Mary Alice Monroe - The Four Seasons

And the nightmares.

The last time she’d slept in here was in her senior year of high school, before she left for Marian House. When she’d returned, her mother had moved her to the guest room. It was all part of her mother’s infinite plan. Marian House was never to be discussed. Not even with—especially not with—her sisters. Her mother had arranged for Jilly to leave for a year’s study at the Sorbonne immediately after graduation. After all, she had painstakingly explained to Jilly, by going so far away, she wouldn’t have to deal with all those prying questions about where she’d been the previous months.

“It’s over Jillian,” her mother had said. “We never have to talk of this again. Everything can be just as it had been before. And you look so well. So slim!”

That was when Jilly knew the pretending had already begun. So, she went to France in the spring, upsetting her mother’s plan the following fall when she was discovered and hired as a Paris runway model and had refused to return home.

“But here I am again,” Jilly said to the stuffed bear, shaking the memories from her head. “I keep coming back. What is the matter with me? I thought I’d left it all behind.” In anguish, she squeezed the bear. “Why can’t I just let it go? Am I like you, you bear? Torn and badly mended at the seams, hmm?”

Ready or not, here I come, she thought as she crawled from the bed. She went first to her closet and, opening it, found it stuffed with her old clothes from the 1970s. Everything was still there. She grabbed a short lavender silk kimono, a favorite in high school, and slipped it on.

She moved slowly through the hall and down the stairs, cautiously, sniffing the air like a long-lost dog finding its way home. She paused to study a photograph or two on the stairwell wall, then paused again at the landing that overlooked the foyer and the front room. Dust motes floated in the sunbeam that poured in through the tall, gracious beveled glass windows. Jilly clutched the railing and stood, blinking, taking in the sight. Time could have stood still in this house. Last night she’d been too drunk to notice. But now, as she took in the heavy brocade curtains, the antique coatrack by the door, the crystal chandelier in the foyer, her mind slipped back once again to when she was seventeen years old and coming down these stairs for the last time.

It was the day she had left home for France.

“Jilly, come down!” her mother had called. “It’s almost time to leave!”

She’d felt rooted to the edge of the bed, her ankles together, hands clasped in her lap. She was so thin the smart navy suit her mother had purchased for her hung shapelessly from her shoulders as though from a mannequin.

The lies and the secrecy of the past weeks had worn her out. She took a last, desperate look around the room, terrified, committing to memory the details, knowing instinctively that it would be a long, long time before she saw this room again.

“Jilly!” Her mother’s voice was strident.

Jilly rose, pausing to stroke her favorite stuffed bear, then she silently came down the wide staircase, beginning her longjourney of isolation from her family. She held her shoulders back and her chin high. Her eyes appeared glazed and directed inward. Already, she was unconsciously assuming the trademark walk that would later place her in high demand in the European fashion world.

Downstairs, her father moved silently from the garage to the foyer, shoulders stooped, carrying her suitcases back out into the car. He appeared saddened that she was leaving for Europe, but she couldn’t be sure. He wasn’t one to share his private feelings, and in the past weeks he’d taken pains to avoid her, spending long hours at the courthouse or in his den.

Birdie and Rose, fifteen and eleven, slouched against the door frame, whispering to each other. She offered them the briefest of smiles. She coveted their innocence.

Then, suddenly, it was time to go. The family moved quickly, as though caught by surprise.

“I want a picture!” her mother cried out, frantically waving her hands. She was clumsy, tottering, which meant she’d been drinking again. Jilly felt a wave of sadness, then, looking at her sisters, concern. She wouldn’t be there to draw their mother’s ire anymore.

“Bill, get the camera!”

“I will, I will.”

Jilly felt the press of the bodies as they crowded together for the photograph. Her sisters crowded close with a kind of silent desperation. Birdie put her arm around her shoulder and Jilly caught a quick scent of her emerging body odor, strong and pungent, not yet masked with deodorant. Birdie was squeezing her shoulder hard, firmly hanging on. Rose, smaller, stood in front of her, silently but determinedly nudging Merry away with her elbow in order to stay close to Jilly. Merry clung tenaciously to Jilly’s arm.

“Merry, Rose, stop wriggling,” their father ordered. “Look here, everyone. Okay, Four Seasons, smile for the photograph. Say, fromage!”

Jilly smiled wide, shoulder to shoulder with her sisters, feeling one of the family again in that frozen moment in time captured on film. This would be the memory she’d take with her to Europe, she decided. The four of them, close together. It ended too quickly. Bodies separated and Mother began directing again.

Have a good time! We’ll miss you! Bring me back a bottle of French perfume!

“Say goodbye, Merry,” her mother said, nudging her forward. “Jilly has to go now.”

“I don’t want her to go!” Merry wailed, shaking her head so violently her long pigtails swung around her neck.

Jilly turned her head away, not wanting to see the sorrow swimming in her sister’s eyes lest it break her own fragile hold on composure. “Bye, sweetheart,” she called out in a tight voice as she headed out the front door. If she could make it down to the car, she told herself, she could escape into the private darkness and end this charade forever.

Merry, however, burst into tears and tore after her, clinging to Jilly’s arm at the car and tugging her back toward the house. Their parents rushed forward and wrapped their arms around their youngest daughter.

“Jilly has to leave,” they said in singsong tones.

Jilly stood ramrod straight at the curb, clutching the car door handle and struggling not to cry. She’d vowed she’d play her role in her mother’s plan without fail. She’d failed her family enough already; it was the least she could do.

“No, she doesn’t!” Merry cried belligerently. “She doesn’t have to go. Make her stay! Ple-e-ase, Mama! Make her stay!”

Jilly held those cries in her heart like a talisman, loving her poor little shaman sister all the more. She let go of the car and slowly walked to her baby sister, kissing her cheek and hugging her, hard, all the while looking over the small, bony shoulder at her father with a gaze that challenged. You can let me stay if you want to.

“Jilly! You’re up!”

Jilly blinked and turned her head to the voice calling her name, dragging her back to the present.

“Rose!” Jilly’s voice squeaked out of her dry throat. She opened her arms to the slender, smaller sister as she hurried up the stairs to hug her, fiercely, in her surprisingly strong arms. They hugged for a long time, rocking back and forth in tender glee. No more yesterdays. This is now, she told herself, relishing the familiar scent of sweet roses in her sister’s hair.

“You were daydreaming,” Rose said. “Miles away.”

“More like years away,” she replied, then cast a sweeping glance at the house. “It’s being back here again.”

“I didn’t want to wake you,” Rose said, pulling back yet keeping their arms linked. “I’ve read all about jet lag and thought you might want to sleep straight up until the funeral. But oh, Jilly, I’m so glad you’re awake. I’ve missed you.”