There was a long pause. “Sure, Grace. I’ll help, but it has to be you. You have to come to me.”
I started to tell him to go straight to hell because I knew what he wanted. He wanted to play. He’d always loved games: cards, videos, relationships. The higher the stakes, the better. To him, Stella’s death was just another game. With Ben the risk was the best part, almost better than winning. But he always expected to win. Could using his arrogance against him be the key to finding out what had happened to Stella?
I agreed to go to him. I told myself it was only to get my sister back and achieve closure for our family. But when I heard Ben’s voice, there had been something, not the same intense desire I’d had when we were together. Something darker, possibly the opposite of desire.
Chapter 9
I expected a fight when I relayed my conversation with Ben and announced my decision to go to Ecuador alone. But my mother surprised me.
“Grace is right. Ben knows how the rest of the family feels about him.” She took my hand and held it to her lips. “If anyone can reason with him, it’s you.” She gave Mike a look I couldn’t quite interpret, and he shrugged his massive shoulders.
Mike insisted on setting up my travel plans, and I headed for home, troubled at the ease with which my mother was sending me off on a potentially dangerous mission. Settling the cosmic score for Stella was more important to her than preserving the safety of her remaining daughter. Even in death, Stella remained the favorite sister.
I didn’t get home until after midnight. Either I had annoyed her by leaving her alone so long, or she sensed Stella’s death and was depressed, but I had to coax her into a walk. The temperature had dropped, and the wind had risen, carrying with it the promise of snow. My neighbor’s Christmas lights blinked manically from the small, leafless hardwood in his front yard. The decorations were wrapped tightly around the base of the tree, strangling it with seasonal joy. Scarlett and I were both shivering when we returned home.
Once inside, I undid the dog’s leash and scratched the sweet spot behind her ear, causing her left leg to jerk wildly. “Sorry, Miss Scarlett, but it looks like our arrangement will be permanent.” She shook herself, gave me a mournful look, and strolled into the kitchen.
I changed into flannel pajamas. Exhausted, but wide awake, I opened the bottom dresser drawer. Under fancy, silk underwear I most likely would never wear, I found it. The family photo album Gran had given me a few weeks before she died. Her name, Emmaline Burns Hathaway, was on the first page in her own beautiful, flowing handwriting. She’d kept this album separate from the others, her favorite, she said, and it was right that I have it.
“I know you don’t want to think about the past right now, my love, but someday you will,” Gran said.
Pictures of my grandparents’ wedding day filled the first two pages. Seeming uncomfortable in what must have been their best church clothes, both stared directly at the camera, unsmiling, almost stern. Gran’s shoulder-length hair was dark and wavy, like one of the glamorous starlets she loved so much. With her startling, silver-gray eyes and high cheekbones, she wasn’t exactly beautiful. She was like someone you see every day for months, maybe years, and don’t think much about. Then one day she looks up at you from some ordinary task, like hemming a dress or washing dishes, and she takes your breath away. Was that what happened with my grandfather? Or had the slender, fair-haired young man in the picture taken one look at her and known she was the one?
“Seriously?” I asked myself out loud. “You still believe that love-of-your-life crap?”
The next few pictures were candid shots, several catching my grandparents in mid-laughter. In the last photo my grandfather carried his bride over the threshold of the tiny apartment they lived in above his parents’ home. Their happiness was almost tangible.
My grandmother devoted the second section of the album to pictures of my mother and aunt when they were very young. A few featured Mom during her brief stint as an only child. In one, Gran held an infant bundled up in a blanket above the caption: Home from the hospital. Another showed her as a grinning toddler stuffing handfuls of cake in her mouth: First birthday. A series of other firsts were documented: steps, Christmas, tooth.
Then her solitary reign ended with the birth of Aunt Rita. In most of the following pictures of them, my mother glared at her baby sister. I didn’t think it was possible for a small child to register such intense hostility, but it was clear Mom wanted no part of her sibling.
When I turned the page, I became disoriented. Instead of a continuation of the sisters’ childhoods, Gran skipped ahead to me and Stella.
I checked the pages to make sure they weren’t stuck together, but they appeared to be in their original, intended order. While pictorial evidence suggested my mother had not welcomed the younger child, my photos with and without Stella told an entirely different story. Before my sister arrived, I was consistently unsmiling. Not frowning in frustration or pouting in protest, just neutral. After Stella showed up, I was a different kid, as if a light switched on for me.
“Okay, Gran,” I thought. “You made your point.”
I thumbed through the next few pages of sibling glee. Toward the end of the album, Gran included pictures with Lesroy in them. Most shots of my cousin were blurry since he couldn’t stand still for more than a few seconds at a time. It made me smile to see the three of us together before we lost our glow of innocence.
There was only one picture on the last page. For a moment I was nine years old
