Susannah’s heart had dropped a mile. She should be happy for her sister. It was what Kate had always wanted. But a voice inside her head said something else.
Now she’s trapped forever.
She realised the final piece in her happiness would have been if Kate had come to Cambridge and never gone back to the island. Been as free a bird, as she was. But as much as Kate couldn’t change Susannah, Susannah could never change her sister. Try as she might, Susannah would never accept Matthew was a good match for her sister, but she’d tolerate him for Kate’s sake, and for the baby.
29
Emer
28th October 2011
The night after Lars left, Emer dreamt about Orla being alive again. This time, Orla was in a boat in the harbour at Vinalhaven, preparing to set sail. Emer was standing at the wharfside, calling to her to come back.
‘You’re very sick,’ she shouted at her. ‘I have to make you better.’
But her sister laughed at her, hoisted the sails. ‘Come with me,’ she called back. Orla had wanted to go sailing in so long, and she wasn’t coming back even if Emer was too frightened to get on the boat, even if she had cancer.
Emer woke filled with panic. She had to get her sister off the boat. Time was running out; she had to save Orla. And then the cold realisation. It was too late. She was already dead.
The sun had just risen as she got out of bed. The sky outside her window was a flat, pale grey, making the foliage look even brighter and more glorious. Fall was nearly over, the colours giving an intense final flare before winter set in. How would she find the dark months on Vinalhaven? Susannah had told her they could be cut off for days if an extreme nor’easter came in with snow. Would she be able to endure the loneliness and the cold? How would Susannah fare?
A lone pick-up drove by past the house. It looked like Henry’s, and Emer instantly felt guilty. She still hadn’t replied to his text. Why did she always screw everything up?
Later that day, Susannah asked Emer if she could light the fire in the woodstove in the front room and read to her.
‘I feel like revisiting some of my books,’ she told Emer. ‘You have a very pleasing reading voice,’ she complimented her.
‘Oh well, one of my many talents,’ Emer said, happy to be of use.
Susannah’s front room was filled with books. Row after row of packed bookshelves, with an array of titles from old classics, to hardback volumes of history and trashy paperback crime novels, which, Susannah was hasty to point out, belonged to Lynsey. It was the history books Susannah wanted Emer to read to her. At first, Emer thought she’d be bored. She’d never been interested in the past that much. But now she felt herself drawn into the subject matter, pausing to ask Susannah questions if she didn’t quite understand.
‘You’re a good teacher,’ she told Susannah, after Susannah had explained to her what the Reformation was and why it had happened.
From her letters, it was evident Susannah had adored her life at Harvard. Emer was mystified as to why she hadn’t pursued her academic career, rather than live as a recluse on a remote island off the coast of Maine.
‘You know so much,’ Emer said. ‘Did you ever teach in a university?’
‘No,’ Susannah said. ‘I would have needed to study more, got an MFA. And I had to raise Kate’s girls.’
‘But you could have gone back, when the girls left home?’
‘I couldn’t leave Vinalhaven. It was my mother who kept me here. It’s not that many years ago that she passed away.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be, she lived to the great age of ninety-six years old. By the end, she had dementia so bad it was a relief when she was finally gone.’
The letters Emer had been typing up from Kate to Susannah all these weeks had been dated until just before she had got married. Not in one letter was there an indication of any problem with Matthew. However, there were five years from 1961 to the year of Kate’s death without any correspondence between the sisters.
What had happened to Kate’s marriage?
‘What happened between Kate and her husband for him to kill her?’ Emer now asked Susannah, unable to contain her curiosity any more.
The older woman gave a big sigh. Shook her head. ‘He was a bully and a brute,’ she said to Emer. ‘Beat her up on the regular, I’m sure of it. But in those days, no one batted an eye.’
Susannah looked at the flames leaping inside the wood stove.
‘I don’t know exactly why, but I suppose it was one of his beatings gone too far. I think he killed her by mistake.’
On her walk into town later, Emer found herself imagining how things would have been for Susannah all those years on Vinalhaven, bringing up her sister’s daughters on her own in the aftermath of such a terrible tragedy. Her heart went out to her. Susannah had given up so much to look after Kate’s girls. Not just her career, but clearly Ava, too.
In the food store, Susannah scoured the shelves for something she could cook for Susannah, whose appetite was pretty non-existent. Anything fatty, or too heavy, gave her terrible pains in the stomach. Emer settled on some tofu, which she would stir-fry with some spinach and noodles, hoping she could coax Susannah to eat something. She had got dreadfully thin and Emer was worried when Lynsey and Rebecca arrived they’d be upset and shocked. But that’s how it was with cancer. Emer closed her eyes, and despite the fact
