The Sisters Chase Read online

  Once, without thinking, Mary grabbed one. Her hand moving independently of her mind, she took the little bird. Bringing her nose near its beak, she looked into its black eyes, which didn’t register terror, as she might have expected them to. At first, the bird held still, then its legs bicycled around, and it let out a peep. “You have to be careful,” she said. Then she set it gently back onto the sand, and with a fury of flutters, it was gone. “Now you have a good story,” she said, over her shoulder.

  She felt different; she knew she did. But it wasn’t in any way she might have expected. She wasn’t retching into the toilet in the morning. She wasn’t suddenly craving pickles. Instead, she was simply hungry. Hungry and so tired that she’d fall asleep on the sand, her limbs angled out around her, her black hair hot from the sun.

  “Were you at the beach all day?” Diane would ask, inspecting the red hue to her skin, the bloom of tiny freckles on her nose.

  “Yeah,” Mary would reply, letting her bag drop on the floor. “I went for a walk.”

  Diane would stop and square her hand to her hip. “Well, I needed some help getting the rooms cleaned up for check-in!”

  Mary would roll her eyes. She’d walk right past Diane.

  “Don’t you think I’d like to spend my days at the beach?” And Mary would start down the hallway to her room. “You really are a piece of work, Mary Catherine Chase!” Diane would call after her. Adding, when she heard Mary’s door shut, “What would your grandfather think, huh?”

  If Mary knew that she was pregnant, it was an abstract understanding. She wasn’t panicked. Not really. The boy was coming back. He’d told her so. He’d return in the fall just as the winds changed and the earth was leached of green. He’d sail over the sapphire sea in his white boat. He’d come right to her. They’d whisper their plans, and she’d leave that night, her black hair waving in a sky as dark as pitch.

  The day Mr. Pool had a huge catch of albacore at the trenches off the coast, Alice called over to the Water’s Edge. Mary was lying in bed, pressing her hands into her belly, feeling the taut roundness that was forming there, pushing it from side to side, up and down. As if she could prove that it wasn’t part of her. That it was something alien. Diane appeared in her doorway, her arms crossed in front of her. One of Mary’s hands casually flattened against the plane of her belly; the other slid toward the book that lay beside her. But Diane hadn’t noticed anything. Diane was looking at Mary’s face.

  “You have any plans tonight?” she asked. It was early evening, and she had her hair in rollers. Mary assumed that Barry was coming over, as he often did to spend time with Diane. She couldn’t leave the Water’s Edge, not really. Not in the summer.

  Mary didn’t look up. “No,” she said, her knees angled up, her back against her pillow.

  “No friends you want to see? Allison hasn’t come over in a while.”

  “She’s babysitting for the O’Nearys,” Mary said, though she hadn’t spoken with Allison in months. She turned to angle her back toward Diane, her open book in her hands.

  “Well, Mrs. Pool just called,” Diane finally said. “She said Stan got a bunch of tuna and the charter group he was with didn’t want it. She’s putting it up tonight. Wanted to know if we wanted some.”

  “Do we?”

  “You like tuna,” responded Diane. “I like tuna.”

  Mary remained silent.

  “It’s probably going to take Alice all night to get that fish canned. I’m sure she’d love some help.”

  Mary carefully folded down the corner of her page, running her finger along the crease. She knew that Diane was worried about her, was wondering why her teenage daughter slept all day and went for walks alone, why she didn’t see her friends. Why she seemed to be putting on weight. “Okay,” Mary said. She liked helping Mrs. Pool in her pale-blue kitchen. She liked the amicable silence. “I’ll go over.” And the relief on Diane’s face was undisguised.

  The processing was already underway by the time Mary arrived. She stepped into the warm humid kitchen, letting the screen door clatter shut behind her. Mrs. Pool was hunched over the white stove, the coil burner below the pressure canner glowing red. On the small kitchen table lined with newspapers were mountains of pink flesh, slick and shiny, and the fan overhead cast its whirling shadow around the room.

  Mary stepped up beside Mrs. Pool. Without saying a word, she rested her hand on Mary’s back and smiled.

  “Mom said you needed some help.”

  “More like some company,” she said. It was the great tragedy of Alice Pool’s life that she could never have children and the great grace of Diane’s, for it was the childlessness of the Pool household that created a void the Chase girls helped to fill.

  “What should I do?”

  Alice tilted her head toward the piles of fish behind them. “You can get it into jars. Get it ready.” In a box on the floor were clean mason jars. On the table, a small cutting board and a knife.

  Mary pulled out the chair and sat down. “Are you going to can all of it?”

  “I think so,” said Mrs. Pool, as she peered down at the gauge on her cooker.

  “How full should I make them?”

  “You can pack it right up to the bottom thread,” Mrs. Pool replied. “Just get it into chunks first.”

  Mary took one of the large hunks of meat. It was still cool and smelled only of seawater. Then she brought her knife against it, and with an elegant stroke, the meat was severed in half. Mary didn’t mind this kind of work. When she was younger, she used to go out with Mr. Pool on the boat, and he’d taught her to run a blade along a fish’s spine, to remove all the bones and innards with a few deft slices.

  They worked for more than an hour before either of them uttered a word. If Mary appreciated one thing about Alice Pool, it was her ability to stay quiet. When Mary was alone with Diane, Diane was on a constant quest for information. How is math going? Is Angie Barclay’s mother feeling better? Have you seen Kathy lately? Ann? Laura? But Alice Pool didn’t ask questions. Alice Pool just quietly hummed.

  When she finally did speak, it was a statement. “Stan says that the Japs eat fish raw.” Her voice was distant and light, as if lifting to meet a passing thought. “They don’t even cook it first.”

  “Why?” asked Mary.

  “Beats me,” said Mrs. Pool. “They’ve got some funny ideas.”

  And with Mrs. Pool’s back to her, Mary made a clean slice of fish and plucked it up with her fingertips. She brought it close to her face and turned it from one side to the other for inspection. Then she passed it through her lips whole and let it fill her mouth. She bit down and felt its cool, firm resistance. As she watched Mrs. Pool—the soft roundness of her shoulders, the dromedary droop of her neck—Mary felt the lovely slow-release pleasure of hiding something.

  “Didn’t Mr. Pool used to live over there?” Mary finally asked. Mary knew the answer but wanted to hear it again all the same. Though no one was aware of it, Mary had looked through Mr. Pool’s photo albums, seen the picture of him in his sand-colored uniform, read the bundle of yellowed letters written by his parents, and by a young, besotted Alice.

  “Mmm-hmm,” replied Mrs. Pool. “After the war. He was stationed in Okinawa.”

  Mary had found Japan on a map, run her finger along the crescent nation. “I want to go there,” she said. “Someday.”

  Without looking up, Mrs. Pool chuckled.

  Mary and Mrs. Pool canned more than a hundred pounds of tuna that evening, enough to line the pantry shelves with a winter’s worth of fish.

  And after the last batch had been put into the pot, after Mary gathered up the wet piles of newsprint and brought them to the metal garbage can in the shed, she walked back to the kitchen and let the screen door again clatter shut behind her. She watched Mrs. Pool for a moment. “I guess I’ll go,” she said.

  Mrs. Pool turned around and stepped toward Mary, pulling her into a hug. And perhaps it was the weariness from the hours of canning
that made Mary forget. Or perhaps it was that Mrs. Pool’s embrace came so naturally, without the shifting, cautious hesitation that had started to precede all of Diane’s. But when Mrs. Pool rested her hand on Mary’s back, when she gently pulled Mary’s body into her own, that round hardness that had formed so insistently in her belly made its presence known—an orb between them. And before Mary could react, before she could sliver away, Alice Pool gave a small but certain gasp, then pulled back. With her hands on Mary’s shoulders, Alice’s frightened eyes probed Mary’s.

  “Well,” said Mary, her face registering neither acknowledgment nor guilt. “I better get home.” And she pushed out the door into the night. Mary didn’t look back as she walked across the scrubby grass to the Water’s Edge, but if she had, she would have seen Mrs. Pool standing on the brick walk watching her, her apron still on, moths circling the bright beam of the floodlight above.

  Glancing briefly through the glass of the door to the Water’s Edge office, Mary saw Diane and Barry sitting on the couch, white containers of Chinese takeout in front of them. The television was on, and Diane’s foot was under the coffee table, rubbing Barry’s ankle.

  The bell of the door clanged when Mary pushed it open.

  Diane straightened up, nudging Barry, whose eyes had been fixed on the television. “Hi, honey!” she said. “How’d it go with Alice?”

  Mary assessed the spread of food in front of them. She was hungry. She was always hungry now. “Good. We’re finished.”

  Diane clucked in amazement. “That’s great. Right, Bare?”

  Barry nodded. “Yeah, nice job,” he muttered, before turning back to the television.

  “Okay, well,” said Mary, with a stony calm. “Good night.”

  “Night, hon!” called Diane.

  And that night, as Mary walked back to her room, she knew it was all just a matter of time. That, really, it always was. Because, though Alice Pool had no children of her own, she would know the meaning of what she had felt in Mary’s stomach. She had felt it before. She had been the first one to know about Diane, too.

  Twenty-six

  1989

  The hotel by the ocean was called Sea Cliff. She had been familiar with it for some time. When she was little and her grandfather was still alive, he’d show her pictures of grand old hotels, images he’d clipped from magazines of venerated establishments, places that hosted royalty, movie stars. Princess Grace stayed here, he’d say. Or They made a movie with Cary Grant at this one. And Mary would sit on his blue-polyester-clad lap and stare at the pictures, at the colors that looked so bright they couldn’t be real. And the girl who loved stories understood that hotels were their repository.

  But she knew of Sea Cliff from elsewhere.

  So after she and Hannah had first seen Sea Cliff, they drove to a beach nearby and parked the Blazer by the side of the road. With a blanket wrapped around her, Mary walked down the old wooden stairs to the sand. It felt cooler down by the water by a few degrees.

  “I like it here,” said Hannah, as she stared at the shore birds diving and calling overhead.

  Mary blinked. The morning sun on the water made everything look faded, pastel. “Yeah,” she said, her head nodding to one side with fatigue from the drive. “I knew you would.”

  Mary lay down and she slept, the sand working its way into her black hair. And Hannah walked knee-deep into the water, letting the frigid, foamy surf swirl around her legs, feeling it rock her back as it spilled onto the shore, then watching the sand change under her feet as the Pacific took another great breath in.

  When Mary had dozed away enough of the drive, she sat up with red-rimmed eyes closed against the light. “We need to get some food,” she said, to the air around her, having no knowledge of exactly where Hannah stood, only knowing that she was near. She was always near.

  “We passed a place,” answered Hannah. “It looked like a bakery.”

  “Are you hungry?” asked Mary.

  Hannah watched as a ship moved slowly along the ink-blue horizon line. “Yeah,” she said, reluctant to leave the water. “I guess so.”

  The Chase girls climbed the wooden stairs back to the street and drove to the bakery. Outside, they sat on the curb and ate their cinnamon buns, taking huge mouthfuls, not pausing to breathe or speak. Finally, Mary said, her mouth full of pastry, “I’m going to go to the hotel and get a job.”

  “Do you think they’ll hire you?” asked Hannah. She was watching the cars pass, trying to hide just how much she wanted to stay there, in the town by the sea, where the sun sank rather than rose over the ocean.

  “I don’t know,” said Mary. But right down to her bones, Mary knew that they would. Mary sensed some finality here, in this town. Some inevitability. A lovely trap, the door locked tightly. “But I bet they will. Hotels always do.”

  And when she walked into Sea Cliff and asked to speak with someone about a position, she was ushered to a small conference room and offered a seat. As if her hair wasn’t matted and sandy. As if she wasn’t wearing the clothes she had put on the morning before. Human resources would be right with her, she was told.

  And human resources arrived in the form of a portly man as pale as a poached chicken with thinning drab blond hair. He squeezed himself into the seat across from Mary, the thick of his thighs pressing against the arms of the chair.

  “Bob Kossel,” he said, extending his hand.

  Mary took it, feeling its damp warmth. “Mary Chase,” she said.

  And the interview began.

  “So have you worked in hotels, Ms. Chase?”

  Mary gave him a solar grin. “All my life.”

  And she went on to tell him about the storied East Coast hotel she had grown up in, the one that had closed last year, the one her father had managed.

  “Well,” he said, his voice as wobbly as a top. He looked over what appeared to be a schedule, pushing his glasses up his nose. He was a man to whom things happened. A man whose choices were made for him. “I guess you came at the right time. Half the staff just went back to college.”

  “That’s fantastic!”

  “It’s a front-desk position.”

  “Great!”

  “Yeah, well . . .” He gave her a wagging finger—an attempt at authority. “You’ll have to start with the night shift. The girl who works it now has been waiting to move to days.”

  Mary’s smile came slow and genuine. “The night shift is perfect,” she said.

  Bob looked at her, his suspicion piqued. No one wanted the night shift. Not ever.

  “I have a sister,” Mary said. “She lives with me. I can sleep while she’s at school.”

  THE GIRLS FOUND AN APARTMENT above a Laundromat in a building behind the town’s grocery store. The landlord met them at the property the afternoon that Mary got her job at Sea Cliff. He watched Mary as she walked through the space, her hands clasped behind her.

  “So utilities are included?” she asked.

  “Gas, water, and electric. You have to pay for the phone. And cable if you get it.”

  Mary paid the first month’s rent and deposit in cash. She’d done pretty well that summer and had managed to save a bit.

  It was a small one-bedroom, smaller than even the trailer she and Hannah had lived in, but it was clean, or smelled so at least, with the warm scented air wafting up from the enormous metal driers that churned and spun all hours of the day. It would get hot, Mary knew, in the summer. But they had arrived in early fall, when fog rolled in from the sea and settled into the valleys, sapping the heat out of the nights.

  Their first evening there, Hannah kneeled by the front window and peered out. She looked down to the metal slot through which the postman would slide their mail, down to the doorway that led to the stairs, down to the Dumpster, where they were told they would put their trash. “I like it,” she said.

  Mary sat down on the carpet behind her, but she didn’t say a word, she just watched Hannah, watched her face become illuminated with the he
adlights of passing cars. And that night the Chase girls pulled their sleeping bags out once again and set them on the floor. They opened the windows wide, trying to lure in the ocean air. And as they lay beside each other, Mary spun her finger through one of Hannah’s curls.

  “It’s going to be tight for a while,” she said, feeling the beginnings of sleep start to spread through her body like a thin layer of ice on water. “Until I get paid.”

  Hannah nodded. She understood.

  “And I’m going to have to be at work while you’re sleeping at night. But I’ll be home early. Before you leave for school.”

  Without seeing Hannah’s face, Mary knew that joy had spread across it. And when Hannah spoke, her words galloped with anticipation. “Do you think the school here will have lockers?”

  “Probably,” said Mary. “Mine did.”

  Hannah inhaled. “That’s so awesome,” she whispered, the words rushing back out.

  “We’ll call the school tomorrow. I’ll find out when you can start.”

  Then Hannah rolled onto her side and curled into Mary, laying one arm over her sister. She buried her face into Mary’s sleeping bag, and her words were muffled when she said, “Thanks, Mare.”

  The next morning, from a pay phone in front of the grocery store, Mary called the local middle school. She had to speak with three different people and wait on hold for several minutes before the principal got on the line to talk about Hannah and her situation, as it was termed.

  “And she’s had no formal schooling?” His voice crackled over the line; the receiver felt slick in Mary’s hand.

  Mary leaned against the glass wall of the phone booth. “No, she has,” she said. “She went to kindergarten. Since then, I’ve been teaching her myself.”

  There was silence on the line. “Well, she’ll need to take placement exams so we can find the right spot for her.”

  “When?” Mary asked. “When can you do the exams?”