year. There hadn’t been any one thing she’d been passionately interested in. But once her girls came along, she finally knew who she was. She was a mother, and to Lauren, that was the perfect job. She took selfish pleasure in being able to bake cookies with the girls and give them elaborate birthday parties and take them to Brownies and church. She’d been dedicated to photographing them every year. Her favorite image was one of the girls in matching white dresses, barefoot on the beach, big white bows in their wind-tossed hair.
When the girls were small, Lauren had taken them to ballet lessons. She loved their cute protruding toddler tummies, and little bottoms in pink tights. Their tiny feet were so sweet in dainty ballet flats. She’d collected Sloan’s curls on top of her head, but in mere minutes Sloan always found a way to have her hair tumbling around her shoulders. Her little redhead had been only six when she told Lauren ballet “wasn’t her thing.” Yet, her grace of movement was apparent still. Of course, Sloan would never admit to the benefit of her dance background, but Lauren enjoyed the way she glided rather than walked.
Ainslie’s ballet days were spent peering through the giant glass window at the butterflies lighted in the garden there. She had stayed with ballet longer than Sloan, not wanting to upset her mother. But Lauren had realized one day that her little girl was miserable. She would never be the graceful, long-limbed swan other girls seemed to be, nor did she even care. On the day Lauren asked Ainslie if she wanted to quit ballet she saw relief wash over her child’s face. This second failed ballet experience made Lauren vow never to force her own agenda on her girls again. While Lauren was neither artistic nor scientific, she was supportive of her daughters’ interests. She let them choose their own paths, although she was chagrined she would not be getting even one ballerina out of two girls.
Sloan hadn’t liked swimming lessons either, but the pool had been Ainslie’s passion, at least for a while. Her younger daughter had taken to the water and moved up through the YMCA’s program from Guppy to Porpoise in no time. From the kitchen window, Lauren watched her tomboy daughter saunter to the end of their boardwalk, pocketknife and plastic critter box in hand, bug net thrown over her shoulder like Huck Finn. It comforted Lauren to know that if Ainslie fell into the creek or onto the muddy bank she wouldn’t panic, she’d more likely find a clam to examine before she hauled herself out.
Occasionally, Lauren would climb to the widow’s walk to check on her if she couldn’t see her from the kitchen. Sometimes she would join her, this daughter in cutoffs smeared with pluff mud, a favorite snake T-shirt, flyaway baby hair escaping her ponytail. Ainslie was always eager to share her finds, and sometimes they would sit for hours on the dock examining shells and gory bits of animals her daughter found fascinating. It had never occurred to Lauren that she would find rocks and animal bones in a daughter’s pockets, but she was constantly amazed by the mysterious dead things that crumbled from Ainslie’s clothes.
Emmett banged into the room carrying the balance of the groceries. He deposited them on the counter, and then, before she knew it, he had disappeared. Of course, Lauren thought, it would be too much to ask for help putting the groceries away.
She heard a squeal of glee from upstairs. She left the groceries and sneaked up the steps, following the happy sound. The bathroom door was ajar and easy to nudge open. Straight brown hair pooled on the tile floor and Lauren sucked in a shocked breath. The girls had taken the matter of Ainslie’s thinning hair into their own hands. Lauren knocked gently on her daughter’s bedroom door expecting to see a distraught girl buried under the comforter. But her girls were perched on the bed, books strewn around them, permanent markers tossed thoughtlessly on the pale sheets. They turned to her, wide smiles across their beautiful faces.
“Mom, look what Sloan did for me!” On Ainslie’s deathly pale scalp, her sister had drawn a colorful, undulating Chinese dragon.
“It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!” Ainslie said, checking herself in the mirror. “Thank you so much!” The girls embraced and fell over on the bed, giggling.
So here it was, one of those times when hope renews. When Lauren was forced to reevaluate. It was this occasional glimmer of optimism that kept Lauren going. Just when things seemed most bleak, when thoughts of losing their home, wrecking her marriage, or Ainslie’s illness were foremost in her mind, something miraculous would happen.
She heard Emmett push into the room behind her and turned in time to see him whip off his white running cap.
“So what do you think?” he said, running a hand over his own bald head.
The girls kicked their feet in the air with laughter, and Emmett climbed onto the bed next to them.
“Let me pick out one,” Emmett said.
“Here,” Sloan said and handed him a book of tattoos. Lauren recognized the book. She’d found it in Sloan’s room a couple of years ago and had talked to her about how tattoos were tacky and not acceptable.
Perhaps that was another thing Lauren had misjudged. Emmett pointed to a tattoo of an Indian elephant and Ainslie clapped her hands. Lauren settled on the bed too. This was what she prayed for, that her girls could find some happiness each day, that her husband would come back to them, and that her family would be strong enough to live through this.
CHAPTER 6
The Black Fountain
Everybody had to have a favorite place, was what Sloan thought. Her mother’s place was the bathroom, where she steamed and creamed and conditioned, a flowery funeral smell trailing her for hours afterward. The beach held a special allure for her little sister. Ainslie would hunch over tide pools for hours, her toes digging sea stars from under faint outlines. Her dad had The Pub, although he thought nobody knew how much he hung out there, but his happy, cigarette-tinged demeanor gave him away.
Sloan’s place was Brookgreen Gardens, and on occasion, the remaining shell of Atalaya, the Spanish-style mansion across the road. She never knew when she drove there which way she would choose to turn. To the right lay Atalaya, the salt-crusted walls and empty stone rooms cool even in summer. The front opened to a sand path leading through a thicket of crusty cedars to a beach scattered with shell fragments.
To the left, America’s oldest public sculpture gardens, as Sloan had learned early in life. An independently wealthy couple, Anna Hyatt Huntington and her husband had created the gardens, now the pride of the local community. He was a poet, and she made the garden’s more dramatic sculptures. Sloan’s favorite Huntington sculpture marked the highway entrance—horses as big as cars locked in writhing combat with a snarling lion, a rider clinging to one horse, tossed and feckless, another rider thrown to the ground at the feet of the massive animals.
It was February, and plants were beginning to leak buds. By March, the gardens cascading down to the Waccamaw River would blaze with azaleas like a Valentine’s Day parade. Today she headed back through the gardens, past stone animals and an allee of giant live oaks to the black fountain, Ainslie’s favorite place. There was something creepy and disturbing about the water oozing from the foundation of the original house, which had burned in 1901. The corner was always cooler, a breeze up from the river constant and welcoming even in February, when short-sleeve days were frequent.
On the outside of this raised pool, lusty ferns grew, and in this tiny tropical paradise anoles thrived. Sloan imagined how they must recognize Ainslie by now and run to hide from her. Her sister took some notice of the various animal statues in the gardens, but her main focus was always a huge game of catching every anole unlucky enough to be within reach. She would hang lizards from her earlobes, their fragile limbs flat to their bodies, paralyzed with the effort of biting. Ainslie always put her friends back carefully, saying they had favorite places. It seemed even tiny reptiles had spots of reprieve.
Sloan dropped down onto an ancient millstone and found her drawing pad and pencils in her satchel. She eyed the sculpture atop the black fountain, a stocky man with large feet and hands wresting an alligator backward into a U. Both man and beast were straining, but the man was on the winning end, perpetually compressing the beast in upon itself. She loved the Alligator Bender for its symmetry and contemporary lines.
Ainslie