I am no credit to the family.
Rosemary visits the following summer, as well, but that year, when I am twenty-one and have stumbled through a third year of college hardly attending any classes, I spend June and July back in rehabilitation. I don’t arrive on Beechwood until August.
I get to the island a little heavier, very fragile, but sober and optimistic. I began making jewelry in the rehab center: rings and bracelets of thin bands of silver twisted around one another. I would like to learn to work with stones. Or maybe with fine metals. There are studios in New York where I can take classes.
I have a sober friend from rehab, Deja. I am quitting college and will share an apartment with her in September.
I hope dearly that I have kicked the pills for good this time.
It turns out to be true.
I see Rosemary only once that August. I wake one morning and she is sitting at the foot of my bed, eating a blackberry muffin. She has broken it into several pieces inside a yellow china bowl from downstairs.
“Hi, buttercup,” I say. “You’re up early.”
“You sleep late,” she says. “I like to get a muffin when they’re still warm.”
“You can heat it in the microwave,” I tell her. “Twenty seconds.”
“It’s not the same.”
Rosemary looks tired. Her skin is pale underneath her tan. She’s wearing a Muppets T-shirt and worn jean shorts.
“Are you okay?” I ask. “I’ve missed you. It’s good to see your freckle face.” I sit up and lean my head on her small, bony shoulder.
“I’m not really that okay,” she says. “I like coming to see you, but I’m so, so tired.”
“How come?”
“I can’t come here forever,” says Rosemary. “I mean, I want to, but it’s like—it takes a whole lot of energy.” She pokes her muffin crumbs with a finger. “My bones hurt and it’s hard to keep my eyes open.”
“I thought maybe I imagined you,” I tell her. “I thought maybe it was the pills, making me see you. But I don’t take them anymore. And you’re still here.”
She laughs. “I’m totally here.”
“Good.”
“You take way too many pills, Carrie. You used to, I mean.”
“So they tell me.”
“You have to get better,” says Rosemary. She is so small and earnest. “I can’t make you better, but I keep coming because I’m worried.”
“Is that why you come? Because you’re worried about me?”
“Um-hm.”
“I thought you came because you needed me.”
She shakes her head. “I was worried you’d be an addict and do terrible things, and you did do them.” Her face crumples and she begins to cry. “You did that one thing, first. It wasn’t what I thought you’d do. It wasn’t what I thought, at all. But then there was the cover-up and I couldn’t stop you with the drugs and I’ve been so worried,” she says, sniffling. “I can’t stop anything. I’m just a kid. But I keep coming because I can’t stop when you’re not okay.”
“You thought—you thought I would kill myself?” I say, understanding. “After you died?”
Rosemary nods. “But you didn’t. You did him instead.”
I didn’t know she knew. About Pfeff. A true Sinclair, she never said a word.
I begin to cry, as well. Because Rosemary has loved me knowing the most hateful thing about me.
Because she is dead, and not really here to love me at all.
Because Bess and Penny have stood by me and will never tell, but our bond will always be stained with the blood on our hands. Our sisterhood will never recover. We will always be each other’s secret-keepers, and it is my fault that we are this way.
My darling Rosemary, she has been pushing herself for four summers to come back, worried I would cut my wrists or drown my own unworthy self, then worried I would kill myself with pills, burdened by knowledge no little kid should ever have.
She should have been riding her bike up and down the wooden walkways. She should have been developing a figure and outgrowing her stuffed lions and learning to put on makeup and reading Judy Blume books and folding down the pages on the sexual bits. She should be having crushes, on pop stars and athletes and ordinary people. She would have been starting boarding school, and I could have sent her letters and cards, tucking cash into the envelopes.
Dearie Rosemary （I’d write），
Rehab was hard, this second time. I won’t lie. I was scared I wouldn’t make it. But I am handling things okay here in New York City.