I see you everywhere Read Online Free Page A

disowning. It was one thing, in 1881, to share education and martial fellowship with one’s vanquishers and quite another to marry them, let alone on the sly. Over the next two decades, Père Jardine rebuilt his fortune, cane by cane; Lieutenant Aristide Jardine helped bring in Geronimo; Amy married a grapefruit czar and had the first three of five children; young Lucy grew up and was groomed by mother and older sister for a glorious debut. She knew of her eldest sister’s existence only through whispered remarks outside her home. The way Dad tells it, Lucy was popular and pretty, poised for a momentous engagement, when a letter arrived from Vetty, opened only perhaps because its postmark was a riddle. Vermont? Who knew anyone there? Vetty’s husband had left her. Childless, she could not bring herself to ask his family for help, and she was afraid she might not survive another winter by herself. She was too distraught, she said, to travel home on her own and did not know, besides, whether the family would take her back in.
    Meanwhile, her sister Amy was pregnant for the fourth time—as it would turn out, with twins of her own—and her mother’s help was indispensable. Père Jardine had a business to run, and Aristide was about to set sail for a tour in the Philippines. So a bold nineteen-year-old Lucy volunteered to make the trip, with a trusted servant as companion, to bring home a sister she’d never even known. (Is this tale Victorian or what?)
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    How it happened that the servant returned to New Orleans several months later without either sister isn’t entirely clear. But in the end, what we do know is that Lucy stayed in Vermont to care for Vetty, a woman who made herself scarce, preferring to stay in her room and quilt, her stitching a method of mourning away the rest of her life. About the forlorn, mysterious Vetty, rumors still thrive: that Josiah left her far earlier than she claimed, nearly as soon as she was disowned, because money was all he’d been after; that she had a child who died as an infant; that Josiah ran off with their maid after getting the girl pregnant. Whatever Lucy knew, she kept to herself. When I asked Dad why he didn’t get her to tell the whole story, he said, “Louisa, we live in an age when keeping secrets is out of fashion, and that’s a shame. If she wanted to tell us, well, she would.”
    More than once, I’ve listened to my relatives squabble inconsequentially over the meaning of Lucy’s choice, as if she made it last week. Some say she was a foolish martyr who inherited the loneliness she deserved; others that she was a wise, willful woman who saw and took her best chance at freedom from a life of luxurious monotony. Others insist that she was simply a good girl who honored—as so few children do these days, they’ll say with a sharp mournful glance at members of my generation—the Most Important Thing: loyalty to blood, cost be damned. Some of the younger cousins are certain that Lucy was gay, perhaps dallying with her own sister. I don’t believe any of this; I believe she was swept along on a tide, like most of us. There you are, diligently swimming a straight line, minding the form of your strokes, when you look up and see, always a shock, that currents you can’t even feel have pulled you off course.
    ∞
    a weekend, a whole weekend, with Louisa? What a sourpuss she had become. But I was stuck playing host, so I asked for the afternoon off from the bike shop. That morning, I was slicing the loaf I’d thawed and Louisa was sleeping off jet lag when who should call but Ralph. Ralph Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 18 18
    Julia Glass
    and Hector ran the raptor station. They’re zoology grad students, muscular outdoorsy guys you’d never guess are lovers unless you’ve been to their house and seen their water bed (king size, spread with a polar bear hide). Ralph