of Bitterly through the long, snowy winters. Outside the warm cab, in this new winter, flurries drifted.

Charlie-freaking-McCallan. Of all people.

She had known him as unavoidably as she did everyone else in Bitterly—the ghost-white kid whose parents were caretakers of the town cemetery. They’d grown up together, largely circled in and out of friendship, until the summer they were seventeen.

The heat in the truck was becoming oppressive. Johanna unzipped her coat. “Working the graveyard shift? Pun very much intended.”

“I don’t really work the cemetery anymore. Mom and Dad retired, turned it over to the town. I fill in once in a while, doing maintenance.”

“No one knows this place better than you.” Johanna blew her nose. “And Gina? How’s she?”

“In Florida with the yoga instructor she left me for.”

Again her heart stuttered. Johanna loosened her scarf. Gina had been nice enough, pretty enough, and got pregnant senior year and ruined everything.

“And your…daughter, wasn’t it? You had a few more, too.”

“Charlotte,” he answered. “She’s good. I’ve got five kids. Two daughters and three sons.”

“That’s a lot of kids.”

He chuckled, his eyes straying from the road to look her way. “It is. They also require a lot of pizza. Mind if I stop on our way past?”

“Oh, sure. No problem. Thanks, by the way, for…”

“No worries.”

They drove in silence, the ineffectual wipers slapping a rhythm to go with the crunching tires. He pulled into town following the same trek Johanna had made from the train station. She hadn’t earlier noticed the faux-gaslights wrapped in pine and holly, the trees lining the Green, the candles in every window. Neither had she absorbed the olive oil boutique or the wine bar on either side of the pizza place that had once been the only restaurant in town. She’d been too furious that none of her sisters picked up her call. Her numerous calls.

Johanna sighed. The window fogged. Charlie was nice enough not to ask what was wrong. He could guess, and he’d probably be right. He pulled up in front of D’Angelo’s Pizzeria, and left the truck running.

“I’ll be right back.”

She waved him away. The waft of cold air he let in made her shiver, but it felt good. Bracing. Clarifying. She opened the window and let the falling snow hit her face. Remembering. Johanna hated to remember. It was her number one reason for staying far away from Bitterly. The door opened and reason number two slipped into the truck, stretching nearly across her to set the pizzas down on the back seat. His jacket fell open. He was definitely not the skinny kid she’d pushed into the lake. He smelled good. Pizza and something musky.

“Sorry. They’re hot.”

She closed the window. “Does your father-in-law still make the pizza?”

“No. Gina’s parents sold the place and moved to Florida about six years ago. But the pizza’s still good.”

“Smells it.”

“You want to—”

“No, no. Thanks. I have to get home. My sisters will be waiting.”

“Okay.” He put the truck in drive, pulled carefully back onto the road. “It was good to see Nina. I see Emma and Julietta around town, but I don’t think I’ve seen Nina, well, probably since I’ve seen you. Your grandfather’s funeral, right?”

Eight years. Had it really been so long?

“I suppose so,” she said. Eight years since she’d seen Gram and Emma in the flesh. She had nephews she’d never met. Cyberworld made staying in touch so easy. Video-chatting, instant messaging, texting. Nina lived in Manhattan. They met now and again for dinner or a show. Julietta had come down to Cape May a few times to help out with the bakery. But Gram…?

Tears again. She hated them, fell victim to them more often than she could count and they never did her any good. Ever.

“Hey, it’s all right.”

“No. It’s not. But thanks.”

Charlie fell silent.

Johanna blew her nose on the now-shredded and soggy tissue he’d given her for all the good it did. Covertly wiping her fingers on the inside of her coat pocket, she hoped his kindness held out and he’d pretend not to notice. “Town sure has changed a lot.” She cleared the frog in her throat. “I never thought it would happen.”

“It’s all because of the expansion up at the ski slope. Slopes, now. Five different trails. Remember how rinky-dink it was? Bonfire in an old garbage can? Bales of hay as stops at the bottom of the hill?”

“And the tow rope that shredded our gloves.” Johanna laughed. “I vaguely remember one of my sisters telling me about the changes.”

Charlie paused at the red blinking light at the edge of town. “Now it’s the Berkshire Lodge with ski lifts and instructors and a lodge where you can buy a seven-dollar hot cocoa. Tourists love it. After the expansion, the whole town started to surge. Remember the lake?”

How could I ever forget? “Yes.”

“It’s a country club now, one most residents in Bitterly can’t afford to join. Pisses me off I can’t bring my kids to swim there.”

He drove out of town and into the farmland where the house Johanna and her sisters grew up in straddled the county line. Snow-humped fields and white woods preserved the country feel of her childhood, even while quaint road signs boasting names like Country Farm Lane and Flirtation Street indicated new developments set back from the road. There had been nothing out here when she and Nina first arrived at the house on County Line Road. She’d been just shy of four, and now remembered little of the children’s home in Massachusetts, or adjusting to the doting grandparents she came quickly to love. But Johanna remembered New Hampshire. Mommy. Daddy. When there were so few memories to hold on to, it wasn’t hard to hold them tight.

“Don’t go into the driveway,” she said as he was about to do so. “It doesn’t look like it’s been shoveled.”

“My truck can make it.”

“No.” She grasped his arm, gave it a friendly squeeze. The windows in the house were dark, all but the one around back. The square of light on the snow peeked around the corner, a crooked finger beckoning. She imagined her sisters gathered at the table in the kitchen. Drinking tea. Or wine. Trying not to speak unkindly of their errant sister who missed Gram’s funeral.

“Thank you, Charlie.” Johanna looked for the door handle. “I don’t know what I’d have done if you didn’t show up.”

Charlie reached across her, flicked the perfectly integrated handle she wouldn’t have found in a thousand years of trying. The door swung open, letting the cold swirl in.

“Lucky for me I did.”

“For you?”

He smiled. “You’d have come and gone before I ever knew you were in town. I’m glad I got to see you, Jo.”

“Same…same here.” Johanna stepped out into knee-deep snow. “I’ll be in town a few days. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

“Kind of hard to avoid it, in Bitterly. Get inside before you freeze again.”

Johanna scooped up a handful of snow and tossed it at him before slamming the door. He laughed and waved and pulled away. The light was still on in the interior of his truck, alighting on his hair like sunshine on a copper kettle. She watched until the curve in the road took his taillights from sight.

“It really is good to see you, Charlie,” she said to the falling snow. Whether she was pushing him into the lake or he was chasing her with a dobsonfly, they’d been friends first. Johanna turned aside those thoughts, and to the house instead.

Home.

The word sent disparate shivers into her core. White with black shutters and a red door. The farmhouse porch, empty now but for the ring of firewood between the front windows, usually boasted a number of rocking chairs and porch swings. She and her sisters never complained about summer assigned reading. Afternoons spent on the porch, Gram’s lemonade popsicles melting down their fingers, was one of their joys of summer.

Wrapping her scarf more closely around her neck, Johanna trudged down the driveway and around to the back of the house. She hugged the wall, peeking through the window from the shadows, her heart hammering. There they were, just as she imagined them, sitting around the table as they had so many times during those years they all lived happily there.

Nina, a Wagner dream of Valkyries—blond and bold and brutal, her hands wrapped around a teacup as if she would crush it, or hold it together.

Emmaline, who, like Johanna, had inherited dark curls and cocoa-brown eyes from their mother and, unlike Johanna, was spared her frenzy.

And Julietta.

Johanna’s brimming eyes overflowed.

Awkward even when sitting still, as blond as Nina without any of her beauty, Julietta was a sprite straight out of a fairy story, all arms and legs and ears. Thick glasses accentuated the enormity of her pale eyes. Perpetually childlike, ridiculously brilliant, Julietta was the one. And they all loved her best.

Johanna wiped her eyes with her scarf, her nose with the back of her hand. She gave up trying to pretend she hadn’t been crying, hadn’t been frantic and furious and ready to succumb to the madness always looming like tomorrow’s shadows. Stumbling to the back door that would be open because the lock had broken when she was fourteen and never been fixed, Johanna Coco went home.

* * * *

The truck slid to a stop at the bottom of the hill. Charlie rested his head to the steering wheel. He breathed deeply, inhaling the aromas of pizza and Johanna. Memory sparked. Summer after junior year. Her body pressed to his. The music, and the crowd, and the sand beneath their feet. She had turned and smiled that earth-shattering smile when he slipped his arms around her waist, pulled her against him so she wouldn’t get crushed by the head-bangers moshing outside of the mosh pit. Charlie remembered her leaning into him, her hands holding him in place, the sweetness of her perfume ignited by sweat, and the seemingly inconsequential moment of contact that changed his world.

Headlights approached. He lifted his head. A plow-truck going up the hill stopped. Charlie rolled down his window as the other driver did the same.

“You stuck, Charlie?” Dan Greene, best pal since childhood, leaned an elbow out his window. “Need a tow?”

“Nah, just taking a few minutes peace. The kids are home waiting for their dinner.”

“What are you doing way out here?”

Charlie thumbed over his shoulder. “I just dropped Johanna Coco off. I found her in the cemetery.”

“At this hour?”

“You know those Coco girls.”

“I sure do. Too bad she didn’t make it to the funeral.”

“She tried. This damn snow—”

“Don’t you be cursing my livelihood. This damn snow is taking my sister’s kids to the beach this summer. Kind of ironic, huh?”

Their laughter faded into the night. Charlie felt suddenly drained. Tight as he and Dan had always been, he didn’t have the words to express his sudden chaos of thoughts. Tapping the side of his truck, he waved and let up on the break.

“Right. See you, Dan.”

“See you, Charlie.”

The scrape of Dan’s plow on the road vanished as Charlie’s window went up, trapping the scent of pizza lingering. Johanna’s, like the woman herself, did not. Wild as the Coco girls had always been, Johanna was the wildest. She left after high school and seldom returned. For Charlie, that had been a good thing. He glommed every bit of news, every shred of gossip over the years. Her travels. Her pie-in-the-sky business ventures. Lover after temporary lover she brought home to Bitterly, never the same guy two visits running. Seeing her was always hard, harder when he and Gina stopped getting along. Last time, when she returned to Bitterly for her grandfather’s funeral, the twins were newborns, Charlotte, Will, and Caleb were still in elementary school and he was still married, happily-enough. That was eight years ago, and now none of those things were true. Johanna was home, for however long, and Charlie was not going to let her escape Bitterly without hearing the words he tried to tell her that summer night on the beach and hadn’t stopped thinking since.

* * * *

Johanna woke, blinking away the bright sunlight streaming through lace curtains. Not the cluttered bedroom above the bakery, the one that always smelled of baking and the sea, it was yellow. White bookshelves. A desk under the window, and a Nirvana poster on the closet door. Her nose was cold but her body, warm under downy blankets. A heavy, scraping sounded somewhere outside. She pushed up onto her elbows.

Bitterly.

Home.

Her old room, bed, even the comforter.

Gram was dead.

“Farts.”

Johanna flopped back into the pillow. The reunion with her sisters had been tearful, and comforting. Wrapped in their arms, she laughed at her fury, at the thought that they’d abandon her at the train station because they were collectively angry.

“Last we heard, you didn’t think you were going to make it,” Nina had said, thumbing tears from Johanna’s cheeks. “After the burial, we all went out for pizza and didn’t see you’d called until we were there. Charlie McCallan offered to go find you and bring you home.”

“And here you are.” Julietta had thrown her arms around her. “Oh, Jo! I’m so sorry. After all you went through to get here, you didn’t even get pizza.”

They talked long into the night. And they cried, none harder than Johanna. Emma and Julietta still lived in Bitterly and Nina made certain she returned home for every holiday. Only Johanna stayed away with a million excuses and none of them good enough to justify an eight-year absence.

The aromas of coffee and bacon crept into her room. More snow in the night kept Emma with them instead of going home to her husband and boys. It would be she doing up breakfast the way Gram always did. Johanna pulled back the covers and swung her legs out of bed. The nasty scraping sound outside continued. She looked out the window to see a plow clearing the driveway. Someone was shoveling the front walk. A shock of red hair had her throwing open the window to shout, “Good morning, Charlie.”

The young man who looked up was not Charlie for all he looked like him. Exactly, in fact, like the kid she used to know. Her heart caught in her throat for the memories pelting. This room. That boy. But it wasn’t Charlie, and everything was different now.

“Hey,” he called back. “You looking for my dad?”

“I suppose I am.”

“He’s in the truck. Will’s doing the back walk. I got this one. You’ll be shoveled clear in no time.”

“And you are?”

“Caleb. Which sister are you?”

“Johanna.”

“The one who lives at the beach. Cool.”

“It’s far from cool, I assure you. Cape May is full of old people and tourists.”

He laughed and waved and Johanna closed the window. If she could find the ingredients in the pantry, she’d make the boys her famous hot chocolate. She pulled on the thick robe perpetually hanging on the back of her door, wrapped it tight and followed her nose to breakfast.

Faded school photos lined the hallway painted the same yellow as her bedroom. Gram had let them each choose her own colors when Emma and Julietta came to them in the big farmhouse in Bitterly. Nina, a cool and sophisticated thirteen-year-old, chose blue with white trim. Emmaline, only six, wanted mauve and olive green. Head still bandaged and arm in a sling, Julietta’s four-year-old love of purple and orange had been indulged. But Johanna, eleven and confused as to why they were decorating rooms when Mommy had once again vanished and Daddy was dead and now she had two little sisters as well as a big one, chose the soft, buttercream yellow.

“You?” Poppy had asked. “My wild Johanna? Not red or crazy-girl pink?”

He took her into his wiry arms, right there in the paint shop, when she started to cry. “It reminds me,” she whispered against his neck. Of the house in New Hampshire, the one that burned. It reminded her of them.

He bought three gallons of the buttercream yellow.

“What? It was on sale. Half price,” he told Gram when she scolded. He painted her room first, then the hallway. Last, because there was enough left over, he painted the room he shared with Gram.

“It reminds me too.”

It was their secret. One of many. She suspected he had them with her sisters too, those half-truths more story than anything real, like Weiner-schnitzel, the little man who lived in his pocket, whose voice only she could hear.

Johanna stopped outside Gram’s bedroom door, pressed her hand to the wood panel. She let her hand slide to the knob, felt the cool metal, let it go before any more memories got loose. Instead she hurried down the stairs, her feet thumping like when she was a kid late for school. Already there were her sisters, lined up at the counter like pretty maids in a row, sipping coffee. At the table sat Nina’s husband, ridiculously gorgeous despite his dark hair sticking up in spikes, and the stubble of a man who needed more than one shave a day. Johanna stopped short of sliding across the polished wood floor into the kitchen the way she used to, but only because she wasn’t wearing the proper socks.

“Hey, Gunner. I didn’t know you were still here.”

“I went to bed early so you ladies could have some time alone.” He stood up and pulled Johanna into an embrace, kissed both cheeks. “Good to see you, Jo.”

She tried to laugh. “It hasn’t been that long.”

“Almost a year.”

“No it hasn’t. Nina and I just…oh…” She pressed cool fingers to her burning cheeks. “I guess it has been a while. New Year’s right?”

His smile crinkled in the corners of his blue eyes. “Right. Nina said you had a hard time getting here.”

“It was insane. But I’m here now.” She slipped one arm around his waist, the other around Emma’s. “We all are. Gram would love it.”

“Yes, she would have. At Thanksgiving.” Emma slipped out of her embrace but kissed her cheek. “You’re here now, and Christmas is in less than a week. You will stay, won’t you?”

“I sup—”

“Good. Eat. I have to go. Snow day. Got to get home to the boys so Mike can go to work.”

Johanna let her arm slip from Gunner’s waist. Emma had every right to be upset, despite their tearful reunion. To go unchastised indefinitely was too much too hope for. She pulled out a vinyl chair and plucked a slice of bacon from the plate. Julietta dropped onto the chair beside her. “Emma’s been cranky lately,” she exaggerated a whisper. “I think she’s prego.”

“I am not cranky,” Emma said, putting on her coat. “And I am definitely not pregnant.”

“You and Mike not having sex again?”

Emma froze. Johanna cringed but Julietta sat poker-straight, head cocked and her expression concerned.

“Sex isn’t the issue,” Emma said, resuming her struggle with the zipper. “It’s…nothing. Nothing that needs discussing now. Supper at my house tonight. Nina, you and Gunner, too.”

“We’ll be there.”

“What about me?” Julietta asked. Emma kissed both her cheeks.

“You are a given, darling.” She headed for the door. “Seven o’clock. Bring wine.”

Gunner’s cell rang just as Emma closed the door. Bits of her brother-in-law’s hushed conversation drifted back into the kitchen. Nina poured another round of coffee before sitting down herself, her attention focused on her husband.

“He’s going to have to leave,” she said quietly. “It was nearly impossible for him to get out of the city to come here at all. Huge things happening at the gallery.”

“How huge?” Julietta asked. “Da Vinci huge?”

“Not art-wise. There’s been this firm out of Sweden wooing us for years. They want to buy us out, and I think temptation is starting to get to Gunner. If they succeed, the good news is neither one of us will ever have to work again.”

“And the bad news?”

Nina smiled into her coffee. “Neither one of us will have to work again.”

“How tempted are you, Nina?”

“I love the gallery. We’ve worked really hard all these years to grow it from that stinky little artist co-op into what it is now. But I’m ready to let it go, maybe travel a bit. I just don’t think Gunner would last a year living the life of the idle rich.”

The sisters ate and chatted, but Nina’s attention remained on Gunner. When he came to the doorway and motioned her to him, she went without a word. The pair of them, arms around one another, shared the phone. Gunner’s hand moved up and down his wife’s spine, as unconscious an act as it was sensual. Johanna forced herself to look away, a little embarrassed and a lot envious.

“Could you imagine the world devastation should those two ever have kids?” Julietta was still staring in that unnerving way she had. No self-consciousness, no apologies. “We’d all have to wear sunglasses or suffer some sort of beauty-blindness.”

“Is that like snow-blindness?” Johanna joked.

“No.” Julietta snorted. “Photokeratitis is real. I made up beauty-blindness.”

“Well, they’re not going to have kids, so the world is safe.”

“It’s not too late. She’s only forty-one.”

Johanna let it go. Nina had vowed to never have children, to never pass along the genes they all inherited lest any child of hers suffer their parents’ fate. Emma seemed determined to prove her sister’s fears wrong with three sons in quick succession. And if Julietta’s suspicions proved right, perhaps another.

Left alone with her youngest, unflappable sister, Johanna hedged, “So, Emma and Mike were having problems, you know, in bed?”

“It was a few years ago.” Julietta bit into her toast. “When Gio was a toddler. She wanted another baby. He said they couldn’t afford any more, and didn’t trust her not to accidentally-on-purpose sabotage their birth control. So,” she shrugged, “no sex was the only way to make sure it didn’t happen.”

“He didn’t trust her?”

“I wouldn’t have either. She really wanted another baby.”

In the next room, Gunner and Nina were laughing. Julietta’s attention diverted quickly, always too easily. She pushed out of her chair and joined them.

Johanna sipped at her coffee, basked in the sunshine coming through the big kitchen window and the sisterly gossip she didn’t realize she missed. If I she were in Cape May, she’d have already put in half a day of work. Sleeping in, having her breakfast made for her, indulging in chatting with these sisters she loved, it let her, if only for a moment, forget all the reasons she had for staying far away from Bitterly.

A soft knock on the back door opened her eyes. Charlie waved from the other side of the glass. She leapt too quickly to her feet and nearly spilled her coffee.

“All done?” she asked as he stomped his boots clean.

“Boys are just finishing up.”

Johanna stepped aside to let him in. He put up his hands.

“I’ll get snow all over the floor.”

“Who cares? Get in here. And call your boys. I’m making them hot chocolate.”

“No need to—”

“It’ll take two minutes. Sit. Warm up. It’s the least I can do. Okay?”

Charlie chuckled softly. “Sure.”

Johanna called out to the boys who shouted in return. Head stuck in the pantry, she was relieved to find the ingredients necessary for a real cup of hot chocolate, and not the powdered stuff in an envelope.

“Help yourself to the coffee,” she said over her shoulder, “unless you want hot chocolate.”

“I’d love some. Thanks, Johanna.”

He spoke her name softly, like a whisper before falling into sleep. Johanna stirred the melting butter and chocolate, added the sugar spoonful by spoonful. By the time she started incorporating the milk, she could speak without her voice cracking.

“Thanks again for last night.”

“No worries. That reminds me—I have your backpack. You left it in the truck.”

“Oh, I did, didn’t I. Totally forgot about it.”

“I’ll have one of the boys get it.” He passed behind her to call out to his sons.

Johanna shivered. Lowering the heat, she stirred as if her life depended upon it not sticking to the bottom.

Charlie peered over her shoulder. “Smells good. I don’t think I’ve ever had anything but the packaged stuff.”

“I doubt there’s even any real cocoa in that.”

“Probably not. You never struck me as the cooking type.”

“I never was.”

“But you own a bakery.”

“An impulse decision, not a lifelong dream,” she admitted. “I was vacationing in Wildwood, and decided to check out Cape May. I fell in love with the town, the Victorian houses and quaint shops. It’s real old-world, you know? Even in the height of summer. When I saw CC’s for sale, I…” She bit the truth off there.

Charlie answered for her. “You bought it.”

She shoved him playfully. “I hocked everything I owned and mortgaged six of my nine lives, but I did.”

“CC’s, huh?”

“Cape Confectionary. It came with the name. CC’s for short.”

“Ah, I see.”

“After all my failed attempts at earning a living, this one has turned out to be something good. Who’d have thought I would have a knack for baking? In the summer, I do breakfast and lunch too. It gets kind of crazy, tourists from all around the world there to see the famous Jersey Shore. It’s like no place else on earth. You should bring the kids down.”

Her cheeks were burning before the words were out of her mouth. Johanna took the pan off the burner, kept her back to him as she poured three mugs. Stomping on the small porch off the back of the house signaled the boys’ arrival. Another moment and they were in the kitchen, stripping off snow gear in the boisterous way of young men.

“Caleb, Will, this is Johanna Coco. Johanna, two of my boys.”

“Hi, again,” Caleb waved, his smile wide. “We met through the window already. Here’s your backpack.” He retrieved it from the pile of coats and scarves. “Got a little snowy.”

“Thanks.” She held out a steaming mug. “I’ll trade you.”

He took it with an enthusiastic, “Thanks,” and flopped onto a kitchen chair. His brother, dark-haired as Gina, did not share his enthusiasm, but he took her offering and sat beside his father at the table. Johanna placed the last cup in front of Charlie.

“What do we owe you gentlemen for your services?”

“This’ll do.” Charlie sipped. “Come on, Jo. It’s a favor to friends.”

“Last night was a favor,” she said. “This is not. You have to let me pay you something.”

“No I don’t.”

“Charlie.”

“Johanna.” He laughed. “Seriously. Don’t make this awkward.”

“Hey, I want some.” Julietta blew through the room, took the pan from the stove. She poured herself the little bit left. “Dang.”

“I’ll make more, Jules.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.” Caleb raised his empty cup. “Ow! Quit it, Will.”

“You’re being rude.”

“No, I’m not. It’s a compliment. How’s a compliment rude?”

Will rolled his eyes and shook his head. He reminded Johanna of Nina at his age, when anything and everything her sisters did was somehow embarrassing to her.

“If your dad won’t let me pay you, then I think more hot chocolate is an absolute must. Will? You want some too?”

He looked into his cup. “Well, if you’re making it anyway…”

Johanna started mixing ingredients again, silently happy to keep them around a little while longer. Her slip was already fading. As if Charlie would ever bring his kids to Cape May, of all places. As if anything about that teenage-summer still mattered to him at all.

“We always pay you,” Julietta was saying. “Don’t be stupid.”

“This is different. Don’t start with me, Jules.”

“I’m not starting anything. You are.”

“What are you, twelve?”

Johanna stiffened, but Julietta laughed and shoved him. “Then come to Emma’s for dinner tonight. We’re all going to be there. If you won’t take money, we can pay you in food. My sister’s as good a cook as Gram was.”

“Thanks but—”

“Charlie, I can’t take this much rejection in one day. You know I’m special that way. I’ll square it with Emma. Come. It’s the least we can do for all you’ve done the last few days.”

Charlie’s shoulders slumped but he smiled fondly. “All right. Thanks.”

“Great. Be there at seven. Bring wine.”

Johanna stirred and stirred. The action soothed. She poured out cups while the others chattered. Will and Caleb were trying to convince their dad to take them snowboarding. Charlie said Charlotte could do it. He’d already promised Tony and Millie he’d make a snowman with them. Julietta told the story about the time Emma went up the mountain on some school trip, and how she nearly killed herself and five others by falling in the middle of the slope. Their words were far away and apart, as if she were a ghost listening from the shadows in an altered world. Johanna tried to shake herself out of it. She hadn’t needed this slip from reality in a long time. Of course, being in Bitterly would trigger it.

The scraping of chairs on the hardwood restored her hearing, her sense of place. Johanna found herself helping Charlie into his big jacket.

“Sorry about the floor.” He pointed to the puddles around his sons’ discarded boots. “I’ll have the boys—”

“Don’t worry about it. Julietta will do it.”

“You sure?”

“I’ll make her more hot chocolate.”

He laughed, the corners of his eyes crinkling in deep creases there for as long as she could remember. Back then, they smoothed as quickly as they formed. Today, they did not, and Johanna liked it quite a lot.

“I’ll see you later then?”

“Yup. Later.”

“Come on, boys.” Charlie was out the door before his sons could pull on their boots. Johanna bit down on her lips suddenly buzzing with words like—Stop. Stay. Do you ever think of me? Of that summer? It was so long ago, and they had been so young. In those sweaty months before Labor Day, Charlie McCallan made her happier than she ever thought she could be. And then it was over, just like that.

She dug into the front pocket of her backpack, pulled out two crumpled twenties and stuffed them into the boys’ hands.

“Don’t tell your dad.”

“Wow,” Caleb said. “Thanks, Johanna.”

“Thanks,” Will murmured, shoving the bill into his pocket.

Closing the door behind them, Johanna leaned against it. Dinner. With Charlie. She glared at her sister.

“What?”

“You know what. Heavens to Murgatroyd, Jules. I’m going to murdilate you.”

“You’re welcome.” Julietta handed her the mug of hot-chocolate dregs, kissed her cheek. “And you can clean up the floor.”

* * * *

Johanna lay alone, in the dark, supine on her grandmother’s bed and a hand on her overburdened belly. Emma’s famous macaroni and meatballs sat heavily alongside the pastries Charlie brought—recompense for having to bring his eight-year-old twins, Millie and Tony, to dinner when his older kids stayed late at the slopes. Johanna’s middle nephew, Henry, had been thrilled. He and Tony were classmates, and though Millie was as well, she mostly ignored the boys to instead braid and unbraid the silky strands of Nina’s golden hair. Nina happily took her own turns at Millie’s thick, red curls and Johanna had to wonder if her sister’s childlessness was the choice she always insisted it was.

Gio, the youngest nephew, pestered Henry and Tony, while Ian, the oldest, seemed to share a special bond with his Aunt Julietta. Most of her evening was spent helping the ten-year-old with his math homework. In the thick of it all, Johanna had felt as full of love as she had been of the food.

No one misses the funeral of a Sig’lian’. We make mean ghosts.

Gram always said Italians loved a funeral; it brought family home, and brooked no excuse.

In the dark silence beyond midnight, listening to her belly gurgle along with the creaks and groans of the old farmhouse she grew up in, Johanna was wishing she’d taken her chances with the ghost. The sensation of being only a guest in her sister’s home, in her sisters’ lives descended. Being in Bitterly forced her to acknowledge all the good things she was missing to avoid the bad. Until coming home, she’d been happy in Cape May, in her bakery at the beach, with the hundreds of friendly strangers who populated her life.

Johanna groaned upright, and moved to the window. Outside, the moon shined brightly on the snow and the world existed only in shades of blue. Snow, snow, everywhere—snow. A cathedral of trees. A holy realm of ice. The only church she had ever needed.

She used to imagine her mother playing in the yard, building snow castles or chasing fireflies. But Mommy had never lived in Bitterly, a fact Johanna didn’t know until Emmaline and Julietta came to live with them too.

Johanna turned away from the window, those thoughts. She moved about Gram’s room by moonlight. It never changed, but for the buttercream yellow paint that had replaced Gram’s more sensible white back when she and her sisters were small, and grieving. The dresser, oiled and smooth as honey, always scented with the lavender sachets kept in every drawer. Johanna opened the top one and breathed in, struck suddenly by the notion of getting rid of all the clothes. Who would have the heart to scoop the nightgowns from the drawers, the dresses from the closet, and haul them off to some charity? Johanna shuddered. She could not do it. She would rather burn everything, and that made her shudder again.

On top of the dresser sat Gram’s jewelry box. Adelina Coco was Sicilian, but she was also a New Englander. One good dress and a pair of sensible heels was all she needed. The plain box Poppy had made for her one Christmas, when they were newly married and quite poor, was mostly empty. Johanna lifted the lid.

The ribboned lock of Carolina’s dark hair.

The crumbling letter Johanna knew by heart.

The gold Virgin Mary medal Gram never took off, along with her wedding rings and Pop’s.

And the locket.

Johanna’s breath caught in her throat. She had forgotten about this talisman, this magical thing. Picking it up by the chain, she let it twirl in the moonlight.

“It belonged first to Poppy’s grandmother,” Gram had told her. “Her own nona gave it to her when she left Sicily for America to be married. See the initials? FMC. That is for Florentina Coco.”

“What does the M stand for?”

“Maddelena, I think. Do you want to hear the story or ask questions?”

“Hear the story. Please.”

“Good girl. Back then, when someone left the old country, those left behind knew it was for good. Florentina’s grandmother had already lost many sons and many grandchildren to America. But Florentina was her favorite, I am told, and so she put something very special inside the locket before waving good-bye. Can you guess what it was?”

“A picture?”

“No, not a picture. She put a wish inside.”

“Sure, Gram.”

“You don’t believe me? You doubt it can be true? There was a time, Johanna, when we women still had our magic. It was a simple matter of course, and nothing at all extraordinary. That old woman put a wish into this locket as certainly as I am standing here telling you this tale. The locket has passed from daughter-in-law to daughter-in-law, from Florentina’s down to me. The wish is still there, waiting to be used, because a wish can be scary to actually make, and no one has yet had the courage.”

“Not even you?”

“Not even me. But you do, my Johanna. I have no daughters-in-law, so when I am gone, I give this to you. The wish will be yours to make.”

The clarity of memory left Johanna trembling. She had been seven, and so fragile, always fantasizing about the fiery death she deserved, one that would have spared her all the pain that came after. Gram found her in a closet, curled into a ball and weeping. It was all her fault. If not for her, she and Nina would still be living happily in the woods of New Hampshire with Mommy and Daddy. Words would not come, not then and not ever, because they would have made Gram think Johanna didn’t love her and Poppy, wasn’t glad to be in school, relieved to wear clothes that were not stolen out of a drop-box she’d been lowered into because she was the smallest.

Johanna shuddered. To be so young and so confused, so full of grief and relief—tears started back then continued into the present. They had always been her way of coping. Cry enough and weariness overwhelmed the confusion, put it into perspective of a kind. The older she got, the better Johanna understood how the evasion of tears became the evasion permeating her life. She simply didn’t know how to change it. Or if she wanted to.

Trembling fingers clicked open the locket. She saw the same faded photo, but not even a sparkle that could pass for a wish. Johanna touched the picture of Carolina Coco, young and smiling, her head thrown back. Just beyond the round of her mother’s cheek was what Johanna always believed was her father’s shoulder. Looking at it now, adult eyes focusing beyond the illusions of childhood, it was probably a wall.

“If there is a wish in here, Gram, why didn’t you use it to make Mom well? Why didn’t you use it to get her back?”

Johanna closed it, kissed it, and slipped it over her head again. Emma would want the medal. Julietta and Nina could decide on who got what rings. But the locket was hers.

Gram said.

* * * *

The letter is old and crumbling, and a lie. It speaks of love ferocious, one undefeated by time and distance—or locked doors and walls and razor wire that cuts deeply. Leaves scars that do not heal. It speaks of happiness, that false thing made of chemicals rushing through the brain and can be altered by more chemicals crushed and stirred into orange juice. It made promises that were lies before the ink dried on the page.

But I didn’t know then. I did not know. If you ever believed all the other lies, please believe this one truth I was never able to speak.