you?”
Nina only stared at her a moment, those pale, unblinking eyes almost eerie in the moonlight. She had their father’s eyes. Johan. Johanna got his name, but Nina had inherited his beauty, his striking eyes, his stature.
“It’s usually of fire,” Nina said at last.
Johanna tried not to react, but she felt her body tense, the tears sting, the apology form on her lips—the one she had never uttered. The one no one knew she owed.
“I wake up certain the apartment is on fire. That’s pretty much it.”
“Pretty much?” Johanna coughed as the words struggled to get around the truth.
A tear finally slipped free of her sister’s eye. She nodded her lie. Now Johanna was the one gathering her sister into her arms. She held her close. “Remember,” she whispered, “picking wildflowers with Mommy?”
“I do.”
“And playing in the snow with Daddy?”
Another nod.
“He used to say the snowflakes were fairies?”
“Willies,” Nina corrected. “Like in Les Sylphides.”
“Sylphs.”
Nina laughed softly. “Yes, sylphs.”
Hush, Jo-Jo. Shhh. The sylphs are sleeping. If you wake them, they will make you dance until dawn.
She remembered the cold. She remembered hiccupping in the silence, and being held in strong, trusted arms. The clarity of that moment remained. Johanna never doubted the veracity. Eyes closed, she pulled his image out of baby memory. Daddy. Johanna was certain she remembered him bigger and more handsome than he actually was. “He loved us, Nina. He loved us so much.”
“Of course he did. So did Mom. They couldn’t help what they were. Even today, treating mental illness is such a crapshoot. Can you imagine what it was like for them?”
“Especially when they were separated. When they lost custody of us.”
“And then again with Emma and Julietta.” Nina sighed. “At least we didn’t know we were desperately poor and squatting in an abandoned farmhouse. We ate. We were mostly warm.”
“And we were constantly left all alone and unsupervised for days on end. Every child’s dream.”
“While they hunted, or picked through dumpsters. I believe nowadays they’d be called freegans.”
Both sisters laughed. Gallows humor had its merits.
“At least we had a home,” Nina said. “Jules and Emma didn’t.”
“Mom and Dad were pretty deep into the crazy by then.”
“Jo, that’s unkind.”
“Oh, come on, it’s true. I don’t have to pretend with you, do I?”
“No. You don’t.” Nina settled. “How did we all escape it, whatever genes made them…you know…”
“Crazy?”
“Mentally ill.”
“Same thing.” Johanna answered. “Maybe just stupid luck.”
“It does seem that way. I still worry a little about Julietta, but I don’t think she’s like they were. She’s just Julietta.”
Johanna stroked her sister’s hair. None of them had ever doubted the extraordinary love affair between their parents. It was all in the letter Gram kept in her jewelry box. She told them the story as if it were a movie script, a dark comedy, or a tragedy of love blooming in a mental facility and culminating in a high-speed chase that left their father dead. But the story never included their mother dying too, only vanishing so completely, she might as well have.
“Do you think she’s dead?”
Johanna opened her mouth to answer, and discovered it was she who had asked the question.
“I have no idea.”
“Do you wonder? Or have you stopped?”
Nina turned onto her side again. Her brow furrowed. “It’s like the nightmares,” she said, “we all have them, and we all wonder. How can we not? She’s our mother.”
* * * *
My girls, look at them sleep. Like babies, in one another’s arms. They whisper truths and hide them. They lay bare their souls and conceal them. They console and they hurt. Words are ever like that, never quite saying what is meant. Golden seraph. Wild sylph. Reasons one and two I wish for the locket, for the wish inside, and to have back my painful life.
Chapter 3
Ten Lords a’Leaping
More snow. Bitterly’s record accumulation was already almost met, and it wasn’t even Christmas. Johanna stood at the big front window, watching the snowflakes fall and doubting she would see New Jersey any time before the spring thaw. Though she hadn’t told her sisters yet, she closed for the season after getting the call about Gram. Christmas would have helped line the coffers of her slow season—tourists loved Cape May during the holidays almost as much as they did during the summer—but business was always slow between New Year’s and Valentine’s Day, and didn’t really get good again until Easter. She had been tempted, but never closed for the winter. It scared her a little, having no income, but Thanksgiving was profitable enough, if lonely. Watching the recorded Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade while eating holiday-in-a-container from the gourmet health-food shop wasn’t as much fun without her sisters’ snide commentary. Hosts whose hair never moved. Obviously lip-synched Broadway extravaganzas. This form of holiday-bashing was one of their favorite traditions of the season for as long as she could remember.
Her smile faded, but did not vanish. She had only just turned thirty their last Christmas together. Poppy died the summer prior and Gram could not face the holidays without all her girls. Even then, Johanna had been slacking on her visits home, but she returned to Bitterly and the melancholy-from-all-directions that permeated every visit. At least she had managed to avoid Charlie and his wife and kids and the newborns she had met briefly at Poppy’s funeral.
And now he was finally free.
The thought came unbidden, warming her from tips to toes. Of all her reasons for avoiding Bitterly, he was no longer one of them.
He’s still got it bad for you.
Nina’s tease whispered between her ears. There was a time Johanna had been confident, even smug, about how bad he had it for her. A whole summer of just the two of them exploring the woods and one another. Over the years, she let herself daydream they hadn’t stopped at exploring, that instead of prolonging the exquisite agony of waiting, they’d consumed one another in a teenage blaze of passionate glory. But those fantasies always ended up with her pregnant instead of Gina, of being stuck in Bitterly when every dream she ever had was to escape it, to become someone new, someone
