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The lawyer’s office was a front seating area with a receptionist on one side and three closed doors on the other. The receptionist nodded as we came in, but she seemed distracted, and it was immediately clear why: behind one of those doors, the one with a gold plate that readBernard Stewart, Esq.,a woman was shouting. My mother hesitated, looked at me, looked back over her shoulder to where we’d parked the car.
“Maybe we should...” she started to say, but she never finished. The shouting reached a shrill peak and stopped. The closed door flew open. Diana stood there, her face pale, her eyes blazing.
“What’s going on?” I asked at the same time as my mother said, “Why didn’t you wait?” but neither of us would get an answer. Diana crossed the room in five quick steps. She stopped in front of me. Her mouth was quivering.
“You conniving little bitch,” she said, and slapped me across the face.
20.
1960
Autumn
She is thirty-two and awake again.
Theodora is crying. Again.
Miriam startles awake as she does nearly every night to the sound of her youngest daughter screaming. She doesn’t reach out for her husband, because he isn’t there.
Theo hasn’t shared her bed for many months now, not since she banished him to a spare room during the last pregnancy, a terrible slog of restless nights, crippling nausea, an ache deep in her lower back that never went away, even after the baby was born. Sometimes, between the bouts of vomiting, she had lain down on the bathroom floor, her forehead pressed to the cool porcelain pedestal of the toilet, remembering with bleary disbelief how different the first two had been. How easy, how full of joy and wonder and only the most mild occasional discomfort, so rare that it was almost a novelty. She’d felt so beautifully and completely like a woman then, strong and capable,her body humming along in its purpose and everything working just as it should.
There was none of that this time. Not only did Miriam not feel like a woman, but she hardly felt human at all. She was a shell, an incubator, a chrysalis made of flesh, wrapped around something hungry and angry that felt like it was trying to tear its way out.
She’d been grateful, especially during those final exhausted weeks, to be sleeping alone. But somehow the temporary arrangement had become permanent. Theodora went from being a vampire inside the womb to a screamer out of it. And Miriam’s husband had come back to their shared bedroom for just one night before telling his wife that he’d be good for nothing on the water the next day if he couldn’t get some shut-eye.
It’s been more than a year since then. A year of spending her nights alone, sleeping with one eye open, waiting for the moment that always comes. The silence split by a shriek, the long stumble down the dark hall to the nursery. She gathers her youngest daughter into her arms, already saying,shh, shh, rocking her gently and hoping that this might be one of the rare nights when she calms and closes her eyes again.
But it isn’t. Theodora doesn’t want to be rocked. She wants to scream, scream, scream.
Once a week, Miriam speaks by phone to her mother in Egg Harbor. She says it’ll get better. She says some babies are just difficult and every marriage has its rocky moments, and that Miriam needn’t worry. She also says it’s not a bad thing for a woman to have her own bed, her own space, especially in a house with so much of it—that she should be glad for her privacy.
But Miriam wishes more with each passing day, and each lonely night, that they’d never come back to the Whispers. If only she’d insisted on a place of their own, one of those little houses in town, cozy and quaint. A couple living in a place like that couldn’t help butstay close, not when they were always bumping into each other on the stairs or in the kitchen—and if they had a spat, then they’d have to see it through and kiss and make up before they went to bed together at night. There’d be no room for resentments to fester, for someone to carry a grudge into an empty bedroom and nurse it there for weeks or months or years, for a husband to vanish behind one of a dozen closed doors just when you thought you might finally sit him down and make him talk to you.
Miriam and Theo still talk, of course, but not like they used to. Not when one of those old grudges has a way of suddenly popping up from wherever it’s been hiding, poisoning the air between them and turning everything sour. They don’t fight all the time, but there’s always something to fight about. The charter boat, and whether Theo should be allowed to sell it when her father gave it to him as a gift. Miriam’s cooking, which she knows has never been much good, but couldn’t he pretend to like it? They fight about Theodora’s incessant crying and whether she ought to be seen by the doctor, and they fight about whether to take her to the doctor in town or the one on the mainland. Just last year, Papa told Miriam he’d like to pay for young Richard to attend a fine boarding school, and there was a fight about that—until Papa finally said,Let me talk to him,and Miriam handed the phone to Theo, who listened for a while, his jaw clenched, and then hung up without saying goodbye. He turned to Miriam and said, “Send him away, then, if that’s what you want,” and the look on his face was so sad and strange—a look he’d never given her once in ten years together—that Miriam wished she’d left it alone. Even as Theo walked away and disappeared into some empty room, she told herself she would call her father back tomorrow and say she’d changed her mind.
But she didn’t. In the cold light of day, it all seemed so silly, so unnecessary. It was a very fine school, after all, maybe even the finest. And so she sent Richard off, and this year, she sent Diana, too. Eventhough it made the house feel quieter, emptier, even more haunted by unsaid things.
Thank god for Shelly. If not for her, Miriam thinks she might have gone insane.
Shelly is their nanny and housekeeper, a petite dark-haired woman of twenty-seven who lives in at the Whispers six days a week. Hiring her was the last thing Miriam did before the doctor told her she’d have to spend the remainder of her pregnancy in bed, and it was less a decision than a foregone conclusion: Shelly was the first to interview for the job, and Miriam had been just about to inquire after the woman’s references when she suddenly lurched across the room and threw up into a garbage can. When it was over, Shelly handed Miriam a handkerchief and helped her back to the sofa.
“You have a lie-down right here, missus, and I’ll just take care of this,” she said, whisking the soiled garbage can out of the room and returning ten minutes later with a cup of tea.
Later, when Theo asked if Miriam had offered the young woman the job, Miriam would give a bewildered laugh and say, “I didn’t have a chance to offer. She just took it.”
What she didn’t say wasThank the Lord she did.Shelly had been a godsend during those final weeks of her pregnancy with Theodora, keeping the house in near-perfect order without a peep of complaint, minding the older children and playing nurse to the bedbound Miriam. But in the time since the baby arrived, things have changed. Shelly is something more than a servant. Miriam never had a sister, but she thinks that this is what it might have been like if she did: a little sister, headstrong and stubborn, and impetuous in a way that reminds Miriam so very much of her younger self. Shelly has a wicked sense of humor and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. And Miriam, initially grateful for the help, quickly came to appreciate her company. When she isn’t socializing or entertaining, she finds herselfseeking the younger woman out, following her from room to room as she carries out her duties, joining her out in the yard and holding the basket of clothespins while she strings up the washing on the line. Shelly knows all the best gossip on the island, stories that pass through the small underground network of women who work as maids or cooks in the homes of wealthier folks, and she has a way of punching them up with dramatic pauses and little embellishments so that Miriam will forget the book or newspaper she’s reading and sit, rapt, gasping or giggling, while Shelly tells her which well-bred young lady fell down drunk and lost one shoe in a snowbank last New Year’s Eve, or which prim and proper widow was rumored to have poisoned her husband’s tea. Once she’d spent the better part of an hour listening to the story of how one of Shelly’s friends, a housekeeper in Northeast Harbor, had forgotten her keys at her employer’s home and returned late in the evening to get them, only to walk in on the master of the house sashaying up and down the stairs in nothing but socks, garters, and a very expensive pair of his wife’s high-heeled silk shoes.
“No,” Miriam had gasped. “You’re pulling my leg. But what did she do?”
“Well, according to Doris, she looked him right in the eye and said, ‘You’ll want a pink silk hat to match, sir, if you’re wearing those to dinner,’” Shelly said, and Miriam doubled over and laughed fit to burst, so long and loud that Theo eventually appeared from the other room to ask what on earth was the matter, which just sent the two women into paroxysms all over again, until Shelly finally caught her breath enough to say, “Nothing at all, Mr. Caravasios, we were only talking about the latest fashions,” and Theo said, “Ah, well then,” and left the room with a bemused smile.
That was the other thing about Shelly: she never gossiped in front of Theo or paid him much attention at all. It made Miriam feel oddly proud—not just that Shelly obviously understood when to be discreet, but that Miriam alone had the privilege of her friendship, of hearing those fantastic stories.
There was a time when Shelly would have been beside her now, here in the wee hours of the morning when the silence was shattered by Theodora’s howling. She would appear in the door of the nursery with a warm bottle of milk for Theodora and another cup for Miriam, the latter spiked with a bit of brandy, and the two of them would take turns rocking the baby until she fell back asleep. But Shelly has been staying out more often lately, ever since late summer when she started carrying on with a young sailor from the maritime academy down the coast. The man keeps her out till all hours, so that Shelly spends her morning moving at half speed and yawning all the while, usually until Miriam takes pity and tells her to go lie down for half an hour, for Pete’s sake. She won’t scold the girl, it’s not her place nor her nature, but she worries all the same. She can’t help it. A fisherman, like her husband, that’s one thing. But a sailor... well, she’s never known one, but she’s heard plenty of stories. And not the fun and funny kind, but bad ones. Sad ones. Stories about men who turned out to be good-for-nothing scoundrels, who fill a girl’s ears with pretty talk and promises that turn out to be nothing but lies. A man like that would break your heart, ship out and leave you with nothing but wasted time and a tarnished reputation. But then it’s not as if Shelly has so many options, twenty-seven years old and never married, her whole life spent on this little island. It’s a shame, pretty as she is.
This is how Miriam’s mind wanders as she rocks Theodora alone in the dark. Theo is far down the hall, as far as he can get from his youngest daughter’s nightly disturbances. Richard and Diana are a hundred miles away at their very fine boarding schools. And Miriam, holding the fussing baby in her arms and staring into the deep night beyond her bedroom window, feels terribly alone. As if she and this baby might just be the only two people left in the world.
When Theodora finally quiets, Miriam tiptoes down the stairs and into the kitchen, pouring some milk into a saucepan and setting it to heat while she goes in search of the brandy. She’s halfway down the dark hallway when the wind rises outside and starts muttering under the eaves, a sound so much like a human voice that it makes her hair stand on end. But as she hurries back, the sighing of the wind fades—and in its place she hears something else, the sound of a raised voice from beyond the kitchen, hissing.
