Still, we had a great time. Ceci loved our baby—you could tell she’d be one to have a baby right away—and made a big fuss about him. Rafe was at his cutest, doing things like following the flight of a fly with such fascination, he finally got dizzy and fell over. For the first time, I got to show off my very own little brother, to let others see what I knew—that I loved him as much as I’d loved my sisters. It was even okay that we had to take Aunt Juliet to visit the graves and I had never been. When we pulled up, it touched me to see that Papa’s and Mama’s headstones were apart, with Becky and Ruthie between them, and that Mama had arranged somehow for two little sculpted hands made of stone to connect Becky and Ruthie to each other. Another person might have found it creepy, but it was very comforting to me. I hated to see everyone go, even stuffy Patrick, because I knew we would go back to being how we were after they left.
Then, just a few days later, a few months after my fifteenth birthday—for which my parents had given me another winter coat—my father got me up early and called me out to the barn. He was standing next to Ruby’s old stall with a goofy grin on his face. He’d never stored anything in there.
He must have planned it all along.
I named her Jade.
She was a buttermilk beige Percheron, three years old, already green-broke and gentle as a lamb, with one brown and one green eye. “She reminded me of you,” my father joked, “because you always seem to have your mind in two places.” I wanted to get right up on her, but the lady from Cedar City who’d raised her said she’d never been sat by anyone she didn’t know. Still, I wanted to try. The lady held her halter, and I blew into her nose and talked into her ear and stroked her side, the way mother horses lick their babies (horses hate it when you slap them on the neck, so I don’t know why everyone does it). Then I sat on the side of the stall and put one leg over. She quivered but let me sit on her right away, there in the stall. The lady was pretty surprised. But Jade was trusting, and we understood each other right off. This obviously wasn’t like my other birthdays. I couldn’t believe how thoughtful a gift it was. I went running into the house to get Rafe so he could pet her nose.
Jade brought new life into my days. She wasn’t like my sweet Ruby, as comfortable (and eventful) as riding a coffee table. I never even put a bridle on Ruby, just a length of rope around her neck that I would touch gently if I wanted her to go one way or the other, which was mostly for Becky and Ruthie to hold on to. Angel horse though she was, Jade had a mind of her own; and I spent hours as spring turned into summer teaching her ground manners, getting her comfortable with a bridle, and training her to stand perfectly still to be washed and picked. Jade wasn’t exactly resisting, but all these new things kind of puzzled her. And when she was puzzled, she’d either stop on a dime and pout or have a shaky-shake fit all over, which would have made me laugh if it didn’t sometimes wiggle me off a horse that was seventeen hands tall. Jade never went up or bucked, but she was such a wiggler, I finally put her under saddle until she settled down. It didn’t take long.
I think I rode Jade every day that summer. I had the best inner thighs in my neighborhood. When I rode at night, it was natural that I remembered having the little girls up in front of me on Ruby, when I’d take her for a stand in the creek, away downstream from the swimming area. One night, Becky told me she wanted a telescope when she grew up, so she could look at every star “in person.” We would lie back on Ruby as if she were a sofa, and I would point out the stars in Orion’s belt and the handle and cup of the Big Dipper. Becky argued that it was not a cup at all; cups were round, and the dipper was square. And she said she could see a tiny baby star living inside it. Ruthie and I never could. “That’s because your eyes are round, and mine are sharp,” Becky told me once.
When I took Jade to stand in the water, I tried not to think of them or to wonder if they saw me, if the tiniest stars were their eyes. Jade was good in water, and a lot of horses shy from it. I thought someday I might trailer her somewhere we could swim.
In June, before it got too sweltering hot, I rode Jade up the hill to the Sissinellis. I’d seen a car up there, and though I didn’t know if the whole family was in town, I thought I’d go over just in case. I couldn’t wait to show Jade to Serena. If it turned out that only Dr. Sissinelli was around, the way he sometimes was in and out in summer for a case or a seminar, he’d give me my key so I could start summer cleaning. Having just finished washing Jade and squeegeeing the water out of her coat, I pulled my hair into a braid so I’d look half-human, but I didn’t bother to clean up. I was wearing Papa’s old flannel shirt tied up in front and my jeans that were almost too small to close and so short that I had to pull them down like hip-huggers.
What I didn’t count on was that I’d never ridden Jade on such a pebbly path as the one up the ridge, and she didn’t like it one bit. The sound must have bothered her. Though I wasn’t scared, she spun around on me twice, and once, her foot slipped. Then she got all spooky and started to sweat so much, I was scraping it off with the reins. I could’ve taken her home then, but that would basically have been teaching her a vice, so I slowly urged her forward. We weren’t really in danger, but she was irritating the heck out of me. Finally, I hauled off and gave her a kick, and she took off running all the way to the Sissinellis’ porch. I was bareback and just dug my fingers into her mane along with gripping my reins. When we got to the grass, Jade just stopped with all four feet as if she’d run into a wall, and I went right over her head onto the lawn. I wasn’t hurt, except for my butt and a nick on my palm from a piece of gravel, but I was surely embarrassed. No one came out, for which I was grateful. There probably was no one home. Just to make sure, I got up and knocked on the door, rubbing my rear end where my jeans were ripped. As I was heading back down the steps, to where Jade was lazily cropping the Sissinellis’ flowers and looking at me with her long-lashed green eye, the door suddenly opened, and there stood Miko. He was barefoot, eating a sandwich the size of my head. He beckoned me inside. I didn’t think a thing of it. He had the stereo on so loud—it was Vivaldi, The Four Seasons—that I couldn’t have heard him if he’d said anything. He kept on eating the sandwich. When the section ended, he said, “Aren’t the speakers cool?” He wasn’t bragging, just delighted.
“I hear them all the time,” I said, “remember? I’m the cleaning lady.”
“Bet you didn’t think I liked classical, though.”
“No, I figured you for vintage Van Halen, through and through. What are you doing here?”
“I needed some stuff, and I like being here alone. Helps me think.”
“You, think?” I teased him. “Now, that’s news.”
“Every day is a winding road, you know, Ronnie. Never know what’s around the bend.” He leaned over and, with his thumb, put a dab of mayo on my nose. “How old are you now, Ronnie?” he asked. “Let’s see, Serena’s almost sixteen, so that makes you fifteen. Fifteen years old.”
“I’m almost sixteen,” I said. This was baloney, of course.
“I wish you were sixteen.”
“How come?” I asked, although I knew. I could tell by the way he was looking at me. And although, if you’re LDS, every date is potentially a mate, and that was out of the question for Miko and me, since he was a Catholic and worldly, and nearly four years older, I still wanted to know.
He drank his whole glass of water and said, “Because you’re beautiful and you’re not a simp.”
I was suddenly aware that we were all alone in that big house; and it must have shown on my face, because Miko said, “Don’t worry, little saint. I’m not going to ask you for a date or anything. I’m too old for you, and I know you don’t do that.” He stopped and then said, “She’s beautiful, too.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Your horse. What’s her name?”
“Jade. She has one green eye.”
“You have two.”
“One of mine is glass, though,” I kidded him. “I got her for my bir
thday. I thought I’d show her to Serena. Is Serena coming?”
“No, my sister has a job this summer that already started. Lifeguarding. Family tradition. Aren’t you going out there? She said you were.”
“In August, if she still wants me to.” I was excited about the trip to Cape Cod. Serena had told me boats took you five miles out into the ocean and that she’d seen humpback whales with their calves.
“You smell like a horse,” Miko said. “You took a mean spill. I saw from upstairs. Are you hurt?” I held out my dirty palm. “Now, Miss Swan, this looks like a pretty serious abrasion. Let’s see. I’m premed”—he took my hand—“and in my esteemed opinion, I think you’ll live. But you better wash it off. Have you had a tetanus shot?”
I said, “Duh.”
“Never hurts to ask.”
“You can ask anything you want,” I told him. And the air between us changed.
“Well, can I ask to kiss you?” Miko said.
“You can ask anything you want,” I said again, and he kissed me. He didn’t try to grab me or anything, and though I figured that this was probably wrong, I kissed him, too, putting my arms around his neck. It was a real kiss, and it didn’t feel sinful. It felt safe and clean and natural as the sunny day outside. I haven’t kissed that many boys, and at that time, I hadn’t kissed any. I figured Miko had probably kissed a lot of girls, but somehow, I was certain he hadn’t kissed them the way he kissed me—as though I were one of the globes and vessels of priceless glass on the mantel, precious and rare. Your first kiss is your first kiss, after all. It made me realize a couple of things. One was that life would continue for me, that there was a chance I would feel something other than mourning and determination in my time. The other was that I had probably loved Miko, in some way, since I was about ten years old and that I would probably, in some way, love him for the rest of my life. That was sad. But at least I felt it.
We stood back from each other then, in the silence that danced with little particles in the sunlight from the big cathedral windows, and Miko said, “Let me wash off your hand.” He did, at the sink in the kitchen, and though this was an ordinary friend thing, it felt different. It felt unbearable. For the past two and a half years, I’d been crying for no reason about ten times a day, my emotions all over the place; and I thought I might start to cry if I stood there very long. I figured I’d better get home, quick, and I told him I was going as soon as he was done cleaning my hand. Even how gently he put on the Band-Aid made me feel as though I might faint.
Although I probably saw him twenty times over the next few years, Miko and I never spoke about that day, about how he gave me a foot back up onto Jade’s back and waved good-bye, with neither of us saying another word. We didn’t talk about it until after I’d come home again from San Diego, before I went to college, after everything had happened. Miko was really involved with a girl from the University of Colorado by that time, but he still considered me a friend, the way the rest of his whole family did, and was worried sick about me.
I still think of it as the only purely happy moment in my life between the day my sisters died and the day of my wedding.
I kept it to myself.
I didn’t tell Clare, or even Serena. It was like a lucky pebble kept in my pocket that got so shined up from rubbing against the denim that no one could tell it had ever been an ordinary stone. Just as the ring twined of my sisters’ soft hair came to resemble something else no one recognized, still, I would always know what it was, and that it was mine, something that time, and even eternity, could never change.
Chapter Eleven
Coming home after visiting the Sissinellis in Cape Cod was difficult.
It wasn’t because of Miko, who wasn’t even around.
He’d decided to go canoeing with his college friends somewhere in Canada during the time I was out there.
I think he knew it wouldn’t be a great idea for us to be around each other, and I was kind of relieved when Serena and Mrs. Sissinelli picked me up at the airport and told me Miko was away. Relieved, but also almost sick with disappointment. Still, I was sensible enough to know that Miko might as well have been from Saturn for all the likelihood of his being my . . . well, my crush. Most girls who go to school with kids who aren’t Mormons (and even in Utah, some kids aren’t) have the experience of wanting to date a boy who’s not of the church. I guess if you grow up with something that’s not just your Sunday life, but your Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Saturday life, you can want to put yourself against it for a time and see if it holds up. People do it different ways, I suppose.
Anyhow, I was glad that Miko wasn’t there, because I was having enough trouble putting him out of my mind. I prayed every morning to forget that June day at his house; and every morning, the memory got more vivid.
What was actually more difficult about coming home was that visiting the Sissinellis made it pretty easy to get spoiled, just in two weeks. It was also not that difficult to forget my life and what my life meant.
On Cape Cod—in fact, from the moment I left Provo—I was only Ronnie Swan, a curly-haired girl from the Wild West who rode horses and never went to school a day in her life (that was what homeschooling meant, for all Serena’s friends knew).
It was fun.
It was fun not being “poor Sister Veronica” or “that one whose sisters were killed” or “London Swan’s oldest” or “poor Cressie’s girl.” I felt free of the two little stone hands on my sisters’ graves that locked me to their deaths as surely as they locked them together in their graves. And I didn’t feel guilty. For years, I had been in mourning, a mourning as visible as if I’d been born in Victorian times and had worn a long black skirt and bonnet. Plus, I had been watched in my mourning, described, like a character from Dickens, even photographed by newspapers and magazines that did “one year later” stories about the murders and about Scott Early’s sentence—such as it was. At least right then, I hoped that I might be ready to come out into the light and to see the way others lived. It wasn’t that I minded being who I was and always would be; I didn’t want to be anyone else forever, or even for long. My parents knew that. They knew I wouldn’t be transformed, any more than a missionary is transformed, not forever. I would take this journey and make it part of me, as missionaries did, but I wouldn’t become part of it.
The night before I left, my father again quoted some poet, about leaving home in order to return to it and see it with new eyes. “There’s nothing wrong in that, Ronnie,” he told me. “It’s healthy.”
He understood, though I had never told him, how all the freedom I had once felt on our land, in our hills, had been trashed by Scott Early. Once upon a time, that little map, of our house and my room, our church and Jackie and Barney’s store, had been all the world I’d ever needed; but now it felt broken and soiled. I wanted to see who I was outside the limits of our private world at the foot of the mountains, to see if I could restore some of that sense of it being where I belonged, settled among those who’d watched me growing my whole life.
The Sissinellis were part of that world, but they weren’t of it. And the airplane ticket they had sent to me was a ticket to discovery. My parents had objected, politely at first, to their paying for it; but the Sissinellis insisted that I had gone above and beyond in my care of their house (as I had, with all that polishing, for my own pleasure). It was like extra-duty pay. It would be their joy, especially given what had happened, they said; an early birthday gift. My parents finally gave in, gracefully.
And so I had my first flight on an airplane. When we traveled before, we drove to Florida to see Grandma (a really fun experience, since Ruthie was about three the last time and had to stop to go potty every twenty minutes) or to see my aunts and uncles in Salt Lake or Mesa. I knew how long the flight would be, almost coast to coast, so I brought a biography of Charles Lindbergh and a novel. But I never opened either book.
I was so distracted by the passengers, the movie, the bag lunch,
and even the peanuts that the ride seemed to pass in minutes. The little eight-seater plane that took me out from Boston to Barnstable Airport was supposed to be scary, but I thought the fact that it flew so low was absolutely awesome. You could see everything, all the little lakes and waterways, sailboats like wings on the ocean, flying far from the harbors. I loved the feel of the air under the plane, even when it pitched, rose, and dropped. I imagined that this ride was as close as I’d get to knowing how it must feel to be an eagle.
Once we got to their home, which was as nice as the one in Utah but not so big, the Sissinellis showed me to my room, where there was a bed with a mattress the size of the Great Salt Lake and more pillows than we had in our whole house. I fell into the bed and slept ten hours.
I didn’t dream. I didn’t wake drenched in sweat. I woke to the sounds of birds and the sight of sky painted with small, shredded white clouds through the open skylight over my head; and I turned over and slept another half hour. It was like being at a spa.
The next morning, I went with Serena to her job, where I watched her teach little kids to dog-paddle and float in the “ponds,” which is what they call lakes out there. Serena in this setting was a different person for me. She was so pretty and gentle and kind. The little kids all seemed to trust her, even the ones who were scared of water. They ran to her when she appeared in her red swimsuit and her long sleeveless shirt that read WELLFLEET REC, her straight black hair looped up in a knot. I would have expected Serena to have a summer bikini that left barely anything to the imagination. But it turned out that the Sissinellis were actually pretty strict parents, and the stuff Serena had done around us in Utah was mostly to impress us—and mostly when she was younger and having what she called “the traditional eighth-grade rebellion.” Her bathing suit was two-piece, but pretty modest (not for me, but for her). While she taught, I swam all the way across the lake and back. My shoulders felt like they were going to come out of the sockets. Playing in our little creek was nothing like this; I was lucky I had muscles.