4

EVERLY

Present day

I’d been walking for over an hour, Oliver’s request buzzing in my ears. It was only a fifteen-minute hike to Mom’s house, but I often detoured up and down the streets of Savannah, wandering through the emerald squares with their statues and benches nestled among green fronds, and zigzagging across the historic district with its beautifully restored brick buildings. Walking kept me from revisiting the would-have, could-have land I inhabited when I was sitting still.

I’d discovered that Savannah couldn’t be fully explained to those who hadn’t visited it. Photos, no matter how glorious, and movies, no matter how accurate, couldn’t convey the way Savannah felt—seductive and lazy, busy and slow, modern and ancient. Savannah was a contradiction and a complicated melody that could only be known by walking through it, absorbing its every sensual detail.

I paused when I reached Wright Square, its benches filled with teenagers looking at their phones, unaware of the vibrant beauty around them. A couple—the young woman in cutoff shorts and a neon T-shirt with SpongeBob’s wide mouth, and the young man with his arm draped over her—was staring at the towering monument in the middle of the square. Four red granite columns supported a pedestal on which four winged figures with arms outstretched held up an iron globe of the world. At the edge rested a rock edifice, round and low to the ground.

“I think a famous Indian is buried here,” the man said in a thick New York accent, looking at his upside-down map.

I approached; I couldn’t help it. “It’s Tomochichi’s remains below that rock; he was Yamacraw, and if it weren’t for his assistance, Savannah wouldn’t exist. He helped James Oglethorpe, the British trustee who was sent here to start a colony, to survive in the new world. This square was built in 1773 and was originally called Percival . . .”

Their blank faces caused me to shush, and I laughed. “I’m sorry.” I held up my hands. “It’s a history buff’s tic.”

The woman smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “Honestly, that’s so interesting.”

“Everything here is interesting, if you look closely.” I moved on with a wave.

In the heat of the afternoon, I felt grief begin its slow crawl in my chest and up toward my throat. This feeling was what walking usually helped me avoid, but not today, not with Oliver’s visit.

Grief had been coiled quietly inside me since Papa’s death ten years ago—an absence that was as much a presence as any ghost. I’d become accustomed to the loss in the same way one does a limp. But Mora’s death had awakened that coiled animal, that oily, slithering grief that had hidden beneath the marsh and muck of my life. Mora’s absence had joined Papa’s and together the loss was more than double; it was exponential.

Everywhere I went in Savannah, I was reminded of Mora. The landscape had belonged to us and to our youth. I wanted to stay. I wanted to leave. I couldn’t decide anything at all. I felt frozen and yet still moving through a life that seemed to have been choreographed long ago. I was dancing by pre-planned steps, living by rote memory.

Mora’s death had robbed me of joy, removed my curiosity and stolen my love of life’s adventure. I’d experienced those with Mora, and without her I wasn’t sure I was capable of feeling much at all.

Sunlight toppled through the oak trees, and the scent of gardenias traveled on the air from behind every garden gate. As I drew near the family home where I grew up, the home where Papa had told his stories and Mom still lived, I was stopped short. Two white horses pulling a red carriage along the cobblestone street were blocking our gate.

Tourists filled the three-seat carriage, too-red plastic flowers draped along its sides. With cameras and cell phones, people snapped pictures as the driver, in a nineteenth-century red-and-gold livery costume, droned on. A teenage boy in an Atlanta Braves cap caught my gaze and flicked me the finger. I laughed.

“This is Jones Street,” the guide bellowed across the serene afternoon. “One of the widest and best shaded, with the most elegant homes. In fact, the saying ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ came from this very street.”

Even annoyed, I couldn’t blame the tour guide. This was the perfect time of day for these jaunts—a moon rising over Savannah with breezes gently wafting in from the river, gas lanterns flickering just enough that one could imagine it was the early 1800s, when old Savannah was long considered in its heyday. Spanish moss dappled the streetscape; fading light bestowed upon the ancient houses a resilient grace.

“This house right here, built in the 1800s, is one of the oldest and finest in the city. The Winthrop family who now lives here is one of the first families of Savannah, a very fine family surrounded by the ghosts of this city.”

Having heard it before, I rolled my eyes. I loved Savannah’s legends, but not when my own family became the source of gossip. Our more recent history wouldn’t be narrated on any tourist route, but all the locals knew, and frequently repeated, the story of how my father suffered from a heart deformity and died when I was four years old. Mom had stayed in the house after his death, and her widowed father, Papa, had moved in to help. She never found anyone she loved enough to marry again and change this comfortable arrangement.

Our home was in the Georgian style with symmetrical facades and a hipped roof, the kind of august residence tourists stopped to appreciate while attempting to peer through the garden gate into the backyard.

Waiting for the carriage to move, I spied Mom pushing aside the ornate iron gate and waving her hand in a shooing motion. I cringed. I knew what was coming.

“Move on. Go on. This is a private home. There are no ghosts here.” The voice Mom used was not the one her friends and family heard—dripping in honey and jasmine. This voice, shrill and high, she called up from the depths exclusively for pesky tourists.

Mom must have been sitting on the piazza waiting for me, watching the street like a hawk nested in the live oak. There she stood, all five feet two of her, in white slacks and a turquoise top, her blond hair wound on top of her head for the fund-raiser luncheon she’d hosted that afternoon. In her right hand, as usual, was the Waterford highball glass half full of vodka and ice—it was, after all, almost five p.m. on a summer afternoon. Cameras snapped and the carriage moved on.

I greeted her with a hug and inhaled the ever-present Chanel No. 5. “You know that doesn’t do any good,” I said. “Now you’ll end up on some woman’s Facebook page as a caricature of Old Savannah.”

“Hello, darling. And thank you for your kind advice. But I don’t want those tour guides talking about us.”

From the receding carriage we both heard the parting comment. “If you look closely at night, you might see the ghostly orbs that surround that place.”

I’d often thought the same—that Mora’s orb hung near to check on us all.

I held up my hand to stop Mom from calling out one more parting shot. She let it go. This time. There would be many other days to holler at carriages.

Tourists had always stopped to gawk at the stately Winthrop house. I looked at my home differently. I saw the ivy growing over the crumbling mortar, the paint peeling on the porch spindles and the chimney that needed brick pointing. Glamour with a patina of age and neglect. As a child, growing up here with Papa, Allyn and Mom, my life sprouting from the petri dish of Papa’s extravagant stories and Savannah’s dramatic history, I’d believed that if there was royalty in Savannah, I’d have a crown. As soon as middle school hit and I understood that there were other families who could claim the same heritage, I was as disappointed as if someone had staged a coup and swiped the title from me.

Mom and I walked through the gate with the lion’s head spindle and along the bluestone pathway that wound like a labyrinth through Mom’s prize-winning garden. The original homeowners of 1845 would never have anticipated such a lush landscape in their courtyard. For them it had merely been a place for their cistern, waste and livestock.

Evening-tide, Papa called this time. It used to be my favorite. I loved the way the fading sunlight sat on the waxy leaves and the sky sank slowly into night. Mora and I had known that the flickers of sunlight, the last of the day, were actually fairies dancing on the leaves and grass.

“Do you think they have names?” I once asked, my voice a whisper so as not to scare the fairies away.

We’d sat together in the grass as it itched our thighs and we’d squinted exactly so the light would flicker and dim to confirm our belief. “I’m sure they do,” Mora had replied in reverential tones.

My mind worked this way now—jumping from past to present: a Ping-Pong ball, a hummingbird, a firefly caught in a jar.

At the back door, Mom stopped and faced me, picking a piece of Spanish moss from my hair. She wiped at a speck of dirt on my forearm. “Have you been to Bonaventure this evening? Is that why you’re late?”

“Not tonight. Not in a while.”

Mom nodded and didn’t ask more. “Allyn’s coming over, too. A drink with me on the piazza before she arrives?”

“Is she bringing the kids?”

“Just us girls for an early dinner.”

“I’ll meet you in the library, okay?” I slipped the backpack from my shoulder.

Mom tucked her chin in question but walked off with a wave over her shoulder.

I tossed my bag on the back-entry bench and before I could change my mind, I wandered down the hallway, past family photos hung in gold frames, and entered the library. Bookcases covered the walls from floor to ceiling; a ladder tilted against the back wall on a track for grabbing books from the top shelf. Not that anyone had taken anything from so high lately.

From the window I could see the brick wall that separated my childhood home from Mora’s. Wisteria covered the brick and ancient magnolias shielded everything but the chimney pots from view. Mora’s family had moved once we graduated from high school, but I still thought of the house as theirs.

This was my favorite room in the house. I loved the endless shelves of novels and history books; evenings spent here with a blazing fire; days absorbed in reading for hours, until the sun faded and my eyes ached.

I stared at the oil painting of the Pulaski over the fireplace the same way I had as a kid, trying to imagine the night when the ship exploded. A brass picture light hung over the gilt frame and spread a glow across the wild waves and intact ship. The sky glowed bright blue and clear, the sails up and the paddle wheels in motion.

“You always loved that painting,” Mom said as she entered the library.

“They found her,” I told her in a low voice.

“What?”

I turned to Mom standing in the middle of a room she rarely entered. “They found the wreck. Off the coast of North Carolina.”

“Oh, my goodness. After all these years? I wonder what can possibly remain of it. How amazing.” She handed me a glass of rosé and I took a sip before setting the glass on a marble coaster.

The oil paint wave patterns slapping against the hull brought me back in time. “Papa loved to tell stories about this ship. But never the real ones.”

“He never told a real story about anything at all.” Pleasure filled her voice, not ridicule.

“Well, they were as real as they were meant to be.” I paused and the room filled with memories as quick-flash as lightning. “He loved all shipwrecks—the way they separated the living from the dead in such dramatic ways, the way the beautiful ships slipped to the bottom of the sea with everything the passengers owned, the way they completely altered the future of families, and even entire cities.”

“Everly, dear, you have inherited his great flair for making the tragic past seem quite romantic.”

It was true and I was proud of it. “Oliver wants me to help with the exhibition of the treasures and artifacts they find.”

“Oh.” Mom clapped her hand on Papa’s desk. “You must.”

“Mom, I haven’t worked with the museum since . . .”

“I know.” She held up one hand. “But maybe it’s time.”

“Not with Oliver.”

Mom sipped her drink and then wiped the lipstick from the glass with her forefinger while staring at me. “You two were once lovely friends and he is such a kind man. Why not work with him?”

“I am quite sure he blames me.”

“I am quite sure that’s ridiculous.”

I almost laughed at Mom’s imitation of my voice. “It’s not for me. Not at all.” I sat in Papa’s leather chair, curling my feet under my bottom, and settled back. “All my life I believed Dad’s old Irish stories that you told me, how the world that hides behind a veil is on our side, how everything works together for good. But it’s not true. Life is not like that. There is no fate and nothing is guiding anything, and the sooner we all come to that truth, the sooner we can all get on with our lives.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Yes, I do.”

Mom rubbed at her temples with her pink-painted fingernails, just as she always did when she thought deeply or just before a migraine came on. Silence filled the room and far-off thunder echoed, a prelude to the usual evening summer storm’s song. “Now, Everly Winthrop, you listen to me. I know how horrid all of this has been. Losing your best friend is awful, but you have a life to live.”

“You can say her name.”

“Mora. And you know I loved her as a daughter. But that can’t keep you from working on something that might fill you with purpose and joie de vivre again.”

“Fill me with what?” I grinned at Mom’s terrible accent.

“Joie de vivre. You know, the joy of life. You’ve always had it. Don’t let the past keep you from it. I want . . . my Everly back. The woman who always said, ‘I wonder what happens next.’”

“Well, damn, Mom, so do I, but I can’t quite seem to find her.”

Sweat surfaced on my neck where it always appeared right before the terror reached upward and closed my throat. I shut my eyes, reminding myself that I was not drowning; I was not choking. This panic would pass. It always did.

“Oh, Everly. Are you having one of those attacks?” Mom’s voice came through a long, windless tunnel.

I opened my eyes. “I’m okay.” I focused on Papa’s pocket watch in a glass case on the bookshelf; on the second hand of the wooden clock on the mantel inching forward; on Mom’s hands clasped together, her blue veins crisscrossing under thin skin. “I’m okay,” I repeated.

“I’m sorry,” Mom said again, clicking on the desk lamp. The bright light made me squint and look away. “Maybe this project is just what you need—something else to think about—and you can work with Oliver. You need each other, you know. Maybe this is meant to be.”

“There’s no such thing as ‘meant to be.’ Things just happen. And then other things happen. Some good. Some bad. And some are horrendous.”

“Stop that now. You don’t really believe that; it’s vulgar.”

“So is death.”

Mom came nearer and placed her hand on my shoulder. “That is your pain talking.”

I shrugged her hand off and slouched like a child. “Did you steal that phrase from one of your ladies-who-lunch?”

“No, I didn’t. And now you’re being cruel.”

A scaffolding of false protection collapsed inside. Mom was right. I hated that I even knew how to be so cruel.

A rustling sound made me turn to see Allyn standing in the archway. “Come save me from Mom’s advice,” I said.

Allyn was a brighter image of me—she’d kept our childhood blond hair while mine had turned darker blond. She was as casually elegant as the décor of her renovated Savannah home, which had been featured in a lavish magazine spread. “Oh, please,” she said. “I can’t save you from such travesty.” She entered the library and hugged both Mom and me. “What is meant to be?”

“That nice man, Oliver Samford . . . the one who runs the museum.” Mom paused and Allyn looked at me with an upswing of her eyebrows. “He wants Everly to work with him on an exhibit.”

“Probably not the best idea,” Allyn said.

“My words exactly.” I clapped my hands together.

“Well, it’s about that ship.” Mom pointed at the painting.

“The Pulaski? Why are they doing an exhibit?” Allyn stepped closer and craned her neck like a hinge to stare up at it.

“They found the wreckage,” I said.

“Whoa.” Allyn touched the gilded edge before turning to me. “Remember that woman Papa always talked about? The one with the memorial near the river?”

“Lilly Forsyth,” I said. “No one ever knew what happened to her, so he made up a thousand stories.” I paused and closed my eyes. “Sometimes he’d take us down to that statue and we’d throw pennies into the fountain around it.” I opened my eyes. “Dedicated to the perished of the Pulaski. June 14th, 1838,” I said from memory.

“And often when we asked him to tell us about what really happened to all the people on the ship . . . he’d say”—Allyn sad-smiled, lowering her voice—“the sea always holds its secrets.”

“Well, well,” Mom said. “Maybe she wants to tell us now.”