Juno's Daughters (20 page)

“You tired?” Jenny started the engine and looked over her shoulder, backing up and then out of her spot on Second.

Frankie nodded and leaned back against the seat. “It was great, wasn't it, Mom? The show?”

Jenny smiled. “
You
were great.”

Frankie looked out the window. “Do you think Phoenix will be jealous?”

“I imagine she will.” Jenny started to turn on Argyle to get to Cattle Point, their normal way home, but then on a hunch she kept going straight on Beaverton Valley Road. On the ride from Orcas to San Juan she had taken what Luke had said and turned it over so many times in her mind that it was polished smooth, like beach glass or a witching stone. A declaration of love?

“We have the Shaw and Lopez shows first,” mused Frankie. “Maybe by the time we open on San Juan she'll have heard so much about it from everybody . . .” Her eyes were shining at the thought. “She'll have read about it in the paper even by then, and well, maybe Phoenix will be so used to the idea of me as an actress that it won't bother her. As much.” She sat up straight in the seat. “Hey! I thought we were going home.”

“Your sister told Luke that she was going to make a declaration of love. It just occurred to me where she might do that.”

“Who is she in love with now? Elliot?” Frankie followed their progress past the neat rows of the apple orchard that produced hard cider in fall and winter. She turned to look at Jenny. “Are we going to the Big Rock?”

Jenny nodded. For fifty years the huge granite boulder on the corner of two heavily traveled roads had served as a kind of community billboard with ever-changing painted messages of loss, longing, love, and celebration. It was there that the Friday Harbor High graduating classes of many years in a row marked their passage. One year it had held a farewell message to the island from a German exchange student named Henrike and another time it had memorialized a young man who had died of AIDS. For one week it had sported a finely drawn portrait of a salmon. The American flag painted on it after 9/11 was painted over within twenty-four hours with a giant peace sign. The images might last for a week or six weeks, but sooner or later someone would always sneak over there and paint something new.

And it was always done in the middle of the night, thought Jenny grimly, pulling her truck onto the shoulder of the road.

Frankie leapt out of the passenger side before the engine died. She ran to the rock and stood in front of it, her mouth hanging open. “She loves
Trinculo
?”

Jenny took a few steps toward the rock, her boots crunching in the dried grass. It was about twice as tall as she was and ten times as wide and it was covered with dark green paint. There were just three words spelled out in white, and they were drawn in the bubble-shaped letters that Lilly had once used to advertise a car wash for her junior high softball team.
Ceres Loves Trinculo
.

Frankie turned with a look of disbelief. “But he's
old
!”

Jenny reached her hand out to touch the rock and pulled it back with green on her fingers. The paint was still wet.

“Where'd she get the paint, do you think?” breathed Frankie.

“It's from the shed.” Jenny held her fingers up so that Frankie could see the color. “Remember?”

Frankie took a few steps back and crossed her arms over her chest. She stared at the rock with a mixture of admiration and dread. “
Everyone
is going to see this.”

Everyone was right, thought Jenny, hopping back in the cab and waiting for Frankie to buckle up before she started the engine. Beaverton Valley Road was one of about twelve major roads on San Juan and it cut straight through the heart of the island. The rock was on the corner of Beaverton Valley and Egg Lake Road, where Dale and Peg lived. Where they were scheduled to meet the next night to review the Waldron performance and make some last-minute changes before the play opened on Shaw. Jenny did not know how long it would take the news of a mysterious new message on the rock to spread around the island, but by tomorrow night, at least, everyone who mattered to Lilly would have seen it.

Jenny chewed on the nails of her left hand and held the steering wheel with her right. She drove as fast as she thought safety permitted around the curves on Egg Lake and Wold, which in summer was about half as fast as you would think because of those damn scooter cars the half-blind tourists rented from the moped shop. Trinculo was right, heartbreak
always
hurt, no matter how old you were. But when you were almost eighteen, humiliation was even worse.

She turned onto their gravel road so fast that Frankie's backpack slid from the seat to the floor. In the settling dust of her own driveway, Jenny could admit to herself that she had been afraid of Lilly's wrath and that she had been afraid that exposing this new thing with Trinculo (Lilly might be prepared to call it love, but Jenny was forty-two and for her it was too soon to even think that word) would kill it, and that her fear had led her to do things that she was not proud of. She could admit all that, but what she could
not
do was let it continue.

She hopped down to the ground and headed for the house without even waiting for Frankie to collect her backpack and her jacket. She flung open the door and tossed her pack onto the floor by the coatrack. Her T-shirt was damp with sweat and she was grimy and exhausted from the events of last night and this morning. The muffin she had eaten with her coffee on Orcas was long gone, and her stomach growled. She ignored all that.

“Lilly!”

Seeing the words in Lilly's handwriting had clarified Jenny's purpose for her in a way that all her daughter's flirting and speculating and attention-seeking had not. She would tell her the truth about Trinculo. She would deal with her anger and disappointment. And then she would help her paint over that rock.

“Lil! Where are you?” Jenny flung open the door to Lilly's room.

“Waa? Oh. Hmmm. Hi.” Lilly's head emerged from her bed in a tangle of blankets. Outside the fog and the breeze and the sun had given the morning air the freshness of spring, but all Lilly's windows were closed tight and her room smelled like patchouli, unwashed clothes, and ripe fruit. A bowl with a crust of leftover granola teetered on her night table along with a pack of clove cigarettes, a silver-threaded Indian scarf, and a book of Far Side cartoons, which apparently was what she'd been reading instead of
The Tempest
. She stretched a bare arm up toward the ceiling and peered at Jenny with sleepy eyes. “I didn't think you were home.”

“We are now.” Jenny stood with her hands on her hips. She fought the urge to ask Lilly what she thought she was doing leaving Waldron at the crack of dawn without telling anyone and how she had gotten out to Beaverton Valley without the truck. She reminded herself what she had to do. “Frankie and I took a little detour on the way home,” she said, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Oh, yeah?” A smile played on Lilly's lips. She sat up, clearly proud of herself.

She was, thought Jenny, dancing happily toward a cliff. And it was Jenny who had to push her over.

“We saw what you wrote about Trinculo,” Jenny said. She reached a hand out to push a lock of Lilly's hair off her face. The texture of the dreadlocks still surprised her when she touched them. It was so unlike the silk that fell from her baby's head when she was small. “I think you might want to paint it over. Before everyone else sees it, too.”

Lilly fell back against the pillow. “You mean
you
want me to paint it over.”

“He doesn't love you back, sweetheart.”

“How do
you
know?” Lilly narrowed her eyes.

Jenny heard a rustle and turned to see Frankie standing in the doorway listening.

“Give me and your sister a moment alone, please.”

Frankie moved off reluctantly. It did not sound as if she had gone far.

“I know because, well, he and I . . .” Jenny swallowed. She could tell her cheeks and throat were bright red. Her ears were burning. This was embarrassing and painful, she reminded herself, but it was nothing compared to what Lilly would feel if that message stayed up another day. “He and I are together,” she said. “Kind of.”

Lilly flinched. All the bravado leaked from her face and she looked stunned and very, very young. Her eyes filled with tears, but it was a moment before she said anything. “Have you had sex with him?”

Jenny took a breath. She knew that any normal, good mother would say
None of your business
if her child asked her that question. This was not a normal situation, however, and anyway, she was not so sure that she was a good mother. What she did know was that it was important that Lilly not nurture any false hopes.

“Not yet,” she whispered.

Lilly's expression changed to horror. “But you're going to.”

“Maybe,” said Jenny. “Probably.”

“Oh, my God. Oh, my
God
!” A sob burst out of Lilly and she flung off her blankets to reveal a man's tank top undershirt and a polka-dotted thong. She leaped out of bed and proceeded to hurl clothes around her closet as if she were a thief ransacking the place in search of jewels.

“Look, Lilly, I'll help you paint . . .”

“Don't even talk to me!” She held a flannel shirt to her chest and looked at Jenny with wild loathing. “I
hate
you!” She pushed past Jenny to the door.

Frankie was perched in the soft chair just outside Lilly's room. She glanced at Jenny with alarm as Lilly ran by, half-dressed, toward the shed. “You're not really together with him, are you? With Trinculo? You just said that, right?”

“It's been a long time, Franks, since there was someone I really liked . . .”

“Why would you do that, Mom? Why would you steal him from Lilly?”

“I didn't
steal
him, Frankie.” Jenny took a step toward Frankie, her arms extended.

The look on Frankie's face stopped Jenny cold. It was an expression that allowed for no mercy. She remembered seeing it in her English teacher after she turned in yet another essay written on the bus after a night of partying.

Still, Jenny was unprepared for the contempt in Frankie's voice.

“Are you really that desperate?”

Jenny lunged forward and slapped her, hard, across the face. She did it fast, without thinking, like reaching out to grab a child's T-shirt to keep her from running into traffic.

Both Jenny and Frankie stared at each other in shock. A life lived with children was like a hike over changing terrain. Jenny knew that. Yet, in the flash of light that followed that thunderbolt of a blow, she understood something else, too. Some ground, when crossed, left you in a place you did not recognize. And once there, you could not go back.

Frankie pressed her hand against her cheek. Then she turned and darted out the front door after Lilly. Jenny heard the truck start up a few minutes later. She did not run out to tell Lilly to drive carefully, as she usually did, or admonish her to remember that this was their only vehicle. She did not call after the girls and ask if they wanted her help.

She stood in the hallway and shivered. The breeze jostled the wind chime on the front porch and, knocking against itself, it made a discordant music. Jenny remained still and listened for a long time before moving. She was alone.

Jenny spent the afternoon at the cabin without her truck and without her girls. She knew that if she called, Mary Ann would come over. She did not call. Nor did she call Trinculo, whom she suspected would hop in the Mini and barrel down her gravel drive at the smallest invitation. In spite of the sadness she felt, the image made her smile.

Jenny cleaned the kitchen and then she carried her cell phone into the sunporch. She set it on the small table beside her loom in case the girls called or sent a text. She began to weave the header on the fabric she had recently threaded, bringing all of the threads in order. She had dyed the yarn a rich burgundy, woven together with a soft green in a modified herringbone. Into the center she had woven a caracol, the pre-Columbian snail she had copied from a book on Mexican blankets. A small bowl of water sat on the table next to the phone and she dipped her fingers into it and carefully worked the threads with her hands. They expanded slightly. She dipped her fingers again.

She hadn't felt this way in quite a long while, she realized: wrung out and jangly and relieved and nervous. It was the feeling you woke with the morning after a long, wild party where you were not quite sure what you might have said or done. It was hard not to let her mind wander back to before she had hit Frankie, before she had told Lilly about herself and Trinculo, all the way back to the blanket in the woods on Waldron. Trinculo's fingertips against her skin had been remarkably smooth. This was a man who spent his days on a stage, or a set, reading scripts, discussing characters, drinking wine. Most of the men she had been with, even Phinneas, who supplemented his pottery with odd jobs, had the cracked calloused hands of roofers and contractors and fishermen. They had kissed for the longest time. Faint voices traveled to them from around the fire. Waves pushed against the beach. A breeze moved the pine. His tongue had slid over her lips. She had opened her mouth.