Island Girls Read Free Page B

contain it. She could use it. She needed three months to work on her book. Now she had them, and in a historic house on a magical island. That her half sister and stepsister were going to share the house did not mean this would be hell on earth. She would be polite but aloof. She would be poised, dignified, restrained. So would Arden and Jenny. The three of them were adults, after all.

THREE
    As a child, Jenny had been sad not to have a father. She hadn’t been embarrassed, because several other kids at school didn’t have fathers, or had fathers who lived far away and never visited. But she minded not having even a photograph of her father. Her mother would say only that she didn’t know who Jenny’s father was, and that was that. For years as a little girl, Jenny daydreamed about meeting her father someday. Her mother had such glossy black hair, and Jenny’s was dramatically black, too. She wondered if her father’s hair was also black, like a pirate’s or a Gypsy’s.
    When she was ten, her mother married Rory Randall. He legally adopted Jenny, and he loved her as much, he promised, as he loved his biological daughters, Meg and Arden. He made her mother happy at last, which relieved and thrilled Jenny, and as the years went by, she didn’t wonder about her “real” father so much. For long stretches of time, she never thought about him at all.
    She did mind that Rory Randall had red hair and so did hisfirst two daughters, while Jenny’s was black. So when the three were together with their father, everyone assumed that Arden and Meg were Rory’s daughters, which, of course, they were. Jenny was his daughter, too, his
chosen
daughter. If she could have worn a sign on her chest stating that she was Rory Randall’s daughter, she would have. It was wonderful to have a father.
    Having sisters had been wonderful, too—for a while. Jenny was exactly Meg’s age, three years younger than Arden. The first year of their life together was chaotic, with Arden and Meg living mostly at their mothers’ but staying at the Nantucket house for the summer.
    The second year had been the year of The Exile, and since then, although they saw one another, Arden and Meg had not accepted Jenny as a real sister.
    Well, they would have to now.
    They had to live with her for three entire months in the same house. As if they were family.
    Jenny had seen Arden’s and Meg’s faces when the lawyer read their father’s letter. Meg had gone white. Arden’s lips had thinned in anger. Then Arden and Meg looked at each other and something passed between the two of them, an unspoken message they did not even think to share with Jenny.
    It was partly her mother’s fault, Jenny knew. She could understand why Justine told Rory the other two girls were not allowed to come to the summer house anymore, and back then, when she was eleven years old, she’d been smugly, foolishly glad. That made Rory all hers. He had chosen her, he had adopted her, and then, as if in a fairy tale, the stepsisters had been whisked out of sight, out of mind. She hadn’t cared about Meg and Arden’s feelings.
    Well, Jenny had paid for her mother’s decision and for her own childish sense of triumph. Twenty years had passed, and she’d been raised as an only child. During those years, their fatherdid “get his girls all together” from time to time in Boston, taking the three of them out to lavish meals in la-di-da restaurants or treating them to
The Nutcracker
ballet at Christmas. But even though, in front of their father or any of their mothers, the three behaved politely, Jenny had no doubt Arden and Meg hated her.
    Jenny was hoping they’d do better this summer. Since their father’s letter had decreed they spend three months together, it wasn’t unreasonable for her to expect that slowly, gradually, Arden and Meg would get used to Jenny’s presence, and start to like her just a little, and then accept her a little more, and then, eventually, welcome her