Firefly Beach Read Online Free Page A

life she ever cheated, on a math test in seventh grade, even though Caroline had helped her with her homework, she had pretended to “get it” just to please her.
    The bad things that happened to her, the very bad things. The men she let touch her when she knew she shouldn’t. The times she was scared. The times she didn’t have a choice. The times she was in a place she didn’t know, with no one to call, not even her sisters. The way it feels to kill another human being.
    And even the miraculous times, the times when she was overtaken by the thrill of love, when the light of the moon on the water seemed to promise something Caroline could never understand, no matter that she was her sister, that they came out of the same womb.
    Three sisters, three separate realities. Lots of combinations, lots of possibilities. Take one, get three. Two against one. Odd girl out. Secrets told to one but not the other. Then that one tells the first one, and everyone’s mad at each other. Or secrets told to tell no one. Secrets she knows but would never tell. Secrets you imagine but don’t know. Mistakes of life and death. The geometry of sisterhood.
     

     
     
     
    A WEEK LATER , THE SISTERS WENT OUT FOR A MOVIE . Dropping Skye off at Firefly Hill, where she had been living since the departure of Simon, Caroline hitched a ride home with Clea. They all lived in Black Hall, within six miles of one another. Tonight they drove slowly, taking Clea’s Volvo the long way around. Clea’s husband and kids were out for the night, and she didn’t have to rush home. Caroline loved driving around the shoreline with her sister. The car felt enclosed and warm, a sister-capsule orbiting the towns. They didn’t speak for a few miles.
    “What’s with Skye?” Clea asked finally.
    “I wish I knew,” Caroline answered.
    Caroline pictured Skye’s handsome and ego-laden husband. Skye and Simon, both extraordinary artists, had lived a wild, bohemian lifestyle for as long as it had suited Simon. Running off with his model, he left Skye just before their fifth anniversary. Skye’s dark moods had worried Caroline when they were kids, but they had gone dormant recently, until Simon met someone else.
    “It’s not because of Simon,” Caroline said.
    “What, then?”
    “I think it’s history catching up with her,” Caroline said.
    “What history?”
    “She killed a man, Clea.”
    “But she didn’t mean to,” Clea said plaintively.
    “That can’t bring him back.”
    “She’s drinking away her guilt,” Clea said, “like Dad.”
    “Like Dad.”
    They drove on. Caroline lived in a small cottage of the Renwick Inn. Capitalizing on the family name, Caroline ran it as a hostelry that catered to artists. The inn itself was two hundred years old, a rambling white saltbox with seven chimneys and four secret closets. It had gardens and pine woods and outbuildings and a big red barn. It occupied one hundred acres on the Ibis River, a tributary of the Connecticut River, and it had once belonged to their grandparents.
    Every year artists came to the Renwick Inn for the summer and parts of the other seasons to paint and escape the city and fall in love with each other. Every August at the end of the season Caroline held a renowned ball to celebrate love and creativity and new work and money in the bank. As Clea drove into the winding drive, Caroline saw that the parking lot was full.
    “Good,” she said. “Paying guests.”
    “Artists these days have to be pretty prosperous to afford the rates you charge.” Clea laughed, counting the cars.
    “Well, they’re not all artists,” Caroline said. “I just advertise as an artists’ retreat because that seems to pull them in.”
    “It always did,” Clea said, probably remembering their own childhood, all the would-be protégés and hangers-on who would congregate around their father, hoping for some of his talent or glamour or mystery to rub off.
    Outside, the air was muggy, hot, and still. Heat