Agata wasn’t a lifeguard.
She didn’t know CPR.
She wasn’t even a fast enough swimmer to reach Rosemary in time.
5.
AFTERWARD, WE WENT back to boarding school, Penny and I. And Bess began it.
We left our parents, only two weeks after Rosemary died, to be educated on the beautiful campus of North Forest Academy. When our mother dropped us off, she hugged us tight and kissed our cheeks. She told us she loved us. And was gone.
It was up to me to take care of Bess. I was a junior that year. She was a freshman. I helped decorate her dorm room, introduced her to people, brought her chocolate bars from the commissary. I left her silly, happy notes in her mail cubby.
With Penny, there was less to do. She already had friends, and there was a new boyfriend by the second week. But I showed up anyway. I stopped by her room, found her in the cafeteria, sat on her bed and listened to her talk about her new romance.
I was there for my sisters, but we dealt with our feelings about Rosemary alone. Here in the Sinclair family, we keep a stiff upper lip. We make the best of things. We look to the future. These are Harris’s mottoes, and they are Tipper’s, as well.
We girls have never been taught to grieve, to rage, or even to share our thoughts. Instead, we have become excellent at silence; at small, kind gestures; at sailing; at sandwich-making. We talk eagerly about literature and make every guest feel welcome. We never speak about medical issues. We show our love not with honesty or affection, but with loyalty.
Be a credit to the family. That’s one of many mottoes our father often repeated at the supper table. What he meant was Represent us well. Do well not for yourself, but because the reputation of the Sinclair family demands respect. The way people see you—it is the way they see all of us.
He said it so often, it became a joke among us. At North Forest, we used to say it to each other. I’d walk by Penny, pushed up against some guy, kissing in the hall. I’d say, without interrupting them, “Be a credit to the family.”
Bess would catch me sneaking a box of shortbread into the dormitory—same thing.
Penny’d see Bess with tomato sauce on her shirt—same thing.
Making a pot of tea. “Be a credit to the family.”
Or going to take a poop. “Be a credit to the family.”
It made us laugh, but Harris was serious. He meant it, he believed it, and even though we laughed about it, we believed it, too.
And so we did not flag when Rosemary died. We kept up our grades. We worked at school and worked at sports. We worked at our looks and worked at our clothes, always making sure the work never showed.
Rosemary’s would-have-been eleventh birthday, October fifth, was Fall Carnival day at school. The quad was filled with booths and silly games. People got their faces painted. There was a cotton candy machine. Spin art. A pretend pumpkin patch. Some student bands.
I stood with my back against my dorm building and drank a cup of hot apple cider. My friends from softball were together at a booth where you could throw beanbags at one of the math teachers. My roommate and her boyfriend were huddled over a lyric sheet, going over their band’s performance. A guy I liked was clearly avoiding me.
Other October fifths, back when I was home, my mother made a cake, chocolate with vanilla frosting. She served it after supper, decorated however Rosemary wanted. One year, it was covered with small plastic lions and cheetahs. Another year, frosting violets. Another year, a picture of Snoopy. There’d be a party, too, on the weekend. It would be filled with Rosemary’s little friends wearing party dresses and Mary Jane shoes, dressed up for a birthday the way no one ever does anymore.
Now Rosemary was dead and it seemed like both of my sisters had forgotten her entirely.
I stood against the brick dorm at the edge of the carnival, holding my cider. Tears ran down my face.
I tried to tell myself she wouldn’t know whether we remembered her birthday.
She couldn’t want a cake. It didn’t matter. She was gone.
But it did matter.
I could see Bess, standing in a cluster of first-year girls and boys. They were all drawing faces on orange balloons. She was smiling like a beauty pageant queen.
And there was Penny, her pale hair under a knitted cap, dragging her boyfriend by the hand as she ran over to see her best friend, Erin Riegert. Penny took a handful of Erin’s blue cotton candy and squashed it into her mouth.
Then she looked over at me. And paused. She walked to where I stood. “Come on,” she said. “Don’t think about it.”
But I wanted to think about it.