“And no one held the young man responsible?”
Emmy had always pictured Mum having met someone a bit older than she was at the party who had changed the course of her life, not another teenager like herself. It wasn’t until Emmy was sitting there with Charlotte, discussing the very thing Mum and Nana never talked about, that she suddenly realized that if her father was a few years older than Mum, then he’d taken advantage of an underage girl, and that was against the law. He would have been arrested if Mum had namedhim. That Emmy had never given this any thought irritated her.
She looked up at Charlotte, and her face must have revealed that she had realized something she hadn’t considered.
“What is it, dear?” Charlotte said.
“Nothing.” Emmy drained her cup.
It all made sense. No one had held her father responsible because Mum hadn’t identified him. That was why there was such animosity between Mum and Nana. Any parent whose barely sixteen-year-old daughter ended up pregnant would want to know who the father was. If Mum had refused to say, which surely was the case, it could only have been for one of three reasons that Emmy could think of: She had been protecting the man, she was embarrassed to admit she didn’t know his name, or she had struck a deal with him.
Emmy set her cup down on the little table, angry that she had let herself be satisfied for fifteen years with such vague answers about who her father was.
“Emmeline?”
“Can we talk about something else?”
A slight pause. “Of course.”
At that moment Julia called for Emmy to come look at the baby turtles. She and Charlotte rose from their chairs, and Emmy was thankful that the conversation she had wanted to end fell away, but only partially so. She knew she would revisit it in her strange bed that night.
A few seconds later they were all at the water’s edge, and Julia was pointing to several young turtles swimming in the shallows, their little armored backs glistening. A few feet away, the wood ducks that Julia hadfollowed paddled toward the pond’s center. A pair of dragonflies darted past them and skimmed across the water’s surface.
Surrounded by such pastoral splendor, Emmy found it hard to believe there was a war going on.
Her presence there at a pond in the middle of nowhere was the only proof that there was.
***
WHENthey came back inside the cottage, Emmy and Julia went upstairs to unpack and put their clothes away. Charlotte told them that for this first night they could relax in their room while she prepared supper downstairs, and that tomorrow the three of them would sit down and decide who would do what chores.
As Emmy hung up one of Julia’s dresses, her sister asked what Charlotte had meant by that.
“I imagine she expects we will do our fair share here. Setting the table, clearing it, taking out the rubbish. That sort of thing.”
“Do you think she will let me feed the chickens?”
Emmy slid the hanger onto the rung inside the wardrobe. “I am sure she will. Hand me your jumper.”
Julia handed the sweater to her and snapped her suitcase closed. “It’s not as bad here as I thought it would be. Aunt Charlotte’s nice. And her house smells pretty.”
“Pretty isn’t a smell, Jewels. Slide your suitcase under your bed like I did with mine so you won’t trip over it.”
“Why don’t you want to call her Aunt Charlotte?” Julia asked as she pushed the suitcase past the bed skirt.
“I’m too old to call someone ‘aunt’ who is not my aunt. But you’re young. It’s fine for you.”
Julia rose from her knees and sat heavily on her bed. “What are we supposed to do now?”
Emmy closed the wardrobe door. “What would you like to do?”
“Can I look at the brides?”
“Not now.”
“Why?”
Emmy didn’t have a good reason other than she was tired and it was near the end of a very trying day. “Maybe later. Why don’t you write a letter to Mum instead. You can tell her all about the ducks and turtles.”
