“I really don’t want to hurt you, Kit. I can remember when we were little and I loved you so much. You were always so much bigger than I was. And I was always sick. I still am sick a lot. I’m not put together all that well.” She paused. “And I’m almost grateful for your disgraceful perspective on things: it’s probably kept you from feeling guilty about getting the lion’s share of everything from the minute you were conceived. I don’t want you to feel guilty. I don’t want you to feel responsible for something you did before you were born. Something completely innocent. But I do want you to know that Dad is capable of lying in a deep and sustained way. That he’s capable of forcing people—doctors and dentists and maybe even our own mother—to back him up. If not to lie, then at least to keep quiet about the truth.
“The fact is, Kit, that I was not hurt when Mom fell down the stairs. That never even happened. I was hurt when you kicked me in the face, Kit. Long before we were born. You were four weeks older, much stronger than I was, your bones much harder than mine. And this time, you have to believe me. Because I can prove it. But also because it will give you something to hold on to. It will remind you that even though he is a terrible liar and a terrible father and in many ways a terrible man, our father has spent the past twenty years protecting you. He was right to keep this secret, I suppose. What you did was entirely innocent.” Holly put her arms around Kit and held him as he had not been held since his mother had gone so suddenly to her death. “He didn’t want you to bear any blame,” she said gently. “And neither do I.”
For a long while after Holly left him, Kit sat in the gazebo and listened to the harvest of the bees. He watched a tiny, auburn ant slowly drag the corpse of a paper wasp across the gazebo floor. He followed the patient course of the shadows in the sun-baked garden. He tasted the breeze on his tongue and for the first time in his life noticed his own salt and a subtle, coppery flavor and a trace of the nectar with which the flowers scented the sky. He felt the breeze lift the small hairs on his forearms. He ran his hand over the old wood of the bench where he sat.
He was afraid that if he moved too quickly, the panic that had filled him up would spill over and wash him away, as if he’d never been. He thought about everything Holly had told him, pondered the myth his father had forged, and wondered whether he possessed a tool strong enough to break the bonds of heredity and tradition.
For the first time in years, he remembered his mother in such tremendous detail and dimension that she seemed not to have died after all. He could smell her, feel the texture of her hair, the warmth of her skin. They were on the beach, and he was helping her rig her skiff, hoist its sail, splash it clean of sand. He meant to go out with her, but she said no. Not today. It was too windy. Too late. Nearly time for his supper. She intended to sail out to the first bell, maybe beyond.
Kit remembered how he became furious, threw himself into the sand. How his mother patiently lifted him up and drew him into her lap so that they nestled together in the sand like shore birds. She scolded him gently and kissed him, ran her fingers through his salty hair, told him that he was the best boy she had ever known. Which made him so proud that he wiped his tears with sandy hands, leaving trails along his cheeks, and kissed her good-bye.
“Go on up for your supper,” she told him, dragging the skiff into the shallows and climbing carefully aboard. “And look after your sister while I’m gone.”
He turned and walked away up the beach toward the sloping lawn. As he reached the grass, he thought he heard her call to him and turned back in time to see her wave and blow him a kiss. She called out again, but he could not tell what she was saying, and so he simply waved back, smiling belatedly, as she turned her attention once again to the sea.
Kit remembered waiting for his mother to return, watching his father go out into the night, going to bed with the knowledge that his mother was missing, waking to the news that she was dead.
He and Holly huddled together in their playroom that awful morning, among their wooden horses and their puppets, until someone brought them breakfast on a tray. But they would not eat and instead clung to each other, dry-eyed, serious as young monkeys.
When their father finally came to see them, they were shocked by his whiskers and his sooty eyes. When they both ran to him, still disbelieving, he grabbed Kit in his arms and walked around the room with slow, giant, random steps. Kit hung straight and limp from his father’s emphatic embrace while Holly stood where they had left her and followed them with her eyes.
Kit looked over his father’s shoulder and saw his sister watching them. He missed his mother fiercely and began to cry for her. And although he knew that Holly’s loss was somehow greater than his own, perhaps because he knew this, he was comforted by the knowledge that he was the child his father preferred. He turned his face into his father’s chest, wrapped his arms around his father’s neck, and was only momentarily distracted when he heard his sister open the playroom door.
Kit was startled to find himself sitting alone in the gazebo, surrounded by tulips. But this
