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there was nothing
    childish, nothing condescending, nothing mother-to-
    child about it. We were companions on every level,
    confidantes, comrades, friends, lovers in the deepest
    and most nonsexual sense of the word. My daughter
    and I had fallen in love and delight with each other at

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    the moment of her birth, and it was often all I could
    do to keep Clay and Carter from coming off second
    best. Because they are so ludicrously alike, and because
    Clay’s mind is almost absurdly full of riches and Carter
    is a sunny, confident young man with a full and em-
    powering sense of himself, I do not think that either
    of them has suffered. Rather, they, like most other
    people in our orbit, simply enjoyed and often laughed
    at Venable and Venable.
    I opened Kylie’s door and went into her room. At
    first the great surf of brightness off the noon beach
    blinded me, and I stood blinking, my hand shading
    my eyes. Then they adjusted and I looked around and
    saw it plain, this place that was, of all her places, most
    distinctly hers.
    It was not a frilly room and never had been. Like
    me, Kylie was born with a need for space and order
    and a dislike of cluttering frills and fuss. She had al-
    ways been a small, wiry child, almost simian in her
    build, narrow-hipped and broad-shouldered, slightly
    long of arm and short of leg, never tall, always thin to
    the bone. Ruffles would have been as ludicrous on and
    around her as on me. She was, instead, sleeked down
    for action; pared to sinew and long, slender muscle;
    meant for sun and sand and wind and water, and that
    was what her room reflected. I do not think she ever
    drew her curtains, even at night. Kylie fell asleep with
    her face turned to the moon and

    32 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    the comets and the wheeling constellations, seeing
    when she woke in the night the dance of phosphorus
    on the warm, thick, black summer ocean, or sometimes
    the lightning of storms over the horizon that looked,
    she said, like naval battles far out to sea. Waking to
    the cool pearl of dawn on tidal slicks, to the pink and
    silver foil of a newly warming spring ocean, perhaps
    to the Radio City Music Hall dance of porpoises in the
    silky summer shallows. Kylie went as far as any human
    I have ever known, when she was small, toward simply
    using up the sea.
    Her walls were painted the milky green of the sea
    on a cloudy day, and on them hung her posters of an-
    imals and birds and sea creatures and the big, luminous
    painting of Richard Hagerty’s that was the official
    Spoleto Festival poster one year, of Hurricane Hugo
    striding big-footed and terrible down on a crouching
    Charleston. I had not wanted to buy it for her because
    I had thought it would come to haunt her, but she was
    adamant.
    “Yeah, but see, Hugo didn’t win,” she said. “Big as
    a thousand houses, big as a booger, and he still didn’t
    win.”
    And I had laughed and bought it for her, because I
    wanted her to remember that: the boogers don’t always
    win.
    On the low bookshelves were the models she had
    made of animal skeletons, from kits I had ordered for
    her from marine biological laborato

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    ries and supply houses, and three or four real skeletons
    we had found over on the island when she went with
    me to the house there: the papery carapace of an eight-
    foot rattler; a wild boar’s skull with great, bleached,
    Jurassic tusks; the elegant, polished small skull of a
    raccoon. Estelle would not dust these herself but made
    Kylie do it. Clay was distinctly not amused by the
    skeletons, and even Carter only said, “Yuck. You’re
    weird, Kylie.” But I knew. It is important to know what
    the inside of things looks like. Otherwise, almost any-
    thing can fool you.
    Her books were there, in a military order known
    only to Kylie. The old ones that I had loved: Wind in
    the Willows (“Mother! Listen! ‘There is nothing —abso-
    lutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply
    messing about