I surveyed my mother, my brother, my sister. Annabeth gave cash to a beggar outside a bottle shop. Ben, ten years old and small for his age, was so gentle that Dad had given up ever teaching him to hunt, even though he had great aim when firing at a tin can. And Summer, well, Summer was Summer.
But I was Iris, the unexpected twin, the surplus twin, and with that wink, Dad gave me a new place in our family. Not nice. Not dumb.
This is why I thought I would at least get my share of the family money—not that I expected Dad to die anytime soon. Your average father might not have seen much in me, not compared with my angelic sister, but Dad always seemed to appreciate my cynical streak. Ridge hated the idea of his money being lost, and you have to have a fair amount of street smarts not to be bamboozled out of your fortune. It seemed that Dad thought I would be up to the task.
Annabeth and Dad were already divorced by then, which perhaps partly excuses his dinnertime pronouncements about her brainpower. Perhaps it’s weird that he still came for dinner sometimes, four years after leaving my mother, but he still owned the house on Beach Parade. Later, when I went to law school, I wondered how the hell Dad had managed to keep his property intact through two divorces. Maybe Annabeth was too nice for her own good. Or maybe the judges were afraid of Ridge Carmichael, the man who owned half of Wakefield. Whichever it was, when he died, Dad left his three wives and seven children not much more than comfortable. The bulk of his fortune . . . that’s where it gets interesting.
For the first few years after the divorce, we stayed in the beach house. Dad moved in with his girlfriend, Francine, who lived in a penthouse in inner-city Wakefield. Francine had a two-year-old named Virginia. We assumed she was Francine’s daughter from a previous relationship.
When Dad married Francine, they changed Virginia’s surname to Carmichael. I still didn’t question who her father might be, although my mother must have had her suspicions. But Annabeth wouldn’t say a word against her ex-husband. She acted as if she had been lucky to be married to him in the first place, even though she was a very pretty, sweet-tempered woman—utterly wifely, a perfect match for a man like Ridge. The only way you could tell when something upset our mother was that she would do the housework with even more vigor than usual, slamming the vacuum cleaner into furniture, thumping pillows into place.
By the time Summer and I were fourteen, Francine had popped out three more babies: Vicky, Valerie, and Vera Carmichael. Like Francine, the girls were all too blond to be called blond; their hair was white. The birth of Francine’s fourth daughter tipped the balance of power. Now there were more of them than there were of us, and Francine started making noises about a house swap. It turned out that Ridge owned both properties. Nobody wants to live in an apartment with four kids, even if it is a multilevel penthouse with a rooftop garden and swimming pool, but I don’t know whether Francine would have succeeded if Dad hadn’t died.
After dinner that night, when I kissed Dad goodbye, I begged him to take me with him on his upcoming sailing holiday. Since the divorce, Dad had flown Summer and me and Ben up to Thailand every summer, but this year, he was taking Francine and their kids.
“I can help with the sailing, Dad,” I said. “I’ll even help with the babies.”
Dad laughed. “Stay here and help your mother,” he said. “Stop her from giving all my money away.”
Two weeks later, Dad had a heart attack on the pier at a beach in southern Phuket and was pronounced dead at the scene. Francine said his body had to be taken back to shore in a tuk-tuk because the aging pier wasn’t strong enough for an ambulance.
Francine and her children were back in Australia within two days. The live-aboard sailors of Phuket, a disparate bunch of hippies, old salts, and dreamers from all over the world, had pulled together to help the young widow. They had organized the repatriation of Dad’s body, fed and comforted the kids, and sailed Bathsheba back to the marina, hauling her out onto the hardstand, where she stood high and dry for the next nine years, because nobody in the family knew what to do with her.
I had met these people, these ragtag seamen, on our sailing holidays with Dad. He’d have a drink with them, but sometimes it seemed as if he only talked to them to collect stories about their stupidity: their amateur sailing, their dull lives, how the Thai tradesmen ripped them off. They were nice people, he’d say, like it was the worst thing you could say about anybody.
And now I understood. Nice is dumb.
At Dad’s funeral, Annabeth wore black silk and Francine wore black satin. Francine, awash with pearls, led a cortège of ghost-pale daughters in matching white dresses, their dead-straight hair pulled back by long black ribbons. Annabeth—taller, but a much less imposing figure—was flanked by Summer and me in tailored linen and Ben in his first proper suit. Annabeth only had three children, but she had the boy. Francine was the newest, youngest wife, but Annabeth was still prettier. Besides, Annabeth had the beach house. Or so we thought.
Margaret didn’t come to the funeral. I think she was the only wife who knew what Dad was really like. I was about to find out, before the service even started.
The funeral home was one of those one-stop shops that aims not to offend anyone and ends up being a soulless train station. When we arrived, a soft-spoken man with startlingly pink skin took Annabeth aside. He explained that Dad’s casket would be rolled into the service on wheels. Health and safety regulations.
I don’t know whether Dad could have mustered six loyal mates to carry him, anyway. There were hundreds of people arriving for the service, but they weren’t Dad’s bosom buddies. Apart from family, I didn’t know any of them. They were smiling and chatting easily to each other. No one was crying.
The pink man asked my mother whether any of us would like to “view the deceased before we close the casket for the ceremony.” He gestured down a quiet corridor, away from the room into which the crowd of cheerful mourners was pouring. He might not have figured out that Annabeth was an ex-wife. She looked forlorn enough to be the widow.
“My children are far too young for that,” Annabeth said. She steered us toward our relatives. Her parents were in a corner with my aunts and uncles and a few cousins. They looked hot, itchy, and awkward in borrowed black clothes. January in Wakefield is a punishing time, and the air conditioning was showing its age.
I didn’t mean to spy, but I needed to know that Dad was really dead, and I kind of wanted to see the coffin on wheels. It was easy to evade my grandparents and head down that corridor. I pushed open a tomb-like door and found myself alone with my father’s dead body.
He had died in the tropics, and I guess he had been embalmed, but there was a faint odor in the room. I remembered a dog I had seen—and smelled—when I was a kid, lying dead in a gutter on a busy Thai street. I sure knew Dad was dead now.
Still, I crept forward until I saw him. The great Ridge Carmichael, reduced to a quiet, coffin-bound corpse. His body looked hollow, and his face was a horrible gray. Only his hair looked normal. He had recently turned sixty, but just a few strands of silver had pushed their way through the blond.
Sixty was old to be a father of small children, but it was young to die.
Tall vases bursting with white flowers stood sentinel around my father’s coffin, emblems of love. And not any old flowers. Someone had chosen the varieties: roses and irises.