“I am critical, Pea. You know it’s true. I don’t know why, but I always seem to be pointing out everyone’s mistakes. Especially Charlie’s.”
Penny was shaking her head. “I don’t care if you whipped him with his own belt, mocked his manhood and made him sleep in the root cellar. You still didn’t make him cheat. You didn’t make him steal. You didn’t make him destroy Breelie’s. Someone ought to introduce Charlie Newmark to the idea of personal responsibility.”
Bree was grateful for the vehemence in Penny’s voice, and the loyalty that caused it. But she didn’t want to sweep this under the carpet. If she didn’t acknowledge her failings, how was she ever going to change anything? If she couldn’t get better, she would never be able to put together a relationship that would last.
She didn’t want to be alone forever.
“But it’s not just Charlie, is it? Every boyfriend I’ve ever had has said something similar.” She flushed as an old, half-forgotten memory came flooding miserably back. The day the sexiest rebel in her ninth-grade class, the boy she’d secretly had a crush on for months, had humiliated her in front of everyone. Wild Gray Harper...he had thought she was cold, prissy and boring...even way back then.
Penny looked at her oddly, and if Bree didn’t want to explain that sad old story, she had to recover quickly. “And Rowena,” she added. “Charlie might have taken the words right out of her mouth. And Kitty, too—though she sugar-coated it most of the time.”
“Kitty was a cross between Pollyanna and a Stepford wife.” Penny laughed again, but more softly, as if out of respect for Bree’s obvious distress. “She thought it was a sin for a lady to frown, or express a single authentic feeling, or do anything but coddle and flatter the men in her life. I don’t know how you stood it all those years.”
“She did her best,” Bree said loyally. “She wasn’t even related to us, you know. She didn’t have to take me in.”
“I know.” Penny’s laughter faded away. “That was a dumb thing to say. I’m sorry.”
They were silent a moment, remembering, though it was like remembering a nightmare they’d inexplicably all dreamed at exactly the same time. Such horrors couldn’t exist in the real world, surely. Their beautiful mother, lying broken and bleeding at the foot of the staircase. Sweet little Penny, so pitiful and bewildered. Penny, who had turned eleven that day, and was unaware that her birthday dress trailed through the blood as she knelt beside the silent body, begging her mother to wake up.
Their father, hauled off to jail for deliberately pushing his unfaithful wife over the railing. A phantasmagoric trial, in which their pathetic, shameful family secrets were trotted out, naked, for all the world to gawk at.
Johnny Wright...rotting in jail for years, so intractably angry. Rejecting the few overtures the sisters could bring themselves to make. Finally dying there of a brain tumor that may well have caused his irrational behavior from the start.
But worst of all was the ripping apart of the sisters, all of them just children, really, as well-meaning social workers, remote family connections and dutiful family friends stepped up, one by one, to offer them a place to live.
Bree shook the memories away. She couldn’t let herself drown in them, not after all these years.
She smiled at Penny to show she wasn’t angry. They both felt the same grateful loyalty to their respective saviors. Ruth and Kitty weren’t perfect, but they’d voluntarily offered the drowning girls harbors in the storm. Ruth had provided stability and an almost cloistered quiet, which Penny’s personality had needed. And Kitty, the compulsively smiling divorcée, had, in her own weird, Stepford way, shown Bree how to snap herself out of the trance of shock and grief.
“The point is that they’re all saying the same thing,” Bree went on. “It’s as if they’re reading from the same script. They say I am self-righteous, judgmental. I think I know better than everyone else. I’m never willing to trust other people to do things right on their own.”
She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked away, over toward Penny’s soothing painting of birch trunks. “They can’t all be wrong. There must be some truth in it.”
Penny didn’t respond right away. She tapped her pencil against the sketch pad and ran her lower lip through her teeth softly.
“Well, even if there is...even if you do find it difficult to trust other people...is that so strange, given what happened to us? Why shouldn’t you be afraid that people will let you down? Who, in the end, didn’t let us down?”
And that, too, had the ring of truth. For a minute, Bree couldn’t respond. All she had to do was think back, and she could see that the troubles had begun long before the murder. A mother who had always been emotionally absent...a father who couldn’t control his jealous rages. Three little girls who practically raised themselves.
There’d been a whole year—Bree realized now that her mother must have taken a new lover—when a ten-year-old Bree had scavenged in the kitchen almost every night, trying to find something to feed Penny. Rowena, as usual, simply hadn’t eaten.
One night Bree turned dinner into a hunt for pirate treasure, filling the bread box with carrot “coins” and radish “rubies.” She’d felt such triumph, because Penny, only six at the time, had been enchanted. She had never guessed that she feasted on pirate carrots because there wasn’t anything else to eat.
“It did something to all of us,” Penny went on softly. “Think about Rowena. She was always so angry. She wouldn’t get close to anyone for years. At least you try.”
Suddenly, in the midst of her stupid self-absorption, Bree realized that Penny’s face had grown sad, too. If she’d had any artistic talent, she could have sketched a portrait of Penny that was every bit as melancholy as the one of herself she held in her hand right now.
“What about you, sweetpea?” She lowered her voice, just in case Ruth was awake. “What did it do to you?”
Penny smiled vaguely. For a minute, Bree thought her sister might not even answer. But after several seconds, Penny held out a hand and swept it from left to right, as if to encompass the whole town house.
“It made me cautious. Too cautious. It made me hide out here,” she said. “All these years. Here, where the storm can’t touch me.”
Oh.... Her heart stabbed, Bree stretched across the footboard and took her little sister’s hand. She held it tightly, palm to palm, fingers wrapped around the fragile bones and satiny skin.
They really were like two shipwrecked sailors, holding fast to each other for fear the current would sweep them apart and make them struggle alone.
“We’ll be all right, Pea. Somehow, we’ll figure it out. We’ll find a way to put the past behind us, and we’ll be happy again. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even find a way to be...normal.”
She hoped the joke would lighten the mood, but her voice trembled, and it didn’t come out quite as humorously as she’d hoped.
As usual, Penny was the one who knew exactly what to say. She squeezed Bree’s hand, straightened her spine and gave her a mischievous grin.
“Of course we will,” she said, “Look at Rowena! After all those years of being the world’s prickliest female, she married her true love, became a stepmother—”
Bree laughed. “To a little hellion.”
“Maybe, but he worships the ground she walks on. And she’s making her dude-ranch dream come true. Frankly, she’s so darn normal it’s disgusting.”
Bree laughed and let go of her sister’s hand. “How long before she finds a way to screw all that up, do you think?”
“Brianna.”