“We shouldn’t do this.”
“Let’s just finish it.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
She lifts her eyes to me. “We should go home now and tell everyone the truth. It’s not too late to change our minds.”
“No.”
“They’ll understand. We’ll tell them—I don’t know what we’ll tell him, but we’ll call the police and—”
“Penny.” I try to speak softly. Calmly.
I explain to her and Bess what will happen to the person who killed Pfeff.
I explain what will happen to Penny, as well.
“He’s dead,” I say. “He was not a good person. We have to just get through this and wish it never happened. We will lie about it extremely well and then we will just forget it. Never think of it. Never talk about it. And it’ll basically disappear.”
“I can’t forget it,” says Penny.
“You can. Like you did Rosemary.”
Penny looks at me, stricken. “I didn’t forget Rosemary.”
I stare at her.
“I didn’t,” she insists.
“It seems like you did.”
“I think about her every single day.”
Bess nods. “I…This sounds weird, but I kind of pray to Rosemary. Like she’s an angel or something. Before I go to sleep. I like to think she’s looking over us.” She shivers. “But not now.”
I sit with this for a moment. They do not ever talk about her. Not one word since Penny and I were up in the attic, and when I yelled at Bess. “I can’t tell that either of you thinks about Rosemary for even a second,” I tell them.
“Mother and Daddy don’t like to talk about her,” says Bess. “It’s too much. I try to, you know, respect them that way.”
“I don’t like people knowing my feelings,” says Penny simply. “It feels too naked.”
“So we can do this,” I say. “We are good at it.”
“What?” asks Penny.
“Acting. We have been pretending everything’s okay all year, and we will keep pretending everything’s okay. We know how. It’s the family way. And after a time, it will be okay. Understand?”
They nod.
“We just have to get through this next part and the rest will be easy in comparison. No way out but through.” I quote my father’s motto.
Bess holds the anchor.
I take Pfeff’s shoulders.
Penny takes his legs.
We lift him and step onto the seats. The boat tilts with our weight, all on one side, but we do not lose our footing.
We drop Lor Pfefferman into the sea, the anchor around his waist.
We watch his body sink.
“？‘Of his bones are coral made,’？” says Penny, quoting Shakespeare. “？‘Those are pearls that were his eyes.’？”
61.
I TURN ON the motor and we move away. Soon we cannot tell where Pfeff lies, and we stop the boat again.
We change clothes—into the bathing suits and cover-ups that Bess brought.
We put our sweatshirts on.
We use a lighter, stored in the motorboat for our parents’ cigarettes, to burn the paper towels that Bess used to clean the dock. We toss the burning papers into the air and watch them disintegrate to nothing, tiny orange sparks settling on the sea and then extinguishing.
I open the bottle of whiskey and we pass it around in silence.
It is about 3:45 a.m.
We lie all three together under a rain tarp on the floor of the boat. But it is hard to sleep.
“Remember when that friend of Mother’s took us all camping?” says Bess.
“Um-hm,” I say, though I don’t, really. I have a fuzzy memory of hot dogs cooked on sticks and a bright yellow backpack filled with supplies. That’s about it.
“I was like, only three,” Bess says. “We all slept together under a blanket like this. I was way too young to go camping.”
“You peed the bed,” says Penny.
“Did not.”
“Oh, you totally did,” says Penny. “I woke up with Bess pee all down my leg. I had to go to the creek and wash in this freezing, freezing water, and our bed was all pee-covered and we had to put everything in a black plastic bag to bring it home to Mother to wash.”
“Who was that guy?” asks Bess. “Why did he want to take us camping?”
“Beats me,” says Penny. “But he gave Carrie this bag of mixed jelly beans, I remember. And he said ‘Share them with your sisters,’ but he totally put her in charge of them. She would dole them out two at a time, like she was queen of the jelly beans.”