Bittersweet by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore Read Free Book Online Page B

reminding me of how Ev had merely tolerated my presence in the early months we’d shared a room, before Jackson’s death had brought us close. I watched until the bird’s long wingspan silently lifted it away. I dug my muddy toes in and climbed back up the embankment, backsliding with nearly every step.
    I resolved to climb down again when the land was dry. As soon as the wind was warmer, and didn’t send me goose bumps off the surface of the water, I would swim off the heron’s rock. Even though it seemed hard to imagine it would ever be hot enough to want to swim—the summer was still newly born—I’d liked the running Ev and I had done in New York, and the new strength in my legs. I needed a bathing suit, and the confidence to pull it over flesh that had never known the sun, because this was the kind of place where one swam boldly, daily, and made a body one had never had.
    I set out back up the dirt road John had driven us down that first night. It curved more sharply than I remembered, so that soon Bittersweet was out of sight, and all I could see were maples, pine, and sky. The fresh leaves shook down drops of water in little bursts, and crows cawed at each other somewhere atop the trees—a jarring, comical sound, too common for this beautiful place. I had worn the cashmere, but soon it was tied around my waist. The rain had washed the world clean. Rafts of freshly cut grass began to filter down the road, followed by the sound of a lawn mower.
    As I caught sight of the Dining Hall—which I now knew was the great white structure looming at the intersection of the Bittersweet driveway and the main Winloch road—I saw a phalanx ofworkingmen sweeping the tennis courts, cinching the nets, mowing the lawn, and hammering at loose nails on the wide wooden steps leading up to the building. Two compact white pickups were parked along the side of the road, their flatbeds filled with tools and gathered branches, matching insignias painted on their doors: a yellow dragon, with the talons of an eagle, grasping a set of arrows. The coat of arms matched the flag that one of the men was now hoisting up the Dining Hall pole. I stood in the middle of the road and watched him pull it into place.
    I was just deciding whether I wanted to cut back into the woods beyond the Dining Hall when three dachshunds, yapping sharply, appeared from the undergrowth on the other side of the road. They surrounded me, their assault ridiculous. At first. But every time I tried to step away, they growled and shifted to form a new circle of containment. They were small, and I wasn’t afraid, but there was nowhere to go.
    “Come back, assholes!” Soon, from out of the forest, burst a tall, sharp woman, Ev in another life. A good fifty years older, the woman was not as striking as Ev, and she wore a god-awful hand-crocheted poncho that Ev wouldn’t have been caught dead in, but they were unmistakably related.
    “Oh dear god,” she barked, marching toward me full steam, bending down and yanking the ringleader by the collar. “Fritz, leave the goddamn girl alone,” she commanded, and Fritz ceased yapping at once, which quieted the other two dogs. Soon they were snuffling through the newly mown grass as though I didn’t exist at all.
    She started laughing, big and raucous. “That must’ve scared the shit out of you.”
    “I didn’t think anyone else was here.”
    “Drove up last night,” she confided, taking my arm in hers. “Come to tea.”

CHAPTER NINE
The Aunt
    E v’s aunt Linden—who introduced herself as Indo—lived to the right and over a hill, in a part of Winloch I didn’t know existed, a long, well-trimmed meadow where the oldest cottages sat, four in a row. At the farthest end of the meadow was the largest house I’d seen at Winloch; white, with multiple stories and a porch that stretched around its four ample sides. I recognized it from the picture that had hung in our dorm room. The other three cottages were siblings of