Stella seemed to know she needed to say something. “That was really something, Nathan,” she said.
Nathan smiled and kissed Candice’s cheek. “Words have been pouring out of me since I met Candice. I think we’ve helped each other’s creativity. I certainly haven’t been able to stop.”
“Is that true, Candice?” Stella asked.
“Yes,” Candice said. It didn’t matter that she’d had a period of strangled writer’s block in January and February. It didn’tmatter that her second short story hadn’t been as good as the first. Nathan’s kept getting better and better, which was almost as good as her own success.
When they tied up the boat later that evening, they fell into pairs: Ben and Nathan, Stella and Candice. Candice could feel a harsh urgency coming from her mother, as though she really needed to say something. She wasn’t surprised when Stella touched Candice’s elbow and asked her to hang back. Nathan and Ben continued to the main house, where they planned to get the dessert out of the fridge.
Slowly, Candice forced herself to look her mother in the eye. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling. Her mother’s eyes were endlessly intense, almost reminding her of Nathan’s.
“What do you want to say, Mom?” Candice finally asked. There was a heavy sigh in her voice.
Stella raised her chin. At that moment of silence, Candice searched herself for a rebuttal. She wanted to mention that it was obvious that Nathan and Candice were already more in love than Stella and Ben. She wanted to point out that Stella was jealous! But it was impossible to say.
“Honey, that man is only capable of one thing,” Stella said finally.
Candice couldn’t speak.
“He loves himself. He can only ever love himself. And it’s a powerful, twisted love,” Stella continued, hurriedly. “He wants to overshadow you. He wants to make it so his love for everything—including you—is more powerful than you. He’s that type.”
Candice flared her nostrils. “You don’t know him.”
“Honey, I do. I really do,” Stella breathed, her eyes dark.
Candice wanted to argue with her mother. She wanted to fight, right here on the beach in front of the Harbor House, as her future husband and her father removed the cover from thecarrot cake and grabbed forks from the drawer. But before she could, Stella turned and headed toward the house, her posture perfect, her head straight. There was no arguing with her, Candice knew, because Stella always believed she was right.
7
Hainesborough, Tennessee: Summer 1977
It was only a matter of hours after Heidi discovered Carrie’s bruises before Heidi began to plot her sister’s escape. Lying in the dark next to her snoring husband, Harvey, Heidi considered how she could rearrange her own house to bring Carrie into it. Carrie could easily live in the room at the top of the stairs. They used it for storage right now, but it wouldn’t take more than a day to clean it out and get it ready for her. If Carrie lived here in the house with Heidi, Heidi could protect her from their father. She could make sure that Carrie stayed in school and eventually went to university. Sure, she felt sad about her mother, about her littlest brother, and about how into disrepair the old family house would fall. But she couldn’t focus on that now. Carrie’s life was at stake.
Heidi decided not to tell Carrie about her scheme right away. It was better, she felt, to arrange for everything beforehand, then maybe sneak Carrie out of the house under the pretense of needing her help. That morning, after Harvey went to work and Heidi finished her chores, she attacked that spareroom, throwing things out, vacuuming, dusting, and scrubbing the windows. When she finished, the room looked downright quaint. She stretched sheets over the mattress, then smiled to herself. This was really going to work.
One problem, she knew, would be Harvey. Harvey grew increasingly upset as the days passed and Heidi still wasn’t pregnant. She guessed that bringing “another mouth to feed” into the house—a mouth that wasn’t related to Harvey by blood—wouldn’t be an easy sell. But maybe she could reason with him. Perhaps she could tell him that her father was trying to kill Carrie, that she needed to save her life. Harvey was a human, after all. There was empathy in there somewhere.
That evening over dinner, with the spare room all set and ready for Carrie, Harvey asked her how her day had gone. This wasn’t something that Harvey usually asked. Heidi raised her eyes to his and searched them, trying to figure him out. “It was good,” she said.
“Did anything happen?” her husband asked.
Heidi decided to list out all the chores she’d done. She talked about prepping dinner. She talked about weeding the garden out back. He listened, his brow furrowed, as though he were searching for clues that she’d wronged him somehow.
And then, he said, “I couldn’t help but notice that the room at the top of the stairs is all fancied up.”
Heidi’s heart thudded. But she was careful not to show that fear on her face. “My sister is going to come stay with us. Just for a little while.”
Harvey took a deep breath and set down his fork. “I beg your pardon?”
“She needs a place to stay. My parents can’t take care of her anymore,” Heidi said, looking straight into her husband’s eyes.
“They should have thought of that before they had so many children,” Harvey shot back.
“She’s sixteen,” Heidi continued. “She can do chores around the house. She can help make your life easier. And when we have a baby, she’ll be here to take care of things.”
Harvey looked thoughtful, almost tender, after that. He loved it when Heidi mentioned their future children. He loved it when she got “romantic” about their life together, as strange as that was.
“Why don’t you think about it a little bit?” Heidi urged. “You don’t have to make a decision now.”
