Oh my God,” said Claire.
The words emerged as a sob, and as they did, Claire realized how much fear had been pent up in her bones, to the point of fracture. Her mind spun, dipping in and out of questions. How was her mother here? How was Leslie Sullivan not on a beach three thousand miles away?
“What … what …” The choked word wouldn’t form itself into a sentence. Claire gave up the effort and, instead, cupped her hands over her mouth.
“She’s all right,” Mom said, nodding to the daughter in her arms. “She’d fallen asleep on the beach.”
Murphy, who Claire now saw was awake, gave a groggy half nod.
“Yeah,” she croaked. “I’m cool.”
“She’s cold, though,” said Mom. “Is there something to warm her up?”
Eileen jolted to attention. “Yeah. There are lots of blankets in the other room.”
“I’ll get them,” Claire blurted, suddenly needing this above anything else: to take action.
She propelled herself from the parlor, darting into the sitting room, where Murphy had constructed Cayenne Castle. She grabbed blankets and sheets with abandon, decimating Murphy’s construction and turning the castle to ruins. Then, with the blankets piled high, she returned to the parlor.
Eileen was crouched by the hearth, crumpling the contents of an open filing box and throwing the papers under new logs, striking a match. Soon, the kindling was alight, and the fire grew. Leslie had laid out Murphy on the couch, and Claire made quick work of burying her in blankets, encasing her ribs, ankles, thighs.
“There’s a kettle in the kitchen,” Claire said, remembering. “I’ll heat up water.”
She dashed from the room again, because it was better to keep moving than to sit with panic-stricken thoughts.
Mom was here. She was here. She’d found out their secret, and she’d found them at the worst possible time, with Murphy lost and Claire a mess. And what came next?
Claire didn’t want to think. Instead, she grabbed the cast-iron kettle from the stove and filled it with water. She turned a knob on the range and then stared, nonplussed, at the cold burner.
“God,” she groaned, when she realized: no electricity. If she’d stopped to think—the thing she most wanted not to do—she would have realized that.
Claire set down the kettle and breathed in deep. She turned back toward the parlor, exhaled, and resolved to face what awaited her in there.
“No power,” she mumbled, as she returned to the couch.
“I’m o-okay,” said Murphy, peeking her face over the mountainous pile of quilts. Her chattering teeth told a different story. Murphy’s neck was stark white and her nose and cheeks flushed red. How long had she been out on the coast? Had it been since Claire had abandoned her?
“I’m so sorry.” Claire barely got out the whisper, and she couldn’t look at Murphy as she said it. She definitely couldn’t look at Mom, who was sitting by the couch, one hand resting at Murphy’s side.
“For what?” asked Murphy. “Earlier? You were just being Claire.”
Claire didn’t think Murphy meant for the words to hurt her, but they did—more than any insult ever could.
Just being Claire. Just insisting on perfection, blowing up, running away from her sisters, her life, herself, for something better in the future.
Yes. That was her.
Eileen had finished stoking the fire and joined them by the couch. She stood at a distance from Mom, hands on hips, jaw firm.
“Elephant in the room,” she said. “Mom, what the hell are you doing here?”
Eileen was trying to sound unaffected, sure of herself. Claire knew, though: Eileen was at as much of a loss as Claire was. This was too surreal.
“I’m … sure you didn’t expect me.”
As Mom spoke, Claire studied her mother. She seemed small sitting there, cross-legged on the carpet, with her fine blond hair shrouding her face and her shoulders carved into a slump. Claire had never thought of her mother as a commanding presence, but she hadn’t thought of her as small, either. Small, or scared, or uncertain, or—at one time—young.
Kerry’s words were in Claire’s ears: Leslie, she stuck to that boy through thick and thin.
Leslie.
Mom.
Who had once been seventeen and overwhelmed.
Claire knew a startling truth about Mark Enright. She’d been working it out on her run back to Laramie Court. Now, though, staring the truth in the face, Claire was breathless with inaction, incapable of reconciling any of it with this woman.
“Mom,” said Claire, “why aren’t you in the Bahamas?”
Mom stared at her folded legs, tucking her stringy hair behind both ears. “When we got to Florida,” she said, “I changed my mind. Actually, when we got to the dock. Melodie wasn’t happy, but I made her go on without me.”
“I don’t understand,” Eileen said tonelessly. “Did you forget sunscreen?”
Mom sucked in her lower lip. It was chapped, Claire noticed, and unpainted. In fact, Mom wasn’t wearing a dab of makeup.
“I think,” she said slowly, as though testing the weight of each word, “it took getting there, being in a different place—or maybe it was the heat. It felt like … I don’t know, waking up from a hard sleep. I saw things clearly: I shouldn’t have convinced myself the trip was something I needed. I was wrong to pretend you girls were okay with it. And …” Mom looked up, locking her eyes on Claire and, in the process, nearly knocking the breath out of her. “I was wrong to drive off when you told me how you felt. I’d been telling myself for so long that I deserved that trip. That Murphy was in high school, and old enough that this one Christmas wouldn’t matter. And that the same held especially true for you girls.” She nodded to Claire, and then to Eileen.
“Well,” mumbled Murphy, “we told you it was okay.”
“I didn’t give you a choice.” Mom’s voice had grown firm. “I asked you, but I didn’t listen. I … don’t think I’ve been listening for a while. I guess you’d call it an epiphany, whatever happened in Florida. And then I knew I couldn’t live with myself if I got on that ship. It wouldn’t be vacation, it’d be torture. So, I came home.”
“But,” said Claire, “that had to cost so much money.”
“Southwest.” Mom smiled wanly. “No change fees. Only had to wait on standby for three different flights.”
“And then we weren’t home.” Claire snapped the next piece of the puzzle into place. Her legs felt strained—a delayed reaction to the running before. She sank to the ground, sitting only a foot off from Mom.
“I tried calling,” Mom began.
“I broke my phone,” Claire replied.
“I went searching your rooms for some kind of clue. I thought—my God, I thought someone had taken you.” Mom dropped her head in her hands. On its face the move seemed melodramatic, but Claire could see: This was true emotion. Her mom had been scared. Her mom had cared.
“You found Knutsen’s letter?” Eileen was still standing, arms crossed, face devoid of feeling.
Mom raised her head, revealing two splotchy pink patches around her eyes. “I can’t tell you how angry I am at that man. Just because you’re eighteen, Eileen, that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have contacted me. That he’d go behind my back—well, I gave him a piece of my mind. I called the police, too, but all they did was ask about how we got along, and how likely it was that you three had simply run away, and—I guess I had a second epiphany then. Really, you had plenty of reasons to run. You ticked every box. And I had a pretty good idea of where you’d gone to. I came here, and the headlights caught Murphy on the beach. I thought …” Mom unfolded the fists in her lap, a helpless motion. “God, I don’t know what I thought. But you’re here. And you’re okay. Aren’t you?”
Claire was attempting to take it in: Mom being here, worried, flying back from Florida. It was so much, and when combined with everything Claire had understood from Kerry, from what she’d seen in those PI’s photographs and read in John Enright’s obituary, the questions bubbled up in a rush, like soda fizz. Claire had to hiccup at least one of them out:
“It was you, wasn’t it? You were the girlfriend who got Mark Enright off on the murder charge. Mark was Dad.”
Mom blinked at Claire, wearing a hollowed-out expression. It was answer enough.
“When you moved away from here,” said Claire, “he changed his name to John. I guess it was … a tribute?”
She looked to Mom for confirmation.
“I … ,” Mom said. “He looked up to John. And John hadn’t betrayed him the way Patrick had. That was his word: ‘betrayed.’ I think Pat was … very confused. He’d seen what had happened, when John had left the family for Boston. He’d gone against Mrs. Enright’s wishes, and she’d disinherited him. Pat was young, sixteen. I can only guess what she threatened to convince him to testify.
“Sophia, his mother, was at the root of it. I saw the way she behaved for myself plenty of times, but the stories Mark told … She wasn’t well. I just didn’t understand, when he talked about her, how serious it was.”
Mom grimaced, swatting at her face as though a fly had flown too close. Then Claire realized, she’d been wiping away a tear. Mom cleared her throat and went on:
“Mark could have left the day he turned eighteen. Should have. He’d decided to stay through the summer for Pat, though. He didn’t want to leave him alone. So he still lived here in June, when it happened. Sophia went into one of her rages, only it didn’t end like the ones before. Mark thought—he really did—that she hadn’t meant to kill his father. Had he fallen down those stairs a different way, hit his head in another place … there’s no knowing. Mr. Enright did die, though, and by the time the police arrived, Sophia had a story. I still don’t know how she could’ve done that: tried to destroy Mark, turn Pat against him. Like I said, she wasn’t well.”
As Mom spoke, Claire glanced at a saucer-eyed Murphy, and then to Eileen, whose crossed arms had slackened. These were, Claire knew, truths none of them would quickly recover from.
“John didn’t come back from Boston—not for the trial, or the funerals. Your father didn’t blame him, though. He never blamed John for anything, up to the day we found out he had died in a car crash.” Mom shook her head. “Your father used to joke there was a curse on this house, that it followed him and his brothers wherever they went. I got angry when he said that. Maybe because I believed there was truth in it. We tried to escape the scandal. Went to a town off the map, where he could get work. It didn’t matter that he’d been acquitted; by then, the university had dropped its scholarship offer. So we both worked, and we thought we’d gotten far enough away from this place. I guess we didn’t escape the curse, though. Nothing went according to plan.”
Claire was remembering the day her mother had, inexplicably, piled her and her sisters into the car and driven them to the coast. How could Claire have not seen it then? Mom had been trying to tell them. Maybe she’d meant to say everything and had lost the nerve. Maybe, as she’d said, she’d wanted them to see Rockport once, not knowing what it had meant to her, only digging their feet into the sand.
And then there was Claire’s father: John, who wasn’t John, who’d died before his daughters got to know his real name.
“Sophia killed herself after the trial,” Mom said, the words gone low. “But not before she’d changed her will and cut Mark out. She knew this town would talk, regardless of what the coroner said. If Mark had stayed here, he would’ve been harassed till his dying day. Pat got a guardian, the house, and everything in it, but that poor boy had lost his whole family in the process. So … you see, it’s difficult to blame him. All these years he must’ve felt ashamed about what he’d done. Too ashamed to reach out, until it was too late. I wish, when he’d found us, he would’ve called me. I guess he did what he thought was right. He must’ve thought that by leaving the house to you, he was making amends. And maybe he was. It’s a beautiful place.”
Claire got the impression that Mom was beginning to ramble, unsure of what to say next, or how to make anything right. How could you, after that speech? What could anyone say?
“We thought we’d made the right decision,” Mom said. “We decided it’d be better not to tell you. Better for you. Less confusing. Or, if we did tell you, it’d be once you were old enough to understand. Then your father got sick and died. Life kept going on, and you kept growing up. The older you got, the more difficult it became. Knowing what I had to tell you, unable to do it alone. Soon it was hard to tell you anything. It was easier to take the extra shifts. At least then I knew I was doing something right as your mother: providing for you. But I wasn’t there. God knows what could’ve happened to you girls, traveling up here, with this weather and this town, and … all of that’s my fault.”
No one told Mom it wasn’t her fault. No one said anything. The parlor was so deathly still that the pounding on the front door seemed amplified ten times, and terror shot through Claire’s veins when she heard a voice call out, “ROCKPORT POLICE.”